Chapter 21:
“... So...?” Rarity ventured.
“So what?” Surprise inquired before diving back into her spidery vegetable meal.
“You said you were about to tell us why the world is in danger,” Rarity reminded her with no small amount of irritation. “And honestly Surprise, this is your last chance. If this turns out to be nothing but more of your... you being you, then I think all of us are going to retire for the night. Furthermore, I know I’ll never hear any more talk about that ghastly tree ever again.”
Firefly and Megan nodded their affirmations.
“Oh, yeah, that—” Surprise spoke, instantly snapping to attention. Seeing her so focused would have been rather unnerving under normal circumstances. Then again, there were no normal circumstances with Surprise (or in this era, for that matter). Either way, whatever seriousness the frizzy-maned pegasus was trying to pull off was completely ruined by the purple plant juices dribbling down her chin. “Well, you know how all the imprints of your friends, except for that of my great-greater-greatest grandmother, are all meanie pantses?”
“Yes...?” Rarity humored her friend, really hoping Surprise would wrap this up. It had been quite a day for all of them—scratch that, it had been quite a thousand years for the whole world. The call of the bed upstairs in the room they had rented was like a siren’s song. Rarity fleetingly wondered who would actually get to sleep in the bed. She supposed Firefly and Surprise could just snag some wisps of clouds to sleep on, and Megan very well may have her own bed stored away in her computer.
“Well, I think there’s a reason for all that,” Surprise went on. “You see, well, how do I explain this—”
“Excuse me?”a familiar, yet still quite unexpected, voice interrupted the snowy pegasus. The group turned to see the pegasus peddler standing just beyond the short fence that separated the restaurant patio from the street, a cart full of her remaining recording devices tied up behind her. When had she gotten there, and why hadn’t any of them heard her arrive? Even if she had flown here on wings as quiet as an owl’s, she couldn’t have landed that large cart without a sound. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything...”
“Actually, you are, so shove off,” Surprise answered before anypony else could reply. “Now, where was I? Oh yes, the imprints—”
“Surprise!” Rarity snapped, glaring at the pegasus before turning to the merchant with an apologetic look. “Sorry about her. We were just having dinner. How can we help you?”
“I was just on my way out of town,” the peddler explained. “And I thought I should check up on my best customer in, well, ever. I hope the crack Disks didn’t cause you too much frustration?”
“Oh, no, they didn’t,” the white unicorn answered.
“Really?” the merchant chuckled, looking surprised.
“Hey!” Surprise jumped in. “Stop expressing me on your face! And let me finish—what I have to say is really inordinate! I mean, important!”
“Just a minute, Surprise,” Rarity instructed.“Sorry about her, Miss. Was there anything else we could help you with?”
“You mean you don’t want a refund for the Disks?” the peddler inquired, looking puzzled. Rarity shook her head. “Why would you want to keep recording devices that don’t work for you?”
“Oh, they worked for me just fine,” Rarity replied.
The pegasus peddler’s face froze in a look of wide-eyed shock.
“... What... what did they say?” she questioned eagerly, almost shaking with anticipation.
“... Isn’t that a bit of a personal question?” Rarity answered, feeling more than a little unnerved by the sudden, drastic change in the pegasus’ demeanor. “No offense, but I’d rather keep that matter private.”
“But they played for you?” the merchant repeated, leaning uncomfortably close and causing Rarity to instinctually lean back, even though a full table separated them.
“Yes, I already said that—” Rarity tried to say.
“WE’VE FOUND THE ONE!” the pegasus suddenly shouted.
Instantly, flashes of red flecked with coils of swirling shadow burst into being being all around them. Zebras and ponies alike gasped and staggered back as the miniature dying stars darkened further and took on equine shapes.
What in The ULE?!
There were ponies from each of the three races, though each was sporting a coat dyed dark blue.
Dark blue... Just like...
Rarity’s draconic eyes widened.
“Run!” she shouted, her scorpion tail perking up as her heart rate skyrocketed in a primeval fear. Judging by their facial expressions, her companions didn’t entirely understand the cause for Rarity’s fear, but the fact that she was afraid at all coupled with their experiences with her were more than enough to send the group scrambling from the table.
“Oh, no you don’t!” a newly-appeared unicorn laughed darkly, his horn igniting and darting out with tendrils of magic to snatch Rarity up into the air. Other unicorns did the same for Megan, Firefly, and Surprise, each struggling for all they were worth against the magical auras.
“Let. Us. GO!” Rarity demanded, her tail thrashing wildly. Her fear-fuelled adrenaline strengthened the new primal instinct the extra appendage had come with to levels beyond Rarity’s control. She was relieved that nopony was close enough to be stung.
Her own horn ignited, furiously counteracting the other unicorn’s telekinesis. His aura began to spark and she began to fall out of it.
“I don’t think so, Prophetess,” the unicorn almost guffawed. His horn sparked all the more, though not with his natural glow, or any natural glow for that matter. That same magical scarlet darkness that had heralded the newcomers’ arrival erupted from his horn, snaking along his telekinetic trail. They accelerated as they neared Rarity, darting towards her like hungry vipers. They struck, sinking into her flesh.
Rarity screamed like she had never screamed before. Every scream she’d ever uttered in her entire life, when faced with this scream, would wither away in mind-breaking horror.
After an eternal moment, the dark scarlets and crimson shadows ripped themselves away from the white unicorn’s hide and encircled the other unicorn’s telekinetic field.
After the dark spots had finished dancing behind her eyelids, Rarity saw that the street had been deserted save for the dark-blue ponies. At least the townsfolk had had the sense to get away from these monsters.
“Funny, I only meant to hold you in place a little more tightly,” the dark-blue unicorn snickered. “I guess that’s just... our brand of magic for you.”
A memory flashed in Rarity’s mind. Spells that not even the darkest unicorns of old would even dream of casting.
“Rarity!” Megan and Firefly gasped.
“Marshy!” Surprise screeched.
Each companion moved to retaliate, before they were met with the same fate by the magic of their own captors.
“Now that we have your attention...” the pegasus ‘peddler’ chuckled. “We can finally achieve The Prophecy!”
“What are you talking about?!” Megan snarled. Even having just experienced that pain that was beyond pain, she was still trying to snap her hand-appendages, though her telekinetic prison was too strong. Rarity admired her courage. Before this was all over, the white unicorn knew they would all need such fighting spirits.
“Nothing you would understand, False One,” the pegasus spat. She turned to Rarity. “Now, Prophetess. Tell us. Tell us The Prophecy!”
“What ‘Prophecy?!’” Rarity demanded. “What could ponies like you possibly want with my friends’ messages to me?!”
“What are we talking about?” the pegasus asked. “What are you talking about? The Disks are not messages from your friends—they are the catalysts of The Prophecy, left behind by The High Seeress herself, Pinkie Pie!”
“SHUT UP!” Rarity shouted. “SHUT UP, SHUT UP! SHUT UP! Pinkie Pie was NOT affiliated with you monsters! She hated that her work was twisted by you miserable excuses for ponies!”
“Why should we care whether or not The High Seeress cared for us?” the peddler chuckled. “She was nothing more than a window to The True World. It is we who actually seek The True World!”
“You mean you recognize these ponies?” Firefly asked Rarity.
“We all do,” Rarity answered. “Well, maybe not Megan, but she can hardly be expected to know about the most horrific event in pony history if humans only came here fifty years ago. What I don’t understand is how you monsters survived a thousand years without anypony knowing you had survived the Fire!”
“Oh, the world has not forgotten us,” the pegasus explained. “And we have not been silent. All of the companies, even the useless government of this living lie, has known of our presence from the day we struck the first blow of truth. However, to quell a populace who would rather live in ignorant bliss than face reality, the powers of this world have concealed our continued existence. You’ve certainly heard of our exploits, even if you didn’t realize what you were seeing at the time. You have heard of the magical incident that destroyed Old Canterlot, have you not?”
“You did that?!” Rarity gasped.
“Yes,” the pegasus replied. “Well, not me specifically, but we did. The flame of our birth never died, Prophetess. It was only covered by those who thrive off of lies.
“But enough talk about us,” the pegasus continued. “Deliver for us, o Prophetess, The Prophecy laid down by The High Seeress Pinkie Pie herself through the Disks! Tell us the secret to destroying this world, so that we may transcend the lies and attain godhood in the true reality!”
“Pinkie Pie didn’t leave any such ‘secret’ in those Disks!” Rarity screamed. “They were messages left to me by my friends!”
“Why do you keep saying that?” the pegasus questioned again. “The Disks are not common recording devices. They are sacred objects. We should know; we’ve been collecting them for centuries after they were stolen from The High Seeress’ company during the war. Collecting until we had every last one, and then searching for centuries more to finally find The Prophet or Prophetess who could unlock the Disks’ secrets for us.”
“I should have known that finding them all in one place was too good to be true,” Rarity sighed. “I suspected that, of all the monsters that could have been responsible for this latest tragedy, it had to be you. Why couldn’t you have just stayed in the past? Why couldn’t I have just stayed in the past? Why couldn’t I have not eaten that apple?!”
A tear slid down Rarity’s cheek. She wasn’t sure she could take much more of this.
No. No, she could. She could take on anything. Her sister loved her, blast it all! Her friends needed her, and she wouldn’t be absent from these friends’ lives like she’d been from the ones before!
It wasn’t her fault for eating the apple. She knew that. But it would be her fault if she didn’t get her friends out from the hooves of these barbarians.
“If you don’t reveal The Prophecy, we have means of... persuading you,” the pegasus threatened. “Unless you want to taste the sting of what our magic can do when we actually want it to hurt, I suggest you divulge the information we require.”
“Do your worst,” Rarity spat.
“You are no stranger to pain,” the pegasus observed.
“You have no idea,” Rarity snickered. “Why don’t you let me down so that I can make you no stranger to pain?”
“Soon, but not yet,” the pegasus promised with a dark smile. “Soon, we will lower you to the ground, and you will lower yourself to your knees and beg us for mercy. You will ask us for death and thank us when we oblige you. But first, we need that Prophecy. and there are other ways of making even the strongest-willed ponies talk...”
The pegasus turned her gaze upon Rarity’s friends, and the white unicorn’s eyes widened.
“No, I’ll tell you,” Rarity pleaded. “You won’t like it, but I can tell you.”
“You will tell us,” the pegasus agreed. “But for your insolence, I believe some punishment is required.”
“No!” Rarity gasped.
The pegasus only smiled and nodded to the unicorns holding up Rarity’s friends.
FLASH.
Screams assaulted Rarity’s ears, but a smile split her face when she realized that they were not the screams of her friends. Opening the eyes she had clenched shut to spare her the horror of seeing her friends tortured, Rarity saw, amidst a cloud of dissipating magical sparks—
“Daybreak!” Rarity gasped with overjoyed relief.
The robotic pony had appeared right in the middle of the telekinetic streams of the dark-blue unicorns. The dark spells they must have been sending towards Rarity’s friends must have rebounded off of Daybreak’s reflective metallic hide, as the dark-blue unicorns were now writhing in agony, having dropped their captives.
“I warned you! Now get out of here!” Daybreak called to Rarity before turning to face the monsters who called themselves ponies. “I’ll hold them off—they can’t torture me, since I don’t feel pain—but you have to flee and destroy those Disks!”
“Destroy the Disks?!” Rarity echoed, aghast. “But they’re the only thing I have left to remember my friends!”
“If you destroy them, then these arsonists won’t have any reason to continue their insane endeavors!” Daybreak assured as she shot a blast of magic at the unicorn holding Rarity aloft. He was struck full on and fell back, turned to stone. “I ran into these guys a while back—that’s why I wanted to destroy the Disks over the ocean. Speaking of which, I don’t know how you’re going to destroy those Disks if even I couldn’t, but you have to, or these monsters will stop at nothing to get you!”
Daybreak was firing her burning-orange blasts left and right now, knocking the dark-blue ponies back with dozens of different spells.
“But we can help you!” Rarity insisted, firing her own icy blue magic into the throng of dark-blue. Her friends began to follow suit with their own methods of attack.
“No!” Daybreak argued. “Get out of here! Just stay away from Mother’s company. She’s been working on a new teleportation technology to catch you. I stole some and that’s how I was able to get to you over the ocean. In fact...”
Daybreak about-faced and fired a blanket of burning orange across the group, charging them with magic. They started to fade.
“No!” Rarity called, her voice already as faint as her even-now dissipating form. “At least come with us! You can’t take on all those monsters on your own!”
“Maybe not,” Daybreak called back to them, “but I can slow them down! Now go! Destroy the Disks!”
“NO!” the pegasus peddler roared, weaving her way through the android’s shots. She rushed towards Rarity and her friends, already too late to capture them but too obsessed to care.
Just as the world vanished around them, Rarity heard the pegasus’ parting words.
“We will seek you out!” she shouted. “No matter where you run, no matter where you hide, we will seek you out. We will rise! THE SEEKERS WILL RISE, AND THIS WORLD SHALL FALL!”
. . .
The world materialized around them.
The shadows of the towering trees signified that they had been dropped in The Fluttershy Forests, but the once peaceful groves now felt anything but safe.
“Those were The Seekers?!” Firefly blurted. “I thought they were all—how could they have survived all this time without anyone knowing?!”
“The same way nopony in the general populace knows how the imprints really are,” Rarity answered. “They only know what the imprints tell them. If the companies want The Seekers to stay a secret, then nopony will ever be any wiser.”
“Speaking of the imprints,” Surprise spoke up. “I never got to finish my very inordinate revelation!”
“Not now, Surprise,” Rarity chided. “We need to come up with a plan, and then we need to get some sleep.”
“Plan?” Megan echoed.
“The Seekers have been a secret for too long,” Rarity explained. “They should have never existed in the first place, but now that I know they still exist, I’ll have to correct that error. Once the populace knows the truth, then maybe The Seekers can be put behind bars forever, and I’ll have done some good in this world. It certainly needs some good in it, what with all I’ve seen of it.”
“Forgive me,” Megan spoke. “But like you said, I have no idea who these ‘Seekers’ are. Some kind of pony cult, I’m assuming?”
“Cult with a capital KILL,” Surprise agreed. “But they’re not that big of a threat compared to the horrific secret I’ve been trying to reveal to you.”
“I think the best thing to do would be to rest until morning,” Firefly suggested, earning a glare from Surprise for changing the subject yet again. “Then Megan can conjure up another life raft we can use to fly back to the heart of The ULE. I’m sure we can spread the word in one of the cities the companies have less influence in.”
“But—” Surprise began, raising a hoof.
“I agree,” Rarity affirmed, cutting the pegasus off. “Sorry to keep interrupting you Surprise, but I’m afraid there are just some issues a little more pressing at hoof than your theory about the imprints. With what I’ve seen of them, I’m not sure there’s any way the imprints could be any worse, even with a conspiracy theory. Now, I think it’s all time we got some much-needed rest—”
“YOU WILL LISTEN TO YOUR—” Surprise roared with an impossible volume that literally knocked Rarity off her hooves and sent her tumbling backwards into Firefly and Megan. Then, in her normal but no less frantic voice, she gasped “No, wait, NO! NO! NO! I am NOT going back to THAT PLACE!”
“Surprise!” Rarity uttered. “How... what—”
“Just—just listen to me... please...” Surprise blinked away tears. “Forget what I just said, but please, you have to listen to this. We can go to sleep right after, I promise, but I need to tell you this first!”
“... Okay,” Rarity agreed, puzzling over in her mind how Surprise could keep pulling off such strange anomalies, even if she was Pinkie Pie’s descendant. Then again, according to one of the Disks, Pinkie Pie had crossed an entire ocean without teleporting or even using magic, so the white unicorn supposed that this latest strangeness wasn’t all that far-fetched after all. “What did you want to say?”
“I lied,” Surprise replied. “About not knowing who or what Tirek was or is. Well, sort of. I don’t know who or what Tirek is, but I’ve heard that name before.”
“Where?” Rarity asked.
“I’ve been around Pinkie Pie’s Party Supplies long enough to learn a few things,” Surprise went on. “I know that Pinkie Pie’s imprint is not the copy of the party pony she makes everypony think she is in her advertisements. I know where to acquire all the dangerous ingredients needed for making ‘gimmick’ explosives, as well as how to make them even more dangerous, so that they’ll actually explode in the first place. I even know where all the secret rooms in the factory are, though I haven’t been inside all of them.”
Rarity nodded, not seeing how this was relevant, but humoring Surprise nevertheless.
“And, in my time snooping around the factory when Pinkie Pie’s imprint wasn’t looking, I learned a few things about the imprint herself,” Surprise carried on. “She’s not who she says she is. I know you think she’s the one good imprint and every other imprint went bad, but I think it’s the other way around. I’m not sure how, but I think that somehow Pinkie Pie’s imprint is the reason the other imprints went bad. They used to be the good ones, but she corrupted them, slowly. Over time, they became how you know them to be in this era. She’s not the good one—she’s the worst of the bunch, but she’s smart enough to hide that she’s been the source of all this badness.
“What’s more, she has a secret plan,” Surprise finished. “I don’t know what it is, but I know it can’t be good, especially if the real Pinkie Pie thought that it could destroy the world. It’s called ‘Project Tirek’.”