For this entire chapter, I am not there. I can't be, sorry. Not that I don't want to give you an update on things, and I'll make sure you get something, but it was time, and Starlight was not taking a no for an answer. Amusingly, she also wanted me to not take no for an answer.

She wanted me, all of me. She wanted the caring me, and the godly me, both and seperate. She was eager to encourage depravity from hugging to far more raunchy things. She even demanded I make her conceive, to let us watch it happen, the quickening of her ovum in glorious 4k resolution, with her consciousness expanded to feel it, to go from one level of awareness to the next as what would be our child stirred.

She made quite the noise. I hadn't shared the sensation to myself, so I couldn't tell you exactly what that felt like... but it must have been something from the way she squirmed. Not that being successfully seeded would be the end of her weekend. She coaxed me right on to other things without much delay.

So, you might now easily imagine, I was busy. It wasn't a bad busy. I had fun, she had fun, and our family grew. I've wasted weekends on stupider things before.

"Did you hear?" appeared on the facility Discord.

"Hear what?" replied Applejack.

"We're not patients, we're prisoners!" alarmingly typed out Bon Bon. "They told me straight to my face."

"That's a mighty big claim," replied Applejack, others chiming in agreement.

"She's not entirely wrong," added Scootaloo. "But she's making it sound all scary."

Bon Bon posted an image of a famous actor raising a brow high. "Alright, phrase that in a way that isn't scary."

"We get to stay! We get to be a family, uh, community? I love all of you. We're great friends, and we get to keep doing that. They give us what we want, we're never hungry, or bored. I put the new Playstation on my wishlist and I got it. I mean, sure, I share it with my friends, but I'd do that anyway!"

"Aw, thanks," added Applebloom

"You're the sweetest," agreed Sweetie Bloom.

"Some of us want to do more than play video games," added Carrot Top. "They let me garden, and I do appreciate that, but I want... to go outside, real outside. I want to travel and see new things, meet new people."

"Exactly!" emphatically agreed Bon Bon, likely waving at her screen as she typed it. "We're prisoners in a really comfy cell, but it's still a cell and we're still in it!"

"More of a really, uh, big... place, with lots of friends."

Bon Bon replied quickly, "So we're in a jail, a big, luxurious even, jail. We're treated like kings and queens, but we can't leave. And I'm supposed to be alright with that?"

The conversation began to frazzle with words coming up in favor and against. Some of them were pretty happy with their accommodations, but others joined Bon Bon in railing for the right to decline it.

"Alright, calm down everycreature." Starlight joined the conversation. "This is a civil place for nice chats. Take it to DMs if you can't keep it chill. They're doing what they can to make things better, promise."

"So what's up?" Autumn bounced in place, looking quite excited. "You don't often call me here."

They were in his room. He was sliding open a drawer on his bed-side table and out came a folder in his magic. "I want you to be the first to see this."

Her eyes widened, watching the folder come closer. "Oh gosh! Are you... proposing? This is not the way I expected it to work. Maybe some soft music, or you'd set up something big and corny." She burst into giggles, eyes locked on the floating folder.

"Oh, um, not that." He set the folder right in front of her. The moment was ruined, his thoughts thrown off the rail he had set up. "You... want me to...?"

Autumn came in, thumping her head against his, their horns jostling between them for space. "You are so cute... We already planned our dream house. I'm ready whenever you ask. Now, if that's not it..." She slid back and threw open the folder with her magic. "Oh, oh wow! Wow.... Really? Woah..."

Before her was a paper festooned with letters and arrows and musical notes, all arranged in a byzantine mesh that she had never seen before. "This is like we've been playing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and we were so proud and here you come, swaggering, and throwing down Sonata, um, 5 at us."

"I was... listening to you, how it's like music." He directed a hoof at where the musical notes were. "And that was the secret, I think. The shapes you form are only half of the equation. You also need to put more or less stress, to reach higher or lower notes, see? I... hoped you'd get it." He deflated a little, sagging in place.

Only for her to grab him by the shoulders. "I love it!" she burst out, eyes on the paper. "And there, to there, yeah! I want to try it, but I have to learn it first. This is way too complicated to just do it off the cuff, you know? What's it do?! Gotta be something big, something special..." She threw her hooves wide before bouncing up to all four. "Tell me!"

Sunburst opened his mouth to reply, only for her hoof to cut him off. "Don't tell me. You should be telling us, I mean, Twilight and I."

He gently pushed her hoof away. "Autumn, thank you for being interested, and excited." She was bobbing her head quickly. "But this is for you."

She tilted her head left and right. "That's kinda sweet, but what's it do?"

"You heard Starlight." He cycled one hoof over the other. "She can change her form whenever she wants, like the, uh, like some of the other patients."

Autumn inclined her head left and right once more before she frowned. "Yeah? Oh! You made a shapeshifting spell? That's so cool! I mean, I like the way I look right now, but it's still super neat!"

"Not exactly as you imagine it." He pressed his hooves together. "Shapeshifting is... complicated, to say the least. I tried to, uh, make it variable, at first, but I don't even see how you'd do that. I made a specific one form. One specific target."

Autumn's ears danced. "Ooo? So it's a 'turn someone into this 'specific' thing spell? That's still really cool!" She burst into giggles. "You said specific like three times, trying to make that really obvious huh? Specific!" she sang the last word out as her eyes wandered over the paper, trying to learn it even as they talked. "Wow, this is... so next level. I'm proud of you! I couldn't dream of composing magic this complicated."

"I couldn't dream of playing it," he countered.

"Which is why we're such a good team." She abandoned the paper in favor of moving to his side and nestling close. "So why are we keeping this a secret from Twilight?"

"Because it's for, um, you." He raised a hoof behind his head. "After we have it working for sure, then we can share."

"You still haven't told me what--" She cut off. It hit her. "Oh!" She began to poke him repeatedly in little tap-taps of her hooves. "Silly stallion! You want me to use it on you, don't you?"

"Maybe!" He began to blush increasingly badly. "Yes... Um... I'd do it myself, but, on thinking about it, this is safer." He inclined his head. "Performing surgery on... yourself? Maybe not the best idea."

She whistled softly at the thought. "Maybe not, and by maybe I mean super definitely. I don't want to hurt you." She flopped against him, wrapping her arms around him as her hooves worked into his fur. "Are you sure it's safe?"

"No," he admitted with perhaps too much speed. "But we're gonna try it."

"That did not make me feel better." She slipped up to her haunches and scowled at him. "If this starts--"

He planted a hoof on her lips as she had done to him. "No. Once you start, you finish, or you could make it worse. You play the whole song, start to end, no matter what. Got it?"

"I really don't like it," she admitted in a soft voice. "I don't know what I'd do without my little sun." She raised her hooves to his cheeks. "You are the most important pony in my life." She burst into giggles. "I had no ponies, important or not, before, but hey this is 2020, welcome to it!"

"I'll drink to that," laughed out Sunburst. "But I trust you, and I trust my spell. Learn it, take your time, and play it, for us."

"For us." She touched noses with him.

Autumn slapped down glowing papers on the desk. "He's nuts!" Her magic spread the papers out. "Look at this."

Twilight leaned in over it, eyes sweeping. "Did... he... wow... But... how?" She bobbed a hoof, trying to follow the magic. "This is amazing."

"Amazingly awful!" Autumn threw her hooves up wide. "It'll change him, or just kill him, and he wants me to promise to finish the spell, no matter what. I get to watch and listen as it does... whatever it does, for good or bad, and I'm supposed to just not react, just play. I could be killing my boy!"

"The ethics of this are... troubling." She raised a hoof to her chin, tapping lightly. "Scientists stopped using themselves as test subjects a long time ago. Can't he at least try this on an animal subject first?"

"That's a great idea!" Autumn slapped down her hooves on Twilight's shoulders. "Oh, I'll try to be sneaky. I'll ask him if this should work on an animal, and if he says yes, we got a way forward! I'll zap a mouse and see what happens."

Twilight inclined her head. "I need to do significant research. There are rules for using animals like this, and I'm entirely unaware of most of them. If we want to do this right, we need to be informed. The mice have rights too."

"Sure sure sure, yes, of course." Autumn bobbed her head. "But, look, anything is better than just zapping Sunny with a spell that could hurt him real bad. He's brave, I'm proud, sure, but he's also an idiot, and I have to protect him from himself. You with me?"

"I am." She offered a hoof and they met with a loud clop. "We will not allow him to risk himself needlessly. Besides being a friend, he is vital to the forward progress of the program. He can fashion spells far more ably than I, I'm not afraid to admit." She gestured over the papers spread out. "Look at this! If this works, we're entering whole new realms of complexity."

"I get you're excited, but let's not hurt ourselves trying to go too fast." She let out a long sigh. "Thank... you. I was so worried you would agree with him, that you'd just tell me I was being a big foal about it."

"Um." Both mares looked to the side where Lyra was watching them with a raised brow. "Is my lesson cancelled?"

"Oh! No, of course not," laughed Twilight. "Sorry. Autumn, go on. We'll talk more later."

Autumn saluted as she gathered her papers in her magic, trotting from the room and letting Twilight get back to the job of teaching other unicorns how to use their magic. They both had very important tasks ahead of them, and neither would wait for the other. "I'll save you from yourself, my wonderful moronic genius of a dork." With a growing smile, she accelerated, all the more determined to see things through safely.

"I'm glad you all could make it." Bon Bon's eyes wandered over the crowd of about a dozen others in the game room, a ping-pong table shoved aside to make room for them all. "Now, I feel I should be clear." She raised a hoof to her own chest. "I've been told that I'm being unfair. The director didn't make these rules, and she was the one that came out and told us what's really going on. She's one of us, a victim to this so called vaccine! One little shot and her life was over." She cut across her throat with a swipe of a hoof.

"We are all now inhuman." She waved a hoof at them. "But they have a point. The director did the right thing, she told us the truth, so, hey, I'm a grown ma--" She frowned as the equine word tried to slip into her language and she fought it off. "--woman. I can admit when I was wrong. Eri is not the source of our problems. But she is our jailer, even if she didn't make the system, even if she wants us all as comfortable as possible."

Carrot top raised a hand. Being an indirect infectee, she had fingers, not hooves, and sat up on her chair as a human normally would. "Look, they gave me warnings, lots of them. Heck, this is partly my fault. Just one silly little rule, what was the harm." She gestured down her front. "Pow, lost my man card and got a new one shoved right into my hands."

She reached up to feel over her new snout. "And now I'm something new. Kinda... It's hard to describe. I don't hate the new me. I even like it in a lot of ways, but being locked here, forever? And they're not even working on fixing it? Is that legal?"

"Hay no!" came the sudden shout of another mare. Vinyl Scratch adjusted her glasses with a hoof. "I was musical before, and I became a musical pony. I appreciate that in a way." She nodded mostly to herself. "But what's the point of music if I can't go play it for people?!"

Bon Bon nodded in solidarity. "Hear hear. At least you have fingers."

"Do not." Vinyl arched a brow at Bon Bon.

"Close enough." Bon Bon pointed into the back. "You, you've been quiet. Share your story."

The stallion rose when called on. "Hello... I am Carrot Cake, um... and... I feel like I'm missing something, and I'm not allowed to go look for it." He put a hoof behind his head behind his little hat. "Something that would complete me. I'm a law-abiding pony. I won't make trouble, promise... Why won't they let me go?"

"Hear Hear," called Bon Bon, the others joining in their murmur of approval. Other ponies offered hooves and arms to the stallion in a show of community strength. "We have done nothing wrong. This can't be legal! They should be forced to put all efforts into letting us out. I hear we're infectious..." Her eyes went to Carrot Top. "And it's hard to argue that, with proof of it right here with us... but why isn't that basically all they're working on?"

"I've been checking," came a lispy note, a young female standing up on her chair. "I'm dead." Eyes turned to her obviously not-dead being. She coiled on herself and grabbed a slip of paper in her mouth, tossing it onto the floor in front of her. "Look!"

A few came forward to see what Peppermint Twist had. There was an obituary of a random woman none of them knew. Dead due to covid aggravated with obesity and diabetes. Sad, surely, but it felt so irrelevant.

"That's you," noted Vinyl. "Your original self, isn't it?"

"Yeah," she admitted with a small voice. It wasn't easy to dig up dead names, and that one was deader than usual. "I'm put down for hithtory as a fat lady that got what thee detherved. Tell me that ithn't methed up?!" She thumped a hoof down. "I have family! They muth... think I died... but I'm not dead!"

Alarmed murmurs spread from others who had friends and family on the outside. Carrot Top raised a hand. "This didn't happen to me. I'm still tracking my stuff and paying bills and whatever."

Bon Bon scowled. "So only some of us?" She hissed softly. "The ones that accepted this comfy little prison, who're cut off enough to take scissors to without anycr-- anyone being the wiser. Clever, but it won't work!"

"Break it up." Swinging a billy club in her mouth, Silver Spoon rapped it against the door frame. "Get back to your floors."

Bon Bon fixed eyes with the security guard that was also a filly. "What, are you happy being locked in here, maybe forever?"

"Nope, but it's my job, so get back to your floors." Other guards were present, pushing in and taking posts around the room. "This little gathering is officially cancelled. Like, if you have a problem, use the suggestion box, or write an email." She shrugged softly. "The director does read them."

"They were super mean to her," noted Carrot Top. "Why is she working for them now?"

Silver rolled her eyes. "Am I stuttering or, like, speaking Spanish or something? Go on! She's doing her best to run it from the inside. She let you all get from one floor to the next, don't abuse it by having little hate rallies or whatever."

"This isn't about hate." Bon Bon marched towards the small filly that would also be a guard. "This is about our rights. We did not agree to any of this." The room echoed her sentiments in unhappy mutterings, others rising to their hooves and feet. "If you want to stop us from talking about it, your choice, I suppose, but it won't make the problem go away."

They stared at one another, even if one was larger than the other. Silver snorted softly. "I'll remind, you're being watched. You should, like, know that by now." She leveled a small hoof at Bon Bon. "She already knows it sucks, she hates it too. What do you plan to do about it?"

"Let them listen." Bon Bon shoved past Silver Spoon, nudging her aside. "Party at my place. Pizza will be provided." There were no rules against hosting a party in one's room, and they were leaving the room they were asked to leave. The guards watched them filter out.

"I would have cracked her over the head if she tried shoving me like that," noted one of the guards closing in with Silver, the others cleaning up casually, putting things back in order.

"It was tempting, you know." She threw up her club and turned, allowing it to land in its holster in a display of precise accuracy. "But we're supposed to be upping the peace, not, like, making it rougher. Let them whine, but the people who live here deserve to have a game room."

Soft noises of agreement rose on that point, and soon they vacated, leaving a game room available to anyone who wanted to make use of it.

"I've discovered something," typed in Vinyl with a glowing horn. "Big news, for everypony here. There is not a single person here that doesn't want what I'm about to lay down."

"Stop hyping and start telling," insisted Rainbow Dash. "We get the idea."

"I did some digging where I shouldn't and--" The following words were not what she had originally typed. "found out they were gonna get us all ice cream cake!"

Vinyl squinted at those new words. She hadn't typed that. "Wha--?"

The door to her room swung open, opened easily with security key cards. "Step away from the computer and close the lid," came the stern voice of the filly at the head, eyeing her. "Make this easy."

Vinyl slowly raised her hooves as her magic closed the laptop and pushed it away. "Hey, hey... be cool." Her eyes, hidden by her glasses, darted to see the other guards fanning out to cut off her escape. "It's not even that big of a secret. We're not the only facility! There's at least three others right here in the US of A!"

"I knew that." Silver Spoon hopped up, grabbing the laptop in her mouth. "And you're guilty of hacking. That is so against the terms of service, so you lose laptop privs for a while."

One of the other guards, still human and garbed in hazmat, prodded her with a stick. "Be thankful that's all you're getting."

"Until we get word from the director," reminded a third.

Silver rolled her eyes behind her glasses. "Ugh, right. She will be informed of your naughtiness and she has the last say on what your punishment is." With a toss of her head, she sent the laptop flying to be caught by one of the other guards. "For now, no computer access. We see you touching anything with network access, we'll have to get more mean. You, like, get it?"

Vinyl looked to one of the other guards without turning her head. "Is she the boss? You're alright being ordered around by a filly?"

"She's a filly on the payroll." The guard shrugged softly. "We let her in first because she can't be infected." It was difficult to give ponid to one who was already a pony.

"Uck, I have seniority too!" She stomped a hoof. "Anyway, that has nothing to do with you. Do you understand what I told you or not?"

"A little kid with seniority," chuckled Vinyl. "I dig it... Whatever. When do I get my laptop back?"

"When the director says so." Silver turned away and they all began to leave. "If she says so."

"Ice cream cake?" Rainbow typed. "I mean, cool, whatever. Kinda random."

"Very random," added Apple Bloom.

"But cool!" interjected Scootaloo, typing on the channel. "Do we get to pick a flavor?!"

"I doubt it," Sweetie Bloom added. "That would be a lot of different requests."

"True..."

Bon Bon could be seen typing before her message appeared. "They think they can bribe us into being happy, with ice cream of all things? What are we, kids?"

"Yes?" replied Scootaloo without a moment of doubt. "What? I am. Not afraid to admit it." One could easily imagine her buffing her chest with a hoof.

"Hey, @Vinyl, are you joking?" But Vinyl had dropped offline, and did not reply. The curious announcement of surprise ice cream cake is what she had left behind.

That there actually was ice cream cake appearing in a few days made it less odd. She wasn't wrong!

But some of then knew her personally, and she wasn't locked in her room, so they heard her tale even if she couldn't type it at them. "They burst in and took it, just like that." She clopped her hooves together.

"Harsh," echoed a half-lidded mare, Tree Hugger nodding softly. "At least they didn't do anything to you. It coulda been totally worse."

Vinyl rubbed behind her neck. "I'll give Eri that. I hear, before she got there, they would have... They just took the laptop and left."

Bon Bon clopped a hoof on the floor. "They're impinging on our rights, and we deserve to know that! There are other facilities? Well, if that's the case, we should at least be able to go between them. Not like we can give each other ponid, right?"

"Right," joined Carrot Cake, his heart quickening. "Maybe what I'm looking for is there...?"

"Probably not," disagreed the other carrot-named pony-person, Carrot Top folding her arms under her chest. "But I want to know more about it. What's it like there? Are the ponies there annoyed the same way, or are they being let out? Is this a 'this place' thing or not? We deserve to know." Cheers erupted in agreement.

And that's what I get for taking a dang weekend off. That'll show me...

Author's Note

I can't step away for ONE moment without things going odd. I hear many of you sympathize quite strongly with Bon Bon's thoughts on the matter.

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