*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*...Shakes...*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*
"Hey! Tell me what you 'decided' on! Are you even listening?"
"Yes, yes. I am listening to you, but telling you the plan with the subject right in front of us is about as stupid as telling the enemy your plan of attack, is it not?" Care shot back passively, finally acknowledging me.
I cringed in disgust at his response, but was understanding of it. At least the implication of it was that he was going to tell me once Vinyl wasn't on the scene anymore.
Speaking of Vinyl, she was going along perfectly fine with this, though her smile had dropped at this point. Her face was straight without any emotion, and her head was held low so her eyes were hidden from view - hiding my only way of reading her emotions. I had been surprised enough when she opted not to fight back when being locked up or what not, and even though she would smile, she had to have been feeling something. But even then she would smile, forced or not.
But now she didn't, I didn't know why, and it was actually scary.
A small room was our destination, though it wasn't a sleek white like the rest of the more modern looking parts of the building. This one had dull blue wallpaper with a few paintings hung up on the wall and a couple cabinets with labels on them with really big words that I had no idea the meaning of. The most prominent thing was the examination table in the center of it.
"Take a seat please." Care said, opening the door and letting Vinyl in.
He shut the door and opened a door directly adjacent to it, which lead into a smaller room with walls that lacked anything to cover the cement of the foundation. Inside this one was a few chairs and a couch, a small refrigerator, a window into the room that Vinyl entered - one sided window most likely - and one particularly interesting cabinet with warning labels on it. I assumed it was where the dangerous things that only Care could handle were at.
As I walked in, he simply stared through the one sided window. I stared at him in anticipation of an explanation, but one never came.
"Tell me."
"The plan?" He asked rhetorically.
I didn't answer.
He let out a sigh and rubbed his temples.
"I talked to Silver and Flint. Flint was panting heavily - a rare thing to see - and Silver was grinning. She said that she was holding back, and that she knew Vinyl was too." He said flatly.
I waited for an elaboration.
"Silver says that she doesn't want her being a threat. She picked up on the fact that she didn't have her magic with her, and that if she did then she would've been more serious. She's adept at getting a sense of someone's potential power, and she was visibly serious about Vinyl's." He said.
I scoffed.
"So what? You think she's just going to sit there while you try and kill her? I'm sorry but that's not happening." I said.
"You think she could actually break out of the bonds of the lab to stop us killing her? Even if she did, we could just get Stone to restrain her." He said turning to me, an almost sad look on his face.
I felt my jaw tighten and my teeth grit.
"Who said anything about her stopping her death?" I said dangerously, letting him know that I wasn't on his side in this situation. If it were just me, him and Vinyl right now; I would've freed Vinyl the second me and him were alone.
"Hm. Very well." He said, turning back to the window and watching as Vinyl struggled to get onto the padded examination table.
"The plan is simple. They told me to overload her sense of judgement and turn her more towards a primal instinct that Vampires of a more feral nature operate off of." He said.
"In english?"
"Basically, berserk her. Like turning a domestic house cat into a lion." He said without hesitation. I guess he had to explain things to others a lot.
I chuckled at the idea.
"You understand that you won't be the first to have tried to control Vinyl, right? Last guy who did it got knocked through two floors of concrete."
"We don't plan on it." He said, tone as cold and bland as rock.
"You say he attempted to control her - to alter her opinions and feelings of things against her will. We don't. We plan to simply remove them, or suppress them as much as possible, and resort her back to instinct. Removing something is much simpler than changing it." He explained.
I felt a cold chill come across my neck.
He was right about that.
We went silent for a minute or two, both of us soaking in the silent agreement we had both come to.
"You sound sad about that." I said simply.
"Would you not be?" He said back in an instant.
I tilted my head and raised a brow.
"I'm sad because you guys are about to, from what you're telling me, forcefully experiment on a friend of mine. You don't know her, why would you have a feeling in the matter?" I explained, getting a sad chuckle out of him.
"I've gotta say, it's hard to keep up the act of being sided with those people out there." He said, turning to me with eyes that reflected firmness.
I had noticed he looked a bit conflicted at times in the observation room and cells, but never to the point of thinking he was disgusted by it all.
"I'm a doctor first and foremost, don't ever doubt that. You think this is what I signed up for when I joined this 'order?' I joined this to provide medical aid to the hunters and vampires alike, not to perform experiments on people." He said pointing to Vinyl and air quoting the term 'order'.
I was surprised by what he said to say the least, my eyes going wide.
"I do it because if I refused, they'd have to either kill me, lock me up, or keep me under heavy surveillance at all times so I don't spill their secrets."
"This," he said, waving his hooves around to the cement room, "is the only place that I can truly think. It was a demand I made if they planned to keep me here. Nobody else is allowed in here, as I know exactly who they would go and tell."
He looked back to me, anticipating my question.
"Why do you think I let you in?" He asked sullenly. It could have passed for rhetorical.
Silence once more.
"Because I know you won't snitch, that's why." He said, answering his own question.
"Why don't you tell them you don't want to do it then? I'm sure you have control over what you do."
"You think I haven't? I've complained for almost my entire service here and the only results I've yielded are a few new policies loosely preventing torture - which may as well not even exist considering what goes on already - and a booth for hunters to use when they want to write a complaint." He said, looking back at me with an almost angered look on his face.
He didn't answer the second portion of the question, but I decided not to push the issue of why he couldn't be in control of his actions. I was sure he'd say it eventually.
"Why not run?"
He sighed sadly, all his anger gone in a flash.
"Because I fear that if I leave, someone much more crueler and harsher than I will take my place. At least with me I can do the bare minimum and pass it. Imagine it: getting some eager to impress medical madhat with some all too often heard traumatic backstory to make them despite vampires. They'd go above and beyond the call for torturous experiments and twisted endeavors to try and rise through the ranks to where I am now."
At this point I was silent from both shock at his answers and from a lack of questions. He was self aware of how deep down into a hole he was, and at this point he was just explaining it to me. Prior to this, he had put off an aura of, at the very least, easygoing - but I guess he had to vent some way or another.
His head was held low now, a dark look coming over him as he turned back.
"Either way, I don't want to do what I just told you, but I'm going to do it for both my own sake and hers. If I don't comply, they might let me off with a warning and then tell me to do it anyways. My second refusal and they'd think it was her fault, torture her until I couldn't bear it any longer and cave to their demands."
He waited a moment, as if to let what he just said settle with me, before walking over to an intercom on the side of the room. He pressed in the button, a quick buzz of static going off before silence settled.
"Bring down kit C-43: Heavy and Kit C-43: Heaviest."
I had no idea what those where.
In mere minutes, three ponies walked into the room in front of us, carrying with them two crates that opened up similarly to tackle boxes for fishermen. Inside each of them were maybe a dozen or so vials of colorful liquids and syringes.
Care waited for the group to leave before he started towards the door himself, not bothering to speak to me as he closed the door behind him. An odd sound followed with the door closing, though I didn't bear to listen to it as I simply stared at Vinyl.
It wasn't long before he entered the room in front of me, moving near the table where Vinyl was sat on top of.
He began a conversation with her from the looks of it, though when Vinyl began to speak back to him, his face went wide with surprise and what had to have been pain. I couldn't hear the words exchanged or even read their lips for that matter; whatever Vinyl had said in a brief sentence or two had shaken the already "dead inside" doctor back to life, and then killed him again.
After their little exchange of words, he didn't make a move to start another conversation, and instead went straight to the box of vials.
He pulled out two from the box that was labeled "Heavy" and one from the one labeled "Heaviest". Using those handy deduction skills I had picked up over the years, I figured that the "Heaviest" one was the heaviest and most concentrated dose of whatever in Celestia's name was in that syringe.
I thought of going into the room with Care and Vinyl, but figured that I'd just end up making things worse off for the both of them and possibly even myself.
Well, that and hitting on the door didn't look to be unlocking it.
Looking back into the room, I saw that care was hesitating with the injection, lingering the needle just above Vinyl's arm that had since been strapped down in resistant leather and clasps of metal.
The point of those two bindings weren't to hold her down, but to stall her if she tried to escape the injection. If she had tried getting out as soon as they went on she could've, but Vinyl simply sat there for some reason. Typically they doped up vampires on medicines that make them pass out before doing anything, but I guess Care was confident enough with Vinyl.
His hesitation passed and he slid the needle into her arm, gently pressing down on the back of syringe as a colorless liquid began to go in.
Care removed the needle and began cleaning up the scene before walking out, nothing seeming to have happened.
Minutes seemed to tick by as Vinyl sat there without anything visibly happening to her, and I was beginning to think that her body had resisted it or that it was a dud.
I was quickly proven wrong.
Her eyes went wide and her pupils narrowed, her entire body stiffening up in one big, horrific motion. She didn't shout or scream like it looked like she would've, but the way she was moving suggested she was in pain. It was the first time I had ever seen Vinyl let on a hint of distress. She had typically been able to bear it and grin, but this time there wasn't a smile to be found on her face.
Her body, all at once, relaxed and she fell back down to the table, the metal clasps and leather straps having been long broken.
I felt like I was going to puke.
That combined with the overwhelming sense of guilt I had was more than enough to take the strength from me, causing my knees to wobble and give out.
The door opened again.
"She felt no pain, so don't think that. It was only her muscles tightening. The most damage done was in her head. She's borderline unconscious right now, and extremely suggestible."
A gurgling in my stomach and a pulsing in my head started up when he spoke, like a bad migraine.
"Shut up." I spat.
"It was not my preference to do this. I told you that the reason I was doing it was to protect myself and he-"
I felt my hooves spring on their own as I moved, through my eyes couldn't quite make out where they were taking me. The pain in my hoof that had just started to die down quickly lit back up again, and something warm now covered parts of it.
Looking down at it as my eyes started to catch up, I saw blood.
My eyes trailed over to General Care, who was now getting up after being knocked flat on his back. He had a trail of red coming down from his mouth, though his eyes didn't suggest that he was in too much pain.
"Too much strain on that hoof won't be good for it. It's already bleeding as is." He commented sadly.
I put the hoof back on the ground and walked over towards the window looking at Vinyl, a dull throbbing coming from it with every step, and found her limp still.
"Vinyl..."
*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*...Octavia...*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*
"Well, according to the spot he marked on the map as the base, there is a part of it that's near the edge of the forest." Sweeps said, looking at the map with the help of her light.
We had opted to stay in the forest as we got closer to The Order's base, for both cover whilst getting there and as Sweeps had just said, because we saw that part of the woods were arguably right next to one of the walls that surrounded the base whereas the rest of the wall had an approach where there weren't any trees or cover. It looked a bit odd, carving out the rest of the forest so that you could see someone coming, yet leave the backend of the fortress covered with trees. It looked almost too good to be true for us.
I couldn't quite focus on her too much, my mind had started to wander as we walked through the forest. I wondered what had happened to Vinyl, if they had tried something horrible like the vampires at the castle did, or if Shakes had helped her enough to prevent that. There was also the possibility that Shakes was in just as much trouble, but I personally didn't want to imagine that the both of them were in trouble.
Vinyl's mother seemed to be in a similar situation, her face kind of scrunched up in a look of confliction. I wondered if she had thoughts similar to my own, but figured that if she was they probably wouldn't involve Shakes considering she hadn't met her.
"Hey, so, I know that the plan right now is to just find the place. But, what're we gonna do about getting into it? I mean, I doubt that they'll just let us in and I don't think sneaking in is going to work..." Sweeps asked, trailing off in thought at the end.
"When you have magic, everything is easier dear." Vinyl's mother said.
"Really? What's your plan then?" Sweeps asked genuinely.
"I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise, now would I? I'll just say that magic takes practice. And when you live for as long as I have, you learn some pretty creative spells." She said vaguely.
That caught my attention.
I knew magic was a wide subject, but the kinds of spells you could cast were up to the imagination really. I had heard that time travel had already been done, and knew very well the uses of teleporting thanks to Vinyl. But what could Vinyl's mom know if she was older than even Vinyl? Well, I had actually only seen Vinyl use a few spells - the biggest being teleporting and a basic spell bolt with a few variations of it - so I didn't really know what could happen.
I found myself smiling a little bit as I thought of all of the little spells that Vinyl's mother might have hidden up her sleeve. Walking on water, invisibility, all kinds of things that you'd dream of having if you weren't, well, a unicorn.
"What all kinds of spells do you kn-" I began, only to have it cut short as I ran into something that felt like a wall.
I staggered back a little before looking to see that Vinyl's mom had stopped in her tracks and was looking off into the distance, a disturbed look on her face.
"Miss...Miss Scratch are you okay?" I asked, getting no response and catching Sweeps' attention.
"You okay? Looks like you've seen a ghost?" She said.
I trotted around to see said face, finding it hard to believe that something had scared her that much. But sure enough, her face was paler than usual with her eyebrows arched up and her jaw slack.
Me and Sweeps began to wonder if she had a heart attack or something, but the wonder only changed as her scared face turned to one of pure anger.
The angriest I had seen her ever since meeting her, her nose scrunched up and her nostrils flare while her brows threatened to tilt further inwards than ever before.
Her horn suddenly flared as she began murmuring under her breath.
She began moving forward once again, though with her came chunks of earth that were ripped from the ground and began to float with a red tinge before condensing in on themselves, Vinyl's mother squeezing them hard enough until turned to a fine, powdery substance resembling dust.
I was a little shaken at the sudden 'death march' she seemed to be going through, but more so I made an almost disturbing connection.
"Sweeps?" I asked.
"Hm?" She said, her tone suggesting she was just as confused and shaken as I was.
"Could you describe what Vinyl looked like back when she was marching on the castle? When she was 'shooting salvos of magic'?" I asked.
I hadn't been there for when Vinyl apparently lost it, but Shakes had described it to me soon after and it was strikingly similar to what I was seeing just in front of me.
Sweeps wordlessly raised a hoof to Vinyl's mother, now maybe three of four yards away.