Barrier strength = 5 (Dropping)
Current rate of enemy fire = 0 (Temporary)
Electromagnetic/radio/microwave/boost signal persisting. (Barrier pressure from signal: -0.14) Attempt to receive?
Attempt to receive?
Attempt to receive?
There were many things which people thought about when someone was trying to kill them. The motivation of the other party, that was frequently the last question to pass through a mind, sometimes lingering long after the body had dropped. Where their soul was going to wind up: that almost always came into play for all but the most certain, along with the occasional pondering on whether they had a soul at all. Last things to settle in what they saw as the final moments available for doing so.
For her part, Bree Daniels ignored both primary options. The one and only human agent of the Canterlot Deportation Agency in her world knew exactly why the man (who had stopped firing at the moment she'd gone behind the silvery, smoking, hissing blocky rectangle, the one that looked like a computer from a bad 1950s B-movie, only with a certain flair of steam vents) was trying to kill her, and she had a very good idea as to why he'd momentarily stopped. She also knew about souls and their destinations, although that knowledge seldom brought her comfort. She simply crouched down behind the buzzing, sparking refugee from a Roger Corman production, held the tablet screen at eye level, sighed, tried to ignore the pain from her right ankle, and contemplated how a certain universal constant had just become a multiversal one.
It never fails. Give somepony their first phone, and they will pick the worst possible moment to call you...
But it was her own fault, really. There was a temporal difference between this part of her world and Equestria -- not a changed rate of passage, but a simple problem of time zones. When Canterlot showed five in the afternoon -- the moment Crossing Guard had been asked to make the test on the cross-dimensional communicator she'd spent twelve days putting together -- it was two in the morning for Bree. Not that she'd planned on taking cover behind a silvery whatever at that time. Things had just -- worked out that way, partially at what an outsider might have falsely perceived as 'random'. Bree's life often appeared to have a surprising number of random elements to it, along with a certain degree of sadism directed at her by an easily-amused universe which only laughed at other people's pain.
She looked at the screen again, wondered if any number of wipes with microfiber cloths would ever get the acid stains from the last near-miss off.
Attempt to receive?
"You won't stop me!" her opponent ranted behind her. He was surprisingly good at ranting, if decidedly unimaginative about it, and dreadfully persistent -- although the constant bombardment of cliches at least told her he wasn't moving: still defending the control panel. "It'll only take seconds to finish you off! I don't know how you found me, but you won't live long enough to explain it unless I decide to --"
"-- can you give me a minute here?"
He stopped. It didn't hold for long. "...what?"
"I have to take this call," Bree calmly called out. "For science, mostly." Somewhere behind both of them, one of the more damaged and less-crucial pieces exploded.
She could almost hear him blink. "You won't tell anyone about me! I've cut off all communications! All retreat! There's nowhere to run, you stupid cow... not that you could even run in the first place..." The giggle had a fair degree of insanity lurking within the harmonics, along with more than a little sexism. "I've never seen a cow sprint before... they just get trundled off to the slaughterhouse..."
Bree indulged in a tiny sigh. Her parents had set up a collision of what had supposedly been previously unmixed European and Asian genes and in doing so, activated what she suspected to be a number of lurking recessive Polynesian time bombs. The results included dark red hair, green eyes without epicanthic folds, a solid six-foot build, and a case of virginal breast hypertrophy which had resulted in a bra size that was, at twenty-six years old (she looked younger, she often wondered if she always would), steadily questing towards the middle of the alphabet with no declared intention of stopping there. One of the more imaginative insults to be thrown at her in the last eight years had told her she looked as if she was locked into a perpetual cosplay for a fetish-oriented hentai and at the time, she'd had to look all of that up. "Oh, he already knows you're here," she assured the madman. "Hang on..."
The near-dismissal shut her opponent up for a little bit longer. Bree held the tablet a little higher and started tapping.
*Overall barrier strength impact from attempt at receipt?*
Minimal. Pinhole protocol possible. Rupture probability 0%
*Receive*
Entropic dilution in progress. Spherical weakening described 0.0003nm. Barrier pinhole strength 3.2. 2.127...
"What are you doing?" screamed the self-labeled genius. Still not firing, still not moving. "It won't work! None of it will work!"
Your confidence is touching. She watched the numbers drop. A test, the first test was coming through and it wasn't even going to be made under laboratory conditions, she would have made sure to dump the data off to someone who could use it as her last living act if only there had been anyone in her world who could use it at all...
...and zero.
She hit the speaker button, excitement peaking as she momentarily focused on her earpiece. "Crossing? Talk to me, unicorn -- and pick your first words carefully, this is historic! -- oh, but make it quick: someone's trying to kill me."
A pony neighed in her right ear.
Bree blinked. "...sorry?"
Another neigh. Two nickers. A somewhat confused-seeming whinny.
The redhead sighed. *Terminate connection*
"Note to self," she said, not particularly worried about the party who could overhear. "Cross-dimensional voice transmission from Equestria to here: works. Automatic translation effect present in Equestria: does not transmit." She paused, thought it over for a few seconds. Long fingers tapped at more sections of the tablet's screen. "Addendum: bucking megacrap."
This time, she did hear the blink. "...Equestria? You -- you know? How can you --"
"-- oh, you'd be surprised by how many people know," she told the potential incursion, the one she'd interrupted before he could fire up the final stage of his crossing. "And ponies, for that matter. That's why I'm here. Because you're trying to get through again. And you can't be allowed to make the trip." More taps.
A startled inhale -- and then back to the ranting. "You can't stop me! You're just one stupid cow! I'll get rid of you, and then I'll do whatever I --"
"-- did you notice that you stopped firing acid at me when I went behind this?" Bree asked, taking a moment away from the screen to glance at her half-melted sweater. Forty dollars gone, minimum. Fortunately, the webbing of brass beneath it was more or less untouched. "So did I. You've got an impressive array of stuff in here, I admit. I'm pretty sure at least three-quarters of it is just for atmosphere: you had no problem with destroying any of the Tesla coils, just for starters. But this... this is important. You can't risk damaging it and you're afraid to leave your station in case I make a break for it and damage that." Nearly there...
His type typically didn't do well when future victims started thinking. This one had no chance of being the exception. "You're lying! You can't know that! You can't know anything!"
"I know you hit the side of it on that last shot," Bree lied, and pressed another button.
A curl of acidic smoke rose from a silvery edge.
"No..." A little weaker. "No, I couldn't have..."
Doubt. Worry. Concern.
"Oh, you did," she assured him as she got ready to straighten up. "Right by that patch of wiring -- the one that's too close to the surface, where your shielding material is thinnest? I can see it from my angle. It's sparking nicely. Now I know you're not working to my design standards in any way, so I'd have to figure this leads back to your control panel in some fashion, and with all that insulation melting and the flow regulators starting to go..." More taps. More smoke, with the sounds of sparks and a little lightshow added to the mix.
"...I -- my work, my --"
And to that earlier mix, we now add Belief.
Got you.
Feedback: electrical. Total mechanical failure probability = 100%. Control panel explosion = 85%. Non-fatal disabling of opponent without loss of consciousness = 72%. Continue/execute?
*Execute*
When her ears stopped ringing, she examined the tablet's screen again, moved to a new series of taps, stood up, and quietly limped through the debris, favoring her right leg.
She stepped around some of the small fires which had been started in the abandoned warehouse. No sprinkler systems kicked in. There were a few in and around the ceiling, with spray jet nozzles set into the walls. She'd thought of it as a reasonable precautionary measure at the time, one many wouldn't bother with. As it had turned out, they were false molds around additional security cameras, ones she hadn't spotted in time and thus hadn't sent into false loops. And so the firefight. A new trick, one she would remember.
Past the fast-mixing chemicals of a spilled vial station, shielding her eyes from the fumes. Around a parts fabrication area, which she briefly admired for the sheer quality of the improvised tools. And finally, to the prone, coughing form splayed on the steel floor behind what had once been the control panel.
Bree looked at the burns. Third-degree on the right cheek, not felt yet. Left shoulder visibly dislocated. Protective goggles having done their job.
She knelt down next to the man, wiped the lenses clean with a spare microfiber cloth.
"Look at me," she gently told him. He did. "This wasn't your first attempt at a trip, was it?"
"No... first time, hadn't made it through personally..."
"You viewed it via remote." He nodded. "Saw how clean and pristine and unspoiled it was." Again. "And having found a perfect natural spot, you decided to dump your garbage in it."
"No... didn't..."
Bree sighed. "You want to know how I found you, right? Some of your experiments are producing a very nasty radioactive runoff. You can't keep it around yourself because you want to live. You'd dump it around here, but the stuff is so toxic... someone would notice. The fatalities don't matter, but being noticed? That's a problem for you. And I noticed. I saw what happened to that section of the continent you sent your trash into. What happened to the ponies who used to live there. It also let me get the signature of your chosen pollution. And while you think you've scrubbed this place down, you didn't eliminate every last atom. You don't have the techniques for it. I found the residue you missed -- so I found you."
Half-glazed eyes cleared in a surge of hate.
"And here we are," she softly finished. "I have a few questions for you. Did you see living, intelligent inhabitants when you looked through?"
Defiant, "No."
She glanced at the screen.
Lie
"Did you suspect what would happen to them if they were exposed to the waste?"
"No. I never... saw any ponies..."
Lie
"And yet you know it's called Equestria," she placidly told him. "When the only way to hear the word is to be there listening in person: I know that now."
No answer.
"You knew that world was occupied by thinking beings." Getting close to the end now. "You threw toxins into it. Why?"
"To see what would happen."
Truth
He grinned at her, showed where the explosion had taken two of his teeth. "You know the difference... between stupid humans... and stupid ponies? Experiment on what the waste does to humans... there's the tiniest chance someone might investigate... someone too stupid to be real might still make a mistake and care..."
"Someone cares," she told him. Bree straightened up, moved behind him. "Someone should always care. Try to remember that next time." Knelt again.
She listened to him breathing for a few seconds.
"It's so beautiful there," he gasped. "And they don't have any right to it. If we can't have it... why should --"
Bree put her right hand over his mouth.
"This isn't personal," she told him.
And it wasn't. It never was.
Decay acceleration = 175%
DNA traces = 0
Temporal residue: distortions 68%. Identification no longer possible
Site clean
The doctor looked her over as if her body had done the physician a great personal offense.
"The cracked ribs have finished knitting," Doctor Venkman told her. Bree had chosen the female physician in part so she could think 'No relation' whenever she liked. Additionally, it was a private office, which meant practically no one had ever died there and the number of wraiths lingering about the place tended to be zero unless an overprotective parent was checking up on their grown child. Grandchild. Beyond.
"Glad to hear it."
"I want to put that sprain in a walking cast to stabilize it."
"No."
The older woman narrowed brown eyes at her: dark skin seemed to become even more so. "Miss Daniels, given the degree of abusive relationship you're already in, you're as likely to be attacked for an undercooked dinner as you are for showing up with a sign that you're having the injuries treated --"
"-- I'm not in an abusive --" Her standard protest, one that was destined to be cut off every time, and another reason she'd chosen this particular doctor. Andrea Venkman did volunteer work at a shelter for battered women and so saw a large number of injuries inflicted on the female form. After a while, she'd started to subconsciously assume that every hurt came from the same kind of source. It was a belief Bree could work with, and did.
"-- of course you're not," Dr. Venkman glared at her. "No boyfriend you'd keep going back to would ever abuse you at all. With beatings. And electrical burns. And everything else."
"I don't have a boyfriend." Or a girlfriend. Or anything else, really.
"I want you in the shelter."
"I've been there. I didn't like it."
"You went in as a volunteer. How can any woman volunteer to work around the abused and stay in that kind of relationship herself?"
Another convenient belief of the doctor's, although this one was closer to the truth. Bree did peek in on the shelter when she could spare the time. Most of the women there wouldn't speak to her. Getting any normal person in her world to speak with her had become a deliberate effort. But she could stand in corners, quietly tapping the screen, listening to tales of those boyfriends and husbands and others whom those women would just keep going back to, and...
...well, some of them were returning to find empty apartments.
The life insurance policies taken out in their names sometimes wound up luring a social-climbing class of fresh abuser, but Bree tried what she could.
Bree took a deep breath, felt her right bra strap fray against the movement. It had been too close to the acid splash as well. Ninety dollars for a replacement. She'd changed her sweater and forgotten to switch out the bra. Taken the scent of smoke and acid and everything else from her hair and neglected to simply shower. Too little sleep, too tired to think of it at all. One body trying to serve two worlds. "Do I need a hospital stay?"
"You need a psychiatrist."
"So that's a no."
They stared at each other for a while.
"Bree, you're a beautiful young woman --"
"-- I'm a dark chocolate truffle with sour lemon filling and marzipan trim with gumdrop buttons added to licorice stripping." The doctor blinked at her. "At best, one person out of a thousand has been seeking that exact combination all their lives and the other nine hundred and ninety-nine order the baker to start cutting ingredients off until they aren't offended any more. If you're going to tell me I can do better than this because I'll attract someone else, don't bother. If you're going to hand me more pamphlets, just don't. I come for medical treatment. If I want a lecture, all I have to do is walk down the street."
Starkly, "You're going to die."
Bree nodded. "Have you ever had a patient you couldn't say that to?"
"Of course I --"
"-- so you've found immortals. Don't tell anyone else." Bree forced herself off the examination table, reached for her sweater. "Is there anything else I should do?"
"Leave town," Doctor Venkman told her. "Get away from this. Get a new identity. Take another life."
Bree gave the doctor the last spoken word, left without an audible reply.
Take another life.
In the time since she had first spoken to Princess Luna, she'd found one, on average, every eight days.
On the surface, she didn't have much of a home. It was a small one-story late-40s prefab, and she'd had to personally redo all the wiring just so she could make herself breakfast without blacking out the neighborhood. The furnishings were basic, the decorations were just about nil, and while the electronics were first-class, cutting-edge, and arguably worth more than the land in the Detroit suburb, the security measures had so far prevented any inquiring locals from finding out about that part first-hand. Several had tried. All had been found there the next morning and, since Bree didn't take things personally, seven of them had been alive. The eighth possessed a belief that any venereal disease he personally contracted could be cured through the act of having sex with a virgin, and so he'd taken to self-medication via raping his way through the entire family tree. Bree had met him just before he'd gotten down to the toddlers.
A good portion of what was stored below the house would have been of great interest to thieves. Also general scientists, Nobel Prize winners, and a very large number of people who would have killed Bree on sight simply for knowing most of it had the potential to exist.
At the moment, she was in the room which any geologist would have given a hand for. The one who'd tried tracking her hadn't sacrificed quite that much, although she was fairly sure he would have taken that over the other injuries.
Equestrian jewels... for most of the CDA's human agents, they were the payment of choice. Gems had value for most of the worlds, and typically escalated in worth when they crossed. Bree's travel method allowed her to move her own body mass and a good amount of other material -- as long as that additional material wasn't alive. Bringing gems back wasn't an issue. Selling them was.
There was just something about Equestrian gems. It might have been the way they generally came pre-cut, in perfect shapes with more carats in one place than any jeweler had ever seen in a single stone. Even in her world, they possessed a shine and clarity few natural local pieces ever displayed. She had to cut most of them down in order to reach sizes which the buyers would believe. One still hadn't, and thus two very frustrating months of keeping the cartel off her back, which had ended when it had mysteriously gone out of business for no reasons anyone would ever be able to track.
But she couldn't keep the money from the sales, not a penny of it beyond covering the necessary expenses of her work and the healing up after. For today, she had a hundred and thirty dollars (minimum) in clothing to replace, plus equipment to repair and wiping cloths to buy, there were parts she needed to fabricate and a doctor's bill to pay promptly, enough food to get through a week and sleep aids, dear gods she needed to sleep. To keep funds beyond the strictly necessary was to risk the chance of doing it for money.
Even for the smallest ruby she could safely sell, there would be a lot left over.
Bree donated to a large number of charities. Widows and orphans funds, carefully created. As were the widows and orphans.
She carefully cleaned her tablet, replaced the front panel of what wasn't quite glass. Polished all the brass. Checked circuitry paths, made sure every chip was routing just where it had to, made a coin land on edge six times straight for the bench test. Used a number of brass strips to reinforce her ankle, wrapped that in conventional athletic tape, and limped back upstairs to shower.
I did what had to be done.
The notes had been scavenged and taken where they needed to go. She didn't know if they were enough to let Canterlot try actively cleaning up the contaminated section, but they might help a little. The flow of radioactives had been stopped. And as for treating the ill...
...Crossing would be sure to update her on the fatalities. It was one of the few things he always told her about because in the unicorn's mind, every last one was her fault.
She showered. She made sure to keep it within a timer-regulated fifteen minutes. You could stay in the shower for hours after some assignments. Some people had been known to scrub through skin.
Bree watched over herself, because there were few left who would do it for her (none local), and she'd had to break off contact with pretty much all of them. Her relative seniority and sheer level of experience let her get away with it, but there were still questions being asked -- queries she had to fend off. For to have others supervising her with the previous level of scrutiny was to risk having them learn of Equestria, and...
...she knew what some of those in her world did when they personally made the discovery. She had seen far too much of it. She might see more of it tomorrow. And she didn't trust any of what others might have considered hers not to try some of it for themselves.
The only people truly keeping an eye on her now were the ponies. But that didn't bother her, because it was still enough. It counted. Whether Crossing believed it or not, she largely trusted his judgment, at least when humans weren't involved. She trusted Celestia and Luna even more than that.
If it ever became necessary, she trusted all of them to kill her.
Bree's world was dying. She acknowledged that. It wasn't even by inches any more, leaps and bounds across the final chasms without even quite reaching the landing point which would collapse the ground beneath everyone's feet. Detroit had simply beaten the rest of the planet to it.
Some might have called what had happened to the city 'urban decay'. Most in the media, if they could have been bothered to bring it up instead of the latest population-distracting celebrity scandal, would have talked about rap music and loss of family values and the corrupting influence from liberalism and homosexuality and, just because it had to be included to keep the money flowing, video games. They would blame everything except a series of corrupted corporate interests which had steadily drained every last opportunity from the metropolis, skimming and grafting and taxing into oblivion while writing laws which insured that not only would they never pay a single penny themselves, anyone who looked into why could so easily be arrested. Although arrest was generally too much trouble for anything more than a scare tactic. It was often seen as more effective for those who held the economic power to distribute the guns, tell the people holding them that all power came from the impact of a bullet, and then let everyone else argue about who had more until the flow of blood washed all local debates away.
Bree had done what she could there, before reaching Equestria. Still did, when she could find the time. But it was like trying to behead a heartless hydra with no means of searing the necks. Something else always sprang up to dine on dying dreams, thrilled at the chance for a little less competition.
The sidewalk she walked down hadn't been patched since she'd moved to the community. Some potholes were now entitled to antique status along with the chance to trace their ancestry back to wagon-breaking ruts. Streetlights were only noted by the crunch of glass under her shoes.
People glared at Bree as she passed. They muttered foul things under their breath, words hoped to reach her, made manifest only because there were others watching them and to not make those comments would be to lose status. The gangs had taken over here, and loudly-punctuated arguments broke out on most nights.
Bree was aware of an ongoing debate regarding her continued breathing.
She was the only one of her skin tone for a good distance around: all the survivors had been chased out, or chosen to flee before the former could happen as the best of all possible options. She was a lone female with no male protectors and for many, that would have meant the opportunity to claim a prize before throwing the broken wrapping into the nearest dumpster. But... she disturbed normal people, unless she made a great personal effort not to. If Bree truly tried, she could deal with the real world as she once had, which meant people still insulting her for race and gender and build and anything else they could use as an excuse to not perceive her as human.
But if she didn't... then on some level deep within what remained of their hearts, they sensed different. Which in this case, meant danger. And at the point she'd reached after eight years of soul-deep effort, it was a level of danger which refused to let most risk attack. They discussed it, she knew. Several fantasized. But those who'd tried breaking into her home had spread stories, one hadn't come back, and...
...none of it was ever personal. They didn't know that, weren't aware of any of it. Not consciously. But to look at Bree for too long when she wasn't trying to pass herself off as normal was to potentially hear stalking footsteps moving across the basement of their souls.
So they muttered, and the bravest called out insults while desperately hoping she wouldn't glance back. And if she ever began to do so, those who dreamed of status through murder tried to hide behind each other.
Virtually every normal person treated her that way, unless she turned it off and was lucky enough to find someone who might give her a chance. Every normal human...
...but not the ponies. Take out the shock and worry and fear that came with dealing from a creature from elsewhere, and the ponies treated her normally.
There was a chance that Crossing hated her for herself. She almost relished that.
After a while, she reached the park. As almost always for a daytime sojourn, away from the sections the drug dealers had claimed for their own and the police were generously paid not to look at, she had it to herself.
The final inadequate maintenance costs had been taken out of the city budget two years prior. Pricker bushes grew everywhere a body might try to squeeze through, paths vanished under tall grass, the diseases borne by the last of the fresh industrial fumes and the lingering traces of generations placed foul coats of warped bark over the few remaining trees. Even at the start of spring, no leaves would grow. None which were green, anyway.
On the very dubious bright side, even the shifters had given up. There would be no claws through her back for one of her kind daring to visit a place which had once been beautiful. Not today.
Bree made her way to an abandoned playground, took out her tablet, tapped for a few moments.
Rust coating/chains = non-flaking
Metal reinforced 200%
Accident probability = 0%
She sat down on the old swing, rocked back and forth, her feet never quite leaving the ground.
If she closed her eyes... if she was stupid enough to risk that... she could see verdant hills. Trees which bloomed as normally as pony magic would allow. Smell fresh air and clean water. Sometimes she almost heard echoes of the laughter. A long bout of tapping, a giant fist of pain squeezing her ribs and the phantom feel of metal shards piecing her heart, bruises and sprains and muscle pulls as her own world punished her for abandoning the ruins-in-progress and she would be there.
Bree could justify the trip. The CDA's human agents were given jewels and gold and anything else they could convert to currency when they reached their homes. But they were paid in hours. Bree received one hundred and twenty generally supervised minutes in Equestria for every incursion she could prove she'd stopped. Some assignments granted bonuses: extra time, visits to specific places. But Bree was a particularly active agent, and Crossing always tried to supervise every moment she spent in Equestria himself (she sent message cylinders from her workshop to schedule their meetings) while having very little free time for doing so. But he trusted no one else with her. She had learned of his family some months before and, having none left of her own, hated asking him to take time for her. Time which was now backlogged to a total of eighty-four hours.
She could simply pick an isolated spot and breathe there. Let the few members of the CDA who were aware of the multidimensional biped fifth column know after the fact, then mark it off her total. Crossing would be furious, but he pretty much always was anyway. A full afternoon of just -- being. Yes, it would hurt, it would hurt horribly to leave outside her workshop and another doctor's visit might be mandatory on returning -- but wasn't it worth it? All she had to do was make absolutely certain no one was watching in the name of keeping secrets (and having it hurt a little less), then run the math...
Idly, she brought the tablet high, looked at the screen, tapped.
*biometrics scan*
Scanning. Ten yards: clear. Twenty yards: clear. Thirty yards: human/other. File identified
The picture flashed on the screen. Bree sighed, watched the radar as the new arrival closed in, sent the tablet to a preemptive preparatory section.
Normal people were disturbed by her presence on a level they couldn't explain and didn't ever want to think about. Those who weren't normal -- treated her with only the biases they already had.
"Hey, hey, Eu-Fee-Ay! How many kids did you kill today?"
Which meant they hated her for something other than herself.
Bree looked up as Amber Thistledown emerged from what remained of the artificial woods. The witch had been experimenting with her appearance again, making small changes in ways which could normally be left to cosmetics and weren't, mostly because she knew Bree could do no such thing and so liked to show off. The woman was a few years younger than she was, considerably shorter and slimmer -- things Amber really didn't alter for public display: too great a chance of being noticed (if the huge trenchcoat ever came off), and all that could come with it. It was hair, mostly, and today that was deep black with a white stripe down the center. As a mane, it would have had a chance of being stylish: for a human head, it combined with the little nose and tiny piercing eyes to create the impression of a bipedal skunk.
There was nothing Bree could ever say to forestall or avert what always came next in these moments of privacy, where there was no one to listen and wonder at some of the words, where no devices eavesdropped and summoned trouble: the central reasons why she went to the park in the first place. But others used it now and again, those who felt they had more of a claim to the last remnants of nature than she ever did and wanted to break her grip on it along with her fingers, followed by, ideally, her neck.
There had been a time when Bree had tried to explain herself. Tried to tell the others about duty. A time when she'd still had hope.
Only two had ever listened.
"Amber," she nodded, and continued to rock.
"Fuck you," the witch spat. "Sitting there like you have a right to be here... as if everything around you isn't dying faster just because you showed up..."
"It's a public park," Bree quietly said. "For what's left of the public. Someone should use it."
"We do. Not you."
Because unlike Bree, Amber had a 'we': four others, none particularly strong. Bree was surprised they'd all managed to survive as a group, especially since their response to a dying world was to go down swinging in completely pointless fights they took a great deal of trouble to start. "I just sit in the swings," she said softly. "Don't you ever just want to use a swing, Amber? To close your eyes at the top of the arc and imagine there's nothing beneath you? That if you let go of the chains, you'd fly?"
"What a very nice dream," Amber spat again, and this one had the expertly-aimed glob land on Bree's right shoulder. (She didn't wipe. It wasn't personal.) "You must have had an orgasm when you stole it from the mind of the last child you murdered."
"I've never gone through the duty with a child." The youngest had been sixteen, and his age had matched the number of false tears he'd had tattooed under each eye.
"The duty," Amber hissed, and the tone of it made Bree wonder if the tongue had also been modified for the day. "Such a pretty word to justify yourself, serial killer. Why do we let you live? Why do we let any of you live? Give me a reason not to do it, murderer. Tell me one reason why I shouldn't just save a thousand lives to come by stopping yours right here and now. I'd love to hear one so I could laugh at it..."
This was going farther than usual. Her mentor would have called it a teaching opportunity -- if only Amber had been capable of learning, let alone perceiving any irony within the words. And it made Bree's next sentences all the more painful, just for knowing how pointless they ultimately were.
"Because it would be personal," Bree answered, knowing none of it would truly register. "Because the only way to remain yourself -- to stay sane -- is to only act in duty and fair judgment. You jump to conclusions and make decisions on facts which don't exist." Calmly, completely placid, "If you kill me, Amber, here and now, for those reasons, it will touch you. You may never get it out again. You'll find yourself making that kind of rash jump over and over, until the only thing left is a screaming need which you can never fulfill. And if you're lucky, if you've left anyone who used to care about you alive, they'll be the ones who stop you. From duty. And love."
No -- some of the words had gone in, but only as far as the eardrums: the little dark eyes gained in pupil width what they lost in true understanding. "Personal... I've heard you say that before. Do you know what it sounds like, bitch? Like you can't act when it's about you. Something about your stupid duty, your sick code, means that if it's your own life, all you can do is sit on the sidelines and wait for it to be over. Maybe I should just test that --"
Amber's hand jerked under the raised neck of the trenchcoat, extracted a necklace of green vines and woven mistletoe and every other natural poison to be found. Broke off a berry and flung it to the ground. Bree instinctively hit the right section of screen -- and it didn't matter, because the witch hadn't been aiming at her.
A nearly-dead branch above her, one no park maintenance existed to trim, sick enough that no one would ever question a final loss at any moment, gave up the struggle. It broke, and the heavy wood plummeted down.
Bree pushed back, swung out of the way, got head and body clear in time -- but the hit impacted the tablet, flung it out of her hand.
Amber laughed, closed in --
-- only to meet Bree's feet on the other end of the arc.
Six feet tall. A solid build to start with. And she worked out, because she needed the strength for so many things, because she refused to let knives take her to what others might feel was acceptable, because it gave her something to do when the timer went off on the shower and nothing washed the memories away.
The witch stumbled back, gasping for breath. Bree let the swing's momentum carry her over the branch, jumped off at the end, immediately regretted it. There were some things the truly top-heavy just weren't supposed to do, and a good part of her anatomy let her know just how stupid she'd been and took the option to echo. But...
"You think 'personal' is a prohibition against 'self-defense'," she calmly told Amber, and a solid right hook broke the witch's nose. "That's funny." Blood flowed. Bree's mistake: Amber could do things with blood, at least if she got a chance to think about them.
Which meant the other woman shouldn't have the opportunity.
What was the saying? If you won't hear, you have to feel. Bree hated that expression, disliked it even more in the original German. But listening was one of the hardest things there was, something few humans could ever bring themselves to do. To listen was to take a chance on changing your mind and in a world approaching its death, the last comfort of the fanatics was believing they'd been right all along and nothing which had happened could ever be their fault.
Bree knew that. Couldn't ever explain it. Because no one would listen. And any lesson she might attempt to teach by force only set up more attacks to come.
But the only other option was to let Amber take away Equestria's only hands in this world.
"Don't worry," Bree sighed. "You'll live."
The witch did.
She didn't enjoy it.
Neither did Bree.
Why Detroit?
Anyone who might have tried to track Bree's movements over the years -- and especially in the time since Equestria -- would have concluded she had the directional sense of a concussed homing pigeon. She traveled all over the map, landing in various countries across the globe to take her share of fresh prejudices muttered in new languages. Always with formal travel and with a passport which was almost filled in accurately: she had few other roads available -- but unless someone knew why she was traveling, the destinations would look random.
Some of them actually were, for a given value of 'random'. Bree trusted her luck a little more than most, paid attention to the little signs a dying universe offered up. If she saw a headline about Japan, a wind-blown travel brochure encouraging visits to Osaka, and had a cosplay insult thrown at her in the same morning -- why, it just might mean there was something in Japan worth investigating. And there would be, along with the chance to spread out her hospital bills a little while fudging forms in new and exciting languages.
When she'd moved to Detroit... the city had just started to enter the final convulsions. The police weren't interested in doing much of anything which didn't collect additional income or get rid of those among them who disagreed with that. It meant there was an increased need for her and those of her kind -- although to the best of her knowledge, she was the last. But it had also been shortly after she'd spoken to the Princesses. And a city where few truly cared about what you were doing unless it happened to them... well, that was a perfect site for monsters to set up shop. Monsters with familiar intentions. Bree traveled the world in her attempts to stop incursions, came back to a place where few dared to openly inquire into her activities -- only to find potential incursions waiting on her own doorstep.
Bree often wondered if she was pulling them in somehow, making sure a good part of Equestria's unwelcome locally-originating dimensional traffic took place in an area she didn't need airplane tickets to reach. It was possible, although she'd never run the math to check on her theory just in case the screen came up Cause of incidents = you.
The tablet was serviceable after the impact, but needed some care. Bree fabricated the majority of her own parts and created a few which no one else had ever seen or would believe in, but there were a few things which were conventional: elements of the wiring, a backup battery for when the stranger power source ran low. And so she ventured out into the spring night, because she'd happened to see yet another Going Out Of Business notice in a paper with a circulation down to the low thousands, and it was a chance to stock up. Her instincts told her that the store, keeping hours until midnight to squeeze everything out of their final day, would be especially desperate to sell out the lingering basics as time ran out and their hopes of getting enough to settle debts before fleeing went down for the last time. And so they would be especially happy when she accidentally overpaid by several hundred thousand percent, for she knew the place was run by a good family, one which deserved a chance to enjoy whatever time remained. She'd investigated.
And going out had just felt -- right.
She walked, ignoring the pain from her choice of conveyance. But it was her normal mode. Even when her ankle wasn't sprained, running for more than short stretches was painful. Driving simply meant missing too much. People in cars gazed forward and did their best not to think about what was happening at the back and sides. You picked up on more when you walked, and anything dark moving through the night risked the chance of meeting her coming the other way.
She stopped at an intersection, waited for the light to change, or at least for a large-enough opening to let her get across, just in case the damaged electronics never put up a sign which many drivers would disregard. She could easily tinker with it, but... instead, she found herself looking to the right. Then left --
-- what?
Like many of her kind, Bree had a sense for magic, the actions of the supernatural, things outside the bounds of normal reality. In Equestria, she tried not to pay too much attention to it, because the supernatural was the normal and she could easily find herself in sensory overwhelm. But in her world, where so little was left... it stood out. And her visits to Equestria had given her a unique feel for the lingering traces of that realm, even faint ones. Her equipment helped her detect potential incursions, but there were times when her own feel for the stuff did the rest.
She was getting something now. Weak, but enough to register. There was a distortion to it, as if that distant magic had been twisted by something other -- but it was definitely Equestrian.
Bree frowned, took out the tablet, tapped out a familiar sequence.
Somebody Else's Problem field: active
One of the classics, something which made it almost impossible for others to pick her up on casual notice -- although it did make crossing streets that much harder and she got (nearly) stepped into a lot. Bree faced left, walked.
It took some time. She passed a wraith who was in the middle of committing suicide. The mindless remnant of the teenage girl, pants bloodstained around the zipper, threw herself off the unstable fire escape. Impacted the ground. Flickered, reappeared with white-knuckled hands grasping the bent metal above as vapor drifted from eyes incapable of tears.
In the dark hollow of an old doorway, a large homeless man camped out among broken brick. He spun a child's top, cooed to it, begged it to do something magical. It fell over.
Somewhere beyond her conventional senses, there was pain. There was hatred and rape and murder and justifications for all of it, typically wrapped up in Because You Are Different. Sometimes it was My God Says So, an excuse nothing could ever stop. The two frequently teamed up. And there was only one of her in the city, the only one of her kind left here, and that was because she was the strongest, the one who had survived. The one with an extra reason to keep going.
Bree could feel it up ahead. The alley. Naturally, a dark alley: they were just about mandatory. She adjusted the setting on her contact lenses, mixed in a low-light function to go with aura sight. Quietly went just a bit inside, far enough to be completely within shadow.
The two vampires ignored her.
"You promise this will work?" the younger asked. He was -- almost clean, something which deeply surprised Bree. It was rare to find a leech whose soul was still so close to human, so determined to stay that way. She assessed him carefully, let the tablet measure the data, and judged him to be a blood-bagger. Some of hers would automatically perform the duty on even one like this, judging that near-inevitable murders yet to come had to be stopped now. It was a good way to find yourself in a final meeting with those who had loved you and Bree, who had never been part of that school of thought, decided she would probably wind up letting him go.
"I do," smiled the older, showing fangs. And his aura was not clean. It was tainted by so many things, by murder and atrocity and violation on a level which only the bloodsuckers knew. But there was something else. Something -- familiar.
He's crossed. He's made it through and back. The residue is all over him. Gods, if even the vampires are getting through now...
She tried not to let the horror freeze her, managed to postpone the thoughts of what might happen if this one did the act on a pony, for some among the leeches would try to convert anything just to see what would rise. All of it would impact her later, when there was time for it, and that typically in the dreams which sent her into screaming wakefulness one night out of four. For now, there was simply watching and listening. Gathering evidence.
"How long is it good for?" asked the younger, brown hair vibrating from nerves. He was badly-shaven. He would be badly-shaven until the end of the world.
"At your age? Four hours unless you burn everything out of your system," the older smiled again, shifting his body under the stinking, bulging jacket. There was nothing human in the expression. "And for some reason, this goes out of you last. But -- four hours, fledgling. Four hours in which nothing will make you lose control. Not provocation, not fear of fire -- not even the fucking sun will get on your nerves. It'll still kill you -- you just won't feel any need to run from it. So don't take it too close to sleeping. I like repeat business."
"I don't know what I have left to give you," the younger nervously said. "You have prestation over me for this -- so much of it..."
"There's always more," and atrocity rode in every syllable. "You'll learn that, given enough nights. But for now -- this is worth nearly all of you, isn't it? To know you can make it through the entire party. It even makes you warm. One night of pretending -- it's a bargain, isn't it? Even if you knew how hard this stuff was to get, you'd still think I was undercharging."
The temperature seemed to be dropping.
"Where... where do you get it?"
The older laid his right index finger alongside his nose. "Trade secret. Do we have a deal?"
"Y-yes."
Something went from the younger's hands to the older. A large bag of blood came out from under the jacket, went the other way. The plastic surrounding the fluid didn't prevent the feel from coming through.
Pony blood.
I'm going to --
-- no. This is the duty. I will further my investigations. Quickly. I have to find out how he's crossing and if he's taught anyone else whatever the method is. I may have to follow him across the barrier and I'll stop him before he drains another pony. If I have to perform the duty before I find out everything, if doing so saves pony lives, I will and hope I can clean up after. And now that I know about him, I'll have to keep him from killing humans during that time while dodging the attentions of any superiors he might have, this is about to become the full-time assignment...
The younger jumped straight up, a leap no human ever could have made, grabbed the edge of a more solid fire escape. Went up and over, clambered across a series of metal ladders. Gone.
Bree focused on the elder. She would need to track him wherever he went, potentially over several nights. Setting up the program for that was basic...
"Hello."
His voice was calm. Bemused. Neither quality was real.
And he was looking directly at her.
He moved, faster than any normal person, crossed the distance between them, grabbed her head with one hand and shoved into her back with the other. She went into the brick, and only the momentum-slowing cushioning from the impact of her breasts saved her from a broken nose and cracked skull while simultaneously giving her a whole new set of injuries which would take weeks to clear at best, if she even had anything over a few minutes left to live.
And for the second time that day, the tablet hit the ground.
"So nice to meet you," the vampire purred. "Please... don't get me wrong. I truly dislike it when people misinterpret my intentions towards them, which is why I am going to spell out exactly what will happen next. You're going to tell me how much you heard, why you were here in the first place, if someone sent you... well, I can smell that you're no ghoul, but it's not as if the Prince uses nothing but, is it? Do you know the term? Would that be a giveaway? Feel free to admit it, because that's the next part of what's coming. You will tell me everything you know. And then I'll kill you. Now, if I feel your answers were satisfactory and given in sincerity with honesty rampant... it'll be from draining. You'll enjoy it, I promise. Nothing like it in the world, nothing better for the last thing you'll ever feel. But if I decide not to take a shine to you... let's just say only one of us will enjoy the process, and it won't be you."
She tried to breathe, forcing her lungs to work against the compression. "How... how did you...?"
"See you? My senses are a little -- sharper -- than most. And there's something about you... something I can't quite pin down..."
Shock was her ally. "Equestria. You're -- picking up Equestria on me."
She heard the gasp, a breath the leech only needed so it would produce words on the way out. "How can you -- who sent you?"
"The Princesses," she got out. She wasn't really thinking about the words. Other things were going through her head, all at speed.
Barrier strength = 7 (Dropping)
"...what?" Trying to recover fast, "Any city leader is called a Prince no matter what the gender is, I'm sure you'd remember that even with a bruised head. And for any to be working together..."
"So you haven't -- learned that much," she choked. "Pity... it makes you a pretty new arrival, doesn't it?" And it means whoever you killed didn't have a chance to cry out -- no, maybe he left them alive, only took enough for samples to find out what it would do... She needed more facts. "You know your government -- but not theirs. I'm a little more... experienced..."
Barrier strength = 5 (Dropping)
"YOU CAN CROSS?" It was a scream, and she knew no one would respond to it.
"Yes..."
"HOW? How can a human get there? I haven't even told the layer above me about this and a human can't... What are you doing? What are you sacrificing?"
Which told her too much. "Blood... you're using blood..."
Air made a very distinctive sound when being pulled between fangs. "What else do you think blood magic would use, you stupid cow?" It wasn't her week for avoiding bovine references. "Three dead humans to get across... but only one dead pony to return. It's a real savings."
The thoughts became part of the work. No one else knows. He's comfortable telling me anything because I'm about to die. Because I'm helpless. Because he doesn't know what the tablet is for.
Barrier strength = 2 (Dropping)
"Tell me," he snarled, and pushed harder. "Tell me how you're doing it. Let's -- compare notes. Did you aim on purpose? I was trying for something else, but it was so easy to replicate... Is someone sending you? Where are they on the pyramid? Talk to me: the more interesting your words are, the easier it is at the end..."
"You want to know -- how I'm doing it?"
She was about to trade the pain of the compression for something far worse.
Barrier strength = 1 (Dropping)
"Yes. Now, you stupid kine..."
And if he knew what the tablet was for, he'd think I needed it...
Barrier strength = 0
...and I don't.
It's just easier that way.
"How about a demonstration?"
The ground beneath them vanished.
The dirt went away, spiraling outwards into the walls. A burst of foul air blasted up from beneath them, carrying the stench of all things lost and forgotten. Gravity exerted.
They fell into the Tempest.
There was a storm under the skin of the world, and Bree had seen it as a shortcut.
Initially, when her mentor had indicated that the studies would be turning towards the path which eventually led to teleportation, Bree had been looking forward to it. (Eight years in the past now, in the days when she still tried to balance what she still saw as a real life and the demands of existence within the shadows, when she still had college classes and friends and someone who would welcome her home on every holiday, when her count was at a mere one and that one had been dead to begin with.) Folding space: what could be more exciting than that? To be anywhere with a thought and if those thoughts didn't include the price to be paid for such blatant violation of all the rules which said you couldn't do such a thing, well... it was still worth it, wasn't it? And so she had shown up to that first real class of the day happy and excited and almost squirming within her skin with anticipation of the time when she too would be able to work that kind of miracle.
And what her mentor had told her was that the space she wanted to fold didn't exist.
This was the theory which teleportation was based around: distance was an illusion. All things happened in the same place, because only one place truly existed. Every being which existed at all overlapped with every other. Ultimately, all points were singular. The way you were supposed to teleport was by momentarily choosing to ignore part of the illusion which said otherwise and picking the part of the falsehood you wanted to be in now. Which was the place you'd just been, because all places were the same. It would just look different.
Bree had listened to all of it and then openly noted that under this idea, when she went to the bathroom, she had the entire population of the planet in there with her, which seemed more than a little invasive, plus they couldn't all sit on the same toilet when most of the men would have left the One Seat up to begin with. And that was the cleanest place she took the theory, as the implications for sex were so ridiculous as to make vocalization mandatory.
It had led to a fight. And while they'd gotten past their dispute within the two years before her mentor was killed, she'd never been able to wrap her head around the sheer stupidity of the theory. She insisted that there had to be other ways of moving between locations. She'd tried to find several. And none of them had worked.
Oh, there were tricks Bree knew for travel -- but those were just shifting between the layers of her world, visiting the realm where concepts walked (and she would have tackled that one stupid thing if she'd ever found it), plus the place where spirits coalesced -- and the realm of the waiting dead, where the self-aware wraiths hoped for passage to something beyond, something which just might be worse than the self-inflicted tortures they already knew. As with many of hers, she'd had a special affinity for that last and as the years passed, once she figured out how to make physical crossings, she'd studied the place. She prided herself on knowing as much about it as anyone would admit to. And as for the storm under the skin of the world... she studied that, too. Learned about its geometries and how distances simply didn't match up with what lay above. The harbingers among the wraiths slingshot themselves across what seemed to be very real folds, saved travel time on long journeys while finding an odd form of what had to be teleportation for very short ones.
Bree had studied every aspect. And then she'd tried to apply them.
It had seemed to be a simple (well, ridiculously complex, but once you got the initial matrix of equations sorted out...) matter. She just had to measure those geometries, find out how they didn't correspond, and then slingshot herself. Do all the math and find out how to rebound a living body to something near a desired exit point. On her twenty-third birthday, she'd considered herself to have everything in place: conductive brass strips flush against her skin, a headful of math which she was managing to keep straight, a somewhat-less-complex tablet (one of the first which would pass in public) to help the process, and a whole lot of over-the-counter painkillers to use after exiting on the other side. She'd gone into her workshop, made sure all the protections she was going to need were in place, triple-checked everything -- four times -- and then dropped into the perpetual scream of wind and acid and the howls of those who had already been lost in all but existence and wished nothing more than to take everything else with them into the final oblivion.
It had taken exactly two seconds to realize she was, in a word she hadn't learned to use yet, bucked.
The brass had sparked. Claws had torn at her as she'd catapulted through the storm, skidded off her shields. But she'd been veering off from the instant she'd fallen in, moving to the side and twisting, twisting against the gale of oblivion's agony, there had been a feeling of rotation which had gone down to the atomic level, every electron in her body seemed to surge to another shell...
...and she'd hit grass.
Painfully.
Later, she would learn of more agonizing arrivals, and even one which matched hers for sheer awkwardness. But for a long time, she would consider her first moments in a land she did not yet have a name for, with face in the dirt and butt in the air and bruising compression over a significant portion of what was between, to be among the most humiliating.
Eventually, she'd picked herself up, brushed herself off, and wondered why the pain hadn't hit upon an exit she hadn't been planning, because the math should have left her still within that layer of restless souls, able to see the real world through a skein of rot and decay and death waiting for a place to happen. But she'd certainly shifted her location, even if it had been to a place she hadn't targeted. She'd been aiming for Dublin, and landed in -- no idea. And half her equipment had shorted out along the way, leaving her with no ready means of finding out on the spot. She'd started walking, intent on the visual survey.
Biology -- never her strong suit. Go beyond basic biometric readings (and everything that came with them) and the life sciences were largely a mystery to her, which was why she still needed hospitals in the first place. So it had taken nearly an hour to see that some of the plants seemed wrong and even then, she'd just assumed herself to have landed in a currently-cool section of the tropics.
The ponies had dispelled that illusion in a hurry.
She'd hidden. She'd watched them, listened. Fillies at play, adults supervising from the middle of the picnic. Unicorns exerting their fields, pegasi swooping overhead. But, other than checking her own sanity and finding it intact, watching and listening was all she'd done -- along with repressing her own laughter at a particularly good overhead jest. No contact. No attempt to reach out. Just -- listening to joy.
After the sun (not yet Sun) had set (been lowered), she'd tinkered with the harness. And on the fourth attempt, it had brought her home.
She could not use the storm to reach other parts of her own world. Every time she tried, it simply brought her to a new place in Equestria. The first three trips had her luck working in full: never appearing among ponies, never so deep into a wild zone as to meet a new level of risk. By the fourth, she'd learned how to aim.
More study, and she learned that the rules were like those for simple layer travel at her level of knowledge: her own living body, what she was wearing and some amount of inanimate material, the total mass dependent on the effort she made. Nothing else which breathed, and she returned home to find a very confused gerbil sitting on the workshop floor. But inert matter -- things which had never lived or no longer did -- that was just a question of trying hard enough.
After six trips, she felt she had the process mastered. She went back whenever she wanted to.
And she -- watched.
It was all she ever did. She didn't take pictures, because there was a chance someone else might see them. She didn't make a single note beyond the mental and made sure those were locked away deep in her head. She came to Equestria on days after the burden of the duty felt as if it had become too heavy for lifting, when she looked at the slow death of her world and began to believe there was no way to stop it. She came because it let her know that somewhere, there was laughter triggered by joy. Generosity without traps laced within, loyalty which didn't backstab, kindness lacking ulterior motives, honesty which wasn't cruel, and magic practiced in the open with happiness in the workings. It gave her the strength she needed to return and do what she had to in a place where it so often seemed that five didn't apply and the sixth would forever be impossible.
And then she'd been there when a decidedly less peaceful incursion had burst into the place she was watching.
The local ponies hadn't known how to respond, the CDA in its first moons of existence and lacking the agents in place who could quickly answer the call. But Equestria was a land of magic, and that which Bree did in her own world, that which brought punishment from the universe itself if her changes to reality took any form other than that which belief would explain as pure coincidence, worked in the new one -- without consequence.
She'd emerged. She'd attacked and, with creativity and no worries about the normal limits of her workings, she'd easily won. Confused ponies had shied away from her -- but others had slowly approached. Questions had begun to emerge. She'd been starting to explain herself --
-- and naturally, that was when the CDA had finally shown up.
Crossing hadn't been there, not for this incursion. Not yet. The ponies in the four-member team hadn't known what to do with her, with a human who had acted to defend. And so they had taken her to Canterlot...
The vampire was clinging to her. Not clawing, not trying to hurt or kill, simply keeping hold on the one solid object in the storm. Whatever his method was, it didn't work like this, and he had no idea how to deal with the Tempest, likely lacked any concept of what it was.
Bree's shields only kept out soul-stuff: they didn't repel the undead. But she had been careful to exclude him, in the vague hopes that a passing spectre would tear him away and he would find himself starving in storm or labyrinth. It wasn't happening. The storm pounded him, she could hear the screams -- but his strength was beyond her own, and he wasn't letting go.
But he couldn't shield his body. He didn't know how to protect his mind. The sudden upheaval of reality had left him with no concept other than clinging and hoping to a deity he hated that it would end.
Bree, the equation-writing part of her mind occupied with trying to keep her safe from the acidic plasm, wrapped herself in memory and waited for the inevitable.
"I am looking at a killer," the smaller alicorn proclaimed, her tones remarkably steady -- while still being rather loud. "One on a grand scale. And yet, somehow, I am not looking at a murderer. I saw your soul when you slept within the castle while awaiting our appointment, human -- or rather, I saw your souls. One part joined to another. You kill... and it does not touch you. These are mysteries I would very much wish explained. Immediately. Because there is a killer in my throne room, and I truly wish to know why she would ever be allowed to stay there. Or anywhere else, at least while she still breathed."
Bree had swallowed. She had seen enough of pony magic by that point to have some sense of its potency. She knew the two alicorns standing in front of her were the most powerful entities she'd ever seen -- and there was more than one kind of magic waiting to be unleashed. Having that kind of power holding on the signal to be turned against her left Bree with exactly one extra option beyond telling the truth, and there was nothing to update her will on and no surviving family she could leave anything to.
"Because... it's not personal," she'd said, and waited for the denial of all words yet to come.
It didn't happen.
"More detail," said the larger. "Now."
"I don't kill from emotion," she said. "Not from rage, or anger, or even from love misguided into the wrong target. I kill so that other people can live. And that's all. If I remove a person who's killing for other reasons, who can't be stopped, who's outside what my people laugh about as justice... I save everyone they would have gone after next. No one can hire me: no one can order me to kill or pay me for it, beyond anything I need to survive or get through the mission itself, plus the aftereffects, and I have to make sure those who lived are taken care of every time I can... At best, I can be offered suggestions. And then I investigate, and if there's no other solution, nothing else to be done... I kill. Because if you don't remove a cancer, every healthy cell will die..."
"How many times?" asked the smaller, her voice cold.
"Twenty-seven." It was something more than a mere number.
"And how does someone -- suggest?" the larger harshly asked.
She had closed her eyes. "By crying in the night. By begging for help which never comes. By praying to gods who either won't listen or only laugh."
And with that, she had waited to die.
The voice of the younger was soft now. "You see yourself as a fit judge? Of who should live and who does not?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I have a code. A Chodana." The word, with no direct Equestrian equivalent, entered alicorn ears as something else. "And no one else will do it."
"Tell us this code," said the elder.
She had. It had taken three hours, and she'd needed to cite examples from her own life and those of others from history. But mostly, it had been her own experiences. At one point, it had gone into the deaths of her parents and siblings, and all the ways in which she had not taken revenge. And she had looked at the younger, seen an expression she'd learned to read, and realized the smaller alicorn had walked through every dream of regret.
When it was over and they'd given her water for a dry throat, they stared at her. Then at each other.
"How long have you been coming here?" the elder asked.
"Eight months."
"Never seen," said the younger. "Never exposed. Never even suspected. Never harming a single pony in any way."
"Yes."
"You can come and go at will?"
"More or less. I have to leave and return to a specific location, otherwise it's -- painful. And it's possible to mess up the process, and then... it's worse. If I was hurt badly enough already, potentially fatal."
"Are you able to bring others? Anything besides yourself and a casual lunch?" the taller inquired. Purple eyes steadily met her own.
"Nothing living. Maybe with more work, but..."
Those purple eyes went right, gazed into the blue ones.
"You kill to save those among your own -- people," the smaller said. "You killed to save those among ours..."
The older sibling looked angry. Fierce. The energy of what wasn't quite a mane twisted faster, seemed to reach towards Bree. "Luna, you can't be thinking --"
The younger remained calm. "-- you are aware of the program, sister."
"Human agents stopping incursions from happening from their worlds, yes. I agreed to that. Not assassins! You're saying we should hire somepo -- someone knowing they're going to kill! Knowing that we are going to be responsible for deaths on her side!"
"Deaths which may be the only means of preventing such on ours."
Harshly, "I don't want any deaths."
"Nor do I. None that are not necessary. But there will be times when necessity calls, Celestia. And even so, you have nothing to worry about. For I have no intention of hiring her."
"Luna, I know that look..."
"I merely intend to make... a suggestion."
The vampire's weight threw off the landing. Bree crashed into the ground, rolled away from the leech as quickly as she could, something which brought on more pain and added to the towering tally: impact against Equestrian soil, wall shove, injured ankle, other lingering effects from the warehouse fight -- and the bursts of personal electricity which had coruscated across her skin as she'd dropped, an angry reality throwing the book at her for a violation beyond endurance. If she was lucky, she had a few minutes of useful consciousness left: if she wasn't, the duration was going to be a lot shorter.
But that was just for waking, because living had much higher odds behind it. All she had to do was get away from the vampire, keep her distance, and hope she either hadn't just started a full-blown forest fire or stay alert long enough to stop one. Because they had both landed in Equestria, because Bree couldn't do anything about the time zone difference between Canterlot and Detroit, couldn't do much with time at all beyond small distortions and minor ripples, but she had learned how to aim...
Time travel, at least going backwards, was largely agreed to be impossible, and her world didn't have enough forward left to bother with.
Crossing time zones was easy.
"I don't take things personally," she told the vampire as the flames consumed his hands, as his nose burned away and eyes crumbled to ash. "But Sun? Does."
She waited. She took no pleasure in it. And when it was over, she forced herself to the tablet (which had fallen down the passage with them, which was still largely intact, more designed luck), made herself stay awake long enough to put the flames out and run a few emergency short-term modifications to the earpiece.
The other end, after a long pause indicating that no such call had ever come through in Equestria's history and the contacted party wasn't thrilled about being the first, picked up.
"Crossing?"
A snort. "Oh, so you've fixed it. Yes, I can understand you this time. Congratulations, I suppose. Now if there's nothing else, I'm in the middle of more paperwork than you've ever had to fill out in your life, so check back with me at a scheduled hour and we can --"
She cut him off, told him where she was and why.
At least, Bree thought she'd gotten that much out, and the belief went down with her into the dark.
The CDA had a secure area reserved for when human agents had to be brought in. It was deep within the facility under the Canterlot Archives. Perhaps forty ponies knew it was there at all, only twelve could directly reach it, and two of those were generally otherwise occupied.
Bree, working with some of the other human agents she'd met during mutual time in Equestria, had stored a number of medical supplies there. Most wouldn't work in her world: too magical, too high-tech, too everything. But while she was here, they all worked on her -- to the degree she would allow. She couldn't afford to have her ankle healed: an issue with witnesses, and so accepted just enough to get her roughly moving again.
As expected, Crossing wasn't happy. Not being happy was his natural state.
"We asked you to keep people from sending their trash over here," he shot at her, the red corona around his horn showing a heavily-spiking full primary. "I didn't say you could bring yours."
Bree sighed. "I'm sorry, Crossing -- I really am. It was just the first thing I thought of. Vampire disposal can be easy when you have time to plan it out, but... I didn't." She forced herself off the too-low table. "And now that I'm fixed enough to travel, I have to go back. Now."
"You are going to stay here," he ordered. "I need a briefing. You told us something about vampires, but if we have them coming across... buck it, we have disappearances so often now, some of them were from that thing, I have dead ponies, I have bodies to locate and families to find whom I can never comfort because the wild zone of your world reached out and took more of ours --"
"-- shut. up."
He stared at her. Dark blue eyes met green, touched the smallest hint of what was within.
The unicorn shut up.
"I have to find where he was working the blood magic, Crossing. Because he said he was sacrificing ponies on this side. You have dead bodies somewhere, I know that, and you would never believe how much I hate it. But he was also selling their blood. Was he taking it from them here, over and above what he needed to work his sick ritual? Would it survive the trip back? Or did he keep livestock?"
The unicorn looked away from her. Looked at anything which wasn't her.
"Go," Crossing Guard said, and vanished.
It took her fourteen hours and three fresh piles of ash to find it.
And when it was over, she took the bodies back.
DNA traces = 0
The briefing took four hours, and nopony thought to bring her water. Bree finally conjured her own.
They left her in the room for a while.
Nopony had asked about her hands.
Finally, Crossing trotted back.
"What's your schedule?" he harshly asked.
"I don't have anything I have to be in my world for right now," she told him. "Why? Did you detect something else I can deal with? Everything I found indicated he was keeping the ritual from his superiors until he was sure he could blackmail his way up the ranks with it and not get killed in the process." The larger the ego, the more detailed the well-hidden journal. "We're not going to see any more vampires for a while unless one of them replicates the accident on their own, but if it's another lost shifter..."
"You know about the temporary human settlement camp?" A hard emphasis on 'temporary'.
Bree blinked. "It's -- where you keep the peaceful humans. The ones who either got here by accident or can't make a round trip. If you don't have any immediate means of sending them back, they live there." She had scouted it from the outside six times, unable to find a way of breaching the shield which wouldn't alert the caster and not quite capable of aiming her arrivals through it. Those within seemed to be treated decently, if with increasing pony frustration about their ongoing presence. And her last observation had spotted a visibly-pregnant long-term resident: she suspected that really hadn't gone over well.
He nodded. "Right. I've had you walk through the prison a few times to see if you could identify any from your world. Now you're going to do the same in the settlement camp. I know we don't have any more of those vampires because Sun hasn't taken anyone else out yet. But if we have anything from your world which could be a threat, I want to know about it. Immediately."
Bree took a slow, painful breath. "And how are you planning on introducing me? A new resident? I stay for a couple of weeks before you find a way of sending me back? Because that, I need to clear time for."
"No. Spying takes too long. You said you have a sense of the things from your world -- the ones which aren't normal? Use it. If you have any doubts or think someone is lying, then we'll work on a spy solution. For now, we're going to line everyone up. I want you comparing histories, confronting, and being ready for a fight. We're switching out the personnel there so that only ponies who know about human agents are present. We'll be ready in two hours."
"What about the humans? Do they know some of us work for you? Are you sure they won't tell any ponies when they find out?"
The unicorn frowned. "We've never had an -- agent -- in there before. You're... right: it could be an issue. Do you have... an idea?"
She nodded. "The one I proposed. I go in as a new arrival. I'm betting everyone will be crowding around me, trying to figure out where I came from. If I have anyone... who recognizes my world. The most distant sort of family. When I'm done, I'll let you know and you pull me out. You can claim that the method you found for sending me back is only attuned to my genetic code."
"Your..."
Bree sighed, which also hurt. "I would explain it if anypony ever gave me the chance. Not that I understand how your genetics work, especially the racial ones... But make the lie into something which means 'One person, one passage' and that one person can only be me. Unless you want to tell them you have people working on the other side of the barrier, which I'd frankly prefer --"
"-- fine. Spying it is."
It had been one of the strangest nights of her life and for Bree, that was truly saying something.
There were one hundred and sixty-seven of them (with a plus-one on the way). They were from different worlds... so very many worlds... and so many of them were excited to meet her. Happy. Because they knew she was new and confused and disoriented and needed open welcome. Needed a chance at friends. And they were willing to give her that chance -- because the effect which made the normal humans of her world instinctively loathe her didn't work in Equestria. She was as normal as they would allow her to be.
And for the first time since she had turned eighteen, normal almost included everything.
Bree wanted to bask in it. To do nothing with her time within the settlement camp but feel that reminder of what it was like to be accepted. And she couldn't.
She showed them the tablet, explained how it functioned (with a lie about how it hadn't brought her here, she couldn't use it to get back). None had understood her exactly, but enough had direct experience with magic or super-science or, in her case, the former passing for and being channeled through the latter. Others had inborn powers, and it was going to be nearly impossible not to spend her entire time in New Cynosure finding out just how those worked. But even the most ordinary ones had heard tales from those who weren't, and so they accepted a woman with a two-part soul (although she didn't tell them about that aspect) without question.
Bree compared histories during that first night, was able to reject the vast majority of residents immediately. Those who dated to what she considered future or past: gone. Giant metal human habitat ruled by a lunatic artificial intelligence: pass. Those who came from places where samaritans in spandex flew about: interesting and she longed for a view, but it wasn't what she had been sent for. Simple listings of full professional leagues knocked out most of the ones on timelines which at first glance approximated her own, and she was startled to learn she seemed to have the one reality where Las Vegas hosted all four major sports, making it that much easier to rig every single championship through an extensive network of bribes and blackmail.
She didn't get to everyone, of course, not with so many to go through. At most, she had something beyond shallow exchanges with twenty. But she got close enough to all for her senses to reach out.
There was one. Only one -- but still one.
And Bree knew he'd felt her presence too.
She waited, sitting near the edge of the shield which confined the humans to the camp. She didn't have to wait long.
From behind her, always from behind because they would sneak up every time they couldn't find an excuse for a frontal assault, "I know what you are, Trad."
"And I know you, Tech." Staring at the energy which wasn't quite sky-blue. Not paying any visual attention to him.
"What I don't know," the representative from the Ivory Tower told her, "is just what kind of Trad you are." The dark man took another step forward. "With your look, I'd normally figure Ecstatic heavily into body modification... but there's nothing active on you and everything's organic, so God help you, that's your actual body. Go figure." He tapped the sunglasses, the ones he wore even at night, the only thing to come with him from home. "You're not preachy enough for Chorus, not bitchy enough for Verbena... settle it for me, will you? Or we're going to be here all --"
She moved. She'd been planning the move for the entire time she'd been waiting, had in fact pre-programmed it into the tablet to make sure it would work properly and held the effect until the moment it was needed. It worked to perfection.
And then she was kneeling over his prone body, right hand around his throat.
"Oh," he gasped. "Euthie. Now there's a shock..."
She didn't squeeze. "Someone who wants to stamp out all magic everywhere -- in Equestria." The thought sickened her. "Why the hell did the Princesses let you into the camp? I didn't think anyone was that good a liar, forget about how hard it is to even think about lying in front of those gazes at all. Do you have a hidden tool shop somewhere around here, where you're working your way back to the point where you can go on a rampage and make everything normal again --"
"-- magic -- is -- normal!"
Truth
Bree let go.
Jake sat up, slowly. He rubbed at his throat. "Hell of a grip, Euthanatos... obviously I'm not your first throat..."
"Say that again." It was an effort to keep things above a whisper.
"Magic is normal," the Technocrat repeated. "In Equestria. Where we come from, it's a violation of reality. It makes things worse for everyone. It's deviancy, if you could ever bring yourself to admit that. But here... the ponies need nearly every bit of magic they've got just to create and maintain the settled zones, and that's barely any real percentage of the continent. To remove magic from this world would be to condemn everypony here to death. I stand for the enforcement of what should be, Euthanatos -- and in this world, magic is what should be. I haven't started wiping out the native population any more than you've gone on a killing spree because someone made a rude comment about that sweater. It's not being outnumbered or out of tools or anything else. Here, they're right. And so I stand back and let them be right. They want to seal the barriers, the same way my side does... how much more am I supposed to agree with them? If I could recreate anything beyond a damn solar water heating system, I'd be nailing up the walls with them..."
There were times when Bree wondered if she was the last person in any world capable of detecting irony, and it took what was very nearly the single greatest effort of her life to make the blinking stop. "How... how did you get here?"
He grinned: white teeth flashed. "No one humiliated me with that one yet? Nude in my bathtub. Lab accident which reached into my on-site apartment and tossed me here. I got a pretty unique welcoming committee, too. Oh, and NWO, since you haven't asked. If I was a Void Engineer, I'd probably be out of here already."
"And all you're doing is...?"
He sighed. "Waiting it out. I already know what I'm probably going to do about Equestria if I get home -- nothing. Even if we could figure out how to consistently replicate the ride on a large scale, we can't evacuate here: the planet won't support much of an influx and they have enough problems without us trying to colonize... and any attempt to do so would probably turn into war. We could probably drop a hundred or so people in if we had to, claiming a big accident: anything beyond that and the Princesses would get suspicious. Of course, at that point, there's nothing left to send them back to. But I don't know who I can tell in the Order. Who wouldn't just try to -- invade. I wish I could use this place as a backup plan. But I can't figure out how to make it work without losing both worlds."
"And not bringing the wrong things through."
They were words she hadn't meant to say.
Jake looked at her, got his legs into a more comfortable position, waited -- then got bored and cued her. "Let me guess: you're a round-tripper. Well, I knew some people had to have season passes, and after I saw the ponies turn the personnel switch around in mid-shift, I figured we were in for something strange -- and then you showed up, and my training says you were looking for trouble in the form of me. We all have our tricks, Euthie -- and there are times when I seem to be pretty good at reaching the right conclusions on pretty scant evidence, or so my superiors used to feel. Of course, you'll probably just wipe this conversation from my head after we finish, assuming I'm still breathing at all. And I know you're not taking me back to reinforce the enemy."
"I can't." Stark. "I can move myself. I can move objects. I could move your corpse. If you wanted a trip back so badly, you'd have to suicide and stay down past any hope of revival. If that happens to interest you...?"
"So you're not killing me." It wasn't quite a statement.
"Have you hurt any ponies? Do you intend to?"
"I wouldn't be here if either one applied. And -- no."
Truth
"Then why should I?" Bree asked him. "Solar water heaters don't seem to be all that calcifying to me."
He chuckled, leaned back a little. "You know, this is the longest conversation I've ever had with one of yours outside an interrogation room?"
"I believe it."
"And I still want your deviant ass wiped off the face of the planet."
"But not this planet."
Jake looked at her, brown eyes on green. "Are you going to hurt any ponies?"
"No."
"There you go, then. We're off the battlefield... why lure in the war? So what did you almost bring in?"
"Did bring in," Bree quietly said.
This time, he truly waited for her.
"When I started coming regularly... once I realized just how clean this place was... I made sure all my arrival sites were decontaminated. That none of what's so screwed up on our side followed me through. I never found anything, ever. I was convinced I hadn't carried any of the darkness across. But before I came here, in our world... I found a leech." He didn't know the term. "Vampire. One who'd worked out a way across the barrier, who was killing ponies and using their blood as a calming agent."
He hissed, a sudden intake of breath between abruptly-clenched teeth. "Tell me you offed him."
"No. Celestia did... sort of." Which got her a justified stare. "He had me pinned in an alley... the first thing I could think of was dropping him into sunlight and there's a time zone difference, so I brought him here -- dead matter -- and Sun finished him off."
"Good," Jake said with an open satisfaction which Bree would never be able to make herself feel. "Dead vampire. Or leech -- I like that. So what's the problem?"
So it had come to this: she was so desperate for anyone to talk to, she was doing it with a Technocrat.
"Souls."
"And...?"
For the first time, she laughed. It wasn't all that sincere. "You believe in souls?"
"For purposes of whatever this is, yes. What about souls?"
"His method -- brought ponies back to our side. He had to sacrifice one for each trip back. But I know he brought extras. And..."
She had found herself on her knees. Palms against the ground. Collapsed in all ways but the final physical one and the mental threshold she lived in fear of traveling through. She had wept, let the tears come until there were none left to flow, and it had done nothing except make the floor of the filthy basement stain her clothing and skin with dried blood forced back to liquid.
Vampires used people. This one used ponies exactly the same way: it used them up. With nothing in a dead heart which could care about the deaths on both sides, he'd found it so much simpler and enjoyable to haul his catches back. As for keeping them alive, bleeding them slowly? Why bother? He could always go back and get more ponies. And so he had. Over and over.
She'd run every scan she knew how to do within the bands that registered the passage of souls, for Bree knew what happened to those in her own world. Some returned to live again. Others were lost in a place where the ponies used the same word, but one with a more positive connotation than her own: shadowlands. A place of rest for their world: the prison of the restless in hers. Others... fell. And in a dying world where no matter what the Chorus claimed, she could see no hand of a benevolent deity, Bree felt few rose. Didn't want to know what the criteria was for rising in a place where everything around her seemed to rejoice in the final agonies of a universe gone so horribly wrong.
Had the souls of the ponies gone back through the barrier, reached their own afterlife? Or were they being tortured in hers, the same way she suspected nearly all who passed on were? The way everyone might be after the end?
She could see the traces where souls had left pony bodies. There were no remnants of cauls across the border of the Shroud: they had not become wraiths. But beyond that... it had been too long to find any such small passages through the barrier, especially given the way the vampire's method had messed up all those readings beyond repair.
Bree didn't know where they had gone. Might never know.
She'd screamed. She had beaten her hands against the walls until new blood flowed. She wept for a loss she would never truly be sure about, hated the vampire, hated her world, wished for the end of all things simply to prevent it from happening again.
For her world was dying and every day, she had to struggle for any belief that it wasn't deserved.
"Bucking horse apples," Jake nearly whispered, then forced his volume back up. "You have one fucked-up perspective on the universe, you know that? Okay... I get it. You're afraid they're locked in our local hellhole, forever. And the vampire..."
"That I set his soul free to be in theirs," Bree finished, not bothered to go above that whisper. "I don't even know if the ponies have a punishment part of the afterlife. I haven't exactly gotten to speak to any about it and it's not a natural part of most overheard conversations. Some of them believe in reincarnation: I've gotten that much. I've never seen a single pony wraith. And if he got a second chance here, as a pony, with a completely clean slate... I could live with that. It's part of the idea, why we do things at all -- not that you would ever believe that. But a corrupt vampire soul loosed on their afterlife... or lingering here, beyond my ability to find... coming back as an equally-corrupt pony..."
"They're not exactly all princes of good behavior," Jake pointed out. "Or Princesses. There are some major pony assholes out there, even if some trick valve in their anatomy means you never see the actual aperture when not in use. You might never see the difference."
"Not funny, Tech."
"Wasn't trying to be. Every society has problems, Trad. Everyone has monsters. Ours are just more hidden -- and once they're actually found, more obvious. And if you don't know the answer, can't know -- assume the best. They went home and he's getting what he deserved. Even if that's some kind of second chance. Make that your reality."
The left side of her mouth quirked up. "The one you want to make sure can't exist."
"Well, while you've got it..." He shrugged. "So you killed a vampire who was getting through."
"Yes."
"Is that what you do? Keep our monsters from getting here? And -- hang on, got another giant jump coming here -- the ponies freaked when they found out about the vampire and wanted to make sure nothing was lurking under our sweet little dome?"
She nodded.
"Crap," he said sincerely. "Wish someone had told me. I've been checking the same, and guess what? I thought you were it. I was waiting to get you alone so the others wouldn't get hurt..."
Bree stared at the New World Order agent. Laughed.
And the true laughter hurt, because so much surrounding it did, in so many ways. But for that moment, the laugh was real... and so was the one which answered it.
Silence, equally disbelieving, took its time about closing in.
Finally, Jake asked "So what are you going to do?"
"Stay a few days. Make sure I didn't miss anything. Set up some alerting tricks around the border just in case anything does get past the pony screening process." All she had to do was replicate the system she used for her own home on a larger scale.
He nodded. "And -- about me? You think you can leave me in here with the others?"
"Don't give me a reason to change my mind." She stood up, started to walk away.
From behind her again, "Bree?"
"What?"
"If I get back... and I catch you trying to do... what you've been doing -- as a Trad... look, you're already using advanced technology, you're trying to seal the barriers in the name of protecting innocents -- we take people in when their motives are good, you've got to know that, it's not just Conventions which defect..."
"No."
The next word wasn't a plea. It never would be. "Why?"
"Because in the perfect world of your superiors," she softly answered, "no one even dreams of magic -- and so no one would ever dream of ponies..."
He had no response, and she walked away.
Five days. Call it five days to assemble the necessary components, get everything tested, teach the CDA how to use them, keep working on the method which at least let Crossing signal her, even with the language issue, they could use Morse code... Five days to put it all together and make New Cynosure a little safer, five days during which she could do nothing but hope no monsters from her world got through to cause pain. After that, she had people to kill. And so it would go until the day it either all ended -- because the barrier had been sealed, because her world no longer existed to cause a problem at all, if there was no more cancer to cut out -- or if she simply died.
Bree longed for an end.
And as long as the ponies were involved, 'Which one?' still mattered.
Author's Note
snuff out the light
claim your right
to a world of darkness
