The Black Tide stylist meditates on how sunlight reflects off his soup, then swims through it and stabs you with a trident

…

It was just another day for Doctor Ordrup. Sure, being renowned as one of the best and most experienced doctors alive was nice and all, but Dr Ordrup knew damn well that he had earned those accolades through decades of hard work.

Still, accolades or not, it was a bit strange to have been called to a remote military base somewhere in the absolutely dustiest parts of New Mexico. The base was located somewhere between bullet-riddled signs saying not to pick up hitch-hikers as they might be escaped convicts, and the kind of dirt farms that looked more like prepper fortresses than places of agriculture. It made the good doctor wonder where the preppers got their drinking water from.

Oh well, there’s the exit for the base.

Driving up to the outer gate checkpoint, Dr Ordrup flashed his ID and was let in, with instructions to drive to building six and park inside gate three.

The drive to the base from the outer gate took a while – which fit with what little the good doctor had been able to gleam by looking up the base online… because officially the place did not exist: Only unofficial sources had written of the place, talking about a secret government research facility, where shady unmarked vans and trucks would occasionally arrive and sometimes not come out again. Had some scientist gotten hurt while working on something sensitive? Maybe it was some special forces general who wanted a doctor he could trust – that is, a doctor they had served with. It was a funny thought, considering how most of Ordrup’s old special forces squad mates had gone on to rise in the ranks… but this didn’t look like a special forces base – not enough razorwire and landmines.

Indeed, it certainly had been a while since the good doctor had found himself on a proper military base of any sort. The old reunions with what was left of his old unit were few and far between now, so while Ordrup still stayed in touch with some of them, then he didn’t have anything to do with them or their work ever since he had AES’d and used his bennies to get a doctorate.

Still, it was a very strange military base. The kind of base that the doctor knew, was all barracks and bunkhouses, where infantry and other troops were screwing around and getting shouted at by butter bars and people talking out of their brass – but this… this was all large and non-descript concrete structures, plus the odd patrol of three or four soldiers walking around with what very much looked like live firearms. This was most definitely not a regular military base – this was not a place for training troops, but a place you got stationed and got ruinously bored at.

Pulling into gate three at building six, yet another large and nondescript concrete building, Dr Ordrup had to wonder what he was being called in for. There wasn’t the medical field he hadn’t dabbled in, having done rotations as GP, surgeon, and of course his emergency medicine residency and then some. There weren’t many other like him, a true poly-med. What was it his old colleagues in Praque had called him? The human medical octopus, with a specialty for each arm? Hilarious.

And there were the three soldiers waiting for him, one of them looking like a lieutenant – the doctor’s escorts.

Getting out of his car, he nodded to the soldiers and saw that the lieutenant was a butter bar – a second lieutenant. Cute, a junior officer to lead the escort. Now, the good doctor knew better than to expect his escorts to be able to explain to him why he had been called – but he did figure that they could tell him where they were going: “Gentlemen, where to?”

The lieutenant nodded to one of two soldiers, who hesitantly pulled out a white cloth bag.

“Officer, you’re not thinking of ordered those two boys to do what I think you are?” the doctor said, suspiciously looking at the head-sized bag.

The two soldiers exchanged worried looks – while the junior officer kept a stone-faced expression towards Ordrup: “I am – you are not cleared to see what is inside the facility you’re to enter”

“Adorable. I’m not going fucking anywhere – I’m a civilian these days. You can’t order me anywhere, and if you try to bag me, I know several special forces colonels and generals who will all swear at the court martial, that you magically managed to fold yourself backwards three times over all on your own” the good doctor mused, recalling his extensive martial arts training from back in the special forces and exactly what he could use it for.

The lieutenant’s expression faltered, betraying worry and doubt. What exactly had he been ordered to do?

“I’ve seen shit back during my active service that won’t be declassified in your lifetimes – I might not officially have a top-secret clearance, but I might as well have… so what’s it going to be boys” Ordrup said, both looking and sounding not terribly impressed.

The two soldiers seemed to fidget, the one with the white sack certainly not wanting to be on the receiving end of someone like Doctor Ordrup. In the end the Lieutenant also seemed to cave, sighing deeply and simply gesturing for the doctor to follow them to an elevator, with no bag on.

“I assume that I won’t have to remind you that everything you see in this facility is classified top secret?” the lieutenant said, while deftly punching in a surprisingly long code on a keypad with his right hand.

The good doctor breathed deeply, gazing up into the ceiling: “I’m former special forces… I’ve done stuff you will never hear of, with people you’ll never hear of, using gear you’ll never know of. Don’t insult my intelligence kid”

The Lieutenant shot the doctor a dirty look before opening the door, leading everyone down a corridor lined with doors that each featured a QR code, instead of a label with plainly readable text. The lighting in the corridor gave off a sterile white color of light, making the corridor appear as if it went on forever.

Walking for a while, without anyone saying a word, the four finally turned a corner and took an elevator. The elevator didn’t have a normal interface, the lieutenant instead pulling out a smartphone and activating some kind of app, then basically taking a selfie as the phone scanned his face for facial recognition. Once that clear, he punched in another password, then a QR code appeared on the phone which was shown to a camera on the elevator wall. The procedure continued for a bit before the officer somehow got the elevator start moving.

Doctor Ordrup had to admit that he was quite amused at the ridiculous amounts of security for activating the elevator – though he couldn’t quite sense if they had moved up or down, but suspected down… since the building he had parked in hadn’t been more than three stories high, while it had felt like they had moved vertically for longer than that.

Exiting the elevator, the level the four emerged into had a distinct emergency room/bio-lab vibe to it: The floor was covered in smooth-cast cement with some kind of polymer coating, ideal for washing away spillages, and the floor curved up to the wall so there were no sharp corners that dirt could hide in. This was something the doctor had seen countless of times before. It also worried him… because this was not where you would put an infirmary – so this was NOT about treating some wounded soldier – that would have been on an above-ground facility.

Down more hallways with doors that only had QR codes on them, the four finally arrived at a group of people who stood outside yet another non-descript door. There were four riflemen standing guard, and a familiar face that doctor Ordrup recognized instantly, prompting him to break away from his escort and approach to embrace his old friend: “Chuckles you old goat-toucher, you the one who called me here?”

The colonel who stood before the doctor, the one just called ‘Chuckles’, grimaced at Fred. The woman had the face of someone who’s skincare routine was, at least at some point in her life, a steady mix of gravel, ground-up caffeine pills, hard liquor and spec-ops work – and even if she had cleaned up later on, then such a life had left its fair share of marks and scars. To the good doctor, the new twist on things was her lack of quips, something he was quick to home in on: “Why the silent treatment? What’s wrong?”

“Kjartan, this… this isn’t something I can joke about” the colonel replied, shaking her head at the doctor.

This was not the smart-mouthed officer that doctor Kjartan Ordrup had known – and seeing her this shaken sent a chill down his spine: “I… how bad is this? Did someone get hurt here?”

Steeling herself for a moment, then quickly dismissing the doctor’s escorts and waiting until they were out of earshot, the colonel opened the door and gestured for the doctor to follow.

Inside the door it looked like a waiting room – or a guard room: It was just a few chairs along the wall, and then another door leading to somewhere unknown. The colonel sat down and gestured for her old friend to join her: “Nobody’s hurt – but we are looking at a mystery that I was hoping you could help unravel”

“You had my attention… now you have my curiosity” the doctor said, sitting down next to the colonel.

Sighing, the colonel pulled out a smartphone: “Well listen up Decaprio, what we’re dealing with here is all kinds of fucked up. We found her three weeks ago wandering in the southern parts of the New Mexico desert – she tripped a border camera, but was initially ignored by local border police”

With only the colonel’s story to build his initial diagnosis on, the doctor began thinking of exposure, dehydration and other complications that could come from wandering in a desert. Of course, the military knew damn well how to treat simple stuff like that – and why would the military have any interest in some illegal jumping the border? No, something was off here: “You said… her. A woman? Who exactly are we dealing with here? Did a special forces joker go rogue and run off to fight the cartels or something?”

“Oh, I fucking wish – no, look – I just need you prepare you here. This won’t be anything you’ve seen before. By the way, how are your veterinary skills?” the colonel said, looking down into the tiled floor.

Ok that last comment caught the doctor by surprise: “I’m a human doctor, I don’t do pets – you know that”

“I also know that you helped treat a Saudi prince’s pet camel last year – didn’t he try to pay you with three sportscars?”

Frowning ever so slightly, the doctor replied: “Three sandblasted sportscars that would have ruined me if I tried to import them back here – no I took a nice cash payment thank you, and it wasn’t that difficult to work with a camel… it just had a rash – I told them to stop rubbing it with whatever perfume they were using. It wasn’t a rush job either, I had time to read up on how to treat the damn thing – so I wasn’t going in blind”

“Well, you are in luck here – this isn’t time sensitive either – well, nobody is sick or dying yet. You can take all the time you need to figure this shit out along with the rest of the team I’ve put together”

With a raised eyebrow, the doctor inquired: “Team? Who’ve you got?”

The colonel told of an anthropologist that the doctor recalled hearing of at a psychology conference a few years ago, relating to a talk and panel on linguistic implications on human thought. There was also a particle physicist and a biologist, but none of them sounded familiar.

“So… a doctor, an anthropologist, a physicist and a biologist. Did you find a space alien?” the doctor wondered, drawing the somewhat obvious conclusion – even though he knew it was quite far-fetched.

Shaking her head, the colonel sighed deeply: “I wish – plus if we’d found a spaceship or something there’d be engineers involved – no, it’s not a little green spaceman…”

The despair that the doctor heard in his old friend’s voice finally got to him. This was worrying. What had so thoroughly freaked out his old squad CO? Now he simply had to know!

“Alright, where do I sign?”

“Sign? Nowhere – this is so off the books that a paper trail like that would be disastrous. Plus, nothing I’ve told you so far can’t be explained away – and once you see the thing nobody will believe you anyway” the colonel said, her voice tired and weary, clearly just wanting it all to just be over.

Ok that was enough. Getting up, the doctor looked at his old friend: “Marie, what the fuck have you called me in for?”

Cracking a smile, the colonel got up and swiped a card at a spot next to the door. LEDs cleverly hidden under the wall panelling lit up brightly enough to be seen, and another wall panel slid to the side, revealing a display that read “Marie Calvert, Colonel – Access granted”

The door clicked open.

The colonel gestured for the doctor to enter. Shrugging, Doctor Ordrup stepped inside.

The colonel looked at her phone, counting the seconds. Fourteen seconds later the doctor came out, looking noticeably pale, his eyes wide. This finally brought a smirk to the colonel’s lips: “Cat got your tongue?”

“That… is a horse” the doctor said, sounding a bit like back when Marie had first shown him a photo-album from an ISIS torture prison.

Nodding, the colonel shrugged: “Yup”

“A talking horse… with purple dreadlocks” the doctor continued, looking at the colonel with the greatest of confusion.

Still nodding, the colonel simply replied: “That’s why we got a linguist on the team. Been making a little headway, but the sounds she makes are pretty damn difficult for us to replicate… who’d have thought that talking horse would be hard to understand?”

The doctor just looked at the colonel, a somewhat sour expression on his face, for her lack of acknowledgement of his confusion.

“Come on, I’ll introduce you properly” the colonel said, getting up.

Inside the laboratory/containment facility, the colonel introduced the team and finally… the horse. The very strange-looking horse.

“The feathers appear to grow naturally from her scalp, and she doesn’t like us touching them…” the biologist explained, noting that bio-chemically and anatomically the feathers appear very similar as certain common seagull species found in far-east Asia.

“What about the purple hair… mane? Did someone give her dreadlocks just for fun? And what’s up with the metal-sharpie drawings on her?” the doctor inquired, still not convinced that this wasn’t an elaborate hoax, or perhaps some cartel boss’s drugged up pet that had been painted over repeatedly.

The physicist was adamant that the samples taken from the subject’s coat over the metal-infused areas had the same properties as regular coat samples… but via gas chromatography and mass spectrometry of those samples, then a non-toxic chemical that read like mercury had been found.

“Mercury tattoos… that aren’t toxic. Right”

The physicist agreed that it didn’t sound logical, but gas chromatography and mass spectrometry didn’t lie. The linguist noted that the tattoos appear to be in a strange form of writing – though progress on deciphering wasn’t really happening, due to lack of any kind of reference material. There was no Rosetta stone for this new language.

The anthropologist was similarly tasked with trying to puzzle out the ‘civilized’ behaviour of the horse, since the thing had apparently been captured while eating a lizard it had been cooking over a fire. The doctor found the idea of a horse starting a fire rather difficult to believe – but there were photos and even video, which included a quite curious detail: “Hold on… the horse isn’t holding the stick with the lizard on it – its… telekinesis?”

This was here the physicist was trying to figure out what kind of energy that was in play – because the glow spoke of some kind of photonic emission… and so far, they hadn’t been able to detect a damn thing.

The physicist’s quite energetic and enthusiastic rundown of the energy spectra he had tried to scan for appeared to have annoyed the horse – resulting in it saying things to the team again, in a tone that was being interpreted as annoyed.

The doctor had to agree with the linguist, the language it spoke was quite strange – reminded him a little of what he had heard locals talk when he had been on vacation on the Solomon Islands. The linguist agreed, noting that he had been experimenting with cue cards whenever she was cooperative enough, and had mapped out quite a few words for various states that an ocean could be in, hinting that her culture of origin was probably coastal.

“Hold on – culture of origin?” the doctor objected, finding the idea of horses with culture preposterous.

The anthropologist agreed with the linguist, noting that this being was clearly intelligent – able to start fire and cook food. Those were not skills you could know via instinct, that had to be taught, ipso facto she had been raised either in a tribal culture or something similar.

“What makes you think she’s tribal?”

For this the anthropologist pointed to her dreadlocks and lack of clothing – noting that early hominids lost its fur once it got clever and organized enough to make clothing, and dreads are still quite common in many human tribes, of the few that still live on the fringe of modern civilization, as a result of their lack of access to things like combs or brushes, which are a bit more complicated to craft.

With the horse alert, the doctor approached the large cage she was being held in: “Is there a reason why she’s kept locked up? Is she a flight risk? Has she hurt anyone?”

The whole team got oddly quiet at that question. The physicist spoke up first, reminding the doctor of the subject’s short range telekinesis. Right, she could grab stuff… with her mind – sure, that could complicate things.

“That doesn’t answer if she is a flight risk – I’m only seeing electronic locks on the cage, not something where she can nab a key and run off”

The biologist came up to the doctor with a tablet, showing a video. It was of the horse, which in the video was fitted with a tracking collar of sorts – the horse then… melted, and a few seconds later coalesced into a snake – a snake that did not have a tracking collar on.

Quickly looking at the actual horse in the cage, the doctor confirmed that the collar was still on the pony – though it featured what looked like very obvious claw-marks. Horses didn’t have claws.

“So… it talks… and melts… what the fuck is this thing?” the doctor said, taking a despairing step backwards.

This was too much. The doctor’s head spun. Someone rushed up behind with an office chair to catch him on.

The colonel came up to the doctor, not to comfort him, but to place some firm hands on his shoulders: “Everyone here took a few days to adjust to this. You’re not any different here… look, you even woke her up – try not to scare her, or she might hide again”

The horse stirred as the doctor tried to regain his composure. The shapeshifting, fire-starting horse, with telekinesis… with a mane done up in purple dreadlocks and strikingly expressive blue eyes. Couldn’t this just have been some secret military researchers who had gotten splashed with strange dangerous chemicals that he had to help patch up? That would have been so much more… familiar, and not paradigm-shatteringly strange… and what did they mean with hide again? She was in a cage?

The horse looked… curious? She had seen the doctor when he had first peeked into the lab, and the rest of the team had noted that she had a decidedly uncanny ability to know when someone was coming. Like when the doctor had first peeked into the lab, she spoke up again. Now, the doctor knew well enough what kind of noises that horses were supposed to make – he had an uncle with nice ranch in Colorado – so the sound he heard from her… they were oh so very wrong.

Well, if they had kept a curtain over the cage and made her talk, he would have assumed it was a normal human talking – if he closed his eyes… but no, this was simply too much.

“He didn’t start shouting or screaming – you owe me five bucks” the colonel said in passing to the physicist, as she walked up to the now seated doctor.

As his old friend tried to reassure him, the doctor was told that it normally took a week or so to fully adjust to the weirdness of the strange horse. There was a room ready for him, but the doctor refused. Oh sure, the horse frightened him deeply – but not in a sense that it made him fear for bodily harm – it frightened him because its many strange implications… but that also made him curious: “No, I’m not going to hide away from this thing. What do you need to me find to out?”

The biologist quickly brought out a list of questions that a more medically skilled individual could handle. The biologist quickly admitted that she was much more used to working with samples and creatures that didn’t bite back – but the primary mysteries were things like exactly what the extend of the horse’s diet encompassed, plus she hadn’t really been examined properly yet either… not for a lack of trying, but she just wouldn’t let anyone touch her all that much.

“We’ve already tried bringing in an actual veterinarian, but she reacted really poorly when the thing started talking – we figured that a doctor who’s more used to talking patients who could also do horse would be better – and I know you’re on the level of working on classified projects” the colonel elaborated, leaving out the drama her organization had endured with subsequently keeping the vet quiet.

Steeling himself, the doctor got up and approached the cage. The horse inside stirred, appearing curious herself at the newcomer who had arrived to ostensibly poke and prod her.

Except that wasn’t what happened: The horse perked up, and on her brow a circle of moonlight shined, as did her eyes – the rest of the team said that this strange glowing mark on her brow appeared every now and then, but rarely. That her eyes glowed with the same cobalt-blue light didn’t seem to faze the team much either… but the horse appeared to get quite agitated and excited after having looked at the doctor with those glowing eyes, which quickly faded, the mark on her brow similarly fading after a few seconds.

“Hey, looks like she likes you” the biologist said, pulling out some gear for the doctor to examine the horse with.

Up next to the cage, the doctor carefully scrutinized the horse. She was right up against the cage, appearing to ‘hold’ the bars with her hooves, her nose up to the bars as well – and she was talking. It was strange to observe her mouth, how oddly human it was in its expressions. Definitely not the mouth of a normal horse.

That was when the screaming began: The horse somehow bent the bars on the cage away as if it was wet clay – it then leapt out and embraced the doctor.

The colonel and the rest of the team scrambled to help the doctor – but a creature that appeared to be made of liquid steel flowed from the horse and held them at bay, while the horse loudly spoke out a strange and alien statement. She then began to glow as if emitting moonlight, which moments later turned into silvery fire around her – completely cold and harmless – but bright and awe-inspiring… and that’s when the horse began to emit more of that strange liquid magic not-mercury from her hooves and wrap it around the terrified doctor.

Now, the doctor knew well enough of plenty of stories of medical staff getting contaminated or infected by their own patients – it could be someone sick with something infecting a nurse or doctor, or a patient who had been poisoned by something where the toxins accumulated into their blood or other bodily fluids that medical staff got smeared with. Magic silver goop that appeared to seep into his body? That was new. It was beyond scary.

With a panicked scream the doctor tried to get away from the horse, but she somehow maintained her grip – and her little metal minion, an octopus of living metal from the looks of things, were keeping everyone away, even as the colonel drew her sidearm and tried to shoot it, but its mercurial body simply absorbed the bullets.

Glowing bands of energy emerged from the horse’s silvery flames that enveloped her, wrapping around the doctor. They quickly intensified into a blinding light.

And thus, the doctor was no more – for he had never really exited… instead a second pastel coloured horse stood, blinking with eyes that were just as brown as before, but now with a teal coat and a red jacket around his chest.

“There you are – I could feel that you were getting closer” Last Shimmer said, as she could see Speaker regaining his bearings.

It was strange. The memories of his human life were fading fast, thought it would be a while before they would be completely out of his system. Looking to Shimmer, Speaker nodded: “I… I guess your moonsilver tattoos protected you from this… warping effect of the well of Udr”

“True, and honestly, I think my bond with you ensured that I appeared in the same reality as you… but I tell you, this place is weird. Next to no natural essence flows – and I mean, look at these local creatures. They look so silly” Shimmer mused, gesturing to the rest of the research team in the laboratory and the colonel, all of them looking at the two with the utmost of terror.

Right, those people – the humans - they’re still there.

Turning to the team, straightening out his jacket and quickly having Shimmer fix up his fu-man-chu beard. It was a little strange to make his mouth speak this local tongue that he still remembered, but possible none the less: “Colonel Marie Calvert, do not be afraid”

The colonel ‘replied’ by opening fire with her sidearm. Speaker’ shield charms saw the bullets impact him harmlessly. With a quick gesture and expenditure of essence, Speaker had the colonel’s gun fall apart: “Just listen – the doctor you know was never real. Think back to the earliest memories you have of him… they should be fading already, as reality readjusts to me being back in my true form”

The rest of the team looked at the colonel, not quite sure of what the new horse meant – even if they understood him. Colonel Calvert just shook her head, not even sure if what she heard was to believed.

“Try calling up to check on the car I arrived in. I’m sure it would be gone now” Speaker suggested.

Right, checking up on a parked car. Now that was a lot simpler and more real than anything else… right? The colonel quickly got on her phone, having someone check for the doctor’s car – though the reply she got didn’t seem to please her: “What do you mean there’s no car there? I was watching the CCTV feed when he pulled in… who? The doctor I called in for lab six. What do you mean there’s nothing in the log?”

Speaker nodded, looking at the colonel and the rest of the team: “I told you… now pay close attention. I don’t know how long I will be able to remember your language”

It was thus over the course of five hours that Speaker taught the assembled humans how to speak Old Realm – by the end of the lesson Speaker in turn found that he couldn’t remember the human language he had spoken… and the linguist was bouncing off the walls over having been taught an alien language.

With proper communications established just in time, including proper introductions, Speaker and Shimmer were able to leverage the secret laboratory’s resources in order to set up tools and scanners to scry for a way back to creation – for there was no reason for them to stay.

At first Shimmer had been quite cautious and hesitant – having found that the natural essence flows of this strange world being nearly non-existent, making her respire almost no essence at all. Speaker however, had the advantage of his hearth-stones and the ponies back in Creation who send him their prayers as thanks for his healing. Those streams of essence didn’t just keep him replete with essence, but it gave them something to home in on and track back to Creation.

The particle physicist was absolutely ecstatic in having the secrets of essence revealed to him, while Shimmer and the biologist had their fun with trying to puzzle out how shapeshifting actually worked.

In the end it didn’t take that long for Speaker – him being a peerless paragon of sorcerous artifice – to wrangle the strange artificial lightning-essence that the humans produced, in making a device that would send the duo somewhere else. Of course, they weren’t just trying to get home… they were trying to find their circle-mates and get them all home.

Initial tests revealed how catastrophic the setup would react to trying to draw the four other members of the circle to the duo’s location – so instead they would have to be sent to their friends, or at least one of them.

This was understandably risky as all hell, but Speaker figured that if he had been able to make a device to get them from one realm to another here, he could do it anywhere else – if given enough time and resources.

…this of course meant parting with their new friends, and all the medical miracles that Speaker had been able to perform would have to end. It was a shame really: Everyone on the team agreed that Speaker’s healing powers would have seen him lauded as a great saviour, if made public, for there were many diseases not yet curable that ravaged the world they were on. This pained Speaker, but he knew that he had a duty to his people, and the ponies of creation first.

To this end the day came when seven nuclear powerplants were instructed to generate as much juice as was physically possible for the local grid to absorb. Thick cables that ran along the hallways and service ducts of the facility smouldered, and cooling systems strained to keep everything from melting down.

The machine itself wasn’t all that big – only needing to fit two small pastel-coloured ponies huddled together – but it was not made with true magical materials… though Speaker had found the metallurgical skills of humanity quite impressive, so many workable substitutes had been found.

Another piece of artifice that Speaker had wrought, had been made from blood drawn from Shimmer, distilling traces of moonsilver from it – and using that fashion a harness meant to protect him from the warping effects of the transit, in combination with his own shaping defence charm.

The switch was pulled – the blinding flash of light as a brief rip in reality took place… and thus the two magical ponies no longer existed in that reality.

Author's Note

Yes its a "House" reference