Chapter 4: Mare Troubles
The form of Blackie Fuchs sat on the bathroom floor and listened to the drip-drip-drip from the bathroom tub.
Isn't that just like a mare, D thought sarcastically. Always leaving right when you want her there.
Oh no oh no oh no oh no ... came the not entirely sane thoughts of Schwarzwalder in the back of their shared mind.
I mean, I'd just about gotten her used to her role, D thought. I'd overcome her initial hesitation -- what is it with you Ponies and your prudishness, anyway? You're the species that has to breed, anyway. My kind was born with the Universe and we only reproduce when we want to. But you're all 'I don't know if I'm ready for that' and 'Do you really love me' and 'I'm scared I'll have a foal.' What's with that, anyway?
... Oh Goddess oh Goddess oh Sweet Megan ... was Schwarzwalder's contribution to the conversation.
Oh, hush, scolded D. You don't even believe in The Megan. 'Opiate of the masses,' remember? Oh, our pounding head, I could use a little opium in some sweet wine right about now ...
Drip, drip, drip, chimed in the bathtub.
Come to think of it, F's like that, mused D. I've had to follow her and chase her in every freaking incarnation, let her think I actually love her. Plays her stupid little games. I could say I'm sick of her, but then I've been tagging along in her event wake ever since the first stars were born. Thirteen and a half billion years, rather a long chase ... but I am not in love with her.
D turned within their shared mindspace toward Schwarzwalder. You can see that, right? That I'm a footloose and fancy-free kind of immortal Cosmic being? That I'm just stringing her a long ... alll right, maybe a bit longer than is normally common in these sorts of affairs, but then I coalesced from processes long before sexual reproduction of the sort you'd understand evolved in this Universe. You've gotta cut me some slack for my limited upbringing -- there were no streetcorners to hang out on to learn the facts of life, in my younger days. No streets, you see? No planets to put them on -- at least no terrestrial worlds -- everything was just newborn stars or hydrogen-helium gas giants with some lithium impurities, back then, when Baby D made his parents ... well, hmm, actually they've never really been proud of me, can't imagine why ...
Oh sweet Megan, there's an alien monster in my head discussing cosmology while ... but Schwarzwalder broke into helpless sobbing: he was unable to finish his thought.
Oh, do grow up, scoffed D. Do you think I'm happy about all this? he said, indicating with a sweep of their hoof the bathtub and its contents. I mean, I got her to the point of having sex with us. I got her to the point of accepting that we were never going to marry her -- that her hopes of marriage and foals and being a family were just a stupid naive dream. That all there was for her was to accept that she was hopelessly stuck on us and we could do absolutely anything to her that we wanted. And she served us, cleaned and cooked for us, and amused us at night. He shook their hoof in the air. What more could she have possibly wanted?
You used her and destroyed her spirit! Schwarwalder shouted accusingly at D.
Isn't that what she was for? D retorted. 'To each according to her need, from each according to her ability?' We had a need -- she had an ability. You can't blame me for putting your philosophy into practice! it's not as if I made her do anything -- all I did was analyzed her emotional weaknesses and crafted our persona to totally take advantage of them until she fell step by step into our pattern. Can I help it if I'm a partial copy of a Cosmic Being and she's just a Pony?
Drip, drip, drip, agreed the bathtub. The water was dripping from the leaky faucet, and the excess sloshing down the overflow drain. This had been going on for a while, and the water dripping into the bathtub was pure and clear -- yet the water in the bathtub was still tinged red.
Can't you do anything? asked Schwarzwalder. You keep saying that you're a Cosmic Being, can't you make things better? Make her better?
Why, thank you, said D. But no. This incarnation of me as a possessing spirit is limited to rechanneling your body's natural magic -- far more efficiently than you could have done ...
Magic? interrupted Schwarzwalder. Ponies have no ...
Ha ha ha, laughed D sarcastically. It's amazing how stupid you are. Astonishes me that F's so fascinated by you barely-sapient equinoids. You drove out your other Kinds and denied your own magic less than a millennium and a half ago, but in that brief span of time you've almost totally forgotten. It's so rare that you produce a member of your species even worth playing with. Like Honey Tongue ... he sighed in reminiscence. But for every one like her, he said almost respectfully, there are so many like you, who have a capable mind but don't even bother to use it.
As I was saying, D continued, no. In your form, I don't have the power even to repair the damage she did herself, he jerked a hoof at the contents of the bathtub, let alone pull her soul back to inhabit it. Yes, I could do that back during the Age of Creation, but that was a very powerful incarnation of me. Face it, Chuckles, we have to find a new marefriend.
She was a Pony, Schwarzwalder said, emphasizing the last word angrily. She had thoughts and feelings and identity! She was nice to us. She loved us. How can you talk about her as if she were just a thing, just some sort of sexual convenience.
She was just a thing, D replied coldly. Compared to me, she was barely sapient; she was dumber even than you. And from where I'm sitting, the difference between you and her is not as great as you might imagine. By my standards, your whole species is scarcely superior to a lot of Hyracotheria.
You are a monster, retorted Schwarzwalder.
Well, duh, mocked D. What first gave you the idea? The fact that I'm an alien invading your world, or that I'm a demon possessing your body?
I'd come to hope you were ... kinder than you seemed, admitted Schwarzwalder. That you weren't so malign. That you just wanted to ... to have fun.
Well, I do want to have fun, agreed D. It's just that I'm having fun by destroying your world. Think of me as one of your own colts with a magnifying glass playing in the ... sunlight ... with an ant-hill. What's he doing but having fun? He giggled, as if something about the whole scenario was impossibly amusing.
A colt doesn't know any better, insisted Schwarzwalder. You claim to be super-intelligent.
I am, said D. It's because I'm super-intelligent that I'm completely aware that your whole species matters to the Universe little more than does an ant-hill. And I have a difference of opinion with a certain Cosmic Concept who is under the delusion that you're somehow destined for greatness.
How is killing her -- Schwarzwalder indicated in some obscure fashion the bathtub and its contents -- going to help you win your argument with F?
D whacked Schwarzwalder on his metaphorical forehead.
No, fool, not her, said D. Your whole species. When you've been destroyed, F will realize that you weren't all that important in the Cosmic scheme of things, and she'll come back to have fun with me at the Cosmic level, as she should -- instead of giving me the cold shoulder because she says I'm too cruel and never learn anything.
Even reeling from D's psychic blow, Schwarzwalder could see the flaw in that reasoning.
Wait, he said, if she's rejecting you because she thinks you're too cruel, how is wiping out a whole sapient species going to make her like you more?
Pah! said D dismissively. You wouldn't understand. You have 'drip' written all over you.
Somehow, despite his lack of an independent body, Schwarzwalder saw the word 'drip' written all over him.
You see, continued D, almost kindly, she's a Good Girl. And Good Girls always go for the Bad Boys. Like me. Which is also half of how I won us Raindew.
And you killed her, said Schwarzwalder.
They looked at the bathtub. Lying in it, floating on her back, was the pink-coated, red-maned object that had been Nurse Raindew. Her true colors were hard to ascertain, as the water she lay in had also been reddened, by the blood which had flowed out from her slashed forelegs, until the heart that had pumped that blood had stopped beating. That had been at least an hour ago; she had long since passed the point where any doctor on Earth might have revived her.
She killed herself, countered D.
Because of the way you played with her, said Schwarzwalder.
You wanted it too, pointed out D. Indeed, I found us a mate largely for your sake, to help keep you from going mad. I approve of insanity on general principles, but you'd be a less congenial host were you reduced to a babbling lunatic.
I wanted to have a mistress, Schwarzwalder said. I didn't want you to shake her mind to pieces!
You wanted, you didn't want, replied D scornfully. What makes you think I actually care what you want? This is just maintenance of the shell I'm occupying. Be glad that I don't destroy your mind and run everything myself. I could have done so, he said menacingly. And I might still choose to do so, he added, if you annoy me too much.
Silence.
Whew! thought D, relaxing a little and thinking to himself. I thought he'd never go dormant. A brief check indicated that Schwarzwalder had retreated into the back of their shared mental space, and was entertaining himself with a self-generated fantasy. For once, one not involving mares -- D supposed that he had been too shaken by what they had found in their bathroom. Instead, he was going through the mathematics of early-universe astrophysics. Hmm. At least he pays some attention to what the things I say.
Though, of course, if he retreats into fantasy all the time, he'll go mad, D reflected. That would be bad, because then I would have to run this body all by myself, all the time, as I did at first, until I broke him to my harness. So I suppose I'll eventually have to be nice to him again. Carrot-and-stick always works better than just beating him with the stick.
He glared at the remains of what had been Raindew.
This is all your fault, he silently berated the corpse. Why did you have to kill yourself? Why now? I mean, I'm going to destroy this world, but it'll probably take me many decades, even centuries to accomplish given the limitations of my current state. Yes, your affair with Blackie Fuchs was going to come to its natural ending, probably when I decided to move on to my next host and this either led to his death or long-term removal from your vicinity. So what? Did you really think that this was going to be true love, forever and ever? I've never even known that, and I'm over thirteen billion years old! What an arrogant little Pony you were, to imagine you deserved better?
He sighed.
Now I'll have to come up with a reaction and a story to tell the police, and then call them. Schwarzwald is going to be useless here, he'll get an attack of conscience and try to warn them about me, and if I let him, he'll get us put in a looney bin, which will be amusing but will get me off-track from what I really want to be doing. And no matter what I say, I'm still going to wake up alone the next morning, and there'll be no one making breakfast for me.
Raindew had always been nice that way. No matter how mad he'd made her, either in the sense of "angry" or "insane," she'd always forgive him by the next morning. Part of that, of course, was because he always got her to blame herself by the end of every fight. But a good part of it was that she was simply that nice a being.
Briefly, he wondered how things might have worked had he been what he had pretended to be, a Pony stallion, and one with honest intentions toward her.
I suppose it might have worked out fairly well, D thought. Love, marriage, foals, the whole nine yards. Her niceness would have ensured that the stallion kept on liking her. Her mistake -- which I exploited quite well if I do say so myself -- was that I never meant her well in the first place.
He sighed again.
If you had been merely using niceness as a strategy, you could have broken it off before the effort to please me destroyed you, he mused. Your own goodness destroyed you.
And in a way that's only going to emphasize in what a very sordid way you failed, by the standards of your own society. Because you were so nice, it's going to blacken your posthumous reputation, at least a little. While poor Blackie Fuchs, protected by both his sex and his bereaved status, will not see his status suffer much, if at all.
He grinned. Flaws in the world you helped make, Megan Williams. But then they also existed in the world you came from. A superior mind like mine takes advantage of such flaws, and ensures that he wins regardless of the outcome.
So I win, he silently told the inanimate object that floated in the bathtub. And you lost -- everything.
So why do I feel as if I lost, also? he asked what had been Raindew. Why do I wish that you hadn't killed yourself? That you'd escaped this round of the game with at least some chips, to play again and again? That a world where one like you could win might be ... He briefly speculated.
Naah. It would be boring. Probably just eternal hugs and sing-alongs, like that future we had to destroy. Not actually because of the uninspiring parties, though that would have been one reason in my book. I can't imagine why Celly wanted a long life in that one. Silly enough, but no real sting to the punchlines.
Oh yes, also the Universe would have been burned up by Paradox, I suppose that was important, too. Prime function of us Concepts, yadda yadda, everyone else takes that so damned seriously. My prime function is to have fun, and nasty fun's more fun than nice fun!
He stared at the corpse again.
But this leaves a bad taste in my mind, he realized, and I'm not quite sure why, though I have a certain horrible suspicion. He considered Schwarzwald Fuchs. An ideological fanatic, a traitor, and none too pure in his personal morals. Some of the reasons I picked him -- he seemed fairly unlikely to corrupt me.
I may have miscalculated. Snivelling little worm that he is, Schwarzie is still Pony. And -- hmm -- all those monsters I unleashed on their world, thousands of years ago. I notice that the monsters are gone. But the Ponies are still here. And not all of that was due to Megan Williams ...
Maybe the Ponies are tougher than I thought. Maybe they're stronger than I thought, in a lot of ways.
Because I think that Schwarzie's equinity is infecting me. Making me lose sight of Who and What I really am. So I guess I'm under a time limit too, and not just because in another eighty-some years the Ponies will reunite Science and Sorcery, and build the Paradise Engines -- and then my dim-witted brother's going to show up and seriously rain on their parade.
If I stay Pony for too long, I'm going to be Pony. The same thing that seems to be happening to F, only worse, because she was a lot more like them to begin with. Plus, I'm sharing bodies with fully-developed, mature Pony personalities, so there's a lot more with which to infect me.
I'm going to have to switch bodies before another decade goes by, he decided. Hopefully, to somepony considerably nastier and more alienated than Schwarzwald Fuchs. But somepony who isn't wanted as a mad killer. That limits my options.
He thought about it for a moment. Then he saw the perfect solution, hidden right within Schwarzwald's own ideology.
He smiled in genuine happiness, which would have been anything but heartwarming for any Pony to view, if they knew why he was smiling.
That left the shorter-term problem, of how to replace Raindew -- hopefully with somepony stronger. Somepony who would be attached to the Project, somepony who could help him keep close to the infant Sisters ...
The even-more-perfect solution flashed into his mind. Though it might be hard to integrate into the same strategy as the previous solution.
Still, it was such a wonderful solution that he adopted it on the spot.
He smiled very broadly, and said a name.
"Sweetie Finemare."
And somewhere beyond this world, the soul that had been Nurse Raindew returned to the nascent Cosmic Concept of Kindness to which it had been briefly, very-imperfectly attuned, giving unto it the gift of the experiences of her short mortal life. A structure hard to describe in any terms that either we or the Ponies of the Age of Wonders would have grasped glowed, grew more complex neural connections as it digested the information that had been Raindew, and -- after a space of time of very short or very long duration, depending on the standards by which it was measured -- sent out another edited version of itself onto that Earth, to be reincarnated, as it would do again and again until it would be ready to truly be born.
This is a Hyracotherium. Cute little gal, isn't she? They lived from around 55 to 45 million years ago, at a time just 10-20 million years since the Dinosaur Killer, and they are of interest to us because they are an early kind of horse (and brontothere, but we aren't fans of a show called My Little Brontothere, are we?). Technically, hyracotheria are "palaeotheres" rather than "horses."
She was about 2 feet long, 1 foot high at the shoulder, with four hoofed toes on each front foot and three hoofed toes on each rear foot. She weighed about 50 lbs. She was an inoffensive forest dwelling browsing herbivore, probably on the menu of such large meat-eaters as existed in her warm, heavily-wooded world (grass had not yet evolved).
She wasn't very smart. Few mammals were in her world. You probably couldn't even have trained her to be a good draught animal, she wasn't big enough to ride, and no way no how could she have built a global civilization or expanded outward to the stars.
But her descendants survived, and became the whole mighy group of the Equidae. So she deserves some respect -- more than D is willing to give her.
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Oh, D. Denial is so unbecoming.
I see Discord has been playing fast and lose with his host's anatomy. How rude.
Ah. Discord's motivations become clear. He just wants his totally-not-a-girlfriend to stop wasting her time with this particular planet full of meatbags, and the most entertaining method is to remove the option with extreme prejudice. Of course, he greatly underestimates ponykind's resilience and entertainment value. He'll learn.
And then there's that ending. This seems to be a pattern that will echo throughout the lives of this Concept. At least it will come to stop eventually.
And on the subject of Hyracotherium, this is somewhat relevant.
Did Klaus Fuch's wife/lover ever kill herself or is this another sort of "l'm just going and extrapolating what happened onto my creation" type thing?
in other news, l really appreciated this Christmas present
6767736
No, but suicide ran in the family of the Human, Klaus Fuchs. His grandmother killed herself; his mother killed herself by drinking hydrochloric acid (a terrible way to go) in 1931, and his sister Elisabeth (who had been a prisoner of the Nazis for a time) killed herself by throwing herself off a train in August 1939.
Raindew wasn't Schwarzwalder Fox's wife, but rather his mistress. What drove her insane were the mind games that D inflicted on her. D actually wasn't trying to kill her -- he was by his lights being amusing. You'll note he wasn't actually happy about her death.
Obviously, Pony Fuchs' life isn't a perfect parallel with Human Fuchs; for one thing, the Manehattan Project was started around 1934 and completed in 1938; it deterred what would have been the G2 equivalent of the Second World War from ever happening. Our Earth wasn't so fortunate.
6766996
Fixed my typo.
Fluttershy made her mistakes earlier in life and recovered with the help of Rarity. Also, she's stronger willed than Raindew. But yes, they're both Incarnations of the same Cosmic Concept, and D actually liked Raindew more than he's admitting to himself. That sort of thing is why this is Tragedy.
Heh, the My Little Hyracotheria are cute! Makes me want to write a fanfic in which the Mane Six have their minds cast back 50 million years and have to figure out how to make it back to their proper time, while being hunted by various large Eocene predators. Of course, in Hyracotherial forms, they wouldn't have their full power levels.
instead of giving me the cold shoulder because she says I'm too cruel and never learn anything.
Ironically, did you see where in the PRIME Pony POV Verse, that Discord is given his clue he can't ignore?
Fluttershy didn't break like Raindew, which I think broke Discord.
And -- hmm -- all those monsters I unleashed on their world, thousands of years ago. I notice that the monsters are gone. But the Ponies are still here.
Can't argue with mathematics.
I hold that suicide gets you a one way ticket to hell. Sorry. That's just part of who I am. It's still the act of murdering yourself. Sorry. :-( I hope you don't hate me for that. I consider you a friend.
So she deserves some respect -- more than D is willing to give her.
Nice science at the end there. Cool.
6768234
The part where Discord kills and resurrects that Pony when he first comes to that world?
Fluttershy also had some warning of with what she was dealing. Raindew thought she was dealing with a smart but otherwise normal stallion.
And Discord had mellowed a bit between the fIRST Age of Wonders and the Second Age of Wonders. Among other things, in the early part of that incarnation, he'd been Dissy. And during the time of his rule, he no longer wanted to wipe out Ponykind. He'd changed his mind about that.
I think that suicide is an extraordinarily bad idea -- one of the worst possible -- but I don't think that it makes one evil to the point of warranting eternal damnation. One, after all, owns one's own life if one owns nothing else in the world. I certainly don't think poor Raindew should be doomed to such a fate. She was, fundamentally, an extremely good Pony. She just had the misfortune to encounter something both very evil and very cunning.
Of my Mane Six, Fluttershy and Rarity have contemplated suicide. They didn't do it, though -- they're stronger than that.
Raindew just wasn't as strong, even though she was a facet of the same Being as is Fluttershy. I can't hate her for that -- only feel sorry for her. Killing her off was a difficult choice for me, but I wanted to show how Discord can, casually and with no extreme malice, wind up destroying even a Pony he likes. Especially this early, not-even-considering-reform, Discord.
I believe that Discord is far more responsible for her death than she herself. He played with her in a manner which he knew would greatly hurt her. He just didn't know that she would die from it. That's, at least, reckless endangerment and depraved indifference, in legal and moral terms.
Schwarzwalder Fuchs is not a particularly-admirable character. He's an ideological fanatic, a traitor, and a major jerk. He's not as bad as Wind Whistler later judges him as being (but note: she doesn't actually hate him), but he's somepony who had no problem with taking advantage of Raindew. But he didn't want to cause her death. He liked her too much, even though not enough to really make any effort to protect her.
Actually, Discord liked her as well. He's trying to deny this to himself, because it would involve admitting to himself that he thinks Ponies have value -- which if true would force him to alter his plans, and he's stubborn.
But then, I liked Raindew as well, and I'm rather sorry I had to kill her off -- but if I didn't, this story would be far too Nerfed.
I wish her soul well.
6768278
No no no, I mean in the recent Finale chapters.