Knight of Wands

by Starscribe

Chapter 2: The Tower

The Tower

Jackie landed in a tumble, knocking Squeak from her shoulders and rolling for a few feet before coming to a stop in a field of sand and burned grass. She moaned, trying to get her legs under her, but for the first few moments she didn’t try very hard. So long as she could still move, that was what mattered.

“I don’t…” squeaked the little voice from nearby. “Where the fuck is the receiving portal? There’s supposed to be a huge building, lots of ponies. Warm bath, plenty of bugs to eat.”

Maybe her small size was helping her, because she was already on her hooves, bouncing up and down beside Jackie. “Come on, get up! We’ve got to find everybody.”

Jackie did, though more slowly. Her limbs were a little more sluggish to respond, and she could feel a soreness that she knew wouldn’t be going away immediately. She rose with a groan, shaking out her wings. “Who was trying to kill us?”

“I think the US Air Force,” Squeak said, landing on her back without invitation this time and pointing forward with one hoof. “Go that way! There are some buildings that direction. Maybe we can ask for help.”

Jackie resisted the urge to shake the little pony off her back. But she was light enough that the weight was insignificant. Besides, having her up there probably meant she couldn’t get herself into more trouble.

And I don’t really want to be alone here. Company was definitely the superior way of traveling the Dreamlands, even if her only company was a broken piece of herself. Could I put us back together by eating her, the way spirits do?

Maybe, but she couldn’t bring herself to try it and find out. There was something far too disturbing about killing another version of herself, even if they weren’t supposed to be two people to begin with.

“The… a pre-Event government? Still surviving in the Dreamlands?”

The bat made a high-pitched squeak of displeasure. “Didn’t say we were in the Dreamlands. I have… no idea what the hell that is, but you said that. My guess is the Underworld. And why wouldn’t the Air Force be here? Because it’s not our country? Hasn’t stopped them before.”

She winced, trying to process the high pitched barrage of new information as fast as it came in. A fool’s errand, unfortunately. There was no chance of her keeping up.

But Squeak was right about one thing, there were buildings up ahead. Maybe whoever lived in them would be able to offer them some guidance, even if they looked like something that Sunset might’ve ordered built in Summerland.

They passed a little cottage on the edge of a forest, then crossed onto a dirt road. Apple trees lined it to the left, and Jackie picked one up with a hoof, offering it to the bat on her back.

At least they still had a little in common—she seemed to have no more compunctions about stealing than big Jackie did. She began to chew thoughtfully, without gratitude.

Jackie grumbled and ate one herself, and had just about finished by the time the city came into view.

Well, city might be overly generous. It looked like a modestly-sized European village from several centuries before the Event, except that there were occasional radio aerials emerging from some of the houses and a solar film spread on a few roofs.

It might’ve been a comfortable, charming place, except that it had very clearly been wrecked by some kind of armed conflict. There were strange, square buildings rising on the other end of the city, and everything nearby had been shattered or broken somehow. Entire walls had caved in, as though hit by tank shells. A gigantic tree made of glass had several shattered branches at its base, and bright green fires still smoldered on some of what had fallen.

And there were bodies—human bodies mostly, in various stages of decay. Many of them didn’t look like they’d been fighting so much as they’d fallen over while walking somewhere then gave up on being alive.

Jackie stepped around one of them, eyes scanning the exposed arm for the telltale ichorous black tendrils of a thaumic poisoning. The evidence of a corpse that would soon rise again.

Except she didn’t see it. She was walking beside them, with no sign of magical harm. Even if no ponies had been around at the time, her own presence here should’ve started the process of waking them up.

But it didn’t. The corpses stayed corpses, strange military uniforms and all.

“This is… not what I expected,” Squeak said, perching on a nearby cart. It looked a little big, even from where Jackie was standing. Squeak could’ve been this fruit-cart-owner’s pet cat. It didn’t help that she arched her back and puffed out her chest like she was about to start mewling. “I know there was a plan to invade Equestria, but… this isn’t right. These humans aren’t wearing the right colors.”

“Seems like they invaded anyway,” Jackie said, kicking a bit of metal that had fallen beside one of the humans. She brushed it off with a wing, then lifted it up. It was a rifle of some kind, though most of it was black plastic. Like something she might’ve seen in the hands of an HPI soldier during her earliest memories of being a pony. It had been thousands of years since they used plastic rifles.

“Nobody I know either.” She kicked, rolling over one of the bodies. It was a little gruesome, but she avoided looking at the gray skin and shriveled features as best she could. There was a patch on the breast, and she could read it. “Federation Navy.”

“You know these guys?”

“Nope.” The bat seemed much less comfortable around the corpses than Jackie herself. She landed on her back another moment later, and seemed to be keeping her head down from how muffled her voice sounded. “Ugh… keep going. We should… should walk somewhere else, I think. Yeah. Somewhere else.”

“Where?” Jackie looked around, but she could see no other signs of life. No ponies seemed to have fallen here, just the strange humans. And not one of them was wounded.

“H-how about… oh, there!” She pointed up to a distant hill, overlooking the town. There was a tall wooden fence there, and past it were some buildings made of metal and glass, like the sort of temporary buildings a construction company might put up around a large project that was still being built.

“Sure.” Jackie started walking. She could sense no nearby exits, nothing that indicated they had entered a single pony’s dream. Nor did she sense the dream’s stability, which would’ve been a sure sign that they had invaded the sleep of a still-living pony.

So is it still the Dreamlands? Is this the Equestrian side, maybe?

If it was, the Equestrians were sure dreaming of a lot of dead humans in strange uniforms.

“Wait, I changed my mind!” Squeak called, as soon as they’d made it halfway up the hill. There were more bodies this way, spreading out from a broken-down entrance and shattered section of the wall. Almost as though this is where they’d come from. “We should go the other way! Yeah! That, uh… that mountain there, I think that’s Canterlot! The huge city up on the hill. Looks like it might be a few days away, but… rather be there than here.”

“Sorry.” Jackie kept walking. “I need to figure out what happened here. It’s a problem I have.”

The bat followed along behind her, just as she’d guessed she would. “Are, uh… are you sure? We don’t have anything to do with this. You said so, you don’t know who they are. Maybe we shouldn’t be near a war? There are guns everywhere. You want to get shot?”

“Not today,” she admitted. “But here, it won’t kill us. There’s no such things as guns in the Dreamlands. It only hurts because you believe it does. And if you change your mind, decide it doesn’t… then it won’t.”

“We aren’t asleep,” the little bat called, her voice annoyed. “That was cute when you said it before, but it’s not cute anymore! Don’t get yourself killed!”

“I’ll… stop if it looks dangerous,” she said. “Fair? Anything pops up that looks like it might hurt us, we can both turn around. But these…” She gestured with a wing up at the hill. “These men and women are dead. They won’t hurt us.”

They weren’t alone here. As Jackie passed through the broken gate, a murder of crows took off from a nearby patch of corpses, cawing and squawking their protest at being interrupted. But they didn’t lunge for her, and so there was no violence. Just some annoyed looks.

“There wasn’t even anyone left to bury them,” she muttered. “Who would do that?”

“Maybe not a who,” Squeak said, landing on her back again. “Maybe a what. Disease—contagious disease, maybe. We should get going.”

“There isn’t a single dead pony here,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Maybe don’t freak out about nothing. Obviously nothing we can catch.”

Squeak grumbled, but she had no argument to that. There wasn’t a single pony in here, just the many dead humans left right where they’d fallen. Unless they’d been disturbed by a bird feeding on them, that was.

Of all the temporary buildings in this strange camp, there were two distinct styles. Mostly cloth tents on one side, without any attention paid to privacy or stability. They wouldn’t have been warm enough to keep even a pony comfortable if the snow really got thick on the ground.

But there was another half, the conventional structures she had seen from down in the pony town. One of them still had power.

Jackie approached the building, her body tense and wings spread with every moment. She had to step over and around numerous bodies as she approached, but that didn’t matter. She’d survived the Final War, she could survive this.

The building had automatic doors, and they slid open for her as though they weren’t at the end of the world, surrounded by death.

The inside wasn’t a transition to another dream realm, nor were there any of the impossible proportions that were so common in dreams. But we’re still in the Dreamlands, we have to be. Nowhere else this could be.

Unless Squeak was right, and this really was the Underworld. There was certainly enough corpses.

Inside the building was an open lobby with a few modern desks and a huge model of the globe as a slowly-rotating water feature in the center.

At least it wasn’t choked with bodies like the outside. The air here smelled shockingly sterile, despite everything. Only cleaner and the occasional plant smell drifted through the space.

“Oh thank god.” Squeak landed on the reception desk, which was as empty as the rest of the building. “Nobody died in here.”

“Don’t look too relieved—maybe this is the place that killed those people.”

Squeak glared up at her from the desk, but she didn’t take off. “Don’t think so. That fountain is the same logo as the one on their uniforms. I bet this was their… HQ or something. This might’ve been where those people lived. Maybe you could find out how they died, if you care.”

“Not really,” she answered. “I’m still looking for a living dreamer—so I can use their connection to the waking world to get some magic in here. We’ll run out without it, and eventually have to change ourselves to get work. When that happens, we stop being human one day at a time, and eventually we forget why we’re even here.”

“Great,” Squeak said. “The world you come from sounds like it sucks, if that’s what you think things are like. But you’re wrong anyway. We aren’t in a dream. Maybe we’re dead. But…” She pointed at the screen behind her, making an excited bat trilling sound. “See? There’s power flowing to one of the cells. Looks like it’s locked, too. Someone might be alive down there.”

“Worth a look,” Jackie said. Not because this mystery would trouble her—it was just a dream. But rather, being locked in a cell as the last survivor of a massacre made this sound very much like a dream. One they could repurpose for their own ends.

There were multiple floors, and Jackie very nearly got them lost. But Squeak seemed to know what she was doing, and after a few minutes of backtracking, they were standing in front of the door to the brig.

Locked. The sensor clearly saw them—but each time they approached, a little light above the door would flash red. Probably a sign that they didn’t have permission.

“Well, guess that’s it,” Squeak said. “What a terrible shame. We’ll just have to fly off to somewhere safe. Maybe we can find Harley—she’d cook for us. Even for you, oversized monster pony.”

“Stop.” She didn’t look away from the door. “This door is only polycarbonate.” She rapped against it with a hoof.

“Yeah? Isn’t that stuff shatterproof? Hard as steel.”

This particular flavor of it was, but the technical distinctions were irrelevant now. “Sure. And we’re getting inside.” Jackie closed her eyes, concentrating on the dreamlands as she had so many times before. There was a heavy metallic thunk, and a large object landed on the ground beside her, along with several cylinders that wobbled and fell over.

“Fuck me sideways,” Squeak said. “You have a welding torch up your ass?”

Jackie picked up the helmet, fitting it over her head and letting the visor smack down. As before, the magic drained her terribly, making her mind drift and lose focus on the world around her. She very nearly picked up off the ground and diffused into the air right there, her essence no longer unified by magic. But she gritted her teeth, pictured Ezri’s face in front of her, and held on.

After a few moments of panting, the sensation faded. She offered a tiny version of her helmet to Squeak. “We’re getting that prisoner out.”

Plastic crumbled easily under a few smooth slices from the torch, filling the air in front of her with an acrid black smoke that billowed up and out into the hallway behind them. But it wasn’t as though there were other ponies using the building who could complain about it.

After a few minutes Jackie had cut a hole large enough for her to climb through, and the melted plastic stopped sliding away in thick black strings. She turned off all the valves, switched off the welding torch, and tossed the helmet to the floor at the base of the door.

She wasn’t left searching for the right cell for very long—there was only one to choose from.

As with the outside, the ones who lived here used plastic for the cell door. This was clear, permitting an uninterrupted view inside. Except there was no furniture through the polycarbonate, not even a chair. Just a length of cable, maybe two feet in total. Not even enough for the pony to hurt herself.

But that wasn’t the strangest thing about the cell—no, that was its occupant.

For the second time today, Jackie saw herself. The pony had the same blue coat, the same bright mane, the same interference pattern cutie mark. Only… those wings didn’t open and close quite right. As they approached, her eyes tracked on a perfect curve, like a security camera following someone as they entered the room.

“This is getting silly,” Jackie said, stopping right on the other side of the glass. The pony there was taller than she was by a full head at least, and was bigger along every other proportion too. At least she wasn’t a cat by comparison, like Squeak. “You’re me too? A third one?”

“I can tell that isn’t the case,” said the speaker, rising to her hooves and pacing on the other side of the glass. She didn’t sound quite the way Jackie might’ve expected—there was a slight click with every step, reverberating around the inside of the little room. Like she was wearing plastic horseshoes. “You’ve got no ping. No implants, then, not even a cortical recorder. You’re both all meat.”

Jackie shivered at the way she said it—but there was nothing predatory about those words. She only sounded observational. “Implants?” Jackie raised an eyebrow. “You mean like the HPI putting in metal bones and electric muscles? That was old school, copy number two. We do it with magic now. No need for a new surgery every time someone new comes up with a good idea.”

“The… resemblance is uncanny,” the one in the cage observed. “But that doesn’t mean we’re the same person. I can’t believe my organic self would’ve found her way to Equestria. You couldn’t pay me enough to be a horse. I had to get forced into it, and there’d be no Sunset to do the forcing.”

“Sunset,” Jackie repeated. “Sunset Shimmer?”

“You’re shitting us,” Squeak spat. “She’s not here!”

“She is,” said the bigger version of her, stopping right on the other side of the glass. “No other Sunset I ever met mattered to anything. But I haven’t met too many ponies. Not as many as I’d like. Is it weird if I have sex with you?” Her eyebrows went up. “I was late to the party, wasn’t I? You two…”

The little one shivered, tucking her tail between her legs. Her ears flattened, and Jackie could smell her embarrassment. But the way she took off her back and insisted on floating in the air under her own power was also a powerful suggestion of her discomfort. “We almost got killed in the ghost of Unity. Probably something similar waiting for us here, big me.”

Jackie tensed, finding that logic made perfect sense. She glanced once over her shoulder, then hurried back into the hall and started dragging things in. She didn’t even want to guess how hard it would be to get the computer to open this door. But she wouldn’t need to with a little welding.

“It would be weird,” Jackie said. “I don’t even know your name. But I can guess what you’re gonna say.”

As it turned out, she couldn’t. “Moire Pattern,” the pony said. “That’s how you avoid collisions here in Normandy. New names for a new face, and you’re all invited. So the middle one is Jackie, and the small one is…”

“Squeak,” Jackie said, not waiting for her to have enough time to protest. “That’s what I’ve been calling her, anyway. See, just get her flustered and you’ll see why.”

Squeak obliged them with a little embarrassed performance right there, before landing on the computer console nearby and sticking her tongue out. “Keep talking like that, giant. See how helpful I am when you’re in trouble.”

“I’m just being real! Anyway, neither of you is the real one if you want to get technical. We’re in the Dreamlands… a really shitty part of it I’m guessing. You’re parts of me that got damaged after I died. Spirits eat spirits, but they don’t die. They just decompose, and that’s our life now.”

“You believe in a… Dreamlands, you said?” Moire raised an eyebrow. Now that she was up close, Jackie didn’t think those wings looked terribly convincing with a light source behind them. There were plastic joints inside, catching the light in a way that no real one ever would. She could practically see the hinge.

“It’s not about belief.” Jackie kept back her annoyance as best she could, settling the helmet onto her head. “It’s about experience. The Dreamlands is just another place. It’s not about prayers and offerings. It’s about going there and surviving the trip home. Never easy, but often worthwhile. If you can manage.”

She didn’t hear her companions again, because then she turned up the gas, and for a while that was all she could hear.

The cell door was thicker, and far more stubborn than the door into the brig had been. But a little determination and her fur to keep away the worst of the heat, and eventually a little circle of semi-molten plastic smacked onto the floor in the cell.

“It’s so thoughtful of you to let me out,” said the bat inside, though she didn’t try to force her way through right away. She seemed to be waiting for the plastic around the edges to harden, just as Jackie had done with the door in. “Real good Samaritans you are.”

“I’m not,” Jackie said, matter-of-fact. “I really just don’t want bits of me to die. I’m thinking we might be able to get fused back together at some point. Spirits combine in the wild, and there’s for sure a natural way to force it.”

“Good luck with that one,” Moire Pattern said, taking a few steps back before leaping smoothly through the exit. She executed it perfectly, legs tucking in with mechanical precision and catching her millimeters above the ground. She was like the best trained performers in all Equestria, without even a hint of melted plastic stuck to her coat. “I’ve heard of programs who fuse before, but you’re meat. There’s nothing we can share beyond a good time. Offer’s… still open on that one, by the way. Interested?”

Jackie was about to say no when the earth all around them started to shake. She immediately took off in a low hover, and was unsurprised to feel Squeak’s weight settle onto her back again. The mechanical copy watched from nearby, amused but apparently not intimidated.

Glass shattered, the structure heaving. From somewhere nearby, Jackie could hear at least one other structure actually collapsing under its own weight.

“We need to get outside,” she said, tossing the torch aside before she could get tangled in the tubes.

“Sounds like a plan to me!” squeaked the Squeak. They ran. Unfortunately for them, their own building seemed to be collapsing. Huge cracks were spreading in the concrete, almost as though they were following Jackie in her flight.

They might be. Voeskender could be trying to get his revenge at last. But she didn’t give up—just kept flying as fast as she could, gritting her teeth together and focusing on the objects falling all around her. Huge sections of wall rumbled and cracked.

Then the ground opened. A gaping hole spread through the cement, right below them, and growing wider with every second.

Magic? Are we being attacked? But she couldn’t sense any manipulation of the dream. If something more fundamental was involved, she wouldn’t have been able to feel it.

Moire was just behind her, keeping pace. Despite being mechanical, she seemed able to fly pretty well.

Then the crevasse opened wide enough that the entire building couldn’t escape.

Jackie caught one glimpse of an unfathomably long drop, the return echo of a stretch of ground so long that she couldn’t even sense the other end of it. Then they were sucked down.

Author's Note:

http://sketchashy.tumblr.com/

Comments

[Zutcha]

66.media.tumblr.com/190b38f6032451d944a62ff6c90eb572/tumblr_pn5qdaGreX1rsmidfo1_1280.jpg

[FanOfMostEverything]

When... a... grid's misaligned with another behind, that's a Moiré!
(Credit/blame to Randall Munroe.)

xkcd references aside, the gang is increasingly here. And every time a new Jackie joins the party, the world starts attacking them. Most curious. Hopefully the primary Jackie won't have to pull any more industrial tools out of the aether; she doesn't seem to have many left in her.

[Helium]

The world certainly doesnt want to have a moment for them to talk about whats going on, and at this rate we'll have the full cast of jackies [/spoiler ]before they do. So far i've guessed correctly which jackies we'd be meeting. Im going to guess the next one lives on a certain ring...

[Amaponynoob]

I'm quickly starting to wish this story came with some way to tell what world each page takes place in. For those of us that haven't (and are unlikely to any time soon with how much there is ) read everything Starscribe has ever typed out.