The Centaur and the Centurion
Chapter 5: Fallen Arches
“Amy? Apple Bloom? You better come out here.”
The two mares emerged from Zecora’s tree house to see an army of timber DD’s waiting for them. Colgate had apparently fainted upon seeing them.
“Ah,” Amy said calmly. “I see that their master learns from his mistakes.”
This batch of wood-based creatures were built like American linebackers, so they now longer had necks for a tree trimmer to snip. And the gems that animated them were now buried in the middle of their bodies.
Apple Bloom turned around, and began using her hind legs to lob homemade firebombs at the enemy. The others tried their best to assist, but sadly, Apple Bloom only had a few weapons that were useful, and nothing the others came up with proved damaging against a seemingly endless supply of minions. During the fight, they learned that the change to their eyes made the timber DD’s nearly blind. On the other hand, they proved more than capable of making up for that with their other senses.
In a matter of minutes, the ponies had been overwhelmed, their electrum rings had been stripped from them, and a cloud of dragonfire had teleported them from the scene.
Three of the four captured ponies awoke to find themselves in a long rectangular cage made of metal mesh. It was located somewhere underground, as evidenced by the roughly hewn stone walls around them. The cage extended from inside of a small enclosure into a large open area. Based on the placement of blankets and hay, the dark area in back was for sleeping—and the small amount of privacy that the captives were allowed—while the bright area in front was for daytime activities. Of the four ponies who had just been captured, Amy could not be awakened by the others, as she seemed to be stuck in a deep slumber, so she was left in the sleeping area. Colgate had awoken with a small pool of blood on the floor of the cage around her snout. The nosebleed was not the result of being beaten, but rather something she had been increasingly suffering from in recent months. Apple Bloom and Rory were unharmed. Also present in the cage were several other ponies.
“Applejack!” Apple Bloom exclaimed, moving forward to embrace an orange earth pony with a blonde mane. Her rear legs from the three apple cutie marks downwards were set in a cement block that she could drag around the floor of the cage; she appeared to be healthy enough otherwise. In addition, Applejack looked like she was missing an accessory or two, as evidenced by the cowboy hat and coiled rope located a long way away from the cage.
“Apple Bloom!” exclaimed Applejack and an elderly mare with a pale green coat and nearly white mane. The zebra first glimpsed outside the barn was also present, but she had a plaster cast over her muzzle that prevented her from speaking. Apple Bloom’s greetings soon identified the zebra as her teacher Zecora, and the pony as her grandmother Smith.
“Fraxinus, report on our new captives,” came a booming voice from above.
A timber DD, larger than the others, stepped forward. “Two ponies of the worthless variety, and two magic users,” it reported in a strange hollow voice.
“Hey, I resent that remark!” Apple Bloom exclaimed.
“Give me their cutie marks for my catalog,” the mysterious voice said.
Fraxinus stepped up to the cage, and seemed to squint his little wooden eyes as he looked over the others. “Male worthless has no mark,” he said. “Female worthless has cutie mark of a timepiece.” Apple Bloom made sure she was as far from the magical creature as possible as he was making this identification. “Blue magic user has cutie mark of a different timepiece. The yellow magic user that you have studied has cutie mark incorporating a melee weapon and a ‘rocket’, an object depicted in comic books.”
“I know what a rocket is, you moron. Give me their possessions.”
The wooden servants dumped the saddlebags and satchels of the captured ponies into a pile in front of a stalagmite. Stepping out from behind that stalagmite was a dragon, green in color, her wings folded at her sides. She was standing on her hind legs, and wearing a pair of spectacles. She was about a head taller than Rory had been as a human, and twice as tall as any of the ponies present while standing on all fours.
The first thing the dragon did was to sweep the pile of bits from Colgate’s satchel out of her sight. “Oh no, we’re not going through that again,” she was heard to mutter to herself.
Next, the dragon quickly began sorting through what was left of Apple Bloom’s potions, emitting some sort of magical field from her talons as she did so. Like her creations, her vision appeared to be poor, as she needed to bring each object quite close to her face to be able to identify it.
“Stun potion, sleeping potion...is this Nitro-9?!”
“A-heh,” Apple Bloom said nervously, rubbing the back of one neck with a hoof. “I didn’t have enough room to try that one out.” She then turned to her sister. “What happened to Big Mac?” she whispered. “Did he get away?”
Applejack sighed sorrowfully. “You’ll find out soon enough.” She composed herself before looking at the other new ponies. “Howdy, Colgate.”
“Um, howdy?”
“Who are your new friends?” she then asked Apple Bloom.
Apple Bloom tore herself away from her fevered imaginings of what might have happened to her big brother that her sister didn’t see fit to tell her. “These are the Doctor’s companions,” she said, “Amy and Rory.”
“Any friend of the Doctor’s is a friend of mine,” Applejack said, shaking each of their hooves. “Especially now.”
“Where is the Doctor?” Amy asked, slowly walking to join them from the back of the cage. She looked absolutely exhausted.
“There, and there,” Applejack said sadly, pointing first at another cage, and then at a rock pillar located next to the dragon. In the cage was the unconscious body of a gray pegasus, a spilled fez resting next to him. On the pillar was a metallic head with faintly glowing eyes. At being referred to, the robot’s ears swiveled in their direction.
“Is that a Cyber...pony?” asked Rory.
“As a matter of fact, it is,” the dragon answered, having finished her examination. “I tried to make a regular Cyberman head, but somehow it ended up like that. I knew I’d have to deal with a fellow Time Lord, so I used that to trap the Doctor’s consciousness. He can see and hear everything that’s going on, but can do nothing to stop me.”
“You’re a Time Lord?” Rory asked incredulously.
“But of course!” the dragon exclaimed. “Only the most brilliant Time Lord of all time could have possibly evaded both the constable sent to arrest me as well as the legendary Doctor! For I am the one, the only...Rani!”
“The Great and Powerful,” Applejack added sarcastically.
“Sure!” the dragon exclaimed happily. “It’s a relief to finally be able to introduce myself, instead of being interrupted by failed escape attempts every five minutes. So, Companions, are you reeling in terror yet?”
Amy and Rory looked at each other for a few seconds, and then shrugged.
“Should we be?” Amy asked. “We’ve never heard of you.”
“What?!” the Rani exclaimed. “I was the Doctor’s arch-enemy! I very nearly destroyed him any number of times! I mean, the deadly hugging trees alone...surely he must have included a briefing on me when you were inducted into your position?”
Again, the pair shared a questioning look.
“Nope, must have slipped his mind,” said Rory. “Besides, shouldn’t you be dead...or locked in an alternate reality or something, along with the rest of your kind? The Doctor did not wear his title of ‘Last of the Time Lords’ lightly.”
“I survived!” the dragon exclaimed boastfully. “The Doctor knew when he saw the face of his captor that we two are the last two Time Lords, in either this pocket universe or the larger one from which we came! I escaped capture by the Time Lords in the same way as the late and un-mourned Master. And I should know, because I invented the chameleon arch we both used.”
The Cyber-Doctor’s eyes flashed furiously at this remark.
“Alright, alright,” the Rani said with an eye roll, “I was on the committee that invented the chameleon arch. But as the resident genius in that committee, the credit rightly belongs to me!”
Amy made a point of looking all around her. “I don’t see an arch anywhere around here.”
The Rani sighed, reached behind the stalagmite, and pulled out a very familiar looking pocket watch. “This is a chameleon arch, you simpleton! Well, the important part of it, in any case. It transforms a Time Lord’s body into the form of a native of whatever planet she happens to be on at the time, and rewrites her mind into a gross simplification of her own personality. It’s the only way we can truly disguise ourselves from our more powerful enemies...or from our fellow Time Lords. The disguise is so perfect, in fact, that we no longer even remember what we once were, as false memories are created to explain our new identity, and to keep us from even conceiving the possibility that we are something different than the natives we have chosen to hide among! And so the perfect disguise persists, until the subject opens the watch and thereby reverts to his or her true self. In this case, of course, we already had to change our physical forms to even exist in this reality, so I altered the device to only complete the transformation.”
“And the personality held by the disguise?” Apple Bloom asked fearfully. “What happens to it when the watch is opened?”
“It dies,” the Rani answered coldly. Her eyes lit up as she resumed her monologue. “I had come to this pocket dimension after discovering a deliberately buried report of its existence filed by the Doctor...” she began.
Meanwhile, Colgate had backed away from the dragon until she was out of the dragon’s sight; her eyes were wide and she was hyperventilating. Seeing this, Apple Bloom casually joined her, gave an appraising glance at the bars at the rear of the cage, then snapped a few of them free from the bottom of the cage with a couple of quiet bucks. She led Colgate deeper into the cave, listening carefully to the pontificating dragon as she did so.
“I had gained a bit of a shady reputation for the so-called ‘crime’ of improving lesser beings’ bodies and minds to meet my own lofty standards,” the Rani continued, “and access to this world was forbidden by the Time Lords, so I was pursued here by the Castellan or some other mindless servant of the Time Lord council; but just as we made it through the Sphere of Stars, the recall signal from Gallifrey was sent. I was not about to participate in that idiotic and ultimately self-destructive Time War of theirs, so I activated my arch, while my nemesis’ TARDIS crashed and burned before my eyes. I was stuck in the body of this dragon for who knows how many centuries, before his greed finally compelled him to open the watch and free me. Even then, it took decades for me to assert my control over this body, to reverse its greed growth and the effect that had upon my stupendous intellect. Now I am finally ready to resume my purpose in coming here: to study the strange branch of physics stupidly labelled ‘magic’ by the pendants of this world, and find a way to adapt it into a form that will work in the larger universe. With that power, I will be able to reshape the life forms of every planet in existence to fulfil my every whim!”
Amy looked over at Rory. “What would you say?” she asked. “A six? Maybe a seven?”
“No, definitely a six,” Rory answered. “She’s nowhere near Davros-level.”
“Are...are you rating my speech?” asked the Rani.
“Oh, we’re connoisseurs of megalomaniacal rants,” Amy explained. “This isn’t quite ‘the destruction of reality itself’, but it’s still pretty good.”
“I have had enough of your mockery,” the Rani said, crossing her arms in disgust. “I have sent my ultimatum to the local princess: she is to provide me with a complete documentation of how magic in this world works, or else I use my TARDIS to destroy the planet. I can get my answers from space dust just as well as I can from living creatures—although this way is much more amusing, and in any case I hate wasting good knowledge. That’s why I also asked for books on your science and culture.” She placed one claw over her left-hand heart and stood tall. “After all, knowledge is the only absolute good in the universe, and any action is justified in service of increasing it. In the meantime, I shall amuse myself with my experiments on you, thereby gaining even more knowledge. Servants, remove the tan earth pony.”
“What? No!” Amy cried, as the cage door was opened and the timber DDs removed a struggling Rory, tossing him over a railing down to the floor of a miniature Coliseum. “What are you going to do to him?”
“To him? Nothing. He’s the control. I need to see how well my latest creation operates, and the best way to do that is to pit him in a battle to the death against my creation!” With a wicked gleam in her eyes, the Rani picked up a control stick, and pressed a button. From the shadows of the area emerged the half-simian thing that was once—
“Big Mac!”