See Clearly Now woИ ylɿɒɘlƆ ɘɘƧ
One Day Later
It was late, and Sugar Cube Corner was closing for the night. Among the last of the patrons to leave were Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, who had spent the past several hours on a study session.
“And then a group of populations makes…,” Fluttershy offered as the two walked down the sidewalk.
“A community,” Rainbow Dash responded, trying to remember what order the level names progressed in. She’d tried matching them with the ideal starting lineup of players on various school sports teams, but this was one time that having a repeating list of her again and again hadn’t been much help, so she’d settled with just using brute mental strength to hold them in the right order without any fluffy tricks. “And then adding in all the nonliving stuff from the surrounding environment makes the total ecosystem.”
“That’s right,” said Fluttershy. “I just know that you’ll ace that ecology exam.”
“Heh, B-plus maybe,” Rainbow Dash said, “and only because I’m learning from the class’s top student.”
Fluttershy blushed. “Oh, I don’t think I’d go that far…”
“Are you kidding me?” Rainbow Dash said, folding her arms behind her head. “I snuck a look at the teacher’s grade sheet—you’re best in the class. Heck, you’re best out of all of the ecology classes this semester.”
“Oh,” Fluttershy said, “well then I guess you could say that…wait, you did what?” Rainbow Dash only started chuckling in response.
As the two girls had walked, one thing they might have noticed was that they’d passed several large storefront windows. One thing they didn’t notice, however, was that the reflective surface of the one they’d just passed had begun to ripple outwards from the center. And as the ripples radiated across the window’s surface, the silhouette of a humanoid figure faded into view.
The figure was slightly crouched over, and had a large X-shaped object strapped to its back. It turned its head right and looked after them, taking a step forward. Its left arm and leg phased through the rippling glass surface before it stuck its head out, crouching lower before stepping out fully. The figure was black with plates of dull red armor strapped to the front of its body and legs and the backs of its arms. Its face had a red armor plate on it with a black forehead and gold lower jaw. The Gelnewt slowly stepped after them.
Suddenly Fluttershy stopped in her tracks with a faint gasp. Rainbow Dash stopped a few steps later and looked back.
“Oh, come on, I was joking when I said that I’d looked at the grade sheet,” Dash said, “but I’m sure that you’re…Fluttershy?”
Fluttershy turned around and looked back the direction they’d come from. The Gelnewt stopped. It tilted its head side to side as it watched her staring in its direction. But only in its direction. From her perspective, the street was dark, maybe a bit eerie, but, most importantly, empty.
“Hey,” Rainbow Dash said, walking back to Fluttershy. “Is everything all right?”
“Huh?” Fluttershy said, just realizing she was being addressed. “Y-yeah, I just thought I…n-never mind.”
Fluttershy turned and walked past Rainbow Dash in the direction they were going before. Rainbow Dash turned to follow, but had a sudden suspicious feeling and turned to face back up the sidewalk again. She didn’t know it, but the Gelnewt had advanced towards them to the point that she was staring it right in the face, mere inches away. It had paused again, and was now silently waiting for her to turn and keep walking.
Her internal “bad feeling about this”-o-meter holding steady at high alert, Rainbow Dash slowly turned back forward, keeping a suspicious gaze out of the corner of her eye as she followed after Fluttershy. The Gelnewt again advanced, unseen.
Also unseen, was how the window of the store the girls were about to pass began rippling. A second Gelnewt faded into view in the window’s reflection, if it had been visible, that is. It nodded at the first Gelnewt as Fluttershy was about to step into parallel with the window, and the first nodded back.
Suddenly, Rainbow Dash felt something grab onto her arms and pull back.
“What the—hey!” she shouted. She immediately pulled forward and tried turning to see who was gonna get it, but she couldn’t see any hands grabbing her arms. “Huh?” She lurched forward, but she felt whatever it was start to pull her back again, so she let it. Elbow first.
“Aig—,” she let out as her elbow collided with something with a clunk. She grabbed her right elbow, sure she’d hit her funny bone, before hearing a clatter and thump behind her. She turned around, but only saw an empty sidewalk. “What the?” Then a thought hit her. She took a step forward and kicked. Her foot hit something solid. Great, she thought, now I’ve gotta admit to AJ that she so totally called it.
“Rainbow Dash!” Fluttershy screamed.
Rainbow Dash looked back and saw Fluttershy struggling against another invisible force pulling her towards the storefront window. Without a second thought, she charged forward, shoulder out, aiming for the area just behind Fluttershy. She rammed into something invisible, pushing it back…right into the window. Rainbow snapped her eyes shut a second before the expected impact, but instead of shattering glass, she felt the wind from running disappear.
She slowly opened her eyes, and was utterly shocked at the sight. She was looking down a long clear tunnel between two walls of what appeared to be slightly angled silvery glass boxes forming a 3D grid-like framework. The whole thing was shimmering, glinting with light reflected almost infinitely.
Her eyes were quickly drawn to the silhouette fading into view in front of her. Now fully visible, she was greeted by the face and form of the Gelnewt. It snarled at Rainbow Dash, making her pull back with surprise.
Wait, she thought, this is it? Her look of surprise quickly faded to one of being unimpressed, then she promptly punched it in the face.
Taken off guard, the Gelnewt made a muffled sound of pain as it slowly floated back, beginning to flail as it quickly gained speed and was pulled down the glass tunnel. Rainbow Dash watched as it disappeared in a flash at what was presumably the other end. Now, she just had to figure out a way to get—suddenly she felt a tug on her left ankle and was pulled backwards. She heard a screeching whooshing sound as everything became a streaking silver blur, and the next thing she knew, she tumbled to the hard sidewalk.
“O-oh my,” came Fluttershy’s voice, “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
Rainbow Dash shook her head a bit, then opened her eyes wide and blinked to clear her vision, the blurry image of Fluttershy kneeling down next to her coming onto focus. She quickly sat up and looked over to where she’d been attacked, seeing the first Gelnewt. She saw that it had a large X-shaped probable weapon strapped to its back…and that the weapon was laying flat against the ground, making it rather difficult for the struggling Gelnewt to stand back up.
“You just went right into the window,” Fluttershy continued. “And through it! I tried catching you, but all I got was your ankle, and—”
“Come on,” Rainbow Dash said, grabbing Fluttershy’s arm and jumping to her feet. “I’ll explain later, but right now we have to get to—,” she started to pull Fluttershy away from the Gelnewt, but stopped as something down the street caught her attention, “…to…” She stared until she knew her eyes weren’t deceiving her. “Hey,” she said. “Hey! It’s you!”
Standing on the street corner a block away was a figure clad in a suit of armor: a helmet, a large chest plate, shoulder pads, forearm cuffs, a belt, and shin guards. In silence, he began walking over to their location. As he approached, he passed under a streetlight, revealing the majority of the armor’s plating to be a dark blue-violet indigo, with thin gold borders around the shoulder pads and the left and right half torso plates, and worn over a black undersuit. The helmet bore over the eyes a diamond-shaped silver plate with a vertical ridge down the center and sets of horizontal slits on each side. Strapped to his left forearm was some armament with a flat surface featuring a golden horseshoe, the tips pointing back up his arm, with a gold symbol resembling a front-on view of a horse’s head placed inside the arc of the horseshoe. The belt shone silver, with a rectangular indigo object, featuring the same gold horse head shape and four small silver horseshoes arranged around the corners, in place of a buckle. He also had a pair of oddly placed hollow silver knobs on his knees.
As the Armored Hero reached them, Rainbow Dash didn’t know what to say. So she said something anyway. “The news is trying to say you’re a fake, but I’ve been betting you were real all along.”
The Armored Hero stopped, looking at her. He probably hadn’t expected to be addressed in such a calm manner given the situation.
“Lucky you, then,” he said to her in a voice muffled by the helmet before turning his head to the Gelnewt struggling to stand up. “Get to safety. I’ll—”
“Ah-right!” cheered Rainbow Dash as she started leading a still-shocked Fluttershy away from the scene again. “Teach those gold-faced things a lesson for me!”
As they left, the Armored Hero turned his head to follow them. “Gold face?” he said to himself. “Wait, can she—”
Just then, the downed Gelnewt kicked its legs out to spring itself up and to its feet again. The Armored Hero turned back to see it lunge forward, and blocked a downward chop with his left arm, turning and kicking it square in the gut with his right foot. As the Gelnewt staggered back, he reached over to the apparatus on his left forearm.
Meanwhile, as Rainbow Dash led Fluttershy away from the battle with her left hand, her right hand was aiming her phone back at the fight, camera recording.
The window next to the Hero rippled and the second Gelnewt jumped back out of it, the Hero turning and swiping left with a shiny object in his right hand.
* * *
The Next Day
“And now we’re back live at the ORE News Desk for this update to recent breaking news,” said the Channel 13 newswoman. “Almost as if in response to doubts raised by this network, a new report claims that the unseen attackers the Armored Hero has been fighting off are indeed unseen, somehow being invisible to our eyes.”
The feed cut to a recording from a handheld field camera of another newsperson and two teenage girls.
“Yes, I know how convenient it all sounds,” said the girl with brightly colored rainbow hair, “but it’s true, I’m telling you! Why am I telling you, anyway? You’re just gonna brush it off as another layer in you hoax theory. You could at least run with it to get more viewers on the nightly news. ‘Invisible’ will spark more interest than ‘hoax’.”
The feed returned to the newswoman.
“After just three reported sightings over a span of two whole weeks,” she continued, “the most recent two events have occurred only two days apart. Could this sudden jump in frequency be a sign that more numerous and more constant sightings will be made in the near future? Or has this been the rate of occurrence all along, and just not all cases have been reported? News and police stations across the city have already begun getting new witnesses coming forward, claiming previously unreported encounters with the Armored Hero. Police are advising that, due to the sudden surge in media exposure of cases such as these, any influx of reports like this is bound to include some number of falsifications.”
“A’right you two yahoos, here’s the deal,” said Detective Danny Haygan of the Canterlot Police Department. He was sitting at a metal table across from two high school boys in a dimly lit interrogation room (not dimly lit because he was trying to intimidate a suspect, but because the station’s budget just couldn’t afford new light bulbs). “This,” he said as he slid a piece of paper across the table, “is the guy we’re lookin’ for.” On it were two sketches of the Armored Hero, one in a fighting stance and one a close-up on his head and torso armor. “I don’t know what cardboard boxes you were using for your ‘suit’, but it’s way too square and the paint job’s wrong. He’s not even the right height.”
“B-but it is real!” pleaded Snips, sitting across from the detective. “Just watch the video again.”
“I did,” the detective sighed, “but I’m starting to think that you two didn’t.”
Detective Haygan reached over to a small old-looking portable TV sitting off on the side of the table and pushed a button under the screen. A bit of static jumped across the dark glass square before an image appeared: it was daytime in the city park, with a few sparse trees in the background. Standing in center frame was someone indeed clad in spray-painted cardboard boxes, wearing what appeared to be a small metal trash bin over their head. They stood looking around before stepping forward and punching at the empty air, then holding their arms up in a boxer’s defensive stance. They punched forward a few more times before kicking at a spot about a foot and a half off the ground, waving their arms a bit to regain their balance. They grabbed up an armful of air in a chokehold before repeatedly punching at it to inconsistent depths. They then took a step back before leaning over backwards in a vain attempt at a real-time simulation of a slow motion Matrix dodge. They stood back up again.
“Are we done yet?” asked a muffled voice as the fake Armored Hero turned to look at the camera.
“Don’t break character, keep going!” came what was clearly Snips’s voice from offscreen.
“What the—Snaaaiils!” shouted the Snips sitting at the table, turning to the other boy. “I told you to edit that part out!”
“I thought you were saying that you’d do it,” Snails responded.
“I don’t know how to do that!” said Snips.
“And you though I did?” said Snails.
“Out, both of you,” Detective Haygan said, resting his forehead into his fingertips with his elbows on the table and closing his eyes. “Quit wasting my time.”
* * *
“I don’t think I’ve ever missed a full day of school before,” Fluttershy said as she and Rainbow Dash walked up to Pinkie’s house.
“Hey,” Rainbow Dash said, “at least you had a good reason, and with your spotless record they almost wouldn’t notice. I’m not sure I want to know what they’ll think I was doing.”
“I just didn’t think it would take so long,” Fluttershy responded. “It’s like they wouldn’t let us leave.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Rainbow Dash said as she knocked on and immediately opened the front door. “The media just wants to know as many details as it can get so it can report something totally different, and the police want to know so they can decide what things to try and keep the media from accidentally being right about.”
Passing through the living room, she waved over at Maud, who probably didn’t notice them, before continuing on to Pinkie’s room, the door to which was sitting ajar. Inside, they found the other four members of their group, who looked up as they entered. Rainbow Dash closed the door behind them to block out attentive ears. She didn’t think Maud would be trying to listen, but she could never tell.
“So,” Applejack said, standing up and crossing her arms, “we saw you on the news. Did you enjoy your fifteen seconds of fame?”
“I really liked your ‘its face hurt my elbow’ comment,” Pinkie said. The others looked at her. “What? I did.”
“She actually left out quite a lot,” spoke up Fluttershy, “like the entire part about going into the window.”
“You fell through a window?” Rarity said with surprise.
“Not through,” Rainbow Dash spoke up, “into, as in literally inside of. It was like the portal to Twilight’s world!”
Sunset looked up upon hearing this. “But just on some ordinary window?” she asked to clarify.
“Mm-hm,” Fluttershy nodded. “It was just the one in front of one of the shops near Sugar Cube Corner. Are you sure that the base of the statue is the portal’s only connection point?”
“Positive,” Sunset replied, “there’s no other way to travel between this world and Equestria. If that wasn’t the case, my ultimatum at the Fall Formal would’ve been meaningless. Whatever this was, it must’ve been something different.”
“So, tell us,” Pinkie said, turning back to Rainbow Dash, “what did Wonderland look like?” Rainbow gave her a confused look. “Y’know…‘through the looking glass’ and all that? Geez, it isn’t that obscure, is it?”
“Oh,” said Rainbow Dash. “Hmm, not sure how to describe it. Kinda like the inside of a glass maze? It was just a square tunnel, though. I’m sure ‘Wonderland’ was all the way on the other side. But more about that later. Right now, we have our first real clue in our ‘half-boiled’ investigation, and it could be a case-breaker. We’ve now got our own video of the Armored Hero in action.” She held up her phone.
“And how come the news didn’t say anything about this?” Sunset asked. “Are they just waiting for it to be authenticated like the last one, or…?”
“Nope,” Rainbow Dash replied. “They don’t know about it.”
“I’m tryin’ to think of a plan where that move makes sense,” Applejack said. A moment later she added, “Nope, nuthin’.”
“Yeah,” said Pinkie, “the ‘into the mirror’ part might be a bit much, but this new video could compound with the last one. Eventually there’d be too much footage to ignore.”
“You saw what they did with the last video,” Rainbow Dash said, gesturing with her thumb as if said last video was floating behind her, “they completely sidelined it. They may’ve even forgotten about it by now. More of the same wouldn’t do anything to convince them.”
“Nor would it help us any,” Sunset pointed out.
“Unless…,” Rainbow Dash hinted slyly.
Sunset looked up, then smirked. “Unless it’s more than just more of the same.”
Rainbow Dash handed the phone over without another word. Sunset immediately turned and opened her laptop, whipping out a USB cord and connecting the devices. Everyone gathered around the screen as Sunset opened the latest video file and hit play. As expected, the video was blurry, shaky, upside down, and had a distinct lack of red and black monsters with X-weapons on their backs. They watched a few seconds in silence.
“Well,” said Pinkie, “you’re certainly not winning an Academy Award for camera work, unless you’re going for the ‘found footage’ angle.” Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow at her. “Okay, sorry then,” Pinkie said, throwing her arms up. “Uhg, why is everything I try saying today missing?”
“Well, she’s right, it isn’t the best,” Sunset said, pausing it on a “decent” shot of the Armored Hero. She stared at it for a second. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“A thought just occurred to me,” said Rarity. “That armor. It’s an interesting design, a tad bulky, and probably a complicated fit. It must take him ages to get it on properly.”
“And what does that have to do with anything?” Rainbow Dash said back.
“You were there, didn’t you ever think about it?” Rarity responded. “You were attacked by whatever, and then within a minute, he was there, in full armor. When do you think he had the time to put it all on between when he’d arrived and when he’d have to have somehow been alerted to the attack after it had begun?”
“Oh yeah, good point,” Rainbow Dash said, looking back at the screen. “I was totally about to bring that up.”
“Either he already had it on,” Rarity continued with a roll of her eyes, “meaning that he’s always wearing it, which would tend to stick out in a crowd, or, more likely, he has some method of ‘suiting up’ that only takes a few seconds. Could something like that be facilitated through some sort of magic? Sunset?”
“It’s entirely possible,” said Sunset, “and it might just connect back to that portal in the window. Personally,” she added, turning back to the screen, “that’s what’s got my interest.”
* * *
Late That Night
This was it, the championship was almost theirs. All Rainbow Dash had to do was make one more sliding kick for an epic—her ears were suddenly filled with a whistling ringing noise.
She slammed her hand down on her alarm clock, but the sound continued. She hit it a few more times without success before opening her eyes to see what was up.
“Huh?” Rainbow Dash mumbled. “Four a.m.?” she read off the display. She knew it wasn’t set to go off this early. “Then, what’s making that noise?” She sat up and listened closer. The noise sounded distant, like it was echoing from far away. Was it outside?
She got out of bed, walked over to the window, and pulled the blinds open, but before looking outside, her attention locked onto something closer. Her reflection. She stared at the faint image of herself on the window’s surface as the whistling ring continued, as she now realized, inside her head. The face of that thing and the glass tunnel flashed in her mind for a second.
“I wonder…,” she said, letting the blinds slide back closed.
The next morning, while preparing to race out the door for school by jogging in place, Rainbow Dash detoured to the narrow counter outside the open window gap in the kitchen wall that served as the household’s de facto dinner table and turned on the small TV sitting on the counter. She wanted to test her new theory, immediately muting the sound before lapping through the channels until landing on channel 13 for the morning news segment. She didn’t even have to wait.
“Oh, look at that,” her mother said, walking up behind her, “your new favorite celebrity is at it again.”
Though muted, the Top Stories tagline along the bottom of the screen clearly showed that the newswoman was discussing the latest sighting of the Armored Hero, a sighting which happened only early in the a.m. hours this morning.
“I knew it,” Rainbow Dash said softly.
“Oh?” said her mother affectionately, putting her hands on Rainbow’s shoulders from behind. “Has your conspiracy wall finally cracked the code to his appearances that you can now predict them?”
“Heh, something like that,” Rainbow Dash replied.
Her mother walked around into view; she had pink skin and blue hair styled very much like Rainbow Dash’s, which had served as Rainbow’s style inspiration. “So,” she said, “did something finally click from two nights ago, or was that actually a field test?”
“Um…,” Rainbow Dash started in surprise, “well, y’see—” Her mother gave a chuckle, and Rainbow couldn’t help smiling in turn. “The thing is…”
“Just don’t get in over your head,” her mother said, ruffling Rainbow’s hair. “Well, you’d better get going. Every day is a new chance to set a new land speed record, but it’s not something to have too much riding on.”
Rainbow Dash slowed her jog to a stop in front of Canterlot High’s front steps to check her watch. She snapped her fingers. A minute shy of a new record. She must be slipping. That’s when she heard it, now clearer than before from being fully awake. A low-pitched whistling that also seemed to be ringing, echoing from all around. She looked around to try and pinpoint it source, but the sound kept changing its direction of origin every second.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” she said to herself. “How often does this happen?”
That’s when she heard another ringing. The school bell. She quickly turned and ran up the steps and inside before she became too late to class.
Come lunchtime, and the six had finally accumulated, gathering at a cafeteria table. Rainbow Dash hadn’t wasted a second, and the discussion was already underway.
“And you’re figuring that’s how he knows when to respond and where?” Sunset asked.
“It’s gotta be,” replied Rainbow Dash. “I couldn’t really tell a direction it was coming from, but maybe I just don’t know how to listen to it right. Though from what I can tell, I’m gonna have a lot of practice.”
“Hmm, sounds like he must really be a busy guy if he needs to keep running off that often,” Pinkie added. “Can’t have too much of a life outside this, assuming it’s always the same person. Who knows, maybe the illusion of a single hero is perpetuated by a coordinated effort.”
Everyone paused for a moment after realizing and processing that Pinkie had used those big words correctly.
“Either way,” Sunset picked back up, “you must be thinking of how we can use this new sixth sense of yours to get closer to what’s going on, right?”
Rainbow Dash was about to respond, when she suddenly heard the whistling ring in her head again. This time, however, it was clearly coming from a general direction. The others noticed her pause and looked over eagerly. She gave a slight grin. “Hold that thought…”
Next time, on “Kamen Rider EqG”...
Rainbow Dash runs up to a storefront window and stares into the reflection. Overlaid from another scene, her voice says, “I’m gonna keep showing up to each and every one of these to bother you until you tell me something helpful.”
In the window’s reflection, the Armored Hero jumps his motorcycle up onto its front wheel and spins the bike, the back wheel knocking away a Gelnewt’s flying X-weapon.
“Congratulations,” says the Armored Hero’s voice. “By following me so much you’ve gotten their attention.” Sitting on his motorcycle, the Armored Hero throws a small object at a Gelnewt standing in front of him, and it explodes on impact. “Good luck losing it.”
A giant silver and bronze mechanical spider charges forward.
Along the Watchtower
