Despite their petty squabbles, the Dazzlings were very much a matched set. Centuries spent on this benighted world had forced them to perfectly cover one another’s weaknesses and complement each other’s strengths. To do less would have killed them long ago.
Of course, Adagio Dazzle herself had no weaknesses worth speaking of and no strengths not her own, but she still needed the others to influence humans and maintain some semblance of sanity through the years. And she had to admit, they were the best backup singers she could ask for short of two clones of herself.
(She’d looked into that a few decades ago, when that sheep was all the rage. Upon finding out she’d have to raise her duplicates from squalling fry, she immediately abandoned the idea and reminded herself to be thankful for what she had. The lesson had held for almost a week, up until they had to sing Aria out of getting arrested for yet another bar brawl.)
As a result of those centuries of forced cooperation, the sirens often found themselves claiming parts in many things the same way they knew their places in harmonies. Just as she took the high notes, Sonata lived for the starts of things, the first burst of novelty before she grew bored again and sought out the next hit. Aria kept to the lower registers and looked forward to the ends of things, harvesting the fruit of their labors that meant she could stop having to put in effort and, worse for her, listen to Adagio.
Adagio knew the triple-goddess archetype predated them in this world, but sometimes she wondered just how much they’d reinforced it over the years.
She herself, center of the chords, savored the scheme in progress, when the spotlight was on and the audience watched in awe, when her performance brought them to their knees and summoned thunderous applause like pegasi bucking storm clouds.
Xubidu below, she missed weather control. And having the option of just going under storms. And not having hair. She used to like humidity.
Adagio sighed and regathered her thoughts as she made her way through the streets of Canterlot. This “Battle of the Bands” plan was going better than she could have ever dreamed, and that was the problem. She had more power now than she'd had at any point in her time on this world, and that kind of satiety could lead to complacency all too easily.
That was something the others never understood; having to work with so little meant they'd had to work smart. Yes, being able to draw from Equestrian magic again was wonderful and would let them live out their lives surrounded by adoring mind-slaves and all the power they could ask for. But they had to actually get to that point before they could relax, no matter how tempting it was to enjoy how far they'd already come. They could only push the contest's timetable so far before they overtaxed even their growing power; keeping teenagers in high school against their wills was nearly as difficult as making a man stab himself. But every day this contest dragged on was another for Sunset Shimmer and her flunkies to advance their plan, whatever that was...
Oh for the days in Equestria, when helpful stallions would just point them at seaside villages full of audiences waiting to happen.
Adagio gritted her teeth and shook her head. She never would've thought that having proper power coursing through her veins again would make her nostalgic, of all things. At this rate, by the time she got back to the hotel room, Aria and Sonata would've tried to kill each other again, and that much blood always raised uncomfortable questions.
"Right," she muttered under her breath, "back on task." Even with the negative emotions flowing, the sirens' physical bodies still needed physical food. Aria didn't care what went down her gullet so long as she didn't have to burn magic to ward off malnutrition, and Sonata hadn't had a sense of proportion regarding food since her first smörgåsbord. Thus, grocery shopping, like so many other duties those two took for granted, fell on Adagio's shoulders.
At that point, Adagio turned a corner. Not in terms of better appreciating her fellow sirens or having a sudden epiphany regarding the worth of free-willed human life. She literally turned a corner onto an emptier street, then noticed something odd. Any siren worth her voice could tell how many beings were paying attention to her, the psychic weight of their regard like the physical sensation of clothing, so continually present that her mind filtered it out most of the time. But now Adagio felt more eyes on her than she could account for given the few other people on the sidewalk this afternoon.
She held back a curse. As she'd feared, she'd already gotten a little sloppy. It could have been one of the girls with magic tracking her, hoping to strike while the sirens were vulnerable. Probably Sunset Shimmer; she'd be the truly dangerous one if she ever got her edge back.
But after a few moments with the skin crawling on her back as she waited for the knife, Adagio realized that the balding apes around her, all of them as psychically sensitive as the average potato, seemed to have noticed something off as well. They kept looking behind her. And... above her?
Well. When she'd said she missed weather control, she hadn't meant that she wanted pegasi spying on her. Or whatever it was. Without breaking her stride, Adagio fished a compact out of a hidden pocket in her jacket and flipped it open.
Whatever she'd expected to see in the mirror, it wasn't some giant metal lozenge held aloft by four tiny helicopter rotors, with a camera lens in the middle of the main body like the eye of an Arimaspi. Human toys just got more ridiculous every decade...
But this one didn't amuse her. Not with how, between the pressure of its regard, the unbroken string of befuddled expressions on the primates, and the faint but constant humming sound she now knew to listen for, it was clearly following her.
Still, Adagio hadn't survived in this world as long as she had without the ability to think on her feet, even if she hated the things. She kept walking for another block or two, then without any visible warning, turned into the first alley she saw.
Her follower nearly overshot the alley, backtracking and flying in after several complex-looking maneuvers, its camera showing nothing but dumpsters and brick walls.
Adagio smirked up at it, standing just a step inside the alley and directly beneath the contraption. She doubted her ability to charm some chunk of plastic, and experiments over the last few decades had confirmed that siren song lost its magic when recorded, but she didn't need spells to bluff someone.
That just brought her to the matter of what to do with the thing, and there, she had to admit that the human body had a few advantages on her true form. Opposable digits and greater flexibility made for much more accurate projectiles than slapping something with her tail and hoping it made contact with something she liked even less.
The thrown rock nailed one of the rotors, unbalancing the device and sending it into a tailspin. Once it smacked into the pavement, Adagio circled it, watching for any further resistance. Satisfied, she moved in for the kill.
The last thing the construct saw was the toe of a high-heeled boot approaching at high speed.
Twilight Sparkle grumbled to herself as the feed from her latest camera drone went dead. In hindsight, she really should've suspected that Subject B1 knew she was being pursued when she turned down a dead-end alley. Still, there was some data to gather from the observation, especially her interactions with B2 and B3. And that didn't even get into the A group...
She gasped as she realized she'd been so focused on setting up the surveillance network, she'd neglected to take notes until now. A digital recorder clicked on the moment she tracked it down in the... suboptimally organized lab space. "Undocumented Energy Research, Phase 2, Day 2, Entry 1: The scanners I placed around Canterlot High were a step in the right direction, but it wasn't enough. The recent spikes have yielded intriguing readings, but I still can't tell what precisely they're detecting, much less how to interpret the data. Thus, I have deployed remote observation drones to investigate the sources of the anomalies, providing greater context for the readings.
"Energetically active subjects have divided themselves into two groups, henceforth labeled A and B. Group A appears to consist of the participants in the event that precipitated Phase 1 of my research, six to seven girls attending Canterlot High, the site of said event. Group B consists of three newcomers, whose near-absent social media footprint raises as many questions as the hits I got from facial recognition scans of newspaper archives.
"Subject B1 is more observant and aggressive than initially believed, disabling and destroying a drone within minutes of noticing it. That she appears to be the moderating influence of her group raises a number of concerns. I will suspend research into Group B until I feel better prepared to face such confrontational personalities."
Twilight turned to a different monitor, one that showed a group of girls gathered in front of a house as grey as the resident wasn't. "Group A appears far less situationally aware." She squinted at the girl with her face. "And Subject A7 raises many questions that merit further investigation."