Chapters
-
“Alright, alright, think.” Jackie slipped sideways into the air, but not actually traveling anywhere. She stepped into the dream, and slowed time down around her to a trickle. That was one of the advantages to the sleeping world—time was fickle. Years could pass in a single evening, or else eight hours could feel like seconds. Obviously the former was more useful to her here.She floated through the void between dreams, conjuring herself an environment more out of instinct than desire. A model of the…-
99.8 K •
-
-
“I can’t kill them,” Jackie started, before the copy of Alex could try to swim away again. “I was right up there on the stage with those bodies, I could’ve easily wrecked their shit. But that would spoil all the hard work we did to undermine everypony’s trust in Athena. If we make them disappear, then she can use that to justify a war. Are you trying to make Thestralia go to war?”The little fish raised her forelegs defensively. “I’m not… trying to do anything, Jackie. Your subconscious…
-
99.8 K •
-
-
She arrived to explosions. Compared to the size of Mundi, they were distant and feeble, barely even shaking the ground. Whatever Hat Trick had found for their ponies to use obviously wasn’t meant to bring the city down on their heads.But it didn’t need to. She didn’t poke in to look and see how they’d done. They would know the result of that soon enough.Jackie stepped out of the shadows beside the massive portal, searching out the little wrapped box that contained the spell itself. As she had…
-
99.8 K •
-
-
Jackie felt blood dribbling slowly down one of her wings. It wasn’t hers—she hadn’t been injured, at least not that she could tell. But just because it didn’t hurt didn’t mean that she hadn’t been damaged.She could still hear the gunfire, accelerator rifles firing straight into an unprotected crowd. You have crowd control weapons, you asshole. You already closed the portal. You didn’t need to hurt anyone.She longed for the days of Confluence, the great Central Compiler of the Enduring Ones.…
-
99.8 K •
-
-
The field outside City Hall was completely packed with bodies. Jackie herself had returned to looking like a pony, and wasn’t bothering to hide who she was.They had been prepared to rescue a large number of ponies. Booths were set up around the base of the tree, with housing assignment packets and supplies and everything else their new population would need.There was just one problem: the rescue had gone too well. Some part of Jackie had dreamed that they might, if they were very lucky, double their…
-
99.8 K •
-
-
It was positively insane—Jackie knew it shouldn’t have worked. Knew it in the same way that she knew that comfort was good and pain was bad. Yet incredibly, inexplicably, she was discovering she was wrong.“So much of how we live is built on unquestioned assumptions,” Hat Trick explained. “Assumptions about where the world ends, about how power ought to be used, about what can be achieved and what can’t. But the end of one assumption is the beginning of the next great invention. Or the next…
-
99.8 K •
-
-
Things didn’t go nearly so smoothly with all the other dreamcrafters. They had far less experience—in some cases no more than a single night’s accelerated time. But Jackie didn’t have much of a choice, they needed everyone’s work to build before the whole city collapsed.That left a great deal for her and Hat Trick to do, moving between identical sections of city and fixing similar problems. It was the same stuff she was used to with novice dreamcrafters—doors that were just walls, machines that…
-
99.8 K •
-
-
Jackie had preserved Meliora from being completely overwhelmed with refugees… at least until somepony found out they were living in a dream. But she could do nothing to prevent that, nothing besides making sure that the vast population of Meliora received good instruction into the mechanics of their bat pony powers. They would learn the truth, eventually. The circumstances of that revelation would decide whether her attempt to give them somewhere safe to live ended in terrible failure or audacious…
-
99.8 K •
-
-
Jackie had traveled beyond physical space—up above the Dreamlands into the astral, and across distant shores to the supernal. The trip had not made her into one of the semi-divine Alicorns as it transformed so many others who took it, but that didn’t mean she had been unaffected.As she had done during her trip out to the seapony colony, Jackie could change her form. It was simple enough magic—making herself into different characters was one of the most basic lessons of dreamcrafting. All she really…
-
99.8 K •
-
-
Jackie had been to many strange places in her years. She’d seen the end of life, and beyond it. Felt the corrupting touch of necromancy, and even plunged headfirst into the gnawing void and returned with her soul intact.But in spite of all that, she still caught her breath as she passed into the center of the Breezie capital, and saw it for the first time.A shell of something like glass floated in the center of an incredible space—probably only a dozen meters or so, but unthinkably vast at her current…
-
99.8 K •
-
- Previous 1 … 76 77 78 … 136 Next