//------------------------------//
// The Unquiet Dead 
// Story: Ruler of Everything 
// by Sixes_And_Sevens 
//------------------------------//

Button didn’t move. He didn’t dare. There was a distinct lack of anything beneath him, and the only thing keeping him in the air was Sweetie Belle, her forehooves wrapped around him like a python. He could hardly breathe, but that didn’t much matter, since he hardly dared to try, either.
“Can you -- can you lift me up?” he whispered, his voice hoarse with fear.
“I don’t know,” Sweetie replied.
“How far of a drop is it?”
“...About twelve feet, I think. I can’t give you a shield spell this time.”
“Right…” Button breathed out. “Okay. Sweetie, I need you to unbuckle the strap of my bag.”
“What?”
“It’ll make me a lot lighter.”
“But all your stuff --”
“Is replaceable. Heck, we can walk down a level and pick it back up again. Sweetie, I’m this close to breaking my neck --”
She unbuckled the bag. It fell, and Button rose dramatically as Sweetie reeled backwards from the shift in the weight. She fell flat on her plot, her forehooves slipping free of Button’s neck. “No!” she screamed.
Button, however, had gotten up high enough that he was able to scrabble for purchase on the edge and hold himself relatively steady. Sweetie grabbed him again and hauled him back to safety. For a long moment they just sat on the stairs, gasping for breath. After awhile, Button hauled himself upright and peered over the precipice. “Wow. Yeah, that would’ve been a bad drop,” he said. “Looks like my bag’s mostly alright. It’s anypony’s guess how much inside survived, though.”
“That’s good,” Sweetie said. “So, we’re going down a level to fetch it?”
“Yeah, I guess so -- uh?”
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought I saw something moving down below,” Button said. “Must’ve been a trick of the light…”
“You realize you just said one of the top lines that ponies in horror movies say right before they get killed really horribly, right?”
Button winced. “Yeah -- yup, there it is again. He’s a fast sucker.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Uh, imagine a pony in a cheap rubber alligator costume, but black and white.” He squinted. “Wait -- no, more like a faceless white pony. No, a shaggy black pony with too many teeth and glowing silver eyes. It keeps flickering into other shapes.”
Sweetie joined him in peering over. “Is… is that a zipper on its back?”
“It doesn’t look all that dangerous…”
A beam of silver light shot right between the pair, scorching the stone wall. “Okay, never mind!” Button said, his voice suddenly much higher. “Sweetie, can you lift us over the hole?”
“No. I think we could jump it, but not without exposing ourselves to fire.”
Button glanced down again, furrowing his brow. “Do you have enough juice to lift my bag?”
“...Yeah? Why? Do you have something in there that might help?”
“Not exactly. No, don’t lift it yet, wait until I give the word.”
As the creature wound around the stairs, it seemed to become more real -- it gained color first, then became less like a pony in a cheap bad costume and more like a pony in a slightly more expensive bad costume. Nothing else about it was remotely consistent. Button kept a weather eye on it, just peering over the edge, dodging back each time the shifting monster fired on them. “Wait for it,” he kept muttering. “Wait for it…”
The creature’s form began to stabilize. It looked almost real now, standing twice the size of a normal pony, and it seemed to be consistently red, with arachnid-like features -- too many legs, a hideous crimson carapace, a whipping scorpion tail -- and it was still coming for them. It hissed at Button as it stepped over his bag.
“Now!” Button yelled.
The bag shot up into the monster’s abdomen. Its eyes went wide as it lost its balance and toppled over the edge. It screamed as it fell, and Button winced in sympathy.
There was no crash, merely an echo of a scream that hung in the air far longer than it should have.
“What the fuck,” Sweetie Belle whispered.
“Run now, ask questions later,” Button said, but he glanced over the edge one last time as Sweetie Belle levitated his bag up to sit on a steps a little farther up the staircase. Glimmering below, for a fraction of a second he thought he saw a rift in the air. He blinked, though, and it winked out of existence.





Scootaloo opened her eyes. The two statues still stood, snarling and frozen, on the other side of the chessboard. She let out a sigh of relief. Beside her, Dinky did the same, falling back off her haunches to just sit on the ground, staring across the way at her mother.
Scootaloo glanced at her. “Hey. You okay?”
“No.”
“You wanna --”
“I haven’t been okay in my entire life, I think,” Dinky said. “But I do feel even less okay than usual at the moment, yes.”
Scootaloo pursed her lips. “I suppose talking about it would be totally out of the question.”
“I don’t think this is necessarily the best time,” Dinky said.
“Fair enough. But if we survive this, we’re going to have a conversation. All of us Crusaders are.”
Dinky shut her eyes and nodded. “...Yeah. Yeah, alright.”
“Huh.” Scootaloo blinked. “Wasn’t expecting you to agree so quickly, honestly.”
“Mm. You know how I said I talked with the Doctor telepathically?”
“You mean the thing that happened about two minutes ago? Just about.”
“I saw… stuff in there. I think I’ve seen what happens when you bottle up your emotions for about two thousand years. I don’t want to be like that.”
Scootaloo considered this, then nodded. “Yeah, fair enough. Should we go on, then?”
Dinky’s lips flattened into a long line. She didn’t look away from the statues for a long moment. “Yeah,” she said, dropping her gaze. “Yeah, I guess so.”
She rose to her hooves and together the two mares continued down the hallway. They didn’t look back. This was rather a shame, because the next thing the statues did was really rather impressive, involving quite a lot of lightning and quick movement, and ending with a pair of really very angry statues on the other side of the chessboard. By that time, however, Scootaloo and Dinky were quite some distance away, facing an entirely different potential threat. 
They had reached nearly the end of one corridor and were about to turn right, when they heard muffled thumps coming from inside the wall. Both mares froze and stared at the wall, where they could distinctly hear muttering voices and growls. Dinky lit her horn. Scootaloo braced herself on Dinky’s back.
“Show yourself!” Dinky demanded.
“Y’know, maybe whatever it is just hadn’t noticed us yet,” Scootaloo muttered.
There was a long pause. Then, one of the nearby alcoves slid open. Both mares stared at it for a long moment, preparing to face down whatever came through.
Shining Armor popped his head around the corner. “Wait. You’re alive?” he asked, his eyes wide.





The Doctor yanked and tugged at his bindings. “Let me go!” he shouted, glowering at Romana. “My daughter is in danger!”
“You’ve got your fighting spirit back,” Romana observed. “Good. I rather wanted to see the light go out of your eyes.”
The Doctor snarled. “I can still save her. I can still save all of the Crusaders, look at them!” He gestured as best he could to the six figures, still standing lined up at the front of the stage. “They’re alive and well.”
“Yeah?” Donna said, crossing her hooves across her chest. “How long’s that gonna last them with you running around?”
“Rather longer than it will with me locked up in here.” He looked around at the crowd. “I know you hate me!” he shouted. “Believe me, I know the feeling. But those six ponies have never done you any harm. They’re innocent in all of this. Let me save them, please.”
The assembled companions seemed at best apathetic. The Doctor raised his voice. “Please! It’s not for my sake. It’s for their sake, for your sake, and for the sake of all those like you. If you hate me so much for making you this way, then let me make a change! Let me save them from the corruption that you all had to face.”
There was a long moment of silence. “Why should we?” Peri asked, her voice shrill and cold. “You didn’t save us. Why should we let you save them?”
The Doctor blinked. “Oh,” he said. “Of course. This is all just another trick, then. You aren't even good facsimiles. It's shameful, the way my mind's been twisted around to conjure up you sorry lot.”
“What --” someone began.
“Shut it,” the Doctor said, his voice suddenly cold. “You’re not my friends. My friends had love, kindness, compassion. They formed loyalties to friends they’d barely met, and they were generous to the lowest of people. And, oh yes, we laughed. You dour crew, you never smiled a day in your lives! The joy’s been sucked out of you. You wouldn’t know an adventure if it bit you on the flank. And another thing! My friends were honest. You’ve been lying to me this whole time.”
Leela grabbed him by the neck roughly, but he shook his head, the bonds slipping off him like water. “You’re nothing but a deck of cards!” he shouted. “A horrid illusion to keep me captive. Well you know what? I’m breaking out to save my daughter and the other Crusaders, because friendship bloody well is magic.”
Something strange happened with the light. The red-orange glow of the setting binary suns grew softer, lighter. The crowd glitched and spasmed, like something had crashed their systems. The Doctor stood there for a moment, breathing heavily.
The Crusaders looked up at him, as a single unit. “Not bad,” Rumble said. “Definitely a good start.”
“You’re not free yet, though,” Sweetie Belle warned.
“Run for it!” Dinky ordered.
The Doctor knew a good thing when he saw one. He bolted from the stage, racing through the frozen, flickering crowd that was already beginning to regain its composure. As he passed through, he thought he saw some of them actually smiling at him for a few fractions of a second before their cold, twisted faces flickered back into existence. He pushed that to the back of his mind for his subconscious to puzzle over while he desperately tried to figure out the best way to lose his pursuers. 
There was only one place he could think of going where he could truly get away from this mess, the TARDIS bay. He could steal a ship, randomize the coordinates, and vanish. Trouble was, several of his companions had likely already thought of that, and it would be all too easy for Romana or Compassion or someone to trace him. Where else could he go where they wouldn’t immediately think to find him? Where could he go to collect his thoughts for a few minutes without the world falling down around his ears?
The answer came to him like a bolt from the blue, and he changed direction immediately to dodge down an alley. Everything seemed to be clearer now, less jumbled and disorganized, and he navigated his way through the city to the nearest transmat. It was the work of moments to program his destination into the system, and it took him only a few minutes more to rig up a signal that would fry every other transmat in the Capitol once he arrived safely at his destination. With the roar of the furious crowd growing ever-louder, the Doctor stepped into the booth, shut his eyes, and hoped like hell that no one would be there to greet him when he stepped out the other side.
After all, he thought as he disappeared, the only thing worse than this would be a family reunion…






Romana and Starlight met in town square, Granny Smith, Blueblood, Fancy Pants, and Gilda were already there, each lugging behind them wagons filled with strange devices and parts. Gilda gestured to her haul. “Is this good?” she asked. “I didn’t know what you were trying to build, and even if I did I wouldn’t know what you’d need for it, so I mostly just grabbed a shit ton of clocks.”
“Yes, all this should do marvelously,” Romana said, looking around. “Starlight? Can you start the time-slowing spell now?”
Starlight shut her eyes and lit her horn. Waves of blue-violet energy poured off her, building around the golden cracks, forming elliptical shields around them. She winced. “Huh. Yeah, this thing’s stronger than I guessed,” she admitted. “I can hold it, but don’t expect me to be much help actually putting this thing together.”
“You can still offer advice?”
“Yeah.”
“Then that’s fine. Gilda? I’m going to need your talons for some of the more fiddly work.”
“Me? I don’t know anything about this.”
“Can you hold a screwdriver?”
“...Yeah.”
“Then you’re the most qualified creature around.”
“Hrm.” Gilda nodded. 
Fancy coughed lightly into his hoof. “Of course, you are a foreign dignitary. If you do not wish to help --”
“This thing’s gonna erase the entire planet, she said,” Gilda said, gesturing at Romana. “Last time I checked, Griffonstan’s still on Gaea.”
“As you say,” Fancy replied with a nod.
Gilda picked up a screwdriver. “Alright. Where should we start?”





Traveling through the rift, Thunderlane found, was a singularly unpleasant experience. It was like every molecule which made up his nonexistent body had become carbonated, fizzing and bubbling through his blood, brains, and even bone. He, Flitter, and Cloudchaser all lay on the stone floor for several minutes, staring up at the ceiling and waiting for their eyeballs to stop effervescing. Eventually, Flitter flipped onto her stomach and pushed herself up to stand on wobbly legs. “Never again,” she said emphatically.
She helped Thunderlane to rise to his hooves. Cloudchaser made no effort to get up. She merely groaned and flopped around like a dying fish until Thunderlane and Flitter forcibly lifted her off the ground and dropped her. “Where are we?” Thunderlane asked, glancing around the room in which they found themselves. The other side of the rift was clearly visible, a great gold-edged hole in the universe. Beyond that, they were in a great stone room. A tomb, actually. It seemed familiar for reasons none of them could place. All thoughts of that went out of their heads, however, when they heard, out of the darkness, the sounds of an approaching argument. They were far from being alone in this place.
“Quick!” Flitter hissed. “Hide!”
“We’re invisible, you dork!” Cloudchaser said. Flitter and Thunderlane were already up in the rafters, however. With a sigh, Cloudchaser flew up to join them. 
“I tell you, it can’t possibly have been decaying!” one voice insisted. “The remaining power should have been more than sufficient to maintain the outer plasmic shell.”
“Well, it wasn’t,” said a more familiar voice. All three pegasi stiffened at the sound of the Valeyard. “It must have been diverting that energy from the shell to some other function.”
“It can’t have been!” the other voice insisted. “I would have known about it.”
“You’re disconnected from it now. It could have acted without your knowledge since then.”
“Hm.” The first voice sounded odd, almost mechanical. As the two speakers stepped out into the light, it wasn’t difficult to discern why that might be. “A mystery to be solved once we can get the damned thing open. And the rift?”
“An unfortunate side effect of my hasty escape from the hospital,” the Valeyard said. “However, I feel that this may be an advantage to us -- we can easily stabilize it on our side and use it to conquer the town below, with the ability to easily walk back through and destabilize it again, ensuring that none will be able to follow us.”
“Conquest was hardly an issue before,” the Nightmare said coldly. “Your twisting words won’t work on me.”
“What about the fact that this rift will, when completed, be able to eradicate the planet below from all time and space? You could make it into your personal plaything, to destroy and revive at will. You could make test runs of new apocalypses, start wars between nations, simply smash it like a crystal plate over and over again whenever you felt bored. How does that strike you?”
“Hrmmm…” The Nightmare attempted to maintain its icy disdain,but was unable to keep the avarice out of its voice. “Very well. Leave it for now. The TARDIS, regrettably, will not yield its secrets until we can crack it open. There remains only one problem to be resolved, then -- those six ponies are still at large.”
“The Cutie Mark Crusaders?”
“Don’t speak that disgustingly cutesy name in front of me," the Nightmare spat. "But yes, have they been discovered yet?”
“No. All manner of defenses have been activated across the tower -- I had to reset two of the Angels, as you know. There have been further incursions at the top of the tower, along the middle floors, and under the surface. It seems they’ve split up to divide our attention.”
“How foolish. Their deaths will be all the quicker with their strength divided.”
Thunderlane stiffened and fluffed up, his protective instincts triggered. Cloudchaser bopped him on the head. “You’re intangible, idiot!” she hissed. “If you dive down there, all you’ll do is give us away.”
Flitter placed a calming hoof on Thunderlane’s back. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him,” she said.
Slowly, Thunderlane untensed, nodding slowly. “Alright. Let’s get out of here,” he muttered. “I’ve seen enough.”
Both twins nodded, and together the three of them took off up and through the ceiling.





The Doctor stumbled out into a dank and musty old passage. Behind him, he heard the transmat fizz and pop as it went abruptly offline. Positives: None of his pursuers could follow him. Negatives: He had no way out if this safehouse became dramatically less safe.
Safehouse. Good grief.  If anyone had told the Doctor in the last millennium that he would ever call the House of Lungbarrow ‘safe’, he would have laughed in their face. Most recently, this would have been partly because the House itself had been utterly razed near the end of his seventh incarnation, but it had always been a ridiculous notion. This was the house where the Doctor had been raised as a child, for a given value of ‘raised’ and of ‘child’. He’d had forty-four cousins in the house, and only one friend -- his mechanical tutor, Badger.
He took a few cautious steps out into the hallway. The floor creaked unpleasantly beneath his weight. After taking a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he realized that what he had mistaken for a misshapen rug up ahead was actually a huge lump of black mold, which he carefully skirted around, holding his breath all the while.
He made his way out into the vast atrium in the center of House Lungbarrow, where the gargantuan table and chairs stood, gradually being corroded by time, mold, and cobwebs. He was dwarfed by the size of them -- even if he’d wanted to, he doubted that he could have managed to climb atop one of the chairs. Their seats were easily four times his current height off the floor, and that was setting aside the question of whether, old as they were, they would still hold his weight.
However, the Doctor had no real desire to go up there, though he did vaguely wonder if old Quences’ coffin still sat in the center of the vast table. The house, thankfully, appeared to be as devoid of Gallifreyan life as the rest of the planet. He turned to walk toward the back of the house, but nearly tripped over a figure lying in the dirt.
After a moment’s panic, the Doctor realized that the figure didn’t change his assessment of the amount of Gallifreyan life in the house. He was quite dead. It took the Doctor several seconds to work out who he had been in life. It wasn’t easy. The chubby face now sagged with the weight of decay, the witless eyes had long since gone dark and staring, and of course, he had turned into a pony. However, the Doctor worked it out eventually.
“Cousin Owis,” the Doctor muttered. “Of course. My replacement.”
When the Doctor had been exiled from Lungbarrow, long ago, the family had attempted to erase the fact that he had ever existed there by looming a new Cousin, in order to bring their numbers back up to the requisite forty-five. This was quite illegal, and on a tip from the Doctor himself, had resulted in the entire house becoming disbarred from the Prydonian Chapter, a blow of enormous social and practical repercussions. 
When the Doctor returned to Lungbarrow after some six or seven centuries had passed, Owis had been summarily destroyed by that murderous wretch Glospin.
The Doctor wasn’t quite sure who was sending this message, but its meaning was clear. You are replaceable, it said. Expendable. You are a shallow copy, and you will be killed out of hatred for your very existence.
Well. When he thought of it like that, it was almost certainly the Valeyard leaving that message. Or, of course, it could be a warning from his subconscious, or an effect of his own guilt complex, or a particularly nasty twist on the part of his faux-companions designed to screw with his brain, which in turn could have been caused by any of the aforementioned parties.
That was the problem, rather. His mind was shattered and scattered. He was viewing the world through warped and broken lenses. He needed to start fresh, which wasn’t a possibility in this hellscape of a decaying house.
He set Owis down again and went to move on. He paused in mid-step, reconsidered, and picked him back up. Even this illusory version of a dead cretin didn’t deserve to rot in this miserable old place. He would carry Owis out to the back of the house, dig him as best a grave as he could manage, pay a few last respects. Only then would he set off up the mountain.
Mind, if he came across Glospin's body in the ruins of this place, he’d kick that bastard’s corpse down the stairs.





In the end, the machine's construction only took about half an hour. Gilda grumbled quite a bit, but she was a diligent assistant, and the Doctor had been keeping far more scraps of alien tech in his shop than Romana thought was strictly prudent. The fact that he even owned a Monan Time Disruptor was almost criminally irresponsible, let alone the fact that he had simply left it shoved in a drawer in his workroom. On the other hoof, that particular device had saved her the labor of having to try and manufacture her own artron energy capacitor, which probably would have broken under the strain of what she was trying to do with this device, so she supposed that perhaps she ought not to complain.
The device itself was relatively compact, slightly larger than a breadbox if you didn’t count the antenna. Gilda sat back and studied it. “Alright. So what’s this thing gonna do now? Is it gonna fix the cracks? Slow em’ down? Stop ‘em in a bubble, like Star Girl’s trying to do?”
Romana blew her bangs back from her eyes. “Something like that,” she said grimly. “When I turn this on, everything in a five-mile radius will be put outside of space and time. The rift should be… more or less stable when it opens. Unfortunately, Ponyville will be cut off from the outside world.”
“Until, I suppose, the machine breaks or gets turned off and the world gets turned inside out," Blueblood guessed, frowning.
“In so many words, yes,” Romana said. “And while we’re inside, there will be no backup to help us fight whatever comes through from the other side. Starlight? How long can you hold that spell?”
Starlight glanced up at the two sides of the rift. Golden cracks shimmered and rippled as they pushed against the blueish energy holding them back. “Thirty minutes until they collide,” she said.
Romana nodded and turned to look at the others. “Go. Evacuate Ponyville and get yourselves outside the boundaries. I’ll stay here and operate the machine.”
Everypony glanced at one another. Fleur stepped forth. “I do not think it would be prudent to leave you undefended. Fancee and I will stay, as will the guards.”
Blueblood sighed. “I suppose that goes for me as well. I came here looking for revenge. I haven’t gotten it yet.”
Granny spat on the ground, causing Blueblood to recoil. “Ah was here when this town got founded. Ah live here. Ah’ll die here. But first, Ah’m gonna take out whatever bastard bin messin’ with mah kin.”
Gilda glanced up at the moon, thinking. “So… can I go for the eyes?”
“I strongly encourage it,” Fleur said.
“Yeah. I’m in.”
Romana frowned. “Oh… ridiculous. Fine. Go evacuate the rest of the town, then. If ponies wish to stay… well, I won’t deny help will be useful. But make sure that they understand that if they stay, I cannot guarantee their survival. As a matter of fact, I think the odds of any of us lasting the night are slim verging on none. If any of you change your minds and choose to leave, I will think no less of you for it.”
None of the assembled so much as flinched. Romana pursed her lips and shook her head. “So be it. Now go!”