The Dream Engine

Programs in visions
Visions of whirling shades
Lights into dreams
Dreams of sapphires and jades
Life brings the glow
Wonder in colors and paint
Motions that flow
Tranquil, peaceful, quaint

The bright red mare crumpled the paper into a tight ball as the rhyming panged against her ear. With abandon, she tossed it over her shoulder as it rolled to the base of the waste basket with about eight others that didn't make it in. Why was she wasting paper? Because having this garbage on her computer meant any schmoe could hack into it and read it. Hell, she'd prefer someone to spy on her porn. At least they had better writing skills than she did. Why in the hell was she sitting at this damn desk and writing this drivel anyway?

She was two months away from college, having passed high school by a mile. To appease her mother, she signed up for college the month before graduation. She wanted to take a year off from school, but that was out of the question. Apparently a 3.6 grade average just wasn't good enough. She had to get to the next level whether she cared to or not.

Neon Sol didn't feel like practicing the bass. Her band was practicing tonight, but she knew her part well enough. She didn't feel like writing a song, although she told Dusk that she totally would do so asap. Yeah, not happening.

That's when her eyes traced over to her full sized bed against the wall to her left. She leered downward, toward the bottom, blinking. She scratched the back of her hot pink mane with the butt of her pen and took a deep breath as she pushed her chair out.

"Sol!" The door burst open and she shrieked! Gloaming Flare burst in and scared the life out of her before she put her hand on her chest and gasped for breath.

"Damnit, Flare!" She punched him in the arm with an audible thwack! "How many times do I need to tell you to knock!?"

"Hey! Quit hitting!" He said as he rubbed his tricep. They glared at one another as he stood in her doorway.

"What do you want, you little twirp!" She interrupted her glare to check around her. Thankfully, there didn't seem to be any red feathers from her wings.

"You said you'd help me with my entrance essay." Flare replied, causing Sol to exasperate. "Hey, you're the one who said to remind you."

"I didn't say 'burst into my room like a gazelle and scare the ghost out of me'! What if…" She stopped herself from saying anything more. She shook her head and waved it away. "Just show me what you have so far, you little imp." Sol said and Flare rolled his eyes.

"All this after I helped you pass your programming final." He sighed audibly.

"Oh, don't even start with me! You've been paid back with interest." She followed him across the hallway to his room.

His quarters were about as tidy as hers with an overflowing garbage can, a line of soda cans along the desk ledge and model car parts strewn all over the rest of the surface by his VR based computer. The screen was visible, as neither of them liked doing text documents with a headset. Seriously, the graphics they used in VR documents were seizure inducing. Who in their right mind could type like that?

Sol frowned at the digital keyboard interface on the desk. It was just a series of laser lights forming the keys. Many called her crazy, but she preferred a real one.

"You call this a starting paragraph?" She asked after reading it over. "Where's your thesis, and why are you talking about vamponies?"

"That's what my essay is about. I said I wanted to write about how the legend of vamponies has changed over the last two centuries and how it was better if we stuck with the ones from the 1970's." Flare said as the dark blue pegasus waited for the degradation that was to come. She'd gaslight his topic and call him an immature loser and cast some sort of hex on-

"Okay, that's not a terrible topic." She admitted, causing his eyes to bulge. "Though, if we know when the first legend started, it doesn't predate recorded history." She backspaced some of the paragraph and started tapping on the desk surface.

"For someone who hates holographic keyboards, you sure type fast on them." Flare observed, noticing she had already typed a whole paragraph in the time it took for him to type two sentences. "How do you know when the first book was written about the Blood Count?"

"What? Are you serious? How many times has Firewire brought you in to help with that stupid game? I was helping them test it twice and I caught all of this info. Have you not been paying attention? Where are your sources for this essay?" She asked as she searched through his browsers, seeing Hooftube, gaming sites, coding sources and more game reviews.

Then she brought up the other browser and every single tab was porn. Before he could stop her, there it was, gamer girl cam porn. The one where they put vibrators in their cunts and make them vibrate with the game's impact features. Because of course that's why his essay isn't done.

"For heaven's sake, Flare, how many tabs of porn do you need all at once?" She pinched her snout between her eyes and he gave a nervous laugh as he scratched the back of his blonde mane with red tips. "When is this due?"

"Tomorrow." He said in a small voice and she balked. "I'm just not good at this sort of thing. I'm a programmer."

"And coding doesn't require typing? You've made how many gaming engines from scratch, now?" She asked him and it actually looked like he was trying to remember. "Six, Flare, you've created six of them and I have seen you type a keyboard to death on that third one."

"Yeah, the Flare3 Engine. I still use code from that one." He chuckled until he noticed her death stare.

"And now, you're going to owe me." She said as she intertwined her fingers and popped them and her elbows as she stretched. "That's a thousand words by tomorrow."

"I've seen you write three thousand." He looked at her, puzzled.

"I've written five thousand in a day, but that was song lyrics! I don't need to follow song lyrics up with citations and sources and they don't need to be properly formatted. This is going to cost you plenty." She growled at him, her blue eyes gazing into his yellow eyes to let him know that she was deathly serious with every word.

Then she started to pull up scholarly sources, free public domain books on vamponies and videos on the subject of the movies and the books. He watched her do this as if it were some sort of second nature to her.

"Do you mean the…" He started to say and she nodded.

"Finish my minigame or I swear, you will live to regret it. You will wish that I made you brain dead while we were in mom's uterus together." She said as her fingers began tapping on the surface once again. A good solid minute of typing later and she stopped as she turned to him with an even meaner look. "Well, go on! I'm doing this now, so you should be coding!"

"Hey, Flare!" A familiar voice said from the living room.

"First, see what Fire wants." Sol rolled her eyes as Gloaming Flare facepalmed.

Firewire was in the living room, laptop on his lap, his second laptop on the couch cushion beside him and another laptop on his other side acting as a server.

The naval blue pegasus hadn't shaved, but his goatee wasn't thick at all. His red mane was in a ponytail and he typed on one laptop, then the other laptop, while pressing enter on the third laptop.

"Yeah, Fire?" Flare asked and the older pegasus pointed to the young stallion's mother, who was on the other half of the corner couch.

Night Coder had notes all over the couch, sticky notes all over the laptop on the coffee table and three different coffee mugs lined up along the side of it. She was laying there, her very tired eyes half opened as she looked at her son. She wiped a tiny bit of drool from her bottom lip.

"How's that essay coming?" Her pinkish red hair was in tatters as she sat up on the couch. She went hard the night prior and she was paying for it this morning. It was nearly 10:30 and it looked like his mom was ready to sleep for another three hours.

"It's coming." He assured her, though her look was not very reassuring. "I'll have it done by tomorrow."

"Good, remember to have Neon Sol look it over before you submit it." The mare said as she looked over at Firewire, who stopped typing and looked at her.

"What?" Fire asked, then he looked to Flare, who shrugged.

"You're still going. You've been coding for eleven hours straight. It is time to stop, eat something and cuddle with me. Find a point. I need to call Ember Wing too." Night said as she checked the time. "You're done with all of the objects in level four?"

"All of the breakables are finally done. We can even use some of them in the final levels." Fire said as she picked up the headset and logged into the interface.

"What about throwables?" Flare asked and Firewire nodded. "So you finished telekinesis?"

"Yeah, I even did the glass shards, but it only works on the stained glass windows." Firewire said as Night sighed and took off the headset, massaging her eyelids.

"Okay! Enough talking shop. I swear, I'm having the code dreams again." She got up and popped her back four times as she sighed. Then she pointed at Flare. "You, essay." Then pointed at Firewire. "You, lunch."

"Can't we have brunch?" Firewire asked and she groaned.

"Food, you twirp! Then I want a warm, soft embrace while I watch my new episodes. I must be at least three episodes behind. Damnit, I can't wait until this game is finito!" Night sighed as she gathered the dirty mugs.

"Just half a level to go, sweety." Firewire grinned as he saved his work.

"Don't 'sweety' me. You may as well say we have an entire game left to finish. I knew we shouldn't have gone fully interactive set pieces." Night brought the mugs around to the kitchen as she glared at Flare, who finally went back to his room.

"Every single element is being used to enhance the gameplay. It made every sense to make things moveable and breakable. Remember The Lost Manor? Every review praised our devotion to the interactive setting."

"Not every review." She pointed out and he waved that notion away.

"Every official review. Amateur reviewers don't count. Just because you can type something up or speak into the microphone does not mean your opinion matters." He shook his head and waved both hands this time. "The point is, this is something that other small developers are missing. We're good enough to where we don't need to go early access, nor do we need to release a game and do patches afterward. That shit is either bad practice or publishers wanting to have their cake and eat it too."

"It is also the work of sixty developers or more. I am aware of the numbers, Fire. We don't need to discuss the problems with gaming in general. What matters is the work that needs to be put in and what is simply fluff that the casual gamers never pay attention to. I'd much rather focus on the casual crowd than a bunch of keyboard hounds that will never be satisfied until every game comes with a free blowjob."

There was a silence between them. That long drawn out silence where both parties were given something to think about. Night Coder could understand the need for such detailed work but that was hard to appreciate when it made the level take that much longer to develop. Thankfully, their publisher was very happy with the updates they were sending in. Being a more independent company had its perks, but it also meant they needed a more creative avenue for advertisements and platforms.

Firewire looked off to the side as his hand went to his chin, tapping it with his finger. Night's eyebrows went low and she scowled.

"No, we are not programming first day purchase blowjobs in this game." She said with a very flat tone.

"But just think of the–"

"Maybe next time." Night Coder slapped his arm and motioned toward the next room. "Hungry. Food. Kitchen. Now."

—----------------

"There. Done." Sol said as she stretched. She popped her neck and both elbows and sighed. "I'm only guessing the format they want it in. MPA is the usual go-to." The young mare looked back toward Flare to see he had on his headset and seemed to be quite diligently working.

"How's your end?" She asked as his worked his glowing gloves around, moving virtual objects and casting them onto the digital floor.

"It's going great, actually. Had a bit of a muse, actually. This shouldn't take too long." He said as he began shaping character designs. She knew this because his hand movements were still fast but much more diligent and methodic. The details with which he worked was admirable. She gave him a hard time but she couldn't argue with his results. Given time, he could possibly rival some of the top devs in the industry.

"So, why don't you help Mom and Fire with their game?" She asked as he already finished one character model and went onto another one. How did he do that so quick?

"Because they both want me to focus on college. Despite the fact that I'm not even officially in." Gloaming Flare was paying far more attention to detailing this character and suddenly she wanted to see who he was detailing into the game.

"Alright, well just let me know when you get everything done for an alpha test. I'm going to eat something." Sol said as she noticed his hands were positioned as if he were squeezing two balloons at chest level. She blinked at this.

"Right, I'll take a break here in a bit. I wanted to see Ember when he came. You think he'll bring the bat pony girl again?" He asked as innocently as he could, making her roll her eyes.

"She has a girlfriend. Something you should think about getting." Sol said and he scoffed.

"And your last boyfriend was how long ago?" Flare came back at her, making her eye twitch.

"Just don't forget to eat." She said as she walked out the room.

"Roger wilco." Flare said as he began programming objects.

—-----------

"It is a bit of a problem, especially now." Firewire said as he put the dishes in the dishwasher and rinsed a few of them off while Flare put up the food. "Ponies are literally getting a deficiency in vitamin D because they will literally never go outside. This is why we tell you kids to put up the digitals and go outside for at least an hour as many times as you can."

"Working from home, food deliveries and staying on the internet is no life for anyone." Night said as she finished putting a bag in the garbage. "We want you kids to be better than that. And now you're telling me you're making another game?"

"Yeah." Flare said as he pushed the fridge closed and it began to analyze the contents for any rot or mold.

"It took you five months and I swear we never saw you when you made Cyborg Flint. Now you're jumping straight into another one?" Night Coder asked as she put on her Mom voice.

"No, this one is way smaller and uses the same Dream Engine. It's not going to take near as long. It's for a friend." Flare heard a distinct silence as Sol stopped typing on her ancient keyboard. He still couldn't believe she found a working one at a decent price.

"Well, since your essay is done, I'll let it go, but don't sign any more contracts this time without us. We've been in this business for a very long time, since before you were born, and we kept our noses clean because we didn't skimp on reading the fine print." Night looked over at Sol, who was now reading her screen with her finger tapping her chin. "Any luck?"

"No, all of these basses are beyond repair and not worth the effort. All I can find are cannibal parts." She shrugged. "It's fine, I'll just stick with the one I've got."

"I'll see if I can help on that front, Sol. If you really want an original five string bass that badly, I could find some of my old friends." Firewire said as he checked the time. "Ember should be here soon."

"Didn't you say Dusk had an old bass guitar?" Flare asked, causing Sol to sigh in a big way.

"Yes and sweet mercy, it is beautiful. It is not a six string, but I offered him the moon and the stars for it. He will never give it up because it was his first instrument he ever learned how to play. Even when he took up electric guitar, he kept it." She remembered how gorgeous that instrument was, with the black inner panel on the body and the fire pattern blue around the edges. She would have cherished it, even if it was only one string.

That's when they all got the notification on their devices that someone was at the door.

Sol let Ember in as she waved. "Hey, Ember! Welcome to our humble abode once again." She said and they hugged. Then she saw Vera and they shared a wave as well.

"Hey, Ember!" Night came to him and hugged him tight. "Take a seat, we've got great news!"

"Awesome! So do we!" The orange pegasus said as the purple bat pony beside him nodded. They both walked into the living room, where Firewire was preparing the test session. "We have a solid date for the Game Expo!"

"What? Already?" Night asked as she got her notes and sat on the couch.

"Yeah, actually, that was the big thing we wanted to talk about and why we moved up our meeting." The uneasiness could be sensed a mile away as he scratched his muzzle and looked at Vera, who shrugged.

Both Night and Firewire lifted an eyebrow at him as they sat on the couch. Both of them paused their preparations as they began to have a sinking feeling in their guts.

"Well, it turns out that the ones I told to keep me informed were keeping me informed about… the wrong convention." Ember Wing said and both of their jaws hit the floor.

"Wrong convention? How in the hell did that happen?" Fire asked as he began to run his fingers over his forehead. He sighed, figuring he already didn't want to ask the next question. "So, I take that to mean our convention is…"

"In two days." Vera said with her eyes off to the side and a big, nervously fake smile came to Ember's face.

Flare was at the doorway to the hall. He heard all of this before he had the chance to greet Ember. His eyes lost their irises and pupils, and his mouth hung open.

"Two days?!" Both of them exasperated at the same time.

Ember grimaced and nodded.

"But the demo isn't done!" Night said in a panicked tone.

"It's a five hour train ride!" Fire said as he facepalmed.

There came a very still, uncomfortable silence in the room. Ember's fingers were pinched onto the place between his eyes and Vera was twiddling her fingers as she stared at the floor.

"Well, I guess that stocks up the next two days real nicely." Flare said from the doorway as he leaned against it and grinned. "Looks like the two of you are going to need some help."

"I…" Vera cleared her throat. "I can help too. I've been programming." She said as she slowly rubbed her hoof on the carpet floor as a blush came across her face.

"Yeah, for this to work, we're going to need to visit our old friend…" Ember sighed, as did Fire and Night.

"Admiral Crunch." All three of them said at the same time. Vera looked at them with a raised eyebrow.

"Who?" The purple batpony asked, drawing looks from all three of them.

—----------------

"You have twenty-four hours to program thirty gigabytes of data?" Sol asked the four of them as they set up shop all across the livingroom.

Ember stood in the center with his VR visor, moving his hands around and calling out coordinates to any spot he found glitches or places with incomplete coding. Firewire was typing like crazy on both laptops and Night was on her data pad with the stylus and a data feed streaming on her screen. Vera typed, then sketched, typed, then erased and corrected on a sheet of a notepad.

All four of them had been working for four hours while Sol was in her room, practicing her bass while watching her favorite game streamer recording. She glanced over at Ember, a bit weirded out that he was in her living room in real life.

"That's about the size of it, sweety. That means twenty hours to go. Can you fend for yourself while we work?" She asked, never taking her eyes off of her screens.

"I'm eighteen, Mom. I think I know how to warm up some soup." She rolled her eyes and straightened her mane a bit. The bright red pegasus watched as they all worked in synchronized fashion. All of them working on function, details, backgrounds, voice overs, and just about everything you could think of for this game.

"Um, no, we're ordering pizza. If we're going to crunch mode, we're on a dev diet." Firewire said and Night shrugged, not even arguing any points because she did get hankerings for pizza when they went into programming frenzies.

"Alright, well I'm going to be at band practice for a while so…"

"Oh, ummm, Sol?" Vera said from her place in the recliner. "Dusk is actually sick today. He's been asleep with the flu."

The news caused Sol to breathe in deep. The blew out this breath and began to nod and laugh. This was not a laugh with any sense of humor.

"Well, okay then. I don't suppose you all need someone who can program a stylish version of Pong or Snake, so I guess I'll just be in my room." She sighed as she waved and began to walk out.

"Sol…" Night said, but Sol was already gone. All of them paused as they heard her door close.

Outcasted once again. The family unit worked, she understood that. But if they were a band, then she would have been the one in the background with a tambourine. Sol tried so hard to take up coding. It simply did not click.

Video games were very artistic and she loved them more than a little. When she saw a whole page of coding, though, she froze. She understood maybe two or three commands and she could make one of those activity threads but that's about as far as she went.

All of her skills seemed rudimentary by comparison and sometimes, the only way she could cope was shoving her muzzle into the pillow on her bed. How she wanted so badly to be a part of all of that. It felt like the ultimate game that she couldn't play. It was nothing like that, but the feeling was there.

The door opened after about thirty minutes of her tears soaking into her pillow. Sol sighed and opened her bloodshot eyes as she faced the headboard. As the pony sat on the side of her bed, she was a little astounded to see that it wasn't her Mother that sat there, but it was Flare. Her brother sat on the edge, glancing at her.

"You still want to play that game I made you?" He asked as he looked at her band poster for Triple Abomination on her wall. This gave her pause and made her turn her head.

"You just started that game." She said as she looked over at him. He smirked and scratched his blonde, red tipped mane.

"No, I started it two months ago. It was going to be a surprise. It's not entirely finished, but it's more than ready for beta testing." He said, causing her to pause as she considered his words. Such talent and drive.

Here she was demanding an entire game being made for the price of an essay. There was a severe valley between their talents in terms of skill and effort involved. She closed her bloodshot eyes and laid her head back on the pillow, feeling the cold wet tears as they worked their way into the fabric.

"It's fine, I shouldn't have told you to make it in the first place." She rasped through a hoarse voice.

Then she was stunned as he laid down in her bed with her, pulling her close into his lanky form. She felt his muzzle on her cheek and the breath from his snout as he sighed. Flare kept his arms around her in a rare show of affection.

"If you don't play it, it would make me sad." He said in the most sober, serious tone she'd ever heard from him. "The reason I made it so fast and with so much inspiration is because you inspired me. You're my muse, Sol."

The bright red pegasus gazed at him with some astonishment. To think of herself as a muse was something of a laughing stock… but a fun thought none the less.

The pause brought a stillness to the room. It lasted a good long while as she lied there with her brother in a familiar position. They hadn't done this since well before high school, but the nostalgic memory was not lost on either of them. It even brought back others.

"Okay." She said, looking at him, even surprised him with a small peck on his lips. Her eyes were clearing up a bit and she gave him a genuine smile. "Okay." She repeated.

—-----------------

Bright Shadow City was beyond compare with any other. The neon lights polluting the sky, the hustle of the quiet car engines on the street. Ponies walking through the streets and sidewalks, either commutung to work, home, the nearest club or nowhere in particular.

Neon Sol had never seen so many mohawks in her life. Though, to Flare's credit, their color pallets were all quite diverse and plentiful. Some of them were even spiked mohawks with electrical coils bouncing through them. Eyepatches glowed with a robotic pupil and she even noticed some with cybernetic limbs. It was all fascinating in detail. How in the hell did he make this game in two months?

Sol added a few enhancements of her own. Her blue irises glowed with night vision, her upgrade chip was at level 2 on the back of her neck and she even had a few others in both arms. Sol had to hand it to him. He'd really come a long way since Cyborg Flint.

Bright Shadow looked nice, but as she crossed the street, she noticed a few of the padestrians fighting on the corner sidewalk. There was no communication or insults, one of them just started throwing punches and it was on. Though, Sol knew it was a glitch in the non-player character artificial intelligence, Flare would undoubtedly call it a feature. As much as Sol wanted to interfere and bust some heads, all she had was a pistol. The Wolf .45 automatic firearm was powerful enough to get the job done but she had two clips in total and wasting ammo was not a good idea.

That's when she noticed her device go off on the back of her neck. She tapped it three times to answer and her right eye turned to a purple glow.

"Yeah?" She said and heard a familiar voice.

"Come to the alley on Bricker Street between the diner and the strip club. We got a new job." The voice tried so desperately hard to sound deep and mysterious.

"Be right there, Flare. Try not to get a sore throat." Sol said as she started to walk between NPC's, noticing one had on a jumpsuit, covered in car grease. She had to shake her head at the level of detail.

"Oh, just come on." He said before hanging up and putting a waypoint on her HUD that was very easy to follow, unlike the HUD effects in Cyborg Flint that he had to go back and reprogram around five times before getting them right.

She crossed the street, noticing a passing car had a spoiler on the back, neon glowing below the car itself and shined with immaculate reflection. She shook her head at the detail and found the alley. Of course, her horndog of a brother added the obligatory prostitutes in front of the alley and they said four unique lines of dialogue. All of it equating to how girls got a discount or how tonight could be more fun.

She wore a gray trenchcoat and a red spagetti strap top underneath it. Her jeans were black and her gray boots went up near her knees. The starting clothes were pretty mundane, but knowing him, he probably polished every single shiny plate and glow dotted every surface of the advanced power armors and/or nanotech wear he had time to make.

"There's one of them." A gruff sounding voice said from the end of the alley, making her stop. There stood four stallions in front of a door that she was obviously headed toward. "This is Fade territory now. You're gonna need to cough up seven hundred credits or we're going to teach you a lesson."

The punk stallions all had some cybernetics attached to them. The cyborg golem, especially. He was about seven feet tall, heavily bulked with muscles and metal patches over forty percent of his body.

"Subtle…" Sol said as all of them did not wait for her to pay, as the toll was obviously BS dialogue for a story based battle. With striking ease, she pulled her Wolf .45 pistol from its holster and began to fire.

The nearest one was struck three times with bullets and fell as the brute beside him began to charge. Sol rolled to the side of him as he passed her by and hit the wall on the alley's side. As heavy as he was, the bricks stopped him cold. Sol was left wondering how long the cliche of a brute man charging into a wall to become dazed was going to play out. Still, it was better than trying to take him head on.

That's when she ducked down below a glow blade as the shining blue laser swooped by as a pony thug attacked. She slapped the top of her knee to produce a glow blade of her own along her shin.

With a flip, she shredded her assailant, doing enough damage to him to make him burst into pixels. In two more solid moves, she swept one of the remaining through his shins and shot two more bullets into the next.

Both burst into pixels at the same time. Sol twirled her pistol on her finger and holstered it at her side as she stood. She popped her neck and slapped her knee to retract the beam blade back into her shin compartment.

"Nice combat section, Flare." She muttered to herself. Sol walked on toward the back alley door and opened it. Her face went red and her eyes widened. "Oh, for the love of…"