//------------------------------// // Antagonistic // Story: Daily Equestria Life With Monster Girl // by Estee //------------------------------// In a story, the filly would have turned the page. Something which might have been interpreted as a major scene had just ended and unless she was starting to feel some major concerns about being caught up reading far past her bedtime, the most crucial thing to do was clearly starting on the next chapter. Besides, if it was a decent tale, then continuing to follow the adventurer on their path was clearly prioritized over mere sleep. Especially when a truly quickening plot pace could easily do the same to the filly's heart. It was rather easy to become too excited to sleep, when stories were just about all you had. And besides, her mother was a very large mare. One whose natural instinct was to move with authority. Solid, heavy-hooffalled authority. When they were both inside the house, the filly could hear her mother coming from what felt like a kilometer away: something which had allowed lights to be extinguished, books to be hidden and, if the door was opened, sleep to be faked. Make everything which had happened from the start of the party into a story, and the filly would have just turned the page. A simple rustle of paper, and there would be a meeting with new companions. Perhaps the author would skip ahead, bringing matters back to the reader's eye once everyone was on the road. But... all it took was a simple movement. Stories progressed in a way which life did not. Place the same events within reality, and Cerea wound up with time to kill. The Princesses had told her that there was a full briefing being prepared. There had to be a briefing, because whatever Tirek was doing hadn't attacked a settled zone yet. It was something which appeared to give the palace some time. Of course, it was possible for things to change at any moment and should events surge to the level of immediate crisis, then royalty would act accordingly. But for now, they had to arrange the materials for a briefing. One where there would be more than just Cerea present, because the Princesses were calling in the Bearers. (She didn't know very much about the Bearers. Based on what little had been mentioned, she'd been picturing an elite military unit: a direct Equestrian equivalent to the Commandement des Opérations Spéciales. The fact that nopony seemed to want them at any parties only served to reinforce that impression. Everyone knew about the kind of property damage which a good special forces unit could create just by going on vacation.) But the alicorns hadn't been able to tell her exactly when that briefing would take place, and there was very little point to having her stand around the Solar throne room until everything was ready. So, with no real orders beyond not leaving the palace and being sure to come back when she was called for, they'd sent her out the Sunrise Gate. And she'd managed to exit with all four hooves moving in some kind of rhythm, closing the doors behind her. She'd kept her bearing more or less steady until the moment she was blocked from sight. Checked the hallway for staff ponies and Guards, seen nopony at all, been briefly grateful for the holiday... ...so much of what Cerea felt herself to know about humans came from their stories. A number of the better efforts had been rather good about describing posture. When she pictured what a human would have done after receiving that kind of news... in a story, they would have found a private spot. Something with a wall. And then they were supposed to sort of sag backwards against it. This tended to manifest as a lean, where most of the contact with the supportive surface would come at the scapulae and bracing palms. The head had the option to either press the rear of the skull against the wall or have the chin tilt down: either was acceptable. But at the core, the posture was meant to represent several kinds of exhaustion, along with trying to remain standing under the burden and crushing weight of responsibility. Telling the reader that, at least for a moment (because a hero would always find a way to rally), the wall was just about the only thing holding the character up. There were very few positions which would allow a centaur the chance to brace the back of her shoulders against a wall, nearly every last one involved a very short-term sort of verticality and, outside of the palace, most of what they would have done was allow Cerea the chance to crack her skull on the ceiling just before she crashed to the floor. In Japan, she constantly compared herself to the humans. Everything about her body, along with the way that form moved. She had applied for the program, and began to think about herself in terms of what humans wanted. Desired. Shortly after coming to the household, there had been dreams -- She probably watched those from a cloud too. Or not. Cerea was sure she would have noticed a cloud in most of those scenes. There just wasn't enough ceiling height available in the household's master bedroom. The long body turned. The left flank leaned against marble, and the palace readily took her weight. One shoulder awkwardly turned somewhat inwards, and one breast was pushed into the other: something she could clearly see because her head had dropped, and that was most of the resulting view because her hair hadn't fallen in front of her eyes. There seemed to be very little point in trying to get an ear against the wall: anatomy still posed problems in that area and in any case, the marble was thick. She probably wouldn't be able to hear what anypony was saying. That was how a centaur collapsed against a wall, when pressed down by the weight of a burden which might be too great to bear. A hero would rally. A knight. I'm not -- It felt unnatural. There was... a certain vibration in the marble. Something low-level, which she could only detect when this much of her form was in direct contact. It was similar to the little rumble which seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the air. Another reminder of the protests outside. How many...? She only held the position for a few seconds. There was a chance for somepony to come down the corridor at any moment and besides, every breath seemed to make things that much worse. And then she pushed herself away from the wall, hooves sounding on marble as she began to create some distance between herself and the throne room. It was a rather slow walking pace. There was nowhere to run. Time to herself. Time in which the same thoughts could just keep going around in her head over and over and -- -- I need something to do. She couldn't go back to the gardens. It had taken enough effort just to give her a path the first time. Families had been displaced, families who were touring on a holiday because they hadn't seen a newspaper yet. She'd had to force her way out the first time and -- -- it was a bluff. Her actions of the previous night had already reflected -- 'rather poorly' felt like it deserved its own category of understated -- on the palace. Creating a second riot prior to the next sunset -- -- Sun-lowering -- -- fire engines, maintain orbit, cross horizon -- -- had felt like a rather bad idea. But she'd needed a plan for dealing with royalty. An exit strategy, and just as with any other plan she'd ever come up with for leaving a gap, it had existed as something which could be defined by its flaws. She'd attacked her liege and she hadn't been discharged from the ranks. She'd disobeyed direct orders and nopony had turned her out. It had left her in a position where she'd wound up conducting a frantic mental rundown of every offense she knew which was guaranteed to get a human fired. Cerea didn't even know how to commit sexual harassment against a pony. Maybe it had something to do with the buttocks. Squeezing a buttock was considered to be just about universally offensive across nearly all cultures and species, including liminal ones. It didn't happen often with centaurs because it took an exceptionally stupid stallion not to recognize that most of the positions which allowed them to squeeze were also the same positions which allowed the mare a rather swift retaliation, but it was certainly offensive. Except that ponies didn't really possess squeezing capabilities. ...it had been a stupid thought. (She often felt like nearly all of her thoughts qualified for that status, especially when she was trying to make a plan.) It had just been one of the few she'd recognized as being such before it had broken all the way out of the gate. Cerea had left the barracks on a quest to accomplish a single goal: to be removed from palace service. She understood what the position of Guard truly meant now: taking responsibility for the safety of the world. It wasn't just something she couldn't manage: it was a task no one of sanity should have ever assigned to her in the first place. She wasn't suitable. And she'd felt that way before learning a little more about the nature of the entity she was supposed to be guarding... ...her mind felt as if it was moving in circles. It wasn't leaving her hooves with much of a direction. The palace seemed to be flowing past her like a river, and it was hard to find any true features within the stream. Every so often, she would place a palm upon the nearest wall. A moment of bracing, or -- seeing if the vibrations had changed. It was also possible that she was regularly checking her distance from the wall because if exhaustion and burden ended with her slumping over, at least the wall would be right there. She'd created a goal for herself: to be discharged. And just like her plan to escape from her gap for a single day, it had arguably worked. With both goals, there was an argument to be made for a spectacular amount of unintended fallout. Cerea had gotten exactly what she wanted. (In fact, there was a way in which she'd oversucceeded: she'd had no intention of trying to keep the disc.) Perhaps Mazein would welcome her -- or at least, not be quite as openly terrified. And all she had to do in order to take her out of a position where she seemed to be creating a new disaster every week and, just incidentally, had assumed some degree of responsibility for the entire planet -- was to go on a mission which had the potential to create endless disaster, because merely participating seemed to indicate a chance of having just assumed responsibility for the welfare of the entire planet. But once that was wrapped up? Goal achieved. The girl had a certain talent for self-directed dissection. This came with a lesser skill in locally-targeted sarcasm. The two often teamed up. And in the wake of that meeting, Cerea couldn't even manage to darkly congratulate herself. Do something. Don't just trot. Find something to do. Something which isn't thinking. But it couldn't be the gardens. Princess Celestia had given her the destination she'd never truly intended to reach, and... ...what had she been seeking, huddled in the shadow of the statue at the summit of that cold peak? She'd spoken to the stone, because it felt like something she was supposed to do. Trying to explain her reasoning, how she felt about all of it, failures and intrusion and everything which meant she had to leave, and she'd said it all to the statue instead of Nightwatch because stone ears didn't truly listen. A smiling mouth made of rock couldn't deliver a counterargument. Don't go to the barracks. Don't wake her. Let the medication keep her asleep until I've left. I've done enough damage. Her apartment. Her injuries. Her life. Don't wake her because I did all that and if she knew what was going on, she might still try to talk me out of it. That's what a true knight would do. If it all works out, then I leave before she ever knows I was going at all. Without my getting the chance to hurt her any more. It's... better that way. The girl hadn't been seeking counsel from the statue, not in the sense of expecting to get any words back. You could speak to the dead forever, and it would just provide the chance to reflect on how certain parties had a distinct advantage in maintaining long silences. After a while, you started to fill in the other side of the conversation on necessity, and what was better than the words which were already moving through your mind? What had she been searching for, huddled in the snow upon the little mountain? To be told the decision to leave had been the right one, and Cerea would have been the one telling herself that. Affirmation, delivered from within. Echoes. But echoes distorted. There had been more than one voice to hear in the snow. They just hadn't been Cerea's. "Do the job." She couldn't. "What if the world needs a centaur?" Then the world had exceptionally poor ways of judging its needs. "I don’t want that to be me. A Guard who... abandons somepony.” They were better off -- What if I make the LAST mistake? How could anyone take on the duty of a Guard, knowing that one error could mean the end of the world? Especially when it was someone who, when it came to making mistakes, seemed to do very little else. I'm scared. 'Terror' was more appropriate. I think that might be a good thing. It wasn't... But all the silent statue had done was take its eternal stand. More hoofsteps. She found a ramp, went up without much thought, made the next turn with even less. Empty hallways. Closed doors. Heartbeats drowned out by the steadily-increasing noise, and she desperately longed for the same thing to happen with the endless thoughts. The girl braced her right hand on the wall again. Felt increased vibrations moving through her palm, even as the rumble in the air started to hiss... Overlapping terms. Not unfamiliar words. It's like what happened at the press conference. There's too many things to translate. There was a curtain up ahead, less than two meters away. Something where the fabric looked both heavy and new, with oddly greyish sunlight trying to fight its way past the folds. She didn't recognize this part of the palace. Not in daylight. But a window meant she had to be up against one of the outer walls. And if the rumble was this loud, with the translator fighting to isolate words, then the protesters -- -- the girl had longed to stop thinking and for the most immediate part of her next action, she received her wish. The centaur stepped forward. One hand grabbed the curtain -- What's the population of Canterlot? The girl doesn't know. It's the sort of thing she'd expect to come up in her citizenship classes, and that means it's probably in one of the textbooks. But she can barely read any part of them, hates asking her only friend to help her look ahead in the course. It means she's been waiting on the teacher and based on the way Mr. Trotter likes to illustrate facts by telling a story about a relative who had to deal with that aspect of Equestria's society, she suspects at least one percent of the total is composed of his uncles. She doesn't know how many sapients live in Canterlot. So she can't know what percentage of that population is represented by the screaming mob outside. However, a reasonable estimate might be 'all of them'. ...which might be understating the case. After all, the newspapers do get some distribution outside the capital. Given the amount of time that's passed since the initial printing, Ponyville's probably received a few copies. Allow those citizens to get on the first trains out... There's no hope of making an actual count. Her window isn't at the absolute front of the palace, but off to one side, near the forward edge of the Solar wing. It leaves her viewing at an angle (and serves as the central reason why nopony spots her: they're largely staring, chanting, and screaming more or less straight ahead). So she's seeing a slice of the pie. Take an entire society, bake at the high temperatures of terror and watch it erupt through the crust of civilization. The terror is a presumption on her part. Normally, even with some of the better-built human residences, she would be getting some impression of the scents outside. But this window isn't just closed: it's sealed. Perfectly airtight: something where pegasus magic can assume responsibility. It leaves her with nothing more than the visuals, because the audio has yet to resolve out of overlap and endless hiss. But she knows that terror can wear any number of masks. The majority of those teeming outside the gates (and some press against them, cause the metal to sway) have donned an exceptionally thin veneer of incandescent anger, and some of the rest... haven't even bothered with that much. They're terrified. Because it happened before. Because they've just been told it can happen again. And now they want to know what their rulers are going to do about it. The girl cannot scent what's happening outside, and there's a moment where she's grateful for that. The sheer intensity would have a chance to overwhelm her. The portion she experienced within the walls was bad enough. It's why she doesn't believe the alicorns were lying to her. She did briefly consider that they were trying to lock her away in a rather more final manner than before. Make her trot into her own prison. But it would have been too complicated. Facing both of them at once -- she feels like she barely held off the intruder during a dream. Both of them at once -- they would have attacked her as a team, knocked her out and then dragged her to the true cell. But... ...she's picked up other signatures from the Princesses in the olfactory world: concern, tension, traces of amusement. And it's possible to fake a scent. There are chemicals which can do it, although you'd have to know the exact breakdown of the mood you're trying to simulate. The easier method is to determine the emotion you want to project, and then bring up a memory connected to that mood. Relive it, over and over. Work yourself into an artificial frenzy and eventually, the body will respond appropriately. With the dark mare, she might have believed it. (Present nearly anything negative about that one in the wake of what happened in dream, and the girl just might believe it.) But the white alicorn... the girl wants to think better of the elder and, after learning that Princess Celestia knew about the invasions, is having some trouble with that. She is no longer fully certain regarding either ruler's benevolence. They could have been lying about the offered deal: easy enough to go back on your word, when you lead a nation and nopony has the authority to override you. But for what they said about everything which had happened in the wild zone... The words, for the most part, had been measured. Calm. Even. But in the olfactory world, the alicorns had reeked of worry. And... beyond. The girl is staring out the window. She can't count bodies from her angle, not with the way they're all moving. But there's barely any space between them. The ground is covered by a multihued moving carpet of fur and fear. There's a little more space available in the air, but no pegasus is in the right place to spot her. The vast majority seem to have remained on the ground. Most of what's in the atmosphere consists of those who are desperately wrangling in cloud cover, clearly intending to rain the whole thing out. The few protesters who've taken to the air are screaming at the weather team. Sometimes they do so from a few meters away. Less than one. Close enough to have feathers threatening to intermesh. Those curses are scattered, disorganized. The ones on the ground seem to have settled into a chant and after a few seconds, something begins to resolve from the cacophony of waking nightmare. "...centaur/centaur/centaur/centaur/centaur..." They aren't demanding to learn what their leaders are going to do about it. They want to know what the palace is going to do to it. I'm not him. They don't understand that. They can't. Right now, they don't want to. She doesn't have to know the formula for gunpowder to recognize what's happening outside as a leaking powderkeg. One spark... It's more than that. The news of her mere existence had triggered suicide attempts. With a story spreading about magic drain... Ponies are being hurt in every moment she exists here. More ponies may have already died. Tartarus is for those who actively attempt to destroy the world. She has merely shaken it to the foundations. Societies built on different principles, ideas, hopes and dreams -- but perhaps they all share the same base. Magic. Something which feels as if it can collapse. There are times when it just makes sense to think about herself in terms of what the majority population wants. Believes. It's a means to try and find a way of fitting in. To survive. Everypony outside believes she's a monster. At least one pony inside thinks she's -- -- she can't fix this. She can't explain herself. She can't make them see her. Nothing could. Integration. A joke spread across two worlds. I hurt two worlds. It may be a record. All she can do is... try to give the Princesses what they want. And she's terrified of failing yet again, but -- it's a scouting mission. The sort of thing you give to a squire more than a knight and at the moment, that may still be expecting too much of her because she doesn't feel like she's worthy of being a page. But there's still only so much you can get wrong on a scouting mission. In and out. Descend into torment, and then leave again. Taking most of it with her is just incidental. She's still wrong for the mission. For anything. But the fact that she desperately wants to get away from at least half of the leadership doesn't mean they didn't get one thing right. There is exactly one sapient being on this planet who lacks magic. The mission can go wrong in a thousand ways, and none of them include Tirek gaining any extra strength from her. There's a single thing she can't do wrong, and that makes her crucial. The girl understands that. She still dearly wishes it was anyone else. It's a scouting mission, to check on the one who ended so many lives. Who responded to questions with laughter. A being who doesn't care. There are three wishes in the girl's mind: the traditional number. She could place them all in one cupped palm, and spitting into the other would still fill it up first. But... three wishes... She wants to go home. She's desperate not to make another mistake. And she really wants to get in one good swing at Tirek's skull. At a single source of her pain. It may say something about the day that all three seem equally unlikely -- One good swing... -- she closes the curtain. She's been looking for something to do. If she's working, maybe she won't think. And now she has a destination or rather, she has two. The first... that has to be a kitchen. She's been offered a chance to directly damage the world again, a world where every effect she's had upon it has been negative, and -- she's tired. She didn't get very much sleep (and there's obviously somepony to blame for that), and she's awake fairly deep into the day after so much time as a Lunar. Going into the kitchens will let her use the espresso machine -- although if the holiday's short staff means the kitchen is empty, that's assuming she can pick out where it is. And what it is. The chefs keep tinkering with their design, and discarded parts tend to stay in the kitchens in case they're used for the next iteration: something which gives her a little trouble with tracking by scent because too many things smell like coffee. But there may be no chance to rest before the briefing, and a short nap could leave her too groggy on the exiting side. Besides, she... has reasons not to sleep right now. So into the kitchens, and look for the strongest concentration of glass tubing. But after that... It's almost a funny question. On a holiday dedicated to family -- I want to go home. -- where would Barding wind up? He's never mentioned having any relatives, because it's not a subject which readily intersects with metal. Perhaps he spends some time with the next generation, which probably means visiting a mine. The forge may be occupied. But she feels it's more likely to be empty. Because Barding is effectively divorced from the news cycle -- -- she can't say goodbye to him either -- -- the main difference will be the time required to prepare the fire. And either way... The monster in Tartarus is no part of her herd. The only links with her species are in form and name. But she still has to go see a stallion. There are certain things which mares do, when they have to deal with stallions. It won't take very long to make a weighted baton. The mare didn't quite manage to sneak up on her. With the baton finished and the empty forge shut down again, Cerea's next priority had been to get out of the lower levels. It was unlikely for Nightwatch to wake up and decide to take a trot, but -- if she did, one of the first places the little knight might look for Cerea was the forge. And the centaur didn't have to pack for the mission: if anything, she was waiting to be told what she couldn't bring. It left her without anything to do, and a mind without a task was going to start thinking again. Dreading. The most sensible action seemed to be returning to the palace's base level. Get that much closer to any possible location for the briefing, as she really didn't think it was going to be held in the basement. But it left her wandering again. Waiting to be called. Or 'summoned'. That felt more ironic. To the presence of the Princesses, and -- the Bearers. At least Nightwatch won't be assigned to the mission. Not when she can't fly -- -- oh, good. There was a side benefit to having attacked her only friend... ...the girl didn't hear the hoofsteps coming towards the hallway intersection, not even with the marble in play. Most ponies made some degree of noise when they moved through the corridors, but -- this mare's most natural condition existed in a state very close to silence. It just didn't do anything about her scent. Pegasus mare. Unfamiliar. Frightened... But there was something strange about that fear. Cerea had become reluctantly accustomed to the reek of pony fear: it was the background scent of her existence. It was just that with this approaching, unseen mare, the scent existed as something which seemed to have been laced into the olfactory signature. A potentially permanent, low-level aspect of the mare's very being, waiting to be called forth into prominence at any moment. And there were other emotions detectable in the mix: fierce determination was very nearly dominant. It still took second place to the -- -- which was when the unfamiliar mare reached the intersection. Turned, saw Cerea, and every muscle and feather seemed to go tense at once. It created a moment where there was another statue silently passing judgment on the centaur, one where the eyes were somewhat more liquid and yet colder than stone... The centaur almost lost that impression in the first moment of sighting. There was another sense calling for her attention. Visually... the yellow fur had been carefully groomed. Somepony was clearly taking care of the coral-pink mane. The body was well-proportioned, although something about the posture suggested a mare who was somewhat more ready to flee than the usual: it was a certain bracing in the knees. But the wings would have been a better fit on a pony ten centimeters taller -- while the tail required its owner to be around Princess Celestia's height. Cerea had never seen a tail like that. It dominated the mare, the hallway, and probably most of the conversation. It was a tail which possessed its own gravity. An effort was required to pull her gaze away from it -- -- the girl awkwardly, subconsciously recognized some level of base irony -- -- but that just left Cerea looking at the mare's eyes. They were a rather light sort of blue-green. They possessed most of the qualities for the shallowest parts of the ocean, and seemed to have all the impact of a crashing wave. The pegasus had an aura. Most of it was being projected through those eyes. They locked onto Cerea's own. Neither mare moved. After a moment, the pegasus tilted her head slightly to the right. It made part of the mane fall in front of the opposing eye, partially obscuring the pony's features. The remaining gaze slowly wandered across Cerea. Hooves to head, then front to back, and she finally spoke. There was also something odd about the mare's voice. This pegasus wasn't just soft-spoken: she had vocal tones which existed at the bottom of the disc's detection range. Nearly every bit of speech required a short delay before it began to emerge, as if scant decibels had been scavenged from the air -- and yet every syllable carried the force of a hammer. "...bowel torsion," the pegasus said. And just kept looking at Cerea, with that one visible eye. The girl blinked. She wasn't sure there were any reasonable responses to those words. As such, a bewildered "What?" was no worse than anything else. The scent of the mare's fear didn't increase. The determination stayed right where it was. The dominant aspect surged. "...I have a lot of roles on missions," the pegasus softly told Cerea. "One of them is to be the emergency medic." This is a Bearer. It meant the briefing might be ready. The pegasus had potentially come to fetch her. But that scent... What did I do to -- "...and I don't know your species," the pegasus went on. Thoughtfully, "I don't think anypony does, really. The Doctors Bear will probably talk to me before we go, just in case. But I was looking at you, and... I thought about how long your digestive system would have to be. Stretched out. That can create problems. And I thought... that with a centaur, the first medical issue anypony might have to look for was bowel torsion. So is that common? For your species?" Cerea blinked a few times. It hardly helped. "No," eventually risked making its way into the world. She could hear hooves on the approach, moving rather quickly. Cerea decided it probably wasn't a rescue. The shoulders shrugged. "...oh." Twice. "...it was just a guess. So in that case..." Which was when the pegasus took a step forward. Her volume never changed. Simply the emphasis, as the blast of fury surged through the world, combined with the aura to make Cerea's hooves skitter backwards, trying to maintain the distance as the pegasus advanced, the centaur doing her best not to fall -- "...since I would have to treat it... if somepony wanted to hurt you -- needed to make you drop -- where would they start? The knees? Yours have to carry a lot of weight. Can you support yourself on three legs? Two? What about the neck?" The head tilt increased. "Because that just about has to be the same, doesn't it? For every species. There's so many interesting things which pass through the throat, and a kick to nearly any of them can be crippling. And I don't know much about breasts, because I've never needed to. How do they compare to the rest of your body for density of nerve endings? If you hit them against something, which looks very easy to do, would you say it hurts --" -- which was when the second mare reached the corridor. "Fluttershy." It was easy to look at the new mare. Just about nothing in the world would have been easier, because it meant not looking at the pegasus any more. And with this mare, there was a lot to look at. For starters, you had the height. Factor out the alicorns, and this was the tallest mare Cerea had ever seen -- something which meant even more when applied to a member of what was usually the shortest species. She hadn't known unicorns could be this tall. But it was more than that. It was the proportions of the limbs, the liquidity of pale violet eyes and the elegant streaking of the carefully-styled mane and tall. There wasn't a strand of fur out of place, and every eyelash had its marching orders. Features which had been biologically micrometered. And the gaze was cool, calmly evaluating, like a predator who'd caught something new on her territory and was making a rather passive decision on what to do about it -- while giving up no ground whatsoever. Just in case. I don't know what ponies find attractive in each other. ...that's it. That is all of it. The pegasus turned her head. Casually glanced back at the natural wonder. "...is something wrong?" "You got away from us," the unicorn said. "From all of us. We looked away for a second, and you were gone." "...I just thought I'd trot around a little," the pegasus lied. "Before the briefing started." The unicorn instantly picked up on it. In tones of warning, "Fluttershy..." Which was when memory flared. Fluttershy Phylia. The one Fancypants named in his letter. Discord's friend. Oh no... "...what?" the Bearer asked. "You were looking for her," the unicorn stated. "We all know it --" "-- and I found her," the pegasus countered. "So now we can go back. To the briefing. Together." The unicorn took an exceptionally deep breath, something which almost seemed to ripple from head to tail -- ...what? Her mark... ...how? Maybe... maybe there were only so many shapes in the world. Square. Circle. Triangle. Gallop far enough away from the basics and you might eventually get to -- that. An echo which had followed Cerea across the void... Not without irony, Maybe she's just a foreigner. Even though the disc wasn't rendering an accent, the unicorn obviously had to be from Prance. "They're going to send us out," the unicorn told the Bearer. "Soon. We came to the palace so we could see you off, and..." Another, smaller breath. "...that's it. I can walk you both back to the briefing room. And then I have to go." "...walk us both back," the pegasus semi-repeated. "You both need to be at the briefing," the unicorn observed, and an exceptionally thin smile momentarily manifested on her lips. "Which means you both need to get there. In one piece." The pegasus quietly nodded. The unicorn turned, swished the elegant tail at the other two mares. After a moment, the pegasus began to follow. Down the corridors. Past artwork. There were places where the arranged air currents brought the pegasus' scent back to Cerea, and she had to push on through the cloud of rage. And eventually, there were new doors. The unicorn stopped. Turned, looked at the pegasus again. The foreknees bent a little. Softly, "Come back to me." "...I'll try. I always try..." "It's Tartarus -- " "...we're just getting her in, Fleur --" The wires didn't hiss. The disc went directly for that. The disc has a sense of humor. Who knew? "-- and that's supposed to be it..." "It still could be Tirek," the unicorn quietly insisted. "Watch out for each other. Watch out for yourself, Fluttershy. And... come back to me." It took a second before the pegasus nodded. The unicorn leaned in... ...oh. Okay. If I had that kind of snout, and I made contact with a pony in exactly that way, it would be sexual harassment. ...extended sexual harassment... Cerea began to shuffle portions of her weight from hoof to hoof. It didn't help. Finally, the unicorn pulled back. Nodded once to the pegasus, looked up at Cerea -- "Bring them back." The elegant tail lashed, and the unicorn trotted away. It left the pegasus looking at the centaur. ...staring. The pegasus hadn't tried to take off once. But she was at a distance which allowed a careful neck angle to get past all obstructions, and she kept staring... Cerea managed a breath. On the third attempt. "Diamond told me about what happened." Silence. "...I..." It had been, at most, eight minutes since she'd met the pegasus, and she already had the inadvertent imitation down. "...I am sorry. I -- am aware that it does not mean all that much, as mere words. But I respect his actions, I honor his sacrifice and regret your loss. But it is nothing I did. I understand why you wish to lash out at me. I do. I am here, and -- he is not. But -- for the mission, for the sake of everything, we have to... to..." The emptiness echoed for a while. It filled Cerea's ears, while never doing anything to mute the force of that stare. The girl took another breath, and pushed everything which was left of her into three words. "I'm not him." The pegasus didn't move. "...I don't know what you are," Fluttershy said, and finally turned towards the door. "I guess this is where we start to find out."