The Day of the Million Billion Octavias
On the floor of a deep cave southwest of Ponyville, a ways past the "DANGER: MAGICAL ANOMALY" signs, Octavia Melody lay in the dirt, bound and gagged.
A few phosphorescent plants dimly lit this cave. Turning her head to the left, Octavia saw the long stone path that led to the tunnel through which she had recently been dragged. To the right, in the middle of the cave's floor, there was a round, smooth-edged pool. She could not see her kidnappers, but heard their voices from one of the cave's far corners.
"Okay, boneheads," said one, "we only have one piece of paper, so we gotta get this right the first time. Here, Flatfoot—write what I say."
"'Kay, boss," said another.
"All right," the first said, "Now listen:
"Dear Canterlot Symphony Orchestra,
"If you want to see your chellist again, leave half a million bits in a sack under the old gallows oak outside Ponyville.
"Love,
"Three Dangerous Ponies"
"You spelled 'cellist' wrong," said a third voice. "There shouldn't be an H, after the C there."
"Doesn't matter," said the leader.
"'Course it matters, boss! These nobs are all class'cly edumacated. They don't respect you if you can't spell good."
"Respect horseapples!" said the second. "We got their cellist! We don't need no stinkin' respect!"
"It's always about respect! What if they put the note in the papers or something?"
"Well, we only got one sheet, so shut yer yap," the leader said.
As the debate escalated, Octavia took a calming breath and tried to think.
The "three dangerous ponies" had jumped her not half an hour ago, as she was out for an early-morning walk. She wasn't an expert on such things, but found it odd that after they had trussed and gagged her, they hadn't also blindfolded her before carrying her to their hideout, as she understood was the standard procedure.
As she took a few more calming breaths, she grew more and more sure that she knew what the place was. She had read about it in the papers, after the incident two summers previous when dozens of Pinkie Pies had descended on Ponyville like a pink parasprite swarm. There had been a photo of the cave, too, before the Mayor had the warning signs put up.
Sometimes, when put into extraordinary situations, we find ourselves doing utterly uncharacteristic things to survive. For Octavia, the time had come to do one of those things: She hatched a crazy idea.
Slowly, so as not to make noise, she began moving like an inchworm, closer and closer to the pool.
A few minutes later, three dangerous ponies turned to find no less than two dozen identical duplicates of the musician they had kidnapped, all glaring murderously.
"You know..." said one.
"The funny thing about the Mirror Pool..." said another.
"...Is that it copies ponies, but not the things they're wearing..." said a third.
"... Such as those rather uncomfortable ropes," concluded the first.
With that, the Octavias advanced as one. But the thugs were quicker, and in a flash they turned and bolted up the stone ramp and into the winding tunnel that led to the surface.
An Octavia shouted, "After them!" But this was unnecessary, as the others had already given chase.
The kidnappers had a head start, and the Octavias barely kept up as they turned to the east, into a swampy area. But not five metres in, the foremost Octavia saw them run up against an enormous brown object that hadn't been there before.
An enormous brown object that moved...
... And stood up...
... And looked down on the three kidnappers with four pairs of huge reptile eyes.
There was a horrible chomping and crunching and gulping, and in an instant, three dangerous ponies had disappeared down three long throats.
As the hydra slurped down the last hoof, the foremost Octavias plowed to a halt before it, their eyes cast upward and looks of horror on their faces. The hydra glowered down for a moment, then roared a deafening challenge.
"Back! Get back!" the Octavias yelled to those behind them as they turned to flee.
Now began a stumbling, half-panicked retreat back the way they had come. This continued all the way back to the tunnel, with the hydra's snapping jaws more than once barely missing the ends of their tails. As the last straggler from the cavern emerged from the tunnel mouth, she was bowled over by the mob of her fellows. They in turn tripped over her, and in another moment the whole mess of them was laying in a heap at the bottom of the tunnel, where they had started.
But it didn't take long for panic to start pulling them to their hooves again. The first one who had nearly been caught struggled to her hooves and shouted, "More!"
"More?" said the straggler, now disentangling herself from three others.
"A lot more!"
* * *
Through the underbrush of the Everfree Forest, a thousand lean, chitinous bodies slithered toward the unsuspecting town of Ponyville. From her position in the middle of the third skirmish line, Queen Chrysalis saw thin shafts of sunlight breaking through the trees at the forest's edge ahead. They were close. Within minutes, she would give the order to attack.
All at once, there came a loud crashing and thrashing from the thick cluster of elms at the swarm's left flank. Before Chrysalis could order someone to investigate, an enormous four-headed body erupted from the trees and blundered toward the column at a full run. The changelings in its path took wing or scrambled over each other to get away, buzzing like a hive of startled hornets. Chrysalis herself avoided being caught in the mess only by raising a magic shield just before her fleeing minions reached her position. Within a few seconds, a rift of chaos and ruin had split the column in half. The hydra, stopping for nothing, crashed through the trees to the column's right.
Lowering her shield, Chrysalis looked around for someone to blame, and said to no one in particular, "What, pray tell, is this?"
They say that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The swarm's luck that day was such that their plan didn't even get that far. Before anyone could answer the Queen's question, another army entered the ground held by the changelings. At a glance, it easily matched them in number, and it moved like an angry mob rather than a military force making a charge. Chrysalis had just enough time to realize they had actually been chasing the hydra. She assumed they were another queen's swarm, and had all taken the same grey equine shape.
They didn't slow as they approached, but galloped straight into the changeling army's midst. Already rattled by the hydra's incursion, and now taken off-guard by an unknown force, Chrysalis's troops fell back on instinct.
They took the form of what was charging at them.
Then they attacked.
* * *
Vinyl Scratch was worried.
She knew Octavia's morning walk took half an hour, and never diverged much from the same path: across the bridge, around Fluttershy's homestead, along the edge of the forest, a right bend back toward town, and home again. She was now an hour and a half overdue. Of course, the cause was probably benign, and nowhere near enough time had passed before Vinyl could plausibly raise the alarm. But even so...
As she reached the spot where the path skirted the outer edge of the Everfree, there came an odd noise from deep within which she did not recognize. She stopped, raised her sunglasses, and peered between the trees. The noise grew closer. It was a mix of scuffling and snarling, and snapping of twigs, and thumping of bodies on the ground, and most of all the cacophony of angry voices commonly heard in large street battles.
Then she saw it: a wave of thrashing shapes that extended who-knew-how-far to either side, and drawing closer by the second. All the shapes were locked in fierce combat—kicking, biting, headbutting, and body-slamming. Vinyl blinked and looked again, at first disbelieving her eyes, then realizing that the impossible was indeed true: All of the shapes were the spitting images of the same pretty grey mare, right down to the last luscious eyelash.
"Hot damn!" Vinyl said. "It must be my birthday!"
One second later, the hairy grey wave engulfed her.
* * *
Rainbow Dash lay dozing on a thatched rooftop, dreaming that she had joined a buffalo tribe. Just as she was receiving an honerary buffalo-style name, "Mare-Who-Fights-Like-Stallion," she realized the rumbling of hundreds of hooves was not her imagination, and bolted awake.
She did not at first understand what she saw when she looked over the eaves: A teeming, writhing flood of grey shapes, surging into the town's outskirts with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Ponies fled its advance, except two who Rainbow recognized as Applejack and Big McIntosh. They ran back and forth like sheepdogs, trying fruitlessly to turn the tide. Some distance away, in the thickest part of the mass, a white unicorn was body-surfing.
For a moment, Rainbow wondered if she was still dreaming.
She heard a distinctive cry from near the edge of the forest. Fluttershy we hovering over her homestead, now flooded with writhing grey bodies. Fluttershy strained against the weight of an overstuffed sack—no, a blanket—whose contents squirmed. Rainbow had sharp eyes, and even at a distance could see it was all Fluttershy could do to keep aloft.
Looking up, an observer would have seen a multi-hued blur streak from a rooftop, seize Fluttershy and her load all at once, and haul the lot of it toward the sturdiest building in sight: the crystalline castle that stood just outside of town. And there might have been plenty of observers, if nearly every sapient being nearby had not been either fleeing in terror or grappling with somepony else. The only one looking up at that moment was a cicada named Russel, who had little time to consider the oddity of the event before an Octavia accidentally trod on him. Such are the fortunes of war.
As the three of them (counting the blanket-sack) drew near the castle, a magenta glow appeared around them and drew the lot toward the largest battlement, where it deposited them in a heap. Out of the blanket tumbled five rabbits, three chickens, a duck, and a small compost pile Fluttershy had grown fond of.
As Fluttershy hurried to collect the now somewhat ornery creatures scampering around the upper deck, Rainbow struggled to her hooves, panting hard from exertion. She saw that though it was late morning, their rather purple rescuer was blearly-eyed from sleep. Twilight must have been up late reading again.
"What is going on?" Twilight said, squinting in the light.
All at once, Rainbow tried to both catch her breath and explain what she had just seen, which was a bit too much after a late-morning nap. "It's a... a big..."
"Twilight! Help!"
The shout came from the lawn below, and the two looked over to see a hot-pink shape, jumping up and down and gesticulating wildly. Rather than open the castle's main doors, Twilight picked Pinkie up, and despite the strain of using magic at such a distance, managed to haul her up and over the parapet.
"We're being invaded by a million billion Octavias!" Pinkie said as she touched down.
"Billion what?" Twilight said.
"Octavia Melody! She was at the Gala a few years ago! Remember?" Pinkie clapped a hoof to her head and gasped in realization. "She must have used the mirror pool!"
"Either that, or they're bugs." Rainbow had at last regained her breath, and was not about to be left out.
With a worried frown, Twilight turned to her telescope, adjusted a few knobs, and angled it toward the town. Her frown deepened.
"But why are they all fighting like that?" she said.
"Only one special somepony to go 'round?" Pinkie said, propping her chin on her hoof thoughtfully. "Except, they could have just used the mirror pool on that pony too, so..."
"Whatever it is, they're wrecking everything in their path," Twilight turned from the telescope and furrowed her brow in the manner of one confronted with a challenging problem.
"We just gotta stop 'em, then!" Rainbow, now recovered, flared her wings and braced for another takeoff.
"Wait..."
Though it was the last thing she wanted to do, Rainbow paused. "Wait" was potentially pretty bad, but not as bad as "oops" or "I wonder what this spell does." Looking at Twilight's expression, Rainbow could practically see the hamster wheel turning in her head. Rainbow would once have ignored this, but over time had learned it was no ordinary hamster.
"If they are changelings," Twilight said, "Canterlot will want to know. And Spike's in the Crystal Empire right now, so..."
"Always on vacation when we need him!" Rainbow about-faced toward Canter Peak and pawed at the ground. "Well, let's fly to the Castle, then!"
"All mayors' offices have emergency telegraph lines that go right to Canterlot." Twilight looked over the rampart toward the high, pointed roof of the town hall, which for the moment still stood. "It would be quicker than going there yourself. My castle isn't wired yet, so..."
With a cry of "On it!" Rainbow at last bolted from the ground and made a beeline for the hall.
In the few seconds it took to pass over town, Rainbow witnessed pandemonium. The running battle had spread to the high street, flattening anything without a stone foundation. Any townsfolk who had not fled had barred their doors, and a few heads poked out of second-story windows, mesmerized by the surreal mayhem below. Applejack and Big McIntosh were nowhere to be seen. The white unicorn from before, still afloat in the thickest part of the brawl, was kicking and yelling, "This isn't fun anymore! Lemme down!"
Rainbow broke her speed just enough to make a four-point landing against the hall's rooftop. She threw open a skylight and dove into the office below, where the Mayor sat behind a broad wooden desk, tapping furiously at a telegraph transmitter key.
And standing directly behind the Mayor...
"... Invaded by million billion Octavias! Stop! Send help! Stop!" Pinkie said.
As one, Rainbow's wings and jaw dropped. "You gotta be kidding!"
"Don't interrupt me!" For a second, Pinkie's voice took on an uncharacteristically snappish tone. She turned back to the Mayor. "Signed, Pinkie Pie."
"It's sent, Miss Pie," the Mayor said. She took her glasses off and began to polish them with shaking hooves, though they were not dirty. "What now?"
* * *
Celestia's precognition was not as powerful as it had been in millennia past, but it did manifest on rare occasions, when it could be bothered. Unfortunately, this day's manifestation, in the form of a prickling on the back of her neck, was utterly useless, for it chose to appear about three seconds before a Guard galloped into her throne room and shouted, "Majesty! An urgent message from one of the former Element-wielders!"
"Oh? What does it say?"
The Guard raised the telegram and cleared his throat. "'Ponyville invaded by million billion Octavias STOP send help STOP you gotta be kidding STOP don't interrupt me STOP.'" He lowered the paper. "We have our best strategists trying to figure out what the last two sentences mean."
"The last two? Not the one about the 'million billion Octavias'?"
"With respect, your Majesty, that's easy. 'Octavia' is a mare's name, and a 'million billion' is a one, followed by fifteen zeroes."
There was a long pause. She stared at him, and he stared back.
At last, he shifted his forehooves a bit and cleared his throat. "Shall I have your chariot made ready?"
"Yes. Yes, I think that might be best," Celestia said, rising.
* * *
Discord was in a good mood.
He lounged on an overstuffed sofa that had grown a rather pretty set of dragonfly wings, and now drifted lazily along on the summer breeze. He knew this particular air current had a good chance of taking him past Fluttershy's house. But this was not entirely certain, for Discord hated certainty.
As he dozed, he dreamed a pleasant dream about a riotous battle between armies of gingerbread ponies. But as the sofa drifted closer to a certain small town, (for it was indeed the right air current) the hurly-burly rumbling grew louder, until Discord woke to the realization that it was real.
He peeked over the sofa's back, and for the first time in months, found himself shocked by something other than his own random magic. Half the town proper was swarming with identical grey ponies who trampled everything in their path. As he watched, somepony's outhouse was tipped over, leaving behind only the owner and his newspaper. Closer to the forest, the parents of a small family were helping a white unicorn onto the roof of a ranch-style house where they had taken refuge.
"It can't be!" Discord said.
But it was. As the only logical explanation sank in, Discord's various appendages clenched in anger and his mane began to smoke.
"Why, the nerve!" he said. "Someone is trying to replace me!"
* * *
Twilight held position high over the carnage and pondered where to start.
She might easily have scooped large numbers of Octavias up with magic, but there was no place to deposit them all where they could not get out, and where they would not squash each other by sheer volume. And she would have to make a decision soon because the destruction spread second by second.
"Hello."
Twilight's subconcious recognized the voice before her consciousness did, and her breath caught in her throat as she whirled around in midair to meet...
Chrysalis tapped her forehooves together, and her gaze darted from Twilight to the bedlam below. That answered at least one question.
"You got your spawn in my town," Twilight said, once a moment had passed without hostile moves from either party.
"Ah. Yes. They are unruly sometimes." Chrysalis had become pointedly interested in surveying the entire scene below. "I must apologize, as it really is your town now. Or so I'm told."
"You were coming to attack us." Twilight's eyes narrowed, and she crossed her forelegs.
"May I point out, Princess, that your evidence is purely circumstantial?" Chrysalis said through clenched fangs. "I will have you know, this army of identical musicians attacked us, just as we happened to be passing by."
"Well, can't you just use your hive mind to separate them?" Twilight said.
"Hive minds are... what's the expression? An urban myth." Chrysalis made a sort of buzzing hiss that Twilight took for a snort. "And I heard you were educated."
Before Twilight could retort, there came a gust and a great flapping of wings as a golden sky-chariot passed over their heads. A white shape, twice as tall as any normal pony, leaped from the chariot and pulled up beside Twilight with a mighty clap of its broad wings. Celestia glared.
"You."
Chrysalis hovered backward a bit, speaking quickly and trying to meet Celestia's gaze but settling for addressing her chin. "Before you do anything rash, I may or may not have recently been powered up enough to fight you both. But I just want to collect my swarm and leave, and I assume you want your town to stay standing. I suggest we join forces long enough to solve this little dilemma, and live to fight each other another day. What say you?"
The two alicorns merely glanced at one another—quickly, so as not to take their eyes off Chrysalis for too long.
"You know," Chrysalis said with a flippant toss of her mane, "it doesn't reflect well on the Equestrian royal family if I have to be the voice of reason. If I were trying to deceive you, my plan wouldn't involve that mess." She gestured downward.
"You will begin the casting first," Celestia said at last. "Twilight will assist you in gathering them—unharmed. I will observe, and ensure."
"Fine, fine." Chrysalis ignited her horn and began scooping up Octavias by the fistful, holding them in a fallow field next to the smoking ruin that had once been Fluttershy's homestead.
After a moment, Celestia nodded to an affirmative to Twilight, who moved to assist her old enemy. She didn't get the chance, for at that moment, strange and terrible things began to happen. Chrysalis's magic flickered in and out as it advanced through the crowd below. The Octavias it touched did not move at first, but after a few seconds, were thrown upward by a seemingly unseen force, landing tens of metres away.
"What is th... is?" Chrysalis halted mid-word and hovered unmoving in the air. When she finished it a few seconds later, she did not seem to notice what had happened.
"Do not attempt—t—t—t... " Celestia's last consonant stuttered like a broken record for a moment before she flashed to a colour negative, then blinked out of existence.
The world froze.
Twilight tried to scream.
* * *
The belated scream finally emerged as Twilight appeared, unfrozen, in a starry void. Her hooves touched down on something solid but invisible.
One scream was enough, for Twilight had never been one to waste time. It took only a single look around for her to see that she had been in this place before, though she did not expect this companion.
"Discord?"
"In the flesh," Discord said, holding up his own spotlight in one claw. "That is, if there is such a thing here."
"What exactly is going on?" Twilight said. "And not to sound rude or anything, but how much of that was you?"
"Oh, please!" Discord's eyes rolled so far back, they went all the way and came back up from beneath his lower eyelids. "Don't insult my art by suggesting I would do something that amateur. Whoever did it had one idea, and overdid it until the universe broke."
"Broke?" Twilight's ears flattened, and she grimaced.
Clearly annoyed, Discord threw up his forelimbs. He threw them so high, in fact, that they twirled in the air above his head for a moment before dropping back down and reattaching to his shoulders. "And how," he said, "is one supposed to have fun when time has stopped? Honestly!"
"How did you get both of us here?" Twilight said.
"Celestia made this place and hid it from my view. I only noticed it because she vanished, and time hasn't stopped here."
Twilight gasped, recalling what she had seen when everything went haywire. "Vanished? What's happened to her?"
"How should I know? But you were the nearest pony I knew who might be able to figure out a way to fix this. By the way, don't look now, but there's an old friend behind you."
Twilight looked, of course, and saw the first recognizable object she had seen since arriving, that was neither a purple unicorn nor the god of chaos: a huge, heavy tome, suspended upright in midair and open to a page in the middle.
Large upon the left page, in a professional font, was typed:
THE APPLICATION HAS CRASHED.
DO YOU WISH TO REVERT TO THE PREVIOUS SAVE?
|Y| |N|
As Twilight approached it, her eyes flicked over the words. She stopped before it and considered. "Revert... hmm... yes or no." Twilight's hoof hovered for a moment before she gritted her teeth, looked away, and with a silent wish for luck, pressed the "Y."
Without a sound or the slightest organic movement, the words changed.
REVERTED TO:
AUTOSAVE 1000 HOURS, CURRENT DAY.
PLEASE SUBMIT CRASH REPORT.
On the right-hoof page, there appeared a series of contiguous symbols, each a letter surrounded by a round-cornered square.
Typewriter keys, Twilight thought.
"Hey, do you know what a..." Twilight looked behind her, but Discord had vanished. She silently prayed this meant hitting "Y" had worked.
Twilight chewed at her lower lip thoughtfully. There could only be one meaning for "Report" in this context, but if she was wrong about "Crash," she didn't like to think about the consequences. She raised her hooves to the right page, held her breath, and began to type.
"Crash... caused... by..."
The effect was immediate and surreal: As she typed, the letters appeared in a square outline at the bottom of the left page. She paused once more, considering her next words, for strange and terrible circumstances were no excuse for sloppy reporting. But how exactly did one explain such bizarre events in a way that would be useful to future readers? The space she was writing in was not large, so she would have to be concise.
At last, she raised her hooves to the page again.
"...million... billion... Octavias."
* * *
Octavia lay in the dirt, bound and gagged.
To the left, she saw the mouth of the tunnel through which she had recently been dragged. To the right, in the middle of the cave, was a smooth-edged pool—the one she had read about in the papers.
As her kidnappers argued over the ransom note, it occurred to Octavia that if she could reach the pool, she might copy herself and rush them in force. She began to squirm toward it...
A magenta flash lit up the cave, and Octavia heard a cacophony of thunderclaps and angry shouts, followed by the clippity-clop of three sets of hooves echoing down the tunnel as they retreated up and away. She next heard the distinctive chiming sound of unicorn magic, and all her bonds broke at once. As she scrambled to her hooves, she saw a rather purple face she did not at first recognize, having previously seen it only at a distance or in pictures.
"Hello," Princess Twilight said.
"Oh! Your Highness." Out of a habit acquired from a career performing for important ponies, Octavia made a rather hasty curtsy.
Twilight smiled broadly, in a manner of one both triumphant and relieved. "Octavia Melody, I am here to save you."
"Why, er, thank you, Princess," Octavia said. "But if you please, why... how were you able to find me?"
"It's a little hard to explain," Twilight said, "but I guess you might say, I'm here because one bad day can ruin everything. And not just for one pony."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," Octavia said.
The young Princess looked up and away, searching for the right words. After a moment, to Octavia's surprise, she put a hoof to her mouth and giggled a bit.
"You know, I think I'm starting to see things the way Celestia does. Come on, Ms. Melody." She turned to the tunnel. "Let's get you home."
