Chapters As Eddy Current entered the stasis chamber, motion-activated lighting flared on. At the center of the chamber was a glossy white pod, and on the side of the pod was a metallic label with the words Specimen: “Redcap” inscribed in glowing indigo characters. One of the walls glowed with the image of a green unicorn mare’s head. The image smiled at him.
“Eddy!”
“Jade! Everything okay on your end?”
“There was a graveyard shift guard up here in the control center I had to knock out, but he’ll stay under for at least a few hours.”
“Good. Time to break her out of here.”
He waved his left front hoof over the label. The band of beryl-studded fabric he wore on his fetlock flashed, and the label turned orange. The pod opened, its two interlocking half-hemispheres of insulated ceramic parting with a soft hydraulic hiss. The shell halves rolled away underneath, revealing a clean white bed on which lay a young gray filly with an orange-red mane and tail, and an image of a red mushroom emblazoned on her haunch. “Redcap” began breathing softly, her abdomen rising and falling.
“This would be a lot easier if I were a unicorn,” Eddy grumbled.
“Just get her moving; I’ll dim the lights so she doesn’t come out of stasis prematurely.”
Too much light or agitation would wake her, as they had discussed. Awakening from a stasis enchantment under the wrong circumstances could mean a traumatic seizure. Eddy tugged gingerly at Redcap’s hind legs, lifting them over his neck, and stepped slowly to the side to pull her from the bed. As her head and forelegs neared the edge of the bed, he extended his wing to provide a supporting surface and pulled her away. He nudged and shifted about awkwardly, trying to straighten her on his back. Jade began giggling.
“This isn’t funny!” Eddy grunted in protest.
“Sorry,” she replied. “but you’ll need to get better at this, or you’ll wake our daughter whenever you carry her off to bed.”
“We can talk about the future later, dear.”
“Of course. I don’t know how much time we have until someone discovers me.”
Eddy pulled the sheet off the bed with his teeth, tossing it over his back to cover Redcap’s face.
“You know what to do next, I trust.”
“Yes,” said Eddy. “Use the fire escape hall to leave the building. Have you disabled the alarms on the doors?”
“Yes, as well as the motion detectors on the perimeter floodlamps. And before you leave the building?”
“Disable the air circulation and climate control systems.”
“Everything is in order, then. After I’m done up here we’ll rendezvous at the reservoir, and then you can take her from there. Don’t forget to pass through the terrarium on your way out. Driftwood should have left it unlocked.”
“I will.”
The image of Jade faded with a soft click, leaving a blank stone wall.
Eddy moved cautiously out of the chamber and through the halls, forcing himself into an awkward gait in attempt to keep his back level and still. Redcap began slipping off. He paused to readjust her, extending his wings to hold her in place and regretting his lack of a regular exercise regimen. He then noticed that the bedsheet had fallen off, and Redcap was exposed, and he quickened his pace forward. His wing muscles implored him for another pause, burning with a tension that he knew would soon become cramping. Eddy fought against the ache by concentrating on the memory of Jade and her voice.
He paused beneath the emerald glow of the emergency exit and grunted as he readjusted Redcap. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Jade.” After drawing a nervous breath, he punched the door open. No alarm sounded. He entered, and soft amber lights flickered to life in the narrow fire escape hall.
In the bend where the hall made a U-turn and began up a gradual slope to ground level, Eddy stopped and carefully slipped Redcap to the floor. He yawned and flexed his wings, the popping of their joints echoing in the corridor.
“Sorry the floor is cold, but there’s not enough room in there for both of us, kiddo,” he murmured. “I won’t be but a minute.”
Inside a red box painted on the wall, he scratched a series of glyphs. The path his hoof traced in the stone glowed yellow until he had completed each character, after which it turned green and disappeared. After the fifth, the square inside the red box silently receded into the wall, and Eddy crawled into the smooth square shaft that it left behind.
The shaft led into a cramped cavity that hummed with energy and scintillated with thousands of illuminated controls in colored groups. Eddy oriented himself and zig-zagged his eyes through an indigo column until he found what he was looking for. Holding his breath, he toggled fifteen of them to orange. A distant rumbling sound emanated from below the floor, followed by a conspicuous decline in the ambient noise.
He crawled back into the exit corridor and traced three circles around the red box. The block quietly returned to its place in the wall. Redcap was still asleep and remained still as he lifted her cautiously onto his back again. Just before he reached the exit, the screaming of an alarm echoed up the hall.
Eddy burst out the door and ran into the dark. He felt he had gone blind and deaf once the door shut behind him, sealing away the lights and sirens. One of his hooves landed on the edge of the paved path, and he stumbled to a halt. Between muttered curses he drew breaths through gritted teeth, taking a moment to recover and readjust Redcap on his back. Looking up, he saw a generous swath of constellations and a soft pillar of springtime’s false dawn, but no moon. A cricket purred.
As his eyes finally adjusted to the dark enough to see the path, he began a half-limping gait. To take his mind from the pain in his leg, he thought of Jade and the cryptic instructions which she had promised to explain after they had all been followed.
The glass and metal structure of the terrarium loomed before him like a fragile mountain. Eddy steadied his pace.
“Then you can take her from there?” he asked himself. For all he knew, he would be trekking or flying across Northern Equestria with the gray filly on his back. Perhaps Jade would spell-dye her mane and tail a new color and find a way to conceal the fly agaric mark on her haunches. She’s young enough to pass for a blank flank, after all, he thought.
Eddy reached the entrance and opened the airtight door, thinking of Jade’s other accomplice as he hurried inside the vestibule. Driftwood. The mycologist with whom Redcap had spent more time in tutoring than any other researcher. Eddy had even heard his colleagues joking about how she’d been switched at birth with his natural daughter. Then, other rumors had circulated: Driftwood had asked suspicious questions to the principal investigators, suggesting he had knowledge of classified material. When that happened, they had abruptly taken her away from Driftwood “to expedite further research.”
Eddy’s nose wrinkled as he passed through the vestibule’s air curtain to the cavernous interior of the terrarium; the air was ripe with the humours of decaying plant matter. Eddy strained his eyes to navigate through.
“Well, here we are,” said a young female voice.
Eddy froze in his tracks, holding his breath. Redcap began to squirm on his back. “Oh, please not here.”
“Why not? And can you put me down, please?”
Eddy obliged, slipping her gently to the ground. “Are you okay?” He felt her for tremors.
Redcap yawned. “I’m sleepy, obviously, but fine. So, who are you?”
“My name’s Eddy,” he replied, “and I’m the one who’s getting you safely out—”
“Oh, so you’re Jade’s sweetheart!” That brought a rush of blood to Eddy’s face faster than Jade herself had ever managed. “Nice to meet you. Also, I feel just fine, thank you. Do you know why we’re fleeing the Fount of Creation Research Institute?”
Eddy stared at her, incredulous. “How did you know—” he stammered. “Jade told me what the researchers were about to do to you.”
“I already know. Disembodiment and doomsday. I was just asking to see if you understood.”
Eddy shook his head. “The whole place is waking up, and the night shift guards are out looking for us, so we need to move quickly. First thing’s first, though: Jade told me you might suffer some magic-induced trauma. Mind explaining—”
“I said I’m fine.”
“Okay... But you were under a stasis spell, so I need to ping Jade for help.” He raised his fetlock and prepared to speak into the band.
“I wouldn’t use that if I were you. It’s a stolen communicator, unlike the one on Jade’s left front leg, so using it would broadcast our position.”
Eddy lowered his hoof. “How would you know something like that?”
Very easily, said a voice that sounded like her but seemed to come from within Eddy’s mind.
He jumped. “Okay, filly Einhuf, I didn’t know you were a telepath. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just know I have some boundaries I don’t want crossed.”
“I’ll try to respect them, if you don’t use that pejorative. As for why I’m not seizing: basically, the mushrooms here woke me up.”
“...Mushrooms?”
“I’ll explain while we’re running.”
“Couldn’t we just fly from outside—”
Follow me!
Redcap sprinted off into the foliage. Eddy hesitated, gaping incredulously, and then ran after her. Grotesquely disfigured branches slapped and scratched at his face and forelegs as he plowed his way through the foliage.
What in Tartarus are you doing?
Driftwood said I might be properly come out of stasis in the terrarium because my ‘affinity for for fungi’ would ‘guide my mind back to temporal reality’. The scholars call the fungal collective the ‘cortex mycelia,’ came Redcap’s thought-voice. I’m their eyes and ears. They’re my second brain.
What has gotten into these plants? thought Eddy as he nearly swallowed a leaf.
Twisted by experiments, of course. They’re dying now because their only friend around here has been taken away, disembodied, and imprisoned. Thanks to you and Jade, I won’t be joining him.
Eddy emerged in a square clearing at the center, disheveled and panting. At the center of the clearing before a stout, boxy structure, sat Redcap.
“What in...?” Eddy gasped.
“We need to get some light in here, now that we’re lost in the middle. Could you open this for me?”
Eddy looked at the box. “You’re psychotic.”
Oh, wait, nevermind...thanks Eddy!
She quickly scratched a few luminous patterns in the side of the box with her hoof. The panel fell off, exposing several buttons, one of them large and glowing an ominous red.
“Oh no. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Putting this place out of its misery and destroying the seeds of pony hubris.” She punched the red button with her hoof.
Brilliant lights flared on throughout the terrarium and a piercing alarm sounded. A monotonous male voice echoed across the PA system: “Evacuate immediately. Two minutes to emergency specimen immolation.”
“Fastest way out is with your wings,” she said, winking at him. She reached into the box and hit a different button.
A second, lower-pitched alarm sounded. It was followed by a whine of hydraulic pistons high above and an immense roaring of fans in a far corner that heralded the opening of a massive ceiling panel.
Eddy plucked Redcap off the ground with his forelegs and flew for the opening. His wing muscles ached as he flapped, but the pain was one more familiar and welcome to him. He pushed against the air rushing to equalize pressure, and the black square of empty sky accepted him. Eddy flew out into the night, momentarily blinded once more from the terrarium floodlamps. As he circled in his ascent he surveyed the ground, and noticed the lights at the research center had come on as well. The whole area was alight: the vast clearing in the forest enclosed by a tall fence that met at the sides of the terrarium; the broad, green garden with neatly-trimmed hedges; the enormous, horseshoe-shaped gray structure of stone in the middle wherein hundreds of Equestrian researchers quietly devised ways of stopping a natural disaster — and, secretly, of turning it into a horrific weapon, according to what Jade had said.
A glowing rod shot past them at high velocity. The mana-bullet traced a glowing path off into the sky.
We’ve been spotted! Eddy thought.
Don’t think. Fly. Get us out of the unicorns’ range and leave the rest to me.
He stopped ascending and poured all of his effort into flying out horizontally over the forest. The research center disappeared behind them and the forest’s dark treetops raked invisibly at them from beneath.
I have to be quiet for a moment. Keep flying and we’ll escape.
How? I’m no match for a pegasus guard, and I’m carrying you.
She gave no response.
Redcap?
A howl like an immense hurricane resounded in Eddy’s mind, and his vision turned white for an instant. He came to his senses as fast as he had lost them, but had nearly dropped Redcap. He cinched her up in his grasp and flew dizzily onward, wondering if he was still going in the same direction.
Redcap! What just happened?
Redcap remained silent. He flew harder. If Jade escapes, she’s our only hope, he thought. Something happened to Redcap.
The sound of branches breaking violently came from behind. He looked behind him and saw only darkness. A thin branch grazed his wingtip feathers, and he winced, wobbling in flight. Choking on his own gasps of surprised pain, he pushed against the air, ascending shakily into the safe openness of the night sky. The forest stretched out like a vast black carpet below, and the mountains of the forest basin stood like massive black teeth against the dimly-glowing horizon. Now, to the rendezvous point, Eddy thought.
No, Redcap thought.
Oh, you’re awake. What was that just a minute ago?
It’s something I’m too tired to do again, that’s what it was. Please, just fly as fast as you can. They’ll recover and be back on our trail soon.
Right then. To the reservoir.
We’re not meeting Jade just so you can do... things... with her one last time.
“Yes we are meeting her,” Eddy shouted above the rush of cold air to make a gesture of effort. “And didn’t I say ‘barriers’?” Short of breath, he couldn’t keep it up. And why shouldn’t we follow through with her plans?
Eddy, I made her plans. This whole escape was my design. You think I was looking forward to being a brain in a jar, soul tethered to a crystal? You know Jade is a sworn member of the Stained Glass Order, and can’t tell a lie if questioned. That’s why we can no longer do what she told you. It’s too risky.
“Just what are you suggesting?” That we abandon her? That she’ll betray us?
“Listen in your head,” Redcap shouted. I’m our best chance of getting away now. No one knows my plans except you and me, but there’s a good chance that soon everyone will know hers.
Why should I trust you?
Redcap’s mind-voice turned to childlike, placatory smoothness. I know how you feel about each other. I knew that when I met her, without looking at her mind. You trusted and loved her enough to keep your peace when she asked you not to question her, and that’s what made you a good accomplice. But that means there’s a lot she held back from you.
Like what?
Think about the terrarium and the air circulation. If you’d been caught, you would have had no knowledge of the instructions Jade gave to her sister. Thanks to your faithful work, another one of the “gifted youths” will escape the Fount of Creation.
What sort of escape plan is this? Eddy asked.
The “who” is a colt named Snails I met before I started work with Driftwood. The “how” is reduced to the size of mites, on the backs of insects.
Eddy marveled at the prospect of a skilled unicorn shrunk to a minuscule size and riding a fly. Is there anything else I haven’t been told?
We’re being tracked. The communicator, silly.
Eddy choked back surprise, making effort to maintain stable flight. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? You lied to me, said it would only do that if I used it!
Easy now. It’s exactly what we want. Everyone knows we’re headed in this direction. The reservoir will be a false lead. I didn’t have time to explain and didn’t want you tearing it off early.
Eddy finally understood Redcap’s plans in their entirety. A slip of the reservoir was visible ahead; he saw the reflection of two stars shimmering in it. And then “you can take her from there”?
Yes. We’ll be flying into the Northeast hinterlands.
So then, how are we going to survive out there in the wilderness, Einhuf?
Please, I asked you not to call me that!
I asked you not to look at the parts of my brain that are inappropriate for foals.
Fair enough, she ceded. We’ll be meeting a group of ponies that Driftwood told me about, and I’ll convince them to help us. I know what and who they are, and how to persuade them.
Truly?
I persuaded you easily enough.
He snorted in anger, but soon heard the soft giggle of a filly lingering in his mind like the flurry of white feathers following the impact of a thrown pillow.
That is *not funny.*
Redcap’s mirth gradually died off.
So, which way out of the basin once we’ve dropped this thing?
Naturally, Northeast. That way has the tallest peaks and the most turbulent air about it, and so it’s incidentally the last direction we’d be expected to fly.
Well, fantastic. How convenient. Eddy looked to the east, where the range jutted up black and forbidding. Their last snows haven’t been gone more than a week. You sure we shouldn’t go back to the research center or wait for Auntie Jade so we can get a sweater on you?
I’ll be fine.
The reservoir swelled into view, its cold water shimmering with starlight.
And now, for the final part of our feint. I’ll help you jettison this thing... Redcap tucked her chin in and pulled at the communicator band with her teeth. The pressure between Eddy’s hoof and her abdomen held it tightly so it chafed at them both.
We could land to take it off.
No time. Keep flying.
As she worked at the communicator, Eddy thought of how Jade had told him to keep the band on him until the rendezvous. Redcap slipped it off the end of his hoof with one final yank and spat it out. It drifted silently into the darkness below.
And now what, “specimen” Redcap?
Fly Northeast. Fly faster than you’ve ever flown before.
I’m already doing one of those two things, Eddy thought wearily as he banked through the night.
We need to cover a lot of distance before sunrise. If dawn catches us airborne, we’ll be easily spotted. Also, since you’ve stolen classified information, and I helped you, we’ve both committed treason...In case you hadn’t already figured that out.
And?
And that makes us fugitives, of course.
Eddy Current climbed towards the sky above the dark peaks with the filly in his grasp. Despite discomforting awareness that Redcap could hear his every thought, he could only think of Jade, all of their times together, and whether he would ever see her again.
On the forest floor, a raccoon chanced upon an ornate band of fabric, decided it would be useful for her nest, and grasped it in her teeth. Suddenly, its matrix of beryl beads glowed, and she dropped it in surprise. The beads hummed with a feminine voice.
“Eddy, it’s Jade! Eddy?”
The raccoon eyed the alien garment apprehensively.
“Eddy, if you can hear me: mission failed. I can’t teleport out of here. The security barriers in the control center... Please, stay where you are, and keep the communicator on you... I’m so sorry. You need to give Redcap back so the doctors can help her wake up without brain damage. If we come clean, they might go easier on us—”
Sounds of distant shouting came out of the beads.
“I love you.”
The glow died out and the fabric fell silent. The raccoon attacked it, snarling and clawing and biting it. It refused to tear. She paused, giving it a sniff. It lay deathly still, defeated. She carried it off to her den.
The light of Amber’s horn dimmed.
“And now, awaken.”
The lanky, mustard yellow colt opened his eyes and winced. Drawing a surprised breath, he squinted through the brilliant blue light of the chamber. A pattern of noise that could only be an alarm droned continuously in the distance, muffled through walls.
“What’s going on? Who are you?”
“I’m Amber, and I’m getting you out of here,” she explained. “I’m sorry, but I had to leave you asleep during what I just did to us. We’ll be back to normal in an hour or so.”
Snails stood up, looked around and then back at her. They stood on a ridge of immaculate white fabric, surrounded by a vast landscape of wrinkles: the surface of the stasis bed. He gave a nervous smile, which softened into a confident grin. “Okay.”
“Not afraid of being shrunk?”
“It took me a second to realize.”
“Realize what?”
“Now I’m...I’m small enough to have some real fun with them.”
Amber smiled at him. “You have the right idea. I enchanted a cranefly that will carry us out of the building while the climate control is disabled.”
“I didn’t know you could talk to bugs too.”
“No, I can enchant them, silly. I don’t have your gift.”
Snails lowered his eyes and sighed.
“What’s the matter?”
“You know, I used to hate it when no one knew that.”
“Tired of the attention?”
“Everyone called me names. Not even my best friend believed me, and soon even he stopped defending me. I actually wanted to go here soon as mom showed me the letter.”
“And now that you’ve spent five months here in the School for Uniquely Gifted Youths?”
“I wish I could go back to being the dumb pony and not have to answer so many scary questions.”
“You’ll get a chance.”
“Will that chance be worth all this? What the lab guys said they’d do tomorrow didn’t sound so bad, but this way we could get squashed or something.”
“They didn’t tell you everything. It is imprisonment .”
A weak shadow danced over and past them, and then again. They looked up, squinting into the light. The shadow of the cranefly passed over them again, and then again, and again.
Amber narrowed her eyes. “Hey! Down here, mote-brain! Forget about the light!”
“That’s not how you talk to bugs.”
Amber ignored him and muttered curses. “The spell might have diminished when I shrunk us. At this scale nothing I cast will work unless I’m at close range. Maybe if you—”
Snails had closed his eyes, and his horn glowed a barely-visible yellow. The cranefly immediately descended, its wingbeats becoming audible and growing to a thunderous whirr. It halted abruptly with a gust of micro-scale turbulence, touching down directly over them and puncturing the white horizon with its spindly legs.
“Okay, great!” Amber looked up the underside of the insect as a mechanic spot-checking an industrial apparatus. “Now that she’s here, I really think you should leave this to me.”
Snails ignored her and kept his eyes closed.
“I know you can commune with them, but that’s not the same as controlling them, which is what we need in order to—”
The cranefly stepped forward so they were between its hind legs and lowered its abdomen.
“Well then, bug-whisperer, one way or another, we should get on—” There were the sounds of shouting and a door opening at the end of a long hall. “—Now!”
The two ponies clambered up its back, slipping a little here and there on the smooth, translucent ridges of the abdomen. They stopped at the thorax, and Amber promptly nodded, gracing both their hooves with a wave of purple magic. She tugged at her hooves and found that she was unable to lift them; Snails followed suit.
“It’s so that we can hold on. So, then, can I have her back? I have a pretty tight plan that we need to follow!”
Once more he closed his eyes and ignored her. The cranefly’s long, slender wings rhythmically shredded the air, and it hummed upwards through the cavernous white expanse of the chamber. It homed in on a thick hexagonal lattice grate of glyph-bearing, malachite-studded platinum.
The fly landed on the grate with the two minute ponies attached to its back upside-down, their manes and tails pulled out by gravity. At that moment, two unicorns, colossal by comparison, burst through the door. They looked around the chamber, shouting about a shrinking spell that had been detected. The fly pulled its legs inward, front to back, and squeezed through a hole in the grate, taking care to ensure that the two passengers would fit through between its body and a hexagonal vertex. One of the unicorns looked straight up at the grate and pointed.
“There!”
A burst of magic rattled at the magic-deflecting grate, and the cranefly lurched back, stuck in the hole.
Snails winced. “She lost a leg!”
There was a crash and shouting below as the spellcaster was tackled.
“Obs, you imbecile! You might have killed them!” cried the assailant.
“I was only—”
“They’re vulnerable on that scale! You know what happens to air when magic passes through it!”
“You’re not in charge here!”
Amber looked back nervously. “Come on fly, fly !” The end of the cranefly’s abdomen was coated in a thin black film of singed chitin. A diffuse blue haze lingered in the air below, but terminated in a sharp plane where the hole in the grate began. Further below, the two staff argued.
“I knew exactly what I was doing! We should re-enable the air—”
“And kill one of the Institute’s great assets even more violently?”
The cranefly lurched up into the duct with its remaining legs. The moment its wings cleared the grate, it promptly lifted off. Behind them the vent shrank to a pinhole of light before they banked into a junction and it disappeared. The ducts twisted about like the dark, convoluted intestines of a mechanical beast. Amber cast illumination from her horn and peered ahead through the darkness, while Snails’ young horn continued glowing its subtle yellow.
“Snails, you don’t know the way out! Ask her to stop so I can enchant her again.”
“She knows the way good enough! I can hear your magic echoing in her brain. I told her to follow the echo.”
Amber finally relaxed, hopeful. The continuous rush of air, the coarse murmur of the insect’s chitinous wing joints, the turbulent thrumm of its slender wings and the dark of the duct meant one thing: helping Snails escape was succeeding, albeit not as she’d thought it would. Minutes drifted by. Their long flight was punctuated by turns, patches of stray light from other vents, clumsy bumps against the walls of the duct, and the occasional twisted flit through a complicated metallic obstacle whose complete form and function were masked by shadow. Those would make Amber’s stomach turn over. Her heart would stop with every change in light, and she silently hoped that Jade’s redirection strategy would continue to work as well as it had.
Finally the air temperature tapered down as they entered a long, vertical shaft. The cranefly soared to the end and up between the blades of a massive, immobile fan. After clearing the blades and a loose grate above they soared out into the open air, and the imposing gray surface of the building receding below them.
“We did it, Snails!”
Snails’ horn still glowed, but he was trembling.
“Look! We’re free—”
A roar from beneath them overpowered the hum of the cranefly and her feeble shouting, and the rush of air suddenly changed direction. They were being drawn back down into the maw of the vent. Amber shrieked in despair, but could not even hear herself above the cataclysmic din. Within an instant, the cranefly’s wings failed, the spell cast on their hooves dissipated, and an enormous black object collided with them from the side. The two ponies were in freefall, but the same object then lunged at them again while the cranefly was drawn helplessly down into the fan.
They then found themselves pinched together in the mandibles of an immense beetle. The roar of the fan faded away, replaced by the husky, basso buzz of the insect, and they shook with the exoskeletal reverberations of the beetle’s wings. As they steadily flew over the garden outside the institute, which was brightly illuminated by floodlamps, they finally felt safer.
Suddenly, a deep and powerful thud rocked the air. Far off to their left, a massive orange blob of incandescence lifted into the sky like a fiery balloon.
Amber gasped. “The terrarium!”
The beetle wavered in its flight but it continued, nonplussed, while Snails remained in silent communion. Away they buzzed into the deep forest, leaving the secluded research center behind. The darkness and coldness of the forest enveloped them like a ravenous mouth, and the beetle put additional distance between itself and the ground. Soon the cloying darkness of the forest made it impossible for Amber to judge the distance to its floor. Boughs of the canopy passed by like rough dew-bearing clouds, and she began to ponder how much longer her shrinking spell would last.
The glow of Snails’ horn suddenly grew twice as bright, then stopped. Finally he opened his eyes, wide and fearful, drew a deep breath, and shouted, “Could you do that same spell you did earlier, with the sticky hooves?”
“I don’t think we need it right now!”
“The bug said we’re being followed!”
“Really? Then why would it help?”
“Please, just do it!”
“Okay, I need to concentrate!”
“Now! ”
With their awkward configuration of bodies and Snails’ panicked squirming, she shoddily cast the spell, and the wave of mana came out wavering and blue.
The beetle’s wingbeats halted. A different and far harsher sound — of the beetle’s chitinous armor crunching under immense pressure, and of organic fluids oozing through breaches in its exoskeleton — reverberated through the beetle’s body, and it gave a great arthropodal screech of mortal agony. Its hardened mandibles opened wide, releasing the two ponies into the care of cold air, gravity, and a thick, dark oblivion of evergreen needles.
Amber turned over in her freefall and saw the dying beetle between the pointy white teeth of an enormous bat. As the fear passed over and through her in a brief moment of careless abandon, she observed the bat fly off in search of more prey, masticating the beetle as it flew. She felt the sensation of weightlessness replaced by persistent cushion of air, and knew she had then reached terminal velocity.
A blunt object struck her lower back. She spun, the world a maelstrom of pain and rushing air and alternating textures of darkness. For a moment she lost consciousness, and from deep within herself, heard a voice from her years as an acolyte in the Stained Glass Order.
“There will be no panic in your final tests of skill,” it spoke confidently. “There should be none. In case you have forgotten, confronting fear is not a matter of seeing circumstances correctly, but of seeing yourself correctly. It takes the perspective of yourself as a predictable and weak being to manage irrational emotions. If you only look outward, you’ll lose sight...”
Air friction had slowed the spinning of her broken body, but not her eyes. Through an undulating veil of vertigo and windblown tears she scanned the darkness around her but saw no trace of Snails. He’s gone. She blinked, still straining to see. Biting back her despair, she thought of what had just happened to her, and came to a realization: He should be below me, if his free-fall was unbroken. She looked into the darkness below. A feeble yellow star, barely visible, flickered and wavered in her distorted vision. Alive!
With all of her will and strength, she collected her thoughts, conjuring a streamlined wind barrier around her. She felt weightless again as she accelerated; her limp body twisted freely in the liberty of the silent, dagger-shaped cocoon of air. Pain shot through her upper back, thwarting her concentration, while nothing below a point halfway down her back gave any response. The yellow light grew brighter, and soon she could distinguish four soft blue dots of light.
A plan assembled and ran through her mind. Get beneath him. Use the rest of my strength to remove the shrinking spell. First, wait for the low terminal velocity at this scale to take us to a safer height, but not too long. We must be full size before impact for the transformation to happen properly, and it will take several seconds. I will cushion his impact, and he will survive.
She shot past Snails and released the barrier about her body. The rush of air returned and she decelerated. However, her concentration was broken when the blast suddenly seemed to lose its power, and she accelerated further. She then felt a carpet-like surface of flexible, silky-smooth fibers cradling her body. Snails descended and touched down directly over her, his legs anchoring him to the surface around her.
“I’ll hold you safe!”
The surface then pushed up with great force, and the wind was knocked out of Amber as the two of them were smashed together. A muted, wavering hum of rhythmic turbulence replaced the roar of freefall. Feathery, jet-black planes coated in silky hairs flapped and vibrated to either side of them. The air passed by gentler than before, infused with the scents of the nocturnal forest floor.
“Where are we going?”
“We need to see someone.”
The giant black moth alighted, and everything became as silent as it was dark.
Driftwood stole a split-second glance at the clock and turned back to his audience, trying to ignore the two security officers standing vigil at the meeting room entrance. He had less than a minute left in the oral defense of his dissertation.
Thoughts of what had taken place overnight distracted him, despite how the presentation represented the epitome of years of diligent work. He knew that after he was finished, he would face two volleys of questioning: one of the academic sort, and the other of legal import. It was the latter that loomed in his mind like a forgotten final examination not prepared for. He took a breath, parted his white hair and prepared to savor the time that remained in his presentation. As he once again conjured the bittersweet notion that this was the conclusion of his project, the words to articulate came to him.
“So, to re-iterate, after we noticed pronounced electrical activity in hyphae placed in proximity with subject ‘Redcap’, we used four methods to test that she had attained primordial communion. The first three tests required occupying the clean room for an entire week in order to isolate her from all fungi, including the ubiquitous mold.
“The first test was spatial, in which her critical thinking abilities were diminished with distance from all forms of fungi. In the second, she demonstrated a stunted memory of facts given to her while close to fungi, but had recollection of them later when reunited with them. The third, which was inconclusive but documented, involved the incineration of nearby fungi while in sensory isolation. In that one, pain receptors in her brain exhibited activity that was not only measurable but comparable to the firsthand response to the actual stimulus of heat. The fourth was of a more historical nature, wherein she recounted the events leading up to Age of Discord , having never opened a single of the ancient chronicles in Canterlot.”
In the moment of silence that follows, Driftwood remembered he should have said and that concludes the presentation when one sitting near the front cleared his throat.
“Dr. Shale?”
“Yes. You say that she recounted these events with accuracy, but in the last test, I don’t believe you explained well enough why and how her accounts were accurate.”
Naturally , thought Driftwood. I’ve gone out of my way to study fields wholly unrelated to mine for the defense. It is good to know it wasn’t in vain . “Very well” he said. “First, let me just reiterate that, as part of the enrollment process in the School for Uniquely Gifted Youths, exhaustive background checks were performed on her family, and her file indicates that her family has never set hoof out of Whinniepeg nor been in contact with anyone outside that city. Redcap was, in fact, very sheltered.”
He touched his horn to the projection signal conduit — a small triangle of moonstone. The translucent screen behind him illuminated again with crisp chronological diagrams. “And now, as for her assertion that magic was not the solution but the cause of the disasters that preceded the inception of the Draconequui.
“Near the beginning of the Second age, the Equestrian colony had its first encounter with Gryphonkind. When the land began exhibiting unnatural hostility, the Gryphon ruler Regolos offered unspoiled land to the east of his territory for ponies to settle until the land had returned to equilibrium. The terms, however, were that no magic was to be used on it. Those who settled there reverted to ancient traditions of eschewing magic.
“Now, according to the accounts of the explorer Kitalpha the Bold, the flora and fauna in that land never exhibited any of the instability known to have happened in Equestria at that time. Furthermore, there has never been any reason, historically or scientific, to conclude that the Great Wave and the Great Abomination of Discord were global events, or that they had any effect on the settlers. In very recent history, the Chimera of Chaos himself has made a comeback. It was an observed fact that although Dragonia, Minotauria, the Changeling Dominion and even the Gryphon Principalities were not influenced by the corruption, Discord’s subversive power was able to make playthings of the native Buffalo who dwell near one particular Equestrian frontier city. And, as it turned out from the study I mentioned earlier, the one published in Ecomagical Almanac just last month, Appleloosa has been around long enough for measurable concentrations of the subtle, passive soil magic of the earthbound nonunicorn ponies to start showing up in that region.”
His lungs exhausted by that statement, he inhaled furtively and maintained composure to give an air of professionalism. The next questioner, a casually-dressed and bespectacled old emeritus, gestured to speak.
“Dr. Chrondrule?”
“Yes, I was hoping you could explain again how exactly geological data is best fit by the rapid growth of the fungal chimera, and if you could show us those awesome visualizations again.”
Some found his faux enthusiasm droll; it sparked a round of muffled chortles.
Driftwood tapped the conduit. The projector screen changed to a glowing soup of diverse colors limned in topographical curves and white city-dots — a representation of early Equestria.
“Again, this heatmap is a representation of the magite concentration, and the data was provided by Dr. Whitestone’s study published in Supernature last year. Magite can only form in the presence of magic, as we know, especially the common kinds used to control the seasons, weather and growing of plants. Its use has always been widespread, so magite accumulates in the ground over time.”
He pointed to an area near Canterlot and Ponyville, which stood out as two orange peaks, where there lay a broad dip in color to greens and blues. “As you can see, there’s a plateau and even a shallow basin in concentration near the center where, historical densities of population and magical usage considered, there should be more of a peak. We’re talking the heart of ancient Equestrian civilization, which is now the Everfree Forest. The model is thus based on a difference between the expected concentrations of magite, from historical estimates of populations of Equestrians, and the actual measured concentrations of it.”
Driftwood tapped the conduit again, and a dark red patch appeared in that subdued region of the Equestrian heartland. It began growing slowly like blood soaking into a handkerchief. Patches of it appeared outside the main body in cooler nearby spots and were assimilated as the rest of the red moved outward. He paused the visualization. “As you can see, patches of the fungal chimera began the initial fruiting body phase earlier than the main advance of the wave due Southwest of the main bloom. We can infer this because the bloom absorbed magite, and the longer it had to grow, the more of it was consumed.”
Driftwood resumed the visualization. The small red patch grew further, enclosing its first white dot. “Again, this is the demise of Eponapolis,” he explained. The crimson tumor engulfed three more dots. “Redcap listed the cities exactly in the order that they fell, and described the diversity of unspeakable horrors that sprouted and crawled out of the earth in near the exact details that were historically recorded. Oatathica, Palfreyon, Damarescus.” Homes, towns, markets, farms and temples alike, consumed in a mere day, he reflected. So many lives, gone in so short a time. “The climax of the greatest natural disaster in history.”
The red tide swelled further, sweeping over all but the highest ground. There, tiny oblong topological bubbles of pale yellow stood out among the affected red landscape. When the red tide had nearly reached the crisp edge of the map, beyond which lay a black void of missing data, Driftwood paused the visualization again. Nearly all of pony civilization lay within the inhospitable red lake of poison.
“Any more questions?”
There was a long pause. Driftwood drew a breath, looking around and expecting further questioning about that final detail. Instead, a calm ripple of applause spread across the small audience.
Driftwood bowed modestly and left the podium, pulling the memory unit from the projector with his telekinesis and gathering his notes. Most of the audience left quietly, returning to their own offices and laboratories. Some approached him to give their compliments to his work before doing the same. When all of the placid audience had left, the two who had led their silent vigil through his presentation came to his sides.
One of them cleared his throat. “The Chair wants a word with you.”
“I know,” he said firmly.
The two officers assumed positions on either side of him. They escorted him down long white corridors, up bland gray stairs, through casual lobbies lush with indoor foliage and flooded with window-filtered daylight. Finally they traipsed into the section of the research center where no one pinned cartoon strips on the message boards outside their office doors, and the name plate by every door was etched in pristine glass backed with brushed platinum.
The door of Chair Nobel’s office was wide open, revealing a reception desk at which sat a bespectacled gray mare poring over a roster.
“Through that door,” she said, returning immediately to her work.
Driftwood glanced back at his escort as they departed with smirks on their faces. The mare at the desk did nothing more. Apprehensively, he entered as beckoned, finding that the windows inside had been covered in opaque drapes and its lighting had been disabled. His blood ran cold; everything about the room seemed an omen of a grim interrogation. Dark shapes about the room leered at him.
Then, all at once, the drapes were yanked from the windows and the lights flashed on. A shout of “surprise!” arose from two dozen ponies who stood around him in a half-circle. A modest, shoddy cake sat on a table in the middle of the room, and banner was hung across the ceiling that read congratulations, you’re one of us now.
“W-what’s going on?”
“We’ve decided you’d make a fine member of our team,” proclaimed Chair Nobel, “so here’s to finishing a great thesis!”
Driftwood looked around and realized that he didn’t recognize any of them. This has to be the top echelon of scholars. I guess they finally decided to accept me.
“Well, I didn’t expect a celebration, let alone such a promotion, considering all that’s happened lately.”
“Of course you didn’t! The look on your face... Look, we’ll get around to discussing recent events soon enough, but for now you’ve earned a break.”
“Any idea where Dr. Humus went?” Driftwood asked. He looked about at those present in the room, who had already devolved into casual conversation.
“Your advisor? He’s on his way. He had to to stop by his office to get a surprise. Try some of the cake while you’re waiting.” He turned away to retrieve a beverage.
A black unicorn then approached, bringing a plate with a slice of the cake.
“Hi, I’m Obsidian,” he said. “Congratulations. Here, take this.”
The spongy, cream-white confection had a red-orange frosting flecked with white sprinkles. Just like fly agaric, he thought. How novel. It had been a long morning; the post-climactic fatigue suddenly became appetite. He took a bite.
“Most call me Obs,” continued Obsidian. “I’ve been working with several of the subjects who reached primordial communion, including Snails. You know, we really should give the kids more time together.”
The youngsters, reflected Driftwood. With any luck, the two that escaped are beyond capture by now, but the ones remaining are far less fortunate. No child deserves having their brain made into a plaything of supernatural research.
“You going to finish that?” Obsidian said, nodding at the cake, a grin widening on his face.
Driftwood looked down at his half-eaten slice of cake, then at the rest of the cake on the table, which stood alone at the center of the room while the semicircle of strangers kept their distance and smirked at him. A small, solitary gap in the cake frowned at him. His slice was the only one that had been taken. No, he thought, the realization sinking in. No, they couldn’t really mean to do this to me. His lungs quavered, refusing to draw a steady breath, and a cold sweat crept across his body.
“Had too much? Here, let me take that from you.” Obsidian telekinesed the cake away from Driftwood just as he was about to drop it.
A whimper escaped his lips. “W-Why?” His muscles spasmed gently, and his knees buckled beneath him.
“You’re all we have left of Redcap, until we can locate and bring her back” said Chair Nobel, who had returned to his side. “We know you had some real mind-to-mind with her. That’s extraordinary, you know, for a nonmagical pony to be gifted with telepathy. She’s one of the best chances we had of understanding the Great Wave, and you’re going to help us find her. So, a toast to your great mind and the prevalence of Equestria!” He tipped some of the sparkling grape juice over Driftwood’s face.
“I...you can’t,” he sputtered.
“Don’t take it personally. We want to see all of what she showed you, and without anything held back, including any inappropriate thoughts, Epona forbid.”
“I...never!”
“But of course not. We aren’t interested in your perversions or lack thereof. We just think you’d be far more useful to us in a condition where, oh, let me just say, you’ll be easier to work with . We also want a more appropriate setting to discuss your collaboration with Dr. Jade.”
“...Jade.”
“ She’ll be there too, you can count on it.”
The room around Driftwood swirled with unfamiliar faces, magenta flashes of his optical nerves misfiring, and air that seemed to glow a pale yellow. As he fell on his side and faded from consciousness, he thought of all he had taught Redcap, and where she might be.
When Driftwood awoke, he could not breathe. Fear faded in and out as he came to realize the absence of visceral spasms that life yields during suffocation and panic. An ethereal numbness enveloped him like a cocoon, though he could still perceive himself to be in the shape of a male adult pony. He felt a hard, smooth surface pushing against his dream body, and then came to perceive it was not the surface pushing against his body, but something else pushing him against the surface. It was a silent, inexplicable force that passed through him like wind through a tree.
“He’s finally waking up!” said a filly’s voice.
“Good,” said the voice of a familiar colt.
Driftwood weakly moved his form to “stand” upon the reflective plane, held to its impossibly smooth surface by the closest imitation of gravity that he knew he would ever experience again. Opening his ethereal eyes, he beheld a dizzying matrix of crystal facets that stretched in every direction and spiraled off into infinite fractals of internal reflection. Before him stood the ghostly images of two young ponies, translucent, but with every three-dimensional detail preserved as Driftwood had remembered. They gazed at him forlornly, their eyes betraying a trace of hope.
He spoke. “So this is disembodiment.” There were no fleshly vibrations in his throat, and no breath; his words seemed to radiate from his mouth and mind. He looked back at the three foals with an inner sigh of surrender.
“Cheer up, we’ve got each other. Do you remember me?” said the olive-green colt -- the taller of them.
“Greenbriar. Yes, I remember you. Your mentor was also working under Dr. Humus. I ran into both of you a lot in the terrarium.”
The small brown filly who had a frog mark on her haunch spoke up. “I’m Amphibia, but ‘Briar just calls me Froggy. I’m glad to meet you and can’t wait to start working with you.”
“That’s right, Froggy. We’re glad you’re here, Driftwood. Obs and the other elite kooks think they’ve got us under control in here, but now that we’ve got you, we have a better chance of doing things our way .”
