The Coalition States forces stationed around the nexus at the decrepit ruins of Old Chicago were alerted to the arrival of more D-Bees by the area beginning to flare with power. The soldiers mobilised with the efficiency born of years of practice to surround the fluctuating portal, railguns and lasers were leveled at the mass of raw magic, the giant robot vehicles readied their missiles for launch in case the being that arrived proved too tough for conventional weaponry.
The power flared once more and the expected rift opened, depositing six disoriented brightly colored equine figures on the ground, much to the confusion of the gathered soldiers, all of which had expected something much more fierce than the six small forms before them.
Just then, the D-Bee arrival alarms sounded off. “Contact, six D-Bees located at the base of the rift, don’t give them a chance to get their bearings, fire!” The command came through the communication array built into every soldier’s helmet and they reacted automatically, laying down enough firepower to devastate a medium-sized army.
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Once the arcane power of Twilight’s teleport spell finally faded, the alicorn found herself still standing on her hooves, sore, and her horn felt as if she’d overtasked herself again; but she was still standing. The second thing she felt as her senses returned to her was that the magic where she landed felt different from the equestrian magic she was used to. It was stronger, more primal. Her thoughts were interrupted when she heard the soft groans of her friends around her, which told her they were all there with her. She figured they were probably just as sore as she was, but still alive, for which she was thankful after a miscast teleport.
However before she could say or do anything else, there was a series of deafening alarms blaring all around. Twilight's eyes shot all over the place, noting with dismay the large buildings around around her and her friends.
“Girls, get up, we gotta go!” Twilight pleaded with her friends to rise, to get to safety. She was a hundred percent sure their arrival had been what set off the alarms. Alarms meant danger, danger meant troops, and she had no idea if they’d be met with anything other than hostility.
She’d have just teleported them out of there, but after that mass long-range teleport, her personal reserves felt far too drained for even the most basic of spells.
“W-what’s going on?” Rainbow asked, groggily getting to her hooves.
Pinkie noticed the black and white bipedal armored figures with a grinning skull motif helmet, each of them were holding strange devices that were pointed their way, dozens of the figures surrounding them and points them out to her friends. “We’ve got a welcome committee, girls!”
“What the hay are those?” Rainbow asked.
The creatures didn’t give them any warning. Something shot out of the devices they were all wielding. Applejack cried out in pain as she was knocked over to the ground, several red spots appearing upon her flank and side where she was hit.
“AJ!” Rainbow yelled as she moved to her friend, followed by Fluttershy. Only for the bipedal creatures to fire again.
Twilight responded to this one. She focused the last of her magic on raising a shield that blocked the next volley, and then the one after that.
Her eyes went wide, she was simply too weak to keep it up. “Fluttershy, is she?”
“Ahm fine, dun worry ‘bout me none.” AJ got back to her hooves, grimacing at the line of pits the Coalition railguns carved into her side, wounds that Fluttershy was trying to tend to. Unknown to the ponies was that the only reason their friend was still alive after being shot with such high power weaponry was because the ambient magic has toughened all of them, being the creatures of magic they are. However, even toughened as they are, there was obviously weapons that could seriously injure, or even kill them if they were not careful.
“Um, Applejack? We need to get you to a hospital, sooner rather than later, some of these are quite deep.” Fluttershy looked to her friend with a worried expression
Twilight groaned as more of those creatures gathered around them and opened fire. There were more on the way, a lot more, and to make matters worse, her shield was starting to fail. “I-I can’t keep it up.”
“Get those D-Bees!” Someone in command called out, Twilight had no idea who, which way it came from, or how she even understood their language, but she had no more time to think about it as her shield shattered. Almost immediately afterwards, she felt a searing pain along her side and back, followed by cries from Fluttershy and Rarity as they too were struck by the weapons.
Desperate to protect her friends, Twilight tapped into the ambient magic surrounding them and channeled the magic into another barrier around them all, surprised at how easy it was to maintain this second barrier. “Girls! Pinkie, can you tend to them? I’ll try to teleport us out, I can use the magic around us.”
Pinkie gave a salute and rushed over to her wounded friends while Twilight pulled in more and more magic from the ley line nexus they were standing in to power the mass teleport spell.
“Stop them! They’re casting something big!” That voice called out once more as more soldiers began firing on the shield, but to Twilight’s surprise, the resulting drain to her was minimal after tapping into the nexus for spell power.
Finally, the mass teleport spell went off, thankfully this time without any surges of power or rifts tearing open; however, there was still the sensation of being squeezed by the magic to an almost painful level to deal with.
When the spell cleared, Twilight stumbled about a bit before collapsing onto her belly out of exhaustion. Her addled brain barely recognised the forms of her friends on the ground around her, unconscious. The last word she heard before darkness claimed her too was what sounded like a stallion calling out, “We have wounded here!”
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Twilight let out a soft groan as she regained consciousness, a hoof rubbing at the base of her aching horn for a moment before she remembered the events that led to her current situation. She jumped out of the bed she was laying on, immediately wide awake in her panic.
“Whoa, easy there, don't strain yourself.”
Twilight looked over at the sound of a female’s voice to see three humans standing nearby, all looking her way. Two of them wore what could be recognised as doctor’s outfits, while the third was wearing light armor with a small weapon, similar to the ones wielded by the armored people, holstered at his hip.
“Who are you? Where am I? Where are my friends? Are they okay?”
“Easy little lady, you’re safe here, we’re in the pyramid at Lazlo. Can you tell me your name?”
Twilight looked from the two doctors, to the guard, to the door and back. “I’m Twilight Sparkle… can I see my friends now?”
The two doctors glanced to each other for a moment before the male doctor shook his head. “They’re on the other side of that curtain, but you can’t go see them just yet, they’re still unconscious.”
Twilight jumped to her hooves, a determined look on her face, an action that got the guard to begin drawing on his magic to defend the doctors if needed. “You won’t stop me from seeing my friends! They need me!”
“You need to lay back down”
“Not until I see my friends!”
The male doctor focused his mind on Twilight then. “You will calm down.”
Twilight’s pupils shrank to pinpricks at the touch of the psion’s mind and her horn lit up, the three humans found themselves picked up in her aura as Twilight let out a panicked shriek. “Get out of my head!” The two doctors and soldier got thrown from the room, impacting against the far wall hard enough to crack the light armor they wear just as a purple barrier of magic energy appeared in the doorway.
The soldier, or better known as a ley line walker, groaned and picked himself up then helped up the two doctors. “That was poorly handled, are you two alright?”
The female doctor gave a soft groan as she got to her feet. “We’re fine, can you breach this barrier?”
The walker looked to the barrier in question while the doctor helped her comrade to his feet. “I can try, this is powerful magic though, so it'll take time.”
The psion gave a frustrated groan. “Well, I guess it’s time to call on Johnathan. He did want to be informed when one of these D-Bees woke up.”
When he heard this, the ley line walker gave a slight nod and muttered a quick spell. A small, shimmering blue/white pigeon appeared in his hands, which he sent off to find John to let him know that the winged unicorn D-Bee had woken up. Once the message was sent, he turned to the barrier and started to chant a negation spell, only to gasp in shock at the drain to his magic when it went off.
He took a deep breath to steady himself and fixed the barrier with a challenging glare, then gathered his magic and slammed the barrier with a second negation spell. The walker let out a groan and fell to a knee, a hand went to his head from the exertion. As he stood back up and readied himself for a third and final attempt, he heard the sound of footsteps landing nearby and looked to the side to see the Atlantean he called walking towards them.
Within the cell, Twilight opened the curtain the doctor mentioned and walked past it, seeing her friends all laying on various beds, Rarity, Fluttershy, and Applejack all with bandages wrapped around their wounds, and all of them were unconscious. She barely noticed the two attempts at dispelling her barrier as she walked to the nearest bed, the one holding Rarity.
A few moments later, her barrier simply vanished with thick, black smoke billowing in past where it once was. Twilight looked over in a panic, scooting back away from the black cloud, her horn lit up as she called on protective magic. “Get back! I don’t know what you want from me, but I won’t let you invade my mind again!”
In the black cloud stood a tall human that she attempted to grab with her magic like she had with the two doctors, only to find that she could not direct her magic within the black cloud. Twilight teleported to a spot on the floor between her friends and the stranger. Once there, she called up a small, but exceptionally strong barrier in front of her to protect them all from the being. Confident that the barrier was sound, she began charging a magic beam should he threaten any of them, having expected another attack on her mind.
As she watched the man, he did not attack, and instead just activated a small black device held in one of his hands, which sucked the black mist back into itself. When the mist was gone, the man sat down in the middle of the floor in a rather uncomfortable looking pose, with his legs crossed and his hands placed on his knees. His eyes were staring straight into Twilight’s own, but they held no malice, only curiosity and wariness of the unknown. Twilight was the first to break the silence that had befallen the room.
“Who are you and what do you want with me?”
The human spoke then, his voice soft but at the same time, firm. “I simply wish to speak with you, my name is Johnathan Valorious, what’s yours?”
Twilight’s demeanor went from ready to fight to curious, and more than a bit confused too when she heard that. “Oh, my name’s Twilight Sparkle. Why did that other man try to overpower my mind like that?”
John gave a soft sigh and shook his head slightly. “He was scared, you and your friends are powerful, and he saw that you were beginning to panic, so he attempted to use his psionics to calm you down. A plan that, admittedly, was rather foolish in the first place, but he could not harm you even if he wished to, his powers are for healing, not fighting. On another note, I assume that you have many questions about where you are, am I correct?”
Twilight gave a slow nod to the question. “Yes, and you have questions of your own for me, right? You’re acting as if you’ve never seen an alicorn before.”
The atlantean raised an eyebrow at the unfamiliar term. “Alicorn? That’s what you’re called? Interesting. I’ve heard of both unicorns and pegasi, even met individuals of both races, but none I’ve seen look even remotely similar to you or your friends. And yes, I do have questions for you. What do you say to us alternating asking and answering questions? That way we both get information equally.”
Twilight nodded with an eager grin on her face at the prospect of learning something new, a smile that fell when she looked back to her unconscious friends. “Sounds good to me, but first, I need to help my friends.”
Johnathan simply motioned for her to do what she needed to do. “Go ahead, I can wait.”
She was already moving when John spoke, letting her beam spell fade in favor of a medical scan spell, which she focused on her nearest friend, Rarity. Twilight closed her eyes to better focus on what her spell revealed, then reopened her eyes in surprise at what she detected, and what she didn’t detect. She directed the scanning spell over herself, then over each of her friends to confirm her scans and, sure enough, all of them that were wounded had no sign of injuries anymore. Each that was wounded also had faint residual energy that felt like magic, but also not. In truth it felt closer to the energy used by the man who touched her mind with his.
Satisfied that all of her friends were okay, Twilight canceled the spell and turned back to Johnathan. “What kind of magic did you use to heal us? It’s unlike any sort of magic I’ve seen before.”
“The psion who you threw out of the room earlier was the one who healed you all, the power you’re sensing is psionic energy, or more commonly known around here as ISP.”
Twilight’s ears folded back against her skull when she heard that, suddenly feeling bad for acting so aggressively to the one who healed her and her friends. “Can you bring him back in please? I...I’d like to apologize for how I acted.”
John simply gave a nod and tapped the communicator on his ear, activating it. “Chris, you can come back in, and bring Abbigale back in too.”
A moment later, the door opened up again and the two doctors from earlier walked back in cautiously while Twilight dropped the barrier she had raised and spoke up. “I’m sorry for throwing you two out of the room...you’re not hurt, are you?”
The doctor’s apprehension faded upon hearing the pony’s apology and closed the distance between them, with Abbigale reassuring Twilight with a warm smile. “It’s okay, you didn’t hurt either of us and we understand that you were afraid.” They were interrupted by a rather loud growl that made Twilight let out an embarrassed giggle, a blush appearing on her cheeks. “Sorry, I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast, is there anything my friends and I can eat?”
Johnathan was the one who replied while the two doctors muffle their own chuckles. “Of course, is there any special requirement for you and yours we need to consider?”
“We’re a herbivorous species, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Okay, one moment.” John activated his communicator again. “Black Skull, I need you to bring in a vegetarian meal for six… yes, you do… no you may not… because I said so… we’re in group containment cell one.” With that finished, he turned his attention back to Twilight. “My colleague will be bringing in food for all of you shortly. You may want to wake them up before we begin exchanging questions and answers, time is not a luxury we have right now, so I don’t wish to answer questions more than once.”
Twilight gave a slight nod and turned to the beds that her friends were resting on, gently nudging them in turn to take them up and called their names as she did as to let them know who it was that was shaking them awake. As Twilight was doing that, the door opened and a massive man made of metal, ten feet tall and three feet broad, walked in, barely able to fit through the doorway. He had a pair of large weapons similar to the ones that the men at the nexus had, but far too large for a normal man to wield slung on his back, with thick belts being fed from slots on his back to them. The metal man also had a black spartan-style helmet bolted to his head and a number of round devices similar to the one John had used when he entered the room, but different colors, attached to his chestplate. In his arms was a box from which the smell of fresh fruits and vegetables wafted.
John was the first to speak up, his attention having been drawn when the door opened. “Ah, Black Skull, thanks for bringing the food for our guests.”
Black Skull set the box down and looked to the ponies, who were all awake by now and staring back at him, eyes wide. “So these are the six ponies that caused such a stir.” He gave a low, grating chuckle and an amused smirk found its way onto his robotic face. “You cause almost as much chaos as I do, though my kind of ‘fun’ generally involves me making things go boom real nice.”
“You can meet them later Black, and try not to scare them, we need all the allies we can get and scaring them is not going to help with that.” Black looked to John and shrugged before turning to leave. “Fine, see ya ‘round.”
Rainbow Dash was the first to recover her senses and blurted out the question that was likely on all of their minds. “What the hay was THAT?!”
Johnathan cleared his throat to get everypony’s attention. “All will be explained shortly, your friend Twilight and I have agreed to have a q&a to quickly exchange information. Shall we begin?” This was directed to Twilight specifically, who looked to her friends gathered behind her. They each gave her a nod and a smile showing they have her back, she smiled gratefully in return before turning back to the atlantean and nodded in agreement.
“Yes we are, I’ll go first...”