//------------------------------// // Chapter 19: Reopening // Story: The Happiness and Peace of Mind Committee // by FlanChan //------------------------------// The Happiness and Peace of Mind Committee Chapter 19: Reopening Twilight stood back up, glaring at the now-closed throne room door. That sense of finality from the first time she tried to open the door returned, but this time it was mixed with boiling anger and vengeance. It was a dangerous mix of emotions that she didn’t usually have. No matter how upset she was, it wasn’t until just then that she truly realized who she was up against. Emerald Joy, the conqueror of two immortal princesses. Boy, what had she gotten herself into? Nonetheless, she moved towards the wooden doors, moving much quicker than the first time. She didn’t have the luxury of time on her side this time. She clutched the golden handle tightly, then cast a few last minute spells to be sure she was in top condition. Luckily, when given the time, unicorns could easily recover fully even from being smashed against a wall. She directed her attention back on her hoof, now resting on the only thing keeping her from the final battle. She took a deep breath, gathered her resolve, and pushed the door open. The throne room was just as grand as she was anticipating. It was a large circular room, which was befitting an arena. The walls were made up of silver pillars with green accents, which was to be expected considering the rest of the building. Even still, it was a lot less gaudy from the other rooms. She drew her attention to the large throne on the other end of the room in which Emerald Joy was seated, which was shaped like a large silver tree. It branched off into six branches above her head, and on each one was embedded a large colored gem: one pink, one red, one orange, one blue, one purple, and the very middle one was a deep pink not unlike the color of Twilight’s own magical aura. “Oh, this would’ve been so much cooler if we had met in here first instead of out there,” Emerald sighed, her voice reverberating off of the walls. “Now I can’t say something fitting like “I’ve been waiting for you” because I just saw you not a minute ago! That’d sound totally cheesy and rehearsed! I also can’t make a really big reveal about Ondine, either! Oh, this is a disaster!” “Spare me the details, Emerald,” Twilight replied. “I’m here to take back my world, not to make friendly conversation.” “Wow, getting feisty and confrontational already? Fine, fine. I suppose I can call back Ondine and tell her not to make the tea.” Emerald Joy stood up from her throne and walked down the couple steps to get on the same level as Twilight. “Why so hasty to die, though?” “If I wanted to die I’d have given up at the beginning and gone under your stupid spell like the rest of them,” Twilight shot back. “I’m still kinda mad about that, you know.” Emerald pouted, her curls bouncing as she drew slowly closer. “I put a lot of work into that, too.” “As if something like that matters at this point when I’m about to duel with the great Emerald Joy herself.” Twilight replied sarcastically. Finally Emerald stopped, the two standing at a comfortable distance, which was definitely in attacking range of each other. Still, neither moved. “I know, right?” Emerald answered to the silence. “You’ve anticipated this moment so long that now that you’re here, it’s kind of surreal, and you’re not sure what to do!” “Sh-shut up!” Twilight retorted, her face rather flustered. She didn’t usually have this sort of temper, but this was Emerald Joy she was dealing with, and she was getting on her nerves a lot more than she was expecting. But even then, she was at least a little bit right. At least, she didn’t want to start the battle, but she knew it had to be done. She didn’t notice it before, but her breath was shaky. Why was she so nervous after all of the preparation? Emerald giggled when she saw how tense Twilight was. “Come on, you’ve gotten this far and you still don’t want to attack me? That’s terrible! After all, all of your friends left with the notion that you were going to spark this huge rebellion, but it looks like they were all wrong! Their lives really were worthless, huh? They didn’t even know their own friend!” Emerald Joy jeered, egging Twilight on again. “I said, shut up!” Twilight thrust her horn forward, and it glowed brightly. A magic circle formed around her feet, and four others similar to it appeared around them. Her hair fluttered with power, and her eyes were shut tight in concentration. “Ah, see! I knew you had it in you!” Emerald praised. She made no effort to dodge or counter attack, instead waiting to see the full potential of her spell. Twilight had no intention of disappointing. Her eyes shot open, a bright pink light bursting from them. She jerked her head to the side, and out from the four arcane circles burst pillars of magic, which arched down towards their target. Their size and speed made it so no ordinary pony could dodge them. Emerald Joy, however, was no ordinary pony. “Shiny, but not much else,” she commented, lifting her own horn to blast an equally powerful light green ray which crashed into Twilight’s magic, canceling the two out in a light blue burst. It was to be expected that the first attack wouldn’t be the last, but Twilight was still taken aback at how much power Emerald easily produced. Nevertheless, she moved in closer, shooting a flurry of sparks into the air above them. Immediately afterward, she shot multiple beams at the unicorn before her. Emerald nimbly dodged out of the way of the barrage of lasers, shooting back a few of her own. When the sparks finally fell to the ground, they went off like firecrackers. However, Emerald was able to anticipate that as well. She flaunted her dress, and the bottom half came off, extinguishing the attack in an instant. “It really is quite amazing what materials your friend Rarity could work with. You really need to appreciate them more, before those talents no longer become available to you,” Emerald Joy said. She cast the magical fabric to the side, her clothing now far more maneuverable. “I sure appreciated them a lot more than you did! You just used them for your own selfish needs!” Twilight shouted back, sending another barrage of magic her way. Emerald responded in kind, but both unicorns were quite skilled in their craft. “You wouldn’t be able to tell your ‘friends’ apart from a cardboard cutout of them! As long as they look the same, you don’t bat an eye! What kind of friend are you that you don’t notice when something is amiss?” Emerald answered, her tone less carefree than usual. “What’s that supposed to mean?!” Twilight yelled, her attacks growing brighter as she welled up with fury. “I mean, that’s precisely what happened,” Emerald Joy replied calmly. She waved her hoof, and all of the magical bullets froze. It was as if time was suspended for the whole world around them. “What are you talking about?” Twilight asked, preparing to move forward but finding herself unable to. “Don’t make any hasty decisions when time is stopped, please,” Emerald added. “But haven’t you noticed something strange? How Applejack didn’t go after her sister? How much Fluttershy reacted to her little friend’s death? How suddenly suicidal Pinkie Pie got? How completely irrational Rainbow Dash was in attacking me? And in all of that, how quickly and easily you were able to get over them all?” Twilight stopped. She could have owned all of her friends’ odd behavior up to Emerald’s mind games, but why was she so distant towards them all of the sudden? These were her best friends, who she had known since forever, through thick and thin… But if that was to be true, then why didn’t she care so much? From a technical standpoint she cared, because that was one less person in their ranks, but why didn’t she care on an emotional level? Thinking back on it, the only ones who didn’t seem all that reactive towards the news of others dying were both herself and Aquamarine, which made much more sense in hindsight. “Now, I don’t want to make your head explode and just leave you dangling there! I’ll tell you, so thank me sometime!” Emerald assured after giving Twilight a moment to think. “Now let me take you on a ride in the mind of a young Emerald Joy. I’m putting my grand plan of happiness in its final stages, and it’s come time to accommodate the Bearers of The Elements of Harmony. Now golly, I’m not just gonna be able to clap my hooves together and call it a day, no! Annoyingly enough, the Bearers have a lot more power than that, so I have to come up with a separate plan. “Conveniently enough, however, Ondine over there has a special little power called Ondine’s Curse. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the term, but essentially she can put anyone she chooses into an eternal sleep. Now, isn’t that just handy! So right away I decide to go and incapacitate you and your friends. It was all going nice and fine until we got to you, my dear! It seems that The Element of Magic is a feisty one whose mind isn’t easily persuaded. It’s terribly inconvenient for me, but if it’s just one of you roaming around, it should be fine.” “But that still doesn’t explain anything! There’s no way that all of my friends were asleep that whole time! That doesn’t even make any sense!” Twilight yelled. She wasn’t even sure why she was listening to Emerald, since there was no way to validate what she was saying to be the truth. “Hush, you’re too impatient. I was just getting to the important part,” the unicorn replied. “You see, even when they’re so heavily restrained here in my throne room, The Elements of Harmony still have a tendency to try and reach out and do something with their power. Now mind you I’ve learned to take better care of them over time, but this was right when I was first starting out as a budding young ruler. The Elements knew what had happened to your friends, and tried to compensate.” Twilight’s eyes widened. “There’s no way they could’ve…” “Don’t question the lengths that natural, original sources of magic can go to when they want to, because they did indeed, against my wishes, create manifestations of themselves in the forms of your friends,” Emerald answered with dismay. “Each Element reformed a part of itself as their respective Bearers. Honesty became Applejack, Laughter became Pinkie Pie, Loyalty became Rainbow Dash, Generosity became Rarity, and Kindness became Fluttershy. Magic simply offered its power to help the rest of them. Of course, these new versions were none the wiser. They had hardly any memories.” Emerald Joy turned, her hair fluttering as she did so. “However, when I did the same to make Ike, I realized that it took a great deal of power just to make that unbelievable character. In order to remake a fully complex pony, I can’t even begin to imagine how much magic would have to be exhumed, but for our convenience I can assure you it’s more than The Elements hold. That’s why their personalities are really just boiled down to a few noteworthy traits that each Bearer had, and they were usually amplified to cover up for the rest that they were missing. This produced two-dimensional copies that apparently resembled your friends enough for you to be fooled.” Twilight never noticed at what moment she had started crying, but the realization that she hadn’t suspected something amiss with everyone ate away at her soul. She was the Bearer of Magic, the one who was supposed to tie them all together, so why did she even fail at doing that? She fell to her knees, clutching her head in her hooves, everything just too much to handle. With all of the work that The Elements of Harmony had done to bring her this far, only for her to fail like this...? “How can I even know that what you’re saying is true? For all I know you’re making this up just to make me lose hope,” Twilight countered. Emerald looked back with interest, since Twilight hadn’t spoken up in a while. “Oh, do you want to see them, then? I can do that, if you want to.” The branches on the silver tree that was Emerald’s throne opened just under the Elements, revealing five encasings that resembled test tubes. Inside floated the unconscious bodies of Twilight’s five friends, the liquid around them presumably for preserving purposes. “Of course, I couldn’t just go and kill off embodiments of The Elements of Harmony, so I had to improvise,” Emerald continued after a long pause, though Twilight wasn’t paying much attention at that point. “Instead, I triggered them and killed off everything around them that they loved. Ike I had to go out of my way to plant, sure, but it was easy enough to capture Applejack’s stupid little sister and get her out of the way under the guise that she confronted me. The masses these days will believe anything. “I hadn’t anticipated Applejack would be the one to take the bait about black magic. I planted that library with the ancient books I had left over for Pinkie Pie to wish for happiness or something silly, or maybe even for you to be courageous and do something about the situation yourself! Luckily for me, I didn’t have to go set up anything else, as Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash then conveniently took care of themselves! Not necessarily the most fun, but beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose.” “...I’ve heard enough out of you,” Twilight muttered. “Hm? But I was just about to explain how I was able to kill Rainbow Dash just a bit ago. I can admit, I was worried I’d have to do it now!” “I said…” Emerald looked down and saw that her body was halfway engulfed with a thick purple aura, and it was slowly rising upward. Her horn had also been wrapped in a similar magic. Twilight raised her horn to confirm the ruler’s suspicions. She tilted it downward, and in a sudden mess of blood, the magic surrounding her transformed into daggers that thrusted into Emerald Joy’s body “...shut up.”