“Wait!” Rainbow Dash held up her right wing with her primaries splayed. “Wait, hold up. Before we get to that question”—at this point, Daring Do was rolling her eyes while the rainbow-maned pegasus was ignoring her—“I gotta know what’s the deal with that funny statue of Twilight Sparkle out in the hallway. She looks ridiculous! And she has my cutie mark!”

Daring Do was groaning now and Tarnish, well, he felt her pain.

Somehow, with no means to convey it, the Director seemed amused. Fingers flexing, head tilted to one side, its light-emitting crystals blinking, it looked down while Rainbow Dash gazed up. There was something still very much living about the automaton centaur, so much so that it was almost unnerving. Unnatural. Tarnish began to suspect that this was no mere hunk of metal, but, at some point in the distant past, had once been alive.

“Ridiculous, you say—”

“Yeah!” Rainbow was bold enough to interrupt. “That looks nothing like the Twilight I know. She’s goofy looking. The statue I mean, not the Twilight I know.”

“We didn’t know how Twilight Sparkle would turn out. To be honest, we didn’t even know if she would end up a Chosen One. We only had what we saw on other worlds to go by. The statue—that statue—exists due to an inter-office bet. I sense that you are an Element of Harmony, but how close were we? It was a source of consternation among us. Most of us believed that Twilight Velvet, Moondancer, or Sunset Shimmer would become a Chosen One for magic. As far as Twilight Sparkles go, they’re a high-risk, high-reward model, and not terribly reliable. Instability is inherent. Necessary even, for them to function.”

These words gave Tarnish pause.

“Well, all the right marks are on that statue,” Rainbow Dash said to the mechanical centaur. “But Twilight’s body didn’t change and become princesslike.”

“Oh dear.” One of the Director’s hands reached up to rub its nonexistent chin. “So many factors that can go wrong. Variables. These variables present themselves and it was once my job to study them. Well, us, really. All of us. We? It is hard for me to remember how many of us I am. We worked hard to gain insight into the variables. That was the whole point of this laboratory. This room you stand in now. I—we, it was our job to view the variables and catalogue them.”

“But why?” Rainbow asked in a foalish voice.

The Director shrugged; impressive for a mechanical construct. “I don’t know why. We were sequencing something, but I do not know to what end. The variables produced various types of Elements of Harmony. Concentrated blocks of reality. It is like sequencing DNA or a genome. With various variables, different Elements of Harmony would come into existence. Even two Elements of Magic held by two Twilight Sparkles would be quite different, as both Twilight Sparkles would endure different events, have different friends, and would experience different lives. All of these factors would shape the Element of Magic. We needed a way to sequence an infinite number of Elements. Sadly, that’s all I know.”

“So all these worlds,” Daring Do said to the Director, “exist to produce Elements?”

Again, the mechanical centaur shrugged. “Yes. More or less? There are so many possibilities. Why, I know of a race of mechanical polymimetic beings and they’ve produced a most fascinating Element of Leadership. Only they don’t call it that. They call it a ‘Matrix of Leadership.’ It has become a profound artifact, changing all those who possess it, unlocking their true potential. It came into existence randomly. Isn’t that extraordinary?”

Tarnish considered this. To sequence these Elements, to have them exist, and then in time of some great crisis, to bring specialised Elements together—it would be a powerful asset. The sort of asset one might need to fight Grogar, perhaps. This Element of Leadership and the Element of Magic would give a powerful advantage to a creature whose purpose was to fight the coming darkness. Or even multiple Elements of Magic, each of them suited to a type of magic—perhaps things other than Friendship. An Element of Magic based on Leadership would be a powerful thing indeed, or an Element of Magic powered by Love.

There were dreadful things beyond the stars, a fact that Tarnish understood better than most. Things worse than Grogar. Awful things of indescribable, unfathomable evil—and to fight them, one would need extraordinary weapons. Though he said nothing, he began to suspect that the centaurs had planned ahead for this eventuality. In fact, a part of him knew. How did he know? Through what means did this knowledge confirm itself? It felt like craziness.

“So, about these Chosen ones,” said Daring Do to the Director.

Before she could continue, the Director cut smoothly in. “You are a Chosen One. All of you are. Chosen Ones are rather mass-produced. It would be accurate to say, ‘the Chosen Many.’ I think. Perhaps. A lot of work went into their creation. One of the primary purposes of Skyreach, actually. Weaponised destiny. We were certain that it would be the next big thing.”

“How did that turn out?” Tarnish found himself asking in a rather flippant way.

“Mixed results.” Again, the Director somehow shrugged, quite a feat with two torsos.

“So what makes us Chosen Ones, exactly?” asked Daring Do before Tarnish could become more sarcastic.

“Bad luck, mostly,” the Director replied.

“Bad luck?” Daring Do stood there, incredulous, blinking, and waiting for more.

“Well, we tried all kinds of things, and then we began manipulating luck itself.” With one hand, the Director reached up and began scratching its head, which did it no good. “We tried good luck, but then the ponies we used as test subjects hardly ever left their homes. Life became easy for them. By fortunate happenstance, every want, every need, every desire would be met. They became quite fat and more than a little stupid.”

“That does, indeed, seem counterproductive.” Daring Do glanced at her companions one by one, and then returned her attention to the Director.

“So then we tried bad luck, interspersed with moments of extraordinary fortune. The test subjects were miserable. All manner of ill-fortune befell them. Some of them suffered horrendously. The ones that survived became quite heroic. Not at all like their peers and companions. These ponies broke away from the herd and became self-sufficient. They became adaptable survivors, and from these survivors, great heroes came to be. They took everything that life threw at them and somehow, overcame the odds. We continued to fine-tune the process, until we felt that we had reached just the right level of misery to be beneficial, though the actual application remains quite random.”

In silence, Tarnish thought about his own misery.

“That is part of what we did here, in Skyreach. Destiny produced patterns and we sought to manipulate them. When we began other-world creation, we observed how the patterns we manipulated would form. Certain ponies, certain creatures rose to prominence. The best and the brightest would naturally be drawn to Elements of Harmony, and then those Elements would be shaped by their bearers. Twilight Sparkles, for example, in whatever form they come, be it earth pony, pegasus pony, or unicorn pony, tend to be overly magic-curious—though not always. Twilight Sparkles aren’t always the Element of Magic. Sometimes, they are generous, kind, or curious. Occasionally, they become the Element of Bravery, a fascinating outcome. By and large though, a vast majority of Twilight Sparkles become librarians. Something about their meticulous, obsessive-compulsive nature. They can’t help but be librarians.”

Daring Do sat down, sighed, and began to rub her neck with her wing.

“Look at you,” the Director said to Daring Do while gesturing in her direction. “Is adventure not a fondness for deprivation and hardship? How much have you suffered for your calling? With my eye, I can see the trauma hidden in your body, like an ancient manuscript written on your bones.”

“And you”—the Director whirled on Rainbow Dash before she had a chance to respond—“your foalhood is a tragedy, is it not?”

“I d-d-dunno,” stammered Rainbow Dash as her feathers ruffled.

“You flew so fast that you outpaced your potential. This is tragedy. Instead of living in the shadow of another, striving to do better, you lived in the shadow of what you could be. You forsook everything. For so many years, you knew only the misery of failure as you desperately tried to catch up to what you could be. How many years did you know only one true friend? The only friend who remained with you as you tortured, deprived, and abused yourself in pursuit of impossible perfection? Shall we discuss the years when you denied yourself food with the hopes of making yourself thinner and lighter? Is this not misfortune? Rotten luck? You saw your potential too soon, realised what you might be long before you were ready. And it ruined your life, didn’t it?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Rainbow Dash whined as she made a dismissive wave with her hoof and turned her head away.

“And you… a mute unicorn who loves sound. Not merely misfortune, bad luck, but cruel irony. So much of wizardry requires vocal components, spoken elements for spells. You settled for sound engineering, but your true love is wizardry. But you became a sound engineer for the sake of success in public view, so you could wrestle your failure as a wizard in private. Bad luck has hounded you for a long, long time. Success brings no satisfaction. Your life feels empty and meaningless because what you truly love eludes you. You make others sound so beautiful, impossibly so, but you yourself are restricted to mute whimpers, croakings, and mewling cries.”

Tarnish felt Vinyl’s grip on his foreleg double.

“As for you,” the Director said to Tarnish, “the less said about you, the better. All of you have known extraordinary hurt. You have suffered. The agonies that you have each endured, both as individuals and shared together, has it not made you champions? The best that ponykind has to offer? The fires of the forge have burned away the dross, and what is left is both pure and true. Of all the rotten luck you’ve endured, the worst of which was coming to this place, to Skyreach.”

In these words, Tarnish saw the truth. The awful, awful truth. He was no longer the confused, angry, spiteful colt that had been banished from Ponyville. Since his departure, he had grown, developed, he had advanced. Along the way, he found a mare, another outcast, another with advanced misfortune. Maud too, knew misery and hardship. But Maud was a stoic, and this, along with her nature as a stone pony allowed her to endure all manner of bad luck. Together, they had bonded over a love of making the best of an awful situation. Their relationship had been tried—it had been burned in the crucible of an infant volcano—and their love had sustained them.

How few knew rock-solid love?

This was a heavy moment of contemplation for Tarnish, who failed to notice that both the Director and his companions were all looking right at him. When things took a turn for the worst, that was just a normal workday. Tarnish could, in fact, run into an army of cultists armed with curved swords and guns, and not bat an eye. No, he realised, he did not have bad days, he was a bad day for others. He was the agent of mayhem and misery that changed the lives of others. A minister of misfortune, he was a bad day waiting to happen.

A squiggly-lipped smile spread over Tarnish’s muzzle, and each of his companions squirmed.

“How unsettling,” the Director said, stating the obvious. “Had I bowels, I dare say they’d be in quite a state of distress right now.”

“Oh, he’s not even worked up.” Daring Do recovered herself, stood up, and did her level best to look authoritative. “Out of all of us, Mister Teapot has suffered the most. Still a good pony, just, well, a little rough around the edges. He has anger issues. Specifically, he takes issue with things that make him angry—”

“And a lot of things make him angry!”

“Miss Dash, that’s quite enough.”

“Aw, but I—”

“Hush!”

“Fine!” This sass was served with a side of eye-roll.

Through it all, Tarnish smiled his peculiar squiggly-lipped smile.

“So,” Daring Do said, changing the subject. “Back to the original question. What exactly, is Skyreach?”

Author's Notes:

This might still need an edit or two.