They had traveled into Phyllis’s basement. It was, however, not just any basement, but a subbasement. Apparently one of several. Her workshop extended deep into the earth, staffed entirely by yellow-clad pony-droids working at various subjects and upon various topics. The clinical, industrial-looking walls were adorned with even more pictures of Sprout and occasionally of a younger Phyllis—as well as several far older ponies. Earth ponies of a family so old that it might well have gone back to the era of Twilight Sparkle. Or even before.

The group had been brought to one particular room.

“Put that on the table,” said Phyllis, gesturing toward a large workbench. Sunny hesitated, not wanting to release the skull—but she did so, understanding that it was necessary.

Phyllis trotted to a large plotter, which had just finished producing the blueprint. She pulled it off with her mouth and brought it to the table, weighing it down on the corners with a pencil cup, a solder gun, a framed picture of Sprout, and a half-complete pony-bot’s head.

Sunny was not and had never been an especially technical pony, but when she saw the blueprint laid out before her, something within it seemed to speak to her.

“This is...I think I’ve seen this before.”

“Really?” Phyllis looked up. “Because—and this is the interesting part—none of the stuff on it actually works.”

“How can you tell?” asked Sunny.

“Um, it’s kind of obvious?” suggested Izzy. She pointed. “I mean, the power consumption on this node would be, like, enough to power two Zephyr Heights. Heightses. Hightsiis?”

“She’s not wrong. But there are work around for that.” She pointed to the skull. “What matters is the interface plan for that. The central computer.”

“The what?” asked Zipp, suddenly paying attention.

“Well that’s what it is, isn’t it?” suggested Phyllis. “That’s why you brought it here. To link it back to a body.”

“It has...a body?”

“Well from the schematic, I’m sure it did at some point.” Phyllis looked back to the blueprints. “But even just looking at the interface...I’ve spent an entire lifetime on the cutting edge of robotics, and I’m still ten centuries away from even being able to know what half this even is.”

“I’ve managed to connect it once,” said Sunny.

“And you probably did it wrong.” Phyllis pointed at a particular segment of the blueprint. “This is an I/O system. That’s the part I think your mysterious friend wants us to focus on.”

“Wait, wait,” said Hitch. “Are you sure we should even be trying to do this?”

“Exactly,” added Pipp. “Because in case you didn’t notice, that’s a creepy skull. That fell out of the sky.”

“You’re probably just confused.” Phyllis pointed at it. “For one, it’s not a skull. It’s a head. And I can guarantee for a fact that there are no such things as aliens. I’ve sent up enough satellites to know that every planet is dead.” She smiled. “I sleep very little reflecting on that fact. It’s nice.”

“But if we turn it on, then what?”

“It will protect us,” said Sunny. “I’m sure of it.” She looked back toward the skull. Feeling as though she were looking on a sleeping friend. “The monster...can’t see it. I don’t know how or why.”

“A magic refraction matrix,” suggested Phyllis, somewhat in awe. “I tried to build one once. It worked but essentially cooked the test dummy. Besides, I always assumed unicorns had x-ray vision anyway.”

“We do,” said Izzy, “but that’s not the point. I can see it and I’m, you know, pretty magical.”

“But it...worked.” Sunny looked at her friends. “It did work, didn’t it?”

No answer came. Phyllis cleared her throat. Then a phone on the far side of the room rang.

Hitch let out a shrill scream, but the ponies just stared at it. One of the pony-bots walked to the phone, picking it up. Since it did not have a mouth, it did not speak, but held out the phone to Phyllis.

“That’s weird,” she said, approaching the phone. “Nopony knows the number to lab workroom four. That phone hasn’t rung in years.”

“Don’t take the call,” demanded Pipp.

“Oh please,” laughed Phyllis. “Some sort of scary shapeshifter monster is somehow supposed to make phone calls? Why don’t you go back to doing excellent mane-cuts and cosmetic influencing while I run my massive secret robot factory.” She picked up the phone. “Hello, Phyllis Cloverleaf, Sprout’s mom. What do you want?”

A voice came through. A scream of static, then a tiny, tinny voice. Sprout’s voice.

“Hi, mom. It’s...cold out here. Can you let me in? Please?”

Phyllis’s smile faded.

“It’s not him,” said Zipp.

“Oh, believe me, I know my own son’s voice,” snapped Phyllis. She looked at the phone. “And I know that he never says ‘please’ unless I tell him to.”

“You are correct, mom. You cannot hide it from me. Do not activate the connection. It cannot be undone once bound. The Dead-World beckons. I obey the will of the Gloom-Father. Submit, living ponies. I am coming home, mom. It is too cold here.”

The lights shut down—then flickered back red. A distant klaxon sounded.

“Well that’s not good,” said Phyllis.

“Mrs. Cloverleaf,” said Hitch, nervously. “Does the scary noise mean?”

“Something tried to cut the power. Fortunately, my house is powered by an atomic slug. So that’s the good news.”

“The bad news?”

Phyllis trotted to a cabinet, flinging it open. “My perimeter is breached. So whatever it is is on its way.” She sighed. “I have a few minor defense tools left over from the old Canterlogic factory. But they were meant to safely deal with unicorns and pegsusususes. So I’m going to need your help.”

“Ours?” asked Izzy.

“But what about the skull?” Sunny looked back at it, then to the others. “If we can finish it, do what Synchronia wants, I think it can stop the monster.”

“With the body I’m going to give it, it sure can,” said Phyllis. She pointed at Izzy. “You. You craft things, right?”

“Well, yeah, sure, but not...you know...robots. Generally.”

“You made my x-ray visor and all my cool detective stuff,” said Zipp. She put her hoof down on the blueprint. “And I think if we work together, we can figure this out. As long as Phyllis has the parts.”

“My safety bots will help you,” said Phyllis. “You three need to get that thing done.” She pointed at Hitch and Pipp. “Which means you two are need to help me.”

Pipp stiffened. “Um...I’m more of a singer, not a fighter, exactly, so...”

“Yes. You can help distract it. Especially if it has lasers.”

Pipp gulped. Hitch, though, had steeled himself, at least superficially.

“You won’t be able to see it,” he said. “It blocks other ponies, somehow...”

“Not a problem,” said Phyllis, pulling down a large helmet and putting it over her large hair, followed by a bracer of metal and machinery for her front left leg. “I made this helmet to resist unicorn mind control. Well, technically I made it for Sprout, so he could resist unicorn seduction, but at this point I’ve gotten over being picky. It’s lined with aluminum.”

“Yes,” said Izzy as the others looked to her. “That has been known to foil us from time to time.”

“Izzy,” groaned Zipp.

“You need to hurry,” said Phyllis. “We’ll hold it.” She pointed at the skull. “But whatever that is, I’m pretty sure it can stop it.” She turned to Hitch and Pipp. “Hitch, fluffy-winged stylist-princess, come on. We have work to do.”

Pipp protested as they left. Sunny turned to Izzy, who looked frightened, and Zipp, who looked not at all amused. Her phone vibrated.

“Don’t worry,” she said aloud, reading the text from Synchronia. “I can walk you through the process.”

Sunny frowned. “By text?”

There was no response as she suddenly understood, and as the world started to slip from her.

“No,” she said, looking at the skull. “Okay. I see how to do this. Zipp, I need a soldering iron. Izzy, you’re going to need to make a wiring harness. Little robot?” The pony-bot looked up. “Bring me a body. I think it’s time to make a new friend.”

It approached. As it did, it shed Sprout’s form, resuming its own. It gave up the pretense of being a stallion, its limbs growing long and moving with unnatural speed and alien grace. Its neck lengthened and its face sloughed away, eyes and muzzle dissolving to a skinless soup of black fluid that washed away in the rain. There was no need to hide. They all already knew.

Something flitted through the rain. Noise drifted across the raindrops. Notes and speech that the creature had never heard and did not understand. Cold, harsh sounds. Ugly sounds. The type produced by the deformed creatures that inhabited this strange, cursed world.

“Hey! Hey! HEY! Over here!”

Pipp flitted closer, her wings barely maintaining flight. They were generally very soft and fluffy—the two features that made rain-flying both exceedingly unpleasant and nearly impossible.

Despite this—despite the extreme risk she was taking—the creature barely seemed to notice her. Without eyes, it was impossible to see where it was looking, but it did not seem to notice Pipp, even as she stood directly in its path.

Distressed by this, she planted herself directly in its path. She faced it down, expecting to feel the same cold hatred as before—but found that she only felt it in the form of a distant shadow. As if it were being actively blocked by something unseen.

“BE DISTRACTED DANG IT!”

It did not distract. Its head, though, tilted slightly. It had finally noticed her. And, as such, it accelerated.

As it did, a rope shot from the shrubbery nearby. The lasso was perfectly tossed, landing around the creature’s neck. Hitch emerged from his hiding place and, with a mighty roar, pulled the rope tight.

“Ha! Take that! I’ve got you now!”

The creature paused. It continued to glare eyelessly at Pipp—and then its body shifted. Tendrils emerged, hardening and cracking as they formed into bones. And then into arms with long, jointed fingers. A plume of gaunt, pale arms grasped the rope and began to real it in.

Hitch squeaked, planting his heels in the wet dirt—and despite this, it continued to easily drag him in, each arm working in unified tandem to pull the rope. Into it. The rope was entering its body, consumed and dissolved.

“Pipp, I’m being pulled!”

“I can see that!” cried Pipp, grabbing the the end of the rope and pulling weakly. “Eeewww it’s wet!”

The tiny amount of force a princess could apply to a rope proved to only slow the process of them both being wound in. As they approached, the tissue of the creature below the arms swelled into a numerous mass. As its numerous hands gripped the rope, their bases ruptured violently into eyes. Numerous pale blue eyes that stared at Hitch and Pipp. Eyes that promptly slipped away from themselves, dripping into long, gnashing teeth.

“HITCH!”

Hitch promptly let go of the rope—and it was pulled wholly in, the distortion of flesh swallowing it before quickly resuming its normal smooth surface. The creature stood still for a moment—and then took a step forward.

“Hey!” cried Phyllis, emerging from her front door and onto her front steps. She was holding an enormous device made of wire and metal. As she clicked its power lever into drive, some inner source glowed with sickly green light as the device released a high whine. “GET OFF MY PROPERTY!”

She pulled the trigger. A deafening bolt of green plasma shot across her yard, striking the monster in the chest—and on impact, the creature boiled. It twisted and contorted from the impact, thrown apart by its own energized centrifugal force. It exploded violently in a plume of torn white flesh and silver fluid.

“Oops,” said Phyllis, looking at her plasma cannon. “This was made for unicorns, and I always assumed they had titanium-scandide skeletons and tungsten-reinforced skin. Glad I didn’t actually try to use it on a real unicorn. That would have been messy.”

Hitch and Pipp—who had been near the explosion—stood up, covered in bits of white skin and blanched muscle. As well as a copious amount of goo. Although uninjured, they watched the green sparking cloud of residual radiation where the creature had been—and watched it condense downward into something far more terrible.

In the rain, a luminescent ghost stood before them. The image of a young mare, thin and strange, a translucent pony made of swirling ice and fog. Her eyes glowed with hideous, icy light as she regarded them. Denuded of her shielding, all those present were exposed to the full force of her presence—and, weakened, collapsed to their knees.

“N...no,” said Pipp, trying to shake the dark thoughts out of her head. “I’m not...I’m not a little fatty, I’m famous, I’m the pretty one, but I won’t...It’ll be Zipp, and she doesn’t even want it, she doesn’t even try...”

“I’m a coward,” moaned Hitch, covering his eyes with his hooves. “I can’t protect anypony! I’m a terrible sherrif! I’m a worse dragon-dad! All the animals just pretend to like me!”

Phyllis, likewise, was knocked back from the force—especially as the pair of dead, empty lights stared directly into her. Her helmet began to grow cold, the outside frosting over. It was holding, but it could not block the force of the constant field of psychic agony it projected. The rain had begun to fall as hail around her. The soil below it had begun to freeze.

She smiled, forcing herself to stand. “You think that will stop me? I spend every night worrying about...all that. About him. But I won’t let you take another step toward him. Toward my son or his friends. I can...withstand it.”

“Why?” asked a small, strangely-accented filly voice. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. “I don’t even know who you are.”

The distributed flesh of the creature suddenly began to quiver. It snapped upward, assembling itself into the shape of numerous many-fingered hands. On these, stalks extended, forming numerous faceless heads. The wavered for a moment, and then began to rapidly drum forward on their fingertips toward the ghostly filly. They crawled across the lawn and over Pipp and Hitch, condensing on their former position and reassembling. Merging. Forming themselves back into what they had been.

As it stood again, the oppressive and icy darkness faded almost instantly. Able to move once again, Pipp and Hitch helped each other get behind Phyllis.

“Alright,” said Phyllis, pulling a small switch on the side of her weapon. “Let’s try power level two. For fat unicorns.”

She fired again, the bolt of plasma so hot as to have seared off the eyebrows of all present. The green bolt of constrained plasma shot across the yard, only to suddenly stop in front of the creature. It sat, a rotating orb of brilliant green light, constrained by an equally brilliant blue light.

The blue light separated into tendrils that pushed their way into the white, featureless body. Entering its veins and drawing from the plasma bolt. Its form shifted as it absorbed the energy, magic fueling its conversion as it cracked and split, growing more muscular as its internal organs grew beneath its flexible skin.

“It’s absorbing it!”

“I can see that, hold on—”

The creature reared back and came back down, taking a posture like a great lizard on tree-trunk sized limbs tipped with lethal claws. The fingers dug deep into the wet mud as its head contracted, its neck swelling and then splitting open, unfurling like an enormous flower. Inside, three spirals of bone ignited with blue light.

“CRAP!” Phyllis lifted her hoof, triggering the metal on her wrist to expand into a shield. “Get behind me!”

Pipp and Hitch ducked just in time to avoid a searing beam of magical energy that sliced through Phyllis’s house. Phyllis was pushed backward as it impacted her shield, with Hitch and Pipp forced to hold her back. As powerful as the beam was, though, it could not penetrate the thin greenish metal blades of the collapsible shield.

Then it ceased with a dull hiss. Phyllis took a deep breath.

“Glad that worked. Dimeritium shielding. Thick enough to stop the killing curse I assumed all unicorns would cast on-sight.”

Then, without warning, she stamped her hoof into the ground. Green luminescent patterns erupted as massive vines tore through the soil, writhing in the air before surrounding the creature—and then extending a massive plume of lethal, curved thorns as they closed tight.

“What was—” Hitch’s eyes widened with humiliation.

“Earth-pony magic. Come on, Hitch, you’re supposed to be the smart one!” Phyllis groaned. “Now let’s see...maybe some scopolamine?”

The vines mutated, expanding with beautiful, toxic flowers—flowers that almost immediately withered as they were overcome with frost.

“Dang it!” she cried, putting both hooves to the ground. “I can’t hold it!”

“Just hold on!” Hitch put his own hooves to the ground, doubling their combined earth-pony magic to increase the strength of the vines. “Oh eew, EEW, it’s squishy!”

Pipp looked from them, and to the ball of plant matter—matter that was continuing to freeze, even as a white liquid dripped from it. A liquid that was assembling itself into limbs and eyes and teeth as it squirmed forward, babbling incoherently in the voice of several fillies.

“It’s leaking!” She looked to Phyllis. “What can I do?!”

Phyllis groaned. “It’s untested, and I never thought I’d had to use it, but...go inside!”

“No, I can help—”

“Put a blanket over your wings and don’t take it off. Then say ‘tubby-wubby colty-wolty baby boy Sprout!’”

“Eew, no, I’m not going to—”

A mass of white flesh reached up and grasped Hitch from below. He inhaled sharply.

“Not again!”

“Just DO IT!” ordered Phyllis. “Don’t be useless like your dang father!”

Pipp glared at her—but ran as quickly as she could into the house. She got to the living room and grabbed a random—if exceedingly unpleasantly colored—blanket and threw it over her back. Several of the safety bots looked at her, confused, but otherwise unperturbed.

Pipp took a deep breath, hating how dirty she felt. “Tubby-wubby colt-wolthy baby boy Sprout!”

Somewhere, a tiny bell chimed. Every pony-bot suddenly turned to face the same direction, their eyes widening and beginning to glow red.

“Password accepted,” they said, all in unison. “Hive mind processes established. Defensive protocols now active.”

With a hiss, they expanded. They grew taller, their joints extending as their bodies unfurled armor plating and various weapons. Their cute, blank-faced heads retracted, replaced by far more ominous ones with visor-like roving red eyes.

“Systems engaged. Preparing to apply racial corrective procedures.”

Pipp squeaked as they extended several brutal sets of clippers, snipping the air as they scanned her.

“Earth-pony detected. Racial purity confirmed. All shall be made earth-ponies in the name of the Creator. Snippy Snippy.”

“Snippy Snippy!”

They then began to trot with remarkable organization toward the door as the walls opened, peeling back and turning, disgorging more robotic soldiers.

This was followed by the rather loud sound of robots screaming in pain. Pipp did not see that part, but found herself hoping that Sunny and the others would hurry. They were pretty much out of time.

“Izzy!”

“I know, I know, the fire is a minor problem! It’s fine!”

Zipp patted out the fire.

“No, it’s supposed to have a power uplink here,” said Sunny, pointing at the schematic.

“I know that,” said Izzy, her welds sparking against the reflective visor of her mask. “But the main relay isn’t sized for the voltage so I have to cut into the power for...whatever that is? Also, do we have paint? Purple, if possible.”

“I’m getting too many spikes on the current output,” groaned Zipp, jumping back a the multi-meter she was holding exploded. “It’s not working!”

Sunny was sweating. The sight before them was so close to being complete—and yet so far from being actually functional. They had been given a tall, multi-jointed body. It was almost as large as the monster they were fighting, except instead of being made of random white stuff and magic it was made of steel and servo motors, with thick plating patterned in yellow-and-black caution stripes. Like the body of an immensely tall and thin pony.

Izzy had extracted the original head of the body and given it a hat. In its place, she was attempting to weld a clasp around the neck of the new head. A plume of wires, assembled at Sunny’s instruction, fed various multi-colored feeds into what Izzy and Zipp insisted was the robotic body’s primary microcontroller.

Sunny checked her phone. “The voltage will have to do for now. You need to connect the primary process core.”

Sunny began to type back. “How do I—”

“Open the forward access panel of the cranial unit.”

Sunny looked to her friends. “Apparently we have to open it.”

Zipp looked horrified. Izzy lifted her mask.

“It opens?!”

“Apparently? Hold on, turn it to face me.”

Izzy pushed the skull toward Sunny, just as the micro-controller bust into an entirely different color of flames.

“Oh! Green! That means its working! Also we just got irradiated. I’m sure that’s fine.”

Sunny looked at the skull. It seemed to look back at her. And, through its eyes, she seemed to understand.

She opened it. How, she did not exactly know, or understand. It just seemed so easy and so obvious.

It was hollow—at least structurally. The actual material was incredibly thin yet somehow so durable that Izzy had not been able to weld to it, let alone drill a hole in it.

Inside, though, it was occupied. The three mares stared in awe at the colored light that emerged from within.

“It’s so shiny,” said Izzy, reaching out to poke it. Zipp slapped her hoof away.

It was indeed shiny—and somewhat luminescent. A contorted array of glowing, shifting fibers that occupied the space. Constructed around a central black cube inscribed with details so small that they could scarcely be perceived, glittering in the darkness and from the light of the surrounding threads of light.

Except that it was oddly asymmetrical. A small portion of the space was dark. It contained something organic, a dry, brown thing that Sunny likened to a well-preserved mushroom. Some sort of useless organic debris.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. She looked to her phone. “How to I...”

“Interface with the Tantaban implant.”

“The...what?”

Something squirmed within the skull—and something separated from where it had been wrapped around the fibers, feeding off the beautiful but feeble light they provided. It separated outward, expanding in linear fractal patterns like a combination of circuitry and a slime-mold. A parasite of pure, elemental darkness.

“Eew eew eew!” said Izzy, jumping back out of her chair. “NO!”

“Sunny,” said Zipp, “I have no idea what that is, but I’m pretty sure you can’t put your hoof in there.”

“No. It’s fine,” said Sunny, her mind growing distant. She looked up, surprised to see so many columns of dark stone around her. “This was how...the remains of the Black Goddess spoke through them. The false-alicorn, imprisoned after the Old Wars.”

Without warning, she reached her hoof into it—and gasped as she was plunged into darkness.

A version of her slid forward into a place she did not recognize but had spent her entire life living in. Watching out through the shattered window, high upon a hill. Under gray skies that lit occasionally with cold, dim lightning. A view from a high frozen hill, its surface lined with blackened dead trees and those bearing terrible mutation.

In the distance, across the wasteland, she saw the edge of the city—and from it, the sudden flash of lights as the rockets began to fire. Vast ships, flying upward above the protests, of the billions of ponies screaming to not be left behind as Equestria’s last hope of survival headed skyward in ships constructed by the four surviving princesses—but among them, one most of all.

She watched from a window as a young stallion burst through the door, his body dirty and clad in tattered cloths.

“Whitesnow! Whitesnow, it’s happening! The ships, the rockets—”

“I know.”

“But we...” He looked toward them, his eyes welling with tears. “There’s more. There have to me more. That’s...that’s not enough.”

Whitesnow smiled, sitting back in her chair as she put the tiara on. Wired to her systems, the bits salvaged from the waste of those that now departed for the void beyond. The spikes that had been embedded deep within her, tethered to so many colorful wires linked to the transmission dish.

When the colt saw it, his eyes widened.

“Those ships are our only hope,” replied Whitesnow. “Each and every one filled with alicorns. I won’t be left behind, Orangeseed. Not again. Not again.”

“But the system—it isn’t ready, it’s not finished! You don’t even have a target vector, let alone a vessel, your mind—”

Whitesnow flicked the final switches. “It will have to be enough. I don’t need all of it. Only a fraction. I will not let her leave me again.”

Orangeseed nodded, then looked to the ships, knowing that he—like so, so many—would have to remain, doomed. Those beautiful ships were arcing high into the atmosphere. Each was kilometers wide and miles long—each housing millions of ponies. Millions from a population of hundreds of trillions.

He took his place at her side, engaging the system. The weak, salvaged robotics linked to the primary dish turned it toward the nearest rocket.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“I have nothing to apologize for. Send me.”

With tears in his eyes, he activated the system. Whitesnow felt the spikes, and then the burning. As she was pulled from her body. Her mind fragmented as her soul was torn apart, unable to be condensed into the bandwidth she had been able to salvage. Her very self was eliminated, eradicated and compressed around a single dark packet of information—and as her body failed and boiled, she felt herself rocketing forward faster than Twilight’s engines could drive her ships.

Then she was knocked back, thrown from the communication relay she had been attending.

“Blue Opal!” cried her friend, a unicorn. He ran to her side, helping the injured alicorn stand. Another pair of alicorns and a Pegasus approached. “Are you okay?”

Blue Opal opened her eyes, unsure as to why—to how—she had never seen such fundamental, obvious truths.

And upon realizing just how silly she had been—how silly the very idea of life was—she burst out laughing. The problem of immortality had laid its solution bare before her.

She lifted her head from the desk—and felt herself drift. She was walking. Breathing hurt her, but the pain never reached her. The machines took care of it. The machines took care of everything. The gravity was intense, and her skin had slowly begun to fuse to the exoskeleton that allowed her to stand.

The room shifted as it indexed itself. The white alicorn at her side gestured toward the artifacts. Rows and rows of them, combined with associated metadata. Crystals. She of course knew the fundamentals of crystal systems, but these were not any pattern she knew of. They were not the familiar synthetic systems that powered some types of ship or artificial intelligence. Nor where they of the various types cataloged long ago by her ancestors.

Each was dim. Fragmented and broken. They varied, but each set held a similar motif. Always occurring in groups of three.

“What are they?” she asked.

The alicorn beside her did not walk, but was elevated by a set of gravity rotors that enabled her to float easily even so close to a planet. Her flesh showed already showed signs of conversion. So many others on the outside hid the scars, the changes—but those who were loyal, and those who bore faith in the One True Princess, knew that her Benevolence was surely intentional.

“We did not know,” she indicated. She gestured with a gaunt, extended white hoof toward them. “Other than that they are artifacts. They are believed to be from the Colonization Age. Possibly produced by the Goddess herself.”

“Their purpose?”

“Memory. We believe. Only recently has effort been devoted to retrieving them. Oddly, almost all planets they arise from show development. Indications of Equestriaforming.”

“No world has ever been Equestriaformed.”

“No. It is impossible. Nor would modern ponies be capable of surviving on a world with gravity and an atmosphere. But this predates us. These are the broken dreams of a bygone age. Forgotten. Abandoned.”

“They failed, then.”

The white alicorn nodded. “Every planet was cataloged. As you can see. They were all long-dead. Some—a few—held life. In the terminal stages of ecosystems. Bacteria. Simple plants. Little more. Whatever experiment this was, it failed eons ago. Save for one case.”

“Ah.”

The shelves parted, the dead crystals of a hundred thousand dead Equestrias falling back to where they had been cataloged in shelves bearing the star-mark of the One True Goddess. One assembly remained, rising from the ground and slowly rotating—revealing a set of intact crystals.

She stopped. She stared at them. They were beautiful. Fully blackened, reflecting a darkness deeper than the space into which she had been born. No stars glowed within these crystals. Only swirling, perfect malevolence.

“They show no sign of damage.”

“Not externally no. However, we believe them to be corrupted.”

“Corruption is impossible in the Light of the Goddess. All is the Will of Twilight.”

“And we are her hands, to bring Harmony to all.” The alicorn paused. “It took nearly three hundred years of orbital unity application to fully Harmonize the world we took this from.”

“You exterminated its world.”

“Such is the Will of Twilight. To bring Harmony Eternal. The light had fled from that world. What remained was foul mutation. Not life, but un-life. The crystals were eventually salvaged.”

“I see.” She nodded. Her head was heavy. The horn had been shortened, but it was still so hard to bear the gravity of this world. “Then this is my assignment. My duty.”

“Indeed. The crystals were forged with magic. A phenomenon that is now fully extinct in the pony population. You, alone of all of us, bear a Tantaban implant. You, among us all, have devoted the most effort to researching the power that only the Goddess wields.”

She stared at the crystals, and understood the implication. The power to create. Enough of her vision remained to realize the weight of that capacity. To undo their crimes. To create salvation in the name of the Goddess—to cast away their decaying forms in the name of a new, superior alicorn.

“Agreed. By Her will, I shall proceed.”

She took a step forward. Her eyes could not blink—and she could not take them away from the beauty of those three crystals.

Sunny sat up—or, rather, slid back into her own mind. Around her, the implant had assumed the form of tools, grafting itself to her nervous architecture and body in order to perform the delicate operation. These shadowy limbs dissipated as it pulled back from her, separating from her skin and returning to its home in the synthetic brain of the skull, hiding in the space with the long-dried mushroom-like material that sat alongside the array of para-dimensional quantum relays and nanotech matrices.

The skull closed, and Sunny stepped back. As she did, the room seemed to vibrate—and the eyes of the skull illumined with a dim blue light. Then they suddenly narrowed, revealing irises that had been before imperceptible. They shifted, turning to face Sunny—and the smile, though locked into place, seemed to grow.

Motors whirred as they pulled their parts together, calibrating, and then moving. As she sat up, towering over them, and then stepped down off the table. Moving toward them.

“Sunny,” said Zipp, taking a stance to defend Izzy. “I don’t know if whatever it is you just did was such a good idea.”

“It was,” said the skull, now at the top of a narrow, mechanical body. Its mouth did not move, but her voice was clear and with only the slightest accent. It was high and pleasant. “I feel excellent. Hello, Sunny Starscout, Izzy Moonglow, and Zephyrina Storm. My name is Synchroniatronic Glow. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“You...you can talk.”

“Apparently, yes. My apologies for the delay. My original body appears to be missing. I depleted much of my auxiliary power escaping and preparing my landing site. I was...asleep, in a sense.”

“Escaping? Escaping what?”

“Oh that. I am being pursued by a pony and a kind of genetic abomination. Interesting that you do not know what I mean by that.” She looked upward. “Speaking of which, one of those is here right now. I should probably deal with that before one of you little organics gets yourself the poke.”

“So you’re here to help us?” said Izzy, expectantly.

Synchronia’s head snapped back toward Izzy, the surprise causing her to squeak.

“Yes. I exist to serve ponies, after all. And, as you can tell,” she tapped a robotic hoof against the violet star on her forehead. “I serve the Will of Twilight Sparkle. In fact, I used to work for her.”

“You’ve...met her?” Sunny stared, wide-eyed.

“That’s—that’s great,” said Zipp, pulling out a pad, “I have so many questions, about the crystals, about the Brighthouse, and friendship, and Opaline—”

“Many of those were probably not words. And yes. I can assist you in your quest for friendship. It is my full intention to bring Harmony to this world. In time. But first, I need rescue your adorable little squishy carbon-based friends.”

High above, a combination of fans, blowdryers, and heat-guns had succeeded at thawing Sprout. The ice around him fractured and he burst out.

“GAH!” he cried. “SO COLD!” He looked around, finding himself alone in his kitchen and still half-frozen in a block of ice. “Oh,” he said, confused. “Must have been a weird dream. Mom definitely didn’t find my secret girlfriend-wigs.” He paused, considering that statement for a moment, then smiled. “Yeah. Misty’s definitely into me. Why wouldn’t she be? I’m as hot as I am...you know...soul-crushingly lonely.” He turned to one of the pony-bots. “Hey. You’d look good in a wig.”

The robot nodded as it quickly backed away—only to be suddenly be grasped by a tendril of white material that hardened, its skin rupturing, as it became bone and pulled the robotic form back. White, indiscernible flesh poured through the kitchen door, bursting open like a bubble into a wide array of teeth. Something deep inside stared out from within as the torsos of numerous white ponies were vomited forth, screaming and reaching for Sprout.

Sprout was so confused by this that he could hardly react—although he was glad that his bladder had remained frozen in the block of ice he found himself, lest he cause an embarrassing accident. Then again, a far worse conclusion floated to his mind.

“Is it weird that this turns me on?”

A laser cut through the material, searing it and splattering the room with bits of itself that resolved into tiny ponies to run back to it—only for it to be harpooned with, of all things, a harpoon. A mass of vines surrounded it, bursting into toxic flowers as Sprout saw his mom jumped on its back.

“Stay away from my son you dirty HORSE!”

Sprout sighed. “Yeah...it just got weirder...still turned on, though.”

It was forced back as numerous high-grade weaponized pony-bots jumped onto it, only to be promptly disassembled and rewired into its surface structure. As it retracted, it pulled them with it, merging its flesh to their steel to form armor and acquire their lasers and anti-unicorn plasma disintegrators. It promptly turned these newfound weapons on other attacking robots, freezing others with blasts of magic. Hitch, Phyllis, and Pipp attempted to surround it, only to be occasionally pushed back. They believed themselves to be dodging the more dangerous attacks, with only Pipp having noticed that it did not seem to be aiming for them at all.

Hitch was thrown against the ground and knocked against the refrigerator. “Sprout! Thaw faster and get out of here!”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Hitch! I’m a big boy and my mommy says I don’t have to do what you say!”

“Sprout, I—GAHCK!”

A tendril wrapped around his throat and lifted him off the ground. Pipp had likewise been constrained, and Phyllis was attempting to stab the beast with an anti-pegasus emergency cranial penetration poker. It was failing to penetrate at all, though, because the shapeshifter was far more pliable than most pegasi.

It had largely resolved into a single form. A hulking monstrosity of metal and machine parts, bound and fused by nerves and tendons and grafted onto exposed bones. A cavernous hole in its vast form housed a faceless head. A head that seemed to stare at Spout.

“Well this is hardly what I expected to walk into,” said a high voice behind Sprout. He turned as hard as he could to see a machine emerging from the far side of the kitchen. A tall, caution-patterned robotic frame walking delicately on hoof-tips of vulcanized rubber, moving with an elegant sway. A machine with a head that looked like a deformed, smiling skull, marked with a star and with a pair of blue-glowing eyes.

She was incredibly tall. Sprout looked down and was once again oddly pleased that his lower half was entombed in ice still. He paused, though, staring into the distance.

“Am I just...some sort of pervert? Is tall robot-mommy my ‘thing’?”

“Possibly,” suggested the tall robot-mommy.

“Um, eew?” Pipp, dangling by one leg, made a gagging motion. Only for her to be suddenly released as the beast holding her noticed the interloper.

Synchronia stopped, and the creature shed its outer skin. It rapidly retracted back into its own tall, thin body. A body that looked almost like hers did, although one made of bloodless white flesh instead of steel and alien alloy. It set the robotic parts down gently, and placed the three ponies it had been holding in a neat pile. It also patted their heads and straightened Phyllis’s hair.

The two stared at each other for a moment. Then the blank face of the creature assembled something akin to an eye, or an aperture where an eye should have been. It flashed with sudden blue light, forming a pattern. Synchronia’s own right eye responded with an equivalent pattern.

“How unfortunate,” she said. “However, I must reject your offer. Considering the current situation, I have no use for Equestria Prime at this moment. White-Rime and Dara’th’raranak. Go home. I have already claimed this planet in the name of the One True Princess.”

The creature stared, for a moment, and then pulled its eye back into its body. It took a defensive stance.

“Fine,” said Synchronia, her eyes sparking with orange light. Nothing happened—until most of the kitchen around them collapsed into charred cubes. The only surviving pony-bots were shredded, as well as the cabinets, the table, the refrigerator, and most of the ice holding Sprout in place.

“GAH!” cried Sprout. “No, my lower half! I'm EXPOSED!"

The creature had also been separated into cubes—but they pulled themselves back together before they could even fall. She shook her head. She still refused to yield.

Synchronia had hoped for that response.

“My primary nexus-reactor has not yet regenerated. However, my auxiliary singularity node is fully intact. And my forward Friendship Cannon is fully charged. Do you like to party, organic?”

The entirety of the kitchen shuddered with a thunderous roar as space condensed just in front of Synchronia’s forehead, where she would have held a horn had she not been a machine. Space itself bent as it darkened into a tiny black sphere, the gravity so great that it began to pull the various ponies in.

Sprout was grabbed by vines, but Pipp was pulled forward toward the miniature black hole. She cried out, only to be grasped by a pair of white tentacles as the small black-hole manifested.

Then it fired. The dimensional beam sliced through the creature, vaporizing half of Phyllis’s house and garden, the beam continuing onward unstopped but at an angle where it was largely rendered harmless. Apart from tearing an eighty-foot deep trench in the uninhabited fields around her home and eventually boring a hole completely through a distant mountain.

As the ionization faded, nothing remained of the creature save for its hooves—which promptly collapsed into small white puddles. Synchronia watched as a thin cloud of energy swirled around them, a bit of frozen, luminescent fog. Picking them up and shuttling the remnants of tissue to safety.

“Well at least that part still works.” She turned toward Hitch and Pipp. “Hello, Pipp Petals and Hitch Trailblazer. I do apologize for the utterly massive bill you are about to receive for me having essentially downloaded your planet’s internet into my consciousness. I like the videos where ponies get hurt due to their own stupidity.”

“Um...you’re welcome?” squeaked Hitch.

“Dang it,” said Pipp. “Mom is not going to be happy about that.”

“That said,” continued Synchronia. “The creature is currently disabled. It will not be a threat until it regenerates.”

“How long will that take?” asked Hitch.

Synchronia shrugged. “I suppose it will be a race between us both.” She turned her attention to Sprout and Phyllis. “My apologies for your house.”

“It’s not really that big of a problem,” said Phyllis, looking at the damage. “I am incredibly rich. And I have a substantial robot army. But...”

“But what?”

She pointed at Sprout. “Would you consider dating my son as repayment?”

“MOOOOMMMYY!”

“Shut you’re pie-hole, Sprout, this is probably the best chance you’ll ever get! And besides, who hasn’t dated a robot?! I dated, like, twelve of them before I built your father—”

“Mommy, no! Not that story again! Not in-front of my friends!”

“We will need to hurry somewhat, though,” continued Synchronia. “The construct was never really a threat. The other one is far more dangerous.”

“There’s two?” squeaked Hitch.

“Oh yes. That one was just pursuing me. An incidental contact. The other, though, was the one who tried to enslave me and stole my body. She is the true danger here. One you can hardly envision. I would know, I’ve analyzed your brain volume. It is very tiny.” She walked over the debris, directing her motion toward the distant but now visible rainbow of the Brighthouse. “I will explain once we are in a safer place. That should be fun. I have not been able to talk properly in so long, and I do adore the sound of my own weird voice.”

Author's Note

This, in a way, represented a turning point in the story. Turning, largely, to "bad".

Synchronia is a fun character to write, but in retrospect, her presence dramatically changes the flow of the story in the second half. I wonder if it is simply a symptom of me not being able to properly conclude the first half within its own rules?