It took a moment for Twilight’s eyes to adjust to the dim light; and another few to realize that they had. Ordinarily, Enigma’s room would have been filled with a constantly changing variety of books, toys, gadgets, musical instruments and anything else that Cognastruct or Brace Wits thought might get his attention.
Ordinarily, every inch of the walls would have been covered with posters showing landscapes, ponies, diagrams, maps, star charts and food; the only space that was left blank was the screen for the movie projector which Cognastruct used to display everything from nature documentary’s to children’s cartoons. By rule, if something was left there a month without getting a response it was taken out and replaced with something new. By tradition, most of the room was replaced on a monthly basis.
Now however, the room was depressingly bleak; gray metal walls surrounding a gray metal floor, covered in dirty gray ash that remained after last night’s escapade. Pale gray light fluttered between intermittent lamps, looking for something to do and – hurried hoofsteps caught Twilight’s attention as Enigma appeared.
He… came to her, close; until their noses were touching.
Twilight stared in amazement, he almost never came to anyone. As Cognastruct and Brace Wits stood well back, not making any sudden movements. She knew he had a face, and that it was gray with dark brown eyes; but right now all Twilight could see was a muzzle sticking out from underneath long black mane, kept in constant motion by static electricity, or something similar, creating an effect almost like the manes of the princesses. Cognastruct and Brace Wits tried to trim it occasionally, but he did not like it, and so they could only snip stray clumps when he wasn’t looking.
“Hello Enigma,” she said hesitantly, “Did you miss me?” he didn’t respond, Twilight raised one hoof to give him a hug, but Enigma instantly stepped back, and Twilight didn’t pursue it.
His greeting complete; Enigma trotted down to the corner of his cell and sat down, staring blankly at the wall and Twilight slowly followed him, sat down just far enough away that she didn’t threaten touching him and stared at a patch of wall of her own. “Are you sad because our mom and dad are gone?”
Enigma licked his lips, his breath coming in steady, soft pants; “Are you upset because you never had a chance to say goodbye?”
“…Are you angry at me because I haven’t visited you until now?” Twilight inched closer, and Enigma stopped his panting and turned his head just long enough to lock eyes with her for one, terrifying fraction of a second; and Twilight eased back to where she’d been sitting.
What did he see when he looked at her? Did he recognize her as his sister, or know she was the same species as he was? Did he see her as a single creature, or as a galaxy of cells or even molecules which he could take apart and reassemble as he wished?
After a few minutes; Twilight looked back to Cognastruct and Brace Wits who watched on from the distance. They looked tired, exhausted; neither of them has slept for more than a few hours these last few nights; and, for now, Enigma was only doing what, for him, was normal. If it was only at night that Enigma had problems, they needed to rest while they could. “Get some sleep,” Twilight offered, “I’ll watch him for a while.”
There was protest, but only light; and so after the typical reminders and requests to wake them if needed, they both retired, and Twilight was left staring at the wall with her brother. As usual he wouldn’t look at her, or respond physically, and so she talked to him.
She told him about Shining Armor and Cadance’s first foal Clastic Strain, who’d needed to be born C-section early last month. She talked about how Equestria was changing now that Celestia was giving more and more responsibility to Luna; causing mixed feelings among the population. She talked extensively about her work on The Manehatten Project, emphasizing the number of lives that rested on it and going into extensive detail about the complex calculations she’d been balancing and failing to balance. When he didn’t respond, Twilight even got some diagrams from her saddlebags, and held them in front of him, and tried explaining it in a different voice; all the while entertaining the ludicrous idea that Enigma might suddenly pipe up and explain to her where she was going wrong. As always, Enigma stared blankly ahead, in patient oblivion.
She knew he could hear her, but didn’t know if he had any comprehension of what she was saying… from her words. Twilight knew that telepaths had been extinct for hundreds of years, but Twilight, had inherited a tiny portion of mind magic; not enough to read or influence anyone, but just enough to help keep her own mind organized.
There were theories, unsubstantiated unproven, that Enigma was an actual telepath. Maybe he didn’t understand what she was saying, but there was a chance that he understood the thoughts behind those words, and so Twilight made a point of visually imagining each word as she said it; hoping he understood her, yet praying that he was not a telepath.
There were also theories, unsubstantiated, unproven due to lack of testable subjects; that tylithium did nothing to block mind magic. If Enigma was telepathic, there was no telling what his range was, and his ‘neighbors’ were Equestria’s worst collection of sadistic mass murders and serial rapists. If Enigma heard people’s thoughts rather than words, there was no telling what his developing mind had been exposed to. Twilight tried not to think about it, they were just theories; and, since coming to Alkzum, Enigma he hadn’t shown any violent, or sexual, tendencies.
After an hour Twilight stood up, and walked a few laps around Enigma’s room to get the blood circulating through her legs again. For being someone’s entire world it was small, but for a single room, his cell was massive; forty feet cubed, (the abnormally high celling adding credit to the theory it had been designed to provide a flying occupant with room to stretch her wings).
As Twilight walked around, she remembered the different furnishings it had had over the years; from building retaining walls across half the room and filling one half with enough dirt for an indoor garden, to filling it with a small petting zoo for a few hours for his last birthday. The only furnishings now were a bed and triangular table, surrounded by three chairs; not including the Tylithium bath that had been built into the wall along with a toilet which Enigma had never used.
Enigma had worn diapers until he was eight, at which point he decided that if Brace Wit and Cognastruct kept collecting his waste, they must want it for something, and tried giving it to them directly. Another year went by before he decided to cut out the middle ponies altogether; now whenever he needed relive himself he simply teleported his urine and feces from his bladder and bowels, directly into the toilet. (At least… everyone was fairly sure that he was sending it to the toilet. It was possible that he occasionally flushed the toilet for some alternative purpose, but if he was somehow teleporting his waste somewhere else, no one had found out where yet.)
“I got something for you.” Enigma didn’t bother to look at her, but when Twilight set two heavy bags onto the table, a firm clunk reverberated through the room and Enigma teleported to her side the same instant.
“Oh, now you want to play.” Teased Twilight, “You don’t care that I’m here but you still want your presents.” Enigma didn’t respond; his gaze never wavering from the bags and the twitching at the edges of his mouth brought a full smile to Twilight. “Well… alright then.”
To say that Twilight had never been able to play with her brother would be untrue; there was one game she had discovered by accident, before he came to the asylum. Twilight unbuckled the first of the two bags, and unfolded the lid, revealing a dozen large planes of glass.
“Ba… ba… ba… ba… ba.” Enigma began a low slow chant; that bordered between heavy breathing and an actual syllable. It was the only verbal sign he ever gave that seemed to have a consistent meaning; excitement.
Twilight lifted the first panel in her magic and turned it slowly in her magic, “Ba ba ba ba ba.” His hooves shuffling with anticipation as Twilight lifted the sheet of glass to the ceiling, “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.”
Twilight cast a small shield to protect her eyes; “You ready?”
“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-” SMASH!!!
Twilight slammed the glass against the metal floor as hard as she could; shattering it into thousands of pieces which scattered to every corner of the room and Enigma went after them. He began at one corner of the room and walked in a straight line against the wall, collecting every shard in front of him with telekinesis until he reached the far side where he took one step to the right, turned one-eighty degrees, and repeated. When he reached the table and chairs he lifted them up in his magic and walked underneath, then set them back down behind him and when he reached Twilight he did exactly the same thing.
When he got to the opposite corner from where he’d started, Enigma turned around and began shuffling through his giant ball of glass. As always, it seemed completely random at first; but Twilight waited and after two minutes, larger pieces began to appear as Enigma inserted every piece into its original position; turning the broken glass into a mad ponies jigsaw puzzle.
Twilight had seen this played out a hundred times before, but it still never ceased to amaze her how he could pick up every microbe of glass while leaving dust, loose hairs plus anything else in his way completely undisturbed. Even before the asylum when they used to play this game outside, and Twilight broke the glass over a field of grass or tanbark, Enigma never failed to retrieve every piece, so long as nothing else moved them from where they had initially scattered.
If Twilight took one piece, no bigger than a grain of sand and hid it somewhere else, he would have a panic attack until the prodigal piece reappeared. Even if Twilight hid the piece in the same place every time, and showed him where she’d been hiding it the last few times, he never learned to automatically look in the hiding place when he realized that a piece was missing.
These were the only times that Twilight felt like she was connecting to her brother; watching him doing something that he loved… at least… Twilight thought he liked it. Enigma never broke the glass himself, making Twilight wonder if maybe he didn’t want it broken in the first place, but he never tried stopping her or anyone else from breaking it and he was usually extremely punctual in preventing things he didn’t want.
As Enigma came up on the eight minute mark, he completed his puzzle, sliding the last shards into the corner of the tortured plane of glass. He concentrated for a moment, causing the countless seams to glow, and the sheet of glass was restored as if nothing had ever happened. Enigma gave what could almost be described as a small grin of satisfaction and then teleported back to Twilight, waiting for his second round.
Breaking the same sheet again would be pointless as he never reassembled the same piece of glass twice, so Twilight laid it neatly beside the door, and raised two new sheets towards the ceiling.
“Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba.”