The Healer, The Thief, and the Painter. Act 1 The Healer

Crystal could only stare at what was on the bed before her. The Healer was no pony as Blade had told her, but some kind of bipedal creature with only a small amount of hair on the top of what the doctors assumed to be his its head. The doctors had fixed its small broken nose that Blade had given it, and the various, uh accidental, cuts and bruises that had occurred during the trek to the three story Ponyville hospital. About half of its body was layered in bandages and the other half was white with small brown spots littered all over its flesh. It was very tall, so tall that its legs stuck out a good eight inches over the end of the bed. The thing was snoring peacefully, and Crystal could not take her eyes off the thing, she felt drawn to the creature, like some sort of connection. Yet they had never met before. Then he began to whisper. Crystal was taken aback and looked around for anypony, but nopony else was in the sterile white hospital room. She walked up to the creatures head and heard the whisper.

"Protocal Alpha Gama Foxtrot..., Alexander, virus, entire nervous system shut down." Crystal almost turned away. What were these things it was muttering? It was frightening... But she kept her ear where it was and kept listening. "Full moon, Lunar light able to sustain without burning, Operation Lightning Strike, thousands dead, Arika... ARIKA!" At this word, its eyes shot open showing teal eyes fractured with fear. It opened and closed its mouth like a dying fish and its limbs began flailing. One of these appendages struck Crystal in the snout and she tumbled onto the hard linoleum. In a flash it was on top of her, arms splayed on either side of her. She looked up into its face and saw something. It was the cold sneer and the dead in its eyes that made Crystal feel like it would kill her, and keep smiling that same cruel smile as her blood ran and stained the tiles. He reached up onto the end table and brought the lamp peacefully resting there hurtling at her head.

Crystal screamed and swerved right and felt the shards of ceramic become entangled in her mane as the lamp shattered into a hundred pieces. It then grasped a large wickedly sharp piece of ceramic in five small appendages on one of its arms forming a fist of flesh and bone with a deadly point at the bottom.  Crystal was trembling by this showing of such horrible violence.  It paused, then laughed  brought down the shard, but never made as it seemed like it had woken up and managed to divert its fist into the tile, released the shard and rolled onto its side to her right, passed out cold. Blade and three nurse ponies scrambled into the room and were shocked by the destruction. Crystal was laying on the cold ground curled in a ball, and the Healer passed out on the ground next to her. It took all of the nurses to push it onto the bed again and to secure the form with ropes tied around its middle and around the hospital bed successfully securing its entire form to the unmoving steel bed. Blade managed to pick up Crystal from her position and started working on picking the pieces of lamp out of her mane.

"What happened?" he asked her as he picked the last pieces of blue out of her green mane. She told him, and with every sentence tears began welling in her eyes and she thought Blade would explode. He swung a hoof violently at the resting figure, but was stopped when a midnight aura covered his entire hoof. Nopony had seen the Princess of the night enter the room, much less heard her. There was a cold fire in the air as she spoke her chosen words. "You will not hurt my sister's savior..." at this last word the aura bent Blade's hoof backwards slightly. Blade never cried, but Crystal swore that she saw tears form in the corners of his brown eyes. Luna released him, and he did not fall, but limped out of the room slowly with two of the doctors. Luna had a small object behind her head, which she moved with magic and placed it upon the small table where the unfortunate lamp had been resting. She said nothing but instead summoned a pot of ink and a small sponge with a teleportation spell. She moved closer to the Healer's head and brushed back the hair on its head with more magic. As Luna dipped the sponge in the ink and pulled it out partially blue, she began brushing a circle delicately onto its flesh. Crystal trotted over and looked at the small object carefully it was a band of cold silver with an outcrop from the surface of a wolf head in mid howl, as if the creature was to pull itself from its metal prison.

"If you don't mind me asking Princess..." Crystal started.

"I don't." replied Luna, not taking her eyes off the ink creation.

"What are you doing exactly? And what is the ring for?"

"I'm sorry", Luna replied, still focused, "As you can see, the one that we call the Healer is not ponykind at all. In fact, he appears to be from a different kind of species all together, so since we know nothing about it, or it's kind and if they have magic or not, I have had a "special" ring made that can cancel out any magic type. They were used in the Olden war between the dragoneques and our kind to deal with prisoners." (Crystal hadn't been expecting the history lesson, but she paid attention anyway.) "I will attempt to fuse its memories with the ring's placement where it won't notice the change. A simple memory rearrangement spell will suffice, yet the spell needs flesh contact, hence the spell circle. Now if you could be so kind as to bring me the ring." Crystal obeyed, clamping her teeth around the precious metal band and bringing it to Luna's side. As Luna lifted the band with magic, she slid it onto the second largest appendage on its fist. Luna flashed away the ink and sponge and lit up her horn with dark blue magic.

Luna tilted her head slightly so her horn touched lightly upon the small ink creation. The ink flashed with a blue fire, and Luna screwed up her face in concentration.

Luna could see the creatures entire memory as a library filled with books, shelves upon shelves, novels in corners and stacked upon each other. A large double paned window with curtains drawn tight dominated one side of the room, allowing sunlight to flood the room. Yet Luna felt two presences, one of purity, and one of disease. Yet she saw nothing, she knew that any kind of magic this creature had was locked away in the ring, so she shrugged it off. Shocking back to the reason why she was here, Luna began lifting tomes and sorted through them by subject. She searched for keywords, RINGS brought her nothing but some memories of a book written about several creatures of apparently the same species heading towards a goal to destroy a small ring in some sort of volcano. The keyword FRIENDS brought her closer with several pictures and memories of what was apparently this thing's friends, including a slightly short redheaded creature smiling from a memory. Luna shook her head, she was being too broad, so she went directly to the keyword GIFTS. There she found the perfect memory. It was from a third person perspective and showed the creature wearing thick sand colored clothing in a small room with a apparently female of their species.

Luna could feel that there was a connection between these two and saw a passing of arms, they were hugging. When it ended, the female pulled back and Luna could see slight tears in her amber eyes. The female pulled a small package from a table and handed it to her creature. As he opened it, Luna paused the memory and looked inside the package, inside was a small vial of a strange pearl liquid, Luna magicked an exact copy of the ring inside the memory and placed it next to the vial. She did a quick scan as the memory re-asserted itself, and came up with a full memory synchronization. She breathed a sigh of relief and replaced the novel where it belonged. Then everything went horribly wrong. The curtains on the window snapped shut, severing all light from the room as clean as a knife. Luna lit her horn, and swung the light at the advancing darkness, slowly working on a spell that would extract her from the memory room. She felt fear enter her heart for the first time since her banishment, and her memory self began sweating ferociously.

"Who goes there?!" she cried, feeling the spell grow stronger, she felt something crawl up  her hind legs, freezing the muscles in place.  She was close to crying from the cold when her spell flared up and teleported her back to her real body. Luna fell back into her own body yet still felt the cold sensation around her flank remained, she shot a look at what was happening and could not believe what she was seeing. Something had scratched a large spell circle around her body, and from it black magic had poured solidifying around her back end. She tried to move her legs, yet to no avail for the magic had now spread to the middle of her barrel. She tried to scream, but the magic was constricting her airflow, cutting off screaming. It spread quicker now rising up her neck and started wrapping around her face. Luna was terrified that she was going to die alone until a shattering sound resounded and the magic splintered and exploded.

Air flooded Luna's lungs as she took a glorious breath and looked down at what had saved her. What she saw was a small white-hot spark that seemed to have erased a section of the circle, breaking the connection of the spell to caster. Luna shivered on the tile for at least a full minute, the guardspony, Crystal seemed to have left to leave Luna to her work Luna was barely able to lift a piece of paper and pen from the table's drawer, and used up the rest of her magic scribbling a message and teleporting away to her room in the castle, where the guards would find her sleeping deeply due to an overexertion of magic. Crystal returned to an empty room, a scratched floor, and a scribbled note on the endtable.

She picked up the note and read it slowly, her eyes getting wide with every word. She fisished it and let the paper fall to the ground. Before it even hit the tile she was gone, looking for Blade to tell him the news.

It read:

Dear Crystal, you must stay near to and protect the Healer, before you protest, yes I do know about you and the entire police force's battle against the White Muzzle Gang, so in order to make this official, I am appointing you to Lunar Guard status. You will be able to enter the city at will and will be able to send information about the Healer by the message flame I will send along with your armor. Keep him safe, for if he falls in the wrong hooves, the consequences could be devastating.

Sincerely,

Princess Luna