Final Mission

by Sharp Quill

11. The Tour

“Should I bother asking questions?” I sort of snarked. My heart just wasn’t in it.

The rabbit came right up to me and laid down on the grass herself, whiskers twitching. “I’ll take you back to your own realm soon. We need you to be here while we prepare for your next reset, no thanks to that poison joke.”

It looked like Zecora was right, judging from the way she had spat out those last few words. Apollo was right, too, for that matter. “And where, exactly, is here?” I asked, expecting the same sort of non-response I had gotten from her before.

“This is the Nexus. All realms, including yours, are embedded within.” Her eyes wandered about us. “I’m sure you’ve noticed the unusual geometry of this place.”

An actual answer. Dare I hope for others? “Hard to miss it,” I sarcastically replied.

“You’ll get use to it, in time,” she nonchalantly replied. “What you’re seeing is sort of like a three dimensional ribbon that snakes around a higher dimensional space, splitting and rejoining over and over as it goes past all the realms.”

I gave her a blank look.

“The straightest possible lines are still curved here?” she offered. “That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

I closed my eyes and groaned. Not that any of that mattered to me.

“It took me a while to get used to it too.”

I reopened my eyes. “No offense, but how long before I go home?”

The rabbit’s horn lit up. “You still have poison joke residue on you. I have a spell that will remove it.”

A aquamarine glow surrounded me. There was a spell for that? Not even Twilight knew of one, so far as I knew. While this was much better than using that special shampoo, I wasn’t going to let it distract me. “You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out.

The glow lasted a few seconds longer before fading away. “You shouldn’t think of that realm as your home, not anymore.”

Yeah, yeah, I get it. Thread of existence being unraveled and all that. “So what is home?” I droned. “This place?”

“Basically… yes.” She gave me a wry smile. “It’s not so bad, honest.” She stood up. “Let me show you around. We got some time to kill, and you’re here, so we might as well.”

I got to my hooves. “Just so you know, I’m going to keep asking questions.”

“And believe it or not, I’m authorized to answer them—well, some of them.” She started hopping towards a cluster of buildings. “It’s against protocol for you to have been brought here so soon, but… well… poison joke. That doesn’t mean we have to lock you up somewhere until we’re ready to send you back to your realm.”

“Not sending me back is not an option, because of the resets.”

“Correct.”

No surprises there. I didn’t mind the tour; not so much as to familiarize myself with my alleged future home, but to better understand what I was up against—what Celestia herself had been up against. The cluster of buildings up ahead were refreshingly normal. All had four unambiguous walls and a roof. None were over two stories high. It looked like a miniature town more than anything else.

I continued to pump my guide for answers. “The reset won’t erase my existence from here,” I stated, not asked. That was the case in the cat-realm, after all.

“Only your realm is affected by that,” she said in that odd cadence imposed by her hopping. “Your presence in that other realm has created… complications that are being handled right now.”

“And my presence here? That doesn’t add to the… complications?”

“No. The Nexus exists outside of time as we understand it.” She gave me a smile. “It’s certainly outside of my understanding.”

Which, come to think of it, would explain something. “You remember the conversation we had when I, uh, accidentally triggered a reset.”

We had entered the “town”—for lack of a better term—and were approaching what looked like an apartment building.

“I was outside of time, relative to your realm, when that happened. You were too, once it did happen. We were both in Nexus time.”

Which, I guessed, was why the resets had no effect on my memories, my body, or on anything I was carrying. It must have been within Discord’s power to sidestep the resets, yet evidently he didn’t—maybe, because if he had not participated in the reset, he would not remember the modified history. I certainly did not remember it.

The rabbit stopped in front of a door, numbered one-one-six. She levitated a key out of the bag she kept above her belly and opened the door. “This will be your temporary home, until you get established.”

We went inside. The rabbit stayed near the entrance while I walked around. The kitchen had the expected appliances. There was a bed in the bedroom. In the living room there were chairs, a sofa, a table, and lights. Nothing fancy, but serviceable.

“You can leave some of your stuff here,” she said as I walked back to the front door. “It’ll be safe from the resets.”

“Thanks for the offer,” I said politely enough, “but I’m still going to decline.” I was going to undo that curse they had put on me. This was never going to be my home, temporary or otherwise.

“The sooner you accept this,” she countered, simply stating the facts, “the easier it’ll be.” She hopped back outside. I followed. “As you can see, across the street are various establishments to fulfill your needs.”

Nopony was about. I’d yet to see another soul. How many were in this ‘Nexus?’ Were they all kidnapped from other realms, like me? I was getting the impression this rabbit hadn’t been born here.

My eyes scanned the aforementioned businesses. A general store, a salon, a bakery, and on and on. Okay, not everypony could be… whatever this rabbit was. This… place was still a town, and like any town it had a lot of jobs that needed doing.

Did it need a skilled confectioner?

I gave the rabbit my hardest stare yet, practically drilling a hole with my eyes. “Why me?”

“That,” she carefully said, “is one of the questions I am not authorized to answer.”

I wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily. “Discord mentioned I had failed some sort of test.”

She looked away. “I’m not going to comment on that.”

A really small elephant, about the size of a really large pony, came out of the bakery carrying a full bag with its trunk. No wings or horn on this one. How many different species are there?

“Fine. How about this question: Once I’m here for good, what will I do with my life?”

“That’s mostly up to you. No one would object if you opened a candy store. We do offer resources to help newcomers get established.”

No one? Well, with all the different species here… Anyway, I was pretty sure I wasn’t in this mess because of my talent for candy making. “That wasn’t my only career,” I pointedly said.

“I am aware of that.” She began hopping down the road. “Follow me.”

So I followed her. What else was I going to do?

We went down the road a bit, then made a turn into an alley—except it wasn’t an alley… not exactly. The ground curved gently downwards until it was going straight down, gradually widening into its own landscape.

The rabbit had not paused, of course. I hurried up. Never did I feel as if I was ascending or descending; if I closed my eyes, I would never have known that the ground wasn’t completely flat. I’m never going to get used to this. Nor would I ever need to, as far as I was concerned.

I looked back the way we came… and stopped. I had expected to see the underside of that town, even if that underside had plants, roads, and buildings of its own. And I did see a bit of that, right around that “alley,” but it then curved away out of sight—curvature that had not existed on the topside. Mostly what I saw was… stuff that could not be seen from the town, and the surrounding stuff that could be seen from the town was no longer visible. This was simply physically impossible.

The unicorn rabbit had noticed I had stopped and came back for me as I stared incomprehensibly into the distance. “Like I said, this is a higher dimensional space. We just took a turn in one of those extra dimensions.”

I blinked, hard. “Uh, okay.” I focused my eyes on the rabbit, the better to not see this crazy place. “How was this all created?”

My escort resumed hopping. “No idea. How was any realm created?”

Couldn’t argue that. I had no idea how my own realm had come about, not the origin of the Sun or the Moon or the ground. Celestia might know—maybe—but nopony else did. It wasn’t even myth or legend.

“I, uh, see your point.” Did having more dimensions really make this realm’s origin more mysterious?

But then Zecora came to mind. Maybe some did know.

We were walking through what looked like a park, mostly grass but with bushes and flowers and some low trees to either side. “Is this landscape natural or does some… one maintain it?”

“Nothing is native to this realm. Someone planted it at some point, and it does need some care.”

There didn’t seem to be any clouds. Did it ever rain? And where the hay did that sunlight come from? All good questions, to be sure, but their answers weren’t very meaningful right now. A better question occurred to me. To ask it, I trotted to catch up to the rabbit. “I never did get your name.”

“Beyond,” she replied. “Do you prefer to go by Bon Bon or Sweetie Drops?”

“Your name is ‘Beyond?’”

“Indeed it is!” she singsonged. “You’ll discover that different species have different approaches to names.”

“Yeah, I’ve already seen that.” The cats, for example. “As for my preferred name… Sweetie Drops is my real name, but I’ve been going by Bon Bon for so long now… I guess I don’t really care.”

We were coming up on a lone building. It was one of those. My eyes refused to make sense of it. The walls did not join to make a sensible building. I couldn’t tell which wall was inside and which was outside; for some of those walls, for both sides of those walls, I could trace a path that indisputably placed it inside, and a different path that placed it outside. It gave me a headache.

I tried not to look at it. “Where are you taking me?”

“Through that up ahead.” Beyond looked at it as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. “The walls were put there to make it comprehensible to beings like us, believe it or not. That region is especially convoluted, bringing distant points into close proximity.”

We approached the—for lack of a better word—entrance. “That’s comprehensible?” I droned.

“With practice.”

Without hesitating, Beyond crossed the threshold and grabbed hold of a long, metal rod that was just floating there, and left the ground. “There’s no gravity in here, so hold on to this rod and follow it.”

The rod dipped to the ground, but did not touch it, right at the threshold. I held on to it and entered. I was falling, except I wasn’t. Beyond had already begun pulling herself along, and I hurriedly did likewise. It wouldn’t do to fall behind, for it was a maze in there; but a maze with a sign at each junction. Not that the signs made much sense to me. At least they were physically sensible, unlike everything else around me.

The rabbit navigated it with ease. In a sane realm, there would have been no way we could have gone very far. It seemed like we were just going back and forth and around in circles in random directions. The signs proved that hadn’t been the case, as I never saw the same one twice. Thankful for small favors, it wasn’t strenuous: once in motion, you stayed in motion, gliding along the rod. What kept that rod in place I hadn’t a clue.

Finally, we crossed another threshold and gravity reasserted itself. A short distance away was a large, industrial looking building. Beyond set out for it.

It didn’t take long to reach it. We went inside. A winged hippopotamus behind a desk greeted us. “Hi Beyond. So this is the pony causing all the fuss?”

“Sure is! Just giving her the tour.”

A hippo with wings. Now I’d seen everything.

We went down a corridor and entered a large room. A translucent force field of some sort blocked off most of it, and on the other side of that barrier… “Are those what I think they are?”

“I would imagine so,” was Beyond’s answer.

There must have been hundreds of them, maybe more, buzzing about. Tiny, adorable, pastel colored spherical creatures with insect-like wings, tiny legs, and a body that was mostly mouth.

Parasprites.

Comments

[Stonecrop Sedum]

Whoa. Can't wait to find out what the heck is going on. If all else fails, Nexus seems...tolerable.