Source

~~~~~~~~
The winter is made and you have to bear it... In the mind; pupa of straw, moppet of rags.
~~~~~~~~

Fire.

Screaming.

The comforting, cold blue clear.

I shot upright on the table, inculcated with the firm conviction that the universe had been turned a full quarter in the wrong direction. My front hooves clacked on metal. What, fully, a "universe" entailed or why its turning perturbed me, I couldn't cognize. My mind had been swooped clean.

A thin blue sheet caressed my coat as it fluttered to the floor. Utter disorientation. Smooth, sterile metal. Sweat. Panicked looks tempered by exhaustion.

A barren womb... Room. I meant room. There were two tables exactly like the one I was on pushed against the far wall to my left, separated from me by a pillar. A few wheeled machines were crammed into the corner. They looked like they had some kind of medical purpose. Everything was vaguely familiar, but muddled. The lights cast it all in an antiseptic fluorescent sheen.

What had I been dreaming about?

My muscles were stiff. The only cushion was a thin felt pillow in papery wrapping. Turning my head to look at it was painful. How long had I been laying here? My head felt... cloudy.

Working blood back into my atrophied neck, I craned around looking for some kind of exit. I didn't have to look far. Three evenly spaced doors with heavy, lever-turn latches lined the wall directly in front of me. I wondered why I hadn't noticed them immediately. Despite having just opened them, my eyes felt dry. They ached. The light was torture.

"Oh... You shouldn't be in here," a smooth voice called from behind me, echoing its strange accent in metallic space.

A line of tentative hoof clops made their way closer to my back. I didn't bother to turn.

"No charts.. Hmmm... Give me a second, I'll be right back."

The clops followed the voice, now humming, in a brisk trot then abruptly ceased. Somewhere nearby behind me the metal must end. I flopped over onto my side facing the other tables. Everything was metal; floor, ceiling, walls. Only the pillar several steps away stood out; constituted of matte white ceramic that diffused the omnipresent light into a needly glow. It drew my weary eyes, which traced it from the ceiling down. When my eyes came level, I froze. My ears instinctively leveled behind my head. There was something hanging on it, and the color...

My vision flashed white hot. I closed my eyes and the shimmer faded, but seconds later flashed again.

Fire.

A distorted voice screaming, "You used too much!"

A picture frame under my hoof.

Garbled words in green light.

There were stampedes across my temples, cracking and churning my skull's earth and driving me to bury my head into the pillow; it was the only two-inch thick piece of shelter I knew. My stomach roiled, but was empty. I could only produce a few dry heaves. A faint and fearful whinny escaped my lips as one spasming foreleg clipped at the edge of the table. Please, someone hear me. Help me before I burn.

"Oh goodness!", came a discernibly feminine voice, "Why would?..." A few tentative steps punctuated her speech. "Oh, honey, look at you!"

Rushing sounds; comfort and cold. A hoof on my head. No, she was pressing something onto my head with her hoof, and it was soothingly cold. The hornets' nest of my delirium began to quiet. Their furious wings couldn't stand the winter.

"There, there, dear. It'll be okay," her voice was frost, but there was something else to her tone. Something beyond kindness. Maybe it was just the fever.

The first voice returned from above me. The compress was over my eyes, reducing everypony to simple voice and direction, with my throbbing head as my only compass rose. "Okay, I've found your charts...," said Studious North, "Ah, Nurse Heartspark, I see you found your patient. You're listed as the lead attending nurse on her admission papers. I was just about to go find you. What's the issue?"

"She has a rather severe fever, doctor. Pupils are dilated, coupled with involuntary muscular contractions," replied Knowing East.

"Oh, okay. Let me check the charts. Earth pony mare... Regenerative grafting to treat extensive burns, both thermal and chemical... severe hypoxia... partial cranial reconstruction. Hmmm." North didn't seem terribly confident. I assumed this wasn't his area of expertise.

"This really isn't my area of expertise."

Aha.

"We assume it was a chemical fire, Doctor. Details weren't released by the Church. She was admitted twenty-six days ago, and has been stable since the reconstruction. The fever is a new symptom."

Ironically, I could feel the fever breaking. I wriggled my head gently under her hoof, but she didn't seem to notice.

"What's she doing in the parts room?" inquired North.

"What am I doing in the parts room?" I interjected before East could respond. My throat was horrendously dry, and the words escaped as a hoarse whisper. Still, their conversation abruptly halted.

"And still conscious. I found her sitting up earlier," said North.

Something pressed against my head for a moment, a cheek maybe, and the compress retracted from my face. I blinked the world into focus. The sterile lights still hurt, but not as badly. My headache slowly receded.

I couldn't see the thing on the wall. It was blocked by a cornflower-blue mare with a white and dark-blue striped mane. A nurse's hat with a candy-pink heart sat on hear head, matching the pink barding strapped around her withers and extending halfway down her body. The outfit was covered in pockets holding various medical implements. A pair of jaw-operated scissors. A hoof-full of plastic wrapped thermometers. More blue compresses, like the one she had placed on my eyes and was now folding and placing back in its pocket. On her flank was a stylized image of a bright magenta heart superimposed with a white lightning bolt. Studious North called her Nurse Heartspark.

"I have no idea how she got here, Doctor. It must have been a mix-up with the night orderlies. I'll check up on that and make sure it doesn't happen again," she interjected.

"Please do. I'd actually like to take her back to the diagnostic center myself, so I can monitor my products, I hope the weren't going to scrap her for parts." North, apparently some variety of doctor (whose expertise didn't involve fever, delirium, or burns), remarked. I was glad it was so amusing to him.

Their conversation was beginning to annoy me. They were talking about me like I was another table. "Besides, there's a note on her chart from Doctor Needleminder herself to update her when the patient's status changes."

My eyes stayed fixed on Nurse Heartspark. She looked nervous. Her eyes darted back and forth between me and where Doctor Studious North must be standing.

"Of course. Everything should be in her charts."

She tentatively dropped her fore-hooves from the table and trotted away.

I saw the thing again. The red thing. There was a label just above it.

TYPE-H FIRE EXTINGUISHER.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My wheelchair glided alongside the Doctor as he trotted gingerly down the corridor. My charts trailed along in the air beside him. I tried to catch a glimpse of the text surrounding the strange and elaborate pie and line graphs, but it was moving around too erratically. Levitating the clipboard, pen, another small black box he kept speaking into, and pushing my wheelchair led to him partially losing control of at least one at any given time. He wasn't much of a multi-tasker.

"It's good that your fever went down. I was beginning to think your body might be rejecting the grafts. I think you might be a little more replacement parts than original, though, according to your charts. We needed to make sure you were kept in a sterile environment."

A screen passed by, scrolling through stylized text renderings. Every third panel was a picture of an ornate circle, with a group of smiling ponies smiling beneath it. It read: "The Bishopric is Your Friend."

"Grafts?"

"Oh, yes. Your skin was unusable. Fairly severe brain and spinal damage...," he was reading from the chart again, leafing back and forth. I hated that. "We had to clone quite a few parts. All of them were original mints from the Progenitor Cache at Amity Prime. All of us at the lab were pretty excited about it. You had real VIP treatment over your stay, even if you were unconscious for it."

"Is that where you work, the lab?" I managed weakly.

"Oh, yes. I'm the head of Cloning Integration," he started, finally pausing in realization, "I'm terribly sorry. My name is Dr. Double Helix. I tend to get ahead of myself."

My wheelchair skidded to a halt and the aura around the handles faded. He turned to face me for the first time. Telling from his expression, I didn't look very well.

"I've just been rattling on, haven't I?" he continued, frowning, "Well, the main thing I was getting to is that we had to replace part of your brain. You may experience some temporary cognitive inhibition, but that should pass. Damage to your memory, however, is very difficult to gauge. I'm going to take you down to Cloning for a tissue diagnostic, then over to Cognitive Neuroscience so they can check how your... mental pipes are flowing, so to speak."

"I was meaning to ask you something, Doctor."

"Just Double Helix, please. What was it?"

"What's my name?"

"Oh my," he frowned.

My throat was painfully dry.

"It's... ummm... Lozenge," he said, leafing through the pages of my chart. I hated that.

He was decently handsome, in a bookworm-y sort of way. Caramel-brown fur with a slightly darker mane. Thoughtful and alert green eyes. Every movement he made was purposeful, if not a bit clumsy. He always seemed to be attempting to do slightly more than he should.

The trip to cloning was a test of my constitution. A menagerie of medical machines were either put into me, or I was put into them. I'd been weary since waking, and what seemed like several hours and dozens of needle sticks later, I'd wished they'd "misplaced" me somewhere harder to find. Dr. Helix could tell I was spent. At least I finally got a drink of water.

"Do you know what a unicorn is?" he said, sitting on a chair next to the bed I was resting on. The lights in this room were mercifully turned down.

"You're a unicorn."

"And a pegasus?"

"Pegasi have wings."

He looked concerned. If I wasn't so weak and disoriented, I might have chuckled.

"Right. Good. What city are we in?"

It was almost there on the precipice of my memory, but wouldn't materialize.

"Seems even your integral memory was somewhat damaged, unfortunately. I'm not explicitly a neurologist, so I'll leave anything more advanced for when we take you over to the C.N.D. I honestly can't tell you what you will or won't remember."

"What city are we in?"

"Ah, yes. Baltimare, Ms. Lozenge. Center of science and industry."

"Why do you talk like that?"

"You mean my accent?" he replied, initial offense giving way to amusement, "I'm from Trottingham. It's in the east, near the gryphon wastelands. We can get you some history software once we install a new Generosity plug-in."

I didn't know what a Generosity plug-in was, or what it plugged in to, and that the time I didn't care. My headache was dramatically better, but still enough to keep me from falling asleep. Dr. "Call me Double" Helix stepped out to make a few calls, peeking back in periodically. Part of me wanted to be done with Cognitive Neuroscience. Part of me didn't want to know the extent of what was wrong.

"Doc," I said the next time I heard the pneumatic hiss of the door, "I'm ready for the C.N.D."