//------------------------------// // Chapter 2B // Story: My World Is Empty Without You // by McPoodle //------------------------------// My World Is Empty Without You Chapter 2B In a cell deep underground, a door opened and a tan-colored pegasus with a monochrome mane was unceremoniously tossed onto a small bed before the door was slammed behind her. She still didn’t know what was going on. Why would they spend hours doing...those things to her, and then heal her of all her injuries? Sure, she was missing all her primary feathers, but the rest of it seemed so...pointless. Rainbow Dash was surprised for a moment at how very nice the bed was. Until she remembered who was really in charge here. The same somepony who basically just tortured her for fun. Rainbow decided that Fluttershy was already being possessed by the Dragon Emperor. It was the only conclusion that made any sense. Daring Do got up from her cot, and looked around. The wall outside the bars of her prison was gone. Gone and yet not gone: Guards walked by acting like the open space was a wall, and steadfastly refused to look at it. The fourth wall of a theater was being quite literally presented before her. The captive reached up to make sure her pith helmet was still in place and set at a cocky angle. It was. Rainbow Dash had noticed the changes to her pelt and mane colors. She knew she wasn’t playing herself. And she knew the pony she was playing was named Daring Do. She knew that not from her captors—who so far had not told her anything—but from staring at the book covers when she was at Twilight’s and the egghead was reading her “favorite adventure series”. But that was all that Rainbow knew about Daring Do, because Rainbow was “too kewl for skool.” * * * Twilight Sparkle gripped her head. “It hurts!” “What does?” Vinyl asked. “Somepony, somewhere, is abusing the Laws of Spelling!” Fluttershy leaned back in her chair and sighed, staring at a scattered array of papers across the table. "Can the group run without the spy as the foil?" She asked Angel, turning to look at him and Ryooki the Cabbit, currently playing tug of war with a particularly large carrot. "I really was planning on having the obvious but wrong mole. Somepony well spoken, suave, but…I can't think of a character that fits right now." “Well, you could just have one of us be the spy, I’m super suave!” Ryooki said with a grin, losing the carrot and immediately becoming dejected. “Aw…” Fluttershy tossed them both a few more carrots, turning back to the sheet of paper inside the typewriter, ink still shimmering slightly in the light as it dried. “Well, I suppose I could make it work still, I just need to make the rest of the team seem more suspicious to Daring. A few small changes, maybe a certain zebra-raised pony showing up where she isn’t supposed to…” Nothing was happening. Either somepony else was being the hero, or else Daring Do was the hero. Daring Do was locked in prison. Rainbow Dash might not be an avid reader, but she was quite fond of etheric dramas. I am the hero...AWESOME! she thought. So now what? Daring Do looked once more around the confines of her cell. “Hello!” she cried out. “Is anypony there?” “I am here,” came a faint voice from the other side of the wall behind Daring. Daring put her ear up against the wall. “Who are you?” “You know...I’m not really sure anymore. Was I somepony important? Maybe…” Daring wasn’t in the mood for riddles. “Do you know what you’re in here for?” There was a loud pause. Daring pounded on the wall. “You’re not asleep, are you?” “Huh? Oh, sorry, I fell asleep. I was dreaming about my cutie mark. It was a nice mark...I think?” Daring’s blood ran cold. The Staff! Rainbow’s eyes darted around. I didn’t think that! “What do you mean…’was’?” she demanded. “It was a nice...sort of...swirly thing...with a big star on the bottom,” the unseen mare said dreamily. “Went well with the stripe in my mane.” “Look, did losing your cutie mark have anything to do with this forked staff?” Daring asked. Yeah, that’s right, Rainbow thought glumly to herself. Daring asked. As in not me. “Yeah, that’s the one!” the other pony said, her voice animated for once. “It really hurt!” Daring sunk her head into her hooves. “What have I done!” Hoofsteps approached, slowly. A shape in the dark stopped just out of view and the pony, clearly a unicorn, watched Daring for a moment. “You did what you’ve always done, Daring Do,” the mare said, voice cold but hauntingly familiar in its inflection. “You took a valuable relic, and you brought it to those who know how to use it best. That is…really, all. No adventure this time, no heroics. Just a job already done. By the way, we got everything we want out of you, so you’re free to go.” “What?!” exclaimed Daring, racing for the bars. “Just like that? What’s to keep me from telling the press everything that happened to me. Once I’m free…” The shrouded unicorn laughed coldly, cutting Daring off. “Free? Do you think you will be released to freedom, Daring Do? On the contrary, you are being released to your doom. Before the sun rises tomorrow, you will be cut down...by one of your own friends.” The voice faded into the distance. “And with you gone, there will be nothing to stop the full demonstration of the Staff of Sameness.” With a click, and the grinding of stone, the back wall slid aside to reveal the storm sewers of Canterlot, but as Daring turned to leave there was another sound. A shuffling. “Are you…are you going to leave now?” the soft voice from the adjacent cell asked, seeming to already know the answer. Rainbow Dash scowled. Low blow on the ‘secret traitor’ business, she thought to herself. Daring began to feel along the various stones on the wall. Now the least you can do for me, Fluttershy, is...ha! I knew it! With a click, one of the stones depressed, causing a section of wall to slide away. The small chamber on the other side didn’t even have a nice bed! Daring reached out a hoof to the blinking unicorn on the other side. “Come with me if you want to live,” she said suavely. Rainbow inwardly beamed. I don’t care that I didn’t come up with that line, she thought. I’m still totally adding it to my vocabulary. The unicorn took her hoof, and was pulled into the storm sewer, finally free from the small room as she blinked owlishly up at Daring. “Daring Do, at your service,” she said with a mock bow. “Mauve Shadow. Th…Thanks. I didn’t…actually think you’d save me,” the mare admitted. She had a pale lilac coat, with turquoise streaks in her purple mane, and deep blue eyes that seemed to rarely focus on anything in particular. In Rainbow’s eyes, this boiled down to: purple coat, darker purple mane with a highlight that was cut in front with a ruler. Oh yeah, and she used to have a star in her cutie mark. You do know that there are more unicorns in existence than just Twilight Sparkle, right Fluttershy? she thought to herself. But as they made their way through the sewers, and finally ascended onto a less busy street, the unicorn seemed empty, staring around but not really taking in anything she saw. It was only in the sunlight that Daring could see the greyness in the mare’s coat, and the two black bars that took the place of her cutie mark. “Just wait until you meet my friends!” Daring exclaimed, trying to be extra-happy to lift the ex-prisoner’s spirits. “We’ll find that staff…no, that’s stupid. The bad guy will hold on to it until the very moment he uses it—it’s what I would do in his place.” “You could use the Cruciform…” Mauve said in a low voice, looking down at a hoof that was poking at the pavement. “What’s the Cruciform?” Daring asked. “Well you know how the Staff of Sameness was created by Mage Meadowbrook in order to tame dangerous creatures? Well Starswirl the Bearded was suspicious that it might be used for evil purposes, so he created the Cruciform of Diversity to restore the differences that the Staff removed from its victims. My team already had the Cruciform, so that’s why we hired you to find the Staff.” Her eyes clouded for a moment. “Wait…I had a team?” Rainbow Dash recognized the cue, and mentally stepped back as the next line was supplied to her. “You were the one who hired me,” Daring said with some degree of surprise. “Your ego was so enormous it covered you like a cloak—no wonder I didn’t recognize you as you are now. At the time, I waved off the warning signals because I was so eager to find one of the Wards of the Pillars.” “Do you think Daring Do and the Ward of the Pillar would make a better title for the book?” Fluttershy asked her companions. Angel leveled a cold gaze. “Fluttershy, nothing is ever going to beat Daring Do and the Instrument of Her Own Destruction.” “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Rainbow took control once more to add her own commentary. “Wow, your own team betrayed you. Were you really that obnoxious, or did you volunteer yourself as a guinea pig?” Mauve Shadow racked her brain, then sighed in resignation. “I don’t think I’ll ever know now. I apologize for whatever awful plan I’ve set in motion. The least I can do is make up for it. I remember where the Cruciform is being held: the Canterlot University archives. That’s one of the few clear memories I still have left.” “And where are the archives?” Daring asked eagerly. “Ah. That’s one of the things I don’t remember that well. Or at all.” Daring sighed in exasperation. * * * “...And that’s how we’ll rescue Daring Do!” Twilight Sparkle concluded. “It’s the perfect plan!” “Hi, girls,” Daring said casually as she walked up to the others. “Wow, Tw...Miss Quill, your plan is so amazing that it worked without us having to do anything!” Spike exclaimed. “Who's the copycat pony?” Pinkamena mumbled, half-laying on a crate as she pointed at the mare following Daring. “Yeah, I’m saying you’re a phony,” she added under her breath. “Huh?” the unicorn mare mumbled, looking around as though she’d just been woken up. “Copywhatnow?” Twilight did a double take. “Do I know you?” “This is Mauve Shadow,” Daring explained. “I busted her out of prison with me.” She looked carefully around the group. “Now please, please tell me that there’s one more pony hiding behind a crate or something, some pony near and dear to Dar...to me. The Shrimp.” “The Shrimp?” Applejack asked. Twilight rolled her eyes. “That’s the other pony’s sidekick. We don’t talk about him.” “So…no explosives?” The others all shook their heads in the negative. With a sigh, she closed her eyes and pointed at her benefactor. “Brass Quill.” This was a trick that Vinyl had taught the others after the first dream. If you thought of a pony in disguise, the dream provided the name of the disguise. “Yes?” “If Spike went totally evil, you could just blow him up with magic, right?” Spike looked back and forth between Twilight and Daring Do. “Look, this isn’t one of those ‘pony supremacist’ scenarios, is it? Because I’m just a poor defenseless baby dragon.” And his eyes expanded to the size of dinner plates. “Ok, that…That can’t be normal, right? Does he have some kind of deformity?” Mauve mumbled from behind Daring. “Dragons have acute control over their size,” Twilight lectured, “extending even to control over...well, I wouldn’t remember the rest of that. I must have heard it in a lecture by some famous academic. Can we get back to the need to blow individuals up?” “In case they go totally evil, or somethin’ like that,” AJ said, arching an eyebrow and leaning on a backpack full of Daring’s gear. “Look, is there an all-night diner somewhere around here?” asked Daring. “Because I’ve got quite a story to tell!” And like a book flipping open to the perfect page, Vinyl had one in mind. Quiet, well-traveled but not popular with tourists, and most importantly it was directly in between two possible locations for the Cruciform that she had in mind. Wait, what’s the ‘Cruciform’? Vinyl thought to herself. “Wait, how would Vinyl know about the Cruciform yet?” Angel asked Fluttershy. “Oops, right.” Fluttershy picked up the jar of correction fluid between her feathers, and took out the last part of the last sentence that she had typed. And suddenly Vinyl had no idea why she was confused, which was even more confusing.