//------------------------------//
// 8: Exposition and Acquisition 
// Story: The Clockwork Heaven 
// by Leliel 
//------------------------------//

At first, Twilight just blinked.

Then one of the other Elements started laughing, and the rest joined in. 

"...Stop laughing at us." The feminine voice had lost some of its calmness.

Rainbow barely managed to get her words out through the pearls of laughter. "Why....ha....shouldn't we? That, pfft, that was, haaah, a good one!" She keeled over by that point, too overcome with mirth to stand.

"I said, stop laughing!"

There was the sound of an explosion as the feminine voice rose to a shriek. It had the desired affect.

"...Jophiel."

"Yes, yes, I have a temper. I've noticed already, Harahel."

"It has not been as controlled as it was once."

"Look, Barachiel, I've had a bad week, okay!? It's nothing to be concerned about!"

"If you so speak...Ahem."

The ponies could feel the attention go back to them.

"You have every right to think of it as unbelievable-"

Rarity coughed. "Nuttier than a squirrel overdosed on caffeine, I would think-"

"Unbelievable, but it is as close to our origin as this tongue is capable of conveying."

Twilight sniffed. "Really? Because I think I would remember having intimate relations with a psuedo-mechanical monster, and then pregnancy with triplets. Fraternal triplets, at that,"

"You would be most shocked to learn how frequently the first part of that act was forgotten."

"But we'll be the first to admit we were born from no womb." The voice Twilight realized belonged to Jophiel paused. "Well, the womb of no mammalian female."

"But your rejected role did serve as the basis for our construction....Princess."

Rainbow caught on first. "...Wait, are you telling us that you're linked to-"

"Yes. You are quite accurate in your assessment."

"For when Twilight fell from the heavens, and became lowly mortal once more, the mantle of divinity that she had squandered remained in this corrupt physical world."

"That mantle...was our embryo."

There was a flash, not dissimilar to Discord's dream pearl activating, and the form of the hospital dissolved.

"We are the discarded holiness of a fallen god."





Chapter 8: Exposition and Acquisition





Vinyl blinked. 

One moment, she was trying to figure out how to help Octavia despite her...newfound physical deficits preventing her, the next she was in a strange cavern full of odd machinery,  and (she gulped a little) hanging slabs of meat and other organs, preserved in jars full of yellow liquid. She stared at a pony heart for a while, then blinked and shivered (how she was able to shiver was beyond her), she turned away from the bizarre, creepy panorama.

She squealed in relief.

"Octy! Octy, oh thank the Sun you're okay...Octy?"

Something was...different about Octavia. Of course, she was acting like she couldn't see or hear Vinyl, but that was to be expected-whoever heard of ghosts being naturally visible or audible? No, the body language was off: While normally, Octavia was extremely refined and controlled, one got the sense that it was an effort on her part, because...it usually was. One had to remain utterly stoic if one was a performer for the infamously snobby Canterlot elite if one wanted to remain a performer. Not easy to do when having to deal with the origin of the term "upper-class twit".

Right now though....right now, there was a complete lack of any body language at all, like she was a breathing statue.

"Octy! You okay?"

She turned around, and Vinyl got a good look at her eyes.

The ghost screamed.





The darkness that had been the room brightened, revealing a collection of moving pictures forming the walls-which, to Twilight's alarm, she immediately recognized as important scenes from her life.

"You see, Apostate, the Creator, what you lowly mortals call the God-Machine, is omnipresent."

"There is no place on the mortal coil our most perfect sire-dam does not bless with Its caress."

"Your world not at all the least of those the Creator bases full Infrastructure on."

The images shifted. Now on the walls was scenes of a fiery, lava-covered world, bursting with volcanic activity.

In the sky, a bright light descended on the planet, alighting gently on suddenly-cooled solid ground.

"We, what lesser beings such as yourself call angels, found this world of yours just after it developed an atmosphere, and alerted the Creator to a rocky planet suitable for life."

The light dimmed to reveal a strange angel, looking nothing so much as like a wheel with mechanical eyes and wings of golden flame. It observed the world around it with interest, then turned on its axis to become flat to the ground, beaming light into the sky. More lights soon descended.

"To this planet, we brought primitive, hardy microbes from the most hazardous biomes on other worlds, and saw which ones evolved."

The revealed angels shone lights into the sky in sequence, drawing an asteroid from the night sky. As it crashed, a massive splash of liquid water spilled across the once-dry landscape.

"This was the Creator's most precious gift to this young world-a future."

Time seemed to speed up. The red lava turned brown as it cooled and became stone, dark forms began to dart around the water, and the sky began to turned red and back as the first sunrises came to the young planet. The angels, however, never moved, wheel-eyes staring intently across the planet.

"As is natural for mortals, it was unappreciated."

One of the dark forms broke the water, revealing a strange, monstrous beast that looked something like an obese crustacean with coral for a shell and disturbingly equine eyes. Those same eyes were filled with rage and hunger as it attacked one of the angels, wounding it so that golden, oddly oil-like blood spilled out. The other angels were quick to react, turning those beams that had called the asteroid down on the sea monster. It shrieked, then quickly submerged, its form growing compact and sleek as it retreated beneath the waves.

"This world's infant ecology was shaped by the hundred worlds we drew its seed from, hybridizing into something bizarre and alien to all of those, even the gas giants."

More time lapsed. The sky turned blue as the sun rose and set repeatedly, and even stranger monsters than the coral-beast began to dip in and out of the growing ocean.

"This was displeasing to the Creator. Equestria grew yet more unpredictable by the aeon, with its inhabitants of stranger intellect. It was a labor to predict their minds, even within this animal state."

"It had to be corrected."





Vinyl was internally debating what this...thing was.

On the one hand, it looked like Octavia, and it seemed alive, not like those awful half-pony machines, who she could somehow instinctively tell had already died, though the flesh still lived.

On the other...she really did not want to believe that this thing was her Octy.

To be frank, it didn't act like a normal pony. Or act like a normal cellist. Or anything like anything normal, at all.

It played well, certainly, but there was no passion in it. It might as well have been an equine record for all the emotion expressed in this "live" performance. Yes, it was close enough to genuine playing for somepony who was only listening to think it was normal, in that the somepony in question would then expect to see speakers somewhere.

Certainly not...the eyes. The soulless, emotionless eyes.

After a few seconds of staring in shock, Vinyl's internal debate ended in favor of "Octavia." Phantasmal tears came to her eyes.

"Octy...what did they do to you?"

"Suppressed emotion, gave basic directives, instilled loyalty-enforcing memetic patterns, then told her to play the cello for examination", a group of monotone, harmonized voices responded from behind her.

Vinyl whipped around, and suppressed a scream.

"Greetings, Sentry. I am Dalga."





The wheel-angels surrounding the sea tilted upwards to face the heavens, shining once more.

"Thus, we set about domesticating this world."

The angels shone in sequence, a complex flashing pattern that was too fast to intuit greater logic from the patterns. 

"Our predecessors set in motion the events that would draw other divinities to the forming world, ones that would waste little of the Creator's resources in bringing order."

The angels suddenly turned vertical again and flew off. Shortly thereafter, new lights-not the cold, sterile lights of the angels, but multicolored and somehow warmer and more inviting-descended onto the shore.

"These were the genesis of your Princesses' lines."

The lights dimmed, revealing a pure white female alicorn with a red mane and a pure red male alicorn with a white mane.The two nobles looked around the sea and otherwise barren sea with trepidation and curiosity, sniffing and examining the rocks and water.

"We did not even have to pressure them to make the necessary adjustments-the primordial life did that for us."

The coral-beast (or possibly another member of its species) leaped out at the male alicorn, affixing its jaws to his neck before he had a chance to react. The female alicorn wasted no time in attacking the monster, releasing a powerful blast of many-colored light that instantly vaporized it. Mostly unharmed, the male got to his feet, rubbing his new bitemark.

"Even they, who had just arrived to this world, could understand that it needed to be reordered in order to transmute it into a habitable form."

The red looked at the white, she nodded, and then both released a web of magic into the skies from their horns, which began to fall downwards into the planet. Almost immediately, the choppy sea began to calm, and flora came from stone.

"The world was sealed within its own dimensional pocket, under the complete rule of the Princesses' ancestors, and their chosen people."

A great ship, a white polymer hybrid between a galleon and something out of a space opera, came out of the sky, the flames of reentry apparently ignored. As it landed, great metal sails fanned out to slow its descent and wings folded backwards to create an inverted bell hull.

"This was the Creator's greatest forgiveness of the Second Children."

A passenger bridge extended from the ship, setting ground on the nearest shore. Slowly, hesitantly, a mixed-race group of ponies came out, looking hesitant. Along with non-monstrous pets.

"Do you understand the implications, Apostate?"

"The odds of two worlds developing nigh-identical ecosystems is astronomical, even when what you call monsters is taken into effect."

"But, that is a fable meant for other times. Understand, Apostate, this:"

"Your world has been touched by us forever."





"I've been looking forward to seeing you with my birth eyes."

Vinyl, of course, did not respond. She was too terrified to form coherent words.

It was, after all, a giant spider telling her all this.

Well, okay, not exactly a giant spider. You'd expect giant spiders to have legs that reached the ground, not dangling freely several feet off it. Nor the fact that its face was covered in or made of shining steel, with oddly expressive eyes that looked at you with an alien curiosity. You'd also expect the spiders to be somewhat proportionate, not with a giant, obese, grotesquely translucent abdomen with the pony-sized cephalothorax looking pitiably small in comparison. And you'd certainly expect to see actual internal organs in the abdomen in the case you did, not swirling viscera, metal scrap, and on occasion, a congealed tentacle of translucent flesh that extended from the abdomen, grabbed one of the jars of organs or machinery on the wall, and then feed it to the waiting maw of the spider, while it used its otherwise useless legs to fashion a complex, odd device out of the metal parts those same legs had casually yanked from the abdomen, literally tearing them out in a gush of clear fluid that left no injury.

But, it still looked kind of like a giant spider, which was enough for Vinyl to freeze in her ghostly spot. Though the other things about it didn't help. 

"Hrmm. Has the process of undeath made you mute, or is my form so shocking to you that you are rendered mute? I take no offense if it is the latter."

"Voices, too," Vinyl squeaked.

That was another disturbing thing. While its mouthparts moved while it was talking, no sound came from the spider. Rather, a legion of half-animal machines with golden eyes, similar to the "ponies" that had taken Octavia truly spoke in unison with the spider's mouth in slightly-differently pitched monotones, forming a harmony. They spoke in the same voice too, even if the spider's mouthparts were busy chewing a new morsel the abdomen-tentacles had grabbed, often in the middle of a sentence.

"Hrm. Yes, I suppose that is also something many find quite unsettling. But, it is the way I was constructed and born. Neither I or my siblings can help it."

The spider (or was that "Dalga"?) chuckled (which was incredibly eerie, as all of its voice-bots laughed as one), then those strange, alien eyes turned serious.

"But now is the time for your orientation. Sentry. let me ask you-are you willing to save your beloved?"





Time on the images lapsed again.

"Alicorn royalty came and went. The new nature of this pocket universe settled, as the sun began to rotate around the planet."

Well, "lapsing" was a tad of an understatement. More like "skipped from image to image." Here, a scene of an alicorn teaching a primitive unicorn tribe how to raise the sun. There, a group of pegasi observed their new creation, a wood-and-leaf cloud foundry.

"Required manipulations, the Creator decided, were minimal, though they did occur."

New scenes. First, a strange pony with solid, blue and white eyes directed a smith to create a necklace the Elements recognized as the Alicorn Amulet. There, a giant wasp composed of plantlife gestured like a conductor, causing Cerberus to rise out of the mire before it.

"Of all these wonders and miracles, however, one stood before all the rest."

The images began to show only one scene on each side-a unicorn-like being with the head shape of a tapir and the tail of a wolf, with a floating "crown" of nine blue flames, overseeing a bedraggled unicorn with a beard and wearing medieval clothing.

"The dictation of the first few parts of the ultimate spell."

"The fomula for the most sacred, most guarded, and most secret procedure of the God-Machine's infinite stores of knowledge and sciences."

"The closing sorcery of a most auspicious occult matrix, almost as sublimed as the Creator Itself."

"A spell to create a god."





"Sorry, what?" While the voice of the dead was not sound in a traditional sense, the disbelief in it was still palpable. As was the fact that Vinyl's fear had been replaced by righteous rage. "I'm going to assume that it was one of your goons who pretended to be Octy, killed me, waited for Octy to come back and see my corpse, kidnapped her, brainwashed her... and now you're asking about saving her!? What is the disconnect!?"

"What I was ordered." While the monotone made it difficult to tell, Dalga's expression made it look irritated, like it was explaining that yes, the sky is still blue. "The Overseers asked that I explain what your new position in the Golden Beach's hierarchy was, and I am trying to oblige."

"Oh, so they were the Overseer's goons." If looks could kill, Dalga would have exploded. "Right, so I'll take up my complaints with their department. Issue #1: You killed me. I don't know what you're smoking, but if it makes you think your murder victim is open to the idea of 'having a new place in the hierarchy', I don't want any. Kills your brain OH WAIT, DOPE UP DUDE!"

Dalga's voices sighed in exasperation, a dozen breezes. "Ah. You're one of the recalcitrant ones."

Vinyl had no idea that word even existed, but she gleaned the context. "No dung, ace detective."

"Ah, but what if I told you your beloved won't remain this way?"

Okay, that was new. "...Prove it."

Dalga said nothing, only did a strange motion with its front two legs.

In front of it, the air shimmered, then compressed somehow, becoming almost a mirror, except reflecting everything on either side. Thankfully for Vinyl's eyes, this only lasted a second before the confusing mess resolved into a completely different image: A strange being with four monkey-like arms, a blue, shifting head with no features, and a face in its chest.

"Harahel, Log #7: For my siblings and any successors, I will explain the Anointment process and duration in casual terms..."





The scene skipped again, this time to one more familiar-Twilight's coronation.

"This was the first step to the greatest victory, and the inevitable transformation of this world into a paradise."

"With a princess of the boundary between the periods of night and day, the occult significance of one of the most important thresholds in existence meant it became possible to influence all boundaries-such as between life and death. or one individual and another."

"What had begun was a most glorious march to a new era, one of complete harmony of all beings on this planet in a mental chorus, devoid of pain."

Rainbow thought about making a snide remark about the alternative, but it was at that point that she discovered that not only could she not speak, she couldn't move, either. In any fashion. No heartbeat, no breathing, and no sense of pain.

"...And then you, Apostate, ruined it."

The images went out, leaving only darkness.

"You abandoned the destined path the Creator set for you, and abdicated your apotheosis."

"But the divine being, even forgotten, remained in three."

New images, these of an odd symbol-three diamonds, joined together at the tip and by a circle threading through their midsections.

"Sarx."

"Soma."

"Pneuma."

"Flesh and instinct."

"Body and will."

"Soul and mind."

The symbol split into three.

"And it was terrible for them."

"You, in your limited experience cannot possibly image. How it felt, to be incomplete when once they were whole. To find a part of yourself you had once taken for granted to now lack."

"And lack they did. And suffer did they for it, in utter loneliness."

A pair of gears materialized around the symbol, silver and gold.

"But it was not their end."





Harahel's presentation ended, in tandem with Vinyl's hatred of the Overseers. Now it was utter loathing.

"Let me get this straight: You took a sledgehammer to Octy's mind, forced her to think like you do, removed her emotioness, effectively turning her into a mindless doll!? And you still expect me to work for you!?"

"When you hear my offer, yes."

Vinyl growled, then rushed at the spider's smug face. Naturally, this did not do anything apart from give her a brief glimpse at the partially metal, silvery-blue inside of Dalga's brain.

"I can also teach you how to use your Numina as well, or at least assist in developing ones effective for combat. But that is only a side benefit of the offer I have been authorized to grant. One your profile suggests you will find most appealing."

"Prove. It."

Dalga performed another motion of its legs, this time with its back two. Golden energy crackled between them.

"...Vinyl?"

The ghost jerked around.

"..Octy?"

The cellist was blinking, emotion returning to her eyes.

"Vinyl!? How-!?"

"Octy, no! Please don't freak out, I'll explain everything-"

There was another crackle, and suddenly Octavia's eyes turned dead again.

Dalga cleared it's throats, an oddly staccato sound.

"As you can observe, Sentry, your beloved's Anointment can be reversed at any time, and will be done, if you complete a term of service."

Glowering, Vinyl turned around. "And if I refuse?"

"Well, we have different fates in mind for somepony who lacks preternatural ability, such as being the anchor of an allied ghost..."





"The Creator recognized that this plan may have failed. So It placed a warning system in place."

The gears began to rotate in opposite directions.

"When the mantle of divinity was rejected and trifurcated, it sent out a beacon that warned the Master Control of an abandoned divinity, and in response, it began an occult matrix to salvage the remnants, creating three new angels using each third of the mantle as the central component.

The three diamonds began to glow.

"Thus did each of the Trinity of Being, once the limb of a destroyed hole, become a Trinity unto itself, each one a seat of a most noble Virtue."

Each diamond morphed into the original, unbroken symbol, each colored gold and white.

"Zeal."

The upper-left unfurled a pair of brightly colored butterfly wings encircled with fire, with the cross the Elements had seen during their battle with Bitterwind emblazoned across them. 

"Mercy."

Parts of the upper-right turned azure, as a glowing symbol of two circles with an arrow going upwards through the overlap materialized around it.

"Vision."

The bottom broke into oddly-shaped pieces, like a jigsaw, as a whirlwind kicked up about it, turning it into the pupil of an eye.

"The broken Trinity ceased to exist, for they had evolved into something more."

"Something beyond all that had come before on this planet, something that would create the paradise the Apostate was meant to."

"Something as far beyond that which they had been as ponies are beyond insects."

"And so born, we set to reshape the world into a heaven."





What confidence Vinyl had drained away.

"You...monster."

"If you are referring to the bizarre lifeforms that dwell in non-domesticated areas like the Everfree Forest, I suppose I am. If you are talking in metaphorical terms, I am not morally responsible for my mandated purpose in the Logos. I am simply a humble craftsman, nothing more."

"...And you can't be blamed for turning innocent beings into mindless robots?", Vinyl said with a confidence she did not feel. "Are you honestly that deceptive to yourself?"

"Ah. I see you believe in the idea of utilitarian morality, what causes the least suffering and the most joy is good, and the opposite evil. Admirable, but as with most positions on good and evil, it is woefully naive." Dalga looked utterly content while it explained, completely in its element. "For example, what of Abyssal power? No matter how much it improves lives, the Abyss is a plane of reality that is actively poisonous to all else, so even if used with the best of intentions, and those intentions are not corrupted, you are still utilizing a force that is actively inimical to yourself and everyone you hold dear, one that looks for ways to subvert your control and only grants gifts that are in some way warped. To say nothing of say, taming the Shadow so that a particular area only generates Essence of positive things. What about the useful things generated by spirits such as those of pain, anger, and despair then? Without pain, there can be no empathy for those feeling it, without anger a drive to right wrongs, and without despair there can be no self-assessment due to recognizing failure. You are denying a major part of the sapient experience and possibly leading to great suffering down the road due to immaturity of the affected."

"Ultimately, there are too many variables to consider when addressing a particular action as good or evil even by personal metrics, let alone the subjectivity of the masses. No, the only routes that can be adequately assessed are order and chaos. devoid of any moral judgement." A pause. "Well, any other apart from what considers orderly."

"..I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Oh, you will learn." Dalga shrugged. "The point is you cannot simply define things as good or evil based on a first impression. Especially if that thing is a creature who literally cannot be anything other than a living factory, as the God-Machine created him to be."

In normal circumstances, Vinyl would have called out his reasoning, but right now, the question of whether "normal" had to be redefined was in order. Octavia being threatened with death and recycling into a new, robotic minion was certainly not going to be part of it. Or the fact that she'd be suffering a fate worse than death until Vinyl accepted.

"Damn it.." Vinyl sighed in defeat. "You win. I just want you to restore Octavia first before I do my first job."

Dalga gave that odd many-voiced chuckle. "I'm glad you could see reason. I'll get right on that."

"Thank you...sir."





Twilight gasped as the images turned off and light returned to the room. That was an extremely weird experience, like she wasn't capable of doing anything at all-even thought-except for absorb the angels' monologue.

Come to think of it, she could only recall said monologue, like it was something that happened in the very recent past.

After her bearings got straight, Twilight looked directly at the place she thought the Overseers' voices where coming from.

"And why should we trust you? You're the bad guys. You could just be playing us for some reason, or just for the fun of it."

"Bad guys? We, Apostate?" Jophiel sounded incredulous.

"We were not the ones who cast out major components of our personalities out into the cold to slowly dissolve in a cold, lingering death." Harahel, on the other hand, amused.

"Nor have we turned our backs on God and our appointed purpose." Barachiel sounded...sympathetic almost. In a very patronizing oh you can't help being an idiot kind of way.

"But if you need greater proof..."

Harahel cleared his throat. 

"'What is wrong with this pony!? I have to figure out how that darn Sense of hers works! Everything has to fit into the universe somehow!", he said in a frustrated voice.

"'Augh, darn you Dashie! Don't you get you're putting other ponies in danger because of your grandstanding? I have to figure out some way she never tries it again...'", Barachiel followed.

"'Cadence, you traitor! I'll see your heart torn out for using my brother like this, you manipulative bitch!'", Jophiel finished.

The gears in Twilight's head skipped a tooth or three.

Wait...that sounds...familiar...

One of the best traits Twilight had was an eidetic memory-if she saw or experienced anything, it only took her a second's concentration to remember anything, with detail. 

Such as, for example, the thought process that went into important decisions on her part.

Wait...are those....my thoughts!?

"...Ehhehheh..." Twilight glanced around at her confused friends. "Veeeeryy clever, Overseers. You found out about our adventures and you guessed at..my mental process. You're actually quite...perceptive."  

"...That is the most pathetic mental limbo I have ever seen, Apostate." Jophiel's voice was now soaked with malign glee.

"And that is not the only proof of identity we have on us. Answer me, Apostate: In the recent past, have you noticed anything...out of the ordinary about you?"

"Something of a most...vengeful nature?" 

The gears stopped utterly at Barachiel's comment.

Then went into warp speed.

The train station guard pony.

"A bit...what? Come on Twi, after how you reduced that guard to tears, I'm a bit worried."

"Or any odd leaps of intuition?" 

"Something that came to you without any hints or prompting, something that in any other case would be an extreme leap of logic?"

The Archivist's riddle and the fractals.

Barachiel laughed. "Look, siblings. The Apostate begins to understand!"

"Indeed. Our link is as strong as we thought. Ehehehe..."

"Your link? Hey there, wait a durn minute. What do ya mean by that?"

"Ah, it's quite simple-as beings who were once part of the Apostate's subconscious and later regulators of her abandoned divine powers..."

"She shares an emphatic link with us. Whatever we feel and know most strongly..."

"So does she."

The sound of jaws dropping, if is had one, echoed through the hall.





Time seemed to pass extremely slowly for Twilight.

On one hand, she was just informed she had children...and that they were literal monsters who seemed to hate her utterly for abandoning them. The guilt was overpowering, even if she intellectually knew that they were more of a byproduct of her existence if anything else, and didn't know they existed to begin with.

On the other hand, she had just realized that, partially, her mind wasn't her own. How long had she been feeling the same things as the Overseers, she wondered? How long had she been thinking like these insane supervillains? How much of her was still Twilight, and not the warped picture the angels had of her?

"Truth is, two out of three of us honestly didn't know you were an Element."

"As things that initially were part of the divine Being not the pneuma, neither Jophiel nor I have clear memories of being parts of you, unlike a certain someone..." For the first time since the discussion began, Harahel sounded genuinely angry about something.

"I, however, am completely free of any vulgar impulses such as vengeance, so I allowed the knowledge of you to be unsaid. There was no reason for the impediment of the Mission."

"But due to Fate or circumstance, you are here."  One could hear the smirk in Jophiel's voice. "Lucky for us; we get to be completed with no regrets."

"Com...ple...ted..." Twilight snapped out of her shock. "What do you mean by that?"

"We mean, of course, that we are joined with a greater being, and may become part of a subconscious mind once more, without losing our identity and returning to the broken pieces of Trinity of Being."

"...I get it." Raibow glared at what she hoped was an invisible Overseer. "You're still bitter about being left behind, so you want to possess Twilight's body, turn her back into a Princess, and then use her power to take over the world!"

"Of course not. That would be indescribably foolish, joining with a being that is self-evidently lesser than us."

"Why you arrogant-"

"Shut up, white thing.", Jophiel's voice hissed. "This does not concern you."

"It does too! She's my friend, and I will not stand for your self-righteous bullying!"

"'Self-righteous?' Ha! Rather humorous coming from someone with a profile like yourself, Rarity."

"But no. We have evolved into our own, independent beings, and merging with a mortal would be...inadvisable."

"No, upon the successful completion of our Mission, we will be assimilated, body and soul, into the God-Machine."

Silence.

Twilight tilted her head in confusion. "Assimilated? Doesn't that mean...eaten?"

"To a certain extent."

"Our core being will be translated to code, our physical forms disassembled, and both will be shipped in pieces to various angel foundries across the cosmos in a great journey." 

"Wait. I thought you said you wanted individuality."

"Oh, poor little Apostate. So attached to continuity of consciousness."

"This hardly conflicts. Our appearance, personality, and even memories will be encoded in said parts and code, and all the angels created from them will have elements of us in them, as any angels created form their parts after recycling as well."

"We shall become the forefathers and ancestors of three entirely new lineages of angels, and all of our descendants shall look upon the utopia of logic and focus we create, and take pride in their bloodline."

"The point is...Twilight." Jophiel sounded closer than before. "We don't need you anymore."

"Much as how the mold has little bearing on the existing form once made, you have little power over us, and unlike a mold, you are now useless."

"Thus, shall you suffer the fate of all useless things-being turned to scrap."

Rainbow growled. "Oh yeah? Neither me or the voice in my head notice any warning of lethal danger. That's a weakness of your Containment Zone, right?"

Silence. Then:

"Hmhmhmhm....

"Ha ha ahahaha.."

"Heh...heh."

"Eyaaa-hahaha!"

"Ahahahaha!"

"Heh heh heh...."

The chorus of laughter continued for a few seconds. Then:

"What do you think we've been doing?"

The floor disappeared, and the Elements fell into utter darkness.