The Ponies and the Ponies

by Ponygon

Chapter 3: Dreams and Memories

“Somepony, help!”

No one was coming. Those sirens she’d heard earlier were heterotopic to her—on the other side of the border—and would never arrive. If Meneer Favor was to get any help, Rarity would have to find it herself.

“Please, somepony call an ambulance!”

Most of the ponies in the street ignored her; they trotted past without so much of a glance in her direction. A few turned to her but suddenly turned away, embarrassed, as if they’d been caught cheating on their lover.

Suddenly, Rarity realised her mistake as she watched those ponies canter away. She stopped looking at those ponies and focused on the nearby homotopic walls as if the dried paint was the most interesting thing she’d ever seen in her life. It was decidedly plain and whilst that was fine in some situations, she felt these walls needed a bit more panache. Not that it had anything to do with what had happened.

Rarity should have realised that most of the ponies would ignore her; she’d called out for help in Diurnal Equestrian! The homotopic ponies had quite rightly presumed she was heterotopic to them and had instinctively blindsighted and deafheard her. The heterotopic had heard a pony speaking their native language, but upon seeing her garish Nocturnal Equestrian visitor’s hat, they’d instantly realised she was in a different Equestria from them. She had inadvertently positioned herself in between the two kingdoms; hopefully Concordia had not noticed.

“Lictor!” she called out suddenly upon spotting a pair of ponies dressed in the familiar steel peytral of the lictors. “Herr Lictor! Come quick!” she called out, affecting a Nocturnal Equestrian accent; she hoped the sentence was similar enough in both languages that a shift in accent and pronunciation would suffice. “You must help!” she exclaimed as she cut in front of the lictor nearest to her, a dark unicorn stallion. “A pony’s collapsed.”

“Entschuldigung, Frau, aber—!”

No, Rarity was not going to take that. She pushed the closest lictor off the street, away from his startled companion, past frowning Nocturnal Equestrians and into the alley. As she dragged him away, she suddenly realised how strange that must have looked. Hopefully, those ponies didn’t think too poorly of her.

“Was ist das?”

Party Favor lay unconscious on the ground, his blue coat now a dull grey reminiscent of the equines from the Human World. Rarity wasn’t sure how it had happened, but the moment the cutie mark disintegrated, his magic had leaked out from his body like through a sieve. He looked how Rarity imagined she would have looked if she’d joined her parents and Sweetie Belle on their holiday in Switzerland.

“Get Inquisitor Sparkle here,” said Rarity sternly. She gasped as a sudden weakness spread from her head down to her hooves. Rarity whirled around; it was the other Lictor, a dark pegasus pony. “What—why did you just—did you just clamp an inhibitor ring on my horn? You—I didn’t do that to him. Take the ring off this instant!”

“Gnädige Frau, du bist verhaftet,” announced one of the ponies.

Rarity didn’t need to understand the words. She knew from the tone and from their body languages what they were saying. It was clear as day.

She was under arrest.

* * *

“I-I’m so sorry that this has happened,” apologised Fluttershy with a rueful bow of her head. “I’m very, very sorry. The lictors didn’t hurt you, did they?”

Rarity stretched her neck gently; she thought she might have slept strangely on it. Holding cells had never looked comfortable to her, but those run by the Inquisition were positively medieval thanks to their lack of beds or benches. “No, they didn’t and it’s quite alright, dear,” she said in response to her minder’s apology. It was a little lie—she counted the bare cell as mistreatment—but she decided it wasn’t a good idea to protest about her conditions when the Nocturnal Equestrians could just as easily throw her back in.

“So long as I don’t have a criminal record at the end of this,” added Rarity with a curious glance to the mint green unicorn.

“Prosecutor Heartstrings has assured me that this was all a big misunderstanding,” paraphrased Fluttershy after speaking with the unicorn. “You haven’t been charged.”

“Danke schön, Frau Heartstrings,” said Rarity with a courteous bow of her head.

“Bitte.”

Rarity looked around her. It was just Fluttershy there with the Crown Prosecutor. She couldn’t see hair or hide of Inquisitor Sparkle at all, so she enquired as to her whereabouts.

“She’s waiting for you at Prince Blueblood Hospital.”

“Whatever for?”

* * *

Inquisitor Sparkle laughed at her question. “Did you think I’d continue this investigation without you?” she asked. “I don’t know about you personally, but I’m sure if your government found out, we wouldn’t hear the end of it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have minded so long as you kept me in the loop,” responded Rarity as she followed the inquisitor through the sparsely populated lobby.

Prince Blueblood Hospital—unexpectedly named after an incumbent Prime Minister—was like any other hospital Rarity had ever seen. Of course, there were portraits of Nightmare Moon on the wall and propaganda posters everywhere, but otherwise it was no different. It went without saying that it smelt vaguely of antiseptic. The walls were plain and the floor clean and polished to a mirror-like sheen; she nearly slipped and fell flat on her face.

After a while, Rarity decided to ask after Night Glider and Party Favor.

“Stable,” responded Inquisitor Sparkle and left it at that.

As Rarity followed Inquisitor Sparkle through the hospital, a warren of twisting corridors, she thought better than to enquire further; she would find out when she got there.

Something suddenly looked different. Rarity glanced back. They’d started off in a white corridor and were now in a blue one. It seemed the corridors were colour coded. A purple corridor followed that. And all the while, Rarity passed those insidious propaganda posters, most of which had nothing to do with health, like the one with a pony angrily tearing apart a US flag; ‘Rise up against US Imperialism!’ it said.

Eventually, they arrived outside the only room guarded by two lictors. Rarity noticed they wore the bladed wing armour known as couteaux; one backward slice of that wing looked as if it would cut her in half. Was that even necessary?

Inquisitor Sparkle levitated a warrant card towards the lictors, before she announced they were there to see the patient. She introduced Fluttershy as being from the Ministry of Information, and confirmed that both the pegasus pony and Rarity were with her.

The lictors took such brief glimpses at the ID—before they waved them through—that Rarity wondered if they’d even looked at them. Not that it mattered; the last thing she wanted was to get into yet another row with a Lictor.

They walked in to find a doctor and two nurses fussing over a grey pegasus mare. The doctor was a blue unicorn with a grey and dark-blue mane, her horn aglow with golden magic that scanned across the patient in a straight line.

“Lang lebe die Nacht,” greeted Inquisitor Sparkle. “Wie geht’s?”

The doctor smiled broadly at Inquisitor Sparkle. She quietly dismissed the two nurses before replying with such enthusiasm that Rarity was worried the inquisitor would end up in a hospital bed adjacent to Night Glider. Bones audibly cracked, or so Rarity thought. She may have been mistaken, as the inquisitor managed to pull out of the hug no worse for wear.

“Frau Rarity, this is Doctor Minuette.”

“I specialise in magical dysfunctions,” explained the doctor in slightly accented Diurnal Equestrian. She looked to the patient. “Although magical dysfunction is something of a gross understatement here,” she added. “Lictor Glider here is completely devoid of magic altogether.”

The pegasus pony in question looked pale and strangely out of place among the pastel bed covers, even for someone who wouldn’t normally have been as colourful as others. Night Glider’s face looked drawn but she was otherwise awake, her eyelids closing and opening heavily. Rarity recognised those symptoms from Party Favor. Thankfully, Night Glider seemed to be breathing regularly, strongly, even and unaided.

“She’s pretty weak, so I don’t recommend dream walking or aggressive interrogation,” commented Minuette with a direct glance to Inquisitor Sparkle.

“How are you feeling, dear?” asked Rarity as she walked closer to the pegasus mare. Out the corner of her eye, she noticed a glass vase with an assortment of white flowers stuffed randomly inside it; she made a mental note to fix that arrangement later.

“Like somepony’s stolen all my bones,” sighed Night Glider in passable Diurnal Equestrian. “Are you… Mevrouw Rarity?”

“Why yes! Yes, I am.”

“Caramel… was always talking about you.”

“All good things, I hope?”

Night Glider smiled silently at that question. She might have even nodded, though from the way her eyes fluttered, she might have been tired instead.

“Did you get a good look at the pony who did this to you?”

“I don’t—No,” responded Night Glider with a weak shake of her head. “No, it wasn’t him,” she responded, when Inquisitor Sparkle asked whether Party Favor had attacked her. “It wasn’t—” Her entire frame shook as she coughed hoarsely.

Fluttershy brought over a glass of water with her wing. “Gentle sips now,” she said quietly as she tilted the glass to Night Glider’s lips. “Better?” She smiled in acknowledgement as the patient moved her head to answer. “If you need any more, just ask.”

“I’m sorry for pressing you like this, but do you know where Caramel is?” asked Rarity.

No response. Night Glider had fallen fast asleep.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Rarity. “What could do this?”

Inquisitor Sparkle inhaled sharply through her teeth. “A powerful unicorn,” she responded. “The originator of this spell is scheduled for transfer to Las Pegasus Penal Colony.”

“Why would anypony create such a spell?”

“Originally it was for disguise purposes; the spell-caster would use it to swap cutie marks as a form of disguise. However, when certain ponies displeased her, she would destroy their cutie marks altogether.”

That sounded horrible, but it fit what she’d seen. “I… I didn’t think you could do that,” she said as she turned her attention to the flowers; perhaps rearranging them would take her mind off that horrific thought. “But you say she’s awaiting transfer?”

“That’s right,” responded the inquisitor. “Soon as we’re done here, we’ll go see her.” She asked Doctor Minuette something about Night Glider’s cutie mark but got a negative response. “What we need to do now is locate her old followers,” she added, “like Party Favor. Minuette, is he any better?”

The doctor shook her head.

Rarity knew Party Favor would recover, but would he ever get his old cutie mark back? She sighed as she pulled a shorter stemmed flower out from the middle of the floral arrangement and placed it on the edge. “So, we’ve reached a dead end, have we?” she asked the inquisitor.

“The Oberinquisitor is going to have my hide for this!” exclaimed Inquisitor Sparkle as she started pacing near a window. “She wasn’t exactly too pleased at my performance last morning and now this. I’ve got two unconscious ponies and little to no leads. Between the two of them, we could have—” She stopped in her tracks; a great big smile spread across her face. “That’s it! I could link the two. Parallel dream walking!”

“Inquisitor,” called out Rarity with a look of disapproval she’d used far too often for her own liking. “I’m sure the doctor forbade you from dream walking her!” She suddenly felt as if she was talking to Sweetie Belle.

“If we spread the thaumaturgic and cognitive load—!” exclaimed Inquisitor Sparkle excitedly; she obviously hadn’t heard. (Sweetie Belle could be like that too.) She looked around the room. “Yes, there’s enough room for two beds in here. If we can wheel Party Favor in—!” A grin spread across her lips. “Dreamscapes are more stable if you link more than one dreaming mind, anyway. We can average out inconsistencies and false memories.”

Rarity couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “This is a pony’s head we’re talking about!” she protested with a heavy stomp of her hoof. “You can’t just march into someone’s private thoughts and pick out what you want. Besides, a pony couldn’t be her own witness.” Not in Diurnal Equestria at least. Granted, that was a recent development, but most ponies agreed it was a good idea when they heard it, so the Government had adopted it wholesale from its American source.

“Of course I can!” protested Inquisitor Sparkle with a frown. “She’s the Nachtkönigin’s subject; I can dream walk her anytime I feel it necessary.”

“It’s a violation of her rights!”

“Nopony has the right to be exempt,” retorted the inquisitor. “But if you’re that concerned, perhaps you’d like to come with to make sure I don’t do anything wrong?” She smiled in satisfaction.

Rarity wondered if she’d be able to stop Sparkle if she had to do so. “Well, if it comes to it, I guess I shall,” she responded.

“What, really? But aren’t you aware I’d be dream walking you as well?”

“Yes, I am aware,” said Rarity. “I may not be very au fait with magical terminology, but when you said you wanted to ‘spread… the cognitive load’ I guessed you wanted to create a shared dream walk.” She smiled. “Besides, maybe I’d be able to see something you’d miss.”

* * *

“Do you, Twilight Sparkle, Daughter of Twilight Velvet and Nightlight of the Unicorn House of Glow, swear to be true to our Sovereign Monarch, and well and truly serve your Kingdom and be in obedience to all the wardens and clothing of our fellowship? In reverence of the power invested in you by Her Eternal Majesty, ye shall keep and give no information to any pony but of the said fellowship and in all these things ye shall keep this oath to maintain the Nachtkönigin’s Peace, so help you Epona, your Sovereign and the power that set the universe in motion.”

Rarity didn’t need to know that Inquisitor Sparkle had sworn this oath but the inquisitor had insisted on telling her anyway.

“And dream walking is literally a power invested in us by our Sovereign,” continued Inquisitor Sparkle quietly as they trotted through Ponyville. “Without the Nachtkönigin, none of this would be possible. It takes a lot of energy to enter a pony’s mind, you see, but our link to Her Eternal Majesty makes things much easier.”

In another life, the inquisitor might have been a teacher. Rarity could imagine Mevrouw Twilight Sparkle standing in front of a class, the blackboard behind her covered in equations and diagrams. It was a given that there’d be pupils asleep her in class.

“That’s… interesting,” responded Rarity with all the enthusiasm of a rock. She looked around her. “Shouldn’t we be seeing either Meneer Favor or Lictor Glider about now?”

“It’s possible we’re in your dream,” ventured Inquisitor Sparkle. “Let me check.”

“Oh, I don’t think this is my dream,” protested Rarity as she looked around her. “There’s too much mud. Not the kind that’s good for facials, either.”

In fact, now that she looked more closely, she couldn’t help but notice that the street they were on was just a dirt track. Rarity didn’t remember seeing any part of Ponyville that had just dirt tracks, not even in the polytopic or atopic areas. She gently poked at the surface with the tip of her hoof. It was dry and prone to crumbling.

Unfortunately, her detective line of work severely clashed with her fashion work. Rarity had developed an instinct about dirt. She knew exactly where she could pick up certain dirt stains and—more importantly—what was required to get rid of them. This particular dirt, for example, was common on the side of Ponyville close to the Diurnal Ponyville train station. The cleaning process was very dependent on the fabric, but most of the time, she had to wait for the mud to dry and then brush it off before she could tackle it.

“On second thoughts, perhaps this is mine,” admitted Rarity with a slight sniff of disdain, “although you couldn’t call it a dream by any stretch of the imagination.”

“No, the resonance doesn’t match; this is Party Favor’s dream,” responded Inquisitor Sparkle with a shake of her head. She looked behind her. “I think,” she said as she looked ahead, “we should just follow this track and see where it leads us.”

“That’s a very good idea,” agreed Rarity with a nod of her head. “After you, darling.”

As they continued, the houses started getting grimier. It began as splashes of dirt on the sides until eventually, whole buildings were covered in mud. Later, Rarity suspected they were made out of the stuff, and nearly missed the transition from mud houses to an underground tunnel.

“Oh, is that Meneer Favor?” exclaimed Rarity.

A blue unicorn with a curly mane stood at the other end of the tunnel, surrounded on nearly all sides by dirt. He seemed to be attempting to unearth a ceramic vase of draconic proportions. It looked nice enough, but something about it seemed off. Its shape was clearly pegasus in nature but the pattern was Saddle Arabian. Then again, this was a dream and such strangeness was to be expected.

“That’s odd,” muttered the inquisitor barely under her breath. “What kind of dream narrative is this?”

“It looks like Party Favor wants to be an archaeologist,” stated Rarity. “Perhaps somepony’s been reading too many Daring Do stories.”

Inquisitor Sparkle cleared her throat loudly. “Yes… well… uh… enough of this,” she said quickly. “Obviously, I haven’t linked their dreams properly.” She channelled magic into her horn. “You wait here,” she said, “and I’ll find Night Glider.”

“Wait, Inquisitor—!”

Rarity sighed exasperatedly. Inquisitor Sparkle had already gone.

* * *

A flash of light nearly blinded Rarity.

“So, uh, anything happen here?” asked Inquisitor Sparkle as her ears swivelled this way and that. She fidgeted with her forelegs, almost prancing in place as she looked around her wildly. It appeared as if she was blushing, though Rarity had no idea why.

“Is everything alright, dear?” asked Rarity.

“Fine!” shouted Inquisitor Sparkle at a volume that made Rarity wince. “Everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be? I didn’t see anything I shouldn’t have! Did you see anything you shouldn’t have?”

“No… not really,” responded Rarity slowly as she backed away from the inquisitor. “He’s just been trying to unearth that vase.” She gestured to the unicorn in question. “He’s still at it.”

To give him credit, Party Favor had progressed a good deal, but it seemed that no matter how hard he dug, there was just more vessel to be unearthed. Rarity wasn’t sure how much there was, but it couldn’t have been that large in reality.

“You know, there’s something familiar about it,” said Rarity as she walked past the unicorn stallion towards the titanic ceramic vessel; she had long since found out that Party Favor could neither see nor hear her. “I’m sure I’ve seen something like it before. It just has a certain… je ne sais quois.”

Inquisitor Sparkle frowned as she walked up to one of the walls. “That’s odd,” she said as she pressed a front hoof against the wall. “Why are we still here? There should have been a scene change by now.”

“Did you find Night Glider?”

Once again, the inquisitor blushed. She coughed as she averted her gaze. “There’ll be a… slight delay whilst the narratives merge,” she said waveringly, “but she’ll be here soon.” She murmured something under her breath about decency. “Let me check.” Inquisitor Sparkle pressed her horn against the wall again and focused some magic into the structure. “Ah!” she exclaimed as she stepped back.

“What is it, darling?”

The inquisitor spun round and bucked the wall of earth as hard as she could. She was no earth pony, so Rarity didn’t expect much to happen. Normally, nothing would, except for perhaps the addition of a few hoof prints in the mud. Yet the wall fell as if it had been a wooden background prop. In fact, the thump it made sounded exactly like one.

“Party Favor, what are you doing down here?”

The unicorn stallion whirled and fired a blast of magic that went wide off the mark (that is, if Night Glider had been his target).

Despite Rarity’s squeal of horror, neither Party Favor nor Night Glider seemed to notice her.

“Stop panicking!” protested Inquisitor Sparkle as she patted the air in a gesture for Rarity to calm down. “Nothing here is real.”

“But my mane—!”

“—is fine,” said the inquisitor angrily. “If you’re that concerned, just imagine it whole and it’ll be whole again.”

Rarity hoped so. She wasn’t aware that Party Favor could use such a dastardly magic spell. Did she need to close her eyes? Well, she did anyway and envisaged a full mane again. She ignored the breeze that blew through the perfect hole in her mane. There was no hole. Her mane had not been turned into Swiss cheese. There was no breeze blowing across her scalp.

“See? I told you.”

After she opened her eyes, Rarity felt for the aberration. Just as she’d imagined it, there was none. Her mane was fine. “Oh, thank goodness for that,” she exclaimed. “The dastardly fiends I have to deal with back at home always go for the mane. Always!” She shuddered. “If only I could repair the damage so easily in real life.” She frowned. “Wait a minute, how is it that they didn’t see or hear us?” She didn’t want to admit it, but she was sure that humans in a completely different dimension would have heard her screams.

“Magic,” responded Inquisitor Sparkle curtly.

Rarity wondered whether it was worth it to press for a less vague answer. Given the inquisitor’s earlier magicobabble in the waking world, perhaps it wasn’t. She instead cast her gaze on Party Favor and Night Glider. She frowned.

A gigantic apple stood near the vase. It had a slice taken out of it, which happened to be a good two metres to the left of the rest of the apple. Both stood on a layer of grey ash that covered the entire floor. Rarity gently brushed her hoof over the fine grey particulates; it was impossible to tell what this had once been. In reality, something might have survived, but this was a dream, coloured by expectations and thus nothing remained. If only she could figure out where this happened; she could go there and see what the ash had once been, but there was nothing to go on.

“You said we’d be safe!” shouted Party Favor angrily with an accusatory jab of his hoof. “You promised that if we did what you asked, we’d be safe!”

“I thought you would be,” said Night Glider quietly, her ears flat. “Look, I’ll have a word with my guvnor about this, but you can’t stay here.”

“They knew Starlight’s cutie mark spell, Night Glider! They knew her spell. She never taught anypony that spell!”

“What; how?”

Party Favor shook his head. “I don’t know, but it was the first thing they hit Sugar Belle with,” he responded. “They took away her cutie mark.”

The pegasus mare’s wings sprung outwards elastically, her eyes wide. “Th-that’s impossible!” she protested. She shook her head. “You know we couldn’t dream walk Starlight, and she wouldn’t confess; she would never tell anypony how the spell worked.” Night Glider pulled a suitcase seemingly out of nowhere.

“What are you doing?” cried Party Favor.

To Rarity, it looked as if the lictor was shovelling ash into the suitcase in some bizarre mockery of packing her bags. She looked to Inquisitor Sparkle; the purple unicorn shrugged in response.

“We’ve got to get out of here!”

Rarity wasn’t sure when it had happened, but the room they were in had taken on the aspects of a cage. She stood on a metallic grille and all around, the walls were iron bars. Above, the ceiling was bars too. She stomped her hoof twice on the floor and heard the resonant clang. The imagery was not lost on her.

“You know something, don’t you?” shouted Party Favor.

Then there was a blinding flash of light that engulfed everything in its brilliant wake.

* * *

Rarity’s eyes snapped open, and her head jerked up with a gasp. She looked around and found herself still in the little hospital room.

“Uh, should have seen that coming,” exclaimed Inquisitor Sparkle.

“W-what was that?” cried Rarity, much to Fluttershy’s and Minuette’s consternation. She frowned. “And why is your mane in such a mess?” she asked upon realising the inquisitor had the worst case of bedhead she’d ever seen. “You slept standing up!”

“I’m not sure about my mane, but I believe that flash was the moment Night Glider was attacked,” explained the inquisitor as she smoothed her hair down. “From the way the dream ended so catastrophically, I believe it was a combination of Night Glider running out of memories and Party Favor’s fright response.” She looked to the two unconscious ponies, each in their own bed. “Minuette, how are they?”

The blue unicorn regarded the inquisitor through wary eyes. “What… happened?” she asked slowly.

“The dream turned into a nightmare, that’s all,” responded Inquisitor Sparkle. “It’s nothing, really.”

“Oh, how horrible!” exclaimed Fluttershy.

“Perfectly natural.”

Rarity sighed with a roll of her eyes. “So is the flu, but you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one,” she protested. “We hardly learnt anything new from that at all.” Except, of course, that lictors or ponies dressed up as lictors had apparently spirited Caramel away.

“Well, Twilight, you’re just lucky they’re both fine,” said Minuette angrily. “I did warn you, didn’t I?”

“I’m sorry,” apologised Inquisitor Sparkle. “But we are kind of desperate.” She turned to Rarity and said, “And I beg to differ! That dream generated a few new leads.”

“Oh really?” asked Rarity as she raised a single eyebrow. “In that case, what was the significance of Night Glider shovelling ash into her suitcase?”

“Well, I’m not sure about that.”

Rarity sighed as she pulled out a tissue with her magic. She dabbed at a little bit of drool that had pooled against Night Glider’s muzzle. “Then what lead did the dream give us?” she asked.

“Those apple pieces in the dream were the cutie marks of a pair of local mobsters,” replied Inquisitor Sparkle. “Somehow, I believe they’re involved in all this.”

“So, we’re going to see them?”

“Yes, but first we must pay another pony a visit. We’re going to see Starlight Glimmer.”

Comments

[totallynotabrony]

And another layer.