//------------------------------// // AD 2125 - Judgement day // Story: Mankind Triumphant - Relic // by Dafaddah //------------------------------// The Conversion Bureau: Mankind Triumphant - Relic - Chapter two: Judgement Day by Dafaddah Author's note:  When I first read Chatoyance's story it shook me to the bone. It scared me, it kept me awake, it affected me. When she invited others to submit stories around her TCB New Universe scenarios, I knew I could not refuse. I felt this story calling to me. Resistance was futile. So here it is. By the way the chapters are not presented in chronological order. Yes, intentionally. But you can read them that way if you like! Note: some of the text in part one is from Chatoyance's original story and is used with her permission. A resemblance to Midnightshadow's story Shattered Worlds - Habeas Corpus also intentional and has been cleared with the author. --- AD2125 "Your majesty, we would like to get a photograph of you just peeking through the barrier. Just in the process of stepping through, just your head coming out... our marketing research has determined that this would be seen as 'cute', but also as connoting the willingness of Equestria to step forward and reach out to humanity in kindness. Do you think we could get such a shot from you?" "Of course, my little pon... good humans. I would be happy to oblige this request. It sounds like a delightful image." Celestia stood, peeking through the barrier. Several cameramen checked their watches. "OK! That is excellent, your majesty! Could you please hold that position and smile for us?" "Certainly! A smile gladdens every heart!" Princess Celestia smiled a gentle, loving smile, filled with welcome and peace. The cameramen slammed the goggles over their eyes and ducked low. Celestia stared at them as everything in sight suddenly glowed a searing white and then... ... time slowed. It was an ability the Princess rarely called upon. For an immortal, a shortage of time was rarely the issue, but there were occasions when giving yourself a little bit of extra time came in handy. Like now. She estimated that she had perhaps ten seconds of subjective time before the energy blast reached the barrier. Time enough to determine what had happened. She reached out with her magical awareness to link with the barrier spell itself. It was exceedingly complex as spells went, almost sentient in its abilities, and its enormous power had taken centuries to accumulate before it could be cast. She felt the spell reacting to the explosion, struggling to achieve what she had designed it to do: expunge unnatural and deadly human technology from within its realm. She immediately began to exert energy to reinforce the barrier. Eight seconds. Odd. There were two centers of disturbance, and judging from the scale of the energies involved, these were no doubt hypernuclear explosions. How had the humans gotten such devices past the barrier?! Intriguing, but as this was not her immediate concern she vowed to figure out all the details later. Seven seconds. The Princess came to a realization. Everything and everypony on Earth within several hundred kilometers of the barrier would be vaporized. She quickly surveyed that there were currently over seven thousand ponies and close to a half million humans within this area. And one alicorn Princess. As she was partially out of the barrier 'everything' included her head and neck. Six seconds. Celestia's options were limited. The slowing of time unfortunately did not change the laws of physics. There simply wasn't time to pull her head back inside the barrier before the energy wave hit. Standing astride the barrier had another unfortunate consequence: she could not teleport. Technically, the barrier itself was a teleportation spell between universes, and she was presently mid-spell. She remembered some of the research experiments Starswirl the Bearded had conducted when working on the barrier spell with her. Objects teleported while straddling the barrier simply dissolved into a mush of basic particles, disappeared entirely, or exploded rather messily as their constituent parts tried to rematerialized into the same space. Four seconds. The Princess came to a second realization. She might not survive this attack. A major part of her would remain in Equestria, but she had no idea if it would be able to regenerate sufficiently to live. Much of her substance was hyper-dimensional and would not be destroyed with her head, but would the remainder still be Celestia? She might die. She, the immortal Princess, might die. She thought of her sister, of how happy she had been since her return from the moon. She thought of Twilight, her student, best friend, and daughter in all the ways that mattered. She thought of her friends and loves over the years, many of whom had never known her true identity. There were only two things that she had left to do. Two seconds. She called out to her sister in a mental shout, projecting all the feelings of love she held for her little sister. "Luna - it is now up to you to protect them!" She poured as much available energy into the sending as she could spare, while still shoring up the barrier spell. One second. And then, even stronger and as the last act of a ruler that had been obliged to keep her distance from all those ponies she loved so dearly, she opened her heart fully and broadcast her feelings to all Equestrians: "Remember, I love you." Something strange happened to the barrier. It... disappeared. Where she had felt Equestria and its teaming billions, now there was... nothing. "Oh, no." Her head fell to the ground. --- Pain. There was pain. Something was missing. Everything was missing. Everything but the pain. The pain... was. No air. No breath. Pain. Darkness. --- Pain. Movement. Aching, searing pain! Darkness! Darkness... please! Blessed darkness... --- Time passed. Celestia awoke in the familiar dark. She did not recall why it was familiar. It just seemed so. She must have awoken before, but perhaps not fully. She was aware that she was hurt. Something was missing. Equestria! Where was Equestria? She could not feel Equestria, anywhere. She was a Princess and a ruler. She would not panic. She tried to move... pain! She remembered the pain. Best not to move, she remembered that too, now. The barrier! She remembered the barrier disappearing, and Equestria with it. Fear. Where was Equestria? Where were her sister, her loyal subjects, the billions of newfoals? She feared for them. Fear. How it ate at her being. Celestia desperately wanted to act, to move, but she could not. She could not move, and she had to do something! Magic... make a light... nothing. Fear! Again... darkness. FEAR! One... more... time... an unbearably bright light shone out and... 'AAAHHHHHH!' Her powerful mind buckled in silent agony, rational thought driven out by all-consuming pain. She blacked out. --- Celestia awoke in the familiar dark. She could not recall how often she had awoken. Or where she was. But she knew that she was hurt. She noticed that she wasn't breathing. She must have had an accident and was still regenerating. Might as well try to determine what level of functionality she still retained. Her tongue could move. So could her jaw. The taste of blood was in her mouth. She tried opening an eye. Only darkness. She tried the other eye. Her eyelid did not move. She concluded that she must be lying on that side of her face. But if the first eye wasn't damaged then she must be literally in the dark. Both ears had very limited range of movement. There was a painful area in her neck, and then no feeling below that. Perhaps she was paralyzed from the neck downwards, she thought. The Princess remembered that trying to use her magic caused her pain before. She decided to try producing the smallest glimmer of light. With a tremendous effort she made a tiny spark appear. It was enough light to give the barest glimpse of what seemed like the inside of a box. Celestia wondered if she had been buried and if what she saw was the inside of her own casket. That would certainly explain why she wasn't breathing! She allowed herself a brief smile at the irony. It quickly faded when the spark sputtered and winked out. Trapped in a box in the darkness, the ruling Princess of Equestria knew despair, and wept. After a while Celestia's exhaustion overcame her and she drifted back into troubled sleep. --- Movement. Sound. 'Scritch. Scritch...Screeeeee-eeeeeeeee-eeeee.' A drill. Celestia lit a spark, but could see nothing. Her light was brighter now, and much less painful to maintain than the previous time. She might be healing, at last. There was a tapping noise. She felt lighter all of a sudden, as if some pressure had been relieved. She also felt a part of herself moving away. They had taken some of her substance. But whom? And why? The darkness gave no clue, but a few minutes (seconds? hours?) later the Princess felt something she had not experienced in a long time. A human was being ponified. She felt the call of the newfoal to the conversion dream, but she was trapped in here, wherever here was, in the darkness. She could not welcome the newfoal! Celestia grew frantic. Then angry. It was her duty to welcome the newfoals. Hers, and Luna's as well. She tried to call out to Luna, getting only pain in response. Granted the pain was not as bad as during her previous attempts at magic. Or maybe she was just getting used to the pain. The newfoal! If Luna wasn't there, he or she would be alone in the conversion dream. And Celestia could not feel Luna's presence. Not one bit. 'This cannot be happenning!' lamented the Princess silently to herself, weeping tears of frustration. It was her responsibility to be there for them. But she could not leave this cursed box! Anger rose, and she quickly dismissed it, as she had always done. Anger was the enemy of Harmony. She would not give in to anger. Not now. Never. She then felt the newfoal awaken. He (it was a stallion) projected feelings of both wonder and pain. Soon, the wonder and happiness took over. Something seemed different about this newfoal, but the link was too weak for Celestia to get anything more than a general impression. Still the echos of happiness felt like rays of sunshine, spiced with traces of magical energy. This was the first happiness Celestia had felt since entering this box. She basked in its warmth, and slowly fell back into quiet, peaceful sleep. --- "Good morning, your majesty," said Spike. He was sitting on Twilight's back as they entered the Princess' bedchamber. "Good morning Spike, and my faithful Twilight. You two are my alarm clock this morning it would seem." The baby dragon leapt from the lavender pony's back, a teapot clutched in one claw and three china cups in the other. "So how do you feel today Princess?" asked Twilight as she approached the bed, sounding concerned. "Why, I'm fine," said Celestia, "and how are you and Spike?" "Fine and dandy, thanks!" replied her protégé. Celestia looked on as Twilight went around the room opening the drapes. Oddly, there was already sunlight coming through. Had Luna raised the sun in her place? As the young mare passed the tail of her bed she decided she should arise, but to no avail. She could not move. Concerned, the Princess called out. "Twilight, could you come here and help me to get out of bed? I seem a bit stiff this morning." "Of course, your majesty." Celestia looked on with affection as her student approached with her horn glowing as she drew the blankets back with her magic. Twilight's eyes widened in surprise and she uttered a piercing shriek. The Princess glanced down. In the bed beyond her neck there was nothing. No barrel, no flanks, no limbs, and no tail. Celestia was nothing but a discorporated head! She screamed... and awoke to darkness. Celestia gathered her energies and a small spark lit the inside of the box. She bent her perception to what lay below her neck. There was nothing, only the the other side the small cubic box. Her dream was true, she was nothing but a head and neck. Once more, she wept in silence. --- Celestia dreamt of Equestria again. Those dreams gladdened her heart, but left her melancholy on awaking to her dismal reality. Still, she felt uncommonly energetic today, or tonight, or whatever time of day it was. Her dream brought Equestria to the fore of her thoughts. What had happened to Equestria in those last seconds before she passed out? It was a mystery to say the least. She kept reviewing the sequence of events, as they did not make logical sense. At the very least there were some pieces missing from the puzzle. The Princess still had no clue how the hypernuclear devices traversed the barrier into Equestria. She had one possible lead. There was a twinge of a familiar 'scent' to the explosions: Discord. And just days before the DragonEquus had gone missing from her statue garden. As she had not detected any sign of Discord's particular brand of magic, she could not be certain there was a link between the two. The second mystery was what happened to the barrier itself. Instead of doing what it had been designed to do, it disappeared, along with all of Equestria. The barrier should have simply pushed the hypernuclear explosions outside of its surface. In fact it was in the process of doing just that immediately previous to its mysterious departure from Earth. There was also the third and perhaps most perplexing mystery of all: where did all the energy from the hypernuclear explosions go? It should have been released to devastating effect into the area immediately outside the barrier. But she distinctly remembered as her head fell to the ground that there was no such conflagration. In fact she distinctly recalled a human in radiation gear grabbing her head by the ears and tossing it into a box, most likely the same one in which she currently resided. A last and more personal quandary remained: why hadn't her body regenerated, as it always did after a major trauma? She and her sister both existed partially outside this plane of existence. Was this because she was stuck in Mundus? And was this related to her almost total lack of magical resources, she who once could move the sun and the moon across the sky at will? She pondered often on these four questions. Whodunit, as the humans would say, was not in question. She had received intelligence that the HLF was planning something big. However there was also another very troubling aspect to this: they could only have gotten their hands on hypernuclear devices with the direct collusion of at least one major human government, and probably even then could not have kept it secret from the other governments' intelligence services. The attack was a last ditch concerted effort by the human remnants to avoid the complete absorption of the Earth into the body of Equestria. And to her shame Celestia had to admit that it seemed to have succeeded. --- A long time later Celestia awoke feeling different. Whether it was weeks, months or years, she didn't know. She measured the passage of time by the periodic releases of pressure from the box. Somehow she continuously produced more blood. So far she had been 'visited' one hundred and eighteen times. As to the difference, the Princess couldn't quite place a hoof on it (and not because she no longer had hooves, either!) She savored the feeling of novelty. It had been quite a while since anything had changed in her box. She was in no rush to discover the difference just yet. One hundred and eighteen. What came in one hundred and eighteens? Since her memory was almost perfect she reviewed in her mind's eye all the things related to that number. There were one hundred and eighteen steps from the ground level to the top platform of Canterlot Castle's grand stairway. One hundred and eighteen windows in Royal Library (counting the small ones on many of the inner doors.) One hundred and eighteen Zapp-apple trees in Sweet Apple Acres farm last year. (And the same six years previous, as well.) Celestia paused in her review. Thinking of Sweet Apple Acres reminded her of Applejack, which made her think about Twilight. Her heart ached when she thought of her young protégé. Of all the ponies of Equestria, she missed her the most. Even though she felt Luna's absence acutely, Twilight was the filly she had raised, watched over and now worried about. As Celestia had done countless times since entering the box, she reviewed every moment she had shared with Twilight. She recalled this in sequence: first becoming aware of the filly's incredible magical power during the entrance exam to her School for Gifted Unicorns, her magic studies under her personal guidance, her assignment to Ponyville to bring together the Elements of Harmony, and her role as ambassador after the opening of the Conversion Bureaus. Of course properly reviewing her experiences with Twilight took a pleasingly good amount of time. She slept more than once during her review, often dreaming of Twilight and those happy moments. At each awakening she again felt the growing 'difference' she had first noticed shortly after 'visit' one-eighteen. She could finally identify it: she could now track time. Almost a month had passed in the outside since the last 'visit'. In fact she had been dreaming a lot about the world outside her box, and she was thinking this might be due to all the ponies with her blood in them roaming the Earth, each contributing to her some small amount of magical energy. She was also feeling much stronger and could use more magic, at least within the confines of the box. No attempt to exert magic beyond its walls had succeeded in the least. By a process of experimentation, the Princess discovered how to speak by circulating the air in the box through her throat and vocal cords! The first use to which she put this new ability was to shout for help, hysterically on more than one occasion, a lapse in decorum of which she felt most ashamed. But it was all to no avail. Nopony would speak with her, or even acknowledge her calls for help. If the 'visits' were regular that would mean that she had been in the box now for over ten years, with no contact with anypony in all that time. That she had only limited energy to stay awake might indeed be a blessing! Still, the only logical conclusion was that she was being held by somepony who wanted her kept isolated. How she sympathized with Luna now! Hadn't she done the the very same to her own sister? The thought lay heavy on her heart. She could imagine the conversation they would have: "Oh, Luna, I so regret banishing you to the moon," Celestia saw herself saying. "Pish-posh, dear Celestia. It was necessary," replied her illusory sister. "But still, you were there, alone for a thousand years. What did you do in all that time?" "I angered, I wept, I raved, I went mad, my madness burnt itself out, and I bided my time, sometimes scheming, sometimes praying that I might escape... but mostly, I slept." The imaginary Luna smiled conspiratorially. "Really? I find myself doing much the same. One does accumulate a good number of vacation days ruling a nation. And perhaps a corresponding degree of fatigue." Celestia imagined herself following her sister's lead in the jest. "Indeed. Being upset can tax one's energy so, and I was upset for the longest time. Being on the moon was just the rest I needed actually." Luna winked at her sister. Celestia paused in her fantasy. The imagined exchange had brought a smile to her face, but it also left her longing for real contact. "Even your imaginary self gives good advice, Luna," whispered the Princess into the darkness. --- Celestia was in a lucid dream. She floated incorporeal like a ghost through the ruins of a city. Not a sound could be heard. No pony voices raised in greeting, no animals scurrying, no birds chirping, nothing. Not even the sound of her hooves on the crumbling cobblestones as she drifted down the streets. "Even in my dreams I no longer have a body." she remarked out loud to break the deafening silence of the place. The remaining doorways stood less than six feet tall, and there were visible structures accessible only to beings that could fly. This had been an Equestrian city with unicorns, pegasai and earth ponies. Now it was only shattered timbers, broken masonry, and dust. She rounded a mound of rubble and suddenly her perspective changed. Before her was the first building she had seen that was still mostly intact. That gatehouse and portcullis, those battlements and those crumbling towers were familiar. This was Canterlot Castle. She was home. "Luna dear, this might be but a dream, but how it breaks my heart to see it." Celestia hesitated only a moment. She liked to think that she had always faced the consequences of her own mistakes squarely. Even in a dream she would not betray that principle, so she gathered her courage and entered the deathly quiet castle. The Princess silently made her way to the throne room, past halls filled with pieces of discarded armor, rotting furniture, broken glass and cherished memories. She finally arrived before her throne. Immediately to its right, next to where Luna's throne had crumbled into a pile of dark blue rubble, was a large standing mirror. Intrigued, she rose up the steps to hover before it, expecting no more of a reflection than any other ghost. What she saw instead in the mirror was a human girl-child, perhaps ten years old, with long blond hair and familiar deep blue eyes. The child in the mirror looked up. "Greetings, Celestia. I have been waiting for you a long time," said the child. "Greetings to you as well child. I am sorry for making you wait, but I have been... indisposed. Might I enquire as to your name?" replied the Princess. "You already know my name," said the girl. "We have much to do, in this new world." Celestia hovered lower and approached the glass at eye level to the human child. "I am sure that we do. But this world does not seem so new to me. The place does seem to have gathered quite a bit of dust since I last was here." "Perhaps we shall need a broom?" replied the waif with a shy smile. "And a dust pan," added the Princess, feeling her heart blossom in the light of both the gentle humor and the smile. The girl-child grew more serious. "We also have much to learn in order to rebuild this place," she announced in a whisper as if relating a confidence. She held a hand up to the mirror, as if placing a palm directly on its glass surface. Celestia raised an eyebrow. "And what do we need to study most, little one?" whispered the Princess approaching even closer. "This is no longer a place just for ponies. We have to learn to be human too." As the child replied Celestia felt a moment of vertigo as if falling into the mirror. A moment later, she was on the floor in a tangle of limbs. Limbs. She had limbs! She scramble to rise and suddenly noticed that she stood on two legs, and before her were human arms ending in dainty girl-child hands and fingers. She wriggled them in fascination for a few moments, then looked into the mirror. She was the blond girl-child. Celestia rocked between the ecstasy of finally having a body again, and the horror of it being in the image of those that had taken away her old one. In the end her practical nature won out, and she gingerly walked bipedally to her throne. She sat down and looked over the ruins of her throne room. "Little sister, I have become human. What do I do now?" The wind sighed as it blew through the shattered windows of her broken domain.