Pierce Boil awoke from unconsciousness, bound by shackles around all four hooves, forcing him into a spread-eagle position against a cold stone wall. He appeared to be in some underground room, as near as he could tell. A blurry shape was suspended in front of his eyes. It withdrew, his eyes focusing on the form of a glass vial with some kind of light within it. As he watched, a glass stopper was applied, and the light faded out, but an indefinable feeling of something substantial was still left inside.
The vial was suspended inside the prongs of a gnarled wooden staff. Wielding the staff was a grayish-purple unicorn with a swirling mane and tail. She was standing in front of a ceiling-to-floor mirror. “There, all done!” she said lightly. She put a necklace around the neck of the vial and put it on a table, while setting the staff aside. “Now when this is all over, you’ll have a point for your memories to go back to.”
“What…what is going on here?” Boil demanded. “Who are you?”
“I am Starlight Glimmer, alias the Basilisk,” she told him. “Not that that information will do you any good.”
“And what do you want with me?”
“I’m doing what I was paid to do with you, Pierce Boil.”
“Paid? By who?”
“By whom, Mr. Boil. Proper grammar is always appreciated. I was paid by your employees. Over eight hundred of them. You are a very unpopular pony-resource director. They pooled the sum of 2,000 bits, and now I will perform the service of making you disappear. Forever.” She put on a particularly wicked smile for that last part.
“You’re going to kill me?”
“Oh, heavens no Mr. Boil. I’m going to add you to my organization, and you are going to do it willingly.”
“Willingly? Balderdash! I’ve heard of your ‘Mutes’, Miss Glimmer, and I want nothing to do with them.”
“That’s because you don’t understand, Mr. Boil. You’re suffering from the lies of your upbringing, like all other ponies. Tonight, I will be showing you the truth. Your own personal truth, about your own real identity. Once you know the truth, you’ll join my group of your own free will.”
“I highly doubt it! Unless you just brainwashed me with that fancy stick of yours.”
Starlight picked up the object in question with her aura. “This? This is the Staff of Memory, Mage Meadowbrook’s forbidden ninth enchanted item, long thought to have been destroyed. It records memories, as I have just done. And it erases memories, as I might find myself being forced to do. But it does not change memories, or the core self behind those memories.”
She walked up to a platform, so that she could look eye to eye with the imprisoned stallion, and she brought the Staff of Memory with her. “Now this could go one of two ways. I will show my personal truth to you, Mr. Boil. You will either accept your new reality and join our organization retaining all of your memories, bringing all of your valuable knowledge to serve the Mutes. Or your mind will break because it cannot handle the truth, and I will have to blank you,”—she brandished the Staff—“start you from scratch. All of my ponies who learn the truth without the weight of their Equestrian upbringings accept that truth and join me willingly. I’m hoping you will be the second pony—after myself—to fall into the first category.
“Prepare yourself.”
“You’re not going to be able to get away with this!” Boil called out. “Somepony in this village must be able to hear me. Help! Help! I’m being held captive by a madpony! You have to stop her before…before…”
Starlight Glimmer dropped her illusions. All of her illusions. Showed Pierce Boil what she truly looked like, and why she was known as “the Basilisk”.
Pierce Boil began to scream and would not stop, unable to look away from the imperfect being before him. After a few moments Starlight powered the Staff of Memory, and Pierce Boil fell silent.
“Hello, Pierce,” Starlight Glimmer said, in the tone one would use with a foal.
“Hello, Lady,” Pierce said in a simple voice. “Is that my name? Pierce?”
“Yes, and I am Starlight. What do you think of that name: Pierce? You can have a different one if you don’t like that one.”
“No, Pierce is fine.” He began to look around him in wonder.
Starlight smiled. Pierce had absolutely no problem with her current appearance.
The door to the basement opened, and Gertrude poked her head in. Her ears were stuffed with cotton. “Is it over?” she asked loudly, before remembering and removing the cotton.
“Yes. A pity,” Starlight said as she put her regular disguise in place. “We didn’t even get to the second phase, when I show him what he really looks like.” She gestured towards the mirror on the wall.
Gertrude flew over and unlocked Pierce’s shackles. He watched her with a wide-eyed wonder. “Wow, can you really fly?” he asked.
“Sure can!” she replied. “It’s great!”
“Can I do that?” he asked.
“No,” she said sadly. “But I heard you can do a neat trick with a candle flame.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Starlight said. She levitated the vial around his neck. “Now stay here for a moment while I check on something. Don’t open that vial, or something really bad will happen. Do you promise me you won’t do it?”
Pierce looked down and batted the vial lightly with a hoof. “Okay,” he said. “Do you have anything for me to play with while you’re gone?”
“Why don’t you play with the mirror?” Starlight suggested. “You can try to make the funniest face.”
“Okay!” Pierce exclaimed. He clambered down from the platform he was held on and made his way over to the other platform with the mirror. “I’ll show you the funniest face ever when you get back!”
Starlight walked over to the door.
“Hey wait a minute, Starlight!”
“Yes, Pierce?”
“How did you do that thing with your face?”
“It’s my special talent.”
“Oh. I liked you better before. It was more…you.”
“Why thank you, Pierce!” Starlight exclaimed, her face lighting up with joy. “When I come back, I can do the same thing for you.”
Pierce stared in shock at his reflection. “You mean I don’t really look like this?”
“No.”
“Ooh! I wonder what I really look like.”
“Something for you to look forward to when I get back,” Starlight said before following Gertrude out the door.
~ ~ ~
“Well, Miss Garden went snooping,” Gertrude reported. “I got her, though.” She slumped. “Why do ponies have to be so resistant to seeing their truth? Why do they make you blank all of their memories?”
“It’s just the corrupt nature of Equestrian society, Gertrude,” Starlight said sadly.
“You had to blank everyone. Even…even me, right?”
“Well, what do you think, Gertrude?”
“Well, I don’t remember anything before joining you, Starlight,” Gertrude said. She pulled out her personal vial of memories and eyed it curiously.
“That was by your own request, Gertrude,” said Starlight. “And not like the ponies, with screaming. You sought me out specifically. Told me that you had done something truly awful, that you had become someone you hated. You refused to tell me the details. And you said that you wanted to start over, right down to picking a new name for yourself. You didn’t expect that you’d want to work for me after I blanked you, because you had no secrets for me to reveal to you. But you did it anyway. Because underneath it all you are a decent griffon.”
She walked over to the windows, watching her other Mutants walking the streets, each with their own ‘monstrosities’. The second tier of her Mutes, the ones who had moved beyond serving her in her robberies and were willing to live their truths on a permanent basis.
Starlight gestured through the window at them. “Every pony I’ve met has turned out to be a decent pony once I reset them. That’s why I’m certain we can build a perfect society together. A world without lies. A world where nopony will ever have to lie to another pony, ever again.”