H'ven Sent

by otherunicorn

Chapter 16. Tanked

"What the hell did you pair of reprobates do to me this time?" I demanded. I had lost track of how long I had been trapped down in this laboratory. I had been unconscious for quite a while, I suspected, because I could now feel all of my body again, and that meant the anaesthetic had worn off. They hadn't used the anaesthetic to put me under though. The pain in my head had done that. I extended my fingers from my forehoof and reached up to feel around my horn, where they had injected the first set of modifiers. The skin felt quite normal, which was a relief. I was, however, quite surprised when I went to check the bony nub that was my horn itself. Was being the operative word, because a bony nub it was no longer. And that was a poor choice of words, because longer it was! It felt good, elegant, spiraled, and was probably the length it should have been if it hadn't been tampered with when I was born. It also came with a mental list of a few convenient new program samples, or spells, if you preferred the mythical way of thinking about it. Those had been scrolling through my brain, dream-like, while I had been unconscious.

"She awakes, at last," one of the mad scientists hiding in the cylindrical tank commented. The thing was longer than it was tall, domed plates forming each end. A second, capped cylinder, midway along the body was presumably where they had entered the thing. That cap bristled with connections, both of the plumbing and electrical variety. The whole thing had a heavy, riveted appearance of an ancient pressure vessel, which was probably what it had been.

"And she does sound a little annoyed, at that," the other observed.

"What would you expect?" I growled. "You've been experimenting on me, a living creature with feelings." Not that having feelings should make any difference, I thought.

"Your point being?"

"Arrgh!" I yelled. "It is immoral, indecent, despicable, and downright rotten!"

"But you are our subject. How else are we to advance our science?" one voice offered.

"You don't, you clueless bastards," I spat. "You. Do. Not. Experiment. On. Living. Beings."

"Yes we do," the other corrected me.

"Bah!" Language wasn't failing, in the literal sense, but conceptually, these guys simply weren't getting it at all. "I am NOT your subject!"

"Yes you are. You are here. We let you in for the express purpose of being our subject."

Ah, thus unlocked inner door. Chances were I hadn't been 'qualified' to go through their outer door either, before they unlocked it for me, at any rate..

I advanced on their tank, looking it over, wondering how I could give the contents of it a good scare. Perhaps I could pretend I was going to open it. That would probably upset them. I wondered what they looked like in there after over a millennium of soaking in whatever fluids they had pickled themselves in. Perhaps they were nothing more than a broth, with a computational matrix of modifiers doing all of their thinking. Pony soup. Yum.

"Hmm," I said as I ran my fingers over the connections to the tank. "This tube feeds you from H'ven's nutrient distribution system, and this one takes your waste away to be processed. Ah! This bundle of cables is probably what lets you control the equipment in the room, as well as powering any form of life support you may have in there with you."

"...What are you doing, Aneki?" one asked. The voice sounded concerned.

"Oh, I'm just wondering what you two look like, so I'm working out how to get you out of this big can of soup. Are you are all mushy and gooey, or have your bodies shriveled up?" I said as I tapped on the body of their tank, making a dull thunk, with each tap. The thing certainly sounded full.

"No! Stop!" one yelled into my brain.

"No I won't," I responded. "I want you to see what it feels like when somepony experiments on you against your will."

As I was already listening for it, I heard the relatively quiet sound of the manipulator behind me descending, no doubt a dose of sedative in its grip. Using one of the spell fragments I had learned, I lashed out at the manipulator with my mind, and pushed it away. I was rewarded with some crunching and grinding as I managed to break at least one of its servos. Impressive! Those damn things had been strong enough to hold my weight before.

"You broke our manipulator, our arm!" one exclaimed, somewhat anguished.

"Would you like me to break the next one, too? And the one after that?" I asked sweetly.

"Stop, please stop! Don't break anything else. Do you have any idea how hard it is to repair things when you are trapped in a tank, and locked away from any source of spare parts?" one of them begged.

I leaned against the aforementioned tank and tapped my fingers on it again. "Okay, I've stopped, for the moment. Now, you bastards, what did you do to me while I was unconscious?" I tried again, keeping up my sugary voice. If it was any sweeter they would choke on it.

"We were searching your body for hellite modifiers..." one offered.

"What is a hellite modifier?" I pressed.

"You know, the modifiers that give you Hellites your hard shell, and tough constitution," one answered.

"They are little machines that converted you into a bio-robot," the other expanded.

"Hellite? The guys up above call this sort of body 'Hellspawn', as if we were members of a race, or something," I stated.

"Sounds racist to me," one voice agreed.

"Yes, yes, maybe racist, but you are a race of sorts. You Hellites do come from Hell, after all," the other expanded.

"No I don't. I'm from the H'ven dome, not from the underlevels," I insisted. "I was an ordinary pony until a few weeks ago."

"That is..." one started.

"...extremely unusual. But your knowledge of Hell seems lacking, so we believe you," the other finished. So Hell was that old? It wasn't just something cooked up by recent generations?

"It is very rare for a conversion to occur outside of Hell itself. I presume," the first added. "I only recall hearing of one case."

"Oh, really? Stop spouting non-facts, would you? You two have been locked in a tank for the duration of recorded history, or damn near close enough to it, so how could you hear anything?" I argued. "Anyway, why do you reprobates want the hellite modifiers?"

"So we can become Hellites, of course!" they chorused.

"What? You mean you aren't already?" I spluttered. For some reason, I had assumed anypony behind a door with a hoof scanner would be Hellspawn... Hellite.

"Of course not. If we were, we wouldn't have needed to pickle our bodies to stay alive down here," one stated.

"But not a single modifier was to be found. Your conversion is complete, so there was no need for them to remain," the other added.

"None the less, we still expected to find a few hold-outs, not a total lack of them," the first added.

"And learning that your conversion was so recent, I would have expected to find an abundance of them," the second concluded.

"Oh, the ponies up at Central zapped me good and proper to make sure none had survived," I explained. "I guess they did a good job."

"A very good job, yes. None left. Absolutely all gone," they agreed.

"But clearly my conversion can't be complete. My head isn't black, or can't you see that?" I asked, wondering how they could do things around this lab if they were effectively blind.

"We can see your pretty head, and yes, your conversion is complete."

"Just how thorough were you guys being? Did you cut me up again or something?" I demanded an answer.

"No," one answered.

"Or something," the other said at the same time.

"Spill it, before I spill you," I threatened.

"We did not cut you open. We used magic to scan you. We do have the magics, remember?"

"So, you've seen all of me, inside and out, is what you are saying? I asked.

"Yes, yes. We can investigate you in many ways."

They weren't kidding. They had been investigating the contents of my language centers earlier. Just how much of me had these guys studied. I knew they couldn't have absorbed everything, though, because how can one mind fit the contents of another within itself?

"And that would be the second reason you bastards were welded in here. Ponies must have been tired of the extreme invasions of privacy," I muttered.

"No, no. We learned those skills during our incarceration. With nothing else to do, we have been writing new spells, practicing on each other, getting better..."

"Practiced to the point you can't tell yourselves apart from each other, I suspect," I muttered to myself, then with a louder voice, continued, "Ah, so this time it won't be enough to weld you in here, eh? Should we pour in molten metal? And if you spent that much time writing spells, how come your language transfer spell sucked?"

"Ah, that was not a contingency we had contemplated. We never imagined language, either yours, ours or both would change so much with time. We had to throw that spell together while we were trying to talk to you," one explained.

"And we had to hold you still so you would not break the spell. It was not a very good spell," the other admitted.

"Okay, subject change time, you two. What are your names?" I asked.

"Brainstorm," they replied together. I facehoofed.

"Your names, one at a time, please," I tried again.

"Brainstorm."

"Brainstorm," they replied one after the other.

"You have to be kidding me," I stated. "You really both have the same name."

"Yes, yes."

"Doesn't that get confusing?" I asked.

"Not really. If I refer to Brainstorm, I mean him," they chorused.

"And if someone else needs to address us, it does not matter which replies, so again, there is no problem."

"Bah, I should give you unique names, just to annoy you," I muttered, "but I fail to see the point."

"Smart mare," one of them said. I'd given up trying to work out which was which. Apparently they preferred it that way. From this point on, I was going to consider them to be the one and the same, for the sake of my own sanity as much as anything.

"Now, Brainstorm," I said, trying to redirect the conversation, "you used to develop modifiers down here in this laboratory, even though it was illegal?"

"This is true. This is true. We developed a cure to the magic inhibitors, did we not?"

"And other things as well. We, out of the goodness of our hearts, were trying to prevent the unicorns from going the same way as the pegasi."

"You mean the winged ponies were real?" I asked, somewhat surprised to have these guys imply they were anything but a legend or a breezie tale.

"Of course they were real, but politicians of old did not like them. Very hard to control!"

"The modifiers they created wrote their genetics out of the gene pool even before we were born."

"But some old pegasi were still alive when we were foals, so we know they existed, even if society has forgotten them."

"Unicorns were a bit hardier, resistant to having their genes rewritten. We were born, after all, but as a breed we were dying."

"So, great creators of modifiers, tell me why you need the Hellite modifiers. Why can't you just create your own?" I asked.

"Very complex modifiers, those. A little too hard for us to recreate without a few clues."

"And even if we could, they would not be compatible with the ones that exist. We do not want two types of the nasty little things running around making a mess of unsuspecting ponies, do we?"

I nodded. "You do have a valid point there."

"So how did you ever get away with setting up this lab in the first place? And how does that relate to the sign on your door? Remember, it has been destroyed. All the same, I can't see you declaring your illegal activities on it."

"It read 'Advanced Weapons Development Laboratories'," Brainstorm replied. "The modifiers were a secret side-line, part of an underground resistance, which, alas, met a fate similar to ours. Officially, we were developing weapons."

"Damn good ones too, but they used unicorn's horns as the power source," Brainstorm explained, "thus our inductance to the underground."

"How successful were your modifiers, then?" I asked.

"You stand before us, a unicorn," Brainstorm stated. "That seems pretty successful to me."

"But my horn was crippled and magic nonexistent," I reminded them.

"Yes, but that was caused by those nasty inhibitors they inject into you when you are born. Our modifiers try to reestablish the unicorn genetic pattern when they can. They look for a pattern of genes that belong to unicorns, then correct the genes that allow the horn to grow, as those are what the generally distributed anti-unicorn modifiers change. Without our modifiers, unicorns would be as extinct as pegasi by now. How many of unicorns with crippled horns are there? How many are there with functional horns?"

"Rare, and none at all," I responded. "I thought my nub was a deformity. I have only seen a few others like it in my entire life, and I get around a lot. As for unicorns with functional horns, they simply don't exist. I guess the shortage of horns from dead unicorns will eventually stuff up their technology, won't it?"

"Ah, a pity. Our modifier was not as successful as we had hoped. As for the horns of dead unicorns, I'm sure they have stockpiles," Brainstorm said.

"I thought you said a shortage of unicorn horns was going to make it hard for you to produce weapons," I poked at the hole in their story.

"We were making weapons that could use the dead horns, but our advances make use of live horns, still attached to pony heads! That was why we tried to correct the problem. Losing that option gave us no edge over our competitors."

"I see another hole in your story," I stated. "If modifiers were illegal, and you used them to restore your horns, wouldn't that give yourselves away? Wouldn't that be a monumentally stupid thing to do?"

"We didn't know!" Brainstorm chorused.

"Didn't know what?" I asked.

"We didn't know that making modifiers was illegal! They weren't discussed anywhere. Nothing could be found about them by researching records. They simply appeared to be totally unknown. We thought we were doing something wonderful for ponykind, not to mention helping our business. It wasn't until after we had stuck the advertisements to our foreheads that things became awkward. It was quite the battle of wits after that. Us trying to explain what had happened while researching as hard as we could, using the underground channels that had opened to us, while Central tried as hard as it could to find out what we had done. In the end, when they discovered we had developed concoction ninety two, version eight, they found us guilty in our absence, and sealed us and our experiments in here, writing the whole area off as a hazardous zone."

"Oh," I said. "So fast forward some twelve hundred years, and I walk in."

"We are curious. What do the ponies do for weapons up in the dome now, Aneki?"

"Brainwashing. Keep the ponies sedate. Fill their minds with so much drivel they can't see reality," I answered. "Visible weapons are rare. It's all psychological now."

"I have to admit I don't know what to say about that," Brainstorm admitted, "yet you come from up there and seem to be reasonably aware of what is going on."

"Not as aware as I should have been," I stated. "I was not a member of the mindless masses, but I was also unable to see the bigger picture. In fact, even now I can only see a sliver of it."

"Seeing the bigger picture completely is not possible. Knowing there is a bigger picture is far more important," Brainstorm commented. "And you do. So, would you like to see our weapons? We haven't shown them to anypony in such a long time."

"Sure, why not," I agreed, not that I was really interested in weapons, because weapons were meant to injure and kill.

"Perhaps you would like one for yourself?" Brainstorm suggested.

"No thanks. I have no desire to kill ponies," I responded, shaking my head.

"Aneki," Brainstorm said, suddenly sounding very serious, "there are many things other than ponies against which you can use a weapon. They are also very powerful negotiating aids, even if you never brandish them. Imagine if a group of those Hellite hunting ponies have you cornered. Even if they were armed, all you would need to do was point the weapon in their direction, and they would back away."

"Or that could make them attack," I suggested. "Anyway, the last one I met was so scared of me he killed himself trying to escape."

Their silence was condemning, and not because a pony had died, but because I wasn't keen on taking one of their pride and joy.

"Okay, I give. I'll seriously consider taking one of them, if I find one that suits me," I conceded. "Now, where are they?"

"In our display room, of course," Brainstorm responded. "They sealed it off from the rest of H'ven by welding plates over our display windows and main entry. We haven't had any customers for such a long time."

At that moment, the door at the other end of the room slid away, leaving a semi-transparent window, passing a blue glow from the next room. After a moment, that, presumably some sort of force field, shimmered and collapsed, revealing the sizable chamber beyond, very much displaying an electric blue theme. Chrome and black metal glittered from multiple chest-high display cabinets, each lined with beds of shimmering blue satin. It contrasted somewhat with the room in which I was standing, and extremely with what I expected of this pair.

"Weapon porn?" I murmured, eyes wide, as I was lured a step forward. If presentation sold weapons, these guys had it down to a fine art.

"She understands," Brainstorm whispered to his other self.

---

Author's Note:

If you see blunders, please PM with me. Comments, observations and theories are welcome in the comments.

Comments

[Viking ZX]

Man, every time I think I know where this is going another bit of the puzzle gets revealed and my assumptions change again! Nicely done!

[Nyerguds]

I advanced on their tank, looking it over, wondering how I could give the contents of it a good scare.

Oh, whew. For a moment there I expected her to be 'tanked', after seeing the title. That waking-up scene could've used some more description, in that aspect

"Weapon porn?" I murmured, eyes wide, as I was lured a step forward. If presentation sold weapons, these guys had it down to a fine art.

"She understands," Brainstorm whispered to his other self.

Hah!

---

Whoo. Some interesting insights into history and the 'hellspawn', here. I wonder why she didn't ask Brainstorm what the 'Hellites' actually are, though.

[Fourpony]

Your conversion is complete, so there was no need for them to remain,

So Aneki can keep the quick healing abilities that allowed her to survive a vivisection.

We do not want two types of the nasty little things running around making a mess of unsuspecting ponies, do we?

Interesting they even thought about that. Maybe cause they are worried they would be converted twice.

"Visible weapons are rare. It's all psychological now."

Must use something to hunt the Hellspawn.

"She understands," Brainstorm whispered to his other self.

Me too... I like my long rifles.

[Skulljack17]

"So we can become Hellites, of course!" the chorused.

Should be 'they' chorused here, instead of 'the'.

Interesting to see how the two calling themselves Brainstorm think and talk to Aneki. I feel their argument about having another way to defend herself is a good one. Better to have an option and not need it, than need it and not have it available.