//------------------------------// // Melody // Story: Mancala // by Schismatism //------------------------------// "My, grandmother, what big teeth you have," I mumbled quietly, staring into the jaws of death. The eyes above weren't much better: every time I chanced to look above those teeth of despair, I was greeted with an equally unsettling sight, with which I shan't invade your nightmares. Suffice to say, whatever Scarlet had come up with had - however momentarily - unhinged her, in much the same way as... well. We'll get to that in time, no doubt. Sneaking a peek about the room for some - any - manner of surcease, I saw Shamrock, Cobalt and - all of a sudden - Candy almost... no, they were huddled up in a corner, looking as though a vengeful dragon had somehow found its way into the hospital. Not one of them had their eyes turned towards us, as though they knew that catching the gaze of the monster before them would somehow draw her attention to them. Being the idiot that I am, I returned my own gaze to those eyes, and gave a small upwards twitch of a lip, hopeful that I might perhaps distract her long enough to escape... and spoke what might have been one of the last words of my life. "Parley?" It had been, needless to say, a long day for Doctor Horse. He had been up and down the hospital at least a hundred times already, seeking out papers, documentation, archived files, the works - and with very little to show for it. He'd been tasked with filing for replacements for not one, but four highly precise medical tools, not to mention the scalpels, when each and every one of them inexplicably failed at what they were specifically designed to do. There was the broken ground-floor window, which he still didn't quite grasp the importance of. He'd had to deal with three children, not to mention his changeling - CHANGELING - patient, who - while intelligent enough, based upon his conversation - seemed to be functionally insane. Days like these were, it seemed, specifically designed to test the patience of anyone in any sort of workplace, be it a grocery clerk or a politician or the best doctor within fifty kilometers, and the phrase 'testing to destruction' came readily to mind. A few moments ago, he'd taken the time to pick up a small paper cup of coffee from the local staff lounge, and was casually sipping the beverage as he progressed towards what he was absolutely certain held yet another headache. As with many in the institution, he held the drink with a reverence which most reserved for Celestia herself: after all, while the sun might bring one to awakeness, coffee itself brought one to alertness. Had anypony brought up the idea of a Cult of Coffee, an almost depressing number of students, medical staff, and their ilk would have gleefully joined. At the moment, though, such thoughts were a mere distraction, and he sipped from his cup with an uncharacteristically somber expression. What the buck am I dealing with?, he thought to himself, weaving his way across the floor. While Gem hadn't actually harmed any medical equipment other than an easily replaced bedpan - a small miracle in and of itself - it was clear that she was in such a state of panic that she'd hardly notice if she had... all for a little bit of fog and two tiny stones which had left her in a practical fugue state. The mare had shattered, then dove out a window, and... had worried about the ponies around her, more than herself. The good doctor shook his head, then took another sip of coffee. There were yet more problematic concerns. Whatever that legband was, it was obviously enchanted, and yet the weave, both magical and physical, was so tight that they could barely sense it. Magically, from what he'd been told, it felt almost like every effort to manipulate the material slid right off; the way the moonsilver sublimated like that seemed virtually impossible, but he'd witnessed it in action, and that nearly caused him to wet himself right then and there. Another question to be answered. For a moment he'd felt bad about that series of lies - his seeming madness, his statement regarding the Solar Princess coming to visit, and more - but it seemed the only thing likely to get through to his patient, and it had in fact inspired a moment of what he could only assume to be genuine shock. That, though, was just as non-indicative. There were just too many potential causes: for one, the thought of meeting Celestia herself was enough to make virtually anypony weak in the knees, let alone a changeling. A small note he'd filed away in his brain, though, seemed to beg his attention, and he carefully reviewed it. 'The Princess of the Sun?' Not 'The Princess'. Not even 'Princess Celestia'. The 'Princess of the Sun'. Yes... that would be worth looking into, albeit later. With one more sip of his half-empty coffee, Doctor Horse pushed open the door of the room, to see the unicorn mare of the Wild Guard mercilessly torturing his patient, while holding a feral grin upon her face - one which spoke of a madness all on its own, one he'd seen too often. A patient who, despite being under heavy assault, was... laughing? The cup of coffee dropped to the floor, and began to spill across the tiles. Alas, its time had come. I won't deny, there are tortures, and then there are tortures. Waterboarding, for example, is particularly insidious: it leaves no physical marks, and can nonetheless cause incredible mental harm. A certain author who often went by the name of 'Pterry' once alluded to a 'ginger beer' trick, of which I shall provide no firm details, save that if you've ever snorted soda up your nose, you might have some small idea. And, of course, for anyone who has entered a public school, or - heaven forfend - had older siblings, there are so many more gentle means of torture which nonetheless cause great, if not particularly lasting, trauma. In short form, Scarlet had gently set the cans of soda onto a table with her field, and... promptly started to go to work, tickling me fiercely with one forehoof and giving me a very firm noogie with her other. One might not, ordinarily, expect that this sort of thing would be particularly efficacious, but quite the opposite was true: changeling chitin, while being somewhat harder than normal flesh, nonetheless possesses a great nervous capacity, all the better for ensuring that harm is felt. Pain, after all, is the body's capacity for telling you when you're damaged, or potentially drove yourself too hard (which really amounts to the same thing). And there are few things more hideous than a full-fledged assault of this nature by someone who's already gone through boot camp, and had to endure it herself. I had hitherto thought that, perhaps, my growing up with an older sister may have rendered me somewhat immune to such attacks, and yet... Fifteen seconds into the torture I was nearly completely out of breath, my skull aching; my screams for mercy, mixed with hideous laughter, went unheeded as the other ponies in the room - traitors, they were! - tried to sidle out before the attention of the vile devil was drawn to them. Thankfully, my saviour arrived before things came to a head, announcing his presence with the splash of liquid and a declaration of horror. "What in TARTARUS is going on in here?!" There are reactions ground into us from the very moment we're first aware, such that they're almost instinctual. One does not beard the lion in its den, one does not ignore that tone of voice, and most of all, one does absolutely not ignore a doctor when he's clearly outraged. I swear that Scarlet lept off the bed, and brought herself to attention right alongside Shamrock and Cobalt. Candy was standing there, clearly uncertain of what to do, and I... well, I was trying to recover my capacity for rational thought, while panting like I'd just run a very long sprint. Clearly someone would have to step up to the proverbial plate here, and fortunately for almost all of us, Shamrock was able to stammer out an almost plausible explanation. "Laughter is the best medicine?" he asked, in very nearly a whisper. I wasn't quite certain, but I believe I heard the good doctor's eyelid twitch in the resultant silence. My eyes took a moment or two longer to focus, but I was able to catch Doctor Horse point at the three rapscallions with a truly vindictive glare, then point at the hallway outside. Candy was, wordlessly, told to sit down on a chair, an dictate which she immediately followed. As for me... he began to pace back and forth while keeping an eye on me. A shake of my head later, I was at a point where I could at least think halfway clearly, the adrenaline rush finally tapering off. Barely controlled, Doc Horse took a moment to pull up a seat, and fixed that glare upon me once more. "All right, then. Let us begin from the start. You're clearly not hurt, though your fainting is a concern. I want you to provide me with a short, comprehensible, sane answer to a few questions, and then I want you and those three walking disasters out of my mane, out of my bed, and out of my hospital." That... was something of a tall order. Right then, though, I'd begin to figure a few things out which had been bouncing around the back of my head, ringing bells which I had been studiously ignoring for quite some time. My mood swings, for example... one moment, I'd been laughing and joking, the next I'd been in the middle of a shock, the next I'd gone catatonic from stress... put simply, I was all over the place, and I think I knew why. At the time, though, I was feeling too drained. So I gave the doctor a nod, and a tired, "Ask away." "First off," began the examination, "what is your name?" Ah, simple enough. And yet... names were a difficult thing. You see, in fiction, there are names, and then there are Names. Anyone who's ever read anything about the Fair Folk, who's played a tabletop RPG, or anything like that, knows this: you do not give out your true Name unless you're certain that it can't be used against you, thaumically. Until I knew the rules, or perhaps more accurately, the Rules, I was hesitant. But thankfully, I knew at least one loophole which could almost certainly be applied. "Before we begin, there's one thing I would like to say." Thankfully, that wasn't enough to set Doctor Horse off again, though he paused before giving me a curt nod. Steeling myself, I took a breath. 'Oh, gods alive, this works in a lot of fiction, let this work here...' "I so swear, by the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, by Fire and Water, by Earth and Sky, and by Life and Magic itself, that the answers I provide during this conversation will be factual to the best of my knowledge, though that I reserve the right to withhold information which could conceivably put myself or others at risk." The resultant sensation was... odd, to say the least. It wasn't anything physical, not that I could feel, but I believe that there was a very strong feeling of some bond falling over me, particularly my muzzle. While it wasn't painful, it was a very, very peculiar effect, and it set my chitin to tingling all over, almost a full-body shudder. The resultant effect on the Doctor, not to mention Candy Striper, was far more pronounced. Each of them sat bolt upright as though they, too, were able to feel a sort of static in the air. Ever seen a pony's fur stand on end? Yeah... if I weren't so utterly drained at that point, I'd have almost giggled at the sight. A moment later, the two both let out a hiss of breath, one I'm not sure they knew they were holding... and now they were looking at me as though I was far more dangerous than I initially let on. Well, let it not be said that their instincts were entirely wrong. "What... was that?" asked Candy, in an almost reverent tone of voice. She was shivering slightly, even as the pulse of thaumic energy dissipated into the aether. I gave her a wry smile, showing no teeth. "Two points for asking a good question," I started. "I read a lot, and that was an oath pieced together by a number of clues in, of all things, literature, which I figured would apply as a binding to ensure that you know I'm telling the truth. I wasn't sure if it would work, but it seemed like even if there wasn't a thaumaturgical aspect, it'd still be a good start." Here I gave a Gallic shrug, and returned my attention to the doctor. "To answer your first query, the only name I have here in Equestria is the one I gave you: Divided Gem." Give him points too: he raised an eyebrow at the evasive non-answer, but decided to run with it for now, correctly reasoning that I'd probably run circles around him until sunset if he decided to keep it up. "All right, then." Marking that down on a sheet, he followed up with, "When were you born?" This one I had to give some thought. "A moment, please..." After glancing at the calendar again, and making a few assumptions which I believe mapped suitably well to the timescale, I replied, "969 CE, the twenty-third day of the fifth month." This earned another eyebrow, but he dutifully jotted it down. "I'm not sure I believe that you're only 26, but you did swear that oath..." he began, muttering half to himself and half to the rest of the room. There I had to chuckle slightly, despite how drained I still felt, but let off when he speared me with another glance. "And where were you born?" Ah, another tricky question, albeit one which I expected. Thankfully, loopholes exist all over the place, and this one was easy. "A city in the more or less temperate north, whose name doesn't map perfectly to Equestrian, but which could be called 'Wooded Basin'. Natively, it's called 'Toronto'." Literal truth, and utterly meaningless to anyone who wasn't familiar with good ol' Terra. Oh, I was going to give some bureaucrat a nasty headache. "Are there many changelings within this 'Toronto' of yours?" was his next request, to which I once again shrugged. "Not many," as the number 0 is certainly well within that range, "but it's a fairly cosmopolitan city, with folks from all walks of life." I think by now I was really getting into the swing of things, and I think I heard teeth grinding. Still, on we went. To the query of what I did, I gave the honest truth: a little bit of everything. I'd never really found a calling, though he did blink as I noted my hobbies in photography, gaming, and the like. I decided there to throw him a bit of a bone, and explained that folks like myself were oftentimes generalists, not having cutie marks. I suspect he went with the obvious explanation that I was a changeling, and left it at that. The question about my family was met with dubious curiosity: he was slightly surprised that I only had one sister, but then, the literature on changelings was practically nonexistent, and what little there was... was so contradictory as to be virtually useless. I'll admit, I felt slightly guilty about this, but I had a sneaking suspicion that a number of changelings had already poisoned that well. Finally, we got down to the really fun parts of the conversation: exactly what had happened over the past day. "First off, I'm not entirely certain how I wound up in the middle of that Forest of Illusion and Chaos, over there. One moment I was walking down the street, the next I'm waking up with a nasty headache and a suspicion that something was very, very wrong. After I gathered my bearings and cursed up a storm, I was greeted by those three, who were kind enough to take me to town. I think they were motivated by curiosity as much as anything." Well, that much I knew. I could practically taste their curiosity, and it was quite an energizing feeling, to say the least. "We introduced each other, and I requested to take a gander at the local library. When I got there... erm. Things went peculiar." Candy, who had been voluntold to take up the position of stenographer for this conversation, chimed in here. "Peculiar? I was told you dropped like a sack of potatoes." I had to nod to her. "Exactly," I replied. "For some reason, something went very, very wrong when I walked in. Barely caught a look around before I found myself here, for which I do owe my saviours yet another debt. Bet they'll be holding this above my head for a while," I chuckled, albeit dimly. "And their claims that, when you woke up, you claimed to be from another world?" asked Doc Horse, with no small measure of asperity. Here I had to cough. "That was more or less for the sake of shock value," I replied, another misleading truth. "You... might've noticed that I've been going through some mood swings. Being displaced like that, waking up with this thing," and here I waved my hoof, around which was that strange band, "and basically finding myself a long way from home, I think that shock threw my mental compass so far off course that it's been spinning ever since. Not the best metaphor, but..." Here I sighed. "Anyway, I'm sorry for causing you all that grief." Here there was a pregnant pause, where both of my interrogators took a long deep breath of the resultant coffee fumes which still lingered, despite the spill having been cleaned up a few minutes ago. They each gave a tiny nod, though, before the doctor cleared his throat. "All right. Just three more questions, then. When I walked in here the first time, you were playing what appeared to be music on a small tablet of sorts. What exactly is that?" This was the part I'd been dreading. There were three major, unresolved questions to which I wasn't quite certain of the answers, nor how to obscure them properly. Plus, how would one explain electronics in a world where the technological levels were so anachronistic, if not totally bent? Well, when in doubt, start digging that cesspool. "Maybe the... best way to describe that," I started with a cough of my own, "would probably be a semi-volatile data storage medium. It's a device capable of holding notes, music, and the like, and bringing them back up at whim." Here I gave them a light tilt of my head. "Don't you have unicorns who can hold that sort of thing within a crystalline array?" At their nods, I smiled, albeit thinly. "Then there you have it. It's simply an improvement on the technology." Perhaps guessing once again that I wasn't going to provide answers beyond that, he asked next, "Alright. Those two cans which evidently caused so much trouble. What exactly are they made of?" At this one, I simply had to let out a quiet laugh. "A thin quantity of aluminium metal, containing pressurized soda." Candy simply dropped her clipboard, while both their mouths had fallen open. For a moment, all the ridiculous answers I'd given seemed to drop out of their heads, and I think that their emotions were simply scrambled while their brains caught up with their ears. Well, there was another assumption confirmed, at least. Finally, Candy got her voice back, and squeaked, "You're carrying around soda... in aluminium." "Sure!" I think I was getting another mood swing, because my voice was far more ebullient than it should have been, and I was absolutely enjoying the [System Crash] which I'd just caused. After a moment, though, I was able to recognize it, and took a deep breath. "Sorry. Got a bit caught up there... let's just say that we have a very prominent recycling program, so what aluminium we do have gets brought back into the system after reprocessing." "But... even so, aluminium..." That came from Doctor Horse, who was still clearly trying to get his bearings around that - so I threw him another metaphorical bone here. "Oh, that reminds me," I began, "in order to pay off the hospital visit, not to mention that broken window and the other issues with that little, er, escapade, for which I'm really, REALLY sorry, would one or both of those be a suitable replacement for fungible assets?" They both looked at me like I'd just offered a gold bar in exchange for a salon visit. A quick breather later, during which I carefully opened one of the cans of diet cola with a pair of tweezers and happily imbibed the contents, I offered the empty remains to the doctor. The half-ounce of aluminium present in the can was more than sufficient to cover the costs of my very short stay, hence why he took the prized possession in a shaking hoof. After a few more moments of reflection, he set it aside and asked what we agreed was the third and most important question of the lot. "Okay... last but not least, what exactly is that thing around your leg?" Here, I let out one last weary sigh. "Now, that is hard to explain, not least because I don't know for sure. Nor do I know the purpose of all of these," I added, pointing to each of the twelve jewels which adorned that dark band. "The material which surrounds them, well. Does the name 'buckministerfullerine' mean anything to either of you?" Both of them shook their heads, a response I expected. "It's really difficult to describe, but it's a sort of largely hypothetical carbon lattice arranged in the shape of, say, a hoofball's segments. Properly created, it's possible to create a sort of 'tube' out of them, nanoscopic in scale. From there, and this is all hypothetical... well, imagine a fabric so tightly woven..." I admit, I trailed off there, looking at the thing around my wrist. Well, my foreleg. "A fabric so tightly woven that it can't be made out with the naked eye, and so strong that it can barely be manipulated with the finest tools. Now if one were to weave a series of enchantments into the fabric, and empower it, then that would possibly result in the effects that you saw." Looking up at the two, I noticed a good bit of confusion in Candy's eyes, but the Doctor looked utterly gobsmacked by the possibilities. I shook my head. "This is all hypothetical. I don't KNOW what this is. For all I know it could be some sort of metaversal vortex which will eventually wake up and devour reality one bite at a time. All I know for sure is that I didn't have it before I woke up in yonder forest." Taking up the reins from Doc Hooves, Candy asked, a bit less hesitantly, "And those gems?" I nodded thankfully towards her. "That's a bit less complicated... and a bit more so. There's twelve of them, all different. I've grokked what four of them are already, because they're pretty obvious: diametrically opposed as they are, they represent four... well, let's call them 'aspects'. Fire, Earth, Air, and Water. From there, I can parse that two of the others," and here I pointed at the opal and the pearl, "represent Light and Darkness." I was very careful when I intoned those, because I didn't want those to activate all of a sudden. Thankfully, perhaps in deference to my astounding will - or perhaps because I simply was thinking about them NOT activating - they remained quiescent. On a roll, I continued, "Assuming that the other six also represent primal aspects of some sort or another, I believe that two of them represent Order and Chaos. The other four... I don't know. Right now there are too many possibilities, and I'm loathe to experiment with them at this point after what happened earlier. For all I know that could have turned out much worse. I think that they act as foci for particular spells. I'll need to do research. A lot of research." There I turned to the doctor and smiled wanly. That little Q&A had taken quite a lot out of me. I could tell, really, that he was probably gibbering like a madman in his head, but I still had to give him one last glib statement, just to wrap up the day. "And that's all she wrote. End of conversation, I guess." With that, I felt the oath slide away, and I let out a quiet sigh of relief, as a pressure I'd forgotten about was suddenly released. Then I turned to the closed door, and spoke up, "And you three eavesdroppers can come in now!" Several muted thuds confirmed THAT little hypothesis, and despite my exhaustion, I had to grin widely at confirmation of a well educated guess.