A Shimmering Intellect

by DungeonMiner

Chapter 16

Sunset decided that Transforming her eyes to be better suited to the dark was the best option. She could have cast a light spell, and even though the energy needed to sustain the magic was minimal, it would still prove a waste.

Of course, she could make her eyes reflect as much light as possible, but it didn’t change the light in the room, which was very close to none.

Sunset stared at the deep shadows of the bedroom and tried to see if she could pick out the details.

She couldn’t.

The only thing Sunset could pick out easily was Flash’s silhouette and his soft breathing. It felt strange how familiar that sound was. It didn’t have a right to be so soothing to her soul, but it had been a long time since she shared a bed with anyone, which might have influenced her judgment.

When Sunset first got to the human world and found herself a teenager, she quickly deduced that she could just use the hint of sex as a weapon, much like everything else. Just the implication of someone having no, some, or too much sex could make or break reputations in the world of a High School. Sure, the hormones rushing through her brain as a teenager were also somewhat distracting, but Sunset still liked to think that she managed to overcome the thumping rush of adrenaline in her brain and exert control.

To this day, though, she had no idea why humans were always so—

A thump-thump sounded from behind the door.

Sunset tensed, ready to jump into action, fur standing up on the back of her neck as her thoughts screeched to a halt.

Ten quick heartbeats passed. Then twenty. Forty.

Nothing.

She sighed and slowly let herself relax. Nothing. This was the second time she heard that; like last time, nothing happened. The darkness was not helping her nerves, though. Shaking her head, she rubbed her face and tried to stay awake a little longer. It might be one in the morning for all she knew, but it certainly felt like that was correct.

Her eyes moved around the room again before landing on Flash, whose sleep hadn’t been disturbed by the noise beyond the door. Beyond a mumble in his sleep, he didn’t even seem to notice. All the better, really; she didn’t need him waking up for a little while, and he needed to be alert.

Then again, waking him up now instead of thirty minutes from now wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Sunset bit back a yawn that threatened to sneak up on her and tried to refocus. She just needed to make it to the end of her shift, and then she could sleep. Until then—

Thump-thump.

Her eyes shot for the door, heart beating at a mile a minute as the sound came again. What could that noise even be? If it were the Doctor’s apparatus, they would crash to the floor rather than that distinct double-thump. It had to be something else; this was the third time it’d happened all night. These last two had been so close to each other, but that didn’t explain anything either. Just asked more questions.

A minute passed, and nothing happened.

It couldn’t be the paper notes. They didn’t have the mass behind to thump like that. It’d sound more like that rattle only paper can make as it fluttered through the air. That had to be something heavy but soft. Otherwise, it would crack against the stone floors.

It had to be something else, and the time between them was shortening for some reason.
She still had ten to fifteen minutes left in her shift, and Sunset knew she shouldn’t wake Flash until then, but the thumping continued to worry her.

Thump-thump.

She crossed the room to Flash’s bed and shook him awake. “Hm—?” he began before Sunset clapped a hoof on his mouth.

“Quiet,” she whispered, getting as close to his ear as possible to keep her voice as quiet as possible. “Something’s been thumping on the other side of the door. I don’t know what it is, but it’s been happening more and more frequently. I think something’s going to happen.”

Flash slowly pushed himself up, probably unable to see a thing in the dark. And fumbled for the saddlebag he set next to his bed.

Thump-thump.

His head snapped to the door, even though he couldn’t see.

Sunset stood there with a held breath as she stared at the door. No other sounds could be heard beyond the door. Flash’s body visibly tensed as he prepared to pounce on the door.

Nothing.

After what felt like ten minutes, Flash moved to grab his bag once more. He finally found his bag a moment later and pulled the hatchet free.

Thump.

Only one. Just one thump.

Sunset wasn’t sure what that meant. Was the Doctor finished with whatever he was doing over there? Was it some sort of trap he’d set up, or was there something else beyond the door?

Neither she nor Flash said a word. They both stared at the door, waiting and listening.

The door cracked open.

The light nearly blinded Sunset, her eyes now too used to the darkness. Her eyes squinted shut without thinking, but she heard Flash roar a battle cry and charge. Metal clanged, the sound of struggling sounded, and Sunset still couldn’t see for the light. She cast her transform spell, but without the time for some finer control, the best she could do was make her best guess and finish.

Two blurs fought before her, one yellow, the other stone gray. She’d made herself nearsighted and now had to fight with the weird shapes in front of her. Still, she moved forward, spells at the ready.

“Fly!” Sunset called as she cast, throwing a wave of force that threw both blurs out into the main room. The yellow blur paused in the air, but the gray one flew into the far wall.

“A little more warning would be nice!” Flash said.

Sunset ignored the comment, her brain thinking more than fighting. The gray blob had to be Prototype unless the Doctor covered himself in soot before trying to fight.

“Where’s the Doctor?” she asked.

“I don’t see him,” Flash said.

The gray figure leaped at Sunset, flying through the air like a frisbee that became easier to see the closer it got. Prototype slammed into her, a body of stone that hit her like a truck. A stone claw that was once a hand raised to impale her, and she cast a shield to protect her as it came down.

Sunset cast a second spell as the shield held and launched Prototype into the ceiling.

“The golems are all connected to the Intellect Crystal!” she yelled. “If we get the Doctor to call them off. Then we can work from there.”

“On it!” Flash said, and the yellow blur flew for the Doctor’s room.

The gray blob fell from the ceiling, returning into focus as it landed a foot away from her. Sunset picked him up in her magical grasp and tossed him across the room again, thankful for its much smaller build than the ones outside. Prototype smashed into some glass she didn’t see and slammed into the wall with an audible crash.

“How bad did I mess my eyes up?” She thought, taking another second to adjust them the other way. Her vision shifted wildly as her eyes changed shape, and now, instead of blindingly close nearsightedness, she was farsighted but better off than she was, at least.

Prototype was splayed across the ground, picking himself up when Flash jumped out of the room. “The Doctor’s asleep!”

“What?” Sunset asked.

“I tried to wake him up but couldn’t even get him to open his eyes!”

The thought was making its way through her brain, but Prototype was closing the distance on them again. “I’ll try, keep that thing away from me.”

“Sunset!” Flash called before groaning and leaping at the small golem.

She burst into the Doctor’s spartan room and found him smiling and sleeping on a cot. She ran up and slapped him, grabbed his withers, and began to shake him.

If this were a subconscious action—a stray thought that leaked from his brain into the crystal—that might explain why the Doctor was still asleep. If they woke him up, he might stop the attack completely. He just needed to wake up.

She slapped him again, and all he did was snore.

How could the Doctor be this deep of a sleeper? This was ridiculous. This…this might be magic.

Sunset dropped the limp form of the Doctor and cast Emerald’s Ersatz. The Doctor was covered in the bright yellow magical aura of the Intellect Crystal.

It took a second for her brain to make the assumptions she needed. The Intellect Crystal had the Doctor down in an enchanted sleep. Nothing was going to wake him now.

And then her brain put together the last piece of the terrible puzzle.

The Doctor didn’t want them dead. The crystal wanted them dead.

“Flash!” she yelled and ran out of the room. “Flash, we have a problem!”

“You’re telling me!” the pegasus said, pinned by the golem. He held it at arm’s length, the hatchet’s handle against what passed as the golem’s throat, claws getting closer and closer to Flash’s face with each swipe.

Sunset picked Prototype up again and tossed him away once more. “We need to leave!”

“What about the doctor plan?”

“New plan! Leave now!”

Prototype jumped for her, and Sunset answered with a pillar of stone that shot up from the ground, pinning Prototype to the ceiling. The foal-sized construct answered by digging its claws into the stone and pulling away clumps of rock.

“Grab everything!” Sunset yelled. “We need to go!”

They both rushed for the bedroom and grabbed their bags, where the sound of tearing stones let them know that the golem was getting closer to escaping. “How will we get past the golems outside the door?”

“Right now, I want to survive the golem in here.”

Sunset grabbed her coat and stuffed it in her mouth. She didn’t have time to put it on right now. Flash was behind her, grabbing everything he could and putting his coat on.

“We don’t have time!”

“We have to!” Flash replied.

Sunset ran out of the room toward the door, where the small golem pulled more stones out of the rock pinning him to the ceiling.

Prototype freed himself from the column and leaped at Sunset, identifying her magic as the more significant threat. Sunset answered with a wall of stone that shot up from the ground, slamming into the ceiling and shutting them off the rest of the house.

Sunset turned to the door and saw Flash opening it wide to reveal boulders stacked up to block the path. The golems outside had blocked their way out, and Sunset realized, to her horror, that was the source of the sound of the thumping she heard.

They both cursed, and Sunset once again wished she’d gotten more practice with teleporting.

Prototype’s claw burst through the stone wall, and he clawed in, staring at them silently with its terrible, yellow eye.

“Alright,” Flash said. “What now?”

Sunset turned back to face the wall, and the golem clawed his way through the opening. Sunset gulped and realized she was staring death in the face.

“Sunset?” Flash asked.

“Flash. I’m going to try something,” she said, her mouth dry. “And we might live.”

“Might?” Flash asked.

“Or we might become stuck to each other on the molecular level or torn to pieces. I don’t know. I’ve never mastered this spell.”

Flash looked away from Prototype, clawing his way toward them, and looked at her.

She laughed. “Mastered? Oh, who am I kidding? I could barely use the spell. Mostly, I cast it to turn apples into applesauce.”

Flash stared at her and then looked back at the golem tearing its way closer. “Okay…what are the chances?”

“80-20, in favor of being horribly mangled. I’ll be there with you, so I might be able to keep the worst from us, but I don’t like our chances.”

Flash gulped. “Well, it might be better than sticking around here.”

“Okay, then give me a second,” she said before turning to him. “And Flash?”

He looked at her.

“If we don’t make it out of here, don’t hate me, please?”

Flash looked at her and gave a soft smile. “It’s kinda hard to hate you after all of this.”

She cast her spell, and they both slipped into unreality.

Sunset focused on keeping the bubble of reality around them stable. The moment that bubble collapsed, they were dead. This was the part she wasn’t good at.

The teleportation would be instant, but that wasn’t necessarily true in the world of unreality. Flash might not even notice the time, but Sunset’s focus on that thin barrier between staying in one piece and being torn into infinite pieces meant she would face what felt like minutes trying to hold them together.

Unreality pressed against them, trying to force the offending physics away. Still, Sunset threw her magic into the bubble, fortifying that line with everything she had, but if reality abhors a vacuum, unreality despises matter.

A flare of antimatter shot through the bubble, looping around both Flash and Sunset. It roared in her ears as it cut through the air. The antimatter began consuming their bubble of reality and whatever it could grab inside.

She didn’t dare look at Flash. She couldn't look to see if he was alright. If that flare of unreality had hurt him, she'd never forgive herself. She couldn't hurt him again. She didn't look.

And then she landed in snow colored by the summer twilight of the frozen north.

---♦---

Doctor Tinker Trot woke the following day with a sore jaw. He massaged it, worried. Something must have happened last night.

No. Nothing happened.

No, he must have slept on it in a weird position.

He yawned and rolled out of bed. He had a lot of work to do today. He had to make new breakthroughs in Mind creation and care for his guests.

And clean up the extra rocks you summoned.

And clean up all those rocks. The Doctor probably should have done that experiment outside the house, but things were always more apparent in hindsight.

He stepped into his combination workroom, dining room, and lounge, and over the mess of stones he had left behind from the previous day’s experiment. It was odd that the guests hadn’t said anything.

They did. At dinner.

At least they were polite about it when they mentioned them. They were very understanding. “Prototype.”

His first golem approached, subservient as always.

“Prepare breakfast for my guests and I.”

Your guests left. They had to go despite your hospitality.

“Belay that, Prototype. Breakfast just for myself. It’s a shame they didn’t stay. I would have loved some more company.”

They could distract you from your work. You need to make more golems.

He did need to get back to work, however. After all, genius needed to be productive; otherwise, they were nothing more than lofty ideas.

The Doctor sat at his desk and began working, enchanting a geode with a complex set of matrices that would create a facsimile of life.

Yes, he had a lot of work to do, and once he finished, no one could question his abilities after this.

Just keep working. It will all be yours.

He had just to keep working. And then all the glory would be his.

Doctor Trot worked, and as he did, the light of the Intellect Crystal shone on the back of his head, throwing deep shadows on the wall.

Yes, things were going perfectly well and precisely according to plan.

Comments

[Noobblue]

Ah... That may be an issue

[MoonlightRift]

Hmm. Definitely a different approach from the other two stories. Liking it so far.