//------------------------------// // Chapter 3: The absence of humility // Story: Friends like these // by Istaran //------------------------------// "Mom, I'm home!" Angelica announced as she opened her front door. The stop at McDonald's had made her a bit late, but nothing outside her normal range. The teenager was prone to staying out later some days, or rushing home first thing on others, depending on how her homework and social calendar happened to sync up, and her mom had long since given up on keeping track of it. "Alright dear! Your friends are waiting for you in your room. Don't stay up too late!" her mom replied. 'Friends?' It was hard to be sure after the whirlwind of weirdness that was the bus ride home. Taking a detour through another world that took nearly a month on that side but seemingly no time at all on Earth made it a bit hard to remember little details like this, but she was pretty sure the only one she had invited over was Monique. Monique. One of the ones who hadn't made it. She trembled to think about it, about how her friend had been killed by some idiot teenage boy who apparently thought the whole thing was some sick twisted game. But.. she had no idea how to even begin to explain all that to someone who hadn't been there. No one would believe her. Except the ones who had been there.. at least that guy had been smart enough to get a mailing list together. Angelica breathed slowly to calm herself, to mask the turmoil, until she was ready to step into her room and face her friends. Whichever ones it was. She opened the door and strode in with a mask of confidence on her face. "Hi guys, sorry I'm.. late?" The three teenage girls that looked up at her from their seat on her bed with smiles as faked as her own were definitely no friends of hers. Nor enemies, or even the loosest of acquaintances. She would definitely remember. For one, their skin tones were more fitting for pony colors on Equestria than humans here on earth. The one in the middle was an unhealthy, cartoonish yellow, perhaps a bit pale for a Simpsons character, but otherwise utterly unreal. Her curly orange hair with bright yellow highlights was obviously unnatural, but could pass as modern teen fashion. She was the normal looking one by comparison. The one on the left had blue skin with a two tone straight blue hair in a single, long ponytail, while the one on the right had decisively pink skin, and purple hair with cyan highlights in a pair of pig tails. Each had a simple black leather necklace with a red gemstone around their neck. "Hi, you must be Angelica," the yellow one said as she stood up to greet her, the other two following in tow. It was clear who was the leader of the little band. "I'm Adagio Dazzle, and we're going to be your new best friends!" "Aria Blaze," the pink one introduced with a bored sounding voice. "And I'm Sonata Dusk!" the blue one added cheerfully, "and I'm so glad we're going to be friends and then go home and it will be awesome! Oh! Are you angry? Are you angry at someone? Need us to help you beat them up?" Angelica was a bit shocked by that last bit. She thought she was doing well hiding her feelings, to say nothing of how the sudden intrusion of these strangers into her life was so distracting. "No, um. Well, I mean I am kind of angry at someone, but no you can't beat them up." "I got you," said Aria, "delicate situation. Needs something with a bit more finesse. We can do finesse, can't we girls?" "No, I mean he's already been beat up," Angelica clarified. "That doesn't mean he can't be beat up again. You're still angry, right?" Adagio suggested. Apparently she needed to spell it out completely. "I mean, he's dead. Changeling got to him," she said before clamming up. Did these freaky alien looking girls know about changelings? "Killstealers," Aria said in annoyance, crossing her arms. From her reaction, it was unclear if she was familiar with them, or just rolling with it. "So.. other than beating people up.. is there anything you.. girls.. like to do for fun?" Angelica asked. "Oh, oh! We love to sing!" Sonata volunteered. "Okay, let's hear what you've got!" The girls conferred amongst themselves for a moment, before launching into a loud and glorious rocking song about how great of friends they can be. It.. wasn't quite the usual fare for such a song. It emphasized a lot more pushing fools into being doing stuff for Angelica, beating up her enemies, and otherwise being sort of.. the most evil friends one could hope for? But there was something about it that was just.. magical. For one, they took on a sort of visible shift as they got into the song, fin like translucent wings shimmering into view behind them, while the gems on their necklaces glowed with a visible red light. For another thing, it was literally entrancing and Angelica couldn't help but get swept up in it. When the song was done she was left with the strong sense that the song was awesome and so were her new friends, but any of the other details were hard to keep in her mind, vanishing quickly like a fog in the morning sun. "Wow, you girls really are something! Do you have a name for your band? A YouTube channel?" Angelica gushed. "We're the Dazzlings, of course," Adagio said. "And.. what's a YouTube channel?" Angelica's mom didn't seem to have any complaints about letting the Dazzlings stay over as long as they liked, at least not after a bit of musical intervention. Over the weekend, they got the garage set up into a makeshift recording studio and started putting together a series of music videos to showcase the Dazzling's talents, and Angelica spent all her time out of school working with them and her trusty laptop to get things ready to wow and amaze the world. All her time in school was spent thinking about exactly how she would make every little shot truly pop with fun special effects. Surely grades wouldn't matter much once she was part of a super rich world famous band! While Angelica was in school, the Dazzlings went out to play. They found a bunch of protesters in a park, and mingled with the crowd, easily getting them to talk about what was bothering them, some drivel about Wall Street and the '1%'. After an hour they had plenty to string some lyrics together and found a platform to use as a stage. When their song was done, the crowd's feelings came to a boil and the three girls disappeared into the crowd as it quickly became a riot. They slipped out and went home before the police could mobilize, feeling pleased with themselves and quite sated. For now. Perhaps luckily for them, Angelica wasn't one to watch the news. Finally, their content came together on the little screen, and Angelica uploaded the videos, sharing with the world the amazing talents of her new friends. "Are you sure this will work?" Twilight asked, looking skeptically at the device before her. "Of course! Do I ask you if you're sure your magic will work? This is my talent, give me a little faith!" Silver Spanner replied. The brown furred unicorn, finally withdrew her silver wrench, matching the one depicted on her flank, from the device. The device's interface consisted of a large glass pane on the front, a dozen hoof sized buttons that each bore a dozen symbols laid out in the same pattern as the buttons themselves, and a ball set into a round groove next to a couple more buttons. And finally, a giant metal throw switch, complementing the mad science look of all of the electronic parts behind the interface. Perhaps the creepiest thing about it, particularly for those who knew a bit about what they were looking at, was the giant metal spider, nearly twice the length of a pony in each dimension, sitting on the top of the device, looking down at them facelessly. Dozens of wires were clipped to its legs with little alligator clips. Celestia had somehow produced it from her own blood, using the technology that had been foisted upon her by one of the humans near the end of the war. Now this spider served as the 'brain' for this infernal contraption. "Ready, Twilight?" Silver Spanner asked, as she grabbed the giant metal throw switch. Lightning struck in the background, ominously, followed by a faint and distant "sorry" in Rainbow Dash's voice. "Let's do it!" Twilight nodded. The switch was thrown. The glass pain lit up with a giant swirly icon. "That mean's it's busy.. hold on." The spider connected to the magical wifi router and began downloading information from Earth's internet. The spider was indescribably intelligent, but lacked a lot of the information that it needed. Fortunately, Celestia had seeded it with a few basic URLs and enough understanding of ASCII to start interpreting what it found, and to guide it to the websites of the organizations in charge of defining Internet communication standards. In about a minute, it had read through and understood the entire HTML specifications and several related standards, and was ready to begin interacting with its users. A web page appeared on the screen, bearing a single, baffling word, in a strange, highly artistic script: "Google," Twilight Sparkle read. "What's that supposed to mean?" Silver Spanner rolled the wheel, causing an arrow to pop up and move to the box under the strange word. "Celestia said it was human for 'to search the Internet'. Here, we just type what we want to look for.. " She began hitting the hoof keys. Each symbol required a two-key sequence, so that a mere dozen buttons could represent over a hundred possible options. She quickly typed in 'Twilight Sparkle' and they began going through the results. "There's that show that Frank mentioned. 'My Little Ponies'. That sounds unfair. We aren't that small, humans are just so unreasonably tall. I'm not sure I want to watch my life play out before my eyes though." Taking over the controls, Twilight began looking around, delving into random forums. Then she ran into something she completely failed to expect. "Twilight Sparkle is gay." Someone had said. That was just not true, though it was easy to see how someone could come to that mistake. She didn't have much time for a dating life, and she was honestly a bit shy, and she had several great marefriends she liked to spend a lot of time with. But it wasn't like that! "Dear Anon4314667432: I am not gay. I am just still looking for a good stallion friend, at least when I have the time to do so. I have a very busy life as it is, and barely enough time to hang out with my great marefriends. I love them all to pieces, but we just aren't interested in each other in that way. Sincerely, Twilight Sparkle." "There.." she said aloud, "now.. I hope nopony else made that same mistake. Oh, we should google it!" Silver Spanner returned to the makeshift computer terminal to check on Twilight. "Twilight.. I really think you should go get some sleep. You've been at this for almost a week.." "Can't rest yet.. someone is wrong on the Internet!" the frazzled unicorn replied, turning on Silver Spanner with blood shot eyes. Silver Spanner just backed away until she felt she was far enough to run.