Magic's Birth: The Sisters' Memories

by The Psychopath

NOT YOU AGAIN!

Rahllup lifted the PAB before her by the head and raised it high into the air, eventually tossing it over her shoulders. It bounced a few times before stopping with a long shriek on the ground. The machine continued to twitch and glitch, repeating what its late partner had.

"Well, now that that's out of the way, let's keep goin'," Rahllup declared. "Besides, how many're left? Twenty? Thirty?"

"There's millions patrolling the cities of the blue at any given time," Celestia explained.

"I thought there were only a few hundred," Luna said as she pulled the charred machine away. It had been angrily stomping on the burnt out PAB.

"What?!" Dissonance bellowed.

"We'll have to sneak around, then," Galah noted as he looked around across the streets. "If I'm not mistaken they tend to stay far apart from each other but just close enough that they can reinforce each other in case of a crisis." He look to the side at the group. "At least, that's what I experienced in my day. Not sure if they do the same thing now or there's another system in place now."

Rahllup groaned in annoyance, but Biddy was the one to talk. "You didn't really plan anything when you wanted us to follow you, did you?" the triangular machine asked the sisters.

"I was compelled by...something, to gather as many machines as me and travel the world with them," Luna explained. The lights of her body flickered as she clutched her head. "I don't know why I did it."

Biddybee placed her hands on her hips and shook her head. "Well, too late to do anything about it now, so no point in getting upset."

"The question remains to what we're going to do to get to this 'mechanic' you mentioned," Dissonance said. "Since everyone here seems to scream in terror when they see the two horrific b..." They started looking around. "Where'd the stowaway go?" The group started looking around, surprised that it had vanished once again. "Weren't you holding its hand?" they asked Luna.

The blue machine looked at said hand for several seconds before detecting audio from behind her. The charred machine was busy dragging a maker out from one of the buildings, doing its best to use both hands, although its arched back and plethora of emerging sparks indicated the difficulty it was still experiencing.

"What are you doing, you idiot?!" Galah shouted. He hopped over to the charred machine, his massive weight cracking the ground beneath every stomp. He pulled the maker out of the charred machine's hands, provoking its ire as it slapped him away and rushed to Luna. "The maker is...pale?" the prototype noted. "They look like they've been drained." Said maker was groaning and rolling weakly from side to side. "At least they aren't dead."

The whole group looked to the charred machine hiding behind Luna. It tried to yell at them, but only a garbled electric buzzing came out along with sparks.

"How exactly do you function?" Biddy wondered.

"Are we just going to ignore the triangle's being of the 'gray'?" Dissonance called out. The others ignored them and so were met with a shrug. "Well, alright then. If that's how it's going to be."

Much to Dissonance's annoyance, the group left as quickly as possible, using Luna and Celestia as forward scouts and Galah as an 'all clear' signal. While the makers seemed intrigued by the two floating machines present, they were far less eager when the two giants from the black appeared, repeating the same welcome they had earned when they first arrived: Screaming and running away, ad nauseum.

Dissonance crossed their arms and pouted. "Not liking this place," they complained. "How am I supposed to get a feel for the people here when all they do is run away screaming when they see the two ogres accompanying us?!"

Luna looked at the giants and noticed they seemed more brutish and simple after that comment. She reset her visual programs, delighting at them returning to normal afterwards.

"There's no way we're goin' ta get through all of this without gettin' caught and destroyed," Rahllup grumbled.

"We'll have to take a break when night falls," Luna said. Only Galah and Celestia didn't look at her dumbfounded. "The mechanic's home is around here, but the area is too big. I was mistaken about being able to accurately spot it."

"I thought their workshop was a large, open terrain filled with junk," Galah said.

Luna shrugged. "We can't find it for some reason." She looked around and rubbed her 'muzzle'. "They couldn't have changed the environment that much in the little time we were gone," she muttered worriedly. "We need to stop by a maintenance station and get directions." She looked to her sister. "Or, at least, my sister can get directions as she has map records of the city."

Rahllup's fire dimmed. "Then why don't we just use her map?" she asked while pointing to the white machine.

Celestia was struggling to hold the black machine back while Galah carried the maker back into the building.

"Because she doesn't have any geolocalization," Luna explained. "The city is too big to determine where we are through landmarks as the buildings and layout are too uniform."

Rahllup's flames flickered as she tried to figure out what the blue machine had just told her.

"It means they don't know where we are on the map," Dissonance groaned in exasperation. "I'd call you a meathead if you had any meat on you."

"Hey, ah'm a farmer, not a geolocationalist!" Rahllup retorted angrily.

Dissonance stared at her, speechless. "You mean a cartographer?!" they shouted.

Biddy clonked them both on the head. "Enough of your constant fighting. We've been doing that non-stop! I'm tired of it! My systems are overheating trying to process it!" She looked to Celestia as she dragged the grumpy charred machine letting itself be as heavy a burden as possible by letting itself go limp. "How do we stay out of sight while you stay at a recharge station, whatever that is? I suppose those weird robots won't be taking the 'night off' to recharge as well."

Celestia went through her database. "It would have been optimal to find the junkyard first, but we have no choice. We'll have to find a place where you can hide and rejoin us afterwards, or at least keep us in sight and be fully active when we become active ourselves."

The group continued on, becoming more and more annoyed by the lack of good spots until, finally, they came across a station that had six spots left open. Nodding to each other, the giants decided that climbing the nearby buildings and waiting on the roofs would be preferable to waiting on the floor. After all, the PABs didn't look anywhere but at ground level. There was no reason for any machine to climb buildings, and makers weren't able to get up the smooth surfaces, not that it would matter since they weren't machines of the black anyways, and they would have to go on the ground at some point anyways. A flaw, Celestia noted, but one that hadn't seen a need for correction yet.

And so, the giants and Dissonance watched as the three stepped within the pads of the service stations and stared in awe at the cylinder of light encasing the machines. It was far brighter and filled with more floating tendrils than for the other attached machines. The system seemed to be going hyper active.

Luna felt the comfort of her service then was slowly pulled out of her system cooling and recompiling when a plethora of warnings and danger alerts popped up in front of her. They were flooding her vision, drowning her in red and orange lights that she couldn't escape from. The blue machine could feel her body being worked on but could do nothing to stop it, not that she wanted to. However, the system was trying to access her core files and programs and was met with constant denial. Confused, the system logged the events and made several requests for an administrator, requests which were seen by blind eyes as they were never replied to. Luna felt her body reinvigorated with the energies she so craved, but saw that she had been at sixty-seven percent somehow. Possibly because of her donating energy to Galah so he wouldn't shut down. She should pay more attention to that in the future. It was a thought that caused her body to shake despite being in sleep mode.

What was once a calm, black void was slowly becoming an agitated sea of interconnecting white dots and blue lights. They washed over Luna violently, filling her vision. She could see the lights flickering, then vanish, then come forth again. After what felt like several minutes of this, the calm void returned. Relieved, Luna looked back at the image of the tower that ignited her mind in the past. Her reminiscing was quickly stopped by the feeling that something else was around.

Meet them all

A silent, swirling storm appeared in the distance, its insides on fire and creating flashing spots of orange light when the swirling clouds thinned. There was another of the black, potentially, to find. Or rather...Luna looked at it closely. Every flash started illuminating the outside of something else. It took a while, but the blue machine could finally see it: There was a plethora of pitch-black, furious storms next to the illuminated one. She didn't understand what was happening nor what this meant. Was the network simply being strange? She hadn't connected to it for a very long time, after all. The hidden figures were vaguely illuminated by a light coming from behind the machine. A blue light.

Turning around, Luna perceived towering blue vortexes of pseudo-flame freezing everything around them and producing icey trails in the air.

MeeT aùù%µ gH(°

She felt like she was being crushed in between them as many tinier dots popped up in her vision, strewn about randomly at various elevations.

%-*** u(8°é ¨p++*- ''(tr0 °°ü

From her level to high above or deep below. It was like a whole new world was popping into existence with the machine at its center, then she reactivated. Both she and Celestia were unnerved, and judging by the visual exchange they made with each other, it was a very similar experience they both had. Galah, on the other hand, casually stretched his limbs and whirred his entrails to reheat everything.

Makers walked past the stations with their bots, looking at the sisters with awe...and confusion. Then they looked in horror and fled screaming when Biddy and Rahllup cratered the white ground after jumping down, the latter carrying Dissonance under her arm.

"Do ya know where it is?" Rahllup asked.

"Yes," Celestia answered. "There have indeed been some changes, and it is that way," she declared with a point.

"Then let's get hurryin' along ta be registrated," the giant urged whilst dropping Dissonance down gently. "Don't like the feelin' of bein' a fugitive...Has it been starin' at you the whole time?"

The sisters flinched when they realized that the charred machine had been standing in front of them, hunched over. It bounced eagerly, clapping once the two noticed it and stepped to the side, presenting the group to its latest work: A pile of deactivated PABs slumped against a building wall currently being tended to by thin machines of the blue. The charred machine's arm was immediately grabbed and yanked away by Luna.

"And we are out of here," the blue machine declared urgently.

The group took notes on what those of the black had done and were using the buildings to travel whenever possible. It didn't help that it was daytime now and they couldn't really travel without being spotted by passer-bys. Distance and peripheral vision were a thing. With some difficulty and bashing in the heads of a few more PABs, the group finally arrived at the giant fence leading to the junkyard. The sisters noted that it was far larger than they remembered. It couldn't have grown so big in just a few months, could it?

"How are we going to get in?" Dissonance asked as they looked up the height of the structure. "I don't see an entrance."

"Well, we just float above," Luna explained. "We could carry you up one-by-one so there's no tr--"

"Outta our way!" Rahllup commanded loudly. She and Biddy patted their shoulders as they took a step back. They quickly shoulder-bashed their way through the massive and sturdy fence after multiple attempts. "There. We're in," Rahllup said as she clapped her hands to get the dust off of them.

---

"There's some discrepancies in your story," Twilight noted.

"How so?" Luna asked.

"Well, for one, time seems inconsistent. There's a few days at one moment, then weeks, then hours. I thought it was just you skipping parts, but..." Twilight rubbed the back of her head. "It feels like whoever was writing it couldn't grasp time very well."

Celestia floated around the cramped cave, dusting off the walls as if looking for some surviving remnant of the past. "There's a reason for that, Twilight." She sighed and lowered herself, dissolving her hands into a cloud of dust before quickly reshaping them elsewhere. "Even now we have trouble understanding it..."

Twilight could still feel the sorrow and melancholy coming from the two princesses despite their mostly featureless faces. The discrepancies couldn't be that large, right? Anypony often has moments where it feels like time flew by without noticing.

---

For the first time in what felt like forever, the two had to look up. The titanic creation of the engineer was glaring at them.

"Who's trying to break into my home? Destroying my fence? Think you can get my rare robotics for yourself, huh?!" and angry-yet-familiar voice yelled out angrily. The grumpy maker peered from the side of the colossus, a metal beam in hand. "Robots?! Who sent you?!" Celestia and Luna floated over the wall and dropped Galah down. They set down in front of the maker and waved. The engineer stared at them, slackjawed, and his arm went limp, letting the pipe drop to the ground. "Not you again!" he bellowed.

Author's Note:

Don't forget to vote on here as well. Currently the NMM story and the Sequel to this with bug person are both tied.

Comments

[manacar]

Yeah pretty sure the black machine is chyralis

[Alchemik]

XD

Excellent reaction! I too, would not be super pleased to see the accidental troublemakers wander back in.

I honestly expected the PABs to be more of a threat. Are they intended to be the final defense and are just underpowered, or are they merely a patrol system?

The fact that even the sisters don't know why time is off in their story is concerning. And a nice touch on your part, Psycho. Might have helped to point out the unreliable narration sooner though?

10932508
Hmm... Yeah, that would make sense. It's a better theory than I had.

[The Psychopath]

10937173
The PABs are a patrol and assist system. They were never meant to be a real threat outside of their intended purpose. You've been bamboozled.

That said, since they're connected to the network of the blue and are meant to send an alert when something is out of their control... :>

As for the unreliable narration, it's not 100% unreliable. You'll see why afterwards. When Celestia mentioned 'Even now we have trouble understanding it', it isn't in reference to the narration but what affected that particular issue and that it still affects them even now.

[manacar]

10937173
Yes well if you look it's black like a changing never mind it feeds on love that's why it could live with the giant bugs and be fine and why the humans or caretakers looked pale because she was draining them of love

[Alchemik]

10937191
Unreliable unreliable narration, eh? Ha! Love it. That is a beautiful concept. Sounds like some kind of system clock-based time dilation or memory skipping in this case, but maybe not? I look forward to finding out.

[FridayPie]

10937625
Or time cycles count getting rounded... because of limited count of particles of universe

[tsaukpaetra]

He told them there was an entrance! It's not hard to use the blasted door! 😅
With an obvious pattern of destruction you'd think they would be easily trackable...