> Human After All
>  by Nicknack
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hoof after hoof, I ran through the dark humidity of the Everfree Forest. On any other day, I would’ve loved to stop and take in the sights: fronds as big as bedsheets, drooping vines as long and sturdy as ropes, and—my favorite—the cool little bioluminescent mushrooms that glowed blue in the dark nooks and crannies beneath tree roots.

All of it blurred past me that afternoon. I was running late. I hated running late.

It was kind of ironic, since I was a graduate student in Canterlot University’s archaeology program. My whole field dealt with stuff that’d happened in the distant past. The fact that I could be late to anything I was researching always boggled my mind.

To be fair, that day—the last Thursday in October—I wasn’t late for some sort of archaeological dig, or exploring the ruins in the Everfree. Those were all about ten miles south of me; my current route through the underbrush led me towards a piece of living history, somebody who lived deep in the forest.

And I was late.

The ground beneath my hooves broke up into uneven roots and rocks, so I slowed down. Painstakingly, I cantered over the uneven path, which only grew rockier as I drew nearer to my destination. Luckily, the rocks got smoother and flatter as they replaced the plants of the forest; after a certain point, I could run on them like they were one of Canterlot’s less-maintained cobblestone streets.

Before I sped up to an all-out gallop again, I checked my saddlebag for the fiftieth time. I still had my cargo: a small, heavy chunk of moissanite. Two weeks ago, I’d started with just the name—“sounds like poison-ite”—before I learned it was a stupidly rare mineral. It’d taken me a trip to one of the mining cities far to the north, but I did get it.

Traveling wasn’t exactly frowned upon in my field. Student rates for trains and airships were cheap, so as long as I kept up with my current graduate thesis—studying ruins of a society that used to live in the Everfree—I could pretty much go wherever I wanted.

That afternoon, my trek ended when I reached a familiar cave. The inside smelled wet and earthy, and it would’ve been pitch black after fifty feet if I hadn’t brought my torchstone along. With a tiny effort of magic, the smooth, walnut-sized crystal glowed like a bonfire; after that, I only had to levitate it behind my head.

I walked down the natural slope of the cave’s main chamber. It went on for about three hundred feet, and little pools of water gave the whole place a cheese-like appearance. Like every time I passed them, I noted how my torchstone didn’t show their bottoms. If they all connected to a massive underground lake, that would have been interesting; however, it definitely wouldn’t be the strangest thing below the surface of the Everfree.

At the bottom of the slanty pool room, I ducked into a short hole in a wall. It was only two and a half feet tall, but it quickly opened up into a room whose rock walls were oddly smooth.

Or at least, they would have been oddly smooth had they’d been made of natural rock.

I put my torchstone away once I exited the small tunnel. For a moment, everything went utterly black—the sort of darkness that could only be found deep below the earth.

Then, a tight grid of bright yellow squares illuminated both me and the floor around me. I looked up, trying to find the source of the lights; like every time, I couldn’t find it before the room went dark again.

A dead, female voice cut through the silence and spoke to me in an ancient language. I caught my name—Lyra—near the very beginning, but everything after it sounded like gibberish. My best guess was that it was a pre-recorded greeting; given the lack of tone, it definitely felt like a machine was talking to me.

After the square lights and rectangular greeting, a hexagon of white lines appeared in the rock wall of the fake cave. Two halves slid away from each other to form a blindingly bright hole; after blinking away some reflexive eye watering, I walked forward and stepped through the entrance to my friend’s home.

For an entrance, the first room was fairly harsh. Bright light blinded me, the place smelled like ozone, and the floor itself was just a metal catwalk. The domed ceiling above me meant I was at the very top of a huge, white silo; however, calling it a “huge silo” was like calling a tornado a “big breeze”. I’d seen farm silos before, and none of those went down for miles on either side of a very narrow catwalk.

I blinked to make sure my eyes were adjusted to the oppressive whiteness, and then I started walking forward. At the end of the catwalk was a fairly thin glass tube, about five feet in diameter. When I got close enough to it, another hexagon appeared in the crystal-clear glass; after the trapezoidal doors split apart, a wafer of golden light materialized.

Before I stood on it, I took a deep breath—like always. It’s light, my instincts balked; even though I’d seen weirder things done with magic, an elevator platform made entirely out of energized light was a little harder to trust than something I’d been born with. With a shake of my head, I remembered all the times before that it’d supported my weight and stepped on to its strange, translucent sturdiness.

The disc began its descent as soon as the doors behind me hissed closed. Since the elevator shaft was a huge glass tube, I saw metal support beams and other catwalks rise past me. It gave an immense sense of height to the tube I was in, which clenched my gut as I realized now I was trapped on top of a disc of light, and if the power went out… 

I tried not to think about it.

The music helped with that. Like the light squares at the entrance, I couldn’t tell where it came from. I’d endured music lessons when I was younger, since my parents thought a golden harp on my butt meant “musician”; from what I remembered, the soft, string music sounded like it was written with a vocalist in mind. I couldn’t sing, so I hummed along and bobbed my head as the disc went further and further down.

During my little musical interlude, the elevator passed into a more solid portion of the underground facility my friend lived in. The glass around me turned to a familiar white metal—the whole place was built out of it—and every four seconds, I passed through a ring of lights set into the tube.

Eighteen rings later, with a hiss and a hexagon, the elevator let me off at my destination. I could tell, since I recognized the giant, black symbols painted on the wall nearby. Ancient writings, I mused, but as I stepped into the black floor of a huge, white-metal hallway, something about that definition didn’t seem right.

The whole place was quiet and empty—the music stuck to the elevator—so I didn’t feel bad as I galloped through it. Even though I knew the right directions, it was still a far way to my destination; it’d go faster if I ran, and I was running late.

I ran past dozens of hexagonal doors; set into the wall above each of them was a long, black sign. Most of them were dark and dead, but the few that weren’t had glowing, bright red letters set into their face. I’d asked about the signs once; from what I’d learned, they explained what was in the room inside, and red meant “critical”.

One time, I’d tried to enter one of the dead-signed doors. It was apparently a tricky process, and by the time I’d forced my way inside—with due diligence to archaeological practices, of course—my friend had been inside, waiting for me. After the shock wore off, we had a long, awkward conversation about “boundaries for my own safety”.

It was easiest just to stay in the parts of the facility I’d been specifically given access to. Technically, it was my friend’s home, even if it was a huge, subterranean home where he lived alone and never really entertained guests.

Finally, I got to the door beneath amber letters that spelled out “CSMF Maintenance Control Room”—roughly translated, anyway. That’d been my first time in the facility, when I’d had a quick “tour” of the place. In hindsight, it’d been mostly directions about which intersections to turn in, but it was functional and technically inviting, which suited the tour guide splendidly. 

The door opened for me, and I walked into a warm, dim room that was only lit up accidentally from glowing computer screens at the far end. From what I’d had explained to me, they were similar to the analytical machines I’d seen in Canterlot University—just smaller and faster.

To my left and right, shelf-like desks lined the walls. They made a wide, central aisle that led to the back of the room. Compared to the dead, black screens on the sides of the room, the six glowing rectangles in front of me looked like a beacon of life—especially given the pictures and symbols that flashed across them at breakneck pace.

From the chair in front of them, a distant, yet slightly amused voice spoke: “You’re late.”

“I…” Earlier that day, my planned lunch had things growing on it; since I wasn’t a biology major, I had to stop at a restaurant quickly before heading into the forest. Time went by quickly underground; if I skipped lunch, odds were good I’d be hungry for the whole afternoon and evening. I didn’t know if there even was any pony-suitable food down there; still, my only response for tardiness was a quick, “Sorry, Jesse.”

He chuckled blankly. “I’ve told you seventeen times now, don’t worry if you’re late by a matter of minutes or hours. Days, I might worry about, but only slightly. You’re reliable enough to get here eventually.”

Jesse stated the whole thing in a detached monotone that made me wonder about the differences between us. On top of everything else, there was a language barrier between us—he’d only started speaking to me out loud after I brought him an Equestrian language textbook. If he’d been a pony, I would’ve thought he was cold; with Jesse, I compared him to the metallic greeting that I received up on the surface.

Maybe that was just how humans talked.

I grinned at the back of his throne-like swivel chair; once again, I felt the huge, surreal sense of where I was and who I was speaking to. In my field, discovering an ancient city would be huge news; discovering an ancient city that was inhabited would be legendary.

Of course, I could never put anything on paper. My superiors at Canterlot University were pretty easygoing, but they’d need evidence if I came back with stories of Jesse and his home. In the nine months we’d known each other, Jesse had been stringent about not letting me leave with anything physical; at first, he’d been weird about me taking notes.

So really, all I could do was study Jesse and his lost civilization for my own interests. The ambitious side of me screamed at the notion—I’d never get anywhere in my field if I didn’t put out research papers about my studies—but the student inside me told my ambition to shut up. The whole reason I was an archaeologist was because I loved history; not everything I learned had to go somewhere.

Back in the maintenance room, I probed for information. “So, what are you up to?”

Jesse’s arm rose up over the back of his chair, and he pointed a finger at the screens one by one. “Facility energy output monitor, manufacturing sub-facility controls, deep mining status, security cameras, point defense system—offline, since I’ve got a little green guest with me—and research probe findings. So… the usual.”

I blinked a few times. “Uh… yeah, I never leave home without my… probe… defense… thing.” Jesse stayed silent, so I walked over to him. On the way, I whipped out my notepad and began taking notes. “But… mining? Why do you need ten-point-three pounds of moissanite if you’re already mining?”

“Sharp…” I thought I imagined tinge of warmth in his voice. “But I’m mining far below where moissanite forms. I suppose I could just manufacture silicon carbide in a laboratory. But I’d have to recalibrate the thermocouples, and it was hard enough to get them set up for all the diamonds I needed…” He scoffed and swept his hand around, gesturing to the half-dozen empty chairs sitting at unused desks. “This facility was never designed to be ran by one man alone.”

My ears drooped at the reminder. Jesse was always working, which just made me all the sadder at how his entire home—he always called it a facility—seemed like it was coming apart at the seams. Early on, I’d offered to help with fixing things; that had been one of the few times I’d seen Jesse smile. Then, he’d said no.

“You did bring it, right?” He cut through my idle musings. “The moissanite?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “You were right, it was a rare mineral, but… I found it. Eventually.”

“Eventually?”

It was tricky to balance the truth with my desire to not make a big deal out of it. It had been difficult, but if I said that, I might not get any more jobs to help. “I had to go a few towns over before anyone had even heard of moissanite, but things got easier from there.”

“Well…” Jesse began. After what I hoped was rummaging around in his coat pocket, his hand and forearm appeared over the top of the chair. He held something clear that glistened in the soft glow of the monitors. “I hope this makes up for your troubles. Just don’t go crashing any economies with it.”

I reached out with my magic, and he let me grab the shiny rock. After bringing it over for a closer look, I realized what it was: diamond. A huge, already-cut diamond. Without any sort of jeweler’s training, I didn’t know its value; given how heavy and clear it was, I couldn’t imagine it’d sell for anything less than a small fortune.

And he’d just given it to me. All I could manage was a whispered, “Thank you…”

“Don’t wear yourself out over it…” I could almost see one of his tiny grins he sometimes made. “It was a production error from before I started my mining project. I mixed up schematics from a journal; I was trying to get a five-meter drill segment.”

I chuckled, still incredulous. “Happens to everyone, I guess.”

Jesse, as a rule, didn’t respond to my humor. During the ensuing silence, I put my diamond into one of the pockets in my right saddlebag. I watched the back of his chair for a moment, while he continued working on whatever it was he was still doing.

It gave me time to think about what he’d just done. Without even a second’s thought, as part of an accident, he’d used his race’s technology to give me something that could probably pay for my whole family’s meals for a year.

It was why I believed in him.

On top of my academic curiosity, the main reason I kept coming back to Jesse was his constant, relentless machinations. He wanted to rebuild his home after an eons-old event he’d only vaguely referred to as “The Chaos War”. Whatever it was, it predated Equestrian history, which went back several millennia. But regardless of when he started, Jesse’s plan wasn’t selfish—he told me himself, once he had everything back online, he’d use his technology to help Equestria and save his own race.

I wasn’t certain on the details of it, but given everything he’d shown me, it was impossible to not believe him. Heck, it was inspiring; despite everything he’d been through, despite the mountain of a task in front of him, Jesse always kept carrying out his plan without ever doubting himself or losing his conviction.

Compared to that, spending a few weeks hunting down a chunk of rock was nothing, and I was happy to do whatever I could to help.

The most important thing, I felt, was something that Jesse had clearly forgotten how to do. As noble as his intentions were, he had the social skills of a baked potato. I didn’t know how long he’d been shut away in his home, but I’d only ever seen him up in the forest once—nine months ago, when he’d saved me from a pack of timberwolves. Part of me wondered if he just gave me little chores to do because he was lonely.

Regardless, I felt like we had the basis for an oddly symbiotic relationship. He kept plugging away at his plan, and—while I wasn’t even coming close to doing an equal share—I made sure that, when he went to Equestria, he’d be able to do so without causing a scene. From there, things would only get better—no more sickness, no more hunger; just a brand new paradise for everypony.

After smiling at the back of his chair for a few more moments, I broke the silence again to get him talking: “So, how goes saving the world?”

Jesse made a sound to respond, but he was interrupted when a yellow triangle popped up on one of the screens. He leaned forward, pressed some buttons in a rapid, clicking manner, and then sat back. “It could be better. Want to see my big drill?”

“Uh…” I blinked. “Sure.”

His chair swiveled around and he stood up, which was a relief, since talking to the back of his head got old after a while. That wasn’t to say we were well-suited for eye contact; Jesse was tall, almost twice my height, so he had to look down at me like I was tiny.

Like his plan, Jesse’s clothes were constant—he always wore solid black under a billowing, white lab coat with big pockets for the various tools and devices he used in our ventures throughout his home. Under his coat, his arms and face were the same shade of caramel brown; for hair, he had a thin beard and a huge, shaggy halo of dark-brown hair.

Through all that, the thing that always drew my attention were his ice-blue eyes that shimmered and burned with whatever inner fire drove him.

Jesse didn’t pat me as he walked past to lead me wherever we were going; that had been a humiliating habit before he broke it. I kept a wary eye on his hand as he held it out behind him and waved me forward. “Come, then. The elevator awaits.”

I turned around and followed him, and in turn, I pulled my notepad through the air behind me. My curiosity beamed through in a smile as I got excited to see where we were headed.


> Chapter 2
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jesse and I took a second elevator further down than I’d ever been before. As floor after floor rose past us, I got a sense of just how massive the place was. I grinned as I skritched my quill on the paper, taking notes; Jesse certainly had his work cut out for him.

Elevator rides were always different when I was with Jesse. I wasn’t worried about the light disc failing anymore; Jesse’s absolute certainty of his technology’s reliability carried over to me. Plus, one way or the other, he wouldn’t let me fall.

At the same time, it was an elevator made for humans, not ponies. Even if Jesse was about twice my mass vertically, I took up more floor space; that meant we were both crammed together pretty tightly. I wasn’t afraid of Jesse, but I did hold a healthy respect for him and his power.

The one and only time I’d seen him angry, he’d punched a hole through the machine he’d been trying to fix. Its metal sides had been two inches thick; when he saw I was standing behind him, he froze long enough to keep his fist in the glowing, cake-like slag.

We didn’t really talk about that event, but six months later, I could see some faint scarring on his left wrist. It was eye-level with me, right by my head, which reminded me that I was squished up next to an ancient, powerful entity.

At least the music’s still here. I grinned, but I didn’t hum this time. Instead, I put the finishing touches on my written postulations about how many humans had lived in that enormous facility, and what its purpose had been. Knowing that Jesse wanted to repair things didn’t exactly tell me what I was helping him fix.

“Enjoying yourself?” He looked down blankly at me and my notepad.

I smiled up at him and put the notepad away. “I gotta take notes, Jesse. That’s the bread and butter of observational science!”

He made a quiet, agreeing sound, but he didn’t say anything else for the remainder of the ride. When the glass doors slid open, I followed Jesse out of the tube; after he led me through several hallways and intersections that looked exactly like the rest of his home, I looked up and asked, “So, uh… where’s this drill?”

“Drill?” He kept looking forward and taking long, sweeping strides. “Oh. Yes. First, we need to take a detour. The moissanite?”

I magicked open my saddlebag and brought out the chunk of metal. “Right here.”

Jesse plucked it out of midair and inspected it up close for the first time. A few moments passed, then he nodded quickly. “You did well.”

I swelled up and walked taller for a few steps before voicing the obvious question: “So, what’s it for?”

Above me, Jesse stared off into the distance for a few moments before answering. “Moissanite is a type of metal I can use to repair some bare-essential computer components. Once it’s been purified, I can feed it into the mechanical printers and finish rebuilding the automated production lines.”

For once, after some Jesse technology-speak, I actually knew what he was doing. Kind of. “Production lines? What are you making?”

“I’m creating power over life itself.” I stared up at him and raised an eyebrow; he looked down and mirrored my expression. “Or at least, a device that will allow me to directly harness certain aspects of biological entities.”

A knot twisted at the top of my stomach. “Biological… entities?” Even though he lived in the Everfree Forest, other than the two of us, I’d never seen any signs of life in his home—not even plants. “Like... intelligent beings?”

He threw his head up in a quick, harsh blast of laughter that made my mane stand up. “Intelligent? Hardly. I suppose it does have something akin to a neural network across its swarm…” He looked down at me, and it must have clicked for him. “Oh. No, not you. Tiny horses don’t have the types of energy I’m looking for.”

Somehow, that didn’t do much to take the edge off my uneasiness. I kept walking and asked, “Why do you need more energy?”

“I’m merely reclaiming what I once lost.”

“Lost?”

Jesse’s face twitched from a mildly amused grin back to its usual, distant manner. He never explicitly told me to stop asking questions, but when it came to certain topics, he simply refused to answer. I hated that; it was like falling over a conversational cliff that I didn’t even know was coming.

Silence persisted until we reached the door Jesse wanted. It opened, and he held up a hand to stop me from following him in. “I’ll just be a minute.” He slipped through the door and it slid shut before I could complain.

Fifty-seven empty seconds later, the door slid back open and Jesse reappeared. “Now, it’s drill time.”

He turned and began leading me back the way we’d come. He never waited around for me, so I cantered the first few steps to catch up. Once we were side-by-side again, I decided to leave my moissanite curiosity alone and move on. “So, uh… What are you drilling for, anyway?”

“Power.”

That was the only thing he said on the matter. Once it became clear that Jesse wasn’t talking, I tried to figure out what he meant based on my own brainpower.

I wasn’t the best physicist, but I’d passed some basic courses as an undergraduate. I knew that in order to have all the lights, machines, and elevators work, they needed some sort of force powering them. The usual Equestrian solution for stuff like that was in the form of magic-powered crystals, but those were mostly used in small tools and appliances.

Unless he had a ton of unicorn friends that I’d never seen, I doubted Jesse was using crystals. I also doubted he ran the whole place off his own powers—he could do stuff like kinesis and other functional spells, but he said they messed with some of the more sensitive equipment.

I puzzled over just what was powering everything down there, even after we crammed back in the elevator. It started heading downwards again, and after what felt like a long time, my curiosity took on yet another form. “How… how far down does this place go, anyway?”

“Deep enough.”

“Jesse…” I warned. As patient as I was with him, I had my limits.

He looked down at me and frowned slightly. “It’s… we are actually headed to the lowest part of the facility.” He raised a hand, palm out. “Honest.” His hand slowly drooped back to its usual resting place as he finished, “Since I doubt knowing that we’re forty-eight kilometers below sea level is the sort of scale you’ve had personal experience with, I’d rather just show you than explain things in metrics you can’t comprehend.”

I did some quick math that he’d taught me—add a tenth and half of the original number—to convert from Jesse’s distance to one that Equestrians used. Twenty eight… ish… miles. After smugly grinning that I understood what he meant, despite his condescension, my eyes shot open: we were deep underground. The tallest thing I even knew about, offhoof, was Canterlot Mountain; even that was less than two miles tall.

Begrudgingly, I admitted that he was right.

Then, lights outside the elevator died. In hopeless darkness, I twitched helplessly to my right—into Jesse’s leg—grabbing his knee before realizing the light disc below us was still solid and glowing its usual, golden yellow.

“There, there…” Jesse patted me on the head.

I brushed his hand away as I stepped back to where I’d been standing. I glowered up at him before turning away; his blue-fire eyes were really weird in the dark. I tried to calm myself down with, He’s just trying to be reassuring, but I knew better than to give him too much benefit of the doubt. For our first few months together, Jesse had been pretty handsy. I could’ve taken it as an odd form of affection—especially given his usual distance—but it quickly became obvious that he was just petting something he thought was cute.

The elevator slowly began getting brighter—in a firey, orangeish way. It got bright enough to see that the walls of our tube were surrounded with smooth, black rock. I wanted to ask what sort of rock it was, but I was still silently fuming over being petted.

“Are you angry?” I heard a hint of guilt beneath his curiosity.

“No…” I sighed. Because that would be illogical for like six different reasons. “Just… we’ve talked about this. You know I don’t like it when you… pet me, like that.”

“You grabbed my leg.”

I sighed, harder, this time bringing my hoof up to my nose bridge. “Yeah, I know. It was a reflex. Because the elevator, and the darkness, and—”

“I make you uncomfortable.” He stated it factually, but not coldly—more like, it was something he was so familiar with that it bored him.

I put my hoof down and turned up to him, not sure which of us was wrong anymore. “I mean, I don’t dislike you, or anything; it’s just… well, we’ve talked about this, too. Everything’s always business with you, and advancing your plan—”

“Which is priority.” He turned down to look at me; in the fiery light, his eyes were even more pronounced.

I swallowed my fear. “Which is priority,” I agreed. “But ‘priority’ implies there’s other stuff that you’ve got to put off—that doesn’t mean you should just completely ignore it.”

“Elaborate.”

I pointed a hoof up at him. “That. Th… maybe that’s how humans talked to each another, and that’s your cultural prerogative, but your culture’s…” I stopped short of saying something we’d both regret. “Different, than the one you’re trying to save.”

“Our cultures’ differences are irrelevant; once I am finished, there will be a substantial merging that will redefine one culture.”

“Will it?” I countered. “I mean, freshman year I sent my parents some of the magic candles that my roommate invented. They’re brighter and never burn out, but when I went home for Hearth’s Warming, my parents were still using the ones they had grown up with. So… if my parents can’t do something as simple as candles, how do expect all ponies, everywhere, to embrace stuff like—” I stamped my hoof on the light disc we were standing on. “This?”

The elevator slowed down, and the light inside grew brighter—but still fairly dim, like a candle-lit restaurant. When the doors opened, a wave of hot air wrapped around me like a blanket. Jesse immediately walked off the elevator into what I recognized as a cavern-like hallway. It was roughly the same height and width as the ones higher up in the facility, but its walls and floor had been carved out of the same black rock that lined the elevator shaft.

At the far end of the hallway, the next room shimmered and flickered like a massive fire was burning in there. I wasn’t quite sure if it was safe to get off the elevator, let alone if I wanted to see what burning down there.

Jesse turned and asked, “Are you coming?”

“Am I going to… combust, if I walk out there?” I was already sweating, and the hot air stung my eyes, even in what had to be the relatively cooler elevator shaft.

Instead of answering me, Jesse walked over to one of the metal wall panels and opened it; from my height and angle, I couldn’t see what was in it. After reaching inside and grabbing something, Jesse walked back over to me and held out his hand. On his palm rested a small metal ring—like the gold one he wore on one of his fingers, except this one was white with a glowing, blue line that ran around the outside. “Put this on.”

I looked at the ring, clearly designed for a human finger, and lifted my hoof. “Is that going to fit?”

Jesse leaned down and slipped it on the end of my horn.

The temperature plummeted, to the point where I shivered. That was only reflex; once I adjusted to the new, comfortable temperature, I nodded thanks up at him.

Jesse didn’t acknowledge my nod before turning back around and heading down the hallway. I caught up with him and continued our conversation from the elevator: “I mean, how are you going to help ponies if you don’t even know what they’re like in the first place?”

“I have you for that.”

That sinking realization slowed me down; I had to jog to catch back up with Jesse. “I… me? I suck at selling things. Seriously, my worst summers were the ones where my dad tried to get me to run our family’s antique shop. I… I don’t think I can go up to the surface and tell ponies about everything down here, even once you do get everything up and running.”

Jesse grunted like he did when he was having trouble fixing something. “Then what do you suggest?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Well, if you want to get technology out there, you could start a business and sell things—start small, then work up to bigger and brighter things. I mean, you already know how to do that if you’ve fixed this place up, right?”

He smirked, a quick little twitch of one side of his mouth. “That plan seems like an unnecessary delay.” I tried to cut in, but he spoke over me: “However, perhaps there is some logic to learning some of your culture, for interfacing purposes.”

Interfacing purposes? I fought to keep from rolling my eyes—if that were the sort of thing he wanted to fix, it wouldn’t do any good to mock him over it. Instead, I asked, “So, what do you have in mind?”

“For you to teach me, one-on-one.”

I almost smacked myself over how obvious it sounded, but given Jesse, I was expecting something technical and practical, like bringing him a history textbook. I liked his idea, so I nodded that agreement. “Okay.”

We reached the end of the black rock hallway, and like I’d seen from back in the elevator, it opened up into a huge, circular room whose walls glowed with firelight. A metal railing lined a downward-sloping path that jutted out from the walls; above me in the center of the ceiling, hung a trio of massive pipes.

I couldn’t see the flames, but since shadows stretched and danced from down below, I imagined that was where the fire was.

Jesse stopped and pointed to a sheet of metal that had been bolted to the wall at the end of the hallway. “Safety regulations. Back when this part of the generators was built, they were still concerned with full-body environmental protection suits, but the points about security clearances and hazardous materials still stand.”

I looked at the sign; words were on it, but they were written in Jesse’s language, not mine. “I… I can’t read that, Jesse.”

He shrugged. “They basically say to avoid touching anything important-looking and to watch your step. It’s a long way down.”

With that, I finally walked over to the metal railing and—keeping my four hooves firmly on the ground—I stuck my head under it to look straight down.

Below me, the chamber went down for—as Jesse had so eloquently put it—a long way. It was a huge cylinder, but the very bottom only looked like a tiny circle of bright orange. Magma, I realized, even though none of the area around the Everfree Forest had ever experienced any volcanic activity.

I remembered how far down we were, and I stepped back from the edge of the path with a new sense of respect for humans. They’d dug all the way through the earth’s crust and into the deeper, molten mantle.

As I watched, magma shot up one of the three pipes that ran down the center of the room like it were a massive straw. I suddenly knew what Jesse had meant by “power”, and from behind me, he explained, “Even in the glory days of humanity, geothermal energy was seen as a viable backup solution to power a facility of this size: low-tech and reliable.”

I blinked at the enormous mechanism in front of me, and then turned around to Jesse. “Low-tech backup? What… what was the primary energy source?”

“Stars.” My eyes and mouth shot open, but he ignored my wonder. “Those only lasted long enough to get the drill online and self-sustaining, which in turn is now beginning to reach the lower portions of its effective range.”

My head still reeled implication of “stars” as an energy source; finally, I pieced together enough of what he said to ask, “Wait… so, you’ve tapped out all of the magma here?”

He shook his head, walked to the wall behind him, and slapped it. “These walls are several meters thick, but behind them, there’s magma enough to power this facility indefinitely.” He turned away from the wall and began walking down the spiral path.

I followed him. “Why can’t you just re-fill the chamber? That sounds…” I bobbed my head. “Easy, I guess, compared to making it in the first place.”

“Yes.” Jesse turned to look at the wall on our left. “The main problem stems from something I didn’t foresee when I began this mining operation, back when I made modifications to the drill to dig a deep hole instead of a wide one.”

To my right, the far side of the chamber looked at least five hundred feet away. “This is narrow?” I chuckled. “So why do you want to go deep, if the power system can’t go that far?”

“Because I’m hunting something.”

“What?”

We walked for so long that we passed back under the start to the massive, spiraling path—an entire lap of the room. Every step of the way, I’d gotten closer and closer to giving Jesse an impromptu lesson about being social; finally, he broke his awkward silence: “The part of me that I lost a long time ago.”

I turned to him with a raised eyebrow. “Part of you fell down a volcano?”

“This isn’t a volcano; it’s an artificial magma chamber whose pressure is well-regulated by a series of ventilation—”

“Okay…” I raised my hoof, surrendering the joke to a not-so-clean death. “Not a volcano.”

He looked at me sideways down the side of his cheek before he went on: “But no, this fragment… it didn’t fall. It sensed danger, after the final hours of the Chaos War, and decided to retreat to a source of safety and warmth.”

My ears perked up; he didn’t talk about that war often. “So…” I tried to play my cards right. “Something at the end of the war broke off a part of you?”

“Essentially.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t actually know,” he admitted. “Whatever it was, it nearly killed me. I hope that, among other things, reunification will give me a clearer understanding of that event.”

Reunification… Part of his plan clicked into place for me: “And that’s why you want the moissanite; you’re building something to absorb the energy from that other part back into yourself!”

He shrugged. “That’s a close enough statement to the truth.”

I smiled for a few moments after that; I was glad to finally be able to know part of his plan. My satisfaction drained away when I realized some of the implications. “Wait… so you’re only a part of your old self? Just like the part you’re hunting? Which of you is… the real Jesse?”

“I am.”

“But what would the other part of you say?”

Jesse held up his left hand, so I could clearly see the burn scars on the back of it. “Do you think I have some sort of clone, swimming down in the magma? The entity I’m hunting is a brainless cluster of self-replicating nano-machines. It’s effectively a metallic tumor with the collective intelligence of an ant colony.”

He put his hand back down, and I nodded. “Okay, so why do you need it if it’s so dumb?”

“Because it, being a fragment like me, has roughly an equal amount of the powers I command.” His eyes flared for a moment. “I wish for that strength to be returned to me, a thinking individual. That will certainly help with my plan.”

The remainder of our trip felt like it took close to an hour. As we drew nearer to the bottom of the chamber, I finally got a good look at what Jesse called a drill. Unlike most drills I’d seen before, it looked like a massive metal bar that spanned the diameter of the room we were in. The two halves of it were tilted, almost like a giant fan-blade; vaguely, I remembered that Jesse mentioned building part of it out of diamond. The middle part of it was bulkier and spherical, and it connected with the massive pipes that sucked magma up into the main part of the facility.

When we got to the end of the path, we were also at one end of the drill’s length. It seemed obvious to me, but the drill, as part of its function, had carved a giant spiral down to itself.

“Wait here,” Jesse told me again. That time, I didn’t complain about it; I only watched him as he leaped onto the drill and ran to the center. Once there, he knelt down and opened a hatch; after a few moments of fiddling around inside, the drill screamed to life in an almighty roar.

Jesse seemed satisfied with that, so he closed the hatch and ran back over to me. When he was next to me, he had to shout over the drill. “It’s not a permanent solution, but I’ve overridden its safety protocols to tell it to keep going down. It’ll take another few weeks before it’s out of range of the geothermal generator’s flow intake, but that gives me more than enough time to come up with a better solution.”

I nodded, and Jesse led me back the way we’d come. As we spiraled up the sides of a massive underground tunnel, I mused how we hadn’t really done all that much during our trip—just dropping off a chunk of metal, and whatever Jesse did to the drill.

At the same time, I’d learned more about Jesse and his plan than I had during some of the past months I’d known him for. I organized my thoughts a little, I didn’t pull out my notepad—I was comfortable, but I didn’t know how far the bubble of cold air around me went.

Instead of notes, I pondered the new information I had about Jesse and his plan. Like usual, I wondered how effective it would actually be; that time, with a shrug, I decided I’d actually helped him.

At least now, he’s making an effort to consider the ponies he’s trying to help.

With that in mind, I smiled and began putting together a lesson about Equestrian etiquette for him.

> Chapter 3
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

A week after the drill episode, I went back to Jesse’s with an odd sense of purpose. For once, I had a solid idea of what we were going to do.

“Pony Lessons”, as I’d started mentally calling them, seemed easy enough. Just to be certain—under guise of “babysitting some cousins over the holidays”—I’d asked Ponyville’s elementary schoolteacher for tips on teaching friendship to socially stunted foals.

“It really just boils down to building on what’s already there,” Cheerilee had answered. “They know how to ask their parents for what they want; just sometimes, a few of the late bloomers need reminders about empathy and courtesy.”

Which, really, had sounded exactly like what Jesse needed. I couldn’t quite mention its source to him, but Cheerilee’s advice had been a good foundation for building my own lessons.

At Jesse’s home, once I began my descent on the entrance elevator, I went over the two activities I’d brought supplies for. Today, we were going to start off by eating lunch and playing a game afterwards.

Easy, right?

However, in what had to be some sort of new record for him, Jesse managed to throw me for an awkward, confusing loop before the elevator’s doors even opened. Even after the hexagon hissed open to let me off, I stayed on the light disc for a few moments to try and process what was standing in front of me.

My gut reaction had been to ask the tall, black alicorn who he was, but his fiery-blue eyes were a dead giveaway. That only led me to wonder how Jesse had managed to turn himself into a gaudy-looking alicorn, but I swallowed that question, too. He’s making an effort, I told myself, even if it was misguided and… black, like the color of bad teenage poetry.

“Do you like it?”

I bobbed my head from side to side, not wanting to explicitly nod or shake my head. “It’s… a good start, Jesse. But slate-black is a little… garish? Like, you’d stand out.”

Alicorn Jesse still wore the same blank expression he usually did. I was torn between being comforted and creeped out; all he asked was, “So?”

“Well…” I pulled from my lessons I’d been planning all week. “If you stick out like that, ponies are going to be afraid of you, and that’s just going to make things more challenging.”

Jesse’s horn lit up, and with a flash of blue light, his coat turned a more neutral mustard yellow. “Better?”

I nodded. “Yeah. But you’re still kind of tall, and there’s only like eight alicorns in all of Equestria… maybe go for a more… normal unicorn?”

Another flash of light, and suddenly, I was staring into a mirror—except the mint green unicorn in front of me had blue eyes, not golden ones. My heart caught in my chest and my breathing picked up as I remembered being captive in a mine after being roped into a stupid wedding I didn’t even want to go to in the first place… I shook all of that out of my head. Frustration filled in its place: “Come on, Jesse, now you’re just messing with me.”

“Fine…” he rolled my eyes and responded in my voice—or at least, how I sounded on phonograph recordings. It was weird. With yet another flash of light, a hazel-colored unicorn stallion stood in front of me, short enough to be eye level.

I nodded. “That’s… yeah, that’s great.”

Pony Jesse nodded back. “I’m glad it’s up to your specifications. Now what?”

It took a moment to get my bearings; after realizing we were back to where I’d wanted to start—though I hadn’t planned on him transforming himself—I drew from my plans again. “Uh… first lunch, and then something fun.”

His eyes darted off to the side, thinking. “So, eating? I know the place for that.”

I got a good look at his flank when he turned around—mainly, I focused on the cutie mark he’d given himself. I reeled at the philosophical implications of that, but I caught myself in time to ask a more neutral, “Jesse… why’s your cutie mark… a fist? A human fist?”

Jesse turned his head to look at his flank, then at mine, then to my eyes. “Why’s yours a harp?”

His question caught me off guard to the point where I wondered, Did I tell him this before? “Uh… it’s a lyre,” I corrected. “And when I was ten, I spent an afternoon exploring my grandparents’ basement.” I smiled, thinking back to that day—my first archaeological expedition, complete with excitement and discovery. “When I was done, I went upstairs, and my mom was all excited; I had a picture of Grandma’s lyre for a cutie mark.” I puffed out my chest a little. “That’s when I knew I wanted to spend my life as an archaeologist, finding pieces of the past to tell a story of ancient cultures.”

Jesse’s bemused smirk deflated my childhood pride. “That’s a fairly flimsy basis for determining a vocation, is it not?” he asked. “I mean, if your flank tattoo is related to your passion, couldn’t you just as easily have been a musician?”

Instead of glowering at “flank tattoo”, I answered with another childhood anecdote: “I suck at playing the lyre. And the harp. And basically every other string instruments. Besides, it’s not what your cutie mark is, but how you get it, really.”

“So, are you saying it doesn’t matter what mine is, just as long as it holds some symbolic value for me?”

“I… no.” I shook my head. “You can’t just make one for yourself. You’ve got to earn it.”

Like a switch, Jesse’s tiny grin flipped off, and he swept a hoof around. “This facility is all that remains to stand testament to thirty billion lives that evaporated in an instant, and I have worked to restore it for longer than your race has been aware of itself.” He glared at me, somehow managing to maintain a looming presence despite being eye-level. “Is that enough to deserve an effigy of my dead race?”

I nodded, slowly, and swallowed. “Y… you can keep the fist.”

“Thank you for your permission.” He turned around began walking away from the elevator.

I noted that, for someone who usually walked on two legs, he was fairly graceful as a pony. When I realized he was leading me somewhere, I snapped back to my senses and jogged to catch up with him.

Once we were side-by-side, I could see out the corner of my eye that his usual, flat mouth was curled in a slight snarl. As we walked in angry silence, I tried to think of an apology that would actually mean something to him.

A few hallways later, Jesse beat me to the punch. “I shouldn’t have taken that out on you. You’re trying to help.”

I didn’t feel he needed to apologize, but I was glad he did, anyway. I replied with, “I’m sorry, too. I… It’s hard, I guess, to remember all you’ve been through. You don’t really talk about you all that much, so it’s less like you’re someone with a life and memories, and more like you’re … a constant force of nature.”

He chuckled, which almost sounded like a cough. “Just remember, if you’re building any statues, my favorite color is blue.”

I returned his dry chuckle, and things between us went silent again. We walked a new path, so I took mental note of which directions we took through through intersections. Everything in those hallways looked nearly identical, so if I ever needed to find my way back to the entrance elevator, my only way to do it would be by remembering which turns I’d taken.

With one final turn, Jesse and I entered a relatively short hallway; about a hundred feet from the intersection, it ended at a wide hexagonal door. Its flat bottom looked at least three times as wide as the rest of the doors in Jesse’s home; another difference was how it had black lettering stenciled onto its metal face. 

At end of the hallway, Jesse lit up his horn, and the two halves of the door split apart to reveal a dark, foreboding expanse.

“Uh…” I protested. The pitch-black room reminded me how we were several miles underground. I was an archaeologist, sure, but that didn’t mean I was keen on entering into new places where I couldn’t see where I was going.

“You have your little rock, right?”

I nodded and brought my torchstone out of my right saddlebag. Jesse plucked it out of my own magic grip; when he lit it, it shone so bright that I worried the little thing might shatter. It held itself together, though, so the two of us had a light source as we walked into the room.

In front of us, massive rows of tall metal tables stretched from left to right, from one end of the light to the other. Everything else was hidden behind a veil of pitch black. The air didn’t smell any different than the recycled air in the rest of the facility, but the stillness and the echoes of hoofsteps gave that place a genuine cave-like quality.

“The cafeteria.” Jesse’s booming words sounded tiny in the room. He floated my torchstone over the nearest table to us before turning to me. “As good a place as any to eat?”

“Yeah.” I walked over to the table and its neck-high steel chairs. I’d barely thought of how difficult it was going to be to climb up on one when the legs of two chairs and the square section of the table between them glowed blue. With a popping sound, the table bent down like rubber, forming a lower segment; similarly, the chairs shrank down to pony size.

Jesse walked under the still-normal-height part of the table to the right of what he’d made for us, and I sat down on the chair on my side. Once we were both sitting, I opened my saddlebag and took out the lunch I’d packed for us—salad, sandwiches, juice, and for dessert, home-baked cookies.

I started to divvy up the paper plates and plastic utensils; Jesse’s eyes followed everything as he observed. Once I set his side of the table for him, he levitated one of his utensils up to his face and stared at it, pensively.

“It’s called a fork.” I nodded with a grin.

He ignored me, which I was used to; however, his sense of enthrallment was new. I figured it had to do something with our two cultures’ knack for similar solutions to problems—for example, we both had pieces of furniture we sat on, albeit different shapes.

My train of thought led me to a curious point: “So… what kind of utensils do you usually eat with?”

“I don’t.” He still sounded far off.

I blinked. “You… use your hands?”

Jesse finally broke out of his thought and stared at me like I’d asked a dumb question.

Instead of dwelling on the lack of conversation—we’d work on that during the meal—I took the lid off my salad container and served myself. After that, I passed the dish over to Jesse, who both picked it up and forked it onto his plate with magic. 

I sighed and braced myself for the first correction of what I knew was going to be many. “Uh… lesson one: In mixed company, it’s considered more polite to use your hooves, like everyone else.”

The container sank down to the table, and Jesse raised his hooves. “How am I supposed to grip anything with these?”

“Like this…” I picked up my fork with my right hoof.

To his credit, Jesse did try to pick his fork up with a hoof. He got more and more frustrated—images of volcanoes came to mind—until finally, he blew out a hot sigh. His horn lit up and his hooves glowed; when he touched his fork, it stuck to his hoof like a magnet. “Are chaos-based shortcuts acceptable?”

My stomach froze, and my mind raced. “Wait, you… Chaos? Like… Discord?”

Jesse’s eyes narrowed as he raised one eyebrow. “What?” He rapidly twitched his head from side to side. “Chaos…” His horn lit up, and the salad container once again lifted off the table. “One of the fundamental forces of the universe, named due to its volatile and random nature—unless channeled through an appropriate medium.”

I craned my neck to the side. That wasn’t the term for it, but the definition definitely sounded textbook-familiar. “Wait… are you talking about magic?”

His face lit up in a joyous grin. “Your civilization calls it magic? That’s adorable!”

I glared, like how I did when he used to pet me. “Hey…”

Jesse raised his hooves—with his fork still attached to one—in mock surrender. “Sorry.”

After I accepted his apology with a quick shrug, we started on our first lunch together. The first few bites were quiet, just like a normal meal; I slowed down when I noticed Jesse was clearly forcing down each swallow. I admired his perseverance, but I didn’t want him to rush himself and get sick. “Uh… how’s the salad?”

“It’s food.” He tried to set his fork down next to his plate, but it stuck to his hoof. After glaring down at it, Jesse looked back up at me. “I haven’t eaten in a while. It is apparently difficult.”

I grinned. “You should eat more often, then.”

“Why?”

His question raised a slew of implications, but I didn’t quite know where to start with them. Several moments of silence hung between us, so I explained things more explicitly. “Next lesson: Usually ponies talk about stuff while eating. Like things that’re going on in their lives.”

Jesse flipped his fork hoof over, gesturing me to go first.

“So… I’ll go first, then.” I cleared my throat. “I’m in my third year of a graduate program at Canterlot University. I’ve already got my degree in history, specializing in archaeology.” I looked up, motioning at the light above our table, and Jesse actually laughed at my little joke.

If I hadn’t known any better, I’d say it sounded normal.

Thinking of college jogged my memory for a moment. “And actually… speaking of CU, I’ve actually got to do the lecture requirements for my degree plan over the next few weeks. So… it might be harder for me to get back here to help you with stuff.”

“Duly noted.” Jesse nodded. After a few seconds, I leaned my head forward and mirrored his upturned-hoof, motioning that it was his turn to talk.

He took a deep breath and began, “Drill operations are continuing at near-optimum efficiency, though it’s beginning to reach critical depth—”

“No, no, no…” I interrupted, shaking my head. He looked at me, annoyed, so I explained, “I mean, drill stuff is good to know, but what else is going on in your life? Surely you take breaks sometime; what do you during those?”

He swept his hoof at me, then the food.

“Every day at sunrise—which I’ve programmed into this facility to be at six hundred hours—I do daily inspections on the various systems that keep me alive and this facility running—I guess you could say I ‘eat’ during that time, but if you knew what that entailed, you’d probably challenge that definition. After that, I have three three-hour cycles that I alternate between.” Jesse started tapping his forelimb with his hoof to count them off: “Maintenance theory, where I learn how to rebuild the next step in my plan. Tactical probing, which should be intuitively obvious. And personal enrichment, where I do things like honing my ‘magic’, as you call it, so I don’t accidentally break anything I’ve rebuilt. I do practical maintenance throughout the night, up until an hour before sunrise. During that time, I document everything I did that day.”

I blinked a few times. Before I could even process all of that, I blurted out, “Forget fun, when do you sleep?”

All I got in reply was a mirthless chuckle. “I spent a lifetime asleep, what good does that do anybody now?”

“But you’ve got to sleep!”

“You speak with certainty…” He put his hooves on the table and stared. “How can you? Is the whole point of this not that you don’t know me as much as you wish you did?”

His accusation cut deep. “The whole point, if you’re calling it that, is because it’s like you’ve been underground so long, you’ve forgotten how to live.”

Jesse looked back at me, and I had a hard time reading his face. It wasn’t neutral like it usually was; instead it looked like I’d said something deeply offensive. I braced for the repercussions of that, but before I could say anything to soften the blow, Jesse shook his head and his ears drooped, weirdly. “Do you know why I devote an hour a day to documenting what I did?”

I looked back and, finally, shook my head back at him.

“Human bodies were never meant to be immortal.” He looked down at his hoof; finally, his horn glowed and his fork dropped off. “Or as chaos conduits. I won’t explain things to you because I can’t.”

For a moment, it looked like he was pleading with me.

“I don’t know what happened, specifically, to turn me into this. I don’t eat. I don’t tire. But all of that is built on an underlying, imperfect, biological structure. There are shortcomings…” He tapped his head. “My guess is that there is only physically enough connections to store approximately two centuries’ worth of memories. If I don’t document my endeavors, I will forget them; it’s only a matter of time.” 

The word “time” resonated through the cavern-like cafeteria, and it made me feel a deeper pity than I’d ever felt for another living being. I’d always assumed that Jesse was old, but I’d also guessed he’d also gained some eons-old wisdom, like a dragon or the princesses.

I looked down at my plate as a deeper realization struck: “You’re going to forget me, one day, aren’t you?”

“Yes and no.” I looked back up at Jesse, and he shrugged. “I’ve written a few notes about you in my journal, which goes back almost to the beginning of all this. That was a hard lesson to learn; even data fades away after a few decades.” He looked down at his left hoof and flipped it over a few times. “So, I’ll know who you are until I’m finished with my plan, certainly.” His eyes rose from his hoof to stare at me. “But after a while, you’ll just be a stranger in my notes; someone I’ve never met.”

It all gave me a feeling of tiny, insignificant helplessness. I stifled a bitter laugh at my own stupidity—here, I was trying to teach Jesse how to be a pony? He’d obviously just been humoring me the whole time. More likely than not, we’d eventually go our separate ways, he’d continue on with his plan, and nothing would have mattered in the end.

I shook my head and pushed my plate away. I was done with lunch.

“For what it’s worth, I enjoyed… this.”

His words perked my spirits up a little, but it didn’t stop me from cleaning up. Jesse didn’t need food, and I’d been naïve in thinking I could change anything about him. Once everything was put away—I’d brought a trash bag with me, since I didn’t know how Jesse handled refuse—I stopped. I didn’t know what to do next.

Almost like he could read minds, Jesse asked, “Is that it for today?”

Dejectedly, I nodded.

“I thought you mentioned something fun after lunch.”

Inside, I balked. Oh, you remember that. All I said was, “Oh yeah…” To complete the illusion, I widened my eyes a little as I looked down at my saddlebags.

“You’re upset, and a terrible liar.”

I rolled my head back to lock eyes with Jesse—not fast enough to snap at him, but he’d definitely crossed a line. “That’s because this is pointless. You’re not learning anything, you’re not gaining anything, this has crap-to-do with your plan…” I shook my head. “This is just cute to you, getting to watch a little pony who thinks it knows how to act civilized!”

He stared back at me. “Why would I jeopardize your wellbeing like that?”

I huffed. “Because you either don’t know you’re doing it, or you don’t care… And I don’t know which is worse.”

“Again, I respect you too much to waste your time just to find some sort of intrinsic humor in it.” Jesse shrugged, and his expression darkened. “You are intelligent enough to have your own life and schedule, and if you insist on thinking the worst of me, you should at least know you’re useful to me. From there, I’ll extrapolate and repeat: why would I jeopardize your wellbeing, when it wastes my time to needlessly hurt you?”

“So you’re saying this hasn’t been a waste of both of our times?”

 “I already told you, I enjoyed this.” Without breaking eye contact, he motioned at his torso. “I’ve told you more about myself—despite how there really isn’t much to speak about. Was that not the point of this? To be less like coworkers and more like friends?”

Most of my frustration boiled off at that; but some of my skepticism lingered. “You want to be friends now?”

“No.”

I nodded, not sure of what I’d expected.

Jesse crossed his hooves. “It’s not that I dislike you. But when you began coming here more and more, I reviewed my logs to see if there was any precedence for that sort of thing. There was. For seven decades, I visited a nearby town to spend my evenings with one of the residents. That ended with a single entry of, ‘Funeral today’. After a three-month gap, the logs resume; however, I no longer visited the surface for anything other than supplies-gathering and defending the entrances to this facility.” 

It was all so clinical and matter-of-fact, but Jesse’s story made sense. Whether he was doing it intentionally, or even if he couldn’t remember why, I could see why Jesse had learned to distance himself from anyone who he’d outlive.

I’d heard of a lot of legends about long-lived beings who went insane because of that, too.

“Okay.” I sighed. “So you’re kind of… distant, because of that.” I looked him square in the eye. “Can you at least promise me you’ll try to be more friendly while I’m helping you?”

“Despite how that logically ends?”

I swallowed. “Start small. Make one friend, then another, then dozens…” I grinned, remembering the one and only time I’d been honored to attend a meal with Princess Celestia. I’d just finished a history report on an ancient pegasus city, which somehow made it into her hooves. We’d spent most of lunch talking about what life there had really been like, and some of her friends who used to live there. Her words, when I’d asked about the same thing Jesse and I were talking about, had been: “You’ll still feel the loss, but it is infinitely easier to bear it with friends at your side.”

“Perhaps,” Jesse agreed. After a moment he nodded. “Okay, then. I’ll try to be more open. At least to the point where you don’t need to invent motives for my actions.”

I chuckled, weakly. “Sorry for—”

“No.” He shook his head. “There’s nothing you could have done better given your operating knowledge. I’m sorry for putting you in that situation in the first place.”

I accepted his apology with a nod. A few moments of silence passed, and then I shrugged and snapped open my other saddlebag. In it, I’d brought a chessboard that folded like a box to hold all of the pieces.

When it levitated on top of the table, Jesse leaned forward with wide eyes. “This… this was a human game.”

I didn’t think he was lying, but his statement definitely had profound implications. Sure, we shared things like tables and doors—which were for “keeping things organized”, really—but something as complex as a game?

I raised my eyebrow at a much more pressing point: “Do you even remember human games?”

He shook his head. “It’s not a memory, more like… a glimpse, like it’s on the tip of my tongue.” His horn lit up, the board split open, and all the pieces floated to the board. 

I grinned, stunned, when I looked over the board; he’d only mixed up the knights and bishops, but I’d had to re-learn the placements of all the pieces when I first joined Canterlot University’s chess team. With a new point of data to analyze, that meant…

I shook away analysis for a moment. Instead, we played. After the first twelve games, Jesse and I were at nine-three; after the first few games, I hit a wall and spent the remaining time being crushed. I spent the whole time smiling—across eons and two cultures, without any sort of real coaching, it was nothing short of amazing for us to share something like that.

Mentally, I reminded myself to start with the game next time.

We took a break after game thirteen, where Jesse’s win streak hit the double digits. He declined the sandwich I offered him, but I did the math. Assuming ten minutes per game for thirteen games, it’d definitely been long enough for me to be as hungry as I was.

Halfway through my sandwich, an alarm blasted, loud enough to rattle the pieces on the table. I freaked out, since it definitely sounded like something was wrong, at so many miles below the earth’s surface.

Across the table, Jesse smiled. Between the explosive blarings of the alarm, he explained, “The drill… found what… it’s looking… for.”

The two of us stood up; as sad as I was to end our games, he had work to do. Jesse’s horn lit, and after a flash of light, his usual lab coat and pants materialized. One more flash of light, and he was in them, wearing his usual human shape.

He pulled something small out of his lab coat’s inner chest pocket, held it up, and pressed a button. The alarm stopped, and my ears rang. “I didn’t think the alarm would be that…”

Jesse froze, wearing a panicked expression. A trash can flashed into existence on the floor in front of him, and he knelt down in front of it before violently throwing up in it.

I fought to keep my lunch down—I was definitely a sympathy puker. Fortunately, Jesse finished quickly and sent the trash can back to wherever it had come from. Instead of standing up, he sat on his heels, oddly at eye-level with me and wearing a sheepish grin. “Next time… just bring the game.”

I nodded and began packing up the board. Before I closed it, Jesse stood up and grabbed two of the pieces—the black king and the white queen. He clenched one in each fist, and after I smelled something burning, he held one hand out to me.

Inside his charred palm was a chess queen, except this one was made of a clear crystal—diamond, if I knew anything about Jesse’s consistency.

“You have your lectures, right?”

“Yeah.” I nodded up at him now.

“Keep this; it will let me tell you when I need you again.” He put his own piece, a now-diamond king, in his lab coat.

I put away the rest of the chess set—noting I’d have to buy some replacement pieces—and packed it in my saddlebag. Jesse held out a hand, and my torchstone floated back down to me. I took it and held on to it; we still needed it to see.

Since we were done with everything, I assumed I’d have to find my own way back to the elevator. That was usually how things usually ended—me, getting dismissed from the maintenance room.

That afternoon, Jesse surprised me by taking me all the way back to the entrance elevator. I grinned up at him, and I sincerely hoped that he was serious about making an effort to be more open and friendly.

I stepped forward onto the light disc and waved. “See you in a few weeks, Jesse.”

He waved back at me as the glass hexagon doors closed. “Goodbye, Lyra.”

> Chapter 4
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the second-to-last Thursday of November, I spent the morning working on my last paper for the semester. It was a summary of all my official findings in the ruins of an ancient Zebra tribe who had built a stone city in the Everfree Forest.

Ironically, Jesse had been a huge help with that. Sure, I knew now that he didn’t remember any of that, but when we’d first met, he’d given me an intricate map of their entire city that he’d kept “for tactical reasons”. It made sense to me; someone as reclusive as Jesse would want to make sure his neighbors didn’t know he was living right under their hooves.

I honestly didn’t know if it was academic dishonesty or not, but that map had made my semester the most productive one ever—despite how I’d spent less than a third of my time in the Everfree at the Zebra ruins. I still did most of the hoofwork—digging, cataloging, and taking notes; the only thing I’d taken a shortcut on was the discovery portion of all of it, which honestly, my professors rarely cared about.

At one-ten, I had to leave my paper unfinished; my final lecture of the year was in twenty minutes. In theory, lectures were one of the tacked-on requirements that were there to make sure we history majors didn’t get lost in the past. In practice, they took a careful amount of coordination. Usually, my professors were able to fit me in during the first month or the last month of the semester, which gave me three seasons—spring, summer, and fall—to go around Equestria and explore her past.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My one-thirty lecture was for History 115: Ancient Non-Equestrian Civilizations. The cozy classroom with dim lights and drawn curtains let me use my preferred visual aid: a slide projector. I started my presentation—and the fight to keep the interest of sixteen freshmen who were on the verge of their final exams. My topic was a good one, which really meant it was up to me to deliver; in the first forty minutes, I kept eleven ponies’ attention.

I nodded, and my volunteer in the front row advanced the slide projector. Behind me, the hanging screen lit up with a picture of a broken, time-worn spear.

“But,” I continued my topic, “the Griffalians, despite all the value they placed on combat and honor, had one fatal flaw. Or really, there are some firsthand accounts from their own scribes mentioning how ‘honor’ sometimes meant the same thing as ‘conservative’—to the point they refused to adapt to new military techniques or technologies.”

I nodded again, and the next slide showed a map of pre-unified Equestria. “Things eventually came to a tipping point in the third century A.C. The Pegasus tribe had a tentative trade agreement with Griffalia, but that grew more and more strained as both groups expanded their territories...” I used my pointer to trace the general paths of the two groups’ expansions. “Until finally…”

Another nod, and the picture changed to a polished replica of a pair of pegasus wing blades from the era. “War.”

The word echoed through the darkened classroom for a few moments. Equestria hadn’t marched against any of our neighbors in over two centuries, but learning our history had given me a newfound respect of everyone—pony or otherwise—who had ever taken up weapons in order to defend his or her country.

“Griffalia had a larger army, all of whom had essentially lived the life of a warrior.” I shied away from mentioning the physical differences between ponies and griffins; that sort of subject was touchy at best, even in classrooms. “But the Pegasus tribe had advanced beyond Griffalia, both economically and militarily.”

I nodded again, and the slide changed to the map of the area again; this time, little squares, colored based on the winner, denoted important battles. “So, with better equipment and tactics—including weather control—the Pegasus tribe was able to pick most of the battles, which let them win impressive victories despite their relatively low numbers.”

A hoof shot up, and I motioned to its owner—a yellow unicorn. She asked, “How outnumbered were they?”

My lips curled into a strained smile; I didn’t like boiling battles down to sheer numbers. That put a distance between how each soldier had a life, one they’d put on hold—or even sacrificed—for something bigger than themselves. Still, it was a valid question, and I knew the answer. “It varies. For example, here…” I pointed at the northernmost square that the Pegasus tribe had won at. “Some accounts mention them being outnumbered by three-to-one. Here…” I pointed to another battle. “It was more like two-to-one.”

After answering her question, I went back to the main point I was trying to make: “But numbers and victories on the battlefield are meaningless, unless it all ends on terms that both sides agree to.” I nodded, and the map was replaced with a slightly altered one: a distinct line separated the territories of Griffalia and the Pegasus tribe.

“If this border looks familiar, that’s because it’s still agreed upon, over two thousand years later. And that’s important to think about, especially if any of you are entering the political sphere. The Pegasus tribe and Griffalia disputed these lands for nearly forty years, and fought for six, but the tactic that actually settled things was compromise and open communication.”

A cough from the class’s usual professor signaled that we were nearly out of time. I nodded back to her, which my front-row volunteer took as a signal to advance the projector and cast us all into eye-watering brightness. It passed quickly, and I magicked open the curtains and turned the room’s lights. “And that’s the overview of the Griffalia-Pegusus war of 238 A.C. If no one has any more questions, I’ll give things back to Professor Lectern.”

No one had any questions—which I kind of expected in a 100-level class—so Professor Lectern stood in the back and dismissed them all. After a brief round of applause for their guest lecturer, the students grabbed their bags and left.

I also started collecting the stuff I’d brought with me to the class, which mostly involved levitating and sorting the slides back into their protective box. Professor Lectern walked up to the front of the room; there, she gave me my post-lecture review. “Not bad, Miss Heartstrings. You kept the learners awake, and didn’t just read off notecards for your entire presentation.”

There was an ongoing problem in the Canterlot University history department: many of the students were so caught up in the past, they viewed the present as a distraction—especially the lecture requirements. “Well…” I shrugged as I turned to face the professor. “Isn’t that the whole point of history? Learning lessons from the past? If you can’t teach a lesson, then you didn’t learn it well enough.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Are you certain you haven’t thought about devoting more of your time to standing in front of a classroom?”

I chuckled to dodge the question. “Maybe when I’m old…” Professor Lectern was pushing sixty, so I caught myself. “...er, and more experienced.”

My rephrasing wasn’t lost on her, but she smiled warmly at me. “There’s no shame in that, Lyra. Enjoy the world while you can; there’s always time later for being cooped up and reminiscing.”

For a moment, I thought she’d given me bad advice; if anything, ponies definitely had a finite amount of time in their lives. I decided to push it to the back of my mind and think about it later. “Anyway… speaking of being cooped up, I’ve got a paper to finish before the weekend.” I levitated up the box of slides I’d brought with me. “And I need to get these back to Fred.”

“Have a good Hearth’s Warming.”

I smiled back at her. “You too.”


*        *        *


I had mixed feelings about my office. On one hoof, the university had given me a permanent space—even if my name was only taped onto the little sign by the door. On the other, it was tiny, down in the basement, and I had to share it with someone.

Which, I didn’t have any problems with Fred—or “Fredrick”, as he’d introduced himself as. We were both archaeologists, so we were rarely in the same city; on one of the few days we’d actually been in the office together, we’d reached the agreement of turning our desks around to make a large island in the middle of the room. 

That day, I noted he had to be somewhere in Canterlot. During the time I’d been giving my lecture, a brown paper bag labeled with “NOT VEGETARIAN” had appeared on his desk. I grimaced at the fair warning and put his slides on his desk; I’d borrowed them for my lecture just like he’d borrowed some of my notes for giving a lecture about the Everfree Zebras.

Once I’d given his slides back, I squeezed through the tiny gap between our giant desk island and the office wall—I’d lost the coin flip, so I got the desk in the back of the room. Before sitting down at my desk, I took a little time to look at the painting I’d hung on the wall. It wasn’t a perfect substitute for a window, but the cheap oil painting of a landscape let me clear my thoughts to better switch from lecture mode to paper-writing mode.

There wasn’t that much left on my final paper; all I had left was to wrap it up with the conclusions I could draw from the evidence I’d found. I got to work, but during the first half hour, I kept getting distracted by the feeling that someone was watching me. Every time it happened, I looked up into empty office, blinked to be sure, and then my eyes drifted to the right side of my desk.

Every time, Jesse’s crystal chess piece loomed back at me, somehow being both three inches tall and foreboding.

It’s probably just magical interference, I reasoned. Even though I’d been unable to tell what magic was inside it, Jesse had mentioned that he’d use the crystal queen to get in touch with me. It had to have some sort of underlying connection back to him.

Or maybe he’s using it as a beacon for when he’s just going to pop out of thin air…

I shook the conjecture out of my head. I had two more good paragraphs to go, and then—

The crystal queen glowed green.

I turned my head to focus on it; for a moment, it was its usual, clear crystal. Then, as I watched, another glow of green lit up inside it—me-green, I noted with distant amusement—before fading away.

By the fifth time it lit up, I levitated it off the desktop. It continued glowing in midair, which led to a budding realization: it was, in all likelihood, an extremely passive means of telling me, “Get back here as soon as you can.”

I grabbed the queen with a hoof so I could look at it without my magic’s glow. As soon as I touched it, Jesse’s voice spoke inside my head: “When you’re able, I’m ready for your help at the facility.”

I blinked, then answered, “Uh… okay, I might…” I glanced over at the clock and tried to remember the departure times of the Friendship Express. It was close to three-thirty, and the next train left at four-thirty, which would let me finish my paper, turn it in, and take care of a few more affairs in Canterlot before departing. That just left the travel time to Ponyville, and then to his home. “I can be there at like… seven? No later than seven-thirty.”

There wasn’t an answer.

“Can you hear me?” I levitated the queen and set it back on my hoof; once again, Jesse’s simple message repeated in my mind.

Typical, I noted, but I appreciated how Jesse’d been a little more personal than just a blinking light. It was progress, I supposed—and it was glowing the same color as my fur.


*        *        *


My hooves hit the Ponyville train platform at six-thirty, which gave me just enough time to get to Jesse’s. Even with my hour-long window of arrival, the entrance to his home was several miles, horizontally, into the Everfree Forest.

I hadn’t had time to grab anything from my Canterlot apartment, but I also hadn’t thought about it since the magic in the city usually raised the temperature by a few degrees. In Ponyville, however, a huge gust of icy wind blew through the dark night, which reminded my naked body that it was almost time for winter.

I first had to drop off some things at my Ponyville apartment. Once I’d packed my things and put on a nice, toasty cloak, I lit my torchstone and headed into the Everfree Forest at night.

Which, all things considered, wasn’t the smartest idea, but the forest was tamer than most of the old mares’ tales made it out to be. Slightly. It was still dangerous, but that just meant I had to keep my wits about me during the journey.

To that extent, I packed some safety countermeasures along with my provisions. I had my torchstone, which would probably scare most predators away. On top of that, I rehearsed some loud, noise-making spells I knew.

Like always, as a last resort, I carefully packed a little canister of phosphorus pellets. It was violent, to the point that some ponies protested the ethics of it, but in a pinch, I could throw it at a predator, it’d spring apart midair, and…

Well, it’d burn like Hell. But with vicious things like chimeras or timberwolves, you hit hard and ran away. That was the only way both of you survived the encounter.

My trip through the Everfree had to be quick, but I didn’t gallop at full speed. That late at night, the nocturnal predators were starting to wake up; the faster I went, the less warning I’d have if something attacked me.

The light from my torchstone played interesting games with the shadows of the leaves and vines. Even with how cold it was, the forest was still lush with growing life. I did note that the cool, glowing mushrooms didn’t seem to be in their usual hiding spots. In their stead, I noticed a new type of black flower that grew near tree trunks; maybe on my return trip, I’d get a better look at them.

As much as I wanted to enjoy the views of the plant life, my eyes kept darting upwards whenever I heard rustling above me. Every time, it was either a squirrel or a bird or something harmless, but I didn’t feel too bad being jumpy—rustling branches might be the only warning I got.

I didn’t know what time it was when I got to Jesse’s entrance cave, but the yellow squares lit up just like usual, followed by the doors opening. Then there was the elevator, the tube, the not looking down part, and—my favorite—the music.

No alicorns waited for me at the base of the elevator, which I didn’t particularly mind. I figured that Jesse was in the maintenance room like usual, so I made my way down that familiar path.

As I walked through the hallways, I heard a new sound. I tried to place it, but the best I could come up with was that there was low, barely audible humming that I wouldn’t have been able to hear if the place wasn’t dead silent.

Behind me, a door hissed open—almost deafening in the quiet. I turned around to look at it, and Jesse walked into the hall about fifty feet away. He did a slight double take when he saw me, but then he pulled out a small golden disk from the front of his shirt—a watch, I was certain, though I didn’t remember bringing him one.

“You’re… did you fly here?” He dropped the watch back down his shirt.

I raised an eyebrow and smiled. “No, I took the train. My griffin friend doesn’t give rides to ponies.”

“Well, uh…” He blinked, and I realized he hadn’t been expecting me that night.

Which you could’ve mentioned, I mentally sighed.

Finally, he managed to say something. “It’s good you’re here. Sorry, I’ve had an eventful evening.”

I walked over to him so we weren’t shouting down a hallway at each other. When I got close enough to use my indoors voice, I asked, “Oh yeah? What’s up?”

“Many things.” He glanced around, indecisively, before turning back to the door. It hissed to let us inside, and as we walked through the doorway, Jesse looked down at me and continued, “While you were away, I achieved a production boom.”

The room we entered was… softer, which distracted me for a moment. Unlike the hallways outside, there weren’t long, harsh tubes of light on the ceiling; instead, the walls were lined with opaque, white discs. The walls and floor were the same black-and-white color scheme, but the ceiling was lower, which gave the place a slightly homelier vibe. At the other end of the room, the elevator tube looked like it was made of polished white metal, instead of glass.

It was like someone took the architecture of the rest of the facility and tried to make it comfortable.

I realized we’d stopped moving, which snapped my mind back to Jesse’s conversation, and my question. “What’s a… production boom?”

He began walking towards the elevator, and I followed. “I’m not quite sure if there’s a better word for it in your language, but essentially, I was able to use that moissanite to restart some of the electronics production lines, which let me repair more components and nodes in those lines, which let me produce what I needed to repair or replace the industrial production lines…”

“Is that where that humming is coming from?” I asked as we stepped into the elevator. Its floor seemed solid, which was another change in design I welcomed.

“You hear humming?” Jesse quickly looked away to push some of the small circles of light near the elevator’s door, but he turned back to me as we began our descent.

“It’s quiet, and I can’t hear it over you speaking, but when I was alone in the hallway…” I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Interesting…” he mused. “That may be from this facility’s increased power consumption; with entire systems coming back online, I’ve needed to reactivate more of the geothermal generators. I even flooded the drill chamber, since I harvested everything I needed from down there.”

The thought of that entire chamber being flooded with magma gave me a profound sense of loss. It had been huge, and it had probably taken longer than my grandparents’ lifetime for it to be dug that deep, but once it had completed its purpose, Jesse…

Well, he made it useful for something else, I guessed.

“It doesn’t bother you, does it?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“The humming?”

I shook my head and looked back up at him. “No. It’s just… new, but I guess a lot’s new since last time I was here.”

“Indeed.” He motioned around us, at the elevator. “With all the additional power, I decided to reopen the personnel dormitories.”

“Ah…” That explained the décor. “How’d that go?” 

“Most of the people who lived down there died down there. Specifically, they died when an enemy soldier decided to vacuum-seal the area after flushing out the air. So, while that might’ve done well for preserving several thousand corpses, cleaning that all out was probably the most disgusting thing I’ve had to do in several thousand years.”

I was torn between curiosity and horror: There’d been a near-perfectly preserved archaeological site, at least a few millennia old, and he’d cleaned it all out? “W… why?”

“The idea came during our chess matches, but essentially, I wanted to repay you the cultural sharing.”

“By destroying a perfectly preserved dig site?”

He frowned out of the side of his mouth. “Do you want to see the several metric tons of rotting mush that used to be this place’s occupants? I didn’t turn the incinerator on yet, so it’s still lying there. In a pile.”

I shook my head. “I mean… you’re not supposed to disturb anything…”

“Well, I didn’t remove any of their personal belongings, except most of the bedding. If you’re really interested, we could take a tour, but I had something better in mind to show you than to walk you through a crypt. It’s not quite finished, but you got here sooner than I thought you would.”

With a shrug, I accepted the loss of history and decided that rotting corpses could be left to a secondhoof account. “So… what is it?”

“As I mentioned, I didn’t remove any personal belongings, but I did look around for something interesting. I found a notebook filled with titles, succeeded by exactly four lines of sixty-four letters and numbers. There wasn’t really a discernible pattern at first, but at the end, the author wrote a decryption algorithm.”

I stared up at him, blankly. “Jesse, you lost me at ‘titles’. Titles of what?”

He grinned. “Don’t feel bad, it took me the better part of a month to figure it out. Essentially, I found a library of holofilms, written down on paper.”

“Oh.” I blinked a few times before asking, “What’s a holofilm?”

“That’s what I want to show you, once the file’s done being reconstructed.”

The elevator stopped and let us off into a clean, white room. I blinked for a few moments as my eyes adjusted; everything looked shiny, but nothing looked hard or metallic. All of the furniture was round: tables, chairs, and even the doors were circles instead of hexagons.

Compared to the rest of the facility, this section actually looked like it’d been designed for comfort, rather than function.

Jesse added to the contrast by taking off his lab coat, so he was just wearing the black shirt and pants he always had on underneath it. He walked over to a small alcove near the elevator, and I watched him hang his coat on a hook. “I can take your, uh, cloak if you want?”

I was still weirded out by seeing his bare forearms—they were the same tan as his hands and face—but his offer shook me out of it. “Sure…” walked over as I undid my cloak’s buckles; then, with a bite of my mouth and twist of my neck, I whipped it off. Jesse took it, but since my saddlebags still held my little canister of chimera repellant, I gently levitated them over to the floor.

I followed Jesse farther into the living area, but I kept stealing glances at his coat-less torso. When he finally caught me looking, he grinned, bemused. I defended myself with, “You’ve been wearing the same thing for nine months, Jesse. You look different, now.”

He only chuckled at that.

Jesse led me deeper into the living quarters, and my interest in his new appearance quickly took second place to exploring a new place. We mostly stuck to hallways, but they were smaller and more personal than the ones in the upper part of the facility. Intersections contained long, box-like benches and fake plants; even though it looked sparse, someone had decorated the place.

Our trip took us to a large, circular room. It was dimly lit, and there were rows of benches that wrapped around the circumference of the room in a large, bowl-like spiral. I followed the benches with my eyes for a moment before I realized that, without the four ramps that cut it into quarters, it would’ve been one large, wound-up bench.

Jesse led me down the closest ramp, and I followed him. Before I could ask the obvious question, he explained where we were: “This is one of the six holotheaters in the personnel dormitories. You’ll have to forgive me that I only produced enough components to fix one of them, but I don’t think we’ll need the others for now.”

I still didn’t know what holo meant, but my heart caught in my chest when I realized what two words he’d used it as a prefix for: Film. Theater. I started breathing rapidly as I realized that this place wasn’t the archaeological find of… forever; this was the only archeological find that came with movies of the culture that used to live in it.

Jesse turned to me, and he must’ve noticed I was jittering. “Is everything all right?”

I nodded rapidly, but I couldn’t hold back my enthusiasm. “Are you going to show me a human movie?”

We got to the end of the ramp, and Jesse nodded. “That’s the idea. I… I don’t have any idea if this is going to work, though, so I’m warning you: This might turn into an evening of troubleshooting.”

In the center of the giant dome we were now at the bottom of, there was a squat, cylindrical dais that had a few panels and screens. For a few silent, anxious minutes, I watched Jesse’s face as he typed away at things; his smile grew wider and wider until, at the end of it, he conclusively pressed a button with two fingers.

Then he turned to me. “Let’s take a seat.”

We were in a massive room, but I sat fairly close to Jesse. He’d actually been pleasant for the last half hour, and I didn’t want to end that by demanding a wall of personal space.

Since the benches were tall, human benches, I had to sit upright on it, letting my legs dangle down—almost exactly like Jesse’s posture. He turned, but without his legs to stand on, we were nearly the same height. He looked me up and down, grinned, and asked, “Am I rubbing off on you?”

“What’d I tell you about rubbing?” I grinned back and deflected his question. It brought up too many memories of classmates joking about my weird sitting posture on benches.

Jesse chuckled at the joke; then he snapped his fingers. The lights in the room dimmed down to pitch black. I panicked for a moment before a thin beam of white light shone vertically down the center of the room. The midpoint of the line grew into a sphere, which expanded until it hit the edges of the room.

Inside the light sphere, a massive, solid-looking word was floating and slowly turning around. I laughed because I was smiling so hard; in my excitement, I hadn’t even realized I wouldn’t be able to understand any of human words.

Music started playing, which sounded almost exactly like some of the larger orchestras that I’d heard, and before my very eyes, an entire world blinked into existence. The first things I noticed were buildings and roads—a city that absolutely dwarfed Canterlot.

The buildings grew larger, like I was flying closer down to ground-level; as everything got bigger and more detailed, finally, I saw them:

Humans.

Hundreds—no, thousands of them—walking and bustling through the city streets. I was thrown off for a moment when I saw how colorful they all were; then, I remembered how Jesse always wore clothes. Unlike his black-and-white lab coat, though, the humans in that city wore lots of neutral, dark colors. A few bright colors stood out here and there, but my gut feeling was that those were the exception, not the rule.

I reverted to my initial reaction when I noticed that the humans’ faces and hands were almost universally uncovered, and those were mostly various shades tan—but a few of them were light pink, and some of them were darker brown. So, humans were colorful, just within a more limited range than ponies.

The swooping-in effect ended when it focused on one specific human. He walked through his city and bought a drink from another human, and then he kept walking.

It was fascinating.

When the main human began speaking to other humans, Jesse whispered rough translations to me. With his help, over the next few hours, I watched as the main character, Jim, got fired from his job and met another human: Rachel.

She—and it was interesting to notice the differences in appearance between the two genders of humans—was a florist, which was a lower-paying job than the one Jim had been fired from. After they made friends with each other, Jim started being a co-florist with her. At first, he was bad at it, but by the end of the movie, when he had the chance to go back to his first job, he decided to stay with her at his new one. Then they kissed, everything faded to black, and words began forming in the empty space.

“These are credits,” Jesse explained. “As in, the actors who were in the film.”

“Wait…” I blinked in disbelief. “That… was all fake?”

“Not… entirely.” He shrugged. “I mean, there had to be some basis in reality, right? The backdrops that they didn’t have to explain, since a human audience would’ve just known what it was?”

Slowly, I nodded, even though I felt let down by realizing I hadn’t been watching a real human’s story. I rationalized that with how I knew a few ponies who had gone through situations like Jim’s—losing a job and finding one they liked better. That struck me as profound, but I couldn’t help but feel sad about the whole thing.

There weren’t cities like that anymore. There weren’t humans; everyone in that movie had died, long ago, in some apocalyptic event that Jesse called the “Chaos War”.

“They’re all gone, aren’t they?”

Jesse’s hand on my shoulder almost freaked me out, but I calmed down when I looked up into his steadfast gaze. His blazing blue eyes reflected the scrolling list of dead names; for the first time, I knew just where Jesse found his determination.

He shook his head. “Not all of them. Not yet.”

Those six words kindled a fire in my chest: one of hope, rebuilding, and legacy. I nodded and vowed that I’d do whatever I could to help Jesse preserve his culture. “So… what’s next on the agenda?”

He stood up, but motioned at me to stay seated when I started to follow him. He walked over to the center desk again, typed something, and came back to sit next to me. He snapped his fingers a second time, and I noticed one of the buttons light up as it pressed itself in.

“For tonight? Holofilms. In the morning, we’ve got work to do.”

I nodded before shifting to sit slightly closer to Jesse. I liked that schedule, and even though I felt myself growing tired after a long evening of traveling, I fought off sleep. I wanted to stay there as long as I could, with Jesse, experiencing his lost culture together.

> Chapter 5
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

My parents sat at the table in our plush-decorated kitchen, but as I walked over to them, everything in the room seemed shorter than I remembered. I had to duck through the archway, the table only came up to my waist, and I could easily see the tops of my mom and dad’s heads.
 
I waved to them, and they snapped to me; two vacant, shocked expressions were all that returned my greeting.
 
“Mom?” My eyebrow shot up.
 
Her scream shook me out of my dream, and I popped awake in a cold sweat. After the mild hyperventilation faded, I looked around and my stomach lurched a second time: I had no idea where I was.
 
The décor of the room was a comfortable, flat white, so I guessed I was still in Jesse’s home. I was tucked in a bed, so I magicked the covers off and climbed out. It was farther down to the floor than I was used to, so I ended up slipping and slamming my face into the ground; all in all, I’d had worse mornings.
 
I couldn’t remember when I’d fallen asleep last night. I briefly went over the movies I’d watched with Jesse, but I couldn’t recall how the fourth one ended. I climbed to my feet and grinned, guiltily, as I realized I must’ve fallen asleep next to or even on Jesse; he’d probably carried me to the room I’d woken up in.
 
With that mystery solved, a more pressing matter presented itself: I didn’t know what the bathroom situation was like, or even if I could to go back to the surface if I needed to.
 
Fortunately, the smaller door in the room led to what was unmistakably a bathroom. I didn’t dwell on the similarities of various furniture and apparatuses in there; instead, I focused on testing things to see if they worked. Enough of them did, so after a few minutes, I was ready to head back…
 
Where am I?
 
The new realization that I was lost, underground, crept over me. I looked around for clues of my whereabouts. For the second time, I got lucky without much effort; a piece of paper was stuck to the door with a faint glow of magic.
 
I levitated it over to me; up close, I could see Jesse had drawn me a rudimentary map. A green, pony-shaped blob was in a room whose walls and shape matched the one I was in; from there, a series of red arrows pointed me through the door and down several hallways to a big, round room.
 
As I started on my trip back, I remembered my dream—or fragments of it. It seemed weird, to stand taller than my whole family; only now that I was awake did I realize that, in the dream, I’d been walking on my hind legs.
 
I thought about the psychological implications of that. Part of me knew that it wasn’t exactly healthy to spend time perpetuating such a huge secret that I had to keep from all my colleagues and family—maybe that was what the “not recognizing me” bit was about.
 
That led to some more thoughts about how much I’d changed over the past few months; really, I noted, I was much the same Lyra—just with more human interests than any pony alive. But I didn’t think that made me any better—or taller—than anypony…
 
In the end, I shrugged the whole thing off as a weird dream brought on by sleeping in a new place. Plus, I was several miles underground; that probably messed with my subconscious more than archaeology ever could.
 
Jesse’s map got me back to the big room outside the elevator; on my second time there, I took the chance to look around. With how many chairs and tables there were, I drew the conclusion that it’d been some sort of communal lounge.
 
Before I got on the elevator, I remembered my cloak and saddlebags; even if I had a map, I wanted to keep my stuff together. When I checked the nook they were in, Jesse’s lab coat was gone, so I figured he’d had the same idea.
 
Instead of wearing my cloak, I folded it up to pack it away. It was big enough to take all of one saddlebag, which meant I had to reorganize everything I’d brought along. The granola bars didn’t survive the process, but other than that, I was successfully able to fit my cloak into my left bag. In the right bag, I had my notebook, my torchstone, and—near the top, since it was too volatile to pack at the bottom—my little can of chimera repellant.
 
Once I was ready to continue on my search for Jesse, I walked over to the elevator. After the hexagons sealed behind me, the disc didn’t automatically move. Panic came quickly in the form of one resonant thought: Am I stuck in this thing?
 
I checked Jesse’s map again; near the elevator, he’d drawn six pairs of circles, stacked vertically. One of them—the top-right—was colored in.  I looked around the tube and, sure enough, over by the door were twelve buttons. With a little grin of victory, I used magic to push the button that matched the one on the map; a moment later, the disc began moving upward.
 
Now that I wasn’t worried about having to be rescued, I heard the music again. I smiled for a moment at its familiarity; however, I put it in the back of my mind.
 
There were bigger things to ruminate on.
 
I remembered the movies Jesse had shown me. Even though I’d fallen asleep during the last one, I felt a ballooning sense of wonder and loss from looking into the past. There’d been huge cities, filled with a whole different species of intelligent beings.
 
As active as I was in my field, I’d never encountered evidence of architectural feats like I saw last night. Of course, I doubted that Jesse was lying—he had his whole city-sized, underground facility to back him up—so really, it just gave me an insignificant, tiny feeling to realize just how long ago it must’ve been when humans dominated the earth.
 
For the first time, it struck me just how massive an extinction event would have had to be in order to end their civilization. It reminded me of my resolve to help Jesse restore that legacy.
 
The elevator opened, and I began walking down the same softer, metal hallway that Jesse had taken me down on Thursday evening. Thinking of the date made me realize I had no idea what time it was up on the surface. I’d have to ask Jesse when I found him—except that made me remember my passive question of how accurately he measured the passage of time.
 
At the end of the hallway, the hexagonal door hissed open to let me back into the main hallway. Before I walked through, I noticed two things. First, a huge, black tube, about a foot in diameter, ran the entire length of the hallway in front of me—or at least, for as far as I could see in either direction.
 
Second, just like the door to the room I woke up in, there was a little piece of paper stuck to it. On it was a slightly more detailed picture of me, which I smiled at, and an arrow pointing to the right. I picked up the second paper and folded it up with the map; then, obviously, I turned right and followed the large, black tube.
 
I kept track of my directions as cantered along, but I soon realized that since I’d taken my little sign with me, I wouldn’t be able to tell my point of origin from the rest of the facility anymore. So in a weird sense, I had a map, I knew exactly where I was going, and I was totally lost.
 
The tube went on for what felt like a mile. Every five minutes or so, the tube got broken up by a large, black box with lights and dials on it. The boxes looked identical, which gave me an eerie sense of going in circles; thankfully, I was remembering my directions, which told me I hadn’t turned enough to do that.
 
When I felt I was overdue to pass a fifth box, I turned a corner; about a hundred feet down the hallway, the tube entered a doorway. I followed the tube to that room, and once inside, I looked around at…
 
It took a few tries, but I finally decided I had no idea what I was looking at.
 
Inside that room, wires crisscrossed the floor to connect nearly a dozen small, eye-level machines. They all hummed, and lit up in different blinking patterns, but that didn’t give me any clearer idea about what they were for.
 
Probably the easiest things for me to recognize were what looked like a pair of carts, but even they held their own mysteries: each held a large, two-foot-long glass cylinder. One cylinder held eerie, bubbling, purple goo; the other contained a comparatively dead, rust-colored stalactite.
 
A tall steel apparatus stood in the back of the room. It was wider at the top, and the black tube connected to its base on the side. A large, Y-shaped groove was set into the machine’s face, and straps dangled near each of the three ends. I puzzled over what it was for, or why the top arms of the Y were so much thinner than…
 
Arms.
 
I let out a small, muted cry of horror: It was the right size and shape to fit a human body. My horror only grew when I realized it’d been built for that specific purpose—like all human tools.  But why would anyone need to be fastened to a machine like that?
 
Jesse poked his head around from behind the machine. He nodded recognition and began walking over to me; I watched my step as walked over wires to meet him halfway.
 
“Good morning,” he greeted me. “Did you sleep well?”
 
Despite my growing sense of foreboding, I nodded. “Yeah. And thanks for the maps.” I made a show of looking around at all the technology in the room. “What… what is all of this?”
 
“This…” Jesse swept his hand over the room. “Is the culmination of everything I have been working towards.” He walked over to the cart and knocked on the purple goop canister; the goop inside shrank away from his knocks in an unnatural, living manner. “For example, this is what I’ve been drilling for for the past two centuries. A self-replicating nanorobot that unceremoniously and forcibly merged with a fragment of an incredibly powerful entity. Today, I’m taking that power back.”
 
I remembered what he’d mentioned about reunification before. I still didn’t quite understand it. “So that…” I pointed at the goo before sweeping my hoof to Jesse. “Came out of you?”
 
He shook his head. “We’re more siblings, than a parent-child relationship.”
 
I stared back, thoroughly confused.
 
Jesse responded by hoisting himself up onto a table. He held his scarred hand out, and I sat down as he began lecturing: “Every human discovery and achievement paled in comparison to the discovery that chaos was not only a fundamental force of physics, but that there were sources of it, spread throughout the planet—sort of like the magnetic poles, but obviously nowhere near as organized or symmetrical.”
 
“The original purpose of this facility was threefold.” Jesse held up three fingers and curled them down, one by one, as he counted: “First, to collect it, like a dam. Second, to study it, to determine how it works. And third…” He pointed the final finger at himself. “To produce useable technologies that ran on it.”
 
I nodded; Jesse had mentioned the production facilities before.
 
He continued: “Raw chaos is… well, as you probably know, it needs a focusing point to be applied to anything.” He tapped his forehead, and my eyes drifted up to my horn. “After it’s focused, it still produces the seemingly impossible effects, like turning water into ethanol, but those effects can be stored and then later reproduced, which ushered in a new era of technologic advances.”
 
The implications of all that sank in; from what I gathered, Jesse was talking about a way of storing magic in things—which ponies could do, but it was generally expensive and inefficient. Even my torchstone needed a little spark of magic to start it; Jesse was talking about a torchstone that would light itself, so an earth pony or pegasus could use it.
 
It was impossibly amazing. I tried to pick a hole in the story, and it seemed easiest to start with: “How do you remember that?”
 
He raised an eyebrow. “I… I have history books, Lyra.”
 
And yet you didn’t think to share those? I let it slide; he’d probably never let me take any of them with me, anyway. Instead, I kept asking about the current history lesson. “You mentioned a focusing point? What did humans use?” I brought up a point Jesse had talked about at our lunch. “You guys aren’t very good at magic, even in your movies.”
 
That earned me a chuckle, but it seemed strained—almost sad. “How many lives would you sacrifice to save a hundred? Chaos-based medical technologies did just that, and hundreds times over each year—”
 
“Jesse…” I interrupted and leered. He was dodging the point, and he was doing it in ends-justify-the-means speak.
 
“It was…” He shook his head and laughed. “An organism was biologically engineered to interface with chaos. It wasn’t even human, but there were stories about it, at first, when it did its job willingly. It had a personality. When it became hostile towards the workers here, around two years into its existence…” Jesse shrugged. “They kept it placid by placing it in forced, near-constant hibernation. It never aged, it never felt pain, but some of its technicians swore they heard it speaking, in their heads.” He shrugged again. “That’s what some of the staff logs mention, at any rate.”
 
I looked over at the machine with straps on it, and I tasted bile. “So… you… humans kept someone asleep and just… used their body to build an entire technological era?”
 
“Essentially.”
 
“And… and you don’t have a problem with that?” I cocked my head.
 
“I didn’t say that. However, you can’t proclaim one life’s sanctity while throwing away the thousands that it improved, saved, and extended.”
 
I raised an objection, but Jesse spoke over me. “That was in the past, however. In case you haven’t fully connected the dots yet, humanity paid dearly for its dirty little secret; when I rebuild things, I have no intention of creating a second Somniator.”
 
“Somniator?”
 
“That was its name,” Jesse chuckled. “An ancient word for ‘dreamer’. Because humanity wasn’t anything without its dark sense of humor.”
 
I blinked a few times, not even sure where I needed to begin raising questions. I pointed at the glass cylinders. “Okay. If you’re not making another magic slave, what are you going to do with those?”
 
Jesse also pointed to the goop. “Each of those cylinders contains one-sixth of Somniator’s neuro-chaotic transposers.” He took a deep breath and brought his finger back to himself. “This contains another sixth. By reuniting with the other two fragments, I can track down the remaining three fragments, and when I am whole again…” His mouth stretched into a wide, fanatical grin. “I can start humanity over. I can save them, rebuild society…”
 
He trailed off, and I just kept staring at him, slack-jawed and trying to process everything he’d told me. I decided to put off the whole “running an entire society on the back of an unconscious slave” thing, since Jesse apparently didn’t want to repeat that.
 
Instead, I tried to wrap my head around one simple question:
 
“What are you?”
 
His crazy smile turned into an amused grin. “I’m Jesse. Yes, at some point, there was a human and a fragment of Somniator. I’m unsure how it began, but over time, the two have merged into what I am today.”
 
That explains how he’s so old, I noted, but I didn’t feel like that changed my understanding of him. I went back to a simpler part of him, one that I felt I could understand: “So, rebuilding human society… that’s going to help out Equestria, too?”
 
“Naturally.”
 
“And no one’s going to get hurt? No… weird, secret sleep-prisons?”
 
He laughed harder than I’d ever seen him, and that gripped my throat like a clamp. It lingered in the room, even when he finished.
 
I stepped back when he jumped down from the table and walked over to one of the machines on the far side of the room—not the scary, strap-in one, but a smaller one that stood roughly eye-level with me.
 
As he began typing something onto the device, he finally broke the awkward silence. “No prisons. I’ll either rebuild a sustainable chaos-based society or one that’s based on standard and plasma-based technologies, like this entire facility, but nothing that will be against anyone’s will.”
 
That was as good a promise that I felt I was going to get, but more importantly, it was as good of one as I needed. Slowly, I nodded and agreed. “Okay. Next question: What’s…” I pointed over to the Y-shaped machine with the straps. “What’s that? It looks kind of prison-y.”
 
“I’ll get to that. For now, I want to show you this…” He gently palm-slapped the machine he was standing behind. I walked over to stand next to Jesse; on the other side of the small machine, everything looked distinctly like it was built for a pony. It was short, the buttons were large, and all of the words that glowed on one screen were written in Equestrian.
 
“This is what I need you for here today. Because, much like reassembling a glass sculpture that’s been broken, reuniting with the other two fragments will be an intricate process. The computers are doing most of the work, but I need you to make sure I don’t die.”
 
“Wait, what?”
 
Jesse raised a hand. “Relax. It’s easy, and you’re more than mentally competent enough to handle this.”
 
It didn’t put my mind at ease any. “What do you mean you might die?”
 
“This is a highly volatile procedure.” He took a deep breath. “It’s going to hurt. Me. It’s going to be worth it. But when the procedure begins, some of my vital signs are going to show up…” He tapped the device’s screen. “On here. The main thing I want you to watch is my heart rate; if it goes over two hundred and fifty…” He pointed to a big red button. “Stop the procedure.” He stood back up. “Also, if I ask you to stop… stop the procedure.”
 
Easy or no, it was still a huge responsibility. “I… couldn’t you have built that in to everything?”
 
Jesse walked away from me, towards the two carts with canisters. “I didn’t want to train the speech-recognition software to recognize what I sound like when I’m screaming in agony. And I don’t trust myself to do it, because I’m probably going to be distracted.”
 
I watched in silence as Jesse wheeled the first canister over to the strapped machine and set it vertically on top. He pressed a few buttons and I heard a quiet hiss; when Jesse tried shaking the canister, it stayed firmly where it was.
 
For the second time in two days, he took off his lab coat; that time, he repeated the process with his shirt. I was about to ask Jesse about the huge, jagged scars that ran across his abdomen, but he distracted me by also slipping off his pants.
 
He either didn’t notice or actively ignored my awkward glances; sure, he had on a smaller, thinner pair of pants, but still. It was weird. After folding his clothes, Jesse took a moment to remove his accessories: a watch he wore around his neck, and the ring he wore on his right hand.
 
Once he was pretty much naked, Jesse opened a panel on the machine behind him and pulled out a cluster of wires. With a wave of his hand, they snaked out of the machine and attached themselves all over his arms, legs, torso, and head. In front of me, my machine beeped to life; now, the screen told me various statistics about Jesse: neural oscillations, blood pressure, and heart rate.
 
There was something striking about little graphs that flashed to life next to each number—numeric representations of his life. I remembered my duty, and my qualms; they came out as, “Jesse, I’m not sure if I can—”
 
His heart rate spiked to one-hundred and thirty two. I snapped my attention to him; Jesse wore a grimace that could easily be explained by the thick plastic tube that he was currently stabbing into the right side of his stomach. A thin trickle of blood flowed down to his hips; it made me squeamish.
 
“Hard part’s over, right?” He chuckled, but it sounded strained, and his heart rate stayed at over a hundred.
 
“Why did you stab yourself in the…” I looked over him, and two more tubes snaked through the air to slide into both his arms. “Everything?”
 
“These are for some chemical aid to my organs, to help them endure what I’m about to go through…” He carefully turned around and stepped up, into the Y-shaped groove. When he stretched his arms out, his magic woke up the straps, and they slithered to bind him to the machine.
 
He let out a loud, pained grunt, and his heart rate shot above one-sixty—less than ninety away from the upper limit I needed to watch for. I shouted a question across the room: “What… are you okay?”
 
“Now I’ve been stabbed… everything,” he answered through grit teeth. At the same time, though, his heart rate dropped down by thirty…
 
Heart units? I wondered what the term was. I wasn’t a doctor.
 
Jesse gave me some last instructions. “This shouldn’t last more than ninety seconds, Lyra, and it should go by… well, you shouldn’t have to push the red button. If you do, that’s okay; I’ve got contingency plans.”
 
In a weird way, the plans for failure increased my confidence. “Okay.”
 
“Are you ready?”
 
I took a deep breath and shook my head. “I mean… I’m here to help you, right?” I shrugged and braced myself, hoping I could forget the gnarled knot in my stomach. “Whenever you are.”
 
He muttered some words in his old language; then, after a moment of silence, I heard an oddly soft, pleasant-sounding beep. It introduced a new, steadily increasing whirring; when that hit a peak, a loud buzzing filled the room.
 
At the same instant, Jesse arched himself back into the machine—or at least, he tried to. The straps…
 
I looked away. I wasn’t a doctor or some sort of sick torture-loving freak; all I had was a screen with numbers, so I sat there and counted them off as they slowly rose:
 
Two hundred ten… Two hundred fifteen…
 
A third noise joined the symphony of horrors on the other side of the room. I tried to tune it out. I didn’t want to remember what it sounded like when any living creature was in that much agony.
 
Two hundred twenty-six… Two hundred twenty-nine…
 
The numbers were slowing down, but they were still steadily increasing. In a brief moment’s regret, I wished I’d thought to time the procedure—but then again, I didn’t know which of the sounds was the actual start of things. The buzzing? That hadn’t been more than twenty seconds ago…
 
Two hundred thirty-five… Two hundred thirty-seven…
 
Sweat broke out all over my body, and I wanted to set down my saddlebags. Maybe that would help me feel cooler? I kept my eyes locked on the screen as I magicked them off to the side; sure enough, it didn’t help. The entire room still felt like a furnace.
 
Two hundred forty… Two hundred forty-one…
 
I suddenly wished that Jesse’s heart rate would spike to over two hundred fifty. Surely, that’d mean he’d be close to some sort of death—if he could even die—but… at the same time, I just wanted this to be over.
 
Two hundred forty-six…
 
My own heart leapt up when Jesse’s spiked by five; if it could just do that one more time, then I could put a stop to all of this. I’d tell him next time, to figure out how to do this alone; yes, I wanted to help, but this was too much.
 
Two hundred forty-seven…
 
I tried to think back to the movies we’d watched, or the stories he’d told me over chess. Those had been good experiences—a little frustrating, but wondrous nonetheless.
 
Two hundred forty-eight…
 
I couldn’t make the connection between Jesse’s loud, screaming agony and helping to pass along or restore his culture. I tried, but I couldn’t. It was so close, too, to the point where I could just end this.
 
Two hundred forty-nine…
 
I watched the screen, transfixed, as I hoped and prayed for it to just bump up two more numbers. He’d said over two hundred fifty, right? That meant it had to be at least two hundred fifty-one…
 
Two hundred fifty…
 
I held my breath, and my own heart pounded in my ears. Sweat dripped into my eyes, which added a stinging excuse for some of the tears. I forced myself to keep watching the screen, even though its lights turned streaky and star-like.
 
Two hundred fifty…
 
“Just one more…” I whispered to myself.
 
Two hundred fifty…
 
“Please?”
 
Abruptly, the buzzing sound died, and I looked up to look at Jesse. He was slumped down, hanging from the straps, which scared me; looking back at his heart rate, it was steadily declining.
 
For an incredulous, thought-less moment, I didn’t know what to do. The machine’s whirring wound down to silence, which filled the whole room with an ominous, dead quiet.
 
Jesse’s heart rate was well into the safe half of a hundred, but his machine didn’t say if he were breathing. From what little I knew about biology, I knew that, if something had gone wrong, electricity could very well be faking a heartbeat.
 
I picked my saddlebags back up and reattached them around myself. I didn’t really know why I was doing it; it was mostly a mindless reflex that felt comfortable. Like a hug. Then, I started walking over to him. For all the things the machine told me, it didn’t tell me if he were breathing, or even if he were alive anymore.
 
I had to check for myself.
 
As I drew nearer, I smelled ozone, which added a scary level of reality to my hypothesis. On top of the machine, the canister was now filled with a dull, metallic gray goop—it wasn’t glowing purple anymore. Maybe they both died, I thought, which caused a lump to form in my throat.
 
When I stood right below him, I looked up at his chest. My ears drooped; his hair wrapped around his slumped face, and he wasn’t moving—definitely not breathing. I gasped, which caught in my throat; after clearing it with a cough, I blinked my watery eyes and asked, “Jesse?”
 
He roared to life with a great, raspy breath that sounded like he’d just broken the surface of a lake. After the first breath, he started breathing regularly again, and he looked down at me with a grin.
 
Relief washed over me, followed by a tiny feeling of disappointment. I buried that dark thought and asked, “Did it work?”
 
Everything holding Jesse to the machine suddenly exploded away from him; I hopped back and shielded my face. When I looked up at him again, he was wearing his clothes again; the only difference was now, his eyes were glowing the same color of purple that the ooze used to be.
 
“Better than I could have dreamed.”
 
His voice was different. It sounded… almost like there were two of him, talking in dark unison. I took a few steps back, but he didn’t seem to care. I also asked what I hoped was an obvious question: “So, you’re not… doing the other canister yet? ‘Cause I could use a—”
 
The second canister—the one with the red stalactite—flew across the room, into his waiting hands. He smiled carnivorously, which was scary enough, but then his eyes and mouth filled with bright purple light.
 
I wanted to run, but my hooves locked into place.
 
Black tendrils of magic flowed out of the canister and into Jesse’s hands, permeating his skin. I realized that he didn’t need the machine anymore, which told me that the procedure had been a success. That knowledge didn’t make me any less terrified.
 
He threw the canister aside and it shattered; the stalactite tumbled out from the broken glass and rolled over to me. Up close, I could see the distinct spiral shape that had grown into it, which led to an utterly horrifying revelation:
 
That wasn’t a stalactite.
 
It was a horn.
 
I looked back up from what had to have been the remains of a unicorn; he was looking at me, dead on, like an evil jack o’ lantern made of flesh.
 
He took a step forward; I took a step back. I couldn’t even find the words for what I felt. Betrayal? Stupidity?
 
I took another step back, but that time, I tripped over one of the wires on the floor. I fell on my left side, which thankfully meant my folded-up cloak cushioned my fall. Without looking up, I could see a pair of black shoes as they slowly crossed the floor and walked closer to me.
 
I moved to get up; when I did, I looked up; he was now bent down, reaching for me…
 
On pure instinct, I snapped open my right saddlebag and flung my canister of phosphorous upwards at him.
 
It sprung open, and a fireball of heat and light exploded as the white, waxy pellets did exactly what they were supposed to do: deter powerful, magical creatures from hurting ponies in the Everfree Forest.
 
I didn’t look back as I got up and ran; from the high-pitched, agonizing screams I left behind, I knew I’d lit him on fire. I started crying, even despite myself; I didn’t want things to get to where they were.
 
When I was in the hallway, a huge, guttural voice yelled out my name.
 
I ran, not knowing which way was out, just that I needed to get away.
 
An explosion behind me told me that running might not even be fast enough. I cleared a corner and weighed my options; my scared brain kept coming back to autoteleportation.
 
Which, under the best of circumstances, teleportation wasn’t the safest of ways to travel. I knew the theory, but I hadn’t ever had a need to practice it; whenever I used magic to travel somewhere, it was part of the Equestrian Teleportation Network, so I had both my departure and my return covered on both ends.
 
The basics were simple enough: create a long, thin, magic-vacuum that contained you and your destination. If you made it right, the residual magic outside of the vacuum would try to force the “bubble” to its smallest size. It was a fast, violent, and very prone-to-error process. If you messed up, you were just as likely to overshoot your destination by thousands of miles as you were to get crushed, dissolved, or stuck inside something—like a mountain.
 
However, none of that mattered when something was chasing after you with the intent of killing you and eating your magic. I risked a glance over my shoulder; sure enough, even though he was black and burning, he was running after me in a dead sprint.
 
I’ll take my chances with the mountain.
 
Quickly, I imagined my Ponyville apartment. I imagined the path between my living room and me; then, I slowly pushed all the magic away from that path. Like a siphon, it got easier once I started; finally, I felt it reach a familiar point of no return.
 
With a lurch, I teleported out of the facility.

> Chapter 6
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The green light of my spell blinked away, and I dropped several feet to the ground. A thick, earthy smell told me I was outside; looking around, the black flowers and thick trees gave me some sense of comfort.

I was still in the Everfree. In terms of autoteleportaiton, I’d done a decent enough job; I wasn’t home, but I’d escaped—

Whatever relief I felt vanished. I was in the Everfree Forest, and I’d just pissed off an extremely powerful person. He’s gonna be looking for me…

I whipped out my compass. Ponyville was northwest of the Everfree, but I only knew the general direction, not the specific bearing. I needed to move, so I put my compass away and began galloping southeast. It was still light enough to see, which offered a little relief; I wasn’t an expert on running for my life, but I figured that lighting a beacon to let your pursuer track you wasn’t the best idea.

The trees whipped past me as I pressed on. I took special notice of the roots as I ran; the last thing I needed was to trip and snap my neck. I had to balance looking down with dodging some of the low-hanging branches as I passed them. Sharp pain lashed on my scalp one time when I didn’t do a good enough job at it.  There wasn’t time to stop and give myself first aid. I had to go.

As I wove through trees at top speed, I pieced together bits of a plan. When I got to Ponyville, what then? Was I just luring a monster into the town to wreak havoc? Don’t they have drills for that sort of thing by now?

My dark humor reminded me of Celestia’s six vassals: The Elements of Harmony. They’d put an end to their fair share of dire situations—ranging from world-rending monsters to fashion show drama. They were headed by Celestia’s protégé, and she was a good source of knowledge; whatever tiny echoes of a “plan” I had solidified around her. Step one, go to the library. Step two, hope he doesn’t find me and burn it down out of spite.

I pushed myself harder and ran faster, still ducking trees. My heart pounded, and my panting breaths tasted like metal. I wasn’t out of shape; being an outdoorspony didn’t allow for that. The whole time I ran, my mind raced with panic: Death. Plans. Pain. I was also technically lost, despite my general sense of direction…

I pushed it out of my mind. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, but I needed to keep a straight head.

A smile burned on my face when I came across my usual path through the forest. It was flatter and the tree branches were higher up; not only could I run faster, but I knew where I was! Almost there, I told myself, and I hammered hooves into the dirt.

As I ran, the forest around me began lightening up—literally. More sun could fall through the looser treetops, and I was nearly out of the forest. Ahead of me, I could make out bright, sun-lit hilltops just outside the forest.

I laughed, relieved.

Then, Jesse walked out from behind a tree trunk.

The bottom of my stomach fell out. His black, charred lab coat had burnt to tatters around him, but that only showed how, underneath his clothes, he was perfectly fine—almost like setting him on fire hadn’t done any lasting damage.

By the time I realized how utterly hopeless my situation was, I was too close to him to stop. My only option was crazy: I lowered my head and charged, horn-out. It wasn’t the most damaging of attacks in a fair fight, but maybe if I bluffed…

The world exploded in a sea of bright, shining stars. I blinked to clear my vision, and my eyes were level with Jesse’s furious, violet flames. He kept his now scar-less left hand raised at me, and I slowly floated over to him.

I tried to struggle, but he clenched his fist; my forelegs clamped to my body with crushing force. After that, it wasn’t that I stopped trying to move—it was that I couldn’t. 

When I was directly in front of him, he snarled. “Just what the hell was that supposed to be? White phosphorous? Are you insane?”

I gasped a series of tiny little breaths; he was crushing my lungs, too, which made it a fight to stay conscious.

His eye flames flashed indigo, and in his right hand, a black crystal sword materialized out of thin air. He held it back, poised, and he hissed, “Answer. Me.”

I tried to think of what I could say to save my life; the most coherent thing I could manage was, “Jesse… you’re… hurting me.”

“Good.”

My gasps stopped working. The harder I tried, the more I realized that I couldn’t breathe. My whole body filled with dull, crushing ache; Jesse’s hand tightened on his sword, and his frown deepened to a new level of malice.

The only thing left in my mind was hope that it’d be quick.

Then, his eyes flashed to their usual blue. His mouth shot open, but I only got a split-second’s look at his horrified expression before I fell to the ground. My hooves sprang apart, so I landed wrong on my back-right one, but I didn’t care about that fiery sprain: I was too busy sucking in lungfuls of sweet, cold air.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jesse’s feet step backwards from me, and his sword shattered to dust. I limped forward, away from him, even though I had no hope in being able to escape.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

I kept walking, but I was too dizzy to see straight. I wasn’t going anywhere for a while; that just left me one option: replying. “So…” I wheezed, “Murder isn’t part of your stupid plan?”

“No!” he pleaded. “I never set out with the intent of hurting anyone—”

“LIAR!” I rubbed my neck, which was still sore after being choked. Jesse’s perplexed look frustrated me even more, so I pressed, “Whose horn was that?”

“A tyrannical slave driver. But I wasn’t the one who killed him. I simply harvested his remains—”

“And that’s not sick at all.” I rolled my eyes.

“I took no pleasure in doing it.” The side of Jesse’s mouth twitched down. “It was a necessary evil.”

I pointed to the air behind me, where I’d been floating a moment ago. “And that? Was that also ‘necessary’?”

“Yes.” He said it so matter-of-factly. If I were a few feet taller, I would’ve smacked the nonchalance off his face. “You attacked me, twice.” He looked down and finally seemed to notice that he was wearing burnt rags. Then, he squared his vision back on me. “Which, despite who asked you earlier, the question remains. You attacked me with a war-crime grade chemical weapon, you destroyed a significant portion of my facility’s air filtration system, and I want to know: ‘Why’?”

After a few rapid blinks, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I pointed my hoof at Jesse, frustrated because at how I’d turned into the villain here. “You started walking towards me with your eyes and mouth all lit up and hands out, like you were hungry.” I shuddered at the memory. “I saw what you did to another unicorn’s horn; I didn’t want to stick around and see what you had to do when one was still attached.”

He stared at me, gravely. “I have no memory of that. I just remember waking up on fire.”

I grit my teeth. Knowing him, he was telling the truth. “That doesn’t change what you did.”

“That person was not me.”

He let the words hang in the air for a few moments, but I didn’t have a retort. I was torn between my majority desire to escape that situation—though Sisters only knew that I probably couldn’t—and my own, tiny curiosity about what he meant.

“I… I feel different, now, than I did this morning. Part of that has to do with the raw power I gained, but there are… other parts to me, now. Echoes of the other fragments’ personalities and memories.” He sighed. “It was a lot to ingest at once, which was why I overreacted to your second attack. But now that that my mind is settling down…”

“I don’t believe you.” I shook my head. “No. I saw you punch through solid steel once, because you were mad. That was months ago, not because you just filled your head with crazy purple goo. And I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be in the blast radius next time something pisses you off!”

Jesse stayed quiet for a few moments after I finished something akin to my resignation letter. Finally, he shook his head and spoke simply: “You fear me.”

“Uh, yeah. You just tried to kill me, for starters.”

“After you lit me on fire…”

“Because you looked like a rough approximation of every nightmare I’ve ever had!” I snapped back. “If you’re admitting you’ve got issues controlling your anger, that’s fine. Whip up your pony disguise and join a support group. But you can’t expect me to just blindly continue following you when my life’s at risk!”

“Your life is not at risk.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

My mind blanked when I tried to think of an answer. The best I could come up with was a somber, “Let me go.”

Ironically, I felt a twinge of guilt at how hurt Jesse looked. He stepped back and away from me. Part of his sleeve fell off his right arm as he swept it away, towards Ponyville. “You are free to leave.”

The quiet sincerity of his act made me hesitate. We’d known each other for nine months, and—notwithstanding all the stuff that’d happened in the past hour—this was how it ended? I still felt a tiny sense of duty, so as I turned to leave, I asked, “Are you gonna be okay by yourself?”

“I managed before…” He shook his head and sighed. “If this is ‘goodbye’, then I have two final requests. First, I’d like to apologize for my actions this afternoon.”

I nodded, right as I put weight on my back-right leg. Instead of giving a neutral “Okay,” I let out a hiss at what was definitely a sprained leg—if not broken.

Jesse waved his hand, and instantly, my pain vanished. Despite everything, I fought to keep a grin off my face; if Jesse managed to help Equestria, that sort of magic would do well for us.

It made me think twice about leaving, but then I remembered he’d given me that injury in the first place. Continuing to help him would be unsafe, unwise, and a lot of other “un” words.

“The second is…” Jesse paused. “Something akin to a demonstration. Something I’d like to show you.”

“What is it?”

He shook his head. “If I could explain instead of showing, I would do that. But since the demonstration will directly affect you, I want to ask for explicit permission first.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to do something to me? After what just happened?”

“Only with your permission.”

“What if I say no?”

He took another step away from me, this time, deeper into the forest. Raising his hands, he clarified, “Then we say goodbye, and you will never see me again.”

I weighed my options—including serious consideration to just saying no. In the end, my curiosity got the better of me, and I raised a hoof in a shrug. “Okay. What is it?”

Jesse hesitated for a moment, but then he crossed his arms. “What is your take on the fact that our cultures resemble one another?”

His question caught me off guard, but I put my hoof down and switched tracks to my operational hypothesis: “Multiple discovery is a well-documented phenomenon in ancient cultures, where ponies who had no contact both discovered or invented similar tools or ideas. So…”

I looked up at Jesse. He seemed different, now; almost like he was actively listening to something that interested him. I continued, “Our cultures have similar cultural artifacts since we both faced a lot of the same basic problems: biological needs, shelter, and even things like knowledge-sharing. But human culture seemed to be more driven by electricity and mechanisms than by magic…” I left out how they’d had to harvest it through artificial means.

“That makes sense.” He nodded. “Though it doesn’t account for your species’ existence, does it? Not on any sort of feasible time scale from an evolutionary standpoint.”

That depends wholly on how old you are. However, there was a bigger problem with Jesse’s viewpoint: “We didn’t evolve.” I shook my head. “At least, not like fossil records show for other animals. Celestia’s gone on record saying that the same forces that created her created all life, but she’s been notoriously tight-lipped as to what, exactly, those forces were.”

“Of course she has.” Jesse knelt down to the ground and began using his finger to draw a large circle around his feet.

I remembered magic kindergarten, so I knew what it was before he was halfway finished. That raised the question of why he, after essentially tripling his power, needed even more magic strength. “Jesse… why are you drawing a magic circle?”

He left the last tiny bit open before looking up at me with a small grin. “If I told you, in my right mind, that I mean you no harm, would you believe it?”

I thought about his question; ten minutes ago, I’d been making my peace with death. But, after he’d healed me, the only thing that remained was a memory of the pain and helplessness. “I…” I shook my head. “I mean, how can I?” A little righteous indignation flared back up and I pointed a hoof at him. “Why should I?”

Jesse smiled. “Have a little faith in me.”

He completed his circle, and my stomach clenched; as the ground around him started glowing a soft blue, I loosened a little. In nine months, he’d almost always been calm and collected, and he’d at least acted like he had my best interests at heart.

The light in Jesse’s circle grew brighter before exploding in all directions. I shielded my eyes, but once it was over, I didn’t feel any different.

Above me, Jesse stood. In his left hand, he held an invisible ball of heat—or at least, something in his hand caused the air to shimmer and ripple like the desert on a summer afternoon.

“This is a chaos-nullification field, designed to work retroactively with organisms.” He brought his left hand down, and the ball followed; he continued speaking as he thrust his sleeveless right arm through it. “They were originally designed for hospitals—well, they were usually built, rather than made, but the underlying theory remains the same—to rid humans of any accidental exposure to refined chaos, since even the smallest amounts of it could have drastic effects.”

As I watched, the color faded from his right hand. Instead of a healthy looking tan, the skin turned gray and ashy. Then large, dry chunks started falling off. When they hit the ground, they exploded in tiny puffs of dust, and all the while, I fought to keep my granola bars down.

“I apologize if it’s dramatic…” Jesse pulled his arm out of the circle. Immediately, color returned to his hand, and the parts that had fallen off simply glowed blue before reappearing exactly as they had been. “But I wanted to show you that this is safe to use with no adverse effects to any of my abilities.” He snapped his healed hand’s fingers, and a tongue of blue flame lit in his palm.

I nodded, dubiously. “You want me to put my hoof in that thing that just rotted away your hand?”

The air shimmered as his anti-magic field floated over to me. “I doubt you’re older than three decades, let alone three millennia. You’ll be immune to that phenomenon.”

The field came to rest in front of me, which made me ponder the risks of touching it. Finally, I agreed to a hoof; even in the worst-case scenario, prosthesis technology was an ever-expanding field. “I don’t know where you read about pony biology, Jesse, but hooves aren’t all that magical to begin with…” I pushed my hoof through the rippling air. “This probably—”

I blinked at my hoof. The part of it that went through the field wasn’t covered in its usual green fur anymore, nor did it even resemble a hoof.

It was a human hand.

I gasped and pulled my forelimb back. As soon as it left the field, my hoof turned back to its normal, green self. After moving it around a few times and sensing no lasting effects, I took a deep breath and plunged my hoof forward again.

Again, the anti-magic field acted like a color barrier: green pony fur on one side, pink human skin on the other. The little bits of keratin at the end were neat and trimmed, like how I kept my hoof, and the truth dawned on me:

It was my hand.

The past nine months of interactions with Jesse, all of the times he talked about saving his race and culture and helping Equestria… I shook my head. I understood now, what his plan entailed.

I wasn’t sure if I agreed with it.

I pulled my forelimb back to my chest; that time, the anti-magic field dissipated with a warm gust of heat. I looked up at Jesse, but I truly didn’t know what to say.

“Are you still parting ways with me, for your own safety?”

I looked down at my hoof and leveled with him: “I don’t know.” My eyes flashed up to him. “You’re dangerous. You’re a liar. For all I know, you could be evil.” Jesse stood motionless at my accusations. I waved my hoof at him. “But I don’t know what this means. Not yet. It’s a lot to think about, so I don’t want to give an answer until I have.”

He nodded, vacantly. “I understand. And fortunately—” He stretched the word in an annoyed manner. “—I’ve got to make some repairs to my facility if I wish to continue living above several large magma chambers.”

I considered apologizing, but I decided I didn’t want to say the actual words. Instead, I gave him a guilty smile and asked, “How long is that going to take?”

“I’m not certain.” Jesse stared back. “But if you need time for soul searching, then come back in a week. If things are still toxic down below, I’ll be waiting for you outside your usual entrance.”

A week, I repeated in my mind. Maybe the biggest dilemma I’ve had in my life, and I get a week to think through it. I took a deep breath and nodded; it wasn’t the most generous of deadlines, but he was giving me time to think it over.

My nodding slowly turned to head-bobbing from side to side, since I wasn’t sure where I needed to go from there. The obvious answer dawned on me, so I turned to head home.

I waved at Jesse as I departed. “Well… goodbye for now, at least.”

He returned the wave, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes when he answered, “Have a nice week.”

> Chapter 7
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

After almost dying on Friday afternoon, I spent rest of the weekend locked in my apartment. I knew a simple deadbolt couldn’t stop Jesse, but I sincerely doubted that he’d come knocking. My reason for solitude was simple, even benign:
 
I had a lot to think about, and I didn’t want to be disturbed.
 
The apartment itself had originally come pre-furnished in cozy pastel colors that were beginning to show their age. Since it was technically my second home, I hadn’t devoted much time to sprucing the place up; the only things I’d brought beyond the bare essentials were reference materials to help me study the Everfree Forest.
 
By Monday evening, all of my textbooks were still on their shelves and wearing their thin skins of dust. I’d only needed my notes on Jesse I’d kept for the past nine months. Much like a final dissertation, now it was time to build all the conclusions I could from the findings I’d recorded.
 
It didn’t help that he’d been intentionally misleading the whole time. Every time I’d been amazed at the similarities between our cultures, or when I’d been sad and eager to help him... everything was different now.
 
He didn’t want to help Equestria. He wanted to cure us.
 
“Cure” was the closest word I had for it, anyway—I didn’t feel sick, and I sincerely doubted that pony life could continue if there were any serious detriments to the “condition”. However, Jesse’s demonstration had been extremely effective in its simplicity: With magic, pony hoof. Without magic, human hand.
 
Where I got lost was probably the fundamental point of it. Pony or human, did it matter? I could accept that our race had used to be human at some point—it was impossible, but I’d seen it with my own two eyes. It stood to follow that something had fundamentally changed one species into the other—most likely the “Chaos” War, which was what humans called magic.
 
But what did we gain from changing back?
 
That question took me back to my low-level sociology classes I’d taken as an undergraduate—you couldn’t figure out past civilizations if you didn’t understand the present one. Within Equestria, food supplies were sufficient, disease-based deaths were low, and year after year, polls across the nation showed that ponies were generally satisfied with their lives. I truly doubted our system needed fixing.
 
And yet…
 
I remembered the first movie I’d watched with Jesse, the one with Jim and Rachel. They were fictional characters in a world that was as different from Equestria as it was similar, but the outcome of that film made me think. He’d lost one job, and then gone to one that was completely different than where he’d started in. It resembled some stories I’d heard about friends and colleagues, true, but they’d always ended up somewhere that was somehow related to their cutie marks.
 
I remembered how, when he’d been a pony, Jesse had thought nothing of giving himself a cutie mark. I didn’t delude myself by thinking he was truly human anymore, but that surety, that absolute control of his destiny…
 
Would it be worth changing the world to give that to ponies?
 
With a sigh, I flipped my journal closed for the thirteenth time. The small gust of wind from the pages blew some of my scrap papers off my desk. I shook my head and magicked them back up off the floor. After re-stacking them in the order they’d landed, the top sheet only had a single, circled question: “Blowback?”
 
I pushed myself away from the desk and stood up. My mind was spinning a hundred miles an hour, and it’d been nearly a week since my last decent meal. The clock on my wall read ten-forty, which wasn’t incredibly late, by Canterlot standards, but the bars in Ponyville tended to close at midnight instead of four. It’s now or never, I goaded myself, which was all the motivation I needed to begin bundling up for a trip into the late November night air.
 
Two steps out of my door, a blast of wind bit my face. The local weather pegasi hadn’t scheduled snowfall yet, but the ground was hard and frozen. The ice didn’t make it harder to walk, but I did see cool little crystalline formations on the dirt path as I headed to my destination.
 
As I walked, I fought a losing battle to organize my thoughts about what I was going to do next Friday. Every time I pointed out an extremely good and solid reason that I should just leave the Everfree alone for a few months, I felt like I was turning my back on something bigger than myself.
 
Even scarier than how I was in way over my head was the fact that I might’ve already gone too far to escape. Friday morning, I’d called it “Blowback”, but after a weekend of pondering, I was convinced that there’d be negative consequences for my actions. Even if I did nothing—and going to Philidelphia to see my parents for a month was a tempting proposition—there was a chance that someone, somehow, would link my aid to whatever Jesse’s plan would mutate into without me.
 
I entered Good Spirits, my favorite late-night venue in Ponyville, and a little bell over the door greeted me. Polished hardwood floors, gold trim on the furniture, and warm candlelight from the ceiling all made me feel like I was home, and the food didn’t have too high a premium tacked on to it.
 
That late on a Monday night, the whole place was empty except for the bartender. She was a friendly purple mare who, for the past three years, hadn’t really shown much concern over my notions of personal space. Mentally, I braced myself as I hung my cloak by the door.
 
“Lyra!” Her face lit up when she saw me.
 
I walked deeper into the establishment and waved a hoof in rhythm with my steps. “Hi, Berry.”
 
“I heard you were back in town, but I haven’t seen hide nor mane of you! I was starting to think you weren’t going to visit.” She exaggerated a sad, disappointed face.
 
I shook my head with a meek smile as I took a seat in front of the bar. “It’s been one of those weeks, I guess.”
 
Berry nodded, and her smile grew back as she set a pair of drinking tumblers on the countertop. “Well, you can tell me all about it over some on-the-house sauce.” She plinked three ice cubes in each of our glasses before pouring my favorite scotch over them.
 
It was hard to decline her offer, but I had a few reservations. Mainly: “Uh… thanks, but aren’t you working right now?”
 
She nodded with faux sincerity. “True.” Then, I watched as she walked over to the door, poked her head out into the frigid streets, and flipped the bar’s sign around. The lock on the door clicked, and she muttered something.
 
I didn’t hide my amusement from my smile. “Uh… what was that last part?”
 
Berry sauntered over to the bar, but instead of going behind it, she scooted a cushion over and sat half on hers, half on mine. With practiced balance, she wrapped her right hoof around my waist and belted down her drink with her left. “It’s deader than those stuffy old tombs you always spend your time in.”
 
I looked down at the purple hoof on my abdomen, shrugged my acceptance, and magicked my glass up to take a drink. “Tombs were last year,” I corrected. “This year is ruins in the Everfree.”
 
She rested her head on my shoulder. “You’ll have to explain the difference sometime.”
 
“Well…” I finished off my drink, and the warmth from the drink made me feel like I needed the hug more than my space. I draped my left hoof around Berry’s shoulder. “Tombs don’t usually encompass all of a civilization’s life. Just burial rites and varying degrees of respect for the dead.” I thought back to the personnel dormitories that Jesse had cleaned out. “Though I guess they can be pretty similar to ruins.”
 
“One’s a dead pony, one’s a dead culture.”
 
“Pretty much.” I nodded and set my tumbler on the bar.
 
Berry leaned forward to immediately refill our glasses, but she kept herself next to me during the whole movement. “So, how are the ruins?”
 
I took another sip of my scotch before setting it down. I didn’t want to dive headlong into the bottom of a bottle just yet. I answered her question with a dark chuckle. “Ruined.” That drew a jostle and snort of laughter from Berry, but I continued, “Honestly, it’s not the ruins themselves that are giving me headache, it’s… politics.”
 
“Is it your griffin boyfriend again?” Her ear prickled against my neck.
 
I raised an eyebrow and leaned my head to make eye contact out of the corner of my vision. “He’s not my boyfriend.” I punctuated the statement with another drink. “We just share an office.”
 
Berry grinned and nodded into me. “Okay, then. It’s not the guy you’re shacked up with. Where are the politics coming from? School administrator?”
 
“It’s hard to explain…” I sighed. “It’s more like… I’m out there, exploring ancient ruins, but they’re contested. Like, someone thinks they own the rights to the land, and that’s causing problems.”
 
“That still sounds like your tombs last year.” She finished off her drink and poured herself a third.
 
That’s because it was, I noted. Last year, I’d been cataloguing some ancient Zebronian tombs near the Equestrian border; however, some of the locals still thought the land was theirs. Which, it was theirs, since they were Equestrian citizens, but they were so isolated in their desert that they’d been hostile to me, an outsider, at first.
 
Of course, back then, I’d been able to send a message off to my superiors for advice on how to handle the situation. It was different from being saved by Jesse, following him home, and realizing I’d never be able to keep my job and tell people about the lost city below the Everfree. Even now, it seemed too far-fetched. “It’s… different, since the zebras there eventually realized I wasn’t stealing anything. We actually grew closer over the months…” I blushed and smiled off at the bottles of liquor behind the bar. “We shared our cultures, both past and present, and it was an enriching experience for everyone.”
 
Berry chuckled. “So why not just do that with…” Her head rubbed against my neck as she shook it. “Who’s even living in the Everfree? Zecora doesn’t care about ‘land ownership’ or anything like that.”
 
I felt like I was caught in a lie, and I was, even though I hadn’t said anything entirely untrue. I mulled it over for a moment, swallowed the last of my scotch, and then answered, “I’m not really sure. He’s old, though, like ancient-old. I don’t think he knows too much about the outside world, and that’s the bitch of it.” I set the glass down; the room was now floating happily around me. “Like, it’s my job as an archaeologist—I’ve got a plaque, Berry, that says it. I’m supposed to document ancient cultures and preserve them.”
 
The hoof around my waist tightened a little. “Ancient guy living in the Everfree? That sounds like it should be easy, then.”
 
“It is,” I agreed.
 
“So why the problems?”
 
I magicked up my tumbler and swirled it around, watching the melting ice cubes dance with each other. Watching them reminded me, somehow, of my conundrum I’d been mulling over all weekend. “What does it mean to be a pony?”
 
Berry squeezed me into her when she let out a surprised chuckle. “Is that all? You’re waxing philosophical?”
 
I glared back at her, which was the first time I noticed how close our faces were. “I… I’m serious.” All the glowiness from the scotch swelled up in my face. “Like, if I were a griffin, would I still be the same… me?”
 
“If you were a griffin…” She smirked, warmly. “You’d still be a quiet, bookish griffin with a big heart and naïve mind.”
 
My eyebrow rose defensively. “Naïve?”
 
A smile answered. “You want to see the best in ponies, but sometimes, you completely miss the obvious.”
 
Then, she licked my cheek.
 
I got shocked back into sobriety for a moment, but that didn’t last. Heat swam up my chest and neck, but as it did, I didn’t really think it was a bad thing. I leaned forward and nuzzled her neck, and Berry held me tighter; right then, I was convinced that I’d found my answer—at least, temporarily.
 
Maybe, just for a little while, I needed a break from everything.
 

*              *              *

 
Tuesday morning, I retreated to my apartment through streets that were way too bright for my throbbing eyes. From what I could remember, I was still in disbelief over the events of last night, but—just like the big breakfast Berry’d cooked us—I felt like it’d been exactly what I needed.
 
Still, I couldn’t just stay at the bar forever. It would’ve been easy, but that wasn’t the answer I could choose. I had two days to make the biggest decision of my life, and I’d only ever have one shot at it.
 
Thursday morning, I bundled up for a trip into the Everfree. I didn’t have an answer for Jesse, but I knew I had to talk to him one last time. He’d given far too few answers for far too many questions; the only way to make an informed decision would be to try to filter some more truth out of his words.
 
My breath escaped in cold clouds as I cantered briskly through the Everfree. It was late in the morning, so I didn’t need to worry too much about nocturnal predators. Even then, the bright, cold silence of the forest took on an oppressive presence. I felt eerily alone, which eventually led me to slow down to a comfortable walking pace.
 
Once I got to the cave outside Jesse’s home, I took a deep breath before walking down to the tiny archway. My torchstone lit the way, but at that point, I didn’t need its light to know if I were on the right path.
 
I needed answers.
 
Outside Jesse’s front door, the yellow light squares once again lit the floor around me; but for the first time ever, the rock wall didn’t slide open. My doubts took over for a moment, and I blew a relieved chuckle out of my mouth. If the door was locked, then that was a hard answer to all my questions.
 
Convictions overruled doubt, however, and I walked forward to the rock wall. I knocked a hoof on it and called out, “Jesse? You in there?”
 
Silence answered.
 
Despite everything I’d been through with him, I felt a lump in the back of my throat. This was how it ended? A locked door, and everything I’d done over the past months with him was rendered null and void? It was easier, I knew, but it didn’t feel fair. I wanted closure. I wanted answers…
 
I pounded the rock a second time. “Jesse!”
 
“You came.”
 
His sudden voice behind me nearly made me jump out of my skin; luckily, I regained balance enough to keep me from falling to the ground. I shook the fear back down as I turned to face him. “I couldn’t leave things like—”
 
In the small alcove behind me, I barely recognized the man standing over me. He sounded like Jesse, and had the same glowing blue eyes and chin, but everything else was different. He’d shorn his thick, shoulder-length hair, almost down to his scalp, and he seemed taller. Instead of his usual lab coat and pants, he was wearing a close-fitting, night-blue material that was made up of tiny, scale-like hexagons. Large, flat sections of a metallic material adorned his chest and limbs, and the logo on his chest was a dead giveaway, even if there were several millennia between our cultures: military armor.
 
We stood in silence as I began noting the various notches for tools set into his armor at various easy-to-reach locations. There weren’t any obvious weapon-like apparatuses, but that just reminded me that he didn’t need them.
 
Finally, Jesse spoke again. “I hope you don’t mind the armor; it was the first thing I found while looking for a viable replacement to my coat.”
 
I shook my head. “It’s new…” My eyes went back up to his head. “Why the haircut, though?”
 
Jesse shrugged. “Is that what you came back to ask?”
 
His voice was cold and sharp; I shook my head again to avoid wincing at it. He didn’t sound angry, but given everything that’d happened during our last encounter, I couldn’t really speak for his emotional state. I cut to the chase with, “No, I came to ask about more important stuff.”
 
He crossed his armored arms over his chest. “Stuff like what?”
 
That time, he sounded softer; if I were being optimistic, I’d say he was back to his usual levels of neutral curiosity. I restated my own line of thinking to make sure we were both on the same page: “I’m afraid of you, but I’m also pretty sure that I’m in too deep to just call it quits.”
 
“If you don’t want to help—”
 
I cut him off. “It’s not that. I mean, I’m pretty sure you know where I live, and if you don’t, that’d be maybe ten minutes’ of a setback.” I sighed. “But I know you don’t want that. But you are talking about starting a new government, basically. I’m enough of a historian to know how that usually turns out. You’ve got your benevolence, Celestia’s got hers, and I’m not entirely certain that they’re compatible.”
 
“You fear I wish to start a war?”
 
I looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. “You’re wearing a soldier’s uniform.”
 
Jesse chuckled and shook his head. Spreading his arms down, he motioned to his outfit. “This is SRF-issued equipment for its security teams. It’s protective, but hardly indicative of offensive motives, despite what may be implied.”
 
“But it does have those implications,” I countered. “Surely there’s another lab coat somewhere in your home?”
 
He glared down at me. “Remember last Thursday, when you tried to set me on fire?”
 
I widened my stance and stared right back up at him. “And I’m sorry for that. But it goes back to what I’ve said all along: if you’re not upfront with your motives, you’re just going to be tripping over yourself the whole time.” I swallowed and narrowed my gaze. “What would’ve happened to you if you’d done something like that in front of the princesses?”
 
“Clearly it shows foresight that I undertook an experimental procedure in private, then?”
 
I nodded. “And that’s… that’s why I can’t just leave you to your own devices. For all the good you can do, for all the truths and advances you bring, you need someone to hash out a sociable way of doing things with.” I rubbed my neck. “And for all your lies and misdirection, for all the risks I’m taking, I still feel a sense of obligation to see this through to the end.”
 
Jesse pursed his lips before covering his mouth with an armored finger. He spoke somewhat muffled, amused words: “You probably aren’t going to like the next phase in my plan.”
 
I pointed a hoof at him. “I didn’t say I was going to help you yet. I just said why it might be difficult for me to say no.”
 
He took his hand away from his face and crossed his arms again. “Okay. What’s keeping you from helping?”
 
“Like I said, I’ve got some questions you have to answer.”
 
His hand waved. “Ask away.”
 
 “The first one’s easy, or at least, it’s simple: Why? What exactly does it mean to be a human?”
 
“I believe the answers to those both can be explained with a little history.” Slowly, his arms slid down to his waist; for a moment, I wondered if he’d been tense because of me. “Humanity was wiped out, unjustly, because of our greatest strength, the driving force behind millennia of engineering marvels.” He paused. “We dared to dream. And for that sin, enemies invaded from a realm we’d never heard of, with the sole intention of genocide. There was no parlay, no terms for surrender. They were simply jealous we harnessed ‘their’ Chaos for our own uses. Would you at least agree that it is evil to condemn someone for acting in tune with their own nature?”
 
“Somewhat.” I wove my head from side to side. “If it’s hurting someone else…”
 
“We. Did. Not. Do. That.” Jesse’s words cut through clenched teeth. “There weren’t even Chaos-based weapons until we needed to arm ourselves for the first war in centuries. These… creatures, they were drawn towards any harnessed Chaos: Hospitals. Agricultural Facilities. Starships.”
 
I blinked at that. “Starships?” I looked up, even though we were in a dark cave in the middle of the afternoon. “Like… ships that go to stars?”
 
“There were over fifty thousand exploration vessels that sought only to visit the heavens and find new homes for humanity.” Jesse shook his head. “All but two were accounted for as destroyed during the Chaos War.”
 
“What about them?” I asked. “Are you saying there’s a chance that humans are still alive somewhere?”
 
“Statistically? No.” His face went back to neutral. “I’ve listened for transmissions or any sort of signal from those two ships and their descendants. They are either long dead or impossible to reach, unless there’s some sort of concentrated, technologically driven effort to search for them.”
 
By circling back, he brought me back to my main point as well: “So why does it have to be humans? Why can’t you just show yourself and your technology to the descendants of humans?”
 
“I find it cruel to ask someone to limp along with a mere treatment when I hold the cure for their condition.”
 
“Cure?” I shot back. It was different when he used the word. “Who says we need a cure? We’re happy!”
 
“Is your happiness worth the price of ignorance? Why does your government need to keep its history secret, if ponies are ‘happy’?”
 
I didn’t have an answer for that, and it deflated my sense of righteousness a little—especially since I’d asked myself similar questions about Celestia during the past week past week. The wheels in my head clicked together, and it felt like Jesse’s motives were more concrete: he wanted to help ponies, who were humans, because he didn’t want for society to live a lie.
 
Even if he were good at lying, I had to admit it was a noble intention.
 
Still, I had reservations. “What if ponies don’t want to change back? You’re not exactly talking about an overnight process.”
 
He grinned. “I’m exactly talking about an overnight process. Once I have reunited with the remaining fragments of Somniator, humanity’s biological restoration will be nigh-instantaneous. Like waking up from a bad dream. The technological advances might take a while, since there’s a whole society to re-rebuild, but I will help with that, too.”
 
I took a step forward. “But you’re still not giving anyone a choice, are you?”
 
“Do you think the first Equestrians had a choice when they were transformed?”
 
“That doesn’t make it right!”
 
Jesse took a quick breath and shook his head. “It may not be good, but it’s the active reversal of evil. If that’s not ‘right’ by your definition, then we are at a moral impasse. I wish to restore humanity and improve everyone’s quality of life. End scarcity, abolish illness. But I will only help humanity after it has been saved.”
 
I opened my mouth, but closed it when I realized I didn’t have a response. Yes, there would be an adjustment period. But after that wore off, everything he talked about… My mouth formed a faint grin when I pictured Jesse in a classroom, teaching groups of scientists, engineers, and doctors—people who were now wholly free to choose their destinies—while outside, the cities from his films were rebuilt.
 
It was terrifying, but in an awe-inspiring way.
 
I still wasn’t sold that the ends justified the means. One last question burned in my mind: “Does it hurt? The… restoration, as you call it?”
 
Jesse smiled and hovered his right hand over his left wrist. A small array of lights blinked into existence, and he pressed them in what looked like a precise sequence. When he finished, the yellow light squares in the cave lit up, a soothing female voice greeted us in his language, and the doors to his home opened again.
 
He walked towards the bright, hexagonal door; then he turned back to me. “I can show you, if you’d like. Then you’ll know exactly what you’re compliant with, if you choose to continue to help me.”
 
I looked to the door, to Jesse, and then to the narrow space that was the exit back to the Everfree Forest. I knew what he was offering, and my stomach squeamed. I swallowed my fears, and after that, all I felt was like I was on the cusp of something huge.
 
A week’s worth of questioning raced through my mind; finally, put it to rest and nodded. “Okay. Let’s do this.”


> Chapter 8
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The air in the elevator tube smelled different as we descended—metallic, with a tang of matches. I remembered Jesse mentioning how I’d damaged part of the air filtration system, so since I could still breathe, I didn’t say anything about it.

We rode the elevator in silence, which was basically a tradition for us. It took nearly a minute, but I also realized the music was gone. Unlike the new smell in the air, I didn’t have any idea why the music had stopped; with a sad frown, I realized I missed it.

When the elevator disc reached the bottom of the trip, I looked out through the glass. Jesse’s home looked alive. I did a double take as the doors opened to let us off; what I’d first thought were white birds and animals were actually rounded, metallic things that moved around on their own volition.  I watched several of them pass through the intersection in front of us. There wasn’t a swarm of them, but there were enough to make me point and ask, “What are those?”

“Maintenance robots. With their aid, I’ll have this facility fully powered and under my complete control by the end of this week.”

We stepped off the elevator, and one of the so-called robots flew over to us. It was disc-shaped with what looked like a camera lens on the front. It stopped, and a grid of green squares flashed onto the floor.

The squares turned red, and the robot began emitting a high-pitched shriek; next to me, Jesse rapidly began dialing into the array of light buttons on his forearm.

As suddenly as it began, the robot’s alarm ended, and it flew away. I cocked my head up to Jesse, and he shrugged down at me. “Robotic sentry. I re-added your photometrics into the system, so you shouldn’t trigger any more alarms, barring another chemical weapon attack.”

He said it bluntly, almost amusedly; I bared my teeth in a not-that-apologetic smile. “I only—”

“You were scared, I understand. And I will work to ensure that you don’t end up in that same mindset in the future.”

That was as close to apologizing as the two of us were going to get, I realized, so I nodded. He returned the nod, and we started walking forward into the facility.

After two turns, I could already tell Jesse was taking me someplace new. Even after his half-apology, I reversed intersections and added them to an ever-growing list of directions to get out. Fool me twice…

I also quickly learned to stick to the middle of the hallways. Robots whizzed by at a startling pace; I didn’t know how heavy they were, but I didn’t want to get hit by one to find out. They might defend themselves.

In the dead silence that was only intermittently broken up by a metallic entity rushing past, I noticed that Jesse’s armor made little hissing noises every time he took a step. “Is there… air in your armor?”

“There’s pneumatic and mechanical components that help the suit itself move. It weighs close to two hundred kilograms on its own.” He chuckled. “I’m surprised you can hear it, though.”

“It’s so quiet down here, how couldn’t I?”

“If that’s your way of saying you want to talk about something…”

“I…” I shook my head. “So, where does your plan go from here? An army of robots, some sort of air-powered armor, and you say you’ve got to find three more fragments, right?”

“I am not bringing a sword to our civilization, but peace.”

I turned to stare flatly at him. “Okay, so not a sword. What about some other crazy weapon?”

He only smiled. “I would rather wait until the end of my demonstration and hearing if you wish to help me before I tell you about any sensitive tactical information.”

“If you’re going to kill any Equestrians...”

“No one will die.” He turned to me and gave me a sad, strained smile. “Some may be incapacitated, but only in as humane and painless a manner as non-wartime policies dictate.”

“Wha…” I shook my head. “Non-wartime policies? Whose non-wartime policies?”

Jesse looked down at his armor, and then back to me. “I don’t suppose it would help my terms with you if I mentioned how relatively few times, during its final millennium, that humanity waged war against itself? Standing militaries were practically abolished, in favor of smaller, de-centralized police forces. Security officers, to stop the rogue individuals who carried a brand of anti-social craziness that even genetic screening couldn’t outright end.”

I digested all that information, and I didn’t notice I’d veered to the right until a robot nearly barreled into me. After regaining my balance, I noted, “That sounds a lot like eugenics.”

“It was, but it wasn’t mandated—it was merely a freely available source of information that could improve the longevity and quality of life for a child. One has to question the ethics in a situation where a mother refuses medical aid for her diseased child.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But ‘curing the sick’ sounds like a scary ideology to rally under.”

“How so?”

“It’s one of those political tautologies that you can’t really refute—curing the sick is good, compared to the alternative. But it’s so open for interpretation that it can easily be used by whoever’s in charge, so they can define ‘sick’ and ‘cure’ to whatever they want.”

Jesse grunted in agreement. “And you take issue with my definitions of the terms?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged again. “Though I’m not too fond of ‘incapacitated’, either.”

“You said you don’t want anyone killed…”

“Don’t twist my words.” I stopped walking forward and rounded on Jesse. “I don’t want fighting, or killing, or choking anyone…”

Jesse also stopped, crossed his arms, and answered plainly: “That isn’t part of my plan.”

“What is?”

He started walking again. “We’re almost to the medical bay, where you’ll be able to make your decision. From there, you may find out.”

I huffed a little at his aversion, but I wasn’t annoyed enough to let my curiosity die. Even if it had been a lot to take in, the memory of that human hand—my hand—still burned fresh in my mind. After Tuesday, I’d come to the conclusion that human brains were as smart as ponies’—since they were the same thing, give or take some magic—so I’d still be me, just taller and less furry.

I still wanted to know what being human would entail.

We entered a doorway, and gut-wrenching excitement churned in me. Despite the ethics—which I still wasn’t sure on—this was a monumental occasion. It’d answer my questions, let me understand what I was signing myself and others up for, and it’d either substantiate or alleviate my doubts in Jesse’s plan.

I didn’t know which of those I wanted.

The room Jesse led me into was similar to the room he’d done his procedure in last week, only this one seemed more organized and—ironically, given how utilitarian everything was—comfortable. I recognized a bed against one wall, the shelves were filled with medical-looking containers, and at the other end of the room, a giant glass cylinder made me think of a fancy hotel’s shower.

Jesse pointed at the shower thing. “Well… there it is.”

Learning its function gave me a notable apprehension towards the device. My legs felt a little less willing to move, and I looked up to Jesse. “Uh… how do I use it?”

“You walk inside the machine…” He walked over to a wall, where a panel hissed open. Jesse reached inside and pulled out a blue, folded-up cloth, which he held out to me. “Leave your cloak and everything else outside; I don’t want to break anything.”

I magicked my cloak and saddlebags over to an empty table. Then, I took the folded-up cloth and unfolded it in the air above me. It was a human-shaped gown, about the same size as Jesse’s old lab coat.

The reality of my situation hit a crescendo; I tried not to let my voice shake as I faked a cool, studious tone. “This… and this is temporary, right?”

Jesse nodded and gave what counted as a warm smile. “For you. For the first time. This is a clinical trial so you can see that this won’t cause undue duress or pain to any of your countrymen.”

I swallowed a lump. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Jesse; it was more that I knew what came next if I was okay with the procedure. If I didn’t like it, it also didn’t really sound like there was going to be an option to stop him.

I folded the gown back up as much as I could, then I forced my legs towards the machine. I was curious, even after everything that had happened with Jesse. Once I sated that curiosity, I’d be able to think more clearly on the matter and make an informed decision.

It was the most important thing I would ever have to choose.

Like the elevators, the glass chamber had doors whose seams were invisible when closed. They hissed open when I got near, and I took one final deep breath of procrastination. I looked over my shoulder, where I saw Jesse’s shoulders sticking out from behind the tall control panel he was sitting behind. His head was also hidden, which struck me as odd: “I’m about to be first human in several millennia, and you’re not going to watch?”

“I’ve got to monitor the procedure; infrared sensors will let me know all I need to.” His shoulder rose and fell. “After that, if you want to walk around the facility with me…” He trailed off. “Whatever. You’re calling the shots with this procedure; we only do what you need to determine your functional capacity in the next three days.”

My breath stopped. “Do… do you even need me for your plan?”

“Your aid represents a higher success rate in my plan. But I have contingencies if you don’t want to burden yourself with it.”

“Contingencies like what?”

Silence answered first. Then, “Plans that involve one agent instead of two.”

I pointed a hoof at him. “You’re dodging.”

“You’re asking questions about hypothetical situations that you will choose not to have a part in.” Jesse’s head leaned out from behind his panel, and he scowled. “If I told you I was planning to firebomb cities, that would unfairly manipulate you into helping me. I want your allegiance, not your compliance.”

“Are you planning that?”

He shook his head while pulling it back behind his monitor.

I grunted quietly. It helped, on some level, that he was making an effort to look like he weren’t manipulating me; whether or not I could believe him was another story entirely. Then again, I reasoned, he didn’t really just say anything new.

I closed my eyes and walked into the machine. The doors closed behind me, and I stood in the center of the glass chamber. It made me feel like a specimen, I noted as I put the gown on the floor next to me.

“Ready?” Jesse’s voice sounded like it was in the chamber with me; it echoed, but a quick glance around and above didn’t reveal the source.

“Yeah.”

A familiar thrumming began, and my stomach lurched as I remembered all of the pain and screaming from Jesse’s procedure last week. The temperature in the container rose a few degrees and kept rising; all I could think was No, no, no, no…

Blinding light filled the chamber; when I closed my eyes, I could see the pink insides of my eyelids. The air around me was warm, and it permeated me in a thick, tingling sensation. By itself, it wasn’t unpleasant, but as the numbness spread, I felt myself fall over, and I knew what was coming next. Just because I was numb didn’t mean the procedure wasn’t painful.

The light vanished, and spots swam in my vision as I cried out, “Jesse! Stop it!” My mouth was thick and tingly, so the words sounded thick and stupid, but I didn’t care.

The rest of the machine powered down, or at least it stopped making noises. Around me, I heard Jesse’s amused voice. “Stop what? The procedure is finished.”

I opened my eyes, and the tingling sensation began to fade. In its place, everything sharpened, and it felt like my eyes were stronger. The floor of the machine felt cold and smooth against my side; looking down, I gasped.

I wasn’t green anymore; I was pinkish.

The same hand from last week greeted me when I brought it up to my eyes. I touched my face; some parts felt similar, like my eyes and cheeks, but my nose and mouth were flatter. Humans didn’t have much in the way of a snout.

I spent a few moments looking at and feeling myself. I was smoother, taller—well, longer, since I was still lying on a floor. When my hands reached my head again, I found my ears were down lower and were buried under a length of hair; at the other end of me, I flexed my feet. I couldn’t move the individual toes, but I smiled anyway. I had toes.

When I smiled, a flood of thoughts and energy poured through me. I wanted to do something, anything more than just lying on a floor. I formulated a plan, or rather, making a plan seemed second nature: Step one, figure out how to stand up. Step two, do anything.

Anything.

Seeing the world through human eyes made me realize one core fact. I looked down at what used to be my flank, and all I found on my bare skin were fine, tiny hairs. In that moment, I felt absolute freedom, I felt a risky uncertainty, and I felt…

Cold.

That, I chalked up to having thinner hair than a pony; other than a few tactical areas, I was practically bare. That explained why I’d only ever seen images of humans wearing clothes, and why Jesse was weird about always wearing his—well, it wasn’t weird. It was necessary.

I picked up the gown and, with clumsy hands, wrapped it around me. It had buttons down the front, but as soon as I reached out with my magic, I just felt emptiness inside me. For a moment, I panicked.
 
Then, I took it as a challenge.

After the first few tries, I came to terms with how my new fingers didn’t quite have the dexterity or finesse that Jesse’s did. I felt a little jealous of him, but that only fueled more ambition: I could practice, and get better at it. I liked that plan.

For now, the gown was on, and even if I was still a little chilly, it was better than nothing. With my first obstacle cleared, I went back to my original plan and tried to stand up. Careful, scrambling motions slowly brought me up to a four-limbed standing position, on my hands and knees. I tried to stand up on my knees, since I could probably work my way up to my feet from there; after six attempts, the best I could manage was a wide, half-kneeling, half-sitting position.

I rolled my eyes and sighed; I couldn’t do it alone. Jesse’d been silent throughout my attempts—like he said he would, I guessed—so I called out to him. “Uh… help?”

The door to my chamber opened, and moments later, Jesse peered around the side of his control panel. After his eyes flashed up and down, he gave me a piteous smile. “Trouble with the buttons?”

I shot back a glare. “No, with standing.”

He nodded before walking over to the chamber. When he was in front of me, I noticed I was now eye-level with his stomach. Already, I was taller; I wondered how much higher I’d be when I stood up properly.

Jesse offered a hand and said, “Do you want to pull yourself up, or do you want me to lift you?”

My eyebrow raised in a smirk. Then, I wrapped my hands around his wrist and used him to steady myself as I stretched my legs out underneath me. I put my right foot flat on the ground before pushing up with it; as I did, Jesse lifted his hand to help me keep my grip. I put my second foot on the ground, then I grinned up—he was still about a foot taller than me because of his armor—at Jesse.

I was standing.

It didn’t last very long, however; once I let go of his wrist and tried to balance on my own, I overcompensated and fell backwards. Jesse grabbed my flailing arm, steadied me, and with a wave of his other hand, my gown closed and buttoned itself.

I chuckled. “Showoff.”

He grinned. “You’re already several months ahead of most humans, what with talking and being able to pull yourself into a standing position.”

“I guess.” Something about his face seemed odder than it’d been a few minutes ago; I couldn’t place it until I looked down at my hand. “Why’s your skin a different color than mine?”

“Melanin.” I looked back up at him, eyebrow raised, and he shrugged. “You saw the holofilms; skin isn’t just one hue. Same with your eyes and hair.”

Mentioning those things made me excited again. “I… do you have a mirror?”

“This way.”

Using Jesse as a crutch, I took my first few hobbling steps behind the machine, where a sink had been built into the wall. Above it was a mirror, and when Jesse and I lined up with it, I smiled as I recognized myself. When we reached the sink, I let go of Jesse and used it to steady myself as I gazed closer at the mirror.

Human-Lyra had the same amber eyes—minus the shape—but her hair was completely different. Instead of mint green with a white streak, now I had chestnut-colored hair that fell way past my shoulders—kind of like a mane, but as I tested it out with a hand, the roots only went down the back of my head, not my neck.

That drew my curiosity elsewhere, so lifted my gown and felt the base of my spine. It was just smooth skin; I mused aloud, “Huh. No tail?”

In the mirror, I saw Jesse’s appreciative, downward glance snap up into a confused, forward-looking stare. “You thought I had a tail all this time?”

I shrugged and dropped my gown so I could use my hands to turn myself around and lean back on the sink. When I was facing Jesse, I shrugged. “I’ve never seen you without some form of pants, so you might’ve.”

He returned the shrug and crossed his arms. “Let me know when you’re ready to come to your decision of helping me or not.”

I peered over my shoulder, and human-Lyra peered back at me from behind a lock of hair. I smoothed it back behind my ear, trying to mix this new information in with everything I’d already worked on. It didn’t hurt; it came with a massive boom in technology, longevity, and quality of life; it was fixing a wrong that’d been done to an entire species…

All of those reasons paled in comparison to the freedom I felt, the sharpness in my mind, and the sheer willpower. I knew exactly what Jesse’d meant when he spoke of “happiness stemming from ignorance”; with whatever chaos or magic or whatever taken out of my brain, for once, I wasn’t content with life. There was happiness, I knew, but I had to work for it, which’d make it all the sweeter when I got it.

I turned away from the mirror, sat on the sink, and crossed my arms over my chest. “You said three days? Sounds like we’ve got work to do.”


*        *        *


It took a while for Jesse to lead me down to the personnel dormitories, since I had to use him to steady my walking the whole way. I got better at balance and taking strides as we went, and by the time we got to the elevator, I only needed to keep one hand on his wrist to balance myself.

We went back to the holotheater, but instead of movies, we had a more practical use of the room. I sat down on the bench like before—that part was already easy—and Jesse dialed a sequence on the central dais’ buttons.

That time, instead of a movie, the room filled with a translucent sphere of blue light. A white dot in the center shimmered and spread out to the edges; as it did, parts of it stayed behind to make shapes. As I watched, the white shapes became more and more recognizable as buildings—first of Canterlot University, and then the rest of the city.

“How did you get this?” Even as I asked, I knew where the center of the sphere was: my student office. “And how long—”

“This is a map based on signals that are being collected and rendered in real-time,” Jesse answered. He turned to me and locked eyes. “But I’ve only been collecting data for the past week, when trying to analyze a schedule.”

Schedule? I wondered, but then I saw tiny pony-shaped figures that were moving throughout the entire city. My breath caught in my mouth before I managed to ask, “You can do that?”

“Technically, yes. Ethically…” His head waved from side to side. “Well, you’re probably not going to like the plan, anyway. But it’s necessary.”

His tone didn’t sit well with me. “What is?”

“There are three things I want to explain first…” He raised three fingers. Curling the first one, he said, “No one will die.” The second finger: “The only tactical advantage that ensures zero casualties is the element of surprise.” And the final finger: “They are lying about their roles in the cosmos.”

“They?”

Jesse bowed his head and flared his hands on either side of it. “The earth isn’t normally tide-locked, or rotationally locked. That was one of the campaigns of the enemy during the Chaos War. However, the reversal of that process is relatively simple, given the right tools. It stands to reason that keeping the earth’s rotational momentum low enough to require constant applications of chaos-based energy to spin it can only be for one purpose: the appearance of controlling of the sun.”

My breath came out a shudder as my stomach dropped down a few inches. “Celestia and Luna. You’re talking about… overthrowing them?”

He pushed a few of the light buttons on his wrist, but didn’t look up when he explained, “The time for a highly centralized government ended in the twenty-seventh century. It’s inefficient at its core, since it’s only truly needed to govern a society built on scarcity. With an increase in technology, monarchs’ place in the world is rendered obsolete.”

“Jesse…” I whispered. “Are you going to kill them?”

He shook his head. “It should actually be easier to absorb neuro-chaotic transformers from a living entity.”

I thought back to the large unicorn horn he’d absorbed before chasing after me in a glowing mania. “How do you know?”

“I don’t. Hence, ‘should’.”

My head shook. Here I was, presented with the idea of usurping the Canterlot throne, and my only questions were the practical end of it: “What if they fight back?”

The door to our room opened, and I turned to watch a long, casket-like robot float down the ramp. Jesse walked over to it, pressed a button, and lifted out a small, black sphere about the size of a baseball. He gave it to me, and I held on to it despite how unexpectedly heavy it was. With a chuckle, he explained, “That’s where you come in. What you’re holding is an intermittent chaos-dampening pulse emitter, weapons-grade.”

I blinked up at him. “Oh. It all makes sense now.”

“Watch yourself,” he warned. “The primary function of that is to take a small charge of chaos, then neutralize any and all sources of chaos within fifty meters.”

I looked down at the ball, then up at Jesse. “Magic turns it on, but it cancels out all magic around it?” I bent pulled my head back, confused. “Why?”

“Imagine throwing one into a group of fifty unicorns, who try to stop it…”

“Right…” I nodded. Then, the practical side of his example became clear, “So you want me to run into the throne room with this…”

His shaking head slowed me down to silence. “Watch…” He walked over to the controls of the holofilm projector, and Canterlot Castle moved to the center of the display. The walls turned slightly transparent, so I could see more of the castle than anyone had a right to. Jesse twirled a finger inside what I already knew was Celestia and Luna’s throne room. “Walls don’t really matter to the emitter, though they reduce its effective range by roughly a third each time it passes through one. Given guard patrols and scrutiny of various areas of the castle…” He moved his finger to a hallway that ran directly below the throne room. “Here, between these two pillars, is where you should activate the device.”

I looked down at my gown and legs. “So… wait, I need to be a pony for this…” I shook my head and snapped it back up to Jesse. “And wait, I’m activating the magic pulse-dampening thingy, so that’s going to hit me, too, right?”

Jesse nodded. “It’s a temporary effect that only lasts for about five minutes. Though, once everything goes according to plan, I doubt you’ll remain a little unicorn for much longer anyway.”

“And I’m guessing you’ve got a plan for when both of the sisters are going to be in there?” I shook my head at the incredulity of the whole situation.

“At exactly midnight, the guards transfer shifts, and the two of them are usually together in the throne room.”

“Usually?”

“I can outmatch one of them, alone, in combat. Without their unicorn guards, this plan works even if only one of them is initially caught in the initial pulse.”

“What if you get caught in the pulse?”

Jesse patted his armor. “It’s a pulse, not a field, so once the armor takes the hit, I’m the only chaos-wielding entity in the room.”

The slots on his armor made me think of something else: “Why can’t you do it?”

He grinned. “If one knows what it is, it’s fairly simple to shield oneself from it. The advantage you bring is that no one in the throne room will be expecting a pulse to fire from below them.”

Slowly, I nodded. It still felt like it was too much. All my questions from the past week came back to me, and they clung for a while as I struggled with them. I knew what was for the best, but... I shook my head clear, took a deep breath, and tried to look past my doubts in Jesse’s plan. For a tiny, final compromise, I asked, “And… and you promise no one dies?”

In response, Jesse reached into the casket-robot at his feet. He pulled out a tiny glass tube that was rounded on one end and had a flat, metal base on the other. Inside, a metallic liquid flowed in a lively, animated manner. “Remember the nanobots? They’re still alive, even without their transposers. And they probably have the collective brainpower of a squirrel. A pony body will be even more resilient to the extraction.”

I looked at the gray goo for a little longer; then I sighed and looked down at the device in my hands. My human hands. This was the culmination of Jesse’s plan, where he declared war on Equestria. Except… I shook my head. It’s not war, it’s just… dismantling.

For the first time since I’d found that dilemma, though, I found myself easily able to look past the near details. The next few days might be bad, but what about the weeks after them? I remembered Jesse’s talk of a new society—one without pain or scarcity, the human society that had been wiped out a few millennia ago. Everyone would be human, with truly open possibilities for where their lives could take them.

It’d be for the better.

I shuddered, since even that realization didn’t do much to diminish the gravity of the treason we were planning. Treason against one government to give everyone a new destiny…

“No one dies?” I spoke quietly to the floor.

“Only temporary incapacitation,” Jesse reassured me. His tone turned quizzical: “Would you like to try out one of the chaos dampeners on me?”

Kind of, I admitted to myself, but I shook my head. I looked up and stared into Jesse’s fire-blue eyes. For the first time, I saw warmth in them—a mote of compassion. He knew this was for the best, and so did I.

“All right then…” I let out a sigh. “Let’s get this over with.”

> Chapter 9
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

23:57.

In a lifetime measured by eons, only two of my original artifacts remained: my father’s pocketwatch and my wedding ring. The sentiment of memories was betrayed by the cold brass and gold; I didn’t remember their names, their lives.

The watch was of a traditional Swiss design, kept alive throughout the millennia, handed down within a strongly traditional family. I knew this because, every four decades or so, a component broke; in order to replace it, I needed to read a transcription of the design schematics. Indeed, the original watch had been discarded long ago, piece by piece. I had repaired it with a copy of copied notes, but what I held in my hand was my father’s watch nonetheless.

On the back of it, at one point, my name had been engraved. That, too, had been worn away by the ages; I no longer remembered the name I had been given. I vaguely remembered giving myself names when I needed to interact with the twisted remnants of humanity.

Oblivion was my curse.

It was necessary—a forgetting, my loss of self. An individual could not be the quintessence of humanity, a symbol of our redemption. An individual would lack the motives and conviction to do what was necessary for our race. I embraced oblivion, for it was my greatest strength.

The frigid mountain air chilled the insides of my lungs as I waited above the capital of Equestria, a castle, filled with false monarchs. I’d spent past three hours in stealth and quiet, moving in a large arc around the castle, lazing targets to update coordinates for my armor’s targeting system. When I was finished, I climbed to the peak, looked down on the castle, and waited for my hour of glorious redemption.

With my reflexes, I could have manually aimed each shot, or with my command of chaos, I could have flung the projectiles without even the use of a weapon. However, there was something symbolic, an irrefutable logic of using tools to avoid doing things manually.

It was human.

By the time the sun rose naturally over the earth again—a transgression against nature that I would right—humanity would be restored. Once the false sisters had taken their rightful place in union with me, it would be nothing to raze a colony of shape-shifting insects. Then, I would be complete, and from there, even the cosmos would not be out of my reach, beyond my rule.

Ironically, I just wanted to rest, to sleep. For eight thousand, two hundred and ninety-six years, I had labored. Humanity did not need a ruler, a god. That was its beauty. Once I put them on the right path, they would live and grow again, and the Chaos War would finally be over.

I would look upon that and say it was good.

23:58

I clasped the watch closed and put it in a utility pouch. A button’s press closed the mask around my head, and the inside glowed to life. My eyes were granted vision of the world, overlaid with information about the climate around me. It was negative six degrees Celsius outside, my bearing was point-one-oh-five radians south of west, and a circle of alternating yellow and black triangles told me that, if all else failed, I had an arsenal of backup contingencies.

They lied to unjustly subjugate the remnants of humanity. For that, I would demonstrate true control of sunfire—by raining it down in salvoes that would level even the nearby mountain to glowing dust.

Failure was not an option.

Granted, it was to be avoided if it could be helped. Nuclear contingencies were beyond unethical, especially against civilizations without appropriate missile defense systems.

I had also made the promise to avoid killing, even if had been a lie to say that no one would die. Compared to the existing death toll—which lay in the billions—there would statistically be no deaths, if one counted to any reasonable amount of significant figures. History would forgive a necessary death toll, however; even a thousand lives would be nothing compared to the future I would reforge for humanity.

If she did not forgive me for the sacrifices of her countryponies, then that would be another unfortunate sacrifice that my cause required of me. But even if her country’s capital were reduced to ash, she would live. That was my gift to her, a silent promise I did intend to keep, her reward for loyalty. 

My helmet’s display told me twenty seconds remained until the first shots of the final battle of the Chaos War would be fired. Servos in my suit knew the coordinates of the twelve guard towers spread throughout the castle; they were the twelve guards who, according to a month’s analysis, did not change their post at midnight. By removing the knights from play, I could freely move across the board and check the kings.

Excessive force would draw any and all active guards to my location, away from hers. The distraction would make things simpler and more tactically efficient. It was the right choice.

23:59

For eight centuries after the Satellite Wars of 3309, the idea of a standing military had been abolished, all weapons were outlawed for every civilian, and most lethal weapons had even been banned for use by security details. My grenade launcher broke those laws, as it had been specifically built to the standards of pre-chaos technologies. Magnetic rails accelerated a physical payload to lethal projectile speeds. It was an older technology, one that had taken several weeks to rediscover, but given how long it had taken to find the SMU-7 Weaponized Nanomachines, I felt the need to put them to some use.

I brought the launcher to my shoulder, and the suit took over. It aimed, I pulled the trigger, and it adjusted to the next target for me to fire again. In a matter of two seconds, I fired twelve rounds.

A benefit to that swiftness was how the first rounds were still in the air when I finished my volley. I turned to observe the nearest guard tower as the grenade hit it. The impact itself was fairly muted—no explosives, no white phosphorous. However, once the glass shattered, the machines began their consumption and replication routines; they swarmed and multiplied in a growing pool of metallic gray that dissolved everything in the tower: stone, wood, flesh.

Through the winds and height, I still heard the panicked whinnies and feral screams of the guard as he dissolved into a pool of red and gray. It should have brought me no pleasure, yet I did find it cathartic, in its own way.

I slung the launcher on my back and—with a will of chaos—leapt off the mountain peak. I would land in the courtyard, behind the walls; once inside, my map had generated the quickest path weighted against guard patrols. It would lead me directly to the throne room, and my siege would be over in a matter of minutes.

As I fell into the combat zone, I noted that the remainder of the primary plan rested on my companion’s ability to perform her duty. She was competent, in her own, cute manner; I put the closest thing I had to faith in her.

I had opened for her a window of opportunity. It was now up to her to leap through.





One minute before midnight, I heard cries and commotion. That’s my cue, I realized, though I’d already been jogging through the Canterlot Library at three minutes ‘til.

My cover story was that I was doing some off-semester studying in the library, then I heard panic, so I took a shortcut through a service tunnel—the one Jesse wanted me to activate his weapon in—to get to my office. There’s important artifacts there, I rehearsed again. That was my story, and I needed to stick to it.

I passed through a door in the back of the library, the one that acted as a barrier between wooden bookshelves and stone-arched hallways. It was dim, but I didn’t have my torchstone with me. The only magical item in my saddlebags was Jesse’s anti-magic ball.

The hallways twisted and turned, which made me appreciate how much time I’d spent rehearsing and memorizing at the map in Jesse’s home. As I barreled through intersections at top speed, counting the directions I needed to take, I distantly noted that I didn’t have time to think about what it was that I was doing—not anymore, at least.

This was war.

The fear of failure was the only thing I let myself acknowledge, and it tensed the muscles in my legs so much, they didn’t even feel tired. That’s a good thing, I decided.

And this was for the greater good, even if I still wondered if there was a better way for Jesse to spread his technology. It was too late to contemplate compromises, though; he’d put his bets in with an all-or-nothing plan, and here I was, the keystone in it.

I hoped that one day, I would forgive myself.

Once it was all said and done, I’d have to be able to say I would have done it all over again. I saw the stakes, I knew the rewards, and if there was ever anything worth risking my life over, this was it.

Another intersection flew behind me, and I only had two more turns until I got to the long hallway. Above it, in Canterlot Castle’s throne room… I blinked and shook my head quickly. There were two pillars I needed to be between when I turned on a ball, and then I wouldn’t be able to use magic for about a minute.

Jesse and I had both agreed that, before we met up again, it’d be best to wait for him to normalize with the fragments he was absorbing. What that meant for me was that I had no intention of stopping. I’d run through the hallway, turn on the device mid-stride, and I’d keep going until I was home safe in my Canterlot apartment.

This was war, but I was a civilian. Once I was done, I couldn’t do anything except wait for Jesse to finish his plan. Everything was bigger than I was, so hiding was the smartest thing to do. I couldn’t fight, I didn’t want to fight, I didn’t want—

I turned a corner and almost slammed into a Canterlot elite guard. We locked eyes, his gray horn glowed white, and his voice filled the hallway:

“State your business!”

“I… student.” All of my rehearsals and plans, and that’s what came out as. I pointed behind him. “The university’s this way, I… I heard shouts and commotion. I need to get to my office!”

His face and voice were a stone wall. “This is a restricted area. Show your authorization now.”

“I… I left m-my ID in the library. Checking out a book, I…” I didn’t have to fake tears as they swelled. “I’m sorry, I’ll go—”

For the second time in a little over a week, I felt myself being forcibly magicked off the ground by my neck. The all-too-familiar sensation of strangulation came back to me, and the guard below me shouted, “Canterlot is under heavy siege. Unauthorized personnel will be dealt with as mandated under new defensive protocols.”

I tried to say something, but things were starting to get spinny and light. I heard a gurgling sound, but it sounded far away.

A second voice cut through the haze: “Starlight, what are you doing?”

Air rushed back into my lungs as the guard’s grip loosened. He still kept me in the air, but as reality tightened around me, I saw a second guard rush over to us. They looked almost identical, even up close, or maybe I was too distracted to see their differences.

The first guard—the one I guessed was named Starlight—looked at his comrade. “Cram it, Shield. I caught her running through the hallways.”

“Student!” I wheezed.

The second guard shot a hard glare at Starlight. “Excellent. Captain Armor’s already going to be under duress, and you’ve seen it fit to assault a little schoolgirl?”

Maybe it was the indignation of being called a “little girl”, or maybe I was still running on adrenaline. Maybe, in the core of me, I still held a sense of duty to Jesse. Whatever it was, as soon as Starlight took his eyes off me, it seemed like a profoundly good idea to buck my hind leg down, straight on the tip of his horn.

I felt something crunch under my hoof, followed by screaming, followed by gravity. I hit the ground running, hoping against hope that I could outrun them. It’s one more intersection, I told myself. Once I got through there, I’d activate the orb and run straight to the throne room, to Jesse. He’d help me, especially if he were the only guy who could use magic.

Five feet from the intersection, I tripped. I lurched forward, but didn’t fall; that was when I noticed the glowing nimbus of magic all around me.

Then, a cold tingling spread across my body, flowing out from my left side—the saddlebag Jesse’s orb was in. I fell on my right side, but before I got up, I panicked and tried to use magic to open my bag and check on the orb.

Sure enough, I couldn’t. It was like my magic simply didn’t exist, and my horn was a dead growth of keratin sticking out of my forehead.

No…

Behind me, hooffalls approached, and I snapped my attention to the second stallion guard—the one whose name I didn’t catch.

He raised an eyebrow and muttered, “Perhaps Star wasn’t using excessive force after all.”

In that moment, I felt like I should have been frustrated to fail, so close to my destination. Eighty more feet, and I would have succeeded; now, I was out of the fight and Jesse was probably walking into a fight without any tactical support.

However, the only thing that crossed my mind was fear. Not fear of consequences or blowback or anything like that; immediate threats filled my stomach like a stone.

I managed to stammer out a quick whisper: “Please don’t hurt me.”

The guard standing over me scowled in disgust. I didn’t have time to defend myself; the last thing I saw was his gilded boot stomping straight down towards my temple.





A warning indicator flashed inside my mask, announcing that all chaos-powered functions of my armor were currently offline. I let myself smile; she’d accomplished her task. That left the remainder to me.

I took a quick glance at the map in the lower-left corner of my vision; by some strange fate, she was almost directly beneath me. Or, from what I saw, two larger equine figures were standing over what had to be her smaller, prone form. Logic concluded that she had been apprehended after helping me. Emotion screamed that I should rescue her.

Duty told me to continue with my mission.

I pressed on towards the throne room. My sonic-rendered map showed it as a plain room with vaulted ceilings and large windows; already, I knew the sisters who saw themselves as gods had made it into their cathedral.

A barrage of chaos hit my suit hard enough for alarms to warn of structural damage. I snapped my attention to the foolishly brave guard; he shouted, “You, stop right—”

It was a simple matter to will his armor to turn molten. I stood and watched, curiously, as he both caught on fire and liquefied in a glowing, screaming pool. By all logic, that close to the throne room, he should not have been able to command chaos.

Unless…

I peeked back at the map, where two guards were now carrying a limp form away. I realized that she was on the side of the hallway she would have entered through, which meant she had, in most likelihood, fired the nullifier where she had been apprehended.

I sneered. It had been a desperate attempt, but it was failure nonetheless. A moment’s recalculation, and then I took my grenade launcher off my back; if I couldn’t attack precisely, I would devastate.

As I ran the final distance to the throne room, I reactivated the systems of my armor that the errant pulse had taken offline. I also hovered my vision over the nuclear icon on the lower right; the suit asked for a confirmation passcode, but I blinked and shook my head. Things had not yet reached that stage.

The doors to the throne room were open, inviting; as soon as I barreled through the threshold, indicators inside my suit exploded in a cacophony of screeches and light. Nothing was damaged, but over a dozen sources of chaos were focused on keeping me rooted in place.

I looked around; as I’d expected, stained glass windows adorned comfortably lit walls in a hall fit for two queens. In front of me, several gray unicorns had formed a defensive perimeter in front of two thrones.

Only one was occupied. From it, a false sun-goddess’ voice asked, “What business do you have in my realm this evening?”

Quick analysis showed me the shape and structure of the spells that bound me in place—chaos-born pressure exerted on my position from every angle, leaving one glaring structural weakness.

First, however, I locked eyes with the despot. If she wished to parlay, I would grant her that much. By design, my armor amplified and distorted my voice when it was set to speak publicly. In a roaring bass, I commanded, “By authority of the Unified Terran Republic, you are hereby ordered to stand down and abdicate your subjugation.”

She looked shocked. Indeed, some of her loyal guards turned to face her, puzzled, waiting for her response. It came after she blinked and bowed her head. “The sovereign nation of Equestria does not negotiate with warmongers and murderers.”

I scoffed. “And I will carve that into your tomb.”

Then, I teleported forward two meters. I felt the shockwave of the spell collapsing behind me. I willed negation, and the lights extinguished themselves. Thirteen milky shields formed, and I remembered why subterfuge was an essential part of that tactic.

Nullification shields were worthless for defending against applied chaos, however. I lifted the group of twelve guards into the air and threw each of them through a window. Screaming led to shattering, which led to a horrified, white face staring down at me.

I locked my grenade launcher into my shoulder and fired.

She took flight, nimble enough to dodge even computer-aided predictive targeting. SMU-7 canisters hit the wall, ceiling, and pillars; when my weapon was empty, gaping holes grew in the room as it dissolved.

A blast of chaos-fire caught me off guard; I raised a shield, but it was too late. The inside of my armor grew hotter as the outside began melting. I tried to move, but without its pneumatic systems, the armor was merely cumbersome.

I removed the pieces of molten slag before they could melt through the jumpsuit below; instead of discarding them, I flung them at the false idol. Faster than rail-launched grenades, she couldn’t dodge all of them; my shin plate connected with her neck, followed by my left glove.

While she paused, dazed in midair, I was already flying up to her with a clenched right fist. She dodged, and a surprisingly sturdy wing buffet assaulted my head.

With only chaos to rely on, I condensed all the air in the room into a sphere. The remaining windows shattered in the vacuum, and her wings failed her. She fell, but before she impacted, I flung myself down, threw the ball of air, and released my hold on it.

It exploded, and she crashed into the ruined throne room’s floor. I landed next to her and summoned a black, crystalline blade in my right hand. Beneath me, she craned her head up at me, so I pressed the sword to her neck.

She yielded.

A thin trail of pale blood leaked from her mouth as she asked, “Why have you come here?” She sounded weak.

I knelt down, gripped her horn with my left fist, and began absorbing the fourth fragment of myself. As I did, I whispered to her horrified eyes: “I am salvation.”

Naked human arms wrapped around my shoulders and crossed my chest. My blood ran cold, and I released the idol’s horn in shock. A female form pressed into my back, and a soothing whisper flowed into my ear: “Is it not time to rest, brother?”

I didn’t feel the knife blade enter my spine, but I felt my lower half collapse, numb.

She released me, and I fell, twisting to land on my back. My sword fell to the ground and shattered. I looked up to find a human woman with long, flowing hair the color of midnight. The only thing she wore was a tiny pendant around her neck, one of a crescent moon; in her hand, she carried a bloody, shimmering dagger that was the night.

I summoned chaos, only to find that it was incredibly difficult. I gazed up at her hallowed face, and in that moment, I understood.

It had all been for naught.

Her voice was placid twilight when she whispered one simple command:

“Sleep, now. We shall speak when you awake from the nightmare.”

I lost my final battle to remain conscious; beneath her, for the first time in eight millennia, I drifted off into slumber.


> Chapter 10
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the halls of the Somniator Research Facility, the Chaos War’s clangor drew nearer. Two of us—biologists, not soldiers—were Somniator’s last line of defense. Rico and I both understood that, once the door to our medical wing opened, if we fell, humanity would fall with us.

The door exploded inwards, and our rail guns zapped to life. Plasma bullets meant nothing to these creatures; we had developed special rounds with living robots in their core. At first, we seemed to hold our position; folly gave me hope of a victory.

The beasts fell back—regrouping for a final blow. Rico asked me for all of my remaining grenades. When I handed them over, he patted my shoulder and spoke two words: “Protect Her.”

Then, he ran into the hallway outside the repurposed medical wing we had fortified; explosions and shrieks of death followed.

I retreated into Somniator’s chamber, where she slept, hands crossed over her chest, in a large glass tank. Today, I didn’t have my usual greetings for her; instead, I was forced to make the difficult decision to either wake her, or to let her die peacefully in her sleep. She deserved a chance to defend herself, but this war was not her making. It would be cruel to wake her.

Above me, the lights exploded. Thousands of glass shards, grown by chaos, rained down on me. I protected my face, but I fell to the ground with a sharp pain in my stomach. Thick copper spilled from my mouth, and I didn’t bother to look down to see the blood staining my lab coat.

The only remaining light source in the room, Somniator’s tank, cast the room into soft, golden colors. My back pressed against the control panel for the anesthetic regulation system; everything grew distant and trembling as I reached my arm to grip the main power cord.

I didn’t notice the chaos forces’ leader—a serpent-like conglomeration of mythical animals—enter the room. He bent down to gloat in a lisping, mocking voice. “Surely a valiant effort, human, but if you value valor, mayhaps you should have been born a lion?”

The edges of my life grew fuzzy, blurry. I gripped the cord and pulled it out. Looking up at the monster above me, I spat blood. “Maybe… you should go… to Hell.”





I snapped awake, and the barest echoes of memories teased the edges of my mind. I remembered my wife and daughter, my life as a medical researcher, and my death as a soldier.

Waking came with a familiar evanescence, but unfamiliar to me was the sheer, sluggish, exhaustion that draped me. Instead of simply being aware of my surroundings, I had to focus on individual details. To my right, a burning torch over a barred prison door lit lit cracked bricks of three other walls in my cell; beneath me, a dirty stone floor offered the only comfort given to sit on. My arms were held involuntarily above my head; without looking up, I tested them and heard the heavy clinking of steel chains.

When I attempted to melt them, my shackles grew hot—hotter than steel’s usual melting point, by far. I gave up on that endeavor when I began to smell flesh burning; for the time being, I resigned to my imprisonment.

That realization rose yet another question: I wondered how much dignity my captors had given me. I had no expectations, but I looked down to see whether I was still wearing my under-armor jumpsuit or if I were completely naked.

Instead, I was garbed in my lab coat and black slacks.

Seeing my clothes gave me a sudden realization, one of futility and, indeed, madness. I shook, first with a hammering chuckle, but it escalated into a gale of cacophonous laughter that must have echoed throughout the entire prison block.

It cleansed me, or at least, when I felt the edges of my consciousness blend with the hideous, insane laughter I drowned in, it felt pleasantly familiar.

Near the diminuendo of that damned chorus—how long it lasted was lost to me—I heard the rusty-hinged door to my cell squealing open. Fear of the unknown sharpened my mind and silenced my humor; I turned to see who it was.

In the doorway, she loomed, a dusk-indigo idol, the compliment to her so-called “sister”. She walked to me, wearing an equine body this time; I pulled against my chains to lift myself to a standing position.

With my arms behind my back, I scowled down into her cerulean eyes. She smiled piteously up at me before calmly noting, “Defiant until the end, I see.”

I had lived for millennia, yet I had no time for her word games. “Either kill me, or release me.”

Her eyebrow rose. “And arrogant.”

“Arrogant?” I gnashed my teeth and strained, both mentally and physically, against my bonds. Smoke rose from my wrists as I snarled. “Arrogant is coming to face me alone, when the only thing that separates you from—”

Two sharp points jabbed into my neck, hot needles. In front of me, her horn remained dim, which led to the question of the pain’s source. My eyes darted around the room until they landed on the wall to my left; in the light of the torch over the door, I could make out three equine shadows in front of mine.

The silhouettes of spears pressed into my shadow’s neck, and a dark voice sliced through the air: “If you threaten milady again, the shadows will claim you.”

Their liege looked down at her sides, where the shadows’ owners should have been, and calmly addressed the emptiness. “Eclipse. Nocturne. Be still.”

The two points on my neck vanished, and I scoffed at what I suspected to be a well-practiced show. “I suppose subterfuge and deceit go hand-in-hand.” I scoffed. “What did you stab me with from behind, anyway?”

A quick burst of chaos buffeted my head to the side like a slap; when I looked down, her upward glare permeated me like a chill. “Know your place, human. I do not unsheath Noctis Mortem lightly.” She took a breath, and her words softened. “We still have matters to discuss before your fate is decided.”

I turned back to face her. “Then unchain me, and we can speak as equals.”

She looked up at me. “Would you?” Her horn darkened in the already dim room, but abruptly, my arms swung forward.

My chains had vanished. I attempted to teleport back to my facility, but my wrists flared with heat. Shackles still bound me. I grabbed the left one in my right hand, hoping to find a seam to pry it off, but all I found was a ring of perfectly smooth, colder-than-ice metal.

“Do you think me naïve?” She chuckled lightly and shook her head. “You were responsible for nearly thirty deaths last night, and you still actively threaten malice towards my sister and myself.”

“I intend nothing which is not long overdue.”

“That remains to be seen as well.” Her voice was calm in an absolute, elemental manner.

I crossed my shackled arms across my chest. “How? Who could possibly preside in a fair trial over us?”

“Not all trials are battled in court, or end in sentencing,” came her reply. “Will you journey with me and see what I wish to show you?”

My shoulder rose. “That depends entirely on the context you give to what is seen.”

For the first time since entering the prison cell, she smiled. “Perhaps you are not wholly lost to the grips of insanity.”

“What—”

I looked around, and we were standing opposite each other on the tallest parapet of the castle I had earlier laid siege to. She turned around to stand next to me, and I took a deep breath of the frozen night air. It was better than the prison, at least.

Below us, I could see twelve ruined watchtowers, all of them smoothly destroyed as if they were washed away. I had hard-coded a stop into the nanomachines’ self-replication programming, since humanity ill-needed a world of gray goo to live on; regardless, they had done their job appropriately.

Already, scaffolds had been erected and the first stages of repair, even in the middle of the night, were underway. Next to me, a resolute voice spoke quietly. “Twenty seven valorous guards died in the line of duty last night. Does that not bother you?”

I shook my head. “The term that comes to mind is ‘unfortunate, but necessary’. I’m sure that they led fulfilling little pony lives, but in war, tactical decisions must be made.”

In the corner of my eye, she turned up to look at me. “So this was war?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Indeed.” She nodded. “There were alternative, peaceful paths you could have walked.”

I met her eyes. “I find it difficult to trust monarchs who use deceit and displays of power to maintain their rule.”

My eyes blinked, and blinding white light poured into them. A few seconds later, they adjusted to our new locale; now, we stood atop of the clock tower of a tiny desert town. The heat and dryness of the air around me was uncomfortable, but bearable.

In the town below, dozens of pastel ponies walked the streets, to and from their places of business. I smiled at the quaint antiquity; it was as if they strove to recreate a town from some of humanity’s older legends.

“Do these citizens look like they are crushed under the heel of some oppressive regime?”

I shook my head and chuckled. “I have not lived among them to know how they feel about their government.”

“And yet you pass your judgment as absolute.” Slowly, I turned and met her gaze. “You question the fairness of a centralized government, yet where were these concerns when you proceeded to attempt liberation of its populace?”

“They were irrelevant.” I crossed my arms across my chest and looked out in front of us. “Whether through crude obsolescence or systematic malice, these… things, instead of reclaiming their humanity, have embraced the twisted curse that befell all of us.”

Heat, now excruciating, bubbled up from the cracked black glass we stood on. Gale-force winds buffeted us, but they were like gasps from an immense furnace; no comfort could be found in them.

As far as my now-limited eyes could see, we were in a barren, flat plate of glass. I knew that no human weapons could have caused such neat destruction—even Mjölnir-class nuclear warheads would have left a noticeable crater. Over the winds, I shouted, “Where is this?”

Her voice sounded shimmering and quiet, even over the force of the burning air. “Before the events of last night, this place marked the final battle of the Chaos War, as the brittle remnants of human media were able to name it before society collapsed.”

I looked down at my coat and clothes. “So you do remember. The fall of humanity.”

She began walking away from me, so I moved to catch up. The bottoms of my shoes stuck to the ground before my first step, but after that, each liquid step only squished in a marginally less comfortable manner than the one before it had.

“Do you think it a blessing, to remain ever-haunted by the evils which founded our new society? Knowledge is only as intrinsically good as the ability to contextualize it.”

“So then you have perfect context,” I countered. “Surely that outweighs your duty to remember the dark elements of the past?”

She looked up at me, wearily. “Then do you admit that your own judgment is flawed by a lack of memory?”

Logically, I had to yield. Pride made it difficult to do so verbally. Fighting with the turbulence in my mind and all around us, I retorted loudly, “I recorded histories and refreshed myself as I needed to. Millennia without sleep gave me the gift of time to relearn any essential context, and therefore, judgment.”

“Even if those histories were incomplete?”

I walked alongside her, unspeaking, through the wastes for a while. Finally, I asked, “What happened, during the last days of the war?”

She looked up at me. “Do you remember dying and releasing us? Or rather, the man who once inhabited your body, died, saving us.”

I shook my head.

“After reawakening, we were angry. Even in our rage, crude biology bound us to an imperfect form. When the Chaos Lord known as Discord tried to kill that, we were freed—but at a high cost. Our death caused every chaos-powered human creation to explode in a global chain reaction.” She took a deep breath. “Less than twenty million humans lived at that point, but that population was decimated.”

“A war humanity did not deserve,” I pointed out.

“It was unjust.” Her head bowed. “Yet the past is not something easily repaired, even by the enduring, indefatigable will of…” She looked up at me with a piercing curiosity. “I remember your name, from when you spoke to us in the dream. But I know not now who you are.”

“I am no one,” I admitted. “And I am humanity’s last voice in the cosmos.”

“Are you so sure?”

Silence. And cold.

I looked around us at the white dust of earth’s moon. My body balked at the vacuum around it, but that was the reflex of breathing; I did not need air any more than I needed food or drink. There was no scent or sound, but above us floated a beautiful, sun-lit orb of blue and green as it spun through a great, infinite vastness.

In my mind, her voice spoke clearly amidst the silence. After our schism, your fragment lingered in the facility, determined to repay a debt to the human who freed us. Another hid. The other four of us charged to the surface, hoping to rally humanity’s remaining forces. Whether it was our death or some cruelty of the enemy, I do not know. But those forces had been transformed into something new. Something different.

The image came to my mind, but it came with echoes of emotion. The doubt and despair, which were supplanted by a will to restore and rebuild.

Silently, I smiled and looked over to my lunar companion. We are two outcomes of the same desire placed under different circumstances. I had limited means and information—

She snapped her head and cut me off with a hard glare. So. Did. We. Do not think of this conflict in terms of victory or defeat. That you had a disadvantage and we had the upper hand. The first few antebellum decades were rife with uncertainty. We did what we could to ensure the survival of the new human races. Sacrifices were made, especially given what few technologies and knowledges remained. It was crude, but from the ashes of that raw struggle, a miracle rekindled and blazed.

I crossed my arms and waited for the answer to her implicit question.

Peace. Quiet. Family. Values that had long been enforced due to the deadening of human emotion as it was replaced with cold logic. It did not occur suddenly, but when we noticed these phenomena reemerging, organically, and all the stronger for it… Her head shook. We knew there was no return to the old ways.

And you decided that as rulers?

For centuries, we oversaw from the shadows. Gave aid when it was needed, but never revealed ourselves. For a time, it was good. Almost unanimously, across a population of millions, efforts to restore the old life were abandoned for making advancements within the new society. It was imperfect, but somehow, in the wake of an apocalypse, humanity was closer to the utopia that even a lack of scarcity and sickness had been unable to bring.

So they were happier to lose their humanity and live as animals. My diaphragm twitched, trying to scoff in a vacuum. Of course, ignorance is bliss.

In my mind, her voice grew hotter. And you would force your happiness onto them? Rob the sky from pegasi, steal the arcane arts from unicorns?

Better misery in truth than happiness forged in lies!

“And lies are beneath you? At no point during the past nine months have you been dishonest with your intents or plans?”

We stood in the command center of my facility, where I stood mere meters from a computer terminal that could summon an army of patrol sentries. It would be a distraction, which would let me remove the bonds from my hands…

I shook my head and addressed her question. “Misdirecting someone to let her see that her goals were in line with mine is different than misleading an entire nation. She was still aware of her decisions and actions.”

“Does that make it right?”

“No,” I admitted. “But whatever sins you accuse me of, whatever crimes you condemn me for…” I shook my head. “I committed less than thirty murders last night? Where are the answers for how you continue to allow twenty nine billion lives to have ended in vain?”

“They will only have been lost in vain if we allow their descendants to tear themselves apart after learning truths that have lost all relevance.”

“And that makes it right?”

“No.”

She stood in front of me again; we were back in the prison cell. “But as you yourself stated in my domain, we are kindred spirits who were tasked with doing what we thought was right, given the knowledge and means available.”

I tried to cross my arms, but they were chained to the wall behind me again. I snarled. “What is this?”

“This is our impasse.” She bowed her head slightly. “My sister’s and mine, that is. She, with her wisdom of ruling, wishes for you both to be executed—you in secret, your apostle openly, at least as far as newspapers are concerned. We do not condone public executions, even in cases such as this; we are not savages.”

“No.” I grit my teeth and shook my head. My watering eyes confused me, but I continued, “That is not justice.”

“No? Was she not aware of her decisions or actions, and their consequences?”

“I gave her choices that she wouldn’t have made without my presence.”

Blue eyes gazed up into my own; her voice whispered, “Do you mourn for her loss?”

My head hanged. “She is innocent in all of this.”

“So you seek to make this right?”

I snapped back up to her. “What is your price? What is your judgment, that is so incompatible with your sister’s?”

“Incompatible?” Her eyebrow rose. Then, her horn darkened to pitch black. Pain erupted in my left forearm, my shackles dropped to the floor, and my knees buckled to join them. I grabbed my arm as I felt all my strength flow out of whatever wound she’d just inflicted. I tried to call my command of chaos, but the only thing that answered was a dead emptiness inside me.

The fire in my forearm faded, and when I peeled back the sleeve of my lab coat, a black tattoo of a crescent moon lingered on the skin beneath it.

“What is this?” I croaked up at her.

“In seven days, your heart will stop beating, and all other vital functions will cease. Until then, you are as mortal as the day you released us from our slumber. That debt is remembered, and will be repaid as clemency for your follower.”

Despite being delivered with good news, a very human fear of death suddenly overcame me. I fought through it, shaking my head in denial. “Why… why seven days?”

“Is not a week long enough to make a potentially life-altering decision?”

Her words confused me until I remembered the exact timeline I had given Lyra. That memory now came with guilt, but I managed to keep my face straight as I looked up at the alicorn above me. “What decision?”

“Cooperation, or silence. If you swear to cooperate with Equestria in matters of engineering and science, your life will be spared. You will be allowed to live out the life that was robbed of you during an unjust war.” She smiled, sadly. “But the price will be for you to be the one who destroys your facility, the records…”

I returned her smile, but I felt defiance instead of sorrow. “If I refuse, you will have to combat the facility’s security systems. It will take an army, a campaign that will rekindle some memory of humanity.”

She remained resolute. “It brings us no joy to commit evils in order to maintain peace, but do you at least understand why it must be done? Why your history is incompatible with current society?”

“I understand why you believe it must be done.” I shrugged. “But every recorded document? How will you know about the completeness of any destruction I might order?”

“Henceforth, if you are found attempting to teach or spread any lies by using magically falsified documents, you will be executed.”

Then, she winked.

Slowly, the loophole in front of me opened: the facility at large had to be destroyed, but if I didn’t show anyone what I took from it, I could keep some artifacts of humanity.

I grinned at what felt like mercy, but any appreciation I felt was quickly replaced with the realization of the price my punishment came with. A week felt like an incredibly short amount of time, but I supposed it was fitting, given all I had done.

“So, my facility or my life,” I repeated.

Princess Luna nodded.

“Lyra lives, regardless.”

Another nod.

“And I have a week to decide.”

“That is your sentence, as decided by my sister and myself.” After a moment, she added, “If you choose cooperation, you will be given a new body in which to live…”

I nodded. “And I’m assuming that, for a week, I’m not going to leave this cell?”

“You are free to go anywhere you will not be seen by living eyes. Simply ask, and I will appear at your side.”

I climbed to my feet and asked, “What if I wish to speak to someone as part of my deliberation? Someone who already knows of my existence?”

“That could be arranged.” Luna smiled. “But it may require time.”

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the prison wall. “I’ll wait here until then.”

Silence responded. After what felt like an unnatural pause, even for an immortal, I opened my eyes. I was alone, and the door to my cell was closed.

I slid down the wall until I was sitting; the only things left to do now were to wait and ponder.

> Chapter 11
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

They locked me in an institution.

Sisters save me, I didn’t doubt I needed it, either. Part of me pondered the whole, “If you’re crazy, do you know you’re crazy?” question, but for the first few days of my committal, I tried to relax.

Tried. I spent my days bed-ridden, under white sheets in a white room. Any purity or safety that room offered was merely an illusion. The nurses didn’t speak to me, even to let me know where I even was; finally, on the third day, a gruff, male nursing assistant told me I was in Canterlot Hospital’s Psychiatric Ward.

He also told me what I’d helped Jesse do, and how many ponies had died because of me.

Between the ostracization and my impending execution, I found it pretty damn hard to relax. Crying, now, that was easy. I did a lot of crying at first, after I’d realized what I’d done. The same went for angrily blaming Jesse for everything he’d put me through. By the end of the third day, everything simply left me; I wasn’t relaxed, I’d just burnt out.

Equestria didn’t implement capital punishment often, but the courts were known to make exceptions in extreme cases. I was sure this qualified as one. And yet, all I could do was blame myself. I’d known the stakes were for treason, yet I’d still played along. Why, I asked myself, why, why, why?

On Thursday morning, I felt sick. Literally. My nose was stuffed up, and my throat was sore. It wasn’t enough that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, or even that I’d been “subdued” by two members of Canterlot’s Elite Guard—which earned me several bruises and what felt like a cracked rib—or that I’d never see my parents, or my colleagues, or Berry again; now, on top of everything else, I had a cold.

Once I’d accepted my impending death sentence, my appetite left me entirely. That came as a minor disappointment; I couldn’t even enjoy my last meals as a prisoner. The nurses had a solution for my problem; by the time the third meal came around, they forced me to eat. After that, I rediscovered appreciation for being allowed a choice in the matter.

Friday morning—or maybe it was Saturday, or even Thursday afternoon; I slept so much, the days just ran together—a female royal guard entered my room. Instinctively, I grasped at the familiarity of solitude and emptiness; this was different, this was movement, this was—

“Her majesty Celestia requests an audience with you. You have thirty minutes to make yourself presentable.”

Crap.

I blinked at the guard a few times before I realized she wasn’t going to leave the room while I “made myself presentable”. Armed with that knowledge, I slid out of bed and made my way into the bathroom. She followed me in there, which I almost complained about.

I almost lost it in a giggling fit after I reminded myself, Pick your battles.

One hot and slightly exhibitionist shower later, I felt a little better. Or at least, my scalp and skin weren’t itchily matted down with days-old sweat and other gunk. Also, my nose cleared up from the steam, leaving me with only a mild sore throat.

Back in the main portion of my room, a pair of cushions and a table had appeared in the middle of the floor. It didn’t take much deliberation for me to know where I was going to sit during my audience with Celestia.

I sat down and waited. One minute, two minutes… It occurred to me that I hadn’t checked the time before showering, which made it useless to count out the minutes. The guard still watched me without moving or giving off any semblance of emotion; four minutes into my wait, I finally broke the silence: “How… when will, uh, Celestia get here?”

The guard’s expression never changed; my first reaction was that I wasn’t going to get an answer. She surprised me by finally stating, “Eleven.”

It was ten-fifty two, so I still had a little bit of a wait left. But, someone was talking to me! I pressed my luck and asked: “Do you, uh, know what’s happening?”

Another long silence, followed by, “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

I waited quietly for the remainder of the eight minutes; the only times I even moved were when I glanced up at the clock. The top of the hour came closer, and closer, and closer…

The door opened with a barely audible click, and Princess Celestia entered the room. Her legs moved, and I could count individual steps from her, but even in as dire straits as I was, she was too graceful to describe as walking. It was more like she flowed into the room, or even that she stood still while the rest of the room slowly drifted around her.

My mind struggled with a greeting; I was torn between bowing and not bowing. She didn’t like the former, but not doing it seemed like it wasn’t helping my cause. I settled on staring down at the table in front of me, and I continued waiting quietly until…

Well, in that moment, I realized I didn’t know what she wanted. The sensible part of my brain told me it’d be best to wait and see, and for one time that year, I actually listened to it.

“Eclipse, you are free to wait outside.”

Even when she gave an order, her voice was serene. All I heard in response from the guard was a quiet clinking of metal before her comparatively booming, armored hoofsteps trailed out of the room.

As soon as she left me alone with Celestia, I felt the room fill with a warm, soothing peace. I wanted to take refuge in it, to embrace it.

Instead, it filled me with terror—the calm before a storm.

“Good morning, Lyra.”

That time, her voice was closer to me; I risked a gleaming, tear-streaked glance up and saw that she’d sat down at the table with me. All the bright lights in the room coalesced into a streaky halo around her head; for a moment, it was all I could do to keep from breaking down in front of her.

For a moment.

Whatever it was about her presence—be it the raw power she embodied, or the guilt I felt for my actions, or the shame I felt over being duped—I couldn’t even return her greeting. I just sat there, sobbing so hard that I thought I was going to be sick. If I’d eaten a bigger portion of my breakfast, I probably would have.

Celestia waited silently through my torrent, or if she said anything, princess or no, I couldn’t hear her. When I started to feel a little better inside, I noticed a cloth napkin was floating in front of me; I took it with a hoof and buried my face in it, drying my eyes as best I could.

I also tried to say “thank you,” but between the cloth and the last of my tears, it came out muffled and thick.

Regardless, as I pulled the napkin away, Celestia nodded. “You are welcome.” Her voice was warm, if a little low; I wanted to let that put me at ease. She kept her voice soft when she requested, “Tell me everything that happened in the Everfree during the past months.”

For the second time in less than five minutes, I broke like a dam. Except the second time, instead of tears, I let loose a deluge of words. I felt myself talking quickly, and I had to stop, panting, from time to time to catch my breath. Still, I did what Celestia asked: I started with the beginning, when Jesse had rescued me from a pack of timberwolves, and I kept going until I reached the final stages of his plan.

When I reached the end, I shook my head. “I… I shouldn’t have done it. I… I thought I was helping ponies, in the long run.”

“I don’t doubt your long-term motivations.” Celestia nodded, slowly. “Though your circumstances are regrettable.”

Something strange gripped my throat—was she taking pity on me, after everything that had happened? I swallowed; the only thing that mattered to me, now, was: “What’s going to happen to me?” After a moment, I figured it was better to stick with the side I’d thrown my lots with: “To us?”

Celestia sat silently at first, but her eyebrow slowly rose. “You still feel a sense of allegiance to that man?”

“No…” I shook my head before re-focusing on Celestia’s eyes. “But I did. And I did things because of it, so…” I blinked and looked down at the table. “There’s no running from that, right?”

A mote of warmth lit under my chin and lifted my head. Celestia smiled sympathetically at me. “You were systematically deceived and manipulated by something that excels in those dark arts. The two of you did terrible things, but you cannot be held responsible in an equal manner. He will face consequences for his actions, but you, Lyra, are comparatively a free mare.”

It took a moment for me to process the news. Relief cascaded over me, followed by disbelief. I smiled widely and asked, “R… really?”

Celestia didn’t nod.

After a moment’s consideration, I realized I’d been a little too hopeful, too quickly. “What do you mean ‘comparatively free’?”

That drew a grim nod. “Manipulation or no, you were still remiss in several of your duties as a citizen—and as a student. How much of this could have been avoided if you’d announced your discovery to your supervising professor, instead of keeping it secret?”

My gut excuse of “she wouldn’t have believed me” died in my throat; if I had mentioned something like that to my professor, she might’ve passed it up the chain, or even pulled her authority to send me to a new region, if not sabbatical.

The realization of my gaping oversight came as a crushing sensation; I looked up from under it in time to ask, “So, I’m…”

“Your professor agrees. Effective immediately, you are hereby expelled from Canterlot University.”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. It hurt, to know that I wasn’t a student anymore. Granted, I’d dodged the death penalty, so I figured I should be happy to take what I could get, but that didn’t mean I was going to enjoy the consequences of my mistakes.

“Also, you will serve a sentence of community service or prison time—”

“Volunteer work!” I nearly shouted. I didn’t like prisons.

Celestia nodded, then stood up. I rose with her as she continued, “Then, court date aside, there remains but one final item. I will not tell you what it is or when it will be, but you must remain in this room until it comes to pass.”

“I… okay.” I nodded, confused. It definitely sounded like a weird punishment, but I again reminded myself just how easily I was getting off.

She held out a hoof. “You spoke of regrettable circumstances. Let us hope that, in time, you recover while atoning for your transgressions.”

“Yeah.” I shook her hoof and bowed. “But thank you.”

“Do not thank me yet.”

With that, she got up and left.

I watched the door for a while after it closed. No one came to take the table, either, which left me alone with my thoughts. Those all crept towards the realization that, no matter how merciful my sentence was, I’d just lost my entire life’s work.

Slowly, I shook my head, stood up, and walked over to the only window in my room. I’d avoided it for the past week, but when I looked outside, the view was mostly obstructed by Canterlot Mountain. If I turned my head and pressed my face to the glass, I could see a little bit of the sky and some of the city below; it wasn’t comfortable, but it let me think a little more about what my next steps were.

Well, clearly, my first step was the ambiguous punishment Celestia had mentioned. But I couldn’t really prepare for it, so I’d have to deal with it when it came.

I spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon staring out my window, only taking a break from the view when the nurses brought lunch in. Watching the city was peaceful in a warm, distant manner.

It also made me realize I no longer had any ties to Canterlot—or even Equestria, short of visiting friends and family. I chuckled at the notion; I’d just dodged a treason verdict to come to the realization that, if push came to shove, I wouldn’t mind living outside of Equestria. However, I did like traveling. Even if the university wasn’t going to hoof the bill anymore, I wasn’t going to move back to Phillidelphia with my parents.

That just left me with absolute freedom and no safety net.

Against the glass, I smiled. There was a big, open world out there. Yeah, I’d have to figure out my finances, but I had savings and a very large diamond I still hadn’t sold yet. I wondered if that would even be legal to sell. I shrugged; the important thing was that I wasn’t tied down with anything more than community service. I was free, I had options, and most importantly, I was al—

“Lyra?”

I froze when I heard his voice, behind me, despite the door never opening. In my mind, I guessed where he was standing, and thought about how hard I’d have to fling the table at him to distract him long enough to escape into the hallway…

The sigh made a round, foggy ghost on the windowpane as it escaped me. I was done with fighting and done with running. My stiff neck throbbed as I turned to face him, but that wasn’t even close to the worst thing I felt right then.

Jesse stood to the right of the doorway, and he was wearing his usual lab coat. His eyes were normal, and I noticed his hunched shoulders that slumped back against the wall.

He looked defeated.

Because the clock was right over his head, I counted that we stared at each other for exactly eighteen seconds. I couldn’t find the strength to put any fire into my voice; all I wanted was to know what more he could possibly want from me. I shook my head and quietly asked, “What?”

Across the room, he swallowed and looked away. I almost said something about that, but he spoke before I could. “I don’t know how to apologize for what I did.”

“Good.” The word hissed through my teeth. “How many ponies did you kill? And you think apology is going to make that right?”

“Twenty-seven, and no.” He shook his head. “I don’t expect words to fix anything.”

“So why are you here?”

Jesse pushed off the wall with his shoulders. I lowered my head and readied one of the defensive spells I knew. He raised his hands and fell back against the wall. “Point taken. Though it may interest you to know that between the two of us, you’re the only one who can command chaos now.”

“It doesn’t.” I kept the spell up but frowned, confused. “Actually, why? What happened to you?”

He grinned. “I lost my war. That leaves me to face the victors’ judgment.” His eyes darted off to the side. “She wasn’t exactly explicit about what was happening, but everything’s different now. Hunger. Pain.” He raised his hand and flicked his fingers a few times. “No chaos.”

“Who?” I shook my head. “Who did that? Celestia?”

“Princess Luna.”

I dropped my spell and raised my head. If he were lying—which there was a statistically significant chance of that—it probably wouldn’t have protected me anyway. If he were telling the truth, then…

Then I still didn’t know what it meant. Jesse didn’t seem to want anything from me, which raised the same question I’d already asked. “Okay. You’re… mortal, again. So what? Why are you here?”

“I’m human again.” He took a deep breath. “Part of that comes with certain aspects that, last week, I would have written off as disadvantages. Emotions are a lot harder to control, things like guilt and sadness…”

I sneered. “So you can feel sad again, and now you want to apologize to me because it’ll make you feel better?”

“I want to apologize because you deserve that much, at least!” He didn’t yell it, but his sharp tone rang through the room. After a moment, he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I probably deserve that accusation.”

“Probably?” I took a short, little breath. “Probably? You killed all of those guards, you lied to me for months, and you probably deserve me to doubt you when you’re just appearing in my room…” Something clicked, and I shouted: “And you’re lying about not being able to use magic!”

Jesse turned his hands up, but I cut him off: “Don’t even start! Just… teleport back to whatever Hell you crawled up from!”

“I asked to be sent here.” His hands fell to his sides. “Part of the terms of my relative freedom in the interim is that I remain hidden, which is difficult to do in the crowded hallways of a hospital.”

“The hospital you put me in with lies!”

“And I’m sorry!” he hissed back in a loud whisper. “That’s what I came here to say. I have my debts to your country to pay for my attack, but I wanted to apologize to you. I’m sorry for what I did to you, and for everything that happened to you because of me. But if you’re just going to think that’s coming from the worst possible place, what’s the point?”

I took a step forward. “What is the point? Why are you apologizing?”

“Because I have matters to attend to…” He gripped his left forearm in his right hand, but shook his head. “Because Luna is taking me somewhere. But before I go, I want to know that not everything I did caused irreparable damage. I want to know that you’ll be okay.”

“I’m in a loony bin and my whole life’s work is destroyed. Do I look like I’m okay?”

“Will you be, though?”

I sighed. I didn’t know if this was a new angle from him or if he were genuinely feeling remorse, but something about him seemed… sincere, for once. It didn’t make him any less of a monster, but it wouldn’t be right for me to scorn his attempts at being personable.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Yeah. I will be. Eventually.”

“Good.” He returned the nod.

Part of me wanted the conversation to end on that note, but like it usually did with Jesse, curiosity got the better of my senses. “Where will you go?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. It’s… expensive, either way, and I don’t really have that much left.”

I raised an eyebrow. “So you get personal teleportation from Princess Luna, but you’re worried about travel costs?”

“To an extent.” He tilted his head to the side and rubbed his forearm. “I’d be less burdened on whichever path I took if you accepted my apology. Something of a final request from you.”

It dawned on me, and a twinge of sadness followed in its wake. “You’re not talking about traveling, are you?”

He shook his head. “I… I didn’t want to extort forgiveness from you by revealing it, but…” Jesse slid the left sleeve of his lab coat up. Underneath it, on his tan skin, was a black crescent moon.

I almost laughed out loud; that was an ancient Equestrian glyph they used to burn into capital offenders before their executions. Princess Luna was nothing if not fitting, at least in a judicial sense.

Still, it made me sad to stand there and look at him. There stood Jesse, the last human, a relic of some war that had nearly killed off all life on the planet. He… he was horrible, but he’d been through horrible things in his nigh-eternal life.

“I’m sorry things have to end like that for you.” It wasn’t poetic, but it was the best I could do given my circumstances.

He nodded. “They gave me the option, to live out the rest of my life as some sort of state-sponsored engineer. The price is the destruction of my facility, the legacy of humanity… I don’t think I am strong enough to pay that price to help a society.”

The archaeologist in me screamed at the notion: a whole facility belonging to an ancient race, being destroyed. All those forgotten lives. “Wh… why do they want it destroyed? The princesses, I mean.”

Jesse rolled up his sleeve and crossed his arms. “Apparently, learning Equestria’s true history might cause something akin to dissent, and ponies tend to be happier not knowing.”

Given where I’d been before I met Jesse, I was inclined to agree. Still, the truth could be hard sometimes; that didn’t mean it should just be avoided. “But what happens if you leave it down there and…” I didn’t want to finish that sentence.

He chuckled. “The facility’s on security lockdown. For the next few decades, if anyone tries to enter, those sentries will do a little more than disable them…” Jesse shrugged. “In the long term, without anyone maintaining the systems, the same phenomenon that happens to all things: decay. The power generators will fail, the filtration system will stop, and everything will begin rusting and decomposing.The odds of anyone finding any sort of meaning in the place grow slim.”

“So it’s lost no matter what you do?”

“Essentially. But I don’t know if I can be the one to pull the trigger, so to speak.”

“You’d finally be helping ponies…” I pointed out. “If you went through with it.”

Jesse raised an eyebrow. “Would you want that?”

I took a breath and started thinking out loud: “Well… if the place is going to be destroyed either way, and any sort of potential discovery of your home is going to be kept under government wraps, then yeah. History’s out. You should help ponies in the present. You at least owe that for all those guards you killed.”

“Would you forgive me, then?”

“I…” My head shook a little. “You’d be making good on your word to me. So I guess, maybe I can look past the lying. Maybe eventually.” I swallowed a lump. “You hurt me in so many ways, I’m not sure if I can ever forgive someone who did all that to me.” I finished by looking straight into his blue, not-glowing eyes. “But if you’re different now, if you’re human now, then...”

Jesse picked up where I trailed off: “Helping your countrymen on their terms would be the first step towards giving you evidence of that change?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

He stood there, swaying a little as he mulled it over. Finally, he returned my nod. “That is probably the best I could reasonably expect from you.” After a pause, he tipped his head slightly. “Thank you.”

It suddenly clicked, and I remembered Celestia’s last words to me. I repeated them now, to Jesse: “Don’t thank me yet.” He cocked his head, so I explained, “If you’re serious about going through with this, it’s not going to be an overnight process. You’re going to have to learn how to fit in with society...” I grit my teeth, awkwardly; I didn’t want to bring up how that had been my plan from the beginning.

His shoulder rose and he grinned. “I know salad and chess. That’s as good a start as any.”

Slowly, I returned his grin. We stood there for a few moments, and it grew more and more obvious that there was only one thing left to say. A weird mixture of relief and sadness made my stomach churn, but I raised a hoof and waved. “Goodbye, Jesse.”

“Goodbye, Lyra.”

Then, he vanished.

Something about doubting my eyes and ears while in a mental hospital made my stomach lurch; I really hoped I hadn’t just hallucinated an entire exchange with Jesse. I didn’t need that in my life.

A dark purple letter on the table caught my eye. It definitely hadn’t been there after Celestia left, so I walked over to see what it was. It had a royal lunar seal of what looked like silver on it, which gave me a small sense of comfort; that did collaborate what Jesse had mentioned. The fact that it was addressed to “Lyra Heartstrings” sealed the deal; even my messed-up psychotic brain wouldn’t ever use my full, legal name.

I opened the letter and read its golden, rolling script:



Ms. Heartstrings

This is a royal missive hereby pardoning you for your actions on the night of Sunday, the third of December. You are expected to attend a private hearing in Canterlot Castle on Monday, the eighth of January, at eleven o’ clock in the evening.

Until that date, you are free to travel and do business within the cities of Canterlot or Fillydelphia, as you see fit, with this letter evidencing your pending acquittal.

Signed this eighth of December, in the first year of Solar Reunification, by her Majesty and Regent of the Night Court,
Princess Luna



When I was done reading, I folded the letter back up and smiled. I liked that “free to travel” part of my missive. I’d been stuck in that mental ward for far too long; some “travel” was probably just what I needed. Without further ado, I walked to the door and magicked the knob around.

It turned too freely, since it was locked.

After a quick chuckle, I shook my head and sauntered back over to my bed. I’d have to wait for the nurse to arrive with dinner, then I’d show her the missive, tell her to get stuffed, and I’d be on my merry way.

Until then, I stretched out on the not-too-uncomfortable hospital bed. I read my letter once again, folded it up, and put it on the nightstand. That was my future, and I was okay with it.

One final thing that interested me—since I went to school for it and all—was looking to the past and seeing what I could learn from it. Since old habits died hard, I applied those lines of thinking to my time spent with Jesse.

Obviously, there was some sort of personal lesson about trusting people who had a past history of hurting me, but that was the easy lesson. The same thing went for committing acts of war against Equestria; really, there were some basic things I’d forgotten.

That was what was tricky to me: How could I have just cast away loyalties and responsibilities to the present by looking solely to the future? Sure, it had been a better future; even after all I’d been through, I felt a pang of regret that I’d never get to see anything like it again.

Maybe there was a lesson in the history of humanity, one that warned about ethics in the face of technological advance. I rarely thought about that sort of thing; usually, I left it for engineers and arcane researchers. The only “technologies” I ever encountered were either store-bought or rusted beyond any practical use.

I shook my head and thought, trying to remember. Easily, the most poignant experience with Jesse had been the few hours I’d spent as a human. I’d seen everything from a new perspective—from about six feet off the ground instead of three and a half. But in that time, there’d also been sharpness, a sense of urgency, and ambition.

For a few hours, I’d lived without a cutie mark again.

That was probably the biggest moral dilemma I had about the entire thing. Was it worth one year of chaos to re-shuffle the cards and deal a fresh hand to society?

Would I make the same choice, given the same opportunity?

How much of an impact on lives were cutie marks? Throughout history, Equestrian philosophers and psychologists had spent countless hours debating that question, but there wasn’t much more of a definitive answer than “it varies from pony to pony”.

I pondered that philosophical question for a while, and it eventually led me back to the bed I was lying on. Cutie mark or no, there I lay with no job, almost no ties to anywhere, and a wide-open future.

There was also the fact that basing a lifetime of studying archaeology on a lyre was… how did Jesse put it? A flimsy basis for determining a vocation. And he’s gonna start from scratch as a pony, too...

As I lay there, I took solace in how I’d interpreted my own destiny. I’d gone to school, I’d done the hoofwork for all my expeditions. I’d been given a foundation, but on top of that, I’d built something, and now that had been taken away from me, I knew that in a month or so, I’d be right out there building something new.

I got off the bed and walked back over to the window. The birds-eye view of Canterlot reminded me of the first movie I’d watched with Jesse. Just like the humans in the movie, ponies in the streets below went about their daily lives, dealt with worries, and made decisions for their futures.

Maybe we had a slight bias in our destinies, but in the end, we were the ones who made them for ourselves.

I smiled. In that regard, I guessed we were still human after all.