//------------------------------// // 12. Baby's Book // Story: Cross The Amazon // by Chatoyance //------------------------------// ══════════════════════ T H E C O N V E R S I O N B U R E A U : ══════════════════════ CROSS THE AMAZON By Chatoyance Chapter Twelve: Baby's Book Dropspindle hit the hard, slick top of the human airship. Instinctively she attempted to land on her hooves, instantly they slipped out from under her and splayed wide to the cardinal directions as her undercarriage slammed onto the smooth white surface. Her head followed, whipping down on her long neck, to impact as well. For too long she was stunned, breathless, unable to cope with the pain and shock of her hard landing. Then she noticed she was moving. She was moving very fast, carried by a sheeting river of rainwater, sliding away from where Calloway lay gasping, facing away from her. Dropspindle made motions to try to move against the flow, but her hooves constantly slid away - there was literally no way for her to gain any traction at all. The airship might as well have been made of glass, covered in oil. Nothing she did made the slightest change to her trajectory. She became desperate as the edge of the craft drew near - she tried to stand, she flailed at the slick, hard surface with rapid hooves, she even attempted to swim while laying flat, the water running under and over her, pushing her relentlessly. As she was swept from the ship, she made a last moment effort to catch herself on a narrow hand hold. A line of them ran up the side of the curve, all the way to the hatch on top. Her forehoof clanged off the narrow grip. It was a hand hold. For hands. Not nearly wide or round enough for hooves. The edge of the white-and-orange lifting body receded. She watched the waterfalls from the curves of the craft, her own legs and hooves in her vision, as she fell backward, as she followed the rain down. Then everything was dirty water and bubbles and struggling to reach air. Her head finally above the tumultuous rushing flow, she spat and gasped while treading water. Ponies, as a rule, were decent swimmers. She was not the best, she seldom had the opportunity. But four strong legs and a Celestia-given instinct helped - she fought the current, trying to make it back to the airship, but it was no use. The current was too strong. The airship was shrinking to her view. Dropspindle moved her legs faster, trying to gallop in water, trying as hard as she could to return to the blimp, to Calloway, to safety and not being alone. Her legs began to ache and give out. Her lungs burned as if they were on fire. Finally, her legs and body just... gave out. She found herself under the water, the surface above her, her limbs agony. Breathing was no longer an option. It was at this point, at this moment, drifting down, pushed by the impossibly strong current, that Dropspindle felt an alien emotion overtake her. In her entire life, she had never truly felt fear. She had been uncomfortable, she had known anxiety, she had worried and fussed and thought she had felt afraid - but she was wrong. For nothing in her Equestrian life, or her brief time with the weaving community of another cosmos, had ever truly presented her with the very real probability of her own death. She was going down, her legs were cramping, and she could not breathe. She knew she was going to die. She had never felt such a thing before, and it was incredibly powerful. It was overwhelming, and her mind seemed to start to crack, like glass, like ice, to fragment under the strain. It was hopeless. There was only fear... and then the calmness of doom, accepted. She began hallucinating she was back in the preparatory class she had been required to take before being allowed to leave Equestria. The elderly unicorn - one of the lesser ranks of the Royal Unicorn Corps - was lecturing her group about what they would encounter in the strange and dangerous alien universe of Mundus. "I want to express to you something of the concept of what the humans call 'blind panic'." The ancient unicorn caused his chalk to scribble, 'Blind Panic' was written both in humanese and in Earthpony Equestrian upon the large blackboard. He glanced at it, and the chalk also added the term in the remaining two forms of writing, Pegasus Script and Unicorn Glyphs. "Blind Panic does not mean actually being cloaked within some field of magical darkness, rather it refers to a personal inability to perceive relevant or meaningful choices due to the circumstance of temporary possession by an extreme and utterly confounding emotional state. Specifically, the emotive state is fear." "Shyeah, right, oldstallion." The cyan mare with the colorful mane was some celebrity that had been sent back for 'reeducation'. Apparently there had been an incident on the human's world, some things had been accidentally damaged or destroyed, and several important humans had become very upset. "Fear is for losers. No way this pegasus is going to get addled in the brain pan by anything that place has to offer! I've been there! It's foal's play!" The master unicorn glared at the mare. "Was not becoming 'addled' the very reason you were returned to my class... for what is now the THIRD time?" "Well... uhh... that was because their air doesn't make any sense! It isn't the same up high as it is down low! It wasn't my fault!" "The princesses seem to think otherwise. Sit down, close your muzzle and open your ears. You just might learn something." The grumbling made several other ponies laugh. "Now the human's world - indeed the entire universe in which it rests - is a place vastly more dangerous and filled with threat than our own. Put quite simply, merely entering their realm is an act of placing your body and soul in jeopardy. Peril occurs suddenly, often with little to no warning, and in every respect is equivalent to finding oneself suddenly transported to the very center of the Everfree, and possibly worse." The elderly mage looked over his glasses at the students to make sure they were properly unsettled - save for one, they were. "When catastrophe should strike - and for many of you it very well may - it will come as a shock for which you are, I assure you, entirely unprepared. You may have imagined that you have experienced the sensation of fear - perhaps when faced with public speaking, or meeting a dragon... if any of you have had that singular experience, you may think yourself courageous for your conduct; YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING." He let that sink in. There were a few gasps and one dismissive mutter. "You may find yourself so traumatized by fear, by stark raving terror so great, so terrible, that it dwarfs your very imagination and understanding - in short, you may find yourself so overwhelmed by the certainty of your own inescapable destruction that you lose all sense of proper conduct and all awareness of agency! You may find yourself folding up within yourself, unable to think, unable to act, unable to perform that which you need to do merely to remain breathing for another moment!" That made more than a few eyes wide, and ears low. The Royal Unicorn smiled at the reaction. That was better. Except for her, of course. She would be back. He sighed. "Now. Should you ever find yourself in such a plight, I want you to remember one thing - ONE THING! - and that is this: panic will kill you. If you allow such terror to consume you, if you fail to push it down, to take charge of yourself, if you fail to take rational action despite - DESPITE - your fear, you will DIE." Again he let this set in, and the students were shocked at such harsh statements. "You must, you must, you absolutely must... take refuge within your intellect, and make decisions utterly devoid of sentiment or emotion! You must take action, the action MUST be deliberate - not desperate, not thrashing about, not running away, but conscious, considered and clear. You must take action, and that action cannot be other than rational. There is no place in the human's world for running amuck." A delicate earthpony, scheduled to be sent to one of the Conversion Bureaus as a Newfoal instructor, raised a hoof. "H-how... how do we... how do we manage to be so calm if fear is so terrible there?" The grand old unicorn put a hoof to his long, gray beard and narrowed his eyes. "According to the humans - and they should know, because they live there - the only answer is that... 'you just do it.' Yes. It seems unhelpful, it seems a stark and empty answer, devoid of genuine help or any concern for the pony asking the question. And that is precisely the point, I believe. The universe of the humans is heartless. It is without any concern for any creature within it. Once you set hoof on human soil, you will be - for the first time in your existence - truly and utterly alone and on your own. There is no herd there. The princesses cannot hear you, you are beyond magic, beyond friendship, and often beyond any hope of rescue. As difficult and harsh as this sounds: you must fight, with all of your will and intelligence, to save yourself, because nopony else will." The class sat in stunned silence. An uncaring universe where fear alone could render a pony senseless. Where nopony would come, where it was even possible to be so lost and abandoned that not even the princesses could save you. "You're full of it, old pony!" Dropspindle forced herself beyond all emotion. Something inside her, something new, took hold. It was like anger, only cold and fierce and calculating. If she was doomed, if she was going to die, then she would be... damned... that was the human word... damned... if her body was found and it looked at all like she had just given up. Besides, she had a few words to say to mister 'Go watch a cartoon, it'll be okay' Kotani! That anger somehow combined with the other anger about drowning on some stupid world with stupid nature and stupid heat and stupid everything trying to kill you... as Dropspindle struggled, fought with all of her might in a way she never had before, it struck her - this must be how humans felt. This must be what it was like for the strange, gawky creatures. Anger on anger, fighting just to stay alive, moment to moment. And for the first time in her long Equestrian life, Dropspindle fought the very cosmos for her life. When she broke the surface, and gained breath, she whipped her head around on her long neck and assessed her situation. She was caught in a river as wide as the world, and she was already well past the petroleum plant. The landscape of rushing rain was washing her in a direction she could not determine, save it must be downhill. Assuming that earth water at this scale even worked the same way, of course. With her fear dominated by anger and determination, Dropspindle found she could make choices. It was almost as if her mind was floating on top of her terror, just as she was remaining - mostly - head above the water. She used her four legs smartly, to keep herself at the surface, without exhausting her energy. That old unicorn was right. Panic killed here, in the human's universe. Panic was a luxury that this world did not allow. Here, anger was magic, not friendship. She felt like a newborn foal, learning a new - and utterly mad - way of life. In an insane world, sometimes the only rational response is insanity. Dropspindle discovered a building - some structure left behind when the humans went pony - and made an attempt to swim toward it. It was made of brick and steel, and she had no idea what it was for, but it was her hope to find a way to use it to get above the water. It rushed past her, just beyond her effort to reach it. There was nothing to hook onto in any case, just flat, smooth walls. The building receded as she paddled to stay afloat. Where was she going? And more importantly, what direction? A horrible thought threatened to wash away her clarity with new horror. She calmed herself forcefully and opened the eyes of her thaumatic couplement. She looked in the direction of her travel. It was dark, and colorless. She turned her head and looked back, away from the direction the water was taking her. A gargantuan circle divided reality in half. The circle was the spherical intersection of Equestria into this universe of course, and it was bright, as if a colorful sun were chasing her. Good. She closed her thaumatic eyes and regained normal vision. She was being pushed away from Equestria. That was the greatest fortune. It had frightened her that she would simply be carried straight through the Barrier, perhaps into some incomprehensibly vast ocean in the Exponential Lands. She would drown in her own realm, lost in a sea impossible to even imagine. She shook her head, spraying water from her ears. No! Think angry! D-damn that... yes! Damn that Kotani! Doing nothing, acting like he had a plan, hiding the truth from her, and she had trusted him! Damn! Damn! Fooey poo-poo ca-ca! Mean bad human words! Get angry! The harsh and violent vocabulary helped. That's why they did it! Oh, but falling into a flash flood had become an amazing lesson in humanity! Dropspindle swam with the water, conserving her strength. There might be another building. There might be a tree - no, there were no trees left. But there might be... A construction crane! The thing was huge - and tilted, likely the big machine that the humans had built to carry it had been pushed over by the sheer force of the water. It was possible now to see farther than before - the rain seemed to be easing up - and Dropspindle felt certain she had time to swim so that she would intersect the crane, rather than pass it by like the building before. She began swimming in earnest, using up some of her precious and limited strength, to paddle to her right, to try to get in line with the distant spire. A car rushed past her. The water ran faster the more she moved to the right, and there were objects carried along in the current. It was difficult to swim and keep track of what was around her at the same time. But she would have to. Being hit by a vehicle or other object in the flow would almost certainly be terrible - if not fatal. As Dropspindle struggled, fighting the current, battling the very world itself, avoiding tumbling vehicles pushed along by the irresistible force of the flood, she suddenly felt strangely, bizarrely calm. Never in her life had she felt... so alive. Everything was new, everything was alien and strange and dangerous - it should be horrible. But in some bizarre, insane way, it was enthralling! She could not help but wonder if she had lost her mind, if she had somehow been driven insane by the human world. It had happened before, to ponies who dared to visit this universe. But this wasn't like those unfortunates. This wasn't at all like the warning she had been given to dissuade her from going. It felt almost good. She was triumphing against a cosmos determined to murder her, and somehow... that felt good. It felt great! She was winning! The tilted metal crane was straight ahead of her! She could do this, she would do this - because she had mastered this horrible, nightmare universe of suffering and death. She, little Dropspindle from Surcingle, Equestria, had discovered the angry secret of survival in the humanic realms. Pride swelled within her. Pride and... a feeling, of... of... conquest! Of overcoming! Of domination of an alien nightmare! The crane was coming up fast. Metal struts arranged in a strange triangular pattern, forming a long beam that jutted from the water. She could easily catch onto it with her legs and hooves. She could climb it, get herself out of the water entirely. She could rest, and maybe... definitely! Definitely Calloway would find her and save her and everything would all work out perfectly! She could do this, because she had learned how to think like humans, she was sure of it, and humans lived in this awful place! She could too! The metal crane seemed to rush at her. It was as if it were moving and she were somehow still. She readied herself, determined to grab onto the crane no matter what. Her strength was almost gone - she was beyond any exhaustion she had ever felt. This was it. This was life and death, all focused into one single grab. She no longer felt angry. She felt transcendent. Her legs went through the wide spaces between the metal slats, as she intended. The impact with the crane was immense - she felt a strange cracking sensation in her barrel. She pulled herself out of the water, dragging her body up the angled ladder that the crane provided. Halfway up, she realized she couldn't breathe. She struggled to gasp for air, but it was as if her lungs wouldn't inflate. She fell across the metal slats, halfway up the crane, draped like a rag doll. Again, she tried to gain some air, any air, but her chest was numb and would not move. Dropspindle had never felt so incredibly angry, ever, at the darkness, when it came.