//------------------------------// // Areté // Story: Tales Of The Canterlot Deportation Agency: Soul Survivor // by Estee //------------------------------// She was thinking about blood. There were other things she could have been thinking about: the events which had taken place just before she'd appeared in the palace certainly offered multiple options for review. But a human mind on the edge of death can fixate on strange things. She knew that, even recognized the phenomena taking place within herself. It had been part of the code, the Chodana, that she could never send others on to where she had not been, and so it was not the first time Bree had been so close to dying. On the original occasion, she'd even managed to finish. But now she was being carried along by the Princess' field (Luna's: she hadn't seen the horn ignite, but there had been just enough time to spot the color before her eyes had closed), and it was making her skin tingle. That was a familiar feeling: to be encased within the energy of unicorn (or alicorn) magic produced the sensation of having had a foot fall asleep, only taking the entire body along for the ride. But she'd never been touched by that energy while bleeding, and the touch of that power against her lacerated legs and the long cut on her left palm -- there was something electric to it. Not so much little shocks as a flowing current, bearing her off towards the dark. Behind her, somewhere past the pounding of galloping hooves, there was screaming. She was in Equestria, in the palace (she hadn't been aiming for the palace, she didn't know how she'd wound up there, but you could often trust Euthie luck to do something, and almost never in the way you would have wished), and that meant she was back within the automatic translation effect produced by the world itself. Any words within the screams arrived in her ears as English. But it was still possible to distinguish when those words came from pony voices. Some of the pitches were slightly different. Harmonics... harmonized. A trio of species which sometimes seemed to have been born to the chorus. She could distinguish when ponies were speaking, and so she could make out the screaming of the two human children who'd appeared with her, with their small bodies pressed against her bleeding legs. The screaming seemed to have been going on for a very long time. It had been happening before they'd arrived, and part of her wondered if it would ever stop. But that was just a small part of her. On the edge of death, even knowing what death would bring (at least when it came to humans dying in her own world, something which had just been happening over and over and over and), her mind tried to distract her. And so Bree Daniels thought about the marble of the Lunar throne room, and how her blood had already been flowing across it when the Princess had lifted her. It was... a fairly porous sort of stone, wasn't it? Marble had all kinds of weakness: heat, hard strikes in just the right place... she'd studied that once. And it could so easily take in liquids. Marble countertops were handsome, heavy, and very susceptible to stains. She didn't want to ruin the throne room's floor. She'd always tried to spend her limited hours in Equestria as a good guest. It seemed a shame to ruin her record at the last. And then there was Luna's field to consider. Unicorn/alicorn fields, working against various states of matter... Air tended to mostly go around: enough got through to allow breathing, but not much more. Solids, unless the caster knew enough about shield workings to solidify their projection, went through. But liquids... they often became entangled in the border, flowed along the pathways of the energy itself, and continued to do so until the caster's effort ended. The red of her blood was flowing along the dark blue of Luna's power, tributaries of death running from the ebbing river of her life. She wondered what that looked like. Hooves pounded against marble. Then there were more hooves. "Luna!" The heavier set matched pace. "Where are you taking her? Why are you on hoof? You just ran out --" "-- I cannot teleport with her!" the younger gasped. "She must be kept contained! I sensed something as she came through, something which did not make it to our side, but... the nature of that entity, I must be certain, sister, I cannot take her to the medical facilities until we are sure she is safe! Uncontaminated! So I am going to the signature scanners, the best ones we have, by the only method remaining! Do not slow me with arguments, for she is dying!" Dying. We're all dying. We're all dead. We're all dead and you won't let me catch up. They're waiting for me and you won't let me go. "I think it died!" Luna shouted. "But... what came behind it..." The volume was considerable: a desperate Luna seldom spoke any other way. And yet the words seemed to be getting softer. Echoing. "We must be sure! Let me do this, and once we --" once we once once upon a time... ...there was a girl who had no friends. It could have been said that the girl was passing strange, and it usually had to be said rather quickly because if you saw her at all outside of a classroom, she would have been passing by. The girl generally existed in one of three states: at home, at school, or in transit between the two. Contact with the world which existed beyond those locations was considered to be fatal and in the most absolute sense which could exist, her parents would eventually be proven correct in over seven billion cases -- with a certain degree of irony for one of the exceptions. The girl was the youngest in her family, the last of four children and, on the day she was born, the newest of three. For her world was a place of cruelty, where it often seemed as if joy existed only as something to be stolen. She never knew her oldest brother in life, who had used her time in the womb to progressively slip into the shadows of D.C, searching for the intangible respect which he had come to believe could only exist at the end of a gun and in the last moments of his life, which ran out two hours before his baby sister came wailing into the world, he discovered it couldn't be found at the point of a bullet. She cried when she was born, at least after the caul, the second skin, had been removed from her face. And her parents, who had just received the news, heard it as mourning. They resolved then and there to never lose another, not to gangs. Not to the lie that true power came from the ability to hurt those around you, something which so few recognized had been culturally imposed from the outside because it took those who had been placed into the ghettos and kept them there. And they named her Bree, for her father was of Irish blood and it had been his turn to pick the name. He chose a word meaning virtue, and it could be said that it fit. But definitions are slippery things, and to cross the waters towards the moors would find that same name indicating nothing more than a rather watery sort of soup, the sort of thing consumed by beggars because boiling stones provided very slightly less nutrition. That, too, could be said to fit. She was named for virtue, born into poverty, and there she would remain. From the first day, the girl was strange. A birth caul: that was a rarity to begin with, to have part of the amnion lining coating her features. (Roughly one in eighty thousand births: she would look it up as an adult and wonder about the long odds which ruled her life.) But she also arrived with a near-full head of hair: a redhead from the moment her life began, and the darkness of the shade was the first hint of the genetic, formerly-recessive Polynesian time bombs which had somehow found their way into both sides of the family tree. Bright-eyed, curious, spending so much of her time looking outside her crib and cooing at things which weren't there. Not to anyone else. A birth caul means many things and until she grew old enough to forget, to see only what the world wanted seen, it meant that the oldest brother she'd never known in life came to greet her in death. Peek-a-boo, played with a wraith, is a game which can go on for hours, or until the final oblivion stole him away before her second birthday. She was surrounded by a world of stained sunlight, breathed air whose pollutants were never regulated, for to spend five cents on filters would be to lose just that much profit, and the public relations people could deny the resulting illnesses as part of their standard paycheck. She came into poverty and, as far as the powers which ruled (had always ruled, would die with all the rest, unwished-for equality in armageddon) were concerned, that would never change. But the girl was intelligent. Remarkably so. The girl was also confined. Childhood is often viewed as a period of freedom. It can also be a prison, one with what those bound within are hoping is a limited sentence: that given enough time, they can seize the keys and step out into the greater courtyard of adulthood, which only looks like freedom until you reach it and realize the walls were hidden in shadow, and climb all the higher. Her parents were afraid. It could be said that they had reason to be, for children died every day. An infant was far too young to be recruited for a gang, but the minimum age requirement for catching a random bullet from a street fight -- that began in the negative numbers. Pregnant women (or girls, so often girls) were shot in the belly: one trigger, two deaths. The older siblings... it was too late to fully corral them. They had lives, at least to the degree which the ghetto would allow, and they fought against being torn away from what few joys they had. But their baby sister hardly ever went outside, and never without supervision. When the time came for school, she only went to school. (She had to go: both parents worked, with the father steadily holding at least two jobs, his wife ranging from zero to three depending on how many low-cost eateries had recently been shot up, and it was just enough to keep them all from being homeless.) Not to the homes of other children for parties, not that the family could afford gifts. Not even onto the potholed playground during recess, for the school had been told to keep her inside. Other people: that was the danger. You never knew what other people would do. There was no way out of the ghetto, no means of escaping those who would do their daughter harm. All they could do was keep her in the ratty apartment (always as clean as they could make it, but shoddy construction added to the decay of age had a dirt all their own) as much as possible. To go out and play was to return in a coffin. The friends of today would be the gang's recruiters of tomorrow. So they taught her about other people. They taught her to stay away from them as much as possible and when she showed signs of not wanting to stay away, they kept her away, and said it was out of love. She could go to school, for to teach her at home would have cost too much. She could stay in her room. She could, if she was good, go to the library with her mother, for that was free (if perpetually understocked, on purpose, and the barriers which had been raised against gaining a card had forgotten to account for a child who'd started reading before the age of three). She could play with hand-me-down toys, rag dolls made from true rags, and whatever her father had cleaned most of the street's dirt away from. She could look out the tiny window and regard the bit of alley which made up the space between the wall on the other side, but not when her parents might catch her doing so: after all, bullets came through glass. The girl was intelligent. Curious. Inquisitive. And didn't have a friend in the world. Green eyes opened, and that was the first shock. There were rooms hidden deep under the Canterlot Deportation Agency. (She'd sometimes wondered how they'd originally been dug out, and concluded it had to be pony magic: it wasn't easy to hollow out bedrock.) That was the space reserved for human agents, who either had to be escorted in by a pony capable of teleportation, or capable of reaching those scant halls themselves. Only a few ponies had direct access to that space. Not many knew it even existed. And a few of those rooms made up the hospital. There wasn't much to it. Two rooms had beds. A third held the medical wealth of multiple worlds, and to stand within that room was to -- well, actually, it was generally to conclude that said worlds needed some serious help. Advanced medical technology, actual potions -- but not all of it would work under Equestria's rules, or on those who had come from worlds other than those points of origin. It meant there were multiple shelves which were mostly filled with dusty labels: For Use On Colosseum Humans Only. And adapting pony medicine for use on all those varieties of humanity, some of whom were so very far off the baseline... that was usually a truly bad idea. On the whole, it was often possible to heal more quickly, and some minor injuries might vanish in minutes. But for everything else, it was the most common methods, and that meant the fourth room was a roughly-equipped surgery. She'd been half-propped up on pillows, allowing her to sleep with her torso on something of a slant. She wondered who had done it. Bree occasionally slept that way at home the fire and when she was truly tired, worn out from the duty on a level which reached her soul, she'd been known to pass out sitting up. She wasn't sure that either was the best position for her, but they were what her body knew. She woke up in the hospital, with her legs wrapped in bandages, when she hadn't expected to wake up at all. That was the first shock. The second was having a human in the room with her. "About damn time," he grumbled, and slowly pushed himself off the chair. (A chair instead of a bench: it meant he was a regular visitor.) She watched him approach: a white male who was closing out his fifties, with short brown hair which only knew of brushes through rumor, permanent stubble that never needed to fear the touch of a razor. Ice-blue eyes were somewhat deeper-set than usual, leaving him looking at her through a degree of personal shadow. He had a slightly awkward way of walking, even over that short distance. He favored a leg which didn't seem to need it, like someone who had recently discarded a brace or cane and hadn't figured out how to move normally again. "So this is where I'd usually get an intern to run the orientation tests," he grumbled. (A central Jersey accent, overlaid with bits and pieces of so many other places.) "If I had an intern. So guess who has to do it?" He raised his right hand, thought for a moment, and then selected a rather predictable finger to also raise. "How many?" "One," Bree technically said. At least, she knew the word had emerged from her own mouth, in her voice. It just didn't seem as if she'd really been involved in the process. "How old are you?" "Twenty-seven." A very thin eyebrow went up. "Well, let me be the first to congratulate your diet and exercise regimen," and the sarcasm was thick in the air. "Since I obviously can't credit your surgeon." This was accompanied by a very direct look at her breasts, one which seemed to remain there for far too long. "Because you're passing for eighteen. Nineteen on the outside. Even your tests said that, for the ones I could run." A slow head shake. "One of the most human humans I've worked on since I got here, at least once I overlooked the part where someone crossbred you with a cow. And now it turns out all those little ring layers exposed by the wounds are lying to me." She didn't react, and that seemed as if it should have felt strange. She'd just been openly mocked, and in a very familiar way. There were many costs associated with virginal breast hypertrophy, and somewhere in the middle of the tally sheet was being the target of non-witticisms from those who were somehow convinced that they were the first to the not-joke. (There had been an odd casualness to this particular comment, as if the man had long-ago internally acknowledged that the price for his supposed wit occasionally included being punched in the face and as long as such left him able to speak and deliver the next observation, he was okay with that.) With this category of insult, Bree's reactions generally didn't manifest externally: even a minor break in stride would give others an extra victory. But she hadn't even tensed. It didn't feel strange. It didn't feel like much of anything. "Next question," the man continued. "Do you know where you are?" "Equestria. Canterlot. About four hundred feet under it." He nodded. "And who's the president --" Paused, seemed to visibly suppress a groan. "-- let's try that again. You're American, right? For whatever America you're from." She nodded. "So who's your president?" She told him. After a long silence, "That's a joke, right?" Bree shook her head. "So you're telling me that a hundred million voters didn't somehow mutually decide it would be really ironic if --" "-- it doesn't matter." Except for all the ways in which it had made everything worse. "And you can't ask me about history, or my homeworld's geography, or even sports teams because they won't match." She pushed the blankets off her body, noticed that someone (or somepony) had put her in a rather ill-fitting hospital gown. "Where are my clothes?" "What was left of them?" He snorted. "Trashed. Same for the lower layers. Nopony could explain why you were wearing thin brass strips against your skin, and we needed two of them to help peel it all off. Which was easier than removing the wreckage from the bra --" And now that didn't matter either. She carefully swung her legs to the right, planted her feet on the stone floor. There seemed to be some chance of standing up. "My tablet?" He was moving forward again, and didn't have much distance to close. "Fragments and sparks. And if you don't lie back down, you're going to be envying it. You've been out for two days. Fed by IVs, results went into bedpans. You're in no shape to --" It was when his arms came up, and she saw where his hands were going. He was going to push on her shoulders, force her back down onto mattress and pillows. Make her stay. And then those hands diverted themselves, with the fingers clawing at her left wrist. Barrier strength = 5 (Dropping) It didn't matter. It wasn't her first throat. And besides, she wasn't squeezing. "I say," she softly stated, "when I leave. I'm going back. Now." Two days, she'd missed two days when things had already been the red star -- in the final throes, two days could have done so much... She didn't need the tablet, not for this. She didn't even need clothing. She had secret caches, multiple emergency bugout bags buried around the state. In this case, she was going to aim for the one outside Grayling. Yes, it would hurt to return outside her workshop, hurt horribly and add to everything which hadn't quite finished healing yet, but she couldn't go back to her workshop because it's gone my house is gone Detroit... and the Grayling site was isolated: it gave her the lowest chance of being seen if anyone could still and the best odds that all the contents had survived. There would be a spare tablet, if a lower-quality one --she'd buried that bag some time ago -- along with clothing. Also a passport, but that didn't matter. The borders had been sealed before everything had begun, and that had kept people inside. Shortly thereafter, flights had been grounded. Anything moving through the air did so under its own power. Things had been moving through the air. Barrier strength = 2 (Dropping) "Nod," she said as his fingernails left a bleeding trail down her unmoving forearm, "if the kids I brought in are all right." He had just enough courtesy in him to do that. Barrier strength = 0 It meant there was nothing keeping her in Equestria. No reason not to go back among the dying, the dead, to walk through the ruins in search of what little life might remain. To find something she could do. Something useless and pointless, just like everything else everyone had done. As useless as every last thing which had allowed it to happen at all. But she'd found two girls... Life among the corpses. "I'll come back when I can," she said as the final line of code was written within her mind, the rote complete. "If I can." She wanted to pause just long enough to say something else, perhaps about never calling her a cow again. But that would have made it personal, and what she was doing wasn't personal. It was necessary. Make him stop trying to keep her here with so much, so much happening on the other side, return to the world of her birth, the home of monsters and madness and what seemed like every foul thing to exist, try to find life. To do something, anything, while it was still possible to act. To retain the faintest dream of stopping it. Bree finished the working. Felt electrons rotate within, her body getting ready to shift across the layers -- -- there was a moment when transition should have begun. The instant when the stone floor opened onto howling storm, plasma and acid and the cries of those spectres who had given themselves to the Tempest as the last step prior to true oblivion. It was just long enough to recognize, and so it was also long enough to feel everything going wrong. Bree had created the spell -- the effect which had ultimately (mis)led her to Equestria -- because she had never been able to make herself understand the theory which led to her world's idea of teleportation. The concept that all points were one, every object overlapped every other, distance was but an illusion, and you didn't actually go anywhere. You just decided that the next part of the illusion was going to look different. As theories went, it was self-evidentially stupid, and remained so no matter how many mages managed to work with it. In fact, Bree had effectively disproven it, and done so at the moment of her first crashing arrival in Equestria: a place which very clearly wasn't everywhere else. There were separate points. Separate worlds, so many of which launched incursions against the ponies, and it was possible to travel between those worlds. In Bree's case, she could go to Equestria, and she could go back to her birth home. Nowhere else. There was time to feel it going wrong, and so there was also time to ask a question. What happens when you try to travel into a place which no longer exists? She found out. The void pulled at her, tried to take her, a bed leg began to drop, vacuum exerted against air and walls and magic before trying to come for her soul, there was a scream and she was almost certain it was hers, code rushing through her mind with variables crashing and definitions coming apart, none of the lines made sense any more, she had reached towards nothing and it wanted her, she couldn't think and she couldn't cast and she reached into the coding and set every number to zero. The hole closed. Another kind of darkness rose up to take her, and she rushed forward to meet it. Her childhood was prison, and all she could do was watch the calendar slowly count towards escape. There were very few ways to leave the cell of the dirty little apartment, and most took place within dream. She could always get something to read, because that was free. But there weren't many books in the library, not ones which her parents considered to be suitable. She wasn't allowed to watch much in the way of television and after the transition from analog to digital took place, the set in the living room never worked again: it was too old for a convertor, barely showed color most days, had a permanent splash of green and aqua at the upper right corner of the screen where the youngest, desperate for some kind of entertainment, had discovered that holding magnets next to the glass did interesting things. She'd just kept doing it for a little too long. She had no friends, because even those whom her parents might temporarily approve of would take her out of their sight. There were no youth sports programs in the ghetto: she couldn't ask to sign up for what didn't exist, and the broken remnants of the parks were where so many of the bodies were found. She lived in an area where the street names were single letters and too many who lived there were incapable of reading them. And blocks away, so close and yet completely untouchable, was power. A power which liked it that way. Dreams died in the ghetto, because those in charge had yet to find a socially acceptable way of wiping out the dreamers and so simply encouraged them to kill each other. But she was intelligent. For a while, it seemed as if that was all she had. Schoolbooks to study, and so she did that over and over. Her work reached the point where the teachers could no longer afford to artificially lower her scores. She couldn't get into a charter school, because the sending address of the application would be all they needed for denial, and simply appearing at the interview would do the rest. Her family had no money, no status, and her skin color disqualified her from everything which her half-breed (she got called that in school, quite openly, sometimes by those who shared that status. It was, in many ways, the least of what they called her) blood simply reinforced. She was, educationally, the shining star in a place which was designed to stop teaching. Years later, she would learn that it was agreed to use her marks as a statistical sign that the system required no correction. After all, if one child could do so well... Puberty, and the chains increased in number. She was (and is), in her way, beautiful. (Not conventionally so, because there can only be one kind of beauty there, just a single appearance which those powers claim is allowed.) The time of classmate curiosity began, and her body was already ahead of the pack. Then it just kept going, to where much of the interest turned into public disgust, for even those who were still curious could no longer admit to such in public. Not that she could have ever said yes to any of them. She can't play, she can't go over someone's house, she can't roam around mall or Mall, and she can't date. But she can listen to insults. Nerd. Brainiac. Cow. Dairy queen. Freak. There was a time when she hated her body. It was the point when she learned how much it costs to be poor: that it's possible, if just barely, to pay for bra after bra, keep scavenging mostly-secondhand clothing as she passes through sizes -- but the thousands which represent the surgery, that can never be reached. And the cumulative cost of the clothing is ultimately higher: it's just being paid out at a different rate. She hated herself, hated how she looked, and was years away from learning that it's how those powers wanted her to feel. She ultimately inherits her father's height: more expenses there. She learned how to walk in a way which curls in on itself, hunched, making herself smaller. She kept her teeth clean and perfect because dentists cost too much, and her hair was cut by her mother. She didn't socialize because she couldn't. It wasn't just being forbidden to do so. Part of her wanted to, even then, and -- she didn't know how. In the dark of her tiny room (something she's outgrown, curled up on the mattress so that her feet won't go off the bed), trying to ignore the gunshots in what she's hoping is the distance, she dreamed of talking to people, and few of those ever saw them respond. Books can tell you how people talk, but not how to speak. The girl felt like she didn't understand people. Numbers, now those were easy. Two was always two, no matter how many people claimed it wasn't or shouldn't be. Ratios and formulas and force: to her parents, the books which explain them are boring, and that meant she could read as many as she liked. She can't figure out what moves people and doesn't believe she'll ever work it out, but getting something from Point A to Point B is a matter of math. Building the thing which goes down the trail is just more math. Old computers are frequently put out at the curbs as trash, aren't picked up because moving recycling days around at seeming random discourages recycling. Her father brings one home, then another, and she reads books until she finds the parts scattered among seven systems to make one which works. No Internet connection, but the ability to do math all the faster, to start learning about coding and the means by which equations manifest as lines and graphs. Eventually, sketches. She didn't understand people. But she could work out forms, even those designed to trip up anyone trying to work with them. She saved whatever she could until she had enough money for a single application and when she had to check off a box for 'race,' she wrote 'Human' underneath all the other options and checked that. There had to be a single Ghetto Girl Makes Good story, because having one would keep so many people from wondering why the number wasn't higher, while preventing others from caring. Her grades made her eligible to be that girl, and that meant the letter came back which told her she was about to swear her devotion to blue and yellow while occasionally calling out the name of a superhero from a comic which had been canceled decades ago, because having those who were different calling out for equality simply couldn't be allowed. She'd gotten into college, as an engineering student. The first in her family to attend college, and she would do so on enough of a scholarship that she would only be working for the rest of her life to pay off the student loans which covered the remaining fraction. (She had worked the math, realized what she was getting into, and known there was no other way.) And it was out of state (district). It was away from apartment and locks and control. She'd expected her parents to forbid it, even when she was approaching the birthday which said they no longer could, but... it was also out of the ghetto. Away from the gangs. To them, that made it safe. The cheapest way into Michigan was a slow-ride bus. Two days of sleeping among strangers, purse strap looped around elbow and wrist, curled up in the seat with no one riding next to her: status was cars and planes, whether you could afford them or not, and so there were barely any buses left. And she arrived on orientation day, walked among thousands of happily chattering students, felt some of them looking at her dirty ancient suitcase and the red hair which had grown out because her mother's hands now hurt too much to cut it regularly, knew their eyes were taking in the face of a half-breed and a body which no one was supposed to have and none of them knew her and she'd already decided that every last one of them hated her. Found her disgusting, repulsive, inhuman. There was no reason for them to feel any other way, and it wasn't as if she knew how to talk them out of it. How to talk to anyone at all. And there was someone she would almost be expected to speak with, at least until that person realized she wasn't worth the effort. Someone she had to live with, because she'd applied for a single and been rejected: slow-growth progressive macromastia was a pre-existing medical condition for insurance purposes (and purposes of insurance failing to pay, not that she could afford anything beyond the policy offered to all students, where the loss of both eyes would result in a tiny check and the ability not to read the notice from the bank after it bounced), but it didn't qualify her to live alone. She was going to have a roommate, and it was the central reason she'd spent two days in both transit and terror, with occasional breaks to look out the window and think about how much of the country had never been in a book. She'd gotten to the dorm second. Reached the little room (a bed on the left wall, another on the right, two desks and wardrobes, bathroom shared with the identical room to the right) after true dominion had already been established, and so the little brunette had turned upon hearing the door shyly creaking open. Seen the hunched, frightened figure which stood behind the frame, trying to keep that ugly suitcase out of sight. "It's spelled right," said the brunette, who was easily ten inches shorter. Slender limbs, a trim figure. Everything the redhead wasn't. "...sorry?" was all the girl could manage. "'Allyse'," the brunette explained. "You got that on your notice, right? Everyone thinks it's spelled wrong the first time. Stand up." "...I don't..." "Stand up!" As orders went, it had been a rather merry one. "All the way! Straighten out your back! Get your shoulders right! And look at me! I've never seen a Bree before! I don't know what they look like!" The girl, possessed by an equal measure of confusion and terror, cooperated, for she had nowhere else to go. Waited for the bullying to begin. That roommate took a few steps forward. Looked the girl over, up and down, with a few pauses near the upper middle. "You're telling me," the little brunette said, "that they assigned me -- a man-magnet?" Nothing to say. Nowhere to run. Nothing she could do -- "I," Allyse declared, "can work with that!" Those words saved Bree's life. Allyse would be dead before Christmas. She woke up to find an alicorn in the room. "Based on my personal experiences with Greg," the younger of the Diarchy calmly said, "I can fully understand feeling the urge to throttle him. Possessing anatomy which is actually suitable for the act may make it slightly hard to resist that desire. However, Ms. Daniels, I would rather strongly advise against attempting the same thing with me." She never would. She knew how strong Luna was, recognized that to make a single move against her would result in Bree's death -- "What is that thought?" "Sorry?" "You had a rather curious expression just now. Only for a moment, but it was there. And as I am still not completely educated in reading human features --" "-- it was nothing." Luna looked at her. "Nothing," Bree repeated the lie. "I just woke up. Just about no one's at their best after they wake up." Another look -- and then "You were unconscious for four days. After having been asleep for two." There didn't seem to be anything Bree could say to that, and she waited to find out what else the Princess had to tell her. "You had a shield up," Luna continued. "One resting around both mind and soul. It has lasted for nearly a week now." "It's... been up for a while. I needed it out there. Things were..." The words didn't exist to describe how things were. The shields had been the least of what had been necessary. And something had gotten through anyway. the red star "I could have broken it," the alicorn casually decided. "I was tempted to do so. Six days of sleep, and... you have been dreaming. I do not know what the full nature of those dreams was, for I have not walked through them. But I have been here when Greg had to replace the tubes which put food into your body. Seen you pull them out again. Kicking and flailing your arms and screaming. You have been screaming in your sleep. Endlessly. And to break your shield... you would have felt that, would you not? Sensed an intruder before recognizing the nature of that intrusion. It... might have made things worse. I have watched as your dreams tried to break you, wondering if my stepping in would finish the process..." The dark blue head dipped, down and to the right. The huge eyes briefly closed, opened again. "But you are awake," she finished. "And to speak with you now... is to risk placing you into nightmare unending. But there is no one else." "How are the girls?" It was the first question which had to be asked, and it also postponed all the others. "They were," Luna calmly said, "after they were calmed -- something which did not take as long as I might have believed, as the female youths of your species seem to have a natural attraction towards us -- they were examined. They both required food: Greg quickly determined that they had not eaten for some time." There was bread. But it couldn't be eaten. It couldn't even be touched. "Still, even with us to calm them, they would display fear. There were signs of recent trauma. And when they were interviewed..." The dark eyes closed again. "How much do you know? Of what happened before you found them?" "I worked a few things out." Most of that had simply come from counting the dead, and thinking about where they were found. What they might have been doing. "Children," the alicorn softly said, once again looking at Bree, "among corpses." "Luna -- I know what the rules are about -- bringing problems here." She'd once used the time zone difference between Detroit and Equestria as a means of vampire disposal: night in one place, day in the other. It had gotten her yelled at. A lot. "But with what happened after I found them --" "-- they," Luna calmly broke in, "told me." But only the voice had been calm. The mane was twisting, fur shifted until it lay against the grain... "And so I have no criticism for you. That you finally managed to transport another living being, after nearly three years of failures... that speaks to me of your desperation. To leave them in your world at that moment would have been to add them to the count. I do not doubt that you intended to return them, when it was safe to do so. But... they told me what had happened, at least as it was understood by the minds of terrified children. Including one who has trouble keeping embellishment from any story. But they had little in the way of injury, and nothing to offer as threat. They were moved to the temporary settlement camp." The zoo. The outdoor prison. "Where," Luna steadily continued, "they have been asking about you. Frequently." A deep breath. "Also, in the time since their arrival, the older, who has a rather interesting vocabulary for her age, constructed a mobile of what I believe is your solar system and hung it in the nursery, where it turns completely on its own. It would be something to see, if it didn't make what I am told is a 'grinding squeak' on every third rotation or, if one attempts to correct for that, randomly. But the younger has done no such thing. Instead..." And another. "I have no witnesses. Or rather, she may simply not wish to do it while anypony is looking. But based on what has been happening within the camp, I have some reason to believe that she is regularly turning into a rather small, very young bobcat, who mostly likes to look for laps she can curl up in. And food. Your thoughts on the matter?" She only had one: I couldn't even save two humans. But they were still little girls. "...they're kids," was all she could manage. "Your world," Luna softly reminded her, "produced monsters. What are they, Ms. Daniels?" 'Produced.' Bree couldn't say that it was the moment when she truly knew. It somehow felt as if she'd always known. Before she'd tried to go back, prior to the moment when she'd seen the shockwave coming towards them. Possibly before she'd found the girls, during the last ticks of the clock. She knew, and... she didn't feel the knowledge. It registered on a purely intellectual level, and did so as a bare concept. Nothing beyond the base definition could be delved into, and when it came to emotion... it wasn't in her. There didn't seem to be much of anything in her at all. But Luna was waiting for an answer. "A..." All she had was rumors, passed on by those whose memories were little more than fading dreams. "...different kind of kid. They're safe, Luna, at least when it comes to the camp. They're young, and... they're surrounded by talking ponies. I think that's the most they can ask for." Except for their families back. Their city. Their continent... "I choose to trust that assessment," Luna quietly replied. "For now. With the understanding that the responsibility for their actions may fall on a rather local party. And so..." A long moment of silence, for no words existed which could encompass the scale of what had to be said. "...we have -- performed every test. Every one we can, with our own magic and that which we have asked others to use. There has been science utilized, and powers invoked. I am..." The alicorn trotted a little closer. She was now within reach. "...certain of the results. There is..." A tiny swallow, and even that was strange to see. "...no way to truly say this. Nopony should ever have to do so, and -- no one should ever have to hear it. Ms. Daniels -- Bree -- your world is --" "-- I know." Calm. Neutral. Dispassionate. The perfect Euthanatos reaction. Luna, whose neck had arced forward until her chin was just about over Bree's right knee, pulled back. "You -- know." Bree nodded. So very cautious now, every syllable measured. "Bree... you provided a basic briefing on your world, shortly after I requested your services as an agent." For none of her Tradition could ever be hired. "Among the facts you listed was population. You said --" "-- seven billion." A small nod. "Roughly." Slowly, "Seven billion are dead." Bree took a shallow breath. Wished for her bra back. Clothing. Shoes. Anything. A lamb chop. She so rarely indulged in any kind of pleasure. Food was most of it. She'd had a little indoor grill, a vent set up over the stove, filters for the air... "Well, if you're looking for a positive," she calmly replied, "that means no more incursions from my world. Since there isn't a world any more." Luna blinked. "Bree -- I am not certain you understand --" Still calm. "-- I understand that they're dead. That they're all dead. And there is nothing I can do about it, Luna. I can't bring them back. I can't turn back time and stop it. My world was dying. It's been dying for generations, maybe centuries. Then it started dying faster, we did everything we could to save it... and nothing worked. It was dying, and..." She paused. "I was waiting for a bus once. Do you know what that is? Picture a train car which runs through city streets, stopping every block or so to let ponies on and off. Well -- people, for me. And it was winter. This was while I was still in college, so there were buses for the students, going to different parts of the campus. Local buses weren't all that common in my world. Or any other kind of bus. But they were supposed to be student buses, and everyone rode them. Anyone who lived in the city... they figured their taxes went to the school, so they were entitled to ride the buses. A lot of them just refused to pay any kind of fare, and the drivers who didn't like the fights got tired of arguing." The alicorn was silent. "So I was just about alone at the bus stop. And it was cold. I mean, Michigan in the winter... I'm a D.C. kid. Do you know what -- I guess that doesn't matter. I just grew up with more mild winters and a heater which usually didn't work, and then I moved to a place where the heat always worked and the outside was frozen. On a random schedule, which usually just meant 'all the time'. I think it's worse when you have the heat. When you can be warm, and know you have to go out into the cold. It was below freezing, and it was just me and this old woman at the bus stop. And... I don't know if ponies do this, because you're not as much for clothing. But with some humans, fashion is just about everything. It's more important than food or paying your bills or health. There was this old woman, and in a town full of college students, she'd decided she had to dress young. There was this fad for ripped jeans, in the middle of winter, and... cold air blowing against your skin. Blowing snow, because it snowed the day before. Really powdery on the top layers. She was at the bus stop with me, wearing torn pants because she thought that made her young, and the wind was blowing, swirling around, there was snow going everywhere, and she was stomping her feet to try and keep warm. And she was talking. Not to me. To herself. The same words, over and over. 'I'm dying from this cold, I'm dying from this cold.' One to six times a minute." No response. "And the bus was late, because it was the student bus and there was snow on the ground. I was thinking about just walking it, and that would have made me thirty minutes late. With the bus, it was still a chance for ten. It was just me and the old woman, and over and over, she just kept saying 'I'm dying from this cold, I'm dying from this cold.' No one on the sidewalk, barely anyone on the road, and she just kept saying the same thing over and over and over when there was nothing I could have done about it and she'd pretty much done it to herself. She was cold and it was her fault, but she didn't want to see that. It was just 'I'm dying from this cold, I'm dying from this cold,' and the bus still hadn't shown up and she wouldn't stop talking, no matter what happened, she wouldn't stop talking, and I looked right at her, I got in front of her so I could look at her because she hadn't lowered herself to looking at me once since she got to the bus stop, and I screamed 'FINISH ALREADY!'" Luna was staring at her. "I think that's the rudest thing I've ever said to anyone," Bree noted. "But it did shut her up. For a little while. Until she went to the college and tried to get me expelled over it. But that really didn't matter, because I'd dropped out..." She had to think about it. "...two days earlier. Two days before she worked up the courage and marched into the city relations office, that was when I dropped out. Because my mentor had already died, and my whole family died a few weeks after that, just before Christmas. I... never really had a good Christmas. Do you know what -- it doesn't matter. So it's just that... my world was dying, and I knew it was dying, so much of it was from things it had done on purpose, and it just kept doing them while expecting someone to come along and save it from itself. And we tried, so many of us tried, but it decided the only thing it hated more than dying was anyone who wanted it to live, so it got rid of us until there was just about no one left, then it blamed us for not having been strong enough to keep it from killing us. It kept demanding that someone save it while it was in the middle of killing itself, it just kept dying, endlessly dying and after a while, you just start to think..." The self-interrupting sound came without mirth. There would have never been joy in it. "... finish already." But still, there was a level of amusement in Bree's giggle. It was, after all, graveyard humor, and so it was funny. A final jest spoken as eulogy, standing on the edge of a death pit large enough to hold the world.