Chapters The sharp pain pierced her head like a rusty and crooked nail. Everything around her was a complete blur, with the whites taking over her vision and adding more rhythmic throbbing through her skull. Slowly, painfully, her eyes adapted. It was her study, the sun was flooding the room with the pure, incandescent light of a midsummer noon and the sky was an almost annoying pale shade of blue.. She lifted herself from the desk using her hooves. Immediately, the hurting sensation returned, but only for a little while. She looked down at her workplace: she apparently slept on a blank parchment which was, surprisingly, dry and not drenched with drool. The parchment was also surrounded by many books. She couldn’t even remember what she was studying, and that was bothersome to say the least.. She looked at one of the covers:
Marvelous Merits of Mare-eval Magic, by Starswirl the Bearded
Ugh, she knew that book by heart. She had read it so many times she was actually sick of it, strangely enough. She decided to not worry about it since she didn’t even remember what she was studying, so whatever.
“Twilight, are you awake? It’s almost noon, get down here for lunch!” Spike sounded bothered by something. Maybe it was the fact that she slept in while he probably had to do all the work down in the library.
“Twilight, are you awake? It’s almost noon, get down for lunch!” Spike sounded bothered by something. Maybe the fact that she slept in while he probably had to do all the work down at the library.
She looked around. A thought was bugging her. She was missing something, but she couldn’t recall what. She stomped on the ground in frustration. She was FORGETTING something, what was that? What, what, what? What if it was an assignment, from the Princess? Or a friendship report? No, that wasn’t possible. There is no way she could forget a task given by the Princess. And how could it be a friendship report? The day before had passed with no problems whatsoever. And why she would need a book like that for a report?
“Twilight, move it! Your daisy sandwich is ready!” Spike interrupted her line of thought
Was it really that important? I mean, if it was REALLY important, she would have remembered, right? She stepped out of the study and went down the cool, dark stairs. It was going to be a long day.
It was hot. Really hot. She could see the Everfree Forest and the horizon past it, being deformed by the heat. She was slowly but steadily making her way to Sugarcube Corner, the only place in town with air conditioning. It was going to be pretty cramped, she was sure of it. But the heat was unbearable. Spike was actually comfortable with the burning temperature, as he was a reptile. But for mammals, it was just excruciating. Twilight could feel the sweat beads rolling down her coat as she walked in the hot summer day. It was the moment when the Sun was at its peak. In retrospect, she could have just waited inside the library for it to go down, but she was compelled to get out and breath air not saturated by the dust of old books. The heat also made her very prone to gratuitous irritation, and would always bring the worst out of her. It was a year after the “crashed wedding” incident with Chrysalis, and she was still bothered by it. The bonds that she managed to create with her friends had a lot of up and downs, but Twilight, even if she hid it, was still greatly disappointed in them. The way they didn’t believe her, even if she didn’t let it surface, it still hurt.
A lot.
“They didn’t trust me right away. Just good ol’ Twilight being crazy, don’t mind her”. She was actually getting tired of them. It was like they had fixed, unchangeable personalities. They were small things, but they really started to annoy her: Pinkie’s constant babbling, Rarity’s frivolity, Fluttershy’s cowardice, Applejack’s rustic behavior, Rainbow Dash's self centered personality. At first, she thought of them as merely affections of their personality, unpleasant traits that were just incidental. No one can be completely pleasant. But as time went on, she started to get the impression that those affections were in fact their identity, the means through which they presented themselves to the world. Fluttershy wasn’t just coward, it was all that there was, just like Rainbow being a narcissistic, egotistical pony. There wasn’t more, they were just like cardboard cutouts.
She didn’t like it.
It’s not like she hated them, but she felt like she HAD to be friends with them, for some cosmic plan or something. She wouldn’t dare confess this to Spike or Celestia, especially Celestia. She was getting more and more distant as time passed, and, looking back, she started to see all the little obnoxious characteristics of her mentor. Her childish personality, always pulling pranks, making jokes… Twilight was starting to think she did it just because she could, because no one could dare tell her to stop, to just quit it and grow up. A sadistic desire to see others understand the different scale of power. Worst of all, she heard she had started to tutor someone else… Twilight thought she was being a tad protective, but she really valued her time with Celestia. She wasn’t just her teacher, she was her mentor, like an aunt, or a surrogate mother. First, she had given the privilege of friendship reports to other ponies! That was HER job, her link with the Princess. A time when she could be less of a student, a researcher, a scientist, or a scholar, and more of a normal pony who had just received a pretty harsh lesson about reality. She thought of them as something special, like a journal, or a diary. And then she just went ahead and… and… and, YES, PROSTITUTED her special moment! Now EVERYONE in Ponyville could write to her, even those insufferable foals, the Cutie Mark Crusaders! And after that, a new protégé?
What was she for her, anyway? A student? A daughter? A tool? A weapon?
Did she valued her time with her little more than a teacher teaching a student?
Only Spike never disappointed her. With him, there were no lies, no deceptions, she was just herself. She wasn’t the Princess (ex-)personal student, or a famous magic researcher, or the Element of Magic. She was Twilight Sparkle. But he was growing up. She could tell. As each day passed, he would become a little more short tempered, prone to anger, possessive…
And everything froze.
She could feel her own blood pulsating painfully through her veins. Her ears were suffocated by a soft, rumbling sound. Her vision fixated on the center of the room. It was just standing there. Captivating, actually. A statue, of some sort. The form was not dissimilar to Spike. It stood on two short stubby legs. The arms were a little longer, with no hooves. The head was much bigger: no mouth, no ears, no hair, coat or mane. Just two green balls which Twilight assumed were supposed to be eyes, and a strange paint pattern of black and red on its “face”. It seemed to be carved out of ordinary rock. How could she stop watching? It was something so alien, so strange, so unique. She didn’t want to stop. Her stupid body, with its need to blink. Every second, she felt her eyes getting more and more sore, but she didn’t want to avert her gaze, even for an instant. But her vision was starting to get blurry. It was just so annoying. She had to do it, or her eyes would start to water. She blinked, only for one moment did her world turned completely black.
A sudden noise. The air moving.
She heard the door opening behind her.
She opened her eyes, and turned around.
And she was there. And the statue was there too.
Celestia, visibly strained, with her horn lit and the statue with its “hands” just some millimeters from her white, slender neck.
Oh, the heat, it was unbearable! Why did they choose this day to go near Applejack’s orchard to have a picnic? She was nibbling a daffodil sandwich when:
“Twi? Is there sumthin’ wrong, sugarcube?”Applejack asked with a concerned look on her face.
Red light flooded the room. Outside, everything was pure and utter red.
“Do you really wish to continue?”
“I don’t know. I feel happy. Why would I want to change my life?”
“You’re not happy. You’re sedated. Were you happy when you locked yourself in an ivory tower, burying yourself in books?”
“No, but I-“
“You thought you were. So, what’s different now?”
“I have friends, now. And I’m much closer to Spike!” She sprung up from the floor.
“So?”
“What?” She looked puzzled.
“You have friends, and you’re closer to Spike. So what?”
“I-“
“The closer you get to them, the more you realize you were just building idols in a cave. They are hollow, Twilight. And so are you. The only difference is in the self defense mechanism. They shield themselves with fashion, a strange and random persona, motherly care, work, exhibitionism, the desperate need of growing up. You used to have your books. Now you have fallen behind. And you realize that you are nothing but a fragile shell, just waiting to be broken. They are filled with air, you are hermetically sealed, just waiting to explode for the difference in pressure.” She smiled.
“That’s not true! They are my friends! And…”
“You see? You can’t disprove me, because you know you were right; I’m right. You studied a lot, Twilight. You know something about hedgehogs?”
“What does it have to do with any of thi-“
“Please, humor me”
She rolled her eyes.“Fine. They are mammals. They have a large cluster of spines on their back and-“
“So, what do you think happens when it gets cold, and they have to huddle together lest they freeze to death?”
“Well, they get closer…”
“And?”
“And… The closer they get, the more they are hurt by the spines.”
She woke up to the sound of the flames consuming the wood of a torch. The light irradiated softly and flickered on the cobblestone wall. The room was fairly rustic: she was on a crude bed made out of what looked like cheap wood, and a torch illuminated everything with a light and gentle glow. There was a door at the left side of the room. It was made out of black metal, probably darkened steel. There were some marks on the surface; they looked like claws. It was cold. Water was dripping in a corner of the room
She felt fine. No headaches, no stomachache, no pain at all. She felt right. She started to remember what happened: the statue, the need to not close her eyes, Celestia. The strange sculpture was the thing that interested her the most: the peculiar shape, the captivating form. It was, even in a reminiscence, mesmerizing, like watching the campfire dance, so alien and different from his surroundings, in the black of the night. She didn’t even care where she was held captive, or who her kidnappers may be.
The door opened, painfully slow. Princess Celestia entered the room.
She walked to the bed and put and hoof on Twilight’s shoulder, with a small and warm smile.
She shook it off.
She looked a little surprised, but she quickly regained her composure.
“That thing, the statue. I want to see it again.”
Celestia got closer to her.
She turned around, and pierced Celestia with an inquisitive gaze.
“I’m afra-“
“Why am I here, then?” And she looked around, studying the room in detail
“I thought you needed to rest. So I brought you here.”
“Where is here?”
“You know what my answer is going to be. Right, Twilight?”
She sprung up from the bed.
“No, Twilight, for your own safety. Now, please forgive me…”
“For wh-“
She faded into nothingness.
The sharp pain pierced her head like a rusty and crooked nail. Everything around her was a complete blur, with the whites taking over her vision and adding more rhythmic throbbing through her skull. Slowly, painfully, her eyes adapted. It was her study, the sun was flooding the room with the pure, incandescent light of a midsummer noon and the sky was an almost annoying pale shade of blue.. She lifted herself from the desk using her hooves. Immediately, the hurting sensation returned, but only for a little while. She looked down at her workplace: she apparently slept on a blank parchment which was, surprisingly, dry and not drenched with drool. The parchment was also surrounded by many books. She couldn’t even remember what she was studying, and that was bothersome to say the least.. She looked at one of the covers:
Marvelous Merits of Mare-eval Magic, by Starswirl the Bearded
Ugh, she knew that book by heart. She had read it so many times she was actually sick of it, strangely enough. She decided to not worry about it since she didn’t even remember what she was studying, so whatever.
“Twilight, are you awake? It’s almost noon, get down here for lunch!” Spike sounded bothered by something. Maybe it was the fact that she slept in while he probably had to do all the work down in the library.
“Twilight, are you awake? It’s almost noon, get down for lunch!” Spike sounded bothered by something. Maybe the fact that she slept in while he probably had to do all the work down at the library.
She looked around. A thought was bugging her. She was missing something, but she couldn’t recall what. She stomped on the ground in frustration. She was FORGETTING something, what was that? What, what, what? What if it was an assignment, from the Princess? Or a friendship report? No, that wasn’t possible. There is no way she could forget a task given by the Princess. And how could it be a friendship report? The day before had passed with no problems whatsoever. And why she would need a book like that for a report?
“Twilight, move it! Your daisy sandwich is ready!” Spike interrupted her line of thought
Was it really that important? I mean, if it was REALLY important, she would have remembered, right? She stepped out of the study and went down the cool, dark stairs. It was going to be a long day.
It was three in the afternoon. Twilight was busy reading, as always. Spike was at Carousel Boutique, helping Rarity with some new orders from Canterlot. The front door creaked and opened.
“I’m coming!” She called as she ran to the door.
“Welcome to the Ponyville Library! How can I help you?”
A pony stood in front of her. He had a short grey mane and a jet black coat. His eyes were shining with wisdom and experience, but he couldn’t have been more than 20 years old.
“Please, do come in. Is there something you need?” She gestured to get inside.
“Your friend is dead” said the stallion with a blank face.
“Wh-wha-“
“Good, positive reaction from high priority emotional impulse. Now stay still.” She was blinded by an incredible white glow.
A flood of information invaded her brain. Images slowly started to build, steadily overflowing her senses with pure light and white noise. And then everything turned clear, and she remembered everything: the strange object. Celestia. The room.
“Now you should remember everything. My name is Bright Light, and I’m here to make you an offer. I know that what you want now are answers. I can give you all the knowledge you want. I can show things that shouldn’t even belong in this world. I’m offering you the chance to capture and study them. But you have to leave your old life behind. I can answer some questions, but be quick, as my time is limited.”
“I don’t understand…” She stopped, pondering what to say. Where was the harm in listening to him? “Fine, first question. What was that thing?”
“SCP 173, The Sculpture. A non pony-made object, carved out of mundane rock. It’s extremely hostile and it will try to strangle or snap the neck of its victims, but it can only move when it’s not directly observed. How you managed to understand that instantly, I don’t know.”
“What was Princess Celestia doing there?”
“Celestia is immortal, so we ask her help in the case of a containment breach. She’s not directly involved with us though. You could call her a freelancer.”
“Ok, who is ‘us’?”
“We are a super partes organization composed of all of Equestria's sentient races, dedicated to finding, containing and studying strange, supernatural or downright dangerous objects, beings and artifacts that we call SCP. We are the SCP Foundation.”
“What did Princess Celestia do to me?”
“She used an amnesiac spell. They have no contraindications, and work on the part of the brain allocated to long term memory. They cause immediate and precise amnesia on events chosen by the spellcaster. I just removed the lock from your brain.”
“Why do you want me?”
“Why do we want you? Why wouldn't we? You are the Princess protégé, an incredibly talented unicorn. You also unconsciously knew of 173's weakness. Maybe you have a sixth sense of some sort with supernatural objects. In that case, you could be invaluable for retrieving new SCPs. Also, I sensed it the moment I saw you. You are like me. You don’t simply want to lock up these things and throw away the key. You want to know more about them. Few colleagues in the Foundation share my mindset. Maybe with your scientific authority in the field of magic, we could change their minds.”
“That’s really…”
“A lot, I know. It’s fine if you don’t want to. It’s a tough life. A dangerous life. A sad life. No one knows about your accomplishments. Normal ponies just go on with their lives, not even imagining how close they are to an endless pit. We push them away. And a lot of times we fall down in the process. But, I can offer you knowledge. You could see the inner workings of a dark, obscure, and powerful world.”
“I need to think about it…”
“Yes, of course. I can give you one day. Just one, before Celestia realizes what I’m doing here. She doesn’t want any harm to befall upon you. But, I have the Foundation’s resources and I can make things happen. It will look like an accident. You will not see your friends, your baby dragon or your family again, even Celestia will be convinced of your departure. I’ll come back tomorrow night, at 9 pm sharp. See you later, Twilight.”
“ And ah, compliments for how you’re dealing with your loss. You’re going to need that quality, trust me.”
And he walked away into the scorching sun.
Loss? Oh yeah, right. I forgot, how silly of me. Pinkie is dead. Yes, her body was over the counter. Her neck was snapped and her tongue was dangling out of her mouth. Her eyes were open and looking straight at me. Isn’t it kind of strange I actually overlooked it?
She screamed.
It was midnight, yet she couldn’t sleep. No one actually heard her. She didn’t even cry. She just went back into the library to continue her work. Spike came back and cooked something for dinner. She ate, and she came up with an excuse to go to bed early.
What was she betting? Her old life? Her friends, Spike, her family, the Princess?
What could she lose? A groundbreaking discovery? A life full of risk and adventure? Knowledge beyond measure?
Pinkie was dead. No one knew except her. Of course, this was not her friend’s fault.. But how could she pretend to be interested in Rarity’s fashion-themed rants, Fluttershy’s annoying nervousness? How could she just resist the levity of her current life, where the biggest problem was Applejack not accepting any help for her apple orchard? She regained her memory and she didn’t even think about Pinkie’s death until someone reminded her. Sometimes she found Pinkie Pie just insufferable; but she was still her friend. She was actually the one that cherished that relationship the most. And she was gone. And she didn’t actually care.
She couldn’t simply dive back into a normal, slow, boring and uneventful life.
Twilight, look at yourself. Your best friend died and you didn’t even cry. Now that’s something you don’t see very often, right? How could you live beside these ponies? They are full of love, and joy and they care for others, while you are a mental case. You’re borderline obsessed with studying, socially awkward and here's a newfound trait, completely incapable of sympathy. You’re a monster, Twilight. You belong with monsters. It’s time to fill yourself up with something.
You need to get out of here.
Right now.
We can show you wonderful things, incredible things. You just need to follow the light, Twilight.
There was no doubt.
The cool air flowed through Twilight’s mane, making it float like the ethereal hair of the Princesses. She was standing in front of the library. Spike was already sleeping: she had given him plenty of difficult tasks during the day to tire him out and, after dinner, the baby dragon went straight to bed. The moon illuminated everything with her pale, sweet light. Twilight Sparkle always liked nighttime: everything changed, in a subtle but obvious way. Normal, everyday objects would be charged with no less than a new life. No one was around. There were no cruel eyes watching her, judging her (because, even if no one actually spoke, Twilight knew. It was written all over their faces.) expecting something of her: a “hello”, a “how are you doing?”.
“Good evening, Twilight. I assume you made your decision?”
“Yes. I’m in.”
“Perfect. We must be quick, though. If I’m seen here, Celestia will pretend my head from the 05. I can’t teleport us back to base. I used a particular piece of equipment to get here, a one-time only device. We must reach the Everfree Forest, the Foundation has a small research outpost there. I know one of Celestia’s informants is here, in Ponyville. I managed to find out the codename used by the agent: “The Hand”. Anyway, let’s hurry. If we’re lucky, we shouldn’t even meet someone this lat-“
“Good evening there, Twilight! Who’s the nice stallion?” Said a voice with a warm smile.
A female voice. Twilight already knew who had just greeted her. It was one of her favorite ponies in Ponyville. She wasn’t surprised to see a mare with a green coat and a lyre cutie mark come out from the darkness.
“Hi there, Lyra…”
Once I rose above the noise and confusion
An aquamarine unicorn with a cyan and white mane emerged from the darkness with a smile on her muzzle.
“Hi there Lyra… This is my cousin, Orion.” She gestured the stallion to her right to come closer ”He just came back from the northern border. He was going to Canterlot to visit my parents, and he thought of swinging by… Right, Orion?” she said with an expectant voice.
Bright Light look confused for a moment and then swiftly answered “Uhm, yes, yes.”
“Now Lyra, if you’ll excuse us, I have to take Orion to train station, or he’ll miss his train.” Twilight placed a hoof on Bright Light’s shoulder and started walking away. But Lyra dashed in front of her, cutting her off and saying enthusiastically.
“What a coincidence! I have to go to the train station too! Bon-Bon’s returning from her sister’s place in Baltimare tonight, and she asked me to help her with her bags! We could walk there together!”
“Yeah, sure, why not?” Twilight responded with a smile, while cursing herself for choosing such a banal lie.
They started walking: the lavender unicorn was up front, and Lyra stayed back to talk to Bright Light. Twilight couldn’t help but feel observed. There was something off about the green unicorn. She still had a bubbly attitude, but there was something more to it.
Ugh, why did this have to happen? We can’t let her remember about us. As soon as we’re alone, I’ll ask Bright Light to give her an amnesiac spell, then we get out of here. That agent, though… That’s a funny codename… And finding Lyra near the library, at this hour? That’s strange too. Her house is near the train station, why would she walk all the way up here? She only comes to the library to pick up books about those mythical creatures, huma-
Oh.
Ponies are herbivores, prey in nature. Long before Celestia and Luna appeared to rule ponykind, even before the three tribes, they used to live in the wild. Those ancient ponies were not blessed with civilization and the feeling of security it can give. They were hunted. And, like all prey, they developed a sense, a switch that activated when they felt observed. The things that waited in the darkness of the forest: things with teeth, scales, claws and eyes. Watchful eyes. After ponies managed to get together and form an actual society, those things slowly faded off. But the switch remained. And since evolution is mostly conservative, it was just put to different use.
Now Twilight could feel it. She was observed. She had been turned into prey. She knew that one false step, one discordant lie and the Princess would instantly know everything. Bright Light would just disappear, probably. Even if he’s member of a supranational organization, if Celestia wants you, Celestia will get you. And Twilight? Permanently amnesiaced, surely. And sent to live a life of mediocrity and boredom.
That’s not going to happen.
Bright Light was actually holding up pretty well. It looked like lying was a special talent of his. He just spurted out believable excuses without faltering even once.
Now is not the time to daydream. I gotta think of something to get Lyra off our back.
So she tried thinking of a plan while the green unicorn merrily waltzed around ‘Orion’ shooting questions:
“So, Orion, right? You don’t see Twilight very often?”
“Actually, no. When I’m not stationed at the border, I live in Manehatten, but it has been too long since I saw mom’s side of the family” he ended with a smile.
He’s good. He could even fool Applejack… Wait, stationed? Maybe I can make something of it .
“Manehatten … I bet it’s quite the experience to jump from the Big Apple to a small town like Ponyville!” exclaimed Lyra, who was actually walking backwards, facing Bright Light. Twilight could have sworn she was still looking at her. She was starting to panic. The train station was near, and she still had no clue what to do.
“Well, they’re different, of course. But you need a vacation from time to time, and Ponyville is a really peaceful town”
Lyra’s everlasting smile flickered for a moment.“So… You said ‘stationed’, I take it you’re a soldier of some sort?”
“Not quite. I’m in the bureaucratic side of the army. Just a chair warmer… Although, sometimes even the ones behind the desk get some action…” and he laughed a little.
Ok, calm down. If Lyra is the informant, she’s probably trained as a magician. I’ve never seen her do anything more than levitate objects, yet, I can’t risk it. What if Light tries to suddenly give her amnesia and she manages to escape. It will take us less than 5 minutes to get to the station, for her to see that there is no midnight train for Canterlot. First, I need to inform Light that she is the informant…
Twilight turned herself around and walked backwards facing both Lyra and Bright Light, and chimed in:Hands , was it?” and looked expectantly at the stallion. It was now or never. She just hoped he could get it.
He smiled for a moment.
Lyra just lost it. To find another person interested in humans? A unique occasion!
Ok, he knows. Now, devise a plan to get him to amnesia her without meeting resistance. Easy enough. The train station is just behind this building. Think Twilight, think. Something to catch her on surprise. An occasion where no one would find suspicious to use magic…
“And then they have these things called fics that-“
Twilight interrupted her and looked at the stallion with concerned eyes.
“Orion, are you alright? You look a little pale. Maybe it’s the wound?”
Lyra turned around to face the purple unicorn and asked with a suspicious face. “Wound?”
“Yes. A stray diamond dog pack attacked the outpost he’s stationed at last month. They injured poor Orion right on the top of his head. Now he frequently gets seizures. Doctors say it’s the irregular blood flow.”
“Oh, that’s horrible!” Twilight could read sincere concern in her eyes.
“It is, isn’t it? However, I know a spell that regularizes the blood flow in case of an-“
They heard a loud thump, and looked back: Bright Light was on the ground, convulsing, his eyes were rolling madly and a white froth was coming out of his mouth. Lyra, horrified, looked towards Twilight, expecting her to do something.
Good work, Light.
Twilight shouted:
“Lyra! You have to keep him still! I must touch his horn to regularize the blood flow! Just block him!”
“YES!”
She jumped with no hesitation on the convulsing ‘Orion’, placing her forelegs on his and keeping him pinned down. She still looked at Twilight, the whole time.
And she stood still, doing nothing.
“Down here, actually.” A male voice surprised her.
She looked down at Bright Light, who was no longer convulsing, and was actually smiling at her.
“What the-“ Her horn started to light up, but it was too late. Twilight had already anchored her with her magic while she was distracted keeping him still.
“Sweet dreams, Lyra”
His horn flashed, sending out a dazzling white light. Lyra dropped to the ground and passed out.
“So, she was the informant uh?” He approached the senseless mare, studying her. If she was the informant, then Celestia really chose her well. She just looked like a lively, enthusiastic mare enthralled with humans.
“How much have you blocked?” Twilight asked, visibly exalted by the thrilling experience.
“Just the last ten minutes. Now, we have no time to lose. Let’s go.”
It was almost dawn when they reached the edge of the Everfree Forest. They stopped for a moment to rest, just outside the line of trees. You could see Celestia’s sun just peeking over the horizon, bathing everything in a sweet pink hue. Twilight always found the forest fascinating: wild, untamed, not controlled by ponies. Things would just regulate themselves, like a natural balance. For a moment, it almost seemed the right order. There was a rhythm to it: the forest breathed in and out. Like a living being. She felt every bug crawling on the ground, every animal sleeping on the soft grass. It was like seeing the same thing from a thousand different perspective. She wanted to go inside it. She wanted to feel the moisture on her coat. The bare earth under her hooves. The leaves caressing her mane.
But she was afraid. She really, really wanted to start walking into the forest. To just leave everything behind and go. But a voice screamed inside her.
If you go there alone, you’ll never come back.
“Amazing.” She heard another voice. She turned: it was Bright Light. He looked at her, fascinated. As soon as he talked, she got out of her trance, like she just escape a thick, impenetrable fog.
“What- what happened?” She asked confused.
“You felt it, right?”
She wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about, maybe that strange sensation she just proved? “The need to enter the forest? Yes, I did.”
“Why didn’t you enter then?”
“I don’t know. I had just this instinct that if I actually entered the forest alone, I would have not returned."
“Incredible…”
“What?”
“You were right, about your instinct, I mean. The Everfree Forest is an SCP. It’s perfectly safe if you cross it at least 30 meters near another sentient being. If the distance gets bigger, or you enter it alone... Well, you just disappear. Like, off the charts. We tried everything: smoke, tracking magic, even ropes. We just tied one volunteer to a rope and off he went. After thirty seconds we pulled the rope back: there was nothing attached to it. No bites, no cuts. But, as long as you have company, you’re perfectly safe 100% of the time. So, whatever happens, stick close to me.”
“How did I…” It was the second time this strange trance saved her life. What was going on?
“How did you know? I have no idea. But it looks like the first time wasn’t a lucky chance. Come on, let’s move out.” He climbed down the rock and started to move, but Twilight stopped him.
“Wait!” She tried to reach for him, and grabbed his shoulder.
“What?”
“What about Spike? And the girls? And the Princess? What happens when Spike wakes up and discover I’m not in bed?”
Bright Light looked at her for a moment, then slammed his left hoof on his forehead.
“Geez, sorry, I guess I forgot to tell you. You do remember I told you that you would have to leave your ties behind you?”
“Yeah. Of course I do.”
“Well, you can’t just disappear, right? They’ll look for you. Eventually Celestia will be able to do 2+2 and she’ll find out everything. We can’t let that happen. So, I contacted a sleeper agent of the Foundation residing in Ponyville and-“ Twilight interrupted him, shocked that there could be an agent of this organization without her even realizing it.
“Who is he?”
“I believe he uses a false name… Whooves, I think? Anyway, I told him to place a copy of your body made from SCP-142, a programmable cloning machine. If he didn’t hear from me in the morning, he was supposed to make the clone’s heart fail. Don’t worry, they’re just meatbags, not actual sentient beings. It will look like you passed away in your sleep.”
“Is it really necessary to make them believe I’m dead? It’s so cruel.”
“Hey, you chose this. I hope you’re not having second thoughts…”
She didn’t like it. She didn’t like one bit. But what else could she do?
“No, it’s okay… Let’s just go, please.”
The branches were thick and hard to avoid, so they weren’t going all that fast. Bright Light said it was not so far from the edge of the forest. While they were crossing a small river, he asked.
“Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“No”
“Why did you leave? It looked like you had a pretty good life: peaceful, serene, lots of friends…”
“Yeah, I thought so too. There was nothing to it, actually. Just empty days, with no purpose. Research the magic of Friendship… The Princess left me in a goddess forsaken town to research something she came up with! Even the Elements of Harmony… Everything I’ve done is just false. I was false with my friends, false with the Princess and false with myself. At the end, they were even not my friends, either. They didn’t believe me. They always treated me like a nutcase…”
“Twilight…” She already regretted that she had started talking. She felt terrible, “Look, can we just talk about this another time?”
“Yes, yes. Oh, we’ve arrived.”
They slipped past some trees and found themselves in a clearing. There were no buildings though, just a lonely trunk in the middle. Twilight could feel the weight of the forest on her back. An eerie silence, and the wind flowing through the trees. The grass moved like a single organism, following the breeze. Bright Light knocked on the trunk twice, then neared his horn to a small hole in the bark. At first, nothing happened. Then the silence was suddenly broken by the sound of gears and moving machinery. The trunk, along with a good chunk of terrain, moved to the side revealing a stone staircase illuminated by torches. Bright Light gestured her inside.
“Ladies first,”
Twilight slowly went down the stairs. There was actually a corridor built out of rock, that led into a small circular chamber. At the center of the chamber, there was a small container that resembled a filly sized pool. But it looked it was made out of a strange, lucid pink matter. It seemed to contain just mundane water though. At the side of the ‘pool,' there was a rack, filled with rocks. Twilight heard a sudden noise and she turned to see Bright Light coming down the stairs, while the passage was closing down behind him. He approached Twilight Sparkle with a smile and said while pointing at the strange object with a hoof:
“Let me introduce you to SCP-21, the ‘Pool’. This foal pool is made out of plastic. However, not vinyl, the kind we use. It’s made of a strange carbonic compound that we’ve not been able to synthesize yet, but we believe it’s a concoction of several organic creatures. Not plants, though.”
Twilight stepped back a bit. Something made out of animals? It was disgusting…
“I know, a little creepy. But it’s all worth it, since this baby can actually teleport you to very distant places. However, they are fixed, and in a sequence. You cannot teleport to location C if something was not actually teleported to location A and B. Wait a bit, let me set it to The Horse.” And he threw two rocks in the pool.
“The Horse?” She was surprised by the name. “Horse” among ponies was a fairly derogatory term, so it being used by a shadowy all powerful organization was not something she expected.
“It’s the training and briefing base of the Foundation. It’s also where the 05 council meets every month.” He started to approach the pool, but he stopped when Twilight spoke again
“How many locations are there apart from The Horse?”
“Three : The Scorpion, which is the biological containment base, the Box, which is the artifacts containment base, and the Hole, a base that only houses really dangerous and difficult to contain Keter-class SCPs. Then, there are other three locations that the pool can teleport you to: a chamber in the Canterlot Palace, somewhere deep in space and lastly, a classified location. I don’t know where or what is it, so don’t bother asking.”
“So, deep space, uh… How do you know that?”
“Testing. Trust me, it wasn’t pleasant. Poor fellow was two weeks away from retirement…” He shook his head.“Anyway, the pool’s set on The Horse, so get on my back.” Suspiciously, she looked at him.
“Get on your back? Ehm, why would I even-“
“Look, if you enter after me the pool will have already advanced to the next location, which ironically is the deep space one. So, unless you want to see your body in freeze in 10,5 seconds, you’ll bear this incredibly awkward moment. Now mount me, Twilight! Wait, that came out wrong.”
The lavender unicorn, while blushing madly, slowly put her forelegs on Bright Light’s shoulder. Then she pulled herself up on his back.
“Comfortable?”
She struck him down with a furious gaze.
“Geez, I was just kidding.” And he jumped high in the air, diving for the pool.
“Why are you jumping, it’s just one f-“
She felt the cold water surrounds her. It entered every open crevice of her body, cooling her of a heat she didn’t even know she had. All around her, there was water, water to no end. Like an ocean. It was dark. The surface was as black as the night, and she couldn’t even see the depth. Suddenly she felt something pulling her up: Bright Light held her tail in his mouth and was swimming towards a white patch of water. He lifted her up and embraced her, then he entered the light.
It was so white. Blinding. Twilight Sparkle was lifted and lowered. She could feel a cold floor beneath her, noises around her, shadows of grey moving like ghosts, fading in and out of her vision. They were dancing, morphing and amalgamate. A hissing in her ears. She couldn’t just stand it. She put her hooves on her eyes and waited in the comforting, healing darkness. Slowly the clamor turned into clear, distinguishable voices, but the shadows of her vision still danced in the blackness like neon lights.
“It’s her?” Twilight didn’t recognize this voice. It was hoarse, like a rattle.
“Yeah. Is the council already in session?” This was Bright Light’s voice, though.
“You bet they are, they started 5 minutes ago. You need some help with-“
“No, I’m fine, I can do it.”
Twilight Sparkle felt a gentle touch on her left shoulder, and gently the stallion said,
“I know it’s hard, but you have to open your eyes. It’s painful the first time, but you’ll get used to it.”
It WAS painful. She could feel her eyeballs throbbing through her eyelids. But the voice was so soothing…
“Twilight, you have to keep your eyes open, you have to readjust!”
The whiteness invaded her, making her eyes water crazily. She could feel the blood pumping in her, trying to give oxygen to cope with the immense amount of sensory information. But slowly, the glow faded, and all that was left was a big, big room. It seemed made out of metal sheets painted white. It was really large, maybe ten meters in height, and completely empty. She looked around, still lying on the cold floor: there was the small pink pool at the center. Another rack made out of the same material of the walls with some rocks in it, Bright Light smiling at her and lending her a hoof. She grabbed it and pulled herself up. There was no one else in the room. She heard that other voice, though. She started slowly walking around, looking amazed at the peculiar space:
“So, this is The Horse?” She neared one of the wall and touched it. It was really cold, and from the sound it was not hollow, there was a filling behind it.
“Yes… Well, it’s just the ‘waiting room’. This is not a containment base, so there’s not much movement around here. Most of the personnel here are permanently stationed. Are you ready, Twilight? We need to go to the 05 Council. Normally, there wouldn’t be any need to involve them in mere recruitment, but you’re special. Follow me” And he started walking towards a wall. Looking more carefully, Twilight realized there was a door in front of her, white as the rest. Bright Light touched a small (white) button and the door opened to reveal one of the most incredible sight Twilight had ever seen.
A gigantic cave that extended further than the eye could see. The gargantuan cavern was illuminated by a great many spotlights scattered all around the walls of geological marvel. They were on a steel catwalk, suspended over what seemed to be a bottomless pit, and from this very catwalk lots of branches conducted to smaller holes in the solid rock. But the most amazing sight was not this incredibly big natural structure, but those who were in it. Twilight had never seen so many different species in a single place: griffons, diamond dogs, wyverns, zebras... But no signs of ponies apart from herself and Bright Light. She expected a cold, sterile environment, instead she instantly liked the homely feel of the ambient: the cave was so big that even with the spotlights, you would only have a soft orange light, like the glow of a fireplace in winter. And even if Twilight had some bad run-in with some of the species she saw, they all looked so nice… They talked, joked, laughed, gesticulated. They also had very distinct clothes. A lot of griffons and diamond dogs had a grey double-breasted coat, with a golden band on their left arm. Some people were wearing what Twilight immediately recognized as a lab coat. Some didn’t wear anything at all.
05 COUNCIL
Twilight, distracted by a small lake to her left, didn’t stop and bumped into him. The stallion grabbed her on the shoulders to gain her attention. She instantly turned to face him.
“Bright Light, this place is amazing. All th-“
“Twilight, listen to me, this is very, very important. Behind these doors you will find the individuals that will decide your fate. They are the 05, the highest ranking members of the Foundation. We will need their approval since you’re a special case. You have to let me do the talking, clear?”
“Crystal clear.”
“Good.”
And he opened the door. Inside, there was nothing but black. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, everything was black. There was just one light, illuminating the center of the room. Around the luminous cone, there were six smooth blocks of black material. Each of them had glowing red letters written on them which read ‘05’ and a number from 1 to 6. She actually expected the 05 council to be there in person, but it looked like they were going to communicate through those strange monoliths.
A voice, soiled by heavy interference, broke the silence. The writing on the 05-1 monolith flickered rhythmically as the voice came out of it.
“Dr. Light, why is she here?”
05-4, a different voice but with the same static interferences, spoke:
“Indeed we are curious to know why you disobeyed an order from Celestia. She specifically asked not to involve her in the Foundation.”
Now it was 05-2 that spoke:
During this reprimand, Bright Light kept his head down, like a scolded foal. Twilight suddenly realized the extent of his gamble on her: she was the Princess protégé, and she specifically asked to leave her alone. Even so, he saw the potential in her and he willingly risked everything to make her fill that void, pursue that particular goal she tried to find for all her life.
So, it ends like this, uh? You go home like a rebuked little filly, ending an adventure that lasted a mere five hours. How pathetic are you? How insignificant? How low can you get? You wanted to free yourself from boredom and mediocrity, and you can’t even speak in your own defense?
Shut up.
“May I speak for a moment, please?” All the noises, the 05 telling off Bright Light, him trying to justify himself, the low humming of the monoliths, all went silent. “You don’t have to blame Bright Light. He gave me a choice, and I took it. I chose to come here and save lives and know more about this universe. I know you’re risking a lot, I know that. But please, please, let me stay. I’m willing to do everything it takes to stay here. I’ll throw my old life away, even my name if I have to but please, don’t let me sink back into that sea of dullness. I will be a valuable asset, worth the risk. Just, let me try…”
“I am prepared.”
They exited the room. As soon as the door was closed, Bright Light grabbed her and looked at her with an incredibly serious face. What if he was angry with her for stealing the initiative from him? Her fear soon disappeared as soon as the stallion talked.
“You are absolutely NUTS!” His stern expression turned into a warm smile “You just practically told the Council to buck off!”
Gulp. I did?
“What? It wasn’t-“
“You are amazing! No one ever had the courage to speak against an 05 decision. And you stood up to all of them!” He joyfully interrupted her, and grabbed her shoulder.
“Finally someone with the same mindset as me! We can show all those boring old doctors who’s right!” He started trotting merrily, dragging her with him as they moved between endless corridors carved out of rock that looked all the same. “We’ll show them that we can use those abominations for the betterment of all sentient species!” He started rambling about “the injustice of the system” and “a need for meritocracy," but Twilight was already lost in thought.
I made it. I’m out. Ehrm, I’m in. Well, both. No more waking up everyday wondering what to do. No more ponies looking down on you because they’re ignoramuses that don’t know anything about science and magic. No more “egghead” jokes, no more bullying, no more deadlines, no more stress. No more… them.
Please, don’t tell me you’re going sentimental.
She suddenly felt the pull come to an end. She saw Bright Light looking expectantly at her and asking:
“You’re going to become a researcher, right Twilight?” There was more than a hint of fear in his voice. He really wanted to work with her. That was the first time someone actually shared her desire for knowledge.
I’m not. I don’t need them anymore. I have someone here who’s the same as me.
She evoked the happiest smile she could muster and responded, “Of course. There’s no way I wouldn’t”
Bright Light took her in a small, well lighted room. They didn’t cross anyone on the way. There was just a table with a projector on it, and a small screen. The stallion started to fumble with the object, while Twilight stood beside him.
“You’re lucky, you know? Back when I joined, you had to read and memorize everything. Now, you just watch it, and thanks to our newly invented photomnemonic spell, the pattern in this projection will instantly fixate permanently in your brain. “
“So, I’ll remember this as long as I live?”
“Yeah. The spell contains a failsafe in case you are captured: you just need to focus on your horn and conjure three short light beams. Your brain will signal the spell to auto-erase itself. Anyway, I’ve finished setting this baby up. Let’s watch it”
He pressed a button on the machine and it instantly lit up and started projecting.
“3
2
1
Welcome, new member of our glorious foundation! You are here because your government or the equivalent in your culture proposed you to our recruiting agents. You are the best of the best; we are proud to have you here, and you should be proud working with the most brilliant minds Terrenia has to offer. As you were told by your personal recruiting agent ” Twilight turned to smile to Bright Light, who responded with a small smirk,” we devote ourselves to contain dangerous artifacts, secure them and protect all sentient species on Terrenia. Racist behavior is not accepted in the Foundation: each and every xenophobic episode will be reprimanded and severely punished. We are formed by all sorts of sentient species, and we fight for everyone. This video will provide you with the basic knowledge needed to work here, as well as some Foundation’s background information on your own heritage and culture. This set of data is called ‘Zohar’, and is the backbone of every single task you will perform here in our Foundation. This tape contains Zohar A-2, Equestrian or equivalent pony background.
Let’s start with the fundamentals: the Foundation’s purpose and mission is to find and secure dangerous objects that threaten normal sentient life in any way. The Foundation is ancient, dating back to approximately 2700 years before this video was recorded, 1285 aDd .” That was just three years ago. Twilight was still in Canterlot, locked up in her ivory tower, oblivious to anything but her studies and Spike. The video was kind of entertaining: the narrator was pretty fervent, and various images cyclically appeared in the background. ”As we ran across more and more artifacts, we started to realize how they were heterogeneous and different from one another. Rampant disorganization started to undermine and impede the Foundation’s duty: all culminated in the 282 aDd containment breach of what is now known as SCP-03. The SCP managed to entice one of the regents of the Equestrian Diarchy, Princess Luna. The resulting merge of the two created SCP-03a, commonly called ‘Nightmare Moon’, which proceeded to wage a civil war against the other Princess, Celestia. The war lasted for 33 years, before a brilliant researcher of the Foundation, Starswirl, found out that SCP-11 resonated to 03a just like they did with 34. Starswirl theorized 11 followed a specific set of conditions that allowed them to exit their state of stasis. After 15 months of studies and constantly shifting locations avoiding the hunts conducted by the Lunar Republic, he discovered said conditions: SCP-11 contains a primitive form of intelligence, capable of subtle mental indoctrination. Prolonged exposure to the artifacts will make the subject believe that 11 is a set of 6 powerful artifacts, capable of great feats of magic, although absolutely benign, and that they are agents of a so called Harmony, what the subject described as a shamanistic life force of some sort that permeates and regulates the Universe. This is not true. The only known 2 cases” So this is before our little adventures, uh.” where 11 was used showed no signs of magical activity. The Elements don’t emit any signs of energy: what they actually do is instantly influence what is perceived as a threat by making it, the threat, believe everything about Harmony and the Elements. Eventually, the threat is forced to unconsciously terminate itself, believing it’s actually being beaten by the power of ‘Harmony’. During this process the Elements create powerful hallucinations that can fool even the most trained trickster, but can’t deceive mechanical recording processes, such as cameras. The Elements, even imprinting in the minds of those who use them that they take force from admirable traits such as loyalty, honesty and so on, actually predate on the darkest side of the user's psyche and use flaws instead of qualities to activate itself. After all this info was discovered, Princess Celestia managed to activate 11, and used it against her own sister: 03 was put into stasis, imprisoning Princess Luna’s devastated consciousness with her. As her body continued to surge harmful raw magical energy, she was taken into custody by the Foundation. Celestia told the Foundation that the Elements ‘talked to her’ and told her that in a thousand year, 03 would come back from the stasis. The other use of the Elements of Harmony is only documented in folklore and legends: Celestia herself doesn't remember having used them before the incident with her sister. But even encased in stone, 34 maintains a certain degree of self consciousness, and with the aid of particular mind reading spells it was discovered that ‘Discord’ also was victim of the indoctrination effect of the Elements. Further studies suggested that 34 and 03 were also implanted more hypnotic suggestions: the former was convinced to be a ‘God of Chaos’, the latter a ‘Nightmare’. Even in the present time it’s still unclear when 11, 34 and 03 made contact, for how long, or their origins. We took 03a in custody, and Princess Celestia took advantage of 11’s story to cover up any possible tie with the Foundation by passing the indoctrination materials as historical facts. This concludes Zohar A-2, thank you for watching. "
Everything tumbled down on her. She didn’t pay much attention back in the Everfree Foreste when Bright Light told her a little bit: she was hyped up, her blood pumping with the adrenaline that only transgression can give. Now, where everything was eerie calm, the reality she’d just been told hit her like a brick wall. Everything, everything she was told since she was a little filly was false. Completely false. Even her friends, all host for a deranged, mysterious parasitic being. Everything she fought for was utterly fake, lies fabricated by a strange set of objects and masterfully repurposed by her mentor, the pony she looked up to the most, to shelve the inconvenient truth. It was too much to take. Bright Light noticed her distress and he walked up to her and tried to comfort her:
“Look, I know it’s a lot to take in. But, now you’re no longer bound by anything! You told me you were unhappy, not satisfied with your life, because of some giant cosmic scheme dangling over your head. Now, even if it’s hard, you know it’s all bogus. You don’t have to save the world from Discord. You don’t have to use the Elements again, you’re free to use the rest of your life as you see fit, really doing something to save the world…”
You have the reins of your life in your hooves! You can do whatever you want, and no Princess, friend or brother will tell you otherwise! You’re free, you’d better start getting used to it.
I know. He’s right.
Twilight Sparkle raised her head, a grateful look shined on her muzzle.
“Thanks, Bright Light. Now, I believe we still have a movie to watch?”
He smiled, and started tinkering with the projector again. He extracted one small cubic object and then inserted another.
"3
2
1
Welcome to Foundation 101, your gateway to a new, exciting world. In this video, we’ll talk about SCP, how they are classified, our personnel, security measures and levels. As you know, SCP are dangerous artifacts or beings that the Foundation secures and contains. What you don’t know is how they are classified. After the outbreak of SCP-03 (please refer to Zohar A-2 or your nearest recruitment agent) the Foundation introduced a classification system based on the danger the SCPs pose. The “Safe” class SCPs, if adequately used or contained, are completely harmless. The “Zaqar” class SCPs are not completely understood, yet even if they pose a threat, they can be in some way secured. The “Keter” class SCPs are incredibly dangerous, harmful and/or difficult to contain, and they pose the most significant danger to every sentient species. Containment breach are ordered in three different levels: level 1 is a relatively safe outbreak, level 2 is mildly dangerous and level 3 is incredibly hazardous. Level 3 breaches can cause ‘end of world scenario’, divided into ‘MN,' caused by biological agents, ‘TL,' by magic, and ‘XZ,' by inanimate objects. Specifically tailored safety measures are used to prevent such events from ever occuring. We are very proud of our staff, from the 05 council member to the janitor cleaning the halls, each and every member of the Foundation is a luminary in a field of expertise. A-Class personnel is formed by our top conducting members, compromising managers, administrators of our bases and the 05 Council, the Foundation’s top authority. B-Class personnel features our top doctors and researchers, constantly working to better understand SCPs and invent effective safety measures. Field agents form C-Class personnel: hailing from the top of law enforcement, armies and security companies all around Terrenia, they find and bring back SCPs. D-Class personnel consist of internal security, hygiene operators, bureaucratic staff and volunteers for research. The presentation is over, please return to your recruitment agent, you shall be escorted to the Collocation Office. "
She felt a gentle touch on her shoulder and Bright Light gestured Twilight to follow him. They exited the room and after a series of corridors, went back to the giant cave. He called it “the Hub." Again, no one paid attention to the mare, and again she didn’t see anyone that resembled a pony apart from her and Bright Light. She was once again admiring the incredible vitality and the sheer imposingness of the rock pillars that surrounded her. How old were they? For how long they stayed like that, supporting the enormous weight of the surface, until someone dug this deep into the bowels of the earth and discovered such a majestic marvel of nature? Like sentinels, they stood, stoic to the noises, the life and heat irradiating from thousands upon thousands of living, breathing bodies, that stretched, inflated, deflated rhythmically, their need to breath dictating the pace. Unfazed, stuck eternally in a fixed position, just sustaining everything over them, even behind their backs: the grass caressed by the wind couldn’t possibly know about these rocky pillars, resistant to any change, nor did the animal blindly following his instinct, oblivious to anything else except his life.
A fitting metaphor for this organization.
They reached a cavity, covered by a grate. On the other side a big, imposing and old looking Diamond Dog sat, his eyes locked on the lavender mare. As soon as Bright Light neared the metal grid, his gaze shifted to him, changing what looked like a suspicious stare into a warm, welcoming face.
“Bright Light,” he nodded. Twilight instantly recognized the voice: he was the one Bright Light was discussing with back at the pool.
“Darrrl, how are you? I bet you heard about Twilight Sparkle here” He gestured her to come closer.
“Yeah, heard about her. Fresh meat, that’s why you’re here. I know who she is…”
The stallion put a hoof on the counter. “Then you know what I want! Just give her the authorization and put me in charge of the briefing!”
Darrrl stayed silent for what seemed like an eternity, abandoning his friendly visage for a more serious one. Suddenly, he sighed, and responded:
“I’m sorry Bright Light, she is not B-Class material. The higher ups insisted for another classification….”
The stallion was caught off guard, but the surprise was almost instantly replaced by anger.
“WHAT? She’s a magical genius, a freaking prodigy, and they don’t want to let her study the most powerful artifacts in the whole world?”
“Look, I’m not the one in charge of this whole shindig, orders are orders. She’s not going to be a B-Class.” He reached under the counter to grab something: it was a small metal badge, painted yellow and black, with “FAIT” written over it. When Darrrl gave him the strange badge, he went pale.
“Is this some kind of joke? She’s just a scholar, they can’t just…”
“What’s wrong, Bright Light?”
He turned around, and looked straight into her eyes.
“FAIT stands for Field Agent In Training. They’re sending you to C-Class. Look, this has to be a mistake. Wait here, I’ll sort this out” He reached for a small door beside the grate and opened it. The diamond dog rose up, and tried to dissuade the furious stallion by putting a paw on his shoulder:
“Look Bright-,“ He shook it off angrily and uttered “Shut up Darrrl," and kept walking until he disappeared behind another door. Darrrl went after him, and Twilight could still faintly hear him trying to calm Bright Light down. Five minutes passed by, and no one came back. The waiting was unnerving to say the least, sometimes she could hear voices yelling at each other in the distance, but couldn’t distinguish what they were actually saying.
C-class, the video said they’re “field agents”… So they’re the ones that go around catching doomsday devices. And I’m supposed to do that? I’m just a librarian, I belong in a laboratory, not in a wild lethal hunt for strange artifacts! I can’t do it, I don’t have it.
You’re kidding, right? You managed to escape hydras, kick some changeling’s butt, defeat a crazed all powerful whatever, calm an Ursa Minor, take Cerberus back to Tartarus and discover a coup d’etat behind the façade of a lovely, beautiful marriage. You’re paranoid, good with magic and brave enough to not break down and start crying when-
Her line of thought was interrupted by the sound of an opening door. She saw Darrrl and Bright Light come back from the dim lit corridor, the latter with a sad and defeated expression. His eyes fixated to the ground, as if they were looking for an excuse written on the floor. He lifted up his gaze and looked Twilight straight into the eyes, and then extended the badge to her.
“I’m… sorry. This is a specific order from the higher ups. I don’t know why though. Look, if you wanna call it off, it’s fine, no one’s blaming you. The training is incredibly hard, and the job… Well, I’ve never seen a C-Class in retirement.”
Resting on his hoof was a small rectangular piece of metal. This was the crossroad. What would be in store for her if she accepted? What she could lose?
Not much.
The risk. The danger. The peril. Anxiety. Fear. Adrenaline. Excitement. Satisfaction. Death.
The safety. Boredom. Dullness. Death.
This was it. The focal point of her entire life. Twilight Sparkle was standing exactly over two precipices, one dark and mysterious, the other small and filled with pillows. One was inviting her to taste the darkness of the unknown. The other to slowly but surely live comfortably in tedium.
She looked at the badge for the last time. It was shining under the hot and bright spotlight illuminating the cave. In the reflection, one second there was Ponyville, and her library. Applejack was knocking on the door, bringing some surplus apples. Rainbow Dash was inside, reading Daring Do’s new book. Rarity was chatting with Spike in the kitchen about the quality of griffonian rubins. Pinkie Pie was in the living room, setting up the decorations for the “Welcome Back Twilight” party. The sun was starting to set, leaving everything gleaming of a deep, welcoming orange. The night breeze was starting to touch her mane. Everything was so warm, so fine, so nice.
So… boring.
It disappeared, leaving only the smooth texture of the metal. There was nothing shining on it, no slice of life, no predictions for the days to come. Nothing, just reflections of the light. Nothing to tell her what was going to be of her. Just uncertainty.
She extended her hoof and touched it.
“I’m in.”
Bright Light was running faster than he thought his body could allow, avoiding all sorts of beings on his race: dragons, wyvern, zebras, diamond dogs. Even things that could challenge a small house in size he swiftly dodged. He ran through some corridors, and the crowd started to decrease until he was alone, sweating rivers and shooting through more and more passages carved out of rock. His mind was going just as fast as his body, formulating thoughts at the speed of sound. The majority of it was made of insecurity, fear and concern. But everything stopped when he reached the door. It was humongous, easily the size of one triple stored building. It was completely made out of gray, shining metal. The locks, gigantic bars of blackened steel, looked positively intimidating, just as the rest of the apparatus. It was called the Door to Tartarus for its menacing bulk. One could wonder why such a massive display of defensive prowess was needed, and what could be so daunting that was deemed necessary to be locked behind 2.5 meters of a thick alloy made of steel, nickel, and diamond dust. The only ones that knew were not authorized to say, for a good reason: if any of the recruits saw the training area they had to live in for six months was behind a gigantic door, they would have been biased to say the least. No one apart from the C-Class knew what was going on behind that mass of metal. There were voices about having to survive with no prepared food or equipment for the entirety of the training, in an incredibly harsh environment, full with dangerous creatures. But the agents would not say anything about it, even between them, so the feared training of the C-Class had remained a secret since its institution 670 years before. Bright Light was waiting for her. Back at the Collocation Office he had been amazed by the resolve in Twilight Sparkle’s eyes. Sometimes it happened that some of the recruits didn’t come back. Of course, no one had the slightest idea why. So he tried everything to make sure she passed the training: they had one week to prepare before going in. Cardio, basic self defense spells, how to light up a fire, to find water, treat injuries with natural remedies, and so on. But at the end of the week, he felt like none of that could have possibly prepared her for what was lying behind those doors. She wasn’t the only one going in, there were two other recruits with her, a male Pegasus and a female earth pony. Bright Light could see the door slowly opening, just a chink, and managed to take a look at the training area: just complete darkness. They entered, all trembling, and it closed behind them, leaving only the sound of the bars switching back into place, and then a complete and utter silence.
Six months passed fast: Bright Light was assigned to the Department of Containment Engineering, leaving his job at the Folklore Department. He made quite a name for himself back there and some friends, so he wasn’t exactly thrilled, even if it was a big promotion. But he fitted in pretty well and found that his encyclopedic knowledge about lore and myths became useful in designing containment solutions. For the first four months everything was pretty frantic: there were a lot of SCPs waiting containment and they had to work like crazy designing and building everything. But after that, just dead calm. No SCPs were found for 2 months, all investigations turned out to be bogus and the Foundation was slowly losing funders: no objects found meant governments on the alert, more money spent. They started thinking they could the job themselves, and it wasn’t good. All of the Foundation was desperately trying to stay afloat, but the SCPs came out slowly. The biggest funder, Celestia, wasn’t exactly in good relations with them: even if everyone in her inner circle tried to convince her otherwise, she still blamed the Foundation for the death of her pupil, and sought every possible failure as an occasion to reduce the budget. Bright Light was busy designing a cage that could stop a being capable of going through walls when an A-Class, a zebra, entered his office. His gaze was imposing, but the stallion still had an open wound for the whole C-Class incident with Twilight, and tried to look as secure as possible. He expected a long talk about bureaucratic stuff, but he just came in, said:
“FA Sparkle has passed the training. You’re going to pick her up tomorrow.”
And left.
And here he was, waiting for her. The training was ruthless, that much he knew. What if she had been injured badly, or scarred?
It wasn’t possible. She was a strong mare, she surely managed to pull it off with no incidents.
His mind, filled with concern and doubts, blanked as soon as the pillars started to move: they rotated and retreated inside the jambs. The joints creaked, not used for six months, and finally the titanic barrier of hard metal started to move. Just a small narrow crack. Again, Bright Light managed to see only darkness behind her, as she slowly trotted out. She wasn’t injured, as far as he could tell, but she was completely different. He expected her to change for the worst, cold, detached. But she looked so happy, and with no worries. There was a big smile on her muzzle and her whole body emanated an aura of tranquility and peace. Her mane was different: it wasn’t straight anymore, but wild and disorderly, though not dirty. It was fairly similar to her friend’s, Rainbow Dash, was it? She approached him, and said cheerfully:
“Hi, Bright Light!”
He was still a little confused, but managed to utter:
“Ehi Twilight. You’re… different...” She started to laugh, then stopped and said:
“Yeah, I guess I am. Who’s the one behind you?”
He turned; behind him there was the same A-Class that contacted him the day before. He approached Twilight and offered his hoof. She took it and shook it vigorously.
“Happy to see you completing your training Miss Sparkle. I’m Mbura, an Observer.” ‘So, he’s assigned to monitor agents and their team. What am I doing here?’ thought Bright Light. “I’ve been following closely your astounding progress, and I’m very surprised by the methodology you’ve developed. So, I asked the council to get you under my observance. Dr. Bright here,” he pointed to the stallion without even looking at him,” is a renowned expert of folklore and legends, and since you two already know each other, I’m assigning him as your Oracle. I’m sure our work will be swift and efficient. Your designation is Team Theta, and your room is 1345, third floor. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an audience with the Council.”
And left. Bright Light was still trying to keep his jaw from hitting the ground. Him. An Oracle. The one responsible for supplying the agent with knowledge and information. That was… a lot. A honor, of course, but also a stressful position. At least he was with Twilight, not some hardened veteran. He heard an elated voice from behind him:
“Isn’t that nice, Bright Light? We’ll still going to be working together!”
“Yeah… amazing…”
Their office was at third floor, just one level above basement and logistic. The noise of the machines that kept the water and air clear and fresh annoyed both Twilight,who lost a big part of her good mood as soon as she entered the small, claustrophobic office, and Bright Light, who wasn’t exactly thrilled to begin with, as he lost a pretty comfortable job in just a minute. There were just two tiny desks. They started to clean them in silence, the awkward levels rapidly increasing. They both sighed in relief as someone knocked. The stallion went to open and in front of him stood Observer Mbura. He walked in without asking for permission, extracted a small file with no writings on the cover from his black suit and lowered it on Bright Light’s desk. They both asked in unison:
“What’s that?” The stallion opened it and started reading.
“That’s your first assignment.” He then looked the mare straight into her eyes “Miss Sparkle, you’re going to Canterlot.”
Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona
The sky was a sea of gray. Enormous, menacing clouds covered the sun. Celestia always took pride in her aster, but in winter cold, bitter climates were an obligation. Twilight Sparkle always liked rain and grizzle: mundane things assumed a melancholic feeling, and even the most trivial of occurences took an aura of sadness and gloomy. A perfect atmosphere for a library. A fitting one for an investigation, too. Her first case, here in Canterlot. It thrilled her a bit... Being locked up for six months and then suddendly get thrown in the capital of Equestria... It was exilarating to say the least. The feeling of seeing ponies again, walking, talking, embracing each other, living their lives oblivious of what was going on around them. Ignorance is bliss. What made her so excited was the feeling of escapade: she was for everyone dead. Her family, her friends, everyone who knew her thought she was pushing daisies. She had to dye her coat and mane: the former was white and the latter was black striped with purple. She was still famous, so there was a chance someone could recognize her. But even in disguise, she felt the excitation of a filly trying to put his hooves in a jar of jam, the forbidden pleasure of deceit and delusion. The training if anything, taught her one thing: never let your past cloud your future; what was gone, was gone. Twilight Sparkle was dead, buried in the graveyard of Ponyville, mourned by many. What a tragic loss! A talented unicorn, loved by all, hero and scholar. Definitely dead. However, Dawn Wake, member of the Equestrian Intelligence Service, was pretty much alive. And did she felt great. She was trotting down of Canterlot main street. She stopped by a newsstand and bought the Equestria Daily out of curiosity: who knew what happened to the world while she was gone. She immediately regretted it:
Princess Luna take over morning audiences for fifth time in a row
You reap what you sow, Celestia. Instead of sheltering your little ponies, you could have told them the truth.
Pinkie would have been still alive. She doesn’t deserve my pity.
She threw the paper on the street, while the newsagent asked confused:
“Whatc’ha doing? Ya just paid for it!”
“I’ve seen what I needed to.”
She trotted away, disappearing in of the back alleys. She was getting emotional. She needed to stay focused, sharp, fixed on the mission she received the day before. She could still remember the briefing file word for word:
Three ponies in the Canterlot area have been found with no memories whatsoever: they don’t remember their name, place of residence, relatives, or anything else. Their childhood and adult life have been completely wiped clean. Magical examination shows no traces of amnesiac spells, or any mind altering spell. No witnesses. The Canterlotian Royal Guard managedto cover everything up. Your mission is to investigate the case to verify if there might be a SCP involvement. If so, capture it. Your alias for this mission is Dawn Wake, agent of the EIS. In the envelope you will find the badge. Below you will find what info we managed to gather on the victims and their families.
Good luck, agent.
Her first chance to prove once and for all the justness of the method she developed in training. She saw how other agents conducted their work: mostly lucky guesses and gratuitous violence. She couldn’t blame them, though. The training was...
However, she realized that the succes ratio with these kind of methods was pretty low, and mostly aleatory. She needed more than that. What striked her was how the scientific method that she used in her studies of magic, biology, astronomy and so on worked so well, with so little to work on. Equestria was practically devoided of serious crimes since the exile of Princess Luna, so the police force was just being used for petty crimes and parades. The art of investigation developed in science, not in criminology. It was about time to port it. She needed to examine the victims, ask the relatives, look for any evidence on the location they were discovered, and then put all the pieces back together. A voice ringed in her head, clear as crystal.
“Testing, testing. Can you hear me, Twilight?”
“Yeah, the comm spell is working” Even if she was in a back alley, and she saw no one around her, talking out loud to herself was still pretty embarassing. This communication spell was actually overriding her auditory functions, so when she communicated with Bright Light she couldn’t hear anything else. “Bright, have you found anything related about the case?”
“Well, I’ve looked around. There are several myths about the loss of memory, so I don’t know what could actually be useful to you, I’m gonna need more details. What I can tell you though, is that there are not many deities connected to memory, so maybe a cross research will trim down useless legends. There are just two memory gods that I know of: Alkerun, the draconic god of fire and rock that sculpted everything out of a gigantic boulder. He’s also the god of memory, since he helped a famous draconic hero, Parthurnax, by inscripting on a rock the complete history of the dragonkind so that he could answer a question posed by the Bastheth, dragon’s equivalent of the Sphynx. The other one is Nabu, wyvern god of Ice and crystals. Wyverns believe that the ice was the first matter from which everything originated, so they associate ice with knowledge, wisdom and memory. Sorry I couldn’t find much more... Call me back when you find more, Oracle out.”
It’ll take a long time getting used to a voice in your brain....
____________________________________________________________________________
She entered the Canterlot Central Hospital hesitantly: hospitals made her nervous. She didn’t like to think that whatever problem she may have, it would probably still be small time compared to what some of these ponies had to endure. There was a frantic activity: nurses and doctors running around, ponies waiting for visiting chatting or screaming, demanding to be received. She walked to the front desk, waiting for the turned nurse to notice her. She managed to contain the surprise when she saw the white, pristine coat, the light pink mane and the red cross cutie mark.
“I’m nurse Redheart, is there something you need?” She asked with a gentle tone that only spoke sincere concern for everypony around them. Twilight was baffled, to say the least. What were the odds that she was transferred and her shift was exactly the one that coincided with her visit?
“Ehm, is everything alright?” She asked again.
“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m agent Dawn Wake from the EIS” she took the badge from an inside pocket of the small black coat she wore and showed it to her” I’m here to see the three, uhm, patients”
The nurse looked at her for a moment, trying to understand who exactly was she talking about. Then apparently made the connection, and gestured her to come closer:
“Take the first corridor you see, then turn left and right again. Last room on the right.” Twilight nodded and left: after the first turn, the tidal wave of squirming ponies was reduced to a small stream; after the second, she was completely alone. A perfect stage for her first interrogation. She found the room and opened the door: inside three beds and three ponies on them. The first two, an earth pony stallion with a gray mane and a black coat, a unicorn mare with a golden mane and a red coat, and a unicorn mare with a lime coat and a white mane. She was the only awake, gazing intensely outside the only window in the room: you could see the Canterlot Castle and the Royal Gardens, in all their luscious magnificence. She didn’t even flinch when Twilight opened or closed the door. Only when she neared the bed, she moved her eyes from the window to look the agent straight into the eyes. Her gaze was empty, lifeless.
“I’m agent Dawn Wake of the EIS. I know this is a difficult moment for you, but I’m here to ask some questions. Do you think you can aswer them?” She watched Twilight for some time, without changing her hollow expression. The mare started to fear the trauma was too great for her to even understand what she was saying, when she talked:
“You’re wasting your time. Everything in me is just.... blank. Nothing. I don’t remember my name, my family, my loved ones, everything that happened from birth since I found myself in this hospital. And I can’t even remember why should I even care. Celestia forbid that me remembering just this room may stop from doing your job. Ask away, officer.” That last sarcastycal remark made Twilight hope there would be still something to salvage from all of this. Maybe with a little help from amnesia-related magic and some luck, she could find something worthwhile.
“Thanks, miss...”
“They say my name is Spring Blossom. Not that it’s actually important, since I can’t remember a thing.” She sighed.
“Ok, miss...Blossom. Obligatory question: Do you remember-”
“Anything? No, I don’t. And before you ask, yes, I’m sure. The only thing I know is this room. Don’t bother with the unicorn mojo jojo, they already tried” and she looked at Twilight with a gaze that dared her to ask more. She was right on spot: the former lavender mare lighted up her horn, preparing to probe her mind with an amnesia spell.
“Do you mind if I try this new technique? I’m sure it will be beneficial for your condition. It’s an experimental spell developed by the D.O.T.A.”
Spring Blossom waved lazily a hoof, gesturing her to go ahead.
“Sure, can’t get any worse than this, I guess.” Twilight neared the mare, and their horns touched. She was momentarily blinded, her whole perspective changed upside down. It was like she was watching through another perspective that kept spinning and spinning around her body, surrounded by pure white light. The spinning stopped, and everything turned pitch black. She had arrived:
Twilight was exploring the depths of her mind: she came in thinking to find a gigantic lock on all her mnemonic processes: even if the Wyvern Protectorate, the Griffin Republic and the Equestrian Kingdom had given their blessing, funds and recruits to the Foundation, the O5 council knew they had their own agencies, tracking down SCPs and doing counter-intelligence against each-other. She suspected an intelligence war was going down in Canterlot, and these ponies had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there was no lock. There was no lock because there wasn’t anything to lock at all. Instead of overflowing mundane memories, in front of her there was just the small hospital room. There was no spell she knew that could actually erase memory: amnesiac spells would just lock away a certain memory, and if the lock wasn’t removed after a certain amount of time, the memory would decade, slowly but surely. But the traces would still be there, impossible to remove, like a chain trying to capture the void. No one could miss it. Here, there wasn’t anything.
It’s empty in here. There are just the memory of this room, and the check ups... Wait, what’s that?
She looked into the wobbly mess that were Spring Blossom’s (few) memories: the doctors examined her and the other two ponies in the room. They were not opposing any resistance, allowing the doctors to just touch them wherever they wanted. She was thinking of shutting the memory down, when she saw one of the physicians find a small, regular, square-shaped burn on the base of the neck of Spring Blossom. Then, on the other two victims. It couldn’t be a coincidence, but she needed to see it for herself. Before going out, she put a lock on the last two minutes, just to be sure. She breathed slowly. Coming out of a memory probing session wasn’t pleasant. It was like being pulled outside through an incredibly small hole in a very tight fabric. She breathed once againg, closed her eyes, and deactivated the spell. She felt compressed, squeezed and splattered across the entire fabric of space. The entire universe screamed all at once, invading her head with an outrageous sound that tore out of the bounds of the cosmos: she floated out of the galaxy, the stars, the visible cosmos, into pure and vast darkness. Her breathing was increasing, it was time to pull out. The inconceivable vastness started to crush her lungs: she closed her eyes, and breathed again. When she opened them again, she was in the hospital room, beside a passed out Spring Blossom. She shook her head vigorously, trying to remove the dizzyness. Then, she reached for the unconscious mare, moving her neck and mane to find the burn. She found it: it was the size of a gold coin, with the shape of a square with rounded corners.She examined the other two ponies, making sure not to wake them up: same burn, same spot.
There is no way in Tartarus this is a coincidence. Bright Light talked about a dragon fire god, right? It’s time to put this comm spell to use.
She got out of the hospital, making sure to avoid eye contact with Nurse Redheart back at the lobby. She entered a narrow backroad, walked down a few blocks, made sure no one was around, and turned on the radio in her brain.
“SPRKL-1. Oracle, can you hear me?”
A familiar and friendly voice resonated in her head.
“Oracle’s here. What can I do for you, Twi?”
“I need more infos about that dragon god, Alkerun. The legend you were talking about, does it involve burns, or the number three?” She really hoped that her first case would turn out to be so easy: maybe this lead would get her somewhere near the SCP, if there was even one involved in all of this.
“Actually, yes. Both of them. Remember what I told you about Parthurnax, the dragon hero? He rised against Basteth, because the latter would require yearly sacrifices from the early dragon tribes. One could imagine what creature could scare 3 stores high creatures into submission....
“That’s because the three victims were found together, in the same place, at the same time. Also, they all have small rounded burns on the base of their neck.”
“Whoa, that can’t be a-”
“A coincidence, I know. I think we got something here.”
“You may have a rogue draconic artifact. That stuff really packs a punch, trust me. So, what you’re going to do now?”
“Even if this is a solid lead, there’s not much to work on, right now. I’ll check out on the relatives. Spring Blossom has an aunt still alive. The unicorn mare, what was her name... Nimbus! Yeah, Nimbus has both her parents alive... The stallion is an orphan. I’m going to Blossom first, SPRKL1 out”
“Oracle out”
Blossom’s aunt, according to the briefing file, lived in the outskirts of Canterlot, just under the mountain that sustained the old part of the city. The majestic rock pillars that sustained the Royal Castle, not visible at a first glance, camouflaged into the alabaster wall, stood out beside the small, little cottage permanently shaded by the foundations of the castle. The building loomed eeriely on the cute house; an hypnotic sight, as you could wait for it to crash down any moment. This was a peaceful part of the city, one that Twilight never actually saw back when she lived in Canterlot: this pacific suburban picture, perpetually shaded by the greatness of the royalty, contrasted with the environment she was used to... Small, ancients streets, bustling with life she watched through the dusty window of her father’s library, the most famous in all of Canterlot. Thinking about it now bothered her: her destiny was engraved in stone. Born from a researcher and a librarian, she went ahead and became both. When she thought about it, was there really destiny? She discovered Nightmare’s Moon return because she was destined to, because the Harmony chose her to be the Element of Magic. But there was no Harmony, no Elements, nothing. They were just coincidences. What drove her to become a scholar? She remembered liking the atmosphere of the library her father owned. It was dark, fresh, and dusty. When she opened the first book in her life, her father was beside her, his eyes beaming with pride. Twilight just couldn’t stand disappointing those eyes. Every time she went out playing with other fillies, she could see the imperceptible look of disappointment in his eyes. He probably wasn’t even realizing it, but Twilight gradually spent more and more time inside his library just not to fail him. Gradually, books grew on her, and what started as a simple way of making her dad happy became her full time hobby. She forgot what was her initial purpose, but her drive was still buried deep inside her, and the flame was rekindled every time her dad had a word of praise for her. She tried, she tried so hard not to think about him in a negative way. But something kept telling her... It’s his fault, you know.
Now it’s not the time. Focus, focus!
She walked through the small garden and knocked at the door. A frail looking ancient mare opened. Even with the flow of time distorting and ruining everything in its path, Twilight could still discern behind those wrinkles and drooping cheeks, a young Spring Blossom. They were practically identical, with the same stern, stubborn feel to them.
“Yes?”
“Are you Spring Blossom’s aunt, Lime Streak?” Twilight asked with an inquisitive tone. I need to nail down the “I’m an officer of the Law” vibe. Stay cool, stay professional, Sparkle.
“Who’s asking?” She responded with a more than a bit of suspicion in her voice.
“I’m agent Dawn Wake of the EIS.” She levitated her badge in front of the old mare” I’m here to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.”
“No, of course. Please, come in, make yourself at home, officer.” She gestured her to come inside. As soon as Twilight stepped into the house, she dashed out of sight.
“I was making some tea. Would you like some?” A voice came from what was probably the kitchen.
“Actually, yes, if that’s not an inconvenience.” Answered the young mare while looking around.
“Not at all, dear. Please take a seat! I’ll be over there in just a minute.”
Twilight started looking around the room. It was definitely the home of an elderly: the furniture, the walls, the floor, every piece of decoration was well worn, ancient looking. She scooped around, searching for something that could connect the grumpy aunt to anything. There were some strange, small statues, but she couldn’t understand what they were supposed to be: they all looked the same, a circle hollowed out in the middle with tendrils that irregularly branched out of it. She continued looking around, searching for more out of place oddities. But all she got was a sad parade of past lives: a collection of photographs were placed on a small chest of drawers. A rather young Lime Streak beside a stallion. Another one where she wore a wedding dress, kissing the same stallion. Them, holding a small filly. The now adolescent mare beside her parents, raising a big cup, Twilight couldn’t read the inscription at the base. The mare, now fully adult, with another stallion and Lime Streak holding another filly, with the same pattern of Spring Blossom. It was a snapshot of a normal life, ruined at some point by tragedy. It was oppressive to look at. Those happy faces, oblivious to what fate had in store for them, a Damocles sword dangling over their heads.
They look so happy… A family…
“Is everything alright?” She turned around, and she saw the old mare waiting for her on an armchair, with two steaming cup in front of her, on a coffee table. Twilight sat down on the couch in front of the old mare, it squeaked under her weight.
“Oh, sorry… I’ll try to make this quick, I know this is a hard moment for you.” She levitated a cup and started sipping some tea. It was hot, and sweet. Pretty good.
“It’s okay, darling, ask away” She lifted the other cup and started blowing on it.
What’s up with the ‘darling’? She almost tore my muzzle off when I knocked at the door. I guess the badge has its perks.
“So, where were you the night your niece… disappeared?”
She looked at Twilight with an annoyed expression.
“Your colleagues of the Canterlot PD already came over and asked.”
“It’s standard procedure ma’am. I’m sorry if it’s redundant” Always prepare a lie first. Good work, Twilight.
“Mph. I was here, at home.” She drank the tea in one shot “And no, I don’t have anyone to vouch for me” And she ended the sentence by slamming the cup on the table
What is the deal with the police work around here? She has no alibi, close to one of the victim, and they don’t even bring her to the station for questioning.
She’s a pegasus, Sparkle. This is clearly magic. They don’t know anything about SCPs and what not.
I guess. But I know about them.
“Do you know anypony who could think of your niece as an enemy?”
“Goddess, no. Spring Blossom could be… fierce, sometimes “ I wonder where she got that “ but she was a good girl nonetheless. I can’t think of anypony who could do such a dreadful thing to her”
“Ok. Did your niece ever behaved strangely? Maybe reading or looking for something that wasn’t exactly normal?”
“No, I don’t think so. Her passion was photography. She worked as a stock photographer, taking pictures of pretty much everything and then selling them to magazines, books, and things like that” The grumpy attitude she had until then melted when she started talking about her niece.” She was really talented, she managed to capture everything in a different light… Now that you mention it, she didn’t tell me what her last work before the… incident was about, and that was strange, because she always kept me up to date with her jobs. I remember she started going to a bookshop near the castle” A bookshop near the castle... Oh no, please don’t ” The Dusty Tome, yes, that’s the name” Twilight’s darkened for just a small, imperceptible moment” She came back almost everyday with books about dragons”
“Dragons?”
“Yes, almost every book was about them” She nodded slowly.
Twilight took a small sip and the lowered the cup, breaking the telekinetical force that bounded it. She got up.
“Thank you, you were very helpful, miss Streak”
“Oh, we’re done already?” She couldn’t manage to completely hide the relief in her voice.
“Yes, I have all the info I need. Just a curiosity, ma’am. Those sculptures…”
“Those trinkets? They’re just salt sculptures representing the sun, it’s just a small hobby of mine”
“Well, thank you for the tea, miss Streak. I hope you and your niece can return to a normal life as soon as possible”
“Goodbye, officer” And she slammed the door behind her.
“Oracle, can you hear me?”
“Surprise me”
“Ok, both Spring Blossom’s aunt and Nimbus’s mother worked at the Royal Canterlot University. Lime Streak was a gardener for the Royal Faculty of Archeological Studies. But Fire Dust, Nimbus’s mother, was a counselor for the Royal Faculty of Archeological Studies. Her field of expertise? Dragons. She lived 5 years in a draconic colony up north, near the Misty Mountains.”
“I just asked a few questions to Lime Streak. She said her niece was fascinated by dragons. Bought lot of books from a… local bookshop. I’m going to check out the place and then, let’s just say that miss Fire Dust will have a lot of explaining to do.”
“Twilight?”
“What?”
“Be careful”
A smile crept on her face
“I will. SPRKL-1 out”
The sun was almost setting when she reached the top of the street. The Dusty Tome sat on the precipice of the mountain, its windows facing 30 meters of pure, beautiful complete void. Everything looked the same, just like she remembered. The pastry shop in front of the shop, the smell would always be engraved in her memory. The park just down the road. The sunset, always stunning from the balcony at the end of the street. The unkempt windows, always covered with dirt, even if this was supposed to be a top notch bookshop for scholars. The door, always creaking loudly. The inside, rows of badly lit old books shelved on top of the other. The scent of parchment, glue, dust. The voice that always welcomed the customers in the same way:
“Welcome to the Dusty Tome, reign of the books. What can I help you with?”
Hello, dad.
“Mr. Sparkle? My name is Dawn Wake, agent of the EIS. I’m here to ask you some questions”
A stallion with a dark blue coat and a darker mane emerged from behind a pile of books. He approached her with a smile and offered his hoof. She shook it.
Keep calm. Stay professional.
“Boy, I hope I’m not into trouble!” said giggling a bit.
“It’s alright, Mr. Sparkle. I just need some information about a client you had recently.”
“Sure, of course. Wait here, I’ll grab here the register.” And he disappeared in the darkness that reigned in the shop, while asking “Do you mind telling me why an agent of the EIS has an interest in a humble bookshop and its customers?”
I can’t let my voice crack.
“I’m afraid it’s confidential, Mr. Sparkle.” He teleported behind Twilight, giving her a small scare. He was levitating a big book. He gestured her to follow her at the counter, lowered the book on it and turned around to ask “So, who are we looking for?”
“A mare named Spring Blossom. She bought a few books about dragons” He started turning the pages of his registry, looking for the name.
“Let me see, dragons, dragons… Here it is, Spring Blossom. She bought 6 books, all about dragon folklore… two weeks ago.” He grabbed the book and put it in front of her.
That’s a lot of time to get into a dragon worshipping cult.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Sparkle.”
He smiled and said “Oh, I always have time for helping the law! Feel free to come back, maybe for a less formal occasion”
“I’ll try. Thank again”
She was on the roof of a small building in front of the university and the cool breeze of the dusk chilled her. It made her think straight, and logical. Cold. It was strange to watch the old part of the city from the rooftops: the modern part was divided in squares, the streets were perpendicular to one another. But the castle and its surroundings… It was like watching a white, pristine, marble made tumor, that elongated its pallid tendrils across the streets, the houses, the mountain. It just sat there, feasting on the vitality, glamour of the capital, a millenary parasite that made its way into the households of ponies that lived their life like leeches on productive part of society. Nobles…
When she was little and was appointed as the Princess protégé, she had the occasion to meet these so called nobles. Apart from a few notable exceptions, they weren’t the stuck up, dumb, annoying excuses of ponies she thought: they were akin to predators, at least on a social level. Shrewd, clever little malicious beings that realized how shallow was their cling to the privileges they so much enjoyed. One wrong word, one incorrect inflection could mean an untimely demise for the whole caste. So they learned to avoid using the stick too often and resorted to use the carrot much more. Even as a filly, she realized that every party she attended with the Princess, every occasion she met one of them was like being thrown into a pit full of lions, ready to dismember you at the slightest show of weakness. She was disappointed by the Princess’s attitude: she was by no mean like them. But, as time passed, Twilight realized that her mentor, no matter how hard tried and tried to look like a casual, fun loving normal pony, was in fact madly in love with her status, royalty, the perks, the worship that she apparently tried to discourage but that in fact loved, above everything else. Even her prized student. That was the reason of the confinement in Ponyville:
Who would want a socially inept bookworm as her personal student? Immediately after I exhausted my purpose, she threw me away, and started looking for somepony better than me. Discord was just a bump on her road, and Chrysalis, her true colors.
You don’t need her. You don’t need them. You’re strong now. You’re the master of your own fate. You have your life in your hooves. And there’s nothing she can do about it.
The sun set. It went beyond the horizon, and the sky turned black as coal. The lights of the Royal University glimmered in the darkness, slowly eating it. Soon they were in a struggle, pushing each other, annihilating each other, like matter and antimatter. And that wasn’t right. The shadows were… moving? They slithered about, slowly and subtly, taking everything in their grasp. She felt colder, and colder. The temperature was dropping drastically. Her breath was turning visible. She felt an aching sensation her left backleg, and turned around: a tendril was slowly making his way up her hoof. It was unbelievably cold. She dashed and shook her leg, bucking the air. But the tendril wasn’t just there, it disappeared as soon as she stepped into the light. Whatever they were meddling with, it was dangerous. Twilight had to put a stop to it. Her original plan was to wait for Fire Dust to come out, follow her for a bit, then teleport both of them away from indiscreet eyes and make her confess, one way or the other. But now, she couldn’t wait anymore. Whatever she did, it was dangerous, and probably was the same thing that completely wiped out the memory of her daughter, Spring Blossom, and that stallion. She was against a scholar interfering with ancient and cruel forces. Most likely, it started as an accident; Twilight couldn’t understand why she would want to wipe Nimbus’s memory clean, let alone try it again. She tried a ritual, something went wrong, and now she was trying to fix everything. The lavender mare teleported to another building beside the University and fired up a location spell. Her mind exploded and reassembled outside her body. She moved freely through the ether, at literally the speed of thought. She entered the University and started looking for Fire Dust. With her speed, she reached her office in seconds. She passed through the door, just in time to see the scholar collapse on the floor, with a tentacle made out of pure darkness tugging the base of her neck. The tentacle turned white for a second, the skin of the pony started to sizzle, and then it turned around, like he could see Twilight’s astral projection. It swam into the air following her gaze, and then whipped her consciousness. It was so cold. It speaked of the cold of the endless space around Earth, and filled her heads with alien chants. Her mind started to freeze, right there, into midair. She had to pull out: Twilight took every ounce of every magical power, broke the ice, and rewound her consciousness into her body. The dark vine followed her while she went backwards through the corridors, the hall at a neck breaking speed. When she got out of the University, it disappeared, and her mind returned to her collapsed body. Everything turned black. Then, her eyes opened, and she saw the cloudless night sky. She gasped, and cool, soothing air flowed into her lungs. She managed to get up, her legs shaking a bit. It was dangerous to stay here; she made a series of teleports, to distance herself from the crawling darkness. She stopped when she felt safe. It was time to recollect her thoughts.
Fire Dust got her memory sucked out by that thing, the same way it probably went with the other three. But why? Even if she managed to screw up, was she so incompetent that the ritual backfired?
Why are you adamant that Fire Dust was responsible?
But, everything made sense if she’s the culprit: we got the lore, the knowledge, the advantage of being a unicorn, what’s more to ask ?
You don’t get it, do you? The answer almost killed you back there. That thing, what it was like?
Dark….
And?
Cold, very cold. And then, it turned white for a moment…
Ice can burn too.
A silent wave of magic unhinged the door. Everything was kept noiseless, thanks to a special purple ball of magic film. She entered the house, carefully and slowly, paying attention to every creak and squint: the living room was empty. The kitchen, too. All the light were turned off. Twilight Sparkle started to wonder if her instinct guided her into barging in the house of an innocent pony. She went upstairs, and looked around. There was a lit room, she could see the light coming out at the base of the door. She approached it, and looked through the keyhole. She was right.
She dismissed the noise absorbing bubble and just destroyed the door with a concussive spell. Inside Lime Streak gasped and recoiled in surprise. Beside her, a flickering image of a stallion.
Twilight Sparkle asked:
“Why?”
“For him”
The young mare lit up her horn. The bolt traveled through the air, sizzling and scorching everything in its path. The old mare closed her eyes, and an eternal dusk covered her.
The door creaked yet again, like every single time. The morning sun couldn’t even budge the thick layers of shadow that engulfed the inside of the shop. The voice came in, soon enough:
Twilight Sparkle opened the door with a rude telekinetic slam, and made her way to Mbura’s desk. She took out a small file from her saddlebag, and posed it on the desk. The zebra, without even watching her, asked:
“Is this...”
“Yes, it is. Complete with classification and personal retrieval accounts.” She chirped.
“Good work, Miss Sparkle. You’re free to go. Also, tell your Oracle I need to speak with him” He waved his hoof, dismissing her. Twilight, still happy to have recovered an SCP in her first mission, paid no attention to his rudeness and exited the room.
Mbura waited for his field agent to get out, then opened the file:
Item#: SCP-154Object Class: Zaqar
Special containment procedures: 154 is to be kept in a closed room, with no windows, and with no way in apart from a simple door. The room is inside a 30x30 meters warehouse that must constantly lit. The door is to be kept under surveillance 24/7. Anyone that tries to enter the room without having a research or a 05 authorization is to be immediately subdued and taken for psychological evaluation. In case of breach, the containment squad has to flood the warehouse with as much light as possible until the generators are functional again.
Description: SCP-154 is a small salt statue representing the primal form of Nabu, a Wyvern goddess. Magical dating it’s impossible, as the statue doesn’t emit any kind of visible or invisible energy in any known spectrum, even when activated. When 154 is put anywhere near a shadow, it will activate, instantly possessing every single dark, shadowy spot in a 3,3 km radius. Inside this space, SCP-154, that manifest a conscious activity, is able to materialize as ██████ and black tendrils that can reach -272 C. It’s not clear how the tendrils can move even at absolute zero temperature, since the atoms composing it should at a zero energy state. Nonetheless, 154 is able to move, and is highly aggressive. 154 can only activate if it’s handled by a living, conscious being, called 154-A: however, the touch is registered permanently. As such, the last being to handle 154 is kept under constant surveillance. 154 is able to permanently remove parts or the entire memory of the victim, and then materialize memories from 154-A. The connection between the two abilities it’s not completely clear, but it seems that 154 is able to use the stolen memories as “fuel” to create a living, breathing replica of the memories of 154-A.
Retrieval log - Addendum [DATA EXPUNGED]
The object was retrieved by Agent ██████ ████ in the city of ██████. The SCP was in possession of an old lady named [REDACTED]. It’s unknown when or where she found the SCP, but she probably learned of some of its properties listening to the Wyvern lectures while attending her duties in the garden of the Faculty of Archeological Studies. She probably experimented quite a bit with 154, and realized what was capable to do after her long deceased husband appeared right before her eyes. Further investigations revealed that her husband, Sky Trail, died while trying to save his niece, Spring Blossom, from a great fire. Fire Dust apparently only had word of contempt for the gardener. As for the stallion, [REDACTED].The old lady tried to cover her tracks by sending her niece to look for dragon themed books, and “asked” 154 to make it look like the victims were burned by something.The Agent connected the small burns with the tendrils: she realized that after touching the victim, the tentacle turned briefly into salt crystals: this caused frostbite so severe that they looked like real burns. When the Agent confronted 154-A, circumstances called for a preventive elimination.
Test A - Date 13/23/Crescent Moon EQST
Subject: Earth pony, given by the Equestrian government for ████████████Procedure: REFER TO DOCUMENT 3215PWZ LOG 34Results: IBIDEM
Addendum 34-C/ Transcription of TEST A i.r. SCP-154
Dr. ███: Just stop it, ███████, right now.Subject: I just CAN’T, Doctor. She is talking to me. She knows my pain.Dr. ███: It’s just a statue, ██████, it’s not alive.Subject: You just can’t hear, doc. But she can. She will always listen.Dr. ███: ██████, we need to flood this room, right now. Drop the statue, and come with me.Subject: I’m sorry, doc. But my pumpkin pie is just so near and she can [REDACTED]Dr. ███: ██████ STOP IT, THAT’S AN ORDERSubject: Sorry.Dr. ███: I SAID TO STOP ITD-Class ██████: IT’S MOVING, HIT THE [REDACTED]
He closed the file. In front of him, the grey stallion was waiting for him to say something. Mbura didn’t even hear him come inside.
“Is there something wrong. sir?”
“Actually, yes, Dr. Light. We have a big, big problem”
The green unicorn knocked at the wonderfully crafted door. They were truly a work of wonder: engraved with scenes from Equestrian history, legends and tales from all around the kingdom. The sturdiness of the wood was covered with solid gold, and it shone in front of her, like the Sun itself.
“Come in”
She opened the doors with her magic, and closed them behind her. The room was most regal, luxurious, yet not boastful or in bad taste. On a big, comfy looking pillow, sat Princess Celestia. She rose up, and hugged Lyra tightly.
“Lyra, Lyra... You’ve done great services to me and my sister... I’m really sorry we have to do this. I know how you grew accustomed to Ponyville and to its...inhabitants.” She broke the hug and the informant could see sincere guilt in her eyes. But, even if she made friends, lots of friends... And something more.... She knew this day would come.
“It’s okay Princess. I guess since... she’s not here anymore, my job there is done. And the things I know... It would be dangerous for the next assignment. I was prepared for this day.”
“I know this is difficult for you. Maybe you’ll find comfort that it’s not easier for me”
“It’s fine, Princess. I am... I am ready.”
“Sorry, Lyra.”
She breathed, and launched the amnesiac spell. She closed her eyes, and felt compressed. When she opened them again, she was floating into a pure liquid river of darkness and memories. She concentrated, she needed just to block the memory of Ponyville. Lyra was her best informant, and she could not afford to lose info about the Elements of Harmony if she was ever captured in her next mission. The river divided into smaller streams, and she managed to find the Ponyville one. She went over it, trying to find the singular source, the first memory that spawned the others. But she found something she didn’t think she would. A lock.
A lock? Someone already amnesiaced her?
She hovered near the lock. It was a small memory, just five minutes, from six months ago. It was the night Twilight passed away... She removed it, but too much time had passed, so the stream wasn’t clear. Everything was confused and blurred. But she managed to recognize something familiar: between the polluted waves of Lyra’s memory, she saw a stallion. To her great disappointment, she couldn’t see his face. But he had a grey coat. And no cutie mark?
There was somepony who already fitted the description. Somepony who wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Bright Light”
I know what you're thinking. NO ORIGINAL SCP YOU JUST MADE THAT STUFF UP. Yeah, I did. I wanted to have the first case on my own terms. But from now own, canonical SCP or Equestrian version of them.
The truth is, we were much too young
“Welcome to the first Security Seminar of the Foundation. In this seminar, the department of Theoretical Research, represented by Dr. Shuul, and the department of Engineering and Containment, represented by Dr. Pazu, will illustrate to all our field agents their findings on how to deal and contain both theoretically and practically dangerous Zaqar and Keter SCPs. The seminar will begin in half an hour.”
Twilight Sparkle slumped in her chair. It was incredibly uncomfortable, since she and Bright Light were the only ponies in the Foundation, every piece of furniture was designed to meet the needs of beings with claws, paws, or tentacles. Back in Ponyville, she saw Lyra sit down like all her colleagues lots of time: her back pushed against the chair and her forelegs resting on a table that could be used for taking notes. She didn’t need it, though. She had something she never stopped being grateful for: magic. It wasn’t only her sore butt, the fact that the meeting took place at The Hole, the most dangerous base of the Foundation (Can you believe that an all powerful supranation organization can run out of space?), it was because of her...associates.To say that the demographics were against her was the understatement of the century: roughly 40% of the F.A. were Griffins, not exactly friendly, modest types. Actually, they were borderline xenophobic with everything that wasn’t feathered. Then, there were the Zebras, that made up the 30%. They weren’t so bad, but they tended to huddle together and keep not striped beings out. The other 30% was made of various, less numerous races. They were-
“Oh, look who we have here! Miss Can I Make You A Sandwich”
Not only the only pony in the corp. The only female . She sighed and turned around to a familiar sight:
Two griffins teasing me. Who would’ve thought?
Just fry them already
Quiet you
She recognized them, they were two jerks working down in Maintenance. She knew that janitors liked to bet on who could get through it. She heard the odds were 10 to 1 against her, and that these fine gentlegriffins lost 3 months worth of salary in one day because they thought she would be coming out in a coffin, or just not out at all. That’s probably the reason they bothered Twilight Sparkle like they were in high school, not in the most secret and elite organization in the entire world. Everything in them shouted moronic, and she couldn’t fathom how they managed to even get a job scrubbing floors; they constantly snickered like little fillies, almost drowning themselves in their own machismo.
“Ehi Dan, I know she managed to pass the Hellhole!” The first one, Gill, shouted while looking around, to make sure everyone could see him humiliating Twilight.
“How, Gill?” The second griffin responded with a not so subtle rethorical tone to it, something Twilight thought far surpassed the normal ability of his little feathered brain.
“She just needed to spread her legs!” Gill shouted, while running in circle and laughing like an idiot.
Oh, now you’re asking for trouble
He got uncomfortably close to her, threw a scaly arm over her shoulder and whispered in her ear:
“That’s how you did it, right? Come with us... I’m sure you never tried Grifonic cuisine... How about I let you taste a purebred Griffin saus-”
CRACK
It lasted just a second. She encased his arm with her magic and twisted it very rapidly
He howled in pain, making some heads and appendices turn in the process. Other attendants started murmuring and pointing at them, but she managed to stay impassive.
“No thanks, I’m vegetarian.” Twilight answered, with a smile on her muzzle.
It looked Gill was so much in pain that couldn’t muster enough force to insult her. Dan reached his friend and grabbed him before he could tumble down and break something else in the process. His flaming eyes turned to the lavender mare and he hissed:
“We won’t forget this, bitch!”
And he flew away, taking his injured pal up in the back seats.She was sure that after this graceful display of female force, they wouldn’t bother her for a long, long time. Satisfied, she tried to stretch a bit, but the chair wouldn’t allow her. The seminar wouldn’t start for at least another ten minutes. She looked around the gigantic hall. It was so impossibly big she felt a little overwhelmed. It was so high it could completely enclose the Royal Castle, and so large somepony could’ve dropped Ponyville right in the middle of it and no one would have realized. The rows were concentric, much like a theatre, and they encompassed a small wooden stage. The room itself was just a cubicle, even if titanic in size: it was quite ancient, and even if it was cleaned up for the occasion, the steel plated walls still showed some of their age. Some of them looked corroded by some kind of acid, and other were riddled with holes. Gigantic neon lights dangled from the ceiling, illuminating every corner and cranny of space. It housed 30.000 Foundation members: 1000 were agents, the other were researchers, an entire division of the Security Branch, civilian contractors and maintenance, plus some dignitaries formally invited by the Foundation. Fortunately, she heard that Equestrian ambassadors didn’t show up. Bright Light couldn’t come with her, to her great disappointment: she enjoyed the stallion’s company, but he didn’t even told her what “pretty important business” he had to attend that were so important that he could skip the first seminar in the history of the Foundation. Twilight looked around, trying to find something that could entertain her while she waited for the lessons to begin, and spotted a familiar figure. She got out of her seat and ran through the rows, until she reached one of the nearer to the stage. She carefully approached a wobbly, levitating mass of tentacles that looked much like a squid and jellyfish offspring, and shouted at the top of her lungs “BOOH!”. The strange creature staggered, and turned around. A soothing, otherworldy, if startled voice filled her ears. A voice she missed a lot:
“What in- Twilight? You scared the perkentras out of me! Come here, you!” And he threw his tentacles at her, hugging her. The mare happily returned, grabbing one of the squishy yet strong tendrils and squeezing it as firmly as she could. They stayed like this, locked in marine bear hug, for a bunch of second, then they broke it, and started chatting.
“Kalos, where in Tartarus were you? After the training, you just disappeared!” She ended the sentence with a fake yet adorable pout.
“I’m sorry Twilight, but you know how the Foundation is: First thing you learn in the course, pleasure later -”
“SCP first .” and they both giggled a bit ” I know, trust me. So, you were sent out on a mission?” Twilight asked while playfully shaking one of his tentacles.
“Yeah, a domestic alarm, but it was just bogus.” Even if wyverns were one of the calmest, most collected beings on the planet, the mare detected more than a hint of anger in his voice.
“Well, I was sent out like, the day after we got out. And...” She stopped, waiting for the suspense to rise.
“Oh come on Twilight, don’t leave a filion hangin’!” He started shaking his tendrils in anticipation
“I found one!”
“Well, congrats, emon filion!” She patted her head with one of his appendices” First mission and you got a positive! So, what it was? Draconic? Grifonic? Oh oh, I know, Amoebian!” And that’s way having friends in a multiracial secret super organization that dealed with incredibly dangerous artifacts was to say to your friends that you were almost killed, lobotomized, turned into a talking flower or all of the above because of something their race invented.
She gulped and find the courage to say it.“Ehm, actually, it was Idrionentes...”
“I am...sorry, Twilight. It didn’t hurt you, I hope” His side mantles sagged, the wyvern equivalent of drooping ears.
Twilight approached him and started to caress his body to reassure him. It always felt nice and smooth, much different from fur. “No, no, it’s ok. It’s not like it’s your fault.” she whispered.
“I wish my ancestors understood that you’re not supposed to meddle with the darkness and what lies within it.”
“It’s ok, Kalos. I mean, ponykind is meddling everyday with the natural way of things! It’s not natural how we control the weather, the sun and the moon...”
She realized the self-centered attitude her kind had on the Everfree Forest, the stain on Equestria. The plants and animals were left to fend for themselves, the weather regulated on its own... It was madness, heresy! The horror that something wasn’t actually under their control, that oppressive, suffocating control ponies exercised on everything. Joining the Foundation made her understand something: Celestia, her kingdom and her subjects were going against the universe itself. They abused nature, abused their own celestial bodies, treating incredible, majestic objects like toys that could be tossed around the sky. The things they recovered, some were malicious, evil, downright diabolical. But those weren’t the most dangerous. She wasn’t scared by Nightmare Moon. She was scared by 173 and things like it. What were those things? Why they did what they did? The complete lack of drive, motives, rhymes or reasons why these abominations were so bent on destroying everypony’s concept on normalcy just scared her. But even so, they were more natural that the fake glass world Celestia and Luna built around their kingdom. They were more natural. More chaotic.
“I thought you were a student of Basileia Celestia.” He was confused by this sudden tirade.
“I was, Kalos. I was. I’ve changed since I was her student. What my race is doing is wrong”
He approached her and and started caressing her mane with one of his tentacles:
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s just... I like it here, I really do. You’ve helped me more in six months than my ‘friends’ in 3 years. When it mattered the most... They weren’t there for me, Discord, Chrysalis. But you, Nakest, Bright Light, you were all there for me when I needed you. I feel ungrateful for missing them, sometimes.”
His bio patterns lit up in what seemed to be a fit of surprise.
“What am I going to do with you? It’s normal to miss your loved ones. There is not a single being in this hall that doesn’t think of his or her family. But we are sentinels, Twilight. It’s not the deadly risks, the low pay “ he chuckled, but it sounded more like wobbly intestines being smashed together ” or the costant danger. You can’t go back. I know it’s hard, but you have to grasp that reality and keep it as close to you as possible. If you let it go, you’ll lose yourself and, eventually, you’ll die. Well, that came out less of a consolation and more of a threat...” They both laughed.
“Oh that’s quite alright, you adorable jellyfish. Speaking of Nakest, you know where he is?”
“Maybe I hear he was sent by the Foundation at the Misty Mountains, recovery mission.”
“Oh my, is it a Keter?”
“I don’t think so. From what I know, it’s just a declassified Zaqar that got shipped out on mistake. Nothing major. So, where were you-”
A magically amplified voice interrupted the wyvern, and flooded the hall with reverbs. Twilight and Keles turned around to see who was talking: Dr. Shuul, the dragonling head of Engineering. Bright Light always praised him. He looked a bit imposing, like every dragonling, but she could see in those reptilians eyes a great deal of wisdom and competence.
“It is with my great honour that I welcome between us, for the the very first time for the Foundation, one of the heads of the Equestrian Government. Her Majesty gracefully put aside the past experience she had with our organization, and is now here to learn and help us fight against our enemies. Please, make a round of applause for Princess Luna!” And the gracious form of the Moon Mistress appeared behind him, with a small teleport crack.
Ok, this is not good, This is not good at all.
She jumped under Kalos’s umbrella-like body and whispered:
“Kalos, lower your tentacles and hide me!”
“Why do you-”
“Just DO IT” She almost shouted those last two words.
“Ok, ok, sorry” He moved a group of appendices and covered her completely. The wyvern left a small space she could see through: Luna waited for the tiepid applause to wear out, then procedeed to sit down in the front row. It was going to be a long, long seminar. At least Kalos didn’t need to actually use the seat he was assigned to, since he could hover on place like every other of his species; so Twilight slumped in to the chair, and prepared to pass three hours under the mantle of a 2 meters long levitating and sentient mollusk.
She surely is over the whole ‘Nightmare Moon’ thing. This nice little hall was her cell, back when the Foundation took over her custody. I wonder if she still uses the Royal Canterlot Voice... That Nightmare Night was pretty fun...
“Thank you for attending this seminar! In these three hours, we’ll go over newly discovered and throughly tested ways to deal with the most dangerous SCPs in our possession. Let’s begin with something you will all recognize” Dr. Shuul reached for a small remote on the table in front him, and pressed a button. A really big screen came down from a slit in the ceiling and, following some rails, was set in place mid air. Dr. Shuul pressed another button, and a figure Twilight wouldn’t ever forget. The stubby legs, short arms, the unnerving sensation she proved just at seeing that thing and all the thing it brought up in her memory.
“SCP-173 or, as it’s called by our personnel, the Sculpture. Class Zaqar, highly aggressive. Kills by snapping the neck or suffocation. However, it can not move while in direct line of sight. Direct means no magical or mechanical way of observation. It will stay still only when is watched by an eye or another biological equivalent. When facing this SCP alone, it’s important to stay calm. If your species need to blink, remember that being stressed will only make you blink more. So, even if it sounds cliched and ridiculous, stay calm. Instead of resisting the urge to blink, close one eye while keeping the other open. Our major breakthrough with SCP 173 is that you CAN break the line of sight and not get killed. We’ve discovered that if your sight is intentionally or otherwise blocked by something, 173 will teleport beside you, but it will not kill you. It will, however, the second time you break contact. 173 will instantly kill if you stop watching him directly for any reason, like turning your head, blinking your eyes, and so on. You can use this trick to escape in another room. Remember, 173 can’t teleport through doors and walls. So if you manage to break the line of sight the first time with a closing door, you’ll be safe. So, moving on to SCP-”
The lights went off, completely encasing the hall with a thick mantle of darkness. Everything stopped for some seconds: Twilight couldn’t even hear her own breathing. She read about this, she knew about this, she hoped it was only a local power failure, like probably everyone else in the room.
A red flickering light flooded rhytmically flooded the room with a crimson hue: it ran all over the walls, covering them briefly after letting them dissolve in the dark. It could still be something about the circuitry, or the air, or-
“SCP-106 HAS BREACHED CONTAINMENT.”
What.
“ SCP-106 HAS BREACHED CONTAINMENT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. CONTAINMENT SQUAD DELTA EPSILON ETA WILL BE DEPLOYED SHORTLY. TO ALL NON-SECURITY PERSONNEL, REACH IN A CALM AND ORDERLY WAY FOR THE EMERGENCY EXITS”
The fire flickered and danced in the darkness, opening a tear in the pitch-black, everlasting darkness. Twilight kept looking at the mesmerizing shapes of the flames. Fire was strange; it was capable of so much horror and harm and yet it was so beautiful and captivating: the way it moved, the way it behaved, sucking everything, slowly altering everything. It was the simplest and most basic form of entropy. She crawled closer, and closer. She could feel the heat, building up and hugging her whole body.
The walls looked so fragile, so tiny, compared to what was behind them. Yet, every day (day? She already lost the count a long time before, with no sun and moon helping her) they protected them. They were all so tired, so exhausted. Two were already dead when they woke up, the instructors call it the “white death”. They say it’s just his whim. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. One day you could wake up and be dead. The dead can wake up in here. That’s why everything and everyone is burned. You just need to stop feeling, stop caring. They say that if you can actually make it, it’ll come back. Just as you step out of the door, you feel the most amazing rush of joy you could ever imagine overwhelming you.
The firm and stern voice of the instructor breaks the silence:
“So, you actually survived the Month. I’ll be honest with you: I thought this was the most the pathetic batch I was ever sent” and he glared at Twilight and the wobbly squid that hovered beside her” but I’m glad I was proven wrong. Today, you begin the theory. You all know the rules: never scream, never sing, never say anything out loud. If you want to die, you can just cross the gate and go in the Dusk, no one is stopping you. However, losing two dozens of potentials FA just because someone lost it is not something the Foundation is willing to accept. If you try anything to jeopardize the integrity of Haven One, you will be terminated on the spot. Am I clear?”
The nodding mass of heads and appendices was clear enough.
“Thought so. Anyway, let’s not waste any time and start right with the big ones. In these two days, I will holo-show you the profiles of all the Keter-class object that are currently in possession of the Foundation. You have to memorize each and every detail I will show you, goddess forbids you may actually have to deal with one of these things.” A small bead of light appeared at the side of the flickering hologram of the griffin instructor, and started dividing in smaller pieces, until there were thousands and thousands of them. Even if they were perfectly visible in the almost dark surroundings of the campfire, Twilight realized they weren’t able to create any shadow at all. They started to huddle together to create strange forms that slowly turned into what was undisputably letters from the equestrian alphabet, the lingua franca of the Foundation. Soon, they formed sentences: an entire essay made out of light was forming right in front of her eyes. Normally, she would’ve jumped at this marvelous feat of magic, but right now, for her own good, she just didn’t care. It wasn’t a simple text, it was a dossier:
“SCP-106 Formal codename : Old Dog .Object class : Keter .
Special containment procedures :
The SCP is kept into a lead lined 2x2 steel plated room, completely filled with glass shards. The room is inserted into an elaborate system of steel plates, iron wires and hollowed out concrete walls that completely surrounds it and encases it. This architectural feat is designed to fill as much space as possible, while leaving a constant amount of void between the various elements. Everything is stored into a 100x100 underground storage room with hollowed out steel walls and equipped with 46 floodlights running on redundant circuitry with a second auxiliary generator powered by a 32 Sw double enchanted neodymium ingot. Maintenance on the system is conducted every month, with security personnel armed with powerful torches .Magical fields don’t seem to have an effect on 106. As of now, testing with 106 is forbidden (See Incident 12-54-AF). 05 Level authorization is required to enter the storage room.
Description:
106 is an erected dog, with somatic traits resembling those of a 75 year old Diamond Dog. Appearance may change, but there are two constants: the sex, which is male, and being in a state of advanced decomposition. 106 is capable of slow movement only and has the ability of climbing any vertical surface and stay fixed in place indefinitely.106 is capable of going through any obstacle, no matter how thick. It seems able to do so by entering a completely different dimension on the entry point, and getting out of it on the exit point, leaving a large stain of what seems dried chyme and bile. Magical tests revealed that the half digested matter does not correspond to any known creature to the Foundation. So far, no material is immune to 106’s ability, thus rendering containment fairly difficult. However, it seems that 106 can’t ‘skip’ anything that’s between ‘him’ and his target. So, he will have to enter and exit each and every time he encounter an obstacle in its way. Field reports shows that its ability considers to surfaces as different and not as a whole, as long as there is a 10 millimeter of air between them. Also, 106 is somewhat weakened and slowed down when exposed to a great source of light. Attempts to comunicate with 106 have been numerous and all unsuccessful, but it’s possible to discern some kind of pattern in its behaviour. 106 will always look for victims, with no preferences for a specific species. However, when possible, it will always seek out a young victim, usually of 9-12 years of age, or the equivalent mental age in species such as dragons or wyverns. When it manages to get a hold of a victim, referred to as 106-1, it severs the tendons or incapacitates them, and drag them into its dimension. After usually 3 hours, 106-1 will be expelled from it. The conditions of 106-1 are not constant: even though they are always biologically dead, there is not a clear pattern: sometimes 106-1 is covered with hundreds of thousand of small cuts, sometimes in a state similar to mummification or carbonization. After finding and killing a victim, 106 enters a docile state where he’s far more easily handled and passive than before. So far any attempt to cause damage phisically on 106 has been proved fruitless; it also seems immune to any known form of magic, enchantments, runes, and even other SCPs. “ The luminous dots dispersed in the air chaotically.
“Now, they will form a photo of the fucker, so will you know how it looks like while you run the tartarus away from it. Just hope DEE is around”
The dots started to rearrange in a manner similar to a screen, changing colour and luminosity to form shading. It really looked like a corpse: the skin was brown and bald, with no fur, glistening with reflections. It looked like it oozed a shiny substance that enveloped what she could see of its body. The ribs almost punctured through the skin. The muzzle was what unsettled her: it was impossible, just impossible, but it couldn’t be anything: it smiled, the jaw bone almost showing through the thin layer of epidermis, his beady, white eyes tearing a hole through her.
“Remember, recruits. If you see it, just run. Run and don’t turn back”
“Twilight... Twilight... TWILIGHT!”
A voice grabbed her tight and threw her back into the present. The bleak present. A soft tentacle was shaking her lightly but firmly.
“What... Have I imagined-”
“Twilight, you have not imagined anything. 106 broke containment, and we need to get out of here” He started hovering beside her, letting herself become visible. Panic grabbed her and shooked her hard: she couldn’t allow the Princess to see her. She encased one of his strong tentacle in her magic and tried to keep him over her, but he overwrote her magic, a little neat trick that only wyverns could do. He had lost all his normal, friendly and outgoing behaviour, and the Kalos in front of her was not the normal Kalos she knew.
Wyverns are a strange species. Their appearance is strange, how they behave, act and do things, it all seems alien to the other races. They look like a cuttlefish mixed with a jellyfish. It’s always slightly unsettling to talk to them, since they don’t have any eyes, or mouth, or any orifice at all. Ponykind always look at them with a suspicious and maybe hateful eye: they all are adept to magic, albeit a different kind from the ponies: they use their own body-electricity as a mean to discharge energy and manipulate the environment around them. Five hundred and thirty years ago, Equestria was still struggling under its own power, that is, unicorns that couldn’t control their magic. Magicians and magic experts experimented on everything that was not a pony, even other sentient species, without any remorse. They used Griffons, Minotaurs, Selenides, Dragonlings for cruel and wretched researches. It was customary for Ponykind to consider itself the superior race: they controlled the weather, the earth, the sun and the moon. They were the rightful masters of the world, and all the other living and breathing things were there just to serve their purposes. The only race they wouldn’t, or couldn’t touch were the Wyverns, that called themselves Idrionentes, ‘the folks of the water’. They lived far below the surface of the great Western Sea, out of the reach of every earthly creature. Until, one day, unicorns managed to create a self preserving air bubble, that allowed them to explore the obscure reaches of the ocean. They were thrilled at the possibilities: new subjects, more reactions to test on strange creatures. Of course, whether they liked it or not. A small contingent of three hundred unicorns battle mages and ten magic researchers submerged, looking for fresh specimens to take back to the dry ground. They never came back. The Equestrian Kingdom sent a rescue team. They never came back either. The matter was brought to the attention of Princess Celestia herself. She didn’t care what her little ponies did to the inferior races, as long as they didn’t get hurt experimenting with vermins. But a disgusting fish race had the NERVE to detain her precious subjects! She marched on the shore of the Western Ocean personally, with three battalion ready to subdue and teach a lesson of humility to whatever mollusc with legs thought it was a good idea to mess with the masters of nature. Celestia used her magic to make a large patch of water boil and simmer, hoping it would catch their attention. It did. After a while, the strange and frail looking creatures emerged out of the salty water. There were just one hundred of them, against an entire army of the Equestrian Kingdom, thirty thousands well trained soldiers. They just hovered in place, without saying anything. It’s not like they actually had a mouth to use. The soldiers were baffled to say the least: how could these glassy creatures that looked like big inflated jellyfish, capture hundreds of capable battlemages?
Celestia took a step forward, and the small cough that she used to clear her voice covered the scream of one of the officers who noticed that fifty meters down the coast the waves had casted on the sand pearly white bones of equine craniums. She did notice, though, that she couldn’t speak. She tried to articulate the words, but nothing would come out. She also realized that she couldn’t move either. Her whole body was just paralyzed. The strange creatures got closer, and closer, their silence mixed with the sound of waves behind them.
No one knows what happened after that. Only Celestia came back, and adamantly refused to tell her advisors where were the thousands of soldiers she went off with. She declared magic experimenting on living beings of any kind illegal and punishable by banishment, and reformed the school system, completely removing any kind of subject that talked about anything other than ponies. As time passed, the thought that other races were inferior, or the thought of other races itself faded out of the minds of ponykind. Only a slight, impolite curiosity remained, the kind of selfishness that makes you gaze at the next strange feathered thing you cross down the street, only to make you forget it as not important, or make you snicker with your friends about how different they were, how strange and pathetic they looked without tattoos on their asses to tell them what they were good at. Bio-electricity. Nerves and electrical impulses. That’s how you move, how you think, how you do what you do everyday. That’s what Wyverns were good at.
Everything around them was dark, really dark. The emergency lights moved through the hall likes waves, illuminating with a small, flickering red light before fading into darkness. She looked down, where Princess Luna was supposed to be. She wasn’t there. Actually, pretty much half of the hall was empty, and those who had remained inside scampered about, trampled and pushed each other to get away, to run and never come back like they were always told. She and Kalos moved down the central row, running, hovering, to get to the big life-sign that glimmered in the darkness. Under the stage, big green letters formed the world “EXIT”. That word already meant everything to her and everybody else in the hall. Everything would be alright once they reached it. Twilight dove through the panic door, almost divelting it in the process: in front of them, there was a dark corridor, not illuminated. They runned through it. Twilight was panting, and sweating. It never seemed to end. There was always another path, another turn to take. Kalos was in front of her, partially blocking her already impeded view of her surrounding. Behind her, she could hear the grunts of her colleagues, but it seemed like they were just gasping from the fatigue, and not from fear. After what seemed an eternity, they reached the end of the corridor: in front of them a big room, with floodlights illuminating everything. There were hundreds of creatures forming quehe, and steadily passing through what looked like a gigantic steel lined door. She was exhausted. She felt she had run for dozens of miles through a desert. Kalos was hovering beside her, and asked, confused:
“Twilight? You alright? We have to get in line to get out of here.”
She dismissivly waved a hoof at him. “It’s ok, I just need a *pant* moment. You know, being stuck in a library *pant* all your life” She lowered her head and kept panting and gasping for air.
He asked hesitantly “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, just go. I’ll reach you in a moment.” He started slowly moving towards the line, while still ‘looking’ at Twilight, waiting for her.
She felt dizzy. Her head was thumping and pulsating. This wasn’t normal. Back in her librarian days, she wasn’t exactly in top shape, but now, she was at the peak of a unicorn athletic possibility. She could Rainbow Dash and Applejack a run for their money. Then why she felt so tired? Why her limbs weighted on her like lead? Why every breath burned her lungs? Why she couldn’t even lift her head? Why she felt like going back down the corridor?
Two griffins came through the tunnel and settled beside her. They were just as tired as the lavender unicorn was. She didn’t need to take a good look at them to recognize them: they were Dan and Gil, the two janitors who enjoyed teasing her back at the conference. The uninjured one, Dan, lifted his head and immediately recognized her. Anger flared through his face: he got up and started walking towards her, leaving his mate at the end of the line.
Twilight was not even looking at him. The corridor was a much safer place. 106 could swoop down at any time and kill everyone. They were huddled together so tight they would stampede each other to death to get away. She wouldn’t die like that. She was going to survive, she had to. She wasn’t going to let her down. She really needed a party.
Kalos was turned, talking to one of the guards, that kept the line in an orderly fashion.
“It’s going to take a bit, but we’ll get you out of here, Agent, don’t you worry. Now, you’d better talk to your friend, we’re almost done here, and we’re going to seal this door.” The wyvern turned around, scanning the room to find the mare. She wasn’t where she left her.
She was going back into the corridor, and a griffin was going after her. He managed to see the unicorn turning right and the griffin grabbing her shoulder before the corridor collapsed.
When the rocks came down behind her, the tiredness disappeared from her body. The collapsing concrete boulders filled her ears. She could hear faintly, on the background, a male voice, scared, angry, desperate. She could feel scaly claws grabbing and shaking her for a bit. She felt something tumbling down on the floor. Then she heard sobbing. Everything looked so clouded. She shook her head, and slowly, regained control of her senses. She was standing in the same corridor she came through earlier, but the way to the exit room was blocked by a wall made of collapsed rocks. If someone was digging through it, she couldn’t hear it. It took a moment for the realization to sink in.
I’m trapped.
I’m trapped with 106 and Goddess knows how many more escaped SCPs.
The panic invaded her, shaking the very foundations of her mind. She was going to die. She was going to die for sure. She was going to die, and that would be it. Die, tortured by that thing, screaming and kicking while being dragged into whatever hell 106 called home. No one will remember her. A statistic in the Foundation registry. A milestone never repeated. Her true identity, her true call lost in some dusty archive, while Celestia has her way with another young, malleable mind. Soon her friends will forget about her. She will be a mild nuisance, a small stain in one’s memory, something that makes your eyes water just because they have to. Her brother will steal the spotlight. He will be remembered as a hero. He will become royalty, marrying a princess. Her friends will go on with their lives, frolicking in boring appearances of meaningful lives, while she will die screaming and yelling, mourned only by a nerdy folklore expert, a wobbly jellyfish and an oversized lizard. The voices told her to cry, to kill herself now to spare the pain, to sit in a corner and wait for it, to just bang her head against the wall until the gray matter comes ou-
Survive
What?
SURVIVE
She won’t cry. She won’t sit in a corner waiting to die. She will claw, rip, bite, kill her way out of here, even if it means having to face 106 and chew his rotting mutt head off. She got up, and looked around: the corridor was encased in darkness, but she could muttering and cursing near her. A male voice. She fired up a light spell, and an orb of pure white light hovered over her head. In front of her, there was a griffin, one of the two that picked on her before. His eyes were filled with hate and tears and locked on her, and he kept sobbing and cursing her.
“Fuckin bitch this is all your fault, why the fuck it’s not fair I’m gonna kill you cunt fuck fuck I’m gonna di-”
“You, your name was Dan, right?” She asked with an emotionless voice.
He kept silent, his gaze exploding with resentment.
“I don’t care if you hate me, but we both need to get out of here. You know this place, I have the magic. Take me to another exit point, and I’ll watch your back.” He didn’t say anything, but Twilight see he was conflicted: he stopped sobbing and muttering. After a while, he wiped the tears off his face and offered his claw, his eyes brimming less and less with loathe:
“You have a deal”
He spent 5 minutes drawing a crude map of the facility on the wall with some chalk the mare conjured for him. After that. he started explaining his plan to get out.
“Yes” Twilight nodded in response.
“Then, the only exit on this level is behind this 10 meters of rubble and concrete. We have to go down, to the ‘ArCo’” And he drew a small line going down through some walls.
“ArCo?” She asked.
“Artifact Containment. That’s where they keep the things that are not animate. At least, the things that won’t move. We get back to the hall, go to the teleport, turn right instead of left like you did, and we’ll take the stairs down. We’ll end up in a a series of corridors, and doors. Some may seem strange. Some might be open. Don’t touch them. Don’t go inside. Don’t take a peek. Just follow me, without looking back. 106’s cell was down at the level 4, the most secure. It’s like, almost a kilometer down from here.He’s gonna take a while for him to bypass all the security measures. So, if we’re quick, and if something else hasn’t broke out of containment, we will make it. It’s not much, I know.” He squeezed the chalk in his claw, and it crumbled, leaving a pile of white dust on the floor. He couldn’t manage to look at Twilight anymore. A whiny young mare mustered enough courage to don’t give up yet, while he sat whimpering in a corner. She trotted past him and looked intensely at the simple map. She turned around and looked at him straight in the eyes.
“No, it’s the best chance we’ve got. Let’s go” They looked at the mass of rocks blocking the way behind them, before walking in the pitch black darkness.
They passed through the corridor with relative ease; the light spell conjured by Twilight helped them to not lose time walking slowly for fear or planting their heads into the hard concrete wall. They emerged into the base of stage of the hall, the red emergency light still sweeping the gigantic room. They walked up, through the rows, careful not to make any noise and keeping as silent as possible. Everything was deserted. Twilight knew that in the event of a Keter breach, all the facility is completely evacuated, and containment squad are sent in to deal with whatever has breached. Dan told her that there were magical observer all over the facilities. They were the size of a grain of sand, but they managed to cover a wide area, much like a normal eye, so the Foundation always knew what team to send in, to reduce casualties. Not that they cared much about the well being of their personnel, it’s just that highly trained containment teams or agents like Twilight were very expensive to create, so, if they lost a lot, there would a considerable security problem. However, no 05 would risk help teams for a lone agent and a janitor. The silence was starting to get unbearable. It resonated in her ears, filling them and distracting her.
“What’s the exit like?” She whispered to the griffin
“A tunnel. You just need to go through it, and you’re on the surface. I never used the thing, though. I know it because of security drills” He answered.
They reached the teleporting pool room. For a moment Twilight thought of why she didn’t thought about using it. Entering the room, she remembered why. In case of a breach, the SCP was lowered into a panic room 3 kilometers underground below with magical charges. The risk of a sentient SCP using the thing to enter another Foundation base could just not be taken, even if it meant losing something so useful. Also, with the lights out, she couldn’t know where it was set this particular instance of the pool. She could end up in the cold space.
“We’re lucky, you know.” The griffin whispered to her.
“Why?” She asked, thinking how anything concerning this situation was considered lucky.
“We haven’t met a containment team yet. That means that only 106 has escaped.” He answered in slightly chirpy voice.
Twilight said nothing. But she realized he was right. Only 106 breached containment. She didn’t count her lucky stars. She knew how the gears of her bosses turned, unlike Dan. He didn’t stop to think why while, yes, they didn’t meet any containment team and that meant that only 106 was going about free, that didn’t explain why they were waiting so long to send DEE in. Actually Twilight knew while they waited so long. After killing someone, 106 was calmer and easier to handle. They were waiting. And observing.
They’re waiting for it to kill us.
They turned left, and went through a series of corridors and rooms, until they reached the stairs.
“Follow me”. She stayed close to him, hovering the orb slightly in front of them. Again, there was complete silence. They passed a never ending stream of doors. Some looked really strange: one was made out of simple wood, another looked like it was made of glass, and another one was so sturdy and big Twilight wondered how it couldn’t fall on its own weight. They twisted and turned many times, until they reached a corridor with another source of light apart from her orb. There was a monitor, standing in the middle of it. It was lit up, but it faced away from them, so they couldn’t see what was on it. They approached it, carefully. As they got nearer, Twilight saw something at the end of corridor, a big, rectangular shape. She sent the orb a little further, and she saw that the shape was a... black coffin?
SHIT
She grabbed Dan with a hoof and shoved him back. He was almost crossing over the monitor, looking to what was on it. He whispered angrily
“What the hell is your problem?”
She pointed the coffin at the end of the corridor. He visibly winced. “What is that?” He asked trembling a little.
“895. Don’t. Look. At. The. Monitor. No matter what you hear, what you may think to see, or feel. Don’t turn to back to look at it. If you do it, we’re as good as dead.”
“Wh-what about the coffin?” He pointed at the gigantic hunk of black wood standing 7 meters from them.
“It’s harmless. Just don’t look at the screen, ok? Don’t look at the screen and we’ll be fine, ok?”
They neared the monitor. Even if it was one, and there was something so bright to cast a big cone of light, they couldn’t hear any noise. They slowly crossed it over, careful to look in front of them. That’s when it began. At first, it was just a mumbling. They heard it, but they kept walking slowly away from the monitor. Then, it became a whisper. It slowly build up, with a sound ruined by constant white noise. They couldn’t understand whether it was a female or male voice. But it kept whispering louder, louder “Get out”, the more they distanced themselves from the screen. The whispering abruptly became a scream. It kept screaming the same thing, over and over. You could hear retching and other screams in the background, screams of pain, yelling, gargling. Louder, louder, then Dan yelled “Fuck, that thing is moving!”. Twilight, that had looked at the floor all the time, turned her head up: the coffin was jerking violently, and there was a scratching sound and loud thumps coming out of it. The monitor kept screaming, louder, and louder, and the coffin was moving more, and more violently. Dan yelled at Twilight to turn right, but they were both frozen in fear. The coffin kept jerking, and was starting to crack. Twilight screamed “Bite my tail and close your eyes!”
get out get out get out get out get out get out get out get out get out get out GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUTGET OUT
She closed her eyes and ran as fast she could, ignoring that the coffin grazed her flank, bruising her. She kept running, and running, until she couldn’t hear that voice anymore. She stopped, her heart practically leaping out her chest. She was afraid of opening her eyes. Her eyelids were glued.
Open them, Twilight.
OPEN THEM
Her eyes shot open. They were in dark corridor, of course. She conjured the spell once more. It looked just like the dozen they went through earlier. Dan was sobbing quietly. Twilight got close to him and caressed him with her hoof.
“Hey, hey, it’s over. Come on. We’re almost there, right?” He nodded, and got up. He wiped the tears, and started looking around for a clue on where they might have ended up. As soon as he saw a small silver plaque on the wall that said “For EX-23 down the corridor”, he smiled. He turned around and whispered:
“We’re here. It’s just at the end of the corridor!” Twilight managed not to leap up in air for the joy. They walked for another minute before reaching a steel door with a bright red lettered “EXIT” sign. They slowly opened it: there was a catwalk, dangling over what seemed a bottomless pit. Rock walls surrounded it. At the end of the catwalk, there was a blastproof door, painted in bright yellow and black. They entered the room, and closed the door behind them. Just like the hall, there was a rotating emergency red light illuminating the space. They got close to the door. There was no visible codepad. There was just a small cavity at the right side of the door, enscribed with something that looked like a stretched out rune. Dan got closer and asked:
“What’s that?”
Twilight inspected it for a moment, then answered. “It’s a magic lock. It will open only with enough raw magical energy. The rune here needs like.... 30 kiloSwirl of magical energy. That’s not much, but I’ll need more or less five minutes to get it” She immediately started focusing her magic in her horn, while Dan sat beside her, waiting to get out.
A minute passed.
Another minute passed.
After the second minute, Dan could swear he heard something dripping. Where was it? The dripping was getting louder, like something was getting melt-
His eyes travelled to the smaller door they came through. There was a dark patch forming on it, and it only got bigger, and bigger. Molten metal started flowing down it, and going through the grate of the gatewalk, down in the abyss. Then, something came slowly out of it. It was a lucid, rotten paw. He yelled.
“TWILIGHT HE’S HERE”
She turned around, her horn blazing with raw magic, and she saw the a badly rotten Diamond Dog corpse halfway through a door. Its two arms and the torso were already in, and she could start to see the beginning of the right leg. The head was bloated, and the skin was leathery and glistening. It was smiling.
“HURRY TWILIGHT”
“I CAN’T DO IT, I NEED MORE TIME”
He was already with one leg on the catwalk, and the other was passing through. She didn’t have enough time, she needed another 3 or 4 minutes. But 10 seconds passed and the thing was already making its way to them. Its walk was uncoordinated and sickly to see, but it was coming. Dan couldn’t fly, the ceiling was too low.
“OH PLEASE NO PLEASE PLEASE”
It was walking through the catwalk, just 5 or 6 meters from them. Dan was beating at the door, trying to open it, but it was futile. It was coming, it was coming for them. Twilight couldn’t get his eyes off it as he made its way to them. She started to cry, to cry like she never cried in her entire life. Dan kept banging the door.
Spike. The first spell you’ve ever used. Remember how big you made him?
You have enough magic.
You need to survive.
I need to survive.
She directed her horn to Dan, and fired up the opposite of a spell she had used a long time ago. A spell that made her life change for the better, in many ways. She did remember how big Spike got, from a dragon egg to a gigantic full blown adult dragon. 106 was only two meters from them. A light encased the griffin. It dissipated immediately after. Beside her, there was not an adult griffin anymore. A small griffin kid sat in his place. He was evidently confused. He scampered on his claws and tried to reach for Twilight, but a slimy, cold paw grabbed him by the beak and dangled him on the catwalk. Twilight sat there, waiting calmly for it to disappear. It did have what it wanted, right.
You did good.
The small griffin was crying his eyes out, trying to reach for the mare with his little feathered arms. But she didn’t even look at him. She was looking at the thing in front of her. The thing that started laughing. Laughing like a maniac. It was a gargling, disgusting noise, but she could not be mistaken. It was laughing. She uttered:
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
It stopped laughing, resumed its smiling, and answered in a scratchy, bubbling, sickly, joyful voice:
“What fun is there in making sense?”
Then, he turned around, and reality folded on itself, like a blanket. It stretched in and out, and after it came back to shape, it was gone.
______________________________________________________________________________
The tunnel was long, and cold, and dark. It never ended. She kept walking, and walking, and walking. And it never ended. Maybe that’s what she deserved. The punishment.
She was suddenly blinded by a big white light. A powerful male voice, enhanced by magic, boomed in her ears:
“Identify yourself”
“Field Agent Twilight Sparkle” She managed to say.
“Where is Hygiene Agent Dan Oski?”
She started laughing. She couldn’t stop, she couldn’t breath. It was hilarious, though. That’s why she couldn’t stop laughing. She didn’t have a good laugh in a while. Actually, that was the best laugh she ever had, even better then when Pinkie was around. She started hyperventilating. But she just couldn’t stop. Before collapsing unconscious to the ground, she managed to yell:
“MISSED IN ACTION”
______________________________________________________________________________
The cell was damp. But it was clean. Bright Light sat in the middle, waiting for someone to arrive.
“I know you, Dr. Light. I know who you work for. You don’t want to see the bad side of Equestria. Tell me why a member of the Foundation was in Ponyville the night my sister died”
“I-I do-don’t what you’re talking about, I’m just a consulent, a folklor-” Another punch, still in the jaw. This time, he got on his knees.
“Don’t take me for a fool, Light. Her Majesty told me what you are, and how you get your sick kicks. How you change persona every two or so years because you get bored.”
Bright Light got up, giggled a bit, and managed to conjure a small smile on his face.
“Then I guess it’s no use pretending, right?”
“Tell me what you were doing in Ponyville the night my sister was found dead in her bed.”
“Well, I guess I was in Ponyville, that night. We just had a breach. A very nasty case of 173-itis. I was just making sure everyone had been properly amnesiaced. I didn’t even go near your sister though, if that’s what you’re asking”
“Don’t lie to me! Her Majesty told me you expressed an interest in her!” He yelled at him.
“Yeah, but she said the cutie pie was a no-fly zone, if you know what I mean...” Another punch, this time somewhere around the left eye. He touched it with a hoof. It was already starting to swell.
“You disgust me Light. You’re a sick thing that pretends to be a pony. I don’t know why the Foundation keeps you around.”
Bright Light took a step back with a mocking hurt look on his muzzle.
“We’ll see about that, Light.” He looked at him, his eyes filled with disgust. He turned around and exited the room.
Bright Light waited for some minutes, also making sure no one was listening to him. He fired up a COMM spell. He didn’t even wait to get an answer, he just said:
“I don’t care what game you’re playing, or what do you think you’re doing. If you try to kill Twilight Sparkle again, I’ll tell them everything.”
View Online
The King has come, with justice till the End!
Luna stomped her hoof down, enraged at her sister. The marble floor of Celestia’s room cracked under the sheer force of the Lunar Princess. The Solar Princess staggered a bit, surprised by the anger of her little sister.
“We know what We have heard, sister!” She yelled at her, although not in the Royal Canterlot Voice. “Why thou dost not believe Us?”
“Am I supposed to believe that you heard a Wyvern shouting ‘Twilight’ and saw a mare running back in the facility? Luna, I told you not to go there. It’s... Luna, you know you can’t trust the Foundation, you know that. I gave you to them because they said they would be able to purge you from the Nightmare, but they kept you away from me for a thousand years, ran experiments on you, fabricated all of those lies about the Elements, brainwashed you...” Her eyes started to water” I was afraid they’d take you away from me again.”
Luna regretted her outburst. She herself didn’t understand why she accepted the invitation to the conference. She used to be one of those SCP, and seeing them talking about them, it made her sick to the heart. Did they talked about her like that too? Was she just a number and a dossier to them? What were her ‘special containment procedures’? She couldn’t remember. Was she Safe? Zaqar? Keter? Were they planning to detain her again?
Celestia was right. Who knew what they had in store for her, weren’t for that breach. Maybe they drugged her. She hallucinated! The delusion was about Twilight Sparkle. She was dead. She saw her body. She saw her friends cry their eyes out. She was under 2 meters of warm, friendly Ponyville soil. She missed her too. The first pony who opened her heart to her. Her first friend in a long, long time. She approached her big sister and nuzzled her.
“You’re right, dearest sister. I can’t trust them. I must’ve imagined it, and-” A knock and a door opening interrupted her. Both princesses turned around and they were met with the sight of an rather annoyed looking Captain of the Royal Guard.
“I’m sorry if I interrupted you, your majesties, but the prisoner asked to speak to you personally, Princess Celestia.” He bowed and stood still, waiting for an answer.
Celestia escaped sorrily her sister’s embrace and answered:
“Now he’s making personal requests? Fine, I’ll humor him. He’ll hope not to waste my time.”
Shining Armour gestured her to follow him, but the Solar Princess felt a hoof on her shoulder. Luna spoke softly:
“Sister, I want to be present. I want to meet this prisoner and ask him a few things.”
“Luna, I’m not sure if....”
She smiled. “Fine. Captain, please”. She gestured him to make the way.
“Of course, Princess” He opened the door with his magic, and started walking down the corridor, making sure the Princesses were following him. Shining Armour wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy at all. A year, maybe more, since her sister quietly passed away in her sleep. Twily... It wrecked him. It didn’t help that Cadence had a strong bond with her too. That only made things worse. If she didn’t know her enough, she could’ve helped her husband overcome it. Instead, she was just as depressed as he was. For three months, their marriage had been in dire waters: sometimes days passed without either of them uttering a single word to each other. But, they managed to get through it. At least that’s what he thought. But this... thing (he couldn’t find a better term for him, when the princess explained to him what exactly he was) and fact that maybe he was tied to her sister, that only made everything resurface.
Him, and her friends. He received a letter the other day. Written by one of her friends, Rarity. It said that they were planning to have a ceremony to remember Twilight and what she had done for Ponyville and Equestria. He didn’t ever bother to answer. She just wanted to forget it. Everything. The more he remembered, the more sharp the pain would be.
They went through the majestic halls with the stained glass, the throne room, the main entrance. They got outside, through the garden, to the barracks. They circled around them, and arrived to the dungeons. Down the steps. In the dark, damp corridor, illuminated by flickering torches. The last door. Shining Armour raised an hoof to open it, but Luna talked:
“Wait.” She turned to Celestia “Who is this prisoner, actually?”
“He’s a researcher, he has worked with the Foundation for a long time. His name is Bright Light”
Bright Light... The name almost rang a bell. It did feel familiar, but she couldn’t put her hoof on it. Maybe it was one of the doctors who were supposed to talk at the conference. It didn’t really matter. She was going to get some answers. They entered the room. A grey stallion was sitting in a corner, looking at them with an emotionless face. She saw the blue alicorn, for an instant a look of sincere surprise was plastered on his face. Then, it gave space to a small, confident grin. If Luna met him, she didn’t recognize him. He didn’t look familiar at all.
She whispered to her sister: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this pony before. Are you sure he’s working for the Foundation?”
She whispered back: “I’m positive. Trust me.” She turned around to face the prisoner and talked with an authoritative, stern voice:
“You asked for me, Light. This better not be a waste of time. I may not be able to keep you in here forever, since your superiors evidently value you quite a lot, but I’ll make sure your stay is not exactly pleasant”
He got up, and tried to walk in front of them, but he tripped a bit when the chain that bounded his left ankle blocked him. He snorted a bit and answered in a plain tone: “Of course, Princess. I promise you I won’t waste your time. By the way, I’m delighted you decided to bring Lulu to this little get-together” Celestia recoiled a bit, surprised. That nickname... She only used it when she and Luna were alone. Anger flared through her as she thought of the gross lack of respect. How he dared?
“Luna, Luna what’s wrong?”
“Princess, is everything alright?”
“Don’t...leave me....please....I’ll be good....I’ll do it...just...don’t...it hurts...” She started thrashing her legs around, trying to escape her sister grab, all while staring Bright Light
“Luna, calm down, what is it?”
“I don’t want to...leave me alone....I did it.... so please....don’t....don’t....DON’T...” She started screaming and jerking violently.
“I DON’T WANT TO SEE HIM I DON’T WANT I’LL BE GOOD I PROMISE DON’T BRING HIM HERE”
She was going completely mad. Celestia had to do something. She gestured to Shining Armour to keep her still, while she performed a knockout spell. Luna, unconscious, fell limply on the ground.
“Shining Armour, please take my sister to the Royal Physician.”
He fired up his horn and levitated the blue alicorn in a bubble.
“Of course Princess.” And he teleported out of the room with the Princess of the Night. She turned around, eyes enflamed with rage. She telekinetically grabbed the smiling stallion by the horn and dangled him over her face.
“WHAT DID YOU TO MY SISTER?” She shook him with her magic
He snickered a bit, then answered with that mocking smile still on his face:
“I didn’t do anything at all. But, if I were you, I’d hire a Royal Psychologist”
She freed him and, still enraged, left the room without saying a word.
Celestia knew how to wait. She was old. Very old. A part of being old is knowing how to wait. So, she waited, by the bed, that her sister got better. Days passed. She had a nervous breakdown, they said. A trauma that re-appeared. She wouldn’t talk to her. She just stared at ceiling. But she didn’t mind. But even after she recovered, she started talking again, after she resumed her normal duties and her Night Court, she remained silent everytime Celestia enquired about her connection with the stallion.
One day, they were stargazing together, when Luna spoke:
“He was the Head Researcher, back when they detained me. He was the one who ran the experiments. I must have removed it” She said in an emotionless tone, her gaze fixed on the stars. She felt the pristine wing of her big sister embracing her and her voice saying, sweetly:
“I’m so sorry, Luna”. Some tears found their way on the Lunar Princess’s muzzle, but she managed not to break in a cry and returned the comforting hug of her sister.
Twilight Sparkle was running through the pitch black darkness. She cursed under her breath, she cursed the stupid therapy she had to go through, the stupid mission she had been assigned, the stupid SCP that was now trying to kill her, the stupid decision to change life, the stupid decision to ask someone to fake her death, the stupid decision to go to Sugarcube Corner looking for a small amount of relief from the scorching heat. She turned left in a back alley. The Trottingham night was doing a good job covering her from prying eyes. It was also fantastic that the thing trashing around and following her, moving at impossible angles was of a relatively small size. Still she hadn’t the slightest clue about what to do. Stopping was out of the picture. She was out of magic, and she didn’t exactly have much fight left in her.
Eureka!
She knew what to do. She just needed to-
THUMP
She just bumped somepony! She looked behind her. The thing was closing the distance, fast. She needed to do it quick: just launch the rune, and do a quick amnesiac sweep of the witness. That’s when she felt something touch her shoulder. It was a claw. And it was burning hot. She turned around so fast she almost broke her neck. In front of her, there wasn’t a pony. There was a charred mass of meat, and feathers, something that looked like a burned corpse. It had a beak. And eyes. Black, lidless, irisless eyes that went through her. The corpse spoke to her. And it was the most clear and toneless voice she ever heard. A voice that spoke from far away.
“I’ll always be with you.”
She started to scream. Her body stopped responding, she started to fall on the cold street.
“Always”
She hit the floor of her room, nose first. The pain shot through her like a needle. Nothing broken, but the pain remained. She sat down on the floor. The moquette was a little sticky, since she didn’t even use this excuse of apartment often. Foundation-issued first grade personal barrack. A bed, 40 square metres of free space, a bathroom and a small magic tether link to the Overwatch. Of course, underground. If there was something she missed, it was windows. Windows and what came with them.
After they found her, they just took her to her room and left her there. They didn’t check up on her. They didn’t ask her anything about what happened to her, and what happened to him. They didn’t assign her to therapy, like usual. They didn’t give her any new assignment. No one ever came to visit her, not that she had many friends in the Foundation. Bright Light, they didn’t tell her where he was and when he would come back. Kalos never knocked on her door.
Every day was the same: she got up from bed, took a shower, stared at the ceiling waiting for lunch, she went to the dining hall, she came back to her room, stared at the ceiling some more, went out for dinner, and came back to sleep.
She liked it like that. Everything was numb, and foggy. The days and the creatures passed beside her, accelerating every day more and more, until everything became a blur and time stopped having importance. She liked it like that. She didn’t have to think of anything. She knew her day was laid out, in front of her, like a gray, dry fruit that just waited to be tasted and discovered to be tasteless.
The only downside were the dreams. In the day her mind was more peaceful and sedated that when she slept. But every dream was trying to make her remember. She didn’t want to remember.
One day, while she was eating lunch by herself, she heard young recruits talking about something they heard from a senior agent, something called the Choice. He told them that in every agent’s life there was a pivotal point, a crucial moment when they had to make a choice. That choice changed everytime, and every occasion was different. But it always there, looming over them. And the options were always just two:
Live, or die.
He said that they were the lambs, sacrificed on the altar of normality. The Choice was the High Priest, cutting your throat, ripping out your heart and showing it to the cheering crowd. If somebody defeated the Choice, they died. But few could defeat the Choice, and Twilight was not one of them.
She, like every senior agent, gave in and survived. They gave in to the millions of silenced voices that came before them, voices of bacteria, fishes, mollusk, things that crawled from the sea to the beach, things with teeth, claws, scales, and feathers, and fur, and hooves. The voices that said:
Survive
She got up and climbed back to her bed.
The same question had been bouncing inside her head for some time now. Before 106, before Canterlot, before the Training.
Why?
Why she said yes?
Why she didn’t stay?
Why she didn’t keep her life on rails?
Why she faked her death?
Why she chose to throw her family and friends in despair?
Why she joined this monstrous organization?
Why she killed?
The old world. Her old world. Every day, there would a problem, a triviality. Laughter, joy, happiness. Her friends, helping her at every chance they had. Working together to defeat whatever there may...be....
She thought that maybe, after one year of getting almost killed, of facing lethal dangers, of doing things she never even imagined she could do, she came to a stunning realization:
Ignorance is bliss.
Was it? She didn’t want to forget Pinkie Pie. Why she had to? That wouldn’t have happened if her work, the Foundation’s work were public. Ponies could have helped. Resources could have been used. Lives could have been spared. But Equestria needed to be kept under a glass dome. She won’t give up. She won’t sit in her room, wasting her life away. That’s what Celestia would have expected of her, if she knew her faithful student was still alive. Pinkie died because of her. She became a murderer because of her.
“EVERYTHING IS HER FAULT” She conjured up a lightning bolt that struck one of the walls of her room, leaving a big black mark. She wasn’t going to give up. Far from it. It doesn’t matter if she’ll have to claw, and tear her way out of everything. She will find these things. She will contain them. She will study them. She will understand them. She will use that knowledge to change Equestria, for the better. No more lies, no more cover-ups. She will not allow Celestia to sedate ponykind and sugar coat their world.
A knock interrupted her line of thought. She opened the door, and in front of her stood M’bura, the same deadpan face he carried around every time, with a file in his teeth. He dropped it on the floor and tonelessly said:
“Read it and prepare yourself, Miss Sparkle. You’re going to Phillydelphia.”
There have been several accounts of disappearances in Phillydelphia for the last two months. The local police department at first thought of it just as a statiscal spike, but shortly realized that was not the case. There is not a discernible pattern for the victims, but they were all last seen in the same zone: a small residential zone inside downtown. The Foundation already sent some technicians on the ground, but they couldn’t find any magical disturbance in the area. The zone of interest has been restricted to an alley that joins two parallel roads: reports and testimonies shows that all the victims were in the vicinity of it when they disappeared. Our agents inside the Police Department convinced the Head of Department to fence the area and fend off any onlooker or curios pony that might want to enter. Your assignment is to investigate the area throughly and report back to the Foundation.
Your alias for this mission is Star Blur, detective of Equestrian Administrative Bureau. You will find the ID and credentials in the envelope.
Good luck, Agent.
She had read the short briefing file once again. She was supposed to burn it after reading it only once, so looking at it on a train filled with ponies, going to Phillydelphia, was against a lot of security regulations. But every document used by the Foundation had a hex-based encryption: if the document managed to fall in the claws, hooves or tentacles of someone that wasn’t part of the Foundation, every page would look like a menu for an ethnic-fusion griffin restaurant based in Trottingham. She didn’t like the transformation she had to undergo this time: a jet black coat and an orange mane, the two colours she disliked the most. The countryside was blurring and merging with the outskirts of one of the biggest cities in Equestria. She had never seen Phillydelphia, and she didn’t know the feel of a modern metropolis, compared to the refinement of the Equestrian capitol. And she didn’t care much, actually. This case looked like what the F.A. usually called “green robin”, something that screamed ‘unusual’ and ‘paranormal’, but was actually just a bird dipped in green paint. She sighed.
How long did she have to wait for the big chance? She wanted to climb the ranks of the Foundation. She wanted to stay at the top. But how long would that take? She found ironic that even in a world filled to the brim with monsters, horrible and unexplainable creatures and phenomena, she could differentiate between ‘regular, boring’ monsters and ‘lifechanging’ monsters. And she was sure she wasn’t getting any of latter today. The train screeched and stopped. She had arrived. Twilight stepped out of train, got out of the Central Station, and waited for a chariot to come back. When she saw one, she gestured to it. She showed the address to the ‘driver’, a brawny-looking pegasus stallion, and asked him to leave her a block back. While she flew over the city, she looked at the squirmy mass of lives and lights beneath her: could she really be hoping for someone so terrible that could catch the attention of everypony, not only the Foundation?
Ignorance WAS a bliss. She realized the simplest and most veritable of all principles too late. Now she was stuck with a truth that she just didn’t want anymore.
All the truth does, is make your heart ache.
Sometimes a lie, it’s easier to take.
She payed the driver and got out of the chariot. It was freshly dark, and Twilight breathed in the fresh air of the night. She walked for a minute, before reaching the alley. She showed the badge to the patrolling officer and asked if she could take a look. The policepony moved the fences to let her pass.
It really was a ‘red robin’. Back before the Foundation, she would’ve found this back alley a little creepy, since it wasn’t illuminated, but now...
She lit up her horn, looking for something, a magical disturbance, an abnormal spike of magical activity... Nothing. This was the most mundane alley she had ever seen. It was really short, too: 10 meters straight, a turn left, 4 meters straight, a turn right and you had the parallel road. She walked slowly, trying to waste as much time as possible. She wanted to milk this assignment as much she could, before going back to that dreadful apartment and every memory that came with it. She turned around until she saw the other road. Nothing. The alley was just comprised of some doors and a trash canister. She turned back. After the first turn, she noticed that the alley was longer that she had first thought. But at the second turn, there wasn’t the sight of a fence and policepony waiting for her. There was just another turn. She couldn’t get lost in such a small space. What was going on? She ran back: the other road was gone, there was another turn here too. Moments like this made her feel the absence of Bright Light, or at least a partner.
Maybe this alley wasn’t as trivial as she first thought. Twilight went through the maze, trying to find a way out. But every turn and twist looked the same to her. What was supposed to be a small backwater alley had turned into a gigantic labyrinth. She was starting to panic: what if there wasn’t a way out? What if she was condemned to stay here, until she died of thirst and hunger?
When a sudden realization struck her, she cursed loudly for not having realized it in the first place.
She.
Could.
Teleport.
She concentrated on the fence outside the alley and hoped it would work. The world stretched in and out, and with a flash, she was in front of the now astonished policepony that let her in. She didn’t even stop to say anything: she started running back to the station, the lights of cities blurring and blinding her. She had something to report, and something to analyze.
Twilight Sparkle stormed through the corridors, painting and huffing. She stopped at the black steel door that bore the plaque “CRYPTOLOGY AND LINGUISTIC ” and entered without knocking. Inside, a gigantic warehouse, full of books, that probably kept going for miles, and two small metal tables. She was looking for a small dragonling, Feretrax, one of the most promising translators of the Foundation. She recognized the small, scrawny form of the researcher. He was thin even by pony standard, and his green and white scales glistened under the neon lights. On the table, by his side, there was something that Twilight had wanted for a long, long time, back when she was a scholar, a small black box with a crude monitor attached to it: a Macom, a magical contraption that could use special, enchanted crystals to execute specific commands. The dragonling lifted his head from some papers, and saw her. The mare waved at him, and he gestured her to come closer.
“Hi, Feretrax” She trotted and sat down beside him.
“Good day to you, pony.”He answered with a deep, gravely voice. A penchant of dragon related species was to disregard the names of their interlocutors. It wasn’t purposefully offensive, and Twilight got used to it pretty quickly.”And yes, I believe I found something. This paper you gave me” and he grabbed the thing Twilight found in the alley “believe it or not, it’s written in Equestrian”
“What?” Twilight said, surprised.
“It is Equestrian, yes. But the alphabet, as you can see, it’s completely different. It’s phonetic, every letter corresponds to a single phoneme, a single sound. The normal Equestrian alphabet, instead, it’s syllabic. I think I’ve nailed down pretty much every letter, but to convert this to something readable, would take quite the time. Luckily, thanks to the Macom here” and he patted gently the machine in front of him” we will be able to convert this almost instantly. Anyway, how is it going with the mazy alley?”
“Oh, after I reported, they prepared a covert expedition team. They also ran some test. It looks like the alley behaves strangely only 30, maybe 40% of the time.” She answered
“Mhhh... You’re pretty good, you know that? Two cases and two SCP discovered” He smiled at her.
She tried not to appear too proud “Oh, it’s just luck. Fire this thing up, I want to see what’s on this paper”
He inserted the page in a small slit of the Macom. It got sucked inside immediately, and after a few seconds of peculiar noises, and some tinkering on Feletrax’s side, the monitor started spewing the translation. As the words and the sentences formed, both Twilight and Feletrax couldn’t believe their eyes:
Item # : SCP-1165 Object Class : Euclid Special Containment Procedures : SCP-1165 is to remain permanently closed to civilian traffic. Both entrances to SCP-1165 are to be fenced and marked with quarantine signs, in English and Spanish, warning of high concentrations of toxic contaminants. Plainclothes security personnel are to monitor entrances and act as necessary to discourage unauthorized entrance.
Description : SCP-1165 consists of an alley located in ███████, ██ and an anomalous urban area connecting to it. The alley runs east to west for approximately 0.3 km in downtown ███████, bisecting the city block created by ████ St. and █████████ St. on the east and west, and by ████ St. and ███ Ave. on the north and south. City records indicate that the alley was laid out when the streets of ███████ were first paved in the early 20th century. Aside from construction and renovation of abutting structures, utility work, and a repaving in 19██, it has undergone no siginificant changes since then. The alley exhibits no anomalous effects to traffic entering from the west or exiting from the east. When a traveler enters the alley's eastern exit and proceeds westward, however, there is a 36% probability that the alley will not exit onto █████████ St., but onto a street not accessible by other means. This street connects to a network of other streets that extend outwards in no particular pattern, none of which can be accessed by any means other than the alley. These streets, while almost always meeting at four-way grid intersections, are highly irregular in layout and begin and end abruptly. Traffic lights, lampposts, and other electronics are present within SCP-1165, have power received from an as-yet unidentified source, and function reliably without any sign of human intervention.
“We don’t have a 1165, do we?” Feletrax asked hesitantly
“No, we... we just reach up to 800” Twilight answered, dumbfounded “What is ‘English’? And ‘Spanish’? And why there’s written ‘human intervention?’ Wait, there’s something more.”
Addendum 64-45 (refer to Ex-log):
05 Council unanimously decided to re-allow manned expeditions inside 1165. Expedition number 12-A (at current resolution on date 14/2/2014) will take place at 12/8/2015. For more informations, refer to the Senior Expedition Commanding Officer, Dr. Alto Clef.
He oiled and checked his weapon. It was massive, to say the least. Encumbering, impractical, with expensive and heavy ammo, an arm breaking recoil and an incredibly effective way to produce large amount of noise. Still, he loved it. He checked his boots again, then strapped the laces to the safeties at the sides of each shoe. He checked every single pocket of the pitch black synthetic pants he was wearing: they felt both comfortable and protecting. The researcher managed to squeeze in every single fabric and material that could be useful: Nylon, highly enhanced Nomex, Kevlar, and a secret mixture of Vectran and Innegra S. Knee and elbows pad were made out of HPPE, and even though they were comfortable and flexible as hell, he still remembered fondly the times when they just made them out of good ol’ hardened vinyl. His vest was the most complicated piece of the equipment: it took at least half an hour to go through all the pockets, nooks and crevices. He also had to check the plaque that covered his entire torso, below the resistant fabric: a solid yet soft piece of hardened polymers that contained a semi-trasparent fluid that looked like torbid water, an amazing feat of chemical engineering, a greatly enhanced non-newtonian compound that became solid as titanium when struck by a blow. Special black gloves, designed to insulate the body heat and prevent frostbites and burns, covered completely his hands. He sighed, and stretched a bit, encased in swirl of fabric, materials and stuff that comprised what could be called a ‘modern-day armor’, before grabbing the helmet and putting it on. It was a solid black piece that completely covered every possible side of his head and rendered completely impossible to see his face: on the outside it looked just like a jet black piece of something, but he could see through it crystal clear, there was a filter that could purge air of contaminants for 27 hours straight before needing a recharge, and projected at the side of the mixture of glass and plastic that divided his face from the outside world, there was a simple yet effective HUD, that told him where his comrades where, how far, the temperature, the supposed time of the day, and provided him with a minimalistic compass. He cracked the joints of his neck, adjusting to the new weight that pressed on his cranium; it didn’t feel to bad, it was actually kind of comforting. It was specifically design to avoid obscuring peripheral vision and the condensation typical of gas masks. He lifted his primary weapon, a Gépard M-1, an anti-materiel rifle: a monstrous leviathan, capable of going through a tank, like wet paper, from 2500 m. The 1 meter long barrel, blackened for military uses, swayed from left to right, while he secured the sniper rifle to his back. He grabbed his side-arm, a Beretta M9, and put it in his holster, on the external part of the thigh. He sat down, bored out of his mind.
“You’re bringing THAT?” He heard a familiar voice from behind him. He turned around to see an hulking black figure, sporting the same armor he was wearing. Clutched between astoundingly thick arms, there was a rather futuristic looking FN SCAR H. Even if he couldn’t see his face, the man could imagine the smug look he had. “That look like something coming straight out from the Cold War. I guess you guidos gotta compensate for every war you lost.” He ‘poked’ him with a finger the size of a sausage.
“Leave him be, Frank.” The smaller, more curved figure of a woman, clad in the same armor, appeared from behind the giant. She carried a frightening big Benelli M4.
“Mpfh.” The hulking man grunted and moved forward, sitting on the opposite side of the plane.
“You can’t let him pick on you like this, Lo.”
The smaller man kept looking at the floor, and uttered slowly:
“I don’t care what he thinks, Anya. I’m not here to make friends with him. I’m here to do my job, end of the story.”
“Yes, but-”
Footsteps on a hard, metallic floor distracted her. The woman and the giant turned around to see a familiar, yet not welcome sight: a tall man, with a black jacket and a fedora hat, with a backpack and a 44. Magnum on a holster on his thigh. They both couldn’t look at his face for too long: he wasn’t ugly by any mean, but they couldn’t stand to observe that perpetual smirk and those strange, penetrating eyes that seemed to know about them more than they knew about themselves. He stopped between the seats, and started talking. That voice, was the most unsettling thing of all: it seemed like someone captured the lowest note on an ukulele and synthetized words and phrases from it:
“Frank, m’boy, I don’t approve of you bullying poor Lo, here. Remember, we’re a team, alright? Sex, religion, nationality, it doesn’t mean jackshit when you got a strange thing from outer space gutting you to death... Actually, maybe it does? Well, isn’t it kinda of ironic that you can get a restraining order even in a ruthless, above the law shadowy organization? Anyway, what was I talking about? Ah, yes, Frank. Since you’re so eager to go around bothering people, you’re the scout.”
With a groan the giant got up and protested in a whiny, high-pitched voice, a humorous sight for a man of his tonnage:
“Oh come on, Doc!”
“No buts, young man!” He waved a finger at him.
“I di-I didn’t say ‘but’” The giant seemed confused
The strange man snorted and answered sarcastically “Sure you didn’t.”
We’re almost in Paris, prepare for landing. The voice of the pilot reverberated in the vehicle.
The doctor sat down, strapped the seatbelts and yelled, trying to cover the incredible noise of accelerating plane engines:
“1165 HERE WE COME”
Two men were discussing over a small pizza in a small hall sitting in front of each other near a small table. One man was wearing a long lab coat, and carried a perpetual smirk. The other wore a simple white shirt and constantly stroked his fiery red beard. The bearded man snatched a slice of pizza under the nose of the coated man and said, while taking a crude bite:
“Clef, they are not going to like this.”
He shrugged and went after a slice himself“Pfff, what they’re gonna do, stick me in 682’s cage? Have seen already. Beside, it’s not like I’m taking them to a staring contest with 173.”
He took a napking and wiped out the tomato sauce that still remained on his face. “We’re talking about 1165, Clef. It’s not a walk in the park. And by the way, why the hell you asked permission to do another manned exploration? We’ve already lost one too many teams in that fucking thing”
“Ohhh, you’re worried about me, Kondraki? That’s cute.” He poked him with a long, scrawny finger.
The bearded man recoiled in disgust and groaned “Ugh. I’m just saying, you’re wasting resources. You just stole away from their containment teams the most promising new agents of the Foundation”
“I know, isn’t that great? Oh, by any chance, do you have the dossiers here with you?” The strange man asked with an eager, almost childish look in his eyes.
The bearded man reached for a backpack he left on the floor and grabbed a small envelope inside it.“Mpfh. Yeah, asked Light to take them for me. You owe me, Alto.”
He opened it and gave him a thumb up.“Sure, sure, just say to the psycho butler I sent you, he and I are on good terms” He started reading out loud:
Name : Frank Gedhiman
Nationality : United States of America
Served in : US Navy on USS Bainbridge, Seals Team 2
Personal records :Agent Frank Gedhiman is assigned to Task Force Beta-7 (designated COMM name “Maz Hatterz”) as First Rifleman. Agent Gedhiman earned two (2) commendations, in relation to Containment Breach 43A-444-XC and to Security Breach 21C-209-VL.
Combat and Civilian expertise :gent Gedhiman received basic Navy training and extensive Navy Seals training, especially in arctic conditions. Agent is proficient in basic CQC and advanced HTH. Agent is expert in the use of several automatic weapons, including bullpup rifles, semi-automatic rifles and automatic rifles. Agent has a degree in Civil Architecture achieved at NYU.
Name : Anya Tagore
Nationality : Republic of India (Bharat Ganarajya)
Served in : Indian Army on 4th Infantry Division, Gathak Force
Personal Records: Agent Anya Tagore is assigned to Task Force Delta-5 (designated COMM name “Front Runners”) as Commando. Agent Tagore earned four (4) commendations, in relation to Containment Breach 12L-848-VB, Situation 123480-AS, Situation 192888-GD, Situation 124566-AJ and Containment Breach 94D-585-SD.
Combat and Civilian Expertise :Agent Tagore received basic Army training and extensive sapper training. Agent is proficient in basic CQC. Agent is expert in use of automatic, semi-automatic shotguns, explosives both handheld, planted and IED. Agent has a degree in Chemical Engineering and a degree in Psychology achieved at University of Madras.
Name : Lorenzo Tese i
Nationality : Italian Republic (Repubblica Italiana)
Served in : Italian Navy on 550 Cavour, COMSUBIN Operational Raider Group
Personal Records :Agent Lorenzo Tesei is assigned to Task Force Omicron-9 (designated COMM name “Hot zone dancers”) as First Marksman. Agent Tesei earned three (3) commendations, in relation to Containment Breach 93K-979-JJ, Containment Breach 32F-939-IO and Containment Breach 12X-574-FK.
Combat and Civilian Expertise :Agent Tesei received basic Army training, extensive marksmanship training and extensive COMSUBIN/amphibious training. Agent is proficient in advanced CQC and advanced Krav Maga. Agent has a degree in Modern Western Philosophy achieved at Pisa’s Normale University.
“Creme de la creme, if you know what I mean, Kondrie boy.”
The lights of night-time Paris managed to infiltrate in the inside of SUV, only slight muffled by the obscured windows. They were in the old part of the city, so they could feel the raw, authentic texture of the street beneath them at every bump. Frank looked fairly uncomfortable with the ghastly silence that reigned in the vehicle, so he asked slowly, whilst looking at the mat:
“So...Why do you do it?”
Clef stopped silently fiddling with his ukulele and waited for the other two passengers to answer.
They both said, at the same time:
“Retribution”
The doctor started laughing, a big, boastful laugh that invaded the dark SUV. Frank looked beyond confused, and his eyes kept darting between him and his comrades, that, in the mean time, lifted their gazes from their weapons and tried to stare him down through their masks.
“You got a problem with that, Doc?” She spat the last word. It was true that researchers weren’t exactly a popular category in the Foundation, especially for the Agents.
He smiled at her, a smile that made her feel uneasy, and answered:
“No, of course not. I, however, find it rather... strange. Yes, strange is the word.”
Anya almost shouted at him:
“What the hell is YOUR problem, fucking psycho? You almost killed a little girl just to get rid of an SCP, you just hate them as much as we all do!” A hand descend gently over her shoulder. She snapped back to see Lorenzo beside her shaking his head. She lowered her gaze, seemingly ashamed that she lost control.
Again, he laughed, and laughed so much tears started trailing down his cheeks. He wiped them with his hand and promptly responded:
“Hate them? I don’t hate them at all, my dear Anya. Hate is for humans.”
Anya asked with more than a tinge of annoyance in her tone. “What?”
“It’s simple, actually. SCP, these things... It’s a waste of time hating them. They are just there to invest you, like a wave. You get submerged with all that cruelty, madness... chaos, but what happens if you think that the wave is drowning you because it’s actually evil? You get water in your lungs, your brain stop responding, you fall down and your corpse is eaten by fishes. They don’t think, they don’t live, they don’t feel, they just are, following their own mad little series of rules. There’s no rhyme or reason, no plan, no prime evil, no ever-watchful eye dangling monstrosities over your life, no god, no design, no action and no reaction. There is only us, with a sword made out of nonsense suspended over our heads, waiting to fall any moment now. Why do you do it, what a stupid question...” His face lost his perpetual smirk, and now sported an annoyed, disgruntled look.
He reached, grabbed his ukulele and started playing what Lorenzo recognised as a crude guitar rendition of the first Gymnopédie:
“...Somebody has to.”
Twilight Sparkle was angry. Actually, she was beyond angry. She was furious. Actually, furious was an understatement. She needed to stop herself from incinerating her bed right on spot. She stomped down on the floor, trying to vent out some rage, but every time her hooves touched the floor she brought them down harder, faster. She knew they just snatched away from her a one-time chance: she discovered a Foundation dossier. FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION.
That was the epitome of ‘carrier slingshot’. The discovery of the century! Her chance to climb the steps of this accursed organization and show everything to the world! And just when she and Feretrax managed to read that there was another Foundation, in another world, a world in which mythical creatures were calling the shots, and they already explored and mapped what they designated as 1165, an entire team of griffin agents stormed the place, took the papers, the translations, opened the door, let her Supervisor in, who then congratulated to her for the finding and said she was out of the assignment and to go back to her room and wait for a new one. She yelled in frustration and threw herself on the bed that 30 seconds earlier was about to end its purpose prematurely in a cloud of flames.
She really wanted not to, she fought with herself, wrestled with her mind to no avail, and in the end shouted what she really wanted not to shout, because that would make her sound like a rebuked filly:
“THAT’S NOT FAIR!”
A week had passed, yet her fury didn’t seem to wane. She just sat down, boiling and simmering, imagining how she could have restrained herself the next time M’bura showed his zebra muzzle at the door with that small brown envelope in his smug little mouth and-
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
She jumped on her four hooves, and tried desperately not to appear neither eager nor completely enraged. She ran at the door and opened it: no one was there. She was starting to lit up her horn, looking for however thought it was a good idea to pull a lame fast one on her when one of her stepped on something different that the cold, hard floor. She looked down and she saw a familiar light brown file. She looked around the corridor one last time, trying to find M’bura or however left her this envelope, but it was deserted. She levitated it and closed the door with a slam of magic, then returned to her bed, and opened it:
There have been several complaints of strange noises and lights that arrived to the Neighton Police Department for the last three months. It appeared that this was a mistake of the Royal Police Service, as they were originally documents meant for the Police Royal Archive in Canterlot. The pegasus courier responsible is currently being reprimanded and is on payed leave, yet we couldn’t have acquired said documents if it weren’t for this mistake, as we don’t have agents in the PRA or in the Ponyville PD, the Department that originally issued these documents. The reports describe in great detail curious phenomena and disturbing noises coming from a small patch of wood owned by the Apple family, inside the Sweet Apple Acres orchard. Your mission is to investigate these peculiar occurrences, discover if there may be a SCP involvement and report back to the Foundation.
Since Ponyville is a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other, we could not give you an identity as a local police officer. Instead, you will be going as Magnifying Glass, private investigator hired by the patriarch of the Apple Family, Mr. Orange. Mr. Orange is one of the few civilian contractors in Equestria we have, so he has already been informed and has agreed to help. If suspicion should arise with the locals, Mr. Orange will vouch for you.
Good luck, Agent.
The telekinetic hold she had on the paper disappeared and it slowly descended on the floor. Twilight Sparkle just sat there for a moment, unsure about what to do. Then, she realized she could just say what she was thinking out loud:
“Horsefeathers.”
Ponyville managed to convey more with visuals than its inhabitants could ever hope to convey in words. The luscious, giddly, quaint, scenic spectacle of small houses, simple gardens, noises of lives marching onwards in a small corridor light, ignoring the claws and teeth lurking in the darkness that just managed to graze them from time time. Even in other settlements in Equestria you couldn’t find the same carelessness, the same live by the day attitude. Fate, as Twilight knew, is not without a sense of irony. Someone would have found most humorous that the most loveable, sweet little town in all of Equestria would be the place where Twilight Sparkle found her true, dark, cruel epiphany. The unicorn, however, wasn’t or didn’t want to think about it, as she was too occupied in trying not to catch the attention the ever-watching eye of suffocating country hospitality. She used to think fondly of how warm and the caring the citizens of Ponyville could be, when they discovered that a stranger managed to crawl its way into this love-utopia. Now, it was just an inconvenience: she felt like every single eye was studying her, from hoof to horn, and judging whether she could be trusted with a shower of kindness. Now that she was at the other end of the stick, she realized that she always saw as a show of selflessness was actually, like everything (that much she managed to learn), a calculus. She did remember the cold shoulder the town gave to a donkey that wanted to move in here after a life of travels; the only pony that greeted him-
You see I never saw you before, and if I never saw you before that means you're new, 'cause I know every pony, and I mean every pony in Ponyville, and if you're new, then it meant you haven't met anyone yet-
The clopping sound of her hooves on the soil muffled for a bit. She realized she was in front of her old home. How her legs carried her here, she didn’t know. She was afraid somepony was bound to pay his or her respects in the old tree. Somepony she knew. The relief wasn’t as nearly as powerful as her sick disappointment when she read the crudely painted letter on her door:
ABANDONED
The windows were dusty and unkempt. The tree was weak looking. She looked around before she took a peek inside: all the books and the furniture were gone. A wave of disgust took over her as she realized what she was expecting to see: a sad library, kept by a small dragon dragging his feet, handling books around with a face devoided of emotions. She wanted them to mourn her. She wanted them to be sad for her. She couldn’t even fathom they would even start living again after her untimely demise; just what was she becoming?
You are a sick, sick pony, Twilight.
Every second passed in this accursed town was another voice screaming in her head that she was a horrible, horrible creature. That she deserved to die. That she was mad, sick in the head. That she soiled forever her race, the entire ponykind, even if nopony would ever known. What was she thinking about?
Banning her sister to the moon for a thousand years? That’s cruel.
He was just having a little fun... He didn’t hurt anypony. He didn’t turn ponies into stone.
She was just trying to look after her children.
Yet, why she felt she had to despise them? She didn’t. She didn’t hate Nightmare Moon, she didn’t hate Discord, she didn’t hate Chrysalis. Why she felt compelled to loathe them? Everything around her reminded her that, in fact, they weren’t actually so bad. She saw things far worse, and she kept hating them. Why she kept hating them, why she thought she was the monster? She did what had to be done! These ponies, they wouldn’t know any of it! Everyone beside them had to sacrifice what they held most dear in their hearts and minds, but they still judged you from the safety of their glass fortress! They were judging her, right now. She felt it, she felt every suspicious gaze, every doubtful eye. Every single one of them, thinking higher than thou. Thinking they were the chosen ones, the ones controlling the sky, the clouds, the soil, the sun and the moon. Thinking that every little ray of light and every frickle of spring rain was there just for them.
You just did what had to be done, Twilight. You survived. You protect them, and they manage to make you feel GUILTY about it! They are the ones that should feel bad, they are the one predating on your very soul! THEY SHOULD FEEL GUILTY!
Her left hoof impacted on the ground, creating a small cloud of dust. Twilight Sparkle wanted to spread the truth, the truth about everything: Celestia, the Foundation, the SCPs. But she won’t do it for them. They don’t deserve to know the truth. Ponies are not worthy of the truth. But the truth will make them worthy.
The truth will make them become true to their hearts.
The lovely countryside and the crisp, fresh air of the autumn dusk did wonders to quell her seething worry: soon she managed to push back her anger just enough to concentrate completely on the task at hand. She needed to: Applejack was the cause. She needed to lie through her teeth with the Element of Honesty. She knew Applejack fairly well. Actually, out of her ‘friends’, her company was the one Twilight appreciated the most. Yet, the only remorse she had was that she happened to get the lie-sensible one, and lies were the only thing keeping her afloat right now. After a long walk she knew well and didn’t forget, she started to see the familiar sight of apple trees in the distance, and the familiar sound of thudding and bucking. She rolled her eyes: just what she expected? That her death shocked Applejack to the very core and that the freckled mare decided to become a classical composer out of respect for her? The mental image managed to make her giggle a bit. She was already at the outer fence, and she could see her ‘friend’ bucking an apple tree in the distance. She thought she’d have mixed feelings about this reunion, but she felt just as empty and annoyed as any other day, and she wanted to get over with this as fast as she could. Applejack turned her head and saw Twilight, that now sported a beige coat and a jaunty black mine with coffee-brown streaks. The Element of Honesty covered fifty meters in less than twenty seconds, stopped right in front of Twilight and introduced herself with her unforgettable accent and a smile on her muzzle:
“Well, hello there, miz.....”
Twilight coughed a bit and answered: “Glass. My name is Magnifying Glass”
“I’m Applejack, pleasure to make your acquaintance. So, what brings ya’ll here in this mighty fine apple farm, miz Glass?”
“I was sent here by your uncle, miss Applejack” The earth pony looked a bit surprised.
“Uncle Orange sent ya? For what?” She asked, her eyes betraying her raising suspicion.
“I’m a private investigator, ma’am. I’m here to... investigate those strange noises and lights you have been seeing for a while” Twilight managed to mantain a ‘no-joke’ tone, hoping it would at least appear less suspicious in her former friend’s eyes. But she knew the relationship between Orange and her niece wasn’t exactly stellar. Applejack warmed up a bit, though. It looked like she bought it.
“Oh, thank goodness. Those darns thingies gave me an mah family the heebie jeebies. Poor Applebloom, mah lil’ sis, is scared witless.” Her gaze darted for a bit to a small patch of trees behind Twilight, on the other side of the road. The unicorn assumed it was the infamous infested forest.
“Don’t worry, miss Applejack. I’m here to get to the bottom of this.” She turned around, preparing to go back to Ponyville “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to search for an accomodation. I’ll see you tonight, Miss-”
A hoof grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her back.
“Oh don’t ya ‘miss’ me, lady. Ya’re going to solve this pickle, and Ah’ll be darned if Ah’ll let you let hit the hay anywhere but here. Consider yourself a member of the Apple family for the time bein’”
Twilight was prepared to this. She knew that once Applejack set her mind on something, nothing would make her change it. So she simply uttered a simple courtesy form, lest not sound too rude
“I wouldn’t want to impose, miss Applejack...” Answered Twilight.
The earth pony waved a dismissive hoof at her. “Oh, don’t be silly, ya silly filly. It’s mah pleasure”
The unicorn managed to create a convincing facade of reluctance:
“I guess, staying here would aid greatly my job.....”
“Then we’re settled, miz Glass. Now, let’s go inside, Ah’ll introduce ya’ll to the family” She swiftly grabbed her hoof and dragged her across the fields until they reached the Apple household. It was as Twilight remembered it. She saw Big Mac closing the door of the barn. He turned around to see his sister waving at him. He slowly made his way to them:
“Big Mac, this is Magnifying Glass. She’s a private eye, Uncle Orange sent her to investigate those strange sounds and lights. Miz Glass, this is my big brother, Big Macintosh.” He said:
“It’s might nice to meet ya, miz Glass” and he offered a hoof. Twilight was trying as hard as she could to create a persona: a rugged, rude private investigator who wanted to solve the mistery and get the hell out. The less amiable she managed to appear, the more likely they just let her do her thing and leave. So, she didn’t shake his hoof.
“Mpfh. Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Macintosh”
He looked a bit disappointed, something Twilight considered strange, since she almost always saw the humongous earth pony unfazed by everything.
“Just call me Mac...”
Applejack snorted slightly, visibly annoyed by the unicorn’s lack of manners. But she managed to keep her annoyance bottled up.
“Let’s go inside...” She practically pushed Twilight trough the opened door. Even the inside was just the same, and of course, sitting on a rocking chair in the corner, there was a really old mare she instantly recognized:
“That’s Granny Smith. Everything’s really tirin’ her up, so it’s best not to wake her up.” They went upstairs and Applejack knocked on the first door on the right. A familiar voice resonated, muffled, in the corridor.
“What?”
“Applebloom, we have guests! Get here, I want ya to introduce yourself”
There was a sound of hooves running on a wooden floor, and the door opened shooting. Standing in front of her, a filly she remembered smaller, and with a blank flank. She could see a plank and a hammer crossed.
I missed it....
“Applebloom, this is miz Glass. She’s a private investigator Uncle Orange payed to discover what’s going in the forest”
The eyes of the filly beamed up with wonder after she heard the word ‘investigator’.
“Hello miz Glass, Ah’m Applebloom! What is it like being a private investigator? Is it hard? Is it cool? I have friend called Scootaloo that loves saying ‘cool’, I bet she would find you cool!”
Twilight tried not to break in tears right there. She still wasn’t used to seeing...fillies. Or anything small, for that matter. She managed to maintain her composure and answered plainly:
“It’s job like any other.”
Applebloom was visibly disappointed by this cold display, so she blurted that she had to finish her homework, darted back to her room and slammed the door.
“I’m sorry to leave ya here, miz Glass, but Ah have an appointment with a friend of mine. We’re having supper in an hour, ya’ll hear the bell. Well.... Ah best be goin’. Good evenin’, miz Glass”
Twilight Sparkle just nodded, and waited for the earth pony to disappear in the distance before leaning a bit on the edge of the porch. She really, really wanted to stay here. She really wanted to run back to the library, find a book and start reading. Then Spike would come, asking her where would they eat for dinner. They could go to Fluttershy’s cottage, she always liked it when they visited. Maybe, after dinner, they could settle down, on the hill behind it, and watch the stars a bit. Surely, Rainbow would come to greet them, they would ask her to go fetch Rarity, and Applejack, and Pinkie Pie. Applejack would bring a casket of apples, and Rarity would go on a tirade on how much uncouth grass could be. Pinkie Pie would probably talk non-stop, dragging everypony in never-ending debates on whether mints could be considered, in all respects, actual sweets. After a while, she and Spike would wish goodnight, and go back to the library. She would tug Spike, and then go read for a while on the balcony, basking in the fresh air of Luna’s night. Then she would go to bed, sleeping peacefully, freed from nightmares.
“I’ll always be with you.” Those black eyes stared at her. The charred beak didn’t move, yet the words kept flowing out.
Maybe she could still fix this?
“Always”
This place was worse than Canterlot. She didn’t want to stay here. She desperately wanted to get out of this damn town. She went inside, found Big Mac cutting some apples on the table in the kitchen, and told him in the same atonic voice she would be not present for dinner, that they could find her in the notorious patch of wood. She didn’t wait for an answer, and stormed out in the dying twilight, trotting lightly between the trees and the farming equipment, reaching the road, and then, the woods.
This ‘forest’, and she knew she thought the same thing of something incredibly strange, was, for the moment, the most normal and mundane patch of trees she had ever seen. Even when she wasn’t a highly trained agent, she would find far more scary normal looking forest instead of, let’s say, the Everfree Forest. The latter was so outlandishly strange, that it seemed far more cartoonish than creepy. Yet this.... this couldn’t even be called a real forest! Fairly big, but not thick, and all the trees were the same! She walked through it for what seemed hours; the sun already had given way to the moon, and the sound of cricket was invading her perked up ears, ears desperate to catch a strange sound, and eyes scanning between trunks looking for peculiar lights.
Yet nothing happened. She hoped desperately that all this trip, everything she had to swallow, to change, to hide was not in vain. She hoped that reminiscing everything that she had lost, a town that constantly reminded her of the worst decision she ever made was not a fruitless exercise. It was dark, and cold. She shivered a bit. Maybe the next day, something will happen. Twilight will aks the Apple Family if these happenings took place every night, or just in a regular basis. She walked back to the deserted dirt road. In the distance, she could see the small Ponyville shimmering in the night. The lights were still on in the Apple house. She sighed, teleported over the fence, and started the walk back to the rustic mansion. Halfway through, she saw the door opening with a slam, and a breathless Big Mac galloping to her. He stopped, breathed a bit, and then told her, his eyes full of concern:
“Miz Glass! Applejack found a strange critter in our barn! She’s waiting for ya inside, she asked me to look after Granny and Applebloom”
Twilight beamed, excited. A strange critter! Maybe this wasn’t just a waste of time! What if she actually found something worth mentioning the Foundation? She nodded, trying not to look to eager, and dashed to the barn door. She opened it with a slam of magic and ran inside, the door closing behind her. Everything was dark, and she couldn’t see a thing; maybe Applejack was in the back?
“Miss Applejack? Are you th-”
A flash of blue light blinded her momentarily, but she swiftly realized it was coming from the floor: she looked down to see a gigantic symbol made out of dazzling light shining on the floor of the barn. It looked like a rune. She tried to launch a light spell to see what was going on around her, but her horn was unresponsive. The unicorn tried to concentrate as much as she could, but her magic was completely inert. A voice she remembered caught her attention.
“It’s useless. We made sure thou won’t be able to use thy magic.”
Panic and fear were starting to overwhelm her, and she stuttered:
“P-Princess Luna?”
A horn, a dark blue horn lit up, and a big ball of light formed in the room. She closed her eyes for a moment, her eyes defeated by the sheer brightness. When she could manage to open them, she saw the only sight in the world she never wanted to see:
In front of her, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy and Applejack. Behind them, Princess Luna and Princess Celestia. The princesses shared the same stern gaze that tore a hole through her. The smaller mares were displaying a different set of emotions: Rarity and Rainbow looked at her suspiciously, Fluttershy was whimpering a bit but she managed to hold her ground, and Applejack was looking at her with a face that only spoke of contempt. Princess Celestia laid a gentle hoof on the earth pony shoulder and said:
“You did good, Applejack. Who knows what could have happened if this...spy managed to get a hold of what she wanted” The mare blushed a bit, before resuming her serious gaze towards Twilight:
“Shucks, Princess. Ah don’t really know about this ‘ Foundation’ you told us about, but first Ah saw her she struck me down as the lyin’ kind.” Celestia nuzzled her a bit.
“Good work, my little pony. Thank the goddess she stumbled on somepony so observant” Her stare locked itself on the trapped unicorn, and her voice lost all the warmness and kindness she had a moment before. “As for you... I know you’re trained not to reveal your identity. But you’ll find I have spell that can be very useful for finding out informations. First, I’m gonna wash out every possible enchantment or tracking system they managed to put inside you. I know how many spells they use on their agents. You have one last chance to tell me everything with your will. Otherwise, I’ll just probe your mind... It’s not a nice procedure, I assure you.”
Twilight Sparkle lips quivered a bit, before she could emit a discernible sound.
“You’ll r-regret t-this, Celestia” She managed to say, her eyes trying to fight that impassive gaze.
“Mpfh. We’ll see about that.” Her horn got engulfed in a white aura, and the unicorn was covered in light for a moment. She could see it all: the disguise enchantment flowing down from her like wet paint, making visibile her purple coat underneath. She could see the slow building horror and surprise in her faces as they saw the form of a stranger change into one they knew all too well.
The enchantment formed a luminous pool around her hooves for a moment, before disappearing into the thin air, sparkling a bit. A deadly silence reigned in the room, until she spoke with her voice, her true, not magically altered voice:
“I told you you would regret this.”
“I told you you would regret this.”
The orb flickered and buzzed above their heads, its cold, white light illuminating faces stricken with the surprise of a lifetime. The silence took its place in the center of the room, and reigned for what seemed an eternity. Twilight Sparkle gazed at them, losing all hope she would come out of this barn on her own terms; the resignation transformed her face into a blank, impassive surface. Sometime she imagined, mostly among missions, what a reunion would be like, and she pictured herself much more panicked Instead, she was as calm as one can be in such a situation, and actually, she found herself almost enjoying the discovery, almost like a sick, twisted surprise party.
The same couldn’t be said for the other ponies in the room. Everypony had the same strange expression, a mixture of astonishment and horror that made Twilight want to burst out in a big laugh and say:
You should see the look on your faces, priceless!
The calm was expected; yet, it was strange. Twilight Sparkle had every reason to stay still and not utter a single word, but why her ‘friends’, the princesses, just stood still, observing her, that canvas of fear and guilt, surprise and anger, and pure unadulterated confusion plastered on their muzzles?
It took her some seconds to realize they weren’t just too disconcerted to say her anything, all the ponies in the barn apart from her were actually frozen in place. The only movement she could see was the slow expansions of their chests.
The door shot open, startling the unicorn and directing her head backwards with a snap: in front of her, standing outside, with the pale light of Luna’s moon shining upon them, there were a grey unicorn with an amused and slightly startling expression on his face. His eyes were gleaming with excitement. By his side, a hovering mass of tentacles that emitted a constant buzz. She heard a familiar voice dancing in her ears:
“Emon filion , we have to go. I can keep them blocked, but not for much, we need to get out of here!” He gestured her to come closer with a long tentacle.
“Kalos?” She asked, bewildered. What was he doing here with Bright Light?
“Twilight, leave them, we have to go! He can’t hold them much longer!” This time was the stallion’s turn to speak: he didn’t even remotely sounded preoccupied or distressed: actually, it looked like he was enjoying every minute of this sick get-together. Also, he sounded very different from the bookish, timid, folklore-loving stallion that she knew. Even so, she didn’t have much of a choice: it was either following them, or stay here and face whatever the princesses had in store for what could be considered a long list of felons, including treason, espionage, first degree murder and illicit use of magic. Ages passed since crimes like this actually received a trial, and she wasn’t going to stay and find out whether they would give her life sentence or actually banish her then give her a life sentence. She dashed out of the rune and in the open, and felt like an enormous weight had been lift from her shoulders: she tried to levitate a fallen leaf, and she did with no difficulty whatsoever. Twilight Sparkle turned around one more time and looked at her old life, the life she lost a fateful night of a scorching summer, frozen in front of her eyes, before mustering all the magical energy she could and disappearing in a dazzling flash of light with the grey stallion and the wyvern. The world turned off, everything stretched around them like an enormous black elastic, and they all felt the unfamiliar, peculiar sensation of being in a complete void: The darkness in front of the three flickered, and suddenly, they were in a gigantic cave, lit by a pale moonlight. Everything felt wrong, a powerful nausea took over her senses and made the mare kneel down, trying to fight the urge to vomit her intestines out. She had never teleported herself (or anybody herself, for that matter) so far away. She tentatively lifted herself up and managed to walk, stammering a bit, to a rock wall on which she rested her back. Twilight Sparkle breathed slowly and steadily, trying to shake off the sickness that invaded her body. The air in the cavern was cool and moist, and she felt a light breeze caressing her mane and cooling her entire form. The rhythm of her breath calmed her, and after a short while, she was ready to stand up again.
It didn’t took much a toll out of her the striking yet evident realization that her life was over. It was a quiet chaos: the fact that the Foundation would negate to the death that they ever employed her. The fact that she deceived everyone she thought she held dear. The fact that she wasn’t really concerned about the moral consequences of her actions but more about the legal ones. Banishment? Life imprisonment? Capital execution? Was there even a punishment left for the likes of her? The fact that she was alive, or dead, would only serve as a remainder to the ones she had wronged. Justice isn’t about retribution, though. How many valuable informations were inside her mind? How many things that weren’t supposed to see the light of the day or the darkness of the night? These questions kept swirling inside her, and the more they showed up, the less she could bring herself to answer them. Her old friend, panic, started to creep up its ugly head.
Twilight was on the brink of crying, when she remembered she wasn’t alone in the cave. The lavender mare looked in front of her, and saw the three beings she owed her life to. Bright Light was looking at her, completely unfazed by the long range teleport, a comforting smile on his muzzle. Kalos was hovering beside him, and she could discern the bioluminescent equivalent of compassion plastered all across his soft, glowing membrane. Behind him, the charred mass of meat and feathers that just kept grinning at her. Twilight remembered fondly of how he came to save her from Celestia, how he managed to grab her and get her out of that barn, and whispered lovingly in her left ear:
“Always .”
She closed her eyes and darted them open again. It was gone. Her sudden show of fear startled the stallion and the wyvern, as they rushed to her side and the former asked, somewhat concerned:
“Twilight, is everything okay?” She moved her head left and right. They were standing beside her, enclosing the mare in a warm space. These were her true friends. She smiled at the grey stallion and answered.
“I’m fine. How did she....” No, something was much more important to her now “How did you know I was in danger?”
Bright Light sighed and looked at her with eyes full of pity. Twilight felt a familiar sensation, and saw an absurdly soft tentacle making its way to her shoulder.
“They sold you out, Twilight. The Foundation.” She really wasn’t prepared for this. Twilight Sparkle wasn’t naive, at least not anymore. But she thought that as long as she was useful, the Council wouldn’t bother with her and would have treated her like any normal agent. Why?
“Why?”
He looked at her, trying to form a reasonable explanation. He had one, but it pained him to say it. Fate was not without a sense of irony. He needed to be honest with her, even if he couldn’t understand why. Why did he save her?
“I was detained by Celestia for a while. She tried to discover if the Foundation was bubbling something up” Twilight ears perked up and she started to look around for an exit, trying not to be too obvious. She failed. “It wasn’t me who sold you out, Twilight. If I did, why did I risk going against the orders of my superiors? We are fugitives as much as you are.” It looked like that calmed down a bit, as her eyes stopped darting at the infinite, quiet forest she could see in the distance, out of the cave. “It was your discovery, actually. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. You were right. You did discover the dossier of a SCP. It wasn’t fabricated. A real, genuine document from another dimension. Believe it or not, it was from a Foundation, almost identical to ours. Same objective, same scope, same organization, almost. And it was managed by humans. Maybe it will be of some relief to know that they thought of us as mythic creatures as much as we did of them.”
The old flame of knowledge was rekindled in her spirit, despite the horrid situation she was in. Humans! They were real! From another dimension! She discovered them! They had a Foundation! What artifacts they had in custody? Myths about humans were fairly notorious, but few in numbers and clarity. They were depicted as small, biped creatures, kind and wise, that lived long, had no magic to speak of and shared Equa with ponykind far before the Princess, the three tribes, or even Discord. They had Mare-eval technology: carriages, crude machinery, swords and bows. She couldn’t even understand how they could contain abominations without magic. Her eyes beamed with excitement: she was ready to inundate
“Look, it’s not important.” She opened her mouth, looking to explain in the tiniest detail why it was of paramount importance, but a gray hoof covered it. “It’s important that you stay focused. You need to hear the whole story.”
The sun was not even peeking on the horizon when they arrived at the alley. Clef looked at his digital watch: 4.55 A.M. Right on time. The driver stopped at the deserted sidewalk and the four got out from the back, the sound of their boots reverberating from the wet cement. They were in the suburbs of Paris, inside a fairly normal residential zone. They still had various spotters around the corners, to warn them in case someone or something suspicious should come around. Their ears were filled with the constant sound of speeding cars in the background. While the three field agents donned the imposing and ghastly suit of armor, Clef decided to, as he put it, ‘stay casual’, wearing long jet black jeans, simple boots, a dark trench coat, a grey shirt, a black fedora and a pair of black teashades. The whole ensemble was fairly inappropriate, and it managed to gather a few annoyed puffs from Lorenzo, a not so well hidden giggle from Anya, and a shrug from Frank. Everyone had their weapons and equipment: aside from the guns, that Clef considered as important as a newborn infant (‘You will always love your son more than the snotty brats of your friends!’’) and always left them free of choice, he demanded that every FA working under him, aside from standard Foundation equipment, brought the following items:
-A plastic-wrapped cinnamon twist (‘If I hear the word ‘Twinkie’ another fucking time, I will your rip your throat out, Gedhiman’ )
-His book “Reality Bending: Why Amon was right”, that you actually had to buy with your own money through a shady, even for Foundation’s standards, publishing house located in Castroville, California
-A dogtag, it didn’t matter if anything was carved on it (‘It’s for sentimental value, silly Anya’ )
-A copy of Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart, any format is fine
-A single mint (‘You’ll thank me when you’re done with your garlic filled spaghetti and you have a breath that can kill 682, Lorenzo.’ )
They all heard two things about Clef: he was beyond strange, and he was dangerous. So far, they had seen only the strange side. And it was a source of enjoyment for some and a bother for others.
A jubilant voice broke the silence:
“Everyone, get your dossiers out, it’s reading time!” said Clef, almost snickering with excitement. Everyone reached in their backpacks for the small files. The doctor started to read, but a gust of wind tore the document out of Frank’s burly hands and made it fly in the alley.
“Oh, for goodness sake, Frank!” Clef threw his arms in the air in a rather comical display of frustration. “Oh well, just share it with Lorenzo.” The gigantic black figure grunted, annoyed, and walked to the side of the smaller man, who tilted the page a bit to let the giant see better. “It’s not like an extradimensional entity might find it and discover about the Foundation, m’right? Anyway, as I was saying-”
“The griffin huffed, the crates on his shoulders weighing him down. He hated field research, it was a vacation for the docs and hell on earth for the D-Class. All day, shuffling around and carrying heavy stuff, and hearing the researcher nerding about some ‘artifact with high magical output’ or things like that. It didn’t help that they were in Equestria. In Grifonia or the Dragons Lands they were allowed to do their jobs and then go relax a bit. Here, it wasn’t possible: the pony princesses were always alert and vigilant, and the Foundation couldn’t risk getting discovered. It was like walking on a thin line of solid ground squeezed between endless rows of hot coals: one false step, one bad call, and you get burned. Not that it was his problem, he was just an arm, the brawn, following orders. But even if the majority of the D-Class was renowned for being fairly average if not a bit slow, he realized that this was dangerous: everyone looked like something could swoop down at any moment. What he managed to grab, he couldn’t put together. While he was carrying some crates around, he heard two docs discussing vaguely about ‘another Foundation’ and ‘humans’. He heard of humans before, pony folklore: harmless little midgets that wouldn’t hurt a fly. Certainly not nightmare material. Then, why all the ones that were supposed to know what the hell were they doing covertly setting up a research camp in an alley in Fillydelphia were as tense as a violin string? The tents were set up, the runes at the entrance of the alley were set up, and everyone that walked through them would just enter a small pocket dimension that looked just like the real deal. Really fancy griffonic magic, never understood a thing about it. There were mostly griffins, a couple of wyverns, some dragonlings and the Doctor, the only researcher who actually talked with the Ds even when there wasn’t any order to bark. Or chirp. Or telepathically send. Depends on species. The griffin couldn’t blame them, though: the Foundation standard procedure for covert mission on Equestrian territory was level 3 classified info, and you had to be amnesiac at both arrivals; he didn’t remember how he came to be from his bed to a simple back-alley in Fillydelphia. He lowered the crates of food slowly, careful not to break them. After they landed with a thump, he slumped down and sighed, overwhelmed by the fatigue. Everything was done and ready to go, so no one would come to him and yell him to get back to work. Now it was only a matter of waiting. Waiting goddess knows what. He rested his back against the crates, massaging his sore talons, while looking around, trying to pick up something about what the hell were they doing in the biggest city in Equestria. He was in the residential part of the camp: 4 small dormitories inside white tents were lined up behind him: there was a fence that separated the barracks from the labs and the contact zone. The labs were under black, magically enchanted tent that reflected every known magic and the most powerful and fast of crossbow bolts: nothing could through the thick material. In front of them, the contact zone: field upon field of enchantments, designed to complement each other and hide magical signatures and energetic signatures. Everyone was tending to their own business: his D fellows were just resting after a long day of work, the researchers were running various checks on the instrumentation, and the security was fairly alert and ready to react to whatever would turn down that alley. He immediately recognized the form of the Doctor: he was the only pony in the Foundation (actually, he heard another one joined recently, but he hadn’t seen her or him), so he was always easy to found in any crowd, even though everyone was fairly accustomed to his presence. He usually looked quite jovial and easygoing, but this time it was different: he looked somewhat nervous, slightly pawing, as if he were waiting for something really bad to happen. He kept darting around, and his gaze fixated finally on the exit of the alley, behind the griffin. He stood there for a second, and his eyes, from slits of grey, turned open in a show of surprise, and he teleported out of sight. The griffin bolted up, hoping to find him and ask him what was wrong, when he heard the most unnatural sound he could possibly imagine: it seemed like someone broke both a vase made out of glass and a chunk of ice at the same time, and then mixed everything together and ran it backwards. It came from behind him. He turned around to see the surface of the spatial rune, something that looked like liquid mercury, rip like a common cloth, and show a swirling amount of everchanging colours behind it. The tear got bigger, and with it the noise.The surface, behaving like a fabric, shattered, out of nowhere, like a glass, and his vision was invaded by the most intense light he had ever seen. He closed his eyes, fearing to get blind. After a couple of seconds the light faded away, and he felt a freezing coldness clutching at his talons and a scorching heat investing his muzzle. All he could see when he opened his eyes was Celestia and Luna glaring at him, shining with light and darkness, before something that felt similar to pony magic grabbed him and shoved him into a wall, causing him to pass out. ”
______________________________________________________________________________
Twilight gasped like a little filly. Bright Light laughed at the show, and the mare blushed furiously, before assuming a more serious tone and asking:
“Wait a second, Princess Celestia and Luna discovered you? Actually, why are you telling everything through the perspective of a D-Class?”
He sighed: “I’m setting the mood, geez. Let me find pleasure in the small things, Twilight, it’s not like I have much left.”
“It’s just that it makes it really hard to follow. Weren’t you supposed to be held by the Princess? How come you were there?”
“She freed me two days after you made your discovery. Me and Princess Luna... had kind of a run-in. She knew I wasn’t going to talk anyway, so she let me walk away free. I tried to visit you, but the council told me you were on a mission. I guess they were afraid that If I met you we would be able to put the pieces together. Anyway, back to what happened....”
______________________________________________________________________________
“I was at the camp, when I felt it. It wasn’t clear, at first. More like a background noise, or a really faint smell. Yet, you can always pick it up, when it’s something familiar, it doesn’t matter how feeble it is. And I couldn’t ever forget that particular... It was Luna magic. Slowly but surely, it was all around me. It was feeble, and it was a forgotten feeling that only I remembered. But I knew what was going to happen. I have no idea how they discovered us, and now, it’s not really important. As you know, teleporting out of that alley is hard: you need to concentrate a lot of magic and I just didn’t have the time. So I just teleported myself on a roof. I figured that would be the last place they’d think to look. I was right. I could see how far the thing actually extended from up there. As far as the eye can see. There’s probably no end to it, at least, I didn’t see it. Anyway, I managed to teleport myself on a nearby roof when the spatial rune was ripped. Frightening display of raw magic power, as always. The demonic sisters, that’s how we called them sometimes at the Foundation. They just tore through it like wet paper, when it would have took me at least three hours or so. They were swift, too: as soon as they entered the alley, they incapacitated both the D-classes and the wyverns. Security couldn’t even react. Celestia and Luna just banged them together repeatedly. They left the researchers that weren’t wyverns conscious though, and they started to do what they do best: interrogating. Same spell you were taught. Actually, it was my invention. They discovered everything in a short span of seconds: about the SCP, its properties, the human Foundation we came for, everything. Not that it really matters, but none of the researchers knew you were involved in the discovery, or knew you at all. That’s when things started getting... complicated. Your brother, I believe, entered the alley, accompanied by three Royal Guards. -My brother? He wasn’t hurt or anything, right?- No, he’s fine. I only put him to sleep. -YOU WHAT- Look, I needed a disguise. I’m not a changeling, I can’t turn into an alicorn, an earth pony or a pegasus, I can only change my color and my eyes. He was the only unicorn excluding me, the other guards were all pegasi. They started searching through the instruments and the notes. I waited for him to split from the others, I sneaked up on him, fired up a tranquilizer spell and changed into Shining Armour, captain of the guard. -Hmph- I needed to know why and how Celestia and Luna homed in on us. So I approached them and reported we didn’t find anything. That’s when Celestia answered:
“Not that I wasn’t expecting to find anything really important. I must applaud you, Shining Armour: you were zealous and professional not to disregard those strange movement of magic-resistant containers through Equestria. I wonder why they got so lass about these operations.” She looked fairly happy, I guess she was joyous they busted our bubble. “This discovery, however, it’s both very unsettling and very promising: the legends about humans were already old when Luna and I rose to power... If we are to believe them, and the document the Foundation discovered, we have another organization, only directed by an ancient and wise race. I’ve learned too late not to be hasty when making my judgements” and looked at Luna, busy scooping around field manuals, with a loving smile”, so I’m putting here a standing guard and contact force. I’m not going to alienate the first contact with humans by letting the Foundation greet them first, and-”
“Dearest sister...” Luna interrupted her, and by moving my head to look at her, I realized why. Celestia turned around and asked: “Yes, Lu....na..”
They were standing there, four of them, at the first turn of the alley, just outside the camp. They weren’t at all like what the legends portrayed them. They stood as tall as a young dragonling, slender, and fully erect, not hunched like the Diamond Dogs. They were completely clad in black, and three of them had an helmet of some sort and clutching a strange long and curvy object, but the fourth one was uncovered, so we saw what one of their faces looked like. I couldn’t stand to look at it for too long: it was like a spiral, sucking you in the center. A wide, unsettling smile was on his face, muzzle, whatever. I don’t know. I could see the canines poking out of his upper lip. Two eyes, that stared me down. I turned around my head a bit, and saw Celestia and Luna as much as disconcerted as me. These things were predators, we could all tell. We knew they used a language identical to Equestrian, but it’s so strange, when you hear it in first person. Especially if they have a Manehatten accent. It reached for a strange kind of sheat, he removed a small metal thing and waved at us:
“Uh, ponies. Well, that’s something I never thought I actually- Wait, I did! You owe me fifty bucks, Frank.” The voice was undisputably male. He turned to a figure that stood taller than the others. He answered, but the voice was muffled and distorted by that strange helmet:
“Come on, Doc! I thought it was just a joke!” He said, with a booming volume and a somewhat comical whiny tone.
“AH! A deal’s deal, Lieutenant! Oh, the cinnamon rolls I’ll get with this...” Answered the other male, joyfully, as the bigger man handed him some strange pieces of green paper. Another one spoke: this time it was clear it was a female. The figure was smaller and curvier, even through all that clothing.
“Look at them, aren’t they just adorable? Look, that one has a uniform! That’s so cute!” She reached for the human that had remained silent with an arm and pointed at me. He didn’t answer right away, but after a while he raised an arm, pointed it to Luna and uttered, emotionless.
“The blue one.”
“Yes, what about the blue one?”
“I really like her mane.” He said
The one without the helmet turned his head to Celestia, and said:
“Look, that one has a crown! How cute is that? Ok, who got the tranquilizing darts? We’ll take these adorable little ponies back for testi-” We all jerked in surprise. I was going to say something, but Celestia beat me to it.
“Wait!” The humans stared her, completely silent. She gulped, and then continued: “I’m Princess Celestia, she is Princess Luna, and he is the Captain of the Guard, Shining Armour. We wish you no harm.”
The one without helmet shrugged and answered:
“Uhm... okay?”
If he was surprised, he hid it well. Celestia was going to answer, but Luna just fired up a question:
“Are you humans?”
“Last time I checked, yes.” He answered, the smile slowly creeping back on his face.
“Do you have ponies in your world?” Luna kept asking, eager.
“Damn right we have. They don’t talk, though. And they certainly are not blue.” The humans behind him were starting to check, I think, the strange contraptions they were carrying. Weapons, probably. But the unmasked man looked back, saw them preparing, and waved them to stop.
“Why are you here?” Luna actually sounded excited the more they answered. She’s kind of like you. Really curious. He answered shortly:
“Define ‘here’’” He said, with a hint of amusement in his voice.
Luna turned to Celestia for a moment, with a pleading face. She nodded, and the sister snapped back to the human:
“Equestria, human. We have found your dossier, and this is one end of your ‘SCP’.” He quickly slapped himself in a manner that looked suspiciously similar to a facehoof, turned to the hulking figure behind him, managed to muster the most terrifying gaze I have ever seen and turned back to face us.
“So, you know about us. You know how to get to our world, though?” He asked.
“No.” Luna shook her head.
“Good. I need to know if you have ‘Any kind or manner of aggressive behaviour and/or reason to attack, jeopardize or otherwise threaten the stability, well being, normality or survival of the human race’.” He said, annoyed.
Celestia and Luna snorted lightly.
“We wish you harm, I believe we told you a minute ago.” Answered Celestia with a hint of annoyance in her voice.
“Standard procedure, shit like that. Perfect. Then the feeling is mutual.” He holstered the strange weapon and sighed in relief. For the first time, I spoke up, wanting to ask something that bugged me a bit:
“You don’t seem too surprised to see ponies talking, human.”
He looked at me, and laughed a bit, before answering:
“I’ve seen stranger.”
I had to agree with that. Celestia turned to me and whispered gently:
“Captain, I need you to get a team of unicorn mages and five guards. We’re taking them to Canterlot.” I nodded vigorously and ran for the still broken rune. I dashed through the remains and found myself in Fillydelphia, in front of a simple alley. I wanted to talk to you, Twilight. It took me over a week to reach the Foundation, since I had no evac. When I arrived, no one could tell me what you were doing or where were you. It was starting to get suspicious: first, a busted operation by Celestia and now, I couldn’t find you anywhere. That’s when I thought about reaching the friend you talked me about.”
And he pointed to Kalos, who had remained silent the whole time.
“Doctor Light contacted me just after I returned from a mission. He told me that he had a need to talk with you but couldn’t find you. We went together asking, even tried getting an hearing with the Council, but to no avail. We both agreed there was something... how do your people say it... fishy going on, and Doctor Light remembered about M’bura, your Observer”
“When even your Observer said he didn’t know your whereabouts, I realized that something was REALLY wrong. While Kalos here held him still, I probed his mind. Maybe you’ll find comfort in knowing that he was completely oblivious about you getting discovered. The mission they gave you, it screamed ‘trap’ to me.You, a pony, ex Ponyville resident and former Element of Harmony, sent to do a mission regarding the Element of Honesty? Please. We looked through the files and the registers looking for the funders: Orange wasn’t one of them. Kalos told me more about the Element of Honesty: he had listened to you ranting about her and the other Elements for hours. We put two and together:
You got to Sweet Apple Acres and introduced yourself to the Apple Family. Applejack, being the paranoid lie-detector that she is, ran straight to the postal office to send a telegram to her Uncle Orange. Orange answered fairly quick. Applejack warned the Princesses. They realized you were a Foundation Agent. And... well, you know the rest.
The only thing I don’t understand is... why? Why they just didn’t accept you as a member and dumped everything on me? It was me who recruited you, they could have just laid the blame on me and it would have been the truth! We have bigger problems right now, though. The sisters will look for us. The Foundation will look for us. We are in a clamp, squeezed between two fronts: one wants us dead. The other, I don’t really want to know what Celestia will dish out on us if she manages to capture us.”
The sun started peeking over the horizon, on the black forest. Its light slithered inside the cave, tickling with its warm the three fugitives.
“I heard that basilea Celestia can see through the Sun like a giant eye” Twilight Sparkle giggled a bit, before answering:
“Kalos, that’s not true. It’s just a legend. I saw the Princess raise the Sun personally lots of times, and she can’t do that.” Well, there was that one time... “Maybe.”
Bright Light stretched himself and gestured Twilight to stand up. After an hour or so of just sitting down and listening to the stallion, the nausea was gone. She jumped on her hooves, ready to get out of the cave. He looked at the slumbering forest that just now waking up, before turning to face them:
“So, where are we going? I think around Appleloosa there should be-”
That’s when the Sun dashed into the sky, culminated and stood there for a moment. A sound so powerful their insides were shaking up got over everything. The lament was a scream and everyone in the whole world could hear it: it was pain, and sorrow, and anger, and despair, compressed and released in a booming cacophony. The howl lasted for a time that seemed too long. There shouldn’t be something capable of releasing a sound so great and horrible and sublime for such an amount of time. Yet, it stopped, abruptly, and the silence took over everything. The early birds had stopped singing, and the furious river under the mountain flowed muted. Kalos was the first to talk:
“What in Tartarus was THAT?”
Bright Light managed to regain his composure and answered:
“I don’t know, I’ve never heard anything like that in all my life...”
Twilight shook her head vigorously, trying to erase from her memory that bellow that had infiltrated her entire body, horn to hooves. Her tongue was dry as sand, but she tried to voice her opinion anyway:
“Maybe it was-”
She stopped midsentence, mouth agape. The sky was turning as dark as a starless night, yet the sun was hanging over them like an overgrown lamp. The darkness crept up from the horizon, and everything started to blacken, and get less visible. She never understood the meaning of silence before now: the only thing she could hear was her own heart, beating and pumping blood through her veins. Even with the aster in the sky, the dead shadows, the inert darkness that grasped everything and felt like swimming through air was familiar to the three of them. It was the prime companion of something they all had survived.
“The Training...” whispered Twilight.
“This can’t be...” Kalos said. “It was a controlled environment! The Training was just fancy runes that blocked light, strange noises and psychological tricks created to scare us! It wasn’t real!”
The only blot of clear sky was now covered in black. A familiar light, much similar to dusk, made it’s way and sat on the horizon, making everything just barely visible.
That’s when the sun shattered. Like a glass ball, without any noise, it just exploded in a million pieces of pure light that faded away almost immediately. The quivering voice of Bright Light resonated in the hollow cave:
“He’s back”
30 Frostivus 3455
I never really thought about the concept of family. I always assumed my relationship with Twilight was something different altogether: I always called her a “friend”. They say that you don’t truly understand what it means to lose something until you actually lose it… It’s been two months since Twilight… when you write it, it is so harder… since Twilight died in her sleep. I don’t remember the funeral, I don’t remember the moment when I found her, still and cold, in her bed. The only thing I remember is the void, the emptiness. There’s nothing left for me to do, neither in Ponyvillle nor in Canterlot. I’m staying at Applejack’s for now, until the Princess finds another home for me. She says she and Luna would love to let me stay at the Castle, but the court wouldn’t allow it. I think it’s for the better. The less I see them, the better it is, since they remind me so much of her I can’t stand it. With her friends is better. I had come to see them as my friends as well, so there isn’t much of an association, but since Twilight passed away, they don’t really hang out anymore. Not as they used to do. It’s like Twilight was the cornerstone, the central piece of puzzle that managed to make everything fit together perfectly; without her, they recriminate and lunge at each other’s throat at every occasion. I’ve seen the dark side of everypony, at last. I always thought of them as big perfect sisters that weren’t flawed in the least, each and everyone perfect in its own way. It isn’t true in the least. But I don’t really care anymore. I’ve started writing this diary, after reading in a book that putting things on paper helps coping with them. I’ve also started reading a lot more. She always said I didn’t read nearly enough.
13 Brumarch 3455
Today I had a fight with Applejack. I said some bad things, and she said some bad things too. If it weren’t for Big Mac we would’ve tried to tear our respective faces off. I was sent in Applebloom’s room, where I usually sleep. She tried to console me, but my nodding was just circumstantial. Granny Smith is cold towards me, she thinks that my brooding is a bad influence for Applebloom and that it is keeping AJ always on edge. She’s not completely wrong.
17 Brumarch 3455
Fluttershy came to visit today. She’s the only one I look forward to see, the others now just seem insufferable. She brought some spiced tea, and two gems. I really liked both. We chatted. After an hour or so, she started sniffing. It’s probably because I remind her of- I said it was fine if she wanted to leave, if I was causing any discomfort. She just let a tear fall down her cheek, trotted up to me and hugged me tightly for what felt a long time. After a while I touched her mane. It was as smooth as hers.
1 Termidorus 3455
I went to Rarity, to see if she needed some help around the shop like usual. Her parents doesn’t let Sweetie Belle stay at Rarity’s much more now. Even if she thinks she hides it well, I saw the tear-stained pillows and tore fabrics lying in the back. She seems like her normal, vain self, but she cries every night. It’s probably because she can’t even make a decent dress anymore. It’s more pity than love. She always said I should help out friends
20 Termidorus 3455
She was like a mother, wasn’t she?
22 Termidorus 3455
I miss her. I want her to be here with me.
34 Septembrile 3455
Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie fought in front of everyone at the market. It was for something stupid and trivial, I can’t even remember it. But they had to be separated by me and Big Mac. I read somewhere that dragons go through spurts of growth when they are faced with an hostile environment. I can already stand eye to eye with a normal stallion. Is that what you wanted, Twilight? To keep me happy until you were gone and then leave me to age and its curses? Why am I writing this? You aren’t going to answer, aren’t you?
37 Septembrile 3455
Just came back from a small trip to her parents. I wonder why I accepted the Princess’ invitation. After I got inside, I was showered with unconditional love from… I called them Mum and Dad when I was smaller. It’s probably because I am the only bridge left for them to remember. It’s ok though. Shining Armour and Cadance were there too. Cadance was nice as always, but Armor was absent and concise when addressing me. I think it’s because he blames me for her death. I don’t know why. It’s ok though. Dad started talking about a nice mare she met at the library, a detective for the Equestrian Intelligence actually. He said that she reminded him of Twilight, then covered his mouth with his hoof. But Mum was already going into the kitchen, saying she had to wash the dishes. After that, I went to the Castle to spend the day with Princess Celestia. She wasn’t there, there was a sudden appointment, something about an old lady and an archeologist, didn’t quite catch that. But Luna was there to greet me. She said there wasn’t any need for formality, that I could just call her by name. We spend the day touring the castle, and the night watching movies, something she hadn’t caught on yet. She really liked The Thingie, but I think it’s kind of trashy.
14 Ottumbrine 3455
Heart’s Warming is nearing, it’s just next month. I’m kind of getting into the spirit myself. After all, I made a new friend. Me and Luna sent letters to each other every week since the first time we actually talked. We both like movies, and I’ve started to help her a bit to get into touch with all the modern life. It’s good to finally help someone again.
25 Ottumbrine 3455
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I’m your faithful assistant, not anypony else. I won’t do it again, I’m not going to help her. Please, don’t be mad at me.
1 Januris 3456
On the last day of the year, I apologized to Luna. Maybe I should write this down. Maybe it’s going to help. One day Luna came to see me in Ponyville. I had decided to come back to the library, since Applejack was no longer a feasible option, to take on to the job of the librarian, given that it was me who kind of already did most of the job, before. It was boring, because the citizens in Ponyville are not really interested in the literature, but it was a way to occupy days, and it felt nice to have something to do again. Also, I could read anything I wanted. Anyway, Luna came for a surprise visit after the sun was beyond the horizon. She had brought a movie I had suggested to see, and asked if we could see it together. I accepted, and whipped something up for dinner. While at the table, she said how she was grateful that there was someone like me to help her get by in this everyday, common life that seemed so strange to her, how good it felt to have something like a “faithful assistant.” Hearing those words, I snapped at her. I almost tried to claw her face off. She just blocked me with her magic and looked at me sadly, then teleported away. I can’t keep this up, Twilight. You have to let me go. I have to let you go. Will you forgive me, Twilight? If I move on, will you forgive me? You won’t be mad at me, right? Luna said she understood my reaction and that her choice of words was poor and uncalled for. She’s not fair. I’m one who should be feeling bad. Not her. Then why I felt rightly offended? Why it feels like you are still here with me?
15 Januris 3456
Me and Luna, we did…I’m sorry.
16 Januris 3456
I’m seeing a therapist now. The first session was strange, but it felt good, really good to talk about it. To talk about everything. He just said I could talk about anything, so I started. I told him I was keeping a diary. He complimented me and advised to continue writing it. The girls are also starting to move on. They are all calmer and more collected now. I don’t see them much, since I spent half of my time in Canterlot, but I can see they are a lot friendlier to each other now. To see best friends changing to enemies and then friends again. Strange how things goes.
18 Januris 3456
I sneaked up on them. They tried to make it seem like a Royal Visit, that it was just to check up on the remaining Elements of Harmony. But I followed them to Applejack’s barn, and there I saw her. I saw her, she was there, and there was a flying squid, and another stallion, and I couldn’t move. Now I’m writing, and the Sun is no longer in the sky, even though is about eleven in the morning. There is only this deep dusk that encompass the entire sky, and it’s dark and cold. Luna is coming to pick us up today, she’s bringing us in a safe place.
Twilight, I know you’re there. I know you will come back here. Maybe you already have. Just please, I just want to know this. Why?
The small, charred notebook fell down her grip, into the dusty ground. The oak was practically split open, and she could see and feel the dark, starless sky above her. A familiar buzz and hum got behind her, and a familiar sensation of softness tingled her shoulder.
“Twilight? Are you done? We have to move, Bright Light said the Ukulele is nearby” a friendly and soothing voice ringed in her head
She sighed and answered slowly, without looking at the wyvern.
“Go ahead, Kalos. I’m coming right away.” The wyvern knew better than to insist, and left the lavender mare alone with her thoughts.
More than a single, solitary tear left her eyes, as she looked one last time at her home and at that burnt book lying in the dirty floor that had seen so many strange and happy and wonderful days.
“I wish I knew, Spike.”
It's not the end of the world
The small lamp hanging from the ceiling swung back and forward, as the powerful steps above them shook the ground to its very core. They were all huddled up in front of a modest fire, enthralled by the dancing, care free flames. Someone lowered a hoof on her shoulder and whispered in her ear:
She rose up, eliciting glances and nervous gazes, and even some quiet gasps of surprise: everyone was so absorbed in his or her pain that even the smallest distraction in their deaf, mute little world of brooding was enough to startle them greatly. She looked at the mass of terrified, nervous ponies in front of her, her subjects, her responsibility, and their Princess was not going to let them down. She pressed forward, and stopped in front of the flickering fire, her unyielding determination radiating and making everyone in the small, cramped room seemingly obvious about everything apart from her very words:
“Loyal subjects, I know you all are scared and worried about your family and friends, but I ask to stay vigil, sharp, and hear my words properly, because what I am about to say to you, ‘tis the truth most unpleasant.
She was interrupted by a big, nervous looking stallion that darted up and yelled stuttering:
“Enough with this! Where is Princess Celestia? We want to talk to her!”
Something in her eyes was put down, for just a moment, and the fiery flames that reflected in her pupils seemed to dim for a moment, but she lowered her gaze to stare at the blaze and answered slowly.
“Our sister… Your princess of sun… is no longer with us. Princess Celestia is dead.”
Loud gasps were heard, followed by a deafening silence. Some ponies were starting to sob and sniffle, and that was the majority; but here and there, there were some eyeing her with suspicion and anger, something she had taken into account.
“I know it’s a lot to take in, but you need to calm down and-“
“It was you, isn’t it!?!” A mare with pinpricked eyes and a manic smile got up and pointed a hoof at her “And now you’re going to kill us too”
Voices full of despair and malice started to rise up and filled the room with a cacophony of badly directed hatred:
“I knew she couldn’t be trusted!”
“We would have been better off with her petrified!”
“You, it’s all your fault!”
“We want Princess Celestia back!”
“There’s no way you could have killed her! Tell us where she is!”
“Why you had to live?!”
The flames were calmed down as an ominous shadow built up from behind her, and crept on the walls. The sounds were muffled by an oppressive presence that no one could see but anyone could feel weighing on their very souls like pure lead. Her unwieldy, powerful gaze slowly was brought up to their eye levels, and all the yells and screams were silenced. Every pony in the room held his breath waiting for words to come out of her lips. And out they came, hard and unmovable like stone:
“Enough. It wasn’t me who killed my sister. I know you all doubt about me, about my redemption, and I can’t blame for that. You had your princess, your loving sun. I’m just a nuisance, right? But tell, what I could have possibly gained from all of this? My sister is dead, the kingdom is in shambles, my subjects are dying by the thousands, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Even the celestial bodies are out of my grasp.”
At the end of sentence, loud gasps and whispers could be throughout the room, as the full realization of a misdirected and despair driven outburst grasped many of those who had stood up and accused her of treachery, murder, conspiracy or worse. Fear and terror had blinded them, and many slumped back on the ground to look at the wearily dancing flames.
“However, not all hope is lost. Out there you won’t find the gentle caress of the sun or the understating embrace of the moon, just a never ending dusk that won’t ever go away; that is, unless we do something about it! Celestia is… no longer here, and so the world has been put on “standby”, for someone to claim her role of Regent of Sun.”
A beautiful looking mare who had been silent until that moment, huddling up with a small foal, whispered something in her ear. rose up and walked up to her, with a determined expression in her eyes: the alicorn could see that she terror had been subsided by a sheer will to make things better:
“Princess, I understand this dreadful situation it’s a fruit of vacancy of power, but why when you were… exiled, this didn’t happen?”
She smiled at the smart rebuttal and answered quickly:
“It’s simple: I wasn’t dead, my power over the moon was simply borrowed by Celestia for a thousand years. Now that she’s gone, her law of regency is permanently lost, and until someone with the same skills and destiny is found, the world will not allow the celestial bodies to be commanded, even by me.”
The mare seemed unsatisfied with the answer, and pressed forward with another issue:
“The world? What does that even mean, with all due respect…”
Again, a legitimate doubt she had to quell, lest she wanted to maintain the feeble looking speck of trust she had gained with her show of sincerity.
“Akasha, the root of the world. I take it you didn’t read much Starswirl, miss…”
She seemed surprised to be asked her name, but she answered nonetheless.
“Rarity, your highness.”
The alicorn frowned lightly; to think she could forget the face and the name of one of her saviours, unbecoming to say the least.
“I’m quite sorry to have forgot the name of the Elements, Rarity. Also, you can drop the titles, I’m no longer the Princess of the Moon. The root of the world, Akasha, is the will of everything that has ever, or will, exists. It is the will of ponykind, of the griffons, of the wyverns, of everything that lives and everything that doesn’t. It seems rather poetic, but in reality, it is just the collective changes that our unconscious minds cause on the cape of magic that the planet is submerged in. As you probably know, everything is affected by magic, even rocks and plants can change the course of thamaturgic energy, yet they cannot actively redirect it as they want, it’s a mechanical process. Akasha is just the unconscious desires and natural disturbances that change all the magic in this world. Usually, it is content with maintaining the status quo, but when great disturbances appear, it feels the need to freeze everything until a solution is found, and that is something we can’t change.”
This explanation seemed to take out a bit of determination out of the mare’s eyes, but she vigorously shook her head, like she wanted to shake off bad, lazy thoughts about waiting for starving and sickly death, and asked with more vigor:
“Surely that must be something we can do!”
She smiled warmly at her resolve, and her display of decisiveness seemingly made some of the ponies who up till then had apathetically watched the walls in silence interested in their fate again:
“Yes, there is something we can do. However, it won’t be easy nor simple. I ask all of you to place my trust in me, not because I am an alicorn, or a princess. I ask you to trust me because I care for all of you deeply, and centuries of experience will greatly aid us in what it’s to come. What we will face will test our mettle and our hearts to the fullest, and it will be for many of us, the first taste of hardship you ever faced. Yet, I won’t be lying when I say this: I think that each and everyone of you, and all the ponies still out there have the strength necessary to face this, together or alone. Some may stray, some may falter, but in the end, we will come out on top. And if we fail on the road to salvation, we will no one to blame but ourselves, and that is the greatest achievement life can give.”
As the massive claw swept forward, the air whistled and screamed for the sheer force that this piece of meat was able to transmit to the body unfortunate enough to cross its path: it was Shining Armor’s supreme skill that allowed him and the two guards who were with him to dodge it with a well placed telekinetic push: the razor sharp nails, as big as his entire body, fell into the hard stone rubble of the would be Castle of Canterlot. The claw was stuck in the stone, and they weren’t going to take any chances. Shining Armor teleported himself on the head, at least the part of the body that actually had a mouth on it, grabbed what seemed to be its neck with a firm grip of telekinesis, and twisted it repeatedly, while the other two guards held the other arm in place with thaumaturgic binds. The creature shrieked and fell limply on the ground, shaking it like an earthquake and making their ears tingle with pain. One of the beast was slain. Yet, as the three looked over the perimeter of wood bards, stone blocks and repulsive magic, they saw an entire army of the same beasts roaming wildly in the entire plain in front of Canterlot, which fortunately was almost completely devoid of civilization. Yet, just four hundred meters above and ten kilometers in front of them laid the almost completely destroyed Canterlot, still hanging desperately from the cliff of the Lone Mountain. The once illustrious and magnificent was now a collection of run down buildings, straight up ruins and bonfires that were needed to see clearly in the thick darkness of the constant twilight. There was a way inside the city, the flat side of the mountain where there were roads and railroads leading up to the city walls: the Royal Guard had to destroy them, to avoid the risk of getting what was left of the city swarmed by titanic monsters.
They were so unnerving and weird to look at: they had a grey, smooth skin with no fur, and walked on two short, stubby legs, while relying on two strong, clawed arms to balance themselves. There was no difference in the material that composed the majority of their body and the nails, it seemed like they were just a smooth hulking piece of grey matter. The head was big and rotund, with no eyes, nose, or ears to speak, just a gigantic mouth that opened to eat everything living that managed to fall within their grasp. What was strange is how fast and agile they were despite the fact that they seemed to have no visible way of feeling anything around them.
That, and the fact that they stood over 15 meters tall. How this one had managed to sneak inside the city perimeter, Shining Armor didn’t know, but he was going to find it out. He stood on the still strong perimeter, kept alive by magic, thanks to the major unicorn population left in the city. Behind him, there were more than two thousand survivors, scared and really nervous. The food was enough for at least two month, but what then? Maybe they could just lure one monster at a time near the walls and kill it easily, until they could move safely in the plains. But the it looked like the sun wasn’t coming out any time soon, and neither the moon, and he had to account for the worst case scenario: they had several scientists, maybe they could devise a way to magically grow crops in this dim, orangey light that permeated everything and made him sick to the heart. But before that, he needed to meet up with Princess Luna: after what happened there was much need-
A noise perked his ears up, as he and his guards looked down at the road that led into the city, now a mess cluttered with stone and gigantic crevices torn up by powerful telekinetic magic. There’s no way a creature that big would have been able to climb all the way up there, but they stood alert and carefully moved near the edge to see what caused the noise.
They saw four familiar figures climbing their way up on a big chunk of rock that stood right over a crevice that separated the road from the small clearing in front of the city doors. They all jumped on the other side safely and started to look around carefully. When one of them saw Shining Armor looking at them from the walls, he waved at them, smiled, and gestured them to come down.
“Sir, should we call for backups?” Asked one of the unicorn guards.
Shining Armor waved them back and answered without even looking at the stallion. “No, there’s no need to. Actually, this might be the stroke of luck we needed. Follow me.”
He teleported down, and so did the guards, right in front of the imposing, biped creatures. One of them, the only that didn’t have an helmet on its head, smiled at the Captain of the Guard and offered him a fist, which the stallion bumped happily with his hoof.
“Clef, goddesses, I am so happy to see you! Where were you?” Shining Armor asked, elated beyond words that he managed to recover such a capable team of warriors.
Clef kept his sardonic smile, gave the stallion a pat on the shoulder and knelt down to face him eye level.
“Shiny, you wouldn’t believe what happened to us after…. Well, you know… Celestia and all…”
The mention of her princess darkened Shining’s expression a bit, but he was still ecstatic to see a friendly face, finally.
“You’ll tell me everything after we get you to safety” Said the stallion, and gestured them to follow him.
“Yeah sure. Just wondering, you three all the ones around here?” Clef asked curiously.
“Yes, the remaining guards are busy protecting the survivors and helping with the shelters. But now that you’re here, we can finally go on the offensive with these monsters” Answered Armor, and smiled back at the human.
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” Answered Clef, and gestured with his head his comrades to follow them
Shining Armor turned back to show them the entrance, only to hear two deafening booms, and see his two fellow guards drop to the ground with a thud and a hole spewing forth blood in both their heads.
He turned around again, only to feel another loud noise that stunned him, and a striking and horrible sensation of pain striking him into his stomach.
He looked down to see a giant, gaping wound that had just formed a crimson stain on his pristine white coat. In front of him stood Clef, with his strange weapon drawn, still smoking from the shots, and that sardonic smile still adorning his face.
The stallion staggered and felt his hindlegs swimming into the void: he had walked up to the cliff near the walls, and was now clinging with his forelegs on the edge, just barely keeping himself alive. The wound on his stomach was sending waves after waves of pure, unbearable pain that made every second of clinging a living hell. He only managed to utter a few words.
“How… I had...kinetic field”
“Oh, that? Nothing that can’t be resolved with a good ol’ dose of 148, or Telekill Alloy. Punch right through you pesky psychics. You know, back on Earth, my favorite movie wasn’t something cerebral or even for adult. It was The Lion King, a flick for children. You know, there was this one scene-“
He knelt down to the struggling Shining Armor, and grabbed his forehooves in his hands.
“When the bad guy is holding the protagonist over a fiery pit, full of flames and embers, and reveals him the most shocking revelation of the entire story-“
He neared the stallion’s face, and he could feel his gentle breath caressing his left ear as he whispered those words:
“I killed Celestia.”
Author's Note
Well, I'm thinking maybe it's best to release, smaller, quicker chapters instead of really long ones. Whatcha think?
“It may be our only chance to set things right. The only way this wounded world is going back to its natural beauty.” Luna lowered her hoof on the dancing flames, and in the general wonder, picked up a small trail of ember blaze. It coiled in the dark, humid air of the shelter, until it took a shape that was deeply unnatural for a simple flame: a stable and fiery representation of a tower. A tower all the ponies had seen at one point or the other in the past months.
“We need to reach the Crystal Kingdom and find the Crystal Heart. Everypony, think of it as a metaphorical tuning fork for Akasha: its magical power is great, so fine adjustments to its matrix will be able to affect all ponykind. With the right spell, we can reveal the pony with the special talent we need: guiding the Sun across the sky.”
The strange flame dissipated with a loud snap, and everyone fell silent for a moment. Then a cacophony of voices rose up and filled the small, cramped room. She couldn’t make up what everyone was saying, but it warmed her heart to see that, in a way she didn’t quite understand yet, shook them out of apathy and despair. She walked between the groups of discussing ponies, nodding slowly and taking in every bit of apology, accusation, critic or complaint they directed at her. She noticed one small group was staring silently between themselves instead of talking. In the dim light she couldn’t really make up their faces, but she heard abruptly a small sigh and stopped behind a column to listen in. It wasn’t really fit for a princess to hear out on private conversations but, again, there wasn’t an Equestrian Kingdom anymore. As soon as she listened more closely, she recognized familiars voices, the voices that whispered to her when she was still Nightmare Moon. She remembered how the Elements of Harmony were the last to present to the Town Hall for evacuation, making sure everyone was safe before finally let themselves be teleported by Luna with the others to a safe location only known to her. But in the haste and the anxiousness for all of her subjects, she had relegated them to the background of her mind.
“I say that wasn’t really her. We all saw her girls! She was in the casket, we buried her, we cried for weeks and then we moved on! The real Twilight would never make us believe something so….”
“Dear, we can’t really exclude this from the realm of the possibility. The Princess personally removed every possible enchantment from whoever that mare was, and what was left was Twilight! You do remember how she could be obsessive, at times, right?”
“But to leave us, Rare? And make us believe she was pushing daisies? Ah was the first to say that Twi might have been a lil bit OCD about them books of her, but this? Ah think-“
It seemed such a minor issue to Luna now, but that showed just how much their friendship went: even in the face of the apocalypse, it seemed to them that it was more important to try to understand this mystery.
“Princ- errr… Luna. Didn’t see you there!” Said Rainbow Dash hesitantly.
“It’s quite alright. I picked up on your conversation, and decided it was for the best to dispel any doubts you might have” Their smiles disappeared and made place to a serious nod, an invite to continue. “What you saw back in that barn… It was indeed your friend, Twilight Sparkle. Her magic signature, the one that led all of you with the Elements… I could never forget it.” She looked down for a second, apparently lost in her thoughts. “You just can’t imitate that kind of magic.”
Some ears drooped, and some eyes fell to the floor. Rarity and Applejack just shook their heads and sighed, while Rainbow Dash huffed indignantly and almost barked to the Princess:
“But why would she do that? If that mare was Twilight, why she decided to leave us, to fake her death? That’s totally uncool! That’s not cool at all. Just… just not cool, Twi.” Her angry eyes darted around the room before setting ultimately on the dusty floor in front of her.
Luna took a step forward and her left wing moved ever so lightly to the distraught mare, but ultimately it settled still at her own side again. In her eyes still danced the flickering flames of the dim fire.
“I wish I could say something to help you… Maybe it’s best if I leave you to your own thoughts.” She said, turned around and walked away.
Luna walked between the aisles of distressed, talking ponies, that yelled at each other, discussed animatedly and waved around to prove their points. She reached the end of the room, and moved the old wooden wall with her magic, careful not to produce any startling, creaking sound. The door closed behind her, and the faint light of the bonfire and the animated chatter left place to darkness and muffled sounds.
Her eyes didn’t even need to adapt to dark, as it was her rightful domain, and she was through them like in the clearest summer day. So she had no trouble spotting the hunched figure at the end of hall, rummaging through some old books that were left in the dungeons. She walked slowly behind it, her hooves sounding softly against the stone floor. As soon as she was just a hoofstep away from the bipedal outline, she asked with a playful tone.
“Have thou found what thou were looking for, sir dragon?”
The dark purple shape didn’t turn around, and kept looking through the old books. A bunch of seconds passed before Luna heard an answer from a deep voice filled with apparent seriousness, but that actually barely contained laughter.
“I thought you had finally stopped with the Shakesneigh.”
“Thou surely jest! We hath been most modern in our way of speech!” She waved a dismissive hoof at the silhouette.
He turned, and faced her with an expression so intense in its annoyance that Luna actually thought to have angered him. But his gaze was immediately softened by a small chuckle that spread to the former princess.
“So, you told them about the Heart, right? How did they take it?” The dragon asked softly.
“Well, at least they are a discussing it, that’s a start. I had a small chat with the Elements..”
Spike nodded and turned back, giving half of his attention to the ancient looking books stacked in front of him. He went through them rapidly, the darkness not hindering his reptilian eyes, designed to see in the thick shadows of moist caves.
“About what?” He asked curiously.
Luna looked nervously to her side, searching for something to say, but her gaze was only met with dark cobblestone walls. The dragon stopped in the middle of an old tome, and asked in a calm and collected voice, without even turning around to face her.
“It was about Twilight, wasn’t it? They weren’t sure it was actually her.”
The mare moved an hesitant hoof to his shoulder, but before she could him, he stood up, turned around and continued, looking at her with eyes that made a hole through her skull.
“I’m not like them, Luna. I’ve known Twilight all my life. The moment I saw her in that barn, I knew it was her, and not some clone. No doubts about it.”
He kept staring at her for a moment, then suddenly turned around and knelt down on the dusty volumes, picked another one up and started going through the pages quickly.
“I have to find some kind of map of the Kingdom, even if we’re going to follow the train tracks.”
The mare, still surprised by the sudden outburst, managed to utter a single question, in a voice so small and soft one could doubt it came from such a large and majestic creature:
“Aren’t you…angry?”
He didn’t turn around to answer her.
“I can be angry when it’s all over.”
“Duck!” The stallion whispered at them. Kalos flattened his body as much as he could and Twilight Sparkle dived quickly behind a big chunk of rubble. The towering mass of flesh lazily moved its steps in front of them, sniffed the air a bit, then moved on. They waited for half a minute before coming out of their hidings, with carefully balanced steps. One loud noise could attract the Walker again. In front of them, just scorched ruins and battered, rundown buildings voided of life. It should have been summer, but there wasn’t a single cricket screeching, the temperature was almost polar, and there wasn’t a sun in the sky, just an endless plain of brown clouds and a dim, sickly light that encompassed everything. They looked around one more time, to make sure there wasn’t anything watching them, and Bright Light teleported them in the building across the street, the only one nearby that could still be considered somewhat structurally safe. Twilight conjured a big chunk of wood and placed it, careful not to make any sound, on the opened doorway that didn’t have a door anymore. She looked around: there were two rows of seats, a counter and a scratched, almost invisible insignia above it that said:
Neighton Postal Office
Kalos was not to be seen: he had probably went ahead to scout the building, making sure there was nothing inside, and Bright Light was already intent on setting up a small perimeter inside the lobby, as organizing up sleep turns was not enough to satiate his justified paranoia. Walkers were parading magic insulators, that runes, unicorn magic and even wyvern manipulation couldn’t touch. So, if you fashioned magic in form of a rudimental circuit and left it open, when one of those things stepped over the perimeter, the magic flow would stop, something that was noticeable by a unicorn. Still, it was just a way to make sure not to get your guard lowered. He was kneeling down, with his horn glowing, whispering incantations and formulas the mare couldn’t get understand. It was night time according to their respective biological clocks, so they had decided to just stop the march and sleep it off for a while, an activity rendered kind of hard by the lumbering monstrosities walking about everywhere the eye could see. They had just appeared out of nowhere, and they seemed invulnerable to magic but vulnerable as much as the next faceless giant to mundane damage inflicted by weapons. It was still hard to bring such a big creature down, even if, watched in the distance it seemed relatively peaceful. But they all had seen what a Walker could really do. It had happened shortly after the sun disappeared from the sky: they had reached the nearest town, Sacramare, and there weren’t ponies in the street. Buildings were already destroyed in large part, probably by the Walkers. Still, while the group wandered on the deserted Main Street, they spotted a mare trotting warily between the aisles of rubble. Before they could yell at her, she slammed into a big, smooth grey column, a Walker’s leg. The beast turned around with a speed that was almost impossible for such a size, scooped the screaming, kicking mare with its hand and bit her head off cleanly. Then, he tossed the lifeless body with nonchalance and kept on going. It had been a week since that moment. A week of slowly drifting from city to city, carving a way through ruins, making sure not to get spotted and generally sleeping with an eye or electric receptor open.
But that wasn’t the thing that was actually scaring or unnerving Twilight Sparkle. She should have been terrified witless, but the more time passed, the more she thought about surreal this situation was, even for a Foundation agent. Bright Light hadn’t really said what he meant by that “He’s back” he uttered when they all saw the sun shatter, and every time Kalos or Twilight called him out on him he changed topic quickly. She got behind the counter, and opened silently a door that led into the inner offices. Inside, there were two rows of five desks, and Kalos going through various papers with a tentacle. He felt her presence and greeted her amiably:
“Oh, Twilight. I was just looking through these documents to find something that could be useful for us…”
One advantage of speaking with a Wyvern is that you don’t even have to open your mouth: everything is done through the mind:
“Kalos, we need to talk.”
His pattern of luminescence darkened for a bit before he answered:
“Ok, about what?”
“About Bright Light, about all of this. Doesn’t it seem suspicious to you that he keeps dodging questions about what he said? Who’s back? And why? And this whole situation… It seems off, I don’t how to explain it.”
The giant squid hovered briefly up and down, the Wyvern equivalent of a nod.
“Yes, it is strange. We haven’t met a single living soul apart from that poor mare a week ago and those monstrosities. And even though building are often destroyed, we always seem to find enough food and water to keep going for another day or so.”
“Now that you mention it, we always have enough to just move on to the next city.”
“I don’t know Twilight, but something is strange around here. When I think about that mare, it seems like there’s only a logical conclusion.”
“What? I mean, she bumped into the Walker and then…”
“No, it’s different. I mean, it could have just been an unfortunate accident, and maybe lots of ponies are dead or in hiding. But we would have seen the bodies by now, if they were killed. We saw how the Walkers don’t really eat things whole. And even if they did, we would have stumbled across another accident, or even an attack on those creatures. So, if we cross the “killed” option, they must be in hiding. Yet you, a personal student of the Princess and sister of the Captain of the Guard don’t know about any possible shelter made for this kind of situation. So where did everyone go?”
Twilight nodded in understanding. What Kalos said did make sense.
“So there’s something wrong with the general populace here. But how about that mare? We saw her, even if I wish I hadn’t…”
“I think I have an answer for that. If she wasn’t hiding or trying to kill that thing, she was sure pretty adamant on going through that rubble face first into a Walker. No hesitation, no fear, no confusion. And everything conveniently happened just in time for us to see it. Twilight, that wasn’t a coincidence. I think that mare was-“
Tiles started piling up in her mind, and as Kalos drew closer to the conclusion of the argument, the absurdity of it all suddenly made sense to her:
“A warning…”
“Exactly. A way of saying ‘stay away from these creatures’.”
“But from whom?”
“I don’t know and I don’t like it. I suggest keeping your guard up for the time being. We’re already near the Badlands, where Bright Light said we would find the key to get to Akasha and find the new Regent of the Sun. We see what we have there, and then we decide what to do-“
A familiar if unwelcome voice reached from the lobby.
“What are you guys doing in there? I finished setting up the alarming spell, we can whip up a fire or something, it’s freezing in here!”
The wyvern and the unicorn shared a look of doubt before going back into the lobby. Bright Light was standing in the middle, smiling at them. As they neared him, he asked them eagerly:
“About the sleep turns tonight, I thought maybe I could-“
Twilight interrupted him by putting a hoof on his mouth.
“Don’t worry Light. Tonight it’s me and Kalos who will stand guard.”
He looked at them puzzled, since it was unusual to offer to spend half your sleep cycle awake and jumpy, but just shook his head, turned around and started levitating small pieces of wood in the center of the room.
“It’s your funeral.”
A freezing desert of dirt, sand and dust. It was strange how even with the cold temperature, there wasn’t any snow coming from the infinite cover of dark clouds above. Sometimes a serpentine lightning slithered through the black haze, and Twilight and Kalos waited for the thunder to follow, but they were met with only an eerie silence. She remembered this place, as they were near the Buffalo stomping grounds. Yet, no one was to be seen: even Appleloosa, looming in the distance, was still and lifeless. As they reached a big, solitary boulder standing in the middle of nothing, Bright Light stopped, gave the rock three quick knocks and two slow, and waited. After a bunch of seconds, the sound of old gears and rusty mechanism finally moving after who knows how much time filled the dead air. It was a pleasant change. They always marched in complete silence to avoid detection, even when there were no Walkers to be seen, and any sound, any noise at all was a welcomed friend. The boulder moved to the right on invisible tracks, revealing a pit that fell into darkness after a few meters. The stallion closed his eyes, his horn was enveloped with a grey aura and a small ball of light appeared in front of him: it flickered slightly, like a consumed light bulb. The ball descended in to the pit, and Twilight could see now that it wasn’t just a hole in the ground, but something dug deliberately in a square shape and covered with what now were just rusty iron plates. The orb fell for 20 meters before finally showing them what could be called a floor. Bright Light didn’t wait for questions and just teleported straight to the bottom.
“I don’t like this.”
“Just keep your cool Twilight. Don’t act suspiciously.”
The stallion looked at them with his penetrating grey eyes, clearly waiting for them. Twilight just teleported at his side, while Kalos hovered into the pit until he reached the bottom. Bright Light nodded slightly and proceeded forward, following the orb closely. The corridor was covered with the same iron plates as the pit, and their hooves clicked loudly against them, somehow making the mare nervous. Kalos stood behind her, never leaving his attention from the stallion marching in front of them. The atmosphere was so tense that the two almost jumped in surprise when Bright Light turned around and uttered these few words:
“We’re here.” He stopped, and the two friends saw behind a rusty door. Above it, she couldn’t make out exactly what was written, but it seemed a number, something with two five, but it was too hard to read the rest. 155? No, it wasn’t here in the Badlands. Now that she thought about it, she didn’t remember this particular containment facility.
“You’re wondering why I brought you here. Why, for a week, I avoided your questions about the object that lies behind this door. The thing is, those were questions I couldn’t answer, and now you’ll see way.”
The handle was encased in a grey aura and the door opened with a weary creak. The orb quickly moved inside the small room that was in front of them, illuminating a small pedestal on which a completely mundane object lied. There wasn’t anything particularly threatening about that thing, and even with the sharp instinct for “seems innocuous but it will rip your eyes out” SCPs the agents develop for their job, it seemed completely and utterly normal. Bright Light grabbed it with his magic and moved it closer to them, so that they could see it better.
Twilight broke the silence and asked:
“What is that thing?”
The stallion smiled a bit and answered:
“This is the key to open Akasha and turn everything back to normal.”
A sharp, clacking noise startled both the mare and the wyvern, as they turned around to see that a small pebble had fell into the pit. They turned back to face Bright Light and she asked curiously:
“Were you talking about something? And what is that thing?”
The stallion groaned.
“This is going to take a while.”
Sometimes regret makes a great pet
The old hatch creaked and opened slowly, as someone was careful enough not to drop it on the barren soil. A cloud of dust flew through the freezing air, as first a majestic blue alicorn and then a small, huddled up group of ponies slowly and somewhat clumsily got out of it. They looked in front of them: a deserted plain filled with sickly and dried grass and a stormy yet eerily silent sky above them. Clouds and lightning coiled around each other like monstrous snakes of gigantic proportions, a show of unnatural strength that was mesmerizing and painful to see. Through the knee high grass ran a series of wore down train tracks that seemed to stretch on indefinitely. Someone decided to turn around and see one last time what they were leaving behind: some houses, farms in the distance, and fields that once were green but now were just plains full of dullness. They all felt small and insignificant under the uncaring skies above, where turmoil and conflict tore the clouds apart. Even the simple act of hovering in the air was seen as an act of unforgivable hubris. The last one to come out was a relatively small dragon who could see the alicorn of the night eye to eye; he slowly closed the hatch, making sure not to make unnecessary noise.
“My little ponies” said Luna, with care and concern clearly sincere in her voice. “what awaits us is a long and perilous journey. It shan’t be easy, and maybe before the end we’ll have to do things we thought we couldn’t do, not in a million years. We all have suffered many a grave losses already. But if we pull this together, we can win back our Equestria from these monsters, and go forward towards a brighter future. I won’t ask you to give me your loyalty. What I want from you is your trust. Please trust me. That’s all I ask. I’ve seen one too many times what mistrust can do to us, to those we love. I thought your ancestors didn’t care about me, didn’t trust me with the kingdom. That everything was done thanks to Celestia. I committed a mistake. And as long as I live there won’t be a day when I won’t think about all the pain and the suffering I have caused because I didn’t trust the ponies I was sworn to protect. No more. No… more. It’s ending now. I swear that I will bring you back the peaceful world you deserve, even if it means personally dragging each and everyone one of you through pain and sufferings. I won’t allow it, and if you think you can give up halfway through and die on me, you are all gravely mistaken!”
Silence settled once more as the ponies huddled up in a circle around her. They whispered to each other hastily for a moment, then a mare stepped forward, touched her bosom and said with an hesitant but hopeful tone:
“We trust you, Princess Luna”
The alicorn looked down at that mare, and in her eyes she could see real, sincere trust, something she had yearned and asked for such a long time she couldn’t even remember the first time she had wanted to see that beautiful look. Her mouth settled into a soft smile and she answered.
“Thank you.” She almost turned around and saw Ponyville and beyond it Canterlot in the corner of her eye. Her pupil didn’t move from that sight and she didn’t blink, so much it hurt after a while. She forced herself to turn her head completely and watched intensely the train tracks, long snakes of metal that seemed to stretch as far as she could see. A slight breeze came from nowhere, caressing her fur and making her shiver. She breathed slowly one last time before setting one hoof over the other, and another one, and another one. The other ponies watched her for a moment, then quickly scampered and started following their former princess, now leader and guide, through the vast plains of nothingness and dried grass, animating them with whispered and contained chatter. The pure and white snow covered mountains that marked the arrival of every visitor of the Crystal Empire were nowhere to be seen yet.
Just a small dragon stood behind them, watching them reach slowly but surely the train tracks. He found a burned stump of tree and sat on it, making sure not to completely lose sight of them. He gazed at Ponyville, and his eyes rested upon an old oak tree. He breathed a small sliver of green, iridescent flame that danced in the cool air before disappearing completely. He sat there for a while, before reaching up and running to the others, a small speck of purple and green under the darkly streaked and leaden heavens above.
Right after the sun quietly exploded out of the sky, the best definition that could describe the streets of Ponyville was just “panic”. Ponies were just running into the streets, looking to reach their loved ones, a figure of authority or just someone they thought could explain them what happened and why the sun was no longer in the sky. Inside the Golden Oak Public Library, Spike was busy making sure no one got inside as he tried to get a sense out of what he just saw that night. Twilight… her Twilight was alive, of that there was no doubt. Even if it seemed to contradict every possible thing he knew about death, funerals, coffins and bodies, she had been there, in that barn. Her scent, the slightly fidgeting legs when she felt she was the center of attention, all the details he had been able to pick up in the years of asking to sleep with her after he had a really bad dream were there.
From the look of surprise he saw on Luna, the Princess and the others’ faces, he understood that they weren’t prepared to find her under those enchantments, so they didn’t try to keep this from him. As for those things about the Society, Foundation, whatever, he didn’t care much. There was just this one question booming inside his head…
His ears were pierced by the most awful sound he had ever listened to, and he stumbled from his chair. He quickly got up and ran to the window, to see what happened. It had felt like a really close explosion and a death scream all mixed up together and blasted through a train engine. He reached the window just in time to see the sun slowly making its way to the bottom of the sky, before exploding like a glass ball, without making any kind of sound. The shards fell down over the horizon, like sparks of a firework, and the whole world went dark. He closed the curtains and dashed out of the door, looking for some kind of clue of what had just happened and-
The dream-like vision faded from her eyes as quickly as it had formed. Tactile mnemonic spells were tricky to land and even harder to maintain. Ponies impressed their lives all around them, like rain slowly eroding a pebble, and for certain mages it was possible to tap into objects and read them like a record, to show what happened around them. Impressions, thoughts, desires were like indentations on malleable vinyl, yet they could only show what had happened close to them. The small piece of wood Twilight had gotten from the library was not enough to see the rest. She rested her back against the cool wall, and shivered a bit; above was raging a sand storm of titanic proportions. Winds blew and screamed and pillars of dust raged across the desert, carried by the streams. The furious weather above was muffled by the closed hatch, but the grains scratching and mauling at the metal like a wounded beast could still be audible. She bent her neck a bit to look at the room down the corridor: Bright Light was enchanting the knowledge of that thing into Kalos’ mind. His face was scrunched in concentration as his horn glowed and pulsed rapidly. A wyvern mind work in different ways, so adapting a mnemonic spell to Kalos was difficult. And even if it was difficult to imagine the bookish, if somewhat slick stallion kicking flanks left and right, he had been an agent too, even if Twilight hadn’t actually asked anything about those times. So the three of them were more used to make people forget about stuff rather than helping them remember. Nonetheless, this thing she wanted to remember.
055.
A Keter she had never heard of before. After Bright Light had explained it to them, she was kind of grateful for it. Now that she had the knowledge, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. On one hand, it seemed pretty innocuous, even if it had a somewhat annoying anti-memetic property. But as the reality of it all suddenly pressed on her, like an epiphany, she realized they could as well be walking with a humorless, homicidal Discord, for all it mattered.
An object you’d forget about it as soon as you looked away. Who knew what was it capable of? Maybe the moment you saw it you would be completely and utterly horrified, overwhelmed by an unspeakable eldritch horror that seemed to stretch through time and space, or maybe it was just a simple teapot. The unnerving thing was not knowing it. Not knowing what thing could do, or even what it was. And of course, there was the matter of who just wrote the dossier, and or just who found the SCP in the first place. Bright Light told them that he couldn’t be sure that the time he remembered he read the dossier for the first time was actually the first. Maybe he had been reading it all mornings for the past ten years. He just thought that he couldn’t let the knowledge of this slip away, and even if he couldn’t actually remember anything about the thing, even the dossier, there was still a chance to get around it. He engraved the dossier with a spell in his subconscious, making sure it refreshed the knowledge, like showing a photograph, thousands of time per seconds, much faster than the actual electrical impulse running through his brain. So, any thought he could formulate about 055 would always start and finish with him knowing about it. And that thing he had just done to Twilight and was proceeding to adapt for Kalos. According to him, the only ones who knew about it were him, the 05 council, few other researchers, and now the lavender unicorn and the wyvern.
It did bug her one thing. The 05 was understandable. They were the head honchos of the Foundation, so they had to know. The most important researchers could also be relatable, as a decision. But the discoverer, Bright Light. Why they left him with such vital information? According to himself, her Watcher and everyone she had managed to know in the Foundation, Bright Light was just a lore expert, even if a damn good one at that, who helped out agents during missions and retrievals. The strangeness of it all dawned on Twilight, and made feel her uneasy. She felt like she had shared herself with somepony she actually didn’t know at all. And for that matter, how did Bright Light even got in the Foundation? He was the only pony other than herself, and when she asked him the day she came out of Training just how he got into the Foundation, he said he had been “scouted”. But, according to the voices Kalos had heard (he signed up a couple of weeks before her and was also puzzled by the fact that there was a pony working for the Foundation) around, he was always kind of… there. And you could to the list of suspicious coincidences that the they had conveniently a briefing up to date with modern pony history even though there had never been another pony for over a thousand years!
There were just so many things wrong with the whole picture, and to think that they became apparent to her just now was unnerving and frustrating. Her eyes drooped a bit and she massaged her throbbing, sore head. Peeking in the room again, she saw what was really wrong with everything: she had been fraternizing, in other words, making friends. She wasn’t so blind to deny what friendship could do to the world, she had seen with her own eyes and tasted for herself the literal magic that spawned from bonds of love and understanding. But those bonds didn’t help her when it really mattered. Those bonds couldn’t bring Pinkie back. Those bonds didn’t stop her, and her friends from forgetting everything about her. She could now clearly see that point the finger at them, at her former friends, was not the answer. It wasn’t their fault, really, even if it was easy to convince herself otherwise. But when Bright Light unlocked her memory, showed her the ugly, horrible truth about the world, how it could have been possible to turn her back on it? How could she let somepony else die because of her weaknesses? No one else would have taken that deal, no one else could carry the burden of actually doing what had to be done, not even her friends. Some of them were cocky, stalwart or assertive. But none of them could actually kill, or deceive, or lie, or do whatever it takes to survive. She could carry all of Equestria on her shoulders, at least for a little while. She could resist a bit longer. But sooner or later, Twilight Sparkle will come back from the dead, an herald of bad news to come. A messenger with tales of blood, darkness and fire. When everyone, not everypony, everyone, will know about the Foundation and what they have kept secret for such a long time, there won’t be any more Pinkie Pie. She understood that her goals were traitorous to both her former mentor and friends and her current ones, a natural born betrayer. That’s why she couldn’t allow herself to get involved.
Her weakness, her need to have someone she could call “friend” had been her mistake. It wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about friendship, or love, or trust, or anything. There was a goal, an objective to reach, and she couldn’t stop at anything to achieve it.
“Twilight? You there? We’re done here” The familiar voice of the grey stallion suddenly made its into in her mind and interrupted her train of thoughts. She quickly got up, scrolled the dust out of her fur and trotted forward into the room, a small smile on her lips.
Inside stood Bright Light, visibly strained, and Kalos, who was still a bit dazed after the spell. The stallion quickly shook his head to fight the dizziness and picked up 055 with his magic. It levitated in front of them, slowly rotating in the dry air of the bunker.
“So, quick test. What is this thing again?” Bright Light asked with a hint of worry in his voice.
“A SCP, 055” They both answered at the same time. He smiled and placed 055 in a small saddlebag he had found in the city before.
“Good, good, the mnemonic spell works!” He nodded to himself.
The three looked at each other for a bunch before Kalos broke the silence:
“What’s the plan now? We got this SCP, what do we do with it?” He asked curiously.
“Oh, right , right. It’s simple, actually. None of us has the magical brawns to force the Crystal Heart to do what we want and forcibly reveal the pony who will be able to move the Sun. So, we drive this little SCP into it, and hopefully the confusion generated in Akasha by having this thing inside of it will make it more malleable and prone to manipulation. Within limits, of course.”
Her jaw fell to the floor.
“Y-y-you want to throw a SCP into the Root of the World? Have you lost your mind? You’re completely irresponsible! This is not scientifically possible!” She blurted out in complete disbelief while pointing an accusatory hoof at him.
“Well it’s not like we have much of a choice, don’t we? We either do this or just live this out. It could decades or centuries before another pony with the right talent resurfaces, and we have what, two weeks, a month before we all freeze to death?” He asked her harshly. There was reason in his words, yet just the thought of ramming such a dangerous object in something so pure and crystalline as Akasha was just… wrong.
“But surely there must some kind of other way….” She said, her eyes falling to the floor.
“Twilight, he’s right. We have to try this.” Kalos placed a tentacle on her shoulder.
“It’s just… I hope we won’t come to regret it later.” Twilight sighed and leaned against the wall.
Bright Light walked past her and into the corridor. She realized that the howling of the storm was over, and there was that deadly, still silence yet again. The fake boulder blocking the entrance moved on the rusty rails, scratching and creaking, and stopped with a dull thud. He looked, through the hole, the oppressive sky above, and said:
“You shouldn’t be afraid of regret. Sometimes it’s a great incentive.”
Author's Note
Rewrites and revision of the first chapters starts! Also, kudos to anyone who gets the title without googling it.
The mountain towering beside them was an ominous sight. It felt like something was locked in place and time, yet was ready to strike at any given moment, burying them under rubble and rocks of eons eternal.
“What is your name, pray tell?” She asked with a warm smile, trying to break the ice with a pony that seemed made of the stuff.
“It’s Field, your Grace.” He said plainly, returning his gaze to the path in front of him
Field was the most common name among earth ponies, and even if this pony could have been blessed, for all she knew, with the most unoriginal parents in the world, his curious behavior made another option more plausible.
“Just call me Luna.”
She moved her head a bit to take a look at his cutie mark: a closed, stylized eye. A bit on the creepy side, but she was the goddess of night. She turned back and asked gently:
“So, what is it that you do, dear Field?”
“Garbage disposal” He answered mechanically, like he had given the same answer a lot of times in his life. He was still not looking at her in the face, something that back in her days would have been a grave offense to the majesties. But she had learned the hard way that it was not her time anymore, so she let it slip.
“Garbage disposal, hmmm? Must be an interesting field…” She couldn’t resist a small chuckle. Humor wasn’t really her best talent.
“Keeps one occupied.” Another telegraphic answer. Seemed like this stallion had conversations already planned ahead and designed to kill the small talk. Luna eyed him, scanning his features and looking for a clue that could tell her how to spark a chat. A drab olive coat and a dark grey mane that was cut really short, almost like a mohawk. His trot was edgy and contained, like he felt that every moment could happen something that required a sudden jump to the sides.
“Why were you in Ponyville, dear Field?” Luna asked him with a small smirk.
He tensed slightly when he heard the question, and his eyes darted for a second to the saddlebag he had been carrying all along on his back. He turned around again to face her, and Luna managed to take a good look at his face: she kept smiling warmly, yet his eyes were something that unnerved her greatly. Black pools that seemed to dig deep into her soul, absorbing every ray of light in their path. The same eyes that man possessed.
“I was meeting with a business partner. We were discussing some details when everything happened… He didn’t make it in time.” He answered, and his gaze felt like a dagger of ice. There was something strange about this pony, something that Luna found enthralling and repulsive at the same time. She wanted to know more about him, and suddenly the fact that they were walking straight through the apocalypse seemed to occupy a distant place in her mind, as now the thing that interested her the most was to resolve the walking conundrum in front of her. Everything about him was suspicious and off putting, and that only interested more. Before she could ask him more, she heard a loud crack, and saw the stallion tilting slightly. He looked at her with surprised eyes, and his left hooves dangled limply in the air for a moment, before he started falling down into the void below. Luna heard screams in the background, and she was pushed aside as the ponies run beside her to watch the impending death of one of them with eyes wide with fear. She heard them, the slow, senseless muttering, and the legs slowly bending forward, pointing at the obvious. Her horn was already blazing with dark, swirling magic, and in a matter of seconds, the stunned stallion reappeared in front of the group, completely unscathed. It happened so fast, it took a moment for the majority to realize the poor pony wasn’t falling to his death anymore, and was in fact in front of them, alive and well, if a bit shocked. Luna massaged her head, as teleporting someone else with so little preparation was akin to eating a whole tub of ice cream in a matter of seconds, with migraines included. Nonetheless, she quickly turned back to face the still amazed crowd and urged them:
“Please everypony, walk in a straight line, as near as you can to the wall. I’m not sure I can save another one within moments again. If you hear a part of the path loose on your hooves, alert me immediately.”
They quickly got in line and started following the Princess, who knelt to reach Field, as he had ,understandably, pinpricked eyes and a pained, ragged breath. His head shot up as soon as the hoof of the princess made contact with his fur, and he asked her, with an angry voice:
“Why… did you save me?”
Luna walked back, surprised by such a peculiar question. She looked better at this stallion, and his mechanic, fearless movements, that at first she thought born out of confidence, now finally seemed much clearer. She knelt down again and whispered in his ear:
“You just don’t care, right?”
His eyes fell to the ground as he heard her, and she pressed on:
“I don’t know why you think your life has no meaning. And you probably don’t want to tell me. That’s okay.”
His gaze was stuck on the barren soil.
“There was a time in my life I thought I had no reason to live too. I felt my sins, the death and pain I had caused, always behind me, like a void ready to swallow whatever fragment of happiness I could find. I tried to keep them, the old pieces of my life, and felt I could sustain myself with them. But you probably know better than me that you can’t live by picking up happy memories like marbles. That’s when I had an epiphany. Do you want to know what I realized?”
His silence was the most eager she had ever heard.
“You don’t need to be happy all the time, to be content with yourself, to live. You just need a purpose. My purpose right now is to get all of you back to the old Equestria. Alive. And if to take you back alive I’ll have to give you a purpose, then so be it.”
He turned around to face her and she felt like he was trying to look for a misstep, for a reason not to believe in her.
“You’re not allowed to die yet, dear Field.” She told him with a commanding tone “After we get Equestria back to normal, and that’s something that as certain as the sun and the moon, you are going to help me find somepony. We will find him eventually, because I will follow him even at the end of the Earth. And when we find him, we are going to pass judgment. Only after that, you’ll have my permission to die. Am I clear?”
His shocked expression and the mouth agape were really amusing, but she resisted the urge to laugh at him and kept talking, trying really hard to keep a stern tone:
“Of course, since he’s kind of slippery, it may take years, even decades to track him down. You might end up old when we’re finished, I’m sure you don’t mind.”
He felt being engulfed in a blanket of black, velvety vapor as he was picked up by Luna’s magic and planted firmly on the tracks.
“Come, come, we have much discuss and no time to dillydally!” She said with a smile, as she pushed the staggered earth pony with her head, careful not to poke him with her horn. Behind them, the crowd murmured animatedly, before they heard a harsh remark from their princess:
“Are you coming or not?”
And they hurried forward, walking slowly by the murmuring mountain.
We see through a glass, darkly
The fire was crackling and slithering in the cold air of the “night”. The day was over, another march through steppes and silent fields. It had been almost a month since they first left Ponyville, and started a walk that never seemed to end. The alicorn had heard a mare saying that each day felt like a year, when you march in never ending dusk.
“A year whose days are long…” murmured Luna into the fire. Her eyes watched the flames dancing, and they felt so bright, in the darkness. Shadows were her domain, and the night was her kingdom. And she made sure to never forget that shade was only the consequence of light and that her pride, her power and throne were always out of sight. The responsibility that was given to her felt overwhelming, something that was beyond her reach, something more suited for her sister.
She felt a gentle tap on the shoulder, and turned around to see the motionless face of Spike. His gaze was full of tiredness and worry; his arms were tensed, like he was ready to swing a punch.
“What is it, Spike?” She asked, not caring anymore to show some kind of eagerness, since everyone else was already fast asleep, huddled together under a big boulder that came out of the grass like an overgrown nail. The resting place was covered by one of Luna’s most prized spell: it used the moisture in the air to create a deafening mirror, effectively shielding them from the eyes, the ears and the nose.
The dragon sat down beside her and looked for while at the stallion in front of him. Their eyes met for a moment, but neither said anything. Both gazes wandered again at the fire that was dancing freely.
“I just wanted to make sure you were alright. We haven’t got a chance to talk much this whole apocalypse began.” He said nonchalantly.
“Spike, you don’t have to worry about me.” Luna smiled and shook her head lightly. “I’m immortal, I’m used to loss.”
He picked up a chunk of dry grass and threw it into the fire. There was a silence that seemed to last far more than it should have.
“You’re used to see ponies dying. You’re not used to losing somepony…” He finally said, with his eyes still fixated on the blazes.
Luna looked at him with disbelief, and realized she was clenching her jaw firmly. Her wings were tensed at her sides and when she talked her voice came out with a tremble.
“What are you implying, Spike? That since my sister is dead, I’m not apt to guide you? That you’d do a better job? That-“
“You’re doing that again” Spike cut her off, and threw another chunk of grass into the fire. “I thought you were over with blame issues.”
She got up, wings fully open and anger blazing in her eyes. She looked down at him, her horn swirling with magic and ready to vaporize him. Her ears were throbbing, but she could still hear the low whistle of the dragon in front of her and what came from his mouth:
Luna glared at him, rage still seeping through her. Spike didn’t move and kept staring at the fire. Abruptly she sighed, and threw herself on the dusty ground.
“I hate it when you do it! How do you always manage to bring out the worst side of me…” She smiled weakly at the dragon, who now sported an amused grin on his face.
“What I can say, I know you well enough to know what buttons I can, or can’t, push. Who’s the guy?” He used his tail to point discreetly at Field, who was now fast asleep, clearly uninterested in the blazing show of rage his Princess had put on right in front of his eyes.
“Him? I have a few theories. He said his name is Field.”
Spike looked at her, puzzled.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Spike, Field is the most common name among earth ponies, or at least was in my time. It’s the kind of name you give when you wish to keep the true one for yourself.” She said, her head resting on her front legs.
“I guess you could call that suspicious. Why the sudden interest, then? Feel like cracking a mystery?” He said with a small smile, and poked her side with his finger.
“Well, I guess you could say that. I’m fond of challenges, like learning to speak in a modern fashion. But… I think he’s much like me. Just somepony who’s really, really lost.” She looked at the stallion resting in front of her with fond eyes. Spike knew that gaze well, and he knew who was trying to rip off.
“You know who they think if they ask for a mother. And that’s not you, Luna. They want the Princess.” He said, and threw another block of wood into the fire.
“I am a Princess! I always was. As long as I remember, I ruled the Night. But it was always all about the day, all about… Sorry, I’m slipping into it again. It’s just… No matter how hard I tried, I always felt like I existed just as a contrast. For my sister to really shine, I was needed. Always in the shadows. Always unnoticed… You know Spike, sometimes I find myself forgetting my sister's name, her face, her favorite cake." She told him, at first angry, but gradually softening her voice.
"Mh? Really?" Spike answered her, not really sure on what to say. That last sentence was so strange and random, he didn't know how to actually respond to that.
They stood silent for a moment, before the alicorn started speaking again:
“Did I ever tell you about my student? I had one too, before… being exiled to the Moon. Her name was Twinkle Dawn. She was very talented, much like Twilight Sparkle. However, she was kind of a socialite. She had lots of friends, lovers and was known in all of the Capitol as the mare to have to spice up a get together. Her best friend was a stallion named Finishing Touch. She excelled pretty much at anything, but Finishing Touch was better than her at writing poetry. Mind you, Twinkle Dawn was a genius in every field of knowledge: an accomplished scientist, master wizard, and could even play five instruments perfectly. But Finishing Touch was just the better poet, and everypony at the time knew. Their friendship had started from her asking advice to him, some kind of help to write better. They were always together, laughing and having fun. Unfortunately, one day, Finishing Touch passed away for a sudden sickness. Twinkle Dawn was devastated and cried for weeks. I tried to console her until the day of the funeral, hoping my words would help her bring closure to her pain. However, after the ceremony, she came back to me, with empty eyes. She told me she had been to the wrong funeral without even realizing. She was incredibly meticulous, Spike, she wrote checklists on checklists. And that’s when I realized it.”
“Realized what?”Spike asked, curious.
Luna looked at him.
“You should go back to sleep."
“What’s wrong with you two?” Bright Light asked as he tossed another wood block into the fire. “You have been silent for the entire day.”
Twilight and Kalos looked at each other for a moment. The wyvern spoke first, in his calm and collected voice.
“Dr. Light, we have to talk. Or, actually, I believe you owe Twilight here an explanation.” He pointed at her with one of his tentacles. The unicorn got up and stepped forward, hoping it would show her assertiveness to the stallion. However, he didn’t look fazed at all, but continued to stare calmly at her, his usual slight smirk gone.
“Bright, you’ve done so much for me. You were the only one who decided to be honest with me, regardless of the circumstances. You showed me a world I could’ve never imagined even in my wildest dreams. You saved my life twice and even threw away your career for me. No one had ever done so much just for my sake. But…” She stopped, her eyes darting between the fire and Bright Light, unsure.
“But…It feels like I can’t trust you anymore! You disappear for months, and when you come back you tell me you’ve encountered humans! Humans! Might as well tell me you and Princess Celestia had tea and scones… You presented yourself as a simple researcher, and everyone in the Foundation seems to confirm this, but you know things that you’re not supposed to know. And even though you’re not an agent, you seem awfully calm and collected-“Her voice was starting to rise, but an appendix that now rested on her shoulder told her it was time to let the wyvern talk.
“What we are trying to say, Dr. Light, is that we’re really grateful for everything you’ve done for us, me and Twilight both. But it seems like you know a lot more about this grotesque end of the world that you let on, and you aren’t telling us!”
Bright Light looked at them still, unwavering and not even blinking. Eventually he got up, tossed another block into the fire and stared at it intently. Twilight was going to tell him less nicely to open up to them, but he spoke first.
“I knew I was right to pick you two. You were always the smart ones. Let’s make a deal: Kalos will be completely honest with Twilight, and I will be completely honest with both of you. I mean, it’s not like I’m not hiding something. It’s just that I thought you two weren’t ready. I was partly wrong. For someone who studied friendship, dear Twilight here is surely living up to expectations. She told you everything about her past. How I got her into the Foundation. Her friends. But you’ve not been as sincere, have you?”
Twilight looked at the wyvern, confused, and asked softly:
“Kalos, what does he means by that?”
He started to float backwards, and his tentacles started to wobble. Her eyes started to water.
“Twilight, I…” He stammered.
“Not you too…” She told him, with tears already forming in her eyes. “You lied to me!” She pointed an accusatory hoof at the wyvern.
“I can explain!” He floated forward a bit, one of his appendixes trying to reach Twilight. She stopped just beyond his reach and told him coldly, her eyes still watery and a bit red.
“Go ahead, then. Explain it to me.”
Kalos stopped in his tracks and sighed.
“Look, Twilight. What I told you, how I got into the Foundation… I did it because I really cherished my friendship with you and I thought that if you had known about my real past… “His body was looking somewhat saggy, and she knew it was a sign of mental stress. “I know you think that what you did to your friends was ugly but necessary. That what you did, you did it for the greater good. It’s not the same with me. I was a different wyvern before all of this, Twilight. I wasn’t a police trainee who got drafted by the Foundation’s recruiting officers. I wasn’t even a law abiding citizen of the Wyvern Protectorate. It wasn’t just your common Foundation goon who got me in. It was Dr. Light.”
Author's Note
So, you'll probably guess who's going to get a big ass flashback the next chapter, am I right?
Also, those of you who know Freud will understand what Luna is talking about.
