Mira's consciousness returned after an indeterminate amount of time had passed, and with it came one of the most excruciating headaches he could ever recall having. It didn't quite reach 'hangover' status, but it was certainly one of the runner-ups for that particular category. Even as the back of his skull throbbed with demands to tear his brain apart and reassemble it, he refused to open his eyes, instead scrunching them for a second and then relaxing. That made the throbbing wane a little, just enough for him to consider it manageable, and he started letting the sense of touch take over for the time being. He began with his wings, slowly moving them and unfo—wait a minute…

He felt cloth weighing his wings down. Strange. He tried moving them again; at his sides, they could go up and down easily enough. He tried to spread them, and that was where problems began to arise—the cloth he felt moved with them, tightening if he tried spreading them to even half-mast. His brow slanted a little in worry at this development, yet still his lids remained firmly shut. His ears twitched, slowly rotating until they perked upright. With them, he ascertained the situation; he heard two pairs of hushed breaths near him, and he could feel more cloth tickling the back of his mane and his cut shoulder.

But he shelved that sensation; echoing hoofsteps and hushed voices managed to pierce through the fog of pain, with a clarity he couldn't ignore if his life depended on it. "Starbreaker actually thought that was a good idea…" a masculine voice grumbled.

A feminine speaker piped up with a snort, "Then again, besides transmogrifying Omega, what doesn't she think of as 'a good idea?'"

Mira's ears pinned back against his head upon hearing that voice. His heart began pounding in both directions, unsure of which end of his body to exit out of first. His head began to ache harder, as a third speaker tossed in his two bits, "Surprised Prism's actually gotten th' concept of 'bad ideas.' But that's jus' me."

With a groan and great reluctance, Mira forced his eyes open, blinking to get the fog out of them. He swiveled his head left the second the fog cleared, finding himself in a room with seven chairs and a round table… and himself sitting in one of said chairs. Huh, the damn things were marked and… he found a trio of strange red, round things above his head.

Mira scowled upon seeing the furniture all around was crystal, and there wasn't a lot of it to go around. That meant he was back at square one. In another chair marked with a six-pointed star of all things that stood opposite of him from the table, he found the dread harbinger herself, tied up in blankets and with a rather bandaged head slumped. He dared not relax even as he registered that she was out cold for the moment.

Next to him, in a chair marked with balloons to the left sat Tsih, in much the same state as the harbinger with some added bandages on her wounded fronts. Her ears twitched; she was about to wake up sometime soon. Hopefully. Mira turned to look at his own body to figure out what was going wrong this time, and he found bandages and shredded blankets anchoring his wings onto themselves. Worse, when he turned back to the table, he heard the sound of doors flying open. The resultant thud and echo made his head hurt even worse, and though he didn't want to do so, he looked towards it to see if he could dispel any lingering doubts about today's bout of insanity.

Great, it was the other three bozos who had decided to accompany the harbinger, and the Windchime was carrying one of them. And all three turned to regard him as he studied them in turn. Fantastic; that meant he now had to face the music. "Oh good, you're awake," Yukito grumbled, frowning. "Sincere apologies, in regards to the ceiling. That… was not our fault."

Mira huffed from flared nostrils. "Of course," he hissed, lifting a claw to rub his temples in an effort to dull the headache. The claws were cold to the touch, but their temperature did nothing to make the throbbing even stop.

"But I feel the need to ask… why did you attack Starbreaker? Assuming that wasn't your knife that tried to get into her skull," Yukito mused, trotting over to Mira to give him a checkup. Mira pursed his lips, and felt the barest trickle of sweat beading down his neck as he tried to think up an excuse to get himself out of this mess.

"We were in th' carriage in case ya didn't notice, asshat," Omega piped up, tail lashing irritably as he donned a scowl.

Sora shook her head and rolled her eyes emphatically as Omega glared at Mira for all it was worth. "I don't think either he or the foal noticed," she muttered. "Or particularly cared."

Yukito magically seized Mira's raised claw and pulled it as far as it could go to scrutinize it. Mira scowled, eyes narrowing and turning at the unsolicited limb-grabbing. "Dude, the fuck?" he grumbled.

"Don't mind him too much; you're not going under the knife," Sora piped up, trotting over to stand opposite of Yukito in case Mira tried anything. Though, the worse-for-wear stallion shut his trap as she moved and reared up onto an armrest so they were snout to snout when he faced her. Her oddly calm expression and quiet voice did nothing to dull or sheathe the dangerous edge within her tone. "Unless you wish to be dismembered?" She spread her wings at half-mast, making sure the blades stuck out just enough that they were visible. "That can be arranged."

"No thank you," Mira muttered in a faltering voice, the robotic undertone more prominent for a moment. He turned back to Yukito as he dropped the raised leg and sighed.

"No damage, but that's a pretty peculiar augment if I've seen one," Yukito noted, looking at the claws for a second before turning his attention to Sora. "This the pony who mused about two others becoming… screwed up, as it were?"

Sora nodded, turning to the claws, then to the haunches. "I don't recall claws, severed legs, a false horn, or one haunch that's different from the other being fixtures of our last encounter, though," she replied, eyeballing the orange haunch that boasted strange knives bursting forth from some sort of star-shaped explosion for a mark. She turned back to Mira's face and noticed the mismatched ear. "Lemme guess: the ponies who fucked you up the first time weren't exactly content with the results?"

Mira could only nod to that, ears folding back. "And found… pieces of our other body intact," he grumbled. "Went under the knife again, woke up with two different cutie marks. As if they didn't fuck us hard enough already."

Sora lifted a hoof and ran it along the bridge of her snout. That last statement was one she found herself silently hoping wasn't in the most literal sense possible. "Next thing you know, we're gonna find a walking puzzle box of an augmented pony one of these days," she hissed in discontent. She parted hoof from face and, after looking at Omega to make sure he wouldn't slip off, turned to Mira once again with nose wrinkling. "Listen, we just want directions; we'll let you go once you fork over what you know. We set aside all that's happened in the past and go our separate ways. Deal?"

Mira's brows tried to build a bridge to no avail, and furrowed with frustration instead. "Where?" he asked. The windigo's warning rang in his head again, and some small part of him wanted to at least inform his current—at this rate, the most he could call her was an acquaintance—about it. He made a mental note to not anger her in the future, lest his legs get sliced off.

Sora studied Mira's expression for a moment longer, then pulled back with wings fully folding at her sides again as she reverted to all fours. "Aeverafree," she answered. Mira's ears perked for a second, and blood and color drained from his face shortly after.

His pupils shrank and his eyes went wide. His tied wings shuddered with the urge to leave at the earliest window of opportunity, though that rather level stare kept him rooted to the chair. "Wh-why there? Haven't you heard of its laws?" he asked.

Sora did nothing but stare at him for another few and rather unnerving seconds. "Painfully little," she admitted. Her eyes narrowed just a smidgen. "I'm not very politically informed. Enlighten me…"

Mira swallowed a lump that wasn't there before. He saw Omega jostling to get his hind legs beneath those bladed wings and forced his nerves to collect themselves before his entire body could go onto the fritz. "Well… and this is something we haven't personally seen, so we took it with a grain of salt when we first heard it," he began, shifting in his seat to get a little more comfortable. "Any convicts who are tried and found guilty there, whether they're native-born or immigrant, will end up de-augmented ninety-nine percent of the time."

Sora took an unconscious step back, brows raising. "Excuse me?" she asked, ears twitching.

Mira nodded. "That's just what we heard," he repeated. "The remainder? Either died before they could get de-augmented, or had some pretty fucking good reasons to keep their metal bits intact and managed to get by with lesser sentences doing so." His ears rotated back once more. "So if you're going there… as a word of warning, lie your fucking ass off if you can manage it. Especially since, y'know…" He jerked his horn towards Starbreaker for emphasis, frown tightening.

Sora's brow furrowed. "Strange… I've heard nothing about that…" she grumbled. She turned to Omega for a moment. "Want a chair to sit in?"

Omega nodded. "Things look comfy," he answered.

Sora nodded back and turned to Mira. "Hold that thought for a minute." Mira watched as Sora trotted around the still-out Tsih and moved to align her rear with the chair past her, which itself was marked by a triad of diamonds. Then she shifted to sit, but did not quite manage it to let Omega slide off with ease. Once he was seated, and leaned into the back of the chair just to stay upright, Sora trotted back and returned to her staring contest with Mira. "I'll bear that in mind. Now then; you have directions?" she asked, a hint of worry worming its way into her tone.

Mira frowned and shook his head. "Honestly, we don't even know where we're at," he answered.

Sora internally facehoofed, and externally sighed. The day just couldn't get any better. "In that case, I'd avoid going north from here if I were you," she warned. Turning to the table and raising a hoof to her bell, she muttered, "Light, return research papers." The bell rang, glowed, and summoned forth the papers to let them collapse onto the table in an untidy, dusty triad of stacks.

Mira whistled at the sight. "Why should we avoid going north?" he asked, a hint of curiosity aroused somewhere in his tone. Sora simply turned to Yukito and waved a hoof at the papers, and he nodded and turned to start magically sorting and dusting off the whole lot of it.

"Well… to cut a long story short, we're wanted criminals now," Yukito replied dryly, shuffling the papers to knock the layers of dust onto the floor where it couldn't make anypony sneeze. He lifted up a particular parchment stack, one with illustrations on wing joints and showed that to Mira.

Mira studied the papers, lifting a claw to tenderly flip through them. He found more illustrations, some detailing blades, the body of a pegasus, and how those two things went together… "... how did you get your hooves on this shit?" he muttered.

"Stashed them in my quarters, but not before having the cameras removed when nopony was looking," Yukito answered with a mild, almost apathetic shrug of his shoulders. He pulled the stack away once Mira got through with it, and showed him another stack detailing false horns and the like.

As with the stack before, Mira leafed through it with a claw. His expression gradually soured, bit by bit as he found more and more illustrations that detailed how artificial horns went onto a pony's skull, how much metal plating was required to keep the two bonded, and so forth. He even saw illustrations of a crown of horns, similarly applied to their singular cousins on a pony's head. "... these are… these are blueprints…" he muttered as the realization hit him. He turned to Yukito, scowling. "Blueprints for turning ponies into weapons." His tail lashed, and were Sora not presently standing next to him, he'd have lunged onto Yukito and started bashing the back of his head into the table with his own claws.

Yukito nodded. "I was… tasked with making weapons out of ponies, and keeping the blueprints on hoof," he said, scowling in return. "Without these," he began, making the papers vanish in several bursts of light with a flick of his horn, "my… former employers will have to start all over from scratch. I think I'll burn the papers one of these days, once the danger passes."

Mira stood up in the chair, wings flared as far as they could go with the cloth still holding them for all it was worth. Yukito merely shifted his snout to maintain eye contact, and even then he did not waver slightly. "Y-you… you made…" Mira sputtered, lifting a claw just slightly enough to gesture to Sora with it.

A mute nod answered him. "But, she was the first of whom got anesthesia prior to that surgery," Yukito added.

Mira's brow twitched. He leaned over a little, just enough that he could tackle Yukito if the urge decided to drop by. For the moment, he continued restraining his claws, scowl deepening further. "The first… why?" he muttered.

Yukito's expression failed to shift, though Mira could see a fire burning to life in his eyes. "I simply smuggled it in to the operating room, under the pretense of a pre-surgical tool-cleaning liquid," he said.

Mira's brow twitched again, and his horn crackled once with a sputter. "Did you make…" A claw lifted, and he curled all but one artificial digit onto the hoof. He used the odd one out to gesture at Starbreaker, who began shifting in her seat.

Yukito shook his head that time. "At most, her artificial ear," he answered. "Never met her in the flesh before then." His own scowl deepened. "And though I made the blueprints for the horn crowns, I have never once applied them myself. The last two ponies, one being the first… was not augmented with my hooves."

Mira's claw unfurled and dropped in short order. It hit the cushion and crystal with a muffled clang. "What else haven't you done, you fucking murderer?" he spat.

Yukito turned away and trotted to a chair marked with a triad of butterflies. He sat in it with a weary sigh and rested his pasterns on the table. "I wasn't able to prevent them from dying," he muttered. "Nor the first who had received the crown of horns…" He closed his eyes as Sora trotted over to nuzzle him. "I won't deny that there is blood on my hooves and all over my cutie mark—what good would it do?" Mira's eyes went wider and rounder as he returned the nuzzle without further hesitation.

In fact, Mira's brain almost short-circuited at this bizarre sight. A stallion who augmented the Windchime herself, nuzzling her as she did him? Some part of him registered that as rather unnerving, given the circumstances. "Doesn't…" He couldn't finish the question before he reminded himself that these two had admitted they were on the run already. So he had to amend the query before the rest of it could fly off his tongue. "Wouldn't that have been a bit creepy, if you still had your jobs?"

Yukito shrugged and pulled from the nuzzling. "Not 'creepy' so much as 'completely, totally unacceptable.' But, Sora's then-commanding officer disregarded decorum entirely and saw fit to have us… married," he said, without even a faint hint of disgust. "Things were… hectic back then."

Mira sighed and watched as Sora trotted to sit in the last chair, one sporting a cloud and a rather prismatic lightning bolt. "I take it things were cold between you two?" he asked.

Yukito shook his head, and turned to Starbreaker as she groaned and rubbed the back of her head with a hoof. "Well, she was being deployed left and right, and I had to fix augments everywhere they broke," he muttered. "And hello sleepyhead," he greeted. "Are you not going to break floors and ceilings from several floors above ground anymore?"

Starbreaker grunted and turned to glare at him, but said nothing. She continued rubbing her head, and turned to glare at Mira. Mira glared back and sat his haunches down again, before remembering the cloth on his own head and raising a claw to feel for it. Yukito turned to him and piped up, "You were, ah, bleeding a little after the ceiling broke. So was your companion. I wrapped you both up."

Mira nodded, and set his claw down as Tsih finally moved her muzzle. "Auuuuuu… where'd the mechanical duckies go?" she muttered, eyes opening to reveal a pained glaze that was upon them.

Omega piped up, and waved a hind hoof in lieu of a front as best he could. "Some days I wonder th' same thing when I wake up," he grumbled. "And now I think th' duckies are between my ears."

Sora was about to make a retort to that, going so far as to take the needed breath for it, when the whole castle rumbled with another peal of thunder. The room began to glow with the barest trickles of magic, each vein sprouting from the ceiling to crawl along the walls, columns, then the floor and up the chairs and table. The gathered lot began looking around as the doors of the room slammed shut and stayed that way with another passing rumble, and slowly the accumulating magic began pulsing with faint traces of a power long lost.

Yukito was the first to turn to the nearest door, horn glowing and magic trying to wrench the thing open. Alas, the door stayed firmly shut; it did not even rattle with his tugging. Starbreaker, getting some idea of what was going on, alighted her horn to try and wrench the veins of magic from the door—but her aura merely disintegrated on contact with those veins. She tried again to yield the same result, before conjuring her little bomb and alighting one of its beeping lights in that door's direction and focusing some power into it. When enough crimson light had gathered around the beeping nub, it fired off in a thin but red-hot laser that streaked up and down the door's surface—it damaged the crystal, but merely forced the magical veins to take those new indents as a detour.

Mira and Tsih focused their magic on the opposite door as Starbreaker screamed and made her bomb vanish, but as with the harbinger, their magic simply ceased to be around the strange phenomenon that had them all trapped. Sora made to rise, but the veins of magic snapped out and anchored her to the seat in taut lines that even her wings could not cut. "Wh-what the?!" she barked as more veins sprung up on everypony else and tied them in place too. It even wrapped itself around four horns, and whenever they cast, the auras could do nothing but wink out.

"A trap?!" Tsih screamed, kicking out with her hinds as much as the bonds would allow her to. The table's surface began to glow six different colors, and the light lifted up to form translucent but present equine shapes. Then, more colors formed and rose up, making manes and tails that wafted in an unseen breeze.

As the equine shapes on the table grew more and more defined, each one facing a pony in a chair, Sora peered a little closer as three spread wings and two alighted crackling horns also formed as a sort of cherry on the top. "I don't think this is a trap… we'd have been attacked by now if it was…" she muttered, though that was a thought that sent shivers up and down her augments. She noticed that the not-quite-there pony facing her, a rainbow-maned pegasus, had several bruises lining her body. The bruises, though, did not make her stern, tooth-grinding expression falter in the least.

"If anypony has found this castle… Tartarus, if the Castle of Friendship is still standing after all this…" the rainbow pegasus growled in a raspy voice, feathers trembling as she spoke through labored breath, "then please… hear us out."

Sora's eyes widened, and started glowing with a faint whir. She leaned a little to see Yukito shrugging his shoulders at her through… whatever the table was currently presenting them with. She had no choice but to oblige the six, illusion or not. The rainbow pegasus continued, her voice distraught, "Something bad is happening. We're at war with ponies on the other side of the planet. We're surrounded everywhere." There was a sound of ground shaking, one that did not send itself through the crystal of the room as it did coming from the table itself; whatever it was had distorted the image of the standing six briefly.

"They think we done attacked them," an orange earth pony hissed, facing Mira with an expression so stern and dirt-dusted it seemed to have been carved of the earth itself. "But they attacked us first! Took Spike away from us! Foalnapped all of our Princesses!"

"Except me," the sole alicorn of the group hissed, facing Starbreaker with nothing short of contempt and anger alight in her eyes. For a moment her image faltered, and her violet coat briefly turned off-white as her mane and tail went aflame. "I'm not going to go down without a fight." Her wings fluttered, scattering ashes, before her body returned to its sense of normal. "We'll do what it takes to save Equestria…"

"If you are seeing this…" a white unicorn said, facing Omega with hooves steady and horn crackling. She closed her eyes briefly, letting a tired sigh come forth as the collected image shook and faltered again. "Do not let Harmony die, even in the midst of this war."

"If Harmony dies… the windigos and other nasty creatures will attack us all… or what's left after all this," a pink earth pony warned, facing Tsih with her tail twitching erratically. "And we'll all… be in Tartarus." A tear left her eye, and trailed down her cheek at the prospect. "But if—" The six on the table shook and distorted once more, this time nearly vanishing altogether before stabilizing. "—but if the windigos come, and Harmony hasn't died already… stay safe."

The last pony, a yellow pegasus looking at Yukito with an expression and a set of legs that threatened to falter and buckle, sucked in a deep breath to collect her nerves. Her words were quiet, almost drowned out by another crash of thunder, "We'll find and free the other Princesses. We have to. It's the only way the war will stop…"

The alicorn nodded, face hardening. "I'll failsafe the palace if it's the last thing I do." Her face softened, and a tear slipped down her cheek. "Forgive me, Spike… I'm sorry I wasn't able to save you…"

The rainbow pegasus reared up and stomped her front hooves, nostrils flaring. "We'll make those plotheads sorry they took Spike! That'll be the last mistake they'll make if I have anything to say about it!" she screamed, maintaining her angry glare even as she, too, shed a tear.

The alicorn nodded, stern expression returning. "This is our last message… to whomever finds it. If we don't make it out… we've failed Equestria. Please… don't falter like we have; find safety, and build Harmony there. Then free the Princesses, if we are unable to."

A seventh pony, also translucent, spontaneously appeared in a burst of light, between all of the group's turned backsides. She had a glowing horn, and a wide-eyed look of paling dread marred her pinkish but blood-splattered face that did not shift even as the six turned towards her. Sora frowned; the expression reminded her of Alte's frozen face. "T-Twilight, they've managed to start cranking out really strong soldiers!" the new arrival sputtered, hooves pounding nervously on the floor in a frantic little dance.

The alicorn's face contorted in horror first. She was swiftly followed by the other five. "Starlight, what do you mean?" she asked, the collective image swimming again with another passing shake.

Starlight's jaw clenched for a moment. "Battlemages, and pegasi carving everything up with wings turned to blades!" she forced out, ears rotating back. "They… they skewered Sunburst!"

The alicorn frowned, and the six turned to the chairs once again, contemplating what they had just heard. "If anypony finds this, who is such a battlemage or pegasus… I promise you… you're going to have Tartarus itself to answer to when you decide to lay down in your graves," she said darkly. "Unless you're willing to atone for what you have done…" With that, the seven shook again, and faded from the world with the threads of magic as her horn finally winked out.

For a long moment, the sitting six stayed there, stunned at what they had seen. Even Starbreaker had been unable to move a muscle, much less alight her horn after the threads of strange magic had gone. It took a great effort for everypony to even look at each other with a level gaze, sharing wary glances that betrayed all concern and confusion. Seconds stretched to eternity as one looked at the next, then to the pony opposite of them, and back again.

Then, when his eyes met with Sora's, Mira spoke up, "The hell were those ponies babbling about?" Sora could do nothing but mutely stare back, forcing herself to deactivate her ocular augments with sheer will. As much as she wished to answer his question, she could not bring herself to do so—for she had none to give.