//------------------------------//
// ov M4 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
//------------------------------//

"I've found a new world. It's quite a fascinating one, I thought you might be interested in hearing about it."
"What's it like?" Twilight asked as she looked over the small folder of notes the stallion had given her. His writing was a little scratchy, but not impossible to decipher. The nearly nonexistent order in which he took his notes was a little more problematic, but she'd learned to work around that too. Of course she could have just waited for him to properly compile everything, but she liked having direct access to his observations.
"It seems to have been consumed by some sort of machine-like entity," he explained. "Large interconnected constructs of gears and engines and mechanical parts have grown over everything like a fungus. Some of them have formed into towers. It's all working, but it's not working towards anything evident. Just spinning and whirring along for the sake of it."
"You sound more like you're telling a story than giving a detailed report," Twilight noted while turning a page. "You made sure it's not infecting living tissue, I hope."
"It's just been a while since I've had a chance to actually tell someone something, I've missed it," the unicorn replied. "And I did. It's not spreading to anything living at the moment, not to me at least."
"What if it spreads through spores, and you have tiny gears growing in your lungs right now?" Twilight turned another page.
"If it can pass through your filter spells without even making its presence known to them then all we can do is hope you never end up there," he said. "But I will make sure to self isolate for a while, and write to you if I start to cough up cogwheels."
Twilight closed the folder and placed it under a wing. "And here I thought you'd left your sense of humour in one of the worlds you've been through."
"I just didn't have much use for it while I was alone," the stallion replied. "I didn't have much of a reason to laugh either."
"I... can't imagine what it was like. But I can vividly imagine something a lot less bad than what you went through, and I know how much I would hate it. So I can guess how bad it might have been for you, somewhat."
"At a certain point you go numb to it," said the unicorn. "There's only room for so much despair in a pony's mind, once your everything falls apart there's not much else that everything else falling apart too does to you. You can scrape the bottom, but you don't go much deeper."
"It's still not a good thing," Twilight replied. "Especially in the long term. Other ponies at least have something to go back to. Something to rebuild from."
"You have a point there." The stallion rolled his shoulders and spun his neck, trying to work the tension off. "It's all in the past now though. It's been there for a while."