Get outta my dreams, and into
The conversation with the thing - which did not have a name and which found the concept of names in general to be delightfully novel while also being rather difficult to understand - was not exactly productive, but it was at least illuminating.
It went over again with the princesses what it had gone over with Twilight and not a whole lot had changed. If anything things had got just ever-so-slightly worse, barriers weakening and all that. A little worrying, all told.
But still, now at least they’d heard first-hoof what Twilight had, and had a better grasp of the gravity and reality of the situation. Twilight had just stood listening with a mounting sense of dread, mixed with the intense discomfort that came from seeing Anon dangling like some sort of puppet.
In any other set of circumstances this was exactly the sort of thing Twilight probably would have been quite fired up about, all told.
Confirmation of multi-dimensional layer theory? Presence of and communication with an extra-dimensional entity? All amazing, but now really wasn’t the time to be excited about it.
Now was actually the time to be very, very concerned about it, particularly as there was the very real threat of all sorts of nastiness starting with the death of her friend and then escalating from there, culminating (apparently) in the death of everyone.
Indeed, her only real takeaway from hearing the conversation the thing had with the princesses - or at least the only thing that had burned into her mind - had been that, when it was over and Anon had woken up, the first thing he’d done after sitting up and blinking had been bursting into tears.
None present enjoyed seeing this. Twilight immediately leapt up to comfort him while both princesses shifted unhappily, keenly aware that he hadn’t wanted to go to sleep because something like this would have happened, and they had put him to sleep and something like this had happened.
Never nice knowing that you’d made someone cry, even if you might have had a reasonable reason for having had to do it.
“We apologise, Anon. We were hasty. We did not mean to cause you undue distress,” Luna said as Anon clung onto Twilight and sniffled.
“I - I know. It’s okay. You had to. I’m just - I’m just so tired!” He croaked.
No-one present could really argue with that.
“Anon,” Celestia said, stepping forward. “Twilight, my sister and myself are going to go and discuss what should be done next. I feel it would be best if you remain here.”
“I can stay with him,” Twilight said, still being clung onto, only for Anon to then release her. Puzzled, she looked up at him.
“You should go with them. Cleverclogs,” he said, forcing a smile.
“I can stay with you, if you want me to,” she said, more quietly this time, but he shook his head and sniffed.
“I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay. I’ll just - just lie here and be quiet. I’ll be fine.”
Unlikely, but no-one present really wanted to argue with that.
-
They left Anon in his quieter room and moved to another one, there to discuss more openly, away from him so as not to distress him further. Twilight was utterly out of ideas and followed them dumbly, feeling drained.
Fortunately though the Princesses seemed to already have something in mind.
There was an expert, apparently, somepony who’d immediately come forth to both of them. Somepony who was - they said - in the know about these sorts of things. Handled these sorts of things before, was outstanding in his field.
They said all this and it all sounded impressive, but the way they’d said it rather suggested that this wasn’t someone they would have called on if they’d had any other options available. Twilight picked up on this, and was a little curious as a result.
This curiosity melted rapidly when the expert, summoned, arrived looking as though every single good day of the year had been condensed down to one and it was this day.
“Hello! I heard something might be dying, yes-yes? Of something interesting?” The expert asked, skidding to a halt after coming slamming through the door, apparently worried he might have missed it all.
He hadn’t, and instead found himself getting very level stares from Celestia and Luna and a look of bafflement from Twilight. Had the guards got the right expert?
“Twilight, this is the expert, Doctor Knacker,” Celestia said, delicately.
“You’ll have heard of me!” The doctor said proudly.
“Um, no. Sorry,” Twilight said quietly and Doctor Knacker didn’t seem especially put out.
“You should have heard of me, then, yes-yes? So-so, what is happening? What must happen! Details, details!”
The situation was explained to Doctor Knacker in greater detail (or details), and the more it was explained to him the happier he looked until, by the end, he appeared to be almost vibrating in place from excitement.
“Oh this is most-most interesting, most new! So unlike anything! Can I see the subject? I mean, victim? Patient?”
“He is somewhat fragile at the moment. We felt it best you dealt with us first. We assume - hope - that you feel able to assist, given what you have been told?” Celestia asked and Doctor Knacker nodded furiously.
“Oh yes-yes! Most certainly! You came to the right expert, yes-yes. Would know for sure if I could see the sub- the patient but from what you say I think I know, I know. An idea forms in me! We should begin immediately!”
“Whatever you have in mind, doctor, you can assure us that it will be safe?” Luna asked, taking a step forward. The authoritative, regal kind that might have given others pause. Not so here, where Doctor Knacker instead just seemed a bit confused by the question.
“Safe? Hmm, what is ‘safe’, really? Life is notoriously unsafe! Matters such as this? Very dangerous, yes-yes? The mind is complex but present, here, material, can touch it. Slippery, but literally so! The soul? Hmm, HMM! Slippery, but figuratively so! The worst kind! Tricky-tricky.”
Twilight was not overwhelmed with enthusiasm about this expert.
“But is it possible? Solving this? Safely?” Celestia asked before Twilight could put a voice to this lack of enthusiasm.
“Oh yes-yes! Many things possible, this one of them most certainly! I have a device, yes-yes? Something designed for just such as this! Just so, just so! Did I not - ah - did I not present my designs to you, princessesss?”
“You did,” both Celestis and Luna said in an unplanned and unsettling display of stereoscopic synchronicity. It left Twilight blinking. Doctor Knacker just nodded.
“I thought so! I remembered it, in here!” He said, tapping his head happily before looking thoughtful. “There was a prototype too, wasn’t there, yes-yes? Or did I imagine that? The mind is so slippery!”
If he remembered it correctly and was not imagining it he’d sent the prototype in along with the plans in preparation for the Canterlot Equestrian Expo that had happened not that long ago. He remembered being there to exhibit his as-yet-unnamed magical brain imaging machine, but could not remember also being able to show off this other machine. Hence him wondering if he’d imagined it.
“No, you did,” Celestia said.
“Oh. But I did not see it on display with all the other wonderful, interesting, new devices. I was rather looking forward to seeing it there,” he said with a pout. His face was not built for pouting. It was debatable whether it was built for anything other than smiling too wide, really, but pouting was something it was most certainly not built for.
“There was insufficient space on the show floor.”
“Ah, that makes sense, it was very busy-busy. Anyway! It is here, somewhere! That is good! Makes everything easier! We can get started soon-soon! Right away! Guard! Are there guards here?” He asked, looking around, eyes flashing when they clapped onto some guards (for there were always guards somewhere nearby). “Ah, guards! You must go and fetch my device, post-haste! Quickly-quickly!”
The guards, unsurprisingly, weren’t in the habit of taking orders from some guy who’d just rocked up and so looked to the princesses for confirmation or possibly orders to throw this expert out on his ear.
Instead, Luna motioned for a clutch of them to come over and quietly conveyed to them the location of Doctor Knacker’s device and sent them to retrieve it. The good doctor was practically wallowing in delight.
“Where is the subject? The patient? Should I go to them, or them to me? Or both?” He asked.
“How - um - your machine...how does it...work…?” Twilight asked, unable to keep from butting in, all of this being so close to overwhelming that he couldn’t quite help herself. Doctor Knacker rounded on her so suddenly she flinched.
“Work? Work work? What? Who are you?” He asked, advancing. Twilight back away until she bumped into something at once both soft and unyielding.
“Twilight Sparkle is my student and also a friend of Anon, the patient, so if you wouldn’t mind explaining your device to her, doctor, please?” Celestia said, stepping in beside Twilight to provide a very tangible form of moral support, something Twilight appreciated.
Doctor Knacker was immediately mollified, if only because he’d just been given an excuse to exposit.
“Oh! Delightful! Well it is insultingly simple, you see, and merely the practical application of a few formerly theoretical processes. You see…”
And he explained it, and Twilight’s enthusiasm remained where it had been. And then he explained it further, and her enthusiasm sunk along with her expression.
Broadly speaking, his invention seemed to work rather like this: the subject would enter the machine, whereupon the machine - through the exercise of numerous spinning, magical aparati - would draw out the subject’s soul, pass it through a complicated series of tubes, scrubber, screens and filters (all also magical) to remove impurities and then, once that was done, the soul would be restored to the subject, who would obviously feel a host of benefits as a result of this process.
He did not elaborate on what constituted an impurity, for which Twilight could only be grateful.
“I...see…” she said once Doctor Knacker was done. He was out of breath and beaming, clearly enormously proud of this thing he’d designed.
“Amazing, yes-yes? Amazing nopony ever thought of it before! So simple! So obvious!” He said.
Presumably operating off a slightly different standard of ‘obvious’ to that which was used by society at large. Typically, it was felt that the soul was best left where it was. Surely?
“And it works?” Twilight asked. Seemed an important question.
“Oh, it should! No test subjects, sadly. Nopony willing! Can you imagine? So no-no, this subject first test subject! Will work perfectly, perfectly!”
Twilight swallowed.
“Why did you invent this?” She asked. She couldn’t help herself.
He blinked at her, utterly at a loss. He had the look of a man who’d just been asked why he breathed air and ate food and was struggling to work out how best to start on answering something so bafflingly obvious.
Celestia, ever-mindful of keeping things on track, stepped in before he could answer, however.
“If there is anything else you feel you require, doctor, might we suggest you go and collect it now and then see to your machine? Time is of the essence,” she said.
“Ah, yes! Yes-yes, of course. I shall - ah - I shall ‘get right to it’, as they say! Off and away,” he said, giving the most clumsy bow imaginable and scrambling away with ungainly haste, clearly unable to believe his luck that such a wonderful thing should have fallen into his lap.
His exit left a sucking vacuum of awkward silence which Celestia then filled:
“He is an expert, I assure you,” she said, seemingly able to guess what Twilight was thinking.
“What he’s invented sounds pretty horrible,” Twilight said. Celestia sighed. She couldn’t disagree. There had been a reason it had been omitted from that exhibition, after all. The opinion had been that it was unlikely to have been a hit with the crowd, so to speak.
“He means well, he just perhaps hasn’t the firmest grip on how his definition of meaning well is perceived. While we are sure that this machine of his was designed and built with the best of intentions, it is something we felt was rather too dangerous to be put on public display.”
“Not to mention distasteful…” Luna said, sticking out her tongue and getting a sideways look from Celestia for her troubles.
“Now, however, it seems quite perfect, or as close to perfect as we have available in what limited time apparently remains. Assuming the entity can be trusted in the first place, of course,” Celestia then said.
“Even if it can’t, and even if every word it told us was a lie, it is unlikely to come out of the process benefitting from it, so it would gain nothing from misleading us anyway,” Luna said. Twilight supposed she had a point. Not that it made her feel better.
“It just doesn’t sound safe and…” Twilight said, trailing off. The thought of what the machine apparently did - and the thought of Anon going into it and going through - was supremely uncomfortable.
And he’d be the first one through it! What if it didn’t work? What if it did something unexpected? What if - him being human - it did something it wasn’t supposed to completely? What if it didn’t work at all?
What if, what if, what if - Twilight felt a little blip of panic rising and, again, Celestia demonstrated an ability to think ahead and laid a comforting wing over her back. The panic receded.
“It would be worse to do nothing,” Celestia said.
Given what had happened already - and what was going to happen, assuming everybody was telling the truth - this was very true. Didn’t make going for the untested, dubious-sounding option any more comfortable, however.
“I know…”
What a rubbish sequence of days. Her friend suffering, possible end of the world - just not a great time, really. And their current, best hope presently resting in the hooves of a pony who Twilight, despite having only just met him, would be hard-pressed to trust with a knife and fork, let alone a soul.
Still. It was what it was, and there wasn’t much sense in complaining about things you couldn’t change. However cathartic it might have been. Step around the brambles, throw away the cucumber.
“I think it might be best if you were the one to explain the process to him, Twilight,” Celestia said, bringing Twilight back to the moment with a bump.
“Me?!”
“We feel that we intimidate him,” Luna said, moving in the better to be part of the conversation. Twilight looked up at her, then to Celestia, then back again.
“You don’t - I mean, well, maybe a bit…” She mumbled.
Even before all of this had started he’d always been a bit scared of them, Twilight knew. She’d found it quaintly amusing at the time, back then, one of his many idiosyncrasies. Now not so much.
Again, they were right. If anyone was going to explain what was about to happen to Anon to him, it should really be her.
She supposed it was a good thing they were the ones in charge.
-
And so it was that Twilight returned to the room they’d left Anon in.
He had a very distant look in his eyes and was, once again, pacing and he looked straight through Twilight a good two times before finally noticing she was actually there watching him, at which point he jumped.
“Whoa, scared me. How long were you standing there?” He asked, hand to his chest.
“Not long,” she said, then: “You seem livelier.”
“They brought me coffee. Think they’ve put something else in here though, I feel quite pepped up. Or maybe I broke through the wall. Again, heh. Feel all spacey.”
He waved a hand around to demonstrate how spacey he felt. Twilight wasn’t wholly sure who he’d meant by ‘they’ but was fully sure that now wasn’t the time to get side-tracked by minutiae.
“Are you okay?” She asked.
“Heh, no, I’m really not. But we knew that, didn’t we?”
Kind of the only answer she could have expected to get, honestly. Twilight chewed her lip and Anon used two fingers each to try and prop his eyes open wider, with limited success.
“So there’s a plan, right? They’ve got something?” He asked.
“They have got something. The princesses,” Twilight said, nodding. Anon hadn’t seen that one coming and took a second to register that she’d said what she’d said and during that second he just stared at her gormlessly.
“What? Really? I wasn’t - I wasn’t actually expecting anything that quick. They really have something? It’ll work?” He asked.
“We hope so.”
“Oh shit. Soon?”
“Very soon.”
Anon mouthed uselessly for a moment or two - mostly more swear words - before lightly slapping himself across the face (Twilight didn’t appreciate this) and shaking his head.
“So what is it?” He asked.
“I should explain to you first what it is that’s happened to you, as far as we know. Just so you understand it all and what it’ll mean. Okay?”
“Uh, sure, yeah. Makes sense.”
She went over - again, more clearly and directly this time - what she knew. She’d done this a few times today, but this time she was explicitly talking to Anon, who might have overheard the last explanation when she’d been talking to the princesses but hadn’t really been best-placed to pay attention and hadn’t said anything about it either way.
He definitely paid attention this time though, even if however much actually sunk in was unclear.
“Huh. Souls exist? Alright. I’ll buy that,” he said once she’d wrapped up, his face a mask of concentration.
“That’s the bit that got you, souls? Not the...falling through a whole other universe that was itself an entire being? That then latches onto you? And did you forget the part where it will kill you?”
She refrained from saying ‘Is killing you’ despite that being the more accurate statement, as it wasn’t something she actively wanted to say. Anon just blinked at her slowly, letting her words sink in. He then yawned.
“Well, you know. I’m really fucking tired.”
“Right...”
“So what’s the plan?”
“There is a...machine…” Twilight said, and Anon, who had been about to resume pacing again, paused and turned back around to her.
“You don’t sound very happy about it, so that’s a good start,” Anon said with the tiniest hint of a giggle. That’d be the tiredness again. Every fresh moment was a roll of the dice at this point. Twilight swallowed and continued:
“The idea is that your...soul...will be...drawn out? And passed through the machine and, well, spun and filtered is kind of the only way I can explain it, before being put back into you with the...entity...removed…”
Hopefully.
Anon blinked.
“Like...soul dialysis? Only not really?” He asked.
“Yes?”
She didn’t know but if that’s what he thought of and that’s how he understood it then why not.
“That doesn’t sound safe,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t…”
Not exactly what Anon had hoped to hear. He stood perfectly still and thought about it but his head was too thick and fluffy to reach any useful conclusions. He just felt bad. But then again, he’d felt bad for days now, so what was new?
“Guess it has to happen though, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be an option?” He ventured.
“Yeah…” Twilight said, trying for supportive agreement but not able to rise to it.
“Kind of surprised you guys have something like that lying around, Anon said.
It seemed kind of extreme to him. More like the sort of thing they’d be trying to destroy somehow before it got used for some nefarious purpose. He wasn’t an expert - and he was, as has been mentioned, extremely tired - but he was fairly sure that removing souls was a negative thing, regardless of any intention of putting it back once you were done with it.
“So am I, honestly. Somepony made it. An expert. He’s here too,” Twilight said, jerking her head back in the vague direction of ‘outside the room’.
“This soul-sucking, filtering thingy was just made by some guy?” Anon asked, having expected it to have been some ancient magical artefact or something else instead, and not just something cobbled together by someone he could meet. Somehow that made it just seem less reliable to him.
“Yes,” Twilight said.
“He seem, uh, competent?” Anon asked.
“The Princesses vouched for him and while he comes across as, um, unique it is kind of an...unusual area and there isn’t really anypony else and…”
None of this was coming across as a ringing endorsement and none of it was doing anything to bolster what threadbare confidence Anon had in the plan. This was pretty clear from the doomladen, wide-eyed look on his face.
Twilight switched tack, moving up to him and rearing back, putting her hooves onto his waist to balance. This didn’t do a whole lot to shrink the height difference between them but it did immediately get his attention.
“Trust me?” She asked.
He did. He really did.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m worried. I’m scared. I don’t like any of this. But if we don’t do anything it’ll only be worse, and even if this sounds bad - and it doesn’t sound good - it’s the only thing we have. I just want you to be better and this...this seems like the best way for it, right now,” she said.
Anon swallowed.
“Alright,” he said. “Mean, not a lot else I can do anyway, right? And if you think it’s a good idea, well, good enough for me.”
She smiled, he smiled. His smile faltered first, however.
“You’ll - you’ll stay with me though, right?” He asked.
Twilight’s smile had not faltered, nor had it wavered.
“Of course,” she said.
Anon’s confidence remained threadbare, but was now a slightly higher quality of threadbare.
-
“So you’re a...soul doctor or something?”
Anon asked this while Doctor Knacker - with a rather heavy-duty set of mirrored goggles incongruously strapped about his head- dashed around putting the finishing touches to his hastily re-assembled machine.
They’d had to find quite a big spare room to put it in, as the thing was not small and also had a lot of spinny, sticky-outy bits that made it look even more dangerous than it did to start with. And it had looked pretty threatening to start with.
Anon, unfortunately for him, was sat right in the middle of the thing. Everyone else - Twilight, Celestia, Luna, et al - were more towards the edge of the room, watching closely.
“Oh no, no-no! Actually, my speciality is the mind, but there is always a link between that and the soul, yes-yes? The material, the immaterial? Interacting, combining, relating. Fascinating!” Doctor Knacker said, grinning furiously at Anon for a moment before disappearing up to his middle in the guts of the machine, legs kicking.
Anon swallowed.
“Uh, sure. I’ll buy that.”
The other option was being paralysed by anxiety, which didn’t appeal. Anon decided to keep it as an option available for future use, however, pending further developments. Maybe being paralysed by anxiety would become much more attractive some point soon.
Stranger things had happened, and these were rather strange times.
“This won’t hurt, will it?” Anon asked after a moment or two and after Doctor Knacker had withdrawn himself. Seemed a prudent question.
“You will experience a sensation, it might be interpreted as pain,” Doctor Knacker said dismissively, continuing to tinker and only belatedly noticing the appalled looks of everyone else in the room. “But only the good kind of pain! Not the bad kind,” he clarified.
Twilight chose this moment to move over, hopping over the leg-thick cables that snaked across the floor and ducking under the various, bewildering bits of metal sticking out of the machine to come up beside Anon who was still kind of gaping at Doctor Knacker in blank stupefaction as the pony completely ignored him and kept on poking and prodding and pulling on what looked to be important pieces of the machine.
“Hey,” Twilight said, making Anon jump only to relax on seeing it was her. “You’ll be okay. I’ll be right over there. Okay?”
She put a hoof onto his leg and he put a hand onto her hoof.
“Okay. I’ll be fine. Pain don’t hurt, right?” He said, grinning, strained.
“Right,” she said, not wanting to contradict him if saying this sort of insane nonsense helped him get through strange situations. If - when, when - this was all over and they were looking back on it and laughing she’d call him out on it, and point out how dumb it was. But not now, then. Later.
Something to look forward to.
“We are ready! Non-subjects out of the area, please! Stand back, stand back! Now-now!” Doctor Knacker yelled, shooing Twilight back against the far wall, much to her irritation. She complied though, wouldn’t do to get in the way.
Once she was back there Doctor Knacker returned, performed a final touch or two, double-checked that Anon was sitting exactly where and how he was meant to be sitting (the machine hadn’t been quite built with someone of his size in mind, so it was a bit of a squeeze) and then took up position himself behind a vast and intimidating bank of buttons, dials and levers.
The buttons, dials and levers were all labelled. With notes that had been stuck on. Anon only noticed this now. Eyes widening again he looked over at Twilight.
“You’ll be okay,” she mouthed.
And then the machine closed on Anon, like some sort of junkyard clamshell. There came a click, then a rising hum. Bits of it started moving, first slowly, then gradually faster. Some steam even vented from somewhere.
“Um…” Twilight said.
“The steam means it’s working!” Doctor Knacker yelled, furiously wrangling the controls as though they were trying to throw him off. Twilight chewed her lip and just focused on the spot where Anon was sitting, and thought happy thought.
Not a whole lot anyone else could do about it anyway.
-
Anon came out of the machine limp and snoring.
He slept for a little over an entire day, completely dead to the world. Not once did he wake up, screaming or otherwise. While it was rather too early to be definitive, this did seem like a good sign.
Doctor Knacker declared the whole thing an immediate and overwhelming success and seemed to think this meant that now his machine had been vindicated. Indeed, he offered all present a go as soon as Anon had been removed and taken back to the secured guest accomodation to be put into the bed there.
To Doctor Knacker’s disappointment, all present had demurred politely.
To his greater disappointment - bordering on baffled outrage - the machine was to be dismantled and put back into storage. He was thanked for his troubles and paid for his time though, and told that, once things were more settled, it was likely that he would be consulted on the matter so a more thorough examination of what had happened and why might be put together. This mollified him greatly.
Then something unexpected came up that required his immediate attention, and he was left to it.
After that was sorted out and as soon as was possible, Twilight went to Anon’s side and remained there. This was why she was there when he woke up. At first it looked like he was just shifting in his sleep again and Twilight was all about ready to doze off again herself when she noticed that he’d opened his eyes and was squinting around in groggy confusion.
“Wha?” He mumbled, yawning and shifting beneath the covers. His eyes then fell on Twilight and he smiled dumbly. “Ah, you. Good. Cleverclogs, heh.”
He stirred some more and stretched, sitting up. Twilight had dismounted the chair she’d been sat in and moved on over but was giving him space and doing her best not to interrupt or blurt out anything unhelpful like ‘You’re awake!’, feeling that he’d know that already.
Still blinking he screwed his eyes up and looked at his hands in his laps, resting on the sheet, then looked back to Twilight again, stood by the side of the bed and smiling up at him.
“Oh man, I feel so much better,” he said, reaching out to pat her on the head. He stopped halfway there though, his brain waking up enough to realise that was kind of an odd thing to do to a friend - he’d just been acting on some base instinct. He put his hands back.
“Not tired anymore?” She asked. He thought about this.
“No,” he said, then he laughed the laugh of an incredibly relieved man. “No! I’m not! Oh God! Oh wow. I’d forgotten what that feels like! Mean, still, just woke up and stuff but...wow.”
Could hardly believe it had worked!
And so easily!
Surely he had to be missing something? He looked around the room for signs of foul play but, given that it was a strange room in the first place, he didn’t notice anything he could point out as particularly out of place.
“I didn’t die or anything did I?” He asked Twilight. She gave him an odd look.
“How would you be sitting there asking that if you were dead?”
“Well, maybe I got brought back to life somehow. Or maybe this is a dying dream or something,” he said, fishing about for possibilities. Twilight was unmoved and unimpressed.
“No. Apparently it worked completely perfectly, just like Doctor Knacker said it would,” she said. This seemed highly unlikely to Anon. Since when did things work perfectly?
“No grim side-effects?” Anon asked.
“Well, we don’t think so. Are you noticing anything?”
Anon thought again, felt about his person and then slowly, deliberately, lifted up the bedsheet for a nice, big, overblown look underneath it. He held this for far longer than was necessary.
“...no,” he said at length.
Twilight, somehow, was managing to look even less impressed than she had been before.
“Really?” She asked, flatly.
“Hey, you would have done it too,” he said.
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said.
This wasn’t an argument Anon could win, and he deflated.
“No, you wouldn’t…” he said sadly.
Rolling her eyes Twilight hopped up onto the bed and moved in to curl up right against Anon’s side, to his surprise. Once all curled up and quite snug she let out a long, tired sigh.
“You’re okay though. You’re back to normal. Well, normal…” she said, tailing off most deliberately, leaving the blank there to fill in itself.
“Hey,” Anon protested. She just giggled and snuggled some more, which made it impossible for him to press the point further. The two of them stayed there quietly for a few minutes, just soaking in how bloody normal and dull things were now. No tiredness, no looming sense of dread. Anon had seen that even the horrible mark on his chest seemed to be looking better already.
Eventually he felt Twilight stir and he looked down at her.
“What was it like?” She asked.
“Being in the machine?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh…”
Difficult to describe. It had certainly been a sensation. Rather like being drunk - in the glass of water sense. Not painful, at least not in any way Anon was used to things being painful. But not exactly pleasant, either, and certainly more than a little bit claustrophobic. He had no way of conveying the conclusion of all this.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said eventually, feebly.
“Okay,” Twilight said, understanding, snugging again, just happy to have him back and healthy.
Ponies were so touchy-feely. Not that Anon was complaining.
She broke the cuddle a little after this, however, and slid back off the bed and onto the floor.
“I should go and tell the princesses you’re awake, they’ll want to talk to you. I’ll be right back. Okay?” She said.
“Okay,” Anon said. He wasn’t super-thrilled about being left alone again - not in the weird room in the scary palace where the big horses lived - but he was a big boy and could handle it. Twilight departed. When she came back, the big horses were with her, guards and all.
“How do you feel, Anon?” Celestia asked as she loomed.
“Much better, thank you,” he said, fiddling with the bedsheet.
“Good, good,” Celestia said, nodding. A pause. Then: “There’s something we think we should show you.”
The way she’d said it got his attention.
“Hmm? What?” He asked.
“Right now?” Twilight asked quietly, lean in towards the princesses.
“We feel sooner would be best,” Luna said.
That seemed to settle that, and at another nod from Celestia one of the trailing guards departed from the room. Moments later he reappeared, pushing a trolley.
And on the trolley was a box.
A very fine box indeed, all expensive-looking wood and metal detailing. More oddly, a thick cable was sticking out the side and linking to what looked to all the world to be a gramophone, or at least the horn part. Anon hadn’t the foggiest idea what was going on.
“What’s in the box?” He asked.
No-one wanted to answer this, it seemed, and no-one wanted to open the box either. Everyone just sort of stood around awkwardly and quietly for a bit before with another nod (very versatile with her nods) Celestia got the guard with the trolley to lift the lid.
And in the box, sitting in a comfy padded recess, was a fist-sized sphere of what appeared to be black glass. Even just looking at the thing made Anon cold. Then the horn attached to the box made a popping sound, followed by a crackle, and then came a voice:
“Hello!”
Immediately Anon launched himself off the bed and scrambled into the corner in a tangle of bedsheets and a scattering of pillows.
“That-! That’s the-! No! Not again!” He squawked, eyes wild, doing his best to get as into the corner as was possible. Twilight was already over by him, having kind of seen this coming.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
“That’s the thing! The voice! I know that voice! It’s - it’s that!” Anon was nearly shouting, pointing at the box and still trying to force himself deeper into the corner.
“You’re okay, you’re fine. It’s just in there, now, just there, the connection was severed,” Twilight continued and Anon finally managed to wrench his attention away from the box and focus it more-or-less in her direction.
“What does that mean?!”
“It means it worked, it worked. You’re safe, we’re safe, everything’s fine. The, uh, ‘hole’, I guess, was closed when you went through the machine. It’s just that whatever part of...it...that had already leaked through was still here. And had to be, well, contained. Apparently,” she said.
Anon stared at her, panting a bit, trying to calm down.
“...I don’t understand,” he said once he’d done that.
“Imagine a large vessel is leaking from a hole. The hole has now been plugged, but what had already leaked required cleaning up, to keep it from presenting a hazard. Thus,” Luna said, pointing to the box.
Anon thought about this.
“...okay. I think I get that,” he said, then turning to Twilight. “And that doctor guy did that? Just, off the cuff? Like it wasn’t a big deal?”
“He did. He’s creepy but he did do exactly what he said he’d do and more,” Twilight said.
“There is a reason he is kept around,” Luna said.
Things got quiet again as Anon, no longer frantic, just sat and stared for a bit.
“So...whatever was...in me...isn’t in me anymore?” He said.
“No,” said Twilight.
He pointed again.
“And it’s in that?”
“I am maimed! It’s quite delightful. So new and exciting! I’m distinct!” Said the box happily. Twilight, who didn’t like being interrupted at the best of times, gritted her teeth a moment before responding.
“...yes,” she said.
Swallowing, Anon got back to his feet and very, very gingerly moved towards the box. No-one really knew what to make of this so just watched, cautiously. He moved right up, peering down at the sphere. The sphere, being a sphere, had no real awareness of its surrounding beyond what the horn (a two-way horn, apparently) allowed it to hear, so it said and did nothing.
“Nearly killed me and now it’s just...this…” Anon said, licking his lips.
“No malice intended, I assure you! Merely an unfortunate, lethal and entirely accidental set of circumstances,” the sphere said.
“That doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better but thanks anyway?”
“Quite alright! I do feel most terrible about whatever distress all this might have caused. Can only hope I find some way of, ah, making it up! Is that the term? What an idea! To be so distinct as to, ah, come up against such otherness!”
Anon, while rested at long last, was nowhere near rested enough to deal with that.
“Can we go home?” He asked Twilight. Twilight, in turn, looked to the princesses for the go-ahead. There was, unsurprisingly, another nod, and Twilight led Anon out of the room to go and see if she could find something for him to wear on the way back that wasn’t the rather loose robe they’d wrapped about him to sleep modestly in.
That left Celestia, Luna and a handful (hoofful?) of guards. And the sphere.
“I must say, it’s quite the experience being like this,” said the sphere unprompted.
“Is this your problem or my problem?” Celestia hissed to Luna, who rolled her eyes.
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Well how about that, the infernal thing worked as planned!
That's got to be the first time a Skaven device ever functioned so, cleanly.
10185864
He's not a Skaven, he's just...
...very heavily Skaven-inspired.
Ahem.
I'm not a writer who has time for things happening.
Just now found this story and read it all at once. Pretty good really. I hope there'll be a sequel, or at the very least some closure on the sphere.
10185909
Pffbt, closure indeed! That sounds like it'd require leaving a story without a frustratingly open-ended non-conclusion!
I had forgotten about this story until I saw the notification for a new chapter. Glad to see it got a ending, though seeing whose problem the entity would become would be a entertaining story in itself.
I was not expecting a Road House reference in this.
Not complaining, mind.
i.imgur.com/qyD8q8m.png
And then we get a story about the Darkness in the Sphere. Like, it's just set up in a random hallway in the castle as a decorative piece, and random ponies that go by get a cheery hello from it, giving strange, sage advice it has learned from ponies and other creatures over the decades of sitting in that hallway.
10187665
That's actually a pretty neat idea. I'm going to just mention it in some entirely unrelated story and giggle wildly to myself when I do it. Mean, I already put Doctor Knacker in this! I'm creating my own rich mythos! Aha! Ahahaha!
Better than the other idea, where it gets a mechanical body and later upgrades it to include a cloak of blades and causes untold ruckus in the third book in the series, underlining why you really shouldn't trust mysterious spheres in boxes.Tee hee, references...
10186066
Road House is sublime
10186000
Given that a sphere can't really do anything (or can it?) it'd really have to be an adjunct to something else. Maybe. Probably.
10186952
He'll be fine!
Douglas Adams didn't die in vain. He died in Montecito CA.
...special guest star, Dr. KNACKER!
10190908
He's a firm fixture in my broad legendarium of rich characters like, uh...
Doctor Knacker and...
...Mortis Gage got mentioned at least twice because that's a great pun. Um...
There's probably others...
10190928
Yep, big fan of "the Knacker". Equestria occasionally needs a bit of a shake up. Characters like the good Doctor are there to give Harmony a good kick in the pants when it gets too uppity.
At least that's what my stream of consciousness word salad reckons anyways!
Ah, siblings.
Fucking love it
This has to be one of the strangest rides I've been on and still thoroughly enjoyed. Thanks... I think.
10193771
Given that if released it is a 'plane of existence ending' creature, isn't it in both of their interest to treat the entity as if it's both of their problems?
Also, why am I imagining that it'll be given a purpose as a counselor or a motivational speaker?