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// Despite All Your Rage 
// Story: Equestria: A Flux Tale 
// by Star Sage 
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Coughing and chocking sounds are all that comes from the room for several minutes as the air only slowly clears of the dust that had filled it after the floor exploded. Luckily, as soon as the stuff had started to settle down you found that the floor hadn’t actually gone boom, but instead, moved, probably a trapdoor that hadn’t opened in years, explaining the dust, allowing something to rise from the lab’s basement to the ground floor.

“Behold, the first test of the day,” said the Professor, and hovering, you stare at it silently, mostly because you had a sinking suspicion that this was not going to be a fun test. On the floor at the hooves of the ponies was a maze, sort of like those that the rats ran for laboratory experiments back on your world. It had white colored walls, straight angled turns, and a cover atop it that allowed you to see down into it.

“A maze?” you ask in a voice that is at once bored, and rather exasperated.

“Of course! Don’t you see, it will allow me to test several things at once, reaction speed, general speed, logic, and a few magical variables as well. If you want though, we can skip straight to the next step it involves sticking a thermometer up your bu-“ starts DawnChaser, cut off as you land right in front of the maze’s entrance.

“Well, what are you waiting for, start timing me,” you demand, and the Professor smirks as he flicks another switch on the wall, and then pulls a lever.

“Okay, I want you to complete it as fast as you can the first time,” he instructs. “Everypony else should keep an eye on you, and we’ll gauge your time against my apprentices.”

“You mean the others had to run this maze as well?” you ask.

“Oh yes, it’s a logic puzzle, and makes for a good early gauge of how well students problem solve. Plus it’s a lot of fun to watch,” he admits with a smirk, getting him a look from the three apprentices in the room who, likely as not, had not thought their turns in a maze were fun.  For their part, Luna and Trixie actually seemed interested in you, the latter moving her eyes over the maze quickly, probably tracing routes, and the other looking at you with one of those friendly smiles of hers.

“Okay then, time me,” you say, rising off the ground and staring towards the first turn. The instant you hear a distinctive tick that has to be a clock going, you shoot into the maze. Your body is a blur within the walls, taking intersections with near ninety degree turns, and quickly reversing course from every dead end, until you finally rocket out the other side, smiling as you do so, finding a bit of thrill in moving that fast and accurately.

“Hmm, now that is interesting. Beat the best time by more than two minutes,” he says, looking at a clock that uses those turn dial numbers to tell time, a book seemingly materializing in front of him, while you’re suddenly surrounded by a forest of legs that nearly drives you back into the maze, before you rise up to eye level with the ponies again.
“That was incredible. Even my sister and I can’t fly like that, and to do so while trying to find your way out. How did you do that?” she asks, and you put your hands behind your head and smirked at her.

“Easy, logic dictates that if you take the same turn at every choice, eventually you’ll find the exit, if there is one. So I just kept making let turns whenever the opportunity presented itself,” you explain, and with a flash, repeat the event, doing the same thing in reverse, shooting out the other side in less than ten seconds.

“Not bad, and very logical. Hmm, now, try it one more time, this time walking,” he orders, causing you to sigh, landing in front of the maze again, and entering once more. Your shoes slap against the smooth white floor beneath you as you jog lightly down the tunnel of the maze, your left hand running along the wall to help you.

“Hey, who turned out the, holy crud muffins!” you cry out, the light above you going dark, and you looking up to stare into a face, in fact, several faces looking down at you. Apparently the glass ceiling could support the weight of the ponies, as all of them had climbed on, and were following your little jog, making you feel even more like some test mouse doing laps for a scientist. Not that you weren’t, but at least you shouldn’t be made to feel like it, and you decide to give DawnChaser a piece of your mind once you get out.

“Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage,” you mumble to yourself as you keep going, trying not to look up. It was one thing to stand on the floor, surrounded by legs, but it was quite a another to be looking up at those legs from below, like at any second they could smash through the ceiling and squash you.

Several minutes pass as you shake a bit every time there’s a loud clack noise above, but keep your eyes focused on the path below, and a hand on the left wall, turning with it, every time it opens. At least six times this leads to dead ends, but all you can do about that is to keep your hand on the wall, and keep moving forward.

It’s at the third dead end that you feel something strange, and pause, looking up to see the Professor furiously scribbling in one of his books while keeping one eye on you. The Princess seems to be staring intently at you as well, while the others seem to have wandered off somewhere. Not sure about what you’ve felt along the wall, you being to run your hand on it in several places to confirm it, and then sigh, stopping, and leaning back against it.

“Hmm?” said DawnChaser above, his face filling your sky as he grew closer.

“Are you giving up?” he asked.

“If the maze is going to cheat, I might as well stay here,” you tell him, and his head tilts in a quizzical fashion.

“Cheats, how can the maze cheat?” he asks you, looking over the maze around you.

“Professor, this wall is warm, but none of the others are, that means it’s been moved recently. If I had to guess, you were planning on doing this from the beginning and seeing just how long it took for me to give up, am I right?” you ask him, and he turns away for a moment to look at the clock along the wall.

“Well, it is a logic test. Hmm, not a bad time either. You figured it out a few seconds ahead of Deasly’s first time. Not as fast as some though. I’d rate you a six,” he says, scribbling something down in one of his books, and then he turns it to you. It’s that pony book…well, now pony and one human, as it’s got a picture of you in it now, with those stat things off to the side, most of which were blank still, but now one had a six next to it, another a ten, and one at the bottom a three.

“Does that mean I can get out of here now?” you ask, pushing off from the wall, but the Professor didn’t seem to hear you, walking away, making you sigh as you rise off the floor, and shoot off down the path, making all left turns. About a minute later, you stop, as you still haven’t gotten out, meaning that the Professor seems to have made the maze actually impossible.

“Hey, can somepony get me out of here?!” you shout, pounding on the glass top, only to get no response at all. Even Luna appears to have moved away, leaving you along and trapped in the maze.

“Oh you did not forget about me! When I get out of here DawnChaser!” you threaten, hoping that he was just where you couldn’t see him.  After he does appear to immediately let you out, you scream in rage. You don’t know where it’s coming from, but you feel anger at being forgotten like this, of having to run a stupid maze, and you reach into yourself, touching that star of magic, and focusing it into your hands, preparing to blow the roof off the whole lab in anger.

Then you stop, your hands already glowing with power ready to do what you wanted. This was no way to act, no way to behave for someone with the kind of powers you wielded. No, anger didn’t solve problems, it created them. You didn’t need to show off, to show so much of what you were, all you needed was something simple, and floating up to the glass, you knew exactly what it was.

This was a spell of the world, and so, came even easier than the others, no charge required. Remembering what Pumpkin Cake had down, you extend your field into the glass, and imagine it glowing where you needed it to, becoming intangible, so you can pass through it. Breathing in and out, focusing, you soon feel your hand slip through the glass, followed by the rest of you as you rise into the air.

“A very interesting solution, and much less destructive than I was expecting from that scream,” said the Professor’s voice, and you turn to find him, Luna, and Deasly looking at you, having been standing just at the entrance to the room.

“Another test?” you ask, and the Professor doesn’t respond as he continues to write something down. Deasly however, walks over, a bit of an ashamed look on his face.

“I’m sorry, he does that to everypony. It’s to see how they deal with an unexpected, but ultimately harmless crisis. You really can’t expect us to forget about you completely after all. Well, DawnChaser might, but the Princess wouldn’t, and I can promise you, neither would any of the apprentices,” he tells you, and you can feel that anger rising up again, but before it can show, you close your eyes and take a deep breath, gathering the air into your chest, and then just breathing out, letting it go.

“I can forgive you then, but never, ever leave me locked up again. I don’t like it,” you tell him in a rather dark tone.

“Claustrophobic?” asked Luna.

“A bit, but it’s more I don’t like being forgotten about,” you answer, the tone of your voice telling the ponies not to press too hard on that matter.

“Well then, we’ll skip to the tests where you’re the center of attention,” says the Professor, motioning for everypony to follow him.

What followed was certainly attention, as the Professor began to work you over with several strange devices. Some beeped, others whistled, and one made sounds like a theremin. Some he poked into you, gently to him likely, but still a little rough to you, leaving you sore where he did so. Luckily, he seemed to have been joking about the rectal thermometer, and just did surface scans, hmming at every result, asking the opinions of the Princess, Trixie, and his apprentices.

Not that you understood half of what they were talking about. Maybe one word in five was something you recognized, and the rest was just gibberish, like listening to technobabble of Star Trek: Voyager. Heck, it was worst with Pyro, who’s mumbled speech you still couldn’t understand, though the Professor seemed to turn to him whenever he wanted an opinion about your ‘aura’.

“Hmm, yes, that makes sense. Princess, look at this,” he said after the latest test, which involved you getting stuck with a needle. A small one, even to us, but still, needles weren’t fun, and you were rubbing your shoulder where you’d stuck.

“Interesting. Do you know what’s making it do that?” she asked him, and you get curious, trying to look around the pair of pony mountains, while the apprentices move closer to get a view for themselves. Sighing, you decide to risk a bit of flight, something the Professor had forbidden you to do three tests ago, and hover above them.

Of course you still saw nothing, neither did the apprentices, considering the fact that the amount of blood they’d drawn had been small by necessity. It would take ringing you out over a test tube to get an amount visible from your angle, so you get closer, hovering near where Luna’s face was, her eyes able to see it apparently.

“What is it? Am I sick or something?” you ask.

“No, nothing like that, it’s just…your field, the magic you exude, it doesn’t appear to be in your blood,” she said, and the Professor pulled out a book and began drawing something in it.

“Indeed. More importantly though, your blood reacts very interestingly to magic,” added DawnChaser, motioning with his forehoof for you to come over and look. Doing so, you find that the dollop of blood you’d given was growing. Not slowly either, but visibly as you watched it.

“So, whatever is making me small, must be keeping me that way then?” you say aloud, and DawnChaser nods thoughtfully.

“Indeed. Body fluids, at least living cells, likely return to their normal scale once removed from your body,” he answers.

“Does that mean that I’m making me small?” you ask, wondering if it has something to do with that Phenomena Fluctuation your other self was talking about last night.

“What? No, no, your powers are interesting, but this, whatever’s doing this is on constantly. Your abilities ebb and flow, this has been constant since you got here, save for one hiccup, during which you grew from about half an inch tall, to the three inches you are now,” he says, and begins rummaging through his books, before pulling out one that has two sketches of you, one of you at your current size, the other much smaller.

“Your power exudes a field around you, but it’s not constant, you shape it, as a pony shapes their own aura to produce our magical effects, from a unicorn’s magic, to a pegasi’s flight, or an earth ponies strength,” he explains.

“So then, can we remove whatever effect is on me. Not that I don’t like being bite sized, but it would be nice to just sit down normally and talk with somepony,” you tell him.

“Hmm…that would be problematic, but not impossible. It will require more understanding of your physiology and magical abilities,” he said, starting to write in several books at once again.

“Um, Professor, before you do that, shouldn’t we have lunch? We have to be at that field for the day's final test in an hour,” Deasly tells him, and DawnChaser suddenly looks up from what he’s writing and glances at a clock.

“Ah, right. I suppose the world can wait for my next book. Still, this is an interesting line of study. I will have to remember it,” he said, and quickly wrote something down in a book, before returning all the ones that had been hovering around him almost constantly during the tests to the walls.

“Princess, if you would like, I think we would all be honored to have you dine with us in our repast. We have but simple fare, not the likes of which your pallet is used to, but it is prepared with care and attention,” said Strong Arm, with a grin and a smile, bowing gracefully for someone of his size, which the Princess returned.

“It would be my honor to accept your invitation,” she said, grinning right back at him, as everypony started towards the dining room. Not seeing any reason to poke the Professor to go faster with making you bigger, you follow, only to wobble in the air a little as you fly after them. Luckily, the Princess spots you out of the corner of her eye, and uses her magic to plop you down on her back before you can fall to the floor, carrying you into the dining room, and seeing you down on the table.

“Thank you, Luna,” you tell her as you come to a rest, bowing as you do so.

“Think nothing of it, though I do hope you can eat what they’ve prepared,” she says, looking towards the kitchen where Pyro and Strong Arm disappear, before the pair return with several bowls. The pegasus pony and earth pony seem to have no trouble with carrying the dishes on their back, setting them on the table easily, and then taking their seats, whereupon Pyro says something in that muffled voice of his, waving his hooves at the bowls.

“Lunch, is served,” translated DawnChaser, who used his magic to levitate bits out of the bowl and onto plates along the table. What was being served was some kind of fruit salad stuff, which at least looked edible to you, as a bit was placed on a plate next to you. Climbing onto it, a task that takes a moment as you find you can’t seem to get off the ground at all, you then walk over to the mound of lettuce and cut up fruit, taking a piece, and biting into it.

“Not bad,” you say to yourself. It wasn’t the absolute tastiest thing in the world, and certainly not the best you’d had seen landing in Equestria, but it tasted okay. Around you the ponies are eating themselves, though you glance over at Pyro, curious as to how he’s eating, only to see him leaning back, rubbing his stomach, his plate clean, despite it only being seconds ago that the food had been served.

You try to get the image of him eating through the gasmask out of your mind as you continue on with your own meal, taking a few chunks of juicy fruit and wrapping them in lettuce, before sticking the whole thing into your mouth and chewing it a bit. It was nice to have a food you could do that with, remembering the trouble you’d been having with the food situation since you’d gotten here, though making you wonder if you should start packing a lunch from your room whenever you went out.

After a few minutes, everypony is finished with the meal, so Deasly levitates the dishes off the table, and vanishes into the kitchen, wherein you hear the sounds of running water, followed by the squeaking of a rag on porcelain, telling you he had the duty of cleaning alone, as Strong Arm and Pyro start chatting as they get up and walk towards the door opposite the kitchen. DawnChaser, Trixie, and the Princess have their heads together, buried in a book, leaving you forgotten on the table for the moment.

With nothing better to do, you just sit down and wait, looking around at all the various things lining the walls. The dining room, unlike the rest of the house, has no books or panels on the walls. Instead, in here, they were covered with mirrors, that seemed to have some kind of writing on their frames. Not that you could read it, but it did make for an interesting sight, until you turn back to where the three are just finishing up their discussion.