I like to consider myself a patient person. I really do. I don't get angry very often, I can always keep a hold of my tongue when annoyed, and I can usually tolerate anyone for having different views, minus a very few major exceptions. So when my best friend had invited me to come with him to an anime convention since his other friend had bailed on him at the last second, I had said, "Sure, why not?" I'd never gone to one and, truthfully, never even knew our city hosted one at all. It would be a new experience.
New didn't usually correlate with enjoyable, unfortunately. I had dismissed many online rumors and gossip about these types of things, assuming that, as was human nature, people were identifying a larger majority by the negative minorities. Not to say I was wrong, oh no, most of the people here were very nice, if eccentric by way of their interests and hobbies, and were easy enough to start a conversation with. It was the minority that was ruining it all.
Maybe thirty people, maybe even less, of the hundreds of con-goers were the epitome of every bad stereotype one could think of when it came to anime fans. They were so few and yet so god damned LOUD! Wherever I went, they were there. Whenever I avoided them, they somehow found me. When I tried to join any of the events the con was having, they were there, ruining everybody's good time. How the other poor con-goers put up with them, I can only imagine.
But that was neither here nor there now. I had gotten separated from my friend earlier at one of the events and decided to peruse some of the souvenir stands while that group I had taken to simply calling "Them" was distracted. Nick knacks, baubles, trinkets and all sorts of things were arranged for sale. I could tell which stands were run by true fans of whatever franchise they were selling pretty easily as their merchandise was of far greater quality than those who just wanted to cash in on the apparently popular series. But there was one stand that stood out most, tucked away in the corner.
It had all sorts of things, some obviously related to the con, some I couldn't make heads or tails of. Even more strange was the man running the stall. He looked like one of those creepy guys you'd expect to find hiding away behind some abandoned warehouse selling all sorts of illegal things, what with his long coat and bandana mask. Sounded like one too. "Hello, Stranger. What ya lookin' to buy?"
"Nothing in particular. Just looking around," I said easily, more interested by all the things on display.
"He he, well, if ya see anythin' let me know," he drawled. Clearly this guy enjoyed playing as whoever he was dressed as.
It didn't take long before something caught my eye. "Hey what's this?" I asked and held up a multicolored, segmented metal cube. It was weird though. I was sure it was metal but it had a weird texture to it like gel padding. Not to mention the strange combination of orange, blue, and black.
"Ahhh, that," the merchant said. "That there is an old piece. Picked it up off client a few years back. Said it was a nanite puzzle box'."
"Nanites?" I asked skeptically.
"Mhm, said it was his inspiration from an old show he use to watch as a kid." The man shuffled for a moment, eyes shifting warily before before using a hand to hide his already hidden mouth. "Truth be told, I've never been able to finish that thing. Could never figure out where to start." He tapped the box and gave me a strange look. "You look like a smart man though, stranger. So how about it? Fancy, nigh impossible puzzle box sound temtpin to ya?"
I turned the cube over in my hands, thinking about it. It did look like certain parts could be moved around, so it probably was a puzzle box. Even if it wasn't, it looked nice and the texture was very odd, though not unenjoyable. Puzzle or not, it would be fun to play with to relieve some stress. "Alright, how much for it?" I asked, mind made up.
"He he, I knew you'd like it. How much you willin to pay?"
I pursed my lips and thought. "Ten dollars." It might be one of a kind and it might be a puzzle box but as far as I knew, it was still only a colorful cube.
"Hmm, that's a fair price a suppose. It's yours then." I gave him the money and thanked him. "No, thank you, stranger."
I left with my new acquisition and went to the food court, hoping to get a meal while I figured the box out. Whatever event was going on earlier was still going, so the lines were short and before long I was sitting at a bench, munching on some fries, and turning the cube in my palm. "Now then, reveal to me your secrets."
The next half hour was spent in silence as I toyed with the thing. Flip it this way, turn it around, poke at that, rinse and repeat. Eventually, after many failed attempts, I found the chink in the box's armor. "Aha!" I cried as a small portion of its side flipped up. Underneath was another layer, almost exactly the same, only with two obvious areas to peel away from. With this jump in progress, I fell into a sort of trance, peeling away layers and folding pieces back into it to give me leverage over others. Through it all, I never noticed that it was slowly forming a gauntlet. Only until the last piece snapped into place did I realize this.
"What the..." What an odd thing to make out of a box. Actually, now that I think about it, how did I make that out of a box. There certainly wasn't enough breaks in the cube to fold that many times and last I checked metal wasn't that flexible in a solid state. "Huh," was all I had to say.
Hey, it even looked like I could fit my right hand in there. I could! And it was snug too, not to tight but tight enough to not slip off. Cool. I had never seen anything like this before. It was probably the best ten dollars I'd spent in the last month.
Before I could admire it any further, an absolutely unbearable pain shot up my arm, doubling me over as I gripped my arm to my chest. Oh god, I felt like was going to through up. I looked at my arm and to my horror found the gauntlet spreading up my body and squeezing. "What the fuck!" I cried hysterically, ripping at the damned thing. "Help!" But no one came, in fact, everyone was standing completely still. Hell, the guy behind me when I got my food was still at the counter, frozen like time had just stopped.
Another scream ripped through my throat before metal got there, choking me as it started to crawl up my skull and down my chest. Full blown panic consumed me as my only good arm clawed futilely at my face as the metal thing crushed my jaw. Just before it reached my eyes, there was a bright blue flash, darkness, and then a terrible pressure as my skull collapsed.
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When a person dies, what happens? Some would argue that if you led a good life, your soul would ascend to a better place, commonly known as heaven or maybe be reincarnated as a nobleman or a king. If you were a terrible person, you would descend to hell, where you would spend eternity being punished for your crimes or be reincarnated in the body of a bug. Hell, there was a rather set in minority of the global population that said nothing happened at all. Your body died and your mind with it, becoming nothing but fertilizer for the earth.
I think it would be best to say that it varies from person to person. To stay on the safe side.
I say this because I very much doubt that when everyone dies, their soul is trapped into a robot body, forced to share said body with what was obviously an artificial intelligence claiming to be you, transported to a world with pastel anthropomorphic ponies, before being captured and handed off to a prepubescent female of said anthropomorphic ponies to be studied.
[ALERT: Small Equine Approaching With Sharp/unknown Implements]
[ERROR: Chassis Unresponsive. Escape Impossible]
Oh my god, you annoying thing. Shut up already. You think I like being stuck here? If I could have, I would have busted out of here as soon as I stopped freaking out about dying not too long ago. What does that say, huh? The guy who just died is calmer than you are right now.
[Observation: Exasperation Of Primary Consciousness Is Unnecessary]
[ALERT: Small Equine Preparing To Dismember Frame]
[WARNING: Nanite Repair Clusters Currently At 15% Efficiency. Damage Sustained To Chassis Will Be Unsustainable Until Complete Reactivation]
[Suggestion: Do Something]
If I still had eyes, I would have rolled them. You know, little robot voice in my head, maybe if you spent less time freaking out and more time trying to get this tin can moving again, we'd probably be out of here by now. Now shut up and get to work while I try to make sense of our situation.
The voice didn't respond and I felt its presence recede to the back of my mind, trying to do whatever it could to fix whatever was wrong with my body. The only things that still actually worked were my eyes and ears, which should be noted were no longer actual eyes and ears but instead four pairs wide optics and a series of audio receivers.
Sight and sound were the only senses available to me right now and neither painted a good picture of my situation for in front of me was my current warden and soon to be surgeon as I stood immobile in some kind of docking station in a deceptively small, dimly lit room, minus the bright spot light right above me. As mentioned, she was an anthropomorphic pony with the muzzle, fur, hooves, etc, dressed in a combination of grey shirt and pants. She had ash colored fur with a long, frizzy, black mane and tail, with her mane pulled back into a pony tail, a fact I found amusing despite my situation. Behind a pair of large glasses was a pair of bright purple eyes, uplifted maniacally by a too wide grin on her muzzle.
"Alright mister golem, guess what time it is!" she giggled sweetly while pulling several strange blocks from the cart next to her, a cart filled with a worrisome amount of handsaw-esque tools and other tools that I couldn't make heads or tails of. "That's right!" she exclaimed and pressed her thumbs to glowing symbols on each box, causing them to start giving off a ghostly blue light before floating up. "It's time to play doctor!" The blocks flew up passed my shoulders and blue beams shot out down my arms and pulling them up by my wrists.
This was actually the first time I had seen any part of my new body. My arms were ungodly long and the forearm disturbingly thin, with the strange coloration of shiny, metallic orange and blue that would now forever be ingrained into my memory with utter hatred. They looked good for hitting things, a trait that was completely useless to me due to my immobility. Before I could continue to examine my strange arms, my new head-mate decided to make himself known again.
[ALERT: Audio Transmitters: Enabled]
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that means I can talk now. Good thing too because the little pony had gotten a step stool and was now hovering what looked like some kind of plasma cutter shaped like a bulbous wand over my chest. "Don't worry mister golem, I'm just gonna make a tiny, itty bitty cut so I can put a little thingy in you that'll let me see what's inside! That way I don't break anything that looks too important!" Yeah, no.
"Please don't," I said flatly in a booming electronic voice that spooked the pony enough to make her teeter on the stool. Oh, that's a bit loud. I spoke again, this time willing my volume to be a bit more reasonable. "I rather enjoy being in one piece."
After flailing around amusingly, the little filly finally regained her balance. "Oh my gosh!" she squealed, palming her cheeks excitedly. "You're a talking golem! A talking golem that said 'I'! You're a self-aware golem!" Well that was a rather fast, if mostly accurate conclusion. She jumped back, dropping her cutter without a care as she did a jig. "This is so exciting!" she gasped. "I have to inform Starswirl and The Princesses!" She bolted off into the darkness and the sound of a heavy door slamming closed echoed through the room.
For a moment, there was silence. I said nothing and I could feel my robot voice had stopped doing whatever it was doing. Then it spoke and I got the distinct impression that, had it a body of its own, it would be sitting in a corner in the fetal position.
[Observation: Tiny Equine Concerns The Tertiary Consciousness]
[Observation: Perhaps It Was Not Wise To Alert Tiny Equine To Our Sapience]
Stop being a baby. It's just a kid. A kid with dubious sanity but a kid none the less. Besides, I'm sure that whoever these Princesses and Starswirl are, it'd probably be safer to deal with them than it would have been to let that filly pick at us.
[Observation: There Is No Evidence To Support This Statement]
Sure there is! The guards that picked us up seemed sane. At least, sane enough to be professional about their job. Assuming these princesses are indeed royalty, their position would call for a degree of professionalism and wisdom that we could use to get us out of this situation.
[Observation: That Is A fallacy. Professionalism Is Not An Indication Of Sanity And Wisdom Is Not An Indication Of Good Will]
[Observation: The Tertiary Consciousness Is Modeled After The Primary Consciousness. The Primary Consciousness Knows The Previous Statement Is True]
I had no response to that. Right now I was just hoping things would turn out for the best because right now I had little control of my situation. I just hoped I was being more genre savvy than genre blind right now. The fact that I couldn't confidently say which left me in trepidation while my robot friend went back to work trying to get our body functional. So for a while we were alone. For a while I could finally comprehend what had happened and was still happening to me.
I had died.
I had died gruesomely, the memory of my skull caving in resurfacing now that there was nothing for me to do. Then, I had felt like I was in limbo, trapped in a world of nothing with a feeling of surreality. Then my new roommate made himself known, droning in my mind about how I was under system shock, which I translated to extreme mental trauma from its strange robot speak.
After that, and many, many notifications on how the little voice in my head was mitigating the damage to my mind, I saw light. Lots and lots of light that blinded me with no pain, the first indication that my body was not the one I had become familiar with. Shortly after, my vision had adjusted to let me see that I was in a crater right in the middle of a city and dozens of bipedal equines staring at me over the edge. Then the guards came, dressed in gold steel plates and wielding spears, telling everyone to back away and that they would handle the situation before carting me off to this dreary room. That was when I learned that they were called ponies.
And now, having just avoided dissection by tiny filly, I waited in silence for my salvation or possible damnation while my robot friend fixed us.
[Nanite Repair Clusters At 100% Efficiency]
[Optics: Repaired]
[Tactile Receptors: Repaired]
[Internal Motor Components: Damage Sustained To 83% Of Components/ 10% Of Damage Repaired]
Hopefully that meant I'd be able to move soon because just as it sounded off that notification, I heard the door opening and the sounds of several pairs of hooves against the floor. Six silhouettes stopped just outside of the light, to my frustration. Wanting to see just who it was that I'd probably have to bargain with for my life, I willed my vision to adjust itself, assuming that repaired optics meant I could.
The room snapped into clarity as the light on me dimmed in intensity and the rest of the room brightened exponentially. The room was larger than I had originally guessed, large enough to fit two more of the stations I was in, numerous cabinets along the stone walls, a large metal table in the middle, and five, assumingly, fully grown ponies plus the filly with dubious sanity.
Two of them were guards, one with the familiar, simple gold steel plate armor and spear, the other more elaborate, wearing lavender colored steel with a small, rounded kite shield with the image of a quarter moon on it strapped to his arm and a single arming sword sheathed at his side. Standing in front of them were two obviously female ponies and both were more than a foot taller than their guards, probably only a few inches shorter than me. Unlike their guards and the little filly, who lacked any strange characteristics beyond their inherent equine features, these mares had a rather large set of wings and a horn upon each of their foreheads.
The white furred mare was the tallest and had a more motherly figure to her, to put it modestly. Her mane and tail were a mishmash of blue, green, and pink stripes, flowing elegantly in a nonexistent wind. Like the gold armored guard, her apparel was simple and to the point in comparison to her counterpart. She wore a simple long sleeved, low neck, white dress that hugged her hips and bosom while flaring out at the legs and passed the elbows. Sitting behind her horn was a golden tiara and around her neck was a thick golden collar necklace, both imbedded with a purple jewel. The serious glint in her pink eyes and the slight frown on her muzzled almost looked out of place on her.
The blue one, on the other hand, seemed to be her opposite. Where the other mare had a motherly charm to her, this one was a prime example of petite femininity. Her lithe build was complimented by an ornate, yet practical, black military dress uniform, outlined with dark purple hems, and silver buttons. Her mane and tail, like the white mare, flowed in a nonexistent wind but unlike the white mare, hers looked to be made of the night sky filled with stars. Instead of a tiara, she wore a thick, black metal circlet and around her neck was a black collar necklace, though much thinner than her counterpart's, with a quarter moon shaped jewel imbedded into it. Neither her cyan eyes or her muzzle betrayed any emotion.
Then there was the last adult. The picture definition of crazy old wizard. His fur was grey, his belly length beard white, and his yellow eyes were dulled from age. Despite this, it wasn't hard for me to imagine that this was the father of the filly standing next to him. Though his eyes were dull, they were wide with excitement and his grin even wider as he stroked his beard. And dear lord, his robes. Stereotypical wizard robes that fell to the floor, with long sleeves, stars and moons all over, and he even had a pointy wizard hat so big I was sure it would have constantly fallen over his eyes were it not for the horn on his forehead. It also had many, many bells.
I immediately assumed that the two winged unicorns were the princesses seeing as they were the only other females besides the filly. They were talking between themselves, eying me like I couldn't see them. Focusing, their words became more distinct.
"I've never seen a golem of this design before," White said to Blue, worry evident in her tone.
"Neither have I, sister," Blue responded, "and if what little Core says is true, than it also has an intelligence matrix beyond most."
White hummed for a moment eyes roving my form that I still had yet to get a good look at, to my still growing irritation. "Maybe. Perhaps it is more likely to have just been programmed to speak as such?"
Blue shook her head. "Doubtful. There are few golemancers in the world who have the skill to try to make a golem like this. I only know of one who would even dare consider giving the illusion that their works were individuals." Blue glanced meaningfully at the filly, who I assume was this Core they spoke of. "And she has never created such a golem like this."
White continued to frown as she tried to make sense of me. I wished her the best of luck because I still had little clue to what actually happened to me besides being turned into a robot and being referred to as a golem, which didn't help since I remembered they were basically robots in most fantasy stories.
"Then we have a sapient being trapped within the lab of one of our best and brightest. A person. One that came moments away from being taken apart and studied like a cadaver." White looked really upset when she said that and I cheered silently. My hopes were not entirely unfounded!
"But it wasn't," Blue said levelly. "Core managed to avoid an incident with her quick thinking by not doing anything and informing us immediately." Right, her quick thinking. For some reason it wasn't hard for me to imagine that she just wanted to share before she got to the dirty work. Especially since she still had that gleam in her eye from before. "This situation is not too different than that debacle with that Changeling Hive a few decades ago. We handled that well enough, so long as we keep our wits about us, there should be little problem in fixing this situation as well."
[Repairs Complete: Motor Control Has Been Restored]
The sudden appearance of my new robot friend startled me. However, had I still had a mouth, I would have smiled. I could move the impending conversation along without having to spook them too much. With some effort, I managed to moved my torso to look directly at the princesses, just a tiny bit to my left. A much less frightening gesture than going 'I know you're there'. Even still, the guards and princesses tensed while the grinning duo grinned even more.
"It knows we're here, sister," White observed quietly.
Blue nodded. "Then let us greet it and smooth out this situation."
The two stepped into the light and White took the lead. "Greetings Golem, I am Princess Celestia of Equestria." She motioned towards Blue. "And this is my sister, Princess Luna of Equestria."
I straightened and greeted them in turn. "Hello, my name is Charles Keen."
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