A Tale of Soldiers and Scientists

by ZeroInfinity

1: An Improbable Turn of Events

Doctor Tangled Web sat in a chair, sipping coffee and reading his morning paper, as he did every morning. This time though, he was looking for a specific article, an interview of him. He was offhandedly wondering just how much damage control he would have to do when he found it by his picture, that of a gray unicorn with a messy, white mane and a cutie mark of a large number of glimmering threads interwoven haphazardly, fading slowly at the edges.

Doctor Web chuckled. Reporters would be reporters. It looked, thankfully, like they hadn’t meddled in his wording too badly. He sipped his coffee, dropped the paper and looked out the window, greeted by the sight of foals playing in the streets. It was the weekend, after all, and this would be when he could get the most work done. He got up and closed the blinds with his magic. No more putting it off. I have to test that spell while I still have vacation time, he thought.

Dr. Web opened the door to his study, and looked around with pride at his work. The room was converted from a simple, relatively small room with a table and some chairs to a magical focal point, and had been covered in sigils and runes, focuses and tuners, all for a single purpose. Escape.

Dr. Web was a skilled arcanist, but he was very bored with humdrum Equestria. Instead, he had taken to looking into other dimensions for more excitement in his life, and he had found one nearly infinitely more exciting that his home.

It was the dimension of one Sir Phillip, Fifth Battalion Senior Materium Defender.

Phillip woke to the sound of his alarm clock whistling loudly. He promptly proceeded to slap the Disable button on his alarm clock, causing the whistling to slowly taper off, then rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

He rolled out of bed and headed to his small fridge, taking out a glass of water he had left in it over night to drink. As he drunk, he looked around his small room. It was the standard room of a guardsman of his station, outfitted with rather old spell heating and cooling matrices, water and a leyline hook, and decorated sparsely with only the essentials.

He opened the door to his wardrobe and pulled out his guardsman’s outfit. It consisted of an armored trenchcoat, thick reinforced flannel pants, leather steel-toed boots, amplification gloves and a thick metal helmet, equipped with HUD and an aethernet suite. He began putting it on, and when he got to the helmet he put it on.

Immediately, the helmet began to speak to him in a calm, female voice. “Phillip Johnson, please repeat the following sentence: The wicked shall be punished by the just defender.”

“The wicked shall be punished by the just defender, yeah yeah,” said Phillip with the ease of a man repeating an action he had done many times before.

“Vocal recognition accepted. Launching suite...” said the helm. Immediately after, health information, leyline levels and an objective appeared on his screen. ‘Report to Mess Hall,’ it said.

“Same as every day, hess, you don’t need to tell me,” he said, before opening his door to the outside world. London greeted him, a bustling place where steam sat in perpetual pallor over the land as the trains and zeppelins moved off in the distance, creating a constant noise. His room was part of a massive collection of them, all housing guardsmen, part of one of their bases in London. The King liked to keep a close watch on all of them, as they were trusted with the business of keeping the civilians in line whenever he made an unpopular decision, which was often.

From raising the taxes to obscene rates to commissioning statues of himself to even rewriting the history books, The King did everything he could to keep in power. Recently he had assembled a large device to prolong his life indefinitely, but that required lots of magical power to run, so the price of energy had risen as energy was ‘donated’ to the government to power the machine. It was going to be busy for a while, that would be sure.

Phillip walked down the stairs to the courtyard, filled with dirt as the grass had been long since combusted for steam to carry the magical current that made this world possible. He opened the door to the mess hall, and was greeted with the few guards up before the sunrise as they ate.

“Hey, Phillip, over here!” called out one, marked by his HUD as Michael, one of his friends. Phillip grabbed some food from the table and headed back over to Michael.

“Gonna be real busy Phil, real busy, and I’m gonna take on as many jobs as I can. I’m thinking I can make Senior like you by the end of the month!” said Michael.

“Yeah, sure,” said Phillip. “And the Commander’s gonna give us all the day off.”

“No, seriously Phil! I think I can make it!” said Michael.

“Alright, and what’ll you do when you do make it, huh?” said Phil. “Do the same thing for marginally more money?”

“No man! Well, yes, but I’ll finally get some respect! I’m tired of being the new guy.”

“And that attitude is going to ensure you stay the new guy.”

“Hey!” said Michael, then they both laughed.

Dr. Web had been watching the whole time. He smiled at the two, glad to see that friendship will persevere even in different dimensions. Well, he thought. Time to test the link and see if it’s stable.

Slowly, Dr. Web funneled his magic through the various runes around him, funneling it slowly into the cafeteria as the two guardsman kept talking. He panned the view over to the table and slowly lifted a pastry, then dropped it.

“Success!” Dr. Web was ecstatic. He had physically affected the world through the dimensional barrier with a spell! Thankfully, nobody noticed the small spectacle. Web ended the viewing spell and levitated a scroll and quill over, beginning to write at a frantic pace as he trotted out the door.

He would make history. Just, of course, after he got back from his vacation.