The Final 9

In a depressive, dim, candle-lit room amidst a cluttered desk and surroundings with constant and unrelenting popping, clicking, and banging in the background sat a white, alabaster mare on her haunches levitating a needle and thread. She bought the two items close up to her eye and ruffled her wings with frustration and chronic fatigue. With fierce concentration and forcing her eyes open wider, she managed to insert the tip of the thread through the eye of the needle.

She picked up a half-made equine doll from her work desk and a burlap hoof; sewn over at one end, open at the other, stuffing visible with a metal rod centered through the middle of the leg. She held the leg to the front right portion of the underside of the finished doll where more stuffing and another metal rod poked out of the toy's torso. The other three hoofs identical in style; burlap cylinders with a miniature horse shoe attached to the end of each of them, made to look like a pony's leg and hoof. It even had a metal horn attached to its forehead.

With a click, the two rods connected and the mare went about sewing the leg into the rest of the body. That out of the way, she picked up a circular device with a cable running out from the base with frayed wires coming out from the plastic casing. She touched the exposed wire to another wire, and the device opened and closed like a camera shutter.

"Perfect!" She exclaimed in relief. Her expression became sombre after that. "They showed such promise, but we squandered our hope and trust in them, thinking they had changed." She gave a mournful sigh. "I am sorry it's come to this, but I have no choice left. You must live on, my student. You must lead us to a better place; to rebuild this scorched land. Our world is ending, but life must go on."

She picked up the completed burlap doll, taking it over to the other side of the room, side-stepping piles of spellbooks; the likes of which only ever saw the darkness of the underground vaults where all the forbidden books were kept. She placed the doll in a brass skeletal half-sphere; which sat atop a stand. She tied the doll spread-eagled with string so the body of the doll hung in the middle of the half-sphere, its head hung forward; limp, void of any life.

At the top of the ring, a brass rod came out at an angle as did two more rods from the bottom third, converging on a smaller concentric ring that had six raised pins sitting in the middle of the plate. She placed a talisman, divided into six segments, each with a different colour into the plate, fitting the six pins. Orange, white, pink, yellow, blue, and purple. She touched her horn to the talisman, and everything faded to black.

*An indeterminate period of time later*

With a soft thunk, the now-purple doll doll fell from her binds, the last piece of string, cut and frayed from  rubbing against the frame of the half-orb from gentle gusts in the wind nudging their way in through the window. One shutter hung loose, and the other creaked to and fro as the wind tormented it.

The doll knocked loose the talisman from the socket as she fell to the floor. The talisman rolled noisily along the floor of the dead silent room, the metallic rolling echoing so loud it could have been heard from miles around. It finally came to a clattering stop some ways away from the unicorn doll.

The doll lay there, the hind legs stretched out behind her with her right front hoof tucked underneath its torso while the left front leg lay adjacent to the torso. Not a moment later, the two circular devices recessed into its head clicked open and shut repeatedly, almost like it's running a self-diagnostic test to see if everything is working correctly.

It pulled its hoof out from underneath itself, using it as a brace against the floor to pick itself up with. Finally standing on all fours, she put the same right hoof to her head to stabilize the swaying head. With a light metal-on-metal clank, it recoiled its hoof in both astonishment, and mild horror.

'What is this?' The doll thought. She turned the leg over and studied it as the shutters in its eyes narrowed to pinpricks. Metal hooves? She tapped her horn with the hoof again. A metal horn too, apparently. She stood up on her hind legs and studied the underside of her body. A large clothes zipper ran from between her front legs all the way down to her hind legs, and the two flaps lay open, revealing the components and wires inside.

She fumbled with the zipper, using her hooves to push them aside to see what lay within. It's nothing spectacular; several technicolour wires running between, over, and underneath other components that looked as though they're grafter onto a larger cylindrical device. Sitting on her haunches, the tiny purple burlap toy fumbled with the over-sized metal zipper, of which was emblazoned by a cryptic 'YKK' raising out of the face of the zipper. The metal tab proved to be too over-sized to pull with her hooves, so she gave up and elected to study her surroundings.

Before she could, a spark from across the room caught her attention.

Eyeing it cautiously, she inched her way over toward the peculiar, half-sphere looking object as it crackled with several different colours. Her eye-shutters clicking as she blinked, she nudged it with her hoof, resulting in a squeaky metallic clank.

Nothing happened.

She poked it again, but still nothing happened. Sitting on her haunches, she picked up the device between her two metal hooves, turning it over to inspect it. It has six strange symbols on it and six little arms holding each segmented piece to the outer rim of whatever this is. Turning it awkwardly in her already loose grip, it clattered to the floor as a spark of purple electricity erupted from the starburst symbol and struck the metal cone atop her head.

The doll collapsed to the rotting wooden floor, wordlessly groaning with a clenched mouth. No, that didn't sound right, did it? She tried opening her mouth to talk, but nothing came out. Her camera-like eyes slowly widened and her fuzzy vision slowly cleared, showing the strange object laying face down as it rocked on its spherical face. Her demeanour transformed to one of curiosity when she saw six circular holes recessed into the underside of the thing. Turning it over, she saw each hole corresponded with one of the six symbols etched into the face of the sphere.

A sudden gust of wind caused the shutters over the other side of the dilapidated room to creak and bang against the frame, drawing her attention away from the object. She picked it up, sat back, and dropped it into the opening in her chest. She fumbled with the big zipper pull, eventually leaning forward to grab it in her mouth and pull her head up to partially close it.

'I wish this thing would close all the way...' She thought. Almost like magic, the zipper pull was enveloped by a byzantium glow, and, almost as if it gained a mind of its own, shot up and closed the rest of the gap. She just sat there with a rather perturbed expression; not knowing what to think. 'Did  I do that?'

Her eyes converged upwards, wanting to look at the metal horn atop her head, but, alas she couldn't. Comically, like a foal would, she trotted around in circles trying to gain a look until one of her legs caught on a stray piece of paper, amongst many, that somehow got strewn over the floor tripping her up, causing her to fall to the flood with a thud. Wordlessly groaning again, she got up and her attention turned to the window again.

Curiosity got the better of her, and she idly walked over to the impossibly high shutters, craning her neck ever more as the further she got, the higher her head got. Sighing in defeat, she hung her head with the realization of not being able to reach the window where she currently stood. Her head turned to the right, eyeing a pile of conveniently stacked books and boxes. The books had odd titles with symbols she couldn't make out, although one of the books had markings on the spine that looked like the symbols on the strange device. Sadly, it's wedged between many other books, so taking this particular book out would prove difficult for something of her stature.

Reaching the top of the pile, she managed to pull herself up onto the edge of the window sill, being careful the shutter hanging on just by one hinge didn't knock her off. She ducked under it, gaining proper footing on the edge of the window sill. What she saw, shocked her.

Ruin.

Nothing but pure, total, ruin.

Her jaw hung agape like the broken window shutter. In every sense of the word, she was breathless, and not in the good way either. There's something wrong with her voice and it needed to be fixed.

The houses; remnants of a town long since burnt down. All that remained were sections of walls, roofs, floors, windows, and splintered, skeletal wooden beams barely holding everything together. The rest of the building's structure lay strewn around the bottom of the floor and the immediate area house, shop, restaurant, cafe, or whatever purpose these ruins were previously used for. Amongst the rubble were carts, bathtubs, ovens, cabinets with broken windows and crockery, and various cloths hanging from jagged pieces of wood sticking out from the buildings at unnatural angles. Angles that made the purple doll cringe.

A sudden creaking from somewhere down below made her scan her immediate surroundings for the source. Her eyes darted back and forward trying to locate the source, and they eventually settled upon two moving objects. One looked like a roller skate, and the other a white version of herself pulling the skate on some string. The skate and white doll emerged out from behind a twisted, broken wooden cart. Her hoof shot out and her mouth opened in an attempt to call out, but no sound escaped. 'Note to self: Remember you can't talk.'

She anxiously tapped her hooves on the spot—as if tap dancing, disappointed she might not reach the other individual in time. She turned her head over her shoulder, glancing over to the door that hung ajar from across the room from her position. Her gaze darted back and forward from it, and the individual idly trudging in the opposite direction from the sentient doll. If she had a voice, she would have audibly given a frustrated groan.

The purple doll jumped off of the window ledge, skillfully landing on all fours before launching herself over to the door, galloping through it and down a flight of stairs. She reached the bottom, but the creaking the other creature was producing sounded very very weak. She tuned her ears to the source of the noise, and ran off in its direction. She had to stop periodically to make sure she's running in the right direction of the creaking; the pounding of her tiny hooves obscuring the sound. She darted in and out of houses, avoiding sharp and pointy objects that would easily tear at the burlap fabric she's made out of.

Eventually the creaking of what she correctly assumed to be the skate being pulled by the other doll became clearer as she peeked out from behind a ludicrously over-sized, discarded tin can. She poked her head out too far, and accidentally nudged the can. As a result, making it give off a metallic pitter-patter against the dirt ground.

"Who's there?" Came the soft-spoken voice.  The purple doll inched her head forward slowly, bringing the front half of her head into view. "It's OK, I'm a friend," added the white doll. With all due apprehension, the purple doll stepped into full view. The white one gasped, taken aback by the sight of the purple one. To the purple doll, the white one looked rather peculiar.

She had some sort of contraption sitting atop her head, the frame of which included a coil of wire holding one half of a spectacle's eyepiece on a hinge, currently folded up. The white one pushed it down, and started inspecting the purple one over in silence, only giving a short 'Hmm...' now and then. When she moved to the purple doll's back, she gasped rather loudly.

"It's you!" She exclaimed gleefully. "We always knew we would find you!"

The purple one glanced over to her back, only now just noticing that the starburst symbol from the talisman painted onto her back. She then brought a hoof up and tapped it against her throat, opening her mouth and shaking her head.

"What's the matter, can't you speak?" The white one undid the rope she'd been using to pull the skate from around her midsection. While the purple one is made of sewn burlap, the white one looked like it's made of patches of white leather tied together with string up the underside of the torso; knotted just under her chin to resemble a bow. She too, had a horn. The white one turned her back, propping herself up on the edge of the skate and started fishing around in the hole cut in the side for something among the pile of junk she carried in it.

After some time and clinking of objects being pushed around, she finally pulled out something, exclaiming; "Wahaa!" Her expression softened to a somewhat motherly one. She took it in her magical aura, and floated it over to the purple doll.

"Could you mind if I installed this into you?" She asked, rather calmly. The purple one sat on her haunches for the Nth time that day. The white one parted the over-sized zipper teeth by pulling down on the equally over-sized metal tab until it came down half way. The object she pulled from the makeshift cart resembled a speaker. A very small miniature speaker. It wouldn't have been the size of a pea. Dome-shaped, it had a black wire mesh with black foam underneath. The wire mesh holding the foam down set into a silver-coloured metal ring that held everything together. From the bottom came four wires.

The white one parted the zipper flaps and levitated the device into the purple one, sticking in her hoof too and fumbling around. "This land was poisoned, having all the magic sucked dry from it. But, if you know where to look, you can always find a spark of life." With a shove of her hoof the device clicked into place and a glow washed over the purple doll as she sucked in a breath of air. "Go on, try talking," the white one coaxed.

"..ht ...y ...am..." It stuttered; the device clearly not installed correctly.

"Oh, pardon me, I do believe I got some wires crossed!" The leather-bound doll apologetically exclaimed. She put her hoof back into the insides of the purple one and configured the wires again.

"...hat my ...ame" The burlap doll stuttered again.

"Oh my, today doesn't seem to be my day." She put her hoof back into her newly found friend, but only momentarily. A little sparking noise could be heard, and she withdrew her hoof again. "Try that, darling."

"What is my name?" The purple one finally asked.

"You really don't know?" The purple one simply shook her head. "My dear Twilight, it's me, Rarity! Don't you remember anything at all? Come, it's time I took you somewhere safe."