//------------------------------// // Terrors of the Earth // Story: To the Gods // by Comma Typer //------------------------------// The grandmaster has died. With the little respect they have for him, the Power Ponies close his eyes and wrap him in his cloak as a temporary body bag. A temporary peace to rest in before six hooves of dirt cover him up. The name rings in their heads. Verumarendi: real, somewhere down here with them, ready to cause havoc in this world too. A comic arc with a reality-breaking villain would be somewhat suspect, but when one operates without the “restraints” of ethics and morality, of what should and should not be done, only focusing on what one could do… In Spike’s mental cinema, a movie plays: Manehattan burns, skyscrapers vanish into nothing, and ponies fade from this reality. The same in other places: Las Pegasus plummeting to destruction, the cloud city crumbling to the ground—shove away any notion of how cool or epic it’d be. Canterlot suffers with the death of the Royal Sisters themselves, the mountain metropolis sliding the slopes to death. Ponyville will not be spared: Twilight and everyone else disappears. All in the name of controlling the world above, whatever that is: a true eldritch dimension, the control room to reality itself. And the bodies. The most powerful unicorn of the secret sect, their ringleader, barely survived. No energy left to open the door. A couple more minutes of crawling past the door should’ve been his ticket to safety, but his mortal coil failed him. Someone must’ve dealt him the fatal blow. Stockrooms, small kitchen, and makeshift cafeteria. Canned foods make their home there, though many are broken with raw contents spilled onto the ground. More rooms: food stockpiles, water stockpiles, water purifiers. Bunk bedrooms of cheap wooden beds hastily made to accommodate the cult’s believers. One may mistake this for an underground motel in place of the evil lair it truly is. “I don’t know about you,” Mare-velous starts, “but all this feels very new. I don’t see any sign of decay here. Only damage I see is fighting damage or something magical.“ At the end of the room, a stairway stands in their path. At the bottom lies limp a pony on the floor. Fili-Second leans down to poke her head. “Uh, you there? Hmm. Nah, she’s dead.” Another unicorn down on the checklist, matching his physical description to the Matter-Horn’s list: hailing from Bronclyn and a co-leader of sorts before his death, a former student at Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, was likely a shoo-in for the magic-intensive Enchantment Division. But Radiance can only recoil at the random death. “Two members down, both high-ranking. How much more of this can we take?” “At this rate, every pony may be toast,” says Fili-Second standing up from frisking the dead pony’s lab coats. “Mister President and Mister Veep could only get this far out.” A sparkle from the jewelry catches her sight. “The bloodenstones seemed useless too.” “Maybe Verumarendi got hold of the bloodenstore’s magic source,” Zapp suggests before heading deeper. Medicine supplies and storage rooms dominate the next floor. Tiny farms of magic spices and flasked potions line the shelves, some broken with glass pieces scattered on the floor. Someone went here to get help, but they must’ve been very hurt, hurt enough to never get a decent grip. A theory that plausibly explains the corpse at the other side of the room. The bedrooms reek of death. Under a bunk bed, one more cadaver. Not a unicorn this time but a pegasus. Athletic with a huge wingspan and a cutie mark of lightning and barbells. Each new body displays a new injury, bruise, or other agony: broken bones, failing hearts, damaged brains. Graduates with good degrees, talented workers with lengthy resumes, comic artisans with esteemed tenures in the Enchanted Division, battle-ready horses with their latest scuffle in the penthouse office: drained dead. Moments of dread and concern, of hesitation, flicker on the superheroes’ faces as they trot through a silent massacre. Another hatch opens. No magic shield: just turn the wheel and apply delicate unicorn magic or homegrown Earth pony strength. Lying beyond, another style of hallway: darker shades of yellow and brown. The rooms inside, barred off by stronger hatches, to be opened by magic of arcane complexity or the most brute of forces. Labels name the rooms: M-713, M-581, Z-091, or some other letter-number combination. Curiosity leads Radiance to put her ear up against one of the hatches. “Strange. No one’s alive, but I could feel somepony’s magic signature.” Matter-Horn speaks up, looking past a shivering Spike: “Any idea on their identity?” Radiance puts her ear away. “Not sure. What I can say is that I’ve felt this one before though it’s fading quickly. Recent death, I believe. Couldn’t have been more than a few hours ago.” At that, the other ponies stand by the hatch. Another reinforced hunk of security to break apart. Spike stands back, avoiding any future collateral damage. Earth pony magic shakes the locks loose, pegasus winds wind up and break the gears, and unicorn magic completes the deal. The door quivers, the locks let go, the whole apparatus falls to the floor under the howling of wingpowered wind. Zapp reveals a sheepish grin. “Uh, whoops? Sorry about that! That was overkill.” After the embarrassment, they look inside: nothing in the pitch dark. Matter-Horn’s scanning spell spots a light switch and she remotely flips it on. Their mouths hang open mute. Spike lets loose a scream. Issue #057, among the first issues to be enchanted and the story closest to the dragon’s heart: submerged into the Power Ponies’ world for the first time with his pony friends coming along. An important lesson was learned there: that he mattered. Beyond that, there was the Mane-iac herself: in canon, the insane Maretropolis mane-care big shot, leading her own group of organized criminals on the side to stronghoof small hair salons to do her bidding. Her evil machinations one day pushed her off the deep end and into a vat of malevolent magic potion, scrambling her mind into the mane-obsessed hysterical villain she’s known for today. Defeated, she was turned over to a maximum-security prison, never to be seen again. Surrounded by dead henchponies in their austere cloaks, the mane-crazy mare lay lifeless. By her side, a comic book ripped to shreds. Her darkened coat under her burned clothes, her mane and tail of great lengths littering the floor. Nothing to see here but the deceased. Spike fails to find words. Then, “I-is she…?” Fili-Second checks out the mane tyrant’s pulse. “Nope. She’s also dead. Kaput. Capiche. Out of the zone.” “B-but that can’t be right!” blubbers a confused Mare-velous. “We went to the prison yesterday to see if the villains were let out in the chaos, and Mane-iac was still there! I saw her with my two eyes, and my two ears heard all that endless laughing!” While Fili-Second and Mare-velous argue, Rager lifts the chopped-up comic. A skim later: “This may be a different Mane-iac. Another Mane-iac from another version of our world.” “Wait, what? Wait, gimmie me that!“ Matter-Horn encases the comic in her magic. Closes her eyes and casts a perlustration spell over the item. Something falls past her, something of immense worth, something grand. Too grand. Too out of this world. Like the magic in the portal machine to take them to this world, of something new, of something horrifying— “Get away from me!” Flings the comic at the supervillain. Dead; no reaction but a thud. The book adorns Mane-iac’s head like a tattered crown. “What is it?” Mare-velous asks the unnerved unicorn, wary of the dead villain. “Is it another one of those existential crises?” Takes seconds to clear her head, to cool. “Maybe not for us. I… I have to check her DNA… or at least her hoofprint. Rager has the right stuff, but I have to make sure, have to…” Once Matter-Horn keeps going, she can’t be stopped. The frantic leader puts her hoof up to indicate silence—concentration time—and she focuses her magic into a formidable corona, slowly raising the Mane-iac’s leg. Her blank eyes flash white. Nothing else as she remains dead. Her leg drops stiff. Left alone, dead on her chair. Throbs and aches attack Matter-Horn’s head, but she stands firm. “It’s her. Just not quite her. This isn’t the Mane-iac we fought all those years ago.” The enchanted comic book. Now another enchanted comic book. Another world so similar, maybe ninety-nine percent similar, but not a full match. Unspoken questions about parallel universes only fuel the fire. Thus they leave the room. The great delusion persists in the other hatch-protected rooms. Corpses populate the spaces with antagonists front and center. They are the usual suspects, the ones Spike and even casual fans can name on the fly. At times, it reaches beyond the comics: Ahuizotl is part of the gallery of dead rogues, though Matter-Horn and the other ponies disbelieve the Tenochtitlan guardian’s real-life existence. “Magic’s getting stronger the deeper we go. We could be catching Verumarendi’s signature soon. If we confront her right away, it’ll be a quick sprint to the finish.” She pauses to inspect Ahuizotl’s rigid body one more time. “Still, is… is this what their grand plan is all about? Experiments on animating fictional villains? These ‘scientists...’ they have no idea what they’ve unleashed!” “So we’re not the first ones?” asks Mare-velous as they leave the final room and head to another descending staircase. More cloaked ponies lie strewn about, united in death. “I could imagine that, but still…” You’re only a stepping stone, another brick in the building of our grand plan. “Deep in thought, Spike?” asks Matter-Horn. A wince comes up. You’re too perceptive. He’s turned his back to one of the hatches. His frown betrays him. “Oh, I was. I was just…” “Scared, aren’t you?” Adrenaline rushes through his veins. The baby dragon nods, head down low. “Scared of Verumarendi? That even though we’re the best of the best, you’d still be no match for her?” Spike lets slip a nod. Touches the tips of his claws. “Sums it up, yeah.” Rager bites her lip, pawing idly at the floor. “We’re afraid too, little guy. We’re not a hundred percent sure how to defeat her even with all we’ve learned tonight. But we have a vague impression of her which is better than nothing.” “What you get when you’re dealing with a self-styled alicorn,” Matter-Horn says with a cheeky smirk. She raises a brow upon seeing Spike’s confusion. “Well, the enchanted issue you had didn’t dive into the tiny details of our communication with her. In the letters she wrote to us—or death threats, really— she described herself with wings as long as rivers and a horn as tall as a spear, bearing muscles and height on high enough of a level to disgrace an olympian. Yeah, Spike, laugh it up. At least she’s arrogant.” Taps her chin as she trots. “Though we’re not sure if she’d be a pony anyway. Maybe her alicorn form is just what we can extrapolate, a representation of her in our world. It’d be like drawing a 3D cube on a 2D piece of paper.” “So Verumarendi might not be a mare at all?!” “Likely. The writers must’ve had a pony in mind as a template. I assume most Clockwisely writers are ponies. On that note, perhaps that’s why her magic signature is way stronger than expected: consuming the magic of these ponies from other worlds to gain enough power in this one to ascend. Who knows what atrocities she’ll commit if she gets that far?” Extra-dimensional creatures are no stranger to Spike thanks to the occasional sci-fi comic with weird aliens driving weird spaceships and speaking weird languages. Verumarendi as an alien? Then she’s a wild card: a nightmare to analytical and rational minds. Fili-Second pats the imaginative Spike on the head so many times, it’s a thousand ping pong balls bouncing on his skull. “You gotta stay strong, buckaroo. We all have to stay strong. And hey, if we lose, we lose together, and if I die—heh, that’s one way of cutting down on my caffeine fix, am I right?” It’s enough to elicit laughter across the group especially from the highly-strung dragon. “Thanks for that. Heh. I think you really needed that, huh?” “We all do. Can’t go out without a bang, you know.” The next floor provides more hatch-hidden horrors in equal-opportunity bunches: heroes joined villains in death and random characters also dead whether they be a one-time street pedestrian or a background astronaut from an artificial satellite. A diversity of comic books, from fantasy to science fiction, rest in the corner as used-up ingredients to these fatal experiments. Neither the animated characters nor the defictionalizing enchanters survived whatever onslaught befell them. Wind howls from still another hatch: a cacophony of ferocious gusts. The run-down door hanging on a hinge flaps against the rolling gale. Deadly breezes twist in and out of the place at the same time, whistling surreal and ear-killing notes. At the far end of the room, rifts in spacetime spin and swirl. A rub of the eyes later, and Spike gets a sharper look of the experiments inside: an uncontrollable sandstorm desert in one portal, an empty space through some sci-fi windows in another, and an emptied city not unlike Maretropolis in still another. Nobody’s out there. Nopony’s home. “Portals,” Rager identifies. “These... these are portals to other worlds. Comic worlds. Novel worlds. To be here… only to be made low.” Through the third portal, she sees a decaying high-rise buckle under its knees. It crashes onto the streets below, turning into metal dust. A magic beam is fired into its urban world: a scanning spell. The beam boomerangs back to Matter-Horn who receives it with glassy eyes. Seconds later, a shake of the head, and then, “Deprived. They’re... deprived. Closed off from the rest of the world. These have been quarantined… closed spaces… and I don’t know what they did to these places, but it’s gone. All of it. These places have the blood sucked out of them, and they’ve become husks of their former selves.” To Spike, “Do you know any of these worlds, by chance?” A second of hesitation gives way to Spike naming the franchises these worlds, these places, appeared in: a holy temple to a pantheon of alicorn gods fighting a world-breaking war, a once-mighty spaceship from which space rangers guarded the final frontier, and the city hideout to a bunch of scrappy misfit heroes from the resistance. “And they all have magic there! Even the space one has a background magic field. Are you telling me that—?“ “Yes, I’m telling you that. The magic in there was either born wrong due to faulty animation… or they stole the rich pockets of magic from these places.” The others gasp, closing in on the walls. In Radiance’s terror, “So you’re saying these are the magic sources for the bloodenstones? If that’s so, they’ve been running on the fumes of fictional worlds they’ve messed with! Well, not in my backyard, they won’t!” “It’s a working hypothesis,” clarifies Matter-Horn, calming everyone else down, “but it’s the most reliable one so far. It’s not just that, though. The bad guys, the good guys, anyone else from these other worlds: it’s possible the enchanters sucked the power and magic from them too. I wouldn’t expect any of them to be alive now, and I don’t want to know what happens to these worlds without their heroes. Or even villains.” “What about magic artifacts?” Mare-velous adds. “I’m sure these worlds have their own… what do you call them, mackerel muffins?” “MacGuffins,” Matter-Horn corrects. “It’s crass to call things such as Spike’s Elements of Harmony MacGuffins, but it’s a good catch-all term for powerful and valuable items for which ponies will do anything to protect or destroy. It’s not a big stretch to assume they’ve also stolen some of these worlds’ important artifacts.” “But if all the main characters are dead,” Spike says on the tips of his toes, “then that means Verumarendi has the power of dozens of superheroes and supervillains just like that!” A tired sigh leaves Matter-Horn’s muzzle. “We worry about her when we get there.” Their journey unveils more portals in other rooms. Portals to nothing, portals to desolate places, portals to the rest of the room since no one activated them yet. No lives there for their corpses take their place, and so the death toll rises even in these near inter-dimensional rooms. Zapp slows down to a hover, ears standing up. “Um, what’s that?” “What’s what?” Radiance asks. “That slithering sound.” Everyone strains their ears. Something slimy and hissing: slithering. Steps on the floor, echoing down the hallways. Mare-velous’s ears flick up. “It’s big. It’s… it’s not it. There’s several of them. Tons of them.” Matter-Horn lights up her horn. “Hostile?” Zapp takes a defensive stance in the air. “Gotta be hostile. Verumarendi, is that you, you jerkface?!” “It could be from one of the other worlds,” Rager adds. “Who knows how long the portals have been left on.” Fili-Second leans back on the wall, tapping her hoof. “At least it isn’t the devil-mare herself. Some bum-rushing army from another world will be diddly-squat. What’s the worst that can happen?” “Alien hydras!” Mare-velous’s war cry brings all eyeballs to the other side of the hallway. Shadows make way for the five-headed spider creatures: eight legs, a dozen eyes on each of their teeth-rearing heads. They crawl on the floors, the walls, the ceiling: they leave no surface untouched. The nerd in Spike cannot resist. “The Clashoff Hydras from the Light Rammers! They invaded the ESS Verne, leaving the captain as the last survivor. They’re the remnants of an evil empire that used to span the entire galaxy—“ “Save the bedtime story for later!” Rager shoves Spike aside while her eyes flare an angry red anger. “We’re in the middle of something!” A lasso trips a hydra over, but it doesn’t stop a head from shooting a stream of fire at Mare-velous. Commands and calls to move or attack are shouted frantic over hydra screeches. Rager dodges hydras’ swipes and avoids many-headed bites before she bulks up again. Tight spaces limit the angry mare, but it doesn’t stop her boosted muscle tissue from soaking up damage. Laser beams, hooferangs, attack-construct shields, their own martial arts prowess: these make little progress against the endless horde of alien hydras slithering their way on all four sides of the hallways. “When will this stop?!” Radiance yells, slashing hydras with attack-construct weapons everywhere. “Don’t tell me they have an infinite population!” A bead of sweat drops down Spike’s forehead right after blasting his own stream of fire at a hydra. “If I recall correctly, the pods they sent to the spaceship were self-sustaining. Heh-heh…?” A couple magic beams take two hydras down before they dissolve to dust, courtesy of Matter-Horn. “Then we destroy their only entry point here. Spike, you’re small.” (Spike doesn’t mind the statement.) “Do you think you can dodge the incoming hydras and disable the portal? We’ll do our best to keep them occupied.” His eyes bore into the abyss of crawling and hopping and shrieking hydras. An explosion sends a corpse flying overhead. The challenge taunts him, beckoning him to come and die in an impossible task. He salutes Matter-Horn. “Yes, ma’am!” And Spike charges through the alien cavalry, dodging hydras distracted by the juicy prey of dangerous ponies. A slide through a right turn then a drift through another turn thanks to his hard scales. He fires bolts of flame every which way, hitting hydras everywhere while sprinting for dear life. “Aagh!” A scratch and a scar, his hardy lavaproof scales not immune to the ripping of hydra claws. The scar drips blood. A hydra pounces. Fighting against the desire to protect his scar no matter what, he rolls on the floor. A sword of pain shoots up his arm and he bites his tongue to keep from screaming, but the dodge roll saves him from further trouble. The pouncing alien misses its mark and smashes into his comrades, slowing the stampede. An exasperated bolt of dragon fire then sprinkles enough chaos to slow everyone down. Spike keeps running, keeps dodging hydras, keeps charging into the portal room while holding on to his scarred arm. The one in the middle, the portal with the sci-fi world: numerous hydras shoot out of it like water out of a broken dam. A steady stream of fire against the portal singes the hydras but bounces off the portal. Any clog-up of dead hydras is pushed away by more living hydras swarming in. Searching, searching: a control panel! Scrambles to it, and he grabs hold of the lever, ready to pull it out of its sockets. Doubts arrive: What if this lever activates another portal and usher in more threats? Or maybe it’s not a lever but a button that does the trick. Or maybe it’s all broken and the lever might just attract the hydras somehow. No easy-to-read manuals here. Too late for second-guessing. A draconic growl sees the lever slammed home The correct portal closes, deactivating and becoming see-through. The remaining hydras he burns with his breath, chasing them while still dodging their swipes and bites and fires. The portal reactivates. Almost falls into it before fear yields to recognition: an endless ocean with an endless gray canopy of clouds above. Turbulent waters wave mightily, strong enough to sink anyone in their wake. He stands before the portal, puts a claw to his mouth, and whistles loud enough for the hydras to stop running and to turn to their new prey: himself. “Yeah, that’s me, you numbnuts! Come and get it!” The hydras stand still, analyzing him: prey, predator, trap, or other. They smell the shivering fear in his voice, and they bare their fangs. “That’s right! I’m talking to you! What, you’re afraid of a puny little dragon?” But what if I fall? What if they tackle me anyway and I fall into that portal? That’s… that’s ocean over there! That thing’s gonna kill me! Hydras leap after their spicy meal, never thinking he’ll duck and jump out of the way. Shrieks pile up behind him, then—splash! A dash to pull down another lever—they can jump high, even in an ocean void—and the portal closes, ridding him of hydra screams and the big blue sea. The thumping from his heart. The journey to this place somehow. The cold crawl of metal on the lever, half-freezing his claw. “Spike, you did it!” The Power Ponies rush in, taking a look at a tired and exhausted Spike. The mares: enough for him to slump on the floor and take a breather. They see the unmistakable smile growing on his face. “I… a-are you alright, g-girls?” “Yeah, we are.” Matter-Horn dusts off her mane from dead hydra dust. “They were starting to overwhelm us, actually. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many mooks in the span of five minutes. We might’ve pulled it off in the end, but we were running out of stamina.” “You’re alive, and that’s what matters,” Spike jabbers, cozying up to her just like he would to Twilight deep into a late study night back in the old treehouse. “And we’ve also indirectly saved the town and the rest of your kingdom,” Mare-velous smugly adds. “If we didn’t stop them, they could’ve gone up.” “Or they could’ve just gone straight to Verumarendi and finished the job for us, right?” is Fili-Second’s suggestion. Her idea is shot down by more level heads. “Seriously though, shouldn’t we close all the portals here? We’d do better without any more inter-dimensional threats coming in. They’d also do better without the threat of Verumarendi ruining their lives again.” After fiddling with control panels, Spike and the Power Ponies close down all the portals. An act of mercy, cutting off broken sights of familiar worlds: a chance to rest in peace or even recover without the desecration that is Verumarendi. The next floor grants them peaceful laboratories, a welcome respite from the strenuous battle. Alchemy ingredients and sorcery apparatuses crop up in boxes. Over a hundred comic books lie dispersed across the floor, mingled with lab-coated corpses. An additional pile of corpses lay at the entrance like a twisted sacrifice, shutting up the mouths of the living whose eyes witness an utter disregard for equine decency. “Looks like they were trying to escape but the hatch door didn’t open,” poses Rager after a minute of processing what she’s seen and crossing off so many names from the list of members. “There are two possibilities: the hatch systems failed, or Verumarendi used her magic to make them fail.” “Which means she went up at some point.” Matter-Horn then detects a fading signature: that cursed mare’s signature, intensifying with each step forward. “But why go up only to go back down?” Zapp asks. “To make sure no one gets out of here alive. Get magic from everyone before she goes back down. Why she’s down here… well, we’re close to finding out.” The Power Ponies spread out to scavenge for useful stuff. Fridges of canned food with the kitchen nearby mean a quick snack which Spike heats up with his fire: some processed flavored hay with wordy chemicals on the label. “Hey, check this out,” and Fili-Second throws something right at Spike’s face. The dragon catches it swiftly: a comic book, specifically the Mane-iac issue of the Power Ponies. He recoils from it thanks to memories of the last time he’d seen the same issue, but he keeps his focus up. With a quick look at the small text on the front, he confirms his suspicion: it’s the enchanted edition. Fili-Second nudges him on the shoulder. “Open it.” The idea alone makes Spike shiver. “I don’t want to get sucked into your world when you’ve already been sucked into mine.” “You’re gonna be fine. There’s a note in there and a lot of other things there too. That’s your spoiler for the day, kiddo!” Fili-Second then checks out more comic books as the rest discuss their findings and fighting strategies for Verumarendi by a small dining table: dealing with wall-hung noticeboards, forbidden tomes, and occasional doodads from the pockets of a deceased horse. Opening the comic uncovers familiar sights: the panels, the dialogue, the characters standing and talking and breathing before him. Save for the intrusive sticky notes and mystical margin scribblings. The chaotic writing prompts him to loudly wonder, “Formulas?” “I believe so.” Matter-Horn steps into view, having read a little behind him. “References to formulas, ingredient lists, hypotheses, experiment log notes, interviews... this was pretty much a science institute! One without the ethics, sadly.” “’S-381 died on the spot after exposure to unknown green matter from W-913,’” Radiance reads from an experiment log on a clipboard, accompanied by curious friends. “As Matter-horn was saying: yes, it’s an outpost for hyper-pragmatic magiscience complete with lethally unsafe tests.” “But for what?” Spike ponders. “What’s the animation, re-animation, and all this other stuff for? It’s just about getting more power, isn’t it?” “Power alone’s tricky since so many ponies lived here.” Matter-Horn brings up a partial several-paged list of resident researchers. “You’d need an iron grip on everyone to maintain power, and who’s to say that they won’t devolve into infighting after they win? At best, I can imagine a cult of personality with Whorlick at the top, though if he’s offering power to any worthy pony, backstabs aren’t too far behind.” They start their way toward the next descending flight of stairs. “But what about Verumarendi? Anything the logs say about her?” “Nothing much but some reference about a last-minute thing. Test went wrong. Or they were about to start it but then things went wrong. Anyone found any logs?” “Found it!” and Zapp lands in style to bring her findings straight to Matter-Horn’s horn, stabbing it there like the pale metal blade a waiter stacks orders on. Despite the pages’ newborn hole, she stares cross-eyed at the paper hanging off her horn plucking it out to read it properly. These professionals must be dead serious, Spike thinks as the ponies read the document. Dead wrong and dead evil, but dead serious. The document in question is Experiment Log 001, though the date is too recent: a few hours ago with a work-in-progress stamp in a red shade close to blood. The premise: to enchant a modified version of the upcoming Verumarendi arc of the Power Ponies franchise. The first few trials lacked success. Spells needed re-tuning and conditions were adjusted with reckless abandon. It didn’t take long for better results to turn up: an emission of green smoke from the pages, mysterious voices from this or that panel. Said comic panels threw up random possessions before returning them via vortex. The pages then sucked in a test subject but the mages could not retrieve him—a misfire. A postscript indicates unusual enchantment difficulty with this particular issue. Then nothing. The last sentence wasn’t meant to be the last. Attempt 17: Testing conditions viable enough for main character extraction. Extreme security is advised to persuade Verumarendi by force if necessary. Blank whitespace fills up the rest of the log. Matter-Horn returns the papers to the lab coat Zapp found them on: dead stallion’s clothes, shredded to pieces. Stiffened ears tell her something’s off with the clothes. An analysis spell later, her eyes glisten and her hooves go cold. “Well. That’s a thing.” “What’s a thing?” Mare-velous asks, befuddled like everyone else. The clothes float in the masked mare’s magic. “Radiance, check these clothes out. Get the magic signature and tell me your thoughts.” An analysis spell of her own comes into play, softer and weaker but more than competent to discern magic signatures. “It’s… it’s not quite a perfect match from the fragments I could gather. But it’s close to a perfect match for Verumarendi even from before the jump to this reality. It’s still relatively weaker though.” “Alright. Fili-second, what do you think of that?” The caffeinated pony scratches her chin. “So she comes in here in less than full strength? Hey, signatures can decay after a while just like hoofprints. Wait, why’re you shaking your head? Is she…?” A slow blink of the eyes: epiphany. “Oh. So almost the same. And the decay levels don’t match up with her power level?” “Sneaky, isn’t she?” says Rager. “They thought this last test wasn’t successful, but the truth is she came in before that test. Somehow.” She takes the document with her wings “If these latest traces aren’t exactly like Verumarendi’s but are quite close to it, then that brings up the possibility of her taking on a disguise, which is small potatoes for a reality warper.” “Heh! She doesn’t come in with a bang but with a whisper. But then she bangs up everypony anyway when the mask’s off. But hey, decaying hoofprints.” “A hypothesis, but my analysis spell hasn’t failed me so far,” Matter-Horn says. “What’s more, the signature still seems to be coming from farther downstairs. Once we reach rock bottom, we’ll certainly get concrete answers.” “Could be a trap.” The possibility comes from Mare-velous’s extensive experience with death pits of quicksand in her lone ranger days. “Then again, that could just be paranoid old me. I mean, we’ve never even seen the mare herself!” Ponies shudder among themselves, and Spike feels them too, yet he steels himself up, forcing one foot forward. In a voice that charges on despite dripping fear, “A-at least we’re going to try and... and go on, right?” “Without a doubt.” Nothing but resolution in their leader’s words. “And hey, good job, Hum Drum.” For a short while, he has nothing but the buzz of praise, from one of his (formerly) fictional idols! She even winked at him! But no resting on his laurels tonight. They go down the stairs’ cold steel steps—no corpses to add to the body count, fortunately—and open up one more hatch.