---

This is how it feels to be Captain Daniel Romero in the hours after Sharon is… after what had happened.

You can’t think. You can’t focus on the papers you need to sign. There are many reasons for this, of course, but there are two pressing ones.

First: you are a Captain of a research vessel who has just borne witness to something that changes everything you thought you knew. You had forgotten, you realise, that you were dealing with magic. What you thought was impossible is possible. It is a lesson, and you are determined, for the sake of the mission you have taken on, to learn it well.

Secondly, of course, is the pain of losing Sharon.

They were saying “kill her” from the moment it happened. Of course they were. You would have done it, too, for anyone else. Oh, they believe you when you say that keeping her alive is good for research, that you’ve been needing live Newfoals for study, but the truth is plain as day, and in your heart you know even Strike knows it.

Sharon was different. Different because she was smart, different because she was pretty, different because she challenged you, different because maybe you just liked the attention (you’re only human, after all), but different all the same. For anyone else, a bullet would have been the first gift you gave. Merciful death.

For Sharon? The very idea burns your soul. It hurts. You do not entertain it. You do not consider it for a second.

Renner does. Your XO is your age, and takes as little shit as you do. That’s simultaneously why she’s the perfect XO, and why you’d never pursue a relationship with her. Renner makes her displeasure plain one hour, three minutes and twenty eight seconds after Sharon’s… after the incident, when the XO storms into your office, moving quickly despite her ever-present limp.

“Captain!” she says, angry. “Is it true?”

You don’t bullshit her. “Yes. A crewmember was ponified.”

You can say the word ‘ponified’, and you can say the word ‘Sharon’. Putting the two together seems to be the real obstacle.

“Ponified by something that wasn’t even potion!” Renner yells. “How is that even fucking possible, Daniel?!”

She must be angry, you think. She’s using the first name.

“Magic,” you say, in answer to her question. Perhaps a tad facetiously, but you’re allowed.

She pauses for a moment, her mouth working spasmodically, like it can’t decide what words to use, how to reply to such a complete comment. But she buys it, you can tell. You’re both too old and too weary to not buy it. It’s an old joke, by now: every time you can’t understand how the Empire can do something insane or miraculous… magic.

She sighs. She’s worn out. Something you have in common.

“Who?” she asks after a moment.

“Sharon,” you reply.

She pauses at that. “Sorry to hear.”

You nod, silent. It’s fine. It has to be. It cannot be undone.

Yet, you suddenly think, and there it is. You’ve been fighting for so long to save the Newfoals, trying to study the horror that is their existence, but now it’s personal, in a way it never was before.

Because you’ve lost someone.

And it’s not just the particular loss that anyone else on Earth can describe. It’s bone-deep, painful, cutting. It shouldn’t have happened. Couldn’t have happened.

But here you are.

And then Renner says words that cut into you, dissect the fog around your brain and demand action.

“What now?”

---

This is how it feels to be Commander Lucky Strike in the hours after Sharon is ponified.

Sharon - the thing that was Sharon, which is being extremely docile - is moved from where she was ponified to her quarters at the Captain’s request. Is he being nice? You don’t know. You don’t pretend to understand some of the thought processes behind that man. Your mind drifts back briefly to the conversation where he had, of all things, tried to defend Queen Celestia, tried to make a case that something had obviously happened to her. So you don’t question it. He’s got a plan: he’s always got a plan. You just need to wait for him to tell you your part in it.

The Captain knows what he’s doing, and you trust him.

You’re hyper-alert: all the instincts that make you a good security officer turned up to eleven. You feel the adrenaline going through your veins, turning you from what the Captain calls a ‘skittish magic herbivore’ (you forgive him the racial insensitivity: he’s hardly the worst HLF, or even PHL, for that) into a motherfucking machine, made for murder, mayhem and other nasty words beginning with ‘m’. In this moment, no matter who you were faced with, you could kill them stone dead. You are a machine.

But.

You can’t deny that there’s something different about this. You’ve known humans who’ve been ponified - of course you have, you’ve been fighting this war since Romero was working from the Purity back in the day. You’ve seen the study reports. You’ve seen the deed done by PER. You’ve killed what’s left of friends.

You never thought you’d have a thing that was genetically built from bits of a friend stuck on your ship. You wonder whether the Captain has considered that Sharon… that what’s left of Sharon… might be detrimental to the crew’s morale.

It is so much easier to work with these things, you think, when you didn’t know who they used to be.

But the Captain knows what he’s doing, and you trust him.

You just wish you knew what he was thinking.

At least, you think to yourself, the thing that used to be Sharon is quiet. Almost too quiet, but frankly you’d rather it was too quiet than talking. You can’t stand these things when they talk. You can’t stand the smiles, you can’t stand how empty they seem next to real ponies or humans. You wonder to yourself how anyone, anypony, any being in their right mind can look at these things and think that they are, in any way, right.

But none of them are quite in their right mind, are they? you remind yourself. That’s what the Captain says, that’s what the studies are proving. And the Captain knows what he’s doing, and you trust him. You keep saying that to yourself, not because you doubt it, but because the things you’re asked to do…

… okay, maybe you doubt a little. A man bringing Newfoals and Newcalves aboard his ship for study? You’d have to be a fool to not doubt. Even the XO doubts, you know she does. You’ve heard the arguments (half of the deck the Captain’s cabin is on have heard the arguments).

But, despite it all, you know that what he’s doing has good intent. Despite it all, you know that he’s trying his best.

The Captain knows what he’s doing. And you trust him.

---

Throughout the ship, hushed conversations begin to happen, as the hours after Sharon is changed turn into a full day.

Even on a ship as large as the Columbia, the rumour mill is fast, moving along corridors and through locker rooms and into lounges and restrooms faster than the speed of sound. It is often been a joke that the Captain would find a way to weaponise the rumour mill if he thought it would win the war.

Now, of course, there are rumours that the captain is weaponising something else entirely.

Of course, most of the crew have been with him for a long time. They believe in him. Even so, there are rumours. There are rumours that he’s keeping her in her room, rumours that he’s going to do… something. No one quite knows what. Keep her? Study her?

Then the question becomes another.

Is that what he’d do to us?

---

This is Captain Daniel Romero at work.

The next few days after the incident, you decide to buckle down, ignore the pain, and do what must be done. In a way, this is your element, your medicine, your rest. You turn a powerful will upon the threat at hand, and you bend all your thought upon its destruction.

Evocative images, even when the reality is that you’re still stumbling in the dark, worried you'll do it all wrong. But then you mentally slap yourself, you buckle down and ignore your doubts too.

Because that’s all you can do.

You’re not a scientific mind. That much has always been clear to you. At first there was a certain frustration in the fact that you knew the answer to this war was in science, and you knew you had nothing to add to that discourse.

But then, later, you realised that you did. You had the power to bring these people together, and you have the power to make them prioritise. You set the agenda, you chart the course, and just like everything else in a captain's life, your crew does as you command.

So, like any good Captain, you set the agenda.

You make a list of things that you need to know. This… this thing is an anomaly. It should never have happened. So, why did it?

Question one, you write on your notepad. How did a fake potion manage to convert a human being?

You don’t write Sharon’s name. You can’t. That’s one block you can’t break, and so you circumvent it and move on.

Question two, you continue, scribbling. Is this a standard Newfoal, or is it anomalous?

By writing this you set the priority: you will discover just what the differences between the thing that you have in your possession (the thing that used to be Sharon, some part of you whispers, and you push that thought away), and every other one of its kind. There has to be a difference: there is no way it is a standard Newfoal. But even if it is, that, in and of itself, means that you will have learnt something.

For a moment the implications of what you will learn terrify you. There is no such thing as potion, you fear, only liquid medium, a conductor for terrible magicks, a placebo that the soldiers of the Solar Empire think will convert you. And when they think it does, it does.

That is a fear, you think, but it is not proven. This is the first time this has happened.

You pause. Isn't it?

The next thing on your list isn’t a question. It’s an imperative. You need to know if this is the first time, or if somehow, somewhere, this has happened before.

Get all files on Newfoals, anomalous and otherwise, that you can, you writer. Speak with Col. H. M. Find out if this is an isolated incident.

You’re always careful to use initials. The PHL are working with you, they always stress, except when they aren’t, except when people like Robert Gardner are giving interviews insulting you, except when there’s reports of your people being arrested, blocked, seemingly ignored, and even shot in ‘friendly fire’ situations.

Not a priority, you think, dismissing thoughts of Gardner from your mind. You’ll fix that problem when you’ve less important shit to worry about.

Question three, you write now. How can this progress the cure?

The cure. The reverse potion. A theory, they call it, and they’re half right.

“The problem,” one of your sciencey types said once, about a year before you got the Columbia, “is that we can almost guarantee fixing the body. There’s gotta be a magic for that. But the soul…”

There’s the rub. The soul. That thing that up until this line of research became a thing, you weren’t even sure existed. But now you know. And sure, there’s a certain joy in knowing that there’s a part of you that exists beyond death… but to know that this selfsame thing is being tortured in every single Newfoal…

It’s the sort of thing you shouldn’t think about, you think paradoxically. Or you’d go mad from grief.

But the existence of the soul complicates matters. How do you make the intangible tangible? How do you fix something that cannot be measured, cannot be repaired?

You keep writing, ignoring the magnitude of the question. What else can you do?

---

This is the Newfoal lying in a bed. She is sleeping, and looks peaceful. Perhaps she is peaceful. No one is there to tell otherwise.

No one physically, anyway.

Something is watching her, someone no one can see. This someone is watching to see if she is the one they are waiting for. They can’t tell yet: no one can.

“Where will you go?” this being asks the unconscious Newfoal, in a voice no one can hear. “What will you become?”

That is the question on everyone’s lips and on everyone’s mind throughout this ship. As scuttlebutt continues to spread like wildfire among the crew, the being wonders what the subject of that scuttlebutt would make of it, if anything.

And then there’s a noise at the door. A knock.

Ah, the being thinks. Now it begins.

---

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