Game of Worlds

by DualThrone

Twilight: Unalive

“We’re still trying to figure out where the little bint came from,” Ember said. “Obvious guess is that she comes from Zebrica, but that’s one hell of a walk and no one has ever seen her teleport or show that she’s capable of it; must be a limitation of her magic or something.”

“Being able to teleport accurately, even at short distances, is an unusual talent,” Twilight said. “Look at who has it: Luna, Mother, me, the daughters of the changeling queen and both she and the crown prince. And her sisters, needless to say. The power and control to do it is kind of rare.”

“Twi, you’re thinking of blinking,” Dawn said.

“I am?”

“I am.” Her hallucination confirmed. “Most unicorns have the ability and focus, but being able to do so rapidly and with pinpoint precision is something only I and a few others can do.”

Twilight looked hard at the apparent manifestation of Nightmare’s bestowal as Ember frowned severely at she and Dawn.

“I don’t care,” she said. “Just that the twerp doen’t seem like she’s able. With how she works, it’s probably something she’s planning to keep tucked away in a saddlebag till she can get the most outta it, but I’ve never seen her do it. Anyway, she sorta… appeared one day. Not like, popped into existence sort of appearing, but we dug her out of a snowbank out north.”

“Put herself in danger so ya’d feel bad an’ help her right inta the middle of your caves.”

“Got it in one.” Ember sighed. “I know you ponies think that dragons are full of mean about everything, and we’re all the same, and yer actually mostly right but we got altruists too. Looking back on the entire thing, pretty sure she was watching for a while before she set it up so a maternal sort would find a poor little filly shivering and lost in a blizzard. I actually sorta doubt she can suffer from cold, what with the fact that she’s cold as death to the touch.”

“Coincidentally, she’s dead.” Twilight hadn’t even noticed Thalia reentering the room--which she had done somehow silently via the door, which shut again even as Twilight looked at her--but she’d also shed the dragon shape she’d been wearing at some point during her raid of the larder.

Although Twilight had never been to an actual competition, she knew about kickboxing and had spent several days shadowing and interviewing a few of the semi-professional competitors, trying to understand the mentality behind violent bouts as a popular spectator sport (although mostly in the northern cities like Trottingham and Stalliongrad). Thalia looked like one of those competitors: lean, layered in hard shaped muscle from intense exercise and fighting, with visible scoring along her chitinous hide where she’d used it to take hits meant for vulnerable places. The theme extended to her mane, where she’d cut it almost unattractively short so as to remove it as something to grip, and the smooth, rolling gait she walked passed with that made her hoofsteps almost silent, no movements wasted, hooves placed with the casual and unconscious care of someone who’d trained it into muscle memory.

“What came first, the chicken or the egg?” The hallucination said. “Did a princess become a strong fighter and decided to represent Scarabi to the dragons, or did she decide to represent Scarabi to the dragons and made a fighter of herself?”

Twilight looked hard at the hallucination again. This seems… new. What it says is still the way I think but it’s like she’s… it’s… switched from voicing my thoughts to lead me somewhere, to commentary.

“The first, certainly,” she said lowly.

“What was that, Princess Sparkle?” Twilight looked at Thalia, who was watching her with a concerned look.

“Thought tumbled out of my head,” she said. “What did you say about Penumbra being dead?”

“Closest guess Tettidora had,” Thalia said. “Pickled cabbage leaf?”

“About what, and... “ Twilight eyed her. “I’ve never heard of pickling cabbage.”

“Great preservation technique,” Thalia said, offering a leaf that smelled pungently of vinegar. “Sprig of dill, mustard seed, and… something else, should ask Green about it when I get the chance. Weirdly enough, tastes sorta like a sharp cheddar.”

Remembering the almost pie-filling texture of the citrus skate and vegetables that’d been served at the state dinner before they left Scarabi, Twilight accepted the leaf and took a bite. The flavor was sharp and acidic, but the inside of the thick leaf had softened enough to remind Twilight of biting into a slice taken from an aged cheese wheel. “A little more like a gouda,” she said. “Maybe asaigo.”

“Boffin Farms bleu, sixth year, seaside casks…” Applejack made a loud smacking sound with her lips. “...mmm… applewood barrels, raw stripplings.”

All of them turned and stared at Applejack, who looked uncharacteristically smug.

“...that’s amazing!” Rarity gaped after a moment.

Applejack snorted. “Who y’all think taste-test farm products before they make their way to the upper crust? More upper crust?”

Thalia grinned. “Bet they can sip your select and tell everyone what tree it comes from.”

“Sugarcube, that’s impossible.” Applejack winked at her. “Cardinal section.”

“Kin of the soil, I swear.” Thalia sighed and the merriment faded. “To answer your question, Twilight… closest guess Tettidora had about Penumbra’s nature. Even calling her dead isn’t really accurate, though. She’s a… copy of alive. A perfect duplicate of living, but not quite… living, not really.”

“Took us a really long time to notice,” Ember said. “The sense of wrongness she carries with her is awfully subtle and she had evading too long around one dragon down to an art form. ‘Lia was the first one to keep her pinned down in business long enough to catch it, and that was after it stopped mattering.”

“So what happened when ya brought her back?” Dawn said.

“Nothing, at first,” Ember said. “Girl was crazy invested in her acting gig, and she playacted out a few weeks of recovery like she actually had gotten lost in the snow and was gonna die. It was convincing as hell, and she poured on the ‘adorable little filly’ cham too. Got everyone to think she was some poor innocent child, though she didn’t go for the orphan gig and overplay it.”

“So she claimed to have parents?”

“A dad,” Ember said. “Said her mom died just after she was born, and it was just her and pops ever since.”

“It wasn’t a lie either,” Thalia added, offering Pinkie and Rarity leaves of the preserved cabbage. “Unless she’s good enough to manufacture the correct emotions for the story. I think she really is the child of a single father, that her mother really did die in childbirth or close to it. And she spoke of her father in the present tense, and the emotions fit for a parent who was still present.”

“But she’s an evil, not-quite-alive eldritch something that can break minds,” Dawn said.

“And impose order,” Pinkamena said quietly. “Being Laughter allows me to just treat reality as optional, if the result is funny. But not here. Here, my head would get stuck in the basket of sponges, instead of me being able to pop out up to my shoulder and sink back down, like it was water. You called us part of a magical superweapon, Princess Thalia…”

“...but Penumbra can stop it from firing without taking any overt action,” Twilight finished. “I’ve… I can’t even imagine how that’s possible.”

“I can.” Thalia said grimly. “But we need to build up to it.”
“Princess Thalia, with all due respect, that’s a bit too important to just dangle.”

“The situation won’t change in the time it takes to explain how Penumbra came to be in the position she’s in,” Thalia said, with a touch of sharpness. “If you’re gonna deal with her, you need to know how she operated before now, and how she might operate again.”

“Somethin’ more to it, ain’t there?”

“Always is.” Thalia said. “Like the playacting. There was a great deal of exaggeration in how she presented her state, and how much recovery she actually needed, but the damage was not faked.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ember rolled her eyes. “She can get a mountain dropped on her and shakes it off, but a blizzard fucks her up when she’s already cold as death. Ya gotta know that’s a hard sell, ‘Lia.”

“The delay gained her nothing,” Thalia said. “If she’d come to, eaten heartily, and wrapped up extremities to fake frostbite, you would have bought it just as hard. But she threw away weeks being an invalid. If she did it for fun, it would be literally the only thing we’ve ever seen her do that has no logical purpose and gains her nothing. Either she got something that we still don’t know about, or you’re being too hard on yourself and you weren’t played as hard as you think.”

“I think Ember was the one to find her and bring her in,” the hallucination said at about the moment that the thought occurred to Twilight. She glanced to either side of herself and could tell that the same realization had hit the other girls, but no one seemed like they were willing to bring it up.

“This lot says a bunch of them have been moving around and making trouble,” Ember siad. “Maybe she was waiting for everyone to get on the board.”

“Plausible.” Thalia looked at them all. “Once she got started, it didn’t take long. She started with the shy and isolated, then moved up to the clever. Swept up the thugs on the way up. After all we’ve tried, we still don’t know what she’s doing to keep them knuckled under, but it doesn’t seem to need her to concentrate to make it work, and no matter how you poke at an enthralled, they don’t react like they’ve got a mind of their own.”

“Alright, so how does she not have that staff thingy?” Dawn looked at Ember. “Yer sure she doesn’t have it, and you’re not running around with it, so what gives?”

Ember grimaced. “Father’s centuries old,” she said. “Ya don’t stay on top if you’re dumb as he played at. She screwed up, thinking that loud and brutish was the whole story, and didn’t figure out all the dynamics right. When the guy who’d drag himself to his post same time every day if he was bleedin’ ta death didn’t show up when he shoulda, Dad figured that weird cold filly was bad news. Decided to go fix her but good, but first took a detour with some boulders, chains, and a shiny object.”

“About three kilometers offshore to the north is the Wound,” Thalia said. “Call it that because it’s like someone took a big axe and drove it about as deep into the bottom of the ocean as they could. If yer a giant ancient dragon, you can get to the bottom. If ya can guise into a deep diver, you can get there too. But it takes a few hours, goin’ straight down.”

“And excessive amounts of flowing water can deaden active magic,” Twilight said. “But can’t she pry information out of her puppets?”

“Probably can, but Father isn’t just some dragon, and he ain’t just some puppet either.” Ember looked the most serious and solemn she had during the entire time they’d been interacting with her. “Dragon Lord isn’t just a title. I don’t know the entire thing. Father has been slowly laying it out for me in pieces for a while, but I know enough to know, there’s a reason we pass an artifact down instead of a pretty piece of metal.”

“Sorta like that amulet Queen Chrysalis had around her neck?”

“Exactly like that,” Thalia said. “Except Chryssy uses hers as a magical focus, and the Wyrm Stone works like a battery.”

“That’s all interestin’ and such,” Applejack said. “But sorta gets aside from the main point: she can’t just pry open his head and rummage.”

“I’m sure she could if she felt the need,” Thalia said. “But brute-forcing a mind is reckless and dangerous, and her seeming disinterest in getting it makes it seem like removing it from play fit her objectives.”

“And Lord Scorch?”

“She subdued him,” Ember said. “Didn’t seem to hurt him--I’ve seen him, not a mark on him, good health, given regular food and water like all the rest--but she’s keeping him under lock and key.”

“Like he’s a threat still.”

“Yeah. I don’t think whatever trick she used on the rest worked as well on him, so she’s keepin’ him imprisoned.”

“And yet, she doesn’t seem to be bothering you,” Dawn said. “You’d think the heir would be prime meat for control, but yer walking around.” She looks at Thalia. “And it’s a sure bet she’d love the idea of having a thrall wandering around the court of her enemy.”

“We don’t know,” Thalia said. “She hasn’t said a word on the matter. Talked plenty with us, but never discussed motivations or anything.”

“The hay’d a filly got to talk plenty about?” Applejack said. “Ah mean, Applebloom can chatter fer a long time but doesn’t go for the long conversations. Until compelled, o’ course.”

“Empress Moon’s malevolent male counterpart and his sock puppet.” Twilight glanced at Pinkamena. “You mentioned him before. How does he fit into this?”

“That was the thing I was working up to,” Thalia said. “Penumbra’s father rides shotgun in her head. Based on what Chryssy told me about Empress Moon, he’s the definition of whatever she is, some kind of otherworldly thing that uses Penumbra as a kind of container.”

“A nightmare.” Twilight said. “Nightmare--Empress Moon--speculated that we’d run across another of her kind, and one that had the inclination to talk their way into a vessel instead of force their way in. And Nightmare speaks of regarding her last vessel, Luna, as her sister so I guess it makes sense that this one would see Penumbra as a daughter, and she see him as a father.”

“As near as we can tell, that’s pretty much how it is,” Thalia said. “Although…”

“Let’s wait on that ‘although’ a second,” Dawn said. “So, we’re probably facing someone with the kind of power that Nightmare Moon has, except male and malevolent. But, see, we’re not screwed enough yet, so it’s time that you tell us that we’re not just kind of screwed or very screwed, but double-triple-plus-plus-bad screwed.”

Thalia looked blankly at her.

“She has an off button for the Elements,” Dawn said. “And you know why, and when you tell us why, we’ll understand how our level of screwed has reached scientific notations.”

“What you call an ‘off-button for the Elements’ is just a supposition at this point,” Thalia said. “A… pretty reliable supposition given how Laughter simple does not function here, but I can’t be sure.”

“And…?” Applejack gave her a skeptical eyebrow raise.

Thalia sighed. “And there’s a good reason I suppose it. But you’ll have to indulge me; there’s a bit of a story behind this.”

Author's Note:

I was planning to publish this and the next as a single chapter, but decided at the last second that they're different enough to need to be split. Sorry it took a while.