Mar. 2014 - Megastructures
Prologue
The cold, biting my hide…
The chill, frizzling my mane…
The silence, deafening my ears…
The smell of oil, retching my guts…
And that breathe on my face…
Which wasn’t mine…
My eyes fluttered. Opening one eyelid at a time, gasping for air as my muzzle was buried deep in a gooey brown puddle, my limbs shook of all their might. I was cold, I was alone, and I was scared.
Slow and shaky, I lifted my face out of this lair of reek. On my febrile hindquarters, eyes shot wide at my hooves and torso trickling with oil and unholy fluids, I tried to wrestle myself from my stupor, to no avail…
Spasms running across my spine and shakes crippling my limbs, my stare wandered around me. I couldn’t see anything as every point of space was thrown into a dreadful pitch black. Numbness gripped my mind. And the breath, continually flowing onto my face spread a cold deadness beneath my fur. Gulping, struggling to keep my composure, my mind screamed at me orders I didn’t listen to. Where was I? How did I get there? Was I covered in filth? And this breath…
Two greenish glowing dot burst open before my eyes and I froze. Adjusting like two microscopes on a slice of translucent crystaln the two flickering points scrutinized me with a terrible sight, cold, hopeless, and heartless. They were huge, terrifying… So large I wish I couldn’t see my reflection in those glassy orbs. A white fur smeared with black, brown, and grey. A sick purple mane soaked in murk, falling into atrocious locks onto my face, neck, and shoulders. How uncouth… And the whole… my features outlined by an eerie green light bursting off those two… glaring eyes. I was pale, terrorised, completely out of phase.
Unbearably slowly, my eyes drifted away from those artificial mirrors and took a proper view of my surroundings. The glow spreading a dull light over the barren land before my hooves, I found myself stranded on a large metallic platform, a drip-drip from a pipe located far above me and hidden by the darkness hitting the floor two hoofsteps away from me.
I jerked my head back, sweat crawling down my neck in between my jaded mane and fur. I could see no wall, only darkness and a guardrail vanishing into it. Lethargy weaved in my bones, and with what seemed to be ants running through my veins, I staggered and curled up into a ball.
This moment of respite went short-lived, the whirring of uncountable rusty cogwheels breaking a silence I couldn’t have fathom back in Ponyville.
Home… the thought struck me. I wanted my warm bed, my dusty shelves, my frou-frou, voili-voilà, and bric à brac... My soft silk bed linens stuffed with feathers. My warm tea time at four in the afternoon. I wanted home so ardently, but I was just offered a cold, alone, and miserable night. Was it even night?
The warm breath came back and swiftly slapped my face. Undutiful, I looked up at the two green dots and gulped. It was looking at me, passively, in a silent tearing up my very soul. And then, light burst from above. The lamp, hung up on an insanely far ceiling focused on me, bathing me in a sliver of burning white. I was being watched, and I couldn’t even tell by who.
Rubbing my eyes with my quivering hooves, trying to wash off the filth only to spread it like peanut butter on my pristine coat, I finally brought my sight up to my watcher.
It wasn’t equine…
I cried out and my whimper went lost in the nether, as everything was dark and shallow two meters away from the stream of light. I couldn’t look at it, yet I couldn’t stare down. I was so scared, powerless.
I just said it wasn’t equine… The truth was that it was even a living being.
Two massive bulging balls of glass marred with two deep black pit circled by large zooming green irises glared at me with an irrepressible coldness. Instead of a muzzle, it displayed a bony white nose like an upside down ship bow sporting no mouth but two large tube which tips, ending below what must have been its cheeks, were two silently rotating fans. The breath came from there… It was the respiration of a machine.
Yes, it was a machine, the largest, most horrendously-looking, and far-fetching engine I had ever laid my eyes upon. Twenty times the size of a pony, its thin, insect-like shape weaved past me, its many arms showing off razors sharp claws clattering on the ground, leaving indents in the metal floor. From my position, it looked like an erring slender crow skeleton which wings had been ripped away to be replaced with myriads of arms of many shapes. Wires and pipes hung below its belly like ripped open guts. Sickening.
I spectated nearly religiously as it neared a wall I could finally see, thanks to the inbuilt light of the creature’s eyes. It raised its hooves… claws to the wall, drawing a perfect square with its shiny sharpened nail. Then, the scream began.
It wasn’t a common scream a mare would howl as horror was breaking into her daily life. It was screeching, raspy, and loud, like a broken knife etching over porcelain inside a gigantic echoing castle. Unbearable and painful. I covered my ears and cried back.
“Make it stop,” I begged.
And indeed, it stopped instantly. Tears flowing down my cheeks, my eyes wandered up to the creature’s hands. There, tiny stream of bright green and blue flames died and revealed beneath a grown brick of metal, square and hung onto the mark it had made in the wall. He had just built an object out of nothing. I would have been impressed if the dolor clutching my head sparked shivers in my backbone.
“Please, stop it. It hurts,” I supplicated.
The machine hung its head onto the side and looked at me. The stare duel didn’t last long as I broke the contact with its intense flaring bright eyes. It started beeping, tilting its head from left to right intermittently. Was it… communicating?
“I… I don’t understand,” I blurted, trying to wipe my tears, only to cover my fur with even more oil and dirt, I would have sold my soul for a bath. “I… can’t understand.”
I heard a pop as the machine slowly hung its shoulders and head and bent over me, covering my body with a large shadow. With widened eyes, I followed a thin cable hovering from the creature back in my direction, a crawling black and metallic tendril. I froze as it stopped a hoof away from my nose, my attention riveted on the five centimetres long needle pointing from the cable tip.
“What… the…”
The creature raised up its claw and tapped its right temple with a crystalline clicking tunk.
“Wait…” I muttered. “I’m not going to stab myself with this long, unrefined hospital tool of horror.”
The machine’s head reacted with a shifting backward movement, betraying a sense of surprise. Slowly it showed the side of its head, revealing a small built in plug-in, similar to those guitar rear thingies the mare everypony known as DJ-Pon3 in Ponyville used, a jack I think it was called. And right know the plug-in was as thin as a long and frightening needle. I hated needles.
I gulped. “I don’t have one... I’m not a rusty cranking machine such as you, you punk!”
Being compared to a machine. Boorish! But soon, I was going to regret my honesty.
I yelped, a claw encasing my neck and lifting me off the group, biting in my skin like a monstrous maw. Thrashing around, kicking the air in hope I could sustain myself to escape the hellish burning sensation sizing my throat. The machine held a whirling scream. I stopped, scared to death, the creature’s eyes now glowing red, staring at me in the white of my eyes.
Holding me like a mere puppet, another of its deadly gripping hand bit on the side of my head, cutting down a large chunk of my mane, which fell down to my upmost terror.
“What are you doing?” I yelled, only to gurgle for air as the machine tightened its grasp.
The hand closed onto the right side of my head and I screamed.
I screamed as I never did, for I hadn’t known true pain until now. Staggering pain, ripping-off pain, moulding pain, breaking pain… Tearing me apart like a sheet of paper under the shiny edge of an exotic sword. I screamed until my vocal chords cracked. I hissed until my mind blacked out. Supplicating, pissing myself, thrashing, jerking around, and just… begging for my life, I saw light washing over the world around me as my eyes slowly closed. I hadn’t had the time to see beyond the pain and darkness swallowed me like an old friend.
-- α ϵ Ω / Ω Ø α --
Blood burst painfully beneath the skin of my right temple and forehead. My ears whizzed in a mind-induced cacophony. I rolled on my back trying to scream out my pain.
“The size of the megastructures is of approximately one hundred forty thousand seven hundred twenty-three kilometres wide and growing, no one knows what lays beyond. The government will soon take you to a provided shelter. Don’t panic, don’t move, and don’t fight. Wait,” I heard a mechanical voice in my head. “You…”
I jumped away and a new wave of pain washed off my body, straining my muscles and throwing me off-guard. My jaw hit the ground in a loud thump. Tears crawled off my face and I hugged my knees tightly.
Before my eyes lied the cable and its needle, blood dripping off its point. My eyes perked up with stars. The stars took an ice blue colour and slowly reshaped into weird writings, superposing over my vision. I saw numbers and words I couldn’t understand, labelling every item laying around me. A name was displayed over the machine’s head.
It wasn’t surprising that I began panicking. I rubbed my eyes, likely trying to scrap away something that wasn’t physical. Pain sparked again from my right temple and through my body.
After a scream, I slowly raised my limb to my head.
My hoof hinted on a foreign piece of metal stuck into the right side of my forehead. Small, round, and painful. I touched it once.
“What have you done to me?” I said, bemused, at the creature.
Twice.
“What. Have. You. Done. To. Me?” I growled.
Thrice…
I looked up at the creature. The cable had already disappeared. ITtturned away from me and backed away toward the wall.
“What. Have. You. Done. To. ME?” I shouted.
The robot’s claws bit in the metal and like an arachnid it walked up the wall above my head. A wall that was endless, its ceiling disappearing through a mist only an insane distance could breed. Soon it was too small to be seen.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!” I screamed and fell into a low cry, tears flowing to my eyes.
Indeed, I cried… hitting the floor with my hooves. Whining in pain. I was pathetic, but whining had always been my speciality. So I whined... I whined until I cried myself to sleep. Yet, sleep never came.
As time passed, I wiped my tears away and stood on my hooves, desperately trying to forget about the lancing headache.
To my horror, my eyes lied upon the world around me, and something broke within my heart. Beyond the guardrail, everything was engulfed in a shallow white light, highlighting the leaks, rust marks, construction mistakes, and abandonment this world which wasn't mine was suffering from.
A gargantuan closed world the only sight shattered my conception of reality. Emptiness and ramparts… everywhere was emptiness enclosed by god-sized ramparts… pure metal, kilometres-tall walls disappearing over me and below, bridges stretching toward the infinite, gigantesque structures growing in an insanely wide area. Black and gooey, scarred with rust broken pipes, and wires as large as mountains. I was lost inside the entrails of an infinite monster of metal I couldn’t fathom the size. I could see black clouds immobile in this horizon enclosed in this antechamber of a cold artificial hell.
I was lost, without any landmark in a world of silence, trapped in a majestic and terrifying maze of metal. There was no grass, no animal, no chirping… nothing. Just me and a city of metal created for and by beings that could step on me like bacteria. I was lost in translation in a world I wasn’t meant to see.
Where was I...?
Maybe on Equestria...?
Maybe in the future...?
My name is Rarity, and this is my story through the Megastructures, a story of blood, oil, destruction, and search for a mythical way out.
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