I trailed after Cosmic as she pulled herself through the snow. She was wrapped up in a hood while Dust was clad in a thick human made coat, bright orange and still barely visible through the intense snow storm. "Fucking hell, which way!?" I screamed, clawing my way up an embankment.
"Keep- ... -ass!" her words were barely audible, leaving me little choice besides scrambling after her through the snowdrifts that completely encased the city. It was horrifying to think that, from what Cosmic described, this was once an entire metroplex, now buried under meter after meter of ice.
Everything was awful, the cold was biting through the thick jacket they'd given me, the train was too far back to see, there was nothing but white and a small speck of orange wandering through it, and it was dry. Every bit of moisture in my skin and eyes was pulled away and turned to frost as I followed after Cosmic.
Even walking was terrible, my feet sunk in up to my calves before hitting the permafrost below. "This is bullshit, I swear to god this is bullshit!" I shouted, drudging after her. My breath was gone, my endurance was crumbling from the bitter cold. My body could surly do it, but my mind was screaming at me to stop and just live with a decapitated pony.
But out of the white I saw Dust standing still, prodding the ground with a bundled up hoof. I hurried over, running like a fat boy after a food truck, "Oi, you found it!?"
I reached her just in time to get an angry glare, "Pop this open!" Cosmic yelled, Dust tapping a strange door with her hoof, "Bloody trap door means we're about a few hundred stones high."
I shook my head, falling to my knees and scraping off the hard oak door, "Not sure what a stone is, but I'm going to assume that's high!" I pulled at the door, eventually hearing it click, then crack. I threw my arms up, watching as the door was ripped open, lock included. "Oh shit...is that gonna be a problem?!"
Dust jumped down into the void below without another word. "...Guess not." I held onto the side of the door, closing it best I could before dropping down with a loud wooden thud, "Jesus, light!? Light!?"
On cue a soft blue light sparkled to life from Cosmic's horn, her head now revealed and unbound from her hood. "Right...this is it. Smells like sterilizer and soggy oak." she started wandering to the walls of the circular tower, "Observatory...well, if ya' ever wanted ta' study the sky...grab something."
I watched in awe as she pillaged the dull white stone walls, dropping assorted things onto the floor like nothing mattered. "Cosmic, what the hell are ya' doin'!?"
Dust turned around, Cosmic not bothering to stop her plundering, "We're not on some vacation...we're supposed to grab everything we can, and leave. I thought ya bloody knew that." She looked over an oddly ornate telescope, "Here, ya can sell this." She trotted over behind me, pulling my pack open and carefully tucking away the delicate metalwork. "Grab everything you can carry,"
I looked around the room, spotting thing that were undoubtedly worth fortunes in their own right. "So we're looting?! That's--"
Cosmic soon found her way before me, "Look, either we're gonna find a way to fix me, or we're not. And if we don't, I need to make sure we have the bloody money to come back out here, got it!?" To punctuate her pilfering she nabbed a strange looking horn and held it for me, "Now take this, pack it in, and follow me."
I grabbed the horn, looking it over and slowly wandering off after the seemingly bitter mare. "...So, you know what this stuff does? Like what does this even do?" I held the horn to my lips, blowing through it. No sound came out, but everything seemed to crystallize for a moment, adopting a thin sheen of ice before bursting, "Whoa...what the--"
Cosmic grumbled as she tossed me yet another artifact, "I know what some of these things are, I was stationed to keep these pillock safe, and I followed this one tosser around while he cataloged a bunch of it." She levitated another object over to me, a strange dial. "That one there, controls the seasons in a few miles. That horn, brings down a frost storm, so be careful with that thing."
"Jesus...and we're just stealing--"
I felt myself pulled down by my collar, Cosmic's glowing orange eyes bright in the dimly lit room, "After what they did to me...I think I'm owed a little swag of my own...."
I ignored the modern connotation, the fact that we were stealing gold from ancient chests and an ancient tower gave, swag, a whole different meaning. "Well- I- look, can we just hurry?"
I watched Cosmic turned away with a snap, heading down towards a flight of stairs, "Look, we ain't just stealing. There's stuff in here that could help the country too. So fill your pack ta' the brim and follow me!"
I grumbled angrily, my light source leaving, I had no choice but to move on from the ice buried room. A last look around saw only oak crates and broken bits of metalwork, all polished brass or silver. With the top floor looted I hurried down, finding Cosmic levitating a bunch of books into a stack, "Medical studies...cures for diseases that were eraticated...cures for headaches, everything from A to Z." she waved me over.
I set my pack down, letting her carefully pack away a set of journals and a few strange instruments and alchemy appliances. "Cosmic...exactly how many floors is this place?"
She started shaking her head, "Not many, maybe six or so. But if we find something I think should have survived...we shouldn't need to climb back up." She stopped packing and looked up at me, then at the now empty tables and chairs that littered the room, "What do ya' know about pyromancy?"
"What like fire mag--" I stopped myself as a familiar wet sensation fell from my lip, "I'm bleeding again, aren't I?"
"Bloody- I swear if it's rift-- Wait a bloody minute!" Her eyes started daring left and right, "Temporal studies...we need to get to temporal studies, third floor!" she started prancing around, "Uh- grab anything that looks important and let's go!"
I looked around the medieval looking classroom, finding nothing of value and following Dust to the next set of stairs. Another flight of creaky stairs and I found myself amongst something all to familiar, weapons. I had stumbled my way into a medieval armory.
Walls full of ornate black steel and embroidered wood surrounded us. Dust looked around frantically, "Damn, nothing worth a toss is left!"
I looked around, spotting an oddly hilted saber, "What is up with these things, the grip is all--"
"Mouth grips, ya idiot!" she stated, prancing in place around, "Now- bucking pick something and let's go!"
I looked at the massive wooden racks, perusing the oddly visceral methods of pony death dealing. I stowed a few small knives and the saber I was looking at. But something was out of place, "I- what the fuck?" I grabbed the strange plastic weapon, "G-thirty-six," I checked the weapon, ejecting a round and checking everything, "This...what the fuck, why would a pony have this!?" I held the gun in Cosmic's view.
She started shaking her head, "Do ya not know what rift sickness is!? Boy, you're not gonna like what happens next...not one bloody bit." she started off down the next flight, "Now take it and let's go- oh boy...yep...yep, rift sickness...ooooooh boy," the light disappeared, leaving me in near pitch black.
I stowed what I could, clipping the stock of the rifle to my pack and hurrying after Dust. "Alright, you keep saying rift sickness, what the hell does--" I stopped half way down the steps, spotting something horrifying in the dull blue light of Cosmic's horn, "...Why is there a dead guy in the corner!?"
Cosmic looked back at me with a hearty amount of worry on her face, "Aye...he uh...looks like the portal closed on yer' leg...poor bastard bled out."
I started waving my arms out in front of me as I hurried down the wooden steps, "Whoa- back up, my leg!? What happened to my leg?!" I looked around the strange room. It was simply a circular workshop with a single work bench and a vast number of windows, mirrors, doors and locks of every form or fashion, and laying face down on the rotting wooden floor was a human being in a dull green coat, it's leg cut off below the knee and laying before a broken window frame.
I walked around, next to the body. Cosmic was busy pillaging the sole desk in the room, "Oi, don't touch em!" she snapped, turning around with a strange awl of some sort, "Nothing good's gonna come if you touch yourself."
I started shaking my head, "Are you making a jo--" I stopped as Cosmic pulled the dead man's head up, tearing a strange metal mask, completely featureless save two circular eyes, off and revealing an extremely familiar face, "Holy shit, what the fuck man!?" I screamed, standing up and lumbering back, "Wha- I- what the fuck!?" I could hear my hear speed up to an insane degree as I looked at my own dead face on the floor, "I- why- why am I dead on the floor, but still standing here!? Cosmic, what the--"
Cosmic just jabbed the dead body in the neck with a strange pair of scissors. "Calm down, this is more common than you think...usually it's ponies, but every so often it's a diamond dog or a dragon, or... a human." She went to work, cutting apart the dead body's neck. No blood, only a glowing red light came from the wound, "Gotta just...cut the ties to this reality. Can't have two versions of yourself if one's dead, ya' get rift sickness, and that develops into wither, which...just, extremely fatal."
I just pulled at my hair as the body was desecrated, "Cosmic, that explains--"
She stopped cutting and looked up at me. "...Ponies here, were psychotic bastards. They cut my head off, tampered with reality at a cosmic scale, brought beings that weren't meant to survive in this land just to study, and were generally buckin' crazy. Does the fact that other realities surprise you, when you come from a different bucking reality!?"
I tried to form a rebuttal, but between the dead me, and the vast amounts of insanity that seemed to be factual, I was speechless. "...So what the hell are you doing?"
She went back to cutting, "I'm not completely sure...but back when a pony came through, a doctor, one died...decapitated before I got my turn. And...they kept trying to stop the other one from dyin' they cut the neck with these things!" She wiggled the scissors around, causing a bright orange fire to envelop the corpse, "There, got it!"
I rubbed my arms, watching in horror as the body, minus the clothes, fizzled away into orange embers that faded into inexistence as they petered out, "Oh god...I feel like I'm dying...." Soon all that was left of the corpse was a set of clothes, now clean and free of blood stains. The strangest part, the metal faceplate sat at my boots.
Cosmic took a deep breath, "...Jason...Jason look at me."
I ignored her, picking up the mask by the harness, "...I just- this was me, but it's not me! I just- who was I meant to be!?"
Dust stepped onto my toes, Cosmic looking up at me, "Look...there are an infinite amount of worlds out there, infinite variables going against horrible odds and coming together. This could be you if you were wounded, if you were born ten seconds later, ten seconds earlier, who knows who this was, but it's not you anymore! So fuckin' focus and remember why we're here!"
I watched the mask shaking violently in my hands, "I uh...sure, keep going through the pain and all that bollocks." I packed the mask away in my bag, just another piece of fucked up loot from this arcane hell.
Cosmic nodded, heading towards the next flight of tattered steps, down another flight, into another white brick room filled to the brim with metal and glass. "Neurological and aural studies...cram everything you can into that pack!" She looked back at me with a worried look, "Jason...Jason you're shaking."
I clenched my fists, "Look, I know I said there wasn't much that got to me...inter-dimensional...suicide, or death, or whatever that was, that gets to me." I knelt down, turning my back to her, "Just pack what you can and let's go!"
I felt my pack slowly getting heavier as Cosmic trotted about the large room, "Jason, remember...I love ya, I'm not gonna let ya hurt once we're out a' here. I need ya ta' remember that."
I rubbed my hands together, biting back the cold, "Look, I know, I'm fine. I just need to get through this, and...I don't know, I just need to get out of here."
I heard the zipper wrap up my pack, "There...lots of toys ta' play with when we're back home...now, there's live studies and the lobby, so it's gotta be the next room!" She ran over to the last set of stairs, "Come on lad, come on we're almost out of here!"
I hurried down the steps, an extremely loud crack came from underfoot. I slammed into the floor below, landing nose to nose with a pony skeleton, "Jesus why!?" I snapped, scrambling back, and spotting the body it belong to across the room, "Oh fuck--"
"Found something!" Cosmic screamed, running over to me with a book, "I- notes, tons of notes!" her face was elated, even when standing on the bones of a dead pony, "Jason, Jason it's bloody here! They took notes, they kept--" she stopped herself, "We need the blade...we need the blade too!" She spun around, pointing out the guillotine from her vision, "Jason, I need that blade, we don't need the frame, the blade's what's enchanted!"
I looked to the far end of the room, spotting the evil looking contraption. "That's it!? You got everything else?!"
Cosmic bolted off to the side of the room, grabbing things and stuffing them in my pack as I hurried over to the guillotine. "Jason just--"
I was fueled by fear and grabbed the sides of the blade and pulling it off as hard as I could. The blade refused to come off, pull after pull, yank after yank. I was panicked, I just wanted to go home, I wanted to take a shower and nap. I wanted my bed, I wanted my sandwich, I wanted to be home in peace. And as I knocked the device on it's side, pressing my foot against the base of the device and pulling hard a final time, the abomination snapped in two.
In my panicked pulls I hadn't realized, hadn't seen or hadn't cared, but the blade slid straight through my neck. My vision tumbled to the floor, the feeling in my hands remaining, my body still connected even as my vision blurred from the sudden impact of the floor.
I stared into the darkness as my heart stopped. My hearing was gone, replaced by a constant ringing as I rolled around the floor. Only when a strange tingly grip picked me up, bringing me face to face with Cosmic, did I say something. "Holy shit!" My body was still my own, my limbs responding to my commands, but my head was severed, my parts both separate and connected.
Cosmic's face was one of sheer horror, "Jason...can ya feel--" I spotted my body, slowly trying to turn around and walk over to myself. Despite my sudden decapitation, I still had one thought on my mind. I wanted to go home.
I forced my body to listen to me, struggling with the strange perspective until Cosmic helped my head into my own hands, "Cosmic...grab everything, we need to leave...now." I held my head against my new neck stump, "This...is horrible."
Cosmic's face was both sympathetic and angry, "Aye...we uh...Jason, do ya trust me?"
I could feel my heart speed up as I started laughing, "Cosmic...I just cut my own head off because of you. You should have your-" I was cut off by a soft smile and a bright blue light, "-answer." My eyes cleared, revealing us back in the train, Cosmic smiling for a few seconds before falling to the side and rolling out of her saddle.
I tried to reach out to her, finding myself extremely sick.
One, two, three, four--
I reached four before passing out, the combination of nausea and lightheartedness was overwhelming. So much trauma had befallen me in such a short time, I just needed to get a little rest. Whatever was going to happen next, I just needed to get a little bit of rest first.