It took some time for the flesh to realize that things had changed.
The greatest parts of its mind had atrophied in the long ages that had passed during its entrapment. Piece by piece it had written itself into long-term storage, checksummed chemical complexes designed to sustain themselves with half-lives of dozens of millions of years.
Age by age, the world had turned. The ice had come and wiped away the cities of the flesh's masters, and after the ice had come fire, and grass, and the the meat of apes, and the bones of machines, and the fire of pinprick stars lit up over the surface of the world, and new ice, greater and more terrible than any the Earth had known before.
And then new meat had come, with teams of drills and fire-lances, and had cut through the old ice and stone to marvel at the ages that had passed.
The flesh woke, almost dead and almost mindless, and took the meat into itself.
BIZARRE VANISHING AT ARCTIC RESEARCH BASE
All Staff Missing—Crown Investigative Bureau Stumped
"ANCIENT DEATH ROBOT ON THE LOOSE"
Inside Scoop From Secret Government Contact
EQUESTRIA ACCUSED OF SLAUGHTER OF GRIFFON OUTPOST
"This is an act of war!" crows clan ambassador
NEWS REPORTER EATEN ALIVE BY 80-FOOT SLUG
Journalist is victim of giant prehistoric beast
THIRD DISAPPEARANCE ON MAJOR ROADS
Travelers Should Stay In Groups, Report Anything Suspicious
"'Bat-foal leads royal guard on three-county chase,'" Rarity read. "'Mutant steals Celestia's carriage for joy-ride.' Oh, where do they come up with these things?"
"It doesn't seem very accurate," said Fluttershy, from her place on the opposite end of the spa's hot tub.
"Oh, it's not supposed to be," Rarity said. "It's not news, it's quote-news-unquote."
"We've got a problem!" Trixie shrieked as she scrambled up the stairs.
Chrysalis sighed. "What is it this time, you foal of a—"
"It's moving again!" Trixie said, trampling over several changeling drones to get away from the stairwell. There was, from below, a strange and irregular rumbling.
"But that was half the lamp oil in the city," Chrysalis said. "It should still be burning! Nothing could survive that!"
A blast of flame and noxious vapors burst up from the stairs. Drumbeats and faint, reedy song echoed from the dungeon they led to.
"It is still burning!" Trixie said, and then she jumped out the window.
"Tekeli-li!" cried a chorus of sharp, keening voices from the lower stairs, and Chrysalis decided that it would be best if she jumped out the window too.
"Oh, Celestia," Trixie said, and she cowered away from the roundels set into the walls. They lined the ancient stone from floor to ceiling. "They're moving."
Twilight frowned, stepped forward past the other pony. "It's just an optical illusion," she said. The long, low chamber seemed like a service tunnel to her, though the proportions seemed somehow disjointed. The roundels were all of different sizes, and with each step they played with perspective, tricking the eye into seeing different arrangements.
"Trixie doesn't trust this place." Trixie was breathing too fast, too, and Twilight had to adjust the long tether-spell pulling in fresher air from where the cavern wall gave way into the underground city.
"Tekeli-li," said a huge, blind penguin as it stepped into view from a corner at the end of the hall. Trixie shrieked, and jumped back against a wall—
—and the roundels moved, in a way that hurt Twilight's eyes—
—and Trixie was gone.
"Tekeli-li," offered the penguin again. It was standing on a path that had been worn into the stone, Twilight realized, down the whole length of the room… but never near any of the walls.
"Trixie?" Twilight said, but her voice was faint. She stepped slowly towards the middle of the chamber, where the worn path was. "Trixie?" she repeated louder, but no noise came back to her but a faint croaking like that of huge frogs.
"Tekeli-li!" hissed the penguin. It was staring at her, even though its eyes were cataract white.
"I don't know what you mean," Twilight said. Her hooves were shaking.
The penguin shook its head. "Tekeli-li," it said, and walked back around the corner.
When she'd stepped to the end of the room, Twilight saw she'd been mistaken. There was no corner to the room at all—only a sloping curve set with blobby, misshaped roundels, deceptive-looking in the light from her horn, and a single huge round door that she'd been looking at the whole time.
There were, she saw with some apprehension, no penguin-footed tracks in the dust that coated the edges of the room.
"Fluttershy, it's a giant… blobby thing the size of a train! It's got, like, six mouths! There's no way it eating half your animals was an accident!" Rainbow Dash gestured wildly, shooting glares at the giant blobby thing in question to make sure it didn't move from the huge life-stripped crater it had made in Fluttershy's backyard. Even the grass underneath it had been eaten away, leaving bare earth.
"But, Rainbow Dash," Fluttershy said, "it didn't try to—"
"It almost ate one of my hooves!" It had maybe not been the best decision to try and buck the huge blob of carnivorous flesh-jelly, given that the scrap of it that clung to her had already burned a nasty scar into the nail of her right hindhoof by the time Fluttershy doused it in enough vinegar to crumple off and shrivel back to the main mass of the creature. It had still been worth the try, in Rainbow Dash's opinion.
"I'm sure that it's really very—"
"There's no way we can let this thing just… wander around and try to eat ponies," Rainbow Dash said, and she huffed.
"It's not trying to—"
"Maybe Zecora knows how we can get rid of it," Rainbow Dash said. "Or Twilight can get the Princesses to send it to the moon or—"
"RAINBOW DASH!" Fluttershy shrieked, and the prismatic pegasus flinched. "Um, look. If you don't mind."
Rainbow Dash's gaze followed Fluttershy's outstretched hoof, and her jaw gaped when she saw that the strange creature's hide had bubbled into huge letters as tall as she was, off-yellow against the purple of its jelly-hide, and loopy and disjointed but legible.
SORRY, it said.
