//------------------------------//
// Visitation 
// Story: Ruler of Everything 
// by Sixes_And_Sevens 
//------------------------------//

Fancy Pants, his face grave, handed his letter to the pegasus guard. “Be swift, my good mare,” he said. “We need all the aid we can get.”
The soldier saluted and took wing.
Things had moved apace since Fancy and Fleur’s return to the hospital. Blueblood’s warning of the incident in the orchard had been dire enough, but the Valeyard’s escape had pushed Fancy and Fleur over the edge. They needed backup, and they needed it now.
Starlight Glimmer had taken to investigating the rift in the hospital hallway. It had only grown since its closure, stretching out to form a thin, golden crack in the air, over a meter in length. Though jagged and spiking out in all directions, it was clearly pointing directly toward Sweet Apple Acres, a phenomenon which could not be in any way coincidental. Starlight had put it in a bubble of frozen time, which seemed to have halted its progress for the moment, but it was by no means an easy spell to maintain.
In the coma ward, meanwhile, the patients were running hot and cold -- literally, in the case of Celestia, whose mane was beginning to glow with orange flame, and Luna, on whose horn frost had begun to form. Redheart had elected to simply disregard hospital procedure entirely, and shoved them together on the same bed. It didn’t seem to be helping much. 
The pegasi’s hearts had fluctuated wildly between beating so slowly they ought to have been dead and beating so quickly that they ought to have been dead, with no middle ground whatsoever. The unicorns were still undergoing severe magic drainage. Discord had simply stopped breathing altogether. The Doctor had reached a temperature that was almost normal for a regular pony, but was a dangerously high fever for a Time Lord. His coat was soaked with sweat, and he kept groaning and whining in his sleep. Redheart couldn’t decide if that was better or worse than the way he had been virtually indistinguishable from a corpse half an hour ago.
The only ones that seemed remotely healthy were Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Spike, and the Crusaders. Redheart rather wished that Romana was here. Angry as she was that the Time Lady had knocked her unconscious, at least she might have some clue about what was affecting the nurse’s patients, even if she probably had no better idea of how to treat their maladies.
She wished Granny Smith was here, as well. She was a solid mare, reliable, and more relevantly, she was medically trained. With her around, Redheart would have a partner with whom the stresses of the task before her could be shared. As soon as the no-longer-old mare had learned that the Valeyard had dared trespass on her property, though, she had taken off ahead of Blueblood and Romana to fetch out her old blunderbuss.
Redheart wished that there was any other doctor or nurse in the building at all, but they had gone -- whether they had fled or simply been vanished by the Valeyard, Redheart didn’t know. The fact that several patients had also gone missing, however, suggested the more nasty explanation, as did the ragged rot of ravaging time that had spread throughout the hospital.
Most of all, Redheart wished that Tender was here. She needed a shoulder to lean on, to cry on. The nurse had become the last line of defense between the gods themselves and death, and it was wearing her thin. Romana hadn’t been entirely wrong in her assessment of Redheart’s need for a nap, only in her execution thereof. Not, of course, that the nurse would ever admit that. She just needed a hug from her marefriend and to be told, You’ll be alright, hon. I’m here.
Redheart shuddered, a brief muscle spasm rocking her body. When it had passed, oddly enough, she felt a little bit better.





Tender Care watched her marefriend’s face relax ever so slightly as she moved back to doing her job, taking care of her patients. She should have felt happy, knowing that she had given Red a little peace of mind. Instead, all she felt was hollow and flat. She wasn’t sure why. Her memories felt foreign to her, as though she was seeing them through somepony else’s eyes. The others had wandered off their separate ways, and she had never felt so alone.
She looked down at her Button and stroked his mane. Her hoof went right through him, but the sentiment was there. He was smiling in his sleep, her big sweet goofy colt. Wherever he thought he was, she hoped he was safe and happy.





Sweetie Belle strode down the hallway, projecting a confidence she didn’t really feel. Button walked beside her. His headlamp was strobing and making both of them feel fairly nauseous. “Are you ready?” Sweetie whispered.
“I only have to stand there. Are you ready?”
“...As much as I’ll ever be,” Sweetie said.
The flickering light threw up strange shadows on the walls. The pair watched them carefully. Eventually, Button stopped and grabbed Sweetie’s hoof, pointing ahead. Two great eyes, glowing orange in the darkness, gazed back at them. Sweetie Belle took a deep breath and stepped forward. There was a growl in the darkness, but she swallowed her fear. Then she opened her mouth and began to sing.

Through shady trees and light green glades,
We sally forth, never afraid.
A merry company of friends,
A quest for joy that never ends.

Each golden dawn we all away
Each diem we seek to carpe.
We forge onward in any weather
The fears we face, we face together.

And
We 
Ride…
The tinker, the thinker
The rock, and the lover
The fearless one runs on ahead of the others,
And the one in the back keeping up with the pack
The merry singing entertainer.

It’s a difficult way that we go, that’s so,
And we’ve painful new lessons to learn, you know,
There are tree roots and rocks,
And the turn of the clock,
In short, we’ve a long way to grow.

But
We 
Ride…
The tinker, the thinker
The rock, and the lover
The fearless one runs on ahead of the others,
And the one in the back keeping up with the pack
The stumbling, pained entertainer.

Sweetie paused for a moment in the song, catching her breath. The creature, who had been staring at her placidly, began to blink slowly back to wakefulness. She quickly resumed singing.

But we press on through thick and thin,
Escape the scrapes that we were in.
We gather up and rally round;
We rise and fall, but soon rebound.

We brought more smiles than we’ve brought frowns,
Our ragged capes we wear as crowns.
I look back on the fun we had,
And know we did more good than bad.

So
We 
Ride…
The tinker, the thinker
The rock, and the lover
The fearless one runs on ahead of the others,
And the one in the back keeping up with the pack
The determined and young entertainer.

As she sang, Button realized that she was singing about him, and the other Crusaders, too. He also did some quick one-to-one calculations in his head and realized who the lover had to be. He tried not to react, tried not to distract her from the song, but he must have inhaled too sharply upon his realization, because Sweetie faltered and turned to glance at him. The beast grumbled and began to stir.
So Button did the only thing he could think of to do, and gave Sweetie the biggest grin he could. Sweetie brightened and started singing again, more confident than ever.

And we’ll all ride on together, as ever,
Bonds of friendship that cannot be severed, whatever,
Our quest never-ending,
As running, befriending,
We cry out, “Crusaders forever!”

Still
We 
Ride…
The tinker, the thinker
The rock, and the lover
The fearless one runs on ahead of the others,
And the one in the back keeping up with the pack
The joyous, dancing entertainer.

By the time the last notes had faded, the beast had lowered itself to the floor and was breathing calmly. Sweetie reached out and patted its nose. The beast purred.





Far, far too high above the song to hear it, Apple Bloom and Rumble made their way slowly and carefully down the spiral staircase. Both of them were still recovering from the near-disaster at the spire, but they were well enough to walk without needing one another’s support. “How much farther down do ya reckon we gotta go?” Bloom asked.
Rumble considered this, stopping on a landing to estimate the relevant distances. “I don’t really know,” he admitted. “It’s hard to tell how far we’ve already come when we’re, uh, enclosed like this.
Bloom winced. “Yeah, this day’s goin’ pretty rough for you, ain’t it.”
“Really?” Rumble asked, arching an eyebrow at her. “Gosh. Whatever gave you that idea?”
Apple Bloom snorted. “Yeah, alright, alright. Still. You reckon we oughta start checkin’ doors as we go down?”
“Uh…” Rumble glanced at the heavy wooden door on the landing. “Yeah, I guess. Not sure how we’ll be able to figure out the right floor without looking around, though.”
“Hm. Yeah, good point,” Bloom said. “We’ll just have to poke around a lil’ on the other side. Do a bit o’ that ol’ reconnaissance.”
Rumble nodded, opening the door and glancing around. “Sounds good. You go left, I’ll go right.”
“What, you wanna split up?” Apple Bloom asked.
“Well, we’ll cover more ground that way. I mean, obviously don’t go back into the tomb alone or anything stupid like that, just nose around a little.”
“...Well, alright,” Bloom said. “Meet back here in five?”
“You got it,” Rumble said, trotting off down the hall.
Apple Bloom watched him go for a few seconds before she hurried off in the other direction. She hadn’t been going very long when she noticed something odd. There was a door in the right-hoof wall, one that seemed very out of place in this building. It was painted barn-red, with a familiar-looking carving, shaped like a tangled heart, in the upper center. The handle was good, solid iron, and as she reached for it, it clicked open.
The door swung inward onto an open field of green, and beyond that, a veritable sea of apple trees extending to the horizon. Before she had fully absorbed all that, she was distracted by a hubbub out on the lawn. Dozens upon dozens of ponies were gathered there, and she recognized them all. Braeburn, Babs Seed, Uncle Russet, Aunt Admiral the Admiral, crazy cousin Carroll, Great-Aunt Envy, second cousins Jazz and Empire… She had never seen an Apple Family reunion turnout like this in her life. She saw that the Manehattan Oranges were here, and a few Pears, a smattering of Berries, and even the rarely-seen Pineapple branch. 
She was about to ask what in the world her entire extended family, plus a large section of Sweet Apple Acres itself, was doing several stories up in a mausoleum, when she caught sight of a few more figures. Her breath caught in her throat. There, walking up to her, were her parents. Big Macintosh walked at their father’s side, and Applejack walked by their mother. Granny Smith stood in the middle, moving more sprily than Bloom could ever remember seeing. And out ahead of the pack, tongue lolling in a big doggy grin, was Winona.





“Well,” said Thunderlane. “This is another fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
The four ghosts sat around an unoccupied waiting room. Cloudchaser was sulking because she hadn’t managed to actually scare anypony, Tender Care was moping because she couldn’t be there for her marefriend, and Flitter was still trying to figure out how to sit down without passing through the chair.
“There has to be some way to get in touch with the living,” Thunderlane continued. Then he stopped, winced. “I can’t believe I just referred to them as ‘the living’ unironically.”
“You think we could find some other ghosts?” Flitter asked. “Maybe we could talk to them.”
“Where would we find other ghosts, exactly?” Tender asked, perhaps a little sharply.
“Um… the graveyard, I guess? Or the place where they died.”
“Why would they want to stick around there?” Cloudchaser asked. “I’d go straight to Las Pegasus and see all the shows, free of charge.”
Thunderlane frowned and looked around. “It’s funny,” he said. “I would have expected to have run into at least a few other ghosts. I mean, Ponyville General is a pretty good hospital, but ponies have still definitely died here.”
“That’s because when you die, you do the obvious thing and go to Las Pegasus for all eternity,” Cloudchaser said.
Flitter tilted her head. “Is that for when you’ve been good, or when you’ve been evil?”
“It’s for when you want to take the edge off being dead, Flit.”
Thunderlane sighed and massaged the bridge of his muzzle with a hoof. “Tender? You said that you were able to make some kind of contact with Redheart?”
She nodded. “Yes. I was trying to hug her, but I just sort of passed through instead, and she seemed to calm down after that.”
“So we can communicate, kind of, through physical contact.”
“Yes, but she certainly didn’t realize it was me. We’ll need another way to communicate directly.”
“It’s still a start,” Thunderlane said, determined. “This might be a clue to how we can interact with objects. If you had some impact, no matter how small, we can figure out a way to exploit that.”
Flitter, her expression grave, shut her eyes and settled into her chair. For a split second, tail met seat, and she beamed with pride. Then her eyes went wide as she promptly fell through it and onto the floor. 
Cloudchaser looked at Thunderlane flatly. “Yeah. Good luck with that.”
Thunderlane glared at her, and Flitter flipped her sister the feather. Tender Care, sensing that things were only likely to escalate, hurriedly interrupted. “Look, perhaps if we try working together on something, we could make it move.”
“Such as?” Cloudchaser asked.
Tender glanced around the room. “There. That vending machine,” she said, gesturing to a corner of the room. “We can try and pull out, I don’t know, a bag of chips.”
Thunderlane shrugged. “Sure, why not,” he said, rising from his seat. “What else is there to do for all eternity?”
“Las Peg-a-sus,” Cloudchaser enunciated, but she and Flitter gathered around the machine as well.
“Right,” said Tender. “We’ll all aim for that first bag of Cheese Crumblies, shall we? On three. One, two, three.”
Four pairs of intangible hooves passed through the machine’s side for the orange bag. All four passed through said bag and smacked into one another. Cloudchaser grit her teeth and took another swipe at it. All four strained their minds and non-bodies as they grappled at their goal.
Then, Thunderlane noticed something odd. The blinking digital readout had stopped asking passersby to insert their bits and select a snack. Rather, it was now rapidly shifting through ‘OOPS’, ‘SHIT’, and other four-letter words besides. As soon as he noticed that, it started to display ‘????’ in between the assorted profanities.
“Huh,” said Thunderlane, tilting his head.
‘IDEA’, said the vending machine.





Scootaloo had returned to riding Dinky’s back down the corridor, frequently casting glances back the way they’d come, just to make sure that the monstrous statues hadn’t somehow broken free. At last, there was an end in sight, in the form of a stairwell only a few dozen meters away. Or, if ‘end’ wasn’t the right word, at least it was a sign that they were getting somewhere.
“Hey,” Scootaloo said. “So, why isn’t the staircase moving around like it was earlier, when you had to shake the tower to get it to stand still?”
Dinky shrugged. “Maybe I broke something when I was shaking it all around. Maybe the Nightmare isn’t bothering with it now that it thinks we’re dead.”
“Maybe you just scared it into behaving,” Scootaloo said.
Dinky chuckled. “Yeah, that could be, too.”
“How many flights up do you think we need to go?”
Dinky considered this. “Good question. We’ll just have to check every floor we come to.” She started up the stairs. 
It was quite dark in the stairwell. There was no ambient light here, as there had been in the corridors. Scootaloo still wasn’t quite sure where the illumination had been coming from, but she wasn’t happy about the fact that it was shirking its duties. The golden glow of Dinky’s horn was the only light in the darkness.
They had hardly gone around the first turn in the spiral staircase when Dinky’s magic flickered. Both mares stiffened. “Keep checking our six,” Dinky muttered. “I’ll keep my eyes straight ahead.”
“Yeah,” Scootaloo said, peering back into the blackness. “You got it.”
They went up a little farther, Dinky’s magic flickering and guttering like a candle in the wind at irregular, but increasingly frequent, intervals.
They had gone up perhaps three full cycles of the staircase when Scootaloo caught her first glimpse of their pursuer -- no more than a grey stone hoof on the stair, the rest hidden behind the wall. “Go faster,” she said.
Dinky broke into a gallop up the stairs, Scootaloo struggling to hold tight as she bounced on her friend’s back. The golden light flickered again, and Scootaloo was just able to catch a glimpse of a stone muzzle before they passed out of sight again, up and up the winding staircase. 
Scootaloo shook her head. “It’s no good. No matter what, I can’t keep my eyes on it. The walls keep getting in the way!”
“Maybe we can get off on the next floor,” Dinky proposed, her voice raw with fear and exertion.
“What next floor?” Scootaloo demanded. “We’ve gone up three times as high as the ceiling was downstairs. The tower’s turned on us again!”
“Just… oh, keep as close an eye on it as you can!” Dinky said.
The light flickered again, and as Dinky forced the golden light back on, Scootaloo saw the face of their pursuer for the first time. Rainbow Dash looked back at her, sharp teeth bared.
Dinky must have felt Scootaloo go stiff. “Close enough to see her face, huh.”
“You knew it was Dash?”
“I guessed,” Dinky admitted. “Seemed to be that all the captive pegasi got… converted.”
Scootaloo said nothing for a long moment. “I’m sorry,” Dinky said, and she seemed to genuinely mean it. “I didn’t think it was a great time to bring it up.”
The light flickered again, and Rainbow was frozen with a hoof reaching out for Dinky’s tail. Scootaloo squinched up her face in desperate thought and said, “Stop.”
“What?” Dinky asked, perplexed.
“I said, stop!” Scootaloo said.
Dinky slowed and came to an eventual halt on the stairs. Scootaloo attempted a clumsy dismount from her back, not once taking her eyes off the lowest stair that she could see. Dinky lowered herself to the ground so it would be a little easier, then rose and turned around when Scootaloo was safely off. “You have a plan?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Scootaloo said.
“How likely is it going to end in us both dying?”
Scootaloo considered this. “Eighty, eighty-five percent?”
Dinky nodded. “Well, that’s better odds than I had going for us just trying to run forever. Let’s do it.”
“Okay. Follow me, and when I say blink, blink. If you’re going to blink any time outside of that, nudge me in the flank.”
“...Alright,” Dinky said, nodding slowly.
Scootaloo led them both down and around the spiral staircase until they were face to face with the Dash statue. It was smiling at them rather smugly, in a way that was so painfully Rainbow Dash that it made Scootaloo’s heart ache.
“Hi, Rainbow,” Scootaloo said softly. “How are you doing? I mean. Pretty good, it doesn’t seem.”
“Scootaloo,” Dinky began.
Scootaloo ignored her. “I don’t know what’s happened to you,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s any Rainbow Dash left in there, but I guess we’ll find out. See, in a few minutes, Dinky and I are both gonna blink.” She nudged Dinky in the flank as she herself blinked back tears. “And then you can do whatever you like. If there’s no Rainbow Dash left in there, if she’s dead and you’re just wearing her face… well, I guess we’re dead.”
Dinky nudged her in the flank and Scootaloo redoubled the intensity of her stare. “But if there’s any of you left in there, Rainbow… you don’t want to hurt us, do you? You don’t want to hurt us. You’re the Element of Loyalty.” Her voice was high now, and more than a little strained with tears and fears. “You would never hurt a friend, never abandon them.”
She nudged Dinky, who was straining a little less to keep her horn glowing golden. “Remember who you are, Dash,” Scootaloo said softly. “You turned down the chance to compete with the Wonderbolts that one time, all for your friends. You’re always there for Ponyville. You were always there for me.”
Dinky nudged her, and Scootaloo struggled to keep her watering eyes open. “Please, Rainbow. You’re like my big sister. I love you.”
She inhaled deeply and let it out. “Alright,” she said quietly. “Blink.”
There was a moment of darkness. Then, Scootaloo opened her eyes. She wasn’t dead. Neither, it appeared, was Dinky. The Dash statue was still standing there, but the smug grin had given way to a slack-jawed gape. If one looked closely, they could see crystalline tears in the statue’s eyes.
Scootaloo grinned. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Dinky’s horn guttered again. When the lights returned, Rainbow was struggling to hold it together, Her hoof was outstretched. Dangling from it was a familiar silver key.
“The TARDIS key?” Dinky asked, wide-eyed. “How -- what -- why --”
Scootaloo took the key from Dash’ hoof and bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Rainbow,” she said. “I promise, we’ll fix this somehow.”
There was another flicker of the lights, and Rainbow’s statue gave the pair a watery smile. Another flicker, and she was gone.
Scootaloo let out a long and shaky breath and slid to the floor. Her heart was beating fit to burst. Dinky sat down next to her and wrapped a hoof around her withers.
“‘M sorry,” Scootaloo muttered. “Didn’t think to do the same thing for your mom or Fluttershy.”
Dinky hugged her a little closer, her eyes still glassy and fixed on the point where Rainbow had been. “You did good,” she said quietly. “You did good.”





Rainbow had always thought that if she moved fast enough, she could escape thinking about things. This was contrary to all of her experience, of course -- flying fast was a pretty lonely pastime, and it left a lot of time for self-reflection. She just did her honest best to ignore and repress that as much as was equinely possible.
Now that she was stuck between moving faster than she’d ever been able to in her life and completely frozen, she felt more isolated than ever. Not having anypony around to boast to was particularly galling. And, in the absence of any external noise, Rainbow was forced to turn her thoughts inward. 
She was so hungry. It gnawed at her stomach, her mind, her heart. All she needed to do was find a single victim, a simple touch in the dark, and she knew, through some strange instinct of this form, that she would be satiated. 
But that would mean killing a friend. She hadn’t been able to think about that clearly, not until Scootaloo had spoken to her. Oh Celestia, she’d nearly killed Scootaloo. And Dinky, too, which felt almost as bad.
What had the Nightmare done to her? What had she become? She felt ill and dizzy and disoriented. There had to be a way to fight this, to keep herself from becoming a danger to the ones she cared about most in the world. She stumbled into the lower hallway, back into the light, and hurried back toward the atrium. It was pretty obvious that Fluttershy and Ditzy were already out of the running -- they had followed the two Crusaders directly, while Dash had chosen to take the long way around through a door hidden behind one of the big grim statues.
She could see the two figures now in the dim light of the hallway, staring at one another, fixed in position, snarling at something that was no longer there. Dash’s heart panged at seeing two of the kindest mares she knew twisted and perverted in such a way. If she felt this bad about nearly killing Scootaloo, how much worse would Ditzy feel about the terror she’d inflicted on her own daughter?
Rainbow sidled down the corridor, drawing closer to her transfigured friends. She skirted along the wall to Ditzy’s left, keeping her eyes fixed on them both until --
She couldn’t move. She had been caught in the glare of Ditzy’s lazy eye. The hunger was still there, eating away at her love, her morals, her sanity, but there was no longer any way to act on it. She would abide here, safe in the knowledge that none of the trio could harm anypony they cared about.
…
… Shit, now her nose was itchy.