The Siren

by McPoodle

Chapter 43

A basement.

March 20. “The Best Night Ever.” Sunday afternoon.

It had all happened so fast: the three large spinning bow ties converging around her with their hypnotic patterns, the walls of magical force springing between them, trapping her, and then the magic rushing inward, inducing instant unconsciousness.

Lyra awoke on a bed constructed of hay, covered with a coarse blanket. “uh,” she said, and then stopped at the different—but very familiar—sound of her voice. She lifted an arm into her sight, an arm of steel, with wires visible inside the joints. “no. no no no no no no.”

She meant to wail, to cry out to the heavens at her fate, but that was impossible in this form. Her voice…it wasn’t robotic, in the usual sense. The sounds she made were pleasant, even musical, but the artificiality was shown by its rigid invariance:

All syllables had the same length, a constant tempo of 150 to the minute. One silent syllable separated each word, and two of them separated each sentence.

The syllables modulated up and down a half octave in pitch, with one cycle every two seconds.

And no syllable was louder or softer than another.

In short, she had no way of expressing her emotions in any of the vocal means familiar to ponies.

“huh.”

With that feeble excuse for a sigh, she got up. Despite having roughly the same proportions in this body as she did when she looked like a pony, she now stood bipedally, with four worm-like fingers surrounding each forehoof. Her neck was short, her face completely round, her muzzle pushed in but not completely flat, with oval-shaped ears coming out of the sides of her head instead of being on top. She had no mane, no tail, no fur of any kind—only featureless burnished chrome. Her eyes were sunk into her head, looking out through closable square holes, and were colored the same steel color as her flesh in both the “white” and the pupil. She had no nose, and her mouth was a rectangular slot, currently closed by an interior panel. She did not need to breathe.

She was in a cage, which took up most of the basement—the bars were set into a concrete slab resting on the dirt floor of the room, and the cage was topped with more bars, with enough room to make it impossible to reach the wooden ceiling from the other side. The being walked over to the bars closest to the stairs leading to the ground level and examined them carefully without touching them. The bars were studded with a hard substance the color of rust. An elbow was carefully touched to the red brown substance and was quickly pulled away as the resulting chemical reaction started eating away at the being’s skin. The process stopped a few seconds after the body part had been pulled away, leaving a darkened scar.

The door opened, and a confident Bon-Bon strode down the stairs. “I caught you,” she bragged. “I caught you! All by myself, with not even the Princesses the wiser!” She sat down on a cushion, carefully positioned so that her captive could not reach her through the bars. From her saddlebags she removed a long necklace attached to a tray with a concave curve opposite the attachment point. She put on the necklace and rested the rounded end of the tray against her chest, then removed various writing and drawing implements to put in the tray—a portable writing set. She then triumphantly produced a cup of tea and took a loud slurping sip. “Have you nothing to say? Alien, Extra-equestrial?”

The captive looked around her. “this is the part of the interrogation where the power dynamic is established,” she said. “i am willing to concede that you have all of the power and that i have none.” She stood perfectly still when she talked. In fact, she didn’t even open and close her mouth-slot to speak individual words. The panel behind the slot would snap up and out of view at the beginning of an utterance, and snap back down when she was finished.

Bon-Bon furrowed her brow as she tried to determine the emotions behind the mechanical utterance. “Is that sarcasm?” she asked.

“no. it is a statement of fact. the auo field makes it impossible for me to speak anything other than the simple truth.”

“Yes, the truth,” Bon-Bon said with a tight-lipped smile. “Finally, you are at my mercy, and—”

“check.”

“—And I will finally get the truth…wait, what was that?”

“oh that is a little game i play during my interrogations. this is my three hundred and thirty sixth interrogation and i need to do something to retain my sanity. i have therefore compiled a list of hackneyed phrases uttered by my interrogators and i keep track of how many of them they use in each interrogation. you are at my mercy is one of those phrases.”

Bon-Bon ground her teeth. “Are you accusing me of being a cliched comic book villain? I used to deal with them on a weekly basis!”

“really. that is quite interesting. quite different than your current occupation. how did you get into it.”

“Well, I’ve always been good at seeing into the minds of other ponies, which led to—hey, I’m the one asking the questions here!”

“check. in fact two checks because you used that exact line last time so you should know better.”

Bon-Bon groaned in frustration. “Stop that! I’m the good pony here—”

“check.”

“And if you want this interrogation to finish as quickly as possible, it makes sense for me to ask the questions and you to answer them.”

“check. no wait no check. you actually provided a rational reason. please ask your questions.” There was really no point describing what she did when she spoke, as she refused to move in any way other than opening and closing her mouth flap, and no emotions were expressed in her words.

“That’s better,” said Bon-Bon. From next to her cushion, she picked up a file folder stamped with the royal seal of Equestria. “Now the records I have obtained—”

“obtained.”

Bon-Bon interpreted the repetition as a questioning of her right to be consulting that file. “Yes, obtained,” she said sharply. “These records say that there are two self-reported aliens residing in Ponyville. So, are you Crouton, or Rozetri?”

This finally produced a reaction from the captive—her eyes closed. “rozetri,” she said.

Bon-Bon wrote a note on a notepad, using a feather pen and ink bottle held in her little necklace shelf. “You are Rozetri.”

The being opened her eyes. “no i am crouton. the earlier statement was actually a question.”

Bon-Bon corrected her note. The name of “Crouton” appeared to be some kind of joke when applied to the being before her, a being made up entirely of carefully drafted curves, with not a single right angle in sight. “So, you know this Rozetri,” she said.

“i do not know her. i knew her. she is dead.” Crouton began to sway slightly from one foot to another.

Bon-Bon didn’t know what to make of this. “So…did you kill her?” she asked.

Crouton suddenly lunged forward, causing Bon-Bon to flinch as she expected the artificial being to try to grab her. But instead, Crouton gripped one of the bars, causing the metal skin of her hand to blister and darken. Her eyes remained on Bon-Bon the entire time.

“Stop! Stop that!” Bon-Bon cried out as she stood on the cushion. “Please stop hurting yourself! I’m sorry…I just couldn’t read your emotions. …I’m sorry.”

Crouton pulled her hand away from the bar. Her head tilted slightly as she examined the damage. She lowered her hand and stared at the shaking Bon-Bon. “i am clearing your score,” she told her.

Bon-Bon dropped down onto the cushion, panting heavily as she slowly calmed down.

“i am sorry that i caused you distress,” she said. “i will try not to do that again.” When Bon-Bon said nothing for another minute, Crouton ventured to speak again. “since you are not asking questions i will ask some. you are not obligated as i am to answer. you have fallen out of the habit of interrogating.”

“That is not a question,” Bon-Bon said with a small smile.

“no i suppose it is not. your cutie mark is not for candy making.” She pointed using her injured hand at the wall behind Bon-Bon, where the instrument of her capture was mounted. It was a trio of bowtie-shaped weapons, each the size of a grown pony’s head. The central disk of each object was painted with a hypnotic swirling pattern…that just happened to be identical to a candy swirl disk.

Crouton’s statement was true: It was the creation of the capture spinners, uniquely powered by her earth pony magic, that earned Sweetie Drops her cutie mark. As she looked back at it, Crouton spoke once again: “you are a monster hunter but you are not allowed to be a monster hunter. you are not even allowed to admit to being a monster hunter. therefore you are a secret agent. I did not know that ponies knew what secret agents were.”

Sweetie Drops didn’t even bother refuting the accusation. “I’m retired,” she said coldly.

“not by your choice,” said Crouton.

“No,” said Sweetie Drops.

“then your employer is a fool. to deny a pony the purpose behind their cutie mark will inevitably lead to madness.” (As had been shown by each of the Bearers over the past few months.)

“My employer was Princess Celestia,” Sweetie Drops said with bitterness.

“then she was a fool. unless she did not know what your cutie mark was for.”

Sweetie Drops was silent for a moment. “She…she didn’t know. Everypony in the Agency thought that I designed my weapons after my candy cutie mark, instead of going into candy-making as a cover for my distinctive weapons.”

“ah. then she is not the fool.”

Sweetie sighed deeply and sank her head into her hooves. “You’re right, Lyra.”

“crouton.”

“Lyra,” Sweetie repeated firmly. “You’re the same pony you’re been since I met you. Other than the fact that you didn’t tell me you were an alien. And you had a very good reason for that. I was suffering from Cutie Mark Insanity Syndrome. Capturing you cured me.”

“okay. if you are using my alias then i will still call you bon-bon.”

Sweetie shook her head. “Bon-Bon” sounded so incredibly fake the way that Lyra was forced to say it. “Sweetie Drops,” she said. “My real name is Sweetie Drops.”

“it is a good name.”

“Thanks,” Sweetie said with a smile. “I always thought ‘Bon-Bon’ was pretty dumb.” She fished out the key to the carefully constructed cage. “You really can’t use your magic in there?”

“no i cannot.”

“And after you walk out of this cage?” Sweetie asked warily.

“i will be able to do anything. my capacity exceeds the resting level of princess celestia.”

Sweetie lowered the hoof holding up the key in shock. “You could have conquered Equestria.”

“yes. but i did not want to.”

“Then why are you here?”

“i am here on vacation. i wanted to get away from the constant interrogations.”

Sweetie wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not.

“that was a joke.”

She let herself laugh as she unlocked and opened the door.

Lyra looked at her, as if expecting some sort of trap.

Sweetie backed up a few steps.

Lyra stepped out of the cage. There was a flash of light, and she was back to her pony self. “Oh, thank Celestia!” she cried. She brought up her horrifically-scarred hoof—Sweetie had only a moment to look at it before a beam of magic from her horn instantly cured it. She then turned her head to look at the door to the surface.

“If I bring down another cushion, could you stay down here and talk?” Sweetie asked. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know about the real me, but I’d really like to know about you. The places you’ve been, the things you’ve seen…”

“They’re mostly bad,” Lyra said wearily. “This is by far the nicest planet I’ve ever visited in my century-plus of traveling. Almost as good as…home.”

Sweetie reached out a hoof to cradle Lyra’s cheek. “If you don’t want to talk about it…”

“I’ve been dying to find someone else who would listen to my story,” Lyra said, leaning into the hoof. “Go ahead and bring down my favorite cushion.”

“I know which one that is,” Sweetie said with a smile, darting up the stairs.

Author's Note:

The notes for this chapter can be found with Chapter 53.