Pound and Pumpkin Tales 2

by Never2muchpinkie


11-8: Break the illusion

Flurry and the rest were walking through the Crystal Empire. After a few minutes they reached the spot for the Crystal Heart and set it in place.

It lit up beautifully, pouring out over the Crystal Empire. As the light reached them ponies began leaving their houses to join in on the happiness.

It all felt so special.

The children beamed as Cadance and Shining gave them credit for Sombra’s defeat.

“Well, my daughter is quite something,” Cadance said proudly. “She saved all our lives. Shoot, I think it’s time to retire and put her in charge.”

That got a lot of laughs out of the crystal ponies, but Flurry’s gaze grew hard.

“Well, after that train wreck of an interruption I think we should restart the Crystal Fair. Goodness knows we all need to come down from that horrible experience.”

That statement was met with cheering.

As some of her friends went to follow Cadance they found themselves being dragged backwards by her magic, and now they could see Flurry’s expression.

“What’s up?” asked Flash. “What’s with that face?”

“Exactly,” said Plum. “You opposed to fun and celebrating now?”

Flurry was glaring hard at the departing Cadance. “That’s NOT my mom!” she said angrily.

“What do you mean?” asked Masky.

“You remember Pound and Pumpkin’s birthday where you first met me?”

“Yeah.”

“Aunt Twilight had me brought out to their place from the Crystal Empire because they all knew I had a problem I was keeping secret.”

“Sure,” said Tree Leaf. “I remember it was tough getting you to open up.”

“Because I was born an alicorn I had a crazy fear of being forced onto the throne if something happened to my mother, and my parents both heard me when I was ranting about those fears.

“She knew how much I was suffering from holding onto that fear, and because of that I know my real mother would never say something about being put on the throne at my age to everyone, even as a joke.

“I should have known something was up. We defeated Sombra almost effortlessly. It’s never that simple.”

“So,” said Mayhem, “you think this is like what happened during the superhero adventure, and that Sombra is using magic to disguise himself as your mom?”

Flurry shook her head. “No. It wouldn’t make sense that way. We destroyed Sombra. There can’t be two of them.

“I think we’re all trapped in the illusion of Sombra’s door.”

“So then what happened?” asked Sweet Pea. “I thought that door was supposed to show you your greatest fears, but we just got to humiliate Sombra by beating him so easily. That hardly seems worthy of a ‘greatest fear.’ “

“Maybe,” said Spring, “he’s setting you up. He wants you to think you won, just so it will hurt more when you find out it was just a trick.”

Flurry got a curious look on her face.

“That seems wrong too,” said Pound. “Sombra did curse the door to show someone illusions, but I don’t think he’s controlling it.”

“And if that’s the case,” said Pumpkin, “then we only should have seen bad, scary things here once we were put under its spell.”

“Oh!” said Peppermint. “I got it!”

“Got what?” asked Chocolate.

She pointed at Flurry’s neck. “Flurry has a piece of the Crystal Heart around her neck. She can’t be hurt by the effects of dark magic.”

Flurry used her hoof to lift up the little gem. “That… would explain things. So without the influence of dark magic the illusion tried to show us the opposite of our biggest fears? It gave us what we wanted the most.”

“Okay, so what do we do?” asked Mayhem. “The plan was to call out to you to break you from the illusion once it got to you, but we were all caught by it.”

“Probably because we were too close to you,” said Pound. “Spike was far away from Twilight when she was caught.”

Flurry sat down, putting a hoof to her chin thoughtfully. “Aunt Starlight taught me about illusion spells. The better the illusion the harder it becomes for your mind to see it as anything but reality.”

“So how do we get out of this?” asked Spring.

“Well… that’s the tricky part. There’s usually only two ways out. One way is like what happened with Spike, where having someone on the outside pulls you out. Obviously that isn’t happening since we all got caught in the illusion.”

“So what’s the other way?” asked Peppermint.

Flurry sighed. “And that’s the even trickier part. You have to convince your mind that you’re inside of an illusion.”

Plum’s eyebrow rose. “But didn’t that already happen with you? You said that your mother said something she would never say.”

Flurry shook her head. “Not good enough.

“Think of it like… a war inside your brain. Even if something seems suspicious to you your brain will think of excuses to justify it. What happened after I hit the door has all seemed perfectly normal. We didn’t get mysteriously teleported to Canterlot like Aunt Twilight.

“Getting the Crystal Heart and beating Sombra may have seemed easy, but it could just be because he didn’t reset his traps, or he didn’t account for someone with super speed. And everyone is capable of making careless statements, even if we personally don’t think they should say something like that.

“So even though things seem off to one part of my brain, another part of it says that nothing is wrong. In order to get your brain to break out of the illusion you have to convince it that it’s nothing but an illusion.”

“And how do we do that?” asked Chocolate.

Flurry closed her eyes. “You’d have to see or hear something that seems utterly impossible. It’s not enough for it to simply seem odd. It has to be something your brain cannot make an excuse for.”

She let out a sigh. “As things now stand it’s impossible to get out of this illusion without it hurting.”

“What do you mean?” asked Spring.

“Every minute we’re stuck in this illusion is another minute that Sombra can torture my parents. We don’t have the time to waste observing this illusion world to find something so out of place we can snap ourselves out.

“That being the case, the only other option we have is to create that impossibility ourselves.”

“How does that work?” asked Masky. “I thought you said that to get out we’d have to see something so suspicious our brains couldn’t make an excuse for it.”

“You’ll see,” Flurry said, shivering a little.

With a flash of her horn they were all teleported towards the middle of the Crystal Fair.

“Okay, we’re here,” said Sweet Pea. “Now what?”

Flurry sighed. “Now you sit here and watch. It's not going to work for me but it should wake some of you up. All we need is one to wake up so they can get the others out.”

Her horn light up, and her magic changed into dark magic. She flew up into the sky, and the other children gasped as she shot down, blowing up one of the stands as screams rang out through the crowd.

Flurry continued firing at all the other stands. The happy atmosphere completely vanished as ponies expressed their terror of her and fled.

Cadance and Shining ran up. “Flurry, what are you doing?” Cadance asked fearfully. "Why do you have dark magic?"

Flurry landed, closing her eyes tight as her horn’s glow increased in intensity. "Forgive me," she said quietly. Even though she couldn’t see them she certainly heard their screams of pain as her spell landed.

The other children were speechless. Flurry had attacked her own family.

Now Flurry had set her sights on them. Once more her horn lit up with a bright, dark light. “You’re next!” she said coldly. “Goodbye, friends!”

As the beam was released and heading towards them all of Mayhem’s old friends suddenly found themselves back in front of Sombra’s door, blinking as they looked around.

Pound fell to the ground, panting. “T-that… was scary.”

“No kidding,” said Pumpkin. “But Flurry would NEVER EVER attack her family like that, and she loves us too much to attack us. That was completely impossible.”

“Got that right,” said Tree Leaf.

Peppermint looked around, seeing Mayhem’s new friends and Flurry were still immobile. “I guess it doesn’t work on Flurry herself, and the other children don’t know Flurry as well as we do.”

“That’s fine,” said Masky. “Now that we’re free we just have to break them out."

They each took a child, calling out their name and shaking them. It only took about ten seconds before they all stirred and began shaking their heads as they broke free of the trance.

Flash closed his eyes for a few moments to let his mind catch up. When he opened them again he looked around. “Shoot. We really were in an illusion.”

“That was kinda scary,” said Sweet Pea. “I mean, Flurry was right, and her plan worked, but that was still scary.”

“No kidding,” said Spring. “She seemed like she was possessed, just attacking everything in sight.

Mayhem put an arm around Flurry. “Hey, Flurry. Are you okay?”

Flurry didn’t answer at first. She looked distraught.

“Oh, right,” said Masky. “Even if it wasn’t real you still had to attack someone that looked like family.”

“Just… just give me a minute,” said Flurry. “I’ll be okay.”

“I think we could all use a minute to relax,” said Pound. “So let’s just sit down and rest a bit before we continue on.”

Off to the side Twilight felt a desire to hold her niece, but held herself back. She wasn’t a part of the game world, after all.

She was pleased that they had managed to escape the illusion. Starlight had been teaching her well. Now they just had to obtain the Heart and defeat Sombra for real.