17:14 - 6/04/1008 - Castle Observatory Complex, Everfree Forest
At last, Grim finally had it! Free to study it, free to dive into its secrets, the Miriclarium was hers!
While she was usually kept at Special Research Site C, an underground complex deep in the mountains of Rockshire, for the time being she’d been moved to the research facilities of the Lunar Castle itself to provide special consultation on necromantic research. At her usual facility she was closely observed at all times and kept to a tight schedule, but whoever ran this site held her on a drastically looser leash and even gave her a personal lab to study dark magic in her free time.
As she trotted through the halls, she struggled to stop herself from flicking through the book and skimming the aged pages. She'd have all the time and space she could ever want to uncover the mysterious tome's dark secrets in her lab. Before long, she was there, the steel doors of Chamber 93E. Her lab.
Ignoring the occupied sign, Grim put her key gem up to the light panel on the wall. The door hissed open, permitting Grim to enter the lab before her.
“Hey! Occupied! Can’t you see the sign?”
Two ponies at the centre of the immaculate white lab, her lab! The engineer Pocarona, tinkering with a headset consisting of headphones and a wide pink visor, and his personal guinea pig Moonatik, slouched in an orthodontic chair.
“Wuh?” Grim stammered. “But, but this is my lab!”
She'd crossed paths with these two jokers before, and she couldn’t recall a single positive experience she had with them. Pocarona carried a rancid stench wherever he went, Moonatik acted like he knew everything about the world, and both randomly alternated between being a lazy bastard or a hyperactive maniac. Poca’s speciality was in developing mind control technology, but why he constantly chose Moonatik as his test subject baffled Grim. Testing a mind control headset on Moonatik was like using jet engines to get a bicycle moving.
“You weren’t here when we found it,” Poca dismissed. “Plus, it's perfect for what we need. Got a nice big chair, got all these tools, got all the bits.”
None of the things Poca listed was there when Grim was last at the lab. She briefly wondered how they got that heavy chair in there in such a short space of time, before anger and frustration reasserted themselves as her dominant emotions. “I was promised my own bloody lab! This lab!”
“Tuff, fi’ anudder one,” Poca muttered, his words muffled by the screwdriver in his mouth.
Grim growled as she sucked a breath through her nostrils, then immediately wretched and staggered back as Poca’s foul hempy whiff assaulted her. “Agh!” she groaned. “Great, you’re stinking it out too!”
“We’re stinking it out?” Poca laughed, putting the screwdriver aside. “Girl, your mane has more grease than a deep fryer. When was the last time you gave it a wash?"
“Says you!” Grim scoffed, casting an anosmia spell on herself. “Your hair looks like a mangled rat corpse!”
"Woah woah, watch out, I think she's going to try and resurrect my mane!" Pocarona mocked, sharing a chuckle with Moonatik.
"Necromancy is a science!" Grim roared, stomping a hoof into the floor and slamming the Miriclarium onto the nearest surface. "Show some bloody respect!"
“Hey, wait, maybe you should be the test subject,” Moonatik said, gesturing towards Grim. “Once the hypnosis kicks in we can force you to take a shower!”
Poca and Moonatik shared a laugh at Grim’s expense, the pair of them pointing their hooves at her and exaggerating their laughs just to rub it in. Grim had been barely keeping a hold on her anger, and that pushed her over the edge.
“That’s it!” Grim shouted, great light igniting in her horn as she stormed to the chair. “Either you’re getting out now or I’m making you get out!”
The laughs stopped. Moonatik and Pocarona shared a quiet look. Poca smirked deviously, and fiddled with something on the work surface as he turned to face Grim. “That’s an empty threat if I’ve ever heard one,” Poca said, slowly walking over to Grim. Yet Moonatik spotted that Poca had stashed a spare headset under his wing. Opting not to intervene, Moonatik sat back and observed quietly.
“You think?” Grim gritted her teeth.
“A pony with your record? Assaulting two Institute employees?” Poca chuckled, rolling his eyes. “There’s ponies who want your neck and if you slip up, they’ll have just the excuse they need to get rid of you,” Poca stopped beside Grim, eyeing her carefully. “Either way, not like you can do anything like that if you’re- Hyah!”
In a motion so quick Grim couldn’t have possibly reacted Poca slammed the hidden headset onto her head.
“Aagh!” she wailed, both surprised and enraged by Poca’s move, but far too distracted to give a seething threat.
The device lit up with life, instantly beginning to overwhelm her with a dizzying barrage of hypnotic sounds and lights. Her mind desperately commanded her to resist, to hold on to her reason and will. Her panic steadily rose with the mental sedative drilling its way in. She growled and groaned as she batted at the device trying to find a way to remove it.
“Ngaah! Get this sodding thing out of my head!”
She continued to strain, but her efforts lessened. Thoughts of autonomy, thoughts of resistance, thoughts of any kind at all slipped further and further away. She moved even less, only little bits of magic fizzling into her horn now. Each pulse the device delivered didn’t fill her with fear anymore, but rather, passivity.
Before its effects finished settling in, the final vestiges of her conscious mind acted. Grim’s instincts as a mage seized those last free corners and forced the magic from her horn to discharge a bolt of magic - right in the direction of Poca. Watching the blast leave her horn, her mind went entirely blank, her sense of feeling, of literal self, collapsing.
Unknowing of what was happening, too busy being deep in a fit of maniacal laughter, Poca was struck by the bolt with ease. The magic seeped into him, visually flowing up his chest. He’d jumped as his laughs quickly devolved into incoherent mumbles. Seemingly fighting an internal battle, he staggered backwards, looking like he’d nearly fall over himself at any moment. A brief struggle seemed to form on the stallion’s face before he was soon rendered in a similar state as Grim.
Seconds later both ponies had fallen silent. Their bodies went completely still, their eyes froze in a blank stare, glazed over and empty of emotion, while their mouths lazily hung open, strands of drool falling down their chins.
Tentatively, Moonatik got out of the chair, having been quietly watching the situation unfold before him. “You guys alright?” he asked as he walked up to the two entranced equines. “Poca? Grim? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, Moonatik,” they said in unison, their expressions unchanged.
“Ooh shit, nice, nice,” Moonatik smiled, looking between the two. “Wait wait, if she cast a spell on him that made him obey her and he put the headset on her to make her obey him, then it goes around in a loop where you’re controlling each other but neither of you is actually in command, right? So you're both just in a trance awaiting orders from the first pony to assert themselves… correct?”
“Yes, Moonatik,” they blankly confirmed.
“Ooh, nice, nice!” Moonatik's wings went stiff on their ends. “Fuck, I should be writing this down,” he said through teeth he didn't know he'd clenched. “Though, maybe I could indulge a wee bit…” he pondered. Suddenly, confidence surged within him and he puffed his chest out. “Alright, you two, I'm in charge, and from now on you're gonna address me as 'Your Prettiness'!”
“Yes, Your Prettiness.”
“Haha, yes! Yes! Aight, first, you should… Uh, go take a shower,” Moonatik said. A moment later, before either of the two could react, his eyes lit up with excitement. “Oooh, you should do it together! And get to know each other while you do it! Like, like intimately! While I wa-” he stopped himself, slamming his mouth closed. “This is getting way too self-indulgent I'm shutting it down.”