The sound stone was silent for several minutes, until Dorable gave a long, unhappy sigh.
"Come on, buddy..." Valey nudged the stone a little. "I wanna know. You still owe me big-time."
"You don't want to know," Dorable replied flatly. "They won't make you feel better about anything."
Valey frowned. "Tough, because I'm not interested in feeling better. I'm interested because right now there's a bad guy running around with one of them, and I need to know what they're capable of. And I'd really rather not find out by having whatever it is used on me."
"...You won't thank me," Dorable warned. "You could steer clear of this person instead."
"Nope. Not happening." Valey shook her head. "Partly because I don't wanna, and partly because I can't. I need to know this, science guy. And you're not looking for my thanks in the first place."
"Nightmare Modules are extracted from obsidian," Dorable said. "Just like you. This is your last warning."
Valey glared at the sound stone. "Tough. Even more reason why I need to know this. Spill the beans, Dorable."
The gemstone paused for a moment, then finally relented. "They are patterns. Shapes and waves condensed to information, extracted from some property in the structure of obsidian that isn't entirely physical. Obsidian is a physically perfect substance without blemish, but upon exposure to certain higher orders of magic, it contains... traces. I'm not sure how to explain it to someone of your intellect. They're like shadows. If you examine them the right way, you can tell what made them. Aftereffects of the event and magic that created the obsidian before it was a meteor in the sky."
Valey shuddered. "Bananas. You crazy scientists were trying to recreate that? To make more of this stuff? Were you insane?"
"Don't interrupt now that I'm telling you what you wanted to hear."
"Right..." Valey shrank, licking her lips in frustration.
"We discovered a violent reaction between the chaotic essence of windigoes and obsidian. The explosion that ended our research in Icereach happened after we liquified a windigo heart using a procedure we had developed for other spells, injected it into a particularly large piece of obsidian, and had our shield spells fail when we failed to anticipate the strength of the blast as it reformed inside. You arrived shortly after, with the entire room covered in ice. You may have thought it was a failed experiment, but even as we were frozen, our sensors in the tower recorded the data we needed, and an automated process finished our work. The shape and structure of the ice crystals generated by the blast were the data we needed, and they were left in records, down in the basement of the tower, even when we were gone."
Valey stared into the sound stone in rapt attention.
"I went back to get them, of course. You didn't keep a close enough eye on me to stop it. So many of my colleagues had died for that information, I was duty-bound to retrieve it. I took the readouts back to Ironridge and analyzed them, hoping to use advanced mathematics to construct a model of the magic's original form. What I found instead was fascinating. You would find it disturbing."
Dorable cleared his throat. "Under analysis, the patterns broke themselves into precise blocks of uniform size, under a finite number of states and arranged into clearly-progressing chains that I was slowly able to assemble into one long stream. In layperson's terms, letters arranged into words in a language. Whatever magic created obsidian, its shadows were left behind in the form of thoughts or meaning. Scientifically, that is impossible as a coincidence, which means not only did something intelligent exist at the top of the mechanism that created obsidian, but it put that level of detail into its work."
Valey was gripping the sound stone hard enough to crush a lesser rock by now, but didn't dare interrupt. Dorable was telling her that moon glass had been deliberately created, with an exact purpose. If that same cause had made her...
"The next thing I learned was that the language's syntax was much simpler than a spoken language. In Ironridge, Sosa was working on theoretical improvements to the finite-state terminals used to control communication connections and data capture and playback. We didn't have the physical ability to make them, but there was a theoretical interest in... machines that could follow a set of instructions, moving from one instruction to the next. I read the papers written about these, and the patterns extracted from the obsidian... even without a way to interpret their meaning, they were similar in structure. Nightmare Modules are that: instructions designed to be executed on a machine."
Valey swallowed. "W-What kind of machine? Did you build one? And what do they do?"
"We found a way to use them. This module attacks a living creature's memory, corrupting and twisting it in on itself or erasing it altogether. After seeing it used, even my curiosity and constitution for the dark sciences was overwhelmed. Now, the research is locked away, and I only allow the spell to be used sparingly and under Arambai's direct orders. More importantly, we learned that there are more than one of them, but not how many or what the others do. Do you understand the significance of everything I've told you?"
"Uhhh..." Valey nearly dropped the stone, her hooves were shaking so hard. "That this stuff is bad news? Like, I like my memories, thanks."
"They are malevolent; when executed, they act cruelly on harmonic life. They are self-propagating; one thing that is almost certain is that another module has the effect of creating obsidian. They are incomplete; if there are multiples, they all come from a greater whole, and there were fragments of unused instructions in the data we obtained. They are from beyond this world; they fell in a meteor. And, they have an intelligent creator. Do you want to imagine what greater picture all of these things point to? Because I have, and wish I hadn't."
The swirling vortex of magic that powered the sound stone reflected in Valey's eyes as she stared darkly into nothing. "If there's more of them, so you put them all together and have them do whatever they do all at once... and they came through space, which no living thing could do... but... so..."
Her ears went flat. "Bananas. Are you saying whatever nasty made them could be trying to duplicate... itself...?" Her eyes turned straight upwards, though it was broad daylight and her target was nowhere to be seen. "The Mare in the Moon..."
"Yes," Dorable said. "Much of this is conjecture. The Icereach module's effects are not. And think... if these instructions were sent here with such insidious precision for foolhardy scientists like me to find, you came with them. You, and every other obsidian brand. Why do you think you are here?"
"I..." Valey swallowed, feeling her heart skip a beat.
"I don't know," Dorable told her. "I never found out, or even came up with a good guess. Maybe you will. I told you this wouldn't make you feel good about yourself, however. Here is your marefriend. Maybe she'll help you work it out."
"Valey!" Amber cried, sounding as if it had taken everything she had to remain silent during that discussion. "That's... Listen, maybe there's a scary or unpleasant effect from this spell, but that doesn't have to reflect on you!"
"Yeah. Yeah, cool, I know." Valey's voice was distant, her mind too busy processing implications to feel anything. "Stay here, Amber. I'm definitely gonna need someone to talk to once I... uh... start drawing conclusions..."
"I'm not going anywhere," Amber promised. "I'll be right-"
The sound stone ran out of power.
Valey blinked. She blinked again. "Bananaaaaas..."
Hugging herself and grimacing, she stopped beating her wings, descending into a loose glide spiraling slowly toward the ground. Dorable had been right. She didn't feel better knowing. But now she had to know what Puddles wanted with her Nightmare Module along with so many other things... and was even less sure she was a real pony.
If only keeping the world safe could wait...