The peaceful, rhythmic movements of sewing thread eased Twilight’s usually manic senses into a relative calm as she carefully stitched her way through the flesh of the corpse that she and Spigor had so recently robbed from what had been intended to be an eternal rest. The calming of said mania was quite a feat, given how much caffeine she was currently ingesting in order to put off the fact that she hadn’t slept at all the previous night. Twilight was not one for dreams, or sleep, they seemed to her a waste of time, especially when she could be using that time for the much more exciting purpose of reanimation of the dead. She took another swig from her coffee cup, all but inhaling the sludgy black drink that Spigor made when attempting to mix coffee with her suppression draught. The last thing she needed now was her arm to start twitching with a mind of its own.
Situations being what they were, the pair had only robbed the single corpse from its gentle repose, as such her stitching now was less an effort to piece together various parts and pieces as she had grown used to doing back in Canterlot and, instead, was more a work of… repairing what she had. The cadaver had kept amazingly below the earth of the Ponyville Cemetery, to Twilight’s astonishment. It looked as if it had just died a few hours ago instead of a handful of days. Despite the lack of decay however, it was clear that life had not been kind to this “Applejack”. Her skin was decorated with scars, some old enough to have gone white with age, but others were recent, and deep, and that was to say nothing of the fatal wounds that had put her into her grave. Claw marks, Twilight knew. Wolf-like. Some monster of the Everfree no doubt.
Twilight tried not to think of the Everfree. Though with her proximity to it and the growing feeling that this was to be her abode for the foreseeable future, she knew she would have to face it eventually. It was a product of some mad scientist in ages long past. Not a proper mad scientist like Twilight Sparkle, but a MAD scientist, the kind that would destroy the world to see what it was made of. The kind of insane power hungry maniac that would start by working on a new kind of weed and end by creating an entire forest that spread like a weed. The kind of person whose side projects made Twilight’s main course of study look like a fun afternoon hobby. The kind of person Twilight thought she might turn into some day, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Nowadays, with the forest contained by the Scholar Queen’s efforts, it had become a dumping point for failed experiments from the Scholar Queen’s School for Gifted Scientists. Not that Twilight knew anything about failed experiments, she’d had minor set backs before of course, but miscalculations were not the kind of thing that got dumped in the Everfree. You only tossed something in the Everfree if it was too shameful to face, too dangerous for society, or too powerful to control; or, more often than not, all of the above.
As a cramp began to build in Twilight’s hand she was shaken from her thoughts and glanced across the work table to the empty seat opposite her own where more work had been left half finished. Spigor had gone to get some food in the early dawning of the morning, or what he’d said was morning as the heavy cloud cover made it closer to a suggestion than a reality. With so many hours invested into the work, Twilight now found herself needing to pause as well, to collect herself, to invest her mind in something, lest she continue thinking about these distractions of the Everfree.
She could only stand peace in small moments, and now found herself with the familiar itch to tinker and fix and build again. Rote stitching was all well and good, but she needed to be engaged, to figure something out. Namely, the rest of the electronic systems that she’d been forced to leave half done as Spigor had convinced her that perhaps it would be a good idea to make sure the corpse were prepared to receive life before finishing the mechanism with which to deliver that gift.
Standing from the table, Twilight Sparkle stood to reexamine the lengths of cord that ran from the metal base below the cadaver and wound their way up through the building. Most of it was in place, she just needed to do some proper tests and fiddle with the flow of power to make sure it could channel a bolt of lightning how she needed it to. While at the top of her new tree house she decided to connect the cord to the impressive lightning rod she had installed, admiring the fortune of living in a tree building that hid the heavy metal device from the world around them. Sure, it was a minor fire hazard too, but there were some risks you had to take, and Twilight was confident in the insulation and tree trimming work that she’d applied.
Twilight had just reached her testing station on the main floor to prepare a small shock of electricity to check the integrity of the wire and the flow of energy when she was startled by the opening of the door behind her. She jolted to her feet, spinning as she readied her small sewing needle like a dagger, her fight or flight response firing into high gear. The sight that greeted her, however, was enough to put a stopper in the energy that was building in her.
Spigor, holding a pile of foodstuffs, was forced to twist his way around the door, closing the door by hooking it with a boot and swinging it closed. He nodded to her as he entered and set the boxes down. Opening the top most box Spigor retrieved a pair of premade sandwiches, no doubt purchased in town, and made his way over to her. With a deep breath, he silently offered one of them to Twilight, grinning worriedly as she took it from him and began to inspect it.
Lifting the top slice of bread from its resting place, she levelled a glare to Spigor, a glare that seemed to want an answer.
“It was all they had!” He was quick to supply.
Twilight lowered her glare and once again looked at the ‘sandwich’ that had been given to her. It was, simply, two slices of bread with a large mass of dandelions held between them. She looked back to Spigor. “They didn’t have any meat, or cheese?”
“They didn’t even have lettuce or carrots or anything else!” Spigor answered, revealing his own sandwich that was devoid of even the dandelions, his ‘new’ stomach not being much of a fan of most plants. Even bread was pushing it.
Twilight blinked, once, before heading back into the kitchen. She dropped her sandwich onto the barren table without a second thought and made her way to a nearby crate, one of the ones they’d brought with them after her exile. After searching through the various odds and ends she found what she was looking for and pulled out the traps she’d used in Canterlot to keep the rats out of her lab. They were not in great condition, having taken a train ride in a box of metal odds and ends, and she quickly set to work on repairing them.
Spigor stood idly by for a moment, hazarding a few bites of his bread, before daring to speak up. “What are you doing Twilight?”
“You’re an obligate carnivore now, Spigor.” Twilight answered in a guilty tone of voice. “We need to get your dietary needs taken care of as soon as possible if you’re going to be of any help to me.” Twilight’s hands seemed to move of their own accord as her eyes fixed on something only she could see. “I know rats are not the ideal diet of dragons but-“
“Well, okay, I agree,” Spigor cut in, “about the obligate carnivore thing, but I can always do my own hunting at night. And you’re in the middle of an important project. You don’t need to-”
Twilight glared at him, it was her turn to cut in now. “I do, actually.” She said, her eyes focusing now onto the traps themselves. “No assistant of mine is going to be running around in the dead of night in an unfamiliar landscape for food like an animal.” Then, after a pause as she wound some wire, “Scholar Queen take me if I ever let that happen.”
Spigor looked to interrupt again but, seeing little chance of success in swaying her mind, sighed instead. “Did you finish the sewing job?” He asked half-heartedly, more to change the subject as he glanced to the windows to try and spot any would-be eavesdroppers. There weren’t any, of course, just the tree line lingered beyond those glass panes, but it was best to err on the side of caution.
“No.” Came the sharp reply, punctuated by the twang of metal. “Can you look over my work down there when you get a moment as well? I’m sure it’s fine, of course, but you always had a keener eye for thread.”
Nodding in resignation to how things were going to go, Spigor was about to make his way to the cellar door once again when a thought sifted its way to the top of his mind. Detouring slightly, Spigor grabbed the dandelion sandwich once again and placed it next to Twilight with a half-hearted smile. When she finally glanced away from the snare she was working on he made eye contact with her, seeing in her pupils a demand to know why he had intruded on her work. “Make sure you eat something.” He said simply and, after she nodded, he turned and strode away to descend down into the depths that lurked beneath the unassuming tree-like building.
Twilight, who was now alone at the table, glanced once at the sandwich and then to the far door that Spigor had closed behind him. “Thinks he has to look out for me or something,” She said quietly to herself. “You pass out from starvation one time.”
It was quick work, the traps were not even half as complicated as her other work, even beat up as they were, and Twilight quickly set them up around the corners of the house, torn pieces of bread from her sandwich resting as bait in place of cheese or some other much better food. Twilight hoped the rats would be as desperate as she was as she took a bite of the dandelion sandwich and found that, astonishingly, it wasn’t the worst tasting food she’d ever had.
That was when a knock came at the door. Twilight, already on the main floor after having set out the traps, moved towards it, her mind distracted by the project in the basement that it was eagerly looking to get started on again. She heard Spigor’s steps on the stairway and contemplated waiting for him, but decided against it.
Swinging open the door, she was greeted with the form of Rainbow Dash, larger than Twilight remembered her being, taking up the whole of the doorway. She wasn’t wearing her suit anymore, instead she had on a sleeveless shirt and shorts. Her hair seemed wilder than before too, straining against its ponytail shape. “Twilight Sparkle.” Rainbow Dash growled in greeting, tone flat, anger brewing like a thunderstorm just below the surface. “Want to explain to me why you haven’t been in town for even one full day and you’ve already started robbing graves?”
“What?” Twilight backpedaled, shocked to have been found out so easily but pretending to simply be confused. Rainbow took the opportunity to enter the room as Twilight gave up the ground. “Listen here you jumped up deputy, just because I was exiled for the reanimation of corpses doesn’t mean that-”
“As much as I would love to watch you dig your own grave, I don’t have the time today. You were seen in the act.” Rainbow said, her voice still flat, still full of potential anger, building. “And if you act quickly and run your sorry asses out into the forest right now I won’t bother coming after you, but if you stay here I’ll tear you apart myself.”
“Seen? By who!?” Twilight demanded, she wasn’t going to get banished a second time, at least not without some damn good evidence. She was sure that there hadn’t been a soul anywhere near the graveyard last night, she’d checked like a paranoid owl she would’ve seen something, surely.
Rainbow looked to the open door, Twilight following her gaze. There, in the middle of path, was a tree. There hadn’t been a tree there before, had there? “Fluttershy, want to let our soon to be gone friend here in on something?” Nothing happened for a moment, and Twilight looked harder at the tree and realized, with terror, she’d seen it in the cemetery that night.
Slowly, dreadfully, the knots on the tree unwound themselves, wood stretched and reshaped itself and before too long Twilight could make out a face, then an arm, a torso, and then, suddenly, a whole humanoid creature. “Dryad…” Twilight breathed in amazement and confusion. “I thought they were a myth…”
“Oh, I’m not a dryad, not really,” said what could only have been this Fluttershy that Rainbow Dash had mentioned. “I, um, I was…”
“Doesn’t matter.” The anger that Rainbow Dash had been tamping down sensed an outlet and flooded into the words. “We have a witness, and proof, as far as that goes for your kind and we’ve also got mops too, to clean up the blood when I’m done with you.” When Twilight looked back to Rainbow Dash she could see the veins in her neck beginning to define themselves against her skin.
“I thought we weren’t going to tell people that.” Fluttershy said, frowning like a disappointed therapist, moving forward into the room.
“She isn’t people,” Rainbow hissed though her teeth, “She’s a scientist, and she won’t be ruining my town much longer. I just need her to tell me,” Rainbow lunged for Twilight. “What she did with the corpse!” There was a crash as lightning struck and in that same moment, Spigor was between Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle, holding her at bay.
Twilight, having nearly been hit, only being saved by inches, was only thinking about one thing. “That was lightning.” She said quietly, and managed to spot the blue flash that shot down the wires at the back of the room.
“What did you say?” Asked Fluttershy as Rainbow Dash and Spigor were held at a stand still, Rainbow Dash unable to damage the stalwart half-dragon in front of her, while Spigor struggled to find the concept of ‘offense’ under the oppressive force of his opponent.
“That was lightning!!!” Twilight said, her voice soaring into the vocal registers that Mad Scientists were known for.
Fluttershy seemed to want to ask the same question again when the thuds of heavy feet began to ascend the heavy stairs from the basement, Fluttershy’s face twisted in horror as realization dawned on her, inspiring a different question to slip through her quivering lips. “Wh-what did you do?” She asked, desperate eyes turning to Twilight Sparkle.
Twilight Sparkle smiled wide, leaned back to look skyward, held two half clenched fists out to her sides and roared victoriously, “Science!!!!!”