Meliora

by Starscribe

Chapter 12: Perotis

“Alright, alright, think.” Jackie slipped sideways into the air, but not actually traveling anywhere. She stepped into the dream, and slowed time down around her to a trickle. That was one of the advantages to the sleeping world—time was fickle. Years could pass in a single evening, or else eight hours could feel like seconds. Obviously the former was more useful to her here.

She floated through the void between dreams, conjuring herself an environment more out of instinct than desire. A model of the city appeared around her, the towers of Mundi the same scale they might’ve been if she were gigantic. The megalopolis towered over the ancient desert, not so far from the pyramids. But thousands of great pyramids could’ve fit inside this city.

It hadn’t been called the last city for no reason.

“Seventeen minutes. Until she lands,” she repeated to herself. “How do we stop her from segmenting everyone once she does? How do we make sure they can keep flowing?”

“You have to disable the hardware,” said a helpful voice. Hat Trick appeared in the void beside her, not drifting so much as standing. There was no floor, but that didn’t seem to bother her. “Athena can’t take back machines that we’ve broken into little pieces.”

“That… makes sense,” Jackie said, sounding unconvinced. “But we don’t have demo teams in place to attack each target. We don’t even really know what we’re looking for! Mundi was built to last.”

“So figure it out.”

She stared down at the model city, eyes narrowing as she considered their options. Jackie had nearly unlimited time to plot and plan—it was only the execution that would be limited. Anything that required her to contact the outside—sending messages, instructions, teleporting around, all that would cost her precious real-world seconds. As fast as time could flow in the Dreamlands, it still moved forward.

Jackie spent subjective hours pacing around the model. She started peeling away layers—the towers first, since they would be empty of any interested bats by now. At first the size of the problem seemed completely overwhelming. The model contained only security measures Jackie knew about. There were already enough ways to isolate everypony.

It was unfortunate that disabling Athena’s grip on the city meant the transit systems weren’t working, or else they could have easily got the bats to the night market in time. But we aren’t trying to evacuate everypony.

All the while Hat Trick watched her, expression varying flavors of smug and concerned from moment to moment. But either she didn’t have any helpful ideas of her own, or she wanted Jackie to come up with the solution herself. She couldn’t have said which was the most infuriating.

Eventually she was left with just the night-market itself. A single massive chamber, with a thousand ponies packed inside it at this moment and more flooding in. This was their only portal out, and it was the point that Jackie needed to keep clear.

So if I’m Athena, how do I stop ponies from getting in?

That was when she had it. “Alright.” She sat back on her haunches, breathing a little more easily now. “I think I know what to do.”

“That’s good,” Hat Trick said. “I was getting worried you wouldn’t.”

Jackie ignored that remark. “We can’t stop all of Athena’s security measures. This city was designed to resist an invasion in every neighborhood and in every building. That fight was lost before we even got here. Buuuuut, I don’t think we need to. Like all the defenses targeting living areas, that’s a red herring. Everypony who is coming is long out of their homes by now. We can’t keep every security door closed, but there aren’t really that many.”

She enlarged the model with a little effort of will, highlighting a few important hallways. “All the traffic in the city uses these. The transit rail, obviously, but that’s down. And the foot-paths. I think we can count on everypony who cares about leaving already being in one of these main thoroughfares. They don’t seal as easy as side-passages, there’s only a few places with blast doors that could lock them off.”

They appeared, eight points spreading out from the night market. “Here’s my plan. We get any volunteer engineers, along with our own small team, and we hit these spreading out from the night market. We blow the control nodes on each one with whatever explosives we can teleport in.”

Hat Trick was silent for a long time. She rose, walked around the model, then sat back down again. “What about Athena? She could shut down the environmental systems, couldn’t she?”

Jackie shrugged. “Not really. This isn’t a starship, it isn’t designed to isolate. These corridors aren’t pressure tight. If she somehow overrode the air circulators, it wouldn’t do enough damage nearly fast enough to slow us down. There’s enough air just floating around to keep us evacuating until we’re done.”

“What about her security robots? If whatever she’s sending overrides Eureka’s spell, won’t she get those back?”

“Probably,” Jackie admitted. “I don’t think there’s much we can do about that. They’re going to be harassing the back of our group, trying to close in and cut us off from as many people as possible. We aren’t prepared to fight them. And they’re too spread-out to sabotage now, so don’t think about that either. I already considered it.”

Hat Trick sighed. “I feel like… we might have acted prematurely. I don’t think we’ll have an opportunity like this again. If we want to get bats out again, either Athena has to let them out, or it will be a war.”

“Maybe they’ll want to get rid of them,” Jackie suggested helpfully. “Things only got worse after we broke out the first time. I assume she’ll make it even worse after today. Do all our recruiting for us. Hopefully not… it’s not like I want the ponies here to suffer anymore than they have. But we don’t have the resources to house a hundred million. If we tried to destroy Mundi, we would be guilty of more murders than Athena.”

“Pity,” Hat Trick said. “Division of responsibilities, eh? I’ll find the explosives we need, you get bats into place to deploy them. We’ll cast the broadest net we can.”

“Even if we end up with too many?” Jackie asked, though she never would’ve dared suggest this fear to Lavender. “Things have been bad down there, worse than we thought. Athena has started separating families, punishing ponies for no reason… it’s like she’s trying to ferment a revolt. What if a million ponies end up in New Thestralia?”

“What if indeed,” Hat Trick repeated. “It’s as though our governor would have to deal with it, wouldn’t she? It’s a good thing we have one of the oldest and most experienced ponies there is.”

“Don’t.” Jackie ground one hoof against the invisible floor. “Don’t push your luck, kid.”

The bat vanished with a giggle, leaving Jackie alone with her map. She was in no rush to return—so long as she was still here, she could go as slowly and carefully as she needed to. She took what felt like hours more to plan, racking her memory for the names and faces of any bats with even a suggestion of engineering competence.

She took her time, writing everything down on a set of carefully demarcated packets. She had known nothing at all of how the emergency blast doors worked, or how she could disable their control nodes. So she cut herself a few windows back into the physical world, burning a few precious seconds for a look.

“It’s a good plan,” said a small voice from the other side of the room. Right about the moment Jackie had piled up her eight packets of instructions and was holding her knife, ready to cut her way back to the physical world. “There’s just one thing you’re missing.”

“You.” Jackie set the knife down gently on a model tower, then met Alex’s brown eyes. The alicorn hadn’t even bothered changing back into a land form—she swam through the air around the model with a few nervous flicks of a white and gray tail. “I thought you ran away from your job. What are you doing here now?”

“Oh. I’m not,” said Alex, circling closer to her, shrinking down to the size of a seahorse and settling between two of the nearest skyscrapers. “I’m a figment. You just created me.” She sounded embarrassed about it, or maybe embarrassed on Jackie’s behalf. Like she had noticed a blackhead on her face and didn’t want anyone else around to hear her.

“I don’t stress-dreamwalk anymore,” Jackie insisted, indignant. “And certainly not dream Alicorns. Your disguise is full of shit. I don’t even know how you got here. Are there dreamwalking fish?” Getting a good look at her wasn’t easy. She kept dodging behind the model, so that Jackie couldn’t see more than the flash of a tail or a bit of a fin, maybe an eye.

Then she groaned, and vanished the model completely. The fish was suddenly floating in open air, and Jackie got a good look at her with her magical senses. She could follow her back to the dreaming Alex—though she wouldn’t yet. Whatever she was playing at, Jackie would punish her for having the audacity to waste her time during such a critical moment.

There was no dreamer. The fish was just a figment. Well… maybe not quite. Most figments were wisps of personality, illusions that were animated by the dreamer looking at them. Like little mirrors that reflected the personality of the dreamer back. It took a little scrap of soul to make them something more, the kind of spell that took the greatest unicorns months to perfect. Or Jackie, who had apparently done it by accident.

Jackie slumped back into a sitting position, dropping her folded packets to the ground beside her. “I forbid you to tell the real Alex I did this,” she said. “She’ll never let me forget.” There were worse things Jackie could’ve summoned to torment her.

Of course, even a dream-Alicorn could be banished. She could return this creature to whatever corner of the void she’d accidently dragged her from.

She didn’t, though. Figments might be wisps and stardust, but this one was independent. Killing her would be like murdering a real pony.

“I don’t actually have to listen to you,” said the little Alicorn, flipping over in the air and backing up. “I’m real. I mean… I’m not the Alex. But I’m a real me. But you made me for a reason, and I want to—”

Novice mistake, to think that Jackie needed physical proximity inside a dream of her own creation. Jackie focused her attention briefly on the fish, who appeared before her with a pop like a teleport. Jackie conjured a little collar for her neck, along with a chain that led to one of her own hooves. “Are you sure about that?” she asked. “Go ahead, try to magic your way out of that. Won’t work.”

She did try. A dozen little spells, including trying to return to normal size. None worked now that Jackie had bound her. After thrashing about madly she slumped onto her back in the air, apparently breathing heavy. Or whatever the equivalent of breathing was for seaponies. “Why… I’m trying to help you, jerk! You’re really mean.”

“Then tell me why you’re here,” Jackie said. “Then you can give me your word you’re never going to talk to your real-life counterpart, and maybe I won’t lock you in a tiny bowl. Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Athena’s pretend Alicorns,” squeaked the little fish, glaring at her now. “They’re like drones. If she gets her hardware back, she’ll get them too.”

“So?” Jackie shrugged one shoulder. “She can fool Mundi, she can’t fool the Supernal. No soul, no Imperium.”

“Maybe not,” not-Alex agreed, sounding increasingly frustrated. “But they can still do magic. Half the infrastructure of Mundi is Thaumoelectrical. That’s a lot of power for the smartest wizard in the universe to use against you. How easy do you think it would be for her to close your portal home?”

“Oh.”


Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Yeah, that's definitely a valid point. This got a whole lot more complicated... assuming Athena hasn't already worked New Thestralia into her plans, what with the possibly deliberate fomenting.

[Yami Vizzini]

Oh hi, adorable new player.

It almost sounds like Athena really is trying to overload New Thestralia, except I thought she ultimately wanted to foster rival nations in order to build up larger conflict?

[minibox]

An Alex copy joins the team? By accident? Geez Jackie, How much longer until you can use dreamwalk to create your own universe and become an actual god?

“Oh.”

Now I know how seriously screwed Jackie is given how her reaction reminds me so much of that one scene in John Wick.

9067879
I thought the founding of New Thestralia was already the plan? Maybe Jackie might take the fake alicorns and find a way to turn Mundi's magic against Athena.

9068064
I don't think Athena would destroy New Thestralia to the last. Killing a few hundred people here and there will be enough to get the hatred needed to fuel a war.

[backinpie]

I can’t help but picture little fishy Alex having a derp face.

[Lithl]

9070727
Or accidentally creates an Ezri?

[minibox]

9077860
That would uh... complicate things.

[minibox]

9072366
Jackie would so let that happen.