//------------------------------// // 5.7 - Explosive Admissions // Story: Quantum Vault // by WishyWish //------------------------------// July 16, 2015 Ponyville – Dr. Hooves Laboratory Thursday Quantum couldn’t get up. The weight she carried on her back would have been tolerable for most to bear, but she had always been a scrawny excuse for a pony, and her legs were hardly apple-bucking material. In her own defense, she reasoned that the constant burden of once again her own weight on her back would have been difficult for even a healthy, fit pony to tolerate every single minute of the day. And Quantum was anything but healthy. She was lying splattered on the floor of her host’s laboratory; a spilled scoop of mint-flavored ice cream slowly liquefying under the rays of the June heat filtering through a window. Her ears picked up the satisfying crackle of old Tesla coils, but they brought her no more joy than did the open yellow book lying in front of her. She scanned the room. Spike was sitting on the edge of a table, swinging his legs and staring at them as if he’d only just found out they existed. Hal, who had taken over for Princess Twilight when the group was safely back ‘home’, was hovering absently on his wings and picking at his device – clearly just desperate for something to stare at. Quantum had always wondered how pegasi could just hover like hummingbirds all day long, but only lose stamina when they were sick, injured, or actually exerting themselves. Flying was apparently as much second nature to a pegasus as a sparkly horn was for her own kind. Derpy was where she had been since yesterday, and where she was likely to stay. Her soft gray belly was fused to Quantum’s back, as though the two of them had been born that way. Their coat colors had begun to swirl and mingle into one another, bound like the dance of oil and water – disease greeting disease as it all mingled through their joined bloodstreams. Quantum shuddered at the idea of some desperate surgeons somewhere trying to force the infection into remission by cutting the fused body parts away from one another. She was already beginning to feel parts of Derpy’s body – the fluttering of her wings, or the little dabble of pain when the ditsy pegasus pricked her hoof with a splinter from the beloved mop she still cradled in her mouth. If the joining connected them so deeply, so quickly…surgical separation was just plain insanity. Hal looked up when he noticed his friend and fellow student wriggling under the weight of the wall-eyed Derpy. “You shouldn’t…move too much,” he offered, looking away out of politeness. “It’s still a disease. Physical exertion will probably just make it spread faster.” “I had an itch,” Quantum complained. Hal glanced at the zoned-out Spike. “Ask him. He has claws.” “It’s in the center of my back,” the minty-gray mare added, her voice slightly muffled by her chin’s proximity to the floor. “You know what’s worse than an itch you can’t scratch?” Quantum didn’t wait for an answer, “One that you know is impossible to scratch. There’s a whole psychological difference. I don’t think I’m ever going to let an itch I can’t scratch bother me again, as long as I know I can scratch it eventually.” Hal bowed his head a little and kept his eyes averted. “…does it hurt?” “Like funny bone pain mixed with throbbing from a week-old broken leg,” Quantum replied. “It’s not fun, but I’ll live.” Hal adjusted his fuchsia argyle turtleneck as though he could feel the heat of the day around his collar. “…Tissy says it’s going to get worse. And the two of you ran into each other so forcefully you’ve probably sped up the process a hundred times or more.” “How long?” Quantum asked with a gruff air. “Dunno,” Hal sighed. “But so far not a single pony we’ve met…not even Princess Twilight, was able to keep the pain from driving her mad.” He shut his eyes and shivered, as if the phantom holographic heat had been replaced by bitter cold. “You go crazy, turn into one of those things…and that’s it. Then we find out if whatever happens here will completely unravel society in our own reality.” “I’ve been thinking about that,” Quantum sought to change the grisly subject. “History doesn’t record an epidemic like this striking Ponyville twenty-four years ago, right? And obviously Shypie, Raridash, and Twijack can’t possibly have existed in our reality. So why is Tissy so convinced that failure here could be the end of Equestria as we know it?” Hal grinned and folded his forelegs, almost leaning against the wall before remembering he’d just fall outside. “You’re forgetting the elementary temporal theory that the Accelerator Project was based on, Cutie. The Quantum Vault was never meant to be used the way you used it; just leaping into it without considering and finely tuning the variables of space and time. Here-” Hal began rummaging through an invisible opening Quantum assumed was a bag of some sort that was firmly rooted to his point in spacetime. “I get it Hal, I don’t need a lesson in—” “Like this banana,” Hal produced the fruit and continued his lecture. “Well…okay there are better analogies but this is what I have to work with. Peel it—” He began to do so, “—and you have unraveled fragments of space and time floating around. That’s what you did when you didn’t fine tune the coordinates for your vault. And when you jumped through?” Hal dropped the fruit, which promptly vanished, and stomped his hoof on the ground. “You mixed all the fragments together. That’s the theory, anyway. Anything you do in any reality you vault into might have some affect on, or even bleed into, our own reality. And considering your molecules originated in our reality, you could be the very catalyst that gravitates fragmented events from, say,” he waved at the room, “this reality to our own, as opposed to anywhere else they could potentially go.” Quantum rolled her eyes. “So you’re saying I’m a temporal lightning rod, and this Ponyville I’m in now could actually be fragments from many different ones?” Hal smiled as though his prize student had just been enlightened. “Bingo-bongo. Most of what’s happening here is a reality of its own, which is why Derpy and Spike and every other pony here are indigenous to this place. But the rocks outside or the test tubes on that rack over there? One or two of them could be from another reality altogether, where another rock or test tube is sitting in exactly the same place, at exactly the same time.” He somehow managed to both grin and look grave, “So the more royally you screw up, the worse it gets. If you fail? Not only are your molecules likely to be scattered to the cosmos like you’d originally planned anyway, but you could very well doom us all, as most of whatever reality you screw up in potentially bleeds into our own. In theory, of course.” Hal took a breath and went on, “And before you ask me, Tissy has readings on every single pony we encounter here, and if you remember what I told you back in Baltimare, no readings means nothing you do is likely to affect them. So anything you do here will probably affect them all.” “Great,” Quantum sighed. “Just what I needed to know on an empty stomach.” She found herself staring at her own hoof. “…and it explains why you’re all helping me.” “What?” Hal looked away again, finding himself at a loss, “...you still think that...?” “Muffin?” The conversation was abruptly derailed by a muffin that suddenly appeared atop the book. It had jewels embedded in it that glittered in the sunlight. “Muffin?” Derpy repeated. “I still got a few.” Quantum craned her neck to look up, nearly going cross-eyed trying to bring the pegasus on her back into focus. “What?” Derpy’s honest, pouty frown and the wisp of moon yellow hanging over her lazy eye made Hal blush. There was something about her that reminded him of Tissy, which further reminded him of Quantum and the simpler days when the three of them shared science projects together. Just him and the two complicated mares with simple beauty who were his best friends. “You said your tummy was rumbling, Doc,” Derpy went on. “Mine too. Maybe if we eat this one, it’ll fill us both up!” Quantum narrowed her eyes at the muffin. It looked like it was about as stale and stiff as the gems it was baked with, and she felt her appetite suddenly vanish. All the same, she felt a smile helplessly spread over her cheeks in the face of Derpy’s downtrodden expression and the sheer audacity of her joke. “…thanks Derpy.” Derpy grinned. “So your imaginary friend’s name is Hal? Flamer is a baby dragon, but you already knew that.” “Hey!” At the mention of Derpy’s recently self-declared imaginary friend, Spike perked right up, hopped off the table, and trotted over. “I taught Flamer everything he knows, you know!” The little dragon beamed with pride. Derpy grinned and clapped her hooves. Quantum’s cheeks were on fire worse than in those dreams where she stepped out of the shower to find herself giving a presentation in the middle of physics class. “Hal’s a…pegasus.” The minty mare muttered just loud enough to be heard. “Oh hey! Me too!” Derpy flexed her wings as though she were revealing them for the first time. “What’s he like?” Quantum stared at Hal with a ‘help me’ look in her eyes. The holographic pegasus, as much in need of the levity as any of the solids, could only smile. “You’re supposed to be acting in character. Doctor Hooves probably has an imaginary friend. Scientists are eccentric!” He laughed, “Just look at us!” Quantum was silent for a time; two eager pairs of eyes digging a hole to Saddle-Arabia straight through the top of her head. She finally spoke. “Hal is…my best friend. A-and you know what they say about friendship. That it’s…magic.” Hal’s smile vanished. With a new reason to blush, he adjusted his pocket protector and began booping randomly at his device without looking at it until it emitted a series of high-pitched error beeps in complaint. Startled, he nearly dropped the little control device. But Quantum wasn’t finished. “He’s a…really nice guy. He teaches me things, looks out for me, and…he cares, even when I do stupid things that make me not worth being cared about. He has horrible fashion sense, he’s argumentative, and he’s terrible with the mares—” “Hey!” Hal interjected. “—but he has a heart of gold, forgives every trespass, and I’d be totally lost without him. He looks before I leap, and he’s more than I deserve.” Hal was rubbing the side of his neck and staring at the floor. “…Cutie I…thanks, um…” He sounded like a schoolcolt about to ask the filly of his dreams to the prom, and he was thankful when Derpy broke the moment up. Except that she was pointing straight at him. “You mean him?” The muffin mare grinned. “You’re right, he has funny taste in clothes.” Derpy looked down, “And you look kinda funny too, Doc. Sorta like a mare. And a unicorn.” The jaws of the two reality-dislocated ponies in the room simultaneously dropped. “Wh-what…?” Quantum could barely speak, “…you can…see him? How is that possible…?” Hal was beeping buttons so fast it was as if he was trying to knock them right off his keypad. “I-I have no idea!! Tissy says…Tissy says…” he huffed, “Dammit stop typing faster than I can read…” Spike stared in Hal’s direction, then fixed the two conjoined mares with a look. “Huh? I don’t see anypony…what are you talking about?” Derpy had an idiot grin on her face and was waving at Hal. Hal grinned nervously and held up a foreleg, before turning back to his readouts. “Okayokayokay…Tissy scanned you and she says your brainwave patterns are starting to merge with Derpy’s. So somehow she’s begun to be able to perceive…what you can perceive. Though chances are I’m barely there to her, like a ghost; to her, you and Doctor Hooves are probably more like blurry afterimages superimposed over one another in a photograph.” He raised his voice beyond a necessary level, “Derpy! Can you hear me?” Derpy flicked an ear and tilted her head. Her lips matched the movements of Hal’s, and twenty seconds later she finally uttered, “Nope! But I can read lips real good!” She put a hoof on Quantum’s head and forcibly turned it, removing the hoof only with a painful ripping sensation. “Hey, can you see Flamer? He’s right over there! Sometimes he helps me make muffins. Actually the rock muffins were his idea.” “Rock muffins are the best idea ever!” A grin expanded across Spike’s face and contracted back into confusion faster than a single breath. “Sooo…are you guys starting to lose it from the sick or what? Cause I’m not into that whole bleeding with leeches thing.” Quantum was still whimpering in pain from the sudden hoof application and removal. Her voice softened. “…I’m gonna die, Hal. I might as well do it with a clear conscience. Or at least clearer than the last time I tried.” Hal’s beeping and booping slowed when he noticed the soft blush on Quantum’s cheeks. He remembered the previous conversation and faltered. “I…Cutie listen, I…” Derpy’s brightness never failed her – not even when a shudder and a rasping cough wracked her flanks. “Aw Doc, we’re not gonna die. We’re just gonna turn into a new pony. Maybe we’ll be like Shypie. She sure seems happy.” Humbled by Derpy’s endless enthusiasm. Hal and Quantum could do little but stare at once another in silence. They didn’t realize they were even looking at each other until Spike was suddenly in between them. He pointed at the still-open book on the floor, with the rock hard muffin still atop it. His eyes were as big as wagon wheels. “Doc, we gotta do something. You said this book would help us…” Quantum had little choice but to turn her attention to the little dragon. She felt her softness glaze over and tighten into frustration along with her stomach. “Can you read it?” “Well, no, but—“ “Because I can’t read it. Derpy can’t read it either.” Derpy pointed at Hal, “Can he read it?” Hal only shrugged. “Tissy can’t place the dialect or the vocabulary. Even Princess Twilight has no idea, and if even she doesn’t have a clue, it must be older than any of her books. I’m sorry Cutie,” he said heavily, “but…I can’t help you this time.” Quantum slammed the book shut with her magic and utterly failed at throwing a tantrum when she realized she couldn’t suddenly get up and trot away. She grunted, forcing herself and Derpy off the floor until the weight suddenly lightened dramatically. She glanced over at a nearby mirror, and was greeted by an image of Doctor Hooves, his brown coat mottling into gray along his back. Derpy was laying on top of him, smiling as she beat her wings just enough to give the doctor on his hooves. “Spike,” Quantum watched the doctor sigh into the mirror, “it’s over. Unless you have some incredibly advanced ancient computer or something…that…can…” “What’s a computer?” Spike furrowed his brow. He waved his arm in front of Quantum’s eyes and tried to get her attention, but the minty mare and her pudgy, holographic friend were sharing a lightbulb moment. “The computer pad!” Hal was practically dancing. “It’s twenty-thousand years old and it’s way past any technology we have in Equestria! If there’s any way to translate a language so old Equestria has no records of it at all, the computer has to be it!” Quantum’s brightness waned. “But…we can’t operate it. It has a mnemonic interface. The only reason I was able to trick Tilt’s cronies into thinking Hole Card was a guard brigade back in Baltimare was by trying to access the thing incorrectly so many times it set off a security alarm.” She pointed to her temple, “Without a data port drilled into my head leading straight to my cerebral cortex, getting it to do something that complicated is as much fiction as the idea of having a jack-in port in my brain in the first place.” Hal felt a thickness rising in his throat, but he fluffed his wings indignantly and narrowed his eyes, as if to challenge fate itself. “It’s better than nothing! Tissy and Princess Twilight are doing all they can, but…this is something we can do in the meantime. Just try it?” Quantum glanced down at the leg pouch Hal had burned out part of the Accelerator’s matrix just to provide her with. Still out of phase, both it and it’s contents remained invisible to anypony that couldn’t also see Hal. It sported the Canterlot Academy of Sciences class of 2039 logo. Inside, it held a thin, hoofheld computer device that predated all of Equestria by twenty thousand years – a civilization Quantum had witnessed die. And so far as she knew, there was no way to operate the device without plugging the snakelike appendage that would slink out of it whenever it was activated straight into her head. In 2039, it was laughable fantasy. Twenty millennia prior, it was a day at the office. “It…can’t hurt to try.” Quantum finally agreed. She didn’t get past unsnapping the pouch flap before a tremor sufficient enough to send several beakers crashing to the floor rocked the laboratory. Spike, who was simmering with confusion and about to pop, scattered his thoughts all over the floor like marbles and sprinted for the door. This time when he pulled on the knob, the entire door simply popped off its hinges. Discarding the splintered object he stared outside…and froze. “Spike…?” Quantum offered, as if the word alone were enough to request an explanation of what the little dragon was seeing. “…g-go…” Spike choked, and then bounded back into the room, waving his arms in panic. “Go! We gotta go! NOW!!” “What?” Quantum sputtered, “Why?” A section of the wall of the laboratory began to glow with multicolored light. As if caught in a powerful gravity field, the wall simply…pulverized, crumbling in on itself, subjected to stress levels that were only theoretical - even in 2039. Quantum stared, and found she couldn’t move. And it wasn’t because of the pegasus on her back. Twijack was there. An accusatory fire of damnation was burning in the apple-princess’s eyes, but it paled in comparison to the monstrosity she brought with her. There, standing more than twice Twijack’s height, its horn still aglow with the colors that had rent the very walls like paper, was a tall, elegant alicorn in the splotched colors of night and day. Its mane and tail, both constantly whipping like banners caught in a malignant wind, could easily have enveloped Quantum whole, with Derpy still attached. Its rump was half covered in a black blotch, with dueling symbols of sun and moon on its flanks that anypony could easily recognize. “…m-mother of…” Hal’s warm, burnt orange coat was so pale that the fear-accelerated blood throbbing through his temples was nearly visible. He didn’t even bother trying to press any buttons. “Cutie…get out of here…don’t wait for an explanation from Tissy, just GO!” Quantum could practically feel the huffing breaths of the two shocking beings before her. They both fixed her with a seething gaze that made her instantly weak in the knees - if not for Derpy’s wings, the minty mare would simply have collapsed from fear. Doctor Hooves had robbed the princess’s cradle, and Twijack had called in the royal cavalry. “D-do we have a back door in this place?” The words rattled out through Quantum’s chattering teeth. Derpy looked down incredulously. “Sure Doc. It’s in the back.” The new monster – Quantum mentally dubbed it ‘Lunestia’, glared at the aquarium-like container in the middle of the doctor’s lab that Quantum had learned used to contain an invention of his – flameless fireworks. With barely a hint of effort on the part of the merged princess, the reinforced glass glowed with magic, bypassed cracking, and simply exploded into thousands of dangerous shards, the suspension liquid inside drenching everything within ten hooves in all directions. “Sp-Spike…” Quantum sputtered, “Spike!!” Spike was already fleeing for the back door. Only the shock of actually being addressed stopped him. “D-doc!? C’mon we gotta get outta here!!” “No.” “No!?” “Cutie,” Hal was backing away as well, hologram or no. “I dunno what you think you’re planning but you CANNOT fight those things. There’s three of the most powerful ponies in Equestria in there combined with an earth pony whose steadfastness is a legend even in our time.” Hal recalled Quantum’s motives when she first leapt into the Accelerator, and a horrible thought struck him, “There could still be a way out of all of this Cutie…don’t just throw your life and Derpy’s away—” Twijack launched herself on powerful hind legs and sailed straight towards the Quantum/Derpy connection. The only way to dodge was for Quantum to throw herself off balance on purpose and skid across the slick floor, coming up with several shards of glass embedded in her flank. She winced, checked that Derpy was still breathing and conscious – and then began barking out orders. “Spike! Get the book! Stuff anything else you can find into your satchel, and get the hell out of here! We’ll cover you!” “C-cover!?” Hal exploded, “Cutie that’s suicide!!” “Princess Twilight said it herself, Hal!” Quantum called, “we lose that book and it’s all over!” Spike, momentarily awed by the doctor’s sheer audacity, felt a welling of dragon pride swell in his breast. He stood tall, sprinted forward, and nabbed up the yellow book, stuffing it in his satchel. He then went about grabbing any small objects he could that looked as though they would be of any use – sealed beakers, instruments, and so forth clattered into his bag one after another. Quantum, still on her side, craned her neck to glance at Derpy. She was counting on the ditsy pegasus and her amazing courage. “You ready for this?” She wasn’t disappointed when the wall-eyed mare saluted her yet again. “Rodger dodger!” Twijack snarled and drew a bead on Spike, but the newly conjoined mares were suddenly right in her path; Derpy’s wings beating furiously just to keep them standing. “Hey ugly!” Quantum chided. “I scribble in dictionaries and wipe my butt with encyclopedia pages! How about that!?” Hal began booping buttons and staring at his readouts as though he were waiting for the final play of a hoofball tournament. “Tissy Tissy help me out here..! Quantum’s going coltcrap craaaaazy on us again!” Twijack fell into a crouch, her hackles high and her wings spread low as if she intended to launch herself into the sky. Rather than attacking right off, she began circling Quantum and Derpy like a predator, and it didn’t take long to figure out why - though she was still towering regally, Lunestia was doing the same thing. The only two corporeal ponies left in the lab who were not infused with the power of a princess suddenly found themselves stuck in the middle. As Quantum and Derpy kept switching views between their two assailants, Hal was flitting all over the room like a startled breezy, smacking at controls, phasing through things, and scrounging for an answer. A device studded with vacuum tubes and arcing bolts of energy sailed right through him on a trajectory for his companions, but Derpy managed to pull them out of the way. Seconds later, Quantum deftly sidestepped a wooden contraption that looked like a bumpercar that had been ripped from the ceiling by magic. Hal paused to consider the mingled pegasus and unicorn. Somehow they’d managed to avoid being crushed under debris being tossed at them from two different directions. When the answer came to him, he smacked his forehead so hard he nearly staggered himself. “It’s teamwork!” Hal shouted, “Cutie! They’re out of their heads with anger and disease! Disorganized! They can’t flank you if you can watch both of them at once! Keep it up!” Quantum felt a rush of adrenaline she hadn’t experienced since she was beating Tilt at his own game in 2027, with her mother looking on. “Derpy! Hup!” “Hup Hup!” The pegasus responded. With a sudden blast of her wings she lifted the pair safely over the good doctor’s recently acquired bowling ball, which had been lobbed at them like the shot of a cannon. The ball went bouncing into a support beam, shattering it easily with the force that had been used to toss it. The laboratory shuddered. Several other heavy objects were already incoming. Quantum’s lightbulb went off again. “Derpy…” She grinned. “…bring it down.” In the initial stages of the disease, the minds of the two ponies were literally beginning to merge into one. As a result, they could anticipate one another’s moves faster than the most skilled team of Wonderbolts to ever live. Each pair of eyes stayed focused on the repetitive, unimaginative smashing attacks stemming from the impaired minds of their opponents. With each new assault, they made a point of moving in front of another support beam, waiting for it to splinter under the force of more sparking, obliterated machinery. By the time enough of the twisted flotsam was sufficiently damaged to start a fire, portions of the roof were already collapsing. In the instant it took for their attackers to become distracted by attempting to stamp out the flames or simply rearing like mindless stablehorses, Quantum eyed a hole in the ceiling and supplied her partner with the final leg of her plan. “Derpy! Go!” As Doctor Hooves’s laboratory collapsed into rubble, Derpy burst forth from the roof, her wings beating too fast to see. Hal was in the sky - he pointed out Spike, who had already reached the edge of town on foot. “The hills!” Hal barked. “Tissy says there’s a cave half a mile away due east. That rubble won’t hold them for long, so grab Spike and disappear!” Quantum had only known Derpy for a short time. At first she had though the lazy-eyed, slackjawed mare to be nothing but a frustration. But she had to admit – Derpy’s courage and ability to cast off exhaustion until she got the job done was as awe-inspiring as her impossible resistance to pessimism. As the party fled through the air, Quantum thought that with these two by her side, she could accomplish anything. Even the impossible feat that still lay ahead.