Visitor from Another World

by Novus Ordo Seclorum

Chapter 12: Stay Awhile -or- God Out of the Machine

Chapter 12

Stay Awhile

-or-

God Out of the Machine

Pinkie Pie was the best at throwing parties, but the “Welcome Back” party the Ponyvillians gave the motley band came pretty dang close.

Dr. Drake had never felt so stuffed full of amazingly delicious apple fritters, nor had he felt so exhausted from sheer excitement. The ponies were so relieved to have their little pink party house back that the party had already lasted several hours, and was still in full swing.

The hero of the mission, however, had mysteriously disappeared.

Dr. Drake sat in his makeshift abode, now running calculations and crunching numbers to figure out how much uranium he would need to make the jump between dimensions. Four-dimensional travel was really quite complex, not to mention five dimensions. If he wanted to get back home near when he left, it would take nearly triple the energy it took to get there. He sighed, rubbing his forehead with his fingers.

A sudden rapping at the door made him almost jump out of his skin. “Oh, c-come in,” he stammered, futilely attempting to clear off his work table.

A reddish-purple nimbus wreathed the doorway, and Twilight stepped in. “What are you doing here? Everypony’s looking for you.”

Dr. Drake chuckled, somewhat guiltily. “Erm, well, I was…um….” He floundered, at a loss for what to say.

Twilight glanced over all the scribbled notes at his work table. “You’re…you’re getting ready to leave us, aren’t you? After all you’ve done for us? You can’t just leave!” The lavender mare was getting hysterical by this point.

The physicist was taken aback by Twilight’s vehemence. “Whoa, there, Twilight…I’m going to be sticking around for a good long while, you can count on that.”

Twilight looked back up at him, eyes shimmering in the low light. “Promise?”

“Well, I still need to get the uranium for the trip home, and calculating the coordinates is probably going to take at least another week or so. Five dimensions, you know. God, now I know how the Doctor feels.”

Twilight’s look of distress morphed into one of puzzlement. “The Doctor? As in, Doctor Whooves?”

Dr. Drake nodded. “Except on my world, the Doctor is humanoid and fictional. And we call him Doctor Who.” He paused briefly. “Although, with the FIR Traveler, he could become less fictional. Hmm…”

“Anyway,” Twilight said, not wanting Dr. Drake to get distracted further, “Pinkie Pie promise you’ll stay for a while?”

The doctor smiled at the unicorn. “Pinkie Pie promise.”

Twilight stared expectantly at him.

“What? Do you seriously—Ugh, fine,” Dr. Drake said, rolling his hazel eyes in exasperation. Then, with the appropriate hand motions, “Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.”

When he was finished, the two scholars—one of magic, the other, science—stared at each other for an awkwardly long time. Then Twilight snorted, and both of them lost it. As they stood there, laughing, it occurred to Dr. Drake that he and Twilight almost seemed to fit together, like two adjacent pieces in a puzzle. Although he much preferred working solo, if he had had a colleague like Twilight, he was sure that his work would have been so much easier.

Maybe it still could.

“Hey, Twilight? How would you feel about helping me crunch some numbers for the FIR Traveler?”

Twilight’s head snapped up. “R-really? I’d love to!”

“Well, I’d better show you the ropes on FIR theory, then. Okay, first, just imagine….”

Man and mare discussed the Fiction Is Reality theory at length for the better part of three hours. Twilight learned much about conceptualizing the imagined, and gave many insightful comments that Dr. Drake had not yet considered.

Twilight broke off topic to interrupt the physicist. “Um, Doctor—?”

“Twilight, I’ve told you a million times, call me Pascal.”

“Um, okay…Pascal, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. Since that day when the perytons attacked.”

“Okay…?” Dr. Drake replied, not exactly sure where this was going.

“And then there’s all these things you’ve done, just out of the goodness of your heart. You didn’t have to help Fluttershy out with her animals, you didn’t have to rescue Pinkie, you didn’t have to save me. You are an amazing stallion—”

“Man,” the doctor corrected.

“—whatever. You are an amazing man, and I just wanted to say that I—”

This time, Twilight was interrupted by a massive shockwave that rocked the ground beneath them. Both she and Dr. Drake fell over. Dr. Drake was the first to recover, saying, “What the hell was that?”

His question was answered when a two-toned voice emanating from the town square reached them, saying, “Bring the human here, or suffer!”

Dr. Drake slung his satchel and ran out the door as fast as he could—which was actually not very fast at all when compared to a pony’s canter. Still, he was just within the edge of Ponyville by the time Twilight tackled him to the ground—close enough to see the behemoth of a draconequus in the town square.

“You won’t bring him? Well, we guess we’ll have to…persuade him to come,” it said, cackling maniacally. It searched the ring of ponies at the edge of the square, before lifting a carefully chosen mare high into the sky with telekinesis.

Dr. Drake recognized her dark gray coat almost instantly. Octavia.

“Twilight, get off me!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No!”

“Do you want that mare to die?”

Twilight hesitated.

That was all Dr. Drake needed to shove her off of him and allow him to sprint the rest of the way, shouting, “You bastard! Set her down!”

The draconequus turned to face the physicist. “Ooh, look who showed up. The human that bested our younger brother. The human that murdered him!”

With a snap of its lion paw, Octavia reappeared on the ground, visibly shaken. A white unicorn galloped up to her side, calming her down.

Meanwhile, realization overcame Dr. Drake as he realized just to whom he was speaking. “Destruction…?”

“Destruction is no more! We ascended when we absorbed our brother’s power! We are now Death, and Death shall be your downfall!”

Death’s lion paw glowed with black energy, lifting the doctor into the air. His satchel was tugged open, and the FIR Traveler flew out, landing in Death’s outstretched paw.

“Well, what have we here…a device to travel between worlds? How convenient…for us, that is.”

The paw closed, and Dr. Drake shouted, “NO!”

Death’s arm underwent a dramatic transformation, and in seconds, it had become a machine.

Death slashed at the air with a talon, creating a rift in space-time, and spat, “Go back to the hell whence you came, human!”

Death’s mechanical arm snapped to the side, and the physicist flew through the rift, which closed immediately afterward.

Author's Note:

Who all knows what the Latin phrase that means "god out of the machine"?

Comments

[Rough Boulder]

What a Twist.

[Morphy]

Why did I suddenly get a really strong "Time Bandits" vibe when he was tossed out a 'random' rift to somewhere else? Granted, there's no small army of midgets with a map of time rifts but you get the general idea of him coming back with reinforcements from the various eras to do battle with the Ultimate Evil Being... and then 'god' has to show up and put everything back in it's proper order (ordering Pascal and buddies to pick up every bit of that concentrated evil into a biohazard barrel).

[Novus Ordo Seclorum]

2301354 Eeyup
2301565 I have no clue who those people are, but remember how Commander Carmichael found his blueprints?

Yeah. One does not simply break a Pinkie Pie Promise.

Did either of you see the pun in the chapter title?

[Novus Ordo Seclorum]

By the way, "god out of the machine" in Latin is deus ex machina.

[Cades]

This is too fast paced for my tastes.

[Novus Ordo Seclorum]

2473450 How so?

[Cades]

2473841
It just seems like everything is going at a really fast pace. For example: The month long time span in which we see nothing happening. The time skip was thrust upon us so suddenly. And the arrival of the sons of chaos, was it? They just appeared, no warning whatsoever. Slow it down a little, describe things in detail, it'll be okay at the end.

[Novus Ordo Seclorum]

2473941 Thank you, sir or madam, for that advice.

I will try to apply it to chapter 13...which I still haven't been able to work on

Seriously, I know exactly what I'm going to do, I just haven't had the time to work on it.

[Cades]

2473959
I identify as a sharkbear. Kidding. I am male. And patience is key.