I woke to an alarm blaring, the noise shattering my pleasant dreams. I rolled out of my bed with a grunt. A light green glow filled the room as I used my magic to turn off my alarm clock. Grumbling as I stretched in a similar fashion as a cat, I went towards the small bathroom in my Manehatten apartment. After a quick shower, I looked myself over in the mirror. Solid blue eyes gazed back at me, my black carapace shiny from the water, my gossamer wings fluttering a bit to work the sleep out of them. ‘Today’s the day,’ I thought to myself, ‘I can feel it.’
After my bout of vanity, I changed to my ‘normal’ form. A flash of green fire replacing my hole-filled changeling self into a dark-grey pegasus with a choppy dark-purple mane and tail. Violet eyes inspected my cutie mark, a simple raincloud with a few scattered drops of rain beneath it. Leaving the bathroom I opened my curtains to let in the morning sun, the warmth quickly chasing away the last vestiges of sleep from my mind. Gazing out the window of my Manehatten apartment, I watched as the rest of the city came to life.
Ponies were leaving their homes to head to their jobs. The occasional sky wagon flew overhead, making deliveries or just taxiing ponies around the city. The residual effects of last night's rainfall caused the city to glisten in the sun. A faded rainbow could be seen in the air as the last of the moisture in the air cleared. I wish the city looked this beautiful every morning, I thought to myself.
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After a few minutes of calm reflection, I left my apartment to get started with my day. On my way to work, I stopped at a cafe to grab a bagel for a rushed breakfast. It was a small place, the only pony that worked there was the owner, Meadow Breeze. She was a pale yellow earth pony with sky blue eyes and an orange mane. We became friends during my frequent mornings there.
“Goodmorning Rain,” she greeted me with a smile as I entered the cafe, “here for the usual?” She always wore a smile, but it didn’t take an emotivore to see the sadness in her eyes.
“You know it,” I responded, slipping into our typical routine. “Any plans for the weekend?” The cafe was almost empty that morning, the only other pony I saw was a grey, old stallion sitting by himself reading a newspaper.
“I’m leaving early today to bring my daughter on a trip to visit her grandparents in Canterlot. I’ve been wanting to get out of Manehatten and I haven’t seen my parents in a while so it felt like a good idea.” I occasionally saw her daughter helping run the store, but she was shy around strangers, so she usually stayed in the back.
“That sounds nice. I haven’t seen my family in a while, either. Maybe I should do the same,” though with how our last interaction went, I doubt it would go well, I thought to myself. “Anyway, I hope you have a good trip, but I need to get to work before Rosie blows a gasket about me being late again.”
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After saying our farewells, I left the cafe and headed out onto the busy streets of Manehatten. At a glance life in the city looked the same as it always had, but when you walked the roads for long enough you began to see the way it changed. While ponies still bustled about, they did so with a constant sense of dread. The Ministries of Image and Morale did their best to maintain an air of peace and happiness, but they could only do so much.
As I walked I could feel the blanket of emotion the city produced. It was a constant presence in a city as large as Manehatten. The air itself buzzing with the emotions of the populace. I once heard from some of the older changelings back at the hive that the happiness and love in the air could almost sustain a changeling on its own. Since the war began, however, the air has been filled with something else.
The sadness from those who’ve lost loved ones, the anger at the ones that took them away, and the fear of being the next ones to die, created an almost tangible darkness that hovered around the city. It occasionally reached a point where it threatened to overwhelm my other senses.
Breaking out of my thoughts, I realized I was at work. In front of me was one of the Ministry of Peace’s hospitals. Walking in, I was greeted by a hovering white robot behind the front desk. “Good morning, Dr.Rain. Lovely day out isn’t it?” the robot’s feminine voice said while using the pincers on one of its three limbs to type on its terminal. These robots were a variation of the Mr.Handy robot designed to work in hospitals or other caretaking professions. Instead of a saw and a blowtorch, these models had a scalpel and defibrillators they could use for emergencies.
“Good morning Rosie, has Time Turner arrived yet?” I asked as I looked around the empty reception room.
“Dr. Turner arrived thirty minutes ago and has already gone down to the labs,” Rosie informed me, looking at me with one of her three eyes, the other two still focusing on the terminal in front of her.
Giving her my thanks, I went over to the elevator and rode it down to the basement. While the primary purpose of the facility was a hospital, there were a few labs in the sub-basements dedicated to experimentation. Though the experiments themselves differed greatly, all had the goal of protecting and healing ponies afflicted by the war.
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Finding Time Turner was easy. Even without my ability to sense others from their emotions, the amount of noise coming from one of the labs was a dead giveaway. I could hear him muttering between the sounds of various power tools and banging. Making sure to grab a lab coat and safety goggles out of a cabinet next to the door to the lab, I entered to see him working on a contraption about the size of a pony. Due to the noise he was making and his unwavering concentration, he wasn’t aware of my presence until I tapped him on the shoulder.
“Great whickering stallions!!” the beige earth pony exclaimed, startled by my unexpected tap. He turned to glare at me as I started laughing, “You shouldn’t sneak up on ponies Rain, it’s quite rude.” He did most of our engineering work on our little project, though I did occasionally have to stop his more crazy ideas.
“But it’s so easy with you, I can’t help it!” I said as my laughter died off. “How goes the progress with the device?” The device itself consisted of a lot of wires, tubes, and blinking lights. I never really figured out what each part did, no matter how many times Turner explained it to me.
I felt his emotions go from annoyed to frustrated as he began explaining, “Well my dear colt, I’ve found my progress to be at a standstill at the moment. I can’t seem to find a way to make it smaller without also making it completely dysfunctional. The main problem coming from the fact that we have to use a frankly ludicrous amount of spark batteries to make the stasis spell last the desired amount of time! I could probably do it if-” the rest of his statement getting cut off by another voice.
“No matter how many times you ask, I am not letting you ‘experiment’ with the spark batteries. They are extremely dangerous and liable to explode from too much tampering,” the voice belonged to our last team member, Resolute Star. She was an older unicorn mare with a yellow coat and an orange mane pulled into a ponytail. She was sent by the Ministry of Arcane Sciences to assist with any projects that needed her magical expertise.
“I didn’t know you were coming in today Star,” I said, “I thought you were still on vacation in Las Pegasus”
“You know I was forced into that vacation because I ‘overwork myself’ and ‘needed to take a break’, not because I wanted to.”
“I said that because it's true. You’re here longer than most of us daily and then I found out that you hadn’t taken a day off in years. It’s my job to make sure ponies are taking care of themselves and that includes time off from work,” I replied. I worked with the Ministry of Peace as a psychologist and therapist. Being able to sense the emotional state of others made me perfect for the job.
“Just because I enjoy my work does not mean I am not taking care of myself, and besides we are here to work, not evaluate my life choices. Now, since we are all here we can begin with the next batch of trials. Rain, if you would prepare the subject while Dr. Turner and I go to the observation room we can get started,” she said before she left.
Turner waited a couple seconds before speaking to me, “Don’t tell her I did this, but I did modify the spark batteries a little bit.”
“What did you do?” I asked with an exasperated tone.
“Hopefully, they will absorb some of the wasted arcane energy in the air from the spell firing. That way we won’t have to wait so long between tests to recharge the batteries and, I will also prove that I can tinker with them without causing them to explode!” he answered with just a bit too much enthusiasm before leaving to bring the device to the test chamber.
I facehooved before going over to the section of the lab where we kept our test mice. I knew it was necessary to test the effects of an extended stasis on a living creature, but that didn’t make it easier to experiment with said living creature. Pushing away my feelings on the matter I collected a mouse in a cage and carried it to the test chamber.
The chamber itself was a fortified room with thick steel doors that would seal in an emergency. In the center of the room sat the stasis device. ‘Hopefully, Turner is right or we’re going to have to build another one of these things’ I thought to myself as I placed the cage with the mouse a few feet away from the device. I looked up and saw Turner and Star on the other side of the reinforced glass that led to the observation room.
Nodding to them through the glass I turned to leave but before I could, several things happened at once. I felt the ground rumble and I saw the device start to whir to life as it glowed brightly. The emergency doors slammed shut, sealing me in the room. I felt a surge of panic from the observation room as a wave of magic pulsed from the device and washed over the lab and everything in it.
The last thing I felt before the wave hit me, was the constant blanket of emotion from the city above me disappearing.
Author's Note
This is my first time writing a story so feel free to leave a comment with any tips or to point out any errors. I am my own editor and proof-reader so I am bound to miss a few. Also, I have a rather chaotic schedule so updates will probably be few and far between but I do hope to finish this story.
Much love,
Static Rain