Somehow, Rainbow Dash was coaxed into the wheelchair. The woman (a nurse, apparently) wouldn't let her walk on all fours, and with how hard it was to balance on two for longer than a few seconds at a time, she did need it, much as she hated to admit it. But that didn't mean she had to be happy about it. Rainbow shifted awkwardly in the seat as the nurse rolled her down the hall, trying to compensate for the lack of a tail under her rump. And the lack of wings on her back. "Ugh!" Rainbow groaned, shifting roughly and crossing her front legs (arms, whatever). "Are we almost there? You could be pushing this thing at least 20% faster!"
The nurse reassured her that they were almost there, and sure enough, they soon reached a big room with lots of sunlight coming in through the glass ceiling above. To Rainbow's disappointment, however, there wasn't a single pony in sight; there were only more of those monkey-things. Did that mean Twilight and the gang had all been transformed by Discord too? "How am I supposed to find them in all this?" said Rainbow, voice cracking in exasperation. Everyone looked the same! Only the colours of their manes stood out as different. How did anyone find anyone in a crowd like this?
"I'm sure you'll find someone eventually," the nurse reassured her charge, wheeling her around various patients. "Until then, why don't we find you someone to get you started in Landel's? I'm sure someone would love to get to know you and help you settle in."
"I don't want to settle in!" Rainbow protested, brow furrowing and tone rising. "I wanna find my friends!"
"Here Corrie, why don't you sit with Lisa for a while? I'm sure she'd be glad to put down what she's doing for a little while to help you," said the nurse, seemingly ignoring what Rainbow had just said. The lady gave the blonde-maned girl, Lisa, a look as she eyed the defaced t-shirt, just daring her to keep doing what she was doing, lest the shirt be confiscated. Sweet the nurse may have been, but tolerant of graffiti on Institute property she was not.
"Hey, hey! Come back here! You can't just leave me!" Rainbow tried to push herself up higher in her wheelchair seat as the nurse started to walk away after that. "Oh fine! Well then I'll just find my friends and defeat Discord on my own! We'll see how you like that!!"
Rainbow lifted herself up by the heels of her hands, then pushed herself up onto her feet. She took one wobbly but determined step with arms splayed out in front of her, then two.
And then she tripped over the toe of her slipper and want tumbling down flat onto her own face.
Rose smiled sweetly back at the nurse. They couldn't exactly take her shirt away here and now, and she had lots of arguments about individual expression to throw into the works.
Besides, she'd done enough. It now smirked, with narrow eyes, rather than smiling fatuously. 'Corrie', who was as likely to be named that as she was to be named Lisa, was attempting to walk, with about as much success as a toddler, or a drunken woman in four-inch spike heels.
"Discord? Your dedication to your friends is admirable, but you won't find them here." Rose stood up, and extended a hand to the girl. "That is, it's highly unlikely."
"Oh yeah? Says who?" Rainbow grunted as she pushed herself up on her elblows and rubbed her nose with the back of her hoof hand (dang it). The muscles in her back twinged, wanting to flap wings that weren't there.
"I just saw them a second before turning into... whatever it is Discord turned me into! They gotta be around somewhere!" At least, that's what Rainbow wanted to believe. She didn't want to listen to the little nagging voice in her head that told her Discord could've spread the six of them out all over Equestria for all she knew right now.
"I take it you are another nonhuman?" Rose crossed her fingers against the next word out of the girl's mouth being troll.
Even if she was a troll, there was mocking, and then there was standing around watching an girl/troll/alien flop around on the floor. That was just cruel.
Though without her normal accumulation of inappropriately and gender-hegemonically named mangrit, she wasn't about to be able to pick her up. So she did a graceful swandive onto the carpet and wound up facing her, also propped up on her elbows. "If you don't mind me asking, what are you?"
Rose Lalonde, huh? Rainbow was pretty sure there was a Rose in Ponyville. But she was also pretty sure that pony was a redhead. Suddenly Rainbow realized how frustrating it was not to be able to see someponybody's cutie mark right off the bat; she could've checked to see if this Rose and that Rose were maybe related. As it was, she could only guess.
But never mind that. The other girl had said something about being "non-human"? So what, was "human" the name for what they all were right now? Guessin' so, she thought. She was going to go with that regardless. She didn't plan on being in this body for a second longer than she had to be, so she figured stopping to get the name right would be a waste of time. Though she had to admit, Rose Lalonde did a pretty decent swan dive for a non-pony. And a non-swan, even.
Rainbow crossed her forearms in front of her, more than glad to have the other girl come down to her level. Getting back in the wheelchair was not something she wanted to do just yet; the less sitting on her freakishly tailless rump she had to do, the better. Besides, it gave her a better position to do one of the things she did best: bragging. "Only the fastest pegasus pony in all of Equestria!" she told Rose, cocking her head up with more confidence than maybe she was actually feeling at that moment. "Name's Rainbow Dash. Ya heard'a me?" she tacked on out of habit.
"I'm afraid not." Talking ponies belonged with wizards, in tales of mystery and romance and anthromorphized (but not in the furry way) animal companions to chosen children, born into peril and strife, only to rise above it all. With the help of a four-footed friend. Rose suspected certain maternal purchases to be in mockery of such fanciful notions, none of which Rose had.
That she would admit, at least. "Pony. As in hooves, mane, tail? All of which have disappearified along with your entire planet?" The planet might or might not go with the territory; Earth had been destroyed long before she'd woken up here. It was possible, after all, that the same was true of Rainbow. It wouldn't be the most ridiculous universe she could have helped create, in fact. Hmm.
"You haven't heard of anything called Sburb, have you? Wait. Perhaps you would call it Sbarn?"
She should've expected that, considering Rose was probably really a human and not a transformed pony like her. But Rainbow still couldn't help being a bit disappointed. She still had a ways to go in spreading her name outside Ponyville and Cloudsdale, it seemed.
"Uh, yeah. What else would I mean by pony?" she asked, trying not to look ruffled at the addition of "entire planet" at the end of the question (and failing pretty badly in that attempt). "And nah, never heard of that. What's that supposed to be?"
"I take it you aren't acquainted with the human emotion known as sarcasm." Rose had thought she'd heard inklings of it in Rainbow's speech; in fact, she was certain she had. Horses were such sweet animals, as long as one kept to encountering them merely in stories.
(That was unkind to Maplehoof, who had never kicked nor bitten her, but as her entire existence was proof of parental enmity, her affectionate nature had not gone as far to persuade Rose as a chance encounter might have.)
"It's a video game. A thing humans do for entertainment." Hooves. Controllers. Not really a match made in the glorious realms of the suitably apt. But this game could find a way, if it wanted to.
Rainbow raised an eyebrow. "Course I know what sarcasm is! Duh," she answered, though even as she spoke, she couldn't think of where Rose had used it. The question about her being a pony? She had seemed kind of disbelieving while asking that, now that Rainbow thought about it, but she didn't know why that would be. Rose knew what a pony was. Why was it so weird to be talking to one? Maybe it was the Discord thing at work. It wasn't every day ponies turned into humans, after all. Did that mean Rose didn't even know Discord was out there?
She had to find out for sure, and so she breezed through the next thing Rose said. "I know lots about games, but no video games, sorry," she answered with a shrug. "Kinda not important right now, though. I got another thing to ask you: do you know anything about Discord? Or how to get outta this place?"
Wow. And not like a stupid toy with tangled hair and easily-broken plastic wings, but an intelligent person she could have a real conversation with. Even if right now she was having the usual reaction to the Institute, which didn't tell her much about Rainbow beyond the fact that she was, at least, thinking on her feet. Metaphorically.
"No. And another negative. We can get outside at night, at least for a little while, but we always wake up here." She hadn't tested that herself, but the reports were numerous enough to be believed.
"What's Discord?" The capital D was coming through loud and clear. "Or is it a who?" It didn't sound good, whatever it was.
Rose said one thing, but Rainbow Dash heard another. What she heard was not "no, there is no way out", but rather "no, I don't know a way out". Two very different things, one of which Rainbow was a lot more likely to take to than the other. Looks like I'm gonna have to ask someone else, then. Or just bust outta here by myself! Whatever works! she thought while pushing herself up onto her knees (carpet was not kind to human elbows, apparently).
"Oh he's a 'who' all right! A 'who' that's gonna get his stupid dragon antlers kicked from here to Appleloosa as soon as I find him!" Rainbow asserted, hitting the ground with the flat of her hand the way she would normally pound down a hoof. Somehow, it didn't quite have the same impact as normal. Still, she went on: "The Princess says he's the spirit of disharmony, and he's been nothing but trouble since he broke out!" She hoped that maybe Rose's mind would be jogged by the description. Maybe she would put two and two together and realize that the weird things here - like always waking up in the same place and transformed ponies - were clearly the work of a big jerk with a lot of power.
A dragon? Rose's curiosity was piqued, though she showed no more than the slight widening of her eyes. Dragon of Discord. That was a name to know, if there was any connection between her universe and the Pony Universe.
"And this Princess?" A mentor? A superior? An insult, leveled at someone who only pretended to such lofty heights? "If she's here, you might want to let her know that there is no red carpet for royalty. We all have to work together." Which might be the entire goal -- she still hadn't seen anything of the other kids, and while she'd been the one that had dragged them into Sburb, she had never put herself forward as superior in anything other than knowledge.
"The main boss was General Aguilar, but he's been replaced. Re-replaced, to be exact." Or, more simply, it could be that Landel had never left. That he had always been here.
It was so. So weird to meet someone who didn't know who the Princess was. Was Rose from the Everfree Forest? Or some other faraway place like it where the natural laws of Equestria didn't apply? She would've figured everyone in the world would know who raised the sun and the moon every single day.
Before Discord started doing that every five minutes, anyway, she thought, gritting her teeth. That was another thing that surprised her now that she thought about it: the sun had been up the whole time in this place so far. No sudden day and night switches? Geez, Discord really was focusing on other things now.
In any case, even though Rose didn't seem to know who the Princess was, Rainbow still felt her shoulders and head rise slightly in a state of ruffled-ness. "She'd know that. Princess Celestia is the one who called us all to work together against Discord in the first place," she explained, not doing very well in hiding the insult-by-proxy she was feeling for Celestia.
Moving on to the next bit, a bit more of her energy came back to the fore. "Ha! That's gotta be Discord, then!" she said. "He'd have the power to just bump out whoever was running this place for sure."
Rose had heard her own voices, some slithering sussurrus and one Royal Copperplate, offering courses of action. She took them under advisement, though generally she preferred to trust no one without sufficient rationale.
"If he is, he's working incognito. That would be the man you heard on the intercom. He goes by D☺C LANDEL."
She'd made the same assumption, arriving here. That all feuds and fates rested on resuming connection to Sburb, and that this was all a sidequest or gaiden chapter in their ongoing saga. Now she wasn't so sure. Sburb had a unique, but distinctive, sarcastic mien, with a heavy fantasy basis. Whereas this seemed more stuffed with everything someone once thought was cool. John would love it, unironically. He did everything unironically, but this would be extra-unironic.
So she'd have to break this news to Rainbow. "It may not be the same man. I haven't seen a single sign of my own antagonists." The real ones, not the trolls. They were just annoying.
"Doc Landel. Got it." She could have sworn she heard a smiling face in there somewhere. Whatever, she thought. The important thing was that she had a name to go on now. "Doc" did sound kind of like a shortened and reworked version of "Discord" (if you squinted), so maybe she really was onto something here.
"Well it's worth it to see if he is or not!" Rainbow insisted. She was confident that she could lure this "Doc" out somehow. Even if she couldn't, she knew she could get away from him and his little trap somehow. She was fast enough and determined enough. Even with a freaky new body, she was still Rainbow Dash. Nothing was going to hold her back from her friends for long!
And speak of the pony devil, Doc Landel came on the intercom again shortly after all that. He didn't sound exactly like Discord, but something in that cheery tone totally sounded off to her. That had to be a fake voice of some sort. If Discord could use a fake identity and body, why not a voice too?
It was then that Rainbow's nurse came to scoop her back up off the floor, scolding her for being too eager to use her weakened legs. "Hey who are you callin' weak?! I'll show ya weak!" She continued to protest as the nurse wheeled her away from Rose, not even remembering to say goodbye to the girl.
Somehow, Rainbow Dash was coaxed into the wheelchair. The woman (a nurse, apparently) wouldn't let her walk on all fours, and with how hard it was to balance on two for longer than a few seconds at a time, she did need it, much as she hated to admit it. But that didn't mean she had to be happy about it. Rainbow shifted awkwardly in the seat as the nurse rolled her down the hall, trying to compensate for the lack of a tail under her rump. And the lack of wings on her back. "Ugh!" Rainbow groaned, shifting roughly and crossing her front legs (arms, whatever). "Are we almost there? You could be pushing this thing at least 20% faster!"
The nurse reassured her that they were almost there, and sure enough, they soon reached a big room with lots of sunlight coming in through the glass ceiling above. To Rainbow's disappointment, however, there wasn't a single pony in sight; there were only more of those monkey-things. Did that mean Twilight and the gang had all been transformed by Discord too? "How am I supposed to find them in all this?" said Rainbow, voice cracking in exasperation. Everyone looked the same! Only the colours of their manes stood out as different. How did anyone find anyone in a crowd like this?
"I'm sure you'll find someone eventually," the nurse reassured her charge, wheeling her around various patients. "Until then, why don't we find you someone to get you started in Landel's? I'm sure someone would love to get to know you and help you settle in."
"I don't want to settle in!" Rainbow protested, brow furrowing and tone rising. "I wanna find my friends!"
"Here Corrie, why don't you sit with Lisa for a while? I'm sure she'd be glad to put down what she's doing for a little while to help you," said the nurse, seemingly ignoring what Rainbow had just said. The lady gave the blonde-maned girl, Lisa, a look as she eyed the defaced t-shirt, just daring her to keep doing what she was doing, lest the shirt be confiscated. Sweet the nurse may have been, but tolerant of graffiti on Institute property she was not.
"Hey, hey! Come back here! You can't just leave me!" Rainbow tried to push herself up higher in her wheelchair seat as the nurse started to walk away after that. "Oh fine! Well then I'll just find my friends and defeat Discord on my own! We'll see how you like that!!"
Rainbow lifted herself up by the heels of her hands, then pushed herself up onto her feet. She took one wobbly but determined step with arms splayed out in front of her, then two.
And then she tripped over the toe of her slipper and want tumbling down flat onto her own face.
"...Owfh," Rainbow mumbled from the carpet.
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Besides, she'd done enough. It now smirked, with narrow eyes, rather than smiling fatuously. 'Corrie', who was as likely to be named that as she was to be named Lisa, was attempting to walk, with about as much success as a toddler, or a drunken woman in four-inch spike heels.
"Discord? Your dedication to your friends is admirable, but you won't find them here." Rose stood up, and extended a hand to the girl. "That is, it's highly unlikely."
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"I just saw them a second before turning into... whatever it is Discord turned me into! They gotta be around somewhere!" At least, that's what Rainbow wanted to believe. She didn't want to listen to the little nagging voice in her head that told her Discord could've spread the six of them out all over Equestria for all she knew right now.
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"I take it you are another nonhuman?" Rose crossed her fingers against the next word out of the girl's mouth being troll.
Even if she was a troll, there was mocking, and then there was standing around watching an girl/troll/alien flop around on the floor. That was just cruel.
Though without her normal accumulation of inappropriately and gender-hegemonically named mangrit, she wasn't about to be able to pick her up. So she did a graceful swandive onto the carpet and wound up facing her, also propped up on her elbows. "If you don't mind me asking, what are you?"
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But never mind that. The other girl had said something about being "non-human"? So what, was "human" the name for what they all were right now? Guessin' so, she thought. She was going to go with that regardless. She didn't plan on being in this body for a second longer than she had to be, so she figured stopping to get the name right would be a waste of time. Though she had to admit, Rose Lalonde did a pretty decent swan dive for a non-pony. And a non-swan, even.
Rainbow crossed her forearms in front of her, more than glad to have the other girl come down to her level. Getting back in the wheelchair was not something she wanted to do just yet; the less sitting on her freakishly tailless rump she had to do, the better. Besides, it gave her a better position to do one of the things she did best: bragging. "Only the fastest pegasus pony in all of Equestria!" she told Rose, cocking her head up with more confidence than maybe she was actually feeling at that moment. "Name's Rainbow Dash. Ya heard'a me?" she tacked on out of habit.
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That she would admit, at least. "Pony. As in hooves, mane, tail? All of which have disappearified along with your entire planet?" The planet might or might not go with the territory; Earth had been destroyed long before she'd woken up here. It was possible, after all, that the same was true of Rainbow. It wouldn't be the most ridiculous universe she could have helped create, in fact. Hmm.
"You haven't heard of anything called Sburb, have you? Wait. Perhaps you would call it Sbarn?"
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"Uh, yeah. What else would I mean by pony?" she asked, trying not to look ruffled at the addition of "entire planet" at the end of the question (and failing pretty badly in that attempt). "And nah, never heard of that. What's that supposed to be?"
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(That was unkind to Maplehoof, who had never kicked nor bitten her, but as her entire existence was proof of parental enmity, her affectionate nature had not gone as far to persuade Rose as a chance encounter might have.)
"It's a video game. A thing humans do for entertainment." Hooves. Controllers. Not really a match made in the glorious realms of the suitably apt. But this game could find a way, if it wanted to.
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She had to find out for sure, and so she breezed through the next thing Rose said. "I know lots about games, but no video games, sorry," she answered with a shrug. "Kinda not important right now, though. I got another thing to ask you: do you know anything about Discord? Or how to get outta this place?"
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Wow. And not like a stupid toy with tangled hair and easily-broken plastic wings, but an intelligent person she could have a real conversation with. Even if right now she was having the usual reaction to the Institute, which didn't tell her much about Rainbow beyond the fact that she was, at least, thinking on her feet. Metaphorically.
"No. And another negative. We can get outside at night, at least for a little while, but we always wake up here." She hadn't tested that herself, but the reports were numerous enough to be believed.
"What's Discord?" The capital D was coming through loud and clear. "Or is it a who?" It didn't sound good, whatever it was.
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"Oh he's a 'who' all right! A 'who' that's gonna get his stupid dragon antlers kicked from here to Appleloosa as soon as I find him!" Rainbow asserted, hitting the ground with the flat of her hand the way she would normally pound down a hoof. Somehow, it didn't quite have the same impact as normal. Still, she went on: "The Princess says he's the spirit of disharmony, and he's been nothing but trouble since he broke out!" She hoped that maybe Rose's mind would be jogged by the description. Maybe she would put two and two together and realize that the weird things here - like always waking up in the same place and transformed ponies - were clearly the work of a big jerk with a lot of power.
Reply
"And this Princess?" A mentor? A superior? An insult, leveled at someone who only pretended to such lofty heights? "If she's here, you might want to let her know that there is no red carpet for royalty. We all have to work together." Which might be the entire goal -- she still hadn't seen anything of the other kids, and while she'd been the one that had dragged them into Sburb, she had never put herself forward as superior in anything other than knowledge.
"The main boss was General Aguilar, but he's been replaced. Re-replaced, to be exact." Or, more simply, it could be that Landel had never left. That he had always been here.
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Before Discord started doing that every five minutes, anyway, she thought, gritting her teeth. That was another thing that surprised her now that she thought about it: the sun had been up the whole time in this place so far. No sudden day and night switches? Geez, Discord really was focusing on other things now.
In any case, even though Rose didn't seem to know who the Princess was, Rainbow still felt her shoulders and head rise slightly in a state of ruffled-ness. "She'd know that. Princess Celestia is the one who called us all to work together against Discord in the first place," she explained, not doing very well in hiding the insult-by-proxy she was feeling for Celestia.
Moving on to the next bit, a bit more of her energy came back to the fore. "Ha! That's gotta be Discord, then!" she said. "He'd have the power to just bump out whoever was running this place for sure."
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"If he is, he's working incognito. That would be the man you heard on the intercom. He goes by D☺C LANDEL."
She'd made the same assumption, arriving here. That all feuds and fates rested on resuming connection to Sburb, and that this was all a sidequest or gaiden chapter in their ongoing saga. Now she wasn't so sure. Sburb had a unique, but distinctive, sarcastic mien, with a heavy fantasy basis. Whereas this seemed more stuffed with everything someone once thought was cool. John would love it, unironically. He did everything unironically, but this would be extra-unironic.
So she'd have to break this news to Rainbow. "It may not be the same man. I haven't seen a single sign of my own antagonists." The real ones, not the trolls. They were just annoying.
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"Well it's worth it to see if he is or not!" Rainbow insisted. She was confident that she could lure this "Doc" out somehow. Even if she couldn't, she knew she could get away from him and his little trap somehow. She was fast enough and determined enough. Even with a freaky new body, she was still Rainbow Dash. Nothing was going to hold her back from her friends for long!
And speak of the pony devil, Doc Landel came on the intercom again shortly after all that. He didn't sound exactly like Discord, but something in that cheery tone totally sounded off to her. That had to be a fake voice of some sort. If Discord could use a fake identity and body, why not a voice too?
It was then that Rainbow's nurse came to scoop her back up off the floor, scolding her for being too eager to use her weakened legs. "Hey who are you callin' weak?! I'll show ya weak!" She continued to protest as the nurse wheeled her away from Rose, not even remembering to say goodbye to the girl.
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