//------------------------------// // The Eye Guy // Story: Cause, Effect, and Consequences // by Coltsguy //------------------------------// It didn't take long for the temporary blindness to subside. When it did I was once again greeted by the sight of fives mares staring at me and Fluttershy as well most likely. "Alright, first things first. Twilight you were right. I should've put more thought into the order into the order in which I travel through these rifts. Still, from the look of things on the other side there aren't any significant differences to the rift's stability or anything from what I can see." "Speaking of which," she responded, "where are your glasses? I've never really seen you without them." "Ah yes... this," I said hesitantly. "Well I... kind of... got punched so badly that I went blind." A series of gasps went out as they all got in close. "Oh my stars what happened?" Rarity asked first. "Well it was an accident that involved the concept of human modesty and a convention of humor that surrounds it." "Ohhhhh!" Pinkie exclaimed. "So Eris turned the clothing of a couple of superheroes into something revealing which prompted them to get embarrassed and punch the closest guy, which happened to be you, in the face which then rendered you blind from the blunt force trauma and that required them to help you out because they're superheroes after all so they took you to their secret laboratory and got their good friend to help you who then gave you some new eyes to replace your old ones and now you can see better than ever!" she finished with a flourish. ...The fuck was that? Did she just pull an Equestria Girls on me? I didn't even get to reveal that these weren't the same eyes! Damn it Pinkiedamus! "Umm... yeah. That's right, more or less," I said lamely. "They socked ya one over sonthin' that wasn't even yer fault? That just ain't right!" "Female modesty is a very delicate thing for humans. The slightest sense of wrongdoing in their eyes can easily set them off. Add that to the probability of gag humor in fictional realities and the chances of a physical reaction to embarrassment are substantially high." "There's also the possibility that they thought you had Eris do it on purpose and they acted according to that assumption," Twilight explained. "What did you mean by fictional realities though? Is that similar to what you said before about us?" "That's right Twilight. Heh. Um, yes, I told you all before that you were all a television show where I'm from. Well, the same principle is sort of in effect with these places. All of these are based on television shows as well." "But what about the world we went to darling?" "Or the one we went to? There were a whole bunch of super sad ponies everywhere I went and nothing I did seemed to make them feel any better." "Yeah it's similar, like I said, but not quite the same thing. You see, all of these worlds are based off of these shows, but each of them have their own interpretation or change made to them. They're what's called fanfiction. It would be, for example, if Rainbow Dash decided to write a Daring Do book with herself helping out along the way." "Oh my gosh! That would be so cool!" "And that's exactly what they think too. I've tried doing that myself without any success. These people have had that success. Each of these worlds are a depiction of a world from a fanfiction that was at least a moderate success if not more. The one with Applejack is called 'The Phantom in the Machine' and is a mashup of Ghost in the Shell and Danny Phantom. The last one was 'Powerpuff Girls PSHAW!' and is a bit of a humor driven, multi-author skit fiction piece started by a guy with the moniker of AndrewJTalon. "Even the two you just mentioned are like that. The one Rarity talked about is called 'Ungrounded' and is about a mage whose spell gets messed up and is sucked into Equestria. The one Pinkie went to is called 'Rebel Against the Night'. That one is a cross between you guys and a show called Code Geass. The premise for that one is about when you used the Elements of Harmony on Nightmare Moon that instead of erasing that part of Luna, it separated from her and traveled through what I would describe as the outskirts of the multiverse before coming into the universe that contained the story of Code Geass. When there, she used a mineral native to that world which had magical properties and with it turned every human on the planet into a pony. I'm willing to bet that's half the reason why it would be difficult to cheer them up." "That does sound really sad," Pinkie replied. It was probably less than half if you knew more about the story that was going on. "Yeah and that's where we're headed next. Fluttershy." "Um, yes?" "Can I have Eris back please?" "Oh! Um, of course," she said bashfully. She held up her hoof and I took back Eris. "Thanks for keeping her safe." "Oh, it was nothing really." "Okay then. Last thing. Each of these have made a vague mention of me in them except this one and the one Rainbow Dash was in. I can't make- no, we can't make big waves in these or else something possibly bad could happen. When I was there last time, I caused a small ruckus, but somehow the scene I stumbled upon made no mention of me and actually cut off before I interfered. I'm pretty sure I got lucky in this instance. If we mess up canon then I have no idea what the consequences could be." "Don't you worry!" Pinkie Pie exclaimed. "We will be totally invisible to them. Even more than when you're invisible! We'll sneak behind enemy lines, close that rift, and be back here before anypony even notices we were there. Which they won't because we'll be invisible. And when everyone's done, I'll throw a party!" I swear that I felt the icy breath of Murphy all over my neck. "Let's just focus on these one at a time Pinkie Pie," Twilight advised, "and Seth, I don't need to tell you to be careful, but I still think I should after the fact that you got yourself hurt." "Nah, I understand, but I think I'm going to wait to go there. I need to go over the notes Dexter left me on these new eyes of mine." "What notes?" she asked a bit excitedly. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a tiny binder no bigger than the palm of my hand. A quick wave my hand and the binder grew to it's normal size. I then opened it up and let Twilight take a look. Again, I was happy about the enhanced durability I had now because I had still been on a single knee since I had given Fluttershy that praise in Powerpuff world. "My eyes have an instruction manual. I think I'd like to make sure I know how to use them properly or to make sure that I don't do something that might end up blinding myself again. I like being able to see." "Oh come on!" Rainbow Dash cried. "We've been here all day and all night and now into the morning! I'm getting hungry and tired here!" ...Wow. I suck as a friend. I was so focused on fixing one problem that I ended up not noticing a developing one here. They all looked a bit haggard, even Rarity to a very minor degree. I needed to help alleviate. that somehow. To that end, I performed a double-handed snap of my fingers and several items popped into existence. The first things were six beds of matching color to their fur. The other thing was a giant table filled with assorted vegetables and other items and drinks that were herbivore friendly. "I didn't realize until now how bad of a person I've been by ignoring how you were doing. I was too focused on doing what I needed to do to fix these rifts. I should have been more considerate." "Yeah you shoulda," Rainbow Dash said before she was elbowed by Applejack. "You shouldn't be frettin' so much about it. It ain't like we can't hunker down for a spell over somethin' like this." "But you shouldn't have to. Especially now that we know we caught these early enough to take some time to approach them cautiously. So therefore we can afford to take a break, get some food, take a nap, and get back to solving the problem. I think we could all use a break about now." A few nods were given and everyone ended up taking some time to get something to eat and drink; myself included. I did notice while I was eating that after I drew some power from Eris that while my reserves were topped off, she only had seven percent left. That could be an issue. It was a bit surprising even though it shouldn't have been. I didn't have nigh infinite power after all. It just kind of felt like I did since I had been capable of all those acts without much of a care. I'd need to take care of that later. For the time after I was done eating, both Twilight and I decided to read through the binder of notes. I did tell her that she ought to get some rest like everyone but Fluttershy was doing, but she insisted on reading it with me since it was too fascinating of an unknown to pass on. Therefore the two of us took on the task of learning about my eyes. I did learn quite a bit. I learned not just about my eyes but also about Twilight Sparkle as well. She read quite a bit faster than I did. She was often done with the right page when I had only gotten about two-thirds of the way on the left page. She was also pretty impatient while waiting for me to catch up and turn the page. She didn't say anything but it was really obvious. That wasn't really too big of a deal. The big deal was how the eyes worked. I was able to discern how to make the color shift thing work as well as the infrared and ultraviolet vision too. I even found out that with practice I could do the Kaa eye trick which I always found cool. I also figured out a possible bypass to get the lightning eyes. That still needed to be tested first because it could mess me up. I tore through the whole binder to try and see how the x-ray function worked. I needed power, which I could convert directly from magic into proper electricity. After that, I needed to set the functions inside properly so that I didn't project them outwards, which could cause who or whatever I was looking at harm as well as to myself, and instead filtered the image traveling through my eyes to a certain level of transparency. I wanted to call bullshit because x-rays needed to travel into and through an object to work, but I wanted x-ray eyes more so I just let it go. Even better was a fun little trick Twilight got me to think about. Since the eyes were sending information to my brain, why couldn't they send it elsewhere? Memories are just files in your brain. Why not create a spare memory device for the things I see? The eyes were synthetic after all. I didn't have a way to do it yet, but I would try to find a way later. I timed it with my watch, which I was glad Dexter didn't remove now that I think about it, and noted that it took two hours and forty nine minutes for us to finish reading all of it. Twilight actually looked giddy after we were done. All that shiny new knowledge would do that to her. It did for me, though that was more because I was wanting to test out the features myself. Ultraviolet and infrared were interesting, but were not that useful at the time. The lightning I saved for later. The eye color thing was kind of hard since you can't look at your won eyes without a mirror. Rarity was helpful in that regard as she had brought one with her. About ten minutes of practice and feeling things out and I had gotten the hang of the basics. I then began the work on the x-ray vision. It was actually pretty difficult. It felt similar to how I changed eye color so I kept doing that for a bit instead. Once I got it right, that became a bit of a chore as well. Three characteristics went into proper x-ray vision and those were alignment, power, and speed. Alignment was in order to pick the subject or area with proper precision. Power was about how much you required to see through certain objects and went hand in hand with speed. Speed, in this instance, meant oscillation speed or more specifically the amount of times an image is filtered with x-rays of specific intensity. It was a really delicate dance between the latter two parts since as long as I was locked on to what I wanted to look at the first part was actually pretty easy. I was glad that the power consumption required for it was almost negligible. It would've made it a selective option to use sparingly. Almost twenty minutes of testing later and I had gotten it down really well. I will add that pony skeletal structure is pretty neat. The density between each tribe is quite interesting. Once I was finished, I knew it was time to head to the next area. Twilight and I woke up Pinkie from her nap without any difficulty and the three of us went to the rift where Fluttershy was waiting at. "Alright Pinkie are you ready?" I asked. "I'm soooo ready!" she answered. "Time to put my gameface on!" A swirl of colors surrounded me and I took on the same appearance as the last time I was there. I once again looked like a portly blue stallion with a white mane and a white horseshoe cutie mark surrounded by a golden glow. Twilight and Fluttershy were both quite confused. "Why do you look like that?" Twilight asked. "Everyone there are ponies remember? I need to blend in." "Wouldn't it be better to be invisible?" "I arrive and leave in a large flash. I'm not sure that would matter. I do need to be subtle while I'm there and by I I mean both Pinkie and me. Right Pinkie?" "Okie dokie lokie!" I cringed a little inside hearing that. "Last thing before I go. I need another translation spell from you Twilight. Pretty much everyone there is speaking another language." "Oh you are so lucky I did some more research on that. Before it only translated the first spoken language you heard after being cast. Now it can translate any language you hear into the one you are most familiar with." "Thank you merciful Princess Twilight," I deadpanned. "But seriously thanks for doing that." Twilight rolled her eyes and then flared her horn as she activated her spell. One purple hue later and the spell was complete. "Okay! Let's get things moving," I said and placed my hand on Pinkie's mane. "World three is go!" I placed my hand on the rift and once again we disappeared in a bright flash. It didn't take long to hear some astonished gasps. It was probably because of our abrupt entrance. At least until I opened my eyes and realized that it was only a part of it. I had appeared inside of a large hall decorated in lots of black and blue over pristine white walls. There were quite a few ponies standing to either side of a long red carpet that divided the room in half and led up to a large throne. A throne that had a glaring Nightmare Moon sitting upon it. Only in that moment did I realize just how bad of an idea it was to keep the same appearance as before. It just made me easier to remember. I did the only thing I could think of. I simply looked up to the ceiling and raised an angry fist to the unseen sky. "CURSE YOU MURPHYYYY!!!!!"