I open my waking body’s eyes slowly to a relentless, tinny chiming coming from somewhere nearby. It takes me a few moments to recognise it as the ‘call’ function on my intercom, and I shake the cobwebs from my head as I reach into my breast pocket and pull out the little black cylinder that looks a bit like an old-timey journalist’s recorder, but half the size.

Clicking the ‘Receive’ button, I raise it to my lips.

“Scarlet Dream here,” I say groggily.

//Hey Red, did I catch you napping again?// Aria’s voice came out distorted by static but audible enough that her wry tones were crystal clear.

“Yeah, I’ve got an… an old friend down here,” I respond as I stand up and stretch, trying to get some blood flowing back to my brain and extremities.

In the observation room, Applejack is sleeping peacefully. The lines of strain on her face are finally gone, replaced with the slackness of real sleep. She’ll probably be out long past the normal wake-up time but to be honest she could probably use it. Her head is still a rat’s nest, though. No amount of dream sorcery can fix that.

//Ouch, who is it?// Aria asks.

“Applejack.” I sit back down as I reply, fiddling with the computer and checking over the real-time recording to make sure there aren’t any skips or discrepancies. “She came in for exhaustion from night terrors, but honestly there’s no medication in the world that can fix what’s wrong with her. I’m gonna leave a note in her file to recommend fifty CC’s of therapy and maybe a vacation somewhere other than Canterlot with her girlfriend.”

//Ooh, Hayseed’s got a lady?// Aria jeered.

“Don’t you have gunshot victims to look after, Doctor Blaze?” I ask testily.

There’s no reply for a while, but I can practically hear Aria laughing at me from her office in the Emergency Department.

“Seriously, though,” I continue, “you’re not gonna believe it, but Applejack’s with Twilight Sparkle now.”

//Wait what?! You mean…?// She trails off, but I know what she’s thinking.

“No, not that one, you know the portal is shut for good,” I say quietly. “It's the one from, y’know, here. Which isn't that surprising, really, since Twi’ is a Canterlot native.”

//I guess so,// Aria replies, her former good humor vanishing. //Weird coincidence though.//

“No more so than all five of those girls meeting up and being friends in both dimensions,” I point out. “Honestly, Twi’ meeting Applejack, along with the rest of them, was probably more inevitable than it was a coincidence.”

//Yeah, fair enough, I guess,// Aria says. //Anyway, you got a minute? Me and ‘Hearts got some actual results back for once.//

My heart leaps at her words.

“Hell yes,” I hiss, “I can’t leave but—”

//No problem, we can, it’s dead up here for once,// Aria says. //If they need us they can call us. Sleep clinic is like, down the hall.//

“I’ll be here,” I say.

Where else would I be? Still, the possibility of real results after almost eight months of bupkis is a high point to my night that I really needed after having to deal with Applejack.

It takes Aria less than ten minutes before her familiar knock is sounding at my door, followed by the woman herself. On her heels is the Director of the Canterlot General ED, Redheart, a former nurse practitioner that got her M.D. out of spite, and it showed.

She was the one who had been on hand when I’d been brought in a year ago, and she’d seen things that night that Aria had been forced to explain in order to get me treated. By the time I started my recovery her memories were too ingrained for me to futz with, so instead, I’d just told her that she was better off just ignoring what happened and passing it off as a weird occurrence, but that wasn’t enough for the woman.

I warned her that this business was potentially lethal. I warned her that just being in our general proximity and associating herself with us could lead to a literal fate worse than death,

None of that had fazed the thirty-nine-year-old doctor. Despite her soft exterior, pale complexion, and powder-pink hair, she had real steel in her spine.

“A’right, Red,” Aria says around a dum-dum she had in her mouth. She always seems to be eating something for some reason. “You ready for this?”

“I died ready, Ari’,” I reply with a cocked grin.

“First off,” Redheart starts grimly, “none of this data is necessarily reliable, we have no means of comparison, and what we’re dealing with isn’t strictly physi—”

“Yeah, yeah, hold this for me, Doc.” In one smooth movement, Aria takes out her lollipop and pops it into Redheart’s mouth before plucking the clipboard from her shocked fingers.

“Smooth,” I say as I stand to get a better look at the results.

“Unsanitary,” Redheart grumbles around the lollipop.

She doesn’t take it out though.

Aria has this weird ability to get away with anything, but that’s doubly true with Redheart. Aria can ask her for something completely unreasonable like, say, permission to run secret and undocumented medical tests using hospital equipment, bat her eyelashes, and the Director immediately folds.

It’s also the worst kept secret in the ED that Redheart is sleeping with her best doctor, but the hospital administration turns a blind eye to that for good reasons.

Mainly their extreme competence.

Redheart is the best Director they’ve ever had, and she’s held the position for longer than anyone expected. The position comes with a lot of burnout from what I hear, and the last Director only managed it for a couple of years before requesting a transfer.

Due to its unpopularity, whoever is willing to hold the position is given a lot of leeway. Administration makes certain allowances for a Director who’s willing to stay in a job that literally no one else wants but that they desperately need to keep filled.

Aria is in the same boat. Despite only being with Canterlot General for a year and a half-ish, she’s racked up more ED hours than half the Doctors in the hospital put together. She’s single-handedly letting Doctors who would never set foot in the ED stay in their cushy little offices, and they are more than happy to keep it that way.

Hell, she’s the only one who’s ever requested a permanent station there, and nobody gives a damn why. They're just happy someone is willing to take the job.

“Okay…” Aria mumbles as she flips through the papers, “here we go, so we’ve got real results for those of us who are still definitely mortal.”

“What about the three of us who...” I grimace and trail off.

“Yeah, those results are still basically garbage,” Aria replies, and I curse. “But—!” She flails the clipboard at me “—we have learned some pretty weird stuff!”

Redheart pulls the lollipop from her mouth and sticks it back between Aria’s lips as she reclaims her clipboard.

“The blood samples from the non-converted subjects are fascinating.”

Non-converted is Redheart’s term for those who were taken but not turned into a Killer. Her theory is that the Killer state is one of total biological conversion, while the Survivor is sort of a half-way point between human and whatever kind of species you'd call a Killer.

“The simplest conclusion is that technically speaking I was right, none of you are fully human anymore,” Redheart says briskly.

My eyebrows rise up to my hairline.

I mean, I knew that had to be the case for Sonata, Adagio, and myself, but all of us?

“How do you mean?”

Aria exchanges the lollipop’s place again, much to Redheart’s annoyance.

“It's the Fog,” Aria says. “The Fog is inside of us. Me, Sour, Star, probably Tempest too. It’s in you and my sisters obviously, but in, like, catastrophically higher quantities.”

“I wish Tempest would let us run the tests on her,” Redheart grumbles around the lollipop. “I’d like a full dataset.”

“It was purely voluntary, Hearts,” Aria reminds her. “If Tempest doesn’t want to be your lab rat, that’s her call, honestly I'm surprised Star was willing to after her experiences with The Doctor.”

Redheart continues grumbling but doesn’t argue. She tried it months ago when she started putting the project together, and Tempest refused flat out to be ‘treated like a test tube’ as she put it, punctuating her point with a series of colorful Marexican curses.

“Okay, so… what is it doing to you?” I ask, feeling a little lightheaded at the idea that we’d all brought something of the Trials out with us. “To all of you?”

“Near as we can tell?” Aria says, glancing at Redheart who just shrugs. “It’s improving us.”

I stare at Aria for a long moment before shaking my head and laughing.

“Uhm… what?” I could not have heard that right. “Improving?”

“Yes,” Redheart replies around the dum-dum. “Cardiovascular systems, immune systems, nervous systems… everything shows biological improvement.

“The non-converted have a rate of vascular recovery after exertion comparable to an Olympic athlete. Their blood clots almost forty per cent faster than average, their reaction time is on par with certain forms of neural savantism, and they’re almost totally immune to disease and infection.”

Redheart is breathing hard by the end of her rant, and she looks almost feverish, with wide eyes and flushed cheeks.

“God you’re hot when you get that crazy look in your eyes,” Aria says, earning a glower from Redheart.

“Anyway, the Entity did something to us, Red,” Aria continues as she turns back to me. “And by that I mean, the moment it took us, it changed us.”

“How?” I tried to recall what it felt like to be taken. It was a long time ago, but it was also… hazy. “I don’t even remember it, really.”

“Yeah.” Aria’s face falls as she crosses her arms over herself. “Kinda like how none of us really remembers what happens after we’re sacrificed?”

A sluice of ice water goes down my spine at her words. She isn’t wrong though. Everyone has vague and horrifying conceptions of what happened, but nothing definite.

For me, it had been the feeling of being taken apart piece by piece and then put back together just slightly wrong. Starlight had described feeling like she was being unraveled, like an old sweater, and Sour said it felt like being opened up, like an autopsy, and having everything taken out and being left empty.

Tempest still refuses to speak about what it felt like for her, and we all agree that no one has the right to ask someone to relive that.

I don’t like thinking about it either.

“Okay, so, you said the Fog is inside of us, right?” I ask. “What do you mean?”

Aria and Redheart share a look that’s just a little too long for me to be totally comfortable with.

“That’s… complicated,” Redheart says cautiously. “The short of it is that the Fog? It’s… it's been woven into your genetic code, it’s literally a part of you, a part of all of you.”

My stomach does an uncomfortable flip at the idea. The idea that Tempest and the rest of the girls were permanently altered by the Entity in a way they had no control over is not my favorite idea in the world. That it goes as deep as their DNA is troubling for a variety of reasons.

“How is that possible?” I ask, knowing that it couldn’t just end there. There had to be more to it than just that. “How could the Entity have changed us that much and we didn’t notice?”

“You know how we always thought our ability to heal and survive the wounds the Killers gave us was some magic of the Trials?” Aria says as she walks over to the couch and plops down on it before gesturing for me to join her.

I nod and follow, sitting beside her as she holds up the charts. Some of it I understand, some of it is just medical jargon that’s over my head.

“Well, it wasn’t,” Aria continues. “Or at least, it wasn’t just magic.”

“This is going to get technical but follow me, alright?” Redheart says as she pulls a chair close and sits down in front of us. “Aria’s DNA contains sets of markers that match nothing in the human genome, those same markers are present in the rest of the non-converted. My theory is that these interact with the Fog, catalysing with it during the Trials.”

“Think about how many lethal hits we took,” Aria says. “Think about how long it took one of us to bleed out on the ground despite having a goddamn hole in our guts!”

“I… I always thought it was just the Entity keeping us alive long enough to hook us,” I say uneasily.

“It was,” Aria replies. “It’s just that it did it biologically and magically. Magic doesn’t heal everything, Red… it has a lot of limitations when it comes to serious wounds. The Entity didn’t just take us, it respun our entire genetic code to make us better at not dying so it could torture us for longer.”

My stomach is doing flips again. I can’t even fathom that level of magical complexity. It would have had to have been magic that let it rewrite us like that, but the amount of power and control that suggested… the Entity really is a God on par with, or above, the legendary Spirit of Disharmony.

“On the other hand, did think of something else to test,” Aria says in a slightly more chipper voice.

“Cool, I could use something that isn’t existentially harrowing,” I reply.

“Mm, can’t promise that,” Redheart says blithely.

Aria pulls out an empty glass test tube from her pocket, along with the plastic cap, and passes it over to me with a wide grin. “Here, breathe into that and then cap it.”

I raise an eyebrow at her, then shrug and blow a breath into the tube, cap it, and pass it back to her. Redheart immediately gets up and scoots in beside Aria as the former Siren gives the tube a few good shakes before rummaging around in her pocket again and drawing out a small flashlight.

“Alright, ‘Hearts, time to test your theory,” Aria says quietly.

Then she raises the flashlight, presses it against the side of the tube, and turns it on.

“Yahtzee,” Redheart breathes.

“Shit.” Aria apparently has a different feeling on the matter.

“What?” I stand up and move over to them, crouching down so I can look at the vial. “What’s wrong with my—”

What I’m saying dies in my throat as I see what’s inside the vial.

It’s faint… so faint that it’s almost imperceptible, but it’s definitely there. It might be in only the barest trace amounts, but the fact that the contents of that test tube came out of me is enough to make me want to claw my own chest open.

Fog.

There’s the barest hint of Fog in the tube.

I literally breathed out Fog.

“I thought so,” Redheart sits up and shakes her head. “Your powers aren’t just magic, they’re fueled by the Fog, so that meant that either you would lose your powers outside of the Trials, which obviously you haven’t…”

“Or I’m self-sustaining,” I say hollowly as I stand up and stagger back to my seat so I can slump down in it. “I’m a living Fog machine.”

“Essentially, yes,” Redheart agrees. “Given the drastic changes that have occurred in the non-converted, I honestly can’t even imagine what it must have done to you.”

“Thanks for the pep talk, ‘Hearts, that was really encouraging,” Aria says testily before looking back at me. “Look, Red, it’s messed up, but it doesn’t really change anything for you, y’know? Same with ‘Dagi and ‘Nata… they’re still themselves.”

I’m not so certain that’s true, but I don’t say it. Every time I change, I have to fight back the ingrained instincts of my nature as a Killer. I used to think it was just some kind of preprogrammed biological imperative, but now I have to wonder if that’s not the case. I wonder if, maybe, the Entity is still in my head somewhere… whispering… driving me to do it’s bidding and send more people into the Fog.

Adagio says she has the same impulses, but she fights them back for our sake and for Timber’s sake. Sonata doesn’t shift into her Killer state at all because she’s afraid she won’t have the strength to come back from it, so we’re not sure about her.

“I do have one other theory,” Redheart begins with a touch of unease, and I raise an eyebrow at that.

Aria sighs and glares at Redheart for a moment. “C’mon, ‘Hearts… is this really the time?”

“It’s not as if she’s going to get any less ‘foggy’,” Redheart replies with a terse gesture at me. “Sorry, Sunset, but this theory… it could be a weapon against whatever stole the Entity’s powers, and it may save Aria’s life one day, so you’ll forgive me if I’m biased.”

Well, that got my attention. “A weapon?”

I stand up, pushing back my revulsion at the idea of the Fog just sitting inside of me and fixing Redheart with a hard look.

“Sort of,” Redheart says. “The Fog catalyses with non-converted bodies, making them faster, stronger, more agile, and giving them a greater healing factor.”

“Yeah, I got that part—” I wave my hand for her to continue— “what’s the idea?”

“She wants to harvest Fog from you, ‘Dagi, and ‘Nata,” Aria says, and there’s an undercurrent of anger in her tone.

That earns a grimace.

“Don’t say it like that, Ari’!” Redheart swats Aria on the back of the head lightly with the clipboard before turning back to me. “I just want to collect it using a breathing apparatus! The short of it is this: The Fog can make the non-converted stronger and more durable, I can make an inhalant system that can deliver doses of the Fog in short bursts.”

That… didn’t actually sound so bad.

The Fog isn’t toxic, at least not to us, obviously. We were surrounded by the stuff back in the Trials. If that was the reason we were all so durable, then it would make sense to make use of it now. The more I think about it, the more it feels like the right course of action.

“Are we sure we won’t trigger conversion?” I ask. I have to ask it, even though I'm certain I know the answer.

“Obviously we can’t know the answer for sure,” Redheart says. “But considering the quantities of Fog you all were exposed to near-constantly during your imprisonment, I doubt the comparatively minor amounts delivered through an inhaler would even register in that regard.”

I nod at that. I’m fairly certain the creation of a Killer requires a lot more than just Fog, too. I’m not sure it’s exactly an automatic process either. Every Killer is substantially different, and each one seems to be heavily influenced by their own pasts. Adagio reverted to her violent Huntress aspect from hundreds of years ago after the murder of her family. Sonata channeled the spectral rage of her ghostly self from when she was tortured in the bowels of the Crotus Prenn Asylum.

And me?

I became a reflection of the living nightmare that was my life. A monster whose hands could only hurt other people, and whose power existed only to turn dreams into horrifying prisons of anguish.

There was more to the creation of a Killer than just Fog. There was purpose, intention, and… acceptance.

Will you-Won’t you?

The Old Stain didn’t force anything on me. He didn’t turn me into this against my will. No… he dragged me into the shadows, and then he asked.

Will you be mine?

And I said yes.

We all did.

“Alright, let’s set something up then,” I say. “We’ll figure out some time for us all to come in and you can collect as much Fog as possible. If we’re going up against new Killers, I want every advantage we can get our hands on.” I look over at Aria who's more grumpy than usual, and frown. “Only if everyone’s okay with it, though… same deal as the tests, so if Sonata or Adagio don’t want to do this, we won’t make them, but I’m in.”

I sit back down and bury my face in my hands for a few moments as I take several long breaths.

“You okay, Red?” Aria asks.

“Yeah.” I lean back in my chair and pull my hands away, and sigh as I stare up at the stucco ceiling. “I just hate playing catch-up… I don’t want to lose anyone, Ari’.”

“I hear you,” Aria replies quietly before turning to Redheart. “Alright, babe, let’s do this.”

Aria and Redheart make to leave, but not before Aria comes over and wraps her arms around me, pulling me into a tight hug. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t need to. She’s my sister, maybe not by blood, but that doesn’t change anything.

I never would have imagined back during the Battle of the Bands that the women who would end up being my ride-or-die family would be the three Sirens I sang down on the stage at Canterlot High and not the six girls who had pulled me out of a crater months before.

Then again, they were the ones that put me there. Not that I didn’t deserve it, but the facts remain, our relationship was probably poisoned from the get-go.

Aria is the closest thing to a platonic soulmate I’ve ever had. She gets me in ways even Tempest doesn't, and I appreciate her more than I have words for. We don’t need words, though… not really. She and I get each other and that’s all we really need. In the end, I’d do absolutely anything for Aria Blaze, and I know she would do the same for me.

“Take care of yourself, Red,” Aria whispers as she pulls back. “Call me if you need me.”

“Same,” I say back, finally finding my smile.

Taking Redheart’s hand, Aria walks out of my little clinic to head back to their department, and I turn back to the slumbering form of my once-friend.

Applejack and the girls… they weren’t even my friends for terribly long, but the time we did have was something I cherished, specifically because I’d never had it before.

I had never had friends, never had anyone who wanted to be friends, and being with them had given me hope that things could get better which is why it was so devastating for me when I lost them… because in the end all it proved was that nothing ever would.

None of that matters now, though, so I settle back into my chair for another long, boring night, and try to ignore the fact of who it is I’m watching over.

I survived the long nightmare of the Trials. One night of doing my fucking job isn’t going to kill me.

Author's Note

A momentary abatement...

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