Chapters
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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…-
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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“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…
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“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…
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Everything had to be perfect.Jackie knew that her chances of pulling this off were remote—there were too many pieces moving, too many ways it could go wrong. But she wasn’t the sort of pony who spent her immortality locked in a safe tower somewhere, living the same way century after century. She’d already done that, done it until she’d been driven to near insanity with boredom. Living safely maximized years, but what good was one empty, lifeless decade of existence where she learned nothing and the…
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Jackie dreamed of forests. Of alien trees from primordial ages, when the Earth was young and the strong had ruled. She met Voeskender in those trees, alone except for his influence. “I’m done!” she proclaimed, tossing imaginary chains at his massive hooves. “My debt is returned to you. I gave you my word and I kept it.”The deer, of course, did not speak to her. She saw the slow erosion of distant mountains, the gentle lapping of the waves. Jackie interpreted these images to mean the god wasn’t…
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Of course, it wasn’t as simple as just pretending that nothing had ever happened. While Jackie took special joy in imagining the displeasure of the ponies back in Mundi, she couldn’t quite act like nothing had happened. Her average citizen would just take her at her word—practically worshiped the ground she walked on—but not all were so compliant.Hat Trick found her near the end of the party, holding a tablet computer and looking agitated. She hadn’t been on the viewing balcony, but she was here…
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Jackie knew Mundi hadn’t forgotten them. She got her confirmation about six months later, when it was time to cut the ribbon on her most ambitious structure yet.She’d wanted to name the incredible thaumic ash Hometree, but most of her ponies didn’t understand the reference, and the ones who did weren’t keen on that. They didn’t like Das Kapital either. So it was that one of the most impressive achievements of modern magical engineering received the drabbest name.“City Hall” stood nearly four…
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