The Perfect Little Village of Ponyville
Chapter 10: Lights Out
Spike caught himself falling asleep.
With a jerk, he sprung to his feet, and looked around him.
Something was most definitely wrong.
Despite the blazing of all of the streetlights in town, the streets of Ponyville looked...dim.
Ponies and buildings were hard to make out in the gloom that seemed to envelop them. The pavement itself seemed to melt into a solid mass instead of being composed of distinguishable cobblestones. Even the ponies, with their bright coats and manes, seemed to fade into a gray sameness.
“Guard!” Spike cried out, approaching one of the ponies. At least, he thought this was one of the guards. It was getting so you couldn’t even tell the breeds apart.
The pony opened its mouth, and a slurred sort of mish-mash emerged.
“Speak up!” Spike shouted. “I can barely hear you!”
“Calm down,” the pony could be heard to say, faintly. “why are you so excited...”
“Can’t you see what’s happening?” Spike asked, gesturing around him.
The pony looked around, and then wandered off, having seemingly completely forgotten about Spike.
Now Spike had to put up with being overlooked on a regular basis. He was never named in the reviews of the concerts of Vinyl Scratch’s music that he had conducted, and that he had orchestrated. He had once written a dissertation on using the Draconic Bloodline Codes embedded in the collection of messages stored in the Royal Archives to reconstruct the genealogy of the messenger dragons. As near as he could tell, this was a completely original idea and, given the often-secret clan alliances of the various dragon tribes, a discovery that could have a strong impact on the future of pony-dragon diplomacy. Yet because the paper had been written by “just a baby dragon”, it had been ignored by everypony. Spike had put up with it. He was a diplomat dragon by breeding, even if one with a rather unusual occupation. He would take the higher ground.
But having a pony walk out on Spike mid-conversation without even an excuse was definitely crossing the line.
“Now see here!” the dragon exclaimed, trying to turn the pony his way.
Only to be met by a pair of totally dead eyes.
With a shout, Spike turned and fled aimlessly down the street, trying his best to avoid seeing any other pony’s eyes.
“What’s going on?” he asked himself fearfully.
He decided to head for the Apple, Inc. headquarters. First because he had seen Vinyl gather the other ponies there to make some sort of an important decision, and second because he had a feeling in his gut that the tree house was the place everypony in Ponyville went to for answers.
As he approached the tree house, he saw a pile of burning leaves a few pony-lengths away from the base of the tree. Or rather, he saw a pile of burning paper, covered with a rather thin layer of burning leaves. Whatever it was, it was burning at an unnaturally slow rate, and giving off next to no light or sound.
Creeped out even more by this sight, he walked into the tree house. The lower level he quickly found to be completely empty. Even the larder was empty, and Spike was getting hungry.
He hoped he would not have to resort to the last of the amethysts—he wanted to save that for the victory party.
Spike then headed upstairs. This room, strangely, seemed brighter than the street outside, despite not having an independent lighting source. Sticking out from under the bed he found the letter that the Princess had sent to Vinyl Scratch that morning. He picked it up and looked it over for a few moments.
Now there’s a pony who appreciates hard work, regardless of where it comes from, Spike thought with pride. Instead of Celestia’s return address, she had deliberately crafted a cord-address two base pairs off from her own that didn’t belong to anypony. It was her way of expressing her appreciation for his dissertation, while at the same time doubling as a rather subtle joke at her student’s expense: “Vinyl Scratch,” it seemed to say, “as Princess of Equestria I beg of you to go to Ponyville and make some friends, although I might as well be Princess Nopony, as there is absolutely no chance you will follow this advice.”
Spike took some time to look around in awe at all of the books, and then finally focused on the table in the center of the room with its three tomes. Whatever answers Vinyl and the rest found, it was in those books.
Unfortunately, the table was far too high for him to reach, and there was nothing for him to stand on. He might be able to stack up some of the other books into a suitable perch, but they looked so precarious that he might cause a book-alanche if he tried to remove the wrong volume.
Why do ponies always have to put everything so high? Spike asked himself in frustration.
Having no other recourse, he started tipping the table carefully so that one of the books could fall down to the floor, hopefully open to the same page the ponies had been consulting. Unfortunately, all three shifted at once, and he was instantly buried in books.
Spike slowly allowed his eyes to refocus. One of the books had fallen down so to form a tent over him.
He looked up wearily at the incomprehensible symbols of the pages above him. They had to translate them, too? he asked himself.
Pushing himself up, he flipped the book over so that the pages were facing up and gave them a scan.
“There are six Elements of Harmony,” he read effortlessly, “but only five are known...”
But those same words had been meaningless gibberish a few seconds ago.
He started reading again, but then realized that he wasn’t reading at all. He was looking at the book, and then the words appeared in his mind.
Spike jumped up in shock...
...a horrible suspicion occurring to him...
...and ran downstairs and out to the bonfire. Being fireproof, he easily retrieved a mostly unburnt piece of paper from the flames.
He played some sort of odd game with the piece of paper.
To be specific, he held the paper out before him with the hoof-written text and letterhead facing away from him. Then he flipped it around, for just an instant, and then closed his eyes, making a mental image of what he saw. Then he opened his eyes and looked with dismay at the rows of numbers he read. There was no way that the shapes of the blobs in his mind could fit the actual contents of that page.
He looked across the street at the signs above the shops, with lettering that was nearly faded into obscurity.
It was easy now to see the individual symbols that made up each sign. Meaningless squiggles having in no way a relationship to the Equestrian alphabet.
Spike turned wearily around and climbed back upstairs to look at the first of the other two books on the ground: The Big Pop-Up Book of the Pony Mind.
It was exactly the book he needed to consult. How narratively convenient, he thought glumly.
He sought out the entry for Dreaming, with the air of one who had the text memorized:
In general, if you ask yourself if you are dreaming, you probably aren’t. However, there are those lucid dreamers who may find themselves stuck, in which case the following signs are useful to look for:
* Nothing makes any sense anymore.
* Alternatively, everything starts making sense.
* Memories no longer match knowledge.
* What was once impossible is now not only plausible, but boring.
* You find that seemingly random events have become narratively convenient to you.
* And, most obviously: written materials on close inspection are found to consist of nonsense symbols.
Once you know you are dreaming, you will then wake up. Unless this is no ordinary dream...
This would be the point when Spike would need to consult a second book: Bigby’s Book of Non-Unicorn Mental Magic. Which was sitting right next to The Big Pop-Up Book of the Pony Mind. Of course.
The Dragon Emperor of Spike’s memories was apparently the same Dragon Emperor that had sent Vinyl Scratch into this “world”: a supreme manipulator of minds. And Bigby described that dragon’s favorite spell.
Spike opened up the last remaining book, and read the following entry out loud:
The Dream Trap is one of the most wicked uses of illusion magic imaginable, so you will certainly find no recipe for creating one here. However, in the unfortunate event that some poor soul finds themselves a victim of it, I shall describe its effects and vulnerabilities:
The wizard who cast this spell came upon his victim while she was sleeping, and stole her spirit into his dream. This means that the victim is utterly bound by the laws of whatever existence the wizard dreams up. Anything that happens to the mind and body of the victim in the dream will be visited upon her mind and body in real life, up to and including madness or death. The only escape is to force the dreaming wizard to wake up, either from within the dream, or by having an awake ally attack the sleeping wizard.
Since the wizard must be asleep during the dream trap spell, he leaves himself vulnerable in a number of ways. As mentioned, he can be physically attacked, unless he has set up proper defenses. And by the illogic of dreams, if he fails to maintain a lucid state, he may find himself under attack by the world he created. In the same way, a wizard who fails to maintain control of the dream will find himself exactly as vulnerable to mental and physical harm (and consequent damage to his real mind and body) as his would-be victim.
In fact, although the spell is rightfully dreaded and banned, the history of its use has shown the casting dreamer to have ended up suffering more than the victim in the majority of cases. Many an evil wizard has sought a way to overcome this limitation, to create a “dream trap chain” that would force multiple victims to serially inhabit each other’s dreams, in hopes that, unaware that their dreams are out of the ordinary, they might eventually kill each other off and so save the wizard the trouble.
Luckily, no wizard has yet succeeded in creating the Dream Trap Chain spell described above.
Spike turned back to The Pop-Up Book of the Pony Mind, and flipped back a page:
The three methods for waking up from a dream, from least- to most effective:
3. Figure out that you’re dreaming.
2. Receive a persistent outside stimulus that cannot be incorporated into the dream. In other words, an alarm clock.
1. Falling. This one never fails.
As he finished the entry, Spike was suddenly overcome by a severe nausea. At the same time, everything went gray.
The dream, he realized, had suddenly reached a stage where the dreamer’s attention was completely focused on a scene far away. Ponyville wasn’t needed anymore.
I wonder what happens to fictional characters when nobody remembers them anymore?
Dream-Spike figured this would be as good an epitaph as any for himself as he dissolved into the grayness.