Misappropriated Fanfiction Theater #3, Part One · 6:49am Nov 22nd, 2012
I consider it ever-so-slightly rude when one artist takes somebody else's work and then runs with it, especially if they do it without asking permission. But the fact that you are reading the third segment of a series called "Misappropriated Fanfiction Theater" proves that sometimes I just can't help myself. My only excuse is that I'm sticking it here in my blog, where fewer people will see it.
The work being "desecrated" tonight is "Hello, Sedna", by shortskirtsandexplosions. I found it to be a powerful story with an enigmatic ending...that I just couldn't leave alone, so here's a sequel a little bit longer than the original, posted in four parts. The numbers after the name of each part are Dewey Decimal Classifications—it's what Twilight would have wanted. 
Journey of the Sorcerer
(An unauthorized sequel to “Hello, Sedna”, by shortskirtsandexplosions)
Part One: On the Beach at Acapulco [917.27]
(A little music to get things started.)
Waves washed slowly across the abandoned beach of Acapulco. No other sounds could be heard.
No chatter of tourists. No cries of seagulls. No clacking of crab claws. No swooshing of palm leaves. Only wind and water pushing the endless expanse of sand around.
In the tide pools, single-celled algae and plankton thrived, for nothing bigger existed to feed on them. The aberration known as “multicellular life” ended its two billion-year reign of terror in an orgy of self-destruction a while back, in the form of an eleven month release of mutagenic radiation known as “World War III”. The radiation broke down the barriers between cells, and plunged the Earth into a decade-long winter that finished off those higher life forms clever enough or tough enough to survive the gamma rays and alpha particles. Contrary to popular belief, the cockroach did not survive.
Life on Earth had survived cataclysm before. In some ways the Oxygen Catastrophe of 2.4 billion years ago was even worse than this—imagine how you would react if the air started eating you alive one day. There would be a recovery eventually, as the radiation level gradually dropped. Multicellular life would return in ten million years or so, in some new and unexpected form...
...or it might descend down from the heavens this morning encased in a crystalline sphere.
~ ~ ~
For hours after the sphere touched down gently on a sand dune, nothing happened.
And then with a strange chittering sigh, the side of the structure spontaneously grew apart and down, into the form of a ramp. Walking slowly down this ramp came a quadrupedal creature, obscenely enormous by unicellular standards. It’s outer surface was mostly made up of a shiny smooth membrane, with metal rings to allow some flexibility around the joints. The head of the creature was encased by a helmet composed of a hardened version of the same substance as the suit. A large hole was present in the front of this helmet, but between the face of the creature and the Earth’s fatal atmosphere was a scintillating sphere of dark purple light. The creature moved strangely, too slowly for this gravity field, its limbs only barely touching the ground with every step, as if some force was keeping most of Earth’s pull from affecting it.
The creature turned its head about as it walked, somehow sensing its environment despite the opaque sphere of light about its head. Reaching the tide pool, it kneeled down until it was resting on the sand, and then a beam of purple light emerged from near the top of the light sphere, bathing the tiny inhabitants for a few seconds. A few samples and some sea water were lifted into the air by the beam and moved into a stoppered glass tube that was hanging from the waist of the creature. The beam then visibly retracted into the sphere (something that really shouldn’t be observable with light), and the creature rose one more to its extremities. It looked up at the sun and stared at it from several long seconds, then turned and returned to the sphere, which sealed itself up in a manner as inexplicable as its earlier opening.
~ ~ ~
The day passed, and then the night. The sphere made microscopic repairs to itself overnight to undo the damage caused by the disintegrating radiation. That night, a small spot of light in the sky remained stationary over the beach, just as it had been for the past two months. Unlike last night, it didn’t even have to move to avoid being obliterated by a stray piece of artificial satellite.
Bright and early the next morning, the creature emerged once more from the sky-sphere. She was still not walking properly. Floating behind her, in a rude violation of the law of gravity, six glass stands topped with colored jewels made their way out to form the boundaries of a large circle centered on the sphere. The creature examined the placement of each stand carefully, making minute adjustments and at one point swapping the positions of two stands for what appeared to be entirely arbitrary reasons. Finally, it walked over to stand next to the sphere and lowered its head.
Nothing appeared to happen for nearly a minute.
And then, the sphere encasing the creature’s head began to grow.
It swelled outward, slowly but steadily, sinking down into the sand and rising up into the air. Bigger and bigger it grew, with the beach slowly finding itself more and more inside instead of outside. Finally the sphere touched the six mounted crystals, and there it stuck.
Then something even more incredible happened: the radiation level, which had been dropping by such miniscule degrees for so very long, suddenly disappeared entirely within the sphere.
The purple pony unicorn in the suit let out the breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding, and then stripped out of her clothing.
Correction, the purple pony unicorn pegasus.
Twilight Sparkle took a good look around her, with vision no longer obscured by her magical field. It was, as she had observed several times during her approach to this world, a very good planet to live on, similar in many ways to her native Equestria. It was also rather unfortunately similar to that one world in one additional way: they were both currently devoid of intelligent life, with herself as the lone exception.
She had been very sure of this point. From orbit, she had bombarded the world with a variety of ingenious scanning techniques she had devised uniquely for this planet. This was not because this was the first world she had encountered during her voyages through the cosmos; on the contrary, this was her forty-first landfall—thirty-six worlds that had never had intelligent life, interspersed with four worlds where intelligent life had existed, but had been wiped out before her arrival. But what made this world, this Earth, so unique, was what it lacked: magic.
When she had discovered the human’s dead colony on the world of Sedna, she had not been particularly surprised to learn that the race was non-magical. So were several creatures on Equestria, and similarly with the remains of a few of the creatures she had found in her travels. But before now, all of those creatures lived on worlds saturated by magic, and had to compete with creatures that could wield magic. Earth was utterly unique in being an entire world devoid of magic. The leylines of the galaxy and solar system buckled around Earth’s orbit, leaving a space out to ten thousand kilometers above Earth’s surface utterly mundane. And this was not just a result of the cataclysm that wiped out the humans—the anomaly was completely stable, something that would have taken at least a billion years to occur. As a result, Twilight had to improvise sensors using the less reliable of the physical forces of the universe in order to probe the planet for intelligent life. Besides the lack of the radio communications the Sedna base had used, she detected no movement of any objects within an order of magnitude either smaller or larger than that of humans, either on the earth, in the sky, or up to half a kilometer underground.
Twilight Sparkle hadn’t thought that life was possible under those circumstances. She had been certain that life had sprung from magic, and had been shaped into its present forms by its capricious nature. But here was Earth, a world that once had and still had life, but life independent of mana. Experiments with her single-cell samples showed that they were affected by magic just like most everything else in existence, however. She had been afraid that her magic might prove harmful to the humans she hoped to meet or whatever other life she encountered on this odd world, and was glad to see that this was not the case. She was still left with a bit of a problem, however.
Twilight was immortal, but she was not all-powerful. She drew her energy, both physical and thaumatalogical, from the magical field. This meant that she could not remain continually down on this world. Periodically, she would have to return to her manaship to recharge from the leylines. A “mortal” wound on the surface of this world would have very serious consequences for her, potentially leaving her in a crippled state until the end of time. Still, she was determined to put up with this danger, until she had learned everything should could about the humans who once lived here before annihilating themselves in a fit of self-destructive rage.
The first thing, in fact the only thing, for her to do on her carefully planned mental list for today, was to build up her muscles. It had been a very long time between star systems, and she had conserved her magic, leading to muscle atrophy. She was currently supporting most of her weight via telekinesis, but that would serve to severely shorten how long she could stay on Earth before having to recharge, as well as leaving herself very vulnerable in the case of earthquake or other natural disaster. So she started running around the perimeter of the pen she had made for herself out of the Acapulco beach. Most of her weight was still supported by magic, but as she finished each circuit, that magic incrementally lessened. After twenty laps, she took to the air with her wings for another twenty laps before returning to her hooves. As she trotted or flew past each of the pillars, she nodded respectfully at the gem at its top.
~ ~ ~
Immortals are, by necessity, very patient creatures. It took two weeks before she felt she was strong enough to leave her base camp. This time could have been a lot shorter if this world had a magical field for her to draw from. When she felt she was ready, she put her jumpsuit back on, contracted her magical field back inside her helmet, and set out for her next destination: the ruins of the human city behind the beach.
There wasn’t much of the city to see. Unicellular organisms are very good at tearing down artificial structures if given enough time, and time was exactly what they had been given. That this place had once been built of stone, steel and glass was obvious, but virtually nothing else survived...except for a hole in the ground.
This was a fallout shelter, a place for the human civilians to wait out the mad war of this world’s military. Except in this case the war left the world with no place safe to come out into.
This particular shelter appeared to have been defective—it had sealed itself shut when the final assault began, but before anyone had actually managed to enter it. That seal was designed to stand up to anything and everything, and so it had.
Twilight set up another magical perimeter around the door of the shelter, and got to work studying the lock. There were about a dozen ways she could have used her magic to break through that door, but she estimated that there were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of these shelters shattered across Earth with nearly identical locks, and she didn’t want to lose a single bit of information during her exploration of all of them. She gave that lock the electrical power it needed, and proceeded to methodically crack it. If she had had to key in every possible ten-character code manually, she would have been here for centuries, and of course the lock was set up to permanently lock the door from the outside if it was overly tempered with, but she had the ability to peer into the circuitry and trace it all back to the microcomputer that controlled it, so it merely took her seven hours to crack it.
Inside she found living quarters for nearly two hundred humans. To keep themselves amused for the decade the humans assumed would be the most needed to wait out the Apocalypse, the place was equipped with paperback novels, dozens of board games, several packs of playing cards, and a video playback system and collection of films.
This was what Twilight Sparkle was looking for. As near as she had been able to tell from orbit, Acapulco’s fallout shelter was the best preserved on Earth. It was the basis from which she would study the culture of humanity.
~ ~ ~
As it turned out, the leisure set of a beachfront community was not the best place to begin studying how humans lived and dreamed.
As best, it could be considered a base state, what humans considered “mindless entertainment”. Worst of all was the fact that no humans had ever been allowed to customize these rooms to their own personal tastes before the end came for them. Twilight supposed that by studying this collection, she now knew the mind of one crass businessman, somebody who clearly didn’t take the idea of fallout shelters seriously, but wanted to pass something off as safe in order to attract one more demographic slice to his resort.
Once she had scanned the contents of the shelter, she sealed it back up. It had finally occurred to her, thirty-some worlds into her odyssey, that others might stumble across these dead worlds after she had left them behind, and so, in addition to leaving them signs of her existence and plans, she also sought to leave things as much as possible as they were when she had found them. In some cases, when her magic was low, she had no choice but to be destructive in her scanning, but she was just starting on her study of planet Earth, and she didn’t want to get herself into any bad habits.
With the re-closing of the Acapulco shelter, her first trip to Earth came to an end. She returned to her landing pod, and propelled it back up to her manaship.
We got the cockroaches! I say "worth it!".
I really really hate this paragraph. You're lecturing us when we should be learning alongside Twilight.
TL;DR