They Kill Us for Their Sport
The unicorn tucks the last of her unconscious friends into a blanket. Spike found it difficult to get the guest beds out, but the only visitor not knocked out by her own arrival was as powerful as he remembered. Conjuring up beds with her own magic was an easy feat.
She turns to the baby dragon. The goggles enlarge her eyes a bit; would make her dorky if not for her inquiring frown. “So… you’re one of these… higher-power beings, right? A native of this world, correct?”
Spike curls his digits, searching for the words to say to his guest: unbidden but nonetheless welcome. “Maybe not higher-power as in raise-the-sun-and-moon, but… yeah, I live here.”
The pony nods, her tall mane bobbing with her head. “So, do you... do you know Verumarendi? Does she rule this cursed world?”
“I wouldn’t say this world’s cursed, but....” Scratches his scaly head. The name could refer to a real Verumarendi roaming the world in secret or could be the code name for a villain he’s familiar with. Shakes his head. “I don’t know her. I’m not even sure she exists here.”
The pony’s heart falls, but it does not break. “That means no closer to finding her than before. Still… this is another reality, right?”
Spike nods back at her. The air goes silent for a few seconds. Veins flush with blood, heart pounding. A sideways glance at a pile of books by the crystal walls. By the pile is a magic platform with envelopes and mail: something Twilight installed for mail addressed to the castle’s residents whenever she had to take long trips out of town for princess duties. Something to take his mind off on for a moment.
A long sigh pierces the silence. The air is quickened with his dread. “You… you should see what I’m gonna show you. I don’t think you’ll like it, but… let’s say I’ll show you how I know you and your friends so well.”
A cautionary look fashions itself on the unicorn’s face, but she complies. She follows Spike as he walks to the mass of pages and book covers. Now that the lights are on, she could distinguish that the books aren’t novels: at least, nothing thick like encyclopedias and dictionaries. Not even thick enough to pass for a science or magic journal; she subscribed to enough of them to know how thin they can go.
Colorful illustrations grace these books. Her number one super friend loves to read these sorts of books when they aren’t on a mission. Hoards them even if it means throwing bits away.
Spike picks up one of them, the one at the top of the smallest pile. “Give this one a whirl. A skim would be okay. I don’t know if… if you’d be fine reading it whole.”
Her blue magic covers the book: a comic book. The goggles double as reading glasses; no need to remove them.
There’s her on the cover, her and all her friends. On the background: their city burning in chaos, ponies galloping to safety. Below the title lies the subtitle: Verumarendi’s Game Over! Spike keeps his mouth shut, but he taps his claws, beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
The comic is opened.
The downward spiral traced back to last week. She and her friends received a letter from a mysterious entity calling herself Verumarendi: presumably a pony and a mare, but that was all they could get. That and also that she called herself an inter-dimensional entity. Her ultimatum: peacefully surrender the world to her or see her take it by force. They said no.
From then on, mysterious happenings… happened. The sky flickered red. Faraway stars and planets popped up everywhere else. Clocks broke down, both analogue and digital. Both magic and technology started failing with no clear cause. The daily letters from Verumarendi confirmed who the suspect was: herself. She basked in the blame.
Disappearances came next. The little things vanished first: a misplaced house key last remembered under a rug, somepony’s financial report placed on a desk before its absence, a broken wagon supposedly at the repair shop. Bigger things came afterwards: trees in the city parks, streetlights on the sidewalk, entire billboards just gone.
When ponies disappeared, the last straw was broken.
She gathered her friends for the most dangerous mission of their lives: if Verumarendi was going to invade their world, they shall invade her own world back. It took an impossible effort to round up what was left of the global wizarding community, but after several sleepless nights of researching and testing and failing and retesting, they cracked the code: a portal straight to Verumarendi’s realm. However, it would take powering up her and her friends to levels unknown to equinity, all to survive merely existing in this new world. Apparently, it was not just another dimension; it was a “higher-order universe,” something not fully understood even by the unicorn herself. All she knew was that the inevitable battle would be tougher than they could ever imagine.
That did not matter. Let them sacrifice their lives in this other universe if it meant saving their city—no, the whole world—from doom.
That was the last thing she remembered before falling into a dark room, seeing her friends unconscious, and meeting this baby dragon who was busy reading something on his bed, flashlight and all.
A conclusion forms in her mind as the last page snaps the comic shut.
“If I’m right, then this is an alternate universe where we are just protagonists for a comic book series.” She levitates the goggles out of her tired eyes to rub them. “I expected something more... sinister. Well, I suppose I could find comics or somesuch of your world’s heroes in my realm.”
Spike’s throat registers one loud, heavy gulp. “Um… I don’t want to alarm you but—“
The mail platform glows, capturing their attention. An instant poof of smoke and magic drops an envelope onto the mail heap.
His blood speeds up. “Nopony sends mail past midnight unless it’s urgent. Hold your horses right there.”
To see Spike scampering to the platform and grabbing the envelope: it’s cute, but she watches in dread. Something urgent in this higher-order universe, something to distract her only other-worldly friend from her own world’s calamity.
His sharp claws rip the envelope open. The letter gets taken out. It does not take long for Spike to turn to the unicorn—eyes quivering.
“Okay… I should explain myself.” A scratch on his back, sharp teeth creating a tense smile. “You see… I’m a big fan of the comics, and enough conventions landed me some friends in high places. One of them sent me an early copy of the issue you read: it’s not supposed to come out until Friday.” He gestures to the letter in his claw. “Now, he’s asking me to return it or burn it.”
Although her mouth opens, nothing comes out. Return or burn. Be returned or be burned? She kicks out the thought: please, no worst-case scenario or….
Spike hands over the letter to her. “I suggest you read it.” It leaves his claw; the claw rubs his chest. The dreadful air weighs heavy on him. A glance at the visitor’s friends sleeping on their beds—whether they should read it too or not.
The last thing she remembers him saying is, “If you need a hug or a shoulder to cry on… I’m here for you.”
Starlight wakes up to a howling scream.
A teleport brings her to Spike’s door. In her grogginess, she sees Spike holding up a vinyl he calls enchanted. Says he’s sorry: didn’t expect that this one song on The Lunar Empire’s Moon: Dark Side to have a loud scream. It was supposed to be a classical orchestra; the scream wasn’t expected, he testifies.
Starlight just wants to sleep. A quick scold about enchanted vinyls is enough to shut Spike up. With the problem solved, she teleports back to her room and hops back to bed.
The visitor sits there on the wall. Lies there on the wall. The hero assumes the fetal position there on the wall. She has been murmuring to herself with shrunken irises, holding herself there on the wall.
The letter from Spike’s contact spoke of the return-or-burn command; judging from the scrawling hoofwriting, the sender could have been scared jotting it down. Attached to the letter, a copy of a snagged notice from Clockwisely Comics, the series’ company. The notice had for-your-eyes-only confidentiality: the preface ended with, Unauthorized dissemination of this notice is grounds for immediate termination, a lawsuit for damages, and, if need be, further punishment and reparations upon the princesses’ discretion.
The attached notice was short, straight to the point. It began with talk of the company, how Clockwisely always supported enchanted editions which provided immersive reading experiences for their dear fans.
It fast twisted into a dark reprimand for the addressed.
Animating fictional characters in our world oversteps the limits spelled out in the Ethics of Comic Enchantment, a universal agreement you’ve explicitly sworn to upon being employed here. Regardless of your motives, we cannot allow the complete enlivening of fictional characters (which includes full sapience) due to the many moral quandaries this poses. That you have cast this same enchantment onto all previous issues, up to and including the first issue of the entire series, only compounds your ethical breach: animating the characters of this to-be-released issue means they have truly lived out their whole lives—from birth to the present—in a world which, thanks to the scope of your enchantments, has existed in an alternate universe as real as this one.
You have animated a universe whose conflicts and villains you have also animated. You have therefore become morally responsible for the harm and suffering to the world’s real-life creatures who are supposed to remain fictional. If the princesses found this out before we did, they would have meted out a punishment worse than what we could ever legally give….
Hyperventilation took over. Her mind, scrambled. She wasn’t supposed to be here: she, the culmination of forbidden innovation. None of this was supposed to be real.
She wasn’t supposed to be real.
She howled to the heavens.
It was a miracle she didn’t pass out or die due to shock. The scar remained, however, etched onto her brain. Sages back home once told her of the dangers in unraveling everything at once: lest you go mad from the revelation, they said. Chances are, that was just an arc, a storyline, in this world too.
She was reduced to a mental foal. The first time Spike shed a tear tonight was not upon joyously meeting one of his heroes but upon hearing this brave unicorn muttering, “Mom… Dad… Mom… Dad…” ad infinitum. The sweet kiss of motherly love on her cheeks, the strong legs of fatherly love wrapping her in an embrace: ghosts of them now.
Slowly, her senses returned. Gibberish became coherent on her lips, her tongue unloosed to speak without resembling a madmare’s speech. Still, on her mind constantly: reality. Her reality versus this one. Or, worse still, her “reality.”
To kill the ones behind all the danger in her world. To let them know that she is more than a character to suffer the hero’s journey. Misery builds character, they said, but her world ended up a stage: they were actors, all of them.
The writers, the illustrators, the managers, the retailers, the fans: let her horn aglow and turn them to dust.
A draconic claw grips her shoulder, and he hugs her tight. She hugs back: those last words of his come to mind.
Her lips shudder. Pearly whites clatter as murder leaves her. What to say when she comes home, when she steps down from reality into something lesser: her home, her world—something lesser. What they would all think of the truth she will tell: if it will be told. Poor Hum Drum. He’s loved reading comics for so long. To think of him discovering that he, too, is a comic character, fated to be literal comic relief.
“Is he… is he real? Is my little Hum Drum… r-real?”
She waits, thirsts, for the answer.
He casts his eyes down the floor, to the mare’s shadow. “Well… you’re real. You’re here, in the flesh, and so are your friends.”
Her head casts itself toward the floor. A nice shade of sea green. Her already broken heart sinks further: this sea green floor is more real than her.
They spend a few minutes hugging.
Once it is finished, Spike looks up at her, at the character herself. The big goggles, the tall mane, the suit befitting the superhero—that she looks much like Twilight stirs his heart, warms it in a sympathy that desires to give but does not know how.
“So, Miss Matter-Horn... what are you going to do?”
The Masked Matter-Horn says nothing: cool night air surrounds her, comforts her even if slightly. Her friends: still sleeping, some snoring like nothing happened.
She holds up her hooves to her eyes. Removes the goggles then inspects them, turning them around. They aren’t chained or bound by a nefarious ne’er-do-well. At least she could do something.
As leader of the Power Ponies, she does the one thing she does best: make a plan.
“You and I will explain everything to them when we wake them up.” Her voice, charged with a sliver of assertion: it ought to be so, ought to for the Power Ponies’ sake. “We make sure there isn’t too much noise when they react to the news: we cannot have that Starlight pony see us. After that, it’s an A-S-A-P trip to the headquarters of Clockwisely Comics. Tell me where that is, Spike.”
The dragon’s eyes shift. “It’s in Manehattan, but that’s across the kingdom. It will take us hours on train to get there!”
“Then the sooner the better…. Hours, you say? Write a note for Starlight that you’re out of town on important business. Write that it’s to see a pen pal.” Her legs let her pace around: a far cry from the broken mare by the wall. “We’ll have a meeting with the president or whoever’s at the top. The company notice will go with us in case they think we’re just good at costumes.”
The pacing stops. Confidence and assertion fade away. To take their place is anxiety shown in her pawing hoof. Fighting against it, she speaks on:
“After that… well, we’ll play by ear. Maybe we’ll ask them to tell the truth to the public right away. Maybe we’ll do that ourselves if they’re corrupt jerks. Maybe we’ll implore them to help our world out somehow.”
She stops talking, stops planning.
Another wayward look to the ponies in bed: there they all are, still in their memorable suits. Mistress Mare-velous, Zapp, Radiance, Saddle Rager, Fili-Second: less real than reality. For the moment, they rest in peace, rest in ignorance. To plunge them into the revelation’s madness—she gnashes her teeth.
“I should write to Twilight and the princesses about this,” Spike says, popping Matter-Horn’s thought bubble. “They should know sooner or later. This is huge stuff.”
She snaps her head in his direction. “We’ll get there when we get there. For now….”
She heaves a heavy breath.
To feel that, to focus on it.
To breathe.
Breathing again, feeling the air course through her snout, enter her lungs. To feel herself, all of her body: hooves in contact with the floor, horn brimming with powerful magic, mane and tail as part and parcel of her, the goggles resting on her forehead. The memories too: a one-of-a-kind foalhood with the professor at the famed School for Gifted Youth, scouring the world over for the world’s best defenders, creating the Power Ponies that have kept the world safe and sound for the past decade and more.
Becoming the best of friends with them thanks to Hum Drum who has been there since the beginning.
Feels as real as ever.
“I’ll wake them up.”
Spike watches on as Matter-Horn trots over to the beds. Though she trembles and her heart quickens, she manages to reach Fili-Second without fainting in fear. Her heart flutters: what to say, what to do to make them not scream or break down somehow.
Despite all that, let truth be told.
She pokes the zig zagged-maned mare on the head, and Fili-Second yawns.
The morning sun gets Starlight to wake up with a moan. No need for an alarm clock to ruin a Thursday morning before it even starts. As she reels from the throes of not being in bed, she remembers what to do for the next hour: check if Twilight has returned home early, make breakfast for her and Spike… and, of course, check on Spike. Here’s hoping he didn’t spend the whole night reading that new early Power Pony comic he got from his insider friend and spending the next few hours theorizing on what would happen next.
A trot through the halls later, she rounds her way to the dragon’s room. “Wakey-wakey! I’ll try out a new recipe for waffles, Spike. You wanna help?”
The note on the door makes her cheer and good will dissipate.
She floats it out of the surface. Starlight reads the square paper with knitted brows.
I’ll be away for a while in Manehattan. My friend from Clockwisely Comics sent me a letter to come over as quickly as possible. Don’t know if it’s good or bad news. All I know is that he wants me over pronto. I should be back before evening.
See you soon. —Spike
