The Literary Hypothesis

Chapters

Potential
Discovery
Imprisonment
Dreams
Freedom

Potential

Cardboard and papers and rolls spread out on the tabletop. Glasses and shades and telescopes were dumped on top of them.

As one, the doctors crowded around and chatted. Earth ponies plucked samples with their jaws or their deft forelegs. Unicorns levitated theirs over their heads. The one pegasus pony swooped down and carried off a couple of rolls.

In various corners, vices were clamped to paper. Other ponies pinned paper samples to whatever part of the wall was free. The pegasus dumped one roll on top of a cabinet and twirled the other in her hooves until a sheet dangled down, ready for inspection.

Those few ponies who hung back at the table now placed sunglasses on their faces, or raised telescopes to their eyes, or removed lenses and fitted new ones in. Many squinted, hummed, cocked their heads, or cast spells on their instruments. One enthusiastic earth stallion reared up. He lowered his faceguard with the air of one preparing for war and lit the flamethrower before approaching the roll the pegasus was dangling. Rather understandably, she blanched and started backing away.

In the midst of the rushing around and the flashes and the repeated adjustments of eyepieces, Doctor Stone Meadow blew through her lips. Her face was blank. Beside her, Doctor Caramel dropped the shades and glanced around the table for replacements.

“Can’t I have a go with the flamethrower?” Stone Meadow peered longingly at the flames spouting up to the ceiling.

“Definitely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” said Doctor Caramel with a sigh, “I don’t want to have to write on my report the words ‘gave the most dangerous piece of equipment to the pony from the asylum’.”

“Oh, you’re so silly!” Stone Meadow slapped her on the haunch, making her whinny in protest. “I’m mad, not dangerous! That’s a common – prejudiced – misconception. Most mentally ill ponies are just impaired or have daily difficulties. The stallion over there’s got more chance of attacking you than I do.”

“Now now, children.” A grey stallion with jaundiced eyes wandered out of the madness, telescope hovering next to him with a blue aura around it. “No squabbling over the toys.”

“Hello, Lance.” Caramel raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t it feel nice to know you’re not the newcomer anymore?”

Stone Meadow pouted. “That flamethrower’s the only creative element in this whole madhouse.”

The grey stallion Doctor Lance peered up at the pegasus pony, who was howling and who rushed past the three of them trailing smoke. “It is, isn’t it? A bit on the extreme side, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not extreme enough! If we’re going to deliver the ultimate immersive experience, we’re not going to get far when the only option is ‘self-immolation’. Don’t you think, Caramel?”

To her own surprise, Caramel found herself nodding. She was working next to a silver badge pony who’d barely been around long enough to know where the toilets were. Irritating as it was, however, she felt it was to Stone Meadow’s credit that the crazy mare forgot to wear said badge too. As far as she knew, Stone Meadow had shoved it into a locker during her first week and then simply forgotten about it.

Smirking, Doctor Lance focused, and once his horn was aglow, a parchment popped into existence before him. He placed a pair of glasses on his nose, each lens the size of a pea, and hummed to himself.

“Any ‘last-minute’ amendments?” said Caramel with a smirk. “Again?”

“Hardly. The Suit’s been on his best behaviour this time.”

His gaze strayed briefly towards Stone Meadow, who was staring at the ceiling with a grin on her face. Caramel could guess what that look meant. If the Suit was leaving the fire-stoking to them, it was only because he wasn’t sure how wise it would be to stray too close to the flames.

“He’s quite the poet, isn’t he?” Stone Meadow said as though describing a pleasant dream. “Scruffy, casual, blundering along as though absorbed in another realm of existence, one that no one else can see…”

“Yes,” said Caramel testily. “The traditional art major look. You’d hardly think he was the owner of a billion-bit industry.”

“Except when he feels like being a rich play-colt.” Doctor Lance sniggered and mimed walking in a thick suit. “‘Ah am as rich as Cree-o’-Salt, look upon mah works ‘n’ dee-spair, how you doin’ sweet pea.’ Then he can’t move for the jewellery.”

“He used to publish private commissions for Canterlot types,” said Stone Meadow to Caramel. “The usual stuff: exclusive legends for lords and ladies, royal libraries, Canterlot Archive filler. You name it, he’s had it written, published, or bound. That was in the old days of the exclusive patrons, obviously. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and all that.”

Caramel frowned. I spent most of my adulthood working with the stallion, and all I know about him is how he dresses and what a patronizing, pretentious popinjay he is. This creep’s been here a few days, and she’s already educating me about his commercial history.

“So what’s your big plan to wow him, then?” she said coolly.

Doctor Lance grinned at her. “Let’s just say it’s a kind of expansion.”

“Expansion?”

“Well, he’s a fan of science, isn’t he?” Stone Meadows winked at each one of them. “He wants to take another field and stretch it outside of exclusive practice. He wants to popularize it. Well, what better target than reality itself?”

Doctor Lance laughed and threw a forelimb across her withers as though they were bosom pals. “I like your style, kiddo. Can you believe this mare? Why haven’t we recruited her before now, eh?”

Caramel’s brow furrowed. “With bits of paper?”

Stone Meadow shrugged. “Why not? There’s a forest south of here where weather moves on its own.”

“And,” added Doctor Lance, “I’ve heard of a few creatures made out of nothing but constellations.”

“Not to forget that dragons shouldn’t by any measure be able to breathe fire without incinerating their mouths. Yet they manage!”

“Compared to that,” said Doctor Lance, “manipulating reality with bits of paper is child’s play.”

“It happens every day. Literature can take the mind to any kind of world without it ever leaving the room.”

Caramel frowned. “Oh come on. You’re not going to trot out some mystical nonsense, are you? You, of all ponies?”

“I’m deadly serious.” Stone Meadow reared up and towered over her, still grinning but eyes now narrowed. “Art and science aren’t ‘mystical’. We have gone beyond ‘mystical’. The creator of art and the discoverer of science… at the end of the day, they’re the same thing. Creation is discovery, and discovery is creation. The only question is where? Out there” – she pointed all around her – “or in here?” – she pointed at her own head.

Behind them, the pegasus screamed and something exploded, raining bits of metal over their hair and lab coats. No one paid much attention, simply because anyone who did had clearly just wandered in from another department.

“Outside for a moment.” Caramel nodded towards the reinforced steel. “Just you and me.”

Both of them squeezed through doors that would in another building have been used for a treasure vault, and found themselves at the top of a flight of metal stairs. Beyond were the hulking shadows of machines waiting for power; in the low light, they seemed broken and on the verge of collapse.

“I just want you to know,” Caramel said, “that I don't like being teamed up with you any more than you dislike being teamed up with me.”

“Well, really!” Stone Meadow pouted.

“Really. From what everyone else was saying, you're the perfect combination of creative insanity and unstoppable genius. Well, I've been working with you from the moment we left that loony bin, and what I've seen out of you so far is all insanity and no genius. That 'O Brother and Sister' act might go down a treat in that pit you left behind, but it's a choke chain here, and I'm not gonna stick my neck out for it.”

“Excuse me, Colonel Mustard, but I've been rewriting the rules of reality since I was old enough to bite a pencil. Think twice before you throw a gauntlet at my hooves.”

Caramel glared at her, not even bothering to hide the disdain anymore. “I knew someone like you once. Talked big, played up to the crazy image, loved every second of it. They didn't care what the rest of the world thought about them either, but it didn't end well for them.”

“Then more fool the rest of the world! For his sake and my own, I accept this as a challenge!”

Shock stabbed through Caramel's chest. Gritting her teeth against it, she lowered her horn, which suddenly flared and burned. For HIS sake?

“You don't have the right to do that,” she hissed.

The momentary gape of alarm vanished under the arrow-like point of tensed eyebrows. “What treachery be this!? You cannot be such a faithless philistine!”

The creak of six inches of iron snatched at their mutual glares; Doctor Lance slammed the door behind him, seemingly oblivious of two heated glares that should've laminated him to the wall.

“Snuggle time's over, sweethearts,” he said with a smirk. “We don't want ponies talking.”

“Let them talk!” Doctor Stone Meadow whipped her hair haughtily. “So poisoned be my character, as poison shall my words be received.”

As though waking from a dream, Caramel noticed her glowing horn for the first time. The flames were extinguished. Hastily, she straightened up, trying to impress upon everybody present with her bent limbs and slumped backbone that nothing interesting had happened. After all, it was dark in here. Anyone would need light to inspect this floor for change.

“We were concluding our spiels," she muttered. “It seems we made a case for the insanity plea.”

“Feh!” Doctor Stone Meadow turned on her hoof and strode towards the steps. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my quarters.”

Doctor Lance watched her go, clank by clank, and tittered to himself. “Well, this ought to be good.”

“Yes.” Caramel’s eyes were narrowed. “Good. Right.”

The little filly Caramel closed her eyes and focused on the spikes of the crystal on the floorboards. Heat clustered inside her horn, and she was sure she felt it move before it scattered and died away. With a grunt, she stopped trying to concentrate. Her teeth ached with the effort of gritting against the pressure.

At the table, Mom lowered a steaming mug onto the surface and raised the newspaper to her face. There was a scrape; the mug slid over to the edge and crashed onto the floor. Without even looking around, Mom buried and rubbed her face in the pages.

“Gosh darn that table leg!” she moaned, slightly muffled, into the home advertising column.

Caramel hurried over, horn aglow. While Mom lowered the paper, Caramel bent down to examine the offending leg, which rocked slightly as she experimentally levitated and lowered it.

“Put the book back, honey,” said Mom with a heartfelt sigh.

“I’m reading it.” Caramel grunted and sweated before the book drifted over to her from beside the crystal. “Haycart says you can’t master magic until you master his techniques, so I’ve got to read it or I won’t know what they are.”

The glare this earned her was enough. She shoved the book back under the leg and stormed off. Behind her, Mom's horn summoned a dustpan and brush to sweep up the remnants of the mug.

“Load of ancient nonsense,” Mom muttered, and Caramel wasn’t sure if she was supposed to have heard it, because in a sprightlier voice Mom added, “Honey, why don’t you practise that spell outside? I’ve got some boring housework to do.”

Caramel bit the crystal and placed it onto her back, with some help from a well-placed elbow. “But you’re just reading the newspaper.”

To the filly’s consternation, Mom slumped and looked away for a moment. “Will you just do what I ask, please?”

A few seconds later, Caramel let the door slam behind her and scampered across the nail-and-plank veranda to the steps. She had no desire to be around Mom when the mare was in this mood.

It remained eerily quiet inside the timber home all the time she spent outside.

Caramel began digging out the satchel of tomes and tools from the dirt under the veranda, coughing and blinking against the sand she threw up. Jars rattled loosely inside, so she stopped to rearrange the books and jam the glassware into place until the rattling stopped.

Caked in sand, she scampered across the dirt avenue, ignoring the sleepy-eyed pony that shuffled across the road.

“Today,” she said to the sun, which was rising beyond the distant hills, “I’m going to find fairies!”

Anything, she thought, so long as I don’t have to do chores.

Leaving the inevitable trail of disturbed dust behind her, she crested the eastern ridge and peered out beyond the shoreline of the desert. Sands and crags crashed against the wall of the conifers, and beyond that was a dark green carpet, the stuff of fairy tales. It sloshed up the slopes of the mountains and faded with a growing joy into the light of sunrise.

She slid down the slope on her croup and hopped back onto all fours, running across the desert to the distant row of trees. Already, she could see the flower heads poking out like the eyes of crazed animals. Finally, she skidded to a halt.

Among the shadows and the trunks, she was in a still world. Unlike the desert, there was no wind; the locks of her mane slumped over her eyes. She strode forwards and bounced off a tree. Squint as she did, she was almost blind under the canopy.

“Come out, come out, little fairies,” she said. “Come say hello to your biggest fan.”

Despite the stars of colour in an otherwise total shadow, the filly almost got her leg stuck in an unseen burrow, and she constantly snapped twigs and stumbled over broken branches and bumped into trunks. After sniffing three different flowers and getting not even a scent from them, she growled and sat down at the foot of a pine.

With a groan of effort, she made her horn light up. “Better,” she said to the circle of grass around her.

Shiny carapaces fled from the light, but she paid them no mind. Instead, she focused on a small daisy by her hoof. A sniff: no scent still, but the white petals radiating out did remind her of a crayon drawing she’d once done of the sun.

“This pleases me,” she said with a smirk, and she plucked it from the earth with only a grimace on her face.

It was her hooves, however, that reached into the satchel to pull out the journal. She didn’t think her magic was up for two levitation spells in a row. When she opened the book, the masses of scribbling stared back at her. Pages were flicked aside by her muzzle, but she couldn’t find a free one.

“What is this?” One eye widened as she leaned forwards. “A recipe for carrot cake? When am I going to use that, silly? I don’t cook. Mare’s sakes, the things you get up to when you’re young.”

She grinned. It had been fun a year ago, but she still shook her head at the innocence of youth.

Something clammy snagged her hoof.

With a squeal, she leaped clean into the air, flipping the book over and trampling the satchel under her hooves when she landed. At once, she looked down at the clammy thing.

For a moment, she thought one of the flowers had bitten her. Under her horn’s light, a dull grey stem rose up from the soil and stretched over to her hoof, where three petals had clamped onto her. Even as she watched, what looked like three stamens wriggled free of the three petals’ tight grip and wrapped themselves around her hoof.

Caramel blinked and leaned closer. The flower must have sprouted up where the daisy had just been. She could see the layout of the twigs and leaf litter were mostly the same.

Then, the thing detached itself from her, and at once she saw her mistake. Rows of gums bubbled out of its maw. Black drool dribbled from its three “petals”, which flexed and closed like jaws. The three “stamens” were tongues. All three of them were sucked back in like spaghetti, and the stem curled round to let it look up at her. Tiny black eyes like beetle shells blinked.

“Ew,” she said, and she crouched down to look at it. “A wormy worm.”

The thing hissed and bared its three jaws. Her face shot back up, startled, but when the thing relaxed and closed its mouth, she leaned in close again.

At once, she pulled a book towards her and flicked through the pages. After a while, she pressed her hoof down smartly on an illustration.

“I was right!” she squeaked. “And you’re not just any worm, are you? You’re a tatzlwurm!”

She glanced back at the book, drawn this time to the text.

“Oo,” she added. “Not that big. A baby tatzlwurm, then?”

The tatzlwurm hissed at her, and then gave a tiny sneeze. Caramel giggled and held out a hoof, which it wrapped around, pulling its tail out of the hole.

“Dad says fairies guard flowers, and that you shouldn’t take the flowers because that makes them sad.” While the thing tried to bite into her leg, she tilted her head curiously. “Do you want your flower back, little worm?”

She lowered her leg to the daisy on the ground. After a while, the tatzlwurm slithered off and wrapped around the green stem.

“Must be boring,” she whispered. “Having to sleep under a flower all your life, I mean. You must have been stuck there forever, and nobody came to see you. Even your daddy. You must be very lonely.”

The tatzlwurm curled its head up and hissed at her, waving back and forth like a cobra.

“You need to read books,” she said. “It’s like ponies talking to you, even when they’re far away or dead. You’re in this book, look.”

She turned the book around so it could see the illustration, but it simply lunged at the words and stuck fast.

“Huh,” she said. “I guess you don’t like it either. It’s not very nice, is it? But you’re OK. I mean, you just eat ponies. You don’t send them off to their aunts when they break things.”

With a sticky sound, the thing detached from the book, trailing black drool after it. It shook its head to dislodge the spittle.

“I’m going to leave home one day for good,” Caramel said, lowering the book. “I hate home. And I’m gonna go to Canterlot, and then I’ll be – oh my! What have you done to my book?”

The drool began to spit and steam, and when it ran off the paper, the page was blank of ink and words. She snapped the book shut and shoved it back into her satchel, rubbing her hooves afterwards.

“My word.”

She pulled out a jar. The tatzlwurm gave a harsher hiss than ever when she levitated the creature, daisy and all, into the glass prison, and she slammed the lid down and sealed it.

“Right,” she said. “If there are no fairies, then you’ll do. Come with me, little tatzlwurm. And behave yourself!”

And she strode out of the forest, ignoring the hissing and banging coming from the glass.

Discovery

The portal shimmered and swirled like disturbed water in a basin.

Doctor Caramel Crisp looked down at the serial number carved into the bottom of the crystal window frame. Project 12-28-22 had been a long time waiting, but here it was in its moment of glory. She couldn't stop shaking.

On the other side of the reinforced glass, Doctor Stone Meadow turned to the desk beside her and grinned down at the tome left upon it. No matter how many times they'd seen her look at it, she never ceased to smirk at the title. On its spine in golden lettering were the words A Thousand Years of Teleportation and Portals: Entering a New Realm of Magic and Science.

With a cackle, she swatted at it with a backhoof of a swipe. It clattered in the wicker basket next to the desk. In an instant, it compressed the reams of paper she’d dumped in there to a suggestion of white at the bottom.

“Good grief,” murmured Caramel to herself. “She did it. She actually went and did it.”

Behind Caramel, the other doctors watched the swirls and smirks warily through glass as thick as a brick wall. Despite the fact that most of them had grubby white coats, shiny red lumps on their forelimbs, and bags under their eyes, their faces were scrunched up into sneers and grimaces. Only Doctor Lance was smirking. Caramel simply stared, slack-jawed and eye muscle twitching every few seconds.

They watched as Doctor Stone Meadow patiently plucked random kitchen utensils, bathroom bottles, and toy shop bric-a-brac from a table and threw them into the portal, one at a time. As one, they glanced up at the clock hanging over their glass wall. Quarter past seven taunted them.

“I don’t get it,” said one at last. “It’s garbage. A miracle of science, and she’s using it to dump garbage.”

“Now, now!” said Doctor Lance, and his smirk widened. “She’s building up to something.”

“Yeah,” said Caramel, still staring. “A psychotic breakdown.”

Behind them, the double doors swung open and the Suit walked in.

None of them had to turn around to know it was the Suit. Apart from the flood of perfumes that suggested a botanical garden had been packed into every molecule in the room, he couldn’t help but jingle, rattle, and clink wherever he walked. Even his steps thudded with the golden horseshoes he’d had fitted years before, though they all knew they were just iron horseshoes with gold leaf added.

“Hey there, my friends!” he purred, and a few of the doctors shivered and inched away from him. “How’s my favourite cuckoo clock counting down today, my friends?”

Doctor Lance spun round, reared up, and – still smirking – bowed with a flourish. Around him, the other doctors took their time to do so much as turn.

“Just testing it now, sir,” he said cheerfully. “I don’t think it’s anywhere near being finished yet, but –”

“But nothing, goldie oldie.” The Suit cruised through the rank, forcing the stallion to quickstep out of his way before he inspected the room beyond. “I’m on my last limbs here, sweethearts. ‘When the storm-cracked wall is trembling under thunder, The pallid stench of mortar tastes like heaven’s greatest wonder’.”

“This wall’s gonna topple hard, then,” whispered the blue mare to her partner.

“That crazy mare,” murmured Caramel to herself. “She said she'd do it. And she did it.”

“Get me in the cocoon, o myrmidons of industry, o butterflies of steel and stone. Papa ain’t seen his children for months now.”

A few seconds passed while the doctors stared up at the ceiling, mouths working feverishly. Keeping up with the Suit was the mental equivalent of a ten-second triathlon. Already the older ponies were sweating and frowning.

Finally, Doctor Caramel blinked out of her stunned reverie and turned and swallowed. She was going to have to take the initiative again. Great.

After a quick glance about in case of any last-minute saviours, she hopped smartly forwards and her horn flashed bright pink. The Suit vanished. On the other side of the glass, the Suit flashed back into place, jingling and rattling, and clinking as he strode over to the giggling Doctor Stone Meadow.

At once, the Suit’s face was set in stone. “Revelation dawns, sweet pea. Time to put away childish things.”

The doctors pressed their faces up against the window. A blue earth pony shook her head, squeaking slightly on the glass.

“Did he really just say that?” she whispered. Beside her, a pink stallion gulped.

Doctor Stone Meadow spun round, eyes bulging, all thought of lobbing the toothbrush through the portal forgotten. “You call this ‘childish’, good sir knight? ‘You dare compare my flare and wit, With a nasty newborn’s nagging skit?’ I, the indisputable great Doctor Stone Meadow, she of the giddy heights of the Everhoof and the darkest depths of the Lunar Sea?”

All the doctors groaned. The Suit, grinning wide enough to fit a banana sideways into his mouth, raised a hoof – sounding like a wind chime in a hurricane – and gestured towards the portal.

“Behold! Yesterday’s technology.” His eyes twinkled as he said it.

Doctor Stone Meadow reared up and pointed at the portal. “Au contraire! Tomorrow’s world. Beyond that portal lies the realm of gods and heroes, spies and revolutionaries, heavenly stars and demonic cities. With this magic, we can create all worlds with nothing but an utterance.”

Doctor Lance rolled his eyes and chuckled under his breath. “Oh, here we go, here we go, here we go…”

“Deserts at my command! Jungles at a word! We can travel down to the darkest chambers of ancient tombs, and up to the tallest skyscrapers of future cities. Portals and incantations! Alternate histories and possible futures! Every possibility is just a word away!”

The Suit laughed and stamped a hoof. Immediately, one of the unicorn doctors turned and rushed out of the door.

“A word,” he purred. “A word, you say? Try a word and more bits than the average pony can count. Where’s the popular appeal? Where’s the business sense? We already have portals that cost a country to make and only benefit the odd billionaire.”

“The very odd billionaire,” whispered one of the earth stallions. A couple of colleagues tittered.

“She's done it now,” murmured Caramel, still falling into a silent world of her own. Her mind had gone blank out of sheer self-defence. Age-old memories lurked in her shadow. “This is how it always starts. She's done it now.”

Beside her, Doctor Lance chuckled under his breath. He was hunched in a ready-to-pounce posture, his gaze fixed on the swirling vortex. Something of the predator glinted in his smirk this time.

As soon as the unicorn doctor rushed back in, the others noticed the mug of hot chocolate hovering ahead of her. A flash later, it was on the other side of the glass. The Suit grinned and took a sip from the steaming rim.

“Ah,” said Doctor Stone Meadow, who casually fell back onto all four hooves. “But I’ve found a way.”

“I’ve seen the budget for this thing. The bill alone –”

“Is but a hundred times what we’ll need to make this thing go.” Doctor Stone Meadow winked and swiped at a teddy bear, knocking it into the swirling colours. “The portal needs only enough power and magic to get the basics of a world’s logic. It doesn’t have to find the whole world from scratch each time. And thanks to advances in mental advancement, we have access to the greatest single repository of information the world has ever known.”

Despite themselves, the doctors chuckled and nodded at this. The Suit frowned and downed the rest of his drink.

“And that is?” he said.

Doctor Stone Meadow grinned and tapped her skull. “Flights of Fancy, Land of Nod, the Castle in the Air – my word! Just a pigment of a figment of a foal’s imagination, and the mind paints afresh a city, a planet, or a nation.”

Caramel felt her face prickle with sweat. Only her professional pride forced her not to curl up and rock back and forth. Echoes of old shouts ran through the back of her head.

“Daydreams?” The Suit shook his head wearily. “You’re telling me the revolutionary new principle was some kiddie fairy tale kitsch?”

“Ah, but we put the ‘kit’ in ‘kitsch’.” She threw a spatula into the portal and trotted over to the frame to lean against it casually. “A child has no brain, but an adult has no heart. It takes qualified genius and naive innocence to turn leaden fantasies into scientific gold.”

“And the benefits?” The Suit was grinning again.

“What the mind can conceive and believe, my work can achieve.” She strolled back to her spot and threw a frying pan through the swirling rainbow of the portal. “In only a hundred bits.”

“A hundred bits?” The Suit whistled; behind him, the doctors exchanged worried glances.

“Initially. Once set up, however, there would be little need for anything but paper and ink. Quite a nice saver, do you not agree?”

“Still. Compared to the mountains of yesteryear, that’s almost hills. And the money I actually spent on this was…?”

Despite the frantic waving and head-shaking of the doctors, Doctor Stone Meadow gestured to the laden tables. “I wanted to move in. Someone needs to operate things from the other side. And I do like living large!”

Caramel had to shake herself; she'd almost fainted. No! It would not do to faint now. Not this time.

Behind the doctors, the double doors burst open. Armour glinted in the dim light. Two stocky stallions strode in, their faces carved from alabaster and their hooves leaving scuffs on the tiles. With the fluid grace of curtains, the doctors drew back and let the guards through. Both charged their horns, smothering their entire bodies with light, and strode right through the glass as though it were air. Only when they flanked the Suit did they stop and stand to attention.

Finally, the Suit dropped the mug. It vanished in a flash. On the other side of the glass, a green stallion levitated the mug and galloped out of the room. Rings struck against rings, necklaces and pendants tapped each other, and a gold tooth flashed as the Suit leaned forwards and placed a hoof on the Doctor’s withers.

“That’s so sweet,” he said through clenched teeth, “but what the hay has it got to do with comic books? Enchanted Enterprises ain’t the goshdarned space program.”

“You said you wanted 3D comic books,” said Doctor Stone Meadow without a trace of a shiver or even a flinch. “I got you 3D comic books.”

And she burst into fits of giggles.

She was still giggling when the guards on both sides of her levitated a forelimb each. The doctors almost backed into the corners when the three passed. Doctor Stone Meadow was dragged through the glass and out the double doors, and echoing back at them were her giggles fading away.

Behind everyone's backs, Caramel grimaced and clutched at her head. She was crouching.

The villagers had long since retreated indoors. Even out of the window, the much older filly Caramel – adjusting her apron’s knot with her magic – could see an ocean of heat haze distorting the timber planks of the opposite house. Overhead, the sky was pure blue. Net curtains were drawn up either side of the street. Horn aglow, Caramel sighed and slammed the shutters.

“It’s lunchtime!” she yelled, her voice now deeper and worn out. “Come get it while it’s fresh!”

Mom limped into the room, dragging the cast behind her while her rear left leg hopped to keep up with the front ones. She cast her gaze over the table and rolled her eyes.

“Bowls of hay?” she said. “You’re not much of a culinary artist, I’ll say that.”

“My talents,” Caramel said, unfastening the apron with her magic, “lie in other areas. As you’ll soon see!”

Mom smirked and brought herself up to the table. “I wonder what it’ll be this time. New species of beetle, maybe? Miracle herb solution that turns out to be a gas producer? Or a follow-up for ‘Sunset Splodge’, the great impressionist painting?”

“Hey, that last one was your fault,” said Caramel with a smirk. “I told you for years I don’t paint, but would you listen?”

They stood on either side of the table and leaned forwards. For a while, nothing but the crunch of hay under champing molars could be heard. Mom hummed with appreciation and swallowed.

“This tastes salty,” she said.

“I ‘ike it sal’y,” said Caramel through a mouthful of hay.

“Don’t talk when you’re eating. And I’m not complaining about the taste. It’s good.”

There was a hasty swallow, and a brief fit of coughing. “Oh… ahem, OK. Uh, thanks.”

The room was Spartan. It was little more than an oversized wooden crate, echoing slightly whenever they spoke. Caramel’s gaze drifted over to the lighter square in the corner. Dad’s dresser used to stand there. Even as she stared, she could’ve sworn she saw its memory still there, teetering dangerously under all the gears and levers and metal chunks he’d normally kept in plain sight.

For a moment, Mom stopped eating and gave Caramel her full attention. “So…” she said cheerfully, “what’s the big news?”

Caramel wiped her mouth with the back of her hoof – ignoring Mom’s wincing – and grinned at her. As she did so, her mind drifted back to the letter tucked under the welcome mat, and she grinned even more broadly.

“First,” she said imperiously, and threw in a wink. “A little parlour trick. This is something I picked up during my exchange week in Canterlot.”

Humming in what she hoped was a vaguely mystical manner, she reared up and waved her forelimbs, trying to weave a bucket-sized ring before her. Totally unnecessary as it was, the suppressed giggle it got out of Mom made it seem right.

Her horn flashed, and she spread her forelimbs wide before the plumes of green smoke. She blushed at the powder dribbling from her hoof, but then it had been cheap stuff, and the joke shop had hosted quite a nice sale.

“Ta da!” she said, and the plume vanished to reveal the envelope, which ripped itself to shreds and revealed a scroll.

Instantly, Mom’s ears were erect. “Wow! They’ve replied already?”

“Even better!” Still levitating the scroll, Caramel unfurled it and flipped it round to show the gigantic stamp on it. “I’ve been accepted! Unconditionally. Weeks in advance.”

“Oh, my sweet little angel!” Mom’s eyes began to well up. She flapped her hoof in her face to ward off tears. “You did it! You went and showed them! I mean,” she added hastily, “I knew all along you were good enough to get in, of course. It was just a matter of whether the magic academy saw sense or not. And they have! Oh, my darling, you are going to be so happy there. I remember my time at that place as the best years of my life…”

“Whoa, whoa. Relax, Mom. You’ll let your dinner get cold.”

They both glanced at the fried hay, which sparkled with salt. Both of them chuckled and shook their heads, and Mom reached across and plucked the scroll out of the air. Even now, her eyes gleamed as they stared at it.

“Oh, we absolutely must have this framed. I don’t want the other mothers to be jealous when they see this next poker night. I want them to be frothing at the mouth!”

“There’s a spell for that, you know.” Caramel smirked at her.

“You’ll have to teach me, some time.”

Behind her winks and smiles and laughs, Caramel felt her heart grow and become elated at the way her mother’s smile stretched against her jaw. Great idea, she thought, leading in with this. Look at her; swelling so much just having the scroll in her hooves. I could ask for our life savings, and she’d hand them over without a second to think.

All the same, Caramel took deep breaths, and then a few mouthfuls, before she swallowed her doubts down and continued.

Briefly, she flashed some magic and stuffed the scraps of envelope under the table. Instead, she focused on the diary she’d stuffed under the table earlier, and lifted it up for Mom to see.

“This,” she said, “is a double whammy discovery. It took me weeks to get this right, but I think you’ll find it’s been worth it. Watch this.”

Mom was giggling with anticipation when Caramel flicked the book open and let the bookmark flop out and onto her fried hay. Holding it up so the page was right in front of Mom, Caramel groped under the table for the ink pot she’d stashed against the right leg, smacking her hoof against it once or twice before she eased the hoof down on top of it.

“As you will observe,” continued Caramel, “this page is full of foalish squiggle and useless trivia. I’d love to replace it with more worthwhile facts and artistry, but oh deary me, there just isn’t enough room left.”

“Oh, you’re a regular B. D. Barter, aren’t you?” Mom smirked and shook her head at the folly of youth.

“If only,” added Caramel, who’d decided just then not to gesticulate with her left foreleg, “I could wipe away these useless notes and clear the page for my studies. Heehee… enter the Black Pot of Erasure!”

Barely had the last word ended when she clasped both hooves over the pot and whisked it out for Mom to see. Not that there was much to look at; it was just a black inkpot with what looked like ink floating inside it.

I really should’ve spent some time sprucing up the cover, she thought idly, but the rest of her wasn’t interested.

“So,” said Mom after rubbing her chin and peering at the pot, “how does one, uh, ‘enter the black pot of erasure’?”

“Very funny, Mom.” Caramel’s grin barely flickered. “Now, if you will observe my pot and its mystery substance –”

“That’s ink, isn’t it?”

Caramel lowered the pot to the table. “Mom, come on. Work with me here.”

“Oh all right. Astound me, dear.”

“Thank you. Observe!”

With a little flourish, she dipped a hoof into the pot until the edge was black and gleaming. Carefully as she could, she stepped onto the table with the other hoof and reached over the cover to wipe the page, right where Mom could see it. Caramel didn’t see the result, but memory and imagination filled in the gaps.

She’d remembered practising with the stuff ahead of time. First, she’d had to ignore the slight tingling of the strange black ink on her hoof – the first few weeks, she worried she’d caught something off it or that it was dangerous. However, the town physician had dismissed it as dehydration, and given her mouth often felt like it was full of sawdust, she was inclined to believe him.

Then, there was a slight fizzing. Mom gasped and drew back from the wisps of smoke, but Caramel didn’t stop rubbing the page. Nothing was going to happen; the smoke was just the ink evaporating away. All the same, she’d spent hours earlier checking her hoof for burns and discolorations.

And now, she knew by the stare Mom was giving the page that the words were being wiped away. Not so much as a comma would be left, so long as the strange black ink was rubbed on the spot and she didn’t miss it.

“Is it blank?” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

Mom glanced up at her, mouth open, and then closed it and nodded.

“Voila!” Caramel’s hoof shot back and she spread her forelimbs wide. “My own yet-to-be-patented Mystery Ink! No more fumbling about with sandstone or pumice, no mucky wax tablets or bits of rubber that snap in your grip. It’s no more complicated now than painting a canvas with a hoof. And best of all” – in spite of Mom’s yelp of astonishment, she darted the hoof into her mouth and licked the gunk off with one swipe of her tongue – “completely and utterly harmless.”

“Bravo!” Mom’s hooves stamped on the planks in applause. “Bravo, my daughter the inventor!”

“You like it?”

“It’s great! Oh, you’re so clever, Caramel. That magic academy won’t know what hit ‘em.”

Suddenly, Caramel gagged and retched and stuck her tongue out, beating it with both hooves. Shivering and groaning, she stood back up and turned to Mom’s raised eyebrow. There was a thump as the diary, momentarily ignored, landed with a tremor on the tabletop, making the bowls rattle when they bounced.

“I thought you said it was harmless.” Mom jutted her lower chin.

“It is harmless,” she said at once. “What it isn’t, sadly, is tasteless. But” – she levitated the diary once more, trying to ignore what had just happened, and with one hoof whipped the bookmark off the table to join the envelope scraps under it – “I’m just getting started. As if it wasn’t enough to solve many a storage problem in books, so I have solved many a storage problem with books.”

Even as she said it, she blushed. To say she’d solved it was utter cheek; the actual technique had been mastered centuries ago by a host of great magicians. This was just evidence that she could do it at all, and any magically knowledgeable critic could’ve picked her technique apart in seconds, pausing only to say things like, “And I don’t like your shoddy presentation skills either.”

As though unveiling the secret of eternal life, she flicked the pages across to the second bookmark, which immediately filled the vacancy on the tabletop. Mom’s wide eyes narrowed. Her nose wrinkled.

“Well…” she said. “Uh… it’s… quite a vivid picture, isn’t it?”

Caramel’s memory gave her a glare. “Quite a vivid picture” was understating it. The picture was twisted and coiled and wrinkled and frozen in the act of stretching its three jaws as wide as possible, with as much inky black mess as possible. As a result, the thing looked like it had been frozen in the act of leaping at someone, which – Caramel winced – was totally accurate.

“This is the secret to my inky success,” she said, trying to rally some bravado into her leaden voice. “The ingredients are naturally harvested from the spittle of a rare creature from beyond our borders.”

“What!?” At once, Mom had reared up and stamped two hooves either side of her bowl, making a second rattle. “What are you saying, Caramel? You’ve been looking for creatures like this?”

“It’s OK, Mom. It’s OK. This one’s no problem if you know what you’re doing, like I do.”

“Where?” Mom said sternly. “Where have you been?”

“I only went once!” Caramel’s voice was rising; she hadn’t expected this bad a reaction. “It’s not as vicious as it looks. I had complete control over the thing, and I got what I wanted without a hiccup. It was Haycart that gave me the idea of doing things this way. Look, I’ll show you!”

And Caramel’s horn glowed brighter. Her eyes burned with concentration. Despite herself, she yelped at the shock coursing through her horn.

In hindsight, she really, really should have asked Mom to step back first.

There was a burning light from the book, and a loud crash, and then the room echoed with the screeching hiss of long-suppressed rage. The thing had grown until it almost buckled the table legs and towered over the bowl, dripping black ooze over the salt and hay. Mom screamed and threw herself backwards, landing with scrabbling thumps on the floorboards.

“It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK!” Caramel yelped over the screeches and screams. “It’s under control! Don’t scream! Don’t scream! You’ll set it off!” The tail whipped at her bowl, sending it crashing against the wall. “Hold on!”

The sheer rush of pain that burned through Caramel’s horn, when she sent the creature back into the diary, was nothing. She looked up into Mom’s wide, cracking, straining eyes, and only then knew what real pain was.

Imprisonment

And now it was a week later, two hundred miles away. It was raining. It always rained over Aunt Grey’s house.

She’s requested it specifically from the pegasi. Or rather, she’d “requested” it in the only way Aunt Grey ever requested anything, which was loudly and with wide gestures and always by impressing upon the poor cringing target that they were still in diapers compared to her great age, that they had just defiled the lovely new carpet by spilling dinner over it, and that an eternity in the naughty corner was too good for them.

Under the patter of the rain against her bedroom window – barred with iron like a prison – Caramel could hear nothing else. She knew Aunt Grey was downstairs, and – here, she looked up at the clock over the tombstone-like door – that Aunt Grey was stooped over the day’s crossword puzzle. She’d heard legends that Aunt Grey used to go out on nights to play bingo, but Caramel had never seen it happen. Apparently, too many old friends had died.

Caramel turned back to the decaying flesh – no, she blinked it back – the tattered grey shawl flopping over her bedside table. Focusing her energies through her horn, she clicked the knitting needles together with the clinical ease of a surgeon stitching up an incision.

The rain, she’d heard her aunt explain, was therapeutic. Everyone knew, after all, that arthritis kicked in right before a rainstorm hit the house. So, with patient dullness and several verbal smackdowns, Aunt Grey told her that it was patently obvious that the only solution was to have the rainstorm already here. You couldn’t get “a case of the arthritis”, as she’d called it, before a storm when the storm was already here and would always be here.

Caramel had given up picking holes in the idea years ago. It made no difference that rain and arthritis had nothing in common, that in a big enough world there were always going to be “cases of the arthritis” before a storm, and that it was all too easy to confuse “and” with “because” if you had little else to go on. Aunt Grey, she’d been told by the mare herself, did not get “cases of the arthritis”, even when she winced and took pills and muttered about the inferior rain you got these days.

The needles clicked together, and she stopped to roll the ball of wool back towards her with her magic. Although she was mangling the edge of the shawl fluidly enough, she hadn’t knitted in years, but Aunt Grey had always had her knit during the Crossword Hour, and so “knit during the Crossword Hour” she would.

Underneath her bed, the trunk lay where she’d jammed it in. She hadn’t bothered unpacking. If she kept everything there, it would give her that abiding hope that she was just a moment’s away from leaving.

Apart from the bed and the table and the clock and the trunk, the room was Spartan. Not Spartan like her old kitchen had been, with everything shoved off into other rooms out of the way, but Spartan in the Aunt Grey way, because ornamentation was the sign of an idle mind. Idleness was a crime.

Caramel’s stooped back stiffened for a moment, and she let out a sigh before sinking back into the deep.

Some time into the drudgery-imposed trance, she saw Mom’s face bursting with terror, flecked with black spittle, and her scream drowned out by the screech of the tatzlwurm. In hindsight, it was utter stupidity. How could she, Caramel, have ever thought this was a good idea? She could’ve led up to it gently, she could’ve tried something inanimate first to make the point, she could’ve just NOT shown it.

Mom had screamed the house down even after it was gone, but the screams had become words and they hammered into her here, crossing over the miles and the weeks to crack her ribs and batter her heart against her back. It was Dad all over again. How could she have been so reckless as to bring things like that into the house? What the blazes had she been up to? She, Mom, knew the filly’s fancies should have been stamped out of her.

“Oh, Caramel, why didn’t you think? Don’t you realize what you could’ve done?”

Mostly, it was the shock. Caramel kept telling herself that, because the thought that it could’ve been anything else was lurking in the shadows, staring out at her. She felt her spine chill.

While she continued to twist the hemline into tatters, Caramel tried to keep the spark in her mind from going out. Aunt Grey was just going to keep her until she started at the academy, which suddenly seemed a lifetime away. The spark had to stay alive until then.

She frowned and stopped to untangle a few knots.

Why had she done it? The question had ambushed her a few times over the past month or so, but this time there was a bite of Aunt Grey in it. Silly thing to do, really. Mom didn’t need to know where the black ink was coming from. And what, when you got down to it, was the point of using Haycart’s Method, especially on that thing?

Feebly, an inner Caramel said she’d wanted to do both. Show the source of the ink. Show how Haycart’s Method could hide things away.

And the new voice answered: Don’t you think it’s wrong to put real things into paper?

Under the patter of the raindrops on her window, Caramel pouted. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might be wrong, but her mind threw up images and pointed accusingly. Using it on objects? That’s an invitation for smuggling, not to mention it would make it easy to conceal evil talismans and dark amulets. Using it on animals? It didn’t take long to conjure up creatures worse than the tatzlwurm; Equestria was a net exporter of monsters.

On ponies, her imagination shut down in protest.

But then, said a treacherous thought in the darkness, what was it like, being an illustration in a book?

None of the tomes she’d read had mentioned it, since it was invariably done to others rather than done on oneself, which in any case was considered a nigh-impossible feat. Would you see in paper and hear in words? Or would it be like a deep sleep, and if ponies forgot you were there, then you’d simply sleep forever? Could the spell be adjusted to make ponies move, or would they be frozen pictures only? What if someone destroyed the book?

Caramel shuddered and hissed. No, something like that had to be stopped. She must’ve been mad to try it. What had come over her?

Wonderful ideas, that’s what. Haycart’s Method was hard to do – the meagre imitation she’d tried on the tatzlwurm had left her unable to cast spells for days – and it couldn’t be that hard to track ponies capable of using it. There had been no grim incidents in the centuries of its admittedly limited use. Besides, storage was a real problem in Equestria. Museums and libraries would hail her as a visionary. Ponies could travel in greater numbers than was normally possible. If they ever amassed enough magical power, maybe even whole buildings could –

No, said the Aunt Grey in her head.

Why? said her own younger self, but the conviction was draining away. The spark dimmed.

It was wrong. Messing with magic was unnatural and wrong and dangerous. It’s book buses and library libraries one day, and then the next day the newspapers are telling horror stories. It was madness. Why couldn’t she just leave things alone?

The spark vanished.

So she sighed and bent lower and took up her knitting. Madness was nothing but trouble. Dad proved as much.

Before the hour struck, Caramel ducked under the bed and fished out the diary. The page was blank. She’d thrown out the tatzlwurm long before coming here, as soon as Mom had told her Aunt Grey was at the front door to collect her.

There had been no tears; they would’ve been wasted on the thing, and she’d passed beyond tears hours beforehand. Besides, at that point it had been trying to eat her face. The idea that she’d coddled the thing as though it were a fairy was suddenly insane.

The clock struck.

“CARAMEL!” yelled Aunt Grey from below. “CARAMEL! IT’S TIME FOR MY PILLS!”

The yellow mare glowered and enchanted the bedroom door aside. Irritating old bore! She was a dead mare walking, and still she was trying to make ponies miserable!

Only for a few seconds the thought lived, and then it vanished into the darkness. Caramel sighed, and then she slipped off the bed and shuffled out of the room.

The guards all agreed it was a dreadful novel.

It began In Media Res, a term they heard a lot from the giggling mare in the cell, and which they could only translate as “you’ll immediately have no idea what the heck is going on”. The central hero could only quip one-liners and attack hordes and hordes of enemy ponies, which they were sure was beyond the scope of the average journalist in real life. Three quarters of the plot could’ve been solved if the hero had ever once stopped to ask; “Am I playing into the villain’s hands here?” It made mere pulp look like the classical work of the Bard.

A few noted how it always looked freshly bought, even after weeks and weeks of being in the same cell as the giggling mare.

They’d only let her have it in the first place because the yellow mare doctor had come down on the first day, dropped it through the flap, and insisted she have it. They never questioned why. The doctor’s bronze badge waving in their faces was enough to discourage out-of-place questions.

The Suit came round regularly and told them to keep it well away from the giggling mare, “just in case”. All of them nodded in his presence and levitated it out, but after he’d left, they always slipped it back through the flap of the door. It was either that or listen to her try to “read aloud” the contents of the daily gruel bowl, which she seemed to translate as some kind of spitting and coughing gibberish. It just seemed too ridiculous – and too harsh – to deny her a book simply because… well…

“How can you get lost in a book?” said the guard to the left of the padded cell door. “Especially that book?”

“Something about a portal, from what I heard,” said the guard to the right. “Figuratively or literally. Or some horse apples like that, anyway.”

They were both staring ahead, down the corridor and past the other doors to the distant entrance of the ward. Neither of them had a watch, and there were no clocks in sight.

“I think the Suit needs a padded cell of his own,” said the guard to the left, “if he’s spouting stuff like that.” His voice was monotone and carefully slowed down as though any variation would spell his doom.

“Ha. I dare you to say that the next time he’s here.”

Both guards grunted, which was the closest they ever came to a chuckle. Inside the cell, the giggling mare cocked an ear and leaned closer.

“You ever wonder how a mare goes mad?” said the guard to the left.

The guard to the right sighed. “I always assumed it was the stress of their work. I don’t read academic papers, you know.”

“I read once about this stallion who once mistook his mare for a hat. And then there was this mare who developed… music-philia, or something. Don’t ask me; I don’t remember it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Sometimes, they’re just born with it. Sometimes, they get it over time out of nowhere. And sometimes, they get it when a giant iron spike explodes up their skull.”

“Yes. Yes. What’s your point?”

“What I mean is that this mare we’re guarding, right. She’s had none of that. All she did was misappro… misappriate… uh, spend funds wrong. So what’s she doing in a padded cell?”

She saw the guard on the right shrug. “Dunno. A pony trying to swindle a billionaire business pony for a comic book gimmick? Sounds pretty mad to me.”

“She seems pretty nice to me. Greets me every morning. Talks normal apart from the odd giggle, and I’ve heard worse in here. You’d swear she weren’t a nutjob. Seems wrong to trap her in a cell.”

Nothing followed this for hours. Instead, the giggling mare curled up in an opposite corner and spread out the pages of the novel. Her eyes were two black holes, sucking in every word, capturing every nuance of meaning so that not even the most obscure of allusions escaped the gravitational pull of her mind.

What foals they were! Trapped? She was as free as a bird, a stamp away from having her every wish fulfilled. Why, she only had to close her eyes, and once she opened them again, she would be standing on a distant beach, or above a sea of clouds, or under the stalactites of a forgotten cave. Such poor deluded souls!

Before her, the novel screeched and whined like an orchestra being conducted by twelve ponies while beating each other with their own instruments, but that was precisely the point. The schlock kept her normal, kept her sane, and reminded her that, for every level and every number and every field conceivable under the sun, there was always the zero, the nothing, the least point below which a lesser point could not be conceived. It kept her tethered to the real world.

And they thought she would escape with it? Oh, how she giggled at the thought. It never seemed to get any less ridiculous.

Each day, the Suit came back and peered through the bars looking increasingly flustered. An earring would be forgotten in his haste to get here, or the necklaces and pendants would become entangled, or his mane would stick out like a drunk hedgehog that had been struck by lightning. Yet she would be there, ready to look up from her novel and giggle and wave at him.

“Has she ever been let out of her cell?” he said after the twelfth week.

Both guards shook their heads and continued staring at the opposite wall. Between them, the Suit peered through the bars with a suspicious eye.

“Take that novel away,” he said suddenly.

“With all due respect, sir,” said the guard on the right, “it’s a harmless enough book. Our orders were to –”

“Who pays to keep this place running?” The Suit had lost his smile totally. His face was nose-to-nose with the offending guard’s. “Who’s your generous sponsor? Who’s legally entitled to shape policy here? For the last time, I want that book shredded.”

She watched him march back up the corridor. So he had seen her! She giggled when he slammed the doors shut.

Sadly, the two guards unlocked the doors and cast the sleeping spell on her. When she awoke, the book was gone. For several hours, she paced her cell; she was no longer giggling and no longer content to curl up in a corner.

“You OK, miss?” said the guard on the left after several hours of shuffling and pacing. His voice was edgy as though he half-expected her to leap through the door at him.

“I want my book back,” she said simply, trying to hide her panic.

“Sorry, miss. The Suit has spoken.”

“Fine. Then a newspaper’ll do. A crossword puzzle. Anything. Please.”

“Sorry, miss. The Suit has spoken.”

The only other visitor they received that day was the yellow mare doctor, who strode right up to the doors with some kind of package levitating beside her.

“I got her another book,” she said dully. “Keeps the monotony at bay.”

The guard on the left shook his head in what he hoped was a saddened but sympathetic manner. “Sorry, doctor. Orders from above. No more books for this mare.”

To his relief, she took it all without fuss. “Here's a card, then. Surely, she’s allowed that much.”

The guard on the right squinted at the message. “‘GET WELL SOON’. What a nice thought, ma’am. We shall see to it that she gets it.”

They summoned their magic and the card slipped through the bars. Both of them nodded at the squeal of delight from within. It was so rare for someone to treat patients like this; most ponies were too frightened or ashamed to so much as come by. It was so rare that the guards marked it down on their work calendar that evening.

The next morning, they found the card ripped into two on the cell floor. “GET WELL SOON” had been peeled off to reveal a short story of – here, they paused to count – exactly one hundred words. It was about a lovely little carrot called Baldric. It made the journalist stuff look like The Canterlot Tales.

When the Suit next burst through the doors and marched up to the cell, it was empty. He said nothing. He stared for a long while at the emptiness. He stared at the guards, who stared down the corridor and said nothing. He staggered back the way he came with a trembling of gold all over him. Only when he had passed the corridor did he break into a gallop.

In a neighbouring office, the remains of the card lay crumpled in a wastepaper basket. It wasn’t considered evidence, reasoned the guards, because it was just a card, and in any case what was it evidence of?

Dreams

Doctor Caramel Crisp turned her back on the rest of the lab and focused on the diary. The pages were blank, but she stared at them as though they contained a captivating narrative of unbelievable suspense. Behind her, the purple mare paced up and down, chuckling and giggling to herself as she did so. She could’ve been waiting for a prank to begin.

Beyond the crystalline window pane, the factory was chugging away. Tubes of ink pulsed with colour as gobs were pumped into the main vats. Metal rollers and pipes and arms clanked and slid up and down, right and left, front and back, while below them a long snake of papers slithered down the slope into the belly of another machine.

From the catwalks all around, magic hummed and auras flicked on and off as the supervising unicorns focused their energies. All of them stood among the earth ponies, who were sitting down and scribbling on clipboards in whatever fashion suited them. Far below, a cart next to the machine was filling up with dumped comic books. Their yoked drivers whinnied and took off, but no sooner had they done so that the gap was filled with another cart, and the comics began piling up again.

“Success!” breathed Doctor Stone Meadow, and she pressed her face up against the glass. “Dreams within dreams, a lifetime at the touch of a page!”

“And,” muttered Caramel to the diary, “not a penny to your name.”

“Oh, I never want money, my dear standing skeptic.” Doctor Stone Meadow laughed and sauntered over, delivering a quick slap on Caramel’s rump which she barely winced at. “All that glisters is not gold, what?”

“And gilded tombs do worms enfold, yes.” Caramel rolled her eyes. One telekinetic spell idly flicked at the page’s edge. “I have been around the literary scene, thank you very much. A lot more often these past few weeks, I might add.”

“How inspired!” Doctor Stone Meadow twirled and pirouetted, landing with a broad-legged pose. “So I seem to have made a convert, at last!”

Caramel glanced at the glass. “Oh, I’d say you’d made a few.”

“Pah! Mercenaries! I’m talking about ponies with vision, the true prophets, the seers of the craft!” Doctor Stone Meadow nudged her with an elbow. “You and I are not so sane.”

Caramel sneered at her. “I knew someone like you once. It didn’t turn out well for him, either.”

“But don’t you see, my poor despairing darling? It’s not about turning out well. It’s about broadening horizons! It’s about taking ponies and marching off to the horizon, and finding the world over the next hill!”

“I was under the impression,” said Caramel coldly, “that you were escaping.”

“Caramel, darling! I’m crushed. I thought you liked me. Why else would you leave me that book? You must’ve wanted my company so badly.”

“I only did it because Doctor Lance told me to,” Caramel lied. “You were the only one who could finish the project, whatever the Suit deludes himself into thinking. Like he cares now that it actually works. So long as the Suit only thinks he saw you around the lab, then I can sleep easy tonight.”

Stone Meadow giggled. “That’s a lot of ‘only’s’ for such a lot of effort! Come on. What happened to your spirit, your joie de vivre? Whence cometh the cloud of untimely storm and stress?”

“Look!” Caramel rounded on her, making the gangly mare back off wide-eyed. “You’re out. Free. Unrestrained. Whoop-de-doo. Now buzz off already, before we get into trouble. And keep away from the blasted window!”

Caramel reached across the desk to the other copy of the dreadful novel. “Copies, you said. Every copy is linked up to the same copies. The perfect two-way communication system, nice. There’s my congratulations. Yay, Caramel, you did a trick.”

Stone Meadow tried a small smile. “Oh, hardly the beginning, my dear! You see, in the other realms, reality is a matter of suggestion. Supposing we joined up not just the same copies, but –”

“Oh, but of course that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?” said Caramel, in a red haze of her own and now pacing up and down. “No ‘Thank you, Caramel’, no ‘Well done, Caramel’, no ‘What a very smart thing you’ve just said, Caramel’. No, it’s just so much fudge, isn’t it? Not worth the effort, is it? I must be mad. I worked hard through magic academy to get where I am now. I don’t deserve this kind of treatment. I haven’t done anything mad.”

“Caramel! For shame! I had no intention of upsetting –”

“Oh, just get out. I haven’t got time for teary goodbyes. There’s the book. Hop through and take your chances. Make good on your freedom! It’s more than I ever managed.”

Magic flashed through her horn. The book on the podium flicked open, and the pages glowed. Swirling dust particles drifted in the vortex.

Exhausted, Caramel slumped over her diary. She was still fuming, and she ground her teeth when she felt the hoof gently rest on her shoulder.

“Why don’t you come with me?” said Stone Meadow brightly. “Leave all this behind? The rules don’t have to apply to you, of course. Carpe diem? Heart held high? Silently unto the dawn, what?”

Caramel sagged, spreading out over the pages. The blank spot leered up at her. Even with nothing else on the page, the blank spot was still obvious, though she couldn’t figure out why. She shook her head, rubbing her fur as she did so.

“Oh well. Ta-ta for now, my lovely!”

There was a flash. When Caramel turned around, the mare was gone.

Under her breath, she counted to five. Hopefully, that would grant the nutjob enough time. Then she levitated the book, strode over to a window, and knocking the pane back like a door, she left it hovering over the sheer drop to the misty treetops below.

Her forelimbs stretched out. She reared up, holding the flamethrower. There was a burst of flame. After a suitably cool pause, the ashes disappeared from view.

“No followers,” she muttered, and she tucked the device back under the desk.

A smile bloomed along her lips, and she turned back to the diary and flipped over to the next page. Unlike the previous pair, these were stuffed with tiny writing, most of it in any direction she’d fancied.

There was no way she was going to let anyone see this, much less the mad mare, but everyone was busy downstairs. Besides, it wouldn’t last long. Her spells were never powerful enough.

Lots of detail had gone into the picture. It looked vaguely like a pegasus, albeit one with spindly legs and iridescent butterfly wings; a tricky effect to pull off with just a piece of coal, so she hadn’t bothered and had added a few drops of oil. But the main body was of someone she knew.

It had to work. If she meant it to be him, then it would be him.

The quill and inkpot – both inkpots – beside her diary jittered. Her horn focused again.

As an afterthought, she scrawled in a tatzlwurm. It looked like any other, but she wanted it to be the tatzlwurm, even though that one was probably the size of a house by now. And there would never be a book or a portal near it, so how could it possibly be the same one? She couldn’t de-age a great stinking monster.

Maybe it could work. After all, Stone Meadow said dreams didn’t have to make sense.

Once more, in spite of her inner voices shouting at her, she closed her eyes.

She gritted her teeth and focused. Her horn blazed bright pink, and she focused on the ancient words Haycart had written down centuries ago… and the more recent scrawls of Stone Meadow’s theories. They floated before her and glowed with all the colours of the rainbow. It was all she could do not to scream.

And she entered the book.

Forget the project, she thought. The Suit can rot for all I care. But if there’s one chance, just one chance left right here and right now, then the last few years will have been worth it. I will be good at making dreams. Goodness knows I’m no good at anything else.

I’ll get to see Dad again. Not the real one. But close enough.

When she heard the hum of wings and looked up, she was her younger self again. She beamed and giggled and didn’t mind the screeches and the slime drooling all over her face.

Hoofsteps approached behind her. She turned to look, and immediately she smiled. Even though it couldn’t possibly be him, he was standing right next to her. With the wings of a Glitter High Butterfly.

“Look, Dad,” the filly murmured, fighting back the tears. “Fairies. You were right, Dad. You were right about everything.”

Doctor Stone Meadow peered up at the rows and rows of shelving, and reared up and spun on the spot, cackling and staggering at the sight of hundreds upon hundreds of books.

“That was very clever of her to use the Worst Book in the World,” said Doctor Lance beside her. He was resting on his back. Underneath him, the books were arranged into the shape of a bed. “Kept you focused on the task at hand. Nothing quite dulls the senses like a soul-destroying bit of pulp, now does it?”

He burst into fits of laugher, falling off and rocking on his spine over the wooden floor. Doctor Stone Meadow beamed at him as though indulging a child.

“Not that it mattered,” she said. “Even the worst drek is ultimately a gateway. I could have visited any realm I wanted. Traditions, clichés, allusions… everything is interconnected with everything else.”

“Well put.”

The stallion rolled back onto his hooves and sat himself down at the book bed. Beside him, the candles hovered in midair, yet no aura pulsed around them or his horn. The candlelight flickered and the wax dribbled down to the holders. Beside them both, the swirling portal shimmered and faded through rainbow colours within its crystal frame.

“The Suit was just a pretender in the end,” said Doctor Lance. “All talk and no walk. Hardly surprising, when he had to rope your brains into the project to begin with.”

She snorted. “Why is it so hard to find a true visionary? You’d swear they couldn’t dream.”

“Now, now, I wouldn’t go that far,” said the stallion. “Even a lowly ant will dream of soil and grains. You just have to be patient with them. Lead them through sprouts and twigs and leaves and things. The great tree sits on the horizon.”

“That yellow mare,” she said. “Who was that? She clearly knew about our intentions, or she wouldn’t have put the book in place.”

“Who knows? Call her an unintentional collaborator.” The stallion smiled. “Though she’s also hopelessly, pitifully dim-witted, but then aren’t most ponies? Present company excepted, of course.”

“Most gracious of you, darling. Besides, the Suit definitely did notice a few of my… excursions. He had the book taken away in the end, and no secret returns that time!”

“You should have been more careful. In fact, why didn’t you just stay there even after he caught you? You could have used the short story.”

“Because my work is complete. The Suit is creating my enchanted comics, and that’s what I need. Now I can hop with ease from book to book, jump out into reality, do some secret work, and then hop back in at a set time. Those guards and even the Suit will never realize what has truly been accomplished here. But what about the portal? I wanted to share my gift even with talentless hacks.”

“And you will. The Suit still has the technology.”

Doctor Stone Meadow let her gaze wander up the walls of books, her eyes gleaming under the candle flames and some inner light source of her own. Despite himself, the grey stallion stiffened and stretched.

He had once thought she was wide-eyed and idealistic. Most of the doctors said as much. Careful observation of her manner and actions had led him inexorably to the conclusion that, in spite of the unrelenting act, she was nothing of the sort.

She was beady-eyed. She was cynical. That was why she enjoyed life so much.

It was fascinating to watch her approach ditziness and good humour from the other direction. Behind every chummy smile was a slight narrowing around her eyes. Behind the staring pupils was a shifting shadow where intelligence lurked like a hunter. When she leaped from quotation to archaic language at the drop of a hat, she was sneering at space and time and convention and rules. Only the keenest of minds would have detected it, but it was there.

So when she flared up and reared onto her back legs and snarled at the distant ceiling, he never so much as blinked. If anything, he smiled genially as though at a mildly amusing joke.

“It’s truly incredible!” she roared. “After all the scorn and fear he poured on me, he just stole my invention and sold it!”

“Of course. He’s not as philistine as you think. He’s just… testy about having money wasted.”

“As if he needed it. I couldn’t help myself. The money was just sitting there. It was a simple matter of fiddling with the books…”

“…and getting yourself dubbed ‘criminally’ insane, of course.”

For a moment, the snarl darkened. Then she oozed back down onto all four hooves. Under the darkness that even the candlelight could not repel, she released a smile.

“That’s how they treat all revolutionaries.” She chuckled to herself. “And then ponies like the Suit turn it into an everyday thing, and the extraordinary suddenly becomes normal. The real genius is left to rot in a prison. Enchanted comics! The ultimate 3D experience! Poor fools.”

Doctor Lance stretched and continued stretching. His jaundiced eyes blinked contentedly. “Well, at least it’s out there. Comics that act as portals. Whole worlds recruited for the sole purpose of role-playing. How delightfully deranged. So what are you going to do now?”

The candelight was starting to dim. Stone Meadow glanced at its shrinking dance. Anything to avoid looking at the stallion's distorting shadow. “I think I’ll put on a few performances. The wonderful thing about inventing imaginary alternative worlds is that inventing imaginary alternative worlds is a wonderful thing. You get to make the rules.”

“Isn’t it just nice? Nothing quite like a good old bout of chaos, now is there?”

She glanced at him and then hastily looked away again. “You… coming to join me?”

“Oh no. There’s far too much fun to be had here. I’m not thinking of reviving the chaos, exactly. It would draw a few complaints. But thousands of years ago, I left a few… back-up plans in place. I’d love to see this world turned upside-down, believe me, but as it is, I have other commitments at the moment. I can’t just rain it down upon the land overnight now. Not like I used to. But believe me, there is a more… subtle way of doing it.”

“Subtle?”

“Well, look at the world as it is now. Duplicating lakes, interspecies transformation magic, plants that cast joke spells on anyone who touches them… wouldn’t you agree the world is chaotic already? When I started out, the number of magical rules could be summarized on the back of a postcard. Now the rules of magic are rewritten practically every week. I’d say my masterpiece is coming along quite nicely, wouldn’t you agree?”

Stone Meadow stared for a long time at the dying candelight. Then it went out.

Her chest shuddered. Her shoulders shook. She was bursting with suppressed mirth, and then it seized her mouth and she erupted into fits of uncontrolled laughter.

“Ahahahaha! Ahahahaha! AHAHAHAHA-HAAAAAAA! Oh my disordered darling of deviousness! You do talk some rot, don’t you? For such a master of chaos, you sure like to plan and scheme a lot, don’t you?” Her grin sliced through the air between them.

The thing on the book bed barely winced. “Chaos isn’t the absence of rules, my dear deranged disciple. It’s a surfeit. But if that’s too much received wisdom for your humble pony brain to handle, I’d just skip the chat and trot on to your eternal playtime, wouldn’t you?”

“I certainly can’t wait.” Before Doctor Stone Meadow hopped into the portal, she turned around and giggled. “Villains have all the fun, don’t they? Many a mare may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

“If you’re proposing what I think you are,” said the draconequus, “then I bow to your good taste.”

With a final outburst of cackling, the mare formerly known as Doctor Stone Meadow bowed back, and then she leaped into the vortex and, along with it and the tome on the podium behind her, vanished.

They’d called her a maniac. It sounded like a good idea.

Freedom

“Look!” said the yellow filly unicorn with a grin. “Fairies!”

She was sitting on the grass among the sombrero cactus plants, her forelimbs raised and wide to show off her discovery. All over the cacti, all over the grass, and all over her were countless iridescent butterflies, each one folding and flexing its wings to get comfortable.

“I found them! I found them! I told you I’d find them!”

“I think it’s more they found you,” said the mare as she smiled and shook her head. “And they’re not fairies, Caramel. They’re Glitter High Butterflies. I saw them when I was just a little older than you. They always come out west every seventeenth year, from today and all the way back to the founding of Equestria.”

The filly Caramel turned around on her backside, scattering a few butterflies that sought rest elsewhere, and looked out. Beyond the pair, the ridges and crests and valleys and mesas stretched across endless orange and brown shadows to the darkening hills on the horizon. Overhead, the sky faded to a flaring purple, each cloud brightly green and pink under the sunset’s dimming light.

She sneezed, and the butterflies rained off her and settled onto the ground all around. “They look like fairies,” she said quietly. “And I’m gonna take one and put it in a jar.”

“And why would you do that?” said the mare, who kneeled down to sniff at a nearby pair of wings.

“Because fairies grant wishes, Mom, when you trap ‘em in a small space.”

“I think that’s genies, dear.”

“Oh.” Caramel hauled her featherweight self onto all fours. “Well, I can still take one home, can’t I?”

“I think they might miss their friends back here, don’t you?”

“Wow!” The filly’s eyes shone and she cast her gaze at the carpet of wings around her. “Butterflies have friends?”

Mom shrugged and raised her head. “Who knows? Anyway, I think the tricky part will be stopping them from coming home with us. Look at your mane!”

She laughed and pointed at the butterflies that had flown up and settled on the filly’s locks, but Caramel shook herself down and flung them off. Butterflies darted away in waves as she hopped up the slope and joined Mom’s side.

“You see?” said Mom, gesturing to the sunset. “It’s not dull out here at all. Wide open spaces, strange creatures hidden under every crevice, and just look at that sky! I’ll have to bring you up here one of these days and teach you to paint, because look at that!”

At these words, the filly shook her head until her locks whipped her ears. “I don’t paint. Paint is icky and wet. I’m no good at it anyway.”

For a moment, irritation flashed across Mom’s face, but she was soon smiling again. “Well then, what are you good at? What kind of art do you like?”

Caramel stuck out her chin and tapped it, still staring out at the sunset. From far above, the screech of a red-tailed hawk broke into her concentration, and the slash-like silhouette drifted across the glowing clouds. Her own horn glowed pink in sympathy.

“Dreams!” she shouted.

At once, she squealed at a wall of fluttering light that rose up before her. Mom grunted when the filly darted round and tried to snuggle up to her tail and rear legs, but she waited patiently until the iridescent swarm settled back onto the warming rocks.

“Nice try, honey,” Mom said with a skyward glance, “but dreams don’t count as art.”

Caramel poked her head out and stared down the slope, trembling slightly. “Dad says that’s where they start.”

“Try again, honey.”

“Stories, then!” The filly ventured out, one forelimb raised in case she needed to flee again. “I like stories. I like books.”

“Stories about fairies, maybe?” Mom gave her a nudge, but Caramel didn’t look away from the butterfly carpet. Instead, the filly sighed.

“Fairies do exist,” she mumbled. “Dad says they do.”

“Oh, honey,” said Mom, and here a twitch entered her eye and her jaw stiffened. “Dad says a lot of things.”

The breeze whipped at the edges of the butterflies’ wings, whistling between the branches of the cacti that towered over them, and tickling the hair of their manes as they passed. Mom closed her eyes, and the filly glanced at her and did likewise. The cool caresses slid over her face. She felt the heat of her cheeks being wiped away.

“OK,” said Mom, opening her eyes. “Let’s go back to the town before it gets dark. Don’t want to get caught out under the moonlight. The worms are coming to the surface tonight, and they might find us.”

Caramel saw her turn away. Instead of following, she continued to stare out at the sunset, just seeing the last crescent of light sink below the hills. “Am I going back to Aunt Grey’s house?”

“Not if you’re a good filly this time. Now let’s go, honey.”

Caramel didn’t move. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not going back to Aunt Grey’s house.”

She heard a sigh from behind her, but refused to move around. “I told you, honey. No one’s going to send you back, so long as you’re a good filly. I really mean it, Caramel; we have to get home. Didn’t Aunt Grey teach you? It’s not all wonder and merriment out here.”

“Glitter High Butterfly.” Caramel stared up at the red-tailed hawk’s silhouette, which was disappearing into the fan of crepuscular rays over the desert, and she grinned wide enough to stretch her cheeks. “I’d like to fly up there too.”

With a groan of frustration, Mom marched back and blocked Caramel’s view of the dying light. “I won’t tell you again, Caramel Crisp!”

“Oh fine, then!”

The filly threw herself around and scurried down the slope, not even waiting for Mom to skid down after her. She broke into a gallop, kicking up a trail of dust from Mom’s arriving hooves to the torchlight of the timber village, right in the heart of the valley.

The yellow mare known as Doctor Caramel Crisp glowered. She enchanted the double doors, which burst aside for her.

A bronze badge, after all the years I’ve poured into this work! A bronze badge. Fudge and sugar! The grey guy was up to a silver one, and he’s only been with us for a few weeks!

Beside the next set of double doors, the earth pony guard tipped his helmet respectfully. “Evenin’, doctor. How’s Doctor Steam Dodger today?”

She didn’t stop, and he hastily pushed the door aside and stepped out of her way.

“He’s over his cold,” she said over her shoulder, almost shouting. “And Cap and Maraca are enjoying Manehattan! Sorry, gotta gallop! Another nutjob to collect!”

As she followed the curving corridor round, passing wards and windows in between forcing the double doors to open every few yards, she ground her teeth and summoned a notepad from her breast pocket. The words “To Do List: IMPORTANT” glared back at her. She knew it continued on for a few more pages, both sides.

“Sorry,” she murmured; a nurse had almost collided with her.

With a growl of irritation, the nurse quickstepped around her and shot through a door on her left. Doctor Caramel Crisp pocketed the notepad and kept an eye on the figures criss-crossing the corridor ahead.

Didn’t she have enough seniors in the lab already? Enough silver and gold flashed in her face every day to make up a private fortune, and would you believe they wanted yet another one? Already, she was pining for her cramped little office with its filing cabinets boxing her tiny little desk into the corner. She even pined for the giant pillar that some far-sighted architect had left her room with; she’d still rather clamber around that to get out of her office than rush through these wide open corridors, looking for some has-been.

Babble followed her as nurses, plain-clothed ponies, and unclothed patients bustled around and occasionally into her. She ducked, dodged, stopped, apologized, and almost pirouetted her way through the throng. She wondered if it was lunchtime or something, and then she groaned and remembered. There was supposed to be some sort of Coronation in Canterlot today. She snorted in irritation. Of course, they wouldn’t want to leave the patients out, but it made this a needless chore.

Like politics ever mattered, she thought. Load of waffle and blah-blah-blah, and welcome to the new world, same as the old one. What difference would one more faddish event make, really?

Finally, the corridor was sparse again. With a slam, she shut out the worst of the bustle and chatter. A few more yards ahead, Doctor Caramel reached the double doors coming up on her right, and she turned and skidded to a halt. Her head leaned forwards and she squinted at the writing painted onto the otherwise featureless wooden slabs.

“‘Wood Shavings for Packing!’” she read aloud, and then she rolled her eyes. “Well fudge. This really is a nuthouse, isn’t it?”

Her horn glowed pink. From her other breast pocket emerged the folded-up yellow copy. Unfolding in midair, it revealed the title “Release Request Form”. Quickly, she scanned the lines of the main text, which had been circled here and there with blue ink. She folded it back up and stuffed it in the pocket before she went through the entrance.

Both doors echoed to a slam behind her; they’d been so unexpectedly heavy that her pink spells had given out the moment she crossed the threshold.

Beyond was yet another corridor, padded doors stretching away on either side. At the far end, she could make out a single one like the throne at the head of a communal table. Her hoofsteps echoed back sharply as she strode towards it.

Two guards stood on either side. Unicorns. Judging from the golden shine of their armour, they were probably high-ranking spell-casters.

Neither of them reacted when she stopped and wiped the glare from her face. Instead, they continued to stare ahead with the cool, bleached indifference of polished machines waiting to be operated.

“Doctor Caramel Crisp,” she said, flashing the release form in their faces. “Bronze-level Member of the Royal Institution of Science and Technology, currently aiding the R-and-D division of Enchanted Enterprises, and three times winner of the Award for Best Brewed Tea and Coffee in a Serious Workplace.”

“Here to collect one Doctor Stone Meadow.” The guard on the left didn’t even glance down. His voice rumbled and quaked through her knees as though he were speaking through the ground. “You’re expected.”

“Documents?” she said.

“Documents.”

The guard on the right summoned magic through his horn without so much as blinking. Out of nowhere, a quartet of papers popped into being and hovered before her. Fumbling, she unearthed a ballpoint pen from one of her pockets and began signing on the lines marked ‘X’, each page being shuffled to the back once it was done.

“Nice day,” she said after the second form was signed.

“Nice day.”

On the fourth document, Doctor Caramel Crisp smiled. They didn’t chat, they didn’t pretend to care, and they just did the job and nothing else. These two were already a sweet relief compared with most of her colleagues. The forms vanished as soon as she’d put her pen away.

“So,” she said. “Stone Meadow is in there?”

The guard on the left nodded one curt nod and then reset to factory settings. “Officially sound of mind as of today. All protocols and relapse emergency contacts will be handed over at the front reception on your way out. Just ask specifically.”

“Thank you.” Doctor Caramel Crisp made to push the door aside, but then her spell faded. Now that she was actually here, it surprised her how little she knew about the mare. She took a step back, wondered which guard to face, and then shrugged and added, “Listen, I’m basically delivery here. I don’t want to get… well, a fork shoved in my back on my way out, so this is more out of curiosity than anything, feel free not to answer, but… but what was she in here for, anyway?”

Only the eyes of the guards moved. They swivelled to send each other a glance. In the silence, she could hear them squeak in their sockets.

“Old research project,” muttered the guard on the right. “Has a history of ‘em.”

Something about the way he said it – even through the omnipresent monotone that quaked through her knees – made her ears stand up. “Research projects?”

The guard on the left nodded. “Shrinking spells, giant bodybuilder formulas, spider-pony hybridisation, and other such experiments.”

“Attracted a lot of controversy," said the guard on the right. “Royal Institution of Science and Technology got complaints.”

“Had her tested.”

“Failed the tests.”

“Insanity plea.”

“Courts accepted.”

“Hence rehab.”

“Hence today.”

“Hence question.”

“Of course,” said the guard on the right, “that will all be explained in the Nega-verse Trial documents you will receive at reception.”

Doctor Caramel Crisp raised an eyebrow. “Nega-verse Trial?”

“Alternate universe experiment,” said the guard on the left. “Dubbed a ‘strange tale of suspense and astonishment’ in the Manehattan Herald Tribune.”

“Tried to pull an evil version of herself from another world,” added the guard on the right. “Called it the Nega-verse, derived from a portmanteau of ‘negative’ and ‘universe’.”

“But it failed.”

“Failed badly.”

“Hence rehab.”

“Hence today.”

“Hence question.”

“Question misguided.”

“Likelihood of forks in back is negligible.”

“Officially.”

Doctor Caramel Crisp sighed. She took it back; her colleagues were nowhere near this disturbing. She gave them a flash of a smile and pushed her way through the padded door.

Standing to attention in the middle of it was a purple earth pony. To Doctor Caramel Crisp’s shock, her acquaintance’s physique was stretched and lithe in the manner of a Canterlot model, and instead of sticking up in the usual puffy cloud of chaos, her emerald mane flowed silkily from her neck and scalp, curling elegantly just shy of the floor. On her back was a single large tome that at first glance resembled a beige brick.

That was, as far as Caramel was concerned, where the good sides ended. The mare in the cell was humming to herself, eyes wide and pupils shrunk to pinpricks. A quiver ran along her lips as though she were suppressing a cackle. As soon as the door opened, the mare leaned forwards and loomed over her. It was all Caramel could do not to throw herself backwards and slam the door shut.

The lips twitched into a grin. “Excellent,” the mare said in a surprisingly low voice. One of her eyelids flicked up and down. “And hello there. You must be –” She bit down hard, suppressing a giggle from her throat. In a more normal voice, she continued, “You must be from the enterprise.”

“Yes. Doctor Caramel Crisp.” Gruffly, she held out a hoof, and then yelped when the mare seized it in both of hers and almost yanked it clean off.

“Delighted! Delighted! I look forward to working alongside your good self. Well now, Doctor Caramel Crisp, shall we begin my new life together?”

With a grunt, Caramel yanked her hoof out and trotted backwards, grimacing at the throbs where she'd been squeezed a little too enthusiastically.

“I didn’t have anything to pack,” continued the mare cheerfully. “So let’s not ‘hang about’, as they say.”

“Yes, Doctor,” said Caramel. To her surprise, this earned a fit of cackles from the mare.

“Doctor, Doctor! Ooh, I do like the sound of that! Well, I’ve been shown a new path, and we must not wait for anything more! Oh! One more thing!”

Caramel found herself knocked aside as Doctor Stone Meadow skipped and jumped to the door. By the time she’d regained her balance and hurried out, the mare was reaching for the tome on her back and talking to the guard on the left.

“Thank you ever so much for letting me borrow your copy,” she was saying with an overflow of glee. “I simply don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t had such a literary lifeline to cling to!”

The guard muttered something and, with a flash from his horn, the book vanished.

“Keep it if you like,” he said.

The book popped back into existence on her spine, and she gave a squeal and embraced him round his immovable neck.

“How wonderful! How generous and noble of spirit! In faculty, how express and admirable!” She planted a kiss on each cheek, which the guard didn’t even blush at. “The envy of the world! The paragon of animals –”

Caramel stomped past, not even looking backwards, and Doctor Stone Meadow fell into line behind her, still cooing and rattling off some antiquated speech with no self-restraint whatsoever. With some distaste, Caramel shoved the doors open and forced them to remain open while the overjoyed mare chatted her way through them.

As Doctor Stone Meadow drew level with her, still chatting, Caramel sneaked a look at the spine of the tome. Every doctor had wondered what a mare of that calibre liked to read, and it was with some embers of smugness that she became the first to know.

“The Words and Works of the Great Bard.” She strode down the corridor, pleased to see the crowds had dispersed. “I didn’t know you were the literary type.”

“Oh, it’s a hobby.” The mare shrugged and grinned. “Inspirational, if sadly rendered distant and alien by the language barrier. You should read The Complete Adventures of the Old Buck. The humour’s a bit old-fashioned, but what do you expect from something so – ahem – historical?”

Doctor Stone Meadow’s face broke into a grin. It was so wide it almost nicked her ears.

“Then again, you’d probably prefer something more upmarket. Have you ever read The Caricatures of Lord Bandy Legs? I think the political satire applies just as well to modern times as they did to his own day and age. It’s a shame they’re out of print.”

Caramel suppressed a sigh and stared straight down the empty corridor. Oh fudge, she thought. Why didn’t I bring earplugs?

Aloud, she said with a brittle smile, “I’m sorry. I don’t read very many novels. Too busy. Don’t seem to get the time of day I used to. Ideas, research papers, grants negotiations…”

You know, she thought bitterly, the grunt work.

“Oh they’re not novels.” The mare winked at her and nudged her rump with her own, almost knocking her into the wall. “Not a word against novels have I, but they hail from another world. No, my required readings are among the world’s first and greatest comic books.”

Caramel felt her shoulders sag. Oh my sacred toffee and beans, she thought. She’s one of them types.

“Of course, there is ambiguity over what constitutes the world's true first comic book. Were we to stretch the concept to its breaking point, some would say the Ancient Amonians with their hieroglyphs created the form.”

While they walked on down the corridor, Caramel tuned out the monologue drifting beside her and focused instead on the upcoming project. After a while, her thoughts drifted down to stories and to fairy tales and alighted, for a shameful moment, upon fairies. But she shook her head and snorted quietly. No time for that sort of nonsense now.