//------------------------------// // Chapter 14 // Story: Millennium Wake: Part 1 // by Chaotic Dreams //------------------------------// Chapter 14 “Not your Disk…” Rarity muttered in her sleep, her last moments of consciousness repeating in her mind. “It’s mine… mine… MINE!” “RARITY!” Megan shouted. “What?!” the white unicorn gasped as she jolted awake. “Wait, the Disk—where’s the Disk?!” Blue magic lashed out to feel for her saddlebag, before finding it and seeping inside of it to wrap around the comforting form of the magical recorder, right where it should be. “Oh thank goodness,” Rarity sighed with far more relief than she felt was appropriate. The Disk’s safety secured, she actually took in her surroundings, something she realized she probably should have done first. She was sitting in a large, squishy orange oval that she reasoned was supposed to be a life raft. That wouldn’t be so hard to believe if the raft wasn’t zooming through the air just as high over the ocean as they had been when in the sky carriage. Firefly was out front pulling them along by way of a life preserver tied to the rest of the raft. Megan and Surprise were sitting adjacent to Rarity, each smiling with relief of their own. “What’s going? Where are we? What happened?” “We finally got you to wake up,” Megan replied. “That’s what’s going on. You’ve been out for the whole night.” “I what?!” Rarity gasped. Indeed, she saw that it was almost morning, the sun creeping over the horizon with the first rays of dawn. “After you flew through the back wall, the rest of the carriage couldn’t take any more stress,” the human explained. “The whole thing shattered. Surprise managed to catch you before you crashed into a skywhale, though you’d already hit the rainbow-tech hard enough to black out. Once we’d finally regrouped, the skywhales had stopped trying to block us in, so we all hightailed it out of there. The last we saw of the pod, it was heading back up to the jet-stream. With them gone, I formed a life raft with my computer, and Firefly’s been pulling us ever since. I’ve had to keep the raft steady with my computer, and though it’s not nearly as fancy or anything as the sky carriage, it’s gotten us this far.” “What about Daybreak?” Rarity inquired nervously. “Who?” Megan asked. “Oh, you mean that crazy robot? I can’t say. I lost track of her after I temporally froze her, and she wasn’t in the same place I’d frozen her in when the skywhales had passed. The freeze must have worn off, and she either caught a ride with the pod, or gotten acquainted with some fish.” “She must be safe, then,” Rarity reasoned with a comforted sigh. “Even if she fell, she would’ve teleported back up to the skywhales.” “I don’t know why you sound so relieved,” Megan commented with a raised eyebrow. “She did try to steal your Disk, not to mention the fact that she almost killed us all! Who was that crazy robot, anyway?” Rarity briefly explained who Daybreak was, and why she was indeed relieved that the android hadn’t been harmed. The false pony may have almost unintentionally killed them all, but she’d also saved Rarity from a fate worse than death. After hearing the explanation, Megan looked like she didn’t know what to think of the android. Rarity could sympathize; what in the world had Daybreak been doing? And how had she even gotten out here in the first place? The white unicorn knew teleharness technology couldn’t have teleported the false pony out to a flock of skywhales high over the middle of the ocean. If it could, then they never would have had to teleport to Old Canterlot after escaping Sparkle Technologies. Furthermore, how had Daybreak even known the skywhales would be there? And how had she known Rarity and her companions would be near the pod at that exact moment? She supposed that since Daybreak had the Disk-locating spell as well, the robot could have used that to track her. If so, and if the robot could somehow appear halfway across the ocean, why didn’t she just appear in the sky carriage straightaway rather than using the skywhales? A surprisingly terrifying thought struck Rarity. Daybreak had claimed that the Disks needed to be destroyed, and that she too was searching for them to do just that. That being said, the android had to know that there were Disks in The Fluttershy Forests! Being stuck on the skywhale pod travelling the other way through the jet-stream meant that Rarity had a head start on Daybreak, if there really was going to be a race to get the Disks. But if the android had already proven she could make it halfway across the ocean before Rarity could, then what would stop her from somehow getting there ahead of them even now? And, if Daybreak had been controlling the skywhales like she’d seemed to be, then why hadn’t she just turned them around and set them to continue pursuing Rarity, or fly to the Forests before them, rather than allow them to continue their original course through the jet-stream? It was enough to make Rarity’s head hurt. Her horn was already aching from the strain of her magical tug-of-war, so she filed all the Daybreak-related unpleasantness away for later. The important things were that she still had the Disk, and for the time-being, it looked like they had a head start on the robot. Speaking of which, if she’d been unconscious for the whole night, then didn’t that mean… “How close are we to The Fluttershy Forests?” Rarity called out to Firefly. “Funny you should wake up when you did. We aren’t close at all,” Firefly called back. “We’re there! You can already see the Fluttershy Fabrications factory!” Rarity’s eyes lit up with a mixture of excitement and fear as she rushed to the side of the life raft. She had been anxious to see the true extent of Fluttershy’s legacy ever since witnessing Oscar the chimaera. The composite creature had horrified her, prompting her to wonder how her dear friend could possibly be responsible for a creature patched together from other animals. Pinkie’s imprint had only worsened her fears when she talked about how much she had thought Fluttershy’s imprint differed from her original. But the skywhales, the first time Rarity had seen them anyway, had given her hope. If Fluttershy Fabrications could manufacture creatures capable of creating songs so heartbreaking and wondrously beautiful as that, then Fluttershy’s imprint couldn’t be all bad, right? Rarity was still dying to know how Fluttershy had gone from being associated with the taking care of animals to the designing of them, but so what if her imprint had deviated from her original? All of the others had, and as Pinkie’s imprint had proven, even though the changes were always disconcerting they didn’t have to be horrid and terrifying. However, no matter what theories Rarity had come up with to try and explain what had happened to Fluttershy’s imprint, nothing could prepare her for what she saw upon laying eyes on the factory. For starters, it looked absolutely nothing like a factory. There were neither smokestacks nor smoke. There were no stones for the building and no glass for the windows. But there was wood. There was a lot of wood, actually. The bulk of the factory seemed to be being made of almost nothing but the stuff. Not made out of it, but still being made. Still growing. The factory of Fluttershy Fabrications was a tree. Rarity’s jaw dropped at the sight of it. She remembered going on a camping trip once in the Whitetail Woods with her friends. She hadn’t exactly been keen on the idea of sleeping outdoors with… nature… but she was with her friends, and so she had enjoyed herself all the same. Applejack had taken them deep within the woods to see the tallest tree in the area, one that seemed to stretch up to the skies. This tree could’ve used that tree as a toothpick. Fluttershy Fabrications didn’t seem to stretch up into the sky—it DID stretch up into the sky. Clouds swam around its middle while its leaves, some as big as city blocks, swayed in the winds of the upper atmosphere. The roots snaked out from a gargantuan trunk thicker than the bases of mountains to cover the surrounding land like a spider web of veins, crisscrossing each other through the smaller forests that grew in between them. And that was just the tree itself; that didn’t even begin to cover what was going on around it. Massive balloon-like things that were perhaps giant flying jellyfish floated all around the colossal plant, most connected to it by way of the intertwining of their electrically-crackling tentacles with the thick green vines emanating from the trunk. Humongous beehive-like structures buzzed with what looked like giant winged squirrels sporting curling proboscises and segmented insect eyes. Manticores with elephant trunks and grasshopper legs bounced around the roots. Polar bears with the mandibles of beetles and snake tails in place of hind legs slithered up and down the base of the tree. Armored kangaroos with crab claws and skunk tails sprayed sickly green smoke over giant red flowers with eyestalks in their centers. Rarity could only imagine what swam in the coastal waters that some of the tree’s roots sank into. “It’s something, isn’t it?” Firefly inquired. “All of those chimaeras designed by splicing together the genetic material of countless organisms. I’ve even heard some of the zebras and ponies who work there have been altered in order to perform their jobs… No, I don’t know any of that stuff! Only a useless know-it-all would understand anything about fabrication…! NO! You are NOT stealing this moment from me! I’ve wanted to see the biological achievements of the Fluttershy Fabrications factory my whole life, and I WON’T let you steal my brain when I’m in one of the most fascinating places in the world!” Firefly gripped her head with her hooves, clenching her eyes and teeth. Firefly’s body shuddered violently, causing the life raft to wobble frighteningly as well, even with Megan’s assistance. The split pegasus sounded like she was almost choking, but Rarity didn’t hear a single cough as Firefly fought to see this place through her own eyes, not from some dark place far behind them. The white unicorn smiled. It didn’t seem as if the real Firefly’s mind was out of the fight just yet. Though Rarity was overjoyed at Firefly being internally victorious, at least for the moment, the white unicorn couldn’t agree less with the real Firefly’s perception of this place. To Rarity it was an abomination, like somepony had taken everything that made sense in nature, thrown it in a blender, and then laughed as everything was churned together. She had hoped that Oscar the chimera would be the freakiest thing to come out of Fluttershy Fabrications. She had hoped in vain. “Want us to land?” Firefly, the real one, called back. “I am certain that President Fluttershy would be eager to assist you in your search, as long as we’re here in this Land. Her resources could prove invaluable.” If Fluttershy’s imprint was by some small sliver of hope sane, then Rarity had no doubt that her resources would indeed be invaluable. If, that was, the mere sight of her factory didn’t make the white unicorn want to throw up. She hated herself for doing this when the real Firefly was obviously so hoping to study the tree up close. But, for the sake of keeping her stomach acids where they belonged, the white unicorn decided it would be best not to go anywhere near the factory. Even if this was the home of a mental copy of one of her closest friends, Rarity feared that she might develop recurring nightmares if she saw what was inside the tree. If this was what the outside looked like, then who knew what horrors lay within? “I don’t think we should,” Rarity replied. “My locator spell is telling us to go beyond the tree. Maybe we can stop by after we collect the Disks.” Firefly’s face fell, but she nodded anyway. The life raft veered off-course from the tree, headed for the thick jungles growing further inland behind it. Rarity sighed with relief, thankful that they weren’t actually going into the factory, at least for now. However, it seemed that the tree had other ideas. A distant screech rang through the air. It was instantly joined by what sounded like the voices of thousands of others, and the leaves of the factory shook as a black cloud burst through the treetop. The shrieking only intensified as the cloud began to disperse into individual flying shadows, each zooming straight towards the group. “What are those things?!” Rarity gasped. “Firefly, get us out of here!” The split pegasus complied, kicking it into high-gear. Never mind that she had been flying for a full day; fear-fueled adrenaline raced through her body just as much as it was coursing through the veins of the rest of the group. But whether the exhausting flight was taking its toll in spite of the adrenaline rush, or if the creatures were just too fast, the black cloud was closing in. Whatever those things were, they were everywhere. They swooped up below the life raft and caved in overhead like a crashing wave, while the rest sped around to the other side to capture the group in a living cage of thrashing claws, bloodcurdling screams, and flapping wings. The monsters flew on leathery wings, buffeting the group with wind well before the flying sphere came closing in. Their screeches were like the scraping of a unicorn’s horn against a chalkboard… if the chalkboard had first been lodged in one’s brain. Their fangs dripped with saliva, their mashed faces looking like those of bats while their bodies were encased in a shining black exoskeleton. Multiple many-segmented legs curled up against the bulging sacks making up the creatures’ lower bodies. Rarity’s horn ignited and blasted a swathe of them back while Megan repeatedly snapped her not-claws and froze countless creatures in place. But there were far too many of them, and even if there weren’t, Firefly couldn’t fight them and pull the life raft at the same time. Webs of sticky white glistening strings shot out from the monster’s bloated flesh-sacks and netted the multicolored pegasus, holding steady even as she thrashed within them. More webs strengthened the hold and wrapped the pony in a body cast, her wings pinned against her side and her mouth restrained so that she couldn’t even chomp the bit that would activate her weapons harness, much less scream. A similar fate befell Rarity, Megan, and Surprise. The sickly string shot out, latched onto their skin, and constricted. Rarity telekinetically tugged at the growing organic net entrapping her, but the string held. Megan was having no better luck, having almost been completely covered. Surprise, who had done nothing during the battle, was also slowly disappearing behind the webs. The white unicorn supposed that since the monsters were only capturing them in this gunk rather than causing immediate physical harm, Surprise wasn’t reacting as she had in Sparkle Technologies. The white pegasus was also absently munching on some of the webbing. Not trying to chew through it to freedom, but just slowly enjoying the flavor. That would give Rarity as many nightmares as seeing the tree ever would have! But harm that wasn’t immediate far from dispelled Rarity’s fears. With them all wrapped up like this, there was no way they could fight back against the monsters if they chose to leisurely dig into them with those fangs and drink their internal fluids. By that time, it would be too late for Surprise to act. It would be too late for them all. The webs continued to douse them until Rarity was completely enwrapped in a solid glob of white webbing. She struggled with all her might, but her lungs hardly had room to expand in here, much less gain sustenance if there was no way for her take in fresh air. The white unicorn had a spasmodic fit of panic as she fought desperately to free herself, knowing this would only waste the precious air she had left, but not caring if she could just tear through to the world beyond her prison and get some more. Suddenly the entire web shook and the white unicorn was assaulted with the sensation of movement even though she couldn’t see what was happening. Was she falling? What was going on?! There was a tearing sound, and veins of light in front of her face were ripped into the wonderful view of the outside world. Rarity drank in the air in gulps. Her lungs hardly had room to expand, but the new air slowly eased the burning within them all the same. Despite the blessed air, though, what little Rarity could see out of her tiny, sticky prison was not a welcome sight. The tree was looming up before them. If she glanced up, she could just make out the flapping wings of the monsters who had done this to her overhead, the strings holding up her imprisoning web dangling from its bulging bottom. Rarity could only assume the others were in the same predicament she was. The monsters weren’t eating them then and there, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t later, and that far from meant anything pleasant would await them within their apparent destination. The white unicorn had nothing to do but stew over the myriad possible horrors that waited for her group inside the tree. After what felt like another thousand years, but what really must have only been a few minutes, the monsters flew her into a gaping hole in the bark. Whatever panicked theories had rushed through her head, they would now be tested. Rarity fell a short ways and hit the ground, the scant air she was able to force into her lungs knocked out of her. Thankfully it wasn’t as difficult to breathe as before, as the bat-spider-things began ripping into her prison of web, but not into her. Rarity’s body screamed at her to leap to her hooves and fight these things, find the others, and escape out the hole they had flown into, but it was all she could do to just struggle and take in more air. There was the sound of furious flapping as she rasped, but thankfully the monsters didn’t seem to be making any more moves. With a few gasps, Rarity at last managed to sit up and take in her surroundings. The monsters were indeed gone, but so too was the hole they had flow into. The bark had closed in on itself, nothing but a warped seam where it had once been. Turning, she exhaled the little breath in her lungs in a relieved sigh as she spotted her companions. They too had been freed and were catching their own breaths, struggling to lift themselves from the spongy green floor. They appeared to be in a small room made of moss and bark. Glowing fruit hung down from the ceiling while a larger flower that had yet to bloom grew from the far wall. It was pulsating like a beating heart. The veins in its unopened petals coursed with some kind of liquid, and the whole plant glowed softly. “Well, that was fun!” Surprise cheered after she’d caught her breath, leaping into the air and hovering as she took in the room. “That silly string was so tasty, and I love the décor in here! I can’t place the style, though. I wonder if they were going for the ‘In the Fluttershy Forests, Your Garden Tends to YOU’ look?” “Alright, so that was about the freakiest thing I’ve ever been through,” Megan announced, picking off stray bits of string that were still attached to her clothes. Surprise noticed this and hastily dashed over to scoop up Megan’s pile of discarded webbing in her mouth, earning an understandable look of disgust from the human. “Where are we?” Rarity inquired, scanning the room for any possible exits save the ridiculously thick-looking bark. “And why were we brought here? Did we violate a law against flying near the factory or something?” Firefly looked like she was about to respond, but she never got the chance. “No... of course not...” spoke a soft, gentle voice. Rarity’s eyes darted to the source of the noise, seeing that the large flower from before had opened. There was nothing inside it, though; just a long dark hole that disappeared into darkness. “You are always welcome here, Rarity! And I hope my spiderbats weren’t too rough on you and your friends. They can get a little overenthusiastic sometimes, but they mean well.” Hope, fear, and shock warred for the right to claim Rarity’s face as their own. “F…Flu…Fluttershy?” she whispered. “Is that you...? I mean, is that your imprint?” “I’ve been hoping for this day for so long,” the soft voice continued, apparently ignoring its guest, the flower quivering slightly as the sound emanated from it. “I’ve always wanted to meet you. The real Fluttershy told me so many stories about your generosity, and the wonderful times you spent together.” “Please…” Rarity whispered to herself, her eyes locked on the flower, a look of utter desperation in their eyes. “Please don’t be insane! Please be let there be just a little of the real Fluttershy in you!” “Did you say something, Rarity?” the voice asked. “If you did, I’m sorry, but I didn’t hear you.” “Are you… a flower?” the white unicorn inquired aloud, hoping so much for a remnant of her most innocent friend, it almost hurt. She could take Fluttershy’s imprint being or living in a flower, as disconcerting as that would be. All she cared about was that it was an actual copy of the real Fluttershy’s mind, not some warped duplicate.   “Oh, no,” the voice responded. “I’m sorry if you thought I was. I’m using this flower to speak to you from my office up where the branches start. We use flowers and tubes like this one to carry sound throughout the factory.” A feeling of dread blossomed in Rarity’s stomach at those words. Something was wrong. Something had to be off. “Why didn’t you have your spiderbats bring us up your office instead of taking us to this little room?” Rarity asked with a nervousness that was bordering on panic. “Before I meet you in person, I have to know if you’re... capable,” the soft voice answered. “Capable?” Rarity echoed, the dread blossoming in her stomach pollinating, spreading seeds, and giving birth to a whole field of dread flowers. “Capable of what?” “Survival,” Fluttershy’s imprint replied. “Just like the real Fluttershy, I love life. But a few centuries into the job I began to realize that to really love life, I had to help perfect it, so it doesn’t end before its time. If I don’t produce only the most excellent organisms, then I’m doing life itself a disservice. I want my sweet little creatures to have the best lives possible, as well as enjoy the company of other life forms who are living the best lives possible. A little later, I realized that this didn’t just apply to my company. It’s just as my company slogan says: ‘all life is connected, and so all life must be perfected!’ “But... how do I make life forms as perfect as they can be?” Fluttershy’s imprint continued. “By only using genes that carry the most essential quality to life! And of course, what quality could be more essential to life than the skill of survival? If a life form doesn’t have the skills to survive, then I figured... maybe I could help with that.” Rarity simply stared blankly for a moment, the gears in her head turning. Fluttershy’s imprint wanted to help the creatures she deemed “imperfect” by helping them with their survival skills? How? She mowed this over for a moment, before her mind flashed back to the view of the many, many abominations crawling around outside the factory. Her eyes widened. “Wha... Fluttershy wouldn’t... She believed that all life is sacred exactly how it is, and doesn’t need to be... CHANGED like that!” “But the real Fluttershy didn’t have as long to think about this as I’ve had,” the imprint rebutted. “She cared for all living things regardless of their survival skills, but what she didn’t know is that instead of helping life, she was actually hurting it. Is it really better to let be a life form that would die on its own? Is it really better to allow something so very weak to be a target for nature’s cruelties? We couldn’t possibly take care of all of them. There were simply too many. To make sure they weren’t killed, we had to make sure that they could take care of themselves. “You know, after a while, I realized that ponies suffer from the same... shortcomings. I had friends... but I knew they were too weak, so I improved them. Some of them are even still around. I talk to them, but they don’t talk back to me. At least, not like they used to. They don’t even pay much attention to me. Perhaps they can’t? Oh well.” An amused chuckle echoed throughout the tree. “There were some side effects, yes... but I knew it was worth it to sacrifice their equine nature so that they wouldn’t die before their time. Some may think that makes them less if not everything in them is pony, but I think it makes them more. Don’t you agree, Rarity?” “NO!” Rarity roared, hot tears in her eyes. “Th-that’s HORRIBLE! Life doesn’t last forever, b-but ponies make the most out of what time they have, even if they aren’t perfect! Y-you’re... they’re not even who they used to be anymore! They’re not less than ponies, they aren’t ponies any more at all! How can they enjoy their lives if--” “Only by strengthening the weak can we eliminate untimely death!” the monster with Fluttershy’s voice interrupted. “We’ll never be able to keep all the weak alive for as long as they could live! If we make them stronger, then they will survive! And their offspring will survive! There would be no need to take care of them anymore; they could all take care of themselves! And no matter which genes perpetuated themselves, they would all survive, because they’re all strong! There would be no more untimely death. These life forms would use their survival skills to live as long as their natural lifespans allowed, without any help from anypony! Each new generation would live as long as possible, forever!” A blue aura wrapped itself around the flower-speaker and ripped it from the wall. The flower shriveled and died instantly, its glow diminishing as its once rich red hue faded to a lifeless brown. The flowery corpse crinkled like autumn leaves as Rarity telekinetically tore it to shreds, her rage fueled by the imprint’s twisted words. Instantly, another flower grew in its place. “Let us out of here!” Rarity demanded, anger seeping into her voice. “I don’t care if you think I’m strong enough or not! I don’t WANT to meet you! Open the door and set us free!” “I shall open the door, and I shall set you free,” the soft voice of the monster replied. “But not the door to the outside. And I shall free you one of two ways. How you go free is entirely up to you. You can either free yourself from being questionably weak and prove that your genes are strong enough to survive by surviving the following test, or, if you fail, I can perfect you so that you never have to fail another of life’s tests ever again! And then I’ll let you go.” The imprint’s words were punctuated by echoing, repeating giggling. “I will never lose any of my friends. Not ever again. They can’t die if I won’t let them. If she’d just had time to realize it, that’s what the real Fluttershy would have wanted: eternal friendship. She lost so many of her friends before she too passed on, but with this system, nopony need ever lose anypony else ever again. With my help, your friends will never lose you, Rarity, and you will never lose them.” Rarity was incredulous. “No! I don’t need to be perfect. Let me out! Let me-” Her voice was drowned out by a deafeningly loud slithering noise. The mossy wall in front of them opened up to the inside of the tree, revealing a gigantic tunnel that wound up and out of sight around a far corner. Unlike the tiny room they had been in, though, this tunnel was not covered in moss nor walled by bark. It was covered in thousands of large, unblinking eyes. Liquid continually secreted from flabs of flesh hanging over them, washing down the ocular orbs and oozing into the floor, where it was absorbed by squishy green tissue veined with pulsating red. In between the eyes, all of which were squished for space, sharp spiky thorns as long as swords jutted out from the wall. The ceiling was dotted with bony circular panels the size of large tables with a single jagged crack running down the middle of each of them. The instant the door was opened, every eye swiveled and locked onto the group with an emotionless stare. The thorns burst out of the wall, connected to the ends of long vines dotted with other, smaller thorns. Veins pulsed along the writhing vines wherever the thorns didn’t pierce the air, and there was no doubt in Rarity’s mind about what those veins were filled with and, if she wasn’t careful, what she too would soon be filled with. “If you don’t need to be perfected, then obviously, you are already perfect. Show me. Only when you reach my office at the end of The Hall of Life will I be convinced that you can take anything the world can throw at you. If you can’t make it by yourselves... well, then you are too weak. But if that’s the case, I can always fix that,” Fluttershy’s imprint announced, before the second flower-speaker withered and died of its own accord. Regardless of the lack of a visible source, Rarity could still hear the insane giggling.  Before the group could so much as react, vines that were thankfully without thorns sliced up through the ground, wrapped themselves around everypony and human, and tossed them into the hallway of the ‘test.’ The tiny room closed up behind them just as quickly as it had opened and, not even giving the nonlethal vines time to retract, cut them in half. The harmless vines’ more sinisterly-inclined cousins lashed forward. “RUN!” Rarity commanded, unleashing her weapons harness and turning as many of the vines to splattered liquefied ooze as she could, catching a myriad more in her telekinetic grip as her group dashed forward. Megan froze as many as she could, and Firefly activated her own weapons harness, chomping down on the trigger-bit with all her might as she wove in and out of the vines in a rainbow streak. Surprise might not have looked like she’d registered anything that had been said during Rarity and the not-Fluttershy’s conversation, but even she seemed to know well enough to try and avoid the jabbing vines. The group was so preoccupied with fighting their way through the living horror that was ‘The Hall of Life’ that they didn’t notice the final trick the hallway had to throw at them until it was right on top of them. The bony panels in the ceiling opened up through the cracks down their middles, foul-smelling gas belching out as the giant mouths vomited the most terrifying creatures Rarity had ever seen. Compared to these monstrosities, the living horror of the hallway looked like a pleasant walk in the park. . . .