//------------------------------// // 6 - Inside Out // Story: Forsaken // by Beware The Carpenter //------------------------------// Twily Luna’s been in a coma for three days. To enter the dreamscape, she flies to high altitudes, begins gliding, and induces a trance where she uses the solar radiation and changing air pressures to navigate. Last Tuesday at ten PM, she left the palace to enter the dreamscape and was expected back at three AM Wednesday. At eleven thirty, she crashed into the palace wall. She didn’t seem physically injured from the crash, but she’s been unconscious ever since and no amount of drugs or magic have been able to wake her up. From what you say, Enigma’s hysterics started about the same time. Did Enigma go to sleep on Tuesday, wake up, and then refuse to go asleep again, or did he begin acting hysterical before going to sleep? If he didn’t sleep, do you know the exact time his behavior started? Has Enigma slept for any amount of time since Tuesday? If so, did that make his hysterics better or worse? For anyone else, lack of sleep causes increased appetite. Has Enigma seemed abnormally hungry since this started? I’ve spoken to the thesteral physicians trying to treat Luna, and they say ponies who’s dreams Luna is visiting may seem awake and often sleepwalk or sleeptalk, even if they have no history of it, but won’t react to physical-world stimuli. I know it’s hard, since Enigma usually doesn’t respond to us anyways, but has he interacted with anyone since his hysteria started? Try to find out as much you can; I’ll keep talking to the thesteral physicians on my side. Now that we have a lead on what’s wrong, we might be able to cast a ritual that can draw Luna back to her own body, curing Enigma in the process. Write me back as soon as you have some answers, or if Enigma’s condition changes. Shining Armor P.S. Please also include a list of the medications Enigma is currently taking, especially any changes Brace Wits or Cognastruct have made over the last few days to deal with the situation; psycho reactive drugs could easily be what are preventing Luna from withdrawing from Enigma’s mind. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Twilight stared at the letter in disbelief; read it again and then dropped her protection from it; letting Enigma’s flames burn it to ash within seconds. Had she really not communicated how little time she had left? Did Shining not understand that she was locked in Enigma’s cell and couldn’t ask Cognastruct and Brace Wits anything? She had minutes to live, and Twilight didn’t even know if she had enough strength left to send another message, telling him she needed him now. Twilight dragged herself to the farthest corner of the cell, tried to steady her breathing and attempted to scrape enough magic together for another letter, but after a few seconds of futile effort, she knew there wouldn’t be enough. There was nothing more she could do. Twilight glared at Enigma one final time, wishing she had never come here, wishing - … Was he… There was a flicker; for a moment Twilight thought he had cast a spell over her eyesight, or maybe he had changed the way her brain perceived what she saw, or maybe she was dead. Maybe all three were true. For now, Twilight took it for granted that she could see through the walls of Enigma’s cell. She could see Brace Wits lying in bed a few meters away, worrying about her and Enigma, feeling helpless, and jealous of Cognastruct that he was able to sleep in a time like this… No, she couldn’t. Twilight couldn’t see Brace Wits, but she could see her worry, helplessness and jealousy. Beneath her was a volatile sea or anger, lust, and loneliness - spotted with intermittent dots of remorse or self-righteousness of the Alkzum inmates, separated from each other by cold, discipline of the asylum guards; but she barely noticed them. Enigma had transformed into a swirling mass of energy that was breaking apart as another force, equally immense and incompatible, buffeted it from the inside. There was a connection, a rope of consciousness which spanned from Enigma’s horn, through the walls of the asylum and disappeared into the translucent Canterhorn in the direction of the palace. It was incredible… and useless. Maybe she was seeing her brother for the first time, but it couldn’t save her, and neither could it help him or Luna or Equestria in – The spell began to wear off, or maybe her eyes adjusted to it, and Twilight could see naturally as well as mentally. Enigma was standing up, and staring at her and with his hooves – no, his mind – he was making her a gift: Twilight had spent countless hours attempting to learn mind magic; and one of her most stubborn failures had been a spell that linked two minds together, allowing instantaneous communication over vast distances. Twilight never came close to getting it right, but she understood it well enough to recognize the flawless display Enigma was crafting. It took enormous amounts of energy to establish, but virtually none to maintain. Enigma forged it, and then he passed it too her. He wanted her to talk to Shining Armor, he wanted her to get help, and he was communicating! One end of the thread attached itself to Twilight’s horn, and the other she hurled towards Canterlot. Passing through the other side of the mountain, a sea of desires, worries, passions and imagination sang and bellowed beneath her. If she’d needed to start looking for Shining Armor blind it would have taken weeks, but she knew Shining Armor would be with Luna, and so she followed the glowing rope connecting Enigma and Luna straight into Luna’s chambers. Inside was a dense swarm of melancholy, worry, failure, suspicion and despair. Twilight could only assume the room was filled with guards and doctors fretting over Luna’s unconscious form. Luna herself seemed completely absent, with the glowing cable ending abruptly in the middle of a ring of protective worry. Twilight looked around the room for Shining Armor, knowing she only had one shot. Impending failure of responsibility were everywhere; the room must be full of soldiers, she needed to think of what was different about Shining Armor? She looked around for a mind that was racing at just having received her letter, but it wasn’t there. Intelligence? There were a lot of doctors in the room, with extensive interest in the sciences, and there were soldiers with discipline and courage; but not many people had both. That narrowed it down, but there were still several – there! Clastic Strain had been born premature and although he and Cadance were out of danger, he was still weak. There was a father in the room who wanted to be there for his wife and son, but who hadn't left Luna or slept in three days, and it was eating him alive, augmented by the guilt of past failures when duty had overridden family. Twilight edged closer to him, and felt an immense power that could only have been him. Twilight hit herself against the corner of his mind, and he noticed it, opened his senses, and she made a link. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… “Luna?” One minute the room had been filled with sound, sweat and anger. When Luna got sick, her thesteral guards had been quick to mutter about a ‘sun pony’ conspiracy to murder ‘The Queen’; believing Celestia’s absence to be a pitifully disguised attempt to clear her of suspicion since she’d be out of Canterlot. This, of course, led to the conclusion that Shining Armor was the assassin, left to poison Luna while his Princess was away. Words were useless to calm their accusations, and trust was non-existent; but if he ran now it would only confirm his guilt in their eyes. Things had been helped, slightly, by Shining Armor’s choice to follow the thesterals in fasting from everything but water out of respect to Luna. Today, for the first time, the thesterals had finally allowed a team of pony doctors to examine Luna, but they’d had exactly as much success as the thesteral physicians had been. None. Any and all attempts to contact Celestia on the western frontier had been futile, with lightning storms blocking telefire communications, and none of the messengers he’d sent were back yet. Ironically, the thesteral city of Iskewrel was about the same distance, and the thesterals had had ample time to rush in additional teams of physicians within the first twenty-four hours; as well as start arming the rest of them for war in the event that Luna died. Then there was the nudge on his mind, subtle but unmistakable. Shining Armor hoped with everything he had that Luna was reaching out to him, to tell him what was wrong, what to do, or how to call off her thesterals. He’d lowered all his mental blocks and that had been… an indefinite number of seconds ago. Now everything around him was white, quiet, except for the faint echo of a waterfall whose source he couldn’t identify, and some obscure smoke taking the shape of, “…Twily?” She looked like she was angry, because she was too scared to be furious, “I don’t have time to wait, or answer any of your questions.” She snapped, “I have maybe ten minutes left before I die; I need you to come get me now!” “What? Where are you?” Twily stomped her hoof; seemingly on nothing but still managed to make a clunk that was audible above the increasing volume of the waterfall; “I’m in Enigma’s cell! He’s locked me in and his flames are going to kill me unless you help because he’s been going crazy for the last three nights. The roof is blown open, so if you stand by the hole you can lift me out!” Three days? “Twily, Luna’s been in a coma for-” “I know!” shouted Twily, above the deafening thunder that had enveloped them, “You already told me in the letter!” “What letter?” Shining Armor’s question was enveloped by the thunder which overcame everything and everyone. The next thing Shining Armor was aware of, he was a thread, reaching between two horns. A few inches away from him, there was a rope, thicker and stronger than the one connecting him to Twily, and they were getting drawn in, like asteroids drawn by a planet’s gravity. He tried to pull back into his own body; but it was too late. The last thing he knew was that Luna’s body, which had lain dormant for three nights, launched out of bed, and was pinning him to the wall with her hooves, horn and eyes. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Twilight kicked, trying to break free but, there was nothing she could do. No matter how hard she pulled, she and Shining Armor were being drawn into the link between Luna and Enigma, whose discombobulated babble of ideas formed the cannonade around them. Funnily enough, she knew that in Enigma’s cell, it was almost perfectly silent. Enigma had stopped screaming, and was standing in the middle of his cell, wreathed with flame, watching her quietly with blazing white-hot eyes. He jumped; covering the twenty-eight feet between them in a single bound, and consumed her. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Enigma was busy thinking. Thinking was something he did a lot; he liked doing it and thought it was something he did better than other people. These last few days Enigma had been particularly busy thinking about what was happening to him; and now, after 3 days, 1 hour and 21 minutes of contemplation, he’d come to a conclusion. He was pregnant. Enigma had never been pregnant before, but 6 years, 36 weeks, 4 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes ago, pregnant was something that had happened to Brace Wits, and Enigma had learned all about it then. Pregnant was when you had another person stuck inside of you and you got weird food cravings: For the last 2 days, 21 hours and 5 minutes, Enigma had had an insatiable craving for jam on toast. Usually Enigma only got jam on toast on Mondays at 8:44 AM; but he couldn’t stop thinking how nice it would be if he had some right now. He’d asked both Brace Wits and Cognastruct for some 4 times each, but neither of them would give him any. Those were the only 2 symptoms that mattered. There were others that didn’t seem as important, but Enigma had them anyways. When you were pregnant, you felt nauseous and bloated. You got weird muscle cramps; you felt cranky all the time because you were always tired, and you needed to pee a lot. Yup. He was definitely pregnant. When Brace Wits had gotten pregnant, she’d seemed terribly excited about it. She and Cognastruct had come and talked to him about how they were going to be a mommy and daddy with a baby, but that this wouldn’t mean that they’d love him any less. Enigma had asked Brace Wits if he could bring the baby out to look at it, but she didn’t answer and so Enigma decided to leave the baby where it was. Enigma did not like being pregnant. When The Fat One had first came to visit him, Enigma had thought it would be fun to make a new friend, so he let her inside to play; but The Fat One was too fat and now she was stuck somewhere in his imagination. Since then she’d been more and more irritating; bumping and bumbling about, knocking over all of Enigma’s nice neat rows and making a dreadful mess of things. Enigma wanted her to go away, but she was thrashing around too much to listen to him when he showed her the way out; instead she just kept on banging around until 1 day, 16 hours and 43 minutes ago, she had found Enigma’s throat, and began poking his vocal cords saying that help would come if he turned them on. Enigma let her vibrate his vocal cords, and then 1 days 3 hours and 15 minutes later Twilight Sparkle came to visit him. At first Enigma wondered if she was the help that The Fat One had promised, but she had not brought any jam on toast, so Enigma had concluded that The Fat One must have been lying. Now he was also pregnant with Twilight Sparkle and Shining Armor. He’d eaten them. Shining Armor tasted like 1s and 19s. Twilight Sparkle tasted like 2s, 5s, and 7s. All prime numbers. Yummy. But they weren’t as fat as The Fat One however and so they wouldn’t get stuck as easily. Maybe Twilight Sparkle and Shining Armor could go find The Fat One, and help push her out. Maybe he could even get them to bring him some jam on toast after they were gone. That would be nice. Then Enigma could get back to the busy schedule he had planned out before getting pregnant. If they couldn’t push The Fat One out however, he’d need to keep all 3 of them, and Enigma wouldn’t like that very much. He didn’t think any of them would like it either.