SotS: 154 - Journey, Part 5 (Intercessions of the Past) · 12:49pm Apr 6th, 2020
See other blog posts for previous parts.
Have some music suggested for Journey by Blaster M on the Discord server:
154 – Journey
V – Intercessions of the Past
Onion found her friends sitting at a table in what they called the Juice Bar—a silly red building right outside the Temple that served all sorts of fruit juices 24/7. It probably helped that it was run by a droid who didn’t need to sleep, making it rather unfair competition for any other sorts of similar businesses. In a universe with no enforced night and day, never closing was of great benefit.
The silvery, floating machine with twelve separate spidery limbs delivered four fruit smoothies to the table. It was more than smart enough to know what Onion would order before she said anything—grape.
“Hey…” Jang said. “How are you doing?”
“Better,” Onion said, getting into her chair and sitting down. She stared at the smoothie for several seconds, doing nothing with it.
“Hey, turn that frown upside-down!” Pringle spread her front hooves wide. “We can forget about all that and drink some smoothies like old friends!”
“We can’t,” Joanne deadpanned, still refusing to look up from her phone. She drank her smoothie by having her Stand lift it for her.
“Joanne…”
“Onion’s fixated on it and it wouldn’t be right to just ignore it.”
Onion frowned. “It’s really hard to take you seriously when you’re saying everything while staring at your phone.”
“You know me, don’t you?”
“Yeah. That’s the problem here.”
Joanne’s fingers stopped flying across her screen. For a moment, her eyes looked up and locked with Onion’s own; a deep, inner fire screaming to be let loose. “I use my phone. You scream at the heroes.”
“I can stop.”
“Can you?” Joanne’s grip on her phone began to loosen due to trembling. “Can you drop it? Never speak about it again? Forget it?”
Onion was taken aback.
“Didn’t think so.” She returned to her phone, tone softening considerably. “I understand, Onion. I understand your need.”
“T-thanks?”
The slightest hint of a smile crawled up Joanne’s face. “Beyond that, you kind of have a point when you’re not frothing at the mouth.”
“What!?” Pringle blurted. “Wait, no, no, sorry, I did—”
“Pringle, we’re friends here,” Jang said. “Speak your mind. We won’t hate you for it.”
Pringle looked at the table. “…We wouldn’t be here without them. We’d be dead. We wouldn’t have been born. How can you be mad at that?”
“It’s the other things,” Onion said. “They define us. They don’t let us find our own way. They see that we need ‘help’ and then just wave their magic wands, dropping the ‘solution’ in our lap.”
Pringle looked Onion in the eye. “Would you rather they not have combined the cities?”
“The problem was partly their fault in the first place.”
“I… well I guess…”
“They didn’t know that at first,” Jang pointed out. “And even if they did, who wouldn’t attempt to right their wrongs?”
Onion tapped her hoof on the table. “It’s… it’s less that and more how they just… keep coming back. They left, but we can’t get rid of them. We idolize them when… they’re just broken people! The entire problem with the two cities was that they worshipped them, and we’re still on that.”
“We’re not!” Pringle gasped.
“Worship doesn’t have to include ritualistic prayer! It can be a fixation, it… really, it’s whatever defines you as a culture.”
“Everyone worships something,” Joanne said. “Money, power, beauty, pleasure—even I worship something.”
“You? The most vocal atheist I’ve ever seen?” Jang blinked.
“Correct. I worship intellectual faculties and the truth they lead us to. Or, if I’m being less nebulous, I worship the connection this phone provides me to people I scarcely feel in real life. I am inconsistent—either one of these may be at the top of my list on any given day.” She slid through a few more screens. “Onion is absolutely correct that the city as a whole worships the past and the legends therein.”
“I… that’s…” Pringle shoved a hoof over her mouth.
“You can say it’s silly. I certainly would if I were you.”
“She’s not you,” Jang pointed out.
Joanne shrugged, falling silent.
Onion sighed, turning to Jang. “What do you think?”
“I think everyone has a point.” Jang folded his hands. “They did a lot of great things, but they had a lot of unintended consequences. They acted as heroes, but they were arrogant. The Tower gave them power, but should that excuse them? They couldn’t be good unless they used it.” He sat back. “I care more about our continued friendship than whether they are good or bad.”
Pringle smiled warmly. “Jang… that’s amazing. You’re always the best of us.”
Joanne nodded, not looking up from her phone.
Onion stayed silent for a few moments. “…What would you do if they came back?”
Jang shrugged. “Dunno. Probably go say ‘hi’ just for the novelty.”
“I’d give Pinkie a big hug!” Pringle giggled.
“I’d walk up to Rev and give her a few things she’s ignoring.” Joanne smirked at the thought. “Oh, she who claims to be rational…”
“Not Discord or Flutterfree?” Onion asked.
“I’m not cruel. …That cruel, anyway.”
Even Joanne doesn’t want to hurt them… Onion sighed. “…Thanks guys. For… for letting me know.” I can trust you as friends. But not in this. “I’m… gonna go home and think about some things.”
“Need any company?” Pringle asked.
“Not now,” Onion shook her head, taking her smoothie in her hoof. “See you around.”
She trotted outside, feeling a bizarre mixture of happy and depressed. They were good friends. But they wouldn’t understand what she needed to do.
Maybe that means…
The thought died in her head the moment she saw the hologram of Cinder coming out of a projector across the street. It was a recording—she wasn’t in the Force temple—but it still had her words.
Onion scowled at the smiling Sweetie. You’re the worst out of all of them. You defined everything about us and didn’t even think about what we might think of it. All for what, an E-MAIL?
~~~
An unfathomable amount of time in the past, Cinder stood in front of a camera in the middle of a large, featureless room.
“We ready to go?” she asked.
“Ready. Just start talking whenever.”
Cinder tossed her mane back and smiled. “Hello! So, I take it you all separated yourself and dealt with the initial chaos, right? That should have gone smoothly, if everything we’ve done on this end worked out properly. If not, I really am sorry, I overestimated what I knew. I kinda doubt that’s what happens, though, but it never hurts to be prepared.
“Anyway… you’re probably looking for some explanation, huh? Well, as you hopefully know, I used my… let’s say connections. I used my connections to send myself and a lot of other people back into the deep multiversal past, so our story wouldn’t have to ‘end’. Even though everything has to end at some point, now there’s so much time between us that it might as well be endless. And if I do somehow survive despite the odds… you won’t see me there. I’ll close a loop and become my younger self, creating another retcon loop. I’m not going to rewrite anything. So, in a way, this message is also another goodbye. One that I can give to people after the war has ended.
“I’m still not sure which version of the end you got. I do know it wasn’t pure-preservation or pure-collapse, the Tower’s not that binary. You either got a New World with the Tower still standing for a time to facilitate an ending to the story, or a New Multiverse with an unexpected tragic cost and a beeline toward infinity. It honestly doesn’t matter which happened; my message remains the same.
“In this temple I’ve got… a lot of stuff. Private messages for every person I could think of that you should watch in private, just to make it more likely the camera won’t be on when you see them. I’ve got records of the era we live in, of the things we did in the past up to this point. And I’ve got a few surprises… but we’ll get to those in a minute. I may add a few things later, but I have to let the Temple become an ancient relic at some point for the plan to work.
“And yes… the plan. See, we needed to ensure you would hear the message, so we had to give it a lot of ka-importance that would only activate when the time was right. So we needed to build a ka-machine in an era that has no Flowers. It was… well, it was ‘difficult,’ but we weren’t exactly in a rush to complete it. Basically, we made the Narrative Temple as a ka-nexus that would store narrative potential over time and release it at the opportune moment, and not a moment before.
“The trick was making sure it survived the trip all the way to you. I have no idea if I actually live long enough to loop back into myself, so it needed to be able to do that on its own. And the amount of time is ridiculous. We landed sometime after the Downstreamer era and the only things aside from their relics that we recognize are Flagg—who’s currently sealed away—and The One Above All—who’s not involved in any sort of society at the moment and is kinda just… there. Actively forgetting about us.
“Regardless, nothing from this era is recognizable in the future. Anything that might be we aren’t sure if it isn’t just some shallow duplicate, given… well, the tremendous amount of time. So… I made it a Force Temple that will split in two once we leave it be. Star Wars is one of the most powerful stories that repeats over the history of the multiverse, and the Force is a powerful entity that doesn’t have a character in the traditional sense, so being eternal and undying isn’t a problem, narratively speaking. The Temple would survive with the ka-machine and the Force manipulator in it.
“But… oh, but… I had to make sure it was important enough to be found. And my message, on its own, doesn’t make a chapter. So we—no, I, I should take the blame for this—set up a conflict. The Temple would divide itself and, once the war ended in a collapse or preservation, it would change. The Force would drift to accentuate the differences between the two groups. It’ll be a subtle change, the sort that can be resisted at any moment, but that no one will want to. There will be a conflict, a conflict that just begs for the heroes of the previous era to solve through friendship and just being awesome.
“I didn’t want to make a tragedy, so there’s basically a guaranteed victory pre-loaded into the encounter. Even though I know you’d win, I also know that the little people in the cities would not want peace. Violence would just come back. So… our little Temple will re-combine itself and combine everyone in it. I bet you just experienced that! Should have been fun and maybe a little entertaining. But the main point was to fuse the citizens together so they couldn’t mentally justify violence toward the other. Might take you a week to sort out, but lucky you, I want you to have an absolute victory.
“Soooooo yeah. That basically explains what just happened. You’ll all get the private messages soon. And for the record, I’m doing pretty good! I’m glad I came back. Not everyone who came with me is as thrilled… but, you know, to each their own. However, before you go and look at those private messages… there’s someone I want you to meet. She’s got a story to tell you.”
Cinder turned to her left, waving for another Sweetie to come over. She was a short Sweetie, though clearly an adult mare. She proudly wore a silver artificial horn and, around her neck, Black Thirteen sat in the middle of a necklace, smaller than it should have been.
The Sweetie walked into view of the camera and Cinder stepped aside.
“I am Allure Belle of Merodi Universalis,” she said, expression hard. “…But not the Merodi Universalis you know.”
~~~
Elder Ahsoka Tano walked to the throne room—now outside the Temple rather than within. The two alicorns were discussing policy when she entered.
“Taxes on fruit are ridiculous,” Troi pointed out, dragging her hoof across a graph even she didn’t fully understand.
Tessa raised an eyebrow. “You’re holding it upside-down.”
“The point remains! Fruit taxes are way up.”
“We have limited farmland.”
“Most of our food comes from conjuration spells. Come on, Tessa, you know this!”
Tessa smirked. “I do… but it is a very special strain on those of our people who work there.”
“We have to cut taxes somewhere.”
“Do we? The people may outcry for less, but we know that we are underfunded for many of our department projects that will make life for them better. If I thought we could get away with it, I would raise taxes.”
Troi gasped. “Whaaaaat!?”
“Every citizen within our fair city lives well above the theoretical poverty line, those slums only exist because some people have a bone to pick with Employment Services, and nobody’s starving down there. Everyone can afford a few more coins taken out of their pockets. They can give up, oh I don’t know, HD-3D subscriptions to live shows beamed from the Tower City.”
“…They do spend a lot of money on that.”
“Ka-shroud or not, it’s still ridiculous…” Tessa noticed Ahsoka. “Ah, Elder Tano! What brings you here?”
“Dropping by to visit my old friends,” Ahsoka said, smiling. “The Force is still balanced and, as usual, my job is just a formality.”
“Don’t say that!” Troi smiled warmly. “You represent the fusion of the Dark and the Light, the Balance, far more than we ever can.”
“You have been with this Temple longer than any of us,” Tessa added. “You refused to devote yourself to either side when we cut it off.”
Ahsoka rubbed the back of her head. “I was a little crazy, wasn’t I? Who clones themselves just to make sure they’re in both places at once?”
“A wise elder, that’s who.” Troi smiled.
“A crazy Force Master,” Tessa added. “Which is just what we needed.”
“I am honored.” Ahsoka bowed.
“Oh!” Troi clapped her hooves. “That’s right, we have to ask you something!”
“We have detected a sky-ship on long-range sensors coming right for us,” Tessa said. “We wish you to confirm if it’s really them.”
“…They’re coming back?” Ahsoka’s eyes widened.
“They might be. Our City of the Moon has moved enough it’s not unreasonable to assume we’re on their return path.”
“I will go right away,” Ahsoka said, a smile coming to her face. “I’m assuming we will prepare a festival?”
“We don’t want them to think we’ve returned to our old ways,” Tessa pointed out.
“Psh, it’ll just be a small thing,” Troi said. “I’ll call the Pinkies. …Assuming we get confirmation.”
“Yes, yes…” Ahsoka walked out of the throne room. As soon as she was out of sight she broke into a grin and ran as fast as she could to the other side of the city. She skidded to a stop outside, of all places, Mary’s Orphanage.
She ran in the door. “Frigid!”
An ice-blue stallion looked up. “Yes?”
“Where’s Mary?”
“Upstai—“
Ahsoka ran up the stairs, finding exactly who she was looking for: a tall woman with pale skin, white hair, and purple eyes.
Mary.
Better known as Minna Belle to those who she wasn’t trying to hide from.
She was carefully watching a hologram of Allure. Ahsoka knew it wasn’t really Allure—Minna had explained to her long ago that her mother’s artificial horn had a slightly different make and model than the one in the messages—but sometimes it was so, so hard to tell them apart.
“…Are they coming back?”
Minna held up her phone. Recent Calls: Captain Pinkie Pie. Minna had a stupid grin and tears on her face. “Yeah. They are.”
~~~
“I both am and am not who you think I am, I…” Allure frowned, furrowing her brow. “…Let’s try this another way. Yes, this is Black Thirteen I’m wearing. I… I basically own it instead of Randall Flagg. I was the one to ultimately beat him and seal him away for… well, a while. I got the artifact in his stead, and with a lot of help I’ve… I can’t say I’ve mastered it, but at the very least it’s not driving me insane. Yet. When I first got it after we’d defeated him, I—well, I gained all the memories of your Allure. She must have made some sort of connection with Black Thirteen in those last moments…” Allure shuddered. “I know she was lost to the price of whatever preserve or collapse happened to you. For a while there, I basically was her. But I wasn’t. It’s… Well, I still haven’t fully resolved it in my head to this day, so there’s that.
“I just wanted to say something to you. I know most of you, but I also don’t know most of you. It’s… I don’t know. Things are so similar yet so different sometimes I have a hard time discerning which one is me and which one is the other me.” She rubbed the back of her head. “This is going to be really discombobulated…”
“Take your time,” Cinder encouraged.
Allure took a breath. “I’m sorry. For being so angry. Yes, it was more reasonable than how everyone else was being, but that doesn’t make it any more right. Being reasonable is revenge, eye-for-an-eye… Being reasonable gets us nowhere. I was on a holy crusade and I never stopped, even after Renee…” Allure took a shaky breath. “Renee… I’ve seen her die twice. At least one of them wasn’t at my own hooves…”
“Allure, if you need to take a break…”
“I’m fine.” Allure tossed her mane back and smiled. “That’s all behind us. Long, long behind us. It was all long gone before you arrived. But… I suppose that’s what I need to talk about. Merodi Universalis. Not yours. The other one… We have very similar histories with minor differences up until Nettle. We don’t have a Nettle. We had a crazed version of Darkseid try to take control of the Tower and fail miserably. After that, Corona studied the Tower, and… I think she wiped the information from her memory and went home, but we can never be sure.
“Merodi Universalis just continued on. A hundred years. Two hundred years. We grew exponentially, driven by the heroes that defined us. Over time, leadership changed less and less. Considering how little it changed before, that’s very impressive. We guided the society in the way we saw fit, until we reached Class 1 status as the beacons of friendship. We sat with the Seats for a time.
“Eventually, however… the grumblings of the next generation got to be too much for us to control. No matter how much we had done, or how much we had saved them, they wanted to control their nation and their lives. Now that we were Class 1 and there weren’t really any threats to our entire nation, they didn’t feel the need to rely on us for protection. They wanted their time in the spotlight.
“So we let them have it.
“That was a mistake.”
Allure tapped the ground with her hoof.
“You were beginning to see the start of it when the War For Existence began. Not the resentment of the younger generations, though that was there, but the immaturity. When you’re in a largely post-scarcity society, you can get whatever you want whenever you want. I know we had a monetary system, but it was getting to the point where it wasn’t providing much. You could get free entertainment, connections, services, and food out of the automatic government provisions in fully integrated worlds. Nobody had to work for anything unless they wanted to. Nobody had to suffer hardship, or even pain...
“We didn’t realize that, at the top. We were constantly fighting, managing worlds that had just been brought in, and putting ourselves on the line for their sake. To make their lives perfect. We didn’t realize that making lives ‘perfect’ actually ruins them. They had no sense of right and wrong—there were no consequences to their actions! Any personal disagreements could be solved by moving away or casting mood-altering spells on yourself. Yes, for a while, people refused to do that… but, throughout every history, the younger generation has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable. In relationships, self-alteration, genetics… Our ban on genetic modification was eventually lifted because of outcry, and that just made things worse. You’d be surprised how many people just remove their emotions. And how they influence the next to do the same…
“We had catered to their every whim and given them a soft life where they were free. It was amazing, for a time. But we let them go too far. We eventually saw it happening, and we tried to reinstate limits to keep them from devolving further, but they resisted heavily. They claimed we were the ‘old morality’ and that they were the ‘new morality’ and that what we thought was ‘good’ was in fact tyrannical and oppressive.
“So we thought we would let them try it out on their own. We transferred leadership over to them and went to retire, watching from a distance. Let them learn the hard way why we did what we did. Maybe they would grow past it and become something better than us—we were awfully stubborn, after all. Maybe we were wrong.
“I don’t think we were wrong. Not anymore.
“Merodi Universalis was stable under the new system for all of ten meta-years.
“The people they chose as their leaders… they weren’t heroes, they were just the people they thought were the strongest, the fastest, the best, the smartest. The people they liked, and in a world where so many people shut their emotions off, or were so high on magic they had removed their negative ones entirely, or were just so bored they were willing to experiment with everything… those leaders weren’t the best. Even those who weren’t selfish for the sake of power often had some sort of ideal behind them that just screamed to be implemented no matter what anyone else thought.
“So they fought. The fights resolved quickly, at first, and the system was changed each time to accommodate. But…” Allure sighed. “We watched our society ruin itself without our guidance. Worlds started seceding, internal wars began, and…
“…By the time we decided to break our promise to stay out of it, it was too late. We fought to bring our society back together, and many, many of us died in the attempt. In the end, it was a full-on war. A Class 1 going to war with itself… destroyed much of the multiverse.
“And that… was the end of Merodi Universalis.” She looked right into the camera, focusing as much as she could. “Our method of building a society is fast. It can bring about great beauty. But it grows too fast, so fast that it breaks under its own weight. We think we are doing the right thing by protecting, sheltering, and making the best life. We were so positive that progress and kindness led to utopia… it didn’t.
“And while I would change some things if I did it again… I don’t regret being part of it.” She smiled brightly. “Merodi Universalis only lasted a thousand years, total. But those thousand years were amazing. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. What would have happened had we not been there? What would the lives of these people have been without us? It may have ended terribly, but that doesn’t make what we did do mean any less.
“We probably shouldn’t have let them run themselves. But how long could we have stopped them? We may have been powerful, but eventually their numbers would have grown too strong. Immortality means we can’t just keep adjusting to a new generation, the generations keep piling up, and we can’t outlive them. They’ll band together and overthrow us no matter what we do, with time.
“Nothing can ever last forever.
“Even a good king will eventually fall, no matter how immortal he is.
“And yet, despite this, here I am, doing it again.” Allure chuckled. “A bunch of Sweeties from the future have shown up and wanted to explore. And I… well; I’m part of them. I won’t bore you with that story, that’s Cinder’s to tell, but know that I’m back here, punching the clock for people that I know will eventually change beyond recognition. Because…
“Well, because we’re heroes.
“Just like you are.”
Allure held out a hoof.
“Go make your new societies. They won’t last forever. But they will be glorious and amazing.
“And Minna? ...I’m proud of you. Carry on our name into… wherever it is you end up.”
~~~
A haphazardly slapped together ‘ship’ of metal, wood, random pastry products, and what appeared to be flaming ice floated through the sky, propellers spinning madly.
It was the Austraeoh XV.
“Thar she blows!” Pinkie declared, jumping on top of the wheel. “The City of the Moon!” These days, she looked more like a swashbuckling pirate than a pink party pony, and that was just what she wanted.
“We have come full circle,” Monika observed, adjusting the suit she now wore all the time. “It marks the twilight years of our journey. We have experienced much, gained allies, lost friends, and here… we are.” She reached her hand toward a planet in the sky. “The Tower groans, and with it we seek reconciliation.”
Burgerbelle glanced at her. “You’ve gotten really poetic over the years.”
Monika nodded. “It could be said I resumed my craft in this very city. A mistake to show my inner flaws. And now, a return, to show how I have grown.” She created a donut and a muffin out of nothing and gave them to Pinkie, who devoured them whole. “In another way, this prepares me for the day my powers fail me. There will be no character files after the end.”
“Donuts, muffins, donuts, muffins…” Pinkie scratched her chin. “Hmm…”
“Neither are superior, both have their own traits and unique gifts to the world. Like the rose and the water lily, the—”
“BOOORING!” Burgerbelle declared. “You already got your reconciliation arc, we don’t need it again.”
“I can have more than one, thank you very much. Though I, again, apologize for Yuri’s behavior.”
“Ugh, you’re dry as a brick.”
Monika smirked. “But a brick is made from the wet mud, hardening into a structural support for much greater things.”
“Ok, boomer.”
Pinkie rammed her face into the wheel. “Burgerbelle, that’s cringey, even for you.”
“It also doesn’t apply,” Monika added.
“SPOON!” Burgerbelle threw a spoon at Monika’s face. It made the “spoon!” sound when it hit.
Monika pulled the spoon away and examined her reflection in it.
“Thinking of a poem?” Flutterfree asked, sitting on Discord’s head as he walked up to them.
“I am always thinking of a poem.”
“And when she’s not, she is writing a poem!” Discord laughed.
Monika smirked. “On the contrary, I could be writing our chronicle—”
“Which is overly poetic half the time.”
“Have you even read it?” Monika asked.
“I give him excerpts,” Flutterfree said. “He always enjoys seeing how you portray him. When he doesn’t get upset and I need to give him the belly rubs to calm him down…”
Discord flushed. “Er…”
Mattie walked up, chuckling. “You know, if I was a betting mare, I would have said he would be the one embarrassing you in this relationship. After twenty-five years of this I can’t believe how wrong I was.”
“Glad I could surprise!” Flutterfree giggled.
“You have a vicious tongue on you.”
“Scared?” Flutterfree waggled her eyebrows.
“Very.”
“As you should be,” Eve said, landing on top of Flutterfree, creating a totem pole of people. Discord struggled under the weight. “You think her blades are the most dangerous part of her… but it’s her words that end the mightiest of rulers. You’ve seen it happen multiple times.”
“She’s just too nice,” Discord said. “It’s impossible to be mad! She can win any fight just by putting on the puppy eyes.”
Flutterfree scoffed. “I do not!”
“You kinda do,” Eve pointed out. “…Though, only for little things.”
“The weak and foolish things of the world shall shame the strong,” Discord quoted, tapping Flutterfree on the snout.
Flutterfree smirked. “Oh, calling me your queen again?”
“I said no such thing!”
She tossed Eve off her and looked Discord in the eyes. “And I didn’t say I had any problem with it.” She kissed him on the snout. “Such a shame, really could have gotten some good-Discord points.”
“You know I never run out.”
“I’m far, far too liberal with them.”
Eve picked herself up off the ground, grunting. “Next time you feel like goggling over each other can you not dump me on the ground?”
Flutterfree put a hoof to her mouth. “Oh! I’m sorry, I was caught up, here, let me help you.” She flew down and picked Eve up. “There you go. Do you want back on the totem?”
“I’m way too big for that anyway. I should be the bottom!” Without missing a beat, she pointed a hoof at Mattie. “You don’t get to say anything.”
Mattie sighed. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
Flutterfree frowned. “Mattie… are you okay?”
“I’m… fine.” She tapped a hoof on the ground. “Just going through some things in this messed-up head of mine.”
“We’re here if you need it,” Flutterfree encouraged.
“When you need it,” Pinkie added.
Mattie laughed bitterly. “Ah, yes, the old adage of knowing you need help but not wanting to grab it and not knowing when it’s the right time in-story to do so…” She sighed. “…I wish the Tower would go already.”
“Soon. A few more years.” Eve put a hoof on her back. “Then… it’ll be new.”
“It damn well better be.”
The Austraeoh XV approached the City of the Moon, coming in at one of the major docks. To the surprise of absolutely no one, it was decked out with balloons, party supplies, and banners saying ‘WELCOME BACK!’
The Austraeoh dropped a plank onto the dock, and several of the heroes piled out, Pinkie leading them. She waved. “HELLOOO CITY OF THE MOON!”
The inhabitants of the city stared at them for a moment. They didn’t look like the heroes they remembered or the statues they had—lots of them had many more scars than usual, weren’t very clean, or had completely changed their look with an outfit or some other kind of modification.
But this didn’t matter to one little soft-pink mare.
“AUNTIE PINKIE!” she shouted, running out of the crowd. “It’s really you!”
“Auntie!?” Pinkie laughed. “I don’t remember you!”
“I’ve never met you but Limestone Pie is my great-grandmother! I’ve always wanted to… just say hi! HI!”
Pinkie swooped her up in a hug. “Hi back!”
Ahsoka stepped out of the crowd, removing her hood. “Everyone, these may not be the heroes you remember… but they are our heroes. Let’s show them a great time!”
“YOU HEARD HER!” Troi shouted. “BRING OUT THE CAKE!”
Tessa tensed. “Oh no. Cake…”
Pinkie threw a cake into Tessa’s face. “Enjoy yourself, Tessa, it’ll be worth it!”
“LET’S PARTY!” Discord declared, summoning as many singing fruit as he could.
If the City of the Moon hadn’t been sold on the celebration before, it was now—the time had come to celebrate and they were going to have an amazing time.
As they partied, Minna snuck onto the Austraeoh. The city wasn’t about to find out who she was today, even if she wanted to visit her old friends.
~~~
“Hey.” Vriska pulled some cotton candy off a stand and shoved it in Starbeat’s face. “Here.”
Starbeat smirked, taking a bite of it. “What’s this for?”
Vriska shrugged. “Feeling the past coming back to haunt me, I guess.”
“Vriska, come on, we were fine when we were here.”
“It’s the principle of the thing.” Vriska pointed at a hologram of the other Allure talking, projected right into the street. “It takes me… all the way back. Back to the war. Back to what I did to you.”
“Vriska…”
“And I can never apologize enough.”
Starbeat rammed her cotton candy into Vriska’s face. “And neither can I. We were both terrible to each other. But we’re past that now.”
Vriska laughed, tearing the confection off her face. “You know, I wonder why we couldn’t have just been… Eve and Flutterfree. I don’t think those two ever had problems. Now Flutterfree and Discord… hoo boy…”
“Eve and Flutterfree fought and disagreed just like everyone else. Just… well, not as loud and shouty as we got.” Starbeat paused. “Get. Last week was… fun.”
“Hey, that was not a proper stuffpile and you know it.”
“I swear I’m ka-cursed to never understand the proper arrangement for a stuffpile.”
“Right after the Tower falls, you and me, stuffpile lessons.”
“Not again…”
Suddenly, both Starbeat and Vriska froze in their tracks. Something had just touched their minds.
Good. I have your attention.
What the fuck!? Vriska called back, psychically. Can’t you see we’re busy?
Can’t be helped, unfortunately. You need to be warned and this is the right place to do it without drawing suspicion. Not everyone in this city idolizes you, there are those who resent your influence.
Just another villain to defeat, Starbeat sent back, trying to pinpoint the voice’s location. Same as ever.
She knows she can’t win. Not here, not now. She doesn’t care. She just wants to hurt you as much as possible.
Starbeat and Vriska froze in their tracks.
Be wary, and be careful. Protect everyone you can. You can’t lose, but you can be hurt.
The voice was gone.
Starbeat immediately pulled out her phone. “Pinkie, you get that?”
“Sadly, yes. Meet back at the docks, we need t—no, wait, it’s too late. Nanoha! Psychic message, stat! We’ve got a mysterious enemy out for revenge! They are going to strike soon!”
Starbeat heard Nanoha mumble something. A second later, she received a warning message.
A second after that, she heard the explosion.
“Fuck,” Vriska swore. “Starbeat?”
“On it…” Starbeat said, executing a teleport.
~~~
“I like this beard,” O’Neill said, scratching the tangle of hairs on his chin. It looked even more impressive in the funhouse mirror he was examining.
“Wear that for long enough and you’ll start talking like a pirate,” Nanoha commented with a coy smile.
“Yarrrr.”
“NANOHA!” Pinkie shouted, startling both of them. “Psychic message, stat! We’ve got a mysterious enemy out for revenge! They are going to strike soon!”
Nanoha wasted no time, diverting her magic to send a message to the entire Austraeoh crew, warning them to be on guard. “Sending, give it a second…”
It went out.
And then there was an explosion.
It wasn’t anywhere near them—it was the Austraeoh itself. In the distance, they saw it smoldering and falling into multiple pieces, crumbling to the surface of Nucleon far below.
Nanoha teleported herself and O’Neill to the dock, holding her device out aggressively. “Whoever did this, show yourselves!”
“Looks like you finally got yourself a good woman, General Snark,” a synthetic voice declared. “I’m glad some of us have turned their lives around…”
There was a massive gust of wind that tossed Nanoha and O’Neill off the dock. Nanoha grabbed her husband with her loose hand, channeling her magic into her feet to levitate in midair. “Who are you?”
A spindly robot made of blue pearls floated toward them, the icon of Breath proudly displayed on its central orb. Massive, tornado-like winds surrounded it, keeping it both aloft and protecting it from attacks.
“I do quite enjoy the confusion on your faces,” the Breath robot said, chuckling. “I wonder if you’ll get past it before you die!”
“STARLIGHT BREAKER!” Nanoha shouted, triggering her massive spell in an instant.
The Breath robot dodged. “Breath is such a slippery Aspect, is it not? Quite a large number of… useful abilities.” A gust of wind shot out… and O’Neill slipped out of Nanoha’s hands.
“JACK!”
~~~
Pringle looked up at Trixie and Pinkie, both trying to out-card-trick each other.
“Woah… you’re both amazing…”
“Trixie is better,” Trixie huffed, pulling out five aces and making a card house out of them.
“Nah, you just have the showmanship.” Pinkie made a sword out of cards. “I’ve got the—”
Pinkie’s phone rang. Her cheerful demeanor dropped in an instant and she let out a tired sigh.
“Pinkie, did you get that?”
“Sadly, yes,” Pinkie muttered. “Meet back at the docks, we need t—” She stopped, as if she’d seen something elsewhere. “No, wait, it’s too late!” She ducked behind a pot and… was gone.
Pringle frowned. “What…”
Trixie put a hoof on Pringle. “It’s fine, Pinkie will handle it. And the GREAT and POWERFUL TRIXIE will keep showing you card tricks!”
“Ooooh!”
“Now you see it…” Trixie got the message when she hid the card behind her ear. She didn’t flinch—she was a performer, and a performer she would stay. The show must go on. “…Now you don’t!”
“Wait, what? You teleported it a—”
The explosion shook the ground.
“Trixie did not teleport it away, though she will teleport us away.” Trixie focused her magic, but was interrupted by a robot powered by the pink of Heart.
“DIE,” the synthetic voice called, bringing a blade of the soul upon Trixie.
Pinkie appeared in front, blocking it with a pool noodle. “Not today.”
“You… YOU… PINK ONE.” The Heart robot flailed randomly in several directions before angling its entire body at her. “You will suffer more than most.”
“I’d like to see you try…” She boxed the robot in the face.
“PRINGLE, RUN!” Trixie shouted.
Pringle did exactly as she was told.
~~~
Jenny was on the back of the Austraeoh when it exploded. She hit the surface of Nucleon at high velocity.
Then something hit her at high velocity. A robot brimming with the green of Life, tangled in a mixture of plants and flesh.
Jenny regenerated, pulling herself out of the Jenny-shaped hole in the ground. “Ow.”
“Gotcha!” the Life machine declared. “And I’m gonna ge-”
Jenny punched a hole right through it.
The Life regenerated the fleshy exterior right back.
“…Not again…” Jenny groaned.
“Fun, isn’t it?”
“Gets a little boring after a while.”
They roundhouse kicked each other, somehow managing to smash the other into the ground again.
~~~
“Hey, do you know where Jojo is?” Pidge asked Mlinx.
Mlinx was busy examining the make of a lightsaber with edge guards. “Hmm? Oh, no. I haven’t sorry. I can try to call…”
“That’s fine, it—” Nanoha’s message entered their heads at the same time.
“Quiznak,” Pidge said as the explosion reached them. “We need t—”
A robot of Hope punched Pidge in the skull, cracking her jaw and knocking her out in one fell swoop.
Mlinx drew his spear. “What was that for?”
“This is between you and me.” A scepter of light appeared in the Hope robot’s hands. “As it should have been.”
~~~
“We didn’t deserve this,” Flutterfree said.
“Deserve what?” Discord asked, carrying Flutterfree as they floated through the clouds above the City of the Moon.
“This. We didn’t deserve each other. We let each other go… and at least my life should have ended before we ever thought to reconcile.” She laid her wings over his shoulders. “And yet, by grace alone, we were given this chance at another life. Forced onto a boat together, given an opportunity to see each other…” She kissed him. “Every last minute has been a gift.”
Discord transformed her into a present. After receiving a playfully annoyed glare, he turned her back. “Pretty sure we know who to thank for that.”
Flutterfree giggled. “Do you think, if we went back, we’d have worked? Or… did we need to drift apart and mature first?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m a being of chaos, I don’t deal in absolutes.” He chuckled. “But these twenty-some years have been the best of my centuries of life.”
“It’s just so… freeing. W—”
They received the message.
“Well, that’s not very romantic,” Discord huffed.
The Austraeoh exploded below them.
The Light robot exploded above them.
Flutterfree spread her wings, summoning Lolo. “We were having a MOMENT!”
“Do I look like I care?” the robot shone like a miniature sun.
~~~
“They do not live to serve,” the Blood robot declared to the people at the dock. “They are not of us, they wish to control us.” It lifted its hands, sending the power of Blood into the many citizens watching the celebration. “We will evict them for the true future…”
“FUUUUCK YOU!” Vriska shouted, throwing the infinite-sided die at the Blood robot. A swordfish slapped it across the face.
The Blood robot toppled back. “There are your enemies. Destroy them.”
The power of Blood demanded obedience to the connection. The more people of the city there were, the stronger it was.
“…This is bad…” Starbeat observed. “We can’t hurt them…”
“Shit,” Vriska muttered.
Ahsoka broke out of the Blood machine’s control. “Listen to me! They are not our enemy!”
“Your Force will bow to us,” the Blood robot said, lifting its hands.
Ahsoka activated her lightsabers, standing with Starbeat and Vriska. Troi and Tessa broke free of the control next…
…but they still had a small lightsaber-wielding army attacking them.
“Five on all…” Troi commented.
“Where we don’t want to hurt them…” Tessa hissed.
“I like those odds,” Vriska chuckled.
~~~
Jotaro wasn’t exactly sure what he was watching. He knew the people involved—Rev and Joanne, the latter of whom Jotaro was introduced to abruptly with the line of “Yes, I’m your great-granddaughter through the line of Jolyne, no, I don’t know where Grandma is. I’m not here to talk to you.”
And now…
“How do you expect me to treat you with respect if you refuse to look up from your phone?” Rev asked.
“The fact that you think respect is a thing I care about is telling. What is respect but a faulty ideal to keep the next generation in line? All should be given that which they prove.”
“People are not equal, though you are correct they should be treated equally—love even your enemies.”
“That gets you dead.”
“Martyrs change the world.”
“Also, you are currently speaking to me with disdain, not equally.”
“I’m not perfect, you specifically sought me out to start an argument.”
“It is what you deserve. From my perspective, it is only you who have done anything suspicious, while from yours, both of us are in the wrong. I am the optimist.”
“How much are you just reading off your phone?”
“Does it matter?”
“Well, there’s no being alive who could go against the collective knowledge of the Internet, you could always argue anything!”
“Perhaps my intention is not to come to an understanding, but to drive something into your thick faith-ridden skull?”
“That’s… uuuugh… what is your problem? What did we ever do to you?”
“Absolutely nothing, at least not relating to your beliefs. You’ve just created a world where—”
“…Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered to himself as they continued going at it.
Burgerbelle snapped a photo. “This is going into the memories folder. Monika will write a grand poem of the duel of the fates!”
“Th—” Jotaro’s comment was cut short by the message.
Joanne kept talking until the explosion went off.
“Ah, a group of four…” the Rage robot descended from the sky, landing hard enough to make a crater. “Worthy opponents. Grandfather, descendant. Atheist, believer. And you…” It pointed at Burgerbelle. “Living beauty!”
“…Wat,” Burgerbelle deadpanned.
The purple energy began to waft off the robot. “Let’s find out where this leads…”
~~~
Roland and Monika were on the Austraeoh when it exploded. Luckily, they landed in a lake on the surface.
Roland pulled Monika out, wordless.
“Egh…” Monika rubbed her head. “What’s the deal?”
“Attack,” Roland said.
Monika stood up, glancing at the Temple. “…I can’t use my powers safely here. Drat.”
Roland pulled out his gun. “Be ready for anything.”
Monika nodded—she may not have been able to make any active changes, but she could passively look for exploits. Which meant she could find things—things like an invisible Void robot through a loose character file.
“There!” Monika shouted. Roland fired—hitting the robot, but only in the foot.
“Arrogance…” the robot shivered into full view, moving as though it had little control over itself. “You… dare? Do you? How could you? What has become of me?”
Monika frowned. “I don’t know. But I assure you, we are more than enough to take you out like trash.”
“You are powerless… one wrong move, Monika… pop! You are brought low. Rightly.”
Monika pulled a green lightsaber out of her pocket. “I edited my character file to be force-sensitive that day and I’ve been practicing ever since so I won’t be taken advantage of again. Between me and the Gunslinger… we’ve got you.”
The Void robot vanished again.
~~~
Corona and Eve were inside the Austraeoh when it went off, but they were able to shield themselves from the fire.
“…Austraeoh sixteen, coming soon to a sky near you,” Corona commented with a chuckle.
“Yeah,” Eve flared her wings, looking for the opponent. “What attacked us?”
“Your hubris.” The Doom robot flew out of the sky, punching them both in the head. Corona had to act fast, preventing instant death from occurring with her own Doom powers, forcing the Doom back onto the robot itself.
It was completely immune to that sort of instant death.
“You think… you think you can just throw your problems back at me!?” the robot screeched. “You… why are you so… happy? How can… not possible!” It let out a roundhouse kick that Eve caught in her magic.
“Calm down,” Eve said. “Who are you? How can we help you?”
“Help? HELP!? I THINK YOU’VE HELPED ENOUGH!”
~~~
Mattie, Minna, and the Everykid were on the Austraeoh when it exploded.
Unlike the others who had some way to defend themselves, these three went flying like ragdolls.
The Everykid worked fast, placing a hat with wings on her head and flying around. She grabbed Mattie first.
“You’ve got quite a grip on you…” Mattie gagged.
The Everykid hummed, gesturing at the falling Minna. As they swooped in, Mattie unfurled a whip and lashed it around Minna. To Mattie’s surprise, Minna didn’t scream, she only grunted. She’d forgotten how high a tolerance for pain that woman had.
The Everykid was barely able to keep them aloft, so they still crashed into the ground, kicking up a copious amount of dust and smashing a large bush.
Mattie picked some sticks out of her mane. “Ow…”
Minna limped to her feet. “What attacked us…?”
“Haven’t the foggiest,” Mattie mumbled, rubbing her head. “Well, actually, a bunch of those Aspect robots, it looks like…”
“Uh-oh…” the Everykid said, backing into Mattie. Turning around, the unicorn and the woman saw two of the robots standing before them: Space and Time. Space was rigid and completely motionless. Time, on the other hand, was quivering with rage.
“I have been waiting… a long, long time for this…” Time curled its hands into fists. “You will know what it means to hurt.”
Mattie folded her ears back. “…Balls.”
Well, that's certainly one way to explain her origin.
Yup. You said we'd be getting a bit into previous interations of the MU.
Allure's tale makes sense. Merodi is a blue supergiant of a society, big and brilliant and gone in a relative eyeblink. Hopefully they'll carry the lessons of that time into the post-ka era.
Hoo boy. This is going to be nasty indeed. Though I have to wonder if Cinder had any private messages for Onion...