Doctor Caramel Crisp turned her back on the rest of the lab and focused on the diary. The pages were blank, but she stared at them as though they contained a captivating narrative of unbelievable suspense. Behind her, the purple mare paced up and down, chuckling and giggling to herself as she did so. She could’ve been waiting for a prank to begin.
Beyond the crystalline window pane, the factory was chugging away. Tubes of ink pulsed with colour as gobs were pumped into the main vats. Metal rollers and pipes and arms clanked and slid up and down, right and left, front and back, while below them a long snake of papers slithered down the slope into the belly of another machine.
From the catwalks all around, magic hummed and auras flicked on and off as the supervising unicorns focused their energies. All of them stood among the earth ponies, who were sitting down and scribbling on clipboards in whatever fashion suited them. Far below, a cart next to the machine was filling up with dumped comic books. Their yoked drivers whinnied and took off, but no sooner had they done so that the gap was filled with another cart, and the comics began piling up again.
“Success!” breathed Doctor Stone Meadow, and she pressed her face up against the glass. “Dreams within dreams, a lifetime at the touch of a page!”
“And,” muttered Caramel to the diary, “not a penny to your name.”
“Oh, I never want money, my dear standing skeptic.” Doctor Stone Meadow laughed and sauntered over, delivering a quick slap on Caramel’s rump which she barely winced at. “All that glisters is not gold, what?”
“And gilded tombs do worms enfold, yes.” Caramel rolled her eyes. One telekinetic spell idly flicked at the page’s edge. “I have been around the literary scene, thank you very much. A lot more often these past few weeks, I might add.”
“How inspired!” Doctor Stone Meadow twirled and pirouetted, landing with a broad-legged pose. “So I seem to have made a convert, at last!”
Caramel glanced at the glass. “Oh, I’d say you’d made a few.”
“Pah! Mercenaries! I’m talking about ponies with vision, the true prophets, the seers of the craft!” Doctor Stone Meadow nudged her with an elbow. “You and I are not so sane.”
Caramel sneered at her. “I knew someone like you once. It didn’t turn out well for him, either.”
“But don’t you see, my poor despairing darling? It’s not about turning out well. It’s about broadening horizons! It’s about taking ponies and marching off to the horizon, and finding the world over the next hill!”
“I was under the impression,” said Caramel coldly, “that you were escaping.”
“Caramel, darling! I’m crushed. I thought you liked me. Why else would you leave me that book? You must’ve wanted my company so badly.”
“I only did it because Doctor Lance told me to,” Caramel lied. “You were the only one who could finish the project, whatever the Suit deludes himself into thinking. Like he cares now that it actually works. So long as the Suit only thinks he saw you around the lab, then I can sleep easy tonight.”
Stone Meadow giggled. “That’s a lot of ‘only’s’ for such a lot of effort! Come on. What happened to your spirit, your joie de vivre? Whence cometh the cloud of untimely storm and stress?”
“Look!” Caramel rounded on her, making the gangly mare back off wide-eyed. “You’re out. Free. Unrestrained. Whoop-de-doo. Now buzz off already, before we get into trouble. And keep away from the blasted window!”
Caramel reached across the desk to the other copy of the dreadful novel. “Copies, you said. Every copy is linked up to the same copies. The perfect two-way communication system, nice. There’s my congratulations. Yay, Caramel, you did a trick.”
Stone Meadow tried a small smile. “Oh, hardly the beginning, my dear! You see, in the other realms, reality is a matter of suggestion. Supposing we joined up not just the same copies, but –”
“Oh, but of course that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?” said Caramel, in a red haze of her own and now pacing up and down. “No ‘Thank you, Caramel’, no ‘Well done, Caramel’, no ‘What a very smart thing you’ve just said, Caramel’. No, it’s just so much fudge, isn’t it? Not worth the effort, is it? I must be mad. I worked hard through magic academy to get where I am now. I don’t deserve this kind of treatment. I haven’t done anything mad.”
“Caramel! For shame! I had no intention of upsetting –”
“Oh, just get out. I haven’t got time for teary goodbyes. There’s the book. Hop through and take your chances. Make good on your freedom! It’s more than I ever managed.”
Magic flashed through her horn. The book on the podium flicked open, and the pages glowed. Swirling dust particles drifted in the vortex.
Exhausted, Caramel slumped over her diary. She was still fuming, and she ground her teeth when she felt the hoof gently rest on her shoulder.
“Why don’t you come with me?” said Stone Meadow brightly. “Leave all this behind? The rules don’t have to apply to you, of course. Carpe diem? Heart held high? Silently unto the dawn, what?”
Caramel sagged, spreading out over the pages. The blank spot leered up at her. Even with nothing else on the page, the blank spot was still obvious, though she couldn’t figure out why. She shook her head, rubbing her fur as she did so.
“Oh well. Ta-ta for now, my lovely!”
There was a flash. When Caramel turned around, the mare was gone.
Under her breath, she counted to five. Hopefully, that would grant the nutjob enough time. Then she levitated the book, strode over to a window, and knocking the pane back like a door, she left it hovering over the sheer drop to the misty treetops below.
Her forelimbs stretched out. She reared up, holding the flamethrower. There was a burst of flame. After a suitably cool pause, the ashes disappeared from view.
“No followers,” she muttered, and she tucked the device back under the desk.
A smile bloomed along her lips, and she turned back to the diary and flipped over to the next page. Unlike the previous pair, these were stuffed with tiny writing, most of it in any direction she’d fancied.
There was no way she was going to let anyone see this, much less the mad mare, but everyone was busy downstairs. Besides, it wouldn’t last long. Her spells were never powerful enough.
Lots of detail had gone into the picture. It looked vaguely like a pegasus, albeit one with spindly legs and iridescent butterfly wings; a tricky effect to pull off with just a piece of coal, so she hadn’t bothered and had added a few drops of oil. But the main body was of someone she knew.
It had to work. If she meant it to be him, then it would be him.
The quill and inkpot – both inkpots – beside her diary jittered. Her horn focused again.
As an afterthought, she scrawled in a tatzlwurm. It looked like any other, but she wanted it to be the tatzlwurm, even though that one was probably the size of a house by now. And there would never be a book or a portal near it, so how could it possibly be the same one? She couldn’t de-age a great stinking monster.
Maybe it could work. After all, Stone Meadow said dreams didn’t have to make sense.
Once more, in spite of her inner voices shouting at her, she closed her eyes.
She gritted her teeth and focused. Her horn blazed bright pink, and she focused on the ancient words Haycart had written down centuries ago… and the more recent scrawls of Stone Meadow’s theories. They floated before her and glowed with all the colours of the rainbow. It was all she could do not to scream.
And she entered the book.
Forget the project, she thought. The Suit can rot for all I care. But if there’s one chance, just one chance left right here and right now, then the last few years will have been worth it. I will be good at making dreams. Goodness knows I’m no good at anything else.
I’ll get to see Dad again. Not the real one. But close enough.
When she heard the hum of wings and looked up, she was her younger self again. She beamed and giggled and didn’t mind the screeches and the slime drooling all over her face.
Hoofsteps approached behind her. She turned to look, and immediately she smiled. Even though it couldn’t possibly be him, he was standing right next to her. With the wings of a Glitter High Butterfly.
“Look, Dad,” the filly murmured, fighting back the tears. “Fairies. You were right, Dad. You were right about everything.”
Doctor Stone Meadow peered up at the rows and rows of shelving, and reared up and spun on the spot, cackling and staggering at the sight of hundreds upon hundreds of books.
“That was very clever of her to use the Worst Book in the World,” said Doctor Lance beside her. He was resting on his back. Underneath him, the books were arranged into the shape of a bed. “Kept you focused on the task at hand. Nothing quite dulls the senses like a soul-destroying bit of pulp, now does it?”
He burst into fits of laugher, falling off and rocking on his spine over the wooden floor. Doctor Stone Meadow beamed at him as though indulging a child.
“Not that it mattered,” she said. “Even the worst drek is ultimately a gateway. I could have visited any realm I wanted. Traditions, clichés, allusions… everything is interconnected with everything else.”
“Well put.”
The stallion rolled back onto his hooves and sat himself down at the book bed. Beside him, the candles hovered in midair, yet no aura pulsed around them or his horn. The candlelight flickered and the wax dribbled down to the holders. Beside them both, the swirling portal shimmered and faded through rainbow colours within its crystal frame.
“The Suit was just a pretender in the end,” said Doctor Lance. “All talk and no walk. Hardly surprising, when he had to rope your brains into the project to begin with.”
She snorted. “Why is it so hard to find a true visionary? You’d swear they couldn’t dream.”
“Now, now, I wouldn’t go that far,” said the stallion. “Even a lowly ant will dream of soil and grains. You just have to be patient with them. Lead them through sprouts and twigs and leaves and things. The great tree sits on the horizon.”
“That yellow mare,” she said. “Who was that? She clearly knew about our intentions, or she wouldn’t have put the book in place.”
“Who knows? Call her an unintentional collaborator.” The stallion smiled. “Though she’s also hopelessly, pitifully dim-witted, but then aren’t most ponies? Present company excepted, of course.”
“Most gracious of you, darling. Besides, the Suit definitely did notice a few of my… excursions. He had the book taken away in the end, and no secret returns that time!”
“You should have been more careful. In fact, why didn’t you just stay there even after he caught you? You could have used the short story.”
“Because my work is complete. The Suit is creating my enchanted comics, and that’s what I need. Now I can hop with ease from book to book, jump out into reality, do some secret work, and then hop back in at a set time. Those guards and even the Suit will never realize what has truly been accomplished here. But what about the portal? I wanted to share my gift even with talentless hacks.”
“And you will. The Suit still has the technology.”
Doctor Stone Meadow let her gaze wander up the walls of books, her eyes gleaming under the candle flames and some inner light source of her own. Despite himself, the grey stallion stiffened and stretched.
He had once thought she was wide-eyed and idealistic. Most of the doctors said as much. Careful observation of her manner and actions had led him inexorably to the conclusion that, in spite of the unrelenting act, she was nothing of the sort.
She was beady-eyed. She was cynical. That was why she enjoyed life so much.
It was fascinating to watch her approach ditziness and good humour from the other direction. Behind every chummy smile was a slight narrowing around her eyes. Behind the staring pupils was a shifting shadow where intelligence lurked like a hunter. When she leaped from quotation to archaic language at the drop of a hat, she was sneering at space and time and convention and rules. Only the keenest of minds would have detected it, but it was there.
So when she flared up and reared onto her back legs and snarled at the distant ceiling, he never so much as blinked. If anything, he smiled genially as though at a mildly amusing joke.
“It’s truly incredible!” she roared. “After all the scorn and fear he poured on me, he just stole my invention and sold it!”
“Of course. He’s not as philistine as you think. He’s just… testy about having money wasted.”
“As if he needed it. I couldn’t help myself. The money was just sitting there. It was a simple matter of fiddling with the books…”
“…and getting yourself dubbed ‘criminally’ insane, of course.”
For a moment, the snarl darkened. Then she oozed back down onto all four hooves. Under the darkness that even the candlelight could not repel, she released a smile.
“That’s how they treat all revolutionaries.” She chuckled to herself. “And then ponies like the Suit turn it into an everyday thing, and the extraordinary suddenly becomes normal. The real genius is left to rot in a prison. Enchanted comics! The ultimate 3D experience! Poor fools.”
Doctor Lance stretched and continued stretching. His jaundiced eyes blinked contentedly. “Well, at least it’s out there. Comics that act as portals. Whole worlds recruited for the sole purpose of role-playing. How delightfully deranged. So what are you going to do now?”
The candelight was starting to dim. Stone Meadow glanced at its shrinking dance. Anything to avoid looking at the stallion's distorting shadow. “I think I’ll put on a few performances. The wonderful thing about inventing imaginary alternative worlds is that inventing imaginary alternative worlds is a wonderful thing. You get to make the rules.”
“Isn’t it just nice? Nothing quite like a good old bout of chaos, now is there?”
She glanced at him and then hastily looked away again. “You… coming to join me?”
“Oh no. There’s far too much fun to be had here. I’m not thinking of reviving the chaos, exactly. It would draw a few complaints. But thousands of years ago, I left a few… back-up plans in place. I’d love to see this world turned upside-down, believe me, but as it is, I have other commitments at the moment. I can’t just rain it down upon the land overnight now. Not like I used to. But believe me, there is a more… subtle way of doing it.”
“Subtle?”
“Well, look at the world as it is now. Duplicating lakes, interspecies transformation magic, plants that cast joke spells on anyone who touches them… wouldn’t you agree the world is chaotic already? When I started out, the number of magical rules could be summarized on the back of a postcard. Now the rules of magic are rewritten practically every week. I’d say my masterpiece is coming along quite nicely, wouldn’t you agree?”
Stone Meadow stared for a long time at the dying candelight. Then it went out.
Her chest shuddered. Her shoulders shook. She was bursting with suppressed mirth, and then it seized her mouth and she erupted into fits of uncontrolled laughter.
“Ahahahaha! Ahahahaha! AHAHAHAHA-HAAAAAAA! Oh my disordered darling of deviousness! You do talk some rot, don’t you? For such a master of chaos, you sure like to plan and scheme a lot, don’t you?” Her grin sliced through the air between them.
The thing on the book bed barely winced. “Chaos isn’t the absence of rules, my dear deranged disciple. It’s a surfeit. But if that’s too much received wisdom for your humble pony brain to handle, I’d just skip the chat and trot on to your eternal playtime, wouldn’t you?”
“I certainly can’t wait.” Before Doctor Stone Meadow hopped into the portal, she turned around and giggled. “Villains have all the fun, don’t they? Many a mare may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
“If you’re proposing what I think you are,” said the draconequus, “then I bow to your good taste.”
With a final outburst of cackling, the mare formerly known as Doctor Stone Meadow bowed back, and then she leaped into the vortex and, along with it and the tome on the podium behind her, vanished.
They’d called her a maniac. It sounded like a good idea.