Hyper Future Pony
Author’s Notes: There will be major, major spoilers for the Battle Angel Alita manga. While I’ve structured to story so it would be unnecessary to have read the whole manga (or even any of it), I’d still highly recommend it. Even if you never read this fanfic, actually. Just go read it, it’s a good one. :P
Prologue: Lotus Eater
Desty Nova had his foe right where he wanted her. They’d dogged each other’s best plans for over a decade now, knowingly or not. Since her rebirth, Alita had been in a constant battle against him, knowingly or not. She was his karma, and now Desty Nova was working hard to unmake that that thorn in his side.
Both of their backs were against the wall now. She’d invaded his home, obliterated his experiments, and left him with no place to run. He’d deal with his karma right now, or it would destroy him. Getting her back into the Ouroboros dream world had been a challenge; hacking into a military cyborg’s communication systems was no easy feat even for a master of nanotechnology and unparalleled genius like himself. He’d barely avoided losing his head in the process. But now she was trapped, and Desty Nova took it upon himself to personally wear down her blades and turn the savage soldier into a demure little pet.
He’d started slow, forcing her to give into the dream world. Alita had fought back, continually killing the faces from her past in an attempt to escape the dream world. But she could only soak her hands in Ido, her ersatz-father figure, so many times before she broke entirely.
Desty Nova laughed maniacally. This would be the final blow that would break her. She was reduced back to right where she started, a lost and nameless face clinging to life in the scrap heaps.
“Heh, heh, don’t you look pretty,” said Desty Nova as he pulled Alita’s shattered body out of the junkyard, just like Ido had almost fifteen years ago. The barely conscious cyborg tried to recoil in fear, but she didn’t have the will to do much of anything. Desty Nova laughed again. “With your psychological stamina depleted to nearly zero, you probably don’t even know who you are.”
Her claws weren’t quite gone yet. Daisuke Ido had appeared, shocked at Desty Nova’s intent to make her tonight’s experiment, and pulled the badly damaged girl away from Nova’s clutches. Not that it mattered; it wouldn’t prevent Nova from drowning that pesky girl in the sweet cream of life until there was no fight left in her. Unwittingly, Nova had just snared himself in his own trap.
“I’m really cool about helping you with your studies Twilight, but I really don’t know how I’m going to help you with this. I’d love to bake you some cupcakes, or sing you’re a song, or maybe throw you a party when you succeed, but helping you with the experiment itself? This doo-hicky here is neat and all, but what am I supposed to actually do?”
“Hush Pinkie, I’m about to do science!”
Pinkie Pie was in Twilight’s basement, hooked up to dozens of wires and sensors, all feeding data into a nearby computer, which dinged and flashed in a pattern that seemed to be intelligible only to Twilight Sparkle. The pink pony’s causality defying powers had always perplexed and intrigued that brainy unicorn, and now she was nearing a major breakthrough. Somewhere in Pinkie Pie’s intrinsic magic field was the secret to conquering the bounds of time and space! No more exhausting teleports; Twilight would have the secret to effective, long-range and (relatively) easy jumps. Or even opening up fixed wormholes between two points! The possibilities for limitless.
Twilight fiddled with some switches, crunched a few numbers, and attached a few more sensor wires to Pinkie. “Gosh Twilight, that tickles!” A short electrical current ran through her body, causing her to twitch and shake Pinkie sense style for a moment. A printer spit out a ream of data, which Twilight scrutinized.
“EUREKA!” cried Twilight.
“Gesundheit!”
“Now is not the time for jokes. I’ve finally unlocked your secret. I’m going to be trying out the new spell, so you can go now.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to watch. Your experiments always turn out fun, and my Pinkie senses tell me this one’ll be a doozy.”
Twilight groaned. Still, she kept up her preparations, aligning the spell foci and rehearsing the thaumic manipulations.
“So what’ll it do?”
“Open up a fixed gate between to separate points, allowing instantaneous travel between the two.”
“Ooh, that sounds neat. Where are you going to go with it?”
“I dunno yet. Probably my backyard.”
Pinkie facevaulted the way only a comedic cartoon pony could. For a moment, Twilight could swear she saw a large cartoonish sweatdrop on Pinkie’s forehead. “Jeesh Twilight, you could go anywhere and you’re going to your backyard. Wouldn’t it be faster to walk.”
“Pinkie, you need to walk before you run.”
“Exactly, which is why I said you could walk to your back yard, and not run.”
Twilight groaned again, much louder. “Pinkie, it’s a metaphor. I can’t afford to take a huge risk with this spell because it’s never been done before. Now stand back, science is about to happen!”
Across the folds of time and space, another mad scientist’s plan was coming to fruition. A month had already passed in the dream world, and the once frightening warrior was now the picture of demure womanhood, her cold cyborg body hidden under frilly dresses and lace.
Desty Nova watched over the fragile young girl like a hawk, casually eating some flan as was his penchant. “So, little girl, do you want anything? I can make you some friends! Just name your heart’s desire!” cackled Nova.
She thought for a moment, holding her fist to her lips pensively. “I want…some flan.”
Nova frowned. “Err…just one bite.”
Alita left, satisfied by the delicious custard, and sat in Ido’s study with him, opening the pages of a well-worn book. Before she started to read, she beamed at Ido. “Someday I want to be a doctor like you, Ido.”
“That’s nice dear,” he replied, wiping the oil from his hands from the latest cybersurgery, “But if you don’t get some exercise, your joints will harden.”
“But I prefer to read.”
Desty Nova let himself have an evil smirk as she stood at the door. “To think this girl is the same person as Alita!” he thought, “I’ll keep her here a bit longer so this new personality will take root! Back in while lab, I’ll perform nanosurgery on her brain to rid her of the memory of that icky Panzer Kunst. Then victory will be mine!”
After a short argument with Ido, the girl grudgingly conceded, and went up to the rooftop to at least get a bit of fresh air. She sat, dangling her legs over the edge, blowing some bubbles at the rundown industrial vista of the Scrapyard City. The Factory’s impersonal foundries and assembly plants continued their monotonous routine in the dream life.
Nova stalked closer to the peaceful girl. “Are you happy? So you like bubbles eh? I could install an internal bubble machine in you!”
Nova’s Cheshire cat grin disturbed her greatly. “Umm…no thanks.”
Alita continued to blow bubbles as Nova crouched down beside her. “Uncle Nova, do you love someone?”
The wild-haired mad scientist was surprised by her candid question. “Love someone? Hmm…there was this one woman I wanted to dissect once…” he replied, trailing off to a whisper too quiet for her to hear.
The bubbles danced across the sky as the floating city of Tiphares loomed in the background.
Only too late did Nova realize that he’d been snared in his own trap. He sat pensively for a moment, before removing his distinctive utility spectacles. The Tipharean exile was trapped, and he didn’t want to be set free.
“Until now…what was it I was running toward? What is this feeling that wells up in my heart?” he asked aloud, not caring if anyone heard or answered. Because deep down, he already knew the answer. And it meant his whole life had been spent chasing the setting sun.
“That there should be an end to suffering and death in this world! If one can truly believe in happiness…one can only have this prayer!”
He sat beside the young girl, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, and wished the moment would last forever.
It couldn’t. Already, Alita’s ally, his son Kaos was trying to free her from the Ouroboros program. It came in the form of the giant cyborg Den, rampaging through the dream vista of the Scrapyard like a giant samurai.
Ido ran out on the rooftop, motioning for them to follow him back inside. “Professor, we need to get inside quick!”
“Ido, take care of her for me.”
“Uncle Nova!” cried Alita.
Presumably, Nova thought that if you have to do battle in a dream world, you might as well be awesome while doing it. With his best impression of an old Japanese super robot story, Nova shouted into his wrist communicator “Great Martian King! Time for battle!”
A giant toy robot appeared out of the earth, and Nova quickly mounted it to do battle. “Very tricky! I’m astonished you got through my electronic barriers, Den…or should I call you Kaos! No matter! You’ll never take my Alita from me!”
Alita and Ido hid below in relative safety, while the two giant mecha did battle across the dream scape. The rumble of the battle reverberated through the building, and soon Alita’s heart beat in time with the din of the fight. Something long dormant finally awakened.
“Ido, I have to fight too!”
“That’s absurd! Why would you?!”
The dream evaporated. The frilly dresses melted away, and the civilian cyborg body morphed into Alita’s rather battered and battle-worn Tuned body. “Because…I’ll be fighting for myself.” In an instant, Ido was all that was left of the dream.
“I knew this was a dream…and I let myself enjoy it. But now I have to go.”
The dream image of Ido smiled ever so slightly back at her. She was missing her right arm and left eye, and the right leg had been cut off at the ankle and patched with a peg, but she stood their confident, even satisfied at the woman she had become. Though the Ido she knew was gone forever, she finally knew that he’d be proud of her.
“You be careful…Alita,” said Dream-Ido. The dream world of Ouroboros collapsed.
They were thrust back into the cold, hard real world of the Granite Inn, buried beneath Cheyenne Mountain. Both Alita and Nova stood for a moment, backs to each other at dueling distance. In spite of years of mutual hate and opposition, at the final fateful moment, neither of them wanted this. The dream of endless possibilities had washed away the tears of hate, but left the necessity of their final duel finally understood.
Alita clutched the giant balisong tightly, hesitating to use the half-meter long Damascus blade like she knew she had to. She’d long dreamed of this moment, and now that she was finally there, she didn’t want it. She didn’t want revenge for his sociopathic meddling with the lives of the people she cared for, or for him ultimately being responsible for the deaths of almost everyone she’d cared for, and her separation from the few still living she cared for. The freedom she had long felt was revealed to be a cruel lie. Now she and Nova were just puppets who saw the strings.
She turned around to see Nova stooped over a computer council, trembling while contemplating his next move. She couldn’t help but feel sad.
“If this were still my dream…” said Nova, turning to level a submachine gun at Alita, “…I would do anything to protect you.”
“The same goes for me.”
Alita lunged towards him, dodging low and to the right to avoid the armor piercing fusillade. As she met him face to face for a split second, ready to strike the killing blow, her joints suddenly seized as a surge of electricity spread across her nanotech body. The arcs of electricity spat across the room. Just before she blacked out, the geometry of the room started to warp, and the colors before her began to shift towards the red end of the spectrum.
Pinkie Pie gasped in awe at the magical spectacle Twilight was putting one. Twilight strained, summoning up all her power and control, as a channel of neon purple energy erupted from her horn, and cascaded onto the focus crystals. Violet electricity arced across the room as a swirling maelstrom of black and purple energy collected around the foci.
It expanded slowly as Twilight poured more power into it, slowly feeling her way through the membrane of space-time. Her experience with the snap teleport spell was unfortunately proving useless, so she was left to slowly pick her way through the barrier and ultimately follow her gut. She had no idea what she was looking for, but a hunch told her to follow the vibrational resonance through her horn, and the ache in her heart.
A hole opened up in the center of the glowing vortex as it continued to expand, picking up momentum with each passing moment. A few images could be seen across the event horizon. They didn’t seem quite right, way too far away for Twilight’s back yard. Different images snapped through, like frames on a slide show as she continued to follow her gut.
The event horizon was now broad enough for two ponies to pass through abreast and not have to worry about personal space. Twilight now struggled to anchor the gate to the foci while simultaneously trying to tune it to its desired location. It must have been tuned in between reality because it was nothing but a black nothingness beyond the event horizon. She slowly focused it back, following her gut. Suddenly, the frame clicked into place
Instead of Twilight’s back yard, there was instead a drab reinforced concrete room and iron scaffolding, and two strange figures just beyond the event horizon. They seemed to be struggling amidst a lightning storm before unceremoniously tumbling into the basement of Twilight’s library. She panicked, and soon lost control of the spell, which dissipated in a large flash of light, dumping a large amount of rubble that had been torn apart on the other side of the pulsing unstable wormhole.
Pinkie and Twilight stood in stunned silence in the dusty, wrecked basement. Twilight couldn’t believe herself…she’d just abducted two strange aliens from somewhere. Which meant she was an alien abductor…which meant a trip straight to the moon. Or back to magic kindergarten at the very least.
“Twilight, that didn’t look like your backyard.”