The Archives. Somewhere beneath Scotland. May 12th 2030.

In the whole of the British Isles there was no safer place than the Archive. The immense underground facility was the single most heavily guarded location in the entirety of the British Isles.

It represented the survival of human culture, the repository of every single piece of salvageable art and information. Behind reinforced steel doors and concrete walls were endless banks of hard-drives containing digitised copies of everything humanity knew. Paintings, statues, copies of books and any other physical items that could have been saved were also down here.

There were also the areas that had been designated as bunkers and storage areas. This was a lifeboat, an area that already held several hundred carefully selected people who would be left to survive in their hidden bunkers should the British Defence Force fail.

For Alex Everett, however, the Archives were a different kind of sanctuary. He had come here seeking little more than security and rest. He had once been a member of the most prestigious orders on the British Isles but here, beneath the surface of Great Britain, he felt safer than ever before.

Alex Everett, formerly (and technically currently, though he didn’t feel worthy to the title) Sir Alex Everett, had requested to be sent here. Whilst he was now another guard in the Archives, already vast, defence detachment, he had once been a Knight of Albion, a proud and upstanding member of the Holy Order. He had fought long and hard in the war against the ponies of the Solaminan Empire and seen many terrible things on the battlefields of Britain.

After years of fighting, years of suffering at the hands of the insane ponies invading his country and years of losing friends, it had all been too much. He had requested that he be relocated. His sterling record ensured his transfer but it had been difficult. Not once had he been able to look his commander and his former comrades in the eye and even now he felt ashamed every time he pictured the faces of everyone he used to call brother.

It had been nearly a year since his last real battle. One year of quiet contemplation, stewing over old memories and looking around the strange facility he was supposed to be guarding. Nothing really happened around here. Every now and then a few technicians would walk in, check the machinery, ask the other technicians that permanently manned the consoles monitoring the facility's occupants whether everything was operating smoothly. It was quiet, slow, sedate, everything he felt he needed.

By this point he felt he knew everyone who worked here. He had often chatted with Frank, the guard who stood next to him at the door, had a few amicable words with the various technicians and engineers that operated the machinery and filed his monthly reports to Rupert Giles in a professional but notably casual fashion. He had even shared a few drinks and some rather awkward dates with Himeko, the cute Japanese techie that was currently staring at some kind of dial that told her something he probably wouldn't understand.

Alex glanced around the facility. He had seen everything before, the same banks of computer consoles, the same grey featureless walls, the same generators humming the background, the cooling fans, the bundles of wires strapped to the walls and floor and dominating the centre of he room, the three sleek cryotubes containing the facility's prisoners.

The large silvery cylinders were covered in bundles of wire that fed into the fold-out panels and ports that adorned their sides. Consoles displayed what Alex could only assume were power levels, or life readings or some other scientific mumbo-jumbo that he knew would mean something to the techies that so often crowded around it. He had never really paid attention to such details. What had caught his eye since day of his new job were the tubes occupants.

Visible through the clear glass panels on the font of every tube, despite the ice crystals that fringed the rim of every window, were three young girls.

All three were teenagers, probably barely older than seventeen or eighteen and each one of them was a figure of perfect beauty. Their features seemed to be perfectly sculpted, as if God himself had decided to pay especial attention to them when he had given them their looks. Even with the dull expressions that were now permanently plastered on their faces by the tranquillizers and the subsequent freezing process he knew they had been subjected to in his first debriefing, they were beautiful, rested in their icy coffins in perfect silence.

They were officially labelled as Archive Experimentation Subject GG3-2356, colloquially they were often called the Gloucestershire Girls, which was probably the kindest thing he had ever heard anyone call them. As the three individuals who were single-handedly responsible for the Gloucestershire Incident, the single most vile non-pony related atrocity that had been committed since the war began. Every time Alex looked at them he tried to remember the news he had heard about the Gloucestershire Incident. He recalled reports detailing the sudden onset of violent insanity, the bloodletting that had ensued as the crowds of refugees descended into rabid madness, of men beaten into bloody pulps, of women trampled and torn to shreds, of children crushed and infants smashed into walls and roads. The stories of the aftermath had been too disgusting to contemplate for many people and rumours had only made it worse. However Alex knew the truth, his debriefing had revealed the perpetrators.

Those three had reportedly been in the middle of the whole massacre, their arms raised and their heads held back as they seemed to orchestrate the violence around them. It had taken long distance sniping from a helicopter that had been out of range of whatever abilities they exhibited to finally stop them as any soldiers and agents that had tried to close in on them had also turned absolutely insane.

Alex looked through the glass panels once again, looking at them to see whether there was any way he could see what they were thinking. There had to be something he could find in them that would show him what they were, why they did what they did and how they did it.

Every time he looked at their perfect faces he found himself struggling to look away again. Their blank expressions still managed to draw him in no matter what he was thinking or feeling before he looked at them. He remembered staring at them for hours with rapt interest when he initially tried to glance at them with disgust. They were hypnotic and no matter how hard he tried not to be drawn in their beauty compelled him. He just couldn't help himself. They were fascinating, and wonderful, and terrible, and vile, and beautiful all at the same time.

That night they had slipped into his dreams, as naked and cold as they were in the tubes, and they had never left. Every night he saw them whenever he closed his eyes. They stood there, their long hair draped around their shoulders and bodies. Ice crystals covered them, glistening in a light that seemed to shine from everywhere and nowhere at once. They always appeared in the distance, obscured by the great shining light that always preceded them as they walked towards him. Throughout all of these recurring dreams was a song, a constant wordless song that filled him with euphoria and delight. Every night he had this dream but each time they appeared to be closer to him, gradually closing whatever distance was between them with every night, on and on, for months.

Last night they had been more vivid than ever before. They were there, surrounded by the glaring back-light that had always been there. Now the light no longer obscured them, it merely made them more noticeable as the rays of light surrounded them, wrapped around them and made them all the more alluring to him.

They had still been walking towards him, hips swaying as they did so, ice melting from their bodies and turning to steam and then mist that blurred the silhouettes that surrounded them, making them appear all the more ethereal and beautiful. They were always walking, slowly and gracefully, their arms stretched outwards, their heads thrown back, their eyes shut and yet they also had their eyes trained on him at all times.

Alex shook his head slightly, ignoring the flash of light that appeared every time he closed his eyes. He didn't like to think about those dreams. The idea that he was fantasizing about the three teenagers trapped in the tubes in front of him was disturbing enough but he was even more unsettled by the fact that they were there whenever his mind started to wander.

Every night they had invaded his head and he couldn't get away from them no matter how hard he tried. He had taken sleeping pills, tried every kind of advice his friends could suggest and even drank himself into a stupor at one point and yet they never disappeared.

Even in his daydreams they appeared. No matter how hard he tried they were in his head, always singing, always slowly approaching him. They were inescapable now. In his dreams, they shoved aside his fantasies, they egged on the monsters that haunted his nightmares and even invaded the idle thoughts of his waking moments. Even his masturbation fantasies were no longer free of their presence. They were everywhere in his head and they demanded his attention.

For a moment Alex closed his eyes for a moment, hoping and praying that the dream would not be there when he did. The instant his eyelids pressed together the light shone in the darkness and the three girls were there. The same ethereal song filled his mind at the same time.

However this time it was different.

None of them were frozen or wet. Their skin was bright and flushed and their hair, normally bedraggled and sodden, was now luscious and worked into individually elaborate styles. They walked towards him, naked and glorious and all three of them had their eyes open.

The girl in the centre, a tall young woman with large unnaturally orange hair, stared at him, her violet eyes boring into him and in return he couldn't help but stare back. A smirk grew on her face as she extended her arm forward and beckoned him forward. He found himself being drawn towards her, as if her simple gesture was undeniable. All three girls now appeared as if they were giants towering over him. The orange haired girl was looking down at him, her hand still calling him forward. Beside her the other girls, identical to one another except for their strange purple and blue hair, continued to sing the same note that cut through his mind and being.

The other girls then opened their eyes and joined the first girl in looking down at him with the same sharp violet eyes.

Alex found himself shrinking as the three girls grew into giants, the same identical smirk marring their faces. Their cruel gazes crushing him. He felt like he wanted to curl up but he couldn't break the connection with their eyes. They compelled him to look at him and yet their reaction to his attention gave him nothing but contempt.

“Oi! What do you think you're doing?” a voice cut through Alex's mind, drowning out the song and shattering the illusion. His eyes snapped open.

He immediately turned his head in the direction of the voice. He saw one of the techies glaring at him, irritation obvious on his face.

“You're not being paid to sleep on the job, especially whilst the rest of us are actually doing something,” the man said with a condescending expression of contempt.

Alex felt the entire room looking at him. Several were obviously amused at his embarrassment, others echoed the first techies' statement, matching his glare with their own.

“Alright already,” the team's supervisor finally called from the other side of the room. “Give it a rest and get back to work.”

In a matter of seconds the entire room returned to what they were doing, several of them stealing resentful glances at both Alex and the supervisor.

Meanwhile Alex felt furious. That pathetic little man had no reason to berate him. He was the one who had fought to defend this realm, he had faced the monsters who were assaulting their shores, he had sacrificed years of his life in a bitter struggle, he had seen friends warped into monstrosities by the foul powers of the animals he had killed. This cretin who had the temerity to suggest he was lazy had huddled in his safe bunker and stared at three naked teenagers.

A scowl grew over his face as he stewed in his bitterness. Every insult he had suffered was now resurfacing. He now realised how many of them had been condescending towards him in every conversation he had with them. These people had always thought they were better than him. They had obviously been dumbing down everything they deigned to talk with him.

For the rest of his shift he stared at his co-workers, remembering every individual incident where he had felt insulted. They were all pathetic, every single one of them. They hid away from the war, seeking refuge in a rats-warren of concrete tunnels and yet they thought he was less than them.

He shook his head. These thoughts… they felt… wrong. He looked back at the cylinders and frowned. He shook his head. Nothing made sense. These visions… no. He quickly muttered a short prayer. He was a Knight of Albion. Whatever was going on - self-delusion, demonic influence, Alien Space Bats...

He would not fail again.

***

It was spreading. Though they didn't dare talk about it, everyone in the room was suffering. Night after night the same dream, the dream of the girls and the terrible but beautiful song. They didn't dare tell everyone because they were afraid of being thrown out of the bunker and into the chaos of the rest of the world.

By now other offices were beginning to feel it as well and as it spread they began to feel angry. The longer the dreams went on the more frustrated they felt. Now they were beginning to lash out at one another. Fights had already broken out as technicians and scientists were already sniping at one another and it was escalating rapidly.

If Adagio Dazzle could smile she would. She could feel the enmity and strife around her as she slowly fed her power into their minds. She could already feel Aria and Sonata reaching out to her, joining their strength with hers. It had been a slow crawl out of unconsciousness but they had finally begun to draw sustenance from the multitude of unsuspecting fools that now surrounded them.

She still didn't understand what had happened to them that day long ago. The change had been gradual, she had felt it the moment the portal had opened and the ponies – who were as pitiable and contemptible as always – has arrived on the planet. However it took until the moment they had finally fled the Barrier and arrived on the grotty, wet British Isles that the change had completed. Where once the negativity of the planet had barely provided them with morsels of power now they were engorged on it. The very air seemed to shimmer with and saturated them with its power. They hadn't even cared what it did to their bodies. They had fed on it and it had made them stronger than they had ever been before, bar the age where they rampaged through Equestria with impunity.

Even though they were now trapped, isolated and immobile, they were growing stronger. She could feel it and she knew that her cohorts were regaining power as well. It wouldn't take long now. She knew that the weak minded idiots around her were growing all the weaker.

Soon they would be free. Soon they would be able to sing.