"Waah!" Starlight yelped and flailed as a strong telekinetic aura hauled her through the door... and immediately set her down again as it slammed closed behind her, leaving her face to face with her reflection.
Glimmer raised an eyebrow.
Starlight ignored her completely, turning and banging on the door. "Hey! Open-"
"Shh." Glimmer's aura pinched her muzzle shut. She looked cross. "You know I only appear when you're alone. What's the big idea, running off here before looking for me? Do you remember anything I told you last time?"
Starlight blinked, unable to speak.
Glimmer sighed, lighting her horn with the same arcane rings instead of a normal aura Starlight had seen last time. External access protocol accepted through Daydream communication socket. Eylista access level verified. System firmware rollback initiated...
A brief field of static obscured Starlight's vision, not helping with her headache, and then it cleared. Rollback complete, her Nightmare Module voice told her.
"...There," Glimmer said, her horn growing dim. "Broadcasting like that wasn't an ability I loaned you to go running around with. Now, next time I do something like that to make your life easier, a good way to thank me would be to listen if I say it's not permanent and spend some time on your own so I can find you and undo it." Her eyes drifted to the door. "Otherwise I have to do this, and that's going to make questions that will annoy you and have no answers."
Starlight frowned. "What?"
"Never mind." Glimmer shook her head. "Next time I'll just... Never mind. Don't you and your friends have a pegasus to chase who doesn't know she's in the prison of an evil monk?"
"No, wait a minute!" Starlight's ears went back, staring at Glimmer before she could disappear. "You gave me the ability to talk to the batponies and play them the sisters' song, right? Why would you give that if you were just going to take it away? You make no sense!"
"Because it didn't change anything." Glimmer briefly turned downcast. "If I hadn't, you would have figured something out with the harmony extractor. And you could talk to the sarosians just fine without this power. It just would have taken longer. All I did was save you the heartache of having Maple walk in and see you hooked up to that thing. And believe me, that would have hurt."
Starlight winced, not wanting to imagine it.
"Here, though?" Glimmer pointed around the room. They were at the head of a steep staircase, the bottom lost in shadows. "It will make a difference, so this is where I draw the line. Even if it means making your friends ask questions."
"So..." Starlight swallowed. "If I had hooked myself up, I wouldn't have vanished like last time? Or fallen unconscious, or started to disappear?"
Glimmer shrugged. "How does your head feel now?"
"A little dizzy," Starlight admitted. "Not perfect. But I didn't touch the machine and haven't been using my horn, so I thought that was just..."
"My advice?" Glimmer backed away, keeping her eyes fixed on Starlight. "Don't let anyone weigh you until you've used the harmonic flame to get back to normal."
Then she was gone.
Before Starlight could even try to get her bearings, there was a smooth rolling of stone against stone, and the polished door slid open. "Starlight!" Her friends' panicked voices immediately reached her, Maple and Valey pushing to be the first through with Gerardo bringing up the rear.
"Maple! Valey!" Starlight ran to embrace them, immensely relieved by their presence.
"Yo, what happened?" Valey let Maple do the hugging, surveying Starlight with a concerned frown. "Something definitely grabbed you with telekinesis. Unless you can lift yourself like Shinespark, that means there's another unicorn in here?"
"It's..." Starlight swallowed, realizing she really did have no way to explain this. What did she tell her friends, that she had a mysterious double who definitely wasn't a hallucination? That wouldn't concern them at all. "I really don't know."
Valey lifted an eyebrow. "Yeah, well what happened? We were yelling and banging on the door for at least three minutes."
"You mean you couldn't hear me?" Starlight settled for a misleading truth, the necessity of it sitting like spoiled milk in her stomach.
"There was, ah... slightly too much panic for us to listen well?" Gerardo's headcrest drooped. "But I'm afraid not. You look relatively unaccosted, unless this is some nightmarish trick, and..."
Maple folded her ears and pulled back. "Gerardo, are you saying we should be concerned Starlight isn't really Starlight?"
Gerardo uneasily shrugged. "Much as I hate sowing the seeds of discord, it's important to consider that we do know of life-forms capable of changing shape. If young Jamjars' accounts are accurate, we've even seen one do it under the Night Mother's control at will. And it does seem very odd that Starlight would be so quickly accosted, yet come out of it perfectly fine. You do have a story to tell, yes?"
Starlight winced, brain in overdrive and still coming up with no ways to explain what had happened. Suddenly, her friends' brightness seemed that much further away. "I don't want to talk about it..."
The griffon frowned harder, but Maple instantly stepped between them. "Gerardo, Starlight is a filly and if something happened to her she's not comfortable talking about, it's not going to help to pry and doesn't mean she's not Starlight! If I was her, I'd have enough to be uncomfortable about on my shoulders already, like everything to do with these Nightmare Modules."
"For what it's worth, I'm not getting any more, uhh..." Valey glanced at Starlight. "Any more danger than I usually do from her when she's gray. Not that that isn't a considerable amount, but still. Cool your feathers, Birdo."
Gerardo sighed. "My apologies. I merely thought it prudent to be wary. Now, what have we ahead?"
After a short landing, stairs sloped down. The very entrance of the cave seemed to be natural, cut off from the previous room by a constructed wall, and their platform stood over the cave floor with enough room Starlight could probably hide beneath it. But when the stairs met the wall, they kept going, burrowing downward in a tunnel that was very deliberately carved. Ornamental pillars and even railings adorned the sides, making Starlight wonder how much time and effort someone had committed to build this.
"Well?" Valey pulsed her flash club down the incline. "Let's get after that pegasus."
Following Glimmer's suggestion, Starlight declined to ride on Maple, taking up a position at the middle of the formation as they descended into shadow. Her head was light and her mother's brightness appealing, but if there was something about her weight that would cause her friends concern...
Nobody spoke as they trekked down the incline, but again, Starlight couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching her.