Critical Angle ɘlǫnA lɒɔiƚiɿƆ
Within the Hour
The rest of the group had gathered, pulling themselves away from whatever they’d been doing, and were waiting impatiently in Twilight’s lab, Pinkie especially being oddly silent and still. Rainbow and Applejack had told what they knew, but it wasn’t any more satisfying to the others.
As Rainbow paced around the room again, she took yet another look at Twilight, who was sitting at her computer as always, as calm as she’d ever been. “Well you could look a bit more concerned,” Rainbow spoke up.
“There’s no need,” Twilight said. “She’ll be fine once she’s retrieved from the Advent Void.”
Rainbow stopped. “And you know that for sure? How many times has this happened to you?”
“Hey!” Twilight shot back.
“Simmer down,” Applejack said, standing up, “there’s no reason to get confrontational. ’Least not with her.”
“I have every reason in the world to be upset right now!” Rainbow shouted.
The mirror on the wall warped, and Cavalier stepped out, all eyes turning to him.
“This oughta be good,” muttered Rainbow, crossing her arms.
But Cavalier was holding his hand in the mirror’s ripple, keeping the connection open as someone else stepped out, the group stirring at the sight. Flash Sentry.
“Flash?” Applejack said.
Flash held up his hand. “Hold your questions.”
Cavalier released the mirror and stepped forward. “The plan was to ease you all in one step at a time,” he explained, his voice sounding weaker than usual. “To let you get accustomed to the latest development before telling you the next one only as you needed to know. Looks like that’s out the window.” He sighed and paused, feeling their gazes. “Time to go all in, then.”
Taking a breath, he held his arms aside and made loose fists. Glowing indigo lines ran across the edges of his armor’s plating, looping the two halves of his chestplate and fanning across his diamond-shaped eye cover, before a large vertical energy ring burst out and split, flashing and fading images of his armor stretching off sideways. In a final lurch, his armor dissolved away, leaving a familiar form: pale orangish skin and blue hair, the spitting image of Flash, save for his hair being notably less spiky, a featureless zipped hoodie instead of a black jacket, and cargo pants instead of jeans. Several gasps came from the group, but not from Twilight. She’d known all along.
The first Flash flipped his raised hand down to point at the girls. “Now you can ask.”
“Wait,” Pinkie began sputtering, “if you—then he—but he’s not—then what?”
“Shall I spill the last secret,” Flash asked Cavalier, “or do you think they’ve already figured it out?”
Rainbow hadn’t gasped with the others. “Do you think we’re in the mood for games?” she hissed. She turned to Flash. “And shouldn’t you of all people be concerned about Sunset, or did you drink the same ‘she’ll be fine’ punch?”
Flash stared at Cavalier, gesturing at the girls. “Aaand they’ve even stopped caring.” Cavalier looked down. “I told you they could’ve handled it all at once.”
“That’s your cue to start talking,” Rainbow cut in. Cavalier mentally shook off the eyes as best he could.
“As you figured out before,” he began, “the Mirror World…didn’t used to be so empty. Not two months ago, it was my home. The only world I thought there was. Something I didn’t mention earlier about Ventara was that every person on it had a mirror twin on its counterpart world, Earth. Much like that, your world and my Mirror World do too, but unlike the pony world you know, we have different names. Lumen. My name is Lumen Centurion. Don’t let it sound too impressive.”
“Not hard,” Rainbow said.
Lumen shook his head. “All I knew was that there had been a string of unexplained disappearances, when one day, out of nowhere, someone in black armor pulled me into a mirror, and through the reflection, I saw everyone else on the street vanish into thin air all at once. He was the Advent Master, and he explained that someone had used a network of teleportation beacons to kidnap everyone in my world. He said that the same thing would probably happen to another world, one behind the mirrors, and convinced me into becoming that world’s first Kamen Rider. Sure enough, within weeks the Monster attacks began. You probably know the rest from there.”
The girls were silent as they absorbed this, only mumbling a bit to themselves. Rainbow turned away.
“E-everyone else?” Fluttershy asked.
Lumen nodded. “I haven’t found a single other person left behind, and believe me, I looked. Even after Master Eubulon told me not to bother. He said it happened the same way on Ventara.”
“Sorry,” she said, “we knew it had to but, I guess we just…never thought about the moment it happened.”
“When should we tell Twilight about this?” Rarity asked. Then she noticed Twilight across the room looking at her. “Well, other Twilight.”
“If Sunset’s just gonna be back real soon,” Pinkie spurted, “then we can just wait and have her tell Twilight herself.” She turned to Applejack, twitching. “I mean, she’s just gonna be right back, right?” She leaned over to Fluttershy. “You watch, I’m sure we’ll all laugh about this one day about how worried we were over nothing. Right?”
Fluttershy put an arm around her.
Applejack looked to Lumen. “You lot’re certain about this safety mechanism talk, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “She’ll be fine.”
“Forgive me if I don’t believe you all of a sudden,” Rainbow cut in from pacing again, “but I recently discovered just how much you tend to leave out.”
“Venting is what happens when a Kamen Rider takes too much damage,” Lumen continued to the others. “They get pulled from the battlefield into the Advent Void so they don’t get seriously hurt. Master Eubulon set up that feature when he made the original Advent Decks. His Deck is the Void Key, and he can go into the Advent Void and retrieve any vented Rider.”
“I already sent him a message before you arrived,” Twilight added from her seat. “If he’s there now, it won’t be long.”
“Okay,” Applejack nodded.
“So,” Pinkie popped back up, “if we’re doing story time, how about you? How did you get into all of this?”
Twilight leaned away from her desk with a sigh. “I was working in the lab late one night doing…research.”
Twilight was sitting at her computer in the lab, watching a close-up video of a person with short hair, a short beard, and glasses talking to the audience from a studio filled with knickknacks.
“So in the end,” he was saying, “maybe we can know… and maybe we can’t. But if we did know, then how would we know… that we knew?” He gave a raised eyebrow for effect. “And as always… thanks for watching.” The screen changed to show a green ‘V’ of dripping slime.
Unseen across the room, the panel mirror hanging from the wall began warping, the image of Kamen Rider Cavalier appearing in it.
Getting a suspicious feeling of being watched, Twilight turned to see Cavalier’s image in the mirror. She gave a short gasp, jumping a step back from her chair. Then she paused. “Mirrors…”
She turned back to her notes, ignoring as Cavalier stepped out through the mirror.
“Most of the incidents took place next to or nearby a large window or other reflective surface,” she muttered, looking over the corkboard covered with papers and strings far more neatly arranged than Rainbow’s had been. “That must be the key: mirrors.”
Twilight looked back at Cavalier as he took a few steps closer.
“You know who I am?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Am I in danger?”
“No.”
“Well if I’m not in danger,” Twilight mulled briefly, “then the only reason you’d be here is… because you think I can help?”
There was a silent pause.
“Yes,” Cavalier said.
“Yeah,” Pinkie said, “what exactly have you been doing?”
“I’ve stayed on top of keeping the Extended Mirror Plane to Ventara connected on this end,” Twilight explained, “as well as providing a safe and controlled location for it to be linked to perpetually. The Advent Master gave me the technology needed to stabilize the connection if it started to give out or fluctuate too much, which it does quite a lot, more than he has the time to keep up with. Despite that, it’s easy to monitor all the time,” she trailed off, letting slip not quite as quietly as she thought, “…since I don’t use my Deck.”
Rainbow stopped mid-pace. “What?” she said darkly, turning. Twilight shrunk back as Rainbow marched towards her. “You mean you have a Deck, too? How come you’re not using it? You could’ve been there, why weren’t you? You could’ve helped prevent this!”
“Rainbow!” Fluttershy shouted, jumping between them. “I wasn’t there. Are you going to be blaming me next?”
“Well I—…” Rainbow stopped, throwing up her arms in defeat. “Okay, no. Sorry.” She turned away.
“Simmer down now, sugar cube,” Applejack said, “we can’t change what’s happened, but we know there’s an easy fix, focus on that for right now.”
“Sorry, I…,” Rainbow sighed, holding her forehead. “It’s just that, being a Kamen Rider…having this much power…” She took out her Advent Deck to stare at it. “And I can’t even protect my friends…” Fluttershy put a hand on her shoulder. “Her Advent Deck, if I was just one step faster…”
“Humbling, isn’t it?” Lumen said. “Our enemy’s at least as strong as we are, just remember that. Even with the power of being Kamen Riders, there’s only so much we can do.”
Rainbow stared at him. “That doesn’t exactly help much.”
“I have to agree with her on this,” Pinkie said, “that actually makes things sound worse.”
Lumen looked away, muttering, “They always are.”
No one knew how to pick up from that. They waited another minute in silence. Then another. There was still no sign of the promised Advent Master or Sunset’s triumphant return, and by now Rainbow couldn’t take it anymore.
“I need to clear my head,” she said as she turned and walked to the mirror.
Pinkie went to reach for her, but Applejack pushed her hand back down. Rainbow warped out.
Now that that flamethrower was away from the powder keg, Applejack turned to Lumen. “So, basically…,” she led in, before unloading, “what the heck were you thinkin’ with all a’ this secrecy?”
“I don’t want to be the kind of person to say, ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’,” he said firmly without looking. “It’s not like there was a manual.”
“Did I say there was?”
“I was a default ‘leader’ because there weren’t any other Riders,” Lumen continued, turning to her, “I didn’t choose or earn the position for any actual reason.” Applejack silently raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you can’t tell just by looking at me,” he stepped closer, “or maybe my name gives you the wrong idea, but I’m not qualified for this. I’m a Dungeons nerd, I…I learned to swordfight at the Renaissance Fair, I critique historical movies for accuracy instead of just watching them.” No response. “What do you want from me!? Do you think I stand by my bad plan after this—no, I don’t. I wasn’t confident in my decisions, but I felt I had to sound like I was because you might not listen to me otherwise.”
“What it’s soundin’ like is that the whole stoic tough guy demeanor was just one big lie.”
“You mean my Armored Hero persona?” Lumen said. He sighed. “It sounds childish to say it out loud. I wanted to think of a hero who could’ve saved everyone if he’d been there. I thought that if I acted like that hero, that I could become him.” He dropped into a chair. “I see how far that’s gotten me.”
“An’ this couldn’t a’ been your introduction because…?” Applejack pressed.
“I wasn’t sure how much of it you’d believe,” Lumen said.
She turned to Flash, who’d been standing off to the side ignored for ages. “You did try to tell him everythin’, right?”
“Mm-hm,” Flash nodded, having kept up regardless. “No idea why he didn’t catch on.”
“You knew there was already another world,” Lumen continued. “Wouldn’t ‘there’s also another other world’ sound a bit tacked on and less believable? I know I’d be suspicious.”
Pinkie crossed her arms with a sigh. “Even still, trying to outrun one trope by falling into another is no solution.”
“Well,” Lumen said, “the past has passed, mistakes and all.”
Turning away from that depressing conversation, Flash walked over and sat by Rarity. “Well. I stayed out of that while you all sorted things out, but I clearly have missed a lot. Last I checked in, Rainbow was the only Rider and bad at keeping her secret identity. She’s lucky she didn’t actually need to follow up with me with an NDA or anything, that could’ve been a big security leak otherwise.”
“Ha ha, yes,” Rarity chuckled, “totally none of the rest of us knew that and also did nothing, I mean could you imagine.” She held a nervous smile. “So you knew everything all along, then? Even back when we were only seeing it on the news?”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, “I heard about that meeting. That was actually Lumen you saw then at Sugar Cube Corner, he was testing the waters with you guys.”
“Riiiight…,” she trailed. “Testing the waters based on your recommendation, I suppose?”
“Yep. They asked ‘Can anyone help?’ and there was no one else to think of. Well, and I figured this world’s Twilight had to at least compare to yours.”
“Then,” Fluttershy said, gravitating over to their discussion, “what else do you do? Do you monitor some security system to keep track of monsters? Or maybe you analyze their movements to predict their next targets.”
Flash shook his head. “I mostly got roped into this because I’m Lancelot’s mirror twin. It would’ve been easy to just keep me out of it, but they decided early that having someone on this side of the mirrors would be useful, and I was an easy first option. Guess I’m also on standby for damage control if someone sees something.”
“Still,” Rarity said, “even if she doesn’t use it, it seems the Advent Master at least gave this Twilight a Deck. What about you?”
“I’m really only here right now so you’d believe he wasn’t me,” Flash replied. “Other than that, again, I’m basically just scouting and crowd control. I’ve seen it twice before, you six are the most capable defense this school has to offer, I know I can’t compete with what you do.”
“But we aren’t even using that power,” Pinkie added, leaning over to their conversation as well, “so why should it matter not having it? There had to have been an Advent Deck with your name on it at some point, right?”
“Well technically,” Lumen joined in, “he kind of already has one.” He held up his own indigo Deck.
“The Advent Decks are locked to a specific genetic profile,” Twilight explained over her shoulder. “They can only be used by the intended user.”
“Or,” Lumen picked up, “anyone with the same DNA.”
“Right here,” Flash said, waving a hand. “Advent Decks count mirror twins as the same person. Call me a back-up copy,” adding a deflated, “Too valuable to risk in the field.”
“But haven’t you ever wanted to use the power of a Kamen Rider?” Pinkie continued.
“I mean, sure, it would be awesome,” Flash said. “It’s just…it’s me. I play guitar, I don’t fight.”
“Pshh,” Pinkie waved off, stepping into an open spot. “I’m sure you could find some way to fight with a guitar. Maybe make it into a sword.” She swung her arms around as if wielding an air guitar blade. “And add in some cool lightning effects!”
She raised her left fist—and an array of lightning bolts struck down around her, blasting up sparks, a central bolt surging across her. She swung her arm out to break the bolt and the charge dissipated.
P
I
N
Amidst an empty dark expanse, she stood gleaming in a sleek and shiny pink suit with silver shoulder straps, dark pink gloves, pink branches on a smooth black face cover, and silver ear spikes. In her hands was a skinny silver and pink guitar with a spearpoint at the tip. She spun and swung it around and over her head, cutting through the air with metallic reverberations.
N
K
I
The spectral form of a purple Siren monster charged her from the right. With but a glance, she twisted the guitar blade in her grasp and thrust it out into the oncoming Siren’s glowing red gem, the monster pushing the weapon back into her full grasp as it came to as stop. In the same motion, she pulled a pink stringed clip off her belt and slid it onto the guitar, its body splitting off into two blades to reveal a pink gem club at the base of the spearpoint.
P
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K
I
She brushed the strings, sending a pink shockwave across the Siren’s body, then started strumming rapidly. The Siren screeched and writhed as a cascade of shockwaves flowed over it. After one last mighty sweep across the strings, Pinkie slowly pulled her arm back up and gave an emphatic thumbs-up as the last note faded.
Flash just blinked at her.
“She does that,” Rarity said casually.
* * *
Rainbow Dash was walking through the city. Not heading anywhere, just to be active, be moving, be doing something.
Even if Sunset was going to be brought back as easily as they kept saying, should everyone else be so calm about it? They suddenly seemed more concerned about some stranger who’d been as good as lying to them for weeks than they were about someone who was supposed to be one of their best friends. Was she the only one who actually cared? Or was she really overreacting? And what was so wrong with overreacting to something like this!
Then a sound came to her ears, and she stopped. As the whistling ring flowed around her, her muscles began tensing and she started to boil. A Rider’s or not, some instinct told her who it was. She took out her phone.
“Yeah, the duplicate thing was a bit weird at first,” Flash was saying, “but thanks to you guys, the school had me pre-prepared for something like that.”
The whistling ringing started echoing to all of them, snapping everyone’s focus to honing in on it, though as Rarity’s hand reached around instinctively to grab her Advent Deck, she paused. “Are we all just going in like usual? Even now?”
“This does feel a bit soon for another attack,” Pinkie noted.
“Well,” Fluttershy said, “we do trust that Sunset’s almost back.” She looked around. “Don’t we?”
Twilight cut in, “I mean you could just sit around and keep talking, but…”
But as the Riders started to stand up, their phones each pinged. The message wasn’t signed, but it didn’t need to be: “Stay out of this one.”
“That doesn’t sound smart,” Pinkie said after a second.
Applejack sat back down on the table edge. “You want her angry at you, be my guest.” She looked to Lumen. “Maybe you could go. Can’t get much madder at ya.”
Behind them, the mirror on the wall started rippling.
Davenport strolled down the city sidewalk on his way to the planning commission. Again. It seemed the city planning board needed to be convinced that a shop selling exclusively quills and sofas was in fact a sustainable economic venture and did deserved the lease on a prime piece of real estate some rich construction company wanted to start planning the expansion of a high rise condo into. Again.
Gigazelle and Megazelle were standing in a window’s reflection looking at the city street beyond it. They had been ordered to put the pressure on. They watched as Davenport walked by across the street.
They turned to each other. Megazelle nodded. Gigazelle looked back at Davenport and leapt out of the glass, sailing over the road with its arm outstretched. {Gotta be strong.}
Halfway to its target, a screech pierced the air as Aquileo surged out of the window across from Gigazelle and crashed into it, plowing it back towards the first window, Megazelle jumping in surprise in the reflection.
Elsewhere in the Mirror World, along the edge of an open cement courtyard, a set of storefront windows warped. Megazelle was ejected backwards out of the reflection as Aquileo dragged Gigazelle through in its claws, throwing it to the ground before giving a strong wingbeat and rising out of the courtyard. Kamen Rider Talon stepped out of the windows as the rippling subsided, clawed gauntlets equipped. She stared the Zelles down.
Hissing, Megazelle jumped up first and charged. Talon didn’t react until it was right at her, knocking it aside with one swipe as it started to jump over her. Gigazelle was on its feet, but hesitating after its last clash with her.
“You two helped steal Sunset’s Advent Deck,” Rainbow said, devoid of pluck, devoid of her.
Shaking off its nerves, Gigazelle let out a howl and charged, leaping up earlier and sailing over the Rider to her right, kicking off of a cement pillar and flipping over past her on the left. She didn’t try looking after it. The purple monster spun and rushed, slamming into her as it passed in a blur. She lurched back, but planted her foot to stay firm.
“You were tricky enough to escape last time,” she continued.
Gigazelle turned on a dime and raced up for another hit, but Rainbow silently ducked back with a turn and swept with her left foot, an old soccer trick to kick the ball away from the opponent, instead kicking away both of Gigazelle’s shins, sending its face into the ground as it tumbled away.
“You shouldn’t’ve pushed your luck!” she shouted as she turned to the monster.
As Gigazelle tried pushing itself back up, Rainbow ran over and kicked it in the gut, the monster dropping to the ground again. She kicked it again, sending it rolling. It managed to roll and spring back to its feet, turning toward her only for her to be right there to unleash a barrage of punches, the knuckles of her clawed gauntlets rapping on its chest like gunfire, scattering showers of sparks off of it.
It staggered back, sparks still falling from its smoking gazelle emblem chestplate. Rainbow shook her right hand to shatter the gauntlet away so she could pull out and slot a card.
Blast Vent
She strode up and slapped her hand onto the moaning monster’s chest, wind swirling around her forearm. As it gave a startled whine, she shoved up, and the tornado erupted over her hand, launching Gigazelle into the air.
Jumping into the tail of the tornado, she somersaulted and, with the cyclone’s boost, rocketed a kick straight up into Gigazelle’s gut, shooting past it with a spray of sparks. Gigazelle tumbled and crashed to the ground in a heap, Rainbow flipping and touching down in the remaining wind of the tornado a short distance away. The monster exploded behind her, Aquileo swooping in to absorb the energy ball that rose from the flames before leaving through a reflection.
Rainbow stood up and scanned the courtyard like a bird of prey, lungs pounding as loud as her heart, blocking out her footsteps as she stalked back and forth. Megazelle was nowhere. “Show yourself!” Even her voice was muffled. No wonder she didn’t hear it. But she felt it.
A heavy bladed weapon caught her left elbow on a dive, dragging down and shattering her remaining gauntlet as the force turned her to see Megazelle. She instinctively swung with her empty right hand, but distracted by the throbbing in her left arm she could barely slap it. Megazelle responded by ramming its palm into her face hard enough to shove her mask into her nose, forcing a reflexive blink as her eyes teared up.
Rainbow grabbed at her faceplate as Megazelle sprang out of her blurry view in a gold streak, trying not to lose her balance. It hurt to move her left arm, and now her eyes stung as she tried to keep them open, being unable to wipe away the tears messing with her vision. She tried to think of an insult, but only managed a pained shout she couldn’t tell how loud. Then she felt something around her waist.
She saw the dual blades of the pincer sword snagged around her from behind a second before Megazelle swung. The trailing blade sliced as its curve spun her, and she was flung out of the pincer, the leading blade’s tip catching her side on the way out with a spit of sparks and spinning her the other way, sending her clattering across the ground. The world spun around her again and again, but came to a stop as the back of her head hit the pavement, sending a wake-up jolt through her body. The muffled state of sound around her numbed for a second before fading back out to normal, and she finally heard her panting breaths. She reached up to her head. Why did lessons on teamwork always hurt so much?
Megazelle leapt a distance backwards before it crouched and charged in. Trying to sit up, Rainbow quickly shoved her slotter open, but in overshooting the reach for a card, the edge of her thumb dragged one out and it flipped up on top of her hand. Reaching after it by reflex, she instead launched it away and it clattered down out of reach. The footsteps were twice as close. Wait, just wait!
She grabbed at the next card but her fingers didn’t listen right, and when she finally had the edge, it pulled at an angle and bent, jamming itself in the Deck’s slot. She yanked at it to no avail as Megazelle sprang up.
Rainbow looked up at a screaming whoop. Megazelle sailed through the air at her, legs tucked, its pincer sword drawn back ready to impale. She threw her arms up in defense.
Strike Vent
With barely a chance for Megazelle to glance at it, a stream of flames shot from Rainbow’s left, crashing into the monster and sweeping it out of view before it exploded.
Rainbow sat there for a second just to breathe, but as several simultaneous shocks faded, an overriding thought formed in her mind. Flames? That can only mean… “Sunset?” she called as she turned to the sources of the attack.
Partially obscured through the air wavering from the rising heat, she could make out the silhouette of a partly crouched Rider, their left arm out to side and their right arm extended forward. As they moved to stand up straight, she saw they were largely red, much like Sunset, but…instead of red armor over a gray undersuit, their suit was the red part, their chestplate a gleaming silver. A red gauntlet on their right hand was shaped like a creature’s head with long toothy jaws, and a pair of glowing red circles shone from underneath their silver facemask covered in horizontal slits. As the heat cleared, she saw their belt’s black Advent Deck bore a gold dragon’s face silhouette, a silver version on their forehead.
“Not exactly,” said Kamen Rider Dragon Knight.
With a screeching roar, a red serpentine dragon flew through the energy ball floating above the scorched ground and sped past Rainbow, looping once around the red Rider. It drifted to a stop in midair, revealing its segmented metal body had four small limbs and the end of its tail looked like a curved sword blade. Dragreder roared at Rainbow again.
Kit Taylor stepped out of the mirror in the Crystal Prep base, his skin a pale red, and wearing a black uniform with a small gold Dragon symbol in ‘name tag position’. “Found ’er,” he said, thumbing back at the mirror as Rainbow jumped out.
“Did you bring Sunset back yet?” she asked eagerly, stepping around Kit. “Where is she?” She scanned the room, seeing the others standing around the table, Twilight still at her computer but not looking back. And no sign of Sunset.
Applejack turned to Rainbow. “Uh, that may be a bit more complicated than we thought.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, taking a closer headcount. That’s when she noticed a short-haired man in a black leather jacket, his skin not bearing any obvious shade, also sitting at the table, a larger black Advent Deck with a circular orange decoration in the center set in front of him. She looked to her other friends for a clue.
“I went into the Advent Void to retrieve her,” the man said.
Rainbow tilted her head and stepped closer. “And…?”
The Advent Master looked her in the eyes. “She’s not there.”
Next time, on “Kamen Rider EqG”…
Sunset Shimmer and Princess Celestia were standing apart at a picnic by a tree under a gloomy sky with the wind whipping by.
“Sunset Shimmer,” Celestia said forcefully. “We’ve been over this, we will get to the Mirror and many other lessons in due time…when you’re ready.”
Sunset and Celestia each turned and walked away from the other.
Sunset glared back over her shoulder. “I am ready.”
Real or Virtual?
