//------------------------------// // [1109-10-??//??:??:??] -- [1112-12-16//15:39:00] (GHOST LIGHT) // Story: Never Going Back Again // by NorrisThePony //------------------------------// I It was like flesh. She touched it, and that’s how it responded. It made a horrid squelching sound when she prodded it, and Celestia instantly recoiled, a cavernous sloshing of barely-viscous liquid nearly driving her deaf as she fell backwards again. She lay for a moment, her breathing quick and panicked, and she stared. It was too opaque to really see much else beyond the revolting, pulsing embryo she now found herself in—her world was rounded green walls and not much else—at best, if she squinted hard enough, she could see the ghost of some faintly blinking red and blue light on the other side. Eventually, she shuffled a little closer once more, frowning as she noticed the heavy clumps of familiar white feathers drifting all around her like leaves in a duck pond. At the edge, she tried to get a closer look through the substance, but it was somehow just as stubborn up close. She brought a hoof to it slowly, and guided it forwards—closer and closer, bracing herself for some perturbed inverse reaction to her touch. None came. Her hoof prodded into the flesh again, and the further Celestia guided it, the more she realized it was more fragile than she’d assumed of it. It felt more like a taut balloon than the impassable wall she’d thought just by looking. Still, the freakishly organic feel wasn’t any less unnerving, and she winced as she felt it start to tear—it seemingly spasmed in response, a pathetic but present resistance. Celestia squeezed her eyes shut as she pushed further, and then with a horrible ripping sound, she tore through, falling for what surely must have been a dozen feet, her entire body singing its pain as it was flung onto a hard and jagged surface. The liquid splashed all about her, and she took a few gasping breaths at the beautifully cool air that greeted her. She lay, gasping and wheezing, her eyes still squeezed shut, while her more lucid brain still fought furiously to assemble some picture of her surroundings. Somewhere, water was dripping, and the more she lay still, the more she could feel something else in the room with her—a steady rumbling of the ground, as though something immense was rotating in a uniform way. Eventually, she did stumble upwards, her eyes fluttering open. More of her feathers littered the floor where she had fallen, and the room still had an opaque sheen that Celestia realized was thanks to her eyes and no fault of anything else. Light was shining down from some point of the ceiling—too high up to be artificial, but she knew the feel of her sun and moon on her back better than the feel of her closest lover’s lips. No sooner had she moved, and a horrible screeching sound rung out through the cavernous hall. It was a near-deafening chirping, like some nightmare monster from those motion pictures Cadance and Luna had always been trying to get her to watch. Silence followed, but Celestia wrenched around at the source all the same, instinctively flaring her wings and igniting her horn. “Who’s there?!” She cried, her voice shaky. “Please… explain yourself before getting any closer.” Expectedly, no answer came. The chirp had been loud, but it had been alone, too, and once more, the dripping water from above was the only sound. Celestia frowned. She’d landed onto machinery, but of what type or purpose was impossible to say… moss and mould had long since re-taken the cavernous hall, and when she peered up she could see that the roof had been opened up to an imperfect void of blinding light. It was too difficult to spot a source through the limited space she’d been given in the roof’s speckled holes, but if it was the sun, it wasn’t doing a very good job. Casting her magic up, she instantly regretted it. Her world flashed into violent-white light and she screeched, the sound of the empty hall cutting in and out of deafening hissing and her vision emptying into nothing. “Gods above, what?!” It was a mare—a young mare, from the sound of her shrilling cry. Celestia felt warm hooves grab her—they cut through the flickering void like a knife. A nurse was staring at her. She was in the hospital, and the faint frames of machines and medicine revealed themselves slowly. The hall was gone. The bizarre, liquidy substance—gone. “Celestia, I’m here. You’re okay.” “No! No I’m not!” She howled. “You are! You are!” She barked something to another soul in the room, and she saw more movement in her void of darkness around her. Something was shot into her side. It stung, but still numbness followed. The screeching was gone. The blinding white, also dimming. And then, sleep. II “...Two… three. Check. One, two, three, check.” “You’d make a good metronome, new-hire.” “I would, wouldn’t I?” The mare gave a little hum. There was a chirruping beep, and Celestia opened her eyes just a flicker at the sudden, strange sound. She still felt as weak as the day she was birthed, and the gambit-planning mare inside knew that whatever these ponies were planning, strength alone might not be her ally in preventing it. “Oh!” The young mare exclaimed, turning her head in the direction of the beeping sound. The mare had a somewhat strange voice—she wasn’t from Equestria, certainly. “Hello, Missus computer! Finally joining us this evenin’?” “Morning, Lotus. It’s morning." Even with the slivers of sight she afforded herself, she could see the mare jotting something down on a glowing notepad, looking away from her. The mare was young. “We’re back to a normal rate, then. No deviation for more than nine hours.” The mare yawned, and Celestia saw her shiver. “Crikey, it’s cold, ain’t it?” “Thought it was just me. Don’t remember it being this cold last time.” There was the rattle of hooves on a keyboard. “Aaaaand here’s the reason why. Twiley hasn’t gotten the heating coils up yet. Givin’ me an insufficient power warning.” The mare mumbled. “Buckin' insufficient—well, kay. I’ll take a bloody walk ‘n go see what’s the trouble.” “Mm. Put on a jumper, new-hire. Need you here with her right now.” The mare chuckled. “Fine, fine. ‘Though she seems stable enough to me.” “If she wakes tonight, we’re busting out that champagne. The three of us deserve it.” “Ugh. It’s gonna be dreadful, y’know. You can’t age champagne.” “Mm. True.” The stallion gave a little laugh. “What?” “You, Lotus Leaf. Us, really. Forgot how much I missed watching you work.” “Course ya do, birdbrain. Means ya don’t have to help out.” The mare laughed, too. “Besides, you’re gonna hate me in a bit.” “Oh? Don’t tell me you—” Whatever the stallion had to say was lost to a sharp cry of pain. “Yowch! Damn it, Lotus!” “Oh, shush, ya pansy. What you get for forgetting to do it yourself.” “You don’t know I wasn’t going to.” “Mm, if the last fifteen times are any indication, I do. You always forget the coagulation injection when we awaken. Assistant Physician of the decade.” He laughed. “Buck you, Lotus Leaf.” “Piss off, Codex Haze.” There was silence for several seconds after, broken when the mare gave a little laugh. “Gods above. I’m still shaking. Look at my hooves.” “You’re not. Quit being a drama queen.” “Never heard those sirens before. They’re certainly alarmin’, ain’t they?” “That’s the point of alarms, yes.” The stallion chuckled. Once more, there was silence. Celestia could hear hooves clacking away at a keyboard, and the mare occasionally uttered some barely audible profanity under her breath as she worked. “Aw, horseapples. Um, Codex?” “Hm?” “Slight deviation. Heart rate’s up.” “Damn it. Uh, you sure?” “I’m the one checkin' her bloody pulse. How long till Twiley’s with us, to get the life support shit online?” “Usually it takes her way less time than this. Something’s seriously wrong.” “Then bucking go fix it. I’m fine here. But her pulse is definitely…” The mare frowned. “Oh. G-Good morning, Princess Celestia.” The entire tone of the room shifted, as though Celestia had announced her return to consciousness by pulling the pin off a grenade and casually setting it down on the end table beside her. Celestia opened her eyes further, scanning the room more carefully. The mare had shirked further away, her eyes wide in shock. Celestia could see that she was dressed in a wrinkled lab coat, and medical scrubs underneath. She was a bat pony, and her partner a pegasus. “You don’t seem to mean me harm.” Celestia said slowly. “Medical staff, it seems?” “That’s, um. Aye, that’s right.” The bat pony mare nodded. “Name’s Lotus Leaf. I’m your caretaker, Princess Celestia. You’ve been under for some time, so please don’t—” Celestia moved to cast the blanket enveloping her aside, and the small movement brought back the same deafening thumbing of blood rushing through her ears, and the room was once more lost to a tempest of stinging, blinding white light. “Shit. That. Don’t buckin’...” Lotus Leaf let out a low growl. “Princess, we’re ‘ere to help, kay? Just stop exerting yerself.” There was a sharp pain—Celestia recognized it as the same as earlier, and this time she could see that it was from a syringe being jabbed into her withers. Instinctively she bucked her back legs, striking Lotus and sending her scrambling backwards. The pegasus stallion—Codex, he'd been called—grabbed her and quickly pulled her away from Celestia, who remained panting and flaring her wings as her vision once again cleared. “Sorry.” Lotus sighed, rubbing her withers where Celestia had struck her. “This ain’t really my profession. I ain’t a very good nurse. But we’re all ya got, so enough with the kickin’, eh?” “Where am I? What is this place?” Celestia looked around. There was a window, but frost and ice was caking the entire thing, obscuring whatever was on the other side. The rest of the room looked like a fairly generic hospital room—albeit more bunker-like and sterilized then Celestia had ever seen in Equestria. “It’s, ah. A lot to take in.” The stallion piped up. “Enough that we kinda wanna make sure you’re not gonna… freak out again.” He tilted his head over at Lotus. “Di’nt really hurt much.” She shrugged. “Can’t hardly blame ‘er. You want somethin’ for your headachin’, maybe, Princess?” “Please.” Celestia sighed, nodding. “I’m sorry I hit you. But please. I need answers. I heard you two mention Twilight. Where is she?” Lotus and Codex shared a glance. Codex bit his lip as he looked back at Celestia. “Um. We can’t really talk to her right now. Most of the reserve power’s going towards keeping life support systems up, and even that’s... hairy, right now.” Celestia brought a hoof to the bridge of her snout. “I’m not going to ask again. Where am I?” Once again, Codex and Lotus turned their gazes upon eachother, as if wordlessly begging one another to take the reins. Eventually, Lotus conceded, letting out an annoyed sigh and glaring at Codex. “Princess Celestia, you’re currently ‘board Equestria's oldest pony-made satellite, currently in orbit 'round a fixed point in deep space." “...what.” Celestia blinked. “Lot to take in, like we said.” Lotus shrugged. She nudged open a drawer with her snout and rifled through, scanning the labels of a few different pill bottles before finding one she was apparently pleased with and hoofing it over to Celestia, along with a glass of icy looking water that Celestia hadn’t noticed had been on the nightstand next to her. “How much do you remember?” Codex asked. “Normally when you awaken, you retain some knowledge of our mission. But considering you awoke about nine whole months before Twily had you scheduled to, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that everything’s still a bit hazy.” Celestia took three of the painkillers and washed them down with the entire glass of water, squeezing her eyes shut. “I remember… it’s difficult to say. I remember… it was really bright. The Sun, the sky, everything. Considerably too bright. I rose the Sun at the scheduled time and noticed it immediately. I didn’t think anything catastrophic of it…” “Okay. Um, and then?” “And then I remember waking up here.” Celestia sighed. “I don’t remember anything rendering me unconscious. Nor any of… you, or this.” “W-well. A… lot happened to you, Celestia. To Equestria, as a whole, really,” Codex said. “It’s still safe—least, it was last we checked. We’re about eighty million kilometers away from her right now, so, uh. Kinda hard to say for sure. It takes a while for the signals from home to reach.” Celestia simply stared. She was beginning to seriously wonder if she’d gone insane. It certainly suited the hospital setting. She’d decided it’d perhaps be best to work forwards with that as her running assumption. “This is why I din’t wanna tell ‘er when she just woke.” Lotus complained. “Haven’t even got the bloody ship running proper, and here we are taking a shite all over the poor princess’s recoverey time.” “I assure you I’m quite fine, dear.” Celestia said. “The painkillers are helping. But your answers are… admittedly leaving much to be desired.” Lotus nodded. “I kin see that.” “...The science tape?” Codex Haze looked over to Lotus with a frown. “Lookin’ like it,” Lotus gave a little nod, trotting over into the next room. She continued talking as if the change in distance and volume wasn’t happening. “I think I actually have it memorized by now? But honestly, the science tape is just so much easier.” Codex rolled his eyes and a faint clattering echoed from the other room, and Celestia didn’t hesitate. Her chances were as good as they were going to get without the mare around to incapacitate her with pharmaceutics the moment she stepped out of line. She viciously cast her blanket aside, trying once again to rise to her hooves. This time, she actually succeeded. The ground was cold, but her hooves carried her. And then, Lotus re-entered, a videotape held in her mouth. There were hundreds of teeth marks all along its surface—she’d clearly carried it around many, many times before in a similar fashion. “Buck me dead, she’s walking.” Lotus dropped the videotape with a clatter. “How long was that, Codex?” “Sixteen hours, from the alarm till now.” Codex didn’t seem particularly perturbed by Celestia’s sudden activity. He was instead staring into a dim computer screen that was plain black except for the occasional line of flickering orange text. “Sixteen? Horseapples! We’re getting good!” Lotus gave a little whistle. “Okay, Celestia. Just… let us get ye a walker if yer gonna try and kill us, yeah?” “Please! Just answer me already!” “That’s the science tape’s job! Trust me, I don’t know. I’m a doctor, not a bleedin’ physicist!” Lotus’s voice was, to Celestia’s amazement… surprisingly calm. The young mare even managed a little smile. “Ye need to cooperate with us here, Celestia. You’re still extremely weak. Now please set down and listen to the damned tape? It’s gunna be a lot of what you’re gunna be doin’ for the next forty-eight hours, trust me.” “Why don’t we show it to her in the lounge? She’s probably sick of this sterile room.” “Mm, good point.” Celestia sighed, eventually deciding to resign herself to the absurd situation, and see where these two ponies might guide her through it. Strange, and unfamiliar, but they did not seem to be hostile by Celestia’s interpretation, and they at the very least had been friendly. More importantly, they were the only ponies that Celestia had seen in her immediate vicinity. Friendly or not, they seemed to be all she had at the moment. The dimly lit and grimy surfaces of the room around her did little to quell a comfort only a pony’s presence could fill. Celestia’s legs wobbled and shook and threatened to give out at any moment, and so Lotus made true on her promise to provide Celestia with a walker. It was old and rusty and the wheels creaked noisily, and Celestia herself felt rather out of place using it, but it at least smoothened the pilgrimage from the medical-room she had been previously and into a more wide-open area. Still, the feeling of oppressive claustrophobia never fully vanished. The next room they entered into was only marginally bigger, truthfully--nowhere near the impossible scale of the first ever room Celestia could recall, with the strange fleshy pupa that had contained her, and the lack of any sort of natural light still remained quite unnerving. Still, at the very least the room was a tad friendlier in terms of decor, with a few simple-but-comfortable looking couches, and a wide window that overlooked a sheet of frost obscuring any actual view. In fact… as the lights laboriously flickered on in the causeway leading into the living area, Celestia could see that a thin layer of frost and ice was covering everything. She could see her breath rising as vapour as soon as she stepped into the living area, something that Codex seemed to have noticed behind her, for the stallion cleared his throat and spoke to his companion in a hushed whisper. “Maybe now’s a good time to go look at what’s swampin’ the power reserves? If you’re good to stay with Celly--er, the Princess?” Lotus nodded firmly. She was still holding the aforementioned ‘Science Tape’ in her mouth, and so she settled on a non-verbal reply, though she stopped to gauge Celestia’s own response, too. Celestia gave a single nod to the two of them, as though they were servants she were politely dismissing in her castle back in Canterlot. Internally, though, the gesture she felt to be rather strange. If they were here to contain her, and they were the only ponies around to do so, why would they split up their efforts? Codex gave her a polite bow and headed off down the corridor they’d come from, and that was the last of the stallion that Celestia ever truly saw. Lotus, meanwhile, had already trotted into the cold living area and set the videotape down into a receptacle beneath a screen several pony’s hooves wide. Nothing happened, at first, though the bat pony herself took to tapping away at the keyboard of another terminal beneath the display unit. The lights in the causeway flickered off. The medical bay, too, was silenced of its idle beeps and chirps, and the lights in the living area instead flickered on shakily. “Limited power. Gotta do what we can with what we’ve got,” Lotus said, noticing Celestia’s curious glance. If the bat pony had anything further to say, it was lost as the receptacle suddenly devoured the ‘Science Tape’ now that its power had been restored. Celestia nearly crumbled to the cold floor of the living area when the face of Twilight Sparkle suddenly flickered into the viewing display. Twilight… Her beautiful Twilight. Her former faithful student, and now her loyal fellow Princess, and her most precious… Well, whatever their relationship had been crystallizing into, before… whatever had happened, happened. Celestia still found it somewhat hard to say for sure. Twilight looked a little older than Celestia’s memory told her she should’ve been. Her mane had been arranged into a rather disheveled bun, hastily held together by a mane-elastic. She was wearing the horn-rimmed reading glasses Celestia had given her on her seventy-seventh birthday, though she had to straighten then with her magic briefly as she trotted into frame, stopping to check something on the other side of the camera and seemingly in the midst of speaking with somepony else. “I know, I know, but just calm down and listen to me, okay?” Twilight gave a little smile to the camera, and it took Celestia several seconds to realize that Twilight was talking to somepony else, on the other side of the screen--where the camera would have been, Celestia supposed--and not to Celestia herself. Twilight herself seemed to be still collecting herself in that time frame, anyways. Celestia could see a notepad hovering in her magic, and the younger alicorn herself looked… impossibly tired, as she suddenly started speaking again. “If… if I did my scheduling properly—and I didddd because this tape is still in use and has not been deemed obsolete by a future version of me!—then you are presently watching this after; Scenario A, a memory loss or dementia-related issue. Scenario B, an incident that has left either of us completely isolated from contact to eachother or any living qualified personnel. Or, finally, Scenario C, a time-sensitive incident requiring the most efficient means of communication.” “Naturally, I’m running with Scenario C for the purpose of any potential Scenario C Princess Celestia or Twilight’s. The quick answer to our current predicament is that we are presently in the middle of an explosion of chaos magic the magnitude of which has been unrecorded since before known history. This means we are all in a presently dimensional-apocalyptic circumstance, held together by the will of ponykind everywhere. Co-operation is mandatory, and compassion remains eternal.” Twilight gave a sniffing laugh. “You wrote that one, Celly. We liked it enough to leave it in the script. Now, remain calm. If you’re watching this tape, there is currently enough harmonic energy to fight the chaos magic storm. It is still possible for us to work together to fix this, but the only ponies who will be seeing this tape will be the crew of Project Sisyphys and Princess Celestia herself. “Celestia… the easiest answer is… Discord got... sick.” Twilight gave a shaky laugh. “And when he did… it created a tear. Like… like a little hole where reality is supposed to be. We don’t know if it was intentional. We don’t even know if he knew it would happen. Fluttershy doubts it. You agree with her. And Luna and I…” Twilight shook her head. “Have been voted against. Regardless, this tear, well… the easiest answer there is… Princess Celestia saved us from it. “When it happened, nopony knew what was happening. Discord became ill. You followed suit, but you weren’t nearly as bad as him. Equestrian medicine managed to stabilize your condition, but Discord… well, he actively refused to allow Equestrian research into Draconequus biology. Otherwise we could have saved him and this whole damn—” “Twilight….” Celestia frowned at the sound of Luna's voice from behind the camera in the videotape. Firm, and impatient, but Luna always had a way of sounding kindly while being both. “Scenario C.” “Right, right. Sorry.” Twilight gave a shaky laugh. “The short answer is… you’re still technically alive, Celestia. The tear… it didn’t take us. We got you kicking enough to get us out.” “Even though we were able to save you, Celestia, we’re now in what is, according to Project Sisyphus, harmonic stasis. You’re… I guess you’d say, on life support. You’re… not dead, but you’re not really alive, either. And even worse, the harmonic energy being drawn through the tear in spacetime is so immense, that the required energy to save you is non-existent as a result. It’s like… like the universe is bleeding harmony magic itself, through the hole that the chaos tear made. So, we settled on a loophole. We figure that Equus can survive some time with a reduced intensity of sunlight—we settled on eight hour days and sixteen-hour nights. A loooooota stuff is dying, including…” The tape continued, but suddenly Celestia found it rather difficult to stay focused on it. Her head was pounding once more, and even the calm, soothing voice of Twilight Sparkle wasn’t enough to quell the aching. Rubbing her temples with a hoof, she tried desperately to regain her focus enough to see the tape through to completion. “…Besides the obvious ones, at that…” Twilight was still in the midst of some tangent, but Luna thusly cleared her throat. “Gods, you should see the—” “Twilight, if you cannot focus on the task at hoof, I can always—” “Sorry, sorry! Uh… right. You’re probably wondering where you come in, during all of this. Because if you’re listening to this message, Celestia, then that means we found some way to stabilize your condition, using what is, at the time of recording, extremely new and recently developed genetic matter reconstitution methods. You, standing here listening to my voice, are the product of a medical miracle. As well as the source of a magical one, but that’s always been true—” “Twilight!” “Oh, give it a rest, Luna, I’m getting there,” Twilight said with a huff, rolling her eyes. “This brings us to the Sisyphus Project. Which is a co-ordinated effort to both keep you alive, and therefore keep the mare responsible for wielding the Elements and closing the tear alive. Doing this requires relative proximity to the tear itself, which is why you are currently in orbit around a fixed point in deep space. But… filly’s steps. If you are hearing this for the first time and there’s been a dramatic memory loss incident, the doctors here say that your condition might be exaggerated by an overload of information. So… to any health care personnel in the room…” Lotus gave a little wave of her wing to Celestia at that. “Please ease Celestia gently into her current situation. Wait until at least twelve hours of harmonic magic stabilization, and then please show her the flip-side of this tape. Until then…co-operation mandatory, compassion eternal. See you on the other side, literally and figuratively, Celestia and company.” Celestia stared for a long while after the tape ended and there was nothing left on-screen besides the jagged static scanlines flickering rapidly across the CRT. Beside her, Lotus had come a bit closer, and was looking at Celestia with an unreadable frown. “You really don’t remember any of that, do you?” She asked, softly. Celestia shook her head, slowly. “I’m still… I’m still so confused.” “I’d bet. L-listen, did you wanna go for a walk, maybe?” Lotus asked, jerking her head towards the obscured glass window. Celestia could see pinpricks of light within the frosty cracks, but nothing resembling a proper vista warranting the window’s existence in the first place. With nothing more to do, nothing else to comfort her, Celestia simply nodded. She’d long ago given up on the idea that Lotus and her companion had dark designs for them, as it seemed whatever dire situation she had wound up within, they were all within it together. Lotus tapped on the keyboard terminal once more, killing the power to the recreation area and once more illuminating the motion-sensors in the causeways. “This place…” Celestia said softly, as they started to walk down the halls once more. “A… ship?” “Right now it’s closer to a station, but basically.” Lotus replied. “It doesn’t really have any significant thrust power of its own. We can tweak our orbit a bit, but that’s about it. No navigational abilities.” “But you said… the word you used…” Lotus pursed her lips, seemingly trying to remember for a moment, before nodding her head as her memory returned the word to her. “Satellite. I said we were Equestria’s Oldest Orbital Satellite.” “Orbiting what body?” “It’s… well…” Lotus bit her lip, pausing in her tracks for a moment. “Y-you heard Twilight explain it in the Science Tape, right? That… ‘tear’ is what we’re out here trying to fix.” “I think I understand. And we are in orbit around it until our reparations are complete?” “Yeah! Exactly like that, yup!” Lotus nodded her head a few times rapidly, apparently content she wouldn’t have to struggle to explain it herself any further. “Come on, let’s go check it out for ourselves. Then I really gotta go see if Codex needs any help…” Celestia followed the bat pony through the dim halls of the satellite. The entire corridor in front of them and behind them lay in darkness, the only lights being those amongst the two’s immediate proximity. The flickered on above them as they walked onwards, while behind them they were extinguished with a gentle diminishing hiss sound. The metal floors beneath Celestia’s hooves were frigid to the touch. The satellite still lay asleep despite the best efforts of the stallion who had gone off to try and awaken it. And still, it seemed as though the two ponies were the only ones besides Celestia herself. Just where in Tartarus was everypony? III A short walk of about five minutes took Celestia and Lotus to what seemed to be a cafeteria or living space. It looked as though it was intended for a group of a dozen or so ponies, judging solely by its size and the number of tables--four--arranged throughout the room. Compared to the cramped corridors and medical bay, it was far larger, and dominated by an immense window that stretched across the entirety of the back wall. Outside the window lay the empty, darkling expanse of space itself. Celestia gasped at the sight--in all her days, she had never seen anything quite like it. A resolute, perfect blackness, broken only by the small pinpricks of stars, and stretching around as far as the eye could see, with no other bodies of planet or moon to interrupt. No lights, of any sort, now that Celestia looked more closely, save for the stars within the deep-space sky. She trotted closer to the window, more and more of the desolate sight flooding her vision the closer she got. Behind her, Lotus lingered, fiddling with another electrical panel but waiting for Celestia to get a good look outside before she activated it. “Startin’ to jog your memory a bit, Princess?” she asked softly. Celestia shook her head. “I have never been in this place before.” Lotus threw a few breakers on the panel, before trotting over to join Celestia. Light slowly flooded into the room. Celestia was now practically standing with her muzzle pressed against the glass window, now. She could see the hull of the structure she was standing within, continuing on in both directions of the window for several hundred meters. It was a little hard to gauge how large the structure truly was from so limited a vantage point, but at least Celestia was able to assemble a bit more of a visual understanding of the strange place she had awakened in. It curved in either direction, as though built along a centrifuge. Floating aimlessly, far in the deep reaches of space. “Wonder if we can see it from here…” Lotus mused, suddenly right beside Celestia now. Looking outside, also, but at something else, it seemed. “The tear, I mean.” Celestia followed her gaze, but she had no idea what the bat pony was looking for. They looked for several more seconds, Celestia pretending she knew what she was looking for, and Lotus looking on thoughtfully with a small little smile that seemed dreadfully forced to Celestia. If the ‘tear’, as Lotus had called it, was visible, neither of the two could see it. Truthfully, Celestia found her eyesight to be lacking the longer she looked, the pinpricks of the stars and the reflection of her snout on the glass joined by several shifting, rippling double-visions, as though she had drank too much at the Grand Galloping Gala once again. Suddenly, she noticed a little flash of light, off at a distant point further down the hull of the ship. It was like a bright little ember, suddenly springing up and then being extinguished as quickly as it had appeared. Lotus noticed it, too, because Celestia heard her breath catch. “Huh… somethin’s sparkin’ out there. Might be why our power’s dead. Hull damage…?” she bit her lip, squinting her eyes to see closer. She brought a hoof to the glass, and Celestia could see that it was subtly shaking. “We should probably regroup with Codex, Princess. It shouldn’t be taking him this long to get the power back online…” Celestia gave a single nod, eventually detaching herself from the glass window, once more looking back at the halls of the satellite, stretching on into darkness. She took a step towards them, and suddenly she crumbled down to the frozen floor of the dining area, hitting the ground with a dull thud. “Ow…” she gasped out. Her head was all of a sudden thumping rhythmically with a splitting headache, and her vision danced and swam as she stumbled back up to her hooves and crumbled back to the floor once again. “Oh gods… Princess!” Lotus was at her side immediately, a shaky hoof helping her straighten herself into a more comfortable seating position. “You’re still weak?” Celestia gave a shaky nod. “Yes… what’s… what’s wrong with me?” “Well, I think I’m getting a hunch,” Lotus replied, stopping for a moment to look at her own shaking hoof. “The hull breach, the power surge… I think something went wrong, and Twiley woke us up, ah… earlier than we were ready for.” Celestia blinked. Twiley. There it was again, the second time she had heard her ex-student’s name, but said with such a degree of casualness that she was unsure if her student and this ‘Twiley’ were truly the same. “M-meaning?” “Meaning, uh.” Lotus had grown distant, staring straight at her wavering hoof, but she quickly shook her head and turned back to Celestia. “It’s… a slow process, wakin’ us from stasis. Like… like…” The bat pony’s left ear twitched a little as she thought on how best to explain it. “It’s like… y’know when you’re wrapping up winter and you’ve gotta wake up a little critter from hibernation? And they’re still all groggy and weak?” “And I’m that animal. I’m all groggy and weak.” “Yes! Yes exactly!” Rising back to her hooves, Lotus gave Celestia a small and patient smile. “And me, too. Between the two of us… I’ve been shivering and shaking the entire time I’ve been up, and have had a nasty headache. Taken enough painkillers to dope up an Ursa Minor. And don’t even get me started on Codex, if I hadn’t remembered, that damn idiotic stallion would be having a gods-damned blood clot by now.” Lotus let out a nervous little chuckle. “We’re… not in the best position. Speaking of. I should probably go check on the colt by now.” At that, Celestia made another attempt to straighten herself back up and regain a standing position, on shivering, shaking limbs that she felt could hardly support her. “Easy, Princess. Stay where you are for a second… Here….” The bat pony trotted over to a cupboard in one corner of the dining area—a red medical cross above it showing it to be some sort of emergency care station. Lotus returned quickly with a shiny, heat-reflecting blanket, which she draped gently over Celestia. “Alicorns have it worse than us little-ponies. More of you that Twiley’s gotta wake up. I think you should stay down and regain your strength, okay? I’ll go get Codex and bring him here.” “P-please don’t…” Celestia bit her lip, looking down the darkened hallway. Lotus stopped, her eyes wide, and for the first time Celestia saw just how frightened the young bat pony was. For herself, for Celestia… and no doubt for her companion who the two hadn’t heard hide nor hair of. “...Don’t be long…” Celestia said eventually. “Won’t be but a jiffy, Princess.” Lotus gave Celestia one last little nod and smile, and then turned tail and headed off down the corridor, the little burning of her flashlight slowly consumed by the encroaching darkness, swallowing up the little bat pony and leaving Celestia alone once more. And so, Celestia waited. The hours crept on. Or, at least, Celestia assumed they were hours. It was rather difficult for her to tell for certain, with no means of gauging time, but Celestia at least knew it was a long time that passed without anypony returning to the dining area. The rest of her surroundings remained the same. Lying on the floor, Celestia became aware of a distant, far-off rumbling of some sort, the same sort that she’d felt when she had first awoke within the strange embryo. It was fainter here, but present if she focused hard enough on it. Besides the faintly glimmering electrical light above her, there were no other sources of light to be seen, and when she tried to light her horn she was met with a splitting headache that was enough to cause her to cry out in pain. Boredom slowly bled into fear. Wherever Codex had gone off to, he seemed to have vanished without a trace. And Lotus had said she would be but mere moments, and they sure as Tartarus did not feel like moments to Celestia. She cursed bitterly out loud--she hadn’t even asked Lotus where everypony else was when she’d had the chance, and now the thought that she was the only pony left, now, was slowly beginning to germinate in her mind against all logical thought. She loathed the sound of her own fearful voice as she spoke up, but she spoke up all the same. “Hello…?” She called it out gently, down the corridor where she’d last seen Lotus vanish. Predictably, no response came. Celestia felt boxed in by darkness, a lone castaway upon a tiny little island of light so far away from anything she knew and was familiar with. Was she dead? Was this Tartarus? Her head continued to pound, and she faintly became aware of the passing of her consciousness in several infrequent intervals. She lost it, regained it, drifted in and out of dreamless sleep, and nothing changed around her. The same encompassing cold, the same infernal silence, with nopony and nothing to break it. Her stomach rumbled. With dread, she realized it had been more than a day since she had eaten anything. What had the ponies been saying, when they had thought she was still unconscious? Sixteen hours? Sixteen, since the alarm to her second awakening. And that itself must have been some time ago itself. Eventually, Celestia grew tired of lying in fearful wait. If Lotus and Codex were in trouble someplace, she would have to help them herself. And if they were the only company she had—wherever she was… then she wouldn’t have a choice regardless. It was with effort that she rose to her hooves, and she felt weaker from the last time she had been moving about. It was as though her ‘rest’ had sapped away even more of her energy, and replaced the numbness in her limbs with a throbbing pain instead. Yet she lumbered on. The corridor ahead of her remained pitch-black, and so she tried to light her horn again. A small little pinprick of light, and it nearly sent her back into unconsciousness once more, but it was something against the inky black. She trekked through the dark corridors of the satellite, looking and listening for any trace of Lotus or Codex or anypony else. Twice more, her legs gave out beneath her, and she hit the ground with a dull thud. She passed in and out of consciousness several more times, and upon falling and rising the second time, she found her vision never truly regained focus. Hungry, thirsty, weak beyond belief, and now practically blind, but she continued anyways, even though she felt quite like a lumbering corpse after too long. Her throat was so dry that it hurt to breathe, and her stomach’s incessant rumbles had ceased in favour of a throbbing pain instead. She attempted to call out once again, and once again there was nothing but her own voice echoing back out at her. The corridor seemed to stretch on forever, although she knew it probably seemed far longer than it truly was given how slowly she was moving. Finally, though, she seemed to find something of note. Two things, truthfully, occurring in sequence after one another. Firstly, she came upon a crossroads. There were written indicators on the walls that stated where each went, but with her vision in such disarray Celestia had to settle on taking the leftmost path blindly and resolving to double back once she was finished exploring The second thing of note occurred when the corridor seemed to gradually open to a larger room once again, and Celestia could see lights ahead, blue and red and green, faintly blinking away within the blurred sludge that her vision had become. The air felt warmed in this other room--she could feel it wafting towards her as though blown by some draft emanating from the larger chamber. Upon entering it, Celestia stopped in her tracks and stared. She had been here before. It was the first room she had awoken into--the embryonic chamber. She could still see it as she wandered in further, broken and torn on the metal floor. Some of the thick, soupy liquid that it had been filled with had frozen over, but some of it hadn’t, either. Celestia could feel it in her hooves, and a strange sort of tingling soon flooded through them. It was… soothing, surprisingly enough. Celestia blinked. The pain that had been coursing through her horseshoes subsided, if only slightly at first, replaced by the calming tingling. Having felt she at least deserved a rest, Celestia layed down upon it, letting the yellowish liquid seep into the feathers of her wings, the down of her fur. The same tingling worked its way through her body, easing some of her pain, enough that she let out a soft exhale of relief and let her muzzle rest against it. The air felt humid in this room, and Celestia decided she would be staying here for some time--it was so much more tolerable than the frozen air of the rest of the structure. Her throat was still parched, though. She was so, so thirsty. The yellowish, soupy fluid didn’t exactly taste pleasant, but it quelled her throat a bit. She had to spit out a few of her feathers, but it felt as though it had given her at least some energy. She drank more, and it tasted a bit better on the second attempt. While she rested and drank, she took in her surroundings a bit more closely, considering the last time she had been here had been in the midst of a disorienting haze. Not that she wasn’t still in such, but it was at least marginally better now. She looked up to the ‘sky’ first, and saw that the bright electrical light she had first spotted had since been extinguished, though she could see the source high above. A dome that had been built in a shape that vaguely resembled her sun, catching the reflected light of her own burning horn. The other lights were indicators of some sort, given the way they were rhythmically blinking, though of what indication they were Celestia could only estimate. When she next rose, she felt much better. She still had Lotus and Codex’s whereabouts to concern herself over, however, and so she soon began to make her way back to the corridor she had come from, resolving to explore the other path of the crossroads she had encountered earlier. She lumbered back with a slight amount more lucidity and speed than had accompanied her first journey down the corridor, only having to stop once this time and reaching the crossroads once more after much less time had passed. Still, she could not read the directional indicator, but it didn’t matter. She headed down the other corridor anyways, and soon she could see something decidedly less mundane than the otherwise empty corridor. It was a lumpy mass still lost in the blur of her eyesight and inadequately lit by the light of her horn, but as she crept closer it took form. Horrible, equine form. It was Lotus. Lying dead and decomposed on the corridor, with half of the keratin of her left forehoof broken off and detached from the rest of her body. Celestia couldn’t hold back a horrified gasp, and she didn’t truly wish to get any closer. She had hardly known this pony, but the otherworldly sight of her corpse was nearly enough to push her back down onto the floor in yet another fit of weariness. She crept forwards closer. The decomposition of the bat pony was freakishly unnatural—it looked… fake, somehow, as though she were not looking at a pony but instead some manufactured facsimile of one. And that was to say nothing of the speed… it had been less than twenty four hours since she had parted ways with Lotus, but the decomposition seemed to be in the middle stages already. She didn’t wish to linger. She hadn’t known this pony long, but she had known her for long enough to know that what she was seeing was a horror the likes she had seldom seen in her waking days and only rarely within the realms of Luna’s more fearsome nightmares. This was Tartarus. She was in Tartarus. There was simply no other explanation for it, now. Without needing confirmation, Celestia knew that Codex was dead, too. She was alone, somehow—weak, hungry, unsustained save for the energy of the unknown fluid, but still somehow alive. Somehow, she was more fortunate than the two far more able-bodied ponies who had set out to try and restore some semblance of sense to the hellish world they had awaken into. Celestia wanted to weep, but she hadn’t the fluid within her to allow such. And, as she lay grieving, a more horrific thought slowly dawned on her. Whatever had killed Lotus and Codex might still be within the satellite. Yet Celestia was not prepared to stand about and let it come to finish her off, either. She was weak, but she wasn’t dead. And if she was in Tartarus, she’d drag whatever had taken these two poor souls with her into whatever darker circle might have been waiting still. I̷V̶ Eventually, Celestia reached what she assumed was the ‘bridge’ of the satellite. It felt a bit improper to call it that considering it wasn’t really a naval vessel, but it seemed the most apt descriptor for the room of darkened control panels that she emerged into after several more hours of blind wandering. The front of the room resolved in another large window, and the sight beyond it made Celestia gawk in amazement. It must have been the tear that she had heard Lotus speaking of. She could see it sprawled out in some spot to the far off distant reaches of space, and it was one of the most otherworldly things Celestia had ever seen in all her days. It was an imperfection within the fabric of space itself, as though an otherworldly force had taken a knife and gutted through Epona’s own starry sky. It glowed softly, pulsating in a non-rhythmic fashion, like a bloody gash sustained in a vicious battle. It was too narrow and spindly for Celestia to properly see if anything lay on the other side, but the light itself looked blinding beyond. It was fortunate for her, Celestia supposed that it was so narrow of a tear in the first place. It almost didn’t seem real at all. Not that most of her recent memory did, but the tear itself looked like it had been plucked directly from a nightmare and plastered upon her own reality. The rest of the bridge was mostly as dead as the rest of the satellite, save for blinking lights indicating that some power was being received, but the greater majority remained extinguished. Celestia could only wager guesses as to what was being used to give energy to the systems--there clearly weren’t any unicorns powering it with magic, but perhaps there were some enchanted gemstones hidden in some far off place that she had yet to discover through her wayward wandering. Celestia decided without much consideration that this would be the room where she would try and spend as much of her time as she could. It was as frigid as the rest of the power-deprived satellite, but she at least had a good view of the… relative subject of her focus for the foreseeable future, as it seemed. By the light of her horn, Celestia ventured off to explore the satellite further, though her investigations did not yield anything particularly productive. The station was smaller than it had seemed when she had been walking about in a semi-delirious panic. The size was comparable to a luxury airship, though with significantly less opulence, and a more bewildering layout. Nearly everything was connected by a narrow corridor, of varying lengths but hardly ever of varying colours or materials. Walls made of cold metal, floors of tile that had seen a significant amount of wear, bearing plenty of cracks, chips, and grimy imperfections. In her head, Celestia was gradually assembling an internal map of the station. She seemed to be along a centrifuge, with several nodes connected to one centralized corridor which ran more or less straight and uninterrupted. Each node was a small cluster of rooms connected at regular intervals. There was the medical bay, which was little else besides several operation rooms and the more comfortable patient lounge. Then, the cafeteria--A dining lounge, a kitchen, and a store-room. It was likely the largest of the nodes, without counting the cavernous central chamber. Then, there was a viewing area--not a separate node, simply built along the side of the centrifugal corridor, with several sitting mats arranged before the large plate-glass window. From there, Celestia could make out the curvature of the centrifuge, which was truthfully the only way she was able to tell it was such in the first place. The next node after the viewing area was the ship’s living quarters. There was no power in them yet and they were rather frigid, so Celestia hadn’t been able to spend much time examining them. Two rooms, and there couldn’t have been more than four bunks in one room, and a single larger bunk for a larger pony, or perhaps a pair of ponies lying side by side. Eight beds, besides what was presumably hers. Eight beds, and only three souls left for them. Regardless, the node seemingly intended for sleeping within was the smallest by a significant margin. The only connecting corridor that did not connect to a node intended for the crew seemed instead to be connected to the mechanical operations of the station. It almost seemed to be a separate structure conjoined with the centrifuge by a lengthy corridor, and far smaller by comparison. If she were to look out at it from one of the windows along the centrifuge, Celestia could count three other nodes, one after the other, and with multiple dishes of reflective-looking panels extending off them from both sides. A few of them looked as though they’d been badly damaged and had been rended off their moorings, which had no doubt been the source of the sparking light that she had spotted earlier. Surely this had been where Codex had first gone off to. Celestia figured she would find him there, when she eventually braved the distance into the secondary part of the station. It didn’t look wide enough to fit a pony, which meant she’d have to travel outside the station. Somehow. For now, though, she had her immediate survival to worry about. Wherever she was, she would need food and she would need water. The cafeteria area seemed to have a decent supply of freeze dried food--oats, rice, and fruit were the chief selection that Celestia could see, and given the supply she imagined it was meant to last several years at best. It was hardly a Royal Palace buffet, but at least her survival was less of a hypothetical. Water was kept in a large tank in the same store-room, and various bits of wires and piping snaked their way from vents in the ceiling, through a metal filter mounted at the top of the tank. Over the course of what surely must have been a day--although it could have been as many as three, it was difficult for Celestia to keep track of time--she hauled various objects into the control room of the station. Blankets and pillows from the sleeping area had been her first priority. She had napped on them only after barricading the only door into the control room with a metal shelf, which she had nearly fainted just trying to move. Then, a steady store of food--as much as she could carry, though she knew it would probably only last her a week or so. She had to carry jugs of water over the course of several trips, and she knew she would have to ration it out if she wanted to limit the amount of time spent wandering the corridors of the station. Finally, she returned to the infirmary to grab more painkillers, blankets, and the ‘Science Tape’, as it had been called. She didn’t know if she’d have any way of viewing it again, but even having some slim reminder of home and of Twilight felt necessary to her.