//------------------------------// // Chapter 40 - Bad Dreams // Story: Off The Mark // by Goldfur //------------------------------// After a few minutes, I decided the current situation was untenable. I had to do something … I had to move. Fixing in my mind an image of what I wanted, I reached into my right saddlebag. Feeling my set of Ever-Dry bands, I pulled them out and snapped them around the base of my wings. After a few seconds to think about it, I also retrieved my spare pair and snapped them around the base of Twilight’s wings. Lastly, I put my fetlock band into my saddlebag. I had scared Starlight badly, but she had gotten away. Until she was dealt with, I’d have to cope with nothing regulating my magic flow. Leaving Twilight as protected from the rain as I could manage, I latched into the nearby ley line and searched the remains of the castle. I quickly discovered that my twisted ankle was not cooperating so I settled for a limping trot and lots of hovering. I found my room and retrieved a pillow and several wool blankets. I knew the blankets had a spell on them to prevent them from getting wet, so they should work fine. A quick check showed me that Thorax’s room was still next to mine but empty. I put two blankets on the ground under the map table before levitating Twilight onto them. I gently laid her head on the pillow and covered her with three more blankets before turning to Ponyville. From the air, everything appeared to be deserted. The plants looked fine if overgrown and I definitely saw a raccoon scurry behind a house. Mentally, I made a note to stop by Fluttershy’s if I had a chance. Some of the animals there might remember ponies fondly and be able to mime out what had happened. I landed at the entrance to Ponyville Hospital and hopped through the broken doors at the entrance. I had been here once for a checkup a few days after my early attempts to fly, so I knew the general layout. The lobby was empty, as was the triage/examination room. Checking out all of the cabinets, I found a sealed first aid kit. Opening it, I smiled upon seeing everything I needed for self-treatment. I swallowed a general-purpose pain killer tablet, sprayed my ankle with a numbing compound, then wrapped it with a self-adhesive tape for support. I’d try to keep my weight off of it, but worst case, I needed to move free of pain. Our luck had been especially bad in several of these realities and I had to assume the same might happen here. I closed the kit and put it in my right saddlebag. I took a few minutes to explore the hospital. There were pony corpses in some of the rooms in various states of decay, either in the beds or next to them. There were none in the hallways or nurses’ stations. I left the hospital puzzled. Did the staff just abandon the hospital with all the patients inside? Entering a house nearby, there were no ponies in the kitchen or living room. Instead, every bedroom had one or more dead ponies tangled in sheets near their beds. That’s when it hit me. Flying back to the castle, I was glad to see that the rain had stopped, for now. While landing, I saw my friend was whimpering and struggling in her sleep. I dug out the first aid kit and found the smelling salts. Holding those under her nose had the desired effect and she struggled back to wakefulness. “No. No. Look out… What? What?” Her eyes fluttered open and she looked up, her panic ebbing away as she slowly recognized me. “Mark? Is that you? I was having this terrible dream…” I nodded, folding the top three blankets before shoving them into my saddlebag along with the first aid kit. Who knows when they might be useful again? “I believe it. Twilight, this is one of the bad realities. Everypony here died in their sleep, I think while experiencing nightmares.” She let me help her out from under the table and struggled to her hooves. “Then we need to get out of here as soon as possible.” She checked the map table which was glowing steadily then turned back to me. “Are you ready?” Sadly, I shook my head. “I was able to fight off Starlight, but she destroyed the scroll. We’re stuck here.” Twilight blinked. “Didn’t I tell you that I made copies of the scroll? I made copies of the scroll.” She levitated two scrolls from her saddlebag. “I put another copy in your bag. Never hurts to have backups!” I slumped and gave her “that look.” I frowned until she gave me a sheepish grin. “Sorry. Forgot to tell you. Even if I hadn’t, I’ve memorized the spell now. I’d just have to write it out again on a blank scroll if needed.” I sighed. “So the game plan for the next time around?” “Starlight must have struck me the moment we appeared.” Twilight looked to me for confirmation which I gave with a nod. “I don’t think she’s going to attack us directly anymore,” I said grimly. She blinked. “And why is that?” “I nearly killed her with my collapsing forcefield.” Twilight gasped and looked to where my fetlock band normally rested. She looked me in the eyes, apparently evaluating me. After a pause, she said. “OK. We can talk about that later, but for now, we just need to get out of here. I don’t want to find out why these ponies died the way they did.” I nodded and we moved on top of the map table. All but one of the scrolls returned to her saddlebags and her horn illuminated the lone remaining scroll which… did nothing. Frowning, Twilight tried again with the same result. I opened my mouth to say something, but Twilight held up a forehoof. She stared at the table, furrowing her brow for several seconds. Raising her head, dozens of small white spheres appeared above us. They formed two rings about ten feet in the air, then one side pinched outwards, drawing all the spheres in that direction. They flowed away like water heading for a distant drain. Twilight said, “There is a very powerful source of magical interference nearby.” Her horn remained lit and she sent another ring of bubbles skywards. They sped off in the same direction even faster than the first ones. “And it is getting closer.” I had only been here for perhaps forty minutes. I didn’t need my band to tell me I wasn’t fully charged. I moved up next to Twilight and held my shield spell at the ready. Looking at the destruction in that direction, I had an epiphany. “Twilight, your counterpart in this dimension fought it and lost, but she was able to hold it off for a while.” Twilight looked critically at the damage around us. “Get your best beam spell ready. It looks like a wide-area magical blast was used here.” I nodded but kept scanning the direction Twilight was pointing her horn. Occasionally, she would send up a single white sphere which would invariably head the same direction as the others. I blinked… …and was somewhere else. A family of earth ponies wailed piteously in front of me. Glancing around, I recognized the location as a grain silo. The door behind me let in bright sunlight and illuminated the light brown wheat which was dotted with sections the color of rust. The sky blue stallion cried out, “Our grain! Our poor, precious grain!” His mate was a dark brown mare with a red and pink mane and tail. She sobbed, “The mold has ruined it! It’s all gone!” Their dark green foal yelled, “We’ll all starve! What will we eat?” I frowned. “Well, you could try eating fish.” They all stopped their hysterics and looked at me in obvious disappointment as if I was a stage actor who had flubbed my lines. Suddenly, I felt my awareness being pulled upwards. What appeared to be clouds of cotton rushed by me. I blinked and was in the castle map room again. I heard mumbling to my right. Glancing at Twilight, I saw her horn was still lit but she was looking at the floor. Needing to try something, I clonked her in the barrel with a hoof. She gasped and scowled at me. “Hey!” “We don’t have to be asleep. It’s strong enough to make us hallucinate, and we can’t even see it yet. Pain can pull us out of the hallucination, though.” She grimaced. “Understood. It will only get worse the closer it gets to us. We need something—” A sound reverberated in my skull that was closest to a moan, though I was sure it didn’t get there through my ears. Both of us gaped at the strangest apparition I’d ever seen. It stepped into the area where the entry hallway had once been. The thing was three times the height of a pony and looked like a blue amoeba full of purple stars. The overall shape was definitely equine, including a unicorn’s horn. Its edges were bordered in a bright purple, almost like a see-through skin that rippled with a will of its own. “Are you seeing this, Twilight?” Not getting a response, I turned… …to see the breakfast dining nook of my parents’ house. Daylight poured in past the yellow curtains I had always detested. It was definitely Sunday from the pancakes and syrup on the table, though I don’t remember them ever being a bright lime green in color. I was currently alone, though I heard someone coming down the stairs behind me. I didn’t have time for this. “Of course you do.” I glanced down to where the voice had come from. A large, blue-irised eye stared at me from the back of my hand, making me jump. It blinked and a mouth along my forearm opened and pulled in a breath. ‘Pain’, I thought. I ducked my head, willing myself to see the horn that was there. The mouth spoke again, “Hey, now! Don’t go—” I stabbed the back of my hand with my horn, causing the eye to explode its fluid everywhere. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the map table underneath my bleeding pastern. I dislodged the back of my hoof from my horn and saw the creature was slowly moving closer. I had the terrifying impression that it was studying us, drawing out our suffering from sheer curiosity. A bright lavender beam from next to me caused it to stagger back, collapsing in on itself like a partly filled balloon. When the beam stopped, it slowly unfolded into its previous form. I heard Twilight yell, “We need something unique! Something it isn’t prepared for!” I did an inventory of what we had available. “Your books from the library! Are any of them spell books that we could—” Phil stood in front of me. We were both in the black void where I had last talked to my Phil. The outline of the mirror frame and a partial view of Phil’s room was directly behind her. This Phil was the pony version, except her eyes were black, hollow holes with dark ichor staining her cheeks like tears. “You left me, Mark. You left me to—” I interrupted her. “Don’t be such a wuss, Phil.” That at least shut her up for a second. I struck my face with a forehoof… “…not in those books! If we had the Elements of Harmony…” The thing was close enough for me to try my trump card. I raised my shield around it and compressed as quickly as I could. The apparition deformed into a rough sphere, but then I couldn’t shrink it any further. If felt just like when I tried to crush a sphere of water that Shining had held up for me. Fluids resisted compression too much for me to squeeze them any further. My magic ran out followed by my shield flickering and disappearing. Almost leisurely, the beast expanded once again to its former shape. “Damn—” Trixie was dancing in my arms. There were candles all throughout the Throne Room. My friends were applauding from around the edges of the dance floor. Except they didn’t look right. Looking outwards, I saw they were all zombies. Trixie’s hoof pulled my head back to look at her. She was nothing but a skeleton now, although admittedly in a stunning wedding gown. Her horn glowed as her jaw clattered. “You can join me forever now, my beloved.” I struck the base of her horn to make her let go. “Nope. You’ve lost too much weight.” Hitting the base of my horn, I came back to reality to hear Twilight’s frantic voice. “…hallucinations are getting more personal. It’s harder and harder to break free.” Twilight had her shield up surrounding an area the size of the original map room. The apparition used its horn to tear a gateway to a dark realm filled with empty spheres. At the same time, an identical rent appeared inside the shield. I knew what would come next. I looked over to see a clear-eyed Twilight, but her muzzle was bloody. “Twilight, can we escape into that realm?” “No! That’s the Dream Realm. That’s where this monster will be the strongest.” What else did I have? Could that work? “Drop the shield.” “What?! If it touches us—” I saw spiders everywhere. They were crawling all over me. Everything from the size of pinheads to goliaths twice my size. The webbing holding my limbs in place didn’t allow me to strike myself to generate any pain. I realized they were all moving towards my head. I felt them crawl up my nose but had to ignore them. “Back for more hugs?” They paused for just a moment. I took it and chomped down on my tongue… …I gasped for air, reaching into my saddlebag for my last hope. Finding it, I looked up to see the monster had completely moved through the rent it had made in reality and the tear sealed behind it. I felt my rear legs tremble and my ears folded straight back on my head as the beast towered over us. Every fiber of my being wanted to just curl up and close my eyes, but I forced myself to keep moving. I threw the nullstone band towards where its chest pulsated. It penetrated the blue field like a rock entering a lake, except lakes don’t catch on fire. A jet of flame erupted from either side of the rolled suppression band. The loop of nullstone rotated quickly illuminating the creature with gouts of fire in all directions. I knew the band would convert magical energy to heat and naturally move to the center of the source of magic. It was finding plenty to convert inside its new host. My skull felt like it nearly exploded with the bellow of pain that drowned out all thought. The beast lifted its head high in apparent agony as spouts of fire sprayed through the purple barrier surrounding the barrel of the creature, making jet black bubbles appear where they had passed. The spectral form crashed through the nearest wall and back into the entry hallway in its blind attempt to escape the burning pain inside it. A huge rent materialized before the creature and it galloped inside. “Now! It’s gone! Cast the spell, Twilight!” Not hearing or seeing a response, I turned to see Twilight lying flat on the map table, her eyes wide as saucers and mouth open in horror. Muttering an apology, I yanked hard on her mane, bringing her head up close to mine. She whimpered once but gave no other response. “Twilight, wake up!” Think! Think! “Thorax needs you!” She blinked twice and turned one eye to look at me. Twilight struggled to get her hooves underneath herself. She choked out, “What…” “The creature is gone! I don’t know for how long! Cast the spell.” She didn’t hesitate and the scroll was lit once more. The welcoming sight of the time portal appeared and we began to float upwards. Just then, a new rent appeared next to the table. With horror, I realized I was drained of magic and completely unprotected. “Twilight! Help!” The alicorn’s horn lit and everything I saw was covered with a lavender tint. Glancing at Twilight, I saw a glowing skin of light covering her body. Looking down, I saw she had done the same to me. The monster placed a front hoof on the map table as it reached up for me with the other. The crystal surface flared red, pulling the hoof downwards somehow into the table itself. The beast paused and looked down just as Twilight and I shot into the portal. In the realm between worlds, the foreleg of the monster floated between us, caught in the same eldritch current that dragged us between dimensions. The leg stretched and grew thin. A moment later, it broke like a dark thread and a fading scream echoed in my mind. Twilight and I spilled gracelessly on the roadway, groaning softly. A few seconds later, Rainbow Dash zoomed over us, paying us no mind. I got up and limped over to Twilight, the adrenaline and painkillers apparently as spent as I felt right then. Her face was a mess, with bruises and blood where she had pummeled herself back to awareness. She pulled me into a hug and we sat like that for I don’t know how long. “That was horrible. The worst yet.” She sniffled. I held her but noticed little tremors were racing across my body every once in a while. I had no idea why that was happening. I just knew I had to keep doing something or I couldn’t hold it together. I couldn’t stop to think. I didn’t want to stop and think. I pulled back. “Let me patch you up. Let’s park ourselves somewhere with a good view of the race and just keep an eye out.” Twilight nodded, her wings sagging in obvious relief. She looked pretty close to normal when I put the first aid kit away. Both of us held out hope that the diving Rainbow Dash would achieve her rainboom, but she was stopped in mid-air at the last moment. Searching for the source of the field that held her, I spotted Starlight, but she teleported away after giving me no more than a quick glance. Even if I had been full of magic, there wouldn’t have been time to do anything to her. We had no control whatsoever over how the portal ejected us from the time vortex, but when we came out on the Cloudsdale side, we had plenty of room to recover. That was not the case on the Ponyville side. This time, I was shot out backward, landing on my rump before I got my bearings. My tail was going to ache for days! Twilight managed a more graceful landing on the map table beside me. Her wings hung limply at her sides and her head drooped almost to the ground. “I don’t know about you, but I could do with a dreamless sleep right now.” “You said a mouthful, Sparkles,” I replied as I looked around to determine if we were going to get a chance to take a nap in this alternative future. “TWILY! YOU’RE BACK!” My ears swiveled in the direction of that very familiar voice. I scrambled to my hooves to face the stallion who was galloping up to the table. Shining Armor’s expression of relief at seeing Twilight quickly turned to puzzlement when he realized who was standing beside his sister. “Princess Celestia? You’ve returned? And where’s Mark Wells?” Oops. Looks like this world’s version of me never ate the poison joke. I raised a forehoof. “Present. Check out the cutie mark.” I turned sideways and lifted a wing to make sure he could see it clearly. Shining gaped. “What happened to you?” He stared at Twilight. “To both of you? One moment you’re checking this weird table out, and the next moment, you’re sucked up into a big magic bubble. And you two look like you’ve been through a twelve-round prize fight. Actually, shouldn’t you be getting off that thing just in case it happens again?” “It’s a long story, Shiny,” Twilight replied as she fluttered tiredly down beside him. I switched to my stallion form as I followed suit, startling Shining again. “Wow. Wait until Chryssy gets a look at that.” Twilight’s eyes opened wide. “Chryssy?” “Yeah,” he replied as he turned to head toward the library tree. “Both the girls have been so worried about you, but now that you’re back safe, she’ll be especially curious about the addition to Mark’s repertoire.” As we followed the stallion, I started putting two and two together. Now, I had just a few minutes of exposure to the mare in question, but Twilight had told me much about her. I wondered if I should be concerned for my health. Before we reached Twilight’s tree home, a certain pink princess burst out of the door and made a beeline for us. She obviously had spotted us through a window. She called back over her shoulder, “Hurry up, Chryssy! Twilight and Mark are back!” A moment later, Cadance practically crash-tackled Twilight. “Thank Celestia, you’re safe, Twilight!” “Can’t… breathe…” wheezed the purple alicorn. “Oh! Sorry! We were so worried about you. What happened to you two?” “It’s complicated, and it isn’t over. We need to talk.” “Can it wait until after you give a hug to your other sister-in-law?” came another female voice. Distracted by the overenthusiastic greeting by the Princess of Love, I hadn’t noticed the other mare approach. I got a good look at this Chryssy now. Despite the sparkling wings, unfeigned joyful smile, and unblemished black carapace, I recognized Queen Chrysalis from the war setting. The changeling held open her forehooves for the requested hug. Twilight looked like a deer caught in a car’s headlights. She tried to say something, but all that came out was, “GKK!” Then her eyes rolled up in her head and she keeled over. Chrysalis blinked in incomprehension. “Was it something I said?” she asked in a hurt tone. My earlier worry about a threat to my life was oddly validated – I think I might die laughing. # # # # # # # # #