//------------------------------// // 53. Suspicions // Story: Kill Me Now // by Golden Script //------------------------------// For the past few days we have been getting along quite well. EQ and Presto are fitting in with everypony like a puzzle piece. EQ fits in with the band; his bass was what we were looking for. It made that low tone that was both complementing and controlled, it wouldn’t overpower the rest of us but it would also keep a steady hum. Presto was helping Vinyl at the club a lot. She said he had a “groove that I’d never heard before.” I didn’t argue, it was defiantly original. Vinyl had fast high beeps and noises in her music, Presto had a slower low hum to his music, like EQs bass. They're working on a new album together; Vinyl makes the higher beats while Presto makes the low wubs. It had only been a few days and my and EQs relationship has escalated to the point of kissing. We knew we wanted to know more about each other before we started going further and I felt that I knew EQ better than anypony else. Maybe even more than Vinyl. One morning I was home alone with Vinyl. We were just talking. Talking about work, what the more famous artist were doing, when our next big performance was. Somehow we started talking about our coltfriends. “I'm tellin ya, Tavi, somethin’s goin on with those two. They seem familiar.” She was trying to convince me that we had met them before. “I remember most of the ponies I meet and I had never seen a face quite like EQs.” I would have remembered his particular style if I had heard him play. “Well, just the way he acts is familiar.” Then I remembered one of my first thoughts when I met EQ. “His voice was au fait.” She gave me a weird look. “Aw what?” I facehoofed. “Never mind, I had heard it somewhere before.” “See, I'm tellin you, I know them from somewhere, but I can't remember.” She tilted her head back in deep thought. I started to think myself. I thought of every performer I had ever met, any high end or low end artists I had overlooked in my previous attempts. My mind sorted through all of the names and faces I had met in all my years of music. After my most recent failure of finding any matches I thought of one last artist. He played bass and knew how to use a pair of turntables. The only issue was that he only had one body. I started thinking of possible explanations of how he could acquire more arms and legs. He might have had his brain copied and placed in different cells, or he could have been put through teleportation and the user was inexperienced. Then I decided to bring it up with Vinyl, seeing as she is a unicorn, she could know something. “Hey, Vinyl, if I wanted to make a copy of myself, how would I do that?” she seemed utterly confused. “What?” “Well, let’s say that I want to be in two or three places at once. How could I accomplish this?” “You could implant a copy of your brain in another body. You could chop yourself in half. Or you could split yourself using a spell.” The surprising thing about all this is she said it with a completely straight face, like she was serious. “You have to be kidding me.” I gave her a questioning look; in response she raised her glasses. “What? Magic is amazing! You should look into it sometime.” I gave her a ‘whatever’ look. “I’ll be sure to do that some time.” she wiped the look of bizarre surprise off her face “so that last one sounded promising. You said a spell?” “Yeah, but why is this important?” she now had a questioning look. “Because I think I might know where we know EQ and Presto from.” I responded with a wistful grin. ----- We had decided to go to the library to find a book on mind spells. An hour later we were at the door knocking. Twilight opened it after a moment. “Hello, girls, is there something you need?” she asked from the other side of the doorway. “Ah, yes, we were coming to check out a book on mind spells.” I answered with no small amount of gratitude, if anypony would help us figure this out it was Twilight Sparkle. “I think I have the perfect thing for you. Please, come in.” she stepped back into the building, we followed suit. She went straight to a book shelf and started searching “may I ask what kind of mind spell?” she asked without looking back. “Well, can I ask you a question, Twilight?” “Sure, what is it?” “What kind of spell would allow a pony to make several copies of itself?” she seemed to be a bit surprised. “Um… I know a spell that fits that description to a T, but it was a major failure. If you are looking for a duplication spell you might want to check old mares tales.” She scoffed at the idea of self replication. “Well, we think that somepony actually did it.” “What? How?” she was in my face. “We don’t know! But we think that EQ and Presto are copies of Dillon.” Both the mares look at me in deep confusion. “What? How is that possible?” Twilight asked the question we have been trying to answer. “That’s what I want to know.” I told her. “And you came here, to the library, to try and find a book on the subject.” She tried to confirm. “Yes, now where was that book you were talking about?” I asked as she went back to her search, after a minute she pulled a book out. “Here it is.” She opened the book and started to read, after a minute of reading she looked at us “are you sure that this is what you’re looking for?” “Well, we don’t actually know anything about it.” I explained. “Oh, sorry, this book has a spell that takes one pony and splits its soul into a number of parts. This also splits said ponies body into an equal number of bodies. This spell has never worked because the test subjects only have one mind, if you try to split one mind you only get fragments. So I’ll ask again, are you sure this is the spell you’re looking for?” “I'm not sure. Has this spell ever been tried on a human?” “Up until a few weeks ago I didn’t know humans even existed.” She had a good point. “Well, it’s our best lead yet, to where Dillon went and where these new stallions came from.”