//------------------------------// // The Sun Rises, The Knight Follows, and The Soul Crumbles // Story: Son of Invention // by Zman537 //------------------------------// (Jenny: Twilight’s Library) The door to the library’s guest room slowly opened as it’s sole occupant peered out for a moment. Seeing nothing sentient in the halls, she slowly started to try to sneak out of the building. She pressed herself to the walls as best she could (armor tends to make that hard) and scooted along the wall towards the main room. When she reached the doorway, she could see the front door easily. Across the main room, she could see Twilight in the kitchen cooking. “Alright Jenny. Just walk in, and explain calmly that she shouldn’t take what you said last night to heart. After that, try and convince her to send a letter to royalty or-” “AH! IT’S THE THING FROM YESTERDAY!” The sudden yelling caused Jenny to jump into the air with a frightened squeak and cling to the first thing she came in contact with. This resulted in her hanging from one of the bookshelves as she stared down at the small dragon that had walked up behind her. “Pleasedon’tsendmetoadungeonI’msorreheheheheeeeeeeeeeeee!” The drake was about to run away screaming when he was suddenly enveloped by a purple aura and lifted into the air. “Spike! That’s no way to treat a guest!” Twilight trotted into view a moment later and sighed. “I told you last night, Ms. Eriman is our guest, and not an evil monster.” She looked back at Jenny and gave the terrified woman an apologetic smile. “I’m so, so sorry about that. Spike is still young and tends to let his imagination run a little wild.” Jenny shakily got down from her perch of books and cleared her throat in an attempt to regain her composure. “I-It’s alright. I just... didn’t expect that... is all.” As the young woman fidgeted in place, Twilight gave her a wary, yet curious stare. “Are you sure? You seem a little... jumpy, this morning.” Jenny hastily waved her hands with a nervous grin. “No, really! I’m totally okay.” A sudden spark of electricity jolting over her unprotected hand caused both her and Twilight to stare for a moment. Jenny’s eye twitched before she looked back over at Twilight. “Ya know what? Maybe I’m not so okay. I’m seeing things now, which only makes me worry more.” Twilight shook her head before taking a closer look at Jenny’s hands. “No, I saw that too.” Twilight looked over Jenny’s hands for a moment before stepping back and putting a hoof to her chin. “Strange. I don’t see anything that could have caused that.” She quickly glanced at the grandfather clock next to her desk as it struck nine, before turning to both the drake and Jenny. “How about we go eat something. Then we can see if I can find out what just happened with Jenny.” Both the drake and knightess nodded hesitantly before following Twilight into the kitchen. (Invention: The Gilgamesh) I groaned slightly as I sat up and yawned. “God I need to fix that bed. Sleeping on the floor is giving me some strange dreams. In no way, shape, or form, are pyramids meant to do that.” I sat on the floor of my room, just staring at the wall across from me. That creature from the dream. He had called me “Zeke” at the end. Was that my old name? Not that it mattered to me anymore. If it really was my old name, “Zeke” could never return home anyways. After two years of being missing, it is more likely that “Zeke” was pronounced dead already, and his family left to mourn the loss of a son and brother. I would be lying if I said I did not sympathise. I stood up and grabbed my coat before I moved out of my room and looked down the hall towards the kitchen. When I heard the clatter of kitchenware being knocked against each other, I started to walk over. “Steve. Are you active yet?” Steve’s head popped from around the corner before he shouted back. “Absolutely Sir. Just finishing up your breakfast.” I nodded and moved into the ..... bloody hell. The kitchen was a damned mess. “Steve, are you actually using this place to cook?” I stared upwards at the seven cracks that had spread across the ceiling at some point. Probably during the crash. Steve slumped some as he looked at me. “Unfortunately, yes.” I shook my head and headed for the cargo bay so I could get off the ship. “It’s alright Steve, just... make sure nothing foreign gets in the food.” I could hear him doing his yes man routine as I got off the ship. I really needed to get him to stop that. It’s starting to get on my nerves. Looking over the ship once I got far enough outside, I started to estimate how much wood I’d need to fix it. I didn’t ponder too long, and mentally noted that I’d need quite a bit. “About seventy feet of wood logs should be enough to fix this. The trees I saw when headed to town are are thick and tall enough for at least three ten foot 2x4 planks each.” I frowned slightly as I started to lower my speech to a mutter. “It’s going to take forever to cut them down though...” I pulled out my sword and looked down the edge. “Should be sharp enough.” I looked over at the trees in the distance and smiled as I began to walk closer. “This shouldn’t take more than a few...” I stopped as I heard a strange humming build in the air. What in the name of Mike is that noise? I’m trying to think here. The next thing I knew, a large vehicular machine shot out of a tear in space before screeching to a halt about twenty feet in front of me. Just looking at it was making me suffer what I could only assume was an aneurysm of ungodly proportions. It looked like someone had taken one of my cars and pasted damned kites to the sides in a pathetic attempt to fly. Above all though, for some god forsaken reason, there was a hyper-drive sticking out of the engine block! In the driver’s seat steering all of this chaos and nightmare there.... was a knight? “Blasted hyperdrive system!” He whacked the steering wheel. “I know you run off of orange juice, but come on!” He sighed and slumped over. “Now where am I?” I felt my eye twitch as I stared at the impossibility. What in god’s name am I staring at? Am I still asleep? My hand shook as it rested over my sword’s hilt. Last time I saw something this damned reality breaking I nearly died, and that was because of Discord, not the dream from last night. The knight had climbed out of the Abomination to Science and was tinkering with a few bolts. “Well... I can park here for today.” He opened a hatch and pulled out some sort of glass staff with a sun emblem on top. “There we are.” I finally had enough of the nonsense and cleared my throat. “Ehem.” He turned to look at me as I tapped my foot impatiently. “If you would be so kind. Who are you, and why are you here?” Maybe this is someone else who’s been moved from their home world. Whether or not he’s from the same earth as me is not my concern, just so long as this does not get out of hand. ... Good god let me still be sleeping. It would make so much more sense. Oh who am I kidding? This is probably something from the multiverse. Nothing from the multiverse makes any sense when it happens. The knight waved a little as he stood in the driver’s seat. “I am Solaire of Astora. I have come to find a certain object in order to return to my own world from an alternate Equestria.” Well... at least I’m not dreaming if the headache I’m getting from his insistent roleplay is any indication. I wouldn’t think of just shouting that out so casually without some form of mental issue being involved. More importantly, similar Equestria involved now. Just, great. I put a hand on my throbbing temples and groaned. Since this situation most definitely was not a dream, I wanted to know exactly who I was speaking with. “I mean who are you, not who are you dressed as.” Damned idgit. I waved my arm out and looked at his helmeted face. “More importantly, just what object are you looking for?” “Solaire” was still for a moment before he spoke again. “It... Has been too long since someone asked a true name.” He looked off in the distance. “I... Am Jonathan... I think...” He shook his head. “Or Cunning...” My annoyance seemed to melt away as I stared at him. Eventually I smiled sadly as he seemed to be lost in thought over his old names and titles. “At least you can remember your original name, even if it is an uncertain memory. As for me, the old me is dead, long forgotten to the sands of time. I go by Invention now, as it is the name those important to me had decided to bless me with.” I’ll never be able to thank Robin properly, even if she originally gave it to me as a joke of sorts. I stepped a little closer to the knight as I took my hand off my blade. “Now, what exactly are you looking for? I’m sure that I may be able to help.” “Ah!” He perked up. “I need something... It was...” He looked off. “Um.. Oh, a small shard of Discord’s tooth.” I stopped and looked at him for a moment before taking a few steps back. “Then I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to help with that.” “... I see.” He took his staff and placed it on his back. “I see. I was hoping, but not too much...” I placed a hand on my blade and sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want to help, but that tooth is more important to my situation than you may realize. It makes it to where I can’t simply let you near it.” I drew my blade and pointed it at him. “If you wish to continue your pursuit, then I suggest a different dimension. There are others where the tooth has gone missing and held less important roles than in this one.” “I would love to leave as soon as possible.” He motioned to the “Car” with a small slump of his shoulders. “But this is sorta broken. The hyperdrive is... Malfunctioning.” I looked at the physical aneurysm and noted the smoke pluming out of it. “I ... can see that.” “Dad, who’s that guy?” My eyes widened as I noticed that Boris was looking out the window of his room. “Did you build a new guy without telling us?” I pointed at him and waved a hand. “Boris, get inside. Now.” Boris looked at me in confusion for a moment before shrugging and going back inside. “Huh... Nice kid.” I looked over at Solaire and kept my blade pointed at him. “Yes, he is.” Can’t let him near Boris... I am not having a repeat of that moment. His hand briefly tapped his staff. “So... This seems like a standoff more than anything at the moment.” “That it does.” I tightened my grip on the blade and narrowed my eyes. “I would prefer if you simply left peacefully.” “And as I have said, I cannot.” He motioned to the car again. I reached into my pocket and grabbed a bronze pocket watch. Fiddling with the dial after feeling for a lightning bolt engraving and finding one. “Then what do you propose?” “I fix the thing. I leave. I can easily do that.” He turned on his heel and thrust the staff towards his car. “Fix.” In a flash, his car stopped smoking and the engine looked.. still insane, but less messy. “There we go.” I paused and lowered my blade slightly. He just has to casually flick his staff and boom, instant repairs? “That’s it? Just fix and go? I can almost assure you that there is another problem with the machine with how you’ve probably just patched it up completely willy-nilly.” He looked over it again. “Yeah you’re probably right, but I made the thing in ten minutes and out of Sunny D.” I felt my eyelid twitch. “Sunny D? You made an entire hyperdrive, out of Sunny D?” “Yeah.” He nodded. “You act as if that’s abnormal.” I groaned and walked over to his car and looked at the engine... yeah, that’s dried on orange juice. “That’s because it IS abnormal! Sunny D is orange juice with a fancy name, not SPACE FUEL!” “It is made of the sun, and the D.” He looked at me. “Also it acts like a flammable material.” I deadpanned at him as I leaned into the machine’s engine. “So do the gems of this Equestria if handled properly, creating a much more efficient fuel.” I looked off to the distance and smiled to myself at the sight of the cave I had grabbed crystals from earlier. I pointed over in the cave’s general direction and stood back up straight. “If you can go over there and find me seven quartzs, thirty rubies, and about twenty three topaz, I’ll be able to get you enough fuel with the correct chemical ratios to make at least three more jumps.” He paused and looked in that direction. “Oh... Okay.” He took his staff and started sprinting away. “Give me an hour or two!” I nodded and as soon as he was out of sight sprinted back into the ship. I ran straight to Boris’s room and hugged him the moment I got there. “What the! Dad, what’s with the hug?” I kept hugging him for a moment before letting him go. “It’s nothing to worry about Boris.” I got up and looked over at my study. “Come with me, I need to show you something.” I brought him into the study and pulled out the fictional books from the stack of stolen literature. “I got you and Vicky some stuff to read while I’m off working to fix the ship. Until then, stay on board, and whatever you do, do not go near that man. Understand?” Boris nodded a little fearfully as he took the books. “A-Alright?” I patted his head and walked over to the door. “Um, Dad? What’s so bad about that man?” I looked over for a moment before I shook my head. “Please Boris, just listen to me and keep away from him. For your safety, not mine.” I noticed that Victoria was peeking into the room before I reached an arm out and smiled at her. “Come on Victoria, you can get a hug and some books too.” She shuffled into the room and grabbed some books from Boris before giving me a thankful hug. As they both left the room, I sighed and looked out the window. I pray that this man just leaves.... If he does come back, then I’ll make him his fuel and send him as far away as possible. (Invention: 1495) About two months after Victoria had gained enough memories to act like any other living being, I started to have a strange feeling of... imbalance. Like there was only one thing remaining inside, and it was beginning to overflow into my being. After some research on myself that had required Robin’s aid, I found that the crystals fueling not just Boris and Victoria, but Steve and Ed as well, had taken fragments of only my consciousness rather than a combination of the two of us. When we used the C.P.U.O., Full name: The Crystalline Processing Unit Omega, to scan over my consciousness, we found only an approximate third remaining from the levels of energy my consciousness should have had. After that, I spent the next week coming up with algorithms to identify the different types of energy that we noticed floating around in hers, and the lack of them compared to mine. Eventually we managed to come up with something that would have been revolutionary, even in my world. I had managed to almost entirely map out the consciousness of living beings. With this knowledge and ability ascertained, I was currently hooked up to the machine myself to see how much my consciousness had been torn apart, by sorting the energies into readable graphs. This meant that I was currently shirtless, and sitting at my stupidly high-end, custom-made-from-scratch, twelve monitor computer in a nice little rolling chair I had made from some Griffon metals, seven sheets of Minotaur brand Hydra leather, and good old fashion wool for stuffing. On a side note, God this chair is soft. Robin stood next to me, looking at the monitors that were displaying several different sheets of numbers with a look of utter confusion on her face. “Invention... I know you explained this to me before... but what am I looking at?” I sighed as I pinched the bridge of my nose, the small little sensors that were hooked to my face and shoulders with adhesive itching terribly as I did so. “Stop looking at the screens that are showing the data crunch... and look at the one in the center.” She did and scrunched her face a bit as she saw the graph that was displayed. “Right... and this means what again?” I rolled my eyes and barely resisted slamming my face into the center monitor. I reached for the keyboard, the hardest thing to make in this century without fucking it up so far (Crystal tech is a bitch sometimes) and hit F1. The Graph spread to the rest of the screens and froze, no longer gathering data. I stood up and pulled off the sensors walking over to the far left chart, showing a red bar on the graph. “This, Robin, is a graph that shows the levels of consciousness in a person/pony/griffon, whoever is hooked up to the machine.” I pointed at the red bar and started to explain. “The red bar here represents one of the six ‘aspects’ of a consciousness we were able to label. While I would have prefered to label them differently, the ones you came up with are actually rather fitting.” Robin nodded a bit and smiled some. “Yes, I recall those. Seeing as you described dimensions working the same way as ourselves, I thought more mystical names would work.” She looked at the graph and pursed her lips. “I’m guessing this one is ‘Fire’?” I nodded. “That’s right. This one shows the levels of my consciousness’ Spirituality, or Fire. As you can see,” I pointed to how the bar rested roughly at the center of the graph’s y-axis, “my consciousness has a decent amount of spirituality, and is remaining stable.” I moved to the next screen, showing a brown bar that was lingering dangerously close to the bottom. “This brown bar is what we labeled as ‘Earth’ or the physical identity. While yes, I know that my name is Invention, I had lost a sense of who I was for a while when we had first met. This leads me to the assumption that it was around that time, that I lost this fragment of me into Boris’ crystal, as it was the first change and he was the first one to come alive.” I moved to screen three and pointed at a green sliver, “As with Air, Mentality” I pointed at 4 and it’s blue sliver, “and Water, Emotion. These two seem to be currently inside of Ed and Steve respectively, explaining Ed’s higher intelligence and mental capabilities, and Steve’s emotional outbursts and spastic tendencies.” Robin looked over to the fifth and sixth screens, with the purple sliver and black bar. “And these last two, by elimination are Æther and Void.” I looked at the fifth screen and nodded. “That’s right, I believe that the Æther portion is in Victoria, but I’m not sure how it’s affecting her.” Robin nodded in agreement as she stared at the picture of Victoria I had on the wall as it hung next to pictures of the others. “True, Every time we tried to look at it, was as if everything is being blinded from our view whenever we try to examine it.” I paused for a moment before looking up at the ceiling. “It’s like staring into the light of heaven and expecting to be able to see what lies beyond.” A glance at the black bar that seemed to almost reach the top of the graph caused me to frown. “Which is fitting, as trying to see what constituted Void was equal to gazing at a black hole. No feed back, whatsoever...” Robin looked at the graph’s black bar in worry for a moment. “But that doesn’t explain why this ‘Void’ aspect of you is so.... vast.” I was silent for a while before I looked over at Robin with a troubled gaze. “To be honest Robin,” I gazed back at the black bar, watching as it hovered dangerously close to the top of the graph. I put a hand on her withers as I sat back down in my chair. “I don’t know.”