//------------------------------// // User Registration // Story: Simulated Intelligence // by Crazy Laughter //------------------------------//   Chapter 1  Twilight Sparkle woke with a start, jumping up and onto four hooves to stare at the notepad at her nightstand. Her covers flew about after her sudden flash of movement, before settling draped over the floor and the bed in itself in equal measure. The mess would bother her meticulous nature in just a moment, but right then she was concentrated on the quill inching closer to the paper. The details of her recurring dream were so clear in her mind and she desperately wanted to record them in a form she could study later.    Yet any detail alluded her as the quill touched paper, she watched the spot of ink slowly spread as no words or images presented themselves. A repeating phrase, a location, a set of specific numbers, a distinct shape, a familiar threat, anything! It was beyond maddening to know you had the exact same dream when you closed your eyes, only to have no solid recollection of it when your mind could actually start processing it properly.    “Gosh darn it…” Twilight muttered in an offensively bad interpretation of Applejack’s accent. She opened a drawer in her nightstand and threw the spotted page to join its dozen identical brethren. Nearly two weeks of indecipherable dreams and always the same result. She was beyond the realm of considering it a coincidence, so being unable to recall any details was infuriating. Getting Spike to wake her up as soon as her sleep cycle progressed to dreams hadn’t helped, it had only made her cranky and sleep-deprived the next day.    She levitated the covers over the bed and set them down straight, throwing the pillow on top with her mouth. The dreams were not affecting her ability to get a night of rest in any real way, but the complete lack of memory of whatever she was experiencing was nagging at her. It was like a song you couldn’t get out of your head, but you were also not able to remember the lyrics, doomed to hum the tune and mutter incoherently.    Coffee helped her wake up, but it wasn’t helping her find a solution to her problem. There were no physiological symptoms, so the problem had to be psychological. She didn’t think she had been pushing herself that hard lately. She’d even taken a break from research after that crazy ordeal with becoming an alicorn and all. She had been operating under the assumption her dreams were a side-effect of being an element of harmony, but her friends insisted their dreams were normal.    Celestia had assured her that alicorns did indeed dream, even if they could make do with considerably less rest than normal ponies, if need be. Twilight Sparkle had found herself sleeping more soundly and being more tired than usual regardless, but decided not to mention it. Fatigue was not uncommon after a traumatic experience, it didn’t matter if it was something that ended well in the end. She needed some time to get used to sleeping with wings and to get her normal sleep rhythm back, before she entertained any of the more serious theories in her head. Being an Element of Harmony hadn’t affected her negatively before her sudden transformation, but Princess Celestia had been the one to wield the elements before the six of them, so her new symptoms couldn’t be caused by either thing on their own. It was either some combinations of factors, or something she hadn’t considered yet.    “Hey, Twilight, you up? I’m five minutes late, so you don’t have an excuse to be sleeping!” Rainbow Dash’s voice called out. A peek into the library’s common area showed the mare already floating inside the library. Flying lessons, right at the crack of dawn, partly because there would be less ponies around to feel embarrassed around, the other reason being that RD would be more willing to take an impromptu break when Sugarcube corner started baking their goods and the smell wafted over to the sinuses of the pegasi who didn’t believe in breakfast.    “The polite thing is to knock before calling out, even if the door isn’t locked.” Twilight answered calmly, sipping the last of her coffee. She was well on her way to being awake, so RD’s intrusion didn’t annoy her as much as it should. She wasn’t looking forward to the energetic mare’s flying lessons, but she wanted to get the hang of her new appendages as soon as she could. She really didn’t want a repeat of her catastrophic landing after her first flight in Canterlot. It was surprisingly costly to replace broken skylights. She had to wonder where Rainbow Dash got the money to pay for her numerous crashes.    “I’ll start fussing about manners when you stop knocking things over with your wings.” Rainbow Dash had a grin on her face as she pointed to the table behind Twilight. A glance back told her that there indeed was a broken coffee cup on the floor and that her right wing was hanging limp by her side. The numbness of the wing would explain knocking over the cup, but why had she not heard it break? She could have very well slept on it wrong, or didn’t know to stretch it properly, so it was not her wing she was worried about. Whenever she wasn’t flying with them they had a tendency to act out, springing up, falling limp, cramping up by her side. Unfamiliar appendages with untrained muscles being put under the amount of strain RD insisted on, Twilight didn’t think it was beyond the realm of possibility.    “I brushed that down on the floor right now, with this wing?” Twilight asked, flexing the said wing, turning back to RD. The pegasi nodded, quirking a brow at the strange question. Twilight set her wing properly by her side and levitated the pieces of the cup in front of her. It was a simple ceramic coffee cup, one without any special decorations, but one that she still favored most mornings. They were cheap enough for her not to have to bother with a reconstitution spell if she happened to break one.    “It made a sound when it broke, right?” Twilight idly stated as her mind tried to piece together what had happened. She’d drunk her coffee and set the cup down, but what about after that? Brushing the cup off the table hadn’t even registered to her. She tapped the pieces of ceramic together and they made the expected sound. Could the limp wing have masked the sound from her? The angle was about right if the cup fell straight off the table. That could be very well be it, but she was not fully convinced.    Rainbow Dash had commented on the broken cup, that was the next thing that happened. The next thing she had heard, at least. There was no intermediate action between sitting at the table and standing in the same room as Rainbow Dash, now that she tried to recall it. She had an excellent memory, so that was a disconcerting fact. She’d memorized more books and spells than she ever cared to brag about, but to claim to have perfect recall would still be preposterous. The loss of short-term memory was a common symptom in magical exhaustion, but she had specifically cut back on activity, so that couldn’t be it...    “Twilight, you have to keep at it if you want to get anywhere. You appointed me to be your royal flight instructor, so…” RD puffed out her chest and set down on the ground in a salute, one wing stretched toward the door. Did she actually think expressing confidence in herself would somehow make her feel more motivated? Accusing her of trying to squirm out of physical activity was something RD would assume to be a natural reaction of hers, but maybe this was just an attempt at humor to alleviate such imagined apprehension? Twilight fixed her face into a neutral mask, as she let the silence stretch just long enough to make Rainbow Dash uncomfortable.    “It was you that insisted on calling yourself that.” Twilight huffed and flexed her right wing, trying to get feeling back into it. The numbness was lingering longer than usual, but at least she could still move it, so it was possible she had just folded it wrong and restricted blood flow somehow. She stretched her hooves and other wing as well, just to make sure nothing else was amiss. “You’re my friend above all else, I hope you don’t forget that.”    “Morning RD!” The sound of claws digging into the polish on the wood scratched at Twilight’s ears. There would be more of those scratches on the floor after today and after every step the little drake took, but Twilight wondered why the sound grated her nerves so much at that moment. She raised her head and opened her mouth to admonish Spike for scratching the floor when her eyes fell on the source of the sound.    The thing that was speaking with Spike’s voice was a grotesque mass of slimy scales, proportionally stunted limbs affixed to a disturbingly bloated body. There was no way this thing could be natural, this was a frightening mockery of life that should be begging for the sweet release of death. Every movement and breath seemed to mesh one unnatural part into another physically impossible joining of scales.    “ShIVIlThY DSure M4R`?” The sickening mockery of life chirped out, incomprehensible syllables forced together by a mouth far too small for the few teeth in its misshapen mouth. She could feel her chest contracting, trying to suck in as much air as possible as the rest of her body felt a surge of energy as the need to run tried to overtake her rational mind. A quick glance at the worried face of the colorful pegasi standing next to the abomination reigned her growing sense of panic in considerably. Rainbow Dash was not seeing the same thing she was seeing, as RD would have been the first mare to attack a monster like the one Twilight was seeing right now.    Struggling against every natural instinct trying to make her run away right at that moment, Twilight closed her eyes and forced her breathing to slow and her body to relax and stay still. What she was seeing could not be the physical reality. It was obviously some side-effect of becoming an alicorn, or a delayed reaction to something she had inhaled during her alchemical research. There had to be a rational explanation for this, other than mental illness, preferably.    “Twilight, are you okay? You can take a day off if you really are not feeling up to it, you know.” There was genuine concern in RD’s words. Hoof on the shoulder, the sound of breathing. All normal, none of it distorted, wrong, or horrifying. It was fine, everything was fine. She had problems with short-term memory and now there was some visual and auditory hallucinations tied into those symptoms. Her brain was just trying to acclimate to the new appendages and strengthened magical capacity. She would probably experience symptoms of magical exhaustion for a while yet, still nothing she couldn’t handle.    “No, it’s fine. I think the fresh air will do me some good.” Sweat on her brow, excess salivation slurring the end of her sentence. All symptoms she could attribute to magical exhaustion. Complete abstinence from physical exertion would only add to the severity of the symptoms. She was capable of enduring more such lapses for a while longer, if it meant they would not become more intense.    “O- okay! Let’s get going then. We’re going to see how high you can go today. There’s a trick to maintaining altitude you’ll just have to figure out on your own and there’s no better motivator than the threat of falling from a cloudless sky!” There was an unsettling fire in RD’s eyes at that last comment. Twilight was relatively sure Rainbow Dash was not a sadist, at least not by the traditional, or the kinky, definition.    “You would still catch me if I fell, right?” Rainbow Dash gave a sly smirk, before happily trotting out of the library. A tryhard psychologist could pin narcissism and a lack of empathy on the boisterous pegasi, but Twilight knew there was no malice in RD’s demands for those same reasons. Capability to cause harm on those you care about, wholly expecting them to succeed, maybe? That would mean Rainbow Dash held her friends in just as high regard she held herself. She expected her friends to rise to her level and she expected her expectations to be taken as high praise, subconsciously or not.    “You’ll be fine, don’t worry about it!” RD waved her off while taking to the air again. Twilight chuckled nervously and closed the door of the library behind her. Rainbow Dash kept gaining altitude, obviously expecting the nervous alicorn to follow her to the skies. Taking off was not the issue, her wings had enough magic in them to keep her afloat easily, but it was the constant intuitive changes in power and angle of the beats of her wings that were giving her both a figurative and an actual headache. The wind, obstacles, her own involuntarily flailing hooves as she looked down; she had a lot of variables to take into account all at once and only moments to decide on the appropriate reaction.    “I can memorize the combined works of Starwhirl the bearded and I’m having trouble with flapping my wings right.” Twilight muttered under her breath as she bounced up from the ground and flexed her wings to stay in the air. She went a little higher than she had intended, so she made the next beat softer and increased the tempo to compensate. She pulled her front hooves closer to her body and fixed her eyes to the waiting prismatic mare in the sky. Gradually increasing the power in the beats of her wings and adding a slight downward angle brought her to a trajectory that would place her next to RD.    “You’re still overthinking it! This ain’t something you can just memorize, I know you know that!” Twilight did know that she should be relying on her natural instincts more, seeing as her wings were a part of her, but whenever she tried to do things naturally her legs started moving along with the beat of her wings and that messed her up. Struggling through it with memorized patterns and looking rigid would have to suffice to carry her over this hurdle, no matter what RD said.    “Have you met me? That’s how I do things, actually, that’s how unicorns do things! I still feel wrong when I see these things in the mirror, so excuse me if I…” She paused her growing tirade when she realised she was going to smack into the surprised Rainbow Dash. A quick correction of the direction and tempo of her wings and she was left hovering next to her friend in awkward silence. Twilight opened her mouth and then closed it immediately, looking away from the concern in her friend’s eyes. She had started the sentence as a jovial joke, but something in her had obviously boiled over in the middle.    “So, uh… How about - How about we go over to Fluttershy’s! You know, only if you’re up for it, though!” Rainbow Dash was being too loud and averting eye contact, flailing her front hooves in a placatory gesture. She was either afraid of her newly minted alicorn friend, or somehow blaming herself for Twilight’s outburst. Volunteering to subject Fluttershy to her temper suggested the latter, as the timid pegasi was far superior to both of them when it came to appeasing flared tempers.    “I would like that, actually. She should have that tea Zecora gets for me.” Twilight answered, the reaction clearly relieving RD in some way. The prismatic pegasi tentatively flew toward Fluttershy’s cottage, obviously slowing herself down with unnecessary beats of her wings. Twilight appreciated the gesture, but had to wonder why her unforgiving coach was giving her so many passes this day. The day in itself shouldn’t be special for the athletic pegasi. They passed over the Ponyville marketplace and Twilight spied the unmistakable form of Big Macintosh manning the Apple family stall. Applejack should have been there and her absence prompted Twilight to wonder if something had happened to Applejack    “Huh, where’s…” Twilight’s breath hitched in her throat as she felt something like a stream of ice-cold water running down her spine, pooling at the base of her wings. The sensation came over her in a blink of an eye, but she could feel the sensation originating at the back of her neck and shoot down to add to the pressure along her spine. She tried to vocalize a warning to RD, her only lifeline if she ended up falling out of the sky, but there was no - *Host interference… unable to comply…*    She smelled apples, fresh apples all around her to be precise, that tart sting to the smell that signaled an abundance of the things being cut or smashed fresh. That particular smell was the first thing she could perceive, along with a general ache all over her body. Obviously a lot of things had happened in very quick succession for things to end in such a way. Twilight opened her eyes, concerned about warm liquid stinging her eyes for a moment, before she remembered the said smashed apples. Had she fallen on the Apple family cart? It would explain the smell of apples.    “Y… Ya alright, Twilight?” She couldn’t see the stallion, but he sounded like he was close. The voice was deep enough to belong to Big Mac, but she was both too dazed to recognize it and it felt like there was some apple pulp in her ear. Her mane felt like it had about half of the cart’s merchandise in it, so it was possible. Carefully, she tried moving her hooves, mushing some more apples as her weight shifted. Okay, she was on her side, resting on apples, at least she knew that much. She must have hit the cart dead on for there to be so many apples directly under her to cushion the fall. She opened and closed her jaw, luckily she hadn’t landed on her head.    “I think so. Give me a minute.” She could hear the early morning marketplace crowd gathering around her. Wiping the apples out of her eyes and turning her head to and fro confirmed her earlier hypothesis; she really had landed right on top of the apple cart, laying on her left side. Getting back up on her hooves was a an uncomfortably messy procedure, but it was simple enough. Nothing seemed to have been broken, so she felt no apprehension in stretching her limbs out to see if she’d sprained something.    “Twilight, stop!” Rainbow Dash frantically screamed while jetting out to tackle the alicorn from among the crowd. The panicked pegasi made sure to offer her hooves to hold Twilight’s weight up, as if expecting her to fall over any moment. Sparing another glance at the gathered crowd revealed faces distorted in shock, fear and more than a few shades of nausea. She was missing something again and considering the crowd was fixated on a spot on her back, it had something to do with her new appendages. She’d fallen on her side, where she has newly formed wings and now Rainbow Dash was expecting her to be in pain  excruciating enough to topple her over.    “I have broken my wing, have I not? In a quite a spectacularly gruesome way, given your reaction.” Twilight had an inkling she should be more concerned about that fact, but no panic or fear reared its head. She could only add the fact of her coming convalesce to the list of activities on her calendar. She would have to make adjustments on her daily routine, not to mention her new diplomatic duties and her already established appointments with her friends. There was no discernible pain, but both that and her emotional numbness could be caused by shock following such a serious injury. Her wings had been sensitive before, so she should be in excruciating pain if her injury was as serious the faces around her were painting it to be.    A glance at her left wing only confirmed her fears. It was bleeding and there were bones sticking out of the mangled mess twitching at her side. A constant pulsating movement made the injury look even more visceral, along with the constant slow bleeding from the broken flesh. She must have aggravated the broken structure of the wing as she had tried to stretch her limbs earlier, explaining RD’s reaction. A constant trickle of blood, the inevitable coming neurological shock and possible sepsis she was more than susceptible to were things she was becoming worried about.    “I need immediate medical attention.” The strange calm that had permeated this whole ordeal lasted long enough for her to utter those words. Immediately after that things got a lot blurrier, as her body spasmed with the sudden influx of pain piercing through her left side. They were new appendages, so her body must have been confused by where to register the blinding pain she was experiencing. Her knees buckled, a nauseating twisting pain burrowed into her gut, starting at the base of her destroyed wing. Her back was arching, her neck was locked rigid and it took considerable effort to force her jaw open.    “Help me! Hospital, please!” Her body wanted to squirm, to flinch away from the pain and inadvertently aggravate the injury, but Twilight had enough sense to fight that impulse. The pain was something that very nearly overtaking her need to breathe, every part of her screaming at her rational mind that there was something very wrong going on and breathing was only making the pain worse. “Every moment iddle adds to the threat of necrosis in the affected tissue!”  “Request for aid acknowledged” A voice among the crowd calmly stated. It was strange for anypony living in Ponyville to use such sterile terms, but she was not going to judge the quirks of ponies willing to take time out of their day to help her.    The ponies around her surged into action, Big Mac offering to pull the flower cart that was cleared out to carry her to the hospital. It was both a show of Equestrian kindness and the amount of unease an irate alicorn brought to the ponies around her. Rainbow Dash climbed into the cart with Twilight, wings twitching impatiently, clearly eager for something to do. She was the one pegasi that would know most about both Twilight and wing injuries, so there was something she was uniquely qualified to do, but she wouldn’t realize it in the heated situation.    “Rainbow Dash.” Yelling or raising her voice would mean taking a deeper breath than necessary, but RD had obviously heard her, as she was hovering next to the cart immediately. A range of emotions passed over the prismatic pegasi’s features, but guilt was a constant backdrop. “Speed ahead to the hospital and explain my injuries to them. Accurate information will expedite their work.”    “Broadcasting emergency code…” The same strangely androgynous voice rattled out as Rainbow Dash snapped a hoof to her temple. Time felt like it slowed to a crawl as her hoof made contact with the edge of her brow. Twilight could hear a whistling sound undulate around her head, with sharp spikes in pitch and sudden and precise changes in tone and volume. She could only hear the sound for a moment, but if she were ever to try and write the entire complexity of it on paper she could at least fill several sheets.       “Got it!” Time snapped back into normal speed and RD was gone as Twilight blinked in surprise. What had just happened and why hadn’t anyone reacted to it? She moved her head to and fro as much she could without aggravating her side and did not spot any unfamiliar faces around the cart. She knew the voices of those within earshot and had no explanation for the perceived time dilation and strange series of sounds.    “Did you hear that?” Twilight asked, making eye contact with Roseluck, the mare that had offered up her cart to transport her. The beige mare flicked her eyes to where RD had been and then back to Twilight, the question clear in her eyes. Twilight needed to be more specific, as RD had been more than loud enough to be heard “The whistling sound just now… Could you hear it?”    “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t hear anything. You just try and stay still, okay?” Shaky voice, a quick glance at Twilight’s destroyed wing and an aversion of the eyes to top it off. This mare’s non-verbal communication was getting on her nerves, but she had given her an honest answer. The voice, along with the strange series of sounds, had been an entirely subjective experience. Another audio-visual hallucination caused by whatever brain damage had made Spike look like a monster this morning, maybe? The voice hadn’t seemed to originate from any specific direction, and neither had the following series of sounds.    *Waiting for host ping…* Her hallucination lacked an auditory component this time, the strange four words instead appearing to float in thin air a meter or so from her face. This would have put these words outside the wooden edge of the cart, but Twilight could make them out, the fact slightly messing with her sense of distance. The words were in her field of vision, despite physical barriers, so it meant they were projected into her mind or directly into her retinas directly by some unknown magic. She closed her eyes to test this theory and was disturbed to find the words still imprinted in her field of view.    “Get her on the stretcher!” Tingling of magic, a jolt upward and a steady floating to a canvas surface stretched taut between two ponies. The two stallions started a hurried, yet steady, trot into the hospital proper, as the doctor unicorn kept pace next to them and prodded her destroyed wing with diagnostic spells. Even the small jolts of the gentle magic made her head spin in pain, so most of the hospital’s corridors passed by her in a blur. *Initiating sleep mode* *User stress hormone levels above set parameters* *Playing designated relaxation music*    “Born free, as free as the wind blows, As free as the grass grows Born free to follow your heart.”    It was dark, dark enough for there to be no discernible objects around her. She could not see anything, nor was there a echo to the sound she could make out to place anything or anyone in the darkness, but she still felt crowded. There were things moving around her, whizzing past her at lethal speed and also colossal entities passing above and around her at a glacial pace threatening to pull her into the stream.    “Live free and beauty surrounds you The world still astounds you Each time you look at a star”    All she could feel was a constant shifting sense of movement, soothing to frightening, all in a moment. Plummeting toward a destination through a fog of grey muck, sticking to her, smothering any and all sensation she could have and what she needed to see. Parts of her were trying to outpace the rest of her, dissolving and churning the parts in between into something she feared would float away into the miasma around her.    “Stay free, where no walls divide you You're free as the roaring tide So there's no need to hide”    The roaring silence in the senseless darkness she was hurtling through started to give away, as the disconcerting sound of such a calm song in such an unnerving place begun to register in her mind. A spot of light blinked into existence somewhere in front of her, giving her the first solid point of reference when it came to her velocity or the size of her surroundings. It did not cast any shadow into the darkness, nor could she be sure how far away it was. She was either in place, or the light was keeping pace with her sporadic movements.    “Born free, and life is worth living But only worth living 'Cause you're born free”    The sense of movement started to subside, as a feeling of tingling warmth spread from her forehead to the back of her head, only making the numbness of the rest of her body more apparent. A sense of panic started to take root as she found that she could not move any part of her body. Her eyes were open and forced to stare at the prick of light in the murky darkness.    “You're free as the roaring tide So there's no need to hide”    The warm tingling was starting to subside, but the thought of being left in this darkness feeling absolutely nothing terrified her, only able to see a pinprick of light and hear an otherwise pleasant song that would assuredly be visiting her in her nightmares. The irony of hearing a song about freedom while restrained in place and robbed of most of her senses sounded like something Discord would do, but the joke had taken too long to get to the punchline for it to actually be the work of the sporadic draconequus.    “Born free, and life is worth living But only worth living 'Cause you're born free”    The song ended abruptly and Twilight was left in the debilitating darkness with nothing but the spot of light in distance. The murky darkness around her was alive with movement, but it was the spot of light that unnerved her. It was like an eye staring at her, unblinking and piercing through her. She could feel something there, something cold and utterly alien to everything she knew. “User biometrics confirmed, registration incomplete, central database offline, no references in internal memory, no other users online, simulated intelligence program corrupted, user interface unresponsive.” The same flat androgynous voice hurriedly listed out words Twilight had a hard time connecting to her current situation. The light scanning her flickered for a moment, before going out completely. She wanted to fidget, to turn around and run into the darkness, but she still had no control over her body. She had no heartbeat to echo in her ears, nor could she discern a pattern in the movement she felt around her, so she couldn’t be sure how long she spent in complete darkness.    “Stable connection established, linking MCF-AIC-MA-36 to user audiovisual feed. Hippocratic access granted, hardware, software and live information feeds accessible.” There was another string of strange whistling and Twilight could feel the darkness around her slowing down, stabilizing to actually have an up and down and a clear floor. She was still not standing, or sitting or anything, completely without a sense of her own body, but the lack of motion helped.    “Hello, I am MCF-AIC-MA-36, but you can call me 36 for short. It seems to me like you are having trouble managing your software. It will only take me a moment to review your device’s log data and present you with a solution.” A shape appeared in the darkness in front of her, a shapeless lump of something about the same height as her, two iridescent dots appearing where eyes would be. Colorless, a dark grey, neutral voice with a hint of male baritone in it, but still decidedly nonthreatening.    “Okay, let’s see here; Unauthorized use of third-party software to alter the functionality and capacity of registered hardware detected. Off-model biological components failed to be integrated into the network and caused an involuntary reset to last official software patch…  The colony attempted to cannibalize computing power to accommodate for your new appendages… Ah, that’s why the SI program was offline. Bio-metrics indicate that is not a...” The dark shape in front of her wavered like a flame on the breeze, the two dots of light flashing brighter for a moment. The whistling noise came back again louder and faster, originating both from where she was and from the shape talking to her.    “You’re an equestrian… Unicorn, cerebral implants, so... Twilight Sparkle, but how… Alicorn ascension forced... defaulted to base…” That high-pitched whistling interrupted the muttered string of words several times, but Twilight was getting concerned because of the urgency and emotion in the words she could make out. She was listening to someone who seemed to have control over her in this void getting agitated after learning who and what she was.  “User bio-metrics place subject in clear and present danger. Extraction from Equestrian society recommended.” Another dark blob appeared next to the one talking to her, this one taller than her and judging both by its bipedal stature and the pair of horns sprouting from their head it was very likely a minotaur. The voice itself was too distorted to make any guesses beyond that. “Hardware malfunctions too substantial for remote repairs, terminating connection.” The original indistinct blob snappily decreed, before disappearing in the darkness. The horned figure lingered for a moment, before turning the dots of lights that represented its eyes toward her.    “You might experience some discomfort.” The bipedal figure said before disappearing just as abruptly.    Twilight’s eyes snapped open in fright. Having control over her body again was a huge relief, but the intense and disorienting wave of vertigo was not. She felt the nausea pushing up from her stomach, but when she tried to sit up and throw up over the side of the bed she found herself too sluggish to get there on time. A cough of burning vomit forced itself through her esophagus, leaving her mouth and throat burning and tasting foul. Her whole body felt feverish and she could feel the dull thud of a major headache being suppressed by the veritable mountain of pain medicine she must have been on. She had not eaten a large breakfast, so all that came up was a splatter of foul liquid and sticky mucus forced from her throat, but it was still enough to coat the side of the pillow she was lying on.    She lay there feeling and smelling her own vomit on her lips, mouth and the pillow that felt to have already been soaked through in sweat. The world was dull, silent and void of any smell other than her own misery. It most likely was less than a minute, but it felt like she lay there for hours before orderlies and a nurse came into the room and cleaned up her mess. They levitated her just barely over the bed as they changed the soiled sheets under her and gave her a fresh and more pleasantly scented pillow. They didn’t turn her over, so her wing was probably in some kind of suspended cradle. She pretended to be asleep during the procedure to spare herself the embarrassment of apologizing to the ponies doing their job.    The room was quiet once more and she was left listening to the sounds of the hospital staff moving and working, muffled by the walls around her. Her physician had obviously thought her wing was in much too fragile condition to afford visitors, as Twilight was quite sure she heard the distant voices of her friends from somewhere within the hospital. She was far too medicated and feverish to give them any coherent answers, anyway. She didn’t want to sleep, she couldn’t move around and she was far too loopy to wrap her mind around her situation, but the silence in the room was still bothering her.    “Born free, as free as the wind blows…” It was taxing to stretch out the words as they had been in the song, but the words themselves didn’t have the distracting effect she was looking for. She had to take a break to catch her breath and try to remember the next line in the song. Her throat burned and her eyes were watery, but even mumbling out the song occupied her mind enough not to wallow in the misery of her situation.    “As free as the grass grows, born free to follow your heart…”