1730, 25th February, 2016
Twilight lay on her back, kicking her legs in the air idly. The biggest problem with having learnt English from Sgt Murray was that now she had nothing left to do while she waited. No books, no conversation, nothing.
She spread her wings wide across the floor, arching her back and feeling the invigorating stretch in her joints for what had to be at least the tenth time today. Why it was against protocol to converse with a neutral alien via the loudspeakers and recording equipment already installed in her cell, she couldn’t work out. The sheer loneliness made it tempting to skip getting the invaders’ story and just start helping XCOM, if only to stop being so incredibly bored.
Twilight slumped to the ground with a huff, frowning up at the glaring ceiling light. That might be the whole point, actually. Not very moral of them if so.
Her ears twitched as Chamber 3A’s door swished open. At last! She curved her back first left, then right, extending her front hoof forward and rear hoof backward, first on the right side and then the left for maximum stretch. She had at least thirty seconds before anyone was ready to enter the cell, so she might as well be ready for them.
The alicorn tilted her head upwards – or backwards, depending on how you looked at it – to study the entrants as one of them started going through security protocols. Same singular scientist, different two guards in the same blue-grey armoured uniforms, carrying the same boxy weapons which she now understood were X-9 ballistic assault rifles.
Given who the two men were guarding, their weapons were certainly loaded. A tall, slim man, with greasy combed-over black hair and pale skin, walked before the two of them. He was dressed in a blue suit, black shoes, and small, dark glasses, which fitted him better than his own skin judging by his stiff movements. Twilight also noted the rough, scaly texture of his skin just above his collar. An alien.
She rolled over onto her belly and then sat up as the man – which she felt she would probably remember from seeing Sgt Murray’s memories if she hadn’t deleted them all – was walked to the door to her cell. This time, it opened before its entrant reached that point, and the man turned and walked straight inside.
The two Arc Rifle-wielding guards stepped in after him, and took up positions to either side of the entryway, standing motionless. The door swiftly slid shut, which the man half-turned to regard, his movements slow and precise. Looking back into the room, his bespectacled gaze settled on the purple pony. One eyebrow was raised slightly, merely curious rather than perplexed. The man took a few steps towards her, his stride shortened by shackles around his ankles, before coming to a stop about six feet away from her. His arms were held behind the small of his back. He said nothing.
“Hello,” Twilight offered, raising a hoof in a brisk wave. She was sat not quite in the centre of the room, and watching the man with a hopeful smile on her face. “My name’s Twilight Sparkle.”
The man made no immediate reaction. “Greetings,” he finally spoke, his voice flat and lifeless. “I understand that I am to help you make a decision of allegiance?”
Twilight hummed in thought. “You could put it like that,” she replied, “because I have XCOM’s views of the war, but they’re unaware if there was anything larger at stake. I’d just like to ask you some questions, but before that,” the alicorn explained, before raising a hoof to shake. “Twilight Sparkle,” she offered again.
The man moved its arms out to one side, demonstrating the bindings around it wrists to match the ones around its legs. “Greetings,” he replied.
Twilight lowered the hoof and frowned as she realised that her interviewee was going to be uncooperative; the handcuffs couldn't be helped, but he could have given a name. “Well, let’s get started,” she decided. “We might as well start with the most obvious, so first of all, do you know what the purpose of your invasion was?”
The man’s face remained expressionless. “Yes,” he tersely replied.
Twilight’s frown deepened. “And that purpose was…?” she asked.
The man gave her a distasteful look before replying, “Our mission was to abduct select human populations with the goal of discovering the Gift among their number.”
Twilight smiled. “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she said, before continuing, “So, do you know why your collective needed ‘Gifted’ humans?”
“No,” the man replied.
Twilight lifted an eyebrow. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“Our leaders do not share the finer details of their plans with us,” the man explained simply, “we simply do what we are ordered to.”
“And who are these leaders?” the alicorn pushed.
The man sniffed once. “I don’t need to answer that,” he defended. Twilight moved to say something, but he rolled his eyes and interrupted, “Your friends have one of our leaders captive already. No doubt they are performing some unspeakable horror on them as we speak.”
Twilight frowned and leaned away from the man a little. “What do you mean by that?” she asked.
The man’s eyebrow lifted. “Surely you’ve been the subject of their experimentation?” he asked.
Twilight nodded, before replying, “Yes, but… Well, they were mostly-”
“You’re not even sure what they did to you,” he surmised, before turning to look out of the wide window on the cell, “now that is horrifying. Have you checked yourself over for implants? Incisions?”
Twilight frowned. “Wait a second, psionic stress-testing isn’t exactly nice, but involuntary surgery is a bit beyond-”
“They operated on all of us,” the man interjected, turning back to her, “it would be foolish to think they treated you any differently.”
Doubt crept into Twilight’s heart. “N-no, they… With the concern they showed to Captain Pimenova…”
The man sneered. “That is how they treat their own, Miss Sparkle. We do not receive the same… value.”
A small voice in the back of Twilight’s mind spoke up against her rising dread, making a point that she quickly brought to the fore. It was the same voice that kept her from admitting defeat to Discord for so long, and that had quickly realised how wrong Cadance had been acting prior to her wedding.
Twilight Sparkle realised that the man before her was trying to manipulate her emotionally into siding with him, rather than give her good rational reason to. She quickly decided that listening to him speak was becoming increasingly dangerous, and that she might need a better method of questioning him.
“I… I can’t believe they’d do that,” she barely whispered, her shoulders sagging and her head drooping towards the floor, looking to the entire world like an utterly defeated mare.
The man’s smirk was meagre, but spoke volumes. “We are little more than playthings to them, Miss Sparkle, curiosities to be taken apart, studied, and ultimately thrown away. If you had seen the things I have seen, then-”
“But I haven’t,” Twilight looked up at him, her face set with worry, “I… I can’t believe they could be so… mindlessly cruel, without first seeing it myself,” she explained.
The man sighed. “I wish I could show you, Miss Sparkle, although you might prefer not to.”
“But… you could show me,” she explained quietly, “if… if I use my psionics to… if you’d let me see it in your mind, I-”
“You possess the Gift?” the man interrupted her.
Twilight blinked, a little surprised, before replying, “Y-you mean psionics? Yes, I… I can use psionics. I mean, only if you’re willing for me to-”
The thin man nodded, his expression softening slightly, “Then you have my permission to continue, Miss Sparkle.”
Twilight really had to try not to smile. “O-okay, sir, I’m ready to begin when you are. If you think about what they did, it will help me find it.” The man nodded again, and she began, a long, violet stream of psionic power twisting through the air from her horn to the man’s head.
The mindscape she found was bizarre. Not terribly dissimilar to her own, or Sgt Murray’s, but… sparse, by comparison. Twilight’s mindscape was an organised catalogue of over two decades of memories and knowledge, every sight, smell and sound preserved as a fond shadow of how she had first experienced them, in a neural tome that could take a year to read itself. Sgt Murray’s mindscape had been more fractured, less organised, and his experiences had been somewhat alien given his radically different environment, but it was still recognisable as a record of thirty-something years of life. While Twilight’s mind was an organised biography album, Murray’s had been a cluttered room of fond mementos – she’d needed his explanations to understand each experience, but the warmth and emotion of each piece was still present. A record of a life, regardless of its structure.
This alien, on the other hand, had a mind like an instruction manual – emotionless, brief, and structured to be understood, not felt. Isolated pockets of knowledge were dotted all over, barely connected to the rest of the mindscape. On top of that, there were barely two years’ worth of memories, and what there were showed signs of having been picked through, butchered for data, and ultimately dumped.
An image formed, one of sterile, steely surroundings. Harsh lighting shone upon myriad sharp and pointy tools, as they were used upon a man like the one she had been speaking to. Figures in yellow, rubbery suits were removing something from him. It looked like an organ of some sort. Twilight felt her stomach turn.
Be glad I cannot show them doing the same to me, her companion thought, seemingly certain that she would hear it.
Undeterred, Twilight checked the memory’s connections. There were surprisingly few, so she found something suspicious very quickly. That’s a poison gland? she asked.
The man’s mind was briefly overcome with hesitation before he responded. A mild poison, yes, which is barely useful as even a self-defensive-
Oh look, Twilight continued, finding another memory, here’s one of your friends firing a cloud of the stuff halfway down a city street. And his target’s pulling back for immediate medical attention? That seems pretty serious.
Perhaps they are… more vulnerable to our toxins than I had realised, the man thought desperately.
Uh-huh, Twilight deliberately sounded unconvinced, I’ll be honest, it’s been fun but I’m kind of tired of you trying to lead me on. Good news for me, I now have access to all the facts, even if only as you understand them.
I assure you that you will find no wrongdoing on our part, the alien explained.
Then would you care to explain why this was linked to the word ‘experimentation’? Twilight brought an image to the front of the alien’s mindscape, of a captive human, naked and writhing, half-submerged in a whitish gel and strapped into an open sarcophagus. His head was enclosed in a metal protrusion from the tank’s edge, and a pair of scrawny aliens with bulbous, reddish heads were stood to either side, motionless. The biting chill of the room nudged at her senses, far too cold for the bared human to survive. Because to me this looks more like torture.
The search for the Gift necessitates many things, the alien man tried to reason, There is no painless way to-
Oh really? Twilight’s presence radiated with accusation, Dr Vahlen devised a totally pain-free method of psionic discovery in a little more than a week, and she could only reverse-engineer what you had.
The human’s method takes too long, the alien responded indignantly, we potentially had an entire planet to search.
Ten days is too long? Twilight was aghast. I spent years learning to do magic, and you can’t be asked to take ten days to prevent someone complete agony? Outside of the mindscape, Twilight’s body was actually trembling with anger. Did you even consider that your vicious methods might have been affecting the results? You can’t force a magical awakening like that, you have to use understanding and guidance!
That is not my concern, the alien patiently replied, I am merely given my orders, and directed to follow them.
Twilight took a moment to calm herself down before replying, I’ll have to take this issue up with your leaders later, then. Now, if you don’t mind I’m going to have a look through what your ‘orders’ frequently entail. The alien made no response, apparently knowing that it was powerless to stop her anyway. Twilight quickly browsed through the brief collection of memories, discovering that the alien had initially been used for maintenance aboard a small scout vessel, before being deployed as an infiltrator in a human city.
This place, St Petersburg, Twilight prodded, what was so important about it?
Indifference surrounded her. I am merely-
Yes, yes, given orders and show no desire to understand what they’re for, Twilight interrupted. She had been hoping to touch a nerve and get him to explain why he didn’t try to understand, but he made no response. She scanned through the memories, finding observations and studies of the city’s streets. There were no military installations watched, no government documents searched for, none of the precautions she assumed they might take if they were planning abductions. The alien had simply been recording where the largest volumes of the civilian population had been located. Surely they hadn’t planned on just swiping huge crowds, with no thought to-
Twilight physically recoiled as the memory changed suddenly. An immense shape hung in the air. Dark figures stalked between buildings. The city was burning.
There were bodies, and bits of bodies. The streets were littered with them. In the scant seconds the memory lasted, as the alien was wrapped in a bluish light and pulled upward, towards the enormous vessel that filled the sky, Twilight Sparkle witnessed over a hundred human corpses, lying in the roads of a crumbling city.
What is this!? the alicorn mentally screamed, even as she felt her throat tighten and her stomach clench. ‘No wrongdoing’!? How could you-
Twilight’s tirade was cut short as she felt a sharp pain in her chest, followed by a loud bang. She quickly dropped the psionic connection and opened her eyes, to find herself dropping to the floor against the wall of her cell, her back and shoulders raw and her breast painful. She took a struggled gasp of air.
The alien had rammed her nearly ten metres across the room with a knee strike, easily winding her. His face was set into a savage snarl, his reptilian gaze locked onto her own. He dropped into a crouch, readying himself to spring across the room after her. His arms twisted unnaturally at the shoulder, bringing his bound hands over and in front of him. Twilight’s panicking hooves scrabbled to lift her upright to meet the charge.
He didn’t get the chance; both guards by the door had stepped forward, and lifted their weapons. The one on the left fired, arcs of white lightning lashing out at the alien, which writhed before falling limply to the ground. The other guard kept his gun pointed at the man for a moment, before lowering it and rushing towards Twilight. She struggled to lift herself from the ground as he approached, her breathing still out of control.
The guard dropped to a crouch next to her, setting his gun on the floor and placing a hand on her shoulder. He was saying something, but Twilight didn’t hear it. He lifted her up a little, helping her into a sitting position. It was a bit easier to breathe now, and the alicorn gave him a brief smile as thanks.
One of the science staff arrived at the cell door, and gave the two remaining guards an instruction. They stepped into the cell behind him, lifting the alien and carrying it out as the researcher walked over to Twilight, crouching next to her and gently placing a hand on her back. The alicorn suspected he was checking for any damage, because he started moving his hand slowly down her spine.
“What-” the alicorn coughed once, before inhaling deeply, her lungs coming back under control, “What was that all about?” she asked.
“Couldn’t tell you,” the guard responded, “Thin Men are normally smart enough to not attack when unarmed and with two armed men directly behind them.”
The scientist scoffed. “Hardly. Bloody wild animals, the lot of ‘em. Should’ve kept the thing restrained, bloody ‘fair image’ nons-”
“No, n-ah!” Twilight dismissed, wincing as the man touched a bruise, “I don’t think it would’ve attacked, but I kind of… freaked out at it.” She grimaced as she felt her stomach turn again, the images she’d seen in the alien’s mind returning.
“’Freaked out at it’?” the guard asked, tilting his head, “What for?”
Twilight swallowed her nausea and explained. “Well, first it assures me that everything they did to find, ahem, ‘Gifted’ humans was necessary, then I find a memory of them basically torturing a man to find out if he’s a latent psion,” she took a breath to steady her nerves, “and then there was this place, St Petersburg, which-”
Twilight stopped when both men looked straight at each other, then back to her. She glanced between the two of them. “…What’s St Petersburg?” she asked hesitantly.
The guard cleared his throat. “St Petersburg was the second place the aliens ever attacked. Not abductions or anything, I mean outright attacked. The first time, they deployed a handful of hostiles in Buenos Aires, and had them target civilians. The death toll went over a hundred, but it was bearable. We intervened, and Earth remained unshaken.”
“But that’s not what happened to St Petersburg,” Twilight pointed out.
The guard shook his head, his eyes fixed on the ground. “The second time, it was sheer terrorism – aerial bombardment, buildings sabotaged, massed hostiles landing… we deployed, but…”
“Chryssalids,” the scientist spat out, “bloody eighteen of ‘em, before the squad even had their feet on the ground. We didn’t have any Carapace armour ready by then.”
Twilight had difficulty keeping on her hooves, even sat down as she was. “So… those men…”
“Code Black,” the guard confirmed, “the Skyranger came home empty.”
Twilight shivered. “A-and the city?”
The guard looked at the scientist. The scientists shook his head. “Hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million. Russia was gracious enough to not immediately leave the council, but…”
The rest of his sentence fell on deaf ears as the alicorn’s knees buckled. She lowered herself to the floor, hyperventilating, seeing the image in her mind spread across half of Equestria.
She saw Celestia half-buried under a collapsed wall, instead of the nameless human woman.
Luna gunned down among a hundred others, instead of the old man with the glasses.
Shining Armour and Cadance, desperately trying to fight off a horde of voracious alien predators.
Her friends…
Bits of her friends.
Equestria was burning.
That had to be what they felt.
Twilight knew she could erase the memory. She could forget about it all. Just one quick spell and she’d never lose sleep over it. She charged her horn…
The image was attached to one word, a connection made of solid belief.
Never.
“I’ll do it,” she said quietly to herself, before lifting her head and clearing her throat. “I’ll do it,” she said again fiercely, to the two humans beside her, two men who had lived what she had merely imagined. “If XCOM wants a better understanding of psionics, I’ll give it to them. If you want me to train alongside your men, I’ll do it. If that’s the kind of attack you face, time and time again, then I want to be there, and face it with you.”
“You’re sure?” the guard asked, honestly surprised.
Twilight nodded, rising to her hooves again. “Whatever they did it for, the actions of these aliens are horrendous, and yet every time they try, you’re there to stop them. That kind of commitment, to safeguard a whole planet… It’s just so…” The young princess’ eyes started watering as her words failed her, her heart swollen with appreciation even as it was weighed down with sorrow.
“Bloody calm down, already,” the scientist said, though his face was set into a smile, “I’ve only been here since August, save the tears for someone braver.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder towards the door. “Mind if I go give Bradford the good news?”
“You go ahead,” Twilight replied, and watched as the researcher left the cell. She then turned to the other man knelt next to her, making an attempt to continue her point before falling short.
“Oh, c’mere, then,” he said, offering his arms out. The young princess grinned, before stepping forward and closing her hooves around his chest. Sure, there was an inch of Kevlar between the two of them, but it was still nice to have a proper hug.
Until he closed his arms around her still sore back, that is. “Ah!” she flinched, “Bruises! Bruises!”
The guard quickly let go, and frowned at the alicorn’s shoulders. “Okay, I doubt Vahlen’s team will have that suppressor ready by tonight, but if I can’t have a proper mattress sent down here, then I’m giving you mine.”
“Aww,” Twilight pulled back from the hug, leaving a hoof on the man’s breastplate, “You’d do that for me?”
The guard grinned cockily. “What, with my rugged good looks? I could probably find a bed to share for a few nights.”
“That won’t be necessary, soldier,” Officer Bradford interrupted as he entered the cell, “I’ll have a proper bed sent down from one of the spare barracks until Miss Sparkle can be better accommodated.”
“You got here pretty quickly, sir,” the guard asked.
Bradford frowned at him. “There was a security breach; I was already on my way.”
“Officer Bradford,” Twilight broke off the hug fully and stepped towards the CO, clearing her throat. “Having surveyed the war you’ve fought from both your soldiers’ and the aliens’ viewpoint, I hereby offer my services, such as they are, in full support of the XCOM project,” she declared, holding her right hoof forward.
Bradford took the appendage in his own right hand. “Welcome to XCOM, Miss Sparkle,” he replied, “I’m glad to have you with us.”