//------------------------------// // 13. A Familiar Voice // Story: Final Mission // by Sharp Quill //------------------------------// CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! My eyes snapped open to darkness as my ears flattened against the assault. I looked around, but I couldn’t see the source of that racket, couldn’t see anything. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! I blindly worked my way out of bed and onto the floor, ready to buck whatever it was into next week. It stopped. I reached for an ever-present saddlebag by my side, to pull out a light crystal, when I was suddenly blinded by light. “About time you woke up.” I recognized the voice, of course; I should have seen this coming. I cracked open my eyes. As my sight adjusted to the illumination, I saw Discord: in his paw he held a metal triangle and in his talon a metal rod. “Was that really necessary?” I said, fuming. He threw the objects over his shoulders; they vanished without a trace. “You asked me to find you after the next reset,” he explained without remorse. “The reset has just completed.” I rubbed my forehead to stave off a headache. Between falling asleep late and being forced awake before sunrise… I didn’t know how much sleep I had gotten, but it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t in the mood to put up with his random crap. But he was here now, like it or not. It was time for Plan B. I said to him, “You are aware of the vaults that Princess Celestia has hidden in this castle?” “I am,” he said, stroking his goatee. “I’m curious as to how you know about them.” “You wouldn’t remember,” I began, ignoring his implied question, “but you told me you could get me inside one of them.” A throne-like chair popped into existence. He sat down and fixed his gaze on me. “Then I’m sure I also told you that doing so would trigger an alarm, that Sunbutt would be here within seconds.” That he was repeating that now made it almost certain he hadn’t been messing with me before. “You did,” I confirmed. He resumed stroking his goatee. “I’m guessing you didn’t go through with it before, but you’ve had a change of heart.” “You could say that.” I walked towards the door. “I’ll take you there.” Discord remained seated. “Which one is it?” I stopped and turned around, afraid he wasn’t going to cooperate this time. “It’s on the ground floor. I don’t know how many there are.” He held up three talons. “On that floor, there’s only one.” A flash of light, and we were in the hidden room adjacent to the first vault I had discovered, the one with The Agency weapons. Discord was still seated in his chair. I went over to the gems comprising the magical lock, the one Twilight had so effortlessly opened. “I suppose Celestia is sleeping now. How much of a difference will that make?” “Hard to say,” he said with a carefree wave of a paw. “That may delay her a few seconds, or maybe Moonbutt will come in her place.” He summoned up a beverage of something violet with green stripes. “Either way, I’m not taking the fall for this, just so you know.” I snorted. “We both know you won’t be turned back into stone.” He gave me a knowing grin. Regardless, I’d have to deal with the consequences. I only needed seconds to zap myself with a time stunner. If it didn’t work, none of it mattered; I’d simply wait it out until the next reset. But what if it actually did work? What would I tell Celestia? How would she react? What if Luna showed up instead? Did she even know about The Agency? It had been shut down, after all, before her return. I didn’t know which was worse: a wide awake but clueless Luna, or a sleep-deprived Celestia. Two sleep-deprived ponies; what could go wrong? Discord covered his mouth with his paw, hiding a yawn. “I’m getting bored.” That shook me out of my thoughts. I couldn’t have him disappearing on me now. But I found myself unable to set things in motion just yet. “Aren’t you curious as to why I want to get inside that vault?” I asked in an attempt to buy more time. “Not particularly,” he nonchalantly replied, “so long as it causes some chaos.” “Like triggering an alarm that drags Celestia out of bed?” He gave me a toothy grin. “I will neither confirm nor deny that,” he said. I went to the vault’s hidden door. It was time to either put up or shut up. Do whatever it took to undo the spell, or resign myself to spending the rest of my life in the Nexus. Did it really matter whether I got inside with Discord’s help or with Twilight’s? Discord was here now. Twilight might be out-of-town—again. “Do it.” A flash and I was inside. My presence caused the lights to turn on. Everything was as I expected it to be. If there was an alarm, it was silent. I hurriedly trotted to the time stunners and picked one up. I headed back to the door— It was closed. Damn it, Discord. He hadn’t unlocked and opened it. First things first. I’d worry about the door later. Maybe it could be opened from the inside, which is why he hadn’t bothered. I laid down on the floor, set the weapon for a wide aperture, pointed it at myself, and fired, immediately dropping it as I did. A near ultraviolet flash, and the world around me rippled away to gray. Did the crystal work, or did I simply trigger another reset? I looked around: no unicorn rabbit, no Gate, and no draconequus. I was alone in the featureless void. If it had worked, I could expect a princess to open that door once reality had reformed itself. But if it hadn’t… well, it was too late to see if it could be opened from the inside. I stared at where the door had been and would once again be, the point being that it wasn’t there now. Nothing stopped me from walking to the other side. I just had to be careful with distances. With carefully measured steps, I worked my way to where the door should have been, then took a few steps more into what should have been the middle of the hidden room on the other side. There was nothing more to do but wait for the reset to finish. It seemed as good a time as any to catch up on my sleep, so I laid down and got as comfortable as I could on what passed for a surface. It didn’t take long for me to drift off to sleep. I woke up in absolute darkness. I got up on my hooves and extracted a light crystal from a saddlebag. I figured the absence of light was proof I was both post-reset and outside the vault. I turned it on. Sure enough, I was in the hidden antechamber. Alone. No Discord and no Celestia. It was starting to look like Apollo’s crystal had failed to work. How many months this time? I wasn’t in the mood to do the math. I exited the room and entered the lit hallway. It was sunny outside. I went up to my room to check on its condition. The dust was undisturbed, just as I feared. I slid off my saddlebags onto the low table and dug around for that crystal. It wasn’t there. I double checked. Same result. I collapsed to the floor. That had been my only chance. I had no idea what happened to it. It definitely did not fall out through a hole in the saddlebag, there being none to fall out of. Could Discord have sensed it and removed it? Whatever. If he had, in fact, taken it, I wasn’t likely to get it back from him. It was probably in the Nexus, somewhere, forever out of my reach. Or destroyed. It didn’t matter anymore. I found the energy to put the saddlebags back on. Keeping them in the Nexus for safekeeping was starting to look attractive. I didn’t do much for the rest of the day. I just wandered around the castle a bit, not to search for more hidden rooms—I was done with that—but because I just couldn’t stand being cooped up in that one room. At one point, I did go outside to visit the nearby Tree of Harmony—not that I’d expected that to accomplish anything. It wasn’t as if it granted wishes or anything. Maybe I subconsciously hoped its inherent harmony would rub off on me; I certainly felt as if my situation was as unharmonious as it got. It was pretty enough to look at, but that was about it. As night fell, I went back to what had become “my” room. That I now thought of it as such only added to my depression. In the hours until bedtime, not to mention the next overnight reset, I had plenty of time for all that I had learned to finally sink in. It wasn’t a pretty picture. I could now understand Twilight’s reaction upon learning the truth from her mentor. How did Celestia manage it? I woke up to morning sunshine. Out of habit, I glanced at the floor, to verify that another reset had taken place. It had—wait… the layer of dust was all messed up. I looked at the table, and saw saddlebag-sized disturbances in the dust. I didn’t dare believe what my eyes were telling me. I had lost the crystal; the time stunner zap could only have triggered another reset. To think the Tree of Harmony was responsible was wishful thinking, at best, yet… the only other possibility was that somepony had been inside this room shortly before I woke up. None of it made sense. I had to know. There was only one way to find out: go to Ponyville and see how ago I had vanished. My old hometown came into view as I reached the edge of the Everfree Forest. I was making no attempt to disguise my appearance; I wanted ponies to react to my presence. As I trotted along street after street, not one of the numerous ponies I passed paid me much attention. Had it been so long that they’ve forgotten me? Every now and then I’d pass a damaged building. There must have been another monster attack. I came upon one under reconstruction and stopped to assess the damage. Something flying must have crashed into the upper story, something a lot heavier than infamously crash-prone Rainbow Dash. It only reminded me that I now knew who was responsible for those monsters. “Bon Bon!” angrily shouted a familiar voice. A mint-green unicorn charged towards me. Lyra? Why would she be back in Ponyville? And had I hurt her so much that the pain hadn’t dulled after all this time? “I’ll explain everything,” I hastily said, “but can you first tell me what happened here?” I pointed at the repair crew. My former very best friend looked at me like I had lost my mind. “You’re telling me you don’t know what happened yesterday.” “Please, Lyra, just indulge me.” She stared at me for a moment, not knowing what to make of me, then glanced at the building in question. “I’m guessing the bugbear crashed into it.” “The bugbear attacked Ponyville?” Why would it, with me not having been here? I might as well have asked whether Celestia raised the Sun in the west. “What is wrong with you?!” Lyra demanded. Ponies were looking at us. “Can we take this somewhere less public,” I told her in hushed tones. Lyra lowered her voice, but not by much. “Yesterday, you were going on about how that bugbear was after you, then you left me to finish decorating the Town Hall all by myself, you never came home—” she eyed my saddlebags, then rolled her eyes “—whatever… and now this.” I couldn’t believe my ears. Lyra had remembered the events of that day—not only that, but it had all happened yesterday! It was as if… could the crystal have been consumed in performing its spell? Did it really matter? I’d done it. Everything was back the way it was. Lyra was still glaring daggers at me. Well, almost everything. How would I make things right with her? Somehow, the truth didn’t seem like an option. Before I could find something to say, a pegasus flew down to hover above us. It was Rainbow Dash. “Uh, Bon Bon? I know this will sound weird and all, but you need to see Twilight, like, right now. Princess Celestia has requested your presence.”