She watched Alex as he came closer, a slight smile on his lips despite the foreboding atmosphere and the reason of why she was here. Although she was smiling too so she couldn’t say anything about him finally being happy that somebody besides himself was here. Her original reason was to talk to him about the burst of magic he gave off, earlier just like the same burst of magic Twilight gave off when she ascended, but different in accordance to it being a different person. When she had arrived she didn’t know what to expect, Twilight being the best and just barely ascending, but the last thing she expected was Mercer. But that drifted to the back of her mind in favor of several questions that needed to be asked before anything else.

So here she was, watching the man responsible for what would be arguably mankind’s greatest triumph, the ability to make every human compatible with magic without even using her or her sister’s blood. His white labcoat trailing behind him, ignoring the rain that should have made it plaster to his body.

All those thoughts traveled through her mind in the two seconds of his brisk twenty second walk to her, him stopping a few hooves in front of her, piercing eyes running up and down her figure as if she was just a curiousity. “Oh hello your majesty, if I would have known you were coming I might have asked you in, but alas I think we’re quite fine in the rain don’t you?” He asked with a mocking tone.

“I’m here because I need to talk to you.” She replied calmly, his only response being to cross his arms. “My student is sick because of what happened at Gentek, there’s reports of a superhuman in New York City and your sister seems to be another superhuman as well.” She paused as a look of confusion encompassed his face and he looked to the side. “This is all because of what happened at Gentek and I need to know exactly what you were making in there.”

Mercer kept looking to the side, one of his hands scratching his chin slightly, for a few moments before looking her back in the eye. “How about we play a game then, it seems that I’m out of the loop your highness.” He paused to look up at the raining sky. “Let’s go inside and talk, because I have a feeling this is going to be a looong talk.”

“Agreed.” With that said he turned around and walked back inside, with her trailing close behind him. His labcoat picked up the non-existent wind and fluttered behind him as she followed him through the winding halls of the building, the duo silent as they kept walking on, he obviously having a certain place in mind for their discussion.

But he broke the silence after a while as they walked past what looked eerily like a dissection table and into an elevator, her having to lower her head slightly to avoid hitting her horn against the ceiling. “Here’s the deal, you ask a question I answer if I want to.” He reached down to press a series of floors on the numberpad, while she shook her head at his arrogance. But alas she couldn’t say no, her student was sick and had been rambling according to Spike’s messages. “Then I ask a question and you tell me what I want to know, got it?”

If it wasn’t for the fact he held almost all the cards she would have laughed at him, instead she nodded when he looked at her. Content with that he leaned back against the wall of the elevator and watched the numbers flash as they passed by each floor, slower than they should have been. “Alright good, first question is why are you so sure that Gentek is responsible for making your student sick?”

Not bothering to look at him she simply stated the obvious reason. “You said yourself that your cure was a virus that you were having trouble with cultivating. An explosion of your entire facility would have released anything you might have created in your lab.” While telling him why she noticed that they past by one of the floors he had pressed.

His eyes shot open in surprise before he tried to cover it up by smoothing the sides of his hair and nodded. “Some of our experiments are more…. unique than others.” Was he surprised to hear about Gentek? That was two whole days ago.

“How unique?”

He smirked knowingly, shaking his head side to side. “Unique as in we built it from scratch, can’t say anything more, you know top secret. My turn, my sister what do you mean she’s superhuman? I haven’t seen much of the news lately, moved to a secure facility a bit ago for the final tests.” They passed by another floor that he pressed.

“I have heard about your sister on the news, from my most trusted ponies that she outran helicopters, ran up the side of a wall and was shot dozens if not hundreds of times. What would you have in that lab of yours that could make somebody like that?” The elevator started to slow.

“We are funded by military backers and contrary to what you might think I don’t know about everything that goes on in there. They could be working on a super soldier serum for all I know. What about this other superhuman, what’s he look like?”

“It’s a she and all I managed to get was some ramblings from my student and some weird reports from my ponies that still watch the news. A woman in a black jumpsuit and messy red hair. Who is she?” The elevator stopped.

He remained silent until the doors opened, face still, the floor indicator completely blank as he walked out into a barely lit corridor. He disappeared into the shadows, then re-appeared under the next light before turning a corner and all was still for several moments until he called out of the shadows, “Come now your highness, you’re the sun aren’t you? A little darkness shouldn’t be to frightening.”

The darkness wasn’t the problem.

It was the room itself that was wrong. Everything was wrong with it. The air tasted like poison, it was filled with hate and suffering so thick it felt like it was suffocating her very spirit. The lights felt like they would burn her if she stood under them. She knew it wasn’t real and couldn’t hurt her.

But it spoke a lot of him since it was all his imagining. Shivering slightly at his choice of rooms she stepped forward onto the steel floor, recoiling as her clad hoofs made a loud pang. She ignored it and kept walking forward, just looking ahead. “Ah wonderful she’s not afraid of the dark. That woman you’re asking about is a test subject of ours. My question, did your student ever meet said woman?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but stopped as she reached the first light, finding everything to be moving to the right slightly. Wondering what was going on she looked down to see the floor moving up and down, as if there were worms under the steel floor moving the world to the side and carrying her with it. Sneering at the disgusting thought she resumed her walking, albeit now trotting at a completely dignified rate. “She did, at Gentek when she was going to give your people some requested supplies. Why do you ask?”

She reached the second light and continued on, moving to the left slightly to compensate for the moving worm floor. “So your student the, fucking Alicorn of magic, met Mother? Ohohoho that is not going to be fun. What are her symptoms?” He asked, his voice taking a darker tone.

Turning the corner she squinted her eyes to try and see where she was going to see she was now walking down another hallway, this time with a light at the end of it. “No no no you answe--”

“I’m fucking asking what her symptoms are!” He screamed at her interrupting her protest, before he calmly continued. “I’m asking because what I’m about to say can either be bad or really really bad.”

Frowning at that half-answer and its implications she reached the end of the corridor, now finding herself in a room with lights all angled at a massive glass box. She answered back as she walked around the room, wondering both where he was and what this room was supposed to be. "She's had a massive fever, she's been throwing up blood, she's having auditory hallucinations--"

A clang from behind a row of consoles set up behind the lighted glass cage as he interrupted her. "Like voices?"

"Exactly like that and she's been having the disturbing feeling of being watched." She finished approaching the console and looking over it easily, to find no Mercer and just hundreds of buttons on the console. Inwardly sighing she moved onto the desks set on the side of the room she came from.

"How long has she had these symptoms?" He replied with the sound of metal on metal, screeching loud and painfully from what sounded like the opposite side of the room.

This was starting to get the slightest bit annoying, everything about this should be subconscious, he shouldn't be able to either move that fast without her noticing or able to project those sounds. "About two days now.”

A harsh laugh echoed in the oversized room. "You should kill her and burn the body, no hope for her now. Best you can hope for is she dies in complete agony, screaming in pain for days on end, vomiting blood and growing tumors. Worst case scenario she becomes a Runner and rips out your guts and then takes over the world.

That pissed her off. She had to put up with an arrogant human, hiding in the shadows taunting her with Twilight's death? No she would not put up with that, he wanted her to suffer in pain while he scurried in the shadows. Inwardly she was a fire, outwardly she was as cold as ice voice completely even. "You dare to tell me, to my face no less, that you want my beloved student, my practical daughter to suffer?"

"Oh you misinterpret me. If she dies painfully she's no danger to anybody because she'd be infected with a strain that'd kill itself off by the end of the month. A runner though?" He laughed again, a sad painful laugh as his footsteps echoed, this was like a night-terror, she thought as he continued talking, hidden in the shadows. "A runner will spread the plague, the strength of a thousand men in one, the resilience of a nuclear fallout shelter, the brilliance of a thinking, living virus co-ordinating the extinction of every race. Inside an Alicorn that's already a child-genius from what I've heard, has magic beyond you, can fly and could already punch through walls? Believe me when I say that you WANT her to suffer instead."

What in Tartarus was he going on about, Twilight wouldn't do something like that under any circumstances. "I don't believe she'd do that."

"No I don't think she would either. The virus though..." He trailed off with a click coming from the glass box. She glanced to it and didn't see him and instead kept walking around, staying closer to the lights as the serum had apparently given him some magical prowess.

"You underestimate her, she's faced far worse things before, without her magic. Without us to help her. She’s an Alicorn now, complete with all the boons to one’s body and mind, there's nothing in that lab of yours that could change her like that unless you yourself used magic." Trotting around the glass box she kept trying to see him, knowing he had to be in here somewhere.

A quiet tut from the glass box made her look again and there he was, sitting on a table that hadn't been there before. "You want to know what I hate about your kind?" He paused as if he wanted a response before continuing, pulling out a scalpel that had been in his pocket and twisting it back and forth, examining it. "You call your wonderful science something so fucking degrading. Magic." He made a gagging noise at the word. "Magic this, magic that, everything's got to be magic. And yet here I am, a man with something oh so more potent than any type of magic you could ever make."

He spread his arms to the side to emphasize himself. "I made a cure out of my weapon!" She frowned at that, their cure was a weapon before they arrived? They were insane. "I took something that could change life on a cellular level and crafted it to suit my needs, without so-called magic," He air-quoted the word to mock her. "It just pisses me off that you all think you're superior because of the way you fucking evolved!"

He stomped the ground in anger, the dream glass fracturing, along with his figure. Reddish lines appeared on his body, his face, his clothes even as he continued ranting. "I fucking clawed my way to the top, becoming who I am, abandoning who I was to create a better life and stop fending for each day of my life! And you want to know what fucking happens when I near my end-goal? You want to know!?!" He screamed jabbing the scalpel at her, while the red lines kept moving up and down, his face changing shape along with his body. He was finally being affected by the serum, but it wasn't working like it should.

"A motherfucking nation full of fucking poison air appears in the Pacific and I'm forced to abandon my years of work and re-direct it to saving the fucking human race!" The hand not holding the scalpel started to flatten into a hoof, then unflattened and re-flattened again, as if he was protesting the fact of changing. "Then some high and mighty bastards start moving into my country changing everybody into them! Fucking preaching about how their life is perfect, no poverty, no crime, nothing wrong like my whole life!" He continued to scream at her, his voice starting to become hauntingly familiar as with parts of his body, walking back and forth in the glass cage. Her mouth started to gape as his hair turned to a blue black little white dots splattered throughout the floating mane.

"I worked so god-damn hard to make the virus the way it was, as the fucking solution to the problem and then you all come along and force me to change it! Fucking! Change! My! Life's! Work!" Her sister's voice screamed at her, lights flickering above the two of them as his body became less human and more pony, then back again morphing like fluid.

"Better in every way! No need to deal with the problems any of us have had in our lives! Mine fucking especially! No need to fucking worry about protecting your fucking sister!” Each sentence was punctuated by a black hoof, each time cracking the glass cage.. “No need to fucking claw to the top!” Crack. “No fucking need to deal with foster care!” Crack, lines snacked up and down the cages. “No god damn need to worry about anything, because everything is just so fucking perfect!” Down went the hoof and with another crack the glass cage broke apart, sending shards flying everywhere that pinged harmlessly off the both of them, but some smashed into the lights, throwing the room into complete darkness.

The only sound in the room was his heavy breathing for a few minutes, Celestia not knowing whether or not to leave as this was either an opportunity to see what was going on, or a safe way to get out. She chose to stay as his breathing slowed. “You’ll have to excuse that, completely unprofessional.”

She heard him adjust his labcoat in the darkness, fabric rubbing against fabric. “But my point stands, I fucking hate your kind, just like I hate most people. Well not hate, more of I really wish you didn’t exist but you’re there anyways. When somebody messes with my mind though? Oh that fills me with so much hate. That’s why I’m glad you’re here.”

She took a step back, as he said that, she couldn’t be harmed but that didn’t mean an unnerving statement wouldn’t have any effect on her.. “And why are you glad I’m here?”

“Simply?” A massive weight slammed into her chest, throwing her off the floor and into the wall, her head whipping against the metal once before she was pinned against said wall by said weight. She felt all of it, just as real and painful as reality would be, amplified by the breath against her face. The lights finally came back on, giving light to her predicament and she wished it hadn’t.

For it revealed the abomination that was Mercer now as he held a scalpel to her face, grinning wildly with a face that wasn’t entirely his. For in the dimly light room, pinning her against the wall was a shadow of the former genius, a mis-match of body parts that looked agonizingly painful as invisible worms traveled up and down his body changing it every second. Her sister’s face was there one moment, staring at her with murderous glee, and gone the next replaced by a random pony’s then Mercer’s and back again.

It was a jigsaw puzzle gone wrong of her sister’s body and Mercer’s, changing each second and complete with red lines. In a matter of seconds the hand holding the scalpel turned into a hoof, the scalpel falling harmlessly to the floor. He simply replaced it with his hand as he reared back, the worms that seemed to be inside him changing his arm, her sister’s arm, into a pseudo blade. Her sister’s voice said, “You’re going to be my screaming and bleeding stress ball is all.” The arm lunged forward to stab her in between her eyes.

Panicking she cast a cancellation spell to escape from him, something far worse than a human. On her throne in Equestria, the home place of harmony, as arguably the most powerful being on the planet and surrounded by her loyal army of guards she felt genuinely afraid.

Author's Note

Two of three. I went through a lot to keep my promise to get it out today, just for my readers!