Lyra's World

I sat up in bed. “And of course I woke up without my short term memory, so I did everything except summon Tirek.”

An alarm started blaring, so I batted at it with my magic until it stopped. Or, well, fell over. A few needles got yanked out of my forelimb, and then some other machines started beeping. It was like I was in a hospital or something.

A bunch of dragons ran in, and started fussing over me. Two of them grabbed me with their claws and lifted me back into the bed, while the other two stood near the door, holding their weapons ready. I wasn’t sure if they were smaller versions of the armless crossbows or larger versions of the lightning throwers or what, but they were definitely holding them like they were weapons.

“Hey, what –“ I started to say, only to cut myself off with an “Ow!” when they started sticking the tubes back in.

“Ah, you’re awake.” said the disembodied voice of an old, fatherly stallion. Although it was probably another earth dragon, since I was obviously still on the earth dragon world. The décor didn’t look much like X-Com, though. For one thing, everything was much better lit. “Perhaps now you can help us solve a small mystery.”

“Sure,” I said, levitating the fussy earth dragons off me and setting them over near the door. I ripped the tubes back out and rolled off the bed. “Did you pull me out from under that rock slide?”

“Indeed. Several of our third-generation synths discovered you buried in an ancient elevator shaft, and naturally assumed that you were one of us. And yet we can find no trace of you, or your purpose mark, or your strange healing ability in any of our records. Who are you?”

I smiled in the general direction of the speakers, figuring that the scrying sensor he was watching me through was probably located in the same place. “Lyra Heartstrings. And you?”

“Do you not recognize the voice of your father?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Odd,” he said. “The subsonics should function on any unicorn, even if you somehow managed to avoid the conditioning. No matter. I am Father, Director of the Institute, and I am happy to welcome you home, Lyra Heartstrings.”

“Thanks!” I grinned at the speakers. “I’m glad to finally find some friendly dragons. Maybe I can stop wasting time fighting everypony and finally figure out how to accomplish my actual mission.”

“And what would that be? We have no record of your research.”

“I need to figure out how to erase my purpose mark,” I said. “We already figured out how to grant them, so if I could just get rid of the one I have then I can finally get the mark I want.”

The speaker was silent for longer than a normal conversational pause, and I noticed that all of the earth dragons were staring at me.

“Or… have you figured that out already, while I was buried?” I asked, forcing a smile.

“Don’t let her leave the room,” Father said, at last. Since the dragons guarding the door were all male, he had to be referring to me. “I’ll have to discuss this development with the Board.”

===

I fidgeted, and pranced in place. Normally, I’d be fine with waiting around while people had a conversation about me behind my back, but the way the dragons were staring at me was making me really nervous.

“What?” I said, turning to stare back at them.

“Can you really erase a purpose mark?” one of them asked.

“No, I can’t,” I said. “We were supposed to be figuring out how, but we didn’t get there before everything exploded. Why? Don’t like yours either?”

He opened his mouth, glanced at the other dragons surrounding him, and his expression hardened. “Of course I do. I’m grateful to Father for giving me a purpose, however brief it may have been, and for allowing me to continue to exist once it was completed.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s not creepy at all.”

After a few minutes, two more earth dragons showed up, this time accompanying a unicorn. All three of them were wearing long black coats that looked like they were made out of leather, and sunglasses. Normally I would have wondered why they were wearing sunglasses indoors, but the building was very brightly lit.

“I’m here to escort you to your new facilities,” the unicorn said. “Follow me.”

So I finally got out of the room, and into the hallway. While it was still much cleaner, and very brightly lit, the hallway looked a lot more like one of X-Com’s underground tunnels than a proper hospital hallway – there weren’t enough doors for this to be an ordinary building, and the walls were far too solid. And there were exposed pipes. Ordinary above-ground buildings put the pipes inside the walls.

We went through a random door into a large underground warehouse or something. In the back was a short passage ending in an elevator, which took us up to a dingier, less well-lit series of hallways – still much better lit than X-Com, though. Everything was kind of dingy, and it all looked like it had been abandoned for quite a while.

“Sort of a fixer-upper, I guess?” I remarked.

“Quiet,” the unicorn snapped. He typed a few things on a typewriter attached to a wall slate, and one of the doors hissed and slid open. “In there,” he said.

I stepped inside, and was not impressed. It was, technically, a lab, but it looked more like some sort of high school chemistry lab than a magical research lab. “Er… thanks? But I was really hoping to work together with somepony who actually knows how to do science,” I said.

The unicorn wasn’t listening to me. “Keep her in the room while I set the charges,” he said, as he started to levitate a series of squarish devices with blinking lights and attach them to the walls, near the ceiling.

The two dragons with him stepped into the doorway and aimed larger versions of the guards’ weapons at me. “Don’t move, or we’ll be forced to disintegrate you.”

Now, I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on, but at this point it was pretty obvious that it was bad. So I formed a big wedge of magic and shoved the dragons to either side, then bull-rushed the unicorn standing behind them. He swore and lost his grip on the ‘charges’, which clattered to the floor as he dove out of the way. I pushed past him into the hallway.

“Shoot her, you idiots!” shouted the unicorn, and somepony did.

It turns out these crossbows shot fire. Now, I know I’ve complained about the lack of stopping power fire has before, but these were different. Somehow, the fire was formed into a spear or something, that burned its way deep inside my body before fading – so instead of leaving wide painful burns that were only skin deep, it left a charred, cooked section of muscle and then flash-heated my hip bone until it exploded, sending sharp little bone-shards all through my lower gut. The entry wound was narrow, and cauterized, so the steam pressure built up inside until it blasted out my various lower orifices as a shower of boiling blood, burning them badly as it passed and completely fouling my tail.

I stumbled – not having a hip tends to do that – but was already healed by the time I took a second step with that leg.

The other one started firing, and more little lances of fire burrowed their way into me, crisping my organs, charring my bones, the agony building higher and higher until it seemed to consume my whole body and I couldn’t even see anymore, it was all just a blue glow engulfing everything until I just crumbled to ashes. Literally. I reappeared standing over a pile of glowing blue ashes.

“It’s not working,” one of the black-clad guards said calmly, but the two of them kept firing, rapidly. The weapons didn’t seem to be very accurate, with most of the blue rays shooting past me to scorch the walls and ceiling. I turned to face the hail of… little pieces of blue light, I guess, and let the fire wash over and through me again.

“Yes!” I said, as the world rushed back into existence. “Again!” And sure enough, after a dozen of those little bolts burned their way into me, the fire washed through me again, burning everything away, and I dissolved into the light…

I know, I probably should have just run for it, but let me see if I can explain. When I fantasize about dragons, there are two main ways of getting killed by them that dominate my thoughts: getting torn apart by their claws and teeth, and being consumed in fire. When I was training with Luna’s Night Guard, I got to experience a reasonably close facsimile of both of those, and it didn’t really live up to my expectations. Dying by being torn apart – or, well, stabbed and clawed – was fairly close; it left you in pain, where every movement was more pain, and you got weaker and weaker until you faded away. The fading away just took too long.

But fire was awful. Yes, it did a good job of instantly filling you with overwhelming agony, but the actual death was usually something like suffocating on the fluid filling your lungs after they were roasted by breathing in superheated air. It took forever, and hurt way too much and for too long.

But this – this was what I’d been fantasizing about when I thought of dragon fire. To be consumed almost instantly, and just fall apart into ash.

“More!” I croaked, staggering as I reappeared, but the guards weren’t firing. “What’s wrong with you? Shoot me again!”

“If I tell them to shoot you, will you go back into the room?” the unicorn asked.

I had to think about it for a bit. “No,” I said. “It doesn’t look like you’re going to help me, so I need to go find somepony who will.”

I turned my back on them and trotted off. As I rounded a corner, I heard the unicorn saying, “Father, I think we have a problem…”

===

There were a lot of unicorns in the underground base, once I got back to the non-abandoned area. Also, a lot of plants, or at least a lot of plants for an underground base. There were also a lot of earth dragons, mostly doing menial tasks or being ordered around by the unicorns. Everypony I passed stopped what they were doing to stare at me, but none of them did anything to stop me as I explored. They looked frightened.

I thought I might get a better reception if I put on some clothes, since nopony else was walking around naked, so I snuck into somepony’s room and took one of the long white coats that the unicorns that looked most important were wearing. It didn’t help – the place was big for an underground base, but in absolute terms it wasn’t that big, and there were probably only a few dozen unicorns total. Everypony knew everypony else. It was like trying to crash an Apple Family Reunion, only with mysterious food paste instead of apple fritters.

But no one called me out on taking the coat, so I started stealing everything that wasn’t attached to the floor. Tools, clipboards, folders full of assorted documents, food paste, various weapons, weird little cylinders with no apparent purpose, mops, globes, pre-loaded syringes, little bottles of water, little bottles of pills… you get the idea. I had it all floating around behind me in a big blob of junk.

I was looting my fourth storage closet when Father decided to talk to me again. “Hello, Lyra. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Not really,” I said, as I added a rack of ear-examiners to the pile.

“Neither am I,” he replied. “Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot.”

“You tried to kill me,” I said. “I’m getting tired of forgiving ponies for that.”

“Ah, no. I can see how you might have interpreted it that way,” Father said. “We were going to collapse an unused section of the Institute and bury you in a rockfall. It’s the only method that we could be sure would keep you contained, and we already knew that it would do you no permanent harm.”

“If you want me out of your mane, just show me to the exit,” I said. “You don’t need to seal me away like some sort of demon.”

“We can’t allow you to leave,” Father said. “You know too much about our operations here.”

I tried to keep from literally snarling. “And I don’t suppose you’ll help me figure out how to remove a purpose mark?”

“Ah, no, I’m afraid that is a line of research which we cannot allow,” Father replied. “It would threaten the very fabric of our society.”

I sighed, and rubbed my forehead with a hoof. “I’m really not seeing how we got off on the wrong hoof, then. You’re not willing to compromise on anything. Everything I want is a deal-breaker.”

“That’s because what you want is unreasonable!” he said, in a slightly harsher tone of voice. “Surely there must be some way for you to remain here and be happy – some line of research that could satisfy you without tearing down everything we’ve built, or some other occupation that you could enjoy! You have a purpose mark, and I refuse to believe that a sun and clouds is a mark for removing purpose marks. What is your purpose?”

I laughed. “Weather control. Do you have a lot of call for weather control in your underground lair?”

“Not… as such,” he admitted.

“That’s good, because I’m terrible at it,” I snapped. “It’s the wrong mark. I got it by mistake, and I want it gone.”

“So you didn’t earn that mark?” Father asked. “It was given to you?” He laughed. “You’re a synth! A unicorn synth! Who ever heard of such a thing? And here I’ve been trying to reason with you, as if you were a person.”

===

So they sent more of the black-coated synths after me. They knew it was useless to shoot me, and my freakishly overpowered levitation kept them from wrestling me to the ground or getting close enough to use their lightning sticks on me, so they couldn’t really do much to me directly. On the other hoof, I wasn’t about to just murder them left and right since they were victims as much as anypony, which meant that they kind of built up into a huge swarm, which was really annoying. I ended up having to use Woodwinds to make a little indoor tornado, just to give myself a little breathing room, and in the confusion I lost hold of the big pile of stolen stuff, which got scattered all over the place.

In the calm after that little temper tantrum, as I stood panting in the middle of a large underground park while unicorns and synths cowered around me, one of them decided to try something new.

“Please stop fighting,” he said. “Your resistance serves no purpose. Come with us and be reclaimed.”

“Does being ‘reclaimed’ mean that you’ll get rid of my purpose mark?” I asked.

The dragon stared at me for about five seconds, then said, “Yes.”

“You’re lying.”

There was another five second pause. “No. I’m telling the truth.”

Well, how could I argue with that?

I let him escort me to the Synth Retention Bureau, where four of the other black-cloaked dragons immediately put him under arrest, and dragged him off into a back room to be ‘reclaimed’.

“What just happened?”

The black-cloaked unicorn who’d tried to trick me before was there, and sneered at my confusion. “He showed far too much initiative for a courser. We can’t have them thinking for themselves.”

===

The reclamation process turned out to be a big disappointment. Apparently, it relied on triggering a compulsion built into the sythetic cutie marks, and while my cutie mark was technically synthetic, having come from the Mirror Pool, it didn’t have any such thing. So I sat on an examination table for a while while a bunch of unicorns argued about the magic scans, and then I fell asleep because apparently I’d been on the run for quite some time – they never turned the lights off in the Institute, so there was no direct way to tell day from night.

I woke up in a prison cell. Instead of bars or a solid iron door, it had a grid of blue beams that presumably would kill anypony who tried to leave. I’m not sure how they expected it to hold me.

But before I could take a running leap at the death-grid, it flickered and went dark. “Come with us,” said a whispered voice from the corridor outside. “We can get you out of here.”

What followed was a confusing trip through a maze of corridors that I’d never have found, because they were inside or behind the walls, and you could only get to them by removing hidden panels and stuff. They were old and dingy, like the fake lab I’d been taken to earlier, and many of them were lit only by little glowing green and red lights on the machines and pipes and things. We met up with a couple of other groups on the way, and eventually we were all led into a weird sort of closet with big humming monoliths in a ring. Once we were all inside, somepony set off the most clumsy and wasteful teleport I’ve ever seen.

Seriously. It was like FOOOOSH – CRACKLE – WHIIIIIIRRRRR. It took *seconds* to get to the other side.

But it was good to be on the surface again, even if it was all foggy and the sky was green.