When the lights went out, Gale froze in place and remained still and silent for several moments, simply waiting. She had no means of producing light of her own, leaving her reliant on her teammates unless she had the foresight to add some glow-sticks to her inventory. All she had at the present moment, of course, was her Gel Launcher which, as much as it was her signature weapon, was only one large part of her standard equipment. After several moments of waiting, she finally took the risk of speaking. “Ash? Soul?” she whispered, “Lights please?” She received no answer and as she focused her attention on listening she realized she couldn’t hear even the tiny sounds of another’s breathing or moving about in the darkness. “Hello?” she said, raising her voice just above a whisper, “Anybody?” Her eyes began to adjust to the darkness, but there was so little light Gale had trouble trusting the images she was seeing. The fact that it looked like she was in a smaller room with a table only made her more suspicious; she had been in a long hallway just a minute ago and she knew she hadn’t taken a single step since the other Order-naries had disappeared. Unless I’m the one that disappeared, Gale realized, and once again cursed her lack of a light source. She started to make her way carefully toward what looked to be a table in the middle of the room, to establish a landmark to explore the rest of the dark room from. After a few steps, her hoof kicked something hard and heavy, but which slid slightly with a hollow metal clang and the rattle of objects inside. Ignoring the slight pain in her stubbed foot, she leaned down and felt the object over with her nose to identify it. It was a large toolbox, the kind where the top opened in two separate directions and likely contained at least two layers of divider bins. After thinking for a bit, Gale decided to pick up the box and carry it to the table so she wouldn’t trip over it again. As soon as she had it gripped firmly in her mouth, more light suddenly flooded into the room through a window that had not been there a second earlier. Gale muttered a curse around the toolbox handle as she rubbed the spots out of her eyes as they raced to adjust, and looked up and saw that the table was already occupied by a model of the fortress.
“What do you think?” a voice asked as Gale set the toolbox down on the floor by the table, “A most impressive feat of architecture, if I do say so myself.” Gale’s head snapped toward the window, which now bore a stained-glass image of Discord reclining against the frame.
“Discord!” Gale hissed, turning quickly to bring the Gel Launcher to bear on the small glass dragonequus and loading a Magebane gel. Discord stared down the barrel of the gun with an unperturbed look on his face.
“Go ahead,” he said, “shoot the window out. I can just make a new one. Or just put the wall back. Either way’s good.”
“I should shoot you,” Gale grumbled, “If only to try and make you go away. But, I’d probably have to paint the entire room with Magebane to do that, and…” She sat down and crossed her front legs across her chest expectantly. “What’s the game?” she asked.
“What makes you think there is a game?” Discord retorted with a wicked smile, “I just want to talk.” He peeled himself off the window, turning into a paper and felt cut-out doll that flew across the room while suspended from the ceiling by a string. He came to a stop by the model fortress and gave it a loving stroke. “I heard what you said about this lovely house of mine earlier,” he said with a hurt tone, “Is it really so bad?” Gale arced an eyebrow at the little figure but didn’t say anything. “Something about butts?” the dragonequus doll prompted.
“Buttresses,” Gale corrected before she could stop herself. Grimacing, she continued through gritted teeth, “I’m not an expert at architectural design, but I can point out at least ten different parts that should either be falling off the fortress or pulling it all down. Why do you care though? You obviously aren’t letting simple physics get in the way of making this place look the way you want it to, and although it makes my brain itch just looking at a model of it it’s none of my concern. Go bother someone else.” She turned and marched away from the table, but only made it a few steps before coming to a stop, looking around, and then sitting down hard and glowering at the wall. “There’s no door,” she said, “Of course. Why would there be a door or other opening to allow passage in and out of here? That would make sense.”
“You know, you’re right,” Discord said, taking a step back from the model and pulling a set of opera glasses out to peer at it through, “There are so many ways this should be falling apart. What would you do to fix it?”
“I don’t care,” Gale said insistently, “I’m not playing your game Discord.”
“Ah, but what if I decided to… say, make it so whatever happens to this model happens to the building?” Discord asked, flying over to hang by Gale’s ear, “And then I’d let gravity do its normal job again…”
Gale blanched and looked up at the paper and felt avatar of Chaos. “You… you would, wouldn’t you?” she asked.
“And you’re not the only one in the buil-ding!” Discord said in a sing-song.
Soul Mage couldn’t remember what had knocked him out, but the simple fact that he was in an unfamiliar room, on his side, and with his head pounding made it seem likely that he had been struck by something. The room was bare and windowless, although sufficient light from an unknown source allowed the golden-yellow unicorn to see. Two of the walls had doors that stood slightly ajar. “Man alive,” he moaned getting to his feet, “This is going to be loads of fun, eh sis?” He looked around and his ears flattened against his skull in fear. Gold Heart was nowhere to be seen. “No. No no no,” Soul said, fighting down his panic, “Rachelle! Where are you?” Silence was the only answer, and Soul surged to his feet, struggling against rising panic as he cast about with all his senses. To a Spiriter there was nothing more torturous than being separated from their twin for reasons beyond their control. It would start as simple twitches and panic attacks, but if Soul couldn’t reunite with his sister he would graduate to a gibbering mess or berserk desperation, becoming a danger to anything and everything that stood in his way. The only consolation was that Heart would be under the same stress and that the pair could still sense each other’s general location at any distance, inevitably drawing them back together. Under most circumstances anyway.
For the life of him, Soul couldn’t feel his sister’s presence no matter how hard he strained. “Ok, ok, think,” he chided himself, looking around, “Logic. She’s obviously not in this room and there are only two ways out. Even odds… Argh.” Choosing a door at random and trusting to luck, he charged into another room that was near copy of the first, save that there were three doors including the one he’d just come through. Peering through the other two doors revealed similar set-ups through both and Soul realized he was caught in a maze with no hints as to the right direction. “There’s a pattern to these things though,” he muttered, “Unless it’s an impossi- NO! Can’t think like that! Chell!” His final shout echoed around the otherwise silent room. Struggling to keep his thoughts organized through the steadily rising panic, he eventually came up with a plan to simply take the left-most door in each room until something presented itself. For several rooms nothing occurred and Soul still couldn’t feel Heart’s spirit anywhere, and he started to lose hope. A sudden tremor shook the room he was in and one door vanished from its spot, a sight that goaded the unicorn back into a full gallop. The shaking recurred every few moments, sometimes quick and barely noticeable and other times sustained and threatening. At one point a door vanished a split second before Soul reached it, and after recovering from colliding with the wall he discovered the only way out was the door he’d entered from.
After what felt like an eternity of identical rooms, running, and earthquakes, Soul was at his wit’s end. Never had he been separated from his sister for so long without even an idea of where she was and what stood in the way, and the vestiges of his rationality started telling him he was likely to just fall over and surrender to catatonia if he didn’t find Heart soon. One last door perhaps, he thought, then... in death we’ll reunite. He staggered through that final door, and in the corner he saw Gold Heart curled up in a ball with her mane and front legs hiding her face. Relief flooded Soul’s mind, washing away much of his worries and anxiety, but, as he approached the golden-yellow pegasus, he realized that he was still feeling some of the separation anxiety, as if Heart wasn’t mere feet away from him. She was shaking like a leaf and whimpering, so she was clearly alive, but even as Soul reached out to touch her the subconscious link between the two of them remained unformed.
“Heart,” Soul said, “I’m here. Get up, look at me.” Heart’s whimpering stopped suddenly at Soul’s words and she lifted her head slowly and with great effort. She looked at her brother with wide, terror-filled eyes and screamed. Soul jumped back in fright and Heart jumped to her hooves and bolted out of the room like Cerberus and the hounds of Tartarus were after her.
“Rachelle!” Soul cried out, running after her, “Where are you going? Don’t leave me again!”
The toolbox proved to be larger on the inside than it was on the outside, but that was merely a footnote to Gale’s greater amazement that it contained not only tools but just about every sort of material she figured she’d need to make the model fortress structurally sound. Without knowing where in the building her friends were, and also not willing to risk the possibility of dealing non-Euclidean geometries, Gale’s plan revolved entirely around making additions to the building’s exterior to increase its strength and support the numerous hanging wings and ill-proportioned towers. The little Discord facsimile, which had changed to a clay figurine when Gale wasn’t looking, seemed content to sit back at the edge of the table and watch as she set up dowels under the worst sections as temporary supports, but Gale kept her eye on him while she dug out some clay, stone, and glue and laid it all out on the table. She then took a moment to close her eyes and clear her mind of distracting thoughts, including the small imperfections she’d seen in the model.
“Are you going to start soon?” Discord asked, “I’ve got a lot of other things to-”
“Shut up,” Gale said flatly, opening her eyes slowly, “If that were true you’d be gone already.” She looked the model over once, and then began to fashion a simple arch beneath one of the wings. Discord watched for a moment, and then got up and kicked out the supporting dowel from another part of the building: a tower that stuck out too far from the side of the fortress, which began to sag and lean out dangerously. “Hey!” Gale yelped, zipping around to right the tower and put the dowel back, but while she was doing so the little clay dragonequus was removing another brace. “Back off you little goblin,” Gale hissed, swinging at hoof at him and, to her surprise, making contact and sending his upper half flying off the table. Recovering quickly, she grabbed the lower half of the figure and squashed it flat, and then crushed a Magebane gel over it just to be sure before going back to the arch she’d been building.
“Nice hit,” Discord said, bouncing up from where he’d landed and walking back to the table on his hands, “but did you really think I was going to let you do this without resistance? There’s no fun in just watching.”
“Despite your opinion, I’m not doing this for your amusement,” Gale groused, “I’m only keeping the fortress from falling apart on me and my friends. I thought you had a rule against killing your victims.”
Discord had made it back onto the table and was in the middle of reforming his legs and tail from the shapeless mass, but stopped to give the earth pony a look of bemused disappointment. “I am the spirit of Chaos and Disharmony missy deGrange,” he said, “long-standing rules go against everything I stand for.”
Gale was startled that Discord knew her real name, but chose to ignore it as the distraction it was. She finished the arch, attaching it to the model with a little glue, and moved on to a gable that needed to be more firmly anchored to the wall. A little clay around the bottom and sides did the job. Discord hadn’t made a move since fixing himself up, and so Gale went on to the next bit, until she noticed that her arch was starting to sag. “What?” she exclaimed, “What did you do to this?”
“Moi?” Discord asked innocently, “Absolutely nothing. You probably made a mistake.”
“Can’t be,” Gale said, looking closer, “It’s plenty thick enough to hold up under the weight… Hold on… is the clay too soft? No, maybe it’s too wide; I should have done a double arch. Or…” A faint creaking sound caught her attention and she looked to see something else starting to fail despite the supportive dowel propped under it. With a cry of alarm, Gale moved to try and fix that problem, only to spot two others as she moved. Those two brought five more to her attention and soon she was trotting almost nonstop around the table, daubing on clay, gluing on stones, and repositioning dowels nearly at random. Discord took flight and hovered over the table, watching with unguarded glee as the brown earth pony began to go into her hyper-drive trance, barely holding back the gradual and inevitable decay of the model.
Gold Heart was running for her life, her thoughts consumed with the need to get away from the thing chasing her and wearing her brother’s form. What it really was, a Changeling or some other shape-changing monster, she couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t feel like her beloved Ray. At first, she thought it might have been a hallucination brought on by the mental strain of losing the real Soul Mage, but it soon proved itself to be all too real. After weaving through several rooms and managing to stay a few steps behind her, it got fed up and unleashed a tendril of ethereal blue flame from its horn to lasso Heart. When the tendril connected with her leg, a terrible pain shot through her body, as if her blood had turned to fire in an instant. With a howl of pure anguish she spread her wings and flew as fast as she could, not noticing that the creature had also recoiled from the contact between their spirits and had stopped pursuing her.
Heart flew until her wings could take no more and she crashed onto the floor, sobbing more from fear and despair than from physical pain. In one corner of her mind a little flicker of thought emerged, noting how likely it was that Discord was responsible for her situation. This thought wormed its way through the darkness of her mentality, stubbornly refusing to fade and instead evolving. The spirit of Chaos couldn’t have chosen a better way to disable her than to separate her from Soul, but adding the monstrous doppelgänger was an unnecessary cruelty. And, the rational thought said coaxingly, you never stand for wanton cruelty. Even if Ray isn’t here, you can’t let him beat you Chell. Get up, face your fears.
But I can’t fight as well solo as Ray can, her stronger negative side contended, and it hurt so much. Better to just keep running and hiding.
“Rachelle!” Heart jumped to her hooves as the voice echoed through the rooms, sounding so very much like Soul but with an undertone that put the pegasus’s teeth on edge. Her eyes darted about as she tried to determine the direction it had come from, but even the sound of hoofsteps drawing near left her conflicted about which way to flee. “Stop running Rachelle, don’t make this harder than it has to be.” Spooked, Heart galloped off without thinking, tearing through the rooms on pure adrenaline. All she could hear was her ragged breathing and the rapid beat of her heart, and so when she was tackled from the side after passing through a door she had no time to react before she was flipped onto her back and pinned down with the golden-yellow unicorn straddling her, his turquoise eyes fixed on hers as he panted heavily. “Ok, this has gone on long enough,” he said in a growl, “It’s time to put an end to this. Hold still Chell; don’t make this more difficult than it has to be. It should be over in a moment.” His horn started to glow and a tendril of spirit energy formed and began to reach down to Heart’s head with agonizing slowness.
“No,” Heart whined, struggling futilely against the other’s strength, “Let me go. Help. Somebody haaaaaaaahhhh!”