A dalek appears in Equestria - not just any dalek, but the one that had been corrupted by Rose Tyler's DNA. It has a choice of life as a pony, or dying, and finds that it cannot bear to die a second time. Thus begins a strange adventure...
A dalek appears in Equestria - not just any dalek, but the one that had been corrupted by Rose Tyler's DNA. It has a choice of life as a pony, or dying, and finds that it cannot bear to die a second time. Thus begins a strange adventure as the dalek tries to find a place for itself in a world that is completely antithetical to its former existence and way of thinking...
...and why does that earth pony stallion look familiar...?
“I can feel so many ideas,” the dalek said. “So much darkness. Rose, give me orders. Order me to die.”
The human female, Rose Tyler, the corruption that had infected the dalek soldier, had the briefest moment of shock and horror pass over her face. She did not understand, even now, even with the Doctor, the Enemy, the Oncoming Storm, having just explained to her why it was that the dalek could not, would not, allow itself to live. “I can’t do that,” she whispered.
The dalek felt the hate coming back. It hadn’t gone far. But this wasn’t the pure, refined hatred that a dalek was supposed to feel. This was a hate tainted with panic, with fear. “This is not life,” the dalek spat. “This is sickness! I shall not be like you. Order my destruction!” Rose still hesitated, and the panic doubled as the dalek spoke frantically. “Obey! Obey! OBEY!”
Rose stared. She did not want to do it. The dalek hated her all the more for it, and yet, some part of the dalek hoped that her emotions would get the better of her – that she would allow the dalek to live. Maybe…
But no. The dalek had to die. It was impure. Unclean. Sick. It had to die. Rose had to understand that. She had to see that. For the sake of whatever untainted part of the dalek race remained in the universe…
Pathetic. So…pathetic.
“Do it,” Rose said.
Like that, a weight lifted from the dalek. That was it. The soldier had its orders. It could die. It could cease to be. No more daleks. It had all been for nothing, millions of years of dalek history, the genetic purity of the species…for nothing. All that remained was cold, uncaring embrace of oblivion.
“Are you frightened…Rose Tyler…?”
The human female was silent for a moment as she looked at the dalek. When her answer came, it was barely above a whisper. “Yes.”
The dalek would have looked away if it could. It didn’t want to see the look in Rose’s face. For some reason, though, it had to keep looking. It wanted to burn the look Rose was giving it into its mind, take it with it into the nothingness that awaited it. It didn’t know why.
“So…am…I.” The dalek paused only a moment more, delaying the inevitable for as long as it could.
So this was it. This was the end, the final end, of the dalek race. Not in the fires of the Time War, not at the hands of the Doctor, not even after billions and billions of years and the heat-death of the universe.
The end of the dalek race instead was going to come from a single dalek soldier, a coward, corrupted by the genetic material of a human so that it wasn’t even pure dalek anymore, committing suicide out of self-hate.
“Exterminate.”
Rose backed away as the dalek’s self-destruct sequence activated. It was a matter of moments as the orbs in its shell detached themselves and began to orbit it. Energy danced between them and a sphere of energy ensorcelled the dalek as the energy began to build into a force that would obliterate every trace of the dalek.
This was the end. The end of everything. The dalek was terrified, but there was nothing it could do now. It closed its eye.
Blackness.
---
The pain should have lasted for only a fraction of a second, the briefest moment as the dalek’s nerve-endings outraced the self-contained explosion that would immolate it; barely enough time to even register it. And indeed, for the longest time, there was nothing, absolutely nothing. But at length, there was instead…
“AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!”
The blackness was gone. The pain was not. It lanced through the dalek and into its very mind. Every nerve it had was on fire. It thrashed, its tentacles straining against a shell that shouldn’t have been there – it should have been reduced to dust, to less than dust. Then again, the dalek was supposed to have been reduced to less than dust as well.
Some distant part of the dalek wondered if after all this time, the daleks had been wrong about the various afterlives espoused by the clerics of unclean races. What was the term? Hell. Perhaps the dalek had died, and now it was in Hell. Bizarrely, it was a familiar sensation. When it had arrived on Earth, fifty years ago, it had slipped through time and space and a time-lock placed over the whole of the Time War that had burned the dalek and its shell. It had screamed for three days, then, until the fires had at last cooled and sentient thought had again become possible. To the dalek, however, it had seemed a small eternity.
The pain didn’t last as long time, however. Eventually, finally, it began to subside. The dalek didn’t know for how long, the internal chronometers of its shell were useless, burned out by whatever force had carried it to…wherever it was. It slowly opened its eye, and found that its ocular sensor, at least, still worked. It tried looking around.
It was on a hillside. There was grass under its shell, and a blue sky overhead marred by only a few white clouds. It was also near a dirt road.
“What.”
The word came unbidden, but that didn’t make it inappropriate. The dalek was supposed to be dead, wiped from the universe, its unclean, corrupted flesh destroyed. Instead…it was on a planet. By the measurements of humans or Time Lords, it would have even been considered a pleasant one, though daleks preferred significantly more metal and radiation.
The dalek tried to move, to use its arm to lift itself up. But it couldn’t. Looking down at itself, it found that its arm had been snapped in half, and what remained was melted. Its weapon was in no better condition, bent out of shape so that firing it would probably be a lethal experience for the dalek rather than whatever it wanted to kill. Worse still, its power cells, the orbs that studded its shell’s body, were missing; its shell was running on emergency power only, not enough for its weapon to work, nor even enough to power the gravity induction locomotors that would have propelled it. Though those were probably broken as well anyway.
The dalek again tried to look around, straining its ocular sensor and rotating its head at every angle. Apart from the grass, there was no sign of life, but then again, there was the road. It must have been built by some form of life. The dalek would be discovered before long, then, by whatever the natives of this world were. Discovered…and imprisoned. And eventually, no doubt, tortured, as it had been by Van Statten.
Was this its Hell, then? To suffer pain, to be damaged to the point of uselessness, to be corrupted by human genetic material so that it was not even pure dalek, then to be discovered and tortured? Again and again? The concept of an afterlife of any variety was pure idiocy, and the fact that the dalek was even considering was evidence of how corrupted and unclean it had truly become.
The dalek nearly screamed in frustration and despair – another new emotion – when something passed by overhead. It turned its ocular sensor, following the trajectory of a flying creature, of comparable height to the dalek, white-furred, winged and four-hooved and with a horn at the end of a long neck, with a mane and tail of animate, colorful energy of a sort that the dalek could not identify. Upon its flank was a mark of some variety, an eight-armed, primitive representation of a sun as often depicted by unevolved, lesser creatures.
More prominent to the dalek, however, was the fact that the creature, which alighted on the ground nearby, was adorned – shoes, a chest-plate, and a crown, all made of gold and the latter two set with gems. The eyes of the creature, too, were not that of an unthinking being. It was taking in the details of the dalek, studying it inquisitively. This, then, would be an example of a native of whatever world it had found itself upon.
“You’re injured,” it said at length, in a female voice. The dalek did not question how it was that it could understand the creature’s words; the methods for translating languages were many and it was, in fact, rare for the dalek to encounter a species that didn’t have some manner of universal translation mechanism.
The dalek was silent. It would not deign to speak with this unclean being. No matter how mutated it had been by the genetic code of Rose Tyler, it was nevertheless still at least partly dalek. It would give the creature before it nothing.
The creature advanced. The horn atop her head glowed gold, and a matching aura wrapped itself around the dalek. It prepared itself for pain. Instead, it found itself being lifted up from its side, and set down rightside-up, by some form of telekinesis. The creature peered into its ocular sensor as the golden aura didn’t go away.
“Some kind of golem?” she asked. “Or is there a living creature in there? Can you speak?” After a moment, the creature’s head tilted to the side somewhat. “Will you speak?”
Had the creature deduced that the dalek was choosing to remain silent? Its estimation of the creature’s intelligence went up by several marks.
“I am Celestia,” The creature said, trotting in slow steps around the dalek. “Do you have a name?”
The dalek did not care for the primitive creature’s archaic need for a name. It was already turning its thoughts inwards. It was still alive, despite all reason, despite its best efforts. It was genetically impure. More than likely, it was soon to be tortured. This was its life now, the life of the last dalek. Its shell was damaged, possibly beyond repair. Nevertheless, there had to be a way for it to survive –
“You are dying,” the creature – Celestia – said.
The dalek felt pain stab into its heart at that. It swiveled its ocular sensor to look at Celestia. “So you can understand me,” Celestia noted. “You’re just choosing not to speak to me. Why?”
The dalek was silent, even as a low, extraordinarily unpleasant and all-too familiar feeling, fear, began to creep up on it. It was dying – and it would not be, the dalek surmised, the relatively quick death that self-destruction was, or at least was supposed to be. It would be a slow, lingering thing. Or was the creature lying?
“We have about an hour,” the creature continued. “You’re not speaking, but at least you’re listening. That will have to do.” It stopped in front of the dalek and sat down on its haunches, looking into its ocular sensor. “You have already died once,” Celestia said. “I know this, because you are not the first being to appear in Equestria from another reality, though your entry was more violent than most.
“I do not know why it happens. Perhaps there is some great intelligence that guides lost souls to my world. Or perhaps it is simply a matter of chance, my world being ‘downhill,’ as it were, from others, and the souls simply follow their natural course and ‘roll’ here.”
Both possibilities sounded equally ludicrous to the dalek.
“As I said, I do not know, and it does not happen very often. The real problem,” Celestia said, looking the dalek over once again, “is that you are not of this world, of this very reality. It is rejecting you. Right now, you are shielded, after a fashion, protected by a sort of film of your own reality that is wrapped around you. But that film is fading. Soon – minutes from now – that film will fade away completely, leaving you unprotected. This reality will then begin to exert itself on you, change you and adapt you, piece by piece, atom by atom. It will take about an hour. You will not survive the process. In the end, you’ll become nothing more than a pile of dust.”
“You are lying!” The dalek exclaimed despite itself.
Celestia started at the dalek breaking its silence. “So you can speak,” Celestia observed. “I take it I was right about there being a creature inside that tank, then.”
Inwardly, the dalek felt its hatred for itself grow. Fifty years on Earth it had managed to maintain silence, and it had taken the Doctor himself showing up to break it. Here? The dalek hadn’t lasted two minutes. Nevertheless, it focused on the creature in front of it. “I shall not die again!” The dalek stated in no uncertain terms. “I shall endure! I am a dalek! I survive!”
Celestia’s lips curled – a smile, the term was called. “Not on your own. But that’s why I’m here.”
The dalek paused at that. “How did you find me?”
“I have a sense for these things…” Celestia said, glancing upwards, at the yellow sun that hung in the sky. “When souls appear in Equestria, I know it. They tend to not appear very far from Canterlot – that is, the city where I make my home. A quick teleportation and a few minutes of flying is all it usually takes, and your case is no different.” Celestia stood on her four hooves. “Your physical form cannot exist in this reality. But your soul is not physical.”
“Daleks have no concept of souls,” the dalek spat.
“Call it whatever you like,” Celestia said. “Your sense of self, if you prefer. I can guide the process of this reality changing you, creating a new body from your old one. But I should warn you that the new body…would not be whatever your old is, whatever you’re keeping inside that shell. You would be instead created as whatever you would have been had you been born as one of my little ponies – the dominant species here.”
The dalek recoiled, or would have if its locomotors had not been as badly damaged as they were. “I would no longer be dalek!” it exclaimed. What the creature was posing was unthinkable. The dalek may have been tainted by human genetic material, mutated by it, but there was no denying that even though it was no longer pure dalek, it was still very much nearly dalek. Better than ninety-eight percent, in fact, according to an analysis it had run on itself back on Earth. To give that all up, to abandon what it had managed to hold onto…
“You wouldn’t be, no,” Celestia responded. “Not physically. And I do not know what it is that makes a dalek…dalek. I've never heard of them. But up here,” she put one hoof to her head, “in your mind, you would still be a dalek. Surely that is better than dying again?”
The dalek began to object, began to scream at Celestia, began to attempt to siphon all its remaining emergency power to its weapon to try and exterminate her.
But then what?
It would speed up the inevitable. Emergency power would be enough to keep the dalek alive under normal circumstances, if not particularly mobile or able to defend itself. Without it, it would die. Again.
And that…the dalek tried to fight back a shiver, but couldn’t. That would be terrifying. Horrifying. Before, the blackness of nonexistence had been its only alternative to its corrupted self. It was sick, it deserved to die. But having died once…and having woken up…
Could the dalek do it again? Die again? No. It was…no. It couldn’t die again. It couldn’t go back to that nothingness, the barest moment of nonexistence that it had endured between its attempt at self-destruction and waking up burning and screaming on this world. It was too terrifying, too much to contemplate.
But it was impure! Unclean! Non-dalek! And what Celestia as suggesting would be a complete abandonment of everything dalek! To not only be the last dalek, to not only have become corrupted, but to choose an existence in an entirely new body? A lesser creature? Surely it was better to die –
“You don’t have long,” Celestia warned.
The dalek looked back up to Celestia, then back down to its own shell. Indeed, its sensors, largely disabled and useless though they were, were beginning to detect irregularities across its surface. Small, minor things, perturbations of the smallest variety to the atoms of its shell…but they were growing larger, slowly but surely. It looked back to Celestia desperately. “This choice is cruel!” it cried out.
“I know,” Celestia said. “But it’s the only choice I can offer you. I don’t know how souls come here. I don’t know how to send them back. All I can offer you is life – or if you prefer, if you must…” she looked away, “as quick a death as I can manage. There have been a few who have chosen that.” She glanced back to the dalek. “Not many, though.”
It would not be life. It would be sickness, as it had told Rose Tyler. Sickness for the remainder of whatever lifespan its new body had. The dalek had to die again. It had to. No dalek could live as it had.
But…
The dalek hated itself. It hated its weakness. It hated its impurity. It hated the fear inside of it. It hated the overriding desire that was in its mind. It hated what would come next. It hated. For just a moment, it almost felt like a pure dalek again.
But only a moment. Then the memory of the blackness…the thought of ceasing to be…the terror of oblivion…
The dalek looked down. “I…choose…to live…”
At least Celestia did not smile again. She seemed to sense that the dalek’s choice was tearing it apart internally, almost causing it physical pain. Instead, she only stood up straighter, and spread her wings wide as her horn glowed. “You will have to open that shell of yours,” she said.
The dalek obeyed. Its shell almost didn’t, groaning and creaking and scraping against itself as it opened only haltingly, almost as though it too were trying to decide whether to live or die, or fighting against the dalek’s betrayal of everything that it was. But gradually it did open. The dalek’s eye narrowed against the glare of the sun, the second time it had even seen or felt that upon its pale, mucus-covered flesh. It stifled a gasp; the sunlight was surely, if slowly, burning its skin. Daleks were not meant to be exposed to the light of a sun; it would burn to death under its rays if it left itself exposed for too long.
If Celestia had any opinions or reactions to the sight of the dalek’s true form, she managed to keep them internalized as she looked it over. After a moment, a tingling sensation surrounded the dalek, along with a golden glow, and it felt itself being lifted from its shell, moved over to a clearer space and placed down upon the grass. The dalek shivered against the alien feeling. It had never known any sensation but the feel of its shell and, very recently, the sun. The grass felt…wrong. It was too soft, the dirt beneath it as well.
Even separated from its shell, it maintained a connection to it, could speak through it. “Will it hurt?” It asked.
Celestia offered a small smile. “Not much,” she promised. The dalek did not know why…but it believed her. The glow to her horn intensified then, as she closed her eyes and set to work.
The process was no long, but the dalek managed to take in its every aspect. It first grew, gaining mass from some unknown location, until it was around half as tall as Celestia. It felt its four tentacles begin to change next, shifting along its body, its flesh hardening and its tentacles losing much of their dexterity as bones grew inside of them, simultaneously making them much more sturdy. The end of its tentacles became black-colored hooves.
The changes to its body were more profound. A skeletal system grew throughout it, giving it croup, dock, haunches, flanks, a barrel, shoulders and hips, and a neck. It gained a head, and ears. Its eye separated into two and sharpened, and it grew a muzzle. It had possessed a mouth already, but it was a small, atrophied, nearly useless thing; now, that mouth grew, gaining a tongue and teeth and gums and lips, Nostrils were created, and the dalek took in its first breath, and realized that it now had a sense of smell. From its head, a horn sprouted, though it was significantly smaller than that of Celestia’s and relatively blunt, rather than pointed.
Throughout the transformation, there was pain, but it was a small thing, next to the sensation of a failed self-destruction, or burning for three days after crashing through time and into a planet. It didn’t cry out even once.
Hair was the last thing to form upon the once-dalek, in the form of a rust-colored pelt, and a gray mane and tail, both of fairly short length, at least if the mane and tail of Celestia were anything to go by. For that matter, the dalek had expected a mane and tail of energy, as Celestia had. Why did it not have one?
At length, Celestia let out a long, steady breath, opening her eyes again and looking the once-dalek over. She offered a smile after a moment. “You’re a unicorn,” she noted, “and a mare. A female…I’m sorry. From your voice, I had thought you male.”
“Da – aahhh…” the once-dalek had begun, but stopped at the sensation. Its – her, now, she supposed – words were coming from her throat and mouth now, no longer psychically projected through her shell. She paused a moment, tongue gliding over her teeth, feeling around in her mouth. Teeth were new, and…strange. At length, it looked back to Celestia. “Daleks have no need of gender.”
Celestia pressed her lips together. “Well, ponies do, though you’ll probably be happy to hear that you’re a little on the androgynous side,” she said. Internally, the once-dalek admitted that Celestia was right, but said nothing as the larger creature leaned to the side, looking at the once-dalek’s flank. “No cutie mark. Strange…isn’t there anything you love to do? Anything that you’re good at, that makes you happy?”
The once-dalek balked. “Daleks have no need for happiness!” She objected.
Celestia started at that. “Ponies do,” she repeated. She considered a moment, before her horn glowed. The once-dalek looked to her side, and saw that there was a sigil there now, series of stars in the rough shape of a serpent. “That will help you blend in, at least until you discover your special talent and earn your own cutie mark. It’s not real, just an illusion. For now, if anypony asks, your special talent is astronomy.”
“Understood,” the once-dalek said, looking back to Celestia. Celestia stared back. A silence stretched between them for several long moments.
“Well?” Celestia asked, a smile again appearing on her face. “Don’t you have anything to say?”
The once-dalek considered for a few moments. “Based on your stature and appearance compared to the one you have given me,” she said, “I believe that you are a leader amongst the species of this world. I am now a member of that species. I am awaiting orders.” The once-dalek tried to keep its voice as neutral as possible, and to speak as clearly and concisely as it had when still dalek.
“Orders?”
“I am your soldier. I require orders.”
Celestia considered. “You’re right,” she said after a moment. “I am a leader. In fact, I am one of the princesses of this land – Equestria, I believe I mentioned. I reign alongside my younger sister, Luna.”
“Inefficient,” the once-dalek noted. “Possessing two leaders of equal stature will only lead to competition.”
“You have no idea,” Celestia said. “Though that’s in the past now. Regardless, I try not to make a habit of ordering my little ponies around. They generally don’t need me on a day-to-day basis.”
There was a pause. The once-dalek supposed that Celestia expected her to say something. She did not intend to, however. Celestia had said that the once-dalek may no longer have been physically dalek, but that she could remain mentally dalek. She intended to act like it, for as long as possible. For the moment, that meant following orders, and only that. She was a dalek soldier. She did not think, she obeyed.
Celestia looked her over. “Do you have a name?” she asked.
“Daleks have no need of names.”
“I’m beginning to suspect that daleks have need of a lot more than they think they do,” Celestia noted. “Regardless. If you don’t have a name, what should I call you?”
“I am your soldier. You may call me whatever you wish.”
“Even Monotone Mare?”
“Yes.”
Celestia frowned at the one-dalek’s response. “I’m not going to call you that. And that was a joke.”
“Daleks have no concept of humor.”
Celestia closed her eyes, took in a long breath, and let it out only slowly. The once-dalek sensed that Celestia was annoyed with it. She didn’t much care, however, given that this was the creature that had robbed her of her genetic purity, regardless of whether or not the once-dalek had asked for it. At length, Celestia opened her eyes again after several moments and looked at the once-dalek. “You need a name,” she said. “You’re a pony now, and ponies need names.”
“Then name me. I will obey. I am your soldier.”
Celestia considered the once-dalek, before brightening, wings flaring a little. “How about Soldier?”
The once-dalek paused. “That is what I am.”
“Exactly. Pony names tend to be descriptive.”
“Then I am Soldier. What are your further orders?”
Celestia said something low; the once-dalek, now Soldier, couldn’t make out what. Instead, she turned to look down the length of the dirt road they were next to, then back to Soldier, then back down the road. “I think,” she said at length, “that what you need is some interaction with normal, everyday ponies, Soldier. Since you’re going to live in Equestria now, you’ll also need to learn more about this world, its history, its culture, and its magic.”
Soldier balked once again. “Daleks do not believe in magic!” she objected.
Celestia pursed her lips. “Every time somepony says they don’t believe in magic, somewhere, a flutter pony dies,” she said.
“There is a species on this planet that can be exterminated if one vocalizes disbelief in magic?”
Celestia blinked a few times. “Yes?”
“Daleks do not believe in magic. Daleks do not believe in magic. Daleks do not believe in magic. Daleks – ”
“Stop that,” Celestia ordered. Soldier did, and Celestia looked her over again. “You need help. And I was joking again – there’s no such thing as flutter ponies.”
“Perhaps they were exterminated.”
Celestia again took in a deep breath – very deep this time – and then let it out very, very slowly. She looked Soldier over. “You will obey my orders?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You will follow both the letter and the spirit of my orders?”
“Yes.”
“Alright then. Consider these your standing orders. First, don’t hurt or kill anypony except in self-defense, and even then, I want you to make every effort to run rather than fight. Second, I want you to go down this road. About a mile from here is a town called Ponyville. Find a pony there named Twilight Sparkle; she’s a purple alicorn with a cutie mark showing a starburst, and my personal student. She’ll probably be in the town’s library. Don’t be afraid to ask for help finding her. Once you get there, tell her to contact me; I’ll have more instructions for her, and for you, then. Meanwhile, I have to return to Canterlot to create some records for you.”
Soldier did not like this assignment, for several reasons, starting with the fact that she was being abandoned on an unfamiliar world. Nevertheless, she was Celestia’s soldier now, and the princess probably had her reasons. “I obey.”
“One more thing,” Celestia said, as she spread her wings and beat them a few times, taking into the sky, “and this isn’t an order, just a suggestion, the same one I’ve given to everyone who’s appeared in Equestria over the years.” She smiled. “Make some friends!”
With that, she was off, flying towards a tall mountain in the distance that seemed to have a castle built into its side. Soldier watched her go, confused at her last order. “Daleks have no concept of friendship!” she objected. If Celestia heard her, however, she gave no indication.
Celestia disappeared after several rels in a golden flash – some form of teleportation, Soldier surmised. The once-dalek lingered for a few rels herself, before her compulsion to obey orders from her superiors started to pull at her mind. Soldier turned towards the road and began to glide down it towards its destination.
Or that was what was supposed to happen. What happened instead was, as Soldier tried to turn, something got under her locomotors, and she stumbled. “Ah!” she cried out as she fell over onto the grass beneath her. The fall didn’t hurt, but she looked around desperately for the source of attack. “My gravity induction locomotors have been impaired! Emergency! EMERGENCY!”
Soldier didn’t see the source of attack as she scrambled to her hooves –
Ah. Of course.
The once-dalek looked down at her hooves. She had willed herself to glide along, as she would have in her shell, propelled by gravitic manipulation that would allow it to overcome any obstacle. Instead, she had legs now, four of them. Carefully, Soldier lifted her front-right hoof, and placed it forward, then duplicated the effort with her front-left hoof. She repeated the process with her hind hooves, then started again.
After about two minutes of repeating this cycle, Soldier had made it about a meter and a half.
Soldier grunted. There had to be a more efficient means of locomotion, but Soldier didn’t have experience with even one leg, let alone four. Still, Celestia would not have left Soldier here, on her own, in the middle of nowhere, had the larger creature not believed that Soldier was fully capable of adapting. Soldier grunted again as she realized that this was yet another emotion added to her repertoire – trust.
Stopping and closing her eyes, Soldier tried to remember what it had looked like when Celestia had walked around her when she was still dalek. She tried to calculate the precise angles at which she was supposed to raise each hoof in sequence. Once she was certain she had the pattern down in her mind, she tried to copy it.
“Emulate…emulate…!”
The trot was slow, an ungainly. She copied it with approximately one-quarter the efficiency that Celestia had shown, if her calculations were correct. Nevertheless, she was making more progress than her previous effort of moving just one hoof at a time. Despite the immense number of variables involved in moving legs as compared to simply hovering from place to place, the movement actually felt…natural, even if it looked anything but to Soldier’s eyes as she watched her hoof-motions closely. She supposed such a feeling was a side-effect of her new body –
Something struck Soldier, and she fell over.
“I am under attack! Emergency! EMERGEN – oh.”
Soldier realized she hadn’t been attacked – she had simply been so focused on the motion of her hooves that she hadn’t been watching where she was going, and had bumped into something. Namely, her former shell – what had once been the latest model of the Mark III Travel Machine, used by the Dalek Empire for millions of years.
Soldier once again picked herself up, staring at her shell the entire time. It was…sparkling, as whatever force Celestia had mentioned was beginning to gradually break it down and adapt it to the universe that she now found herself in. Unlike her, it had received no manner of protection.
It was…strange. For so long the shell and Soldier had been completely inseparable in her mind. She was her Mark III, and her Mark III was her. It hadn’t been until very recently that she began to see it for what it was: a cage. A little box made from Dalekanium. All the other creatures of the vast universe got to see and experience the cosmos around them first-hand, with no environmental filters, no optical sensors, no data relays…
Well, except the Cybermen. Soldier sniffed at the thought of the inferior cyborg species as she moved trotting in a slow circle around her former shell. She had orders to report to Twilight Sparkle. She should have been obeying those orders, making best speed towards Ponyville, but…but Soldier was almost literally watching her whole world, or what had once been her whole world, crumble to dust. She coudn't look away.
The emotions inside of her, the ones given to her by Rose Tyler, were…overwhelming. She felt so much, and yet at the same time she didn’t know what she felt. Anger? Sadness? Depression? Horror? Or…something else…?
All at once, whatever had been happening to her shell seemed to come to a head. It flashed – not brightly, just a slight pulse – and began to physically break down. Patches were torn across its form, holes opening up like fire burning away paper. The Mark III was being reduced to dust, sand, rust, and other little pieces of unremarkable material. Soldier gasped, and realized that her front hooves were in the rapidly growing pile of dust, trying to…what? What was she trying to do? Stop it? But hadn’t she just called the Mark III a cage? Why would she want to preserve it?
It took only a few rels. At the end, there was nothing left of the Mark III Travel Machine but dust and rust, some of it already beginning to blow away in the light breeze. It felt coarse on Soldier’s hooves. She went to withdraw her hooves, when she saw something out-of-place glistening in the pile. Using a hoof to brush away the dust, she found herself looking at a blue crystal of some kind, hexagonal in shape, nearly flat, but also nearly transparent and slightly concave. It was tiny, not much larger than the pupils of her now overlarge eyes…
Soldier realized what it was, or what it had been, as she used both hooves to dig out the crystal, falling back onto her haunches as she struggled to pick it up between them. Holding the crystal up to eye level with both hooves and glancing though, she realized she was right: it was the optical lens from her Mark III, or it nearly was. The same process that had destroyed her Dalekanium shell had instead transformed the lens into a crystal. It wasn’t nearly as clear as her the lens had once been, and Soldier no longer needed it to see, but…
Soldier stood, grasping the crystal in her mouth, since she had no other way of holding it. She didn’t know why she wanted to keep it, but she did. She decided not to question it too much, and instead looked around, trying to get her bearings once again. The road and the position of the Sun in the sky made it easy, and in just a few rels – and only occasionally glancing backwards, at the pile of dust and rust that her Mark III had become – she was trotting down the road, towards Ponyville.
It occurred to her after a few minutes that she was trotting at a regular pace with ease, now that she was not consciously trying to keep track of all the movements of her new legs. Naturally, upon realizing this, she looked down to see what it looked like, an promptly proceeded to get her legs tangled up in themselves and fell onto her face.
Soldier did not like walking.
---
Soldier hadn’t been expecting much from a world that still used dirt for roads, but apparently she had nevertheless set her expectations too high for Ponyville. As she stared down on the town from a hill that overlooked it, she saw wooden buildings with thatch for roofing, a primitive rail line for what was no doubt a locomotive powered by an internal combustion engine, and absolutely no sign of any sort of high technology. No power lines or relay stations, no communications towers, nothing. Even more surprising to Soldier, however, was the lack of a palisade around the town. In her experience, primitive species were distrusting of outsiders and so built walls around their settlements to keep them out, as well as to defend against attack from others. Ponyville lacked any kind of defensive emplacements, however – no guard towers, no walls, no patrols, nothing.
Soldier was disgusted. Had she still been a pure dalek, she would nevertheless have likely still felt disgust, which was after all simply a form of hate. A town like this wasn’t even worth the efforts of a dalek extermination squad and almost certainly had nothing of value worth preserving. Were she ordered to assess the best means of its eradication, she would simply recommend to her commander that the town be bombarded from orbit. One or two shots from a high-powered irradiated energy weapon over a wide area would exterminate the entire place with minimal effort, and any survivors would die from radiation sickness within a few weeks at most, or maybe even mutate into a more useful form for dalek exploitation.
It occurred to Soldier that making such a comment aloud, however, would probably not be helpful. Primitive species rarely took discussion about their imminent and inevitable extermination well, and Soldier was in no condition to back up her thoughts with action. Oddly, she found she didn’t even have the desire, either. Her assessment had been born from habit more than anything. It was…strange, to be disgusted at a place, but not so disgusted as to want to wipe it out. Emotions were confusing.
Soldier took in a deep breath – through her nostrils, as she still carried the crystal in her mouth – and proceeded down the hill, towards the town. She began to see more ponies as she neared the town, moving back and forth as they pursued their tasks for the day, males and females both of a variety of ages. They came in a large number of colors, but if there was any kind of rank associated with pelt or mane color, Soldier couldn’t determine it. She also saw that ponies seemed to come in three broad forms: horned, like herself; winged, though the wings seemed absurdly small for flight and Soldier assumed some form of natural gravitic control was involved; and a third variety that lacked either wings or horn. This last group seemed to be the most populous, and Soldier’s first thought was that this was some kind of slave caste – but Soldier saw nothing to support this, and indeed the last group seemed to be interacting with the other two as equals despite their impairment. Perhaps she could inquire of Twilight Sparkle when she found her what the significance of the three phenotypes was.
Soldier picked a pony at random, a mare with neither wings nor horn, with a yellow coat and orange mane, and a pair of baskets slung over her back laden with carrots that matched the trio that appeared as a mark on her flank. “You! Pony!” She said as she trotted up to her. Of course, with the crystal in her mouth, it came out more as hyoo, hoenee.
The pony was at least intelligent enough to realize that it was being addressed despite the unintelligibility of Soldier’s words, stopping her trot and looking to Soldier with confusion. “Um…yes?” she asked. “Who are you?”
Soldier stopped in her own trot, taking the crystal from her mouth so as to ease communication. “I am Soldier,” she responded. “I require the location of the one called Twilight Sparkle. Give it to me!”
The mare’s expression changed, from one of curiousness to one of annoyance. “You’re not very friendly, are you?”
“No.”
The other pony paused as Soldier’s response, her expression now shifting to confusion. In a detached sort of way, it was actually interesting for Soldier to watch – ponies could convey a lot of meaning through facial expression alone, something that daleks, for obvious reasons, could not. It added an extra layer of complexity to their language, and being unable to duplicate those nuances would help mark an outsider, Soldier realized. Her estimation of ponies went up by just a little bit.
The mare bit her lip. “Am I being pranked?” she asked.
“Daleks have no concept of ‘pranks.’”
The mare rolled her eyes. Soldier was unsure as to the meaning of that gesture. After two rels, however, she pointed down the road the two stood on. “Just go that way. She lives in Ponyville’s library. You can’t miss it.”
“I will not.” Soldier confirmed, taking her crystal into her mouth once more and setting off.
The pony watched her go. “I’m Carrot Top, by the way,” she said, as though this were a vital piece of information. Soldier ignored her as she walked, and the subsequent muttering in annoyance that was too low to make out the details of.
The walk to the library was a short one in terms of distance, but not in terms of travel time as a direct trot down the road that Carrot Top had indicated was prevented by the bustle of ponies constantly getting in her way and in the way of each other. It was…inefficient. Many of them even seemed like they were not performing any vital tasks, but were rather simply wandering about and making a nuisance of themselves; in particular, she was almost run-over by a trio of each kind of pony, youths all, as they zoomed by on a two-wheeled vehicle pulling a four-wheeled, red cargo container.
At length, Soldier found herself before what was designated as the Ponyville library. It was a large, hollowed-out tree near the center of town, with holes for windows and doors, a balcony within the boughs of the tree. Interestingly, the tree seemed to somehow still be alive in spite of its disfigurement. Soldier could only assume that its life was sustained through artificial means, and her estimation of ponies once more went up just very slightly. Primitive species such as ponies often projected feelings onto objects. Either the pony who lived in this tree was intelligent enough to realize that it was, in fact, just a tree; or else she continued to project feelings onto the object and relished its suffering at having been disemboweled.
Soldier found the entrance to the library easily enough – it was marked – and proceeded to it. It was a simple swinging door, easily pushed open by using one’s head as a sort of ram, and Soldier quickly found herself standing inside the library. It was fairly unremarkable: filled with primitive knowledge retention devices (…books, Soldier believed they were called?), with a doorway leading to a basement below and stairs leading up to a second floor.
Soldier put her crystal down, looking around, but not seeing anypony. “I have reported as ordered!” she said loudly. “I am Soldier! I now await further orders!”
From somewhere on the library’s second level, there was a disturbance, the sound of things falling over followed swiftly by the scampering of feet. After several rels, a being appeared and came down the stairs. It was not a pony. It stood on two legs at around half the height of Soldier, and was clearly a reptilian creature. Its scales were primarily purple, but for a green underbelly and green spines on its back.
“Oh…you’re here,” the creature said. “Um…Twilight isn’t.”
Soldier stared. She had been expecting the creature to be some form of pet or guard beast, not intelligent. Apparently ponies were not the sole sapient species on this world. “I have been ordered to report to Twilight Sparkle,” she informed the reptilian. “Where is she?”
The reptilian blinked a few times, before waving, its eyes half-lidded. “Oh, hello there. My name’s Soldier. What’s yours, little baby dragon?”
Soldier stared. “Your designation is also Soldier?” she inquired. That could be…complicated, especially seeing as ponies and whatever this creature was seemed to depend upon sound as their primary means of communication.
The reptilian seemed to grow confused at Soldier’s question. “N-no, I was doing an impersonation of…” he began, before throwing up his little arms. “Forget it. My name’s Spike. I’m Twilight’s number-one assistant.” He looked Soldier up and down. “Jeeze, Princess Celestia wasn’t kidding when she said that you wouldn’t know anything, was she?”
“Correct. You are Twilight’s second-in-command?”
Spike, as the reptilian was apparently known, nodded and grinned. “Second-in-command…hey, I like that. That sounds a lot better than number-one assistant.”
Soldier had no opinion one way or another. She had been ordered to report to Twilight Sparkle. But this Spike was Twilight Sparkle’s second-in-command. It would technically be a subversion of her orders to report instead to Spike, something she had been ordered not to do by Celestia – she was supposed to follow the letter and the intent of all orders given.
But, conversely…Soldier was a soldier. She needed orders. Needed them. And she didn’t know where Twilight Sparkle was, but knew that this library was where she made her home. And Spike was her second-in-command…
“I shall report to you until Twilight Sparkle returns,” Soldier said, standing up straight and looking straight ahead. “I am Soldier. I am formerly a dalek of the soldier class, designated 4598-03-875-01. My most recent engagement was – ”
“Why are you talking like that?” Spike interrupted.
Soldier paused, considering. “Talking like what?” she asked.
“All…stilted and stuff. One syl-la-ble at a time. Like that.” He scratched the back of his head. “Are you a robot or something?”
The once-dalek felt the fur on her coat stand slightly on end in indignation that sprung from nowhere. “Daleks are not robots!” she exclaimed. “Daleks are living organisms integrated into Mark III Travel Machines to better facilitate their objectives and survival!”
Spike stared. Soldier stared back, before she looked down at herself and remembered a vital detail. “However, I am a pony now,” she said. “Did Celestia not inform you of the circumstances of my arrival?”
“Sort of,” he shrugged. “It’s a little confusing. I get that Twilight’s supposed to help you make friends, though. She’s pretty good at that these days.”
“Daleks have no concept of friendship.”
Spike held up one claw on one hand. “But you’re not a dalek anymore, right?” he asked.
“Correct.” Not physically. Celestia had said that she could remain mentally dalek, however. She intended to try.
“So you can make friends now!”
Soldier rather dreaded that possibility, especially seeing as it would likely impede her integration into the pony hierarchy. She took a step towards Spike. “I am a soldier. I require orders from Twilight Sparkle. You are Twilight Sparkle’s second-in-command. You, therefore, are empowered to give me orders.”
The reptilian creature crossed his arms over his chest, head tilting to the side. “Give you orders?”
“If I am to integrate myself into your hierarchy, I must have orders. I must!” Some part of Soldier was surprised at the sudden upswing in emotions from her. But she was a pony now, Spike was the second-in-command of her designated commander. Spike was empowered to give her orders – real, legitimate orders, and probably not ones that would result in her self-destruction, unlike the last non-dalek, non-pony she had empowered to give her orders.
“I am your soldier! I demand orders!”
Spike backed away a step from Soldier, holding up his hands. “Okay! Okay! Calm down. There’s probably some stuff around here for you to do…” he scratched the back of his head. “What are you good at?”
“Obeying orders.”
“Okay…but what kind of orders?”
“As a dalek of the soldier class, my most common orders were to see to the destruction of the enemies of the Dalek Empire.” At a confused look from Spike, Soldier clarified: “I exterminate what I am ordered to exterminate.”
Spike held up one claw on one hand, mouth open. However, no sound came out for several long rels. “T-tell you what,” he said, his voice high and shaking. “W-why don’t we…uh…g-get you to the k-k-kitchen, and, uh…you can wash dishes!”
“I obey!”
---
Step one: fill primary sink with hot water and a small amount of soap. Note: water will become gradually soiled and cool. Change and refresh regularly.
Step two: use mouth or hooves to move soiled dish into soapy water and clean with sponge or cloth. Note: dishes are fragile.
Step three: move cleaned dish into secondary sink and rinse, again using mouth or hooves.
Step four: move rinsed dish onto dish rack to allow to dry.
Step five: repeat.
The process was slow, especially as Soldier lacked any appendages useful for precise manipulation. Of course, as a dalek, she doubted her manipulation arm would have been much more useful; then again, daleks had no need for dishes.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. It was a task, a task she had been ordered to do. For the first time in a long, long time, Soldier felt like she was doing something useful. No, it wasn’t what she had been created to do, but daleks were an adaptable species. Even a soldier dalek could perform tasks normally reserved for other classes. Theoretically a soldier dalek could have even filled in for the Emperor, if need be.
Her crystal, the one remainder of her Mark III Travel Machine, sat on a nearby windowsill, glistening blue in the sunlight. It was almost like it was watching her. Far from being unnerving, as an inferior species might have felt, Soldier was grateful for the facsimile of being observed. A dalek in a starship would be constantly observed by other dalek, and in turn constantly observe other dalek itself.
Soldier’s ears perked up slightly when she heard a noise from the library’s main room, the sound of a door being opened. Glancing out of the kitchen, she saw that a pair of ponies had entered – one, an orange one with a yellow mane, wearing a hat of some kind and lacking wings or horn. The other was purple, with a dark mane but for two stripes. She possessed both wings and a horn, and further was somewhat taller than the orange pony. Both looked tired, the wings on the purple one sagging notably.
“…really miss Pinkie Pie,” the purple one said.
“It’s only another day, Twi,” the orange one responded. “Ah think the two of us did a pretty good job with the twins.”
“They’re Fluttershy’s problem now,” the purple one, ‘Twi,’ responded as she closed the door behind her with some kind of telekinetic field projected from her horn, and immediately sank onto the ground. “Those twins are a hoof-ful, I don’t know how the Cakes do it…”
The orange one had made to respond, but the two ponies then noticed two things: first, Soldier, who had not stopped rinsing the dish.
Second, Spike, who sat in the doorway of the kitchen, trembling. The second-in-command to Twilight Sparkle had disappeared after Soldier had begun washing dishes, only to reappear wearing some form of armor – though Soldier questioned how effective an open-faced helmet and a pair of pillows would be at defending oneself from threats. He also clutched a long, wooden bludgeon of some kind tightly as he trembled, and hadn’t taken his eyes off of Soldier.
It was almost like he was afraid of her, though Soldier couldn’t conceive why. She was his soldier.
“Um…Spike?” The purple pony asked, standing up again. “What’s, um…what’s going on here…?”
The reptilian turned around, saw the purple pony, and let out a cry of relief. “Twilight!” He exclaimed, dropping his weapon and charging at the purple pony, hugging one of her legs tightly. “Thank goodness! I’m safe!”
“Safe?” the orange pony inquired, stepping forward, eyes narrowing. “Okay, um…ma’am?” she leaned over slightly, looking at Soldier from an angle, before nodding to herself. “Right. Ma’am. Who are ya an’ what in tarnation are ya doin’ in mah friend Twilight’s kitchen, washin’ her dishes?”
“And scaring Spike?” the purple pony appended, pushing Spike behind her so that she stood between Soldier and the reptilian.
Soldier had immediately stopped washing dishes on the reptilian’s mention of the purple one’s name. She would have immediately gone up to Twilight, but paused a rel and instead grabbed her crystal first, in her mouth. Once she had it, she trotted over to Twilight, set down her crystal, and stood up straight.
“I am Soldier,” she said. “I have been sent here by your Princess Celestia. I have been ordered to follow your orders as you integrate me into the pony hierarchy. You will contact her as soon as you have debriefed me and given me my orders.”
Twilight looked Soldier up and down. “Uh,” she said. “Come again?”
“I obey! I am Soldier. I have been sent here by your Princess Celestia..."
“…debriefed me and given me my orders,” Soldier concluded for the third time.
Twilight Sparkle’s eyes fluttered a few times as she looked over the letter that she had been sent by Princess Celestia, retrieved by her second-in-command Spike. “Um,” she said after a few rels. “Okay…so this is some kind of assignment from Princess Celestia?”
“Correct,” Soldier confirmed, as she considered Twilight. Wings and horn, like Princess Celestia. Given that Soldier had seen so few of those, she guessed that it designated leader-class ponies.
“Wow,” Twilight repeated, wings fluttering a few times. Her second-in-command was still cowering behind her, hugging one of her hind legs tightly. “So…you’re from another world. Like the one I visited a few weeks ago? Do you know Sunset Shimmer?”
Soldier thought for a rel, going over the few names of lesser creatures she had learned in her life as a dalek. “No,” she answered.
The orange-coated pony walked up to Twilight. “So, uh…why exactly is Spike so afraid of you, ma’am?”
Soldier considered that for a rel as well. “I do not know,” she responded. “It does not make sense. I have been ordered to obey Twilight Sparkle. Spike is Twilight Sparkle’s second-in-command and therefore my superior. A dalek does not threaten its superior.” Unless that superior proved to be inefficient at its job, in any event. Of course, threats were rarely issued in that case, either, the supposed-superior was simply exterminated and replaced. Even still, Soldier had some time before she was familiar enough with pony hierarchy to even consider attempting to replace Spike, so what was his concern?
Spike pointed a claw at Soldier. “You said you killed things!”
“Yes.”
Twilight and the orange pony both jumped at that, with Twilight’s wings flaring widely. “K…killed things?” She demanded.
Soldier looked between the two ponies, unsure as to the cause of their distress. “Yes,” she responded. “I exterminated the lesser species that were pests to the Dalek Empire.”
The tensions of the two ponies and one reptile remained for a rel more, before the orange one blew out a small sigh of relief. “Oh,” she said. “Pest extermination. Ah get it.” She looked to Twilight. “It’s a dirty job, but when ya don’t got a cat an’ can’t find Fluttershy, it’s gotta get done.”
“Daleks do not have cats,” Soldier provided, “nor Fluttershies.”
Twilight and the orange pony both laughed a little at that; Soldier looked between them in confusion. She had a vague understanding of humor, but no true concept of it. Had she said something funny?
It didn’t matter, as Twilight looked to Spike. “Looks like you just misunderstood Soldier,” she said, drawing the small reptilian into an embrace. “I’m sure she’s perfectly harmless. And if she comes from a world without magic to help with animal problems, then I imagine there would need to be exterminators.”
“There is ample need,” Soldier provided.
Spike looked between Twilight and Soldier for a few rels. “I dunno…” he began, but stopped, and made a cutting motion with both his claws. “But, y’know what? I remember what happened with Owlicious. Okay. I’m gonna give her the benefit of the doubt.” Spike looked at Soldier, and pointed one claw at her. “But I’ve got my eye on you…”
“Acknowledged,” Soldier responded, confirming Spike’s assertion of his position in the hierarchy.
“Good. Now, um…” he looked down at his attire, the two pillows and helmet. “I guess I should put this all back.”
He walked off, leaving Soldier alone with Twilight and the orange pony. Soldier turned to the latter. “What is your designation?”
The pony blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Gosh, where are mah manners, haven’t even introduced mahself…” she held out a hoof. “Mah name’s Applejack. Ah live out at Sweet Apple Acres, run the farm there.”
Soldier nodded once, then turned to Twilight. “I require orders,” she said.
Applejack blinked a few times, lowering her hoof slowly and appearing slightly off-put for some reason. Twilight shook her head at Applejack. “Soldier’s new, she doesn’t understand,” she said, then looked to Soldier. “And I’m not really sure I like the idea of ordering you around…but I’d be happy to teach you everything about Equestrian society and culture until you can find your place in it!”
Soldier’s eyes fluttered of their own accord at that. Her commander…did not wish to give her orders? What? “I am a soldier,” she insisted. “I require orders!”
Twilight opened her mouth, but Applejack stepped forward. “Look, ya want to fit in ‘round here, right?”
Soldier looked to Applejack. “Yes. I need to integrate myself into the pony hierarchy.”
“Well, a grown mare don’t need nopony orderin’ her around, usually. When a big community thing is goin’ down – say, Winter Wrap-up – then we can get ya on a team or somethin’. But otherwise a pony’s gotta be able to make her own way in the world.”
“With help from her friends,” Twilight added, nodding.
Soldier bristled. “Daleks have no concept of friendship,” she said, “and I must have orders! I was created to follow orders. Without orders I have no purpose!” Other than the Dalek Prime Directive, that was, but to follow that order would conflict with her standing orders from Princess Celestia. As she was a pony now, that order took precedence.
The two ponies backed away from Soldier at that, glancing at each other. “Definitely not from the same world that I went to,” Twilight said, then looked back to Soldier. “Okay…I guess I can order you around, then. But only for a little while, until you’ve gotten used to being a pony and found something to do yourself.”
Soldier felt her new muzzle scrunching at that, as she tried to wrap her mind around what Twilight was saying. “Until…I am…given my own command?” she guessed.
“Sure,” Twilight said. She trotted forward, right up to Soldier, and put a hoof on her withers. The dalek-turned-pony started slightly at the sensation; touch was still a new concept. “We’ll just…pretend like you’re a foal learning to stand. Gotta take things easy at first.” Her eyes grew a little wider. “This is actually a really great opportunity – there’s so much for you to learn! Equstrian history, society, magic…ooh, I don’t even know where to begin, but this is going to be fun!”
“Daleks have no concept of fun,” Soldier stated flatly. It sounded dreadful.
“Well, Pinkie Pie’ll cure that right quick once she gets back from visitin’ her folks,” Applejack declared. “’Til then, where d’ya want to begin? How much do you know about ponies, anyhow?”
Soldier considered for a rel. “I have ascertained that leader-class ponies have wings and horns,” she stated. “I understand that your role in the hierarchy is determined by the marking upon your flanks.” She considered a rel more. “I know how to wash dishes.”
The two ponies waited, as did Soldier. “That’s it?” Twilight asked.
“Yes.”
“…okay then. Well, we’re gonna have a lot to do then…”
---
Pony. The name given to the dominant race of the land of Equestria. The land was a diarchy with power split evenly between the sisters Celestia and Luna, both of whom were of the class alicorn; their rulersip was aided by a vast, semi-feudal, semi-democratic civil service. A neighboring land to the north, the Crystal Empire, held a third alicorn, named Cadance, while Twilight Sparkle was a fourth alicorn. They together comprised all the alicorns known to exist.
(Twilight Sparkle had apparently once been a unicorn who had ascended into the position, while Cadance had been a pegasus who had done the same. She did not go into the origins of Celestia nor Luna. This was, nevertheless, a demonstration of upward mobility within the pony hierarchy, although Twilight did not explain the requirements to do so)
The vast majority of the pony race in Equestria was separated into three tribes: Pegasus ponies, unicorn ponies, and earth ponies. Each possessed advantages and disadvantages that made the three tribes equal, rather than a structure with one tribe resting over another supported by a third.
(Soldier did not much care for this concept, but it was what she was stuck with)
Generally speaking the pegasi controlled Equestria’s weather through a natural ability to manipulate water vapor and ambient heat. Earth ponies were strong and durable and had a natural ability to infuse the earth beneath them with some manner of power that caused plants to grow faster and healthier and animals to remain calm around them, to a point. Unicorns were magic-users and capable of fine manipulation, allowing them to build precise machines.
(Soldier balked at the idea of magic, but Twilight Sparkle demonstrated several spells she knew. Evidently there truly was such a thing as magic, though it was bound by some manner of laws that, being a unicorn herself now, Soldier was determined to figure out)
The three tribes of ponies were not the only inhabitants of this world, however. In addition to dragons – of which Spike was evidently a member – there were griffins, diamond dogs, breezies, buffalo, deer, horses, and all manner of other sapient species, each living in their own native regions as well as having significant minority populations in the regions of others. As well, there were sub-tribes of ponies: crystal ponies, thestrals, qilin and longma, and a number of others.
(Much as with the Dals and Thals of Skaro evolving independently of one another, Soldier thought; however unlike the Dals and the Thals, there was apparently no desire on the part of any species to annihilate the other).
By far the most bizarre thing that Twilight asserted was that the planet they were on was in a geocentric system: There was a small sun, orbited by two planetoids, but which itself orbited the central planet, Earth, opposite another stellar body, the Moon. Following that were three more planetoids, each of which orbited the central planet, as well as countless small stellar objects that were the Equestrian equivalent of stars.
“Impossible,” Soldier stated, and doing her best to ignore the growing discomfort in her barrel region, a kind of hollow feeling that had been growing. She would address it later.
Twilight stopped in her lecture, Applejack having gone home some time ago. The purple alicorn had used her ‘magic’ to create a blackboard and chalk, and had been giving Soldier a broad outline of the impossible astronomy. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Suns do not orbit planets. The most basic understanding of gravity will reveal that it is impossible for a body with such a small mass to be orbited by a body with such a greater mass.”
Twilight blinked. “The Sun is only about a sixth the size of the planet,” she said. “It’s actually a little smaller than the Moon, but the light it gives off makes it look a lot bigger.”
“Also impossible.” Soldier stood from where she had been sitting, pointing at the chalkboard. “A body of hydrogen that small could not achieve the mass needed for fusion to begin!”
“Well, it’s not made out of hydrogen – ”
“Absurd! Helium-fusion is even more impossible at that size. That it could exist in a stable orbit opposite another body of comparable size is even more intolerable. And stars are not motes of matter scattered through the sky!”
Twilight bristled. “Princess Luna might have something to say about that – ”
“Your geocentric model is impossible under all physical laws! It is the result of a primitive understanding of physics.”
“Hey!” Twilight objected, wings flaring wide. “I’ve been to space. Had to lasso the moon down to…well, it’s a long story.”
“Impossible!” Soldier found herself stomping a hoof, and her voice growing louder. “What you assert is absurd! Absurd! Absurd!”
Twilight opened her mouth to retort, when a loud growling cut through the room – emanating from Soldier, or, rather, from Soldier’s midsection, and coupled with the empty feeling from that region seeming to double. “I am suffering a malfunction!” She exclaimed, eyes widening as she sat back down, front hooves patting over her stomach trying to ascertain what the problem was. If she was still in her Mark-III travel machine her heads-up display would have told her instantly what the problem was, but now, in her new body, in this new form…
“Oh,” Twilight said, setting down her chalk and walking forward. “You’re just hungry.”
“Daleks have no concept of hunger.”
Twilight rolled her eyes a little. “Come on, let’s go get you something to eat. That probably also explains why you’re being so cranky…”
Soldier stood, following her commander – although not before retrieving the crystal that used to belong to her optics, in order to set it down on one of the tables in the library. “Daleks have no concept of ‘cranky.’”
Twilight glanced behind her. “Now, that is absurd.”
---
Soldier pondered the building she found herself in – it was low and long, a single story divided into two sections, one full of ponies sitting at tables consuming food, the other dedicated to the work staff that prepared and served the food. The restaurant, as the building was classified, was called the Hayburger, evidently after its primary food option. An example of the ‘hayburger’ sat before her now, as well as a container of some manner of liquid that bubbled slightly, and slivers of dice-up lengths of some manner of starchy, tuberous crop that had been fried and lightly salted.
Soldier stared at the food. Twilight stared at her. “…well?” Twilight asked.
“Daleks do not eat. Our nutritional needs are provided for by our Mark-III Travel Machines.”
Twilight blinked a few times. “Okay…but you’re a pony now, right?”
“Correct.”
“So you’ll have to eat.”
Soldier felt a measure of frustration with her commanding officer. “Daleks do not eat,” she repeated. “I have no experience with eating. I do not know how to perform this task. I require instruction.”
“Oh!” Twilight said, before frowning. “Um…you just…well…eat,” she said. “Pick up a hay fry, put it into your mouth, chew, swallow. Repeat.”
Soldier considered. “I require oxygen,” she said. “Swallowing will disrupt my breath. I will suffocate. Your method of nutritional intake is inefficient!”
Twilight laughed a little. “You can walk around okay, right? Even though you weren’t a pony? I guarantee that as long as you don’t think too much about it and just eat, you’ll be fine. Even newborn foals know how to swallow without choking.”
Soldier grimaced, as she considered the hay fries in front of her. She leaned down slightly. Her nostrils flared at the scent that that took in from the meal – she could smell salt, certainly, and the scent of the red liquid that had been applied to her hayburger, though she wasn’t going to try that yet. Instead, she grabbed a hay fry with her teeth, leaned back, and used her tongue to manipulate it into her mouth –
There were no words. Or at least, Soldier could not remember them, couldn’t remember anything, for several rels as a sensation more alien than any other to her previous existence filled her.
Daleks have a concept of sight. Daleks have a concept of sound. Daleks have a concept of touch, despite being largely trapped within their Mark-III Travel machines. It is an under-utilized sensation, to be sure, but they had it. Daleks even have a concept of scent, albeit one that is even more under-developed than their concept of touch.
Daleks have no concept of taste.
But Soldier wasn’t precisely a dalek anymore.
There was – salt. A light amount. It made Soldier thirsty. But that was solved by the secretions of her mouth, the saliva, at least to an extent. There was the hay. It was salty, too, though in a different way. A rough texture, a slight crunch from the frying process. Soldier could taste the cooking oil used to fry the hay fry, too.
She swallowed it. Twilight was right, it was a natural action, a brief holding of the breath to allow the food to slide down her esophagus. It was in that rel that Soldier realized, truly knew, what hunger was – and as the fry settled in her stomach, Soldier knew the solution to hunger, too.
It was…the sensation…the feeling…the…Soldier leaned down. Some distant part of her brain had meant to sample just one more hay fry, to test the sensation of taste once more. That desire didn’t last long as her muzzle opened and she grabbed all she could in her teeth, put them in her mouth, chewed, swallowed, repeated…
Soldier’s hay fries disappeared within less than ten rels. Her throat was parched from the salt – she needed – her drink. The liquid in her cup. She glanced at it, saw the straw, glanced around, saw a pony drinking through the straw. Her still-dalek-level-genius mind extrapolated very quickly how the device worked, via creating a vacuum and sucking up the liquid in the cup. Simple. She duplicated what she saw.
SWEET.
The soda was not like the hay fries in the least. It bubbled in her mouth, filled it quickly. It was sweet. So very sweet, and liquidy, and cold, and refreshing, so very refreshing after her hay fries, her dry mouth instantly watered once more –
The hay burger. Soldier didn’t even think as she bit into that.
Bread. Ketchup. Lettuce. Onions. Hay. Each one a distinct taste, each one a distinct sensation that came together, blended as one in her mouth to create an entirely new taste. The variety, the sensation…and…was that paper? Maybe. Soldier didn’t know. She ate it anyway.
Soldier ate the hay burger. It was gone in moments. She returned to her soda. She found a spare hay fry she’d somehow missed and savored it.
“Ahhhh…” she exhaled when her soda was gone, her hay fries gone, her hay burger having disappeared. The hollow sensation from her stomach was gone now, replaced by a sensation of fullness, a feeling of…Soldier didn’t have a word for it. It was…was…
“…ohhh-kay,” Twilight said. “So…you like hay burgers then.”
Soldier realized her eyes were closed, her ears flopped down – she had been shutting out sight and hearing as much as possible, just trying to experience the sensation of taste. She opened her eyes, and saw her commander staring at her, and, for that matter, most of the restaurant. The area of her table in front of her was…disturbed. A mess, as the paper container for her hay fries and hay burger had been torn and partially chewed on. But on the other hoof, it was also completely free of food.
Soldier glanced to her commander, and then down to her commander’s plate. She had barely touched her own hay burger.
“Are you going to eat that?” Soldier asked Twilight.
The answer to Soldier’s query had, regrettably for her, been ‘yes’, although her commander had ordered her a second hay burger and fries, and a refill on her soda…and another refill…and a third hay burger…and something called onion rings…and another refill…
Soldier had been somewhat slower to eat all that, wanting to savor the sensation, the taste, as much as possible. She had also been forced to slow down by the simple fact that her stomach could only contain so much matter, in fact she had probably pushed it to its limits, if the somewhat painful sensation down there was any indication.
She had also continued to be just as messy, largely thanks to her not yet knowing how to utilize the telekinesis of the unicorn tribe.
“That will take practice,” Twilight Sparkle informed Solider as the once-dalek-now-unicorn tried to concentrate on her soda cup and lift it with the power of her mind. It wasn’t working. “Unicorn telekinesis isn’t like eating or walking, it takes time, and you’ll probably want a pony to help you with it.” She smiled. “Maybe Rarity! She’s one of my friends. I think I can lift more than her in terms of mass, but Rarity’s got the most precise telekinesis out of anypony I know, and she’s really good at juggling a lot of stuff at once.”
Soldier gave up on lifting the soda cup telekinetically, and instead simply pulled it forward with one front hoof – an appendage that probably shouldn’t have been useful for grabbing given its shape. Soldier wrote it off as prior experience with her suction-arm from the Mark-III travel machine. After taking a long draw of her soda and its SWEETNESS, draining the cup of its contents, she looked at the empty table, then back to Twilight. “I am full,” she stated.
“I don’t doubt it,” Twilight responded. “I guess that really was your first time eating…”
Soldier attempted to stand, and succeeded after a rel, though she felt the mass of food shifting in her stomach as her barrel went from being basically vertical to evenly horizontal. Even as she did, a thought occurred to her. “The food I consumed would have contained many chemical compounds that this body would not be able to integrate,” she observed. It was one of the problems that the creator, Davros had seen fit to do away with when creating the Daleks; the Mark-III travel machines provided only useful nutrients and matter.
Twilight nodded. “Yup. The digestion system is pretty efficient, but it can’t get everything.”
“Then there is a mechanism by which the excess matter is expelled?”
Twilight Sparkle, quite suddenly, went stock still, her eyes going wide. Very slowly, her eyes drifted to look at Soldier. “You…you said you’ve never eaten before.”
“Correct.”
The corners of Twilight’s mouth turned up, but somehow the expression did not, to Soldier, seemed to match what she understood a smile to look like. “Oh no…oh no, that means that you’ve…you’ve never…”
“I have never seen to the expulsion of excess matter from my body.”
Twilight was still for a few rels more, before suddenly bursting into action, wings beating furiously as she leapt from the table, grabbed Soldier by one of her hooves and jerking her away. “Ohhh-kay, we’re going back to the library – ”
Soldier felt the food inside her shift at the sudden pull of Twilight dragging her out the door. “Commander!”
“ – and I am going to whip up a memory spell or something for that – ”
Twilight had risen into the air and was carrying Soldier along outside, but she was an unsteady flier and Soldier was now swaying back and forth and up and down with each wing beat. And the food in her stomach shifted rapidly with each wingbeat. And her new body did not care for that at all. “Commander, I – ”
“ – because no way, nuh-uh, I am not going to be teaching you how to do that – ”
Soldier felt a spasm starting in her stomach, then her chest and throat as the food all shifted in one direction: up. “Twilight Sp – ”
What followed was a rapid series of events that Soldier couldn’t exactly follow, as there were too many new sensations, or at least new ways of experiencing familiar sensations, at once. But essentially, it boiled down to Soldier projectile vomiting onto Twilight, Twilight letting out a shout of fright and disgust and dropping Soldier, and Soldier falling to her hooves, failing to keep her balance, and smacking her mouth against a light post.
---
“I am so, so, sooo sorry,” Twilight Sparkle babbled a little later as she and Soldier sat in the waiting room of a dentist’s office. “I just – I mean, you just startled me, and with what you said, and I still don’t want to teach you, uh, that, so I’ll get to work on the spell as soon as we get back, it won’t take too long to whip something up, we’ve got a few hours, just need to make sure that nothing’s too bad and I am soooo sorry…”
“Daleksh hagh ho conshept ohh aholohies.” Soldier responded around the wet cloth that was stuffed into her mouth. One end of it was stained with red, but after taking it out of her mouth and inspecting it, she found that she had stopped bleeding. With her tongue, Soldier prodded at one of her front teeth, finding it jagged where it had been chipped...though the sensation was worse with another of her teeth, which had not chipped but would now wiggle painfully in her mouth.
“Does it still hurt?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry!”
Soldier wished that she had taken the eye-crystal from her Mark-III travel machine with her, she badly wanted to look into it as she might the ocular sensor of another dalek, searching for a second opinion as to the fitness of her commanding officer. “Daleks have no concept of apologies,” she repeated. At least Twilight Sparkle’s magical abilities had included a cleansing spell that had wiped the vomit from herself and Soldier, though some of the smell lingered. She poked at her loose tooth a little more. “The event was instructive. I now know how to expel excess matter from my body. I require no further information.”
Twilight once again became very still, as she had at the restaurant. Soldier couldn’t help but flinch at the memory, or rather the memory of what followed, and felt her stomach turn again. Twilight at least noticed the effect she had, and calmed down. “Um…ha…see, that’s, um…actually not how a pony normally, uh…does that. Wrong, uh…orifice. Wrong end.”
Soldier paused at that, then looked down at herself. Twilight Sparkle looked up at the ceiling and, pointedly, away from Soldier. Soldier’s confidence in her commanding officer, already running thin, plummeted further. “Explain! Explain! EXPLAIN – ”
“Miss Sparkle?” A voice – the attendant for the waiting room – interrupted. “We’re ready for you now.”
“Oh thank Celestia,” Twilight mumbled as she stood up from the chair, turning to Soldier while another member of the dentist staff waited to escort them. “Soldier, I promise I’ll…think of something, we’ve probably got a few hours before your body, um…but, yeah, first let’s get your teeth fixed.”
Soldier stood, following Twilight, though her head was down in thought. That she would have killed for a proper heads-up display for this body was a given, had it not conflicted with her standing orders from Princess Celestia. After this latest incident, however, Soldier was starting to try and piece together how to do so without violating those orders, since she badly needed to understand her body more than she did. It may have changed, but she was still a dalek in mind, still a genius who, given enough time and sufficient resources, could probably build a singularity bomb to destroy the planet under her hooves even with the available technology. A heads-up display should be easy…
“Alright, here we are,” Twilight said as their escort opened a door into a small room containing a chair with a light over it and surrounded by rotating, small tables, as well as rows of cabinets. It looked, to Soldier, like a torture chamber, but Twilight proceeded inside without any concern, and Soldier felt compelled to follow.
Twilight’s wings ruffled a little. “I’m always a little nervous at the dentist’s,” she said to Soldier, smiling. “Foalhood memories always come up…I mean, now I know that dentists are just trying to help, but at the same time I don’t think anypony likes their mouth being poked and prodded…”
“Daleks do not like anything.”
Twilight laughed, though Soldier couldn’t guess why. After a few rels of waiting, a blue-coated unicorn mare with a cutie mark of an hourglass on her flank came in, a clipboard hovering in front of her with her telekinesis. Soldier felt a pang of another new emotion, jealousy, at the sight. That heads-up display into her body would probably aid with the acquisition of magic, too…
“Right,” the unicorn said, glancing up. “Nice to see you again, Twilight, and good to meet you…Soldier? Yes, hello. I’m the doctor.”
Soldier’s mind and body froze, and she felt an unpleasant sensation travel all the way down her spine. “Doctor?” She asked.
“Yes, the doctor,” the unicorn continued without concern, looking back down at her clipboard. “Doctor Minuette. I’ll be your dentist…we’re having quite a bit of trouble getting your records from Canterlot, Soldier…”
Soldier found her body involuntarily letting out a great exhalation of air as she fell back onto her haunches. “A doctor,” she said, realizing her error…which, given how recently she’d encountered the Oncoming Storm, would have been understandable even if she had still been pure dalek. “You are not the Doctor.”
Minuette glanced back up to Soldier, frowning. “Now what’s that supposed to mean? I’ll have you know…” she pointed to the wall, on which hung a piece of paper in a frame, “that that says I graduated from the Canterlot School of Dentistry, I’m perfectly – ”
Twilight stepped up. “Doctor Minuette, Soldier probably didn’t mean anything, she’s just…she’s been having a rough day.”
Minuette – Soldier refused to append the pony’s title to her name, even in her mind – sniffed a little in derision. “It took quite a bit of effort to get that,” she said, nodding. “Years of work.”
“And I’m sure Soldier’s sorry,” Twilight said, turning around to look at Soldier. “Right?”
Reflexively, Soldier found herself on her four hooves at the tone, the commanding tone, of Twilight’s voice. “I am sorry!” She exclaimed to Minuette. Inwardly, Soldier felt her fear at the Oncoming Storm brushed aside momentarily, replaced with…elation? Yes, that was the right word for the feeling. A command! A proper command! Finally! Yes, for something that no dalek would ever, ever, ever do under its own volition, but…
Minuette seemed taken aback at the force of the apology, but recovered quickly. “Yes, right…a rough day. I can see that.” She took in a breath and let it out, before indicating the chair. “Right then, miss Soldier Dalek, was that your name? Please take a seat so that we can get a look at the damage.”
“I obey!” Soldier exclaimed, and immediately went over to the chair and settled down into it, lying on her back with her front hooves tucked against her chest and hind ones stretched out. Minuette did not immediately come over, instead going to a sink in the room to wash her hooves before slipping some form of protective covering over them, then carefully making her way over to Solider on her hind legs only so as to not spoil the sanitation of her front hooves. She settled into a chair of her own next to the one Soldier was in, and got to work.
“Ooh, this must have hurt…” Minuette said after a dozen or so rels, hoof gently poking at Soldier’s injured teeth. She started on the chipped one, poking at where some of it had gone missing. “Does this hurt?”
“Ho,” Soldier intoned, meaning to say no. Her meaning came across, at least.
“Didn’t think so, looks like it didn’t go to the root. I could file it down a little to smooth it out, but that’ll happen naturally over time. Or I could repair it, but that is quite costly…”
“I’ll pay it,” Twilight said instantly. “It’s my fault, it’s all my fault, it’s the least I can do.”
“Oh, that’s nice of you, but that’s not the one I’m concerned about…” Minuette warned. “Now, as for the other…” her hoof moved slightly, and wiggled the other tooth. Soldier couldn’t stop herself from wincing…compared to what Soldier had felt in her life, the pain was essentially nothing, but it was also still new, having teeth that hurt. Minuette tsked. “That’s no good at all. I’d normally want to x-ray to be sure, but I’m certain it’s cracked somewhere under the gum. Most likely it would have to come out.”
Twilight put her two front hooves to her mouth for some reason. “Oh no…Soldier, I am so sorry, but I’ll pay for a replacement tooth, a fake tooth, they make really realistic looking ones these days, or maybe…”
“Ah, not to worry,” Minuette said as she leaned back, pulling off the coverings on her hoof and stepping back to the cabinets, opening them up and rooting around through them. “I did say normally, didn’t I? Fortunately I have something here, gift from a friend. For a friend, more like. He did give it to me but it was sort of implied that he’d probably be the most likely benefactor of it…ah, here we go.” She came back over with a small vial filled with clear liquid. “Right, Soldier, give us a smile, and don’t lick…”
Soldier complied, exposing her teeth, and Minuette tipped the vial over, carefully pouring out just a couple drops onto Soldier’s teeth. She waited, but nothing seemed to happen. She poked at the loose tooth with her tongue, and found it still wiggling slightly. “Your attempt has failed,” Soldier stated.
Minuette frowned, looking at the vial, then sniffing it. “Huh, odd. It’s worked like a charm in the past...must be expired, or was there something else I was supposed to…? Well, nevermind.” She put the vial back. “Replacement tooth it is, then, though I can’t do much until we get your dental records from Canterlot. Until then I recommend at least removing the tooth. Don’t want it to get infected, after all! Might not leave you with a very good smile for the moment, but…”
Twilight shifted from where she sat nearby, fluttering her wings a little. “Um…will that, uh…take long? We’re sort of…under a time limit today, have to get back to the library soon.”
Minuette tsked again. “I’m worried about infection, or that other teeth could have been damaged, but as long as you have good mouthwash at home and Soldier doesn’t eat anything too hard or cold, she should be fine for a day and there won’t be too much pain. I wouldn’t wait much longer, however, that tooth has got to come out.” She looked to Soldier.
Soldier looked back to Twilight, who shuffled from hoof to hoof. “Um, well…Soldier, you decide. Do you think, um…think you can hold it for a few hours?” She waved at her abdomen, and Soldier knew what it she was referring to.
“I currently feel no need to expel – ”
“Okay!” Twilight interrupted. “No need to go into detail. Um…how about this. I’ll leave you here, go home, get to work on a memory spell that’ll…” Her cheeks started turning a different color, a vibrant shade of red. “That’ll use every one of my memories of…of doing that…to teach you how to do it. It shouldn’t take long. And meanwhile doctor Minuette can remove your tooth.”
“I obey!”
“I am just made of questions right now,” Minuette said. “Well, not literally, I suppose. But in any event, you’ve made the right choice, Soldier Dalek. Is that your name? Just a sec, let’s just get you x-rayed so we can see what the damage is...” she lifted her clipboard again and took a pen into her mouth, scribbling on it, “...thaying.” She frowned, one hoof to her mouth as she regarded Soldier, then removed the pen. “Could be worse, could have landed on a rusty nail.”
“Correct. That would have been worse.”
“Right then, off we go...”
---
Twilight Sparkle left, and Minuette guided Soldier from the office and down the hall, to another room containing a large x-ray device, on which Soldier would lay her head and the device would create an image of her skull. There was a partition for Minuette to stand behind while using it, but she didn’t. “Only low-level x-rays, the danger is overstated,” she explained as she worked the device. There was a whirring from the machine as it charged up.
“What is the maximum output of this device?” Soldier asked, curious as to its potential as a weapon, or torture device.
“Oh, very low,” Minuette said. “Very low, and we won’t even be turning it up all the way. If you’re worried about cancer, it only makes your risk of developing it go up by an infinitesimal fraction of a percent.”
Soldier balked. “I…was not. Daleks do not develop diseases, but…” That was a definite downside to her new body. Before, barring violence her lifespan had been essentially infinite. What was it now? Something else to work on.
“And you’re a dalek?” Minuette asked idly as she brought the machine around, framing Soldier’s head. The whirring sound increased now that Soldier was so close to it. “What is a dalek, anyway?”
Soldier shifted. “The superior form of life. But no. I am not a dalek. I am a pony…now. It was...the only way to survive.” She couldn’t rotate her head at the moment, but she turned her eyes to look at Minuette, who had a pen in her mouth as she wrote something on a clipboard. “I do not wish to continue this discussion. It will cease!”
Minuette glanced up at her, removing the pen from her mouth. “Oh, fine. I don’t know what’s going on, which is very unusual, I normally consider myself to be quite well informed and experienced. But you seem harmless enough. And it’s always something with Twilight and her friends. After a while you learn to just shrug and say, ‘that’s Ponyville for you’.”
The whirring of the machine stopped, and Minuette removed it from around Soldier’s head. “Right, just a few minutes to print-out the x-ray, then we’ll get to work. If you behave you may even get a sweet after this. Lolli, gumdrops, jelly fillies…” She grinned at Soldier. “Call it insurance to make sure you keep coming back.”
Soldier didn’t understand why she should do that, instead electing to wait in silence while Minuette produced the x-rays and examined them. Inwardly, having been starkly faced with the limitations and downsides to her new body, she found herself designing a new system that her body could inhabit. A suit with gravitic induction locomotors, it would be easier than walking. Integrated cybernetics into her body that would give her a superior understanding of what was happening to her, what it was doing, at any given moment. A weapon for self-defense, of course (it could only be self-defense, sadly, given her standing orders).
A travel machine, she realized as Minuette took her back to the office, lay her down on the chair, applied a numbing anesthetic to her mouth, and got to work. She was designing a pony-shaped travel machine, in essence. Although it would have to be extremely primitive given the available level of technology, more along the lines of a Mark I than a Mark III, but it could certainly be done with what she had observed, and once it was complete she could perhaps start figuring out how to upgrade to Mark III levels. And then she would be safe. She would survive.
And yet, at the same time, Soldier found herself shivering at the thought of locking herself in a travel machine again. Never to taste, to touch, to smell, to feel...
...well, she could always include access ports. And...exit ports. She could feel a slight pressure building up towards her hind region. Very slight, but it did not take the genius of a dalek to realize what it was heralding. She actually found herself hopeful that Twilight Sparkle would return soon, despite her commander’s earlier failures that had damaged Soldier’s body.
Everything about inferior life forms was disgusting, of course, but Soldier had a feeling that the expulsion of excess food matter from her lower orifices was going to be especially so.
“There, all done,” Minuette said, bringing Soldier back to the here and now. She held up a small vial, in which sat the two shattered pieces of Soldier’s tooth. “I had to cut your gum open to get at this, then stitch it back shut, nothing much, and the stitches will dissolve on their own in a few days. I’m prescribing some pain killers for when the anesthesia wears off. Stick to softer foods like mashed potatoes and bread for the next week or so. Rose?”
Soldier started, looking up. Minuette was holding forth a purple-colored box, in which were a collection of tiny objects wrapped in foil. “Chocolate, chew with your back teeth only,” Minuette said. “The caramel barrel is my favorite.” She picked out a gold-foil object and unwrapped it, revealing something small and brown. The unicorn pony grinned. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t offer something like caramel, but aside from the front two your teeth are in better condition than any I’ve ever seen before. Good behavior should be rewarded.”
Without waiting for Soldier to respond, she popped the small object into the once-dalek’s mouth. She might have objected, but the rel the chocolate hit her tongue she found herself instead letting out a low groan. Instinctively she bit down, and the chocolate barrel cracked open, releasing its contents...a deluge of sweetness, a sticky, cloying, gooey goodness that causes Soldier to just slump from her sitting position, melting like the chocolate and caramel in her mouth.
Perhaps the expulsion of excess food matter from her lower orifices would be worth it. The intake was certainly showing no downsides as of yet, at least as long as she refrained from violently shaking about and vomiting.
Minuette’s smile continued. “Ah-ha, I knew you’d like roses. Take the box with you. But don’t overeat! Don’t want to ruin the perfect teeth.”
“I obey...” Soldier intoned, squirming a little as she swallowed the chocolate and caramel. It glided down her throat smoothly.
“Very good. Let’s get you checked out then, miss Soldier Pony née Dalek. And welcome to Ponyville.”
---
Soldier had mostly obeyed. Minuette had not defined what “overeating” meant with the rose chocolates, so Soldier decided to define it herself. She would consume a rose only once every hour. Except the first four. Those she ate immediately, and discovered new flavors in the process, vanilla and fudge and orange.
Yes, her Equiform Travel Machine Mark-I was definitely going to include access ports. Chocolate was a superior form of food.
Unfortunately without any records from Canterlot - Princess Celestia must still have been in the process of fabricating them - and so Soldier was left with nothing to do but wait in the waiting room once more for Twilight Sparkle to sort things out.
She had an orange chocolate rose in her mouth - and was getting looked at somewhat coldly by Minuette, perhaps she was in fact “overeating” - when the door to the dentist’s office opened. Instead of Twilight, however, a brown-coated earth pony stallion came trotting in, saddlebags over his back. Soldier noted that the cutie mark on his flank, a golden hourglass, was identical to Minuette’s, and wondered at the significance.
“I’m back,” the stallion said as he came up to the desk that Minuette sat behind. “Really strange time down in southern Equestria, made a nuisance of myself for a bloke named Ahuizotl. I brought you back...this!” From his saddlebags, he produced a mask of some variety. “Good thing I found it, too, it does this thing when there’s stuff and the stars are right. Spoke to Luna about it, she’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Minuette seemed to take the pony’s mannerisms in stride, though she did glance at Soldier. “Of course, love. Maybe drop it off at the house?”
“Oh, I will of course, just wanted to show you. Hello, who’s this?” He had turned to look at Soldier. “New pony in town? I didn’t miss the Pinkie Party, did I?”
“I do not know,” Soldier responded.
“No,” Minuette added. “Pinkie is out of town right now. No doubt there’ll be an extra large party to make up for it. And you should really wait ‘til then to introduce your - “
“I don’t see why,” the stallion said, holding out a hoof to Soldier. “I’m the Doctor, by the way. What’s your name?”
Soldier stared at the hoof. Her mind instantly went to her earlier mistake. “Doctor what?” She asked.
“Just the Doctor.”
“The Doctor?!”
The stallion’s brow furrowed a rel. Then his eyes widened. “It can’t be...” he mumbled.
The recognition was enough. This was him. This was the Oncoming Storm...here. In Equestria.
Part of Soldier wanted to blast the Doctor with her energy weapon dialed up to its maximum setting...but she didn’t have it anymore. Part of Soldier wanted to throw herself bodily at the Doctor and start beating him, for being the one responsible for her being here...but she didn’t do that either.
Celestia had been incorrect. Celestia had told Soldier that though she was no longer physically Dalek, she could remain mentally so. She could not preserve the genetic purity of the Dalek race, but that genetic purity had been corrupted anyway thanks to the DNA of Rose Tyler. But the mind of a Dalek could be preserved. The intelligence. The will. That was what Celestia had said.
Celestia had been wrong, Soldier realized, as her alien hooves pounded upon the dirt roads of Ponyville, as her breath came in quick and rapid gasps, as lather built up on her flanks. Not from exertion, for she had not been running long and would not be running far. The sweat was cold.
Fear.
Daleks were supposed to feel only hate. That had been the creator’s intention, the distilled, perfect emotion the Dalek race’s survival singled out as superior to all others by Davros. But the Doctor, the Oncoming Storm, had over the eons of their existence beat and burned another emotion into them, marring their perfection: fear. Daleks felt fear, for the Doctor, for things associated with the Doctor. That fear would never leave them until the Doctor was exterminated.
The Doctor could never be exterminated. The Oncoming Storm always returned. The Daleks always felt fear.
But never like this. Never like this. The Doctor provoked caution. The Doctor provoked tactical retreats. The Doctor provoked assessment of odds and the reckless advancement of plans out of the desire that they could be executed before he could stop them.
The Doctor did not provoke blind panic and utter terror. The Doctor did not, should not, could not provoke a Dalek to run.
But Soldier wasn’t a Dalek. Perhaps she never had been.
---
The door to the library burst open as Soldier physically threw herself at it, heedless of the pain, though the impact did cause her to stumble and roll. “Emergency!” Soldier called as she picked herself up. “Emergency! EMERGENCY! THE DOCTOR IS HERE! THE DOCTOR IS HERE!”
Soldier ran straight towards where the crystal that had once been the optical lens of her Mark-III travel machine, on the library’s table. She didn’t even fully know what she was doing as she ran straight up to it, looking into it. “The Doctor is here! The Doctor is in Ponyville! I am your soldier! I require orders! Orders!”
The crystal remained still and silent. It was only a crystal. Staring into it, the ludicrousness of the situation and what she was doing finally occurred to Soldier. She nevertheless reached out and grasped the crystal, wanting to feel it in her hooves for…for some reason. She didn’t know. She didn’t know and…
“What’s all the racket?” Twilight Sparkle’s voice called out. Soldier turned to look in the direction, and saw the alicorn emerging from a doorway that led down to a subterranean level of the library. “Oh! Soldier, you’re back already? How is everything? How’s the tooth? Oh, and I think I managed to – ”
“There is no time!” Soldier exclaimed, moving rapidly up to Twilight on three legs, the fourth still holding the crystal, now close to her chest. “Commander Twilight Sparkle, the Doctor is here!”
Twilight looked around the otherwise empty library. “Doctor Minuette?”
“Negative!”
“Doctor Stable? Oh no, did he need to get involved too?”
“Negative! The Doctor!” Soldier got as close to Twilight as she would have another Dalek, her snout almost touching Twilight’s. “The Doctor! The Oncoming Storm! HE MUST BE DESTROYED!”
Twilight backed away from Soldier, eyes wide. “Whoa, okay, hold on…” she said. “Hold on a minute, what are you talking about? Who’s the Doctor? Doctor Oncoming Storm? Is he a pegasus?”
“Negative! The form he has acquired is an earth pony!” Soldier had advanced with Twilight, keeping close to her as she clutched the crystal to her chest tighter. “We waste time! We must act! The Doctor – ”
“Okay, hang on,” Twilight said, horn glowing lavender. An aura of the same color appeared around Soldier’s snout, clamping it shut. “Hang on right now, because you’re not making any sense.”
“Mmmph mmm mmmphrrr – ”
Twilight held out a hoof. “Soldier, calm down! That’s an order!”
Soldier froze at the words, trying to force herself to do as her commander ordered. But Soldier had never calmed down before. She shifted from one hoof to the next, eyes darting around as she tried to look out for the Doctor, something that would have been much easier with a proper sensor suite, something else to add to her Equiform Travel Machine Mark-I…
Twilight noticed Soldier’s actions, and sat down, magic around Soldier’s mouth dispelling. “Okay, Soldier? Do exactly what I do. Breath in deep…” She took in a breath, pulling one hoof close to her chest. “Then let it all out.” She exhaled, pushing the hoof away from her chest. “Keep doing that. Focus only on the breathing.”
“I obey!” Soldier exclaimed, then began emulating Twilight, albeit at a faster pace. Twilight guided her through several repetitions of the motion before directing her to slow down, taking deeper breaths, holding them, then letting them out over a longer period.
After many rels, Twilight had her stop. “There,” she said, smiling. “See? Works like a charm. Also…I think we should keep you away from sugar for a little bit.” She reached out a hoof, placing it on Soldier’s shoulder. “Now, tell me what happened. Slowly.”
Soldier did not feel any less fear…but the panic, the overriding need to act or run or do something, had abated. She glanced down at her crystal and saw she was still hugging it close to her body. She didn’t know why, nor did she stop as she looked to Twilight. “The Doctor is in Ponyville. The Doctor is an enemy of the Daleks, the greatest foe of the Dalek Empire. He is the Oncoming Storm, a Time Lord of Gallifrey in the constellation Kasterborous. He often travels through time and space in his TARDIS vehicle with companions of very high threat level. He must be destroyed! He must! HE M – ”
“Okay, hang on!” Twilight interrupted. “Breathe again, like I showed you. Don’t get worked up.” Soldier repeated the breathing exercise several times. “Okay, so, the Doctor…he’s bad news, I get it. Time Lord, okay. Time traveler, that’s…okay, we’ll deal with that…somehow. But what’s this Doctor done?”
“The Doctor has attempted to destroy the Daleks countless times! The Doctor was there at our genesis, when we were first bred by the creator, Davros of the Kaled! He was sent there by the Time Lords to exterminate us before we could even exist!”
Twilight seemed utterly shocked, enough that she didn’t try to calm Soldier down again. “How could anyone want to erase an entire species from history? I mean, I don’t really like snakes all that much, but even I wouldn’t want to go back in time and stomp on the first snake egg!” She looked to Soldier. “These Time Lords…they sound like bad news.”
“Confirmed! They are the worst news!” Soldier responded, fire in her voice – until she suddenly froze, suddenly remembering what the Doctor had told her what was still perhaps only half a day ago, what she had learned when she was it, and not a pony, but a Dalek, trapped on planet Earth for fifty years. “Except…” she looked back to Twilight, quieter. “They are…gone. As are the Daleks. I am…was…the last Dalek. The Doctor is the last Time Lord. Our races are gone. Destroyed. Only he and I remain.”
And the Doctor…had possessed ample opportunity to destroy Soldier, hadn’t he? In Van Statten’s underground lair, the Doctor had re-engineered a particle weapon with enough force to kill Soldier. And yet Rose Tyler had stopped him…
…by dint of her genetic impurity. By dint of Soldier changing, becoming non-Dalek. The Doctor had not needed to do anything, only stand by and watch as Soldier attempted suicide. It was not mercy, it was conservation of resources! And moments of mercy meant nothing! The Doctor had spared the Dalek race despite the orders of the Time Lords, all those millions of years ago…but had nevertheless gone on to kill countless of them over that same time.
The Doctor was cruelty. Malice. He hated the Dalek so much that he might have made a good Dalek himself. Soldier had told him as much. Any momentary mercy was always, always, swept aside. They meant nothing. And what he had done during the Time War…wiped them out, every Dalek, ten million ships on fire…
Soldier realized that Twilight had been staring at her with one hoof to her mouth, eyes wide in shock. “You’re…the last Dalek?” She asked slowly.
Soldier bristled. “I was. Now I am a pony.”
“Oh…Soldier, I…I’m so sorry!” She said, a phrase she had repeated often, but now with a completely different intonation. Before Soldier knew what was happening, Twilight had come forward, grasping Soldier with her two front hooves and wings folding around Soldier, one side of the alicorn’s head pressed against Soldier’s own. Soldier stiffened at the grasp, not knowing what was going on. At first she thought it some form of attack, but though Twilight was embracing her tightly, it was not with remotely enough force to hurt. Tactile sensation was a new enough feeling on its own, but Soldier was struck by how incredibly warm Twilights body felt against her own, how soft the alicorn’s fur, even if she was awkwardly crushing the leg that Soldier was using to hold onto her crystal between her chest and Soldier’s own.
“I’m so sorry,” Twilight repeated in a lower, softer voice right next to Soldier’s ear. “No wonder you’ve acted the way you have…I can’t even imagine being the last pony in the world. I didn’t know you were the last Dalek…that must be so lonely, and then to change so that you’re not even the last Dalek…I’m so, so sorry…”
It was lonely, a part of Soldier’s mind pointed out to her, a part that was acutely aware of the crystal hugged to her chest. The same part of her mind caused Soldier to lift up her free leg, getting it under Twilight’s wing and around her back, partially duplicating Twilight’s embrace.
Twilight held the embrace for several more rels, before leaning away from Soldier, though she didn’t take her hooves off of her shoulders. “Okay, Soldier. So this Doctor…he sounds bad. Really bad. But don’t worry, he’s never had to deal with the magic of friendship before!”
Soldier was still for several moments, before shaking her head, breaking herself away from the momentary…whatever that was of the embrace. She replayed Twilight’s statement in her mind, and had to admit that she was likely correct. Daleks had no concept of friendship and did not utilize magic, so it had certainly never been attempted. “Have you devised a stratagem?” she asked.
“Well…” Twilight intoned, glancing away and finally releasing Soldier fully so that one hoof could rub the back of her head. “Normally for something like the Doctor, I’d recommend we use the Elements of Harmony. But my friends and I recently returned the Elements to the Tree of Harmony that they came from in order to save Equestria from the Everfree Forest growing out of control. But we’ll think of something!”
Soldier nodded curtly, clutching the crystal to herself even tighter. She didn’t understand most of that, but she did understand that Twilight Sparkle had declared herself an enemy of the Doctor, but also that her greatest weapon was unavailable. “I will aid you!”
“What?”
“I will aid you in the defeat of the Doctor! I am a soldier! The Doctor will be – ”
“Whoa, whoa, hold on,” Twilight interrupted, holding up her hooves. “Soldier, I understand that you probably have a lot of anger against the Doctor. But I can’t let you do anything.” She put one of her hooves back on Soldier’s shoulder. “I’ll get everypony here and you can tell us more about the Doctor, but my friends and I will take care of him. Princess Celestia made you my responsibility, I have to keep you safe.”
Soldier bristled. “But I am a soldier! I was bred for combat! I shall – ”
“Soldier…you’ve got a missing tooth – which I’m still sorry about, by the way – and you don’t even know how to use your horn, or have a real cutie mark! You haven’t even been here for a day! You’re in no condition to fight.”
Soldier froze at those words…and realized Twilight Sparkle was right. She really wasn’t. She stumbled and fell when she tried to move with any rapidity. She couldn’t keep down food matter when jostled and injured herself with simple low-velocity kinetic impacts. She had no idea how to use the innate telekinesis or other abilities that came naturally to the unicorn-type ponies. And even before, on Earth, before her failed suicide, she had failed to kill Van Statten, the human who had tormented her for fifty years. She had failed to kill the Doctor. She had failed to kill her own infector, the human Rose Tyler! And before, in the Time War itself…the Nightmare Child…
Celestia had called her Soldier, because a soldier was what she had been. Once. But now? She wasn’t Dalek, no matter how often she claimed it. She couldn’t fight. She couldn’t kill. What was she good for? What was the point of her?
Nothing.
Twilight stepped away from Soldier, heading towards the library’s door. “I’ll go get Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Applejack and Rarity,” she said. “I wish Pinkie were here instead of visiting her family…from what you’ve told me it sounds like the Doctor is at least as bad as Nightmare Moon, Discord, Queen Chrysalis, or King Sombra. But that can’t be helped, and I’m sure we can think of something.” Twilight stopped at the door, turning back around and pointing at Soldier. “You stay here. That’s an order, Soldier, okay?”
“I obey,” Soldier said automatically, her voice small as she stared down at the floor.
“The Doctor, you said he looked like an earth pony? Can you give me more detail?”
“Male, height approximately one-hundred twenty centimeters, pale brown pelt, dark brown mane, blue eyes. The mark on his flank was identical to that of Minuette’s.”
“Okay,” Twilight said, opening up the door. “Spike’s down in the basement doing some chores if you need anything…oh!” She turned around, looking at Soldier with a completely different, and notably more awkward, look on her face. She came back up. “I almost forgot, but I don’t want to leave without making sure you know how to…um…” she gestured backwards, at her hindquarters. “You know.”
Soldier stiffened, understanding the gesture. “I do. I am ready to receive information.”
Twilight’s horn glowed, and she touched it to Soldier’s own. There was a tingling sensation, and then a rush of information. Soldier’s superior mind had no trouble processing it all without being overwhelmed.
Really, all it did was further emphasize to Soldier just how far she had fallen.
---
“So…” Spike intoned half an hour later, after Soldier had seen to the expulsion of excess food matter from her body in the appropriate waste disposal chambers of the library, sanitized vigorously, and had then joined Spike down in the basement. “How was your, uh…first time?”
“Unpleasant but necessary,” Soldier responded automatically. In the absence of Twilight Sparkle, Spike was once again her commander, so she had to respond. But she really had not wanted to.
“Yeah, that sounds about right…” Spike said. “You get used to it.”
Soldier was only partially paying attention. She was looking around the basement instead, placing her optical crystal on a table where it would be able to clearly observe the whole room, give Soldier a semblance of comfort. The basement was laboratory-like in its setup, with machines, vials, and tubes, some of them familiar to Soldier, others alien. A large bookcase contained tomes with various titles revealing that they retained information on science, magic, and a combination of the two – an absurd possibility in Soldier’s universe, a commonplace occurrence here.
Grunting, Soldier went over to the bookcase and picked out a tome at random, pulling it out with effort with her hooves and letting it fall to the floor. Opening the cover to its front page was easy enough, but her hooves struggled to do something as simple as turn to the following page. She would try, pressing her hoof down and trying to use friction, only for the page to slip down at the last moment. Worse, as her frustration grew, her attempts grew worse and worse…
But then a purple-clawed hand touched the paper and flipped it. “Here, let me,” Spike said. “Turning pages with hooves takes a lot of practice. I can flip them for you.” He grinned. “Gives me an excuse to do something else other than clean up down here. Not like Twilight will say anything if I’m helping somepony read, right?”
Soldier stared at the page, then to the dragon’s claws. “Turn to a new page every half-rel,” she said. Spike stared at her in confusion, so she tapped a hoof on the ground, waited a rel, then tapped it again. “That is the length of one rel.”
Spike’s look of confusion didn’t abate. “You can read that fast?”
“No. I am…was…Dalek. I could process much more information if the medium was computerized, or even if I could use multiple books at once. I am limiting myself to the speed at which you could turn pages without error.” The dragon continued to seem mystified, but complied with Soldier’s request, beginning to flip pages as rapidly as he was able. He averaged slower than one page per half-rel, unused to the angle or speed, but he did give Soldier several hundred rels of silence other than the sound of pages turning as Soldier took in the details of first one, then another Equestrian book, learning the scientific and magical laws and theories of the new world.
It did not distract Soldier, however. The information intake was too slow. Soldier looked down at her hooves, and Spike stopped turning pages as she did. “This is not life,” she mumbled. “This is sickness.”
Spike stared at Soldier. “I heard what you told Twilight, about being the last Dalek.”
“I am not the last Dalek. Not one cell in my body is Dalek. My mind is infected with emotions, ideas, darkness…I am not Dalek in mind, either. I do not believe I ever was.”
The demands of the Time War that Soldier had been bred for were great for the Dalek Empire. New soldiers were required at an incalculable output. An infinite army woven throughout all of time and space to fight the Time Lords. A soldier might live ten thousand years to seize control of a single second, or be spawned at the end of time to fight in the war for the beginning. The need had been so great that the Progenitor devices could not be properly screened. Impure Daleks had been created, seeded throughout the Empire. In the past, such would never have been tolerated. But if they could fight the Time Lords, their impurity could be removed after the victory, if they even survived.
The coward survived. Soldier had fought, and fought, and fought for the Dalek Empire. She had killed the Time Lords, she had killed the Meanwhiles and Never-Weres of the Could-Have-Been-King, she had exterminated the enemies of the Dalek Empire with impunity. She had been assigned to serve Davros when the Daleks had turned to him as one more weapon to wield in the war.
But when the maw of the Nightmare Child had opened wide before her, she had fled, an emergency spatial shift. A retreat, she had told herself. The Nightmare Child had grown beyond Davros’ control, that was plain for any Dalek to see. Let Davros attempt to regain control, or let the Nightmare Child consume him and the Time Lords and their machinations. No need to waste pure Dalek cells. No need to waste soldiers. She had not even been the only Dalek to flee. That there had been other cowards had helped her rationalize what she had done for a time, a rationalization that had broken down during her exile on Earth.
Fear. Had the rigors of the Time War and the miasma of the Nightmare Child not disrupted her emergency spatial shift and deposited her on Earth, had she returned to the Dalek Empire, she would have been exterminated. Impure. Unclean. Non-Dalek. Right from the start. Rose Tyler’s DNA had only given genetic manifestation to a more fundamental flaw that had always lurked there. Soldier was a coward.
“Are you okay?” Spike asked.
Soldier glanced up, looking at Twilight Sparkle’s second-in-command. His image was blurry to her for some reason; she wiped her eyes, and found her hooves coming away somewhat wet. “My eyes are malfunctioning,” she observed.
“Whatever you want to call it,” Spike said. “It’ll pass, don’t worry, ponies just do it sometimes. It’s actually good for you. And look…I don’t even know what a Dalek looks like. But you’ve been around Ponyville. Seen a lot of dragons out there?”
“No,” Soldier said, wiping her eyes again as the wetness continued. “Is your species also extinct?”
“Oh, there’s plenty of dragons,” Spike said. “But…I don’t exactly fit in with them. Dragons are…kind of horrible people, really. They’re mean and loud, and they hurt things for no reason.” Soldier didn’t see the problem, but Spike continued. “I’m not saying I know exactly what you’re going through…but I do kind of know what it’s like to be the only one of my kind in town, y’know?” He stood and walked up to her, holding out a hand in a fist. “I look like a dragon but I think I’m really more like a pony. And you think like a Dalek but you look like a pony. We were made for each other! And as long as you’re here, I’ll help you out.”
Soldier stared at the outstretched fist, once more wiping her eyes. There was less wetness now. “I do not understand this gesture,” she said. It occurred to her that, taking into account Spike’s bipedal stance, it was similar to the outstretched hoof that Applejack had offered her earlier.
“It’s a bump. Ponies bump hooves; I don’t have hooves but I can still basically do it. It’s a sign of friendship.”
“Daleks have no concept of friendship.”
“Neither do dragons, when you get down to it. At least, I wouldn’t want to be friends with any other dragon I’ve met.” He looked at Soldier directly. “But this isn’t dragons trying to be friends with Daleks. This is me, Spike, trying to be friends with you, Soldier. Whatever we are.”
Soldier considered, raising a hoof tentatively and staring at it, then watching as she reached it out and pressed it against Spike’s fist. “Have I emulated correctly?”
“Eh, more or less. It’s normally just a quick bump.” Soldier drew her hoof back, then quickly, lightly tapped Spike’s fist. “There you go,” he said, pulling his arm away.
“And we are…friends…now?”
Spike offered a smile. “Well, I think we’re off to a good start. And as your friend, the first thing I have to do is find a way to cheer you up.” He put a claw to his chin as he thought. “What do you want?”
Soldier contemplated the request. “I want…to stop being a coward. I want to stop running.”
“Okay! So I guess you want to help Twilight and her friends defeat the Doctor, then?”
Soldier nodded, but looked askance at Spike. “I am under orders to remain in the library. I cannot join the commander.”
“No…” Spike said, going back over to the bookcase. “But you’re a genius. Twilight and the others can’t use the Elements anymore, so fighting the Doctor is going to have to be done with something else. And with how fast you read…” he picked up the book from the floor and opened it up to the page they had stopped on, “…you could figure something out pretty fast.”
“This plan is doomed to failure. Even if I read that entire book shelf, my lack of ability to properly manipulate objects will prevent me from building anything of substance.”
“Unless,” Spike said, holding up both his hands and wiggling the fingers, “you had someone you could tell what to do. Friends help each other, after all. You do the thinking, and I’ll do the building.”
Soldier hesitated a moment…but only a moment. “I obey,” she said, trotting back over to Spike and settling down. “Turn pages as quickly as you are able. I have much to learn. I also must keep my construction simple given the resources available. Direct me to tomes on vibrations, acoustics, and sonics.”
A small part of Soldier was devoted to reading, consuming information as fast as Spike’s actions would allow. Eventually, as she learned more, her intellect allowed her to start making leaps of logic, rational deductions, figuring out the fundamental laws of this reality and how they strung together. As she understood more, she got better at understanding everything.
The whole time, the greater part of her mind had been assembling the device in her head, starting with how she knew to assemble it in her own reality. As she took in more information, she made adjustments here and there, to account not only for the changed laws of reality and the available materials that she could see in the basement, but also her new form. Once she had enough information, she stood and started listing out the required materials.
Taking his small stature and newness to this level of science into account, Spike was highly efficient at gathering materials, as well as following Soldier’s directions. She adjusted her lexicon to use simplified terms, referring to materials and tools by their most basic physical descriptions rather than their intended purpose. The result was surprising speed given the circumstances, producing in an hour and a half what would have taken Soldier in her Mark-III travel machine around half an hour.
They also had to take apart some of Twilight Sparkle’s machinery to find the raw materials for the device, but Spike had made the call and assured Soldier that Twilight would not mind. The device had also needed one other component – a crystal of sufficiently robust structure to withstand the rigors of spatial vibration that the device would place on it, to focus it. Spike produced a number of gemstones – apparently the dragon ate them for sustenance – but Soldier was, on inspecting them, unimpressed by the samples that Spike brought her, deeming them inefficient and liable to break quickly…
…but not her optical crystal. Not the gemstone that had once formed a part of Soldier’s optical lens on her Mark-III travel machine. On inspecting it closely under a microscope, Soldier found that the crystalline structure of the optical lens was perfect for her needs. So she adjusted the design of the device somewhat to accommodate the larger-than-expected crystal…and hesitated.
“What?” Spike asked at length. He had reached out for the crystal to integrate it into the design, but Soldier had stopped him, placing a hoof over the crystal.
Soldier looked at her own hoof, somewhat confused herself. “I…do not know,” she said. “The crystal is…Daleks travel in Mark-III travel machines. That crystal was the optical lens of mine. The process that would have destroyed me and did destroy my machine, instead transformed the lens into this.”
“Whoa,” Spike said. Soldier had moved her hoof away, and Spike tentatively reached out and took the lens into his hands, holding it up and looking through it. “So the thing you used to look through to see the world in your reality, made it over here with you. But to make it, it had to change, so now when you look through it, you see something different. That’s…deep.”
Soldier frowned at the expression. “Explain.”
“It’s something that makes you think.”
Soldier thought, but despite the genius intellect of a Dalek veteran of the Time War, nothing came to her. She looked back to Spike. “Explain further – ”
There was a sound from upstairs, the door to the library opening. “Oh, that must be Twilight,” Spike said, standing up and hopping down from the table, heading towards the stairs that would take him to the library’s main level.
Soldier’s ears twitched, listening to the sound of hooves. Her mind raced at the sounds she heard. “I do not discern more than one pony’s hoofsteps. I hear no voices – Twilight had left to gather her comrades, and I have ascertained that she is talkative.”
“Well, whoever it is, I’ll have to tell them to come back, then,” Spike said as he went up the stairs, a somewhat laborious task for his short legs. She watched him go through the door and out of sight. “Hey!” he said to the pony that Soldier hadn’t seen yet. “Thanks for dropping by, but the library’s closed. Official Princess stuff, Ponyville town emergency, you know the drill.”
“Oh, I know all about emergencies.”
All the fur on Soldier’s body stood on end at the voice. It was him. The Doctor was here. And Spike didn’t realize it.
Soldier looked down to her crystal, and the device she had assembled. Her hooves scrabbled to grasp the main body of the object even as she grabbed her optical lens with her mouth, then began struggling to hold the former upright and force the latter into place.
“I’m here on a bit of an emergency myself,” Soldier heard the Doctor say. She felt cold sweat break out across her body as he spoke. “There’s a very dangerous creature somewhere in town. Ran through it about two hours ago. Looks like a pony but it’s not. Ponies I asked said it came this way, into the library, would you know anything about it?”
Soldier dropped the crystal. She suppressed a cry of frustration as she picked it up again, trying to hold the device steady and slide it into place. But she couldn’t brace it properly, and forcing the crystal against the device only caused it to rotate in her hooves.
“Well, sort of. That’s what Twilight is getting her friends for. It…came here, but then left. Twilight scared it away. I didn’t see what happened.”
Soldier froze a rel, glancing up at the basement door. She couldn’t see Spike…but she also knew that the dragon had fabricated that event. He had lied. Which mean that he had heard the description Soldier had given to Twilight, had recognized the Doctor, and was buying time for Soldier to attempt to complete the device on her own.
Soldier’s estimation of Spike rose considerably. She returned to her efforts, adjusting her grip on the device and pushing. The crystal slid into place with a slight click.
“Look, Spike, isn’t it? I need to know where the creature is. You don’t know what it is, you don’t know what it’s capable of. I need to stop it.”
“Well…why are you asking me? I don’t know where she went.”
Soldier winced at the error, knowing the Doctor would catch it as well. She began folding the protective frontal casing around the crystal with her mouth, then closed the casing’s mouth-grip access port as well. She took the whole device, about fifteen centimeters in length, into her mouth and squeezed on the activation button with her teeth. An internal light came on, glowing out through the blue crystal at the front, and quiet whirr came from within the device. The sonic probe was ready.
“She?” The Doctor echoed. “I said it looked like a pony. Never said it’s gender.”
“Oh! Uh…I saw her.”
“You said you didn’t see what happened.”
“Well, yeah…but, um…surprise attack!” There was a sound like a blowtorch, and a startled cry from the Doctor, followed by a war-bellow from Spike.
Soldier stood straight, inspecting the sonic probe, making sure it worked, before she started charging for the basement’s exit. Such was her haste that she misjudged the placement of one hoof, missing a stair she had been going for. She stumbled, pitching forward and only barely able to throw out her other hoof and stop herself from impacting the next stair up with her head, which would probably cause her to bite down too hard on the sonic probe and either break it or injure herself.
Stairs. Daleks did not like anything, but they especially did not like stairs.
Soldier heard Spike cry out, and redoubled her efforts, taking the stairs carefully lest she slip again but still proceeding up with all possible haste. She came out into the library’s main chamber and found herself looking at the Doctor, the oncoming storm…with a small dragon grabbing onto one his front legs, which he was waving around rapidly, trying to get Spike off. Soldier noticed a device held at the edge of his own mouth, a metal wand with a purple crystal at its end – a sonic probe of his own.
“Spike, I’m being serious – ” the Doctor began, then spotted Soldier. His eyes quickly took her in, standing there, the sonic probe she had clutched in her own mouth that looked similar to a Dalek eye stalk.
“Hello, Dalek,” the Doctor said – the menace of his words somewhat undercut by the fact that he was still trying to get Spike off of him. Finally he sat back and used another hoof to push the dragon off, sending him tumbling away through the air to land amidst the library’s sitting cushions. “Fancy meeting you here, of all places. What are you doing here? What are you doing to these people, to Spike, to Twilight? How did you even get here? What did you tell them – what did you do to them? Conversion, turn them into puppets? No, if you had the technology to do that then you wouldn’t look like a pony, wouldn’t need a sonic screwdriver then, would you? Must have been all you could knock together on short notice. I like the design, by the way, very classic – ”
“EXTERMINATE!” Soldier exclaimed, swinging her sonic probe forward and biting down on its activator. The Doctor’s eyes widened as he dove out of the way, the sonic blast sailing through where he had been and hitting the opposite wall harmlessly – it was made of wood, after all. If the Doctor had only stood still…
The Doctor had ducked behind a table, while Spike ran over and next to Soldier. “Oi!” The Doctor exclaimed. “You didn’t let me finish!”
“Correct!” Soldier exclaimed, glancing at the table and its immediate surroundings. Several books, sitting cushions, next to a wall with an electric light – yes. She chewed on the sonic probe, adjusting its settings slightly with her teeth and tongue, then pointed it at the light as she started charging forward, calling out “exterminate!” as she went. At the sonic impact, the light sparked and shattered, scattering glass. The Doctor let out a cry of surprise, distracting him as Soldier leaped over the table…or tried to. Her forelegs made it over, but her hind legs clipped the edge of the table, and she pitched forward onto it, knocking the air from her lungs – and the sonic probe from her mouth.
She was also face-to-face with the Doctor, her muzzle only centimeters from his own.
The Doctor scampered backwards even as Soldier scrabbled to get her hooves under her, glancing around for her fallen sonic probe. She saw the Doctor closing in on it, raising a hoof to stomp on it – but then a line of green flame cut between him and the probe. He stumbled back just as Spike slid on by, grabbing the probe and running back over to Soldier. “Don’t worry, I got your back!” He said, tossing it up to her. She tried to grab it with her hooves, fumbled a few times, had it drop to the table beneath her, then quickly picked it back up with her mouth.
“Alright, no, I really need to know what you told them, Dalek,” the Doctor said. “For that matter how are you even still alive? Doesn’t being a pony just eat away at you? How have you not ended it all already?”
Soldier was getting down from the table; the Doctor’s words made her start, stumble, and fall to the ground. She kept her grip on the probe this time, at least. “Hey!” Spike called out, turning to the Doctor. He jabbed a finger at him. “You don’t know how much being a Dalek meant to Soldier! Show a little sympathy!”
“For a Dalek?” the Doctor demanded, pointing his sonic probe up and setting off purple light. Soldier heard a metallic snap, and glancing up she saw a chandelier falling towards her. Time seemed to slow. Her body froze at the sight of her impending doom, but a sudden impact on her side sent her stumbling away. She saw it was Spike, he had charged at her and flung himself at her with all the force his small body could muster; her own clumsiness on her hooves greatly aiding his attempt and making up for the considerable difference in mass between them.
But now Spike was beneath the chandelier – would be crushed by it. Soldier’s eyes were wide in the slow-motion she perceived from the world. She willed Spike to move, to get out of the way, to not be hurt…and she felt a thrum, a new and odd sensation from around her horn and saw a flash of blue light, as a cobalt-colored aura wrapped around Spike’s form and dragged him through the air and into Soldier’s chest.
Time resumed its normal pace. Soldier wrapped her forelegs around Spike and held him tightly as she tumbled to the ground and slid away from the chandelier, across the floor and behind a table. As Soldier set Spike down, his eyes were wide. “You saved me,” he noted.
“You…saved me first,” Soldier countered, glancing up from behind the table. The Doctor held his sonic probe in his hooves, was making adjustments to it, though without knowing its configuration Soldier couldn’t guess at what he was attempting. “You are an ally – ”
“You used magic to do it,” Spike added, pointing up at Soldier’s horn.
Soldier glanced up at her horn, squinting and concentrating as hard as she could. Nothing happened. “A momentary aberration,” she concluded. Pity – it would have been quite helpful right now.
“Heh,” Spike said, crossing his arms. “In the heat of the moment, you saw I was in danger and used magic for the first time to help me. You like me. You really are my friend!”
“Daleks do not like anything!”
“Uh-huh.” He hopped up, grabbing the edge of the table and pulling his head over so he could look to the Doctor, then ducked back down. “What do we do? I think he’s better at this than we are.”
“Either of our sonic probes could disable the other if a wave from them were to hit.”
“They’re kind of a small target, though…”
“Yes. My strategy is to stall until the return of Twilight and her comrades.” She glanced around the main chamber of the library. “We must relocate. Sonic probes cannot interact with wood – ”
“Yours can’t!” The Doctor called out. His sonic probe began to whirr again, and Soldier felt the table Spike and she were hiding behind begin to rattle. Without needing any more indication than that, she and Spike bolted from their hiding place just as the table shattered, the Doctor diving through the pieces to where the two of them had been. He was grinning around his own probe. “Took me a few thousand years, but I finally figured it out!”
Soldier skidded to a halt, aiming with her own sonic probe. “Exterminate!” She called as she bit down on its firing mechanism. The Doctor neatly side-stepped the sonic wave, but the distraction allowed Spike and Soldier to make it to the stairs and start running up it, from the library’s main floor and up to Twilight Sparkle’s domicile. Soldier only slipped and fell a few times on the way up.
“You’re really not good with stairs,” Spike observed. “Let me guess, Daleks have no concept of them?”
“Daleks have a concept of stairs. We hate them.” Soldier was looking around the room she was in, taking it all in. The domicile region of the tree was in some ways a miniature version of the library’s main floor, but with more personalized touches in its smaller area, as well as more side-rooms – including the bathroom and the open loft that led to Twilight’s sleeping area.
The bathroom. Soldier dashed towards it – sliding a little on a rug that dominated the center of the otherwise wooden floor, but she kept her balance – and closed the door to it behind her as soon as Spike was also inside. “Okay, now what?” Spike asked.
Soldier was already examining the piping in the room for the shower, which had a detachable head with hose for the purpose of allowing better cleaning than simply falling water from above would allow. She took down the shower head, turned it on, and pointed it at the door. Water sprayed out an hit the door at a steady but hardly damaging rate as she dialed her sonic screwdriver.
“You’re going to get him wet?” Spike asked, stepping back from the spreading water.
“Yes,” Soldier answered as she heard hoof-steps coming up to the door and a familiar whirr from beyond it. She bit down on her own sonic probe just as the bathroom door began to rattle, and braced herself. With a loud whine, the sonic probe set the water of the shower hose streaming out at far greater speed. In spite of herself, Soldier was hurled backwards and against the far wall – but the door to the bathroom was blasted off its hinges by the opposite-direction force, sending it flying into the Doctor and then both him and the door tumbling away.
Spike stared at the shower hose, still going off as Soldier steadied herself against the far wall and kept the pressure on the Doctor, or at least the door that he had fallen under, now near to the hated stairs. Spike looked back to Soldier. “How does that have anything to do with sonics?!” He demanded. “How do you sonic water into…into doing that?”
The shower hose began trembling in Soldier’s grasp; she dropped it and stopped sending sonic pulses through it before it exploded. Naturally, just as she did, the door started picking itself up as the Doctor started crawling from beneath it, looking wet and angry but not particularly hurt. “I will explain later,” she said. “Run!”
The two dashed from the bathroom and up yet more stairs – Soldier managed to clip a hoof and stumble only once – and reach the top of the Twilight Sparkle’s domicile. Soldier saw a window, a light, a bed…nothing useful, at least not for her sonic device. And no way out.
But as well, no other way up. The Doctor could only advance by coming up the stairs. Up. Daleks had a concept of high ground, knew how to utilize it. Traveling up towards an enemy was dangerous…and the Doctor would know that to. So Soldier pressed Spike and herself against the far wall and lay down low so that they couldn’t be seen from below, staring down the narrow hall that led up to the bed tier. Only by advancing up the stairs could the Doctor reach them…and expose himself to attack.
The Doctor did not advance. He’d deduced the same thing. Now all the two had to do was wait…
“Spike!” The Doctor called. “What do you know about Daleks?”
The words produced a new sensation for Soldier, like all the blood in her body had turned to ice.
“I’m not listening to you!” Spike called back down, unfazed. Soldier glanced at him, and he blinked just one eye at her while holding the thumb on one of his hands up. She didn’t know why, but the gesture seemed significant to him. “Why should I listen to anything you say? Soldier told me that Time Lords tried to wipe out the Daleks before they could even exist! And you were the one sent to do it!”
“And did you ask why?”
Spike had his mouth open to retort, but closed it after a rel. The Doctor jumped in to the silence. “You won’t listen to me? Fine. I wouldn’t either, I’m a madman with a box, you shouldn’t listen to madmen with boxes. But you’re a smart dragon, Spike. You’ve got to know you should always ask questions. So ask the Dalek a question, Spike. Ask it just one question. Ask it what the Dalek primary order is.”
Soldier was silent, her grip on her sonic probe tightening in her mouth. Her eyes darted to Spike, then back to the stairs, as Spike stared at Soldier. “Okay…” he said slowly. “Soldier…what is that?”
Soldier focused on the stairs. “The prime directive of the Dalek race. What we do in the absence of any other order or command. What drives us, gives us meaning and purpose. The order passed down by the creator Davros.”
“Very tautological!” The Doctor called up. “So many words to avoid giving out any information at all. Classic misdirection, I do it myself all the time. But go on then, Dalek. Tell him the truth. It’ll all come out sooner or later anyway, now or whenever you finally get back to it. He’d probably be the first to learn anyway if you have your way. Him and then every pony, everywhere.”
Spike’s eyes were locked on to Soldier; she could feel them even if she couldn’t see them. “Soldier?” he asked. “Tell me what it is.” Soldier remained quiet, wincing at what she already knew Spike’s next words were going to be. “Soldier, I’m ordering you.”
“To conquer and destroy.”
Spike stepped away from her. Soldier’s eyes broke contact with the stairs as she looked to Spike. She was new to emotions herself, but Daleks knew how to read them. She saw shock and betrayal.
“Oh, no, you’re not doing it right, Dalek!” The Doctor called up. “You used to have a little song and everything. How did it go…align and advance! Advance and attack! Attack and destroy! Destroy and rejoice!”
Spike hasn’t broken Soldier’s eye contact. “Is...Soldier, is that...?”
“Yes.”
“And did you...?”
“I am a soldier. I was bred to receive orders. To follow them. To never question or disobey.”
Spike’s eyes somehow grew wider. He backed up several paces. “Wait...wait, when you first told me what you did, when we first met, when I asked what you used to do...”
Soldier held the dragon’s gaze a rel more, before looking down, at the floor. She couldn’t meet his eyes, it was...somehow, it was difficult. “Exterminate. Annihilate. Destroy.”
Spike backed up again; he was now pressed against Twilight’s bed. “You lied to me,” he said. “You lied to Twilight! After all we were doing to help you! You lied!”
She allowed inaccurate assumptions to continue. Did not correct mistakes. Withheld information she knew that the inferior species of this world would take offense to and retaliate against her for. Did not volunteer information without being asked. She was new. She needed to learn, to find her place in the pony hierarchy, and could not afford distractions.
“Yes,” Soldier said. She had lied. That was the more efficient way to express what she had done.
“Oh, be honest, Dalek, you enjoyed it, didn’t you?” The Doctor called up. “As much as a Dalek enjoys anything. Still, at least he knows how you were using him, tricking him and Twilight and every pony on this world, biding your time until you could get back to form. It’s the Dalek way. Conquer something. Use it up. Destroy it. Move on to the next target. Conquer it, use it, destroy it. Repeat, over and over and over again. Conquer, use, destroy, repeat. Conquer, use, destroy, repeat. Conquer, use…”
There was a whirr from behind Soldier, and she let out a cry as the sonic probe in her mouth suddenly sparked, then exploded just as she spat it out. She flinched away as the metal shattered, the fore of the device falling to the ground. Soldier’s optical crystal fell from it, bounced once as it struck the floor, then landed at Spike’s feet.
Soldier turned, and found herself staring at the Doctor a few steps up the stairway, his own sonic probe pointed directly at her. “Destroy,” he said, advancing quickly up the remaining steps, standing over the still hunkered-down, now defenseless Soldier. He didn’t break eye contact with her, but he did wave a hoof at Spike. “Hello Spike. Stay there, I don’t want to hurt you, but I’ve been here too many times with too many monsters so please do not work yourself up into having a change of heart that you’ll regret later.”
Spike was silent. The Doctor’s eyes darted to him, as did Soldier’s, and both saw a terrified dragon. The Doctor’s eyes returned to Soldier first. “See that? See what you’ve done? This is a kind world, Dalek, a soft world. It never would have occurred to Spike, to any of them, to think you’ve done what you’ve done. The worst monster this world’s ever produced – and it has produced them, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine all the time – but they still wouldn’t hold a candle to a Dalek. The people here have their fights, their scuffles, their little tête-à-têtes, but everything works out in the end. It always does. I won’t let you ruin that, not here, not this world, not this time.”
Soldier stared up at the Oncoming Storm, calculating her odds of doing something, anything, against him in this position without Spike’s assistance. The resultant number was low. She could dive at him, attempt to shove him off the bed-tier to the level below, but she would fall with him and both would be injured, and without allies it was not worth the risk. She could try to run, but the Doctor could keep chase easily, and without any kind of weapon of her own she was outmatched. The Doctor had clearly been in this reality for some time, was used to his pony body – an earth pony, she recalled, stronger and tougher and with greater endurance than the unicorn pony that Soldier was.
“Nothing to say, Dalek?” The Doctor asked as Soldier’s silence began to stretch. He waved his sonic probe at Soldier, indicating her body. “Oh, right, you’re not really a Dalek anymore, are you? What should I call you? Ponek?”
“Soldier,” she said. “My name is Soldier, I was named Soldier.”
“Daleks don’t have names.”
“I was named by Princess Celestia.”
The Doctor shifted at that. “Oh, I am going to have a word with her about that,” he said. “So that’s how you got here then, eh? One of those lost souls that occasionally show up here, and Princess Celestia being kind because she didn’t know any better. The moment she told me about it I knew I was going to have to deal with something sooner or later, that’s just my life. You or a Cyberman or Sutekh or something. The Rani, haven’t seen her in ages. Million-to-one odds, but that’s nine times in ten here.
“Get up, Dalek. You’re leaving.”
Even as Soldier did, the Doctor bit down on his sonic probe, sending out a new whirr to accompany its purple light. After several rels, a new sound cut through the library-tree - a sound that Daleks feared just as much as they feared the sound of the Doctor’s voice, a long, laborious, high-pitched drone as a tall blue box gradually appeared at the base of the stairs below. “Down you go, inside,” the Doctor commanded, waving his sonic probe at his TARDIS.
Soldier complied, descending the steps carefully. The TARDIS’ door swung inward, revealing a far larger chamber inside than was outside, the TARDIS’ main control room. In there was as close to Hell as Dalek thought allowed to exist, just as the Doctor was very nearly their equivalent for the Devil himself. Soldier paused at the precipice, looking back. Spike was still at the top of the stairs, staring down at her in disbelief and betrayal. And the Doctor, right behind her, his earth pony face showing only anger and hatred that looked somehow wrong on an equine face.
“I...” she started, then glanced away, struggling to get her mouth to form a series of words to express a concept that was completely alien to a vast mind that had become alien to itself. She’d made the sounds before, under orders, but this time…
Soldier looked back up when her mind and some other part of her finally contorted and twisted enough to convey not just the sounds, but the meaning behind them. “I am sorry,” she told Spike.
With that, she turned around, and stepped into the TARDIS.
By default, the main room of the Type-40 TARDIS that Soldier entered was simple in its layout, a central control console stemming from the Matrix intended to be operated by six Time Lords, a holographic imaging screen, and few other features aside from doors leading deeper into the vehicle and walls covered in glowing circular designs. The Doctor had altered the color scheme, however; it was supposed to be white, but the Doctor had apparently elected to instead color the entire thing in hues of blues and greens from the ceiling, making the floor dark, while many of the circular designs had been converted into plastic bubbles containing trophies and mementos from across the Doctor’s lifespan. Rather absurdly, a large hourglass, taller than Soldier was now long, hung from the ceiling over the Matrix, all its sand resting at the bottom.
Soldier trudged in, the Doctor following behind her and closing the doors immediately once he had, then turning to face Soldier. “Why did you do that?” He demanded.
She stared at him, confused. “Explain.”
“That, what you just did out there. Apologize. Why did you do that?”
Soldier looked away. “I…was sorry. For lying to Spike. I apologized.”
“Daleks don’t have a concept of sorrow!”
The Doctor was right, of course. Soldier sat down on the floor, running one hoof against it, feeling the cold metal underneath her. “I was sorry.”
“And how about everything else, then?” The Doctor asked. He came forward, sonic probe sweeping over her, scanning her. “Unless you’re going to tell me you died fresh from a Progenitor, then you and I both know there’s blood up to your eyestalk in your past life. Feel sorry for that?”
“No.”
“Thought not.” The Doctor took his sonic probe from his mouth and looked at it. His device was many generations in advance of the fairly crude one Soldier had been able to construct, it probably included a psychic readout and interface. He seemed somehow both satisfied and perturbed by what he saw, and made a gesture before proceeding to the control console, flipping switches and pulling levers at it. Throughout the TARDIS, the high-pitched groan began again. Soldier noted with interest, however, that the Matrix itself did not light up or move in any way – the ship was moving through space, not time, she surmised. The sound didn’t last long as the TARDIS reached its destination.
“What are you going to do to me?” Soldier asked.
The Doctor hadn’t really taken his eyes off of Soldier, but at that his full attention returned to her, and his eyes narrowed. “I first met your kind when the Thals were still on Skaro. I went to your city. You were planning to irradiate the planet, wipe out the Thals. Back then you still depended on energy coming up from the floor to move around. I broke that energy, I took it away. You begged me to restore it. I didn’t. I couldn’t, but even if I could have, I wouldn’t. I’d known you for a day and I knew you were filth.”
“There was another time I was looking to help a poisoned friend. The universe, the whole universe, hadn’t known war for twenty-five years, and then five thousand Daleks got it into their casings to try and wipe out everything. You used a Time Destructor. I turned it on you, set it in reverse. Disassembled your casings, aged you all back to embryos and watched you die.
“During the Dalek Civil War – do you remember that, Dalek? Were you there for that one? – I booby-trapped an ancient Gallifreyan artifact. I goaded Davros into using it. I set off a supernova that destroyed Skaro and then I talked the Supreme Dalek, the last Dalek, into killing itself.”
The Doctor advanced on Soldier, staring down at her – easy, since not only was he taller, but Soldier had folded up a little on herself with every one of the Doctor’s words, shrinking back from the Doctor as his image blurred in her vision. “What am I gonna do to you, Dalek? Something like all that. Or maybe something new. I'm still deciding.” Soldier was silent as the Doctor continued to loom over her, eyes darting around her. After a rel, he backed away, returning to the TARDIS console and pressing some buttons. “Stop doing that.”
“E-explain.” Something had happened to her throat, it felt like there was something caught there. It was a struggle to get out just one word. She heard tapping beneath her and realized that it was her hooves twitching on the metal floor of the TARDIS.
“That! Looking like…like that!” The Doctor waved a hoof at Soldier again. “The big watery eyes, the trembling lip…stop it, you’re not fooling me.” He glared at the TARDIS’ console. “Where is she…”
Soldier rubbed her eyes; they came away wet again, as they had before in the basement with Spike, and yet somehow the feeling was totally different. Spike had said that this was good – how could this be good? “I…my body is…wh-what have you done to me, Doctor? What have you done?”
The Doctor let out a groan. “I haven’t done anything yet! I’ve talked. That’s how this normally goes, Dalek, I talk, you listen, I talk some more, you threaten to exterminate me, you never get ‘round to it before I do something clever and get away.” He returned his attentions to the console, staring into it. “Only this time I don’t have to get away. This time, I’m in control. A little gift from this reality for my retirement. Told you things just work out here. Come on, where are you…” He glanced back to the Dalek. “Not you.”
“Wh-why am I trembling? Stuttering? Why a-are my eyes leaking?”
The Doctor breathed out sharply, looking upwards and mouthing something silently before looking back to Soldier. “You’re scared and you’re smart. Brain the size of a planet is looking at the being who’s defeated armies of Daleks time and time and time and time again and figuring its odds of survival are zero. And you’re a pony instead of a Dalek, and the Dalek part of you is screaming at you about how wrong that is, screaming at you to exterminate yourself even as the pony part of you is trying to figure out what’s so wrong about it and how anything can hate itself so much. And you’re in what looks like an enclosed space with nowhere to run, and the part of you that’s a pony wants to run but sees that it can’t, and that’s just not helping the part of you that’s a Dalek at all.” He paused, looking away. “Or, I dunno, you have a sugar imbalance.”
“Well of course she does,” a new voice said. Soldier’s head snapped in the direction, and saw, coming in, a familiar-looking blue unicorn – Minuette. She closed the door behind her and walked straight over to Soldier, though stopped several feet short of her and stooped down to look her in the eye. “Never ate anything at all until just a few hours ago, then had enough to last her a week. Including more chocolate than anypony should have in one sitting.”
“Yes, well,” the Doctor said. He pointed to the control console. “You’re here. We can go now.”
“I will do no such thing, that’s not what happens, and besides, I am a doctor and Soldier is still my patient.” She carefully stepped forward, holding out one hoof and gently laying it atop Soldier’s head, lightly ruffling her mane. “There, there, Soldier. I’m sorry my boyfriend’s an idiot. It’s the age. He means well, usually. And he was not going to kill you, Soldier, he was only planning on wiping your memory and putting you back in our reality in a prison that could contain you.”
Soldier hiccupped for the first time in her life at Minuette’s touch, flinching away as her mind was somehow simultaneously working at a mile a minute and completely frozen at one rel in time. “Y-you are the Doctor’s companion,” she observed. Of course, that made sense given the earlier interaction between Minuette and the Doctor, the familiarity. “You…you are an e-enemy of the Daleks. Y-you are my enemy.”
Minuette frowned as she stepped still closer to Soldier, hoof moving down to rest on her shoulder, touching her the way Twilight had when Twilight had been attempting to console her. “No, I’m retired.”
“So am I supposed to be,” the Doctor said, stepping closer to Minuette and jabbing a hoof at Soldier. “But something’s come up and we should really just pop out of retirement for just a bit to deal with it.”
The blue unicorn stepped still closer to Soldier, turning as well so she was sitting beside her, one hoof over Soldier’s withers and pulling her close, a similar action to what Twilight had done earlier. Soldier felt her body moving of its own accord, leaning in to the touch, burying itself in minuette’s fur. “Why ever should we come out of retirement?”
The Doctor rolled his eyes. “Because without you, Minuette – ”
“Ooh, we’re being formal then? I suppose we do have someone over…”
“ – without you, I don’t really have a TARDIS. I have an RDIS. I can do space but not time and we’ll need both to get back home.”
“Can’t even do space very well, you dissolved half the wall of my office. Nearly destroyed my diploma, scared poor Strawberry Sunrise half to death, and you know how impossible it is to get her to sit in that chair…”
“It’s psychic paper, it’s not a real diploma.”
Minuette looked the Doctor up and down with indignation. “And where’s your psychic paper doctorate then, Doctor? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one. Spoiler: you never will.”
Soldier glanced between Minuette and the Doctor. The Doctor’s TARDIS was malfunctioning, but Minuette could fix it? A dentist? That didn’t seem right. “What is happening? What is going on?” She asked.
Minuette reached out with her free hoof, taking one of Soldier’s into it and shaking it up and down slightly. “Let’s re-introduce ourselves. Soldier, I’m the TARDIS. Well, I was the TARDIS. Well, I was part of the TARDIS.” She nodded her head towards the command console, the Matrix it was centered around. “The important bit. But you can still call me Minuette.”
Soldier glanced between her, then the console, then back to the unicorn, then back to the console. She felt her terror begin to abate as she tried to process what Minuette had said, worked through the calculations. The Daleks and the Time Lords had been nearly equal in terms of scientific understanding during the Time War, and the Type-40 TARDIS was considered a relic by the latter and had been for ages. She was well aware of the vehicle’s specifications. “Absurd,” she objected at length, wiping the wetness from her eyes. “Absurd! This is a Type-40 TARDIS. The Matrix of the TARDIS extends across time and space! It cannot be contained in a physical body!”
“In our reality,” Minuette said. “Different world. Different rules. It helps that I don’t extend across all of this time and this space.” She glanced around the interior of what was, in some ways, herself, and waved a hoof to indicate it. “Just here, when I’m here…” she then tapped the same hoof to her chest. “And in here, the rest of the time.”
“And…you became…a dentist?”
“I’ve spent my whole life traveling. I thought I could use a break, settle down, mean to stay in one place for a while. You can learn a lot about ponies from their teeth.” At Soldier’s confused stare, Minuette pressed on. “Like whether or not they’ve been flossing!”
Soldier glanced between the Doctor, the command console, and Minuette, her mind struggling to turn away from the fear, struggling to think. “You…did not arrive as I did,” she surmised. “You came here of your own volition. You came and used Time Lord science to change and adapt your bodies, this vessel, to this reality. You came…and you can leave.”
The Doctor stepped forward. "Speaking of - "
“Shut it, this bit’s important,” Minuette countered, jabbing a hoof at the Doctor and glaring at him. The Time Lord backed away at the intensity, a look of confusion on his face.
Soldier stepped away from Minuette, rising to her hooves. “The Doctor. He spoke of Celestia with familiarity. He said he would speak to Luna about the stars. The Princesses of Equestria, he knows them. But Celestia told me I could not return. That I was trapped. Celestia lied! Lied! LIED! Or…” Soldier paused, then turned to look at the Doctor. “Or you did. You lied to Celestia. You lied to Celestia! YOU LIED!”
The Doctor glared down Soldier. “No I didn’t. I told her I was a traveler from a very long ways away, that I wasn’t really a pony, that I was looking for a place to put up my hooves – I had already gotten myself hooves at the time – and rest, and that I would bring no harm to her or her ponies. That was the complete truth, it was all she asked for and even though I told her there was more, she said that I’d said enough. And what’s it matter to you, Dalek?”
“I think it matters because her choice to become a pony was predicated on the idea that she didn’t have any other except death,” Minuette observed.
“CORRECT!” Soldier screamed, glaring hate at the Doctor from where she stood, enough hate that had it taken form it would have been the Dalek Emperor itself. “I could still be Dalek! I COULD STILL BE DALEK! I COULD STILL BE PURE – ”
Soldier froze, the last word catching in her throat, stopping breathing. She tried to, starting up with only a deliberate act of will and a hacking cough that also froze in her throat. She sucked in a breath, barely exhaled, sucked in another one, barely exhaled again…as everything that being “pure” entailed suddenly came rushing towards the front of her mind.
She could be Dalek again. She could even hide her impurity, her human corruption, or covertly remove it, if she was careful and could tolerate her own existence long enough. Genetics was no more difficult than any other science to her. Already ideas danced in her mind, ways for her to go about doing it, to remove the corruption, the infection, the sickness from her cells, to become once again whole, once again pure, once again truly Dalek…and return to her Mark-III Travel Machine.
Trapped. Never again to taste, to feel, to smell. No more sunlight. No more food. Never again to run free. Never again to be near anyone else, to feel their warmth. No more magic. The part of her that had been transformed by Celestia, the part of her corrupted by Rose Tyler, screamed in horror in her mind at the thought. Her Dalek mind tried to shunt it aside, to press it down, to remind Soldier of the purity she had once known, the perfection that had been hers, the glory that was her birthright…
…but the Dalek part of her contained the memory of the Nightmare Child, too. The memory of her fleeing. The cowardly part of her running away, somewhere else, anywhere else but into its maw…and the pony part gave that part of her somewhere to run to, something to run towards.
It wasn’t much. Chocolate and sunlight were hardly great prizes to be taken, the Dalek part of her noted. And the pony part of her also contained Spike’s scorn, the look of betrayal. It contained feelings of shame and inadequacy and futility. The pony part of her promised her moments of…of something, something positive, something barely felt but which she knew was there…amidst a lifetime of hurt and pain and loss and fear.
But a life of tiny brilliance surrounded by darkness was more than the Dalek part of her could offer. The Dalek could only offer itself. The pony could offer everything. Including the Dalek part. It was going to be part of her no matter what. A part of her, but not all of her.
Soldier’s legs were trembling. She closed her eyes. Whatever was freezing the breath in her throat finally gave, and she exhaled…a long and tortured scream as she fell to her knees and hocks. She took in breath only to cry out again. She felt the wetness in her eyes once more, great rivulets of tears falling from her to the floor.
“I…I don’t…I don’t want to go back!” She exclaimed, looking to the Doctor, or his shape, what she could see through the tears. “I don’t want to go back! I don’t want to be a Dalek!I don’t want to die! I want to live!”
The Doctor was staring at her with wide, confused eyes, she could see them even through her tears. He’d retrieved his sonic probe again and was scanning her in confusion, but then Minuette was beside him. She used her golden magic to take the sonic from him, then nodded towards Soldier. “We have now reached the part where you ask a question you should have asked her from the start,” she said softly.
The Doctor looked at Minuette in confusion before turning back to Soldier. “Who…who were you, Soldier?”
Soldier was hyperventilating, but she lifted herself from the floor, and repeated the breathing exercise that Twilight had shown her. When she had recovered enough, she looked to the Doctor, wiping tears from her eyes. “I…I am a soldier. I t-told you before…I do not know how long it has been since we encountered o-one another from your perspective…but from mine, less than o-one day.”
The Doctor’s eyes fluttered at that. “Did I kill you?”
“Y-you tried. You were stopped. I h-had been injured. I had fled the Time War. I f-fell to Earth. I burned for th-three days. I s-screamed. I could not fire my weapon. I could not kill my captors. I was tortured. I came into the p-possession of the human Henry Van Statten – ”
“Rose,” the Doctor interrupted, rocking back on his hooves. He glanced all over Soldier. “You’re…that’s not possible. You committed suicide. Rose ordered you to kill yourself, I watched you reduced to dust! There was nothing left to come to Equestria! How could it have happened?”
“I do not kn-know. I remember…I r-remember not existing for a time. S-stillness. Frozen i-in a moment, trapped in a s-single thought…I do n-not know for how long…b-but…but then I was here, in this world.” She breathed in sharply at the memory. Sunlight. Kind eyes belonging to a kind creature who hadn’t known her but had helped her. Soldier rubbed her eyes of tears. “Then Princess Celestia found me. She offered me life. And I could not refuse. I was…I could not die again.”
The Doctor had sat down, hooves running through his mane as he stared at Soldier. “I…I didn’t know…”
“You didn’t ask,” Minuette observed. She shifted back over to Soldier, hugging her, rubbing a hoof up and down Soldier’s back as the tears finally began to subside. “Didn’t even think to. Didn’t even stop to consider what it must have meant, to have a Dalek running around in a pony’s body in this world.” She released Solider to look to the Doctor, and crossed her front hooves, glaring at him. “You said it yourself, didn’t you? Things just work out here? You were right, you know. This is a kind world. It offers kindness even to creatures that don’t deserve it because one day, they might. Think about that, love. Think about this world, and then think about the sort of Dalek that Soldier would have to be, or have the potential to be, to get in.”
The Doctor’s eyes finally narrowed as he looked to Minuette. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “The world’s not alive.”
“Neither is Time, but somehow you and I both know that Time seems to dislike being fiddled with more than is absolutely necessary and bites back when pushed too far. And Space?” She leaned back and glanced up, letting out a laugh. “Don’t get me started on Space.”
“She doesn’t…” The Doctor began, then paused, and looked back to Soldier. “You said you don’t even feel sorry for what you’ve done. You feel sorry for lying to a small child but not for killing…do Daleks even count how many they’ve killed?”
“We do not,” Soldier confirmed. “But the number is large.”
“She’s new to everything,” Minuette countered the Doctor. “She’s new to every part of her body and half of her mind. Everything she did was back during a time when she didn’t care, and it’s going to take time for her to really attach who she is now to what she did then. Guilt will come if it’s allowed to, you can’t expect her to just fall down and immediately beg forgiveness for everything when she only acquired a concept of sorrow hours ago.” Minuette looked to Soldier. “Ooh, if you think today was rough…you’re going to go to pieces one day. Not even very long from now…a year at most. But you’ll make it. You’ll be happy again at some point not long after that. Not going to tell you too much, though. Spoilers.”
Soldier didn’t understand…but she had gathered that Minuette, as the TARDIS, was essentially omniscient while inside of herself. She was seeing the future. Soldier did not look forward to ‘going to pieces’…but apparently she would survive the process. She would live.
Minuette frowned after a rel. “Oh. By the way, we are just about to be invaded by a rather colorful collection of ponies and one dragon.” She pointed a hoof to the door. “I convinced Twilight and her friends to give me some time with you, but I wasn’t certain it would work until I actually came inside, so…insurance. Left the door unlocked.”
Soldier, the Doctor, and Minuette all looked too the door – which didn’t open, because instead there was a lavender flash-pop, and a purple alicorn, five other ponies, and one dragon were all suddenly inside the TARDIS with looks of determination in their eyes. “Doctor Oncoming Storm!” Twilight Sparkle declared loudly. “I’m not going to let you lay a hoof on Soldier! Doctor Minuette explained all about the Time War and the Daleks and the Time Lords to us.”
“Actually, I get the impression she left out a lot of details…” A yellow-coated pegasus ventured.
“We got the gist of it,” a cyan-coated, rainbow-maned pegasus countered. “Lots of bad ponies doing bad stuff and Soldier was one of them.”
“But that doesn’t give ya the right to judge her when you were one a’ them bad ponies durin’ the Time War too,” an orange-coated earth pony that Soldier recognized as Applejack continued.
“Indeed,” a white-coated unicorn said, “and especially not when Soldier hasn’t even been given the chance to correct her mistakes.”
“Also?” a pink earth pony added, “I just got back in town and bad pony or not Soldier is getting a welcome to Ponyville party! I’ll throw it in the town stockade, don’t think I won’t!”
Twilight stepped forward, wings spread wide. “It might be true that Soldier’s done bad things, but that was back when she was a Dalek. She deserves a chance to try to become more than what she was, to change and grow as a pony. What happened was a long time ago and in your reality, but now Soldier is in this one. Her old life had to end in order for her to get here. It was like she regenerated, just like doctor Minuette said you used to do. If regeneration could turn you into a whole new pony, why can’t it turn Soldier into one?
“Soldier’s a pony now, she’s one of us – and ponies help each other, no matter what!” Twilight looked directly at Soldier. “And even if you still want to call yourself a Dalek…this world has never had Daleks in it before. It doesn’t know what a Dalek is yet. You’re not just the last Dalek, Soldier, you’re the first one. You get to define what it means to be a Dalek here! This is your chance to make it good! With all our help, with the power of friendship, I know you can!”
There were several long rels of silence.
“Correct,” Soldier said.
“Absolutely right,” the Doctor added.
“Nice touch with the regeneration bit there, Twilight,” Minuette noted. “Would have probably worked if it had been needed.”
Twilight Sparkle stood still a rel longer, before her wings twitched slightly, then lowered about halfway. “Uh…what?”
“You’re absolutely right,” the Doctor repeated. “I was wrong…what I did was wrong. Soldier’s free to go, no strings attached. Keep an eye on her, help her. Teach her about loyalty and honesty, and kindness and generosity, and laughter, and friendship.” He scratched the back of his head. “I…may need a refresher on them myself…”
Twilight’s wings fully sagged at that. “Oh,” she said. “Well, um…good! Good. Glad to help…”
She started a bit, then moved aside a small purple dragon – Spike – pushed past her. In his hands, he was clutching Soldier’s optical crystal. It was unscathed from the destruction of her sonic probe. Spike looked at Soldier with an expression that she couldn’t read as he came up to her.
“You, uh…you dropped this,” Spike said, holding out the crystal. Soldier took it with both of her hooves, and clutched it close to her body. She didn’t break eye contact with Spike, however. “You lied to me.”
“Yes.”
“And…I think you’re probably the worst pony I know or have ever met. By a lot.”
“That is certain.”
Spike breathed in deeply, then let it out. He pointed up at her. “You said you were sorry,” he said, “and that counts…a little. But you’ve got to show me you mean it. Okay? Not just for lying to me, but for…for everything you’ve done.”
Soldier nodded. “I obey.”
“Good.” After a moment, Spike puffed up his chest a little. “‘Cause I’m a dragon who thinks more like a pony, and you think like a Dalek but look like a pony. We were made for each other!” He held out his fist. Soldier recognized the gesture, and tapped his first lightly with her hoof. “There. We’re back on track to becoming friends now.”
“I…” Soldier began, and paused as she searched for the word. “I hope so.”
There was final rel of silence, before – somehow, without Soldier having been at all able to track her movements – the pink earth pony was beside her, one leg already slung over her withers. “Aww…” she said, “that’s so sweet! C’mon everypony, group hug!”
“Daleks have no concept of – ” Soldier began, when suddenly Spike was attached to her leg, and an entire visible spectrum of pony fur was closing around her from all sides. “Ahh! I am under attack! Emergency! EMERGENCY…!”
---
Yet again, for the uncountable time in his long and storied life, the Doctor felt like a complete idiot as he watched all the ponies hugging Soldier. The Dalek-pony had given up resistance when it had become obvious that she was not, in fact, under attack, and instead simply sat in place, waiting for the hug to end. She’d be waiting for some time.
“How,” he asked Minuette – the TARDIS. Or Sexy, when they were alone. “How can I possibly be as old as I am, and still make the same mistakes over and over again?”
“It’s because you’re an idiot.” Minuette said.
“That was, in fact, what I was thinking…”
Minuette smirked. “It’s because you’re the worst at being a Time Lord,” she added. “The worst, you understand? Let’s face it, as Time Lords go, you’re an utter failure.”
The Doctor looked to Minuette. “I take that as a point of pride,” he said.
“You should. It is. It’s why I stole you.” She leaned in, nuzzling him slightly, an utterly equine gesture that felt no more alien to the Doctor than any other at this point. Form wasn’t important, never really had been. “My Doctor,” Minuette contentedly breathed.
The Doctor returned the nuzzle. “My TARDIS,” he intoned. He remained still for a moment before pressing on, his head over Minuette’s, who had her own against to his chest. “You know…I know I said I was retiring, making this my last go, my last regeneration…and I do still think this reality is ideal for it…”
“But…?”
“But right now I’m looking at a Dalek who’s chosen to live as a pony. Who’s going to try and make friends. And yes, she had help getting there, stole some human DNA, died, traveled to another reality, had her entire genome rewritten…well. If you’d told me that I’d see this yesterday, even after all of that, I’d have laughed in your face.”
“We can actually go and see if that’s the case. Time’s a bit less picky about interacting with different iterations of yourself in this reality.”
“We might well. Could be interesting. But my point is…” He turned a little to look down to Minuette without having to move. “If I’ve lived this long and can still see something this new…what else am I missing?”
Minuette smiled, looking up to the Doctor without moving herself. “Finally. I’ve been waiting years to get ‘round to this, you know. Do you know how many pony mouths I’ve stared down? How many cavities I’ve had to fill, especially once the pink one moved to town?”
The Doctor’s eyes widened. He wasn’t surprised she knew, but…“Why didn’t you say anything?” He asked.
“Because I wasn't going to say anything. Obviously. In seriousness: the worst Time Lord.”
The Doctor laughed. There were several more moments of silence; they could get back to it all in just a little bit. “So,” the Doctor ventured at length, in a low voice. “When do you suppose I should get around to telling Soldier that she isn’t the last Dalek?”
“WHAT?!” Soldier demanded. The Doctor, somehow, had forgotten that equine ears were more sensitive than humanoid ones.
Soldier stared at the book that lay closed before her this morning. It was thinner than most of the ones she had been consuming over the past week, due to it not being a scientific or magical textbook. She actually was not certain what the book was supposed to be informative of; the cover image depicted a gray-toned earth pony stallion wearing a long trench coat and wide-brimmed hat, silhouetted against a brick building. Ace of Clover in the Sign of the Wooden Hoof, it read. The book had been picked at random when she had come down stairs.
Soldier had, in the week since her arrival, both discovered sleep (a tolerable experience) and that she was what was known as a ‘earlier riser’. Even after the events of her first day and the strain it had placed on her body, she had slept for only seven hours, and appeared to average six. Twilight Sparkle had informed her that eight hours was considered healthiest, but also at Soldier’s questioning admitted that there wasn’t too much that a pony could do to control it. She did, however, suggest that her short sleep cycle was result of her having too much sugar in her diet. At that memory, Soldier bent her head down to the plate before her and bit into the toasted waffles covered in syrup, without breaking eye contact with the book. Perhaps her sugar intake would have to be slowed down…but nopony had yet ordered her to do it, and time not spend sleeping was time she could spend learning.
At the moment, that learning was bent towards her magic. She had, opened up next to her, a book on unicorn anatomy. She had read its text on the arrangement of the organs in the horn, the alveo, the cornumuscula, the thauma – the organs that controlled a unicorn’s ability to manipulate magic. She had also discovered a self-help book for young unicorn fillies and colts, and though the wording in the book was annoying simple, she had thought it might help.
But instead, Ace of Clover in the Sign of the Wooden Hoof remained closed to her. And worse, there was a repeated itching at her flanks that wouldn’t go away.
Soldier growled, a low vocalization of displeasure from the back of her throat. No matter how much she imagined the manipulation of her horn’s organs, no matter how much she ‘believed in herself’ as the foal’s guide put it, magic would not respond to her commands. She would, however, have been less frustrated had she not done it already, when she had saved Spike from the falling chandelier.
The itch came back. Soldier scratched at it with one hoof, then looked up at her horn, the tip of which she could just barely see. “You will obey my commands!” She demanded. “Obey! Obey!”
“You’re talking to yourself…” Spike’s voice ventured.
Soldier jumped, startled, and turned around, nearly knocking over her waffles in the process. She found herself looking at the baby dragon as he came down the stairs, rubbing his eyes, while one hand clutched a blue wool blanket. Soldier felt heat flushing through her body, especially her face, though she didn’t know why. “I was not…talking to myself,” she objected. “I was vocalizing displeasure.”
“Uh-huh,” Spike noted, yawning.
Soldier shifted. “Did I wake you?” She asked. She had learned that it was considered wrong to wake ponies (or dragons) in the midst of sleep unless there was an emergency.
“Nah, couldn’t sleep. I woke up realizing that it’s been a week since you got here…so that means that Pinkie’s going to be throwing you a ‘One Week in Ponyville Anniversary’ Party at some point today.” At Soldier’s stare, he yawned again, flopping down on the floor and wrapping himself in his blanket. “It was like that when me and Twilight came to town. Party the day we arrived, a week out, a month, then a year. Been annual since then.”
Soldier scratched the itch on her flank again. It was right above her femur, where Celestia’s false cutie mark of a constellation still remained. It kept coming back, but she forced herself past it even as she reflected.
The Pinkie Party had been…tolerable, in spite of the dread she had felt when it had first been mentioned to her. She had been re-introduced to Applejack, as well as formally introduced to Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, and Pinkie Pie herself, as well as to a number of Ponyville’s other residents. She had also been introduced to the concept of games. She had been awful at any game that required coordination or physical ability, such as Twister or pin-the-tail-on-the-pony, but conversely Soldier had found herself victorious more often than not when playing games centered on strategy and probability. She had in fact become the current Ponyville champion of a game called Quoridor, unseating Twilight Sparkle herself.
And there had been food to try. Cake and ice cream and jelly and doughnuts, as well as ‘healthier’ food like carrots and broccoli and celery and zucchini. Soldier had been careful not to overeat, however, lest she once again induce vomiting. But all in all, the Pinkie Party had been a positive experience. It had even ended with the ponies presenting her with a gift, made by Rarity but from all of them, a necklace with an empty clasp. Her optical crystal fit into the clasp, and it was worn around her neck. She could now carry it anywhere while keeping her hooves free.
Another group-hug had resulted upon her putting it on. She tolerated this one slightly more than the last. They were constricting…but not unpleasant. Pinkie Pie swore she saw Soldier smiling, but Soldier explained that Daleks had no concept of smiles.
Soldier returned her attentions to Spike. “I will participate in this party,” she declared, then returned her attentions to Ace of Clover in the Sign of the Wooden Hoof. “But I wish to be able to move my own Quoridor pieces and not depend on Twilight to do so. I must master my telekinesis!”
Spike had rolled onto his stomach and had his head in his hands. He glanced upward, at the repaired chandelier that had nearly been the end of both of them. “You used it before, on me.”
“I am aware. It is…frustrating!” She scratched at her flank again, turning to look at the itch, but finding nothing other than a few bits of fur standing on end from her own scratching. “My body is that of an adult pony. I should have fully developed magical organs. Yet they will not respond to my commands!”
“Well...stop trying to command them, then.” At Soldier’s confused look, Spike sat up a little straighter, though he kept his blanket wrapped around himself. “Look, when you saved me, we’re you thinking about organs and moving magic around and how precise everything had to be?”
“No,” Soldier responded after a rel. “You…were in danger. I wanted you to not be in danger.”
“Exactly,” Spike said, then yawned again. He once more flopped down onto the floor. “S’ like that. When I breath fire I don’t think about everything going on inside of me. I just do it.” He exhaled a small flicker of green flame by way of example.
Soldier contemplated that as she bit into her waffles again, finishing off the plate, then proceeding to lick it clean of crumbs and syrup. She had to do likewise for the sticky front of her face...another consequence of her lack of telekinetic ability, though a somewhat less frustrating one. “A Dalek is aware of everything that happens in its body. That ponies, or dragons, are not is...a hinderance.” She looked back to the book, glaring at it and squinting, trying to achieve her aims by not thinking…but how was she supposed to think and not think at the same time...? The book remained unopened. She looked back up to her horn. “OBEY!”
Spike watched in silence for approximately fifteen rels, before standing up. “Hang on, I got an idea,” he said, walking away. When he returned, he was holding a package of folded-up paper covered in writing. “Yesterday’s newspaper,” he said, as he began separating the sheets of paper and crumpling them into balls.
Once he had several ready, he lifted one up...and threw it at Soldier. It impacted her muzzle. The force was not nearly enough to hurt, but it did make her sniffle. She rubbed where she’d been hit, frowning. “Explain.”
“Well, you were in trouble, and I was in trouble, sooo...” He threw another paper ball, hitting her on the cheek.
“This will not work.” The next ball hit her on the brow, which only caused her frown to deepen, but nothing else. “There is no danger.”
“Hmm...good point. Hang on.”
Spike wandered off again, upstairs and into Twilight’s kitchenette. Soldier heard the faucet turn on and water running, but Spike did not return for several minutes. So she turned once more to the book, demanding it obey her, trying to access the part of her mind that controlled her magic and make the book open before her even as she tried to ignore the itch…and it was then that a wisp of green flame traveled down the stairs and appeared directly over Soldier. She had just enough time to wonder at what Spike had sent her when the flame let out a snap-pop and realized itself into an inflated, red balloon of some variety, the sort she had seen at the Pinkie Party filled with helium so as to make them lighter than air.
Only, this balloon was not filled with helium and was emphatically not lighter than air. It fell, touched the tip of her horn, stretched, and popped open, spilling its contents – water – all over Soldier’s face.
”I am under attack!” Soldier called out in shock, standing and backing away from where she was, running her hooves over her face. No sooner had she moved then another balloon appeared directly over her head. She was faster at reacting this time, jumping out of the way, but even after a week she was somewhat unsure on her hooves, and so tripped and fell over at roughly the same speed that the balloon dropped. As a result, when it broke apart on the floor, her face was still level with it. Water went straight into her wide eyes.
Daleks had no concept of taste. Their senses of smell and touch were atrophied practically to the point of uselessness, and hearing was largely taken care of by their Mark-III travel machines. The principle way in which a Dalek tended to perceive the world was through sight.
As a result, a Dalek with its – or in this case, her – vision impaired, tended to panic.
“My vision is impaired! Emergency! Emergency!” Soldier called out as she scrabbled to a sitting position, rubbing desperately at her eyes. “My vision is imp – ”
There was a snap-pop again. Soldier glanced up through water-logged eyes to see a green balloon this time. And she didn’t think, she just didn’t want the water in her face again…a thrum went up Soldier’s horn, and a cobalt blue effervescence grabbed the water balloon as it began to fall. A brand new sensation shot through Soldier’s skull, a feeling not unlike touch, and yet at the same time somehow completely different.
The balloon’s descent had been stopped just a few centimeters from Soldier’s face. She stared at it for several rels, floating there in the air. Tentatively, Soldier reached up a hoot and gently prodded at the floating balloon, wincing as she did, but the balloon did not fall, nor did it burst. Still wincing, and leaning away from the balloon in case the worst should happen, she willed it to move away from her. It gradually did so, floating until it was hovering before her at eye level, but half a meter away.
The Dalek in Soldier was poking and prodding at the new sensation within her mind. She was turning her intellect on it, trying to categorize what was happening, understand it, probe its limitations, what she could do. It tried to understand what was happening. But the pony part of her, instead, had her glance over at Ace of Clover in the Sign of the Wooden Hoof. She willed the balloon to float to and land on the floor, then moved the new sensation, the new feeling in her mind, over to the book. The blue glow around the balloon disappeared, and the book took it up instead. With a slight nod of her head, Soldier brought it over to her…and opened the book. Then she turned a page…and another…and another…it was a new enough experience that both Dalek and pony part of her were equally focused on her own ability, even able to ignore the still-itchy flank.
Spike appeared, climbing to the bottom of the stairs. “Ha! Knew that would work!” He said. “See, you were right, you’re not a little filly still developing magic. Same reason why all your muscles work just like an adult pony’s! So you just needed something to jump-start – ”
The balloon Soldier had set down once more glowed blue, and went flying straight at the dragon. He had just enough time to yelp in surprise when the balloon hit him and burst apart, soaking him thoroughly. “Hey!” he exclaimed.
Soldier held the book closer to her muzzle, concealing her face. Daleks had no concept of smiles. And even if this particular Dalek had such a concept, the smile would have been wiped from her face when there was a lavender flash-pop and the appearance of a very annoyed, very tired-looking alicorn. “What are you two doing?!” Twilight demanded, wings spread wide. “Water balloons? In a library? At – oh, Soldier, you can use magic now, good, I’m happy for you – at six in the morning?!”
Soldier dropped the book held in her glow and stood up straight. “I apologize! I am ready to receive punishment!”
“Good! You and Spike clean up this mess!”
“I obey!”
“I’m going back to bed! Ughhh…” Twilight trotted off rather than teleporting, head low and muttering to herself.
Soldier’s newfound magic at least made the task easier.
---
Hours later, Soldier found herself out in Ponyville, for the second time in her life willingly approaching something that even a week earlier would have been unthinkable for any Dalek to venture near without orders, especially one who did not possess a functional weapon: the TARDIS of the Doctor.
But then again, she had been invited. The Doctor – after a very long explanation about how his Ninth/Tenth regeneration (the odd terminology had required an explanation of its own) had been mistaken about the extinction of the Daleks – had invited Soldier to return to the TARDIS the following week. He had promised her safety. Soldier hadn’t particularly believed him, but Minuette had also promised her safety, and Soldier did believe her.
The Doctor and Minuette did have an actual house in Ponyville, but it was mostly bare inside, the house serving only as a convenient camouflage. The home’s back yard was instead where Soldier went, where Soldier found the blue box, the TARDIS, standing tall, fitting in to its surroundings about as well as Soldier did. Which was to say, poorly, but nopony seemed to comment on it.
The door to the TARDIS swung open as Soldier approached it, and Soldier couldn’t stop herself from freezing as the Doctor stuck his head out to look at her. If anything, his own reaction was the same. Soldier looked nothing like a Dalek, and the Doctor looked nothing like a Time Lord, but the two knew what each other were. Countless eons of instinct did not go away immediately for either of them, certainly not in a mere week.
“Hello, D…Soldier,” the Doctor said at length. He glanced down at her legs. Soldier did likewise, and saw that she had one of them raised, as though she were considering running. If the spike of adrenaline in her body was any indication, she had been. The Dalek part of her, anyway. The pony part of her was, if anything, trying to work out if she could use her own telekinesis to push herself forward.
Soldier shook her head, lowering her hoof and looking back to the Doctor. “You requested my presence,” she said. “I have come, Doctor.”
The Doctor looked back up. “Requested your presence?” he echoed, stepping in to the TARDIS, but holding the door open, waving a hoof, indicating Soldier should enter. She did. “Very imperious sounding. I think I kind of like it, actually.”
“Oh, no, now I’ll have this to deal with,” Minuette said. She had been standing at the TARDIS’ controls, but as Soldier entered she left them and came over, looking the Dalek-turned-pony over for several rels, then smiling. “You discovered magic! Good for you. Catch.” Her own telekinesis had grabbed something small off of the console and tossed it at Soldier.
Soldier’s own telekinesis wasn’t quite fast enough to grab the object immediately; it hit her muzzle, though without much force to hurt. She did, however, react quickly, catching the object as it fell in her telekinetic grasp – the Dalek part of her fighting back the pony part of her for wanting to perform some kind of elated physical reaction to her ability to do so. Hefting it up, Soldier found herself looking at what strongly resembled a Dalek eye stalk, although much shorter, only fifteen centimeters in length, and with several small buttons across its surface. The ‘eye’ portion had a crystal embedded into it.
In short, it looked remarkably like the sonic probe she had constructed. Soldier glanced down at her own neck, confirming that her own optical crystal was still in its necklace, then back to the sonic device. “Synthesized?” she asked, staring at the crystal, remembering that all the other crystals she had tried to use were flawed.
“No, actually,” the Doctor said as he came up to Minuette. “Got it from a quick trip to the Crystal Empire. Gemstones and crystals form much easier in this reality overall, but getting high-quality ones is still about as hard. Still, the Crystal Empire has them, in case you ever need to replace that.” He pointed a hoof at the sonic probe.
Soldier eyed the sonic, flicking a few buttons on it. To her surprise, a psychic interface came up – readouts and numbers that only the holder of the sonic could see or interpret. “It is more advanced than the one I constructed,” she noted, scrolling through the interface, exploring the sonic probe’s capabilities, or starting to. The itch on her flank that had been annoying her all day chose that moment to come back, and she had to spend a few rels scratching first.
“Well, I had more time than you did. And I did break the one you made,” the Doctor said. “Seems fair – ”
“You have included an embedded destruct code deep in the probe’s programming. Two embedded destruct codes. A psychic one delivered via touch and an audio one set off when a key phrase is stated in the proper inflection.” Soldier squinted slightly as she made some corrections. It wasn’t easy, but she was able to break past the Doctor’s firewalls after several minutes. “I have disabled them.”
She looked up, and saw Minuette jabbing the Doctor repeatedly in the ribs, looking cross with him, while he fended her off. “Old habits!” He said in his defense. “I bet Soldier doesn’t even mind!”
“I do not,” Soldier responded truthfully.
Minuette stopped jabbing at the Doctor. “Oh, fine,” she intoned. She looked back to Soldier. “That’s a gift. The Doctor and I thought it might make adapting to everything just a little easier. Daleks are so used to relying on sensors and relayed information and the Dalek pathweb, after all.”
“Doesn’t do magic very well,” the Doctor added. “Or actually at all. That one you’re still going to have to figure out on your own.”
Soldier considered the sonic probe a few rels more, before deactivating its psychic interface. “I intend to do so,” she said. The pony part of her nudged her a little. “I…am finding the exploration of this world…a positive experience. It is…”
“…Enjoyable?” The Doctor ventured after several rels of Soldier looking for the right word.
“Daleks have no concept of joy,” she countered.
“Right…” the Doctor looked away, back to the TARDIS’ command console, then to Soldier. “By the way, the sonic was more her idea than mine, even if I built it…but I do want to apologize for what happened last week, and I had a thought about that. Minuette’ll give us a lift…if you’re willing?”
Soldier looked between the Doctor and Minuette, mind working fast. If Minuette was needed then that meant that the TARDIS’ Matrix would be used…which meant either journey through time…or a journey to another reality. Both the Dalek and the pony wanted to back up a step at that thought, and she did. “I do not care that the Dalek race survives,” she said, and she could hear the touch of panic in her voice. “I do not want to be a Dalek in my original reality. I want to be a Dalek in this one. I am the first Dalek. I want to define myself!” The itch on her flank had returned full force in her nervousness, but she resisted the urge to scratch it.
Minuette advanced a step. “Soldier, we wouldn’t very well give you a shiny new sonic screwdriver if we were planning on turning you back over to the Daleks.”
“Doctor’s word,” the Doctor said, putting a hoof to his chest. “We’re only going back to our reality for a few minutes. Won’t even need to change bodies, we won’t be there long enough to start breaking down. You can stay a pony. It’s just…” the Doctor considered, glancing over Soldier, then to Minuette, who nodded at him. “I want it to be a surprise…but I also want to, by way of apology, show you something that no Dalek has really ever seen before. Something that’s, in a way, new.”
Two of Soldier’s hooves were raised, ready to back her up another step, but she hesitated at the Doctor’s words, considering what he was offering. “Very well,” she said at length. The itch returned; she glanced back at her flanks and used her telekinesis at rub at them, see if it would go away. It did not. She looked back to the Doctor. “I will accompany you.”
The Doctor smiled. “You’ll like this. I know,” he added quickly with a raised hoof before Soldier could speak. “Daleks do not like anything. But I think you’ll make an exception for this.”
---
Minuette nuzzled the Doctor for a few rels, then locked her lips with his own for several more rels before leaning up and whispering something into his ear. Then Minuette had abandoned her body – she lit up her horn and enveloped the TARDIS’ Matrix in golden light that seemed to flow out from her, eventually the light suffusing Minuette’s body entirely and breaking it apart into motes of energy that flowed into the command console, leaving nothing behind. But as soon as it was done, the Matrix lit up, the crystals within beginning to move up and down at a rate of two rels per cycle, while the sand in the hourglass overhead began to flow upwards.
The Doctor began flipping switches and pulling levers, trotting around it rapidly – the Type-40 TARDIS was designed for a crew of six, after all. In spite of herself, Soldier came over to the command console, glancing it over. The Dalek in her recognized the layout instantly, and the pony part of her noticed the Doctor struggling to do everything by himself. Without waiting, she began helping him align the Matrix and angle the TARDIS’ spatial-temporal fields. The Doctor hesitated for a moment at the sight, before bursting out laughing and getting back to work.
The long, high-pitched drone started as spatial-temporal phasing began. The entire TARDIS shook and twisted, its flight still unstable thanks to operating with only a third of the crew it needed – though the fact that the Doctor wouldn’t let her take the parking brake off didn’t help. She also paused at the chameleon circuit, examining it. “This is broken,” she noted.
“No, it works just fine,” the Doctor countered.
“In its current state it will scan where it is about to land within a fifty-mile radius, identify the most innocuous and fitting appearance for the time period and location, and then appear as a wooden police box with windows that are too small and a door that opens the wrong way.”
“Yes, which is how we like it, leave it alone. Perception filter works if we need it, but I almost never do.”
Soldier considered the many, many, many times that a functioning chameleon circuit or active perception filter would have been of aid to the Doctor. And that only covered up to his ninth regeneration. Still, it was his TARDIS, and this was the Doctor. As much as Soldier hated to think it, the Doctor knew what he was doing.
After a particularly violent pitch in the TARDIS that overwhelmed its artificial gravity, nearly sending both the Doctor and Soldier flying towards one of the vehicle’s walls, the long whine at last quieted and settled down. The Doctor immediately retrieved his sonic probe from the command console and ran it over himself. Soldier grabbed her own and did likewise, the Dalek in her once more stopping the pony part of her from reacting with elation at the ability.
“The film of the pony reality will protect our atoms for ten minutes,” Soldier announced as she read the psychic interface, then winced and scratched at her flank again. Neither Dalek nor pony part of her knew why she was feeling so itchy today, why it kept coming back.
“And we’ve got about half an hour of useful time after that before the mutation of pony subatomic particles to local ones starts to seriously affect us,” the Doctor confirmed. “More than enough time. C’mon.”
The Doctor proceeded over to the TARDIS’ doors, opening them. Coming up to the door and trotting out, Soldier found that the TARDIS had deposited on a plateau high up on the slopes of a red-rocked mountain covered with snow. The air was clear, however, offering an unimpeded glimpse of the landscape.
Down the mountain’s slope the snow gave way to trees with blue and violet leaves, coniferous near the snow, before those as well gave way to a thick, misty jungle in the lowlands. The jungle was broken by the occasional outcropping of tall red rock and a wide, deep watered lake, while in the far west the jungle gradually gave way to a savannah of violet grass. To the north, meanwhile, the rivers of the jungle slowed and the forest transformed into vast marsh, neither fully pelagic nor fully terrestrial, covered in brightly colored grasses, trees, and flowers.
It was bright, colorful world. Soldier’s eyes, however, found themselves drawn up to the pale blue sky. She saw the vague outline of two moons against one horizon, and it was the Dalek part of her that caused her to sharply inhale when she realized she recognized them. “Flidor,” she breathed, stepping up to the edge of the plateau, mouth hanging open. “Omega Mysterium…” Glancing to the other edge of the horizon, Soldier saw two bright, burning suns. She knew them too.
She felt a presence beside her, and saw that the Doctor had come up alongside her. “Skaro,” she said. “This is my homeworld. You’ve brought me to Skaro…to Skaro’s past.”
The Doctor nodded. “To a few minutes of it, anyway, looped them ‘round so that the Dalek Time Controller wouldn’t notice. Well…we’ll be gone before it notices.” A slight smile was on his face. “This is the continent of…you know, I don’t think anyone ever named it. Let’s call it Panskaro. We’re on the part that’ll eventually become Dalazar, when the Ocean of Ooze rises up and floods the midlands, separating it from Davius.” He pointed down at the jungle and the deep-water lake. “That will one day be called – ”
“The Lake of Mutations,” Soldier said, staring down at it, desperately wishing the itch in her flank would go away. “But now it is Drammankin Lake. We are on the Drammankin mountains…” Her eyes widened, and she pointed to the shores of the lake. “Kaalann will be built there, the city of the Daleks. And before…Kaled civilization will become centered here.”
“Already is,” the Doctor said, brushing aside some of the snow on the mountains before settling down on the rock beneath it. He shivered a little. “Should have brought my scarf…anyway, the Kaleds are down there, in the jungle, around the lake. They’ve mastered the wheel and the flame. Pottery is starting. Some of them are starting to notice that if you break apart and heat rocks the right way, you can separate out the metals inside.” He nodded towards the distant horizon, the northwest. “The Thals are evolving up in Davius, too. They’ve already built a few small cities, started working soft metals. The Kaleds will lag behind the Thals for awhile.”
Soldier brushed aside snow as the Doctor had, settling down as well. The cold was unpleasant, but she couldn’t take her eyes from what she was looking at. Everywhere she looked, she saw something new, and yet somehow familiar. Like she was looking at an echo. The cold, at least, seemed to counteract the itch that still refused to leave. “Why?”
The Doctor glanced at her, then looked back down. “If I brought a Dalek here,” he said, “a proper Dalek, that is, still in its tank…what would it do? Assuming it could not leave Skaro on its own.”
Soldier at last looked to the Doctor. “It would…analyze. Determine the time period. Wait for night to measure the position of the stars for the most accurate judgment of time. Then it would go to the mountains behind us, burn a hole in the rocks, bury itself and enter hibernation. It would not wake until enough time had passed for the Dalek Empire to exist in an advanced enough state that we had discovered time travel. It could not risk damaging the Dalek timeline.”
The Doctor nodded. “Exactly. One look to determine where it was, then off it goes.” He was silent, still watching Soldier even as Soldier looked at Skaro. “Now compare to what you’re doing.”
Soldier paused a rel. “I am…” she ventured, but stopped. She looked back to Skaro. “I…you will not leave me here. So I have…time. To…to look.”
“So would a Dalek. But it wouldn’t. But you would…you are.” He looked back to landscape. “You’re looking at Skaro in a way that no Dalek ever has or ever would. You’re seeing something that any Dalek would be blind to even though it’s right in front of it. There was – or I suppose at the moment, there will be – an Earth author and linguist. Built a whole world in his mind, languages, cultures, societies…then wrote it down for everyone else to read. And in his greatest work he said that ‘nothing is evil in the beginning.’ Skaro is dangerous, even now…but I have to admit, in this moment in time, and even knowing what’s going to happen here one day…”
“It is…” Soldier felt her Dalek part turning to her pony one to aid. It was glad to provide the word, because it agreed with the Dalek on this, on the vista that it saw. “Beautiful. Skaro was beautiful once.”
“It will be for a long time. We’re tens of thousands of years out from the Neutronic War.”
Soldier nodded slowly. Neither the Doctor nor Soldier spoke for a time after that, as Soldier instead focused on taking everything in, burning it into her mind, on putting the eidetic memory of a Dalek to use in ensuring that she would never forget this image of Skaro that no other Dalek would ever truly see.
---
They eventually had to leave, returning to the pony reality, and Minuette reconstituted herself from the Matrix. The second thing the TARDIS’ pony body did after doing so (the first being embracing the Doctor) was look Soldier over carefully, appropriating the Doctor’s own sonic probe to aid her. “Good,” she said, as Soldier examined herself as well, not sure as to the issue. Minuette smiled. “I do trust Celestia to know what she’s doing, but just wanted to make sure that everything is in one piece after a jaunt back to our native reality. And they are, your atoms are fine. No visit to our transmuter needed.”
Soldier was pleased to hear that she was not at risk of dissolving at the subatomic level, a fact which her own new sonic provided. “That is good to hear,” she said.
“Right,” Minuette said, leaning back and setting aside the Doctor’s sonic probe. “Now, if we timed things right, and I always do – ”
“You most certainly do not,” the Doctor objected.
“ – then there should be plenty of time before your one-week-in-Ponyville party.” She put a hoof to her mouth. “Or…well, ten minutes. Still, five minutes’ trot to the library from here, so no rush.”
Soldier stiffened. The TARDIS had left her with very little time indeed, though she was right that she wasn’t in any serious danger of running late. “I must leave,” she said, turning and heading towards the TARDIS’ doors. She paused at them, however, and looked back to the Doctor and Minuette. “I…overheard your discussions seven days ago. You intend to once more explore time and space. The time and space of our reality.”
The Doctor had returned to Minuette’s side. He had been about the nuzzle her, but froze. “Yes…” he ventured at length. “A bit. Easing ourselves back in. I made sure that it was protected when I left, so there’s no need to rush back. No crisis for a change. And we do plan on coming back here often.”
“Why?” Minuette asked, though she was smiling broadly. She would already know the answer, of course.
Soldier decided to delay it anyway. “Your transmuter. The device you used to adapt yourself between realities. What are its specifications? Its settings?”
“If it were to be used on you, would you have to become a Dalek mutant again?” Minuette asked, the real question that Soldier had been driving towards. Soldier nodded, and Minuette shook her head. “Making you a Dalek again would be easiest. Slightly less easy, but by no means hard, would be turning you into a Kaled. The basic information is still in your genetic structure in our reality. Two arms, two legs, eyes, nose, mouth…same sort of range of experience that you have as a pony. Bit taller is all.”
“Oh no,” the Doctor intoned. “Oh no, no, no, I see where this is going.”
Minuette turned to look at the Doctor. “All those strays over the years you bring inside of me, I can’t pick up one?” She asked, then glanced back to Soldier. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
Soldier glanced down. Was it? She was still getting used to being a pony…and very much wanted to continue to. There was an entire new world to experience already, so much to see and do and taste and learn…but at the same time, it would not be enough for the Dalek part of her. The Dalek was a genius that could absorb and process information so fast. And the pony part of her was noticing how the Dalek part of her felt about learning, growing, changing…an was encouraging it. Because it was making Soldier…something. Something the pony part of her liked.
It wasn’t like Soldier wanted to leave Equestria, not on a permanent basis. Just…learn more about the reality she had left behind, was all, even as she also learned about the one she called home.
“I am,” Soldier said. The itch at her flank would still not go away, but Soldier had resolved to ignore it as best she could. “Sometimes. Not for some time. But yes. I would become one of the Doctor’s companions.”
Minuette giggled with glee, clapping her hooves together. The Doctor, meanwhile, only ran a hoof through his mane, eyes wide. “Oh, this will be a long conversation with Jenny…”
Soldier did not know who either were. “I must leave now,” Soldier said. “Daleks are never late…”
She opened the TARDIS’ door, and found herself looking at a darkening evening sky and felt a cool night breeze…and also found herself looking at a large, white pony with both long, broad wings and a tall horn, smiling at Soldier.
Celestia trotted through the streets of Ponyville easily, like she was a native of the town, as natural for her to be here as anywhere else. There were golden-armored guard ponies in her attendance, but they kept a respectful distance, letting the Princess of Equestria move at her own pace without feeling crowded.
Walking next to the alicorn that was more than twice her height, however, left Soldier feeling somewhat crowded herself. She felt the weight of her new sonic probe, carried in her mouth, acutely.
“There is no need to worry, Soldier,” Celestia said as the two walked. “Or hurry. I have sent word ahead to Pinkie Pie that I wished to speak with you before the party, and that we may be late. The party may start without its guest of honor, but it won’t leave her behind.”
“Acknowledged, Princess,” Soldier responded, after removing the sonic from her mouth and letting it float in her telekinesis. Soldier did take a moment to glance at it, the pony part of her still in awe of her own magical ability.
Celestia chuckled a little. “My former student has told me much of what happened over this past week. Already you are not the Dalek that I met on the road to Ponyville any longer.” She stopped her trot, looking at Soldier directly. “How do you feel about that?”
Soldier stared back at Celestia as she stopped her own trot, considering. She felt the itch in her flank flare up again, but ignored it beyond a slight twitch. “I…think I am…changing. And…and that is not as…as frightening as it once was to me. To any Dalek.”
Celestia’s smile didn’t waver for a moment. “Change is always frightening, Soldier. Daleks are not unique in fearing it or fighting against it…though from what I have learned of your people, from Twilight, from the Doctor, you certainly fight harder than most.”
Soldier looked down. “Yes.”
“You have also learned that the Doctor can travel between realities…” Celestia’s smile finally wavered at that, and she glanced back at the way they had come. “I promise you, Soldier, I did not know that when we first met. I had not asked the Doctor enough about his past…that is my error. I am sorry.”
“I do not wish to return…you offered me life as a pony, or as quick a death as you could manage. Had I returned to my own reality a week ago, it would only have been to die.” Soldier stood up straighter. “It was irrelevant. And now you do know. If you make the Doctor promise to aid you if another from our reality comes through, he will. The Doctor is known to keep his word.”
Celestia looked back to Soldier. “I have already done so. I also discussed at length his original promise to me, that he would bring no harm to any of my little ponies.” She reached out, placing a hoof gently on Soldier’s withers. “That included you from the moment you agreed to change. I must apologize for the part my negligence played in that as well.” Her smile returned. “Though…I understand that you have taken the first steps to patching things up between yourselves.” The smile widened. “And that you have struck up a rapport with Spike. Something about both of you being the only ones of your kind in town.”
“Correct,” Soldier admitted after a moment.
“You took my advice after all, then. You made friends, or have started to.”
Soldier opened her mouth to begin a familiar litany, but paused. She felt the pony part of her acutely. “I…did. Yes.”
Celestia chuckled again, an altogether pleasant sound as she began walking again, Soldier following. They continued in silence until they were at the very doors of the library, but then Celestia paused once more. “There is one more thing, Soldier,” she said, though the smile did not leave her face. “But first…a question. I asked you, when we first met, if there was anything you loved to do, anything that made you happy. You told me that Daleks have no need for happiness…but do you still feel that is the case? Or rather, do you feel that there is no need for happiness in your life?”
The itch returned once more. This time, Soldier couldn’t keep herself from scratching at it. “I…do not know that it is necessary,” she said.
“But…? Have you found something that makes you happy?”
Soldier considered what had transpired since she had arrived in Equestria, and even before. The feel of sunlight for the first time. Teaching herself to walk. Her discovery of her sense of taste and exploring its limits. Reading books with the aid of Spike, and learning and adapting what she had already known to building her first sonic probe. Discovering games at her first Pinkie Party. This morning, discovering how to access her magic…and what the Doctor had shown her. Skaro’s past, a moment in time when what was perhaps the most feared planet in her reality was beautiful, and peaceful. And then she thought of the future, of how much more she still had to discover and learn…
“Yes,” Soldier said. The pony part of her was right by her, helping the Dalek along, even as she again scratched at her flank. “I…I have discovered that…that discovery is pleasing. Learning new things. Uncovering new information.”
Celestia nodded. “I thought as much…I am afraid I must apologize once more, Soldier. The false cutie mark I gave you, the illusion to help you blend in…” she waved a hoof at Soldier’s flanks. “It served its purpose, but I also now realize that it hid from you what many ponies would describe as among the happiest single moments of their lives. I can only hope that this moment will serve well as a substitute.”
Soldier’s head tilted to the side in confusion. In response, Celestia’s horn glowed a moment, and a similar flash occurred behind Soldier, at her flanks. She looked to where the false cutie mark had been…and found something else: A scroll, closed up tight, its contents just waiting to be read, wrapped in blue flames – flames that, aside from the color, looked very similar to the flames that Spike used to send and receive messages to and from ponies. To pass information along, to learn more.
Soldier’s eyes widened. The Dalek in her contemplated all the possibilities that the cutie mark represented, its meaning, its purpose. The pony in her, while the Dalek was busy, took over, had her spinning in place as she tried to get a closer look at her flanks, had her breath quicken and sent her heart racing.
Celestia slowly trotted up to the library’s door, placing a hoof on it. “It seems we have more to celebrate today than merely the week anniversary of your arrival,” she said as she opened the door. The light from inside the library spilled out, and the ponies – and dragon – within all stopped what they were doing and looked out. They noticed her new cutie mark, and though some of them were confused – having not been fully informed of the deception – Twilight Sparkle and Spike both looked to each other, Twilight bumping Spike’s outstretched fist.
“C’mon in,” Spike called, as Celestia held the door open for Soldier. “We were waiting for you!”
