Chapters It was dark, and there was water below me. I knew this, although I couldn’t actually see or feel anything. It was like how in a dream you can talk to someone and instead of them moving their lips and tongue and shaping the buzz from their vocal chords into a recognizable voice, it sort of skips all of that and just goes straight to them saying ‘hey, Lyra, do you want to try out a new spell?’
I was pretty sure that wasn’t what had happened. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there, but that possibility didn’t ring true. I felt like I had a purpose in being here – a vital task to perform that I couldn’t remember.
Not that I was gripped by amnesia, or anything of the sort. Aside from the immediate past, which was a blur, I remembered everything! I remembered the last time I’d felt an effect like this, and knew what it meant. I was stuck in timeless space, and nothing was ever going to happen again. Once, that had been my worst nightmare, although maybe it was more of a nightmare squared since it was the worst nightmare of a version of me already trapped in a nightmare. I’d managed to escape that time, by having a friend kill me before the timelessness fully set in, but it didn’t feel like there was enough reality here to do anything at all. I’d just be stuck like this forever with nothing but dark and water.
The good news was that while this scared me, the fear was as perfunctory and lacking in detail as everything else.
Then, I realized that I was thinking. The ponies I’d seen trapped in timeless space hadn’t been thinking, because that was sort of like doing something and you can’t do anything without time. I had to be somewhere where a little time was leaking in and making things happen, in a half-assed fashion. Which meant things could happen.
I couldn’t feel my horn, or my magical reserve, but since I was in a state where things just happened without worrying about all the little things that would have to happen to cause them, I skipped every step except for the last one, where my horn lit up with light.
And there was light. It was yellow. The dark waters stretched below me, scattered reflections winking in an out like a sea of stars – I could see. And since the waters weren’t still, there was wind. Acknowledging the wind, I felt it rippling across my fur. And there was fur. Since I had fur, I must have a body, hanging there in the middle of black nothingness above an ocean. And since I was above it, there must be a direction that was down, which meant gravity.
Gravity was probably a mistake.
===
I pulled myself out of the water, onto the shore. Apparently, there was land. I’d probably created it by mistake, while searching for it. The light I’d made hadn’t stayed attached to my horn like it should have; instead it was still hanging overhead in the sky, like a tiny sun. I giggled a bit at the thought of controlling a sun – it was made by my magic, so I controlled it, right? I pointed my horn at it, and wiggled around, and sure enough it followed. I threw my head down, casting it below the horizon, and suddenly it was dark again, because there wasn’t any moon or stars.
“There should at least be stars,” I croaked, my voice hoarse and cracked, as if I hadn’t spoken in a million years. I didn’t know how to make stars – creating them on the tip of my horn, one at a time, and then throwing them up into the sky would take ages – so I did what every filly tries to do before they learn their first spell, and just closed my eyes and wished for stars.
This doesn’t actually work. Only this time, it did. Inside me, where my magical reserve should have been, was a sea of dark timelessness where all the details of how magic was supposed to work were absent, and just like when I’d created the sun, I felt the not-quite-magic skip over all the intervening details, and jump straight to ‘let there be stars’.
And then everything exploded.
A cutie mark is a funny thing. On the one hoof, it’s tied to your inclinations and talents, and appears as a representation of your spirit’s focus. So one might assume that a cutie mark is immutable, at least by outside pressure, and that the only way to change a cutie mark is to so traumatize a pony’s spirit that nothing is left but insanity. And that works! Insanity cutie marks are a thing.
But there are other ways to change them, directly, using magic. When that happens, a pony’s inclination and talent sort of changes with it. This takes weird magic, admittedly, that most unicorns can’t learn – the easiest way is a zebra potion based on Heart’s Desire. The Heart’s Desire potion adds random cutie marks, and they manifest mentally as a compulsion – it’s clumsy and straightforward, and even the pony experiencing it can recognize it as an outside force acting on them.
My cutie mark was changed by the mirror pool. Nopony knew what that meant. I didn’t feel any different, at first.
But when I went to the park – in a light sundress to cover my cutie mark, since I was kind of embarrassed about the whole ordeal – and sat on the bench, and summoned my lyre, everything just felt off. It started with the summoning spell – I’d cast the spell thousands of times, to the point where it was basically reflex, but this time it didn’t work. I tried it again, focusing on the steps and making sure to do them in order, and that time my lyre appeared. It took more out of me than it should have, because it’s always less efficient to do a spell by the numbers instead of just letting it flow through you smoothly.
I played a few simple chords, satisfying myself that at least basic telekinesis hadn’t failed me, and then tried to let myself drift off into the comfortable fugue state where I could sit and play for hours.
Instead, I found myself watching the clouds. For hours.
Every so often, I’d remember my lyre, and strum at it randomly, but there was nothing resembling a song.
That night, I locked myself in my room and pulled out all my old music books, and flipped through them one after another, reassuring myself that I hadn’t forgotten everything I’d ever known about music. I played through the exercises – arpeggios, chordal progressions – and then moved on to song after song.
I could still play. I hadn’t lost that. But before I got through my entire collection, I got bored . I wanted to stop. It took an effort to slog through the sheet music, and the hardest pieces, where the notes had to flow off the lyre too quickly for sight-reading, that I’d always just felt… it just came out as a muddled mess.
I threw my lyre against the wall, gouging a chunk out of the plaster, then screamed and flung it around the room, smashing it against the furniture and the walls and anything else that happened to get in its way. It wasn’t damaged or anything – the frame is a solid chunk of metal – but I put some holes in the walls, scratched up my bedframe, and only stopped when I shattered the window, and the cool night breeze ruffled through my mane and calmed me down.
I couldn’t be a weather pony. I didn’t know the spells! There were only a few that were good for anything except actually changing the weather, and that was done by professionals who did it for a living. There was no hobbyist weather-magic scene, because there was only one sky.
There was only one spell I knew that was even vaguely weather related. So I lit my horn, and cast Woodwinds.
I watched the clouds for hours today… I watched them drifting by. The sunlight shining through the gaps, The soaring pegasi.
The wind whistled in tune as I sang.
The song that sang inside me Has vanished into air. I reach inside myself and find There’s nothing really there
Except the clouds…
The wind gusted through my mane as I stuck my head out the shattered window, my hooves on the sill, the gentle tones building in a crescendo.
Except the sky…
The moonlit streets of Ponyville rippled, as the clouds drifted across the face of the moon.
Except the wind…
I leapt out the window, and a sudden flurry of musical wind swirled around me, setting me gently to the ground even as it tore flowers from the garden and straw from the roof. The trees bent, their creaking and the cracking of their branches forming a percussive beat.
Except the rain…
There was a faint flash of lightning from the dark clouds that now blotted out the moon and stars, and a few scattered raindrops pattered across my coat. The thunder rumbled through me, and, horn ablaze, I sang.
Except the stoooooorm!
Lightning flashed, once, twice, three times, leaving huge scorch marks in the cobblestones and the grass, and then a flash of rainbow light tackled me to the ground, ending the spell and the song both, as my horn was pressed painfully into the dirt.
The wind stilled, the music stopped, but the rain only got harder. When I came out of the daze from the spell backfire, I was lying in freezing mud, the only warmth coming from the pony pinning me to the ground.
“Lyra?” Rainbow Dash asked. “What are you doing?”
===
What I wasn’t doing was joining the weather team. They let me try again a few times under controlled conditions, but I could never get the Woodwinds spell to do the weather I wanted, which was kind of important if I was going to help them stick to the schedule. It didn’t even do the same thing every time. Worse, it had a tendency to pull everypony – or at least every pegasus – into a huge weather-themed montage and that’s something that’s only fun once or twice a year.
So there was no way around it. If I was going to get any use out of my new cutie mark, I was going to have to hit the books and learn some real weather spells. That, or stay in the Night Guard armor full time and learn pegasus-style weather management as a bat pony. I decided to go with the spells since if I did ever fix my cutie mark, I’d probably still be able to cast them, and maybe they’d come in handy someday.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Twilight said, as she helped me find some books on weather magic. “When my friends’ cutie marks were switched, we fixed them by having them practice their old skills until they realized what they were actually good at.”
I blinked. “I thought you fixed them by completing Star Swirl’s last spell and turning yourself into an Alicorn.”
Twilight chuckled. “Other way around. I know you feel like you should be doing weather magic, but maybe you shouldn’t give up on music so quickly? You could join the Ponytones.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I really don’t want to,” I said, flopping onto the couch. “Music just seems so tedious – I want to control the weather!”
“But don’t you want to want to make music again?” Twilight asked.
I had to think about that. “Not especially,” I said. “My career was going nowhere, and none of the things that were going well in my life had anything to do with music. There’s plenty of room for artistry in cloud-sculpting and other weather-related fields, so it’s not like I’m giving up on any of my dreams. I’m just flowing down a new channel, after the storm washed out the bank on the old one.”
“So if Zecora walked through that door right now with a potion that could give you back your old cutie mark, you’d say ‘no thanks’?”
I laughed. “Oh, no, I’d rather go back to the way I was instead of learning a whole new field from scratch. I hate studying!”
Suddenly, Zecora walked through the door, holding a basket with a strange glowing potion.
I gave Twilight a look. “Is that the strangely specific hypothetical you just asked me about a second ago?”
“Maybe!” Twilight said, setting the weather books on the reading table in front of the couch. “How do you feel about having your spirit ripped out of your body and cast into an abyss of endless chaos?”
The Beginning of the Middle
I don’t know how long I was staring into the pool. The unicorn reflected there was beautiful – more beautiful than any unicorn I’d ever seen before. Her face was thin and graceful, with a long, gently spiraling horn ending in a sharp point, and cute little tufts of fur on her chin and ears. Her eyes were small but bright, and her nostrils… I’ve never really looked at a pony’s nostrils before. I mean, they’re supposed to be gross and full of snot. These, though – these nostrils were amazing. I wanted to kiss them, but I couldn’t, because it was only a reflection in a shallow pond, with only the occasional tiny ripple.
The sun rose. The sun set. It might have done that multiple times. I could hear birds and squirrels in the background, and occasionally feel a breeze, but none of it seemed important enough to break me from my trance.
Suddenly, there were a series of splashes, and the image shattered as a small rock skipped off the surface of the pond and hit me right in the knee.
“Ow! Ow ow ow!” I closed my eyes and lifted my leg out of the water.
“Woah!” came a hushed voice from the far end of the pond. “You’re a unicorn, right?”
I opened my eyes and looked at the strange creature on the far bank. It looked a lot like a baby dragon, like Spike – a bit younger, more like Spike when he first came to Ponyville. Very short, no muzzle to speak of, and stubby little arms and legs. This dragon had shaggy brown hair, instead of Spike’s green spines, and its scales were a paler shade of brown. Between the brown theme and the rock-breath, I took a guess. “And you’re an earth dragon?”
“What?”
I made my way across the pond towards it. “You breathed rocks at me instead of fire.”
It shook its head. “I just picked the rock up off the ground.”
“So you do breathe fire?” I asked, standing on the shore.
The little dragon backed away from me as I approached. “I’m just a girl!”
“Don’t be scared,” I said. “I’m not mad that you hit me with a rock. You broke me out of a trance. I was stuck staring at my own reflection. Can you believe how pretty I am?”
“Um…” she said. “You are kind of pretty. I really like your mane.”
“Thanks!” I said, grinning. “So… um…” I wasn’t really sure where to go from here. “I guess I owe you one.”
“One what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t really have anything with me, but the timeless place inside me was still there, ready to cut all the corners I could want with my magic. “One wish?”
“I wish for infinity more wishes!” she said, grinning eagerly for the first time.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I can grant that by just following you around, granting whatever wishes you want, forever?”
“Really?” the little dragon asked.
I smiled. “Sure, I’ve got nothing better to do.”
The dragon rubbed her fore-claws together. I noticed the actual claw-points were very blunt – better for digging in the dirt, maybe? “Then… I wish for infinity dollars!”
“What’s a dollar?”
“How do you not know what a dollar is?” she asked. “It’s, um, it’s money.”
“Infinite money. Got it,” I said. I reached inside myself, and prepared for a deluge of gold coins, or gems, or whatever horrible disaster would come from such a silly wish. But since I didn’t want everything to explode again, I changed the wish to ‘endless money’. She was only a baby dragon, so that would probably be enough.
There was a small ‘pop’, and a tiny, glittery square of metal or ceramic or something appeared in midair, and landed at the dragon’s feet.
“Oh cool,” she said, picking it up. “Look! It has my name on it and everything!” Apparently, her name was ‘Phoebe’. Why can’t dragons ever have normal names? “Let’s go try it out!”
With that, she ran off into the forest. Only she had a baby dragon’s stubby little legs, so I could keep up with her at a modest trot.
===
It turned out that the little glittery metal thing was a ‘credit card’, which was basically a reusable cheque. The shopkeepers used an enchanted thingie to check that the account had enough money to cover whatever the baby dragon wanted to buy, and the card I’d given her made it always say ‘yes, there’s plenty of money’.
So, we were basically stealing. I would have felt bad about it, but I’d created the entire universe, so all of the money belonged to me anyway.
On the other hoof, when we left the covered marketplace, the entire city guard was waiting for us. The door was surrounded by a semicircle of flashing carriages being used as a barricade, with the guards themselves taking cover behind their carriages, the little planters for trees and bushes, and other low barriers. They were pointing things at us that I assumed were weapons – they had a hole in the end, and a trigger, and looked a lot like unloaded crossbows without arms.
None of them were older than adolescent drakes, which kind of made sense – adult dragons are solitary and go off to live in caves and sleep on their hoards, but the less psychotic adolescents sometimes move into pony cities and live a few normal pony lives before they outgrow that phase. Not that we were in a pony city – there were nothing but earth dragons, as far as the eye could see.
Yes, I know, I’m obsessed with dragons. Apparently, I’d created a whole world of them.
Phoebe squeaked and hid behind me, terrified. I levitated the massive bag of candy she’d bought closer to her, but that wasn’t enough to distract her from the attention.
One of the guards had a bullhorn. “Alien monster, step away from the child!”
“She’s not dangerous!” Phoebe shouted back. “Haven’t you ever seen a unicorn before?”
There was a pause, then the guard with the bullhorn said, “There’s no such thing as unicorns!”
“Are too!” I said, grinning.
He replied, “I don’t know what you are, monster, but I’m not letting you hurt that child!”
“I wish you’d all just go away and leave me alone!” Phoebe shouted.
I reached inside for the timelessness, and smirked. “Your wish is my –“
Aaand everything exploded again. Except for me and Phoebe. And the candy.
There wasn’t a lot of fire, or light – it was more of a giant wave of force, starting a few feet from my hooves and getting larger and stronger as it expanded. The glass doors on the building behind us shattered, followed by the walls, the structural beams, and the roof peeling back and flying off in large, flat chunks like it was made out of paper. The flashy carriages were launched into the air, metal and glass crumpling as they flipped end over end, bouncing off the other carriages parked in the large lot in front of the market, some of them bursting into flames.
The guards were torn to pieces. They didn’t even have time to scream before heads and limbs went flying back, shattered torsos splattering in cones of blood and gore behind where they’d been kneeling. The bystanders weren’t so lucky – most of them were far enough away not to be instantly killed, but their bones were shattered and their skin stripped, and they writhed on the ground, some of them torn clean in half, screaming and wailing in agony…
“Oops,” I said, turning to look at Phoebe, who was staring with eyes wide and empty. “I think you need to be more specific next time.”
She whimpered.
“Well, okay,” I said. “By the strictest sense of the word, nopony ever needs to do anything, but everypony has a default standard of living they want to maintain, or some sort of moral code they don’t want to violate, and those put constraints on our actions. So if, for example, you don’t want to kill anypony, you need to specify that you want them to leave in one piece .” There was another explosion behind us, as something flammable in the ruined marketplace went up in flames. “Otherwise it’s far too easy to grant your wish by making everything explode.”
“So you’re an evil genie?” she asked, looking scared.
“What? No!” I said, grinning madly. “I’m a unicorn.”
She glared at me.
“So what should we do next?” I asked, levitating her up onto my back. She was tiny enough to ride me – even smaller than Spike compared to Twilight, although from how big everything else looked next to her, it was probably that I was larger and not that she was really smaller. She reflexively grabbed onto my mane with her tiny claws, and I started picking my way through the field of destruction. “You’ve still got infinity wishes.”
“Dad. Dad!” the little earth dragon screamed, as she ran towards one of the houses along the quaint residential street. It looked just like all the other houses to me, although I could tell that there was actually more variety in the houses than in the ones in Ponyville – they were all different shapes and sizes and colors, but none of them had any decorations or flourishes, which made the entire experience sort of like staring at a pile of trash. Yes, a shelf of dragon figurines has more objective uniformity, but the unordered chaos in the trash pile adds nothing, and every piece of trash ends up just looking like a piece of trash. Somepony needed to teach these dragons how to carve little hearts and stars into their trim.
“Phoebe! You’re okay!” said a large earth dragon, opening the door and grabbing her up in his claws. When I say ‘large’, I do not mean adult. He was still an adolescent, like all the guards, but he was very… heavy. If he’d had wings, I would have questioned whether he could fly, but none of the earth dragons seemed to have wings, so the point was moot.
There was a sudden flash of pain, and a moment of darkness, as the sniper shot me in the temple again. Just like the dozen times before, I was fully healed in a manner of seconds, the pain fading away with a rush of endorphins and sending little shivers all through my body.
“You need to come inside!” the large earth dragon said. “There’s a monster wandering the streets! They called in the national guard!”
I stepped around the pile of bone and brains that had just recently been my head, and approached the house. “Hi, Mister Phoebe’s dad,” I said. “I’m not a monster. I’m a unicorn!”
A large hole appeared in the wall next to us, and for a second I thought the sniper had missed completely, before I felt the blood running down my forelegs, and dripping from my chest and belly. Pain from my shattered ribs started to build into a white-hot agony, and I wobbled on my feet as blood started to pool in my throat, before whatever it was that was pretending to be my flesh and blood rallied and healed me again. I coughed a few times, getting the blood out of my windpipe. And closed my eyes at the rush of pleasure, as the endorphins failed to keep up with the sudden lack of pain.
When I opened them again, he was staring at me.
“Don’t worry. Apparently I can’t be killed,” I said. “It’s kind of reckless for them to be shooting at me when I’m so close to their own people though.”
“Maybe you should leave?” he said, shoving Phoebe back into the house.
“But Phoebe still has infinity wishes!” There was a wet gush as my guts splattered across my hind legs, and the little cement walkway beneath me, and I sat down heavily as my hips stopped being able to support my weight. Even after I healed, that left me sitting on a pile of warm, sticky intestines, and I squirmed a little as the wet guts slid over my crotch. This was not a good time to suddenly have an orgasm. I was talking to my friend’s dad. “I’m definitely not leaving until she at least gets them to stop shooting me.”
Phoebe tried to reply, but there was something noisy overhead, and I cocked my ears forwards trying to make out what she was saying over the noise. “WHAT?”
“I SAID WHY DON’T YOU WISH FOR IT YOURSELF!” she shouted back.
“I DON’T WANT IT TO BE MY FAULT WHEN THEY EXPLODE!” I said. “I DON’T LIKE KILLING!” It was starting to get windy, and even louder.
Phoebe’s dad took a step back, a foreclaw on her shoulder trying to pull her back into the house, but she stood her ground and shouted in my face, “THEN WHY DID YOU KILL THEM?!”
“IT WAS YOUR WISH!” I shouted, then lit my horn and tried to think of a spell to reduce the wind. The only thing I could think of was Woodwinds, and while that made the deafening roar into something a little more musical, it was still deafening, and if anything, the noise was louder.
“BUT YOU’RE THE ONE WHO GRANTED IT!” Phoebe shouted.
I only half-heard it, though, concentrating on my spell. Woodwinds was mostly automatic, but you were supposed to be able to change the type of music. Could you also change the volume? I concentrated on making it as quiet as possible – and it worked! The wind died down, my mane settling against my neck in all its windblown glory.
The only remaining noise was a gentle warbling of a reed flute, syncopating itself to the still-deafening roar of an engine, that if anything was getting even louder. I turned to look, and saw that not all the noise had been from the wind. There was a small single-propeller airship, sort of like Pinkie Pie’s Griffonchaser, although it looked like it had multiple dragons in it. The one in charge of flying it looked panicked, as the spinning blades didn’t seem to be getting as much lift as he expected and the whole thing was plummeting to the ground at a really unsafe speed. Worse, something that he’d tried had managed to tilt the thing over on its side, so it was the big propeller blades that hit the ground first.
They snapped off like twigs, and one of them went hurtling right in my direction. It slammed into my side, slicing me in half lengthwise and sending the bit with my head on it spinning into the neighbor’s lawn. As I bounced and rolled through the grass, I could see the cabin of the Griffonchaser crumple and burst into flames, bits flying everywhere, embedding themselves in trees and houses.
“Okay, that one was my fault,” I said, clambering to my feet as soon as I had lungs again. The sniper shot me in the chest, and he must have been using a crossbow with some crazy draw because I felt the bolt tearing through my entire body, shredding my rear end and splattering most of my organs against the house behind me. I looked down at the relatively tiny entrance wound, and back at the ragged mess where my hind legs used to be, and toppled to the ground.
Then stood up a second later. “QUIT DOING THAT!” I shouted in the general direction where the sniper had to be. Another moment of pain and darkness said that he’d responded with another head shot.
===
I cleaned myself up a bit before proceeding into Phoebe’s house, carefully stepping over the severed lower half of a unicorn since I didn’t want to undo all my work and track bloody hoofprints all over her carpet. The inside was messy and cluttered, a lot like my room, only everything was weird and dragon-themed. I found Phoebe and her family huddled in the basement – it was actually the first place I looked, since she hadn’t seemed completely stupid and the older dragons seemed to like throwing around really dangerous weapons.
The earth dragons didn’t cower as I came in, but I could tell they wanted to. They watched me warily.
“I didn’t grant the wish,” I said. “I didn’t grant any of the wishes. There’s a bit of timelessness inside me.”
“Timelessness?” the father asked.
“That’s what I call it,” I said. “It’s… like… time passing is what lets a world happen. If you have things, but no time, all you have is a description of a static scene. The less time you have, the more simplistic the description gets, until eventually all you have is the idea of something happening, frozen and unchanging and not actually happening at all. But it turns out that that’s powerful – if you want something to happen in a real world, you have to have the power to do it, and know how to do it, and then actually go through all the steps to do it. But if the world is frozen and simplistic, then simply saying what you want to do is just as good as all of that.
“So since I have some of that nothingness inside me, I can feed it simple ideas. Since it’s sitting where my magic is supposed to be, I can pull those ideas out of it using my horn, and throw them into the real world, where they fill back up with time and all the details get filled in automatically. And then boom! It happens.” I paused. “Literally boom. Most wishes seem to get granted as explosions.”
“What have you tried wishing for?” he asked.
“First, I wished for light,” I said. “That didn’t explode, but I got a sun instead of a light spell. Then I wished for gravity, which was apparently a mistake since I was floating in midair before that. Then, after the sun set, I wished for stars, and BANG! Instant universe. Full of earth dragons, apparently.”
“Earth… dragons?” the other adolescent in the family asked.
“That’s what she calls us,” Phoebe said. “I told her we didn’t breathe fire.”
“No, you told me you didn’t breathe rocks,” I said.
“We’re not dragons,” the big dragon said.
I snorted. “I think I’ve seen enough dragons to recognize a dragon when I see one.”
“We’re not dragons,” Phoebe said. “We’re people.”
“That’s a generic term,” I said. “Because the only people here are dragons. What would aliens from another world call you?”
“Um…” Phoebe frowned. “Earthlings?”
I shrugged. “Close enough.”
“Wait, did you say you created the universe?” the heavyset dragon asked. “What have you been doing for the last trillion years?”
“It was the day before yesterday,” I said.
“The universe wasn’t created yesterday,” he insisted. “I can remember last week.”
“Those memories could be fake?” the other adolescent suggested. “It isn’t actually possible to prove that anything we sense or remember is real.”
“Why would they be fake?” I asked. “The universe was created with an explosion, and I was right in the middle of it. I wasn’t blown to the edge of the space, so why would I be blown to the edge of the time? This is the center of the universe, not the edge.”
“Ha! I told you!” the smaller adolescent said. “I told you god created the universe with a past. He – she – doesn’t have to go around burying dinosaur bones by hand, she just creates something with a past, because without a past it would be less perfect.”
“Oh come on! You’re not actually believing any of this, are you?” the heavier one asked.
“Hello!” the smaller one said. “Unicorn!”
Phoebe’s father rolled his eyes. “Just because there’s one impossible thing doesn’t make every other impossible thing true.”
The small one smirked. “It means you don’t know what you’re talking about when you insist things are impossible.”
The large one threw up his claws. “And that’s a classic ad hominem attack!”
I felt something tug at my tail. It was Phoebe. “We’d better go,” she said. “They’ll be arguing for hours.”
The dragon family’s living room looked like it had been the epicenter of a terrible disaster, but actually none of the debris from the crashing Griffonchaser had hit their house – it had been like that before I even got there. Then again, what do you expect when you have a world ruled by adolescents?
The couch wasn’t really big enough for both of us – I was huge! – so Phoebe had to sit on top of me. She kept picking at my mane, which wasn’t really that bad, and occasionally she’d run one of her claws across my coat, which felt really nice. Not quite as nice as Spike, since her claws were so blunt and soft, but still much nicer than a hoof.
There were all kinds of noises going on outside – sirens, dragons talking too softly for us to make out, and people moving around. Loud periodic beeping, at one point, which was really ear-piercing. I would have gotten up to look out a window, but I had a baby earth dragon sitting on me, so I was trapped. None of it seemed to alarm her, so I figured it was normal enough for this place.
In retrospect, if I had gone and looked out a window, the sniper probably would have shot me again, which would have ruined their window and gotten blood all over everything. So score one for laziness.
“I wish I’d never made that wish, and killed all those people,” Phoebe said, eventually. “They’re never going to stop chasing us.”
“Hmm,” I said, considering that. “Wishing for a paradox seems pretty dangerous. It’s probably better to try and fix things in the present.”
Phoebe threw up her claws and flopped onto her back, her long hair draping itself across my tail. “How do you fix hundreds of people being dead?”
“Well, when all you have is a hammer…” I said.
“Hitting dead people with a hammer just makes them more dead,” she said.
“It’s a saying. A pony saying,” I explained. “’When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. Since all we have are wishes, everything looks like something we can solve by wishing for it. Right?”
“Nuh uh,” Phoebe said. “We have stories about people wishing the dead back to life. We had to read one of them in English class last week. They come back as zombies and eat your brains.”
“Oh. Well, we should probably do something,” I said. “You’re right. I’m never going to be able to figure out what I came here for if I’m spending all my time dodging snipers.”
“You didn’t dodge the sniper,” Phoebe said. “You didn’t even look like you were trying to dodge.”
“I would have if I’d known when he was going to shoot me,” I said, frowning. That was basically a bald-faced lie. Yes, getting shot hurt, but being healed afterwards was such a rush, and it happened quickly enough that the pain didn’t really have time to make me suffer. It was annoying, in the same way it would be annoying to have someone duck their muzzle under your tail and eat you out while you were walking down the street, but having someone trying to do that and constantly dodging out of the way would be just as annoying, so you might as well just let them.
“We should apologize,” Phoebe said. “We did something bad even if we didn’t mean to, so we need to tell them we’re sorry and we won’t do it again.”
“’Sorry I killed all those people’?” I suggested, glancing back at her.
She was sitting up, now, and nodded eagerly. “And I already have infinity dollars so I can pay for all the damages. Or maybe you can give their parents a wish to make up for it?”
“They’d probably just wish for their kids to be alive again,” I said.
“Oh… well…” Phoebe frowned. “Well, if they do, it probably won’t be that bad. One zombie isn’t too dangerous.”
===
Now I may have mentioned before that while I’m a fairly skilled spellcaster, compared to others in Ponyville, I’m still not really a magic unicorn. In theory, I know the really basic battle magic, but I was never able to cast bolts or shields with enough power to be worth using. So, in reality, I forgot everything I ever learned about them years ago. I’m pretty good at reading scrolls, but not so much at memorization.
Fortunately, I now had a magical reserve from the depths of Tartarus, and an insanely overpowered Woodwinds spell works just as well as a Shield spell against snipers using crossbows. Walking down the middle of the street while hurricane-force winds play the March of the Goat King is also a good way to get everypony’s attention. By the time we reached the field of ruined carts in front of the blasted marketplace, we’d attracted a crowd.
It wasn’t so good for my mane. I probably looked pretty frightfully windswept. It wasn’t very good for Phoebe either. I tried to ask her why she was even following me, but she couldn’t hear me over the wind and the music.
I let the winds curl around me, playing a final fanfare, and ended the storm with a deceptive cadence.
I also know a megaphone spell. “EARTHLINGS,” I shouted at a volume that had an already battered and shaken Phoebe covering her ears and cringing, “I HAVE COME TO MAKE AMENDS!”
Then, everything exploded. This time I swear it wasn’t my fault.
I stood up in the bottom of the crater, scattered pieces of me and Phoebe lying all around. Apparently, I hadn’t killed off the entire city guard after all, because more of them ran up to the lip of the crater and started bathing me in fire from a dozen flamethrowers. When that didn’t work – fire has terrible stopping power, especially against somepony who can’t die – they switched to little darts that hit like lightning bolts, which paralyzed my muscles in the most painful way possible.
Then they shot little darts at me that had some sort of pain-killing sleepy drug in them, and it looked like they were about to put me in a big metal tube when I passed out. I probably could have healed from the drugs if I wanted to, but they felt really good. Like, seriously, dangerously good. If I ever find out what sort of drug does that I’m going to need to get somepony to erase that knowledge from my mind so that I don’t spend the rest of my life drugged out on the couch.
It would be a short life. Bon Bon would never stand for that sort of horseapples. But it would totally be worth it.
I woke up in a morgue. Not in one of the little freezing drawers where they put dead ponies, but on a metal table surrounded by a marked lack of health monitors or IV drips or anything that you would use to keep a pony alive while you operated on them. Instead there was a large scale with a bucket instead of the normal platform, the sort you’d use to weigh the pieces of a dead pony as you dissected them, and a machine that was probably meant to remove all the blood from a pony’s body and replace it with formaldehyde, given that it had a blood-draining tube attached to it. I don’t know why you’d need a machine for that, actually – gravity usually does the job just fine.
Yes, when I was growing up I briefly considered going into funeral services, seriously enough to break into a mortuary and watch them prepare a dead pony. My mother thinks that that might have been the source of my strange fascination with death, but I think she’s mixing up cause and effect.
At any rate, I wasn’t alone in the morgue. An earth dragon with a full-body protective suit was standing over me, holding a scalpel, and arguing with somepony that I couldn’t see.
“This just seems like such a waste. We’d learn so much more from interrogating her.”
I was still kind of drugged, and the notion of taking any action was quite foreign to me. My senses all seemed to be working, at least, for all the good it did with the blinding lights illuminating my body and the nearby equipment, and keeping the rest of the room dark.
“Well, how long would it take to build a containment facility? We could keep her drugged until then.”
The drugs were starting to wear off, enough that I was beginning to feel the little aches and pains that a body normally feels, especially if that body has just been shocked with lightning and then laid out on a hard metal surface for Celestia-doesn’t-even-know how many hours. So being kept drugged ‘until then’ sounded like a really good idea. I almost managed to summon the effort to smile at the thought, but not quite.
“Yes. Sir. You are in charge,” the dragon said. “But if your soldiers never manage to capture another specimen of this variety, and we end up losing the war because of the information we didn’t get from the interrogation, I’m going to make sure the council knows that this was not my idea.”
She turned to me, and took a deep breath, which was blurred by a bit of static from her mask. “Beginning initial incision.”
She lowered the scalpel to the edge of my neck, and sliced me open. Two quick cuts – shoulder to sternum, then the other shoulder down past the sternum, all the way to my crotch. It took seconds, my hide parting like butter beneath the razor-sharp edge of her scalpel. It was sharp enough that it almost didn’t hurt, until it did – lines of fire flowing down by body, followed by cool relief as the incisions healed, as if they’d never existed.
So she tried again.
I couldn’t move, or even scream. I was awake and aware, but paralyzed, while the dragon looming above me inflicted brief agony with clinical precision. It was amazing. The sort of pain you could never inflict in the real world, at least not over and over and over like that without leaving your partner a bloody mess.
“Subject has a remarkable healing factor,” the dragon said. “Even while unconscious, the incisions are healing in mere seconds. I am going to attempt to determine if different kinds of trauma inhibit this regeneration. Switching to the cauterizer.”
I’m not sure what a cauterizer is, but it hurt a bit more – it burned right from the start, and took longer to heal. She also couldn’t make the incisions as quickly, needing to make multiple slow, shallow cuts to get to the same depth as her scalpel had in one quick stroke.
And still, I couldn’t react. I wanted to cry out – to moan, to writhe on the table and beg her to cut me harder, deeper – but all I could do was lie there while she teased me with tiny slice after tiny slice. It was maddening!
She tried a few other things – various caustic chemicals that burned like acid, followed by dousing me in flammable oil and literally setting me on fire for a few minutes, which was just as unpleasant as the last time I’d been set on fire. Still, the burns healed and my fur regrew within seconds of the flames sputtering out. So she applied a constant buzzing field that made my otherwise paralyzed muscles tense up painfully, like the little lightning throwers had earlier (she called it ‘electric current’). She left it running while she repeated a few of her previous attempts, to no better result.
“Vivisection does not appear to be a possibility,” she said, at last, her options exhausted. “I will now regretfully attempt to end the subject’s life in order to allow dissection to proceed.” She felt around my neck with her gloved claws until she found my jugular vein, then punched the sharp tip of the blood-draining tube through the skin, and started the machine. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the tube fill up with dark blood, as I was drained.
It didn’t kill me, of course.
“Removing the subject’s blood does not appear to lead to the cessation of vital functions. Perhaps the healing factor is replacing the blood as quickly as it is being removed?”
One thing it did do was start to clear the drug from my system, as the newly regenerated blood was fresh and untainted, and quickly diluted the toxins. As my mind cleared a little, I started remembering that things like time existed, and felt like I’d put up with this for long enough. My attempt to roll off the table didn’t quite work out, though – one of my legs twitched, and I managed to turn my head to look at my tormentor.
“Subject is regaining consciousness,” she said, fear showing in her eyes through the transparent faceplate, although her voice remained even. She backed into the darkness for a few seconds, and returned with a small red axe that she held tightly in both foreclaws. “I will now attempt to inflict sufficient trauma to overwhelm the subject’s regeneration.”
Unicorns have thick, muscular necks, but it’s still an obvious weak point. Her first hack sank deep into the flesh and crushed my trachea. The second hack crushed my trachea again, before it could fully heal.
“Subject continues regenerating –“ She slammed the axe into my neck again, this time sinking all the way down to my spine “—but repeated trauma –“ the next swing was almost a miss, failing to deepen the existing wound and instead opening a second bleeding gash “ – appears to be able to overwhelm –“ through the fiery agony in my neck, I felt something crack as the heavy metal wedge slammed into my vertebrae “ – the rate of healing.”
With a final overhead swing, the axe sliced through my spine and the rest of the muscle and hide holding my head in place, and since I was a bit too long for their table, my severed head went rolling off and landed on the floor with a splat. My right cheek started to soak up the warm blood pooling beneath me, while the left side of my face was splattered with the pulsing jets from the severed arteries of my neck. Of course, now that it was no longer part of me my body stopped regenerating its blood, and the flow quickly dropped to a dribble – although not before making me a sticky mess.
I groaned, and sat up to pull my head out of the blood pool. The rest of my body was pristine and untouched, without a trace of the drug, and the only bloodstains being the rivulets that ran down my neck from my face and mane. “That was amazing! Do it again!”
Or at least, that’s what I tried to say. My face was still drugged and mostly paralyzed, so it came out as more of a zombie moan. I can’t really blame her for burying the hatchet in my forehead in response.
I inhaled sharply at the sudden stabbing headache, and staggered back, my thoughts muddied. The dragon tried to keep hold of the axe, but I twisted my head and wrenched it out of her shaky grip, then lit my horn and tore the thing free from my skull, burying it in the chest of the decapitated unicorn body still lying on the slab.
“Security!” she cried, her voice wavering at last as she backpedaled towards the door. A claw grabbed her and pulled her to safety, two armless-crossbow-wielding guards taking her place. They started shooting me right away, over and over and over, flame and noise dazzling me while more of those ridiculously fast crossbow bolts shredded my body. Annoyed, I tore the weapons out of their hands, flipped the things around in midair, and left them hovering to either side of my head, the business end pointing at their previous owners.
“I come in peace,” I said, as the tiny bolts embedded in my body worked their way back out of the holes and clattered to the floor like unusually metallic popcorn. “Take me to your leader.”
Or, well, "Ooaaaeeee! Aaaeeooouuueeeeerrr!”
They obviously didn’t understand paralyzed zombie groaning, because instead of standing down and letting me moan threateningly at whoever was in charge, they pulled out their backup weapons and tried to shock me with lightning again.
I’m not even sure what spell I cast, or if it was even a spell. I mean, I’m sure it wasn’t a wish , I wasn’t about to use a wish just to avoid a little pain! I think it was the sort of instinctual magic that I’d read about but never really experienced as a filly, the sort guided by your cutie mark. The little darts full of lightning struck me, but the lightning itself was turned, and arced back along these little wires and shocked the guards instead. They collapsed, twitching, just like I had the first time they’d used them on me.
I stepped over them and through the doorway. The doctor was already retreating as fast as her awkward bipedal gait could take her, and the dragon with her was close behind. Giant metal doors – like the door on a bank vault -- closed in front of me, blocking off the passageway, but telekinesis is telekinesis and insanely overpowered telekinesis is all you need to crumple steel like it was aluminum foil.
It wasn’t a very large base, and it didn’t take long to find what appeared to be the command center, judging by the gigantic glowing spherical map hovering in midair in the center of the massive chamber. They’d called in every dragon they could find to defend it – half a dozen guards with their rapid-fire crossbows, and a dozen other dragons with smaller weapons of the same sort held in one hand. After enduring a few seconds of being shredded by the massive volley, I lifted one of the heavy metal desks – which was nailed down, but I just ripped it loose – and held it in front of me to block most of the bolts.
“Stop it!” I said. “Stop. Stop. Sssstooop.” By the last repetition, I was pretty sure I was speaking clearly enough to be understood, but they didn’t listen. “I’m not here to hurt you,” I added.
“Hold your fire!” came a voice from across the room, and the loud bangs of the dragons’ weapons gradually died down. When they’d stopped completely, I lowered the desk enough to see who’d spoken. My vision went blurry for a second as one of the dragons took the opportunity to shoot me in the head, but it wasn’t as powerful as the sniper’s bolts and I was healed before I had time to fall over.
“I said hold your fire!” the voice repeated. It was coming from one of the dragons that wasn’t a guard, and also wasn’t dressed as a scientist or a doctor. He was wearing a sweater, of all things. It did have a little ‘X’ patch sewn on it, which seemed to be the symbol of this nation’s military.
Then he turned to me. “If you aren’t here to attack us, why are you here? Why did the aliens send you to destroy Sanctuary Hills?”
“That was an accident,” I said. “I was trying to explain that when you blew me up and killed Phoebe. I didn’t come here to cause trouble.” I set down the desk, and turned to the side so that every dragon in the room could see my flank. “I came because my special purpose is broken, and it needs to be fixed. This symbol on my flank gives me a talent for weather control – I want to change it back to a talent for music.”
“How is coming here supposed to accomplish that?” he asked. “We don’t possess that technology.”
“Yet,” said the doctor. “We don’t possess it yet. Perhaps with study…”
He shook his head. “I’d be more interested in figuring out her regeneration.”
The doctor’s face was grim. “Give me time, and I will unlock all her secrets.”
“Um… the regeneration is special,” I said. “It’s not just magic, it’s… unreality? Reality? It’s an expression of the same timelessness that lets me grant wishes.”
The male stared at me incredulously. “You can grant wishes. Like some sort of alien genie.”
“Yes, unfortunately,” I said. “It hasn’t done me a lot of good. I’m certainly not going to try to change my cutie mark with a wish, not after all the ways it’s gone wrong so far.”
“What do we need to do to get you to grant us a wish?” he asked, ignoring the part where I told him that the wishes were so dangerous that I wasn’t even going to use them on myself.
“If you solve my cutie mark problem, I’ll grant you a wish,” I said. “If you don’t, I’ll grant you *three* wishes.” I met his gaze and glared. “And just in case you don’t understand what’s going on here, let me note that the last person I granted a wish wished for infinite wishes. She didn’t survive to make a fourth.”
“I wish I had a million dollars!” shouted someone from the back of the room. I glanced in his direction, and let the wish form inside me, then tossed it his way. A briefcase appeared, and little scraps of green paper went fluttering about in the air as it burst open upon landing.
“I wish I could live forever!” said someone else. Why not? I tossed the wish his way, and he instantly vanished.
“Where did he go?” the leader asked.
I shrugged. “How should I know? He apparently wasn’t going to live forever staying here.”
“I wish I had the power to transform into any animal!” This time, the lucky guard was transformed into a unicorn, his armor and weapons clattering to the ground around him. “What? How?”
“Unicorns can learn a transformation spell,” I told him. “It’s difficult, but anypony with enough determination should be able to figure it out.”
“Can you teach me?” he asked. She, rather, since she’d ended up as a bright pink mare with an annoying screechy voice.
“No, I don’t know that spell,” I said. “Besides, all I can cast right now are weather control spells, because my special purpose is broken. Now, does anyone else want to commit suicide by wish, or can we move on to the part where you agree to fix me?”
There was a brief pause, before someone chimed in that they also wanted a million dollars, which started a rush, the dragons dropping their weapons and racing towards me with claws outstretched. Luckily for them, the ‘briefcase full of paper’ wish was perfectly repeatable. I’d gotten to about half of them before the leader shouted over the crowd.
“You idiots do realize that all that money is either counterfeit or stolen, right?” he said. “Unless she’s secretly working for the Federal Reserve, she doesn’t have the authority to create legal tender.”
That calmed them down for about a second, before somedragon blurted out, “I wish for a million dollars in gold!”
It poured out of a hole in midair, a stream of molten metal that splattered across his helmet and ran down his face and neck before anypony could react. He had time to scream, briefly, before the screaming noise became steam escaping from cracks in his roasted skull, his flaming body collapsing to the ground under the weight of a thousand pounds of searing liquid. Most of the dragons nearby managed to scramble away before getting more than a few drops splattered on them – their clothes caught fire, but they were able to roll around and put it out, wounded and wailing in agony, but alive. One of the civilian-looking dragons wasn’t so lucky – she was shoved back against the original victim and sank into the gold, sticking there firmly enough that she tried to push herself free with one hand, which only succeeded in flash-cooking her entire lower arm. She screamed for a while, before she died.
I stared back at the commander over the infernal glow of the slowly cooling pile, as the stench of burning flesh and clothing filled the air, and said loudly, over the screams of those still alive, “I’m still waiting for your answer.”
“You’re a monster,” he said.
“They were warned,” I snapped back. If it sounds like I didn’t feel a lot of remorse for these idiots, then… it’s true. I kind of wanted them dead, after what they did to Phoebe. It wasn’t her wishes that killed her – it was them. These weren’t good dragons like Spike, or Phoebe. These were bad dragons, and I knew how dangerous bad dragons could be.
“Very well. If you’ll agree to keep yourself and your wishes contained within the laboratory, I’ll instruct Dr. Vahlen to study your… ‘special purpose’.”
“Cutie mark,” I corrected him.
“I’m not calling it that,” he said. “It’s silly.”
“It’s the –“ I started, and then paused. I’d just helped several of his people kill themselves, teleported one away, and transformed a fourth, all while he stood there unable to stop them from destroying themselves. Whatever authority he had was probably on fairly shaky ground, which meant that he was going to try to assert himself in any way possible until he’d satisfied his own sense of honor. I was probably better off giving in on the things that literally didn’t matter. “Fine. You can call it whatever you want.”
Dr. Vahlen seemed unfazed by the flurry of disasters the dragons’ wishes had caused. “Do not worry, commander. I will keep her contained.”
“Just one more thing,” I said, as I circled around the still-flaming golden death-pyre. “You still have to make a wish.”
“I wish none of this had ever happened,” he said.
I shook my head. “No paradoxes. Do you know what happens if you change the past?”
“It has been theorized that a split timeline develops,” Dr. Vahlen answered.
I nodded. “But only the new timeline is real. The old timeline withers and fades, slowly enough for the ponies trapped inside to see their doom approaching, a timeless stasis that’s a million times worse than death.”
“Could I wish that my men were alive again?” he asked.
“You could,” I said, “but Phoebe was eight years old and even she knew better.”
“It is the classic wish gone wrong from all the storybooks,” Dr. Vahlen remarked. “It is also a petty, selfish wish. These people – all of us here – are expendable. It is the struggle against the alien invaders which is most important. You should wish for something to aid us in our struggle. Perhaps for knowledge?”
“Right,” the commander said. “Knowledge.” He turned his back to me and stared up at the giant floating map. “We have satellite coverage of the entire globe, but we still know nothing of the aliens’ movements. Except for your blatant show of power, they’ve managed to stay stealthy. Hidden. I want them exposed.”
“So you wish… that the aliens would show up on your map?” I asked. “I’m not sure a wish can do that. It sounds like an ongoing effect.”
“Then alter our detection equipment,” he said, turning back to me. “I wish that our satellites would do their job and detect the alien invasion that I know is happening behind our backs!”
I wasn’t sure what a ‘satellite’ was – did he mean the moon? Did the world have multiple moons? – but I did my best to feed his desire into the timelessness, hoping that it would do the extra work of figuring out what he meant, just like it always did the extra work of figuring out how to do anything at all.
And just like that, the map exploded – in a good way. Sort of. Red flashing pictograms appeared all over the map, and a loud alarm started blaring.
“Oh my god,” he said, staring at the result. “Washington DC, London… Moscow! It’s even worse than I thought!”
“Indeed,” Dr. Vahlen said. “It looks like and your soldiers have your work cut out for you. I will escort the subject to the laboratory so that we may begin the examination. Hopefully she will be more cooperative this time.”
I followed her towards one of the exits from the central chamber. “I’m probably still going to heal if you try to cut me open. That’s not under conscious control.”
“Do not worry. We have ways,” she said. Just as she reached the doorway, she turned back to the room. “And send the newly transformed unicorn to join us,” she said to her commander. “We can always use more specimens.”
The End Justifies the Means
It took a couple of weeks to make any progress on the cutie mark front, so I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail. I’ll just give some highlights that stood out in my memory. A training montage!
Day 1:
“Ahhh! Nngggg….”
I screamed as Dr. Vahlen sliced open my cutie mark. It’s one of the more sensitive areas on a lot of ponies, which is kind of strange since it’s right out there in the open – most erogenous zones are in places that are harder to touch without being intimate. I think it might just be a social construct – ponies think it’s weird to touch someone’s cutie mark, so they never get touched there, so when you do get touched there you really notice it. That would explain why it’s a perfectly comfortable place to have saddlebags bouncing – I wouldn’t want to wear something like that over my teats, or whatever.
“Are you sure you do not want the anesthetic?” she asked, as she wedged a thin sliver of cold metal into the wound before it could close, and started slicing a thin strip off one of the flaps of skin with agonizing slowness.
I whimpered, and shook my head. “I want to keep my head clear,” I managed to say. “Besides, pain isn’t so bad when you know it’s not going to do any permanent harm.” I felt my tail starting to raise, and forced it down to cover myself.
“That is not medically accurate,” she said, removing the strip holding the wound open, and letting it heal. I shivered with pleasure as the pain receded, only to return again in a different place as she sliced me open again. “However, this should not be sufficient pain to cause permanent mental damage. These incisions are only skin deep.”
I giggled. “Strangely enough, I keep most of my nerve endings in my skin. What are you doing this for, anyway? Couldn’t you take these samples from the body I left behind?”
“We will study it as well,” she said, taking the next strip from my shoulder. “But it no longer has a purpose mark.”
“Cutie mark,” I corrected.
“The commander has forbidden the use of that term,” she said. “At any rate, we will compare all of these samples – the skin where the cutie mark is displayed, other skin taken from a living subject, and a sample taken from the deceased. We also have taken samples from Johann. I will note that he accepted the anesthetic.”
“Johann?”
“The other unicorn,” she said, letting the second wound heal. “The one you transformed. He has no purpose mark.”
“Ah,” I said, giving a sigh of relief as the pain faded. “You won’t find anything. The coloration is magical, not –“
“Stop!” she said. “Do not contaminate my examination with your bias! If you tell me what I will find, then I will tend to find only what you tell me.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” I said. “I do know some things about cutie – er, about purpose marks. Are you sure you don’t want me to tell you what I remember? I took the class ages ago, but I could give some background at least.”
“Do you know how to change them?” she asked.
“No… it’s supposed to be impossible,” I said. “Although that’s obviously not true, since it’s happened a couple of times before.”
“Then I would prefer to approach this subject with an open mind.”
Day 2:
While the scientists examined the samples, Johann and I were told to practice magic in ‘the box’, a room-sized machine that had every sort of detection equipment known to dragonkind pointed at the interior. “It cannot read your mind,” Dr. Vahlen told me, “but only because we do not yet know how to properly interpret the data it gathers from your brain.”
I wondered what it would make of the timelessness. I wondered if the dragons would be able to replicate that. It seemed unlikely; the timeless chaos created and manipulated matter and energy, not the other way around.
But magic was subject to physical forces, so maybe they’d make some progress there.
So, I spent a couple of hours with Johann trying to remember how we’d first been taught levitation back in magic kindergarten. “Your body knows how to use magic,” I told her, “but as a baby you were conditioned not to use it because of the negative effects caused by uncontrolled magical spells…”
“I didn’t have magic as a baby,” she said.
“Oh!” I smiled at her. “Then it should be easy. Most of the trouble young unicorns have learning to use magic is overcoming their ‘housetraining’.”
It still took a while for her to figure out how to light up her horn, but once she could I was able to take hold of her magic and guide her through the basics – light and levitation. She picked them up instantly, although both her power and control needed work.
If I was a real teacher I probably would have just made her practice that for a while, but she was eager to move on to more complicated stuff. I started teaching her how to read and write magic, since I didn’t have very many spells memorized.
That took a bit longer, since it was essentially learning a new language.
“Can’t I just write it out in English?” she asked.
“You could, but the runes are mnemonic,” I told her. “It’ll make more sense when we get to actually casting some of them.”
We spent the rest of the day studying that. I had her hold up the flash cards with levitation, and indicate her answer in multiple-choice drills by making the cards light up, so she got some practical work in too.
Day 3:
“You want to do what?”
Dr. Vahlen kept her demeanor professional. “I wish to observe the process of a purpose mark fading. To do this requires you to die again. If you have any preference as to the method of your demise –“
“Chopping off my head worked,” I said, feeling a bit of a thrill as I remembered her standing over me with the axe, blood splattered across her white coat. “You need to make sure the cu—the purpose mark isn’t part of the new body that forms, so something has to be cut off. It might as well be my head.”
She nodded. “I suspected as much. We have assembled a guillotine in the box. If you will follow me…”
“You’re not going to use the axe again?” I asked, pouting a bit.
She frowned at my response. “I assure you, the guillotine will be much faster, and far less painful.”
She was right. I set my head down on the padded rest, and let them buckle me in, strapped to a cushioned bench, with a metal retraining collar locked around my neck. Straining my eyes upwards, I could see the blade glinting. When they pushed the button, it didn’t just fall – it was propelled downwards by a pair of hydraulic pistons, and by the time I realized it had happened my head was already in the basket.
Day 4:
Johann was a bit distracted at magic practice. “Why is there a guillotine sitting in the middle of the room?”
I shrugged. “I guess they think they might need to kill me again. Just ignore it.”
Day 5:
“So, any progress?” I asked.
“After examining the data from your death in great detail, we believe we were able to isolate the… probabilistic anomaly representing your purpose mark,” she said.
“Probabilistic – oh! You mean you were able to see it messing with chance? That makes sense, since cutie marks—“
“Purpose marks,” she corrected.
“Right, sorry. Purpose marks are related to a pony’s destiny.”
“It was strange,” Dr. Vahlen said. “We were expecting it to be similar to the quantum particle effects emitted by your magical spells, but there is no apparent relationship between the two. It’s almost as if your cutie marks are not magic, at least not as you know it.”
“I could have told you that,” I said.
She nodded. “I am glad that you did not. That I was able to reach the conclusion on my own makes it a much more significant finding.”
“So what’s the plan for today? Are you going to kill me again? I notice you left the guillotine there.”
She shook her head. “No, no, that should not be necessary until we know more. For today, we simply wish to observe how your purpose mark interacts with your magic. You said that it only let you cast weather magic, but we have observed you casting other spells during your work with Johann.”
“Ah, right. I might have exaggerated a bit,” I said. “I’m only able to cast weather magic well . I’ve always been able to cast other spells by reading them off a scroll, and of course any unicorn can use light and levitation.”
She waved a claw dismissively. “I figured as much. But we wish to compare a spell that your mark assists with to a spell that it does not assist with, and if at all possible, to an effect generated by a wish.”
I shuddered at the last one. “Okay,” I said. “I assume you want this done in the box.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
So I cast ‘Woodwinds’, at a normal volume and wind intensity, and then cast the spell to summon my lyre, which didn’t work because my lyre was stored in a concept space attached to a completely different universe. Their engineering crew made me a new lyre, and I was able to work out how to attune and store it after a few tries – I don’t have that part memorized, but I’ve had to do it a few times and the theory is simple enough.
For the wish, I wished I had a million dollars, letting the briefcase of worthless counterfeit paper appear at my hooves. For a second I considered summoning the molten gold, but to be honest I’m not a big fan of burning to death, and all that gold would have been a bitch to clean up. It’s heavy .
Day 6:
“That’s so cool!” I said. “How did you do it?”
Johann blushed. She was cute when she blushed – almost as cute as Bon Bon. The pink highlights always look ridiculous against my green or Twilight’s lavender, but when a white or pink pony blushes, it just works. “It wasn’t that hard. I was studying computer science before I was recruited for X-Com, so I just whipped it up in XAML.”
What she had was a magic slate with all the magical runes in a box at the side, labelled in English when you touched them. You could drag them around and build spells right there in the middle, without having to draw the runes out or erase them or anything, and related runes would snap into place with little lines indicating the relation. “This is amazing,” I said. “I mean, I’d heard that some of the old wizards had things like this – glowing runes hovering in midair that they could move around and adjust – but that’s a long-lost art. Even Twilight Sparkle just uses a chalkboard.”
“Do you think… that we could actually cast a spell? With this the memorization isn’t as crucial. I mean, I’ll still work on it, but I really really want to actually cast something.”
I perked an ear at her, then nodded. She’d earned it. “Sure. Now, if I was a real professor, I’d have this certain sequence of simple spells that exercise all the magical runes between them, but I’m not and I didn’t bring any textbooks with me, so we’ll have to improvise. Let’s see…”
Woodwinds and Hammerspace are not simple spells, but they’re the ones I know, so we did those first. It wasn’t a terrible choice -- between them they used all the runes except for Spear and Loki. Hammerspace was a bit too big to fit on the slate at first, but Johann was able to poke at a few things and ‘recompile’ and all the letters got smaller. Judging by my brief view of the other ‘apps’ the slate had on it, ‘Runedit’ really was pretty simple, but I was still impressed.
For Spear, I worked out the Magic Laser spell that I’d learned back in the day and forgotten how to cast. I remembered that it had a Spear array as the central active construct, and went from there. I don’t think I got it exactly right, but I got something that worked, and the real point was just to demonstrate Spear, anyway.
I didn’t know what to do with Loki, so I messed around attaching a bunch of copies of it to a Light spell, and ended up with a seriously nauseating version of Dazzle. After we finished throwing up, I tried to make Johann promise to never, ever cast it again, but she wanted to try it out on the aliens if she was ever sent out into the field.
“It doesn’t have the range,” I said. “You’ll always catch yourself.”
She frowned “I can close my eyes?”
I looked at the Loki runes suspiciously. “I’m not sure that’ll help.”
Day 7:
Dr. Vahlen didn’t take me to the box. Instead, she took me into a room with dozens of large magical windows everywhere. One of them had two sets of similar magical rune arrays up on it, looking like they’d been made in Runedit. “On the left, we have the Woodwinds spell you diagrammed for Johann yesterday,” she said. “On the right, we have the spell you actually cast.”
I compared the two. They looked pretty similar. “I don’t see any difference,” I said.
“Indeed,” she said. “That time you cast the spell directly from his tablet, and it was cast exactly as you described. However…” she pushed a button, and the right-hand array changed significantly. “This is the Woodwinds spell you cast yesterday, when asked to cast a spell enhanced by your purpose mark. We reverse-engineered the runes from the data gathered during the casting.”
I boggled. “You can do that?”
She smiled. “I will not say it was easy, but we have the best minds at work on this project, and the theory was simple enough. You had already given us the Rosetta Stone, all we needed to do was apply the translation in reverse.” Her smiled faded. “We are not as adept as you in interpreting the meaning of the new arrangement, however. I was wondering if you could provide any insight.”
I was already up on my hind legs, tracing the connections with my hooves. The spell was still Woodwinds – there was the weather magic assembly, there was the harmonic conjunction – but the entire control structure was missing, replaced with what looked like an optimized version that only cast the exact version of the spell that I’d used. Most of the internal adaptive buffering was missing, too, with only a few amplifiers in the exact places where this configuration would need them. And that connection between vortex dampening and pitch levelling? That was genius!
“I… don’t even know where to start,” I said. “It’s like some magical prodigy took the exact version of the spell that I wanted to cast, and took out everything that wasn’t needed, making the whole spell simpler and easier. And this!” I pointed to the new connection. “They have this little piece doing two different things for two different parts of the spell at the same time! And it’s not the same as either part that it’s replacing.”
“Like an optimizing compiler,” Dr. Vahlen said. “Or perhaps, given the purpose mark’s connection to probability, like a series of fortuitous mistakes that just happens to make things better?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Back home, we don’t have… this. There are ponies that can look at a spell being cast and copy it, and then work out how to write it down later, but it’s always just an approximation.” I stared at the marvelously psychotic version of Woodwinds my cutie mark had helped me cast. “What about the wish?” I asked. “Did it do the same thing to a conjuration spell? I mean, I don’t know any real conjuration spells, but if you were able to capture it in runes I might be able to spot the same sort of shortcuts.”
Dr. Vahlen nodded, and pushed the button again. This time, the whole screen filled with a tangled mishmash of runes and… other symbols, lit up in red. “The effect generated when you ‘made a wish’ appears to be a magical spell, but not every part of it used the runes you enumerated for Johann. The red symbols are unique unrecognized rune-like magical atoms.”
It didn’t look at all like a conjuration spell. It didn’t look at all like something anypony could actually cast, even if they knew what all the new ‘runes’ were supposed to be. There was a Mist rune with sixteen connections. Sixteen! “Now I really, really, don’t want to make any more wishes,” I said, backing away from the... thing. I knew it was just a diagram with no actual power, but looking at it made my skin crawl. “Push the button again,” I said. When she didn’t, I leapt for her and pushed the button myself, but while it made the runes smaller, and put them in a series of boxes surrounded by little pictograms and labels, it was still there, staring at me. “Make it go away!” I said.
She moved the pointer to the appropriate pictogram to hide the display, then gave me a curious look.
“I’m going to have nightmares about that,” I said, sitting down, ears flattened, eyes squinted shut.
Dr. Vahlen patted me on the head, and I rested my cheek against her side.
Day 8:
“I think I’m ready,” Johann said, a serious look on her face. “Teach me how to transform.”
“I don’t know any transformation spells,” I said. “I tried learning them but I could never get the hang of it.”
“If you tried learning them, then you must know where to start?” she asked, hopefully. “What runes do the transforming?”
“Um…” I said, my mind going blank. “I know that the safe version stores your body in concept space, so you’d have to have something like a Hammerspace spell involved. I think. And they’re associated with Princess Luna, so maybe some Moon runes?”
She frowned, and brought up a saved version of Hammerspace, trying to figure out where she could attach Moon runes and have them do anything. “The wish?” she suggested. “You transformed me into this thing with a wish. You could make another wish that transformed something, and then Dr. Vahlen could record the results –“
“It wouldn’t be useful,” I said, cringing. “Wishes don’t use coherent spells.”
“Even incoherent spells might have some hints,” she said.
“It’s not worth the risk,” I insisted. “We already knew the million dollar wish was repeatable. I don’t know if what I did to you would happen the same way if I tried it on some other dragon, even if they wanted to be transformed.”
She wouldn’t give it up. “Then just wish for the transformation! I know at least three people who want to be able to use magic, even if it means turning into a unicorn.”
“It’s not safe,” I said.
“We’re at war,” she said. “Nothing’s safe. They could all die tomorrow on some mission gone wrong, or even on a mission gone right where their little part of it went wrong. If they want to take the risk, you should let them!”
“Do they want to take the risk? Even after what happened to Poindexter?” That being the name of the dragon who’d wished for gold.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I only thought of this just now. If they say yes, will you do it?”
I reminded myself that I couldn’t be hurt, and that I didn’t really care what happened to these stupid, violent dragons. “Fine,” I said. “If you find a volunteer, I’ll do it. But I’m not going to look at the result. That’ll be up to you.”
She spit on her hoof, and held it up. “Deal.” I clopped my hoof against hers, rolling my eyes a bit. “Now teach me more about spell construction. How do you figure out how to make a new spell?”
Day 9:
“Three volunteers,” I said, flatly.
Dr. Vahlen nodded. “They’re waiting for you in the box.”
I sighed. “Have two of them wait outside. There’s no sense having them all killed at once if the first wish goes really badly.”
The first wish turned its victim into a crystal statue of an alicorn, which then exploded, showering me with sharp little bits of glittering stone. By which I mean, my body was torn to pieces and splattered against the wall, and I reformed standing knee deep in a pile of my own guts.
For the second wish, I tried to concentrate harder on the person still being alive afterwards, and maybe my mental image of what I wanted slipped a bit, because he disintegrated into a swarm of bats, which flew all around the room in a panic. The science team eventually captured them all and put them in a cage, where they would be watched carefully for any signs of individual or collective intelligence.
The third sacrifice stepped into the room as if she was walking up to the guillotine. Which she was, technically, since it was still standing there in the middle of the box. But she was acting like she was about to have her head put in it and cut off.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
I motioned to the door. “Then get out of here. This was a dumb idea.”
She took a step towards the door, then turned back. “No,” she said. “Do it.”
So I tried again to focus on the important parts – alive, intelligent, pony – and made the wish again. There was no particular fanfare, but where she’d stood was a perfectly normal, yellow and green blank-flanked earth pony. “Oh, horseapples,” I said. “I forgot the horn. Let me try again.”
“No!” she said, holding up a hoof. “This is good! I’m still alive. I’m… still…” she waited, nervously, but failed to explode or keep over dead or anything. “I’m good. I’m going to leave now.”
Then she backed out of the room, almost tripping over her hooves a few times, but keeping her gaze fixed on me.
I gave her enough time to make a clean escape, then went to find Dr. Vahlen and Johann. “Did you get that?” I asked.
Johann nodded. The two of them were looking up at the big screen, where something I carefully wasn’t looking at was displayed. Probably displayed. Judging by how they were staring. I certainly didn’t look.
“Okay, have fun,” I said. “Just don’t blame me if it drives you crazy and you start murdering all your friends.”
“All my friends are dead,” Johann said, not taking her gaze from the screen. “Except Mike, who’s apparently a bunch of bats now.”
“And… er… that last one. The girl,” I said. “She lived!”
“The other volunteers weren’t my friends. The rest of my friends were killed in action.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “The war really isn’t going well.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You’re nothing like the other aliens. Even Bradford doesn’t think you’re in league with them, anymore.”
“Well…” I said, cringing. “You can make new friends?”
“After the war, maybe,” she said. “No point making friends with more people who are just going to die.”
Day 10:
As I walked up to her to begin our lesson, Johann wordlessly held out her slate. It had a complicated spell on it that I didn’t recognize. I took the slate and looked at it more closely.
“You don’t have any control structures,” I noted.
“I don’t know how to make them,” she said. “It sounded like they were fairly generic?”
“Woodwinds has a pretty good setup,” I told her, looking through the spell in more detail. I didn’t recognize the active elements, but there were a few bits that were mechanically wrong. “You can’t have five connections to one Moon rune. Use two.” I made the correction, and half a dozen similar typo-level fixes that I’m not going to list here because I’d be making most of them up anyway and I don’t think anypony really cares. “And you don’t have any buffers. The whole matrix is going to collapse if you feed power into it.”
“I didn’t just want to stick random buffers everywhere,” she said. “How do you know how many to put, and where?”
“Trial and error,” I said. I set the slate down between us. “I guess it’s time for some practical magical research. I’ll put in some fake controls, and we’ll cast it on a null target and see what explodes.”
A lot of things exploded, but mostly it was just the spell matrix which is relatively harmless. It hurts like a bitch, but unless you were putting a LOT of power into the spell it’s not all that dangerous. I mean, there are standard shielding and buffer spells that actual spell researchers use that I had no idea how to cast, but transformation is more of an intricate spell than a high-powered spell unless you’re trying to force it through an unwilling target’s resistance, and besides I couldn’t be killed. So it wasn’t all that reckless in that exact situation, but it’s not something you should ever, ever do at home, kids. Magic circles are your friends!
At the end of the day, we had a spell to turn a wooden block into a thick puddle of goo. Johann messed around a bit with the central elements of the spell, and I spent a half hour making everything else work around her changes, and then we had a spell to turn a wooden block into a sort of inverted geode, with crystal spikes pointing everywhere. We repeated this procedure five or six more times, getting other random, useless transformations.
“I think I get it,” Johann said, suddenly. She stood up and cast another version of the spell, without even writing it down first, and the next wooden block turned into a little yellow songbird, which chirped happily and flew around in circles for a few seconds before turning back into a block and dropping to the ground. She laughed. “I get it! It’s so simple!”
I stared at her, and then down at her flank, and then up at her face, and pointed at her flank. She turned, and saw her new cutie mark – a yellow songbird surrounded by little stars.
She grinned. “Neat!”
Day 11:
“This is a breakthrough,” Dr. Vahlen said. “We were able to track the probabilistic anomaly when it manifested as Johann’s purpose mark.”
“How is that a breakthrough?” I asked. “I thought you were able to do that with mine since last week.”
“No,” she said, “you do not understand. We were not just able to detect the anomaly, we were able to track it, backwards in time, all the way up until the moment he stepped into the box. Taken on its own, the data from before it manifested is simply random noise, but working backwards, we can follow the coincidences chaining from one to the other, like a trail through the woods.”
“Or like a thread,” I said. “Her thread of fate. Do dragons have a destiny? Or did she get one when I transformed her?”
“I believe…” Dr. Vahlen said, carefully. “I believe that she acquired it at the same moment she acquired her purpose mark, and it was only after the fact that the chain of causality that led up to that event became immutable. This will require further tests, but if I am correct --”
“No, that’s wrong,” I said. “Ponies are born with a destiny. Every foal knows that. You find your purpose, you don’t invent it.”
“The data suggests otherwise.”
“There are spells that show your fate,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never actually seen them cast, because they’re dangerous and restricted, but I know they exist and there’d be no reason for Twilight to lie about that. She’s a terrible liar, anyway. I’d know!”
“It is good that they are not used often,” Dr. Vahlen responded. “It was perhaps imprecise to say that your destiny did not exist before you were marked. It is more correct to say that every possible destiny existed, superimposed atop one another, and when the mark itself appeared the true destiny was selected from that infinite array. Observing the result by any other means would have the same effect.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “You can’t change something just by looking at it.”
Dr. Vahlen laughed. “Then perhaps I am mad, but if my theory holds true, we should soon have the first practical application of this line of research that you have forced us down.”
And, believe it or not, whether her crazy theory was the true explanation for how cutie marks worked or not, the tests she started to run on the soldiers in the base played out exactly as she’d expected. Over the next couple of days she had engineering build this big complicated machine that shot an invisible ray at somedragon, and BAM! They got a cutie mark in whatever they were doing at the time.
And it was a real cutie mark – you could see the effect on their performance immediately. Dragons with cutie marks in shooting never missed, and barely even had to aim. Dragons with cutie marks in sneaking knew just when to move to avoid being seen or heard – they were like ghosts! And one of the scientists was zapped with a cutie mark in data analysis and started making these insane leaps of logic that somehow always turned out to be exactly correct.
Everyone involved in the project was excited and giddy – I kind of got caught up in it myself, even though it didn’t really bring me any closer to solving my own problem since it didn’t work on ponies who already had a cutie mark. It was progress!
So we started getting really stupid with it. Somepony zapped the janitor while he was on break, and he got a cutie mark in looking at porn.
“What the hay?” I shouted at the dragon responsible. “Why did you do that?”
They didn’t seem to understand what they’d done. “What does it matter? He’s just the janitor. Who cares if he’s good at his job?”
“It’s not just a magic skill-granting thing,” I said. “It’s your purpose in life. Your destiny!”
“Are you implying there are mental effects?” Dr. Vahlen asked, having apparently overheard the conversation.
“Yes,” I hissed. “There are mental effects. Why do you think I want my old cutie mark back? Since I got here, have you heard me sing, even once? I should be writing war ballads and epic arias and folk songs about being imprisoned underneath the earth. Music was my life! And now it’s just… ugh.”
I sat down, and hung my head. “Dr. Vahlen. This is great. This thing you built, it’s nice. It’ll help you in your war. But do you have any idea how to use it in reverse? To take away this mark and give me back those infinite possibilities?”
“It is not possible,” she said, flatly. “Your waveform has collapsed.”
“I refuse to believe that,” I told her.
She sighed, and sat down next to me, stroking my mane, in a somewhat successful attempt to comfort me. “I will continue my research,” she said. “Every time throughout history that a scientist has declared something impossible, they have eventually been proven wrong. But from here, I do not see how the thing you desire could ever come to pass.” She gave a little scritch-scratch at one of my ears, and I leaned into the sensation. “Perhaps you should use a wish.”
Maybe I should have. But I didn’t, so I had to live through what happened next.
Commander Bradford called a general meeting the next day. Everypony in the base gathered in the main control room. It was crowded, despite their losses – X-Com had been recruiting, and there were far more dragons present than there had been when they’d mounted their last-ditch defense against me in the same room.
The glowing sphere in the center was also more crowded, and not in a good way. Huge swaths of territory glowed an ominous red, and there were dozens of alien attacks marked, all over the map.
“Congratulations, Dr. Vahlen,” he said as she walked in. I was right behind her, with the rest of the science staff. Johann and the other transformed pony were already out in the crowd. I didn’t see the bats anywhere. “I heard about your recent breakthrough. I only wish it had come sooner.”
“It has been only a few weeks,” she said. “If you expected any discoveries to be made even this quickly, then you know little about the pace of science. As it is, I feel like a mountain goat leaping from boulder to boulder without a net to catch me should I place a hoof wrong.”
He sighed. “I know. And I expected to have weeks or months before I’d have to make this decision.” He turned to the crowd. “Thank you all for coming. Over the last few weeks I’ve seen each and every one of you go above and beyond the call of duty, helping to push back the alien threat. I’ve seen acts of heroism, of sacrifice, that would shame any military on Earth.
“But it’s not enough. As of 08:00 this morning EDT, the Council of Nations has authorized me to enact the Omega Protocols. The launch codes for the world’s nuclear arsenal have been put in my hands, to be used to deny the aliens any benefit from the ground they capture.”
Then he turned to me. “Lyra, before I take this step, is there anything you can do to help us? If I wished for the alien menace to be stopped, could you find it in your heart to grant it in the spirit that the world needs?”
“That’s a terrible idea,” I said. “I mean… if you really want to make that wish, I’ll grant it, but a widespread wish like that, that’s already focused on destruction? It’s just… not really a good idea. It could kill a lot of dragons.”
“And how many people will die if we’re forced to go nuclear?” he asked.
“I have no idea. What’s a nuclear?”
“A terrible weapon,” Dr. Vahlen explained. “It harnesses the process that lights the sun, in order to destroy entire cities in a sea of fire. But commander – she is not lying. I have studied her wish-granting capability, and it is not under her control.”
“Then who is controlling it?” he asked.
“Random chance, perhaps,” Dr. Vahlen said. “What the ponies call ‘fate’.”
“Then at least it’s a chance,” he said. “Lyra – I wish that all the aliens on and around the Earth would be destroyed.”
I gave a heavy sigh, and focused on the map. It was supposedly detecting all the aliens on Earth, and it seemed like the easiest way to avoid destroying myself by accident. Not that I could actually be hurt, even by a wish, but it couldn’t be good for X-Com to have me explode in the middle of their pep rally.
Suddenly, an alarm went off. “Sir!” said one of the civilian dragons, running back to his slate. “We’ve detected a nuclear launch. Multiple nuclear launches!”
“What?” Commander Bradford asked. “How many?”
There was a pause, and then the dragon looked up, his face pale. “All of them.”
===
“The war is over,” I told Dr. Vahlen, as she tried to herd me into the blast shelter with the rest of the X-Com personnel. “You don’t need me anymore. I’m going to go up to the surface and see if I can save anypony.”
She paused. “Be safe,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck and giving me a dragon-style hug, like Spike always does.
“There’s nothing up there that can harm me,” I said, nuzzling her in return. “A little sunfire isn’t going to do anything. I was at ground zero for the explosion that created the universe.”
“What?” she asked, taking a step back and looking at me in confusion.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’ll tell you later. Get to the shelter.”
I was halfway down the hall when I remembered something important. “Hey,” I said as I turned back. “How do I get to the surface?” But it was too late, the heavy blast doors on the shelter were already closed, and forcing them open would certainly ruin its effectiveness as a shelter even if it didn’t immediately kill everypony inside.
So I started looking for stairs. I found an elevator, but riding it to the top just dumped me out in the big glowing map chamber. There was a stairwell up from there, but it only led to a couple of offices and a restroom. I wandered down a few of the other hallways, and found a memorial wall with the names of all the dragons who’d been killed in action, and a huge dormitory where all the dragons must have slept. It would have been fascinating to explore if I’d had time to waste on that, but each time I’d come back to the map room, and look up at the glowing sphere, where the flashing red arcs of the ‘nuclear missiles’ were slowly making their way from their launch points to their target cities. They were getting really close.
So I had a thought – what if we were inside a mountain? Maybe the exit wasn’t at the top at all! I’d never explored the lower reaches of the base, since the lab was only one level down from the map chamber. So I headed back to the elevator and pushed the button for the lowest floor. It got about halfway down when the nuclear missiles hit.
There was no fire, or anything like that – I was deep in the bowels of an underground base. But the ground shook, and the elevator screeched to a halt, jolting back and forth and tilting a bit to the side. I tried to force open the doors, but there was only solid rock behind them – it had stopped between floors, and the base had a lot of space between floors.
Then something heavy thunked into the ceiling, denting it. Several more somethings followed. I had time to get a stupid look on my face and look up, and hear a noise like a thousand tons of crumbling rock falling down an elevator shaft, and then the floor dropped out from under me as the elevator was jolted free.
I’m not sure if it was the fall or the thousand tons of rock that killed me, but I’m pretty sure it was the rock that made me stay dead for so long.
“So how do I fix my cutie mark?” I asked, holding the potion that would let me astrally project. “Do I just wish for it to happen, and poof?”
“That might work,” Twilight said, “but I don’t recommend it. The astral plane is fundamentally chaotic.”
“So…” I prompted.
“A journey you will face, in that shifting place,” Zecora volunteered. “Tools you must find, to focus your mind.”
“Anything you imagine should just appear,” Twilight added. “If you clear your mind and meditate, your subconscious should be able to guide you to what you need.”
“And if I don’t?” I asked. “Because I’ve never actually been any good at that sort of thing, except when I was lost in the music, and that stopped working when I lost my cutie mark. So it’s sort of a chicken and egg thing.”
“Then you’ll have to imagine a scientific procedure to fix your cutie mark,” Twilight said. “If you didn’t have a cutie mark it would just be a matter of sparking inspiration, which the astral plane is very good at, but I suppose you’d need to find a way to get rid of your current one first.”
“So, Tirek,” I said. “I summon Tirek to steal my magic –“
“If you don’t have magic you can’t get a cutie mark,” Twilight said.
“Step 2:” I said. “I imagine a new source of pure magic to replace what Tirek took. Then, zebra spirit journey time.”
Twilight and Zecora looked at each other. Zecora shrugged.
“Sounds like a plan,” Twilight said. “Just be careful, and take your time. There’s no hurry. You have a thousand years of astral projection for each day that passes in the physical world.”
“Um…” I said. “How long does the potion last? Less than a day, I hope?”
“As soon as we see your cutie mark change, we’ll bring you out,” Twilight said. “We’ll be watching. Don’t worry.”
I nodded, and drank the potion. My eyes closed, and my body slumped to the floor… but I didn’t go with it. Then the world started fading… until…
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.
The next few days were a bit of a blur. Dragons were running around frantically telling me to do things, and shooting at each other and hiding in sewers and abandoned basements and things, although I suppose they weren’t really abandoned since they had camps of escaped synths hiding in them. But hardly anypony tried to kill me, and most of the people I talked to were willing to talk and didn’t seem to be ridiculous caricatures of evil, so even with all the running around and fighting it was a definite improvement.
Apparently the world had really gone to Tartarus since X-Com lost and/or won the war. The aliens were mostly dead, but so were the native earth dragons, and the remnants of both sides were living in the ruins of the old cities and not really doing a very good job of rebuilding civilization since half of them would rather blow things up.
The important thing was that there was somepony who could erase my cutie mark.
“Not a lot of synths bother with her services,” Desdemona told me. She was the leader of a group called the Railroad that was running the whole system of safehouses. She’d spent a lot of time talking with me because I was the first synth to escape who hadn’t had her memory of the time inside automatically erased. “Humans can’t get new purpose marks if you remove the old one. But you’re the first unicorn synth we’ve seen.”
“If she really is a synth,” sneered her second in command. “You trust people too easily.”
Desdemona ignored him. She ignored him a lot. They didn’t really have a good working relationship, and I can only imagine he put up with her crap because he was secretly in love with her or something. “The only problem is that she’s holed up in Goodneighbor, and the Gunners and Super-Mutons have been fighting over the surrounding territory. It’s going to take a lot of work to put together a team –“
“Just show me where it is on the map,” I said. “I’ll find my way there.”
“I don’t think you understand how dangerous that area is.”
“Trust me, I’ll be fine.”
===
The area was really dangerous. The Gunners mostly used disintegrating fire-beams like the Institute’s, and the Super-Mutons loved their explosions. They had giant tubes to make things explode at a distance, little beeping trays that blew up if you stepped on them, and even handheld things that they used to blow themselves up. There were also rapid-fire crossbow golems, trained attack-dogs, and I even saw a bear!
This was all in the ruins of a city as built up as Manehattan, so it was a maze of streets and buildings. That worked to my advantage, since I could usually get around a corner before taking enough fire to actually disintegrate or bleed to death, and the area was dangerous enough that most of the attackers wouldn’t chase me very far. The Super-Mutons’ explosions tended to kill me in one hit, but the pile of meat left behind was what they were really after, so after I’d left behind a corpse or three they’d stop to eat and let me run for it.
I was tempted to see what would happen if I surrendered to them. Would they put me in a cage and keep eating me alive? Because that’s always been one of my fantasies…
But I was so close. I couldn’t stop to play around, not when the solution to my problem was finally in sight.
Eventually, I made it to the gate. Or, well, the door. It wasn’t locked or anything, although I assume that somepony was watching the approach since it was suspiciously quiet, and there was a random corpse just lying there in the street about ten feet away, with no obvious cause of death. I opened the door, and stepped inside.
“Hey!” shouted somepony, and I flinched a bit as the door swung closed behind me. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
I looked over the aggressive little dragon who was swaggering towards me across the market square I found myself in. He looked like an idiot. Other dragons idly watched him approach, but nopony made any move to interfere.
“First timers have to pay the toll,” he said. “Just hand over everything you own.”
I stared at him. I wasn’t wearing any saddlebags or clothing. Des had offered to give me some weapons and armor for the trip, but I’d turned her down. It would have all been left behind when I disintegrated anyway.
It took him a bit, but he eventually noticed that I wasn’t carrying anything. “Or maybe you can come with me back to my room, and pay the toll a different way, if you know what I mean.” He leered at me and licked his lips.
“How about I give you a wish?” I offered. “One wish, anything you want.”
“What, like a genie?” he asked. When I nodded, he scoffed. “Fine, then I want a powerful scoped 10mm pistol with a marksman grip and a snub barrel, and one of those magic magazines that never runs out of ammo.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I fed the request into the timelessness, and with a ‘pop’ a little silver crossbow appeared in front of him. He caught it before it hit the ground, and played with it a bit, checking it out and making sure it was loaded.
“Huh. Thanks,” he said, aiming it at my head. I perked an ear at him, and he lowered it and stuck it in his pants.
“Do you know where I can find the Memory Den?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s just back there and around the corner. Can’t miss it.”
As I walked off, I waited for the crossbow to explode, or go off on its own and shoot him, or something, but apparently he got exactly what he wished for without anything bad happening. Can’t win ‘em all.
===
“Doctor Amadi? Are you – oh!” I said, as I entered the basement lab. It was suspiciously well-lit, much better lit than the rest of the Memory Den, and much cleaner than anything I’d seen since leaving the Institute. That wasn’t the part that surprised me.
“Oh!” said the little white unicorn, turning to face me as I came in. “How did you find me?” She looked terrified, glancing around as if she’d suddenly spot a secret escape route from her basement lab.
“Desdemona sent me,” I told her. “It’s okay, I’m a synth.”
“A unicorn synth?” she said, her eyes wide. “How – why?”
“It’s a long story,” I told her, “but I’m not in any particular hurry. Would you like to hear it?”
She tittered nervously. “It would go faster if you let me copy your memories onto a holotape.”
“Okay,” I said. I looked around at the equipment, which was fairly sparse as mad scientist lairs go. “Do I just sit in one of the pods?”
She blinked. “Are you sure?”
“What? Isn’t that what you wanted? I know that they’re not built for unicorns, but I think I can squeeze in.” The pod had a reclining chair, so I squirmed inside and rolled onto my back. “Like this, see?”
“Right,” she said. “Let’s get started!”
The lid closed, a hypnotic pattern played on the screen, and everything went white. Then I lived out my entire life from birth until that point all over again, only with a strange feeling of dissociation that I could never put into words. It was actually pretty frustrating, especially when I could see my really stupid mistakes coming, but was powerless to change anything, and had to just sit there screaming inside my own head as my body went through the same motions it did the first time.
“Oops,” she said, as she opened the pod. “I was supposed to sedate you before I started. You didn’t go insane, did you?”
“Blargle,” I said. I mean, what else could I possibly say?
===
At least it saved me from having to explain myself. “I’m not sure I can help you,” she said. “That is, I can definitely take away your purpose mark, but it won’t restore you to a ‘blank flank’ state. You’ll be markless forever. I could try to swap your cutie mark for one of the ones I have on file, but most of them are pretty dull. Did you ever wish that your special talent was mopping floors? Or having sex?”
“Yes to the second one,” I said, “but I got better. Can you show me what you have?”
She showed me her cabinet full of cutie marks floating in little glass jars, each of them labeled with an explanation of what it meant. There was a lyre cutie mark in there, but it was apparently a mark for the rote memorization of historical dates.
I played around with the idea of taking the ‘sex’ one. After all, not everyone has a cutie mark in their job – having one for a hobby is perfectly respectable! The little pink hearts would have looked pretty awful against my mint green, though.
Then I had a thought. “Could you bottle up somepony’s blank flank, and swap me with that?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But how many blank-flank unicorns have you seen? The Institute doesn’t transform people until they’re fairly certain of what their specialty is going to be.”
“No no,” I said, waving a hoof at the cabinet. “These all came from dragons, right?”
“No, most of them are from humans,” she said, then had a thoughtful look. “Or is it all of them? Yes, all of them. Virgil turned me down.”
“Right right,” I said. “And there are plenty of blank-flank earth dragons around. I’m sure one of them would want a cutie mark for weather!”
“What would they do with it?” she asked.
“Fine, fine, tell them it’s a cutie mark for sex. It is Cloud Kicker’s after all.”
===
She sent me out to find a volunteer, which I thought was completely unfair because I didn’t know anypony. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, of course.
The first person I met wasn’t interested. “The last thing I need is for people to start thinking I’m a synth.”
The second had some sort of social dysfunction. I could barely get a word in edgewise, between his long, enthusiastic babbling about fictional superheroes.
“Weather control is a kind of superpower, right?”
“It’s more of a villain superpower, though, isn’t it? The Silver Shroud never needed magic powers over the weather to bring the evil to justice. The only time he ever got close to magic was in part sixteen of ‘The Curse of Rah Rah Tutenkamen’. That one ended on a cliffhanger, actually, and I was never able to find part seventeen. But in eighteen he was already –“
“Wait!” I said. “Can I just… I don’t know, bribe you? I give you all your missing superhero tapes, and you come downstairs and sit in a pod and let us do science at you.”
“You could really do that? For me?” he looked skeptical. “I’m not even sure where you’d start looking for something like that. They were doing recording for a new series over at Hubris Comics, but –“
I made a wish, and ‘pop’! The room was suddenly full of holotapes.
It took a long time to dig ourselves out, but it turns out that being buried in little hoof-sized mostly-hollow doodads is a lot less fatal than being buried in molten gold.
And it made him really happy. “With this many – wow! With this I could start my own radio station! All I’d need is a military-grade circuit board and –“
“No,” I said, tugging him out of the pile with my magic and floating him across the room. “Downstairs, now. Science.”
“And that was more or less that,” Lyra said, sipping her tea. “I got a job singing and playing piano at a bar nearby, and eventually got my cutie mark back. Six years later , Twilight finally got around to waking me up.” She sighed. “Apparently she’d stepped out to use the bathroom.”
“Your cutie mark is a bell,” Bon Bon said.
“Everyone thought Sweetie was going to get a bell,” Rose pointed out.
Bon Bon narrowed her eyes. “Lyra’s voice doesn’t sound like a bell.”
“It’s a cracked bell?” Rose said, chuckling.
“It… might not actually be for singing,” Lyra admitted, hunching low over the table as if she was trying to hide behind her tea. “I got it when I was performing a new anthem for the Gunners, during the battle to liberate Quincy from the tyrannical Minutemen.”
“That still sounds like singing,” Rose said.
“It does,” Lyra said. “But after I got it, I kind of put my singing career on hold, and went into mercenary work full time. So… I think it might be a symbol for…” she lowered her voice to a whisper, and flattened her ears. “Overthrowing governments?”
Bon Bon frowned. “How many governments did you overthrow?”
Lyra shrugged. “I kind of lost count.”
“So it’s astral projection,” I said, flattening one ear.
“Yes,” Twilight said.
“The astral plane doesn’t exist,” I said. “It’s a metaphor for the set of things which can be imagined, but don’t even not-exist in concept space.”
“Strictly speaking, the real world doesn’t exist either,” Twilight said. “It’s just a metaphor for the thing that our senses would be sensing if they worked intuitively.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can’t travel to the astral plane,” I said. “Astral projection is just looking at the astral plane in your imagination. It’s a parlor trick.”
“Exactly!” Twilight said, with a grin. “It’s impossible to actually go there. But it contains everything that can be imagined but that doesn’t exist, so if you could imagine being there, well, poof.”
“If that was true, everyone who astrally projects would get sucked into their own imagination and cease to exist,” I said.
“A pony’s imagination is not that strong,” Zecora said. “Or perhaps they envision the journey wrong?”
“I know it sounds impossible, but the potion works,” Twilight said. “It’s surprisingly well-documented, in fact.”
“Of course it is. Ponies that get hopped up on goofballs love to write about how wonderful it is to be hopped up on goofballs. It’s one of the fundamental laws of the universe and it’s responsible for at least two major periods of musical history.”
“Goofballs?” Twilight asked, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s the technical term,” I said, blandly. “Layponies might have other names. Drug addicts have at least fifty.”
“Understand your concern, I do,” Zecora said. “But there is much magic in this brew.”
“Is this just the setup for some silly prank?” I asked, then had a thought. “Did Rainbow Dash put you up to this? I know she’s still sore about the hurricane and… the other hurricane. And all the tornadoes.”
Twilight frowned. “Lyra – taking this potion, and going on a spirit journey to the astral plane, is how zebras get their cutie marks.”
I glanced at Zecora, who just nodded. It could still have been a prank – I hadn’t done anything to verify any of the claims they were making, and if it was something really important it would have been criminal to let myself be convinced by somepony’s words, no matter how eloquent they were or how tempting the things they said. But the downside to this looked like it would just be getting pranked, and Zecora didn’t usually go in for that sort of thing. If they’d convinced her to help prank me, then I must have really deserved it.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll try it. What do I need to do?”
