~1~

Time.

I shot upright on the table.

My hooves clacked on steel.

I tried to take stock of my surroundings, but my head almost lolled off its perch at the end of my neck. All I caught was my hospital gown, covered with comic renderings of ears of corn (with eyes and smiling mouths), and the table I oh so vividly recalled. Here I was. The underbelly of the hospital. The parts room.

The gel had an unsettling reaction.

It would be the parts room, if there was a room! The table was there. The pillar supported a non-existent ceiling. The medical-looking machines were still crammed in the corner; all illuminated as if by spotlight, but all suspended over a fantastic nothing that stretched flabberghastingly everywhere. Nothing behind me. Nothing above me. Greedy nothing in the thousand directions and angles I could will my eyes. Nothing, nothing; evermore nothing. This had to be death.

Death was an infinite parts room.

There seems to be more than one way to finish Starswirl's spell.

The far-off crackle of Trixie's voice played over an intercom, if such a thing existed here. The blue blanket slid off me. I willed my body to catch it. It didn't listen, and the blanket sagged off the table and fell. Fell forever. I peeked over the edge of the table to confirm that there was no floor. Oh, there really was no floor, only a shrinking flap of blue fabric. I huddled into the center of the table and commenced to panic. Death had not blunted my fear of open spaces.

Click.

"Take that!"

Click.

The colt, the one from the hospital, knocked the white unicorn figure over with his brown pegasus. What was his name? I conjured up the hospital room and Nurse Heartspark. Ah. Sirocco. Sirocco sat on a red-sheeted bed where the next table should have been; his tiny island of is amidst a heliotropic circle of toys, oblivious or unaffected by his position over forever or his presence in my private Tartarus. Then again, maybe this was a public Tartarus.

I tried to call out to him. My throat was full of metal hooks. I banged on the table as hard as I could.

He kept playing.

...wouldn't Twilight be jealous if she knew.

I waved and made a raspy bark. He kept playing, head down, knocking over his toys, looking lonely.

"That was a stupid thing you did."

~~~~~~~~~~

"Doc, I have some questions first."

He looked flustered, and damn well he should. "Regarding the project, or...?"

"Regarding my accident."

"Uh," he brushed down his tie and coughed, "Well. That's not exactly what we're here to talk about."

He could just tell me to buck a pear tree, and I'd have to. Though if he didn't show me he'd be tossing up a pretty glaring red flag, and I think he was smart enough to know it, but I also thought he was unintelligent enough, in a social way, to not butt heads with me. In fact, I was pretty sure he didn't know what he was doing. Worst case scenario, he'd probably show me some doctored (pun intended) records and steer me back towards the ship. The poor, poor ship.

"Can I just see my charts? Please?"

He looked me up and down. Uh oh.

"I'll take you up on that coffee," I said meekly. What was I doing? There was some internal apparatus giving a very emphatic nod and another, significantly larger one dropping its jaw and turning a shocked, senseless shade of white.

"Ummm. Okay," he smiled, "Doctor Needleminder didn't classify those anyway."

He trotted to a smaller terminal, lit up his horn, and a mess of things, most of them coordinated, happened. He flipped through scores of messages, took a few notes, sipped his coffee from a mug that said "I Have The Cure", and scratched the top of his head with a pen.

My resolve almost wilted under a salvo of nigh indecipherable charts and graphs , but I soldiered on. Maybe he thought the terminology's impermeability would scare me off. Ha. It felt good to put the screws to him. I inwardly squealed with glee when he dropped his clipboard, but I realized it wasn't out of nervousness but out of simple clumsiness. He was worried, but not on a level that connotes wrongdoing. He was just an unsure, socially awkward egghead. I should know. I could smell my own.

As basely enjoyable as making Dr. Helix squirm was, nothing in the report elicited an 'aha'. Of course it wouldn't say anything about the incident itself. They wouldn't know how I grew a train tunnel through my brainpan, they just plugged the hole. I looked sidelong at Dr. Helix then dove back in.

On Scene: Red Gauze, Staunch, Dr. Chainstitch, Nurse Heartspark
Attending Physician: Dr. Skewer
Attending Nurse: Nurse Heartspark
Grower: Dr. Helix
Acquisitioning Authority: Nurse Heartspark
Materials Order: Nurse Heartspark
Admissions: Nurse Heartspark

I sent a little prayer up to Solstice, noting I'd been worked on by a pony literally named Dr. Skewer and come out as good as I had.

Hmmm. Pretty definitive trend there. I didn't need my jack's ever-thoughtful notification to grasp my fever spike.

I felt it.

~~~~~~~~~~

I turned my head as fast as the ponderous thing would go, and I saw him. Really, I saw the stupid hat (the bowler hat) first. Then those always-keyed-in-on-the-joke eyes. Out of the thousand questions my brain was laboring to formulate, I got out a wordless exhale.

"Who am I?" he gestured to himself.

I nodded.

"I'm a new friend, I'd like to think. I figured you could use one. Your old friends don't really get you anymore, do they? And having friends is an important thing."

I'm concerned with how the war is going to affect the project. Trixie continued, as if she too was in on the oddest conversation ever.

Was this my punishment? Stuck forever on a hospital table? Having a one-sided conversation with Mr. Rain Today with background narration by Trixie? Solstice, thou art cruel.

He scratched his chin, then added, "It's Mr. Ergot. Please remember that."

I blinked. Was he... reading my mind?

"Back to friends. Like your little friend Sirocco here," Mr. Red Eyes continued, "He needs your help."

"Why me?" I thought.

He confirmed my suspicions, and answered, "Why you? Before your unfortunate accident, you were pursuing some objectives that were very near and dear to me." He waved his hoof and an arc of twelve tiny moons spread out overhead. I couldn't help but think I'd seen this before.

"Did you ever wonder why it never stops snowing? Why it started snowing in the first place?"

"The scope of my problems is on a pretty personal level," I thought back.

"Awww. Where's your spirit of selflessness? After all, you wouldn't be here if someponies hadn't given so much for you."

"I just blew myself up. I think that counts."

"Was that entirely selfless, my dear? Was that the kind of thing Saints are canonized for?"

Was he lecturing me? Tartarus or not, I wasn't in the mood. "I'm not in the market for friends right now. Find somepony else."

"Suit yourself," he said with venomous finality. He closed his eyes, and vanished.

Sirocco's bed flashed into fire. He, his blanket, and his toys became threatening black images behind a hideous red wall. It crackled. Sparked. The smell of sick, tallowy heat blew over me. Was that what cooking meat smelled like?

I almost wretched but the belly full of cake hadn't made the trip. The sparks swirled, filling the endless black satin with a thousand lighted pinpricks, then exploded up and out into a planetarium stillness, as if the universe was a bed and a universe-sized pony was turning down the sheets. I became roaringly aware of my panic. All was expanding, and me with it! My nightmares from Baltimare were coming true!

Still, I heard Trixie's damned voice just fine.

I'm stuck here, Twilight. I don't know what to do.

I looked to the pillar, but the fire extinguisher was gone. When I tried to stand, my table simply blinked out, and I dropped into the starry night.

The nothing yanked me back, forward, down. It shook the hell out of me. My heart cranked up several notches, but I had no jack to report it. I couldn't blink. I was all lead ears and wooden legs. My tongue lolled lazily from my mouth. It was bad enough that I was dead, now the afterlife was trying to give me a heart attack!

He was next to me, the one from the train. Mr. Bowler. He fell at my exact speed, but somehow his stupid bowler hat stayed put and his jacket showed not the faintest rustle of motion.

"It's Mr. Ergot," he said calmly, "Really, Lozenge. You have the worst memory."

I tried to say something buy my lungs almost ruptured. Was he nuts? I flailed my legs as if I could take off towards him, but only managed a few disorienting (if there was any way to orient) barrel rolls.

"What sins did you commit to make ponies want to be your friend?" A voice blared out bolder and clearer than Trixie's crackling intercom. It was Nurse Heartspark.

Trixie answered. I think... I can still make this right.

The starscape in front of me formed into massive green letters. A terminal screen stretched off to the edges of my upward-rushing cosmos, becoming one wall of reality, with words so achingly huge I simply couldn't avoid them.

...the Honesty.

We have to burn the Honesty...

I looked down. The ground was a broken picture frame rushing up to meet me, and I saw the singed image inside. It was me at a... picnic. I stood next to a smaller pony almost the same shade of dark pink.

Whoosh!

Clear Sky Bureau commandos soared past, shooting into a circle pattern as if to catch me, but they were already on fire. Pieces of them sloughed off, flying up in ripples of heat; thudding against my body with jarringly hideous rhythm as I plummeted toward the center of their burning ring and the picture below. The pieces burst into a thick bloody ash; wet and hot off-red pulp. It was everywhere. I was covered. Oh Solstice.

Everything was on fire. The nothing was on fire. The nothing was fire. The picture was gone, replaced by a pair of golden eyes.

I realized I was screaming. Had been screaming.

I slammed into the glass.

Wet. Close. Jolting stillness. I was in a... shower? A shower in Tartarus! Cerberus was going to scrub me down! I shot up to my hooves, bucked the shower stall with enough force to knock it crooked and simultaneously propel my face into the wall. I wheeled, bucked again, this time connecting with tile, and blew forward.

Double Down and Abridged were also in Tartarus! I lunged between them as they scattered, crying in alarm. A few sopping wet gallops and I flopped spectacularly barrel-down and skidded under a sink. My raw skin screamed. Trying to rise to my hooves, I knocked my head on the sink pipe and fell like a wet sack onto my guts. I was trapped! Trapped!

Trapped... in a locker room. In Tailahassee.

Double Down dropped a cylindrical medical thing into the first aid kit laid out between him and where I had been crammed into a blown out shower stall. Abridged's mouth hung open. Hobble, uninterested, scratched his ass.

"So, tootz, you alive?" DD asked.

"Y-yes," I managed between volcanic heaves of my chest.

"Pay up."

Hobble snorted and passed him an emerald.

~~~~~~~~~~

~2~

That was something.

Trixie hadn't been narrating my afterlife. My hack tool had been decrypting the files while I was out and feeding them into my brain as they opened. Exasperatingly, they had a habit of self-deleting when they finished. Great job, Lozenge; fourteen-hundred year old recordings, a miracle they exist at all, lost forever. Only three left.

Could have been worse.

Going dramatically in flagrante gave me new perspective, so when I tallied my list of problems and realized it wasn't getting smaller, I felt farcically at ease. I was still in Tailahasse. Bad. I was not, in fact, dead. Good, I supposed. Trixie's voice still wafted through the back of my brain, beckoning me to give up some days I mused were part of a cosmic debt payoff plan. Bad.

I added on the following: we all were showing glaring signs of radiation sickness, I was wrapped up in bandages like a vending trough syntha-muffin and, oh, almost forgot, my throat felt like a cup full of broken glass and my mouth tasted like a blow-dryer's insides. I must have burned my windpipe. Five bads.

Okay. Maybe not the best checklist. Still, I was doing well considering the circumstances. I hadn't wet myself. I hadn't sucked my hoof or devolved into a weeping pile. In fact, given the most horrifying state of affairs I could rustle out of my half-empty think thank, I'd at least decided to try and help everypony. Hospital fracas included. Maybe Old Lozenge left me, along with all her problems, a little bit of steel.

"Stop scratching."

"It itches. And hurts," I protested. Every bandage from all of our first aid kits held me together. They were allegedly imbued with some kind of restorative spell. From how I felt, they probably had an itch spell in there too.

"Of course it itches. And hurts. You blew yourself up," Abridged replied.

"I didn't do it on purpose."

"Really?" DD interjected, staring at me with flat indictment. He snapped together a bomb timer and dropped it onto the pile of those he'd already assembled.

"Ummm... What do you mean?" We both knew what he meant.

"What are we really doing here?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"Bet you don't," he scoffed. Bechadunt.

"Really, I don't."

"Do you not see what a gigantic screw job this is?" he said, waving his hoof in an emphatic circle.

I looked down at my pile of explosives and said nothing.

"There we go. Realization," all the mirth was gone from his voice, "We've been down here for days. See or hear any rescue parties? I haven't lived this long without being able to smell a setup. Question is, are you the screw-er or the screw-ee?"

Was I the screw-er or the screw-ee? The screw-ette? Abridged looked uneasily between us, me blinking in dumb recognition and DD staring at the two of us in animate accusation. In fact, I hadn't fully grasped how gigantic a screw it really was. They were really giving it to me, and I wasn't even enjoying it. I was supposed to enjoy it, right?

"I'm both. I'm the Berry Tart."

"The what?" he asked.

"The mare from the freezer."

It was a tense moment. I wanted to bury myself in the pile of junk Doctor Flask had put together two-hundred years ago (a pile that also included what I assumed was his skeleton). I started scratching my bandages and Abridged thoughtfully magicked my hoof away.

"The red one?" he asked.

"Yeah." Hopefully my wiped out tone came off as confident, instead of simply egregiously damaged and slogging through withdrawal.

He grinned, then broke into a full belly laugh. Slick move, Lozenge. Just hide behind humor and they'll never be the wiser. I tried not to show my intense relief. How many holes could they give it to you in anyway? Did I actually have a help file on screwing? Was it under 'S'?

"Damn, lady. What is wrong with you?"

I thought about it for a minute, looking at DD. He simultaneously creeped me out and put me intensely at ease. "Don't even know. I just keep going on, I guess. Only thing left to do."

"That's very earth pony of you," he chuckled.

"I'm mainly having some problems," I paused, choosing my words, "seeing things properly."

"Is that because of your eye?" Abridged asked.

"What about my eye?" Other than it didn't hurt anymore. Was it gone? My depth perception seemed fine. What could she tell about my eye from over there?

She put her hoof over her mouth. That filled my guts with needles, and not needles full of blue goodness. DD stopped laughing.

"What. About. My. Eye?"

~~~~~~~~~~

I veritably skipped up to the chemical locker.

Shooting up at work was probably a bad idea, and/or the greatest idea ever. As soon as I could untangle that one, I'd be set.

Regardless, I needed the edge. Laughter freed up all that brain power normally devoted to silly things like worry and regret and turned it into trumpeting awareness.

"Four 100 HCM vials of Devotion, please."

I tried to look at the clerk, but his face dissolved into caricature and turning away was all I could do not to laugh. This stuff wasn't normal. That, or using the volume I had messed with one's geometry of sight. Everything looked like a drawing. A damn good one, but one that was nonetheless coming apart. It was pretty cool.

The clerk slid the tray out. I bit on and carried it back to Tincture. It was all I could do not to skip.

My foremare Tincture, who prior to my accident had been my assistant, busily worked on blowing up the lab. A spurt of flame burped out of the solution she toiled over and nearly claimed an eyebrow. I slid the tray next to her.

"Don't mix those," I said off-hoof. She blinked in surprise as I bounced back to my terminal.

"Figured that out," she said crossly.

"I mean the next one you were going to use. Don't use it."

"Wh... Why?"

"Bad feeling."

She scoffed and smiled, suddenly alight with an apparent intellectual advantage. "We can't conduct science based on our feelings."

"Soooorry. Mix four parts elation with two parts devotion with one part caution as an inhibitor."

She blinked. "How do you know that?"

"I have it up on the screen."

That was a lie. That was a dirty, great, awesome lie. What actually sauntered down the screen in a wobbling green gavotte was a list of every project I'd ever worked on.

>Project: RED APPLE
>Apothecary Consultant: xxxx
>Augurist: xxxx
>Physician: xxxx

Each name had been replaced by a neat row of tiny 'X's. The whole document had been pared down to a few startling appearances of the word "the". So had a sizable chunk of my personal records. Grand.

It didn't matter. I was pretty sure I knew two of them.

How could they be so careless as to leave this in my record? Why? The realization was so total and sudden it overshadowed the smoking half of a vial firing from Tincture's work area across the table and past me like a rocket, leaving her coughing from a sooty-black face under a singed mane.

They'd left just enough to serve as a warning.

Don't come in here, little filly. This is the burning place.

~~~~~~~~~~

"Go look in the mirror," DD said.

I first galloped, but the closer I got to the mirror the slower I went. By the time I crossed the threshold of blue tile that delineated the Director's office and the Director's private bathroom I was barely tip-hoofing. A long-ago ruptured pipe covered half the wall and the mirror in thick green drek, interrupted by an arch of those same black letters reading Now We Reap It (somepony forgot the period).

I crept closer. My silver right eye looked into its twin on the mirror's clean side. No problems there. Then why did I feel like the floor was about to drop out from under me? Again. A ray of light couldn't have escaped from my plot.

One more step. I took a deep breath. You can do this, Lozenge. You blew yourself up. This is nothing.

I tilted my head, moving my left eye out from behind the obfuscating layer of scum. The pain in my throat stopped, because my lungs had stopped, and so had my train of optimism. Blow me up again. It was blue.

My left eye was blue.

Six bads.

I stared into that blue eye for infinite seconds; me looking into the mirror, seeing myself, and the mirror looking back into me, gasping as it only saw infinite self-images in turn. The longer I stared at it, the more certain I was that I heard music; first soft then trumpeting up into violent andante. Come on everypony! Smile, smile, smile! And I did, stupidly. I smiled.

#~Sparkle radiation levels 75% above mean. Radiation poisoning inevitable.

Then time went everywhere.

Author's Note

I've been varying the narrative voice, word cadence, even her vocabulary based on her mental state. Tell me what you think.

Seriously. Tell me.

Sometimes I get pretty invested in my own bullshit. Keep me honest.

Next up: the showdown with the showmare. Keep those goggles on. One of the loose ends whipping together might put out your eye.