Chapter 5
Darkness.
This was all Twilight could see, or rather, all she couldn’t see.
One minute she was watching the Doctor talking to the ‘Operator,’ whoever that was, and the next…
Well, there didn’t seem to be a ‘next.’ After that moment, there didn’t seem to be anything.
No sights, no sounds, no scents, no tastes, no sensations of any kind.
And then the world that wasn’t exploded into the world that was—and Twilight half-wished it had stayed nonexistent.
The first thing Twilight could tell was that she was encased in a viscous, goopy liquid that pulsated with the beating of her terrified heart. Suddenly getting thrust into a new place all at once wasn’t a new experience for Twilight, being one of the few unicorns in thousands of years to master the art of teleportation (alright, almost master), but this wasn’t like teleportation at all.
Instead, opening her eyes onto the reddish gleam of the muck the unicorn was submerged in was more like…waking up.
Or falling asleep—because what Twilight experienced next was more horrific than any nightmare she’d ever had.
Twilight pushed, struggled and flailed her limbs with increasing vigor to reach the surface, which she could just barely see the light of through the icky red liquid. Cold metallic chords constrained her, pulling and tugging her back down into the warm embrace of the sickly scarlet sea. When the purple unicorn attempted to break free of them with a spell, her horn only fizzled like a newborn foal’s, though she could feel the magic emanating out of her, being sucked away…down the chords.
They wiry ropes were feeding off of Twilight’s magic!
Twilight’s struggles increased all the more in a panicked desperation and a flurry of anger—nopony stole her magic. Twilight jerked and twisted violently, and at last a few of the chords began to rip and pop off and out of the unicorn’s skin, causing her to cry out in pain, the bubbles of her precious escaped breath rushing up towards the surface. But this only caused Twilight to fight against the chords all the more, as her lungs began to burn and the prospect of drowning became less of a distant fear and more of an impending doom.
With each chord that came loose, Twilight was that much more free to struggle to the surface, and her magic was pulled away from her less and less, allowing the unicorn to use her increasingly luminous horn to magically propel her to the surface.
Twilight breached the thick membrane of the liquid like a dolphin breaking free of the sea, breathing deeply the rich, precious air. It filled Twilight’s lungs with a searing cold, but she could hardly care less as each breath brought her back from the brink of death.
When Twilight had finally caught her breath, her analytical mind immediately jumped to search for answers. Where was she? What was she doing in this red goop? What was this red goop? And where was Doctor Whooves?
Inhaling deeply, Twilight caught the unmistakable tang of magic from the reddish liquid, confirming her suspicions—she had been submerged in gallons upon gallons of potion, and a strong batch at that. Lifting a wet hoof to her mouth, Twilight stuck out her tongue and tasted the muck, her eyes immediately drooping as she did so, confirming yet another suspicion: the potion was meant to cast an enchanted slumber, which Twilight herself must have been under the spell of for who knew how long. A quick scan-spell revealed that the potion, in addition to causing any pony unfortunate enough to be dunked into it to sleep, was meant to preserve the pony inside, so that they could wake up (if they ever did wake up, that is) no older than when they had gone to sleep.
Twilight could have been in this enchanted slumber for a day or a thousand years.
The lavender unicorn shuddered at the thought.
Peering tentatively over the side of the edge of the potion’s container, twilight saw that she was in a cauldron, several times larger but roughly the same shape as the one she used to brew her own potions back at the library in Ponyville. The giant metal pot was suspended from three chains to a flagpole-like protrusion overhead, which was in turn stuck to a metal wall.
Looking to her left, Twilight gasped as she saw scores of other cauldrons, each with different colors of potion in them. Twilight could only assume that each one held a pony of its own, oblivious to their surroundings just as she had been and hooked up to those repulsive metal coils that fed off of each pony’s magic—for all ponies had magic, even if unicorns were the only ones who could properly use it.
But what was it all for?
What could one possibly gain from feeding off of a pony’s magic?
Searching for more answers, Twilight waded her way to the front of the cauldron, as far as she could get from the metal wall behind her, and peered over the side.
Twilight couldn’t say what she had been expecting—the ground, maybe—but whatever it was, it wasn’t this.
Twilight saw towers. Scores of them, as thick as the royal palace at Canterlot, rising up through mists far below. When the mists rumbled and glowed with flashes of light, Twilight realized that they were clouds—the towers were so tall, they soared even above the highest objects in the sky. Jutting out from every square inch of the towers that Twilight could see were hundreds of thousands of cauldrons, each presumably containing their own helplessly sleeping pony.
“What the buck is going on?!” Twilight thought desperately, her mind racing. This was no conspiracy—this was a waking nightmare, a brutal assault to everything the purple unicorn thought of as reality.
And then IT came.
With a flash of light that Twilight instantly recognized as the arrival of somepony via teleportation, the lavender unicorn found herself face-to-face with a…thing. It was in the shape of a pony, but Twilight could immediately tell that it was definitely not a pony.
The being was made up of thousands upon thousands of blue, glowing magical runes, each floating in place of skin, so that Twilight could see through the cracks in its composition all the way through it. The runes where the eyes should have been were golden and glowing brighter than the others, though they lacked any emotion that Twilight could discern. Two wings made of yet more bright symbols flapped, keeping the thing aloft, as it hovered closer to Twilight, who backed hastily away through the sloshing potion in terror. The eyes glowed brighter, almost blinding Twilight, and then the thing did its most frightening act so far, besides the fact that it existed at all.
It spoke.
“Pony 741,257,139 has awoken,” it said in a rasping monotone that sounded like ice grinding through a millstone. “Initiating termination procedure.”
Suddenly large, thick bubbles burst to the surface of the cauldron, showering Twilight with gook. Then the potion began to jiggle, move, and twist. Almost as if…
“It’s draining!” Twilight thought with a horrified realization. “And I’m in it! There’s no getting down over the side, either—who knows how long I’d be falling!”
The potion began to swirl faster, accelerating into an instant whirlpool that dragged Twilight, clawing desperately at the sides with her hooves to stay aloft, down with the draining potion through a hole at the bottom.
The pony that wasn’t a pony watched emotionlessly as Twilight fell through the drain, and then disappeared just as suddenly as it had come.
Twilight would’ve expected to simply fall into the caldron immediately below her, but what happened instead was very different. Twilight was sucked into the drain, which she noticed had a glowing ring around, signifying that it wasn’t a plain old hole at all but in fact a magical portal. On the other side of said portal Twilight was roughly dropped onto a soft, cushiony surface.
Looking around her for the next freakish danger waiting in line, Twilight found herself in a dank, metal room that smelled strongly of unwashed ponies and the stink of tepid water. The unwashed ponies themselves were all standing around Twilight in a circle, looking around her expectantly and, in spite of everything the violet unicorn had just been through, beaming at her with welcoming smiles.
The portal above Twilight winked out of existence, and for the first time since she woke up in the sleeping potion, Twilight wondered if she might actually, finally, be safe…for the moment.
“Don’t worry,” said a familiar voice. “You are indeed safe now. We rerouted the spell that was supposed to send you and all the other awakened ponies to the incinerator to here—our airship. You’re among friends, Twilight Sparkle. We are the Resistance.”
Out of the throng of other ponies stepped the speaker—Doctor Whooves.
“I know you’ve just been through a lot and are probably in shock right now,” the Doctor continued. “But rest assured, they can’t get you here—not right now, anyway.”
“What are you resisting?” Twilight spoke at last, eyeing the other ponies suspiciously but taking comfort in the familiar face of Doctor Whooves. “And who’s ‘they?’”
“You witnessed one of ‘them’ when you awoke,” the Doctor explained. “The peculiar-looking pony-thing made out of floating runes. There are more of them—so many more. They are what we are resisting. They are the AIM, and they are the bane of all ponydom.”
Doctor Whooves paused for dramatic effect.
“They are the Artificially Intelligent Magic.”