A Thing of Ours

by psimon

The First Sortie

The field trip had went as planned: a brief tour, some stories about the importance of harmony both for Equestria's past and her future, and a dinner which was received in varying degrees of appreciation. Having the benefit of a royal escort, the entire group settled into lodging amidst the palace, sharing rooms which were naught but partitioned alcoves of a large and lofty central apse tucked into the palace proper.

Sometime during the night, each pony's dreams were violently interrupted by a dissonant hiss sounding something like a waterfall with a strange, metallic note to it like a bag of nails was just strewn about one of the palace's smooth stone floors. The scene then became the same for all of them: Prince Blueblood, Fancypants, Mr. Cake, Cherilee, the fillies, even their accident-prone comrade, all stood on an unbroken plane of the ruddy color of cinnabar filled with an equally unending, low hum. Standing in the middle of the circle they formed was the strange, foreign pony they had all but forgotten. Here, however, he looked quite different indeed.

The almost shadowy coat of his mane was gone, along with most of his dimensionality. Instead, an ill-defined blob the color of an afterimage -- that flickering red, green, and blue shadow you see from time to time when looking away from something after having stared at it -- loomed like some desperate attempt of each pony to re-imagine whatever they saw in a matter less offensive to their expectations and understandings. He was not easy to look at, but fortunately, he wasn't the only thing to look at for long.

Without any noise, the area about suddenly burned away to a night scene vaguely similar to Canterlot. It was a harder, bolder night, however. The moon seemed prouder, the stars bolder, the buildings a little newer... as if they had been rebuilt, as if they had been damaged before. The proud banners of Equestria were not to be found, replaced instead with some flowing moon-bedazzled flag that had an almost imperial, military feel to the way it cut through the night to announce itself.

Each pony was, of course, in a slight state of shock. They expressed it quite differently. Silver Spoon was the first one to make any noise, and all she did was shriek. Miss Cherilee stared around and poked at the ground -- which seemed to still be some planar slice of sky -- as if doubting it. Scootaloo frantically flapped her wings for fear of falling from this height, scanning about for some cumulus safety net.

"The game begins... I will show you how," said the weird, nebulous not-pony amidst the chaos. A clicking, clucking, scraping, pounding noise drifted through the air as the ponies were able to see they were not as much standing in mid-air as they were atop or within some great statue of some kind. It stood on its hind legs, but bore a quirky, balanced posture that wasn't like anything a pony would have ever wanted to try to manage. In the distance, a mass of platonic solids arranged in a vaguely equine fashion dwarfed a nearby parapet of a palace that was not unlike -- but not the same -- as the one they had been in before going to sleep.

Applebloom trotted about in the sky on the unseen plane holding them up, "This is the best dream ever! I'm flying without trying!"

Sweetie Belle recalled a story she had heard somewhere in her past and checked herself for diaphanous wings, not wanting to risk losing them to some over-indulgence.

Prince Blueblood cleared his throat, "What are *you all* doing in my dream?"

They were all interrupted by a screaming ray of cold, blue light blazing past them from the distant behemoth. They weren't touched by it, nor did they feel the cold, other-worldly wrath bound up in the light, but they all shared a sensation which belied the danger.

"This is.... the game, that your wishes will come from," said the thing pretending it was a pony, "You take turns and fight. And win... to continue the game, that is. You... don't want to lose. This is more real than you might want to think."

They felt themselves move forward, conveyed along with the strange, bipedal steps of the towering statue-like structure they were either on top of, inside, or somehow near. Like most dreams, much of the individual facts were fuzzy and hard to focus directly on for analysis. Whatever the details, the main sum of the particulars was that this oddly-shaped thing was advancing towards the other, smashing buildings and paths in its wake without regard for the damage, one of its legs -- which wasn't being used for walking at all -- outstretched menacingly, ending in a wicked point.

Most of the ponies flinches and looked away as the point was driven into the other statue with a crunch, then a slice, then a pop. In the center of the other behemoth, a large sphere, pierced by that wicked point, steamed and hissed in the night.

The pony seemed to level its gaze, though its eyes were indistinct from the rest of its murky visage, "You pilot this thing, and.... must break the core at the heart of the other. They *all* have cores."

Diamond Tiara sounded unusually small when she asked, "This is... really happening? We're all together?"

"What about the wishes, then?" Miss Cherilee asked, sounding less mature than the filly.

"Oh, it's real... you'll have your wishes soon enough, if you keep winning," the almost-pony confessed, "I wish I could---" and it was then all cut off, like an umbilical cord.

The morning came hard and fast, and the day had an awkwardness to it that came from none of the ponies neither understanding nor discussing what had happened. There was something strange to it all which kept their minds busy patching up the holes, filling the gaps, mending the loose seams whenever they thought about it, and it was easy enough to do so if they didn't talk about it. Self-preservation kept it from being a shared experience throughout the day as the field-trip continued; news from Ponyville reported the damage was more extensive than originally assessed, and there was no shortage of things to visit, see, and earn in Canterlot, so it was made into a three-day excursion.

That evening, they all again retired to their lodging exhausted. In addition to a healthy round of exercise going about the capitol, there was also the burden of normalizing everything, of avoiding saying certain things, of fearing certain thoughts, of staying on top of their curiosities. There was also an accident involving the knocking-over of one of the larger tables during lunch, but everyone knew it wasn't on purpose and had no desire to make the perpetrator feel any worse about it.

Again, their slumber was interrupted, though they did not meet that same pony from before in the odd, cave-like sort of chamber they stood about in a circle within. Instead, all that remained were a pair of very odd looking socks with five short little shoots coming out of them, perhaps for decoration or something. Before they could mention it, a small yet noisy creature the shape, size, and color of a parasprite descended on them.

"Oh ... nevermind that," it said in a quirky female voice as the socks vanished with a brief hiss not unlike a steaming kettle, "Let's see who gets to go first. It's game time, remember?"

The ponies all expressed different things: some disbelief, some fear, and for the youngest, even excitement. But it was Fancypants whose expression was the oddest, for he turned to look at something unseen.

"Huh? Did someone call me?" He asked, looking about.

"Ha ha! Lucky you! Going first is probably the best position. Except last... but we'll see who that is," the spritely thing half-giggled.

"I don't... what.... is that?" Fancypants began to try to get more information, but as the surrounding bled away to a bleak, desert landscape with naught but a giant, hostile-looking dragon made of hard, solid shapes and orthogonal lines, he found himself dumbfounded.

A dull thud accompanied by brief tremors filled the area as the statuesque... thing they found themselves associated with drooped to stand, properly, on all its legs, as Fancypants thought it should have in the first place.

"I ... think I get the hang of it," he said, as he narrowed his eyes at their opponent. If this was going to be a game, he was going to win it with poise and without any doubt. He had a lot of people to impress, after all.

But most of all, he really wanted his wish to come true.

Comments

[psimon]

269022
Heh, thanks! I caught a spelling error or two and fixed 'em up, but as for the tabs... I keep finding weird indentation in my chapters after I save them. It might have something technical to do with the way my computer (linux) handles line-breaks and such.... to make a short story long, sorry if you see any weird tabs. I'm aware of them and trying to fix them.

Also, wow, this writes so much faster than the more prosaic stuff. Even *I* can't wait to see who goes next.