//------------------------------// // Liam: Recount // Story: Time & Space // by SomeoneD //------------------------------// You had been asked – incredibly politely – to wait in the library until Celestia and Luna returned. Luna had gone off about 12 minutes ago to ‘sort some things out’, which was just vague enough to be suspicious. Paul, however, was busy sitting around with his eyes closed. He was deeply concentrating on something, but it was impossible to tell what it was unless you had a deep knowledge of his powers. Thankfully, you did. PAUL: They are nearby. LIAM: And how exactly do you- Space, got it. Innate presence detection, right? PAUL: Yeah, you aren’t the only one with innate always on powers. Before you could continue, however, a group of ponies walk in, interrupting your speech. Leading them were Celestia and Luna with their hair blowing in a non-existent breeze. Just behind them was yet another pony with wings and a horn; Cadance, if your memory served you right and Paul wasn’t simply making stuff up. And then, right at the back, were the three ponies who you had dealt with today; Twilight et al, along with what you assumed were her other friends. They all took seats – a particularly bright white pony pulling out a couch from somewhere in a manner similar to a Captcha card. Silence filled the air for a few moments, before it was shattered. CELESTIA: So. LIAM: ...Hmm? CELESTIA: Could you please explain how you got here? PAUL: Haven’t the first clue. I literally just woke up on the stone outside with Pinkie looming over me. LIAM: Same deal here, really. I woke up with my legs bent the wrong way hence Twilight carrying me back due to Fluttershy finding me. LIAM: Cheers for that, by the way. LUNA: Wouldst thou explain where thoust came from? LIAM: It’s a heck of a long story. It might ramble on a bit. LIAM: That alright? CELESTIA: We all have the time. LIAM: Alright then. LIAM: It was a few days ago, linearly speaking. More for me than Paul, due to my time hops. I’d say.. I’m about four days older than I should be. It was the 24th of May, and I had just gotten in from work. LIAM: My friends and I had what was known as a memo going. We all had been waiting for this day for a while. CURRENT temporalWierdness [TW] joined trans-timeline memo “Let’s Play!” CTW: Hey guys. CTW: What’s up? PAST wondermentWizard [WW] (0:12 MINUTES) joined trans-timeline memo “Let’s Play!” PWW: damn man what took you so long PWW: i mean seriously ive been waiting for like PWW: 12 damn hours PAUL: I should probably note that memos are ‘time-independent.’ ???: And what does THAT mean? TWILIGHT: Rarity! Introduce yourself first! RARITY: Oh, sorry. I am Rarity, and I am the owner of the Carousel Botique. As the conversation begins to dissolve due to the interruption, you close your eyes and allow yourself to flit into the feel of Time. Ticking by, ever constant, the beat steady but far beyond you. Of course, while you did that, Paul was busy finishing the talk about the memo. Good job, as well, as you don’t remember much. The excitement and the terror of the Game had pushed that memory from your mind, burying it under layers and layers of a desperate need for survival. PAUL: Basically, after that whole mess, we managed to get Ramona into the Medium. APPLEJACK: What the hay is tha Medium? LIAM: The Medium is the world Sburb – the game we played – takes place in. PAUL: Nice of you to join us, Liam. LIAM: Okay, Mr. “Let’s Put My Strife Deck To Pillowkind”. PAUL: Hey, “Thypeus’ Comfort” was a badass weapon. CELESTIA: What is a Strife Deck? LIAM: A Captchalogue Deck allows us to store items in cards and withdraw them at will depending on our Fetch Modus. LIAM: And before you ask, a Fetch Modus takes a variety of types. Mine is called ‘Array’, and it lets me get any item from any card at any item, provided I can remember what card it’s in. PAUL: Whereas I use FIFO – First In, First Out. CELESTIA: That does not answer my question. LIAM: A Strife Deck is a type of Captcha Deck for Weaponry. We can use any weapon of our specibus – mine is Swordkind, so I can use any type of Sword as a weapon proficiently, as well as dual-wield them. PAUL: And as Liam was joking about, mine is Pillowkind, so I use pillows. LIAM: Do we still have those decks, Paul? PAUL: Yup. CELESTIA: I see. What was this ‘Sburb’ like? I presume you played it to completion. You look around at the group, trying to make a decision. Do you explain it all, and be vague as possible? Or do you just tell them the most vivid thing you remember first, and get the embarrassment out of the way? Screw it, you end up deciding. Might as well relive the worst first. LIAM: I guess a good way of explaining this to you would be to tell you about our final day within the Medium. Which, actually, was only a few hours ago. LIAM: Get up from prancing around on Prospit. We aren’t even allowed to dream properly, anymore. Our dreams belong to our Dreamselves, our backup; the more realistic of us would call them our ‘Extra Life’ in case we died, which was always a big possibility. Our Dreamselves were a mystery to all of us. We didn’t know why we had them, how we got them, or how we woke them up, but they were there. We had learned about the kiss-revival method from the Lore of the Battlefield. I’d spent ages collecting and saving every book, just in case. We had been without sleep for days, and tensions were running extremely high. Sleeping woke our dreamselves, which put them in danger. Danger was lurking around every corner, every crevice, every single path. No matter what we did, we were always in danger of imminent death. We had to stay on our toes. Fight as hard as we could, when we could, and run whenever we had to. Constantly rearm ourselves. As I blearily wake up, I realise I’m surrounded by Underlings trying to kill me. Fight them off, as usual. Fight or be killed is pretty much how this goes, and if one of us dies then we are pretty much unable to win. So I fight. Hard. I make short work of them, easily destroying them. Check in with the others via our only form of communication at this point, Pesterchum. It’s not a fully featured program, but it works. It’s been a day since I saw any other person who wasn’t a game construct in person, if not longer. It’s not like we have a choice – we all have important jobs to do. Andrew was busy working on creating the Ultimate Reward – a universe. One for us to rule as Gods or live in as Mortals, depending on what we wanted. Today is the final day; after all, the day you go to finally defeat the Black King and finally escape the game is the most important of all days. Once we started this, we had no way of going back. No way of preparing more. And worst of all, we were running out of time. Soon, the meteors that the Black King, after winning the war between Good and Evil had summoned to Skaia and the Battlefield would begin to hit the seed of the Ultimate Reward. We had to go, and we had to go now. Our planet, Earth, was already destroyed. The reckoning had already thrown meteor after meteor at Skaia, and it was beginning to run out of defensive portals – all portals that led to Earth, of course. Skaia was ready and primed to complete its final and only duty, to be the seed of life for a new universe. The propagation of Reality. The Ultimate Alchemy. Call it what you want, that’s what it did. We were winning the battle, at first. None of us had used our Dream Self extra lives, and so we were fighting hard. If we died, a simple kiss would bring us back. And so, when we lost Rhia’s Real Self, we weren’t worried. Paul ran over and kissed her; using his status as the Prince of The Land of Frost and Trees to satisfy the ‘must be royalty’ condition. A few long minutes later, her Dream Self rushed back into battle, giving it everything once more. The problems started when Ramona... died. Permanently. Her Dream Self was impaled, and there was nothing we could do. I used some Time magic to spawn a copy of myself – a doomed copy, destined to die and fall irrespective of what actions he took or how safely he took his life, as he was from a timeline that shouldn’t have occurred – in order to make her comfortable in her final moments. She told us to fight hard, and gave us Heart. We tried to fight as hard as we could. We still fought for our lives, but something changed. We began to lose. Rhia was next to fall, having already been in her dreamself. We had lost two of our friends; our sisters. We were alone. Even the Horrorterrors decided to lend us their aid. The Noble Circle of Horrorterrors of the Furthest Ring, to be specific. A group of Eldritch creatures, much like the Black King, lent us the Elements of Sburb players far more powerful than we could ever hope to be. Paul was the first to use them. He found his Space powers absolutely supercharged. Space was no longer under his word and whim; it obeyed his thoughts, conscious or otherwise. The Black King was having an incredibly difficult time hitting us, no matter what attacks it tried or what moves it made. He had become a living God of Space, if you would allow someone to be awarded the title. And the Element of Light he had been lent made his luck skyrocket. Fortune was with him (and myself) and against the Black King. It was a powerful boon. Whispers spoke to him, he told me. You look over towards Paul at this point. He isn’t crying, but you can tell from the strained look in his eyes and the way he is clenching his hands with nothing to hold that he is having to use all his self-control to prevent himself from doing so. He had always felt it was his ability to stay strong, you remind yourself, and being out of the Game wouldn’t change that. LIAM: My lent Element was from two players in the same session as Paul’s lenders. I felt the Horrorterrors impossible whispers in my mind; trying to help me, but trying to push me to darkness and insanity. It’s a weird, frightening feeling, having creatures that - as far as the mind of mortals is concerned are impossible - speak to you. My Time ability became supercharged to the point of actually giving me a glimmer of hope. Powerful abilities I couldn’t perform alone, such as my personal favourite “Clockstopper.” It does what the name suggests. And the Element of Breath was given to me, dominion over the Wind. A powerful hurricane, and a steady grounding for Paul and I. We may have been alone by then, but with the Horrorterrors assistance we were not outgunned. We won, eventually. We had to use our Ultimate Fraymotif – a special technique based on noise and rhythm with specific effects – which was known as “Spacetime Shenanigans”, in its supercharged state, but it worked. A desperate strategy used in a desperate situation. We stood as two alone at the platform, ready to enter our universe. The one we created. We never got the chance. Both of us, exhausted and drained from the battle, passed out, the additional stress of holding Elements we were not born to wield taking more from us than we would expect. When we awoke, we ended up where you found us. And that is what Sburb was like. You stop speaking to find you closed your eyes while recounting that, tears forming at the corners of them. It was a powerful memory for you; it had only happened hours ago by your perspective. To be thrown from fighting for your life, being given help from creatures with ulterior motives packed upon ulterior motives, having to try to comprehend the impossible to use this help to being a pony in a planet you didn’t understand was a major change. You open your eyes, looking around at their reactions. Rarity and Fluttershy seem to be in tears; Twilight had a look of concern on her face that was more telling than anything. The Princesses of Light and Dark simply sat, pensive looks adorning their faces. The Princess of Love’s face was wracked with grief, and sympathy. Pinkie was crying, in an exceptionally over the top manner. CELESTIA: I am terribly sorry to hear that. For anypony to go through that... it must have been terrible. PAUL: That was the worst day. There was more... but I think I can speak for Liam as well when I say we don’t wish to relive it. Right? LIAM: ...yeah. LUNA: I have one question, if I may ask this of thou. LIAM: Yes? LUNA: What are the effects of “Spacetime Shenanigans”, as you called it. LIAM: It turned two desperate fools into one desperate army. LIAM: I don’t wish to talk about it further, if you don’t mind. I’m fairly sure Paul doesn’t either. PAUL: ...no. No. I don’t. The silence was almost palpable. Everyone around you was judging the events, and you had literally no idea what they were thinking. Could it be disgust? Disgust at what predestination forced you to do; even your arrival in Equestria was predestined, after all, and if it wasn’t then this entire branch of reality would be erased – with no clue as to when it will be destroyed. A terrible thing to have to think about under any circumstances, regardless of thoughts on mortality or views on life. Could it be fear? You ensured you recounted it in as much detail as you could muster without breaking down, and even you have to admit it sounds like you are both incredibly dangerous. But perhaps they got the message you desperately tried to tell them through that. You were sick of fighting. You were sick of desperately clinging to survival by tooth and nail. You just wanted to live somewhere. You realise with a start that even though this is not the Ultimate Reward you were promised, you might well be happy here. Ruling as a God, while tempting to anyone with a power trip, is not something you would have liked. Glancing at Paul, you see the feeling in his eyes. You know him too well. You can only fight alongside someone for your life before understanding them. He wouldn’t have wanted Godhood, either. Nor would Rhia, or Ramona. Elsewhere, in a land far beyond Equestria, beyond any universe, in a long abandoned Game of Sburb; the two surviving players having been taken from its clutches, two dreamselves toss and turn. One dreamself, an extremely bright golden earth pony, with a moon laying atop a golden gear for a cutie mark. The other, a truly deep purple Pegasus, with a moon laying atop a purple spiral for its cutie mark.