“We’re not going.”
Sunset stared down the gawping Adagio. She looked dirty, wearing a muddy rag that barely obscured her appearance, and had bolted into Sunset’s new lab as she was wrapping up Sonata’s first proper lesson.
Anger did not adequately describe what welled up inside of Sunset. It was one part of her, a speck of dust the icy fury within built around. That and the frigid fear spread through her torso, filling her legs from the hoof to her hock.
She could not, in the slightest, believe what she had heard come out of Adagio’s mouth. She lacked the words for it, stupidity, insanity, undue desperation.
“Do I need to repeat myself?” Adagio shouted. “They have Aria! I barely got away with her help.”
Sunset shut her eyes and rubbed a hoof to her forehead in circles. She occasionally bumped the inhibitor, still scratched and dented from Chrysalis’ attempts to remove it. “All the more reason we can’t go and help her. Not right now.”
Opening her eyes, Sunset resumed working on unstrapping Sonata from her bed, which Sonata took advantage of immediately. The moment her front half was loose, the rest of her stood up and leapt off the table, standing to one side equidistant from Sunset and Adagio. There, she twisted around to examine her new midsection.
Adagio growled and rolled her eyes. “Twilight threatened to cut me open before. Are you saying you want to risk that happening to Aria?” Stomping around the table, she closed in on Sunset. “We need to go now, not wait. We need to go into Ponyville and—“
“And what?” She shoved a hoof to Adagio’s chest, though she remained firmly in place. “Watch you and Sonata get caught and taken apart, too? We’re not prepared. We can’t be sure where they’ve taken her. With everything happening right now, it’ll take way too long even to start searching. Not to mention—“The hoof slid up and covered Adagio’s mouth as she faux-inhaled. “—that you’ve proven reckless and dangerous when left alone. I’m beginning to wonder if you’re actually worth the effort.”
Sonata gasped, catching both mares’ attention, and Sunset saw the thoughts whirling in Adagio’s mind out of the corner of her eye.
“What do you mean by that?”
Sunset shut her eyes again. Her head throbbed, and an acute pain ran into her brain as though a pick had pierced her skull through her horn.
“You were meant to be my big break. My way to prove myself, to improve my life.” Sunset scoffed. “Now I’m wanted by the royal guard, I’ve been forced out of another home, and there’s a good chance this one is pretty damn temporary. All because I made you three.”
She opened her eyes, and the deep, crinkling frown on Sonata’s face felt like a hammer on that pick.
Sunset couldn’t bear it, and she turned back to Adagio. It was easier to be angry with the cause of her problems. Sonata was just an accessory to them. “Were you followed?” Sunset asked with a deep, low croak.
“No. The mare that attacked us was inside someone’s house chasing Aria’s head last I saw.”
At least homelessness was tentatively off Sunset’s checklist.
“I need you out. Both of you.” She glared at Adagio, then softened her gaze when she turned to Sonata. Hopefully just enough that she would understand, though it was unlikely she could properly suppress her anger. Sonata would be upset either way. “I need to think.”
For a moment, it seemed Adagio was going to defy Sunset. The way her jaw clicked and twitched made it clear she had something more to say, but Sunset wasn’t in the mood for it any longer.
“Out. Now.”
Adagio did as she was told and left without a sound. It took her calling Sonata to follow and them disappearing down the long corridor to Celestia knows where for Sunset to figure that it wasn’t silence she heard. Still, the thunderous roar of her heart hammering away in her ears.
Lifting a hoof, Sunset resists the hulking urge to slam it down onto her workstation. Instead, she thumped it on the ground, approached the entrance, and shoved one of the heftier crate’s lids in front.
It was no door, but it would give her much-needed privacy.
She put her back to the lid and slumped down to her haunches as she surveyed her new workshop. Everything about it seemed a little off since she got set up.
It was easy to figure out why. Sunset had spent months laying out her tower precisely as she’d liked. She didn’t have to search for tools; she just knew where they were. Tinkering on a leg and needing a screwdriver? All she’d have to do was take a few steps back and to the left, and she could reach out with her back hoof.
She didn’t even need to do that, of course. The moment she needed a specific tool or material, it would hover beside her.
Sunset keenly felt the loss of both luxuries. Now, she had to search through crates and boxes by hoof, clumsily retrieving them by mouth. Things had become mixed up in the move. Sometimes, she’d find a screwdriver buried under hammers she seldom used, or a bolt she needed ended up drowning in a small container of gems. Not to mention that much of Sunset’s stuff simply didn’t make it over. She had whole drafts, schematics, and small prototypes still in the tower’s attic, and now Twilight likely had it all.
Sunset couldn’t help but smirk a little at the twerp growing irate over her work. Spike was good, but Chrysalis was terrific in both senses.
Thumping her head to the door, Sunset looked up at the ceiling. The room held less light, illuminated purely by a few crystals she had Chrysalis power. They didn’t have the same cool blue glow, filling the old chamber with a vague, caustic green. Like the migraine, the lack of sleep contributed to Sunset’s gut’s never-easing nausea.
It also made the corners of the room a little more harsh. Apparently, Sunset saw more contrast in green, however, faint the hue, which made working by hoof not quite as arduous, but that higher contrast also meant the shadows of crates and trash—or simply the extent of the crystal’s reach—became dark splotches in Sunset’s vision.
It gave the strong, unshakeable impression that something else was there with her.
That was a silly thought, of course. Chrysalis couldn’t hide in there if she tried, and while Sunset had read a little about supernatural beings of darkness and smoke, she highly doubted they existed, let alone that one would take an interest in her.
The presence was all in Sunset’s mind. Nor was it really that discomforting. It didn’t feel malicious.
Just odd.
“I am in way over my head,” she muttered. The non-presence did not answer back, but it felt good to admit the thoughts in Sunset’s head nonetheless.
It was true. Things had escalated well beyond Sunset’s ability to adapt and improvise. She had started to fall behind, not because there were minds more brilliant than hers at work—though Twilight’s certainly gave Sunset a run for her money. No, there were simply too many moving parts added to the plan and too many things happening simultaneously.
She had a plan. It was simple. She figured she’d be on her way to Canterlot by that point. Still, instead, she was holed up in an abandoned castle, unable to cast magic with magical inventions—tools to anyone else—doing whatever in Tartarus it was they wanted.
She wanted to rein them in. Adagio was proving to be dangerous, overthinking when she understood too little. She acted like she had the brain of an adult twice Sunset’s age, yet her actions proved she knew little more than a foal.
It led to growing resentment, a pit of anger in Sunset’s belly shaped like Adagio. She was responsible for setting everything into motion, alerting Twilight and her cronies to Sunset’s presence and her work.
Sunset could just go out there, make demands, pin the blame on Adagio, and pass her over to Aria in return.
If she did, though, she might never regain Aria and Sonata’s trust again. Never mind the fact she’d be condemning a thinking being to goodness knows what in Twilight’s clutches. Not to mention that blaming something that, until recently, even Sunset was sure couldn’t honestly think or feel might be hard to do.
Scoffing, Sunset rose back to her hooves and approached her makeshift worktable. Small splotches of fake skin stained the top, and scuff marks and scratches. Atop it all was one of Sunset’s notepads, opened to a page full of equations.
Half of them had been filled in by Sonata. The mare struggled to properly understand what half of the formulae meant, what they were helpful for and even how to read them, but she managed to follow the math when explained, much to Sunset’s surprise. Sunset smiled as she read back through their quickened lesson. Most of what she ‘taught’ Sonata was just a quick series of tests to help gauge how much Sonata knew explicitly and intuitively.
Given time, she was sure Sonata could make for an excellent golemancer in her own right. She was never a match for Sunset, but she was definitely capable of stepping out of her shadow.
Turning to the increasingly scant blank pages, Adagio picked up the nearby pencil and began sketching. Mostly, she vented her thoughts, not in an explicit way but more so through gestures. Long, scratchy lines, swirling scribbles. It gave Sunset some sense of control that trashing her lab wouldn’t.
Anger and brash thoughts were Aria’s thing, after all. But she had heart, too. She is willing to throw herself directly into harm’s way. She’d done so too many times in just a few short days, and each time, she must have been sure that would have been the last attempt before she was ultimately, utterly broken.
Hopefully, that fiery temperament and inability to back down meant she’d survive long enough to get herself killed another way.
Sunset flipped the pencil in her mouth regarding her ‘work’. A messy scribble, vaguely shaped like a pony. Its proportions were wrong for most: too long, too bulky. No details could be made about why, as it was made from raw, swirling shapes and sharp overlapping lines. Just a mess of thoughts and gestures.
Kind of like Chrysalis. Big, thick, sturdy. Maybe a little homicidal, but Sunset took the lack of corpses around the tower as a sign that everyone got away with their lives.
Chrysalis’ raw strength and lack of squishy, pretty skin made her an excellent tool to fight. That’s what Sunset made her for, an exemplar of function over form. She gave Sunset the heeby-jeebies when she looked at her, the skull-like face and fake fangs, even if that exhilarated her too.
The sisters’ weakness was their purpose. They were more potent and resilient than most ponies but still made as an example of form. Perfectly moulded faces, made to match Sunset’s ideal of attractiveness, designed to so succinctly climb back out of the uncanny valley.
She’d done an excellent job, given that plenty of ponies seemed to accept them.
Until they didn’t.
Sunset flipped to another blank page, then sketched anew, filled with purpose.
Sunset didn’t want to retrofit the sisters. At least, not too much. But they had a unique property that was clear in Chrysalis’ design.
They didn’t need to keep all their moving parts inside.
The sketch of a form, slightly larger than most ponies but familiar. Sunset’d given the figure a straight hairstyle, tied off into two pigtails to keep it clear of the improvements she drew around it.
Sunset had left the bolts on the sisters’ necks visible. It was the most accessible, least obtrusive way of powering them up, and with the right tools, she could tinker with the tuning of every crystal within if needed.
But if she added more…
She could potentially create a complete circuit around…
With additional pistons and joints…
All covered with…
Sunset dropped the pencil at the foot of the page and stepped back. She felt a little lighter, as though channelling her worries into a potential solution for at least one problem dragged some of the weight of her issues off her shoulders.
There were two issues with the design before Sunset, though.
The first was a lack of materials. They’d exhausted much of what they could work with and were down to scraps. It was barely enough for repairs and wholly inadequate for the coverage Sunset envisioned.
She’d have to hunt for something. Maybe some old weapons and other materials could be scrapped, making a lightweight prototype that is partial to her design.
The other problem was escalation.
If Sunset went through with this newfound plan, it would be a clear signal of escalation. Twilight would retaliate, with her association with Celestia and the Royal Guard at her beck and call; it was only a matter of time before they hit back even harder.
That was the bind, of course. The events set in motion would continue to escalate, for tensions to continue to rise. Sunset’s fight had a clear winner in the long term. She hadn’t the resources or the pony power to win out if things were to drag on.
Continuing the fight wasn’t an option.
Neither was scrapping the idea and giving up.
Both would condemn her and the sisters in the long term. It was likely Sunset would be taken in and imprisoned. She was responsible for the sisters’ creation and Chrysalis’, and she’d be accountable for their destruction, too, if she wasn’t careful.
“Damnit!” Sunset slammed a hoof onto the table, the reverberations rattling the bones up her leg. It hurt, another sensation to make her pounding head pound harder. Another fight will cost them.
But if it would cost them, then perhaps Sunset could control the price.
It would be expensive. She couldn’t give them Adagio, or Sonata, or even Chrysalis. They deserved clemency for what ultimately amounted to Sunset’s decisions. Aria, too, means Sunset would have to find some way of getting her free and back to her sisters.
Giving herself over felt like madness, but it could work if she got the upperhoof for just long enough. Assure the sisters she would be fine, ensure that Sonata had good foundational knowledge to fix everyone up and improve them.
With something resembling the seed of a plan, Sunset turned her attention to the exit. She loathed to exit, to step out and talk to Adagio again so soon. She might not even spare more than a few words for her.
Sunset would have to at some point, but before she could shove the board blocking her way out aside, something else shoved it aside instead.
Chrysalis stood in the doorway, tall, imposing. As she had every time before she laid eyes on her, Sunset felt a mix of awe, pride, and trepidation, as though Chrysalis’ mere presence conveyed an underlying monstrous nature.
She smiled, her sharp, artificial teeth barely reflecting the low light. Teeth that often found their way to Sunset’s throat when Chrysalis tried to tend to the inhibitor still strapped to her horn. “I do hope I’m not intruding.”