//------------------------------//
// Epilogue: Victim of Sunshine 
// Story: Steel Solstice 
// by Starscribe 
//------------------------------//

After what had become of Sunset's escape from the Infinite Realm, she hadn't expected to return to Equestria. Despite Tesla's words, she'd seen enough of the way humans did things to suspect he was not being honest. Her rebellion, however doomed, created an inconvenience, and he wanted to be rid of it. She hadn't thought he cared about getting information from her.

But a trip back to the school, some time disarming her defenses, and she was already on her way out of the Realm for good. Not that I really got a chance to see how Builders lived. Just ghosts I thought weren't alive and a few criminals. Perhaps one day she would return to see what life in their cities was like, in the same way she had once considered visiting the minotaur tribes. Academically interesting, but not worth the risks to actually do.

Of interest to the Technocratic Order was the way some of her modified slaves seemed to have been returned to life by their experience. Twilight in particular, however much she might behave like a computer, had clearly recovered her intelligence enough to think for herself, and to grow. Then again, she was the nexus for thousands of minds. It might've been more surprising if she didn't get more intelligent doing that.

The Tower might even be able to rehabilitate some of Sunset's slaves, where before they'd been nothing more than the lost echoes of people rendered into background scenery by the digital conversion process. Sunset still didn't understand the details, didn't understand why whoever had designed the process had denied backups (and thus the ability to repair a damaged mind) until after they completed their schooling. But Tesla didn't stick around to answer her questions, and none of the other Scribes were able to explain.

What they did do was refuse to let her use Twilight's design for a body, the one Jackie was now (presumably) using in the outside world. Instead they explained that she would need to be human to have access to the full range of hardware, and that her duties would probably require her to use a great deal of it.

Only one task stood between her and taking up that body: finishing her schooling. After spending so long trapped in the school, then transforming it into her own personal fortress, it was strange to be learning in it again. Learning in a human school so she could leave and go back to Equestria was a strange irony, but it wasn't one lost on her. She didn't fight any of it this time—didn't fight the magic that forced her to stay on task, didn't try to take over the shard and use it for her own purposes. There were no more background students anymore, only Twilight and a scholar of the Technocratic Order responsible for making sure she "didn't cause trouble"

Instead of graduating in a school full of cheering students, she got her diploma handed to her by yet another fork of one of the teachers, and smiled gratefully as it handed her a GIO that was much upgraded from the one she'd been first given here (but compared to the changes she'd already made, might as well have been a hunk of rusting metal).

Then it was time to leave, though she would not be alone. Bodies were apparently expensive, or so her representative with the Tower seemed to imply, so Twilight would not be able to physically join her. But that apparently didn't matter, since the hardware to run a single mind was an easy thing to acquire. And Twilight... or her modified version of Twilight... refused to hear of anything but joining her.

Sunset's first taste of the Steel Tower wasn't all that different from her time in digital space. There was little fundamental difference between waking up to a human body within the Realm and outside it. It did seem a little less... refined? Everything in the computer was a perfect ideal of what that "thing" should be. Nothing needed maintenance, nothing ever got old or rusty or fell apart. But in the physical world...

Well, the Steel Tower had clearly been through a lot. Its interior was often dark, lit through visual trickery within her perception that overlaid a better version of what should've been on top of the rusting hulk that was reality. At least her body looked new, skin seeming almost as alive as the way it had been in the realm. But Sunset had no heartbeat on the outside, and her breathing had no moisture to it. It also didn't work perfectly every time she moved it—sometimes she made mistakes, failed to pick up objects correctly. She struggled again getting dressed even though in the shards of the Realm she did it perfectly every time.

Despite her reservations, the Technocratic Order kept its word in another respect: Sunset could see Jackie again. Far from the glamor of the castle as Sunset had created it, or even the plain walls of the public school building the Builders had made for themselves, Sunset finally got to see Jackie in a small anteroom in one of the many subbasement levels of the Steel Tower.

Twilight had done an excellent job with the body. There was no getting around just how much like a pony Jackie looked—the fake fur was almost as good as the real thing. Her bat wings looked convincing too, though Sunset doubted they would work. Good engineering could go far, but it couldn't break the laws of physics no matter how powerful the Element of Intellect had been.

"Well, that's shit," Jackie said, looking up at her from about waist level. Sunset retreated a step when she saw the intensity of her glare, even while the soldier escorting her chuckled. "I've been waiting all this time to give you what you deserved after making me into a horse, but... " She pointed at Sunset with one hoof. "You're not. What the hell is up with that? You should've gone first. I got to spend the last two days sitting in a room with angry legionaries, and you..." She waved an impatient hoof. "What the hell did you do, exactly? Who did you have to blow to stop us from getting dragged off to the king?"

"Nobody." Sunset pulled over a rusting chair, sitting down across from Jackie. It made her a little closer to eye level, but not that close. Sunset still had at least two feet on her friend. "Though you aren't going to like the deal we got instead."

"Probably not," Jackie said, glancing over her shoulder at the Tower footman who'd escorted her. "Given who you're running with, I got some idea. It's somebody important. Had to be, for them not to take this body away from me the second after I rolled out of the fabricator."

"Tesla," Sunset said. "I made a deal with Tesla. And it covers both of us."

"Fuck." Jackie sat back on her haunches, anger replaced with shock. "No way in hell. How'd you even get in to meet with someone like that?"

Sunset shrugged. "He was the one waiting near the exit. I... don't know for sure, but I think some of what I did to the shard must have triggered alarms. I think he was there to investigate. He knew we were coming, and he wanted to see what we would do."

"Well he saw." Jackie got up, pacing slowly around her. Sunset couldn't help but watch, with even more fascination than she had watched her creations in the Infinite Realm. The ponies she had made down there were perfect specimens, as perfect as the Builders in their way. But Jackie's body was more realistic, and had apparently been modeled closer to the way pony bodies actually looked, instead of the ideal. "So, what do we have to do, exactly?"

"Well..." Sunset smiled sheepishly. "Remember how I promised we would be going back to Equestria?" She didn't wait for Jackie's answer. "Well, we are. Diplomatic mission. The first wave is already there, right now. The reason you haven't met the king is because he's not here. Once he gets permission... and they seem pretty sure he will... we get to go too." She looked away. "Mostly they want me to be there so I can help them understand Equestrian culture and customs. Since ponies are... different from humans. You're, uh..." Sunset briefly considered telling her friend the truth. Then she banished that idea. "You've got to help too, if you don't want them to take that body away and replace you with one of their own. You'll have an easier time interacting with Equestrians than any of us. Since you don't look like a freak."

Jackie laughed openly, glaring at her. "I don't look like a freak? I don't think you know what that word means. A freak is exactly what I look like. Weird bodies are all over the realm... there are whole shards run by furries or whatever, and I guess I get that... but you actually got one made?" She held out one leg, flexing. "Are you sure you don't want to switch? It would take like five minutes. Then you could be a pony, and I could be a person, and everything would be perfect. Err... well, I don't know if I'd have gone for hair as garish as yours, but who am I to judge, I'm a damn horse."

Sunset rose, pushing the chair back against the wall. "I already asked, believe me. I just wanted a pony body for myself. It doesn't take any more material to make than a human one. Less, since they're, uh... smaller than I imagined. Anyway, they didn't want me to look like a pony, since I might be advising the king, and that might look bad. Like they were taking advice"—from a traitor she wanted to say, but she didn't—"from a pony. You'll just have to enjoy it for both of us for a while. Unless you want to go back into the realm. Tesla said if you did, he'd have to wash your memory of ever knowing me. Everything, from the beginning. He doesn't really care about you, so he'll do it. But..." Sunset blushed, looking away from her. "If it's all the same to you, I hope you won't. I don't have many human friends. It would be nice to keep at least one." She stuck out her hand towards Jackie, wearing her most optimistic smile.

Her friend glared, and there was a long silence. But then she stuck out her hoof. "Fine, Sunny. But you owe me for this. I don't know what you owe me... and I don't know how the hell you'll pay it back. But you owe me. And one day, I'm gonna collect. You got me?"

"Sure," Sunset replied, smiling back. Her friend didn't really seem serious, but it was hard to tell with Jackie. Even wearing a pony body, humans could be hard to read. "Fine with me."


* * *



Almost everyone Sunset had violated with her magic had been returned to the Tower’s servers, where they would be treated by its expert data surgeons. Sunset Shimmer hoped they would forgive her—or that they would forget what they had endured. Tesla had been clear she would never learn. Anything to connect her to the victims might trace a line of guilt eventually leading to her execution.

There was one exception. Sunset Shimmer would not be bringing all her digital Equestria back with her as she traveled to the real thing, but she had brought a very small piece. The device wasn’t terribly large—a necklace, with a facade of a purple gemstone on the outside.

Of all Sunset’s victims, one had refused to leave her service—refused treatment—refused to even acknowledge that she had ever been anything other than Sunset Shimmer’s willing ally. Twilight Sparkle no longer had any of her old memories, not even her human name. “And you will have her with you until the day I am satisfied with your service,” Tesla had said. “Not so visually hideous as someone tossed into a vat of acid, perhaps. But still a potent reminder.”

Sunset’s body was strange now, as strange as the other builders. Its powers were one of the subjects she had not studied much since she’d been so focused on Datamancy. The gemstone would draw power from her body whenever she had it nearby, the same way her body could act for a battery to any number of small devices builders needed.

Sunset sat back against the empty wall in her cell. Not that they’d called it that—the scribe who had led her here thought it was quite spacious. But it didn’t even have a chair, didn’t have anything but rusting walls, a dusty floor, and a power outlet. Sunset Shimmer turned the gemstone-looking device over in her fingers, then touched it lightly to her forehead. It took only a slight effort of will, and suddenly the cell dissolved.

She was somewhere else—it looked a little like a library, with tall shelves packed with books, elegant architecture and cheery windows. But even a cursory glance revealed just how scarce the space really was. Only ten feet or so around where the library’s single occupant sat looked “real.” Everything else had obvious flaws—shadows didn’t look right, textures that repeated. The gem that held Twilight barely had enough space for one mind—it didn’t have the power for a high-fidelity simulation.

“Princess!” Twilight Sparkle leapt from her chair, dropping the books she’d been reading and flinging herself towards Sunset. She wrapped her arms around her in a tight hug, entirely inappropriate for the setting. “I didn’t think I’d get to see you again! I thought they were going to keep me in prison forever.”

“Prison?” Sunset looked around at the feeble simulation. “I guess I can see why it would feel that way.” She pulled away, walking towards the window. Twilight didn’t move, and so the whole room had to stretch, the walls getting closer to her, warping and distorting as she walked. Twilight remained the center of the illusion no matter where Sunset walked.

Outside looked even worse than inside—it looked like someone was playing back a video of an empty city, in much lower fidelity than the rest of the library.

“I have good news and bad news, Twilight. Which one do you want first?”

“Either one, princess.” Twilight straightened, making a vaguely military salute with one hand. “I assume you got the army back?”

“Not… quite.” Sunset winced. She’d tried explaining her mistake to Twilight more than once, but she just hadn’t been able to listen. The truth didn’t make sense to her, not even coming from Sunset. She refused to believe anything that didn’t conform to her (quite narrow) perception of reality. “But Tesla did decide to honor your request. You can stay with me, like you wanted.”

Twilight interrupted her with a high-pitched cheering sound. It only lasted a second before she covered up her mouth with her hands, blushing. “S-sorry.”

“No problem,” Sunset looked away. “The bad news is that this is it.” She gestured all around them. “I already asked if there was any way to share my body with you, apparently I can’t.” And she’d been glad about that, though she wouldn’t admit it to Twilight. Even her guilt could not make her willing to take such extreme measures. “So, to stay with me, you’ll have to live in this.” She dug her hand into her pocket, withdrawing something that looked like an old-fashioned iron key, cankered with rust. “Tesla gave me admin codes, and now they’re yours. Do what you want with the place… but this is all you’ll have. For… the foreseeable future.”

“Oh.” Twilight deflated. Her eyes went down towards the floor, as she ran one hand down a nearby bookshelf, as though inspecting it for realism. “That’s… that implies you succeeded!” she brightened. “We escaped the realm! I never doubted you, princess! Not for one second!”

Sunset winced. “Y-yeah. Escaped is one word for it. We’re going back to Equestria. Jackie says that having someone without a body is common for people in the real world. Tiny shards like this are way cheaper to run than real bodies. Most of the knights carry them, for assistants and advisors and stuff. Yours is… a civilian model… but Jackie told me she might be able to figure out how to patch it into my sensors. You’d be able to see what I see. Maybe to help me.”

Any trace of Twilight’s disappointment vanished, and she grinned again. “Of course, princess! I can’t wait to see Equestria for the first time.”

Sunset sighed. “Me either, Twilight. Me either.”


* * *


The next few days moved as Sunset expected them. She wasn't allowed to spend much time with Jackie, lest the two of them use it to plan something they shouldn't. She wasn't allowed to do very much of anything, other than sit in an empty room and answer questions from scholars of the Technocratic Order. At least it didn't seem like they were planning to invade her country: most of what they asked involved mundane questions about the way ponies lived, the way their culture worked, the sort of thing that ponies might've wondered about humans.

Unlike them, she didn't answer with a pretty lie, but tried to explain Equestria as honestly and completely as she herself understood it. Tried to help them understand the friction between races, the resentment left seething in the heart of the dragons after their defeat so long ago. The constant wars in the minotaur tribes, the xenophobia with which ponies sometimes saw other races. She told them these things, but kept well away from questions that might hurt her people. Stories about their military weakness, while completely true, were also exactly the sort of thing she knew not to talk about around predators.

Sunset Shimmer had no illusions about the sort of ponies she was living with: the builders were predators, there was no way around it. Predators more dangerous than anything native to her own planet. Predators did not have to be enemies—the griffons were predators too, and they had been allies of Equestria in more than one conflict. Dealing with them just required a different attitude. It meant never showing your back, and being tolerant of their unsightly habits. It was a threat she could overcome.

But being able to look at herself in the mirror, that was a little harder. When I go back to my home, my old friends, my family, even Celestia... they won't recognize me. She had selected a body with hair matching what she had worn in the Infinite Realm, and even clothing with her cutie mark on it. It wasn't the same, and she knew it.

Ponies wouldn't look at her and see a predator, just as she hadn't when she had first woken up in that hospital room. She had taken their lack of natural weapons to mean they had been peaceful for so long they didn't need them. Instead, it only meant the species called humanity had been forced to evolve predatory intellect fiercer than her own kind would know.

I belong here, she thought, somewhere in her deepest, secretest heart. I enslaved them. I did dark magic and permanently scarred thousands of ponies. Nightmare Moon might have killed more, but I might as well have.

Sunset never really doubted that these beings would be able to convince Celestia to let them travel into Equestria. So far as Sunset knew, her old mentor still believed what Clover had said about the Builders and their perfect civilization.

She was a little more surprised when the message came. "Equestria is at war," people shouted silently through the building, using the Technocratic Order's private intranet. "Every soldier will be mobilized. The king demands every able body be put into service." Sunset didn't get to learn anything beyond that, because she was immediately rushed into the basement to line up beside Jackie and wait for their time through the portal.

It was nothing like the Equestrian side. Massive machines filled the room with a constant whine. Energy arched over their head, sending uneven flashes of light through the room all around them. Dozens of soldiers lined up in front of them in perfect rows, wearing old armor and carrying old weapons. In front and beyond them were old war machines, relics from what the Tower called "The Great War."

You think they're telling the truth? Jackie messaged her, as they moved slowly forward in line among so many others. Was Equestria really invaded, or is that just a front to justify the war? Wouldn't be the first time...

It's probably real, Sunset admitted. I came here knowing it was only a matter of time. Equestria looked so weak to our neighbors, so rich... you can't just dissolve the army and expect nothing to happen forever. Not when you've got dragons as neighbors. Technocrats were probably listening in on what should've been their private conversation. Sunset found it difficult to care—whatever she could say wouldn't be made worse if this really was a front. They were already bringing their weapons to Equestria. And if it is a front, I'm probably the one who made them realize how vulnerable we were...

Jackie didn't notice her discomfort, which made sense considering Sunset was hiding all visual sign of it. Are you telling me that dragons were real? Is it all real where you come from? Witches and wizards and other gay shit?

Aren't you gay? Sunset asked, confused. There are gay ponies. I don't know what that would have to do with sh—

Jackie shoved her hard with one leg, hard enough that Sunset very nearly lost her footing and tumbled into the scholars all around her. You spend all this time living with us, and you still need a lesson in context.

Sunset sighed, but she didn't object. After everything Jackie had suffered around her, Sunset had a hard time with the idea of correcting her on anything.

Eventually it was their turn, and they came to the front of the line. Sunset found herself again staring at her reflection in the mirrored surface of a portal. She held up one hand, flexing its fingers in the reflection.

In some ways, she supposed she had accomplished her goal. She hadn't learned to be a princess from the Builders, but she was immortal, and she had brought help.

I just hope Equestria survives my mistake.