The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

The Split Sister

Shinespark floated through the dining hall of the Immortal Dream, eyes scanning for ponies. Amber was laying in the middle of the floor on her belly, cheeks propped on her hooves and tail swishing as she watched the misty clouds below.

"Amber," Shinespark greeted, earning perked ears. "Do you know where Valey is? She borrowed something, and I'm looking for it."

"Huh? Oh, hi, Shinespark!" Amber brightened on seeing her. "She's in one of the empty cabins, I think. Went in a while ago and asked not to be disturbed." She sniffed. "You smell like soup. What are you looking for?"

Shinespark chuckled, bobbing in her own aura. "Slipstream brought me some. We had a nice talk. I'm looking for Nyala's moon glass to take some measurements and run some preliminary tests. I think I've cobbled together enough of a body for her to at least hear and talk again."

Amber shrugged, busy being fascinated by the patterns in the clouds. "Yep, Slipstream's nice. I chat with her about Riverfall sometimes. It takes a while to get her talking, but that girl has a lot to say!"

"Just got to talking about life in the Stone District," Shinespark agreed. "Anyway, thank you. I have a batpony to bother..."

She left Amber behind, drifting up the staircase and down the cabin hall, listening to every door she passed and checking beneath for telltale signs of light. Eventually, near the back on starboard, one door had a note taped to the front reading KNOCK FIRST in messy capital letters.

"Valey?" Shinespark knocked as requested, raising her weakened voice as loud as it would go. "It's Shinespark. Can I come in?"

"Buh?" Valey's voice sounded... odd on the other side, with a slightly different quality it didn't usually have. She hesitated. "Uh, yeah, sure. I guess? Close the door behind you and don't yell or anything."

Furrowing her brow, Shinespark slid the door open, hovered inside and closed it again without focusing her eyes, saving whatever Valey was hiding for once they were in private. When she did look up, the mare laying on the bed wasn't Valey.

Oh, she was partly Valey. One eye remained emerald, and her mane was still green at the base, but it was shorter, with the tips merging to crimson pink. Her other eye was sky-blue, patches of lighter gray spread throughout her coat, and the cutie mark Shinespark could see held a vibrating line feeding into a pony's ear. "Hey, Sparky." Half-Valey waved, a golden pendant around her neck. "What's up?"

Shinespark blinked, taking note of Nyala's empty body standing in the corner, doing nothing as always. "...Valey? Are you okay?"

"You must be Shinespark," Valey said, her voice taking on more of that unusual tone. "It's... a pleasure. I've heard about you. I almost never get to meet new ponies."

Shinespark worked her jaw. "That pendant... actually...?"

"Works?" Valey finished for her. "Yeah. Heh. Guess I kept this an even better secret than I thought. Bananas, I feel like I told you... Whatever. Sparky, this is Nyala. At least, the part of her I knew in Ironridge. She's, uhh... not got a whole lot of memories, sharing my body, but she's still her."

"...Wow." Shinespark glanced again to the empty batpony body in the corner. "It's nice to meet you too, I guess? Sorry. This isn't what I was expecting..."

"Oh, it doesn't happen a lot," Valey said, though Shinespark got the feeling Nyala was speaking again. "You're actually the third person I've ever met, counting Valey. The second was Herman. I saw you before, when you were passed out in the skyport, but we never talked."

"Do I shake your hoof?" Shinespark tilted her head. "Sorry, just, the Nyala I knew..."

Valey giggled, relaxing. "The Nyala you knew had a suit of armor for a body. I'm a shared conscience with Valey's body, and both of us have separate existences from my original body over there." She pointed a hoof at the carapace-covered empty pony. "If you're confused, try being me."

"You're pretty upbeat about it, at least," Shinespark said. "I don't know if you've heard, but I once had my soul split between two bodies at once? So I have at least an idea how you feel. Still, this is surreal..."

"Yeah, we're trying to look on the bright side," Valey admitted, back to herself again. "It's, uhh... it's kinda tough. I first got her out and put her back in the pendant hoping I could stick it on that body and it would just work." She shrugged at the empty shell. "No dice. Nothing happened. So then, I figured maybe taking me for a spin and having a chat in our heads like old times would be better than stasis and oblivion while we waited for you to work, and... here we are."

She coughed, continuing. "I don't think I feel anything in the moon glass, though. I don't have any senses to be aware of the passing of time, or if I do, I don't have any memory to remember it. Or I do, and am not aware of it here..." Valey trailed off, her ears folding. "It's kind of important to stay upbeat. In this life, even if I only have a few days' worth of memories, I know Valey. I've listened to her in Ironridge when she was feeling alone, and I was with her in the Sky District while she was fighting for her new friends. I'm talking to her now and can see how she's changed and am proud of her. It's like my memories are a time-lapse. I wonder if this is how immortals see time."

Valey sighed. "...And then the you in your mechanical body remembers everyone else, and has months of memories... but I brought you back at just the wrong time and had something else to do, or messed up or something, and things are awkward between us. Were awkward. I basically didn't get to know that version of you." She looked up at Shinespark, meeting her eyes. "And now you're working on fixing Braen, right, so things can go back to being that way? It's just... Bananas, this is too complicated to even do anything but roll with it."

Shinespark winced, hovering over to the bed and taking a seat. "You have a complicated life."

"Which one of us?" Valey chuckled, and it wasn't clear who was talking.

"I have no idea." Shinespark shook her head. "It makes me wonder if I should think of myself in Braen as more of a person than an extension of myself, or if there's any way different things could have gone with my own sister, or..."

Valey reached up and patted Shinespark's back. "Hey, trust me, Sparky. If you're not thinking about it? Like, here I am rolling out to Mistvale and dragging all you guys along to get some second opinions and better answers on this thing called Luna's Artifice that's apparently right now forming one half of my butt. I've got, like, destiny and the reason for the existence of batponies to deal with. But trying to figure this stuff out?" She shook her head. "I can't even try. Me and Nyala, we're just... rolling with whatever happens."

Shinespark closed her eyes, and Valey spoke again. "You have a complicated relationship with a sister too, it sounds?"

"Yes..." Shinespark took a breath. "I have a lot of sisters. This one's called Grenada. I looked out for her a lot when we were younger, but never told her about our relationship because I had a district to rule and didn't want to look like I was showing favoritism to relatives. My family also has a messy history, and I wanted to keep her safe from that... and she took it all the wrong way and developed a crush on me. Then we both thought the other had died in that battle at the skyport, found each other months later... and I tried to avoid dealing with the different ways we saw each other, messed things up more through it, and she left. I haven't seen her for a month."

Valey gave her a wry smile. "Yeah... good thing everyone makes mistakes. You wanna lay on our backs and stare at the ceiling for a while?"

"Sounds like a good use of time," Shinespark agreed, rolling over next to her and letting the tension drain from her limbs. "We've still got however many days until we reach the grand temple."

---

Not quite however many days later, Shinespark sat in her makeshift shop, voice and limbs much stronger than they had been before. An unarmored apparatus sat on the table before her, nothing but a square board covered in manacircuits, clustered wires, a few pre-built devices and a central socket where a piece of moon glass would go. Braen's old mechanical wings were attached to the sides, rigged so that Nyala could have at least some sort of physical output without modifying them too heavily to put back once the armor was repaired.

Gerardo and Slipstream stood to one side, with Maple and Valey on the other, Amber waiting in the background with Starlight and Maple. "Yo," Valey said, extending a wing with Nyala's clump of moon glass.

"Alright," Shinespark breathed, holding in her nerves as she took the chunk in her aura. "I'm using Braen's original reception socket for this. It took a while to free it from the armor, but if Nyala can retain her memories using that pendant and they're different from her memories as Braen, it's my best guess as to the cause. Testing in three... two..."

On the final count, she nestled the moon glass firmly into the socket. It almost seemed to meld in place, either the glass filling the space or the metal reflowing around it, and her aura flicked a tiny switch. Lights came alive on the board's back, pathways tracing to a small manacore embedded in the machine's tail... and the wings clicked slightly with motion, the speaker coming alive with Nyala's voice.

"Where am I?" she asked, dazed, as everyone held their breath. "What happened to my body? I can't feel so much of it. Did my legs get cut off when he used that sword on me? Shinespark? Did we lose...?"

Shinespark reached down and hugged the circuit-covered board. "And you still remember. Looks like we brought you back to life after all."

Gerardo beamed with gratitude. "Miss Shinespark here has been working night and... well, night to rebuild you once she was sufficiently recovered from my sword. It's very inspirational."

"Hey, uhh..." Valey grinned awkwardly at the camera. "Welcome back. It's been like a little over a week. Less than two. Round two is over and I'm still in the tournament, thanks to you, so..."

Amber did a tiny dance on her hooftips.

"Really?" Nyala asked, Valey trying to keep in the camera's immobile field of view. "My body stopped working and then everything blacked out..."

"Yes, really." Valey sat down, nodding at the board. "And you didn't have to do that, you know. Even though we, like, should have been close, I... wasn't really that great about not getting distracted and putting you first. So, you didn't really owe me that... but do you think I could try to do better this time and get another chance? We're kinda going somewhere important for me to do something, but I need to be able to balance real life with my friends, and you're completely immobile. So, uhh... yeah."

Nyala hesitated. "I don't think I'm completely immobile," she hummed, thinking. "I can... let me try..."

Her golden wings unfurled and, like giant flippers, started dragging her across the workbench, waddling forward one jerky flop at a time.

Amber couldn't help herself and laughed. "I'm sorry and this is terrible, but that has to be the cutest way of getting around I've ever seen..."

"Huh." Shinespark blinked. "I guess it's a good thing I put those on, then."

"But, uhh, you and me?" Valey gave a hopeful grin. "I really feel awkward and like I should have paid you more attention, but could we...?"

"Do you even need to ask?" Nyala replied, practicing turning in a circle and inclining herself up and down. "It gets lonely sitting with no one to talk to, especially when I don't sleep. Of course you can-"

She was interrupted by a soft crackle from the intercom. "Ahe-he-he-he-hem!" A dainty voice cleared its throat. "Everyone, this is Acting Captain Felicity speaking, seeing as no one else apparently felt like mareing or stallioning the bridge... but someone more in charge than I am really ought to get up here, because we've just been boarded by sarosians."

Comments

[MazingerZ]

Customs inspectors have joined the party.

[Zapdroid]

Missing a couple words here I think: “never told her about our relationship because I district to rule and didn't want”. For shame. Shame I say!

Otherwise, excited to see our first glimpse of Mistvale batponies!

[Hap]

"I don't know if you've head,

She doesn't. She hasn't even a body.

[RoboRed]

oh what perfect timing