Stop Turning Into Your Sister!
Chapter One
Based on Friendship is Magic, created by Lauren Faust
And My Little Pony, created by Bonnie Zacherle
Render Unto Hasbro That Which Is Hasbro’s...
213 Anno Filia Reginae
Tara was having a bad day.
Her hands desperately clawed at the grenade strap around her torso, still full of live grenades. She ripped it off and dropped it. Velcro screeched as her camo top followed it. A tree raced out of the jungle foliage at forty miles per hour. She swerved to avoid it, while the largest animal she had ever seen howled in rage as it chased her.
Tara was having a very bad day.
Her micro-gun jumped up in her hands as she ejected the magazine. 6mm bullets wouldn’t do her any good here. She swerved around another tree while desperately feeling through her backpack; identifying items by touch.
Magazine? Useless. She dropped it.
Flare? Useless. Discard.
Torch? Useless. Discard.
Medkit? Save. Move on.
Autopilot? Useless. Discard.
The monster continued to chase her, as piece by piece her battle-rattle was dropped to the jungle floor. All of it abandoned in her desperate search for the one thing in her possession, that might possibly be useful, against a living creature the size of a naval corvette.
Trees? Wait, where did the trees go?
Why exactly is the horizon so close?
Uh oh.
She skidded dangerously close to the cliff edge as she turned right. Far below she caught the glimpse of a river, and heard the faint sound of a waterfall.
Damnit! This is taking too long!
She breathed out, tightening her micro-gun’s strap around her torso, tight enough to prevent breathing, but also to stop it slipping off, and tripped the switch in her mind which put her body into zombie mode. Alarms flashed in her vision about core body temperature and low reserves. She ignored them, as the last of her chemically stored oxygen was dumped into her veins, and zombie-valves were closed to confine the fresh blood to vital tissues.
Reaching behind her, now with both hands, she pushed under the pack, and ripped open the main buckle holding it in place. With the first hand she hauled the half empty pack around while doing the same to the secondary buckle between her front legs.
Taking one last look, she locked the landscape in active memory, and then stuck her face and one arm into the open bag to find it. Twenty seconds of blind-sight cliffside navigation later, she dropped everything else she had left, save for her micro-gun, and demolition clip.
The five round straight-line clip felt tiny in the gap normally filled with a hundred round C-mag, but it clicked in place, and the action cycled correctly. More cautions flashed into place, letting her know she had loaded torpium microdots, and advising a minimum safe distance of 150m between herself and her target.
She didn’t ignore these warnings. She grinned at them, as she skidded to a stop, loosened her micro-gun, took her first breath in two minutes, and started back the way she had come.
Over the pounding of her own feet, the rush of the rapids below, and the howl of the monster, she heard heavy wing beats to her left. Bitch was back.
“What are you doing Tara?”
She ignored Bitch. Possibly not a terribly clever thing to do, given Bitch’s temper, past behaviour, and strange abilities (abilities that Tara still refused to label as ‘magic’) but Tara had bigger problems. Bitch merely wanted to humiliate her. The thing chasing her wanted to kill her.
And there it was. Or at least that was where a leg was; a leg as wide as a wind-farm mast atop a clawed foot the size of a tank. The rest was hidden from view. But that was fine with Tara. She had five shots. That should be enough to at least cripple it.
Then she could take Bitch down a peg or two. Who knows? Maybe after escaping the first monster, she’d have a thimble of sunshine left over for the other one…
Tara ducked into the forest, crouched down low behind a tree, and took aim at her target - at one-third the recommended minimum safe distance. Her finger moved once. The micro-gun was not stupid. Silent alarms flashed. Lockouts were engaged.
Overrides were issued. Lockouts were removed.
Her finger twitched a second time and the leg disappeared.
Along with everything else as the expanding shockwave threw dust, earth, gravel, bits of tree, and presumably bits of monster-bear in all directions. Tara’s body reported thirty eight different impacts; fifteen to her face and hands. No deep penetrating injuries were reported. Firewalls in major nerve fibres had already flipped automatically to block the pain. Damage reports filled a corner of her vision, along with a caution that she had just exceeded her maximum daily radiation dosage under HSE regulations, and operational guidelines from BAE Systems. She was advised to seek immediate help from the nearest known NATO trauma centre; currently marked on her navigation menu.
Nearest known NATO trauma centre?! The hell is that noise?!
Oh. Right. Her med kit. The location of which was in fact marked on her navigation menu.
Whatever.
She stood and popped her ears, before systematically testing and inspecting every part of her body. Biggest problem she could find was some slight impairment of her left fingers. Nothing serious. She was still combat effective. And the thick smoke was beginning to settle, turned into some sort of light mist. She tried not to breath too deeply. The mist was probably carcinogenic.
She also still had four bullets left. And that thing was still screaming.
Time to fix that.
And suddenly there was silence. Well, relative silence. Animals were starting to screech again. Rapids could still be heard at the bottom of the cliffs, but there was no more bellowing from lungs the size of blue-whales. She advanced cautiously, past blasted and splintered tree stumps, and over, under, and around the blasted remains of every other part of a tree. Terrible ghastly noises were part of Tara’s bread and butter. Terrible ghastly silences were not.
By the time she got to the site of the detonation the sun was visible, and she could see clouds above her, along with the edge of the hole that the explosion had bitten out of the forest. Huh. Bigger than she expected. Apparently these trees weren’t quite as tough as the Terran varieties. Or at least the 21st century varieties she knew.
There was a thump of displaced air behind her, and then a crunch as something heavy landed on the broken timber that littered the ground. Tara didn’t move. Or more precisely, couldn’t move. As the crunching moved to her left, she realised that she could still track it with her ears, and could blink and move her eyes, and breath, but everything else was locked up. She checked her hearts and they were both working. On a whim she tried activating her emergency mechanical heart. No response. Zombie valves were stuck as well. She couldn’t even change focus on her micro-rifle’s optics. But she could in her own eyes, and they worked on exactly the same principles. So what was up with that?
Then Bitch came into view. Bitch was six foot tall by her horn, and five foot long by her hooves. She was eighteen inches wide by her shoulders, but twelve feet wide by her wingspan, and also apparently furious by her expression.
Not that Tara cared. She was still alive. She had endured the worst that Bitch could think to throw at her. And it was not like it was the first time she had seen a talking horse with wings and/or horn. Even if she was slowly coming around to the fact that Bitch was not, in fact, some kind of lab-built pet for the rich and stupid.
The fact that the wings were somehow fully functional, and that the horn might also be fully functional, was a little bit unsettling. But Tara simply refused to focus on such details. As a matter of pride she just would not be intimidated by any creature that had that shade of bubblegum pink for her hair and tail.
“WHAT DID YOU DO?!”
Tara suddenly found that her jaw would move again. She spent a moment pondering how best to answer the question.
“Well, see, I’m not quite sure. Kinda hard to tell what effect I had with all that smoke and dust in the way.”
Bitch screamed and arched her wings. Her eyes turned bright white again.
Could still be bioluminescence, Tara told herself. And this could still be the future.
They had standing orders about that. Time travel, at least in one direction, was not an entirely impossible prospect for Foxtrots like herself. Her body was engineered to survive, amongst other things, cryogenic temperatures. Humans had written books about synthetics that get buried in ice and woke up in the far future, where space travel was cheap, biotechnology was almost unknown, and ray guns really did fire brightly coloured laser beams that moved slowly enough for a human eye to track.
Bitch might simply have been built with non-organic science incorporated into her body; just like Tara was, but with more advanced technology. But jump drive? Antigravity? Tractor beams? It was still possible, she supposed. Barely...
Pulsating yellow light began to surround Bitch’s horn. Frozen in place, Tara was unable to back away from something that looked disturbingly like wrong-coloured Cherenkov radiation. Nor was she able to react when her fingers were forced open, and the micro-gun was pulled away from her, surrounded by the same throbbing off-colour yellow.
“Be very careful with that,” Tara warned.
Suddenly Bitch had Tara’s complete and undivided attention. The torpium bullets were still loaded, and the electrical fuses were still live. Even if they hadn’t been, Tara knew that certain types of strong radiation could easily set one off. Which was another Very Good Reason why they came with a minimum recommended safe distance!
The pulsing change slightly, and the gun started to tear apart. Nuts, bolts and restraining pins flew from their housing. Once enough of them were removed the major assemblies began to come apart, until eventually the gun was completely field-stripped. But it didn’t stop there. Tiny flashes of light sparkled along the length of the feed mechanism, as Bitch started using her strange abilities to take apart things that had not been supposed to be taken apart. Things that were never designed to be taken apart!
Tara watched as the weapon that had carried her through fifteen years of wars and campaigns became so much metal and composite confetti in front of her. Then Bitch turned her attention to one of the two powercells, and Tara felt one of her rare moments of genuine horror.
“No! Wait! Don’t!”
There was another miniature strobe, and Tara breathed out as hard as she could, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. It didn’t help that much. Brilliant white light still burned brightly through fur and skin to highlight the blood vessels in her eyelids, but surprisingly she was not blown off her feet. She slowly cracked open one eye to see (barely) Bitch holding her head insanely close to a white hot ball of liquid metal. Tara closed her Mk VI eyeball again. She could not see anything more through the glare and didn’t want to risk damage to her optics any more than she needed to.
“Do not for any reason try that trick again with the other power cell! And especially do not do it with the clip or the bullets inside it!”
In the blink of an eye the bright light vanished. Cautiously opening her eyes, Tara saw a two-inch wide ball of unimpressive metal, surrounded by rather singed pieces of the power cell outer casing. Bitch was ignoring it though, focusing instead on the demolition clip.
“Don’t! I’m being very serious! Do not mess around with that thing. You have no idea how dangerous it…” The glow around Bitch’s horn blossomed outwards as it turned from merely worrisome yellow to a raging brilliance that Tara could no longer look at.
The unofficial prayer, mantra, and self-administered non-denominational last-right of His Majesty’s British Army immediately rang through her mind, and she threw herself to the ground.
Ohfuckshitfuckshitfuckshitfuckshitfuckshitfuckshitfuckshit
She didn’t bother forcing all air out of her lungs. At this range it wouldn’t make any difference at all. Nor would throwing herself to the ground. But, you know. Bad habits…
Then the glow disappeared and Tara was somehow not dead - and on the ground.
Wait, she could move again?
Her head snapped up and her eyes snapped open to see a large red crystal floating in front of Bitch’s nose. Around the horse’s head the remains of the gun began to disappear and reappear in a explosion of light and sparkles, as Bitch changed them into something else. Meanwhile she was completely ignoring Tara, with an expression of smug superiority that the soldier did not like one bit. Though she wasn’t above taking advantage of it. She leapt for the crystal.
Which promptly flew up out of her reach, then further up when she tried again. On the third attempt Tara ignored the crystal and aimed for Bitch’s back instead, intending to use it as a launching pad, only to be thrown across the clearing for her troubles. She landed badly, and felt something hard shove through her stomach. She looked down to see a splinter of wood the size of her forearm sticking out of her side.
Well that’s just great!
Tara gritted her teeth and reached underneath her body to see if she splinter was still attached to anything, and how firmly. She reviewed her internal damage sensors at the same time. Punched through her left abdominal sub-dermal armour, glancing off her small intestine’s at the 30cm, 45cm, 62cm, 98cm, 103cm, and 152cm locations, then straight through the right abdominal armour. No significant abdominal bleeding. Some minor intestinal bleeding. No intestinal perforations. Good. Internals had done their job. It was fresh wood, still covered in sap, so chances of infection were minimal.
Yep. That was definitely going to leave a scar. Wait...
Bugger!
And it was still firmly attached to the tree stump. And bitch was coming over.
Bugger!
The foxtrot went limp, and stopped her hearts.
“Well Miss Tara, as entertaining as this was, I really need... Tara!”
Tara couldn’t turn to see what happened next, that would defeat the purpose of playing dead, but she was pretty sure Bitch flew over.
“Don’t move! Lie still! You’re going to be all right!”
Yes, thank you. I realise that. It’s not the first time I’ve been stabbed you know.
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Why do you keep doing this? Think! Think! Abdominal wounds! How did this go again?”
I know you are but what am I?
Wait, Bitch was actually concerned about her? Wait again, she was actually about to attempt first aid on a synthetic life form she’d never seen before? Wow. Tara was almost impressed. And almost touched. Almost.
Now just a little bit closer...
Shadow fell over her and she felt something wide and soft poke her belly.
Good enough!
Tara ripped her kunai from her harness, pulled back, and then swung her arm and upper torso towards Bitch. She turned her head just in time to see the sharp black tip hit a burst of yellow, a quarter inch short of Bitch’s neck, and bounce off.
So... Jump drive, antigravity, tractor beams - and forcefields. Well that’s just peachy isn’t it?
She suddenly noticed Bitch’s head was less than six inches from her own, and that the horse-thing was apparently frozen in shock. Never one to waste an opportunity, Tara gamely swung her kunai a second time, with roughly the same result.
That time Bitch scrambled back out of reach. She was still obviously in shock, so Tara flipped the kunai around and threw it at Bitch’s chest, wondering if perhaps ‘third time’s the charm’. It wasn’t. The kunai stopped halfway there, surrounded by more of that disturbing not-cherenkov light, as Bitch’s face turned thunderous.
“You tried to stab me!”
Tara grabbed the slightly bloody shaft of jagged wood she was still impaled on.
“You did stab me!”
“That was an accident!”
“And dumping me in front of the great huge blue monster bear, with the pointy teeth bigger than you are? That was an accident was it? Miss ‘I’m the most powerful being on this planet, and you should learn respect for your betters’. Or should that be Miss ‘I don’t believe you killed that snap dragon. You’re far too small.’ You really going to claim that was an accident, are you?”
“That was...” Bitch stopped and changed the subject. “How can you be talking? That must hurt! How can you not be screaming?!”
“That level of pain wouldn’t be useful. So my body blocks it. Or my mind does. One or the other. You’d have to read the service manual to find out. I never bothered.”
“But you bleed! Even if your heart stopped I can hear it now! You must be a living creature!”
Tara couldn’t help but roll her eyes at that. Oh come on! Even Catholics have figured that one out by now! Living tissue does not equate living creature; no matter how organised it is. Double especially for a heavily cyberneticised factory-product like a foxtrot; assuming you considered the organic parts as even alive.
Damn horse will start going on about souls next.
“But if that’s true why can’t I feel your mind?!”
Oh you have got to be kidding me!
“WHAT ARE YOU?!”
Tara looked at Bitch with contempt. Wherever and/or whenever she was, she was clearly not talking to the smartest tool in the box.
“Well, apparently, as far as you’re concerned, I’m an Out Of Context Prob...” Tara trailed off as she suddenly noticed what the horse had around her neck. “What Did You Do To My Gun?!”
Bitch cringed. She actually cringed, leaning back, with a foreleg raised in defence against Tara - who was still currently pinned in place, and helpless.
A child. That’s what Tara was dealing with. For all her power and abilities, she was dealing with a child. Or at least something with the emotional maturity of one. Hence why she had taken the various bits and pieces of her micro-gun and bent them into a necklace that was currently holding a large red gem; which was also somehow four torpium bullets.
Much like a human child would do with daises.
“Look, is there an adult or something around here I can speak to? Someone in charge? Possibly smarter than you? By preference also a doctor? I mean I know I’ve got a computer chip in my skull, but what’s your excuse for not having any brains?!”
Stop Turning Into Your Sister!
Chapter Two
Based on Friendship is Magic, created by Lauren Faust
And My Little Pony, created by Bonnie Zacherle
Render Unto Hasbro That Which Is Hasbro’s...
Starswirl the Bearded glared at the cylinder of gold in front of him. It was one of six cylinders, three of gold, and three of lead. Five minutes ago, all six cylinders had been as identical as he had been able to make them, before he stuck thermometers into all of them and then turned three into gold.
It was a simple spell. An easy spell. A spell a filly of 10 could cast it, if she or he put their minds to it. A spell transcribed in scrolls a thousand years old, and refined and simplified repeatedly down the ages, because summoned-gold had so many uses. For someone like Starswirl it was little more than a cheap trick. And yet it was a cheap trick he kept repeating, over and over again. In Summer. In Winter. On top of mountains and under water. In as many places and under as many conditions as he could think to try. And he had been doing this for over ten years now.
And still after all that time he still didn’t understand why the bloody gold was always slightly warmer afterwards! And it always was! He had controlled for everything else! Room temperature! Pressure! Cylinder size and shape! Insulation! Restive magic! Inductive magic! Sympathetic magic! Capacitive magic! Age and skill of the caster! Even gender!
Nothing! Nothing explained it!
And if that wasn’t enough he was beginning to suspect the cylinders were losing weight every time they were changed. But he couldn’t be sure. The equipment was still too primitive to measure what he suspected were tiny values. And it wasn’t like he could just keep zapping the metals back and forth to magnify the loss. After a few dozen transmutations, contamination started leaking into the cylinder (Somehow! And that was another problem!) and he had to throw them away.
It was infuriating!
But he would solve it! Oh yes, he promised himself as the gold slowly fell back to room temperature. Someday he would solve this irritating little problem. He already knew how to repeat it, and to study it. Now he only needed to explain it, to control it, and then figure out ways to take advantage of it. Then it would be just another chapter of his book. And he could move onto the next great problem of magical study.
The issue of the contamination perhaps...
He was distracted when a little bell began to chime. Then his head jerked around when he realised which mechanism this particular bell was attached to. He swore before opening his mind, and felt the lay-lines in the University started bending. Bending in a very particular way, and towards a very particular focus, that happened to be the middle of his main workshop.
“Oh chaos take you, you awful awful child!”
Starswirl took one last look at his experiment before trudging back the way he had come. Half way there he heard a pop, and a clatter, and the lay lines snapped back into place.
“Starswirl? Master Starswirl? I need your assistance with a matter!”
“GRAND Master!” Starswirl irritably corrected. “Grand Master Starswirl! If you are going to use my formal title you could at least get it right you confounded mare!”
“If you wish to insist on formal titles then it’s Princess Celestia, or ‘Your Highness’. Not ‘confounded mare’!”
“I still prefer Bitch,” said a third voice.
“And you can keep a civil tongue in that muzzle of yours!”
“Or what pointy? You’ll stab me again?”
“Do not tempt me vixen!”
“Who is that you’ve brought with you Celestia?” Starswirl called as he walked towards the arch. “I’ve spoken to you before about bring others to my workshop! Normal ponies simply lack the resilience that we both...”
Starswirl trailed off as he caught sight of the debris littering the floor, some of which, and only some, was recognisable as leaves and branches. The rest obviously looked manufactured, but apart from the saddlebag, he could neither guess at the function they server nor how they were made.
In the very centre stood Celestia. Next to her floated the oddest chimera Starswirl had ever seen. And below it were several spatters of red on the stone floor, which were joined by three others as more drops of blood fell from the chimera’s injury. The talking chimera.
Starswirl’s horn pulsed with purple light and every loose object below ankle height suddenly swept itself into one corner of the room.
“Move it to a table!” He commanded, even as he used more telekinesis to clear a workbench. When that was done, and while Celestia was still moving the chimera, a wave of magical fire burned across the bench, sterilising it.
“Can you understand me?”
“Yes,” the chimera answered after a pause.
“Are you in any pain?”
“No.”
“Can you move your tail or either of the legs next to your tail?”
The limbs moved and flexed slightly. The tail thumbed once. Toes wiggled.
“Will you bite me if I touch your wound?”
“No,” it said, before turning to Starswirl’s pupil. “Can I bite her instead?”
“No!” Celestia insisted.
“Maybe later. At the moment we need to heal your wound, and understand why you cannot feel it. I fear that the fact you cannot do so may not be the blessing your currently think it is.”
“Lack of pain is normal for this kind of injury. Above a certain level of pain it ceases to be useful, and so it is blocked.”
“That is not normally how it works.”
“It is for me.”
Starswirl considered the matter, as a small parcel arrived through an archway and settled on the desk. The purple glow that had been surrounding it shrank to the buckle, as the unicorn opened the parcel up to reveal surgical instruments. The chimera’s head moved to watch, but otherwise it made no objections.
“Did I hear correctly that you were stabbed?”
“Impaled would be more accurate,” Celestia said.
“I have two lateral puncture wounds in both sides of my abdomen, level with my 48th and 49th vertebrae. My small intestines have suffered some bruising, internal bleeding, and rearrangement, but no external perforations. The wound was created by a jagged wooden spike, itself created by the violent structural failure of a tree trunk.”
“Thank you both, but if you don’t mind I believe I have the ranking medical qualifications.” His horn began to glow. “Now let’s check your vitals first. Feel free to watch Celestia. The patient’s heart...” He trailed off, and then tilted his head to the side. “Patient’s hearts are mammalian, and are intact and beating. Chest cavity is intact and appears of mammalian design also, though the lungs inside are avian. The spine is...” A normal spine had bone, cartilage, muscle and nerve. This spine had other materials, but they were so regular they had to be part of the design. “...Longer than usual, but without obvious trauma. The brain... The patient’s brain is...”
“Yeeeeeeeeees, Mr Doctor?” The chimera drawled.
Starswirl frowned, and swapped out the spell on his horn.
“Obviously functional if she can make that kind of joke. Having secured the patient’s vitals we do a quick scan of the circulatory system, starting with the head, to identify the source of the bleeding and check for any additional internal bleeding. Presumably you already did this before pulling the spike out, or she could have bleed out within seconds.” Starswirl paused at the chimera’s forepaws and glanced at Celestia. “You did check that, didn’t you?”
Celestia glared back.
“I checked for bleeding yes. Speaking of which she still is.”
“She has a name by the way.”
“No heckling during a medical exam. And the bleeding is, three, four, five, six locations. Hmm. Odd. Healing seems to have been retarded by low blood pressure. As if something was blocking...”
Starswirl trailed off as he found yet another piece of anatomy he had never seen before.
“Miss... Vixen, is it? Do you have the capacity to restrict blood flow in the event of injury?”
“Yes.”
“Can you turn it off please? I need flowing blood in order to repair the tissue.” The chimera gave him a hard look. “I remind you of your promise not to bite me while I tend your wound.”
“I can. But I shouldn’t while it’s still open. How much time will you need?”
“With flowing blood I can heal both injuries in less than a minute.”
She stared at him hard, before looking away and seeming to concentrate.
“I’ll hold you to that. Just say when.”
Starswirl nodded. He’d been building up his reserves ever since he saw the injuries and realised he might have to fix them. Chimera were blends of creatures, and simple healing didn’t always work on them. The spell tended to guide them back towards natural non-chimera forms. Watching for that, catching it in time, and preventing it was not an easy task. He took a deep breath and centred himself.
“Celestia, please be absolutely silent for this part. Miss Vixen, release your blood please.”
The arch-mage watched as butterfly valves, actual butterfly valves, opened up within the creature’s blood vessels, allowing the veins beyond to swell with life again. Within seconds the flow had reached the sites of injury and he began to work. Plumes of blood were gathered, forced back within the artery, and held there by magical shield. He then reached down into the cellular level and started to stitch the tattered edges of the artery wall together. The task was repeated another five times, then three more as new sites of damage made themselves known.
“You are an exceedingly lucky vixen, Miss Vixen.”
“Tara,” she corrected. “Can you fix my sides the same way?”
“I can, but it would be good practice for Celestia.”
Tara slowly turned to face the alicorn and grinned widely. That is to say her mouth opened slightly and all her teeth became highly visible.
“No,” Starswirl said. “It is not ‘later’ yet.”
“Fine,” Tara said before lying her head down dismissively. “But I want good movement afterwards.”
“You remember how to do this Princess?”
“Yes, I... Yes. It is not something to be rushed.”
“In your own time then.”
Starswirl watched as Celestia removed the fur from the area around the wound, wash it with summoned water, before banishing the water and running a yellow flame back and forth over the wound site. He corrected her once or twice, making sure she didn’t knit muscles together, reminding her to remove dead cells rather than stitch around them, but otherwise she did well. She was no surgeon, and the wound would scar, but nothing that couldn’t be taken care of later.
She did however take a long while over it. So he turned Tara over himself and fixed the same wound on her other side in less than half the time. With that done the chimera was standing in record time and Starswirl could get a proper look at her. Tara was a creature of six limbs, four shoulders & legs, two bodies, but only one head and tail.
Moving forwards from her tail tip, her hind quarters (sixths?) were entirely normal, as was the body between her back and middle limbs. Externally she appeared to be a collie sized dog, with ruddy fur and two bald patches of grey skin. Beyond the middle legs, things turned strange. In place of a dog’s neck, a second body rose almost vertically from just in front of the lower shoulder blades, ending in two dragon-like arms, before something very much like a fox’s head sat atop a small stumpy neck.
He watched as she moved, externally with his eyes, and internally with his dully glowing horn. She moved with the grace of flowing water, and the precision of pegalopolis computer. He couldn’t help but frown slightly. Living creatures shouldn’t move like that. Double jointedness should only go so far, and they shouldn’t act as if they had brass gears and pinions precisely modulating their movement. It was as natural as her solid metal head, and pretty much every other part of her body. It was somewhat unpleasant to watch.
“I trust the work is satisfactory?”
“Good as a cellular lathe. I’m surprised. I didn’t think your culture had it in you.”
Our culture? Hmm. Starswirl filed that away for later thought.
“And I trust, your Majesty, that you do not have another pressed emergency in need of your attention?”
Celestia looked unhappy.
“Not at this precise moment.”
“Then perhaps the two of you can explain exactly how you came to know each other, and became in so pressing need of my services?”
They did. Or as well as they could considering their different points of view. Celestia had cast a Friend In Need spell and, as was her want, had charged it right up into the 9.99999 range. And so she had found Tara, saw that she was in danger, and ‘rescued’ her. Tara declined to go into details, but said she had been in danger, but objected to being ‘saved’, since that usually involved being taken to a place of less danger. The snapdragon came up, along with several other creatures, and finally Celestia, and the Ursa Major.
Celestia confirmed that Tara had faced off from, and seriously injured an Ursa major, and lived to tell about it - and that the Ursa’s appearance might not have been entirely accidental. They told him about the necklace, and the jewel that hung from it. Starswirl actually stepped back when he looked at it closely for the first time and saw the amount of raw power it contained.
Eventually he had heard his fill.
“Celestia, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times! Do not bring release strange new creatures into Equestria without asking someone else about it! They won’t all turn out as well as the cockatrice!”
“I didn’t ‘release’ her!” Celestia protested. “I brought her right here.”
Tara, for her part, was picking over the pile of debris and artifacts shoved into one corner. She ignored them both save for an ear that tracked them back and forth.
“After you lost her for three days after you lost control of the Friend In Need spell. And after you lost control of your temper it appears!”
“I had the situation under control!”
“No. No you did not. This situation went on for three days and this is the first time you mention it? After it had already gone wrong and you can no longer fix or even monitor events? That is not what I’d call control!”
Celestia turned away in disgust and struck sparks from the stone floor with a hoof.
“Oh we are not having that conversation again!”
“Oh yes we are young lady! You let your ambition, anger, and yes, even idle fancy, override your better instincts. Equestria cannot afford for that to happen a second time!”
“You will speak no more of this!”
“Someone has to!”
“Do not...”
“Five words Celestia!”
“Don’t say it!”
“Just five words!”
“You say it and I’ll…”
“Stop turning into your sister!”
