//------------------------------// // Pain // Story: Identify // by Waxworks //------------------------------// Twilight reappeared in her castle in a flash. She had left Spike in Canterlot, but Celestia would take care of him while he was there and send him home soon enough. She hadn’t broken her promise to take him with her, but she had broken her promise to keep him with her when she came back. But for this, it was necessary. He wouldn’t want to see this. Twilight went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, then looked at the knife she was holding. It was long, and it was sharp. Very sharp. It was the kind of edge that a tool meant for cutting things would have. It served one purpose, and it served that purpose very well. It was all she would need. …if she could do it. She held up a hoof and placed it on the edge of the sink, staring at the violet fur. The idea was that if the castle wanted to keep her alive, then she could cut herself, and it would heal. She had been smashed in the eye by a discus, and the castle had fixed it almost instantly. There wasn’t even any blood left on her fur. If she could prove the castle was doing what she suspected it was doing, then she could cut herself and it would fix it. Unless the castle didn’t deal with self-inflicted wounds the same way. Would it seem them as a violation of some agreement Twilight had made with the castle upon its creation? Was it wrong to think of it that way? Would the castle agree? Did it even care?” All these questions buzzed through Twilight’s head as she stared at the hoof over the sink. It seemed to grow larger, swelling in size then shrinking as she stared. She felt dizzy the longer she looked and tried to convince herself to bring the knife down. Could she do it? Would she do it? She had always been so centered and calm. This seemed crazy, absolutely crazy. Like the insane machinations of somepony who thought they knew the secrets of the universe but only knew what days the trash went out. Twilight shook her head, took a deep breath, and slashed herself along the leg. It hurt. She knew it would, but the idea that she was causing the pain herself made her feel sick. She retched, but held back the vomit through force of will. She forced herself to look. To see the injury she had put on herself. Her vision swam, she felt light-headed, but she stared. The injury knit itself closed almost instantly. Where the knife tracked, the skin closed immediately afterward, without allowing any blood out. Twilight felt a surge of satisfaction. She was right! The castle could fix it! It was simpler the second time. The first time, when she didn’t know if she was right or wrong and would be left with a self-inflicted wound was hard, this was simple now. The wound closed itself as she cut again, leaving no blood. She smiled. She took the knife and walked to the front of the castle, stepping outside the doors. She looked around to make sure nopony was nearby, then cut herself again. It barely hurt, but this time, when she was outside, the wound didn’t close. The skin parted under the knife, letting her see the flesh beneath. No blood came out. Twilight stared at the hole she’d put in her hoof. Beneath the skin she saw a muscle, but this didn’t look anything like the muscles she had experimented on and seen in all her books. Where she had expected to see red meat bleeding within, she saw grey fibre tensing underneath her skin. She twisted her hoof, watching as it moved along with her, and the faint scent of ozone hit her nose. Twilight stared only a moment longer before she hurried back inside. The wound closed and she tried to just breathe. It was hard. She didn’t know what she had just seen. She paced as she tried to explain away the strange sight within her skin. “If…” she began, “there were a change in my physiology from ascending to an alicorn, then that would explain the appearance. But… it still doesn’t explain the healing. Celestia was struck down by Chrysalis quite easily and didn’t heal very fast, and then there was the time she was turned to stone. Maybe healing doesn’t fix stone that easily? I suppose it might not if the whole body is changed, but then that doesn’t explain why I only heal in side my castle. Does Celestia have to be inside her castle? She was inside the castle when Chrysalis attacked, so how does that factor in? Is there some change that a changeling could affect upon an alicorn? Cadance was injured when she was kept under the castle as well inside the mountain, not to mention the way Celestia was beaten down by Nightmare Moon. Does it not affect us if we’re fighting each other? Can Alicorn magic remove alicorn magic? That doesn’t make sense, none of this makes sense! I don’t know what’s happening! How is the castle doing this? Is it me or the castle?” Twilight babbled incessantly to herself while trying to figure out what was going on. She couldn’t understand it, and none of it made sense. It didn’t line up with anything she’d seen or heard about with the other princesses. Was it unique to her? Some part of her special talent as a princess? That didn’t seem to make sense, because if it were, why didn’t it affect anypony else? Friendship was about helping those outside yourself, not taking it all for yourself. “Okay, calm down Twilight,” she told herself. “You need to think about this logically. Your wound and lack of blood aside, the thing affecting it all is the castle, right?” She looked up at the castle walls around her. The crystals reflected the light from outside, shining all over, creating rainbows and waving visions. “The castle is where I have to be if I want to heal, but Spike has skinned his knee and bumped his head and it was never fixed instantly. So it’s just me, and it’s just the castle.” She wandered down the halls, staring at the crystals surrounding her. “If the castle is the catalyst, then that means there’s something about it, something inside it, that makes it happen, and it affects me. Maybe all alicorns, but there’s only five of us, so that’s not a good sample size. I will need to test it with others, but I can’t ask ponies to come hurt themselves. That’s not good. I need to study it more before I try that, and that means I need to know more, but there’s no books on the subject here, and I can’t go to Canterlot because I just left and I didn’t find any books anyway and… UGH!” There was no real rhyme or reason to it that Twilight could yet determine. She healed inside the castle, but why? In anger, Twilight kicked a wall, snapping off a crystal from a corner. It cracked and shattered to the side revealing strange, grey parts, not unlike what she’d seen under her own skin. The smell of ozone hit her nose and she saw lightning for a moment before it started to grow back. The shard on the floor remained, with pieces of the grey stuff still attached to it. Twilight picked it up in her magic and stared at it, not quite understanding what it was she was looking at. Twilight took her knife and cut herself again. She saw the grey muscle beneath, and it almost instantly began healing, but she held the crystal up next to it and compared the two. She had to cut the wound several times while she looked, until she cut so deep she went down to the bone. There, at the base of her flesh, was a bit of metal close enough in make and style to look exactly like that on the crystal. She and the Crystal Castle were made of the same stuff on the inside. The only difference was her flesh, and its crystal. She slowly lowered the crystal. Her hoof healed soon enough and she could stand on it, but the crystal hung ominously next to her head, held in her magic, reminding her of what she had just seen. “I’m… made of the castle? Or is the castle made of me? I guess I’m connected to it somehow, which explains why I heal when inside it, but what does that mean? How did it happen? I used to bleed, right? I used to bleed. I remember skinning my knee. I remember Shining kissing it better and patching me up.” Twilight stood still, trying to reconcile this. She thought about the reasons why she would be different on the inside now. Everything pointed to her being an alicorn, and the fact that such an ascension wouldn’t have ever been easy. There were only five of them in the known world, so not much was known to begin with. If the others were like she was, it would help her understand, because she had never read anything at all about alicorn physiology that went into any depth on the subject. She needed more information. She wanted to send a letter to Celestia, but Spike had been left behind in Canterlot. For now, all she had to work with was herself, and that would have to do. Twilight descended to her workshop beneath the crystal castle. Grown into the soil with the rest of the crystal, it gave her an isolated room within which she could perform whatever experiments and activities she wanted. Inside it, she had all the tools, bottles, phials, flasks, and machines she wanted. With them, she was going to understand herself. The first thing she did was to take a sample of flesh. She pulled it off and new skin grew in its place. She set that aside in a tray and moved to the next step; muscle. She braced herself, held the knife in her magic, put a piece of wood between her teeth and dug it in. She screamed, muffled, as she pushed it in hard, slicing through the sinewy stuff to detach it from herself. It healed while she was digging, forcing her to go back over pieces that had reattached. It wasn’t until she grabbed the edges with her magic and pulled it away from herself that she could finally cut a chunk off. She was panting when she finished, but she also noticed she wasn’t sweating. Something like that—so emotionally, painfully, and physically taxing—should have left her covered in it, but her coat remained dry and unlathered. While she was at it, with the stick still between her teeth, she yanked out one of each type of feather she had, wincing at the pain, but not caring about it. They grew back immediately. Twilight, undamaged by now, looked at the collection of her pieces on the table before her. She pulled out her alchemical tools and put herself to work to understand what was going on. She started with her feathers, unwilling to move on to the flesh and muscle so quickly. She put them under her microscope, checking them for the same structure and build as other pegasi or even birds. She found nothing unusual. Her wings were built of the same stuff, assembled in the same way, just slightly enlarged, like the other alicorns. She took a sample of her fur from the skin she had removed and looked at that, and was pleased to find that there was nothing unusual about it. It had the same structure as other fur. Her mane was the same when she plucked a hair from her head. Nothing strange. With no other choice, she moved on to the skin, breath catching as she pushed it under the microscope. She felt a chill as she finally got a look at it. It was skin, but different. It had cells in it, but they weren’t the same as the cells of a normal pony. They were rigid, and looked like they would be more prone to tearing, and right now, they weren’t moving. They appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be dead or dormant. Quickly, with no time for trepidation but urged on by equal measures of possibility and fear, Twilight thrust the skin to the side and pulled in a piece of muscle. What she saw inside it was both terrifying and wondrous. Her muscle was made of more of the same dormant cells. Structured so as to look pony-made, the cells and fixtures of her body were made of the tiniest creatures, holding each other together with tiny, mechanical arms. They looked like they could stretch or bunch together to behave as normal muscle, but they themselves weren’t the normal pieces of a pony’s body! Quickly, Twilight picked up the chunk of muscle and moved to her chemistry setup. She exposed the muscle to heat, watching the reactions of the creatures within it. She exposed them to cold, to acid, to water, and tested the skin as well. They behaved normally for the most part, but the structure of the organism within her were more resilient. They were powerful, special, unique, and hardy. They could take higher temperatures before melting or being destroyed, they could take colder temperatures before seizing up, and they didn’t dissolve in acids as quickly as other things. It raised more questions than it answered, unfortunately. Because the feathers, hair, and fur were the same, and her eye had been blinded by the discus, so what about the other parts of her body? How did they react? What of her was this new material, and what was old? Twilight needed to know more. She tested the feather, fur, and hair, just to be sure, and was pleased to see she was right. They were normal. But were her organs changed? Were her eyes? Her… horn? How much was different and how could she tell? Twilight’s hoof went up to her eye. She gently prodded it, feeling it give slightly. It felt like it always had, but the discus hitting her had damaged it somehow. She hadn’t gotten a look before the castle had healed it, but something had happened. Was she willing to irreversibly damage her eyeball just for the sake of experimentation? Just to understand what had changed about her body? She answered herself by picking up a scalpel and holding it in front of her face. She could see the faint purple glow of her magic holding it up. The blade was pointed at her eye and she swallowed hard. She thought about the feeling of the discus striking her face and the sensation of something hanging off her cheek. Whatever had happened, it had been fixed. It had been fixed. “It will be fixed,” she said to herself, and pressed the scalpel in. It hurt. A lot. The stabbing of the scalpel into her eye brought searingly painful sensation with it, but she persevered. She drove it in, vision swimming and changing as the scalpel prevented it from working. Parts of her right eye went dark as it ruined it, then she yanked the scalpel out. She panted and grit her teeth. Her vision came back. The castle and whatever strange effect it had on her healed the wound in her eye. Her vision came back in less than a minute, perfect and pristine. There was no lasting damage, and a quick look in a mirror proved to her there was no blood. She was fine. Nothing changed. She could injure her eyes and nothing bad would happen. She started laughing. It was nervous laughter at first, but it quickly devolved into mad cackling. She laughed, harder and harder. She brought the scalpel up to her face and stabbed herself in the eye again. It healed, and despite her wincing she did it again. She stabbed her eye every time it fixed itself, then drew a painful line across her horn. That healed too. As long as she was in the castle, nothing could permanently damage her. She stabbed herself in the chest and it healed. She stabbed herself in the hoof and it healed. She drew a line across her throat. There was no blood and it healed. She laughed madly, cackling filling the castle walls.