I think that the first time that I honestly, truly started to see the full picture of who I was as a person was the day Rarity lent me her camera. Ironically, that development had absolutely nothing to do with the camera itself; I only made this revelation while I was holding it.
On a completely unrelated note, the first thing I noticed with Rarity’s camera was that it looked positively ancient. Not in the sense that it was damaged and worn out — no, it was actually fairly new looking in terms of wear and tear — but it looked like a camera from almost a hundred years before the Other was born. It had film but no built-in flash, and there was a crank to advance the film.
And with the minor revelation that I had absolutely no idea what sort of technology was available, I graciously accepted the Camera from Rarity’s magical grasp. "You just need a few shots?"
"Yes, one from each side. Make sure you hold up that measuring stick so that I can gauge your size correctly," She explained.
"This would be much easier if you could do it yourself," I commented.
"But I can't. I would have taken your measurements yesterday, had it all worked out." She paused, giving me a scrutinizing look. "Jack, about yesterday... Applejack told me something rather troubling about your behavior. About you uprooting your own child?"
"Pragmatism," I answered honestly, recalling the times before my burning where I had killed other pups, and once when I was a pup and nearly executed for almost ruining a hunt. "Cull the problem individuals at the root before they can harm the pack. Preserving the pack exceeds the value of any one person."
Apparently, I did nothing to assuage her worries; if anything, judging by her troubled expression, I only made her fears worse. "Is it not the same with ponies?"
"Of course it isn't! That's barbaric!" Rarity shouted back, quite aghast from my insinuation.
"Then would you prefer the death of one, or the death of many?"
"I would prefer to find a way end it with no deaths at all!" Rarity yelled.
"And if there really was no other option?" I counter.
Rarity gritted her teeth, her expression one of great frustration. "Then make one."
My puppet sighs while my leaves rustle in a nonexistent breeze. "Then, I shall try... I make no promises."
That seemed to placate her enough for now. A breath, far deeper than usual, passed through her lips as the rest of her face resumed a more "ladylike" expression. The seed of distrust was still there, but I could see in her eyes that she was giving me the benefit of the doubt and trying to bury her feelings.
Or at least, that's what I think. I'm still new to this whole "facial expressions" thing, and I based all the knowledge I have on an entirely separate species, so I could be wildly inaccurate. Only time will tell.
"I suppose that is all I can ask for. And, I'm sorry if I offended you; I should not be so short-tempered with a client, after all."
"It's not a problem," I replied.
The trees of the Everfree raced past my puppet as it ran. I found that by focusing all of my magic and attention on a single puppet, its speed and agility increased dramatically. The boost was never enough to fully compensate for the temporary loss of my other puppets in tactical terms, but when I needed to get one somewhere fast, there was no better option.
But, in cutting off all but one of my puppets, I found myself lacking mental stimulation, and so my thoughts began to wander. Thoughts about the conversation I had just had with Rarity were nowhere to be found in my mind; instead, I fixated on my plan to upgrade my Lycan into a mechanical construct.
I would need woodcarving tools and metal joints. A bit of paint wouldn't hurt either. And with an artificially crafted puppet, I could hide tools and weapons in it. Perhaps I could even add poisons, if Zecora was willing to teach me.
A name drifted up from the Other's memory: Sasori. I had no idea what it means, or how it related to my current train of thought. I filed it away for later pondering.
The Other's memories were extremely sparse on personal details. While I knew how to do a lot of things because of the Other, I barely knew who they were. I had no name, no gender, and no physical description. How old were they? What happened to them? Did they have family?
I don't know. It would be interesting to learn, but I'm in no rush at all to find out. If I never do, then there is nothing lost.
But I do have clues. The Other knew how to make moving mechanisms and they had a good understanding of motion and physics — it's where I cobbled together my trap-making skills from. And, when I cut open my prey, I seemed to know generally what every organ was. I suspected that they were something of an intellectual.
My musing was quite suddenly interrupted as I sense something pony-sized approaching my grove; the network of our roots below the ground detected its weight. My Lycan was approaching from the opposite direction, so I slowed it down and instead awakened the wolves nearer to my tree.
The entity is moving slowly between my ally trees. I feel the vibrations in my roots, but I cannot yet sense him directly with that strange hybrid-magical sense. Magiception?
I hated not having a word for something.
Regardless of what word I used, I couldn't yet "see" whatever it is in my grove, so I did the logical thing and sent a wolf to spy on it.
I quickly noticed the scent of fresh blood. The second thing I observed was that there was only one "set" of scents on the creature, which informed me that the blood was its own. Instantly, my blood lust spiked.
What a poor place for a weak and injured creature to wind up.
My whole grove was a trap. The scent of my lure flowers and the promise of food both from my branches and from the branches of the zap apple trees was too tempting for the woodland creatures to ignore. And since I rarely sprung my trap on the smaller creatures, they felt comfortable coming in. The larger creatures — the predators — were doubly lured in by both the plants and the smaller animals.
Occasionally, I'd get something as big as the injured animal, and I would spring the trap. An impulse passed down my roots and into the ring of trees around me. The wind picked up, guided by their magic to carry the scent of my flowers directly towards the spot where we felt our prey's weight on our roots.
The wind blew, and the creature stopped a second later. Inward it turned, heading deeper into my grove.
I finally caught sight of it, and what I saw further confirmed that this world was definitely not the Other's world. Walking through the trees of my grove was a creature that could only be described as a centaur, save for the fact that its face was more ape-like than the Other's depictions.
Quickly, my predatory instincts highlighted three key details: the large gash on its side and many smaller cuts across its body; the frail, malnourished form of its body; and the haggard, aged look in its face. Wounded, starving, and old: it was the hunter's trifecta. I grinned like a piranha.
And then the centaur finally came into range of my magiception, and its appearance to my senses blew me away. If Rarity made me hungry, this creature made me absolutely ravenous.
And yet I didn't strike at once. The idea that intelligence and power went together gave me pause.
Why hesitate? My allies asked. Kill it. Feed us. It took our fruit. Kill it. Feed us.
Yes, I had told them to activate the first stage of the trap; my allies were now just as ravenous now as I was. Lovable parasites, the lot of them. But it didn't matter if they egged me on or not; it entered my grove uninvited, I was already hungry from dealing with Rarity, and it was different enough from the people I knew and interacted with that I didn't have as much interest in preserving it. I was planning on eating it anyway.
Still, my curiosity made me continue to pause. If it really was intelligent, why did it not seek out a town to get aid and food? Why did it not graze in the forest? I'd seen Zecora eat plants she found, so why didn't it?
Maybe it wasn't as intelligent as I first thought. A pity...
An idea popped into my mind. With just a little magic, I plucked a zap apple from an ally and tossed it next to where the centaur had sat down. It rolled a bit and bumped into my trunk. The centaur looked down at the polychromatic fruit, and then at its point of origin. Not spotting me, it — or should I say he — shouted, "Who's there?"
"A denizen of the forest, and an inhabitant of this particular grove," I answered. "I don't particularly like you eating this fruit, but you look hungry. Eat, relax, and rest."
He relaxed a bit. "Thank you."
"I'm curious," I asked, "why did you not seek the forest's edge? A pony village lies not far beyond; they would have tended to your wounds and filled your stomach with more than just wild fruits and dank grass."
"Ponies are my enemies." He scowled. "I seek my vengeance against them for imprisoning me."
Well, that just sealed the deal, didn't it? I said I had learned something about myself that day, and it was at this moment that I did. In that moment, all my qualms about killing a sapient person vanished. Instead, I felt the protective instincts of a Pack Leader willingly give way to the murderous instincts of the beast that I am; in that moment, the Pack Leader in me agreed with the beast: he would be food.
I'll kill anything that threatens what's mine; that was a fact.
"What's your name, my guest?" I asked coyly.
"I am Lord Tirek."
"Lord Tirek... Interesting." It was then that I stepped out of the shadows with all twelve of my bodies, each speaking in unison. In Lycan's grip was his spear, the camera having been set down elsewhere. "I am Pack Leader Lumber Jack."
I readied my spear.
"Get Tirecked."
Perhaps that wasn't my best pun, but the sound the spear made a solid thump as it impacted my hard bark, easily satisfied me more. To clarify a little, the spear made that sound after having passed straight through the centaur's chest and the apple he was holding.
What a shot, I thought proudly. For it to have gone completely through, it must have just missed the centaur’s rib cage, where instead it cut through only soft tissue.
I walked my puppet up to the dying centaur and finished the deed. Blood pooled on the ground as I let it run from the corpse, but as it did, I noticed something very peculiar. The pierced zap apple, having been discarded, was touching the puddle of muddy blood and sparking significantly — I had never seen one of my allies’ picked fruit do that before. With every spark, more and more of the blood took on a mesmerizing rainbow coloration.
The rainbow blood trickled down to my largest root, which greedily drank the delicious treat. Like with the chicken-lizard and the manticore, I could feel magic in its blood seeping into my body, bolstering my magic. It was like liquid fire in my trunk, save for the fact that it was a pleasurable burn instead of agony, a sensation like what the Other felt after vigorous exercise.
And then it hit me quite like a blast of lightning. Actually, scratch that; it was lightning. A massive bolt of electrical magic shot out from my allies and struck the exposed knot of my root that was gorging itself on the rainbow blood.
And for the first time ever, in all of my memory, I fell unconscious.
Timberwolves don't sleep, period. We slow down at night to conserve energy, but we never really stop. That made the experience of waking up something rather unusual.
I didn't ache, as I had half-expected. Instead, I just gradually "rebooted" until I was fully aware again.
That's odd... As I took stock of my surroundings, I noticed that my entire grove seemed smaller. It took me a few seconds to realize that my grove hadn't grown smaller; I had grown bigger.
Again.
Seriously, I now towered over my fellow trees, where I knew for a fact that we were all about the same height before my burning. But even so, this level of growth was ridiculous. I'd just been growing faster than normal after my burning, not instantaneously like this.
I shoved the thoughts aside for now. With barely any effort, I cast out my magic to my thirteen transmission seeds and commanded them to hoist their bodies together. I needed their eyes to really see what's happened here.
They all come together, except for one, which was apparently gathering more wood from the surrounding area.
My mind freezes. "...ten, eleven, twelve... thirteen. I have thirteen transmission seeds now," I mutter through Lycan's mouth. So distracted was I by my extra seed that I almost didn’t notice that I was vocalizing my thoughts.
Thirteen finished gathering its wood and constructing itself, leaving me impressed with what I saw. Its form was that of Tirek's body hybridized with my wolves', but its size was that of both Lycan and a wolf joined together. The limbs were also burlier looking than any of my other puppets' or Tirek's own limbs. Composed of many branches and twigs, the limbs of my puppet gave the impression of dense, toned musculature, rather than that of a body slowly wasting away.
Speaking of Tirek, one of my puppets spotted a black pile of ash where Tirek once was. Quite suddenly, my whole mood plummeted. I can't say why, exactly, but the whole situation left a bitter taste on my roots.
And yet, I wasn't all that concerned over the fact that I had essentially just committed my first murder. Every part of me that was the Other screamed at me, saying I should feel guilty, disgusted, or something, but I don't.
During our design talk, Rarity kindly showed me the developed photos. I must say, in the light of the sunset, as fast as it always was, I had managed to take some excellent pictures, a fact with which Rarity seemed to agree. The fact that she wanted to make a whole line of clothes based upon my "wild beauty," as she put it, only served to inflate my ego.
I carefully omitted that I had hastily covered Tirek's scorch mark with dirt, and that I had hidden the bones of my prey.
"Rarity, something has come up," I said. "I know that Zecora gave you an idea of my budget, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to reduce that. I need to get some hardware tools — a saw, a hammer, nails, some sand paper, and the like. If you know anyone who would be willing to sell me some, that would be great."
"Perish the thought, dear. I'll loan you mine. I hardly ever use them, so it is no trouble for me," Rarity said.
My Lycan smiled. "Really? Thank you, Rarity. I'd love to get my own set, but this will do for now."
"You're welcome," she replied. "Now, if that's everything, I believe I'll be on my way."
"Rarity!"
We both turned to look at the source of the new voice. My Lycan's "ear" branches splayed back and it bared its teeth, but, upon noticing that there was no threat, I made it relax.
I'm actually ashamed that I didn't notice the pony until she was close enough to yell. I should have smelled her or heard her walking far sooner; she has no grace, as her hooves plod loudly on the ground.
Unlike the ponies or zebra I've seen, she has a pair of wings folded by her side, as well as a horn like Rarity's. I ponder how many varieties of pony there are, especially since this one is purple, like fruit.
I've never seen a purple animal, save for those stupid little ball-bugs.
I doubt that she'd like that I just compared her to a stupid little ball-bug.
Mercifully ignorant of my inner musing, the new pony cantered up to Rarity, who seems to recognize the newcomer. "Twilight, darling, how good to see you. What brings you out here?"
"Well, Applejack told me that you were meeting with an intelligent timberwolf, and I decided that I wanted-" Her gaze shifted to me. "-to meet him. You're Lumber Jack, right?"
Why do they always think of me as male? I would have thought that with no physical gender, they would have disagreed on which pronouns to use, but I'm always he.
Strange.
"Yes, I am," I said while shoving linguistic mysteries aside. "And you are?"
"Twilight Sparkle," she introduced.
"Princess Twilight Sparkle," Rarity correct. "Twilight, you're royalty now. You should at least acknowledge it."
A princess? So she was the heir to the throne? "So you're the Beta to your Pack Leader?"
She hesitated a second, apparently processing my question. "Sort of. Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, and Princess Cadance would be the Alphas, and though I'm technically the same rank, I don't have the same authority," Twilight Sparkle explained.
"A Beta among Alphas. Interesting," I replied. "I do hope you can forgive my lack of tribute, though. I was not expecting to meet a Pack Leader today, so I carried no offering with me." I ripped one of my Lycan’s ear branches off and handed it to her. "Please, take this as my token of peace."
She took the stick in her magic. It seemed to instantly dry up a bit, wilting the leaves, as it left the control of my magic. "Umm... thank you?"
She set it on the ground next to her hooves. I’d half expected her to attach it to herself, like any other Pack Leader would have done, but then I remembered that she was a pony and not a timberwolf.
It was at this point that Rarity excused herself, citing that she needed to get back to her own work. Naturally, since that work involved the clothing I had requested from her, I let her go without complaint, and the princess did the same.
"Well then, if you wanted to meet me after just hearing about me, you must want something from me," I observed aloud.
"I have so many questions!" she exclaimed.
"And I have answers," I replied, "but they aren't free. For every question you ask me, you’ll have to answer a question I consider of equal value, and if I run out of questions, you’ll run out of answers, unless you pay some other way. Deal?"
"That sounds reasonable," the princess replied. "Here’s my first question: when and how did you become sapient, unless you were born that way?"
"How I became this way is as much a mystery to me as it is to you, though Zecora, a friend of mine, theorizes that it had something to do with the pulse of harmony magic that happened several months ago. The timing fits." After a second to phrase my question, I asked in return, "How much do you know about magic in general, not just pony magic?"
She smiled. "Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I know a good bit. My special talent is magic after all. Why do you ask?"
"With my intelligence boost came the understanding of just how little I know about how my body works; I want to find out more," I answered. "Now, to return the question, why do you ask? To clarify, what do you hope to gain from me?"
Her smile didn’t waver; if anything, it only grew wider. "It’s simple: I want to know why you are the way you are. An intelligent timberwolf is completely unprecedented! If we can find out how we came to be, we could learn so much about the nature of life, magic, and the soul!"
"Fascinating." A harmless lie, really. All I cared about was understand how my magic worked, and how I could exploit it to my benefit. If this princess wanted to try to unravel the mysteries of the universe while studying me, well, more power to her.
I doubt that she would get much. I wouldn't be letting her close to my real body anytime soon. And yet, by the same token, I knew that I wouldn't get much either.
What was that phrase? Ah, yes: c'est la vie.
Taur, as I had taken to calling my latest puppet, galloped through the forest as fast as I could make it go. Despite its size and strange center of gravity, it was surprisingly agile.
The sheer size would make hunting with it a challenge, if not a downright impossibility, but as a last-defense puppet to guard me, it would be fine.
There was something else that I noticed as I made it run. Normally, there was a measurable strain that comes with distance. My Lycan was near the edge of my range right now with Twilight Sparkle, and I could feel it. Yet, at the same time, Taur had run for a while now and yet I only felt a fraction of the strain I should have been at this distance.
I pushed forwards. If this puppet had a longer range than my other puppets, I needed to know that. Why it would be that way eluded me, but I suspected that it had something to do with what my allies and that centaur's blood did to me.
That too was a mystery. What exactly had that done to me? I got a new puppet, but I lost consciousness. As much as the prospect of gaining power thrilled me, the risk to my mind was something I wasn't willing to gamble on. Maybe Twilight Sparkle or someone she knew could help me figure it out.