Rainbow Dash struggled to blink her eyes into focus, despite them feeling heavy with sleep. The smell of alcohol and lingering trace of rot filled her nostrils as she came to, becoming increasingly aware as her vision focused on the purple unicorn in front of her.

"Well, I see you're awake!" Twilight exclaimed, rubbing her hooves together excitedly. "I couldn't exactly do this while you were asleep even though I drugged you - you need to be conscious for what we're going to be doing together."

"T-Twuh-Twilight?" the cyan pegasus mumbled, trying to move before realizing she was unable to. "Hey, what's going on?" Becoming less tired by the second, Rainbow struggled more forcefully, but her legs were strapped down and her wings pinned to the table. "Wh-What happened?"

"Oh, you must be still a bit drowsy from your sleep," came the response. "What happened was that I called you over to see a book that I-just-so-happened to find about the Wonderbolts and their history. You came over to read it, I injected you with a little benzodiazepine while you were reading it, and boom!" The unicorn slammed her front hooves together. "You were out like a light!" The last few words were accompanied by a chuckle.

The captive pony managed a laugh too, but it was forced with a touch of nervousness. "This... this has gotta be a joke, right? Holding me down and having me in a sort of weird laboratory place? Just a clever prank?"

Twilight shook her head, her somewhat demented smile twisting. "Nope, it's not a prank! I refurnished this place down here all by myself! You like it?"

For the first time, Rainbow Dash surveyed her surroundings - the scanners, the sharp-looking mechanisms, the spiders scuttling along near a dried blood patch which a cleansing apparatus brushed away; the pony skeletons that looked surprisingly real... she was speechless, and not in a good way.

"Amazing, huh?"

The pegasus's eyes darted around frantically, uncertain. It was amazing alright - amazingly terrifying. "Are..." she gulped, trying to reluctantly move her eyes toward two skeletons in her vision, seeing as she was otherwise immobile, "are those-?"

The purple unicorn followed her friend's eye movements to the picked-clean skeletal structures. "Real? Sure are!"

The blue pony's eyes widened in shock, pupils dilating. Twilight couldn't have-

"Oh, no, no, I didn't kill them," the scientist said hurriedly, noticing the look of horror in those wide rose eyes. "They were actually cadavers that I found. You know how some ponies donate their bodies to science after they die?" She paused, clearly awaiting an answer as her left eye twitched.

Rainbow nodded numbly, trying to will herself that this was just a horrible nightmare that she would wake up from.

"Well, I decided to... liberate a few of them and bring them here," the unicorn elaborated with a grin. "To examine pony anatomy, you know."

Rainbow breathed a sigh of relief. But that relief only lasted about ten seconds.

"But see those skeletons way over to your right?"

The gaze of Rainbow's eyes moved as far right as they could, and she could see the glimpse of one, just up to where a cutie mark would be. "I see... I see part of one."

"Well, there's two over there," Twilight clarified. "And those two, I killed."

The brief relief was drowned by terror now as Rainbow Dash's breath caught in her throat. Twilight had murdered ponies?! Killed them down here with this creepy science stuff? "How COULD you?!"

The only response she got was Twilight detailing precisely what she did. "They weren't going to live much longer anyway. I had to remove the coats and skin first, though sometimes the epidermis and fur were extremely hard to separate - that got annoying after a while."

This isn't happening, Rainbow Dash thought, closing her eyes. This isn't happening, this isn't happening... She then realized that having her eyes closed as Twilight spoke only had her imagine it all the worse, with no visuals to focus on. Tentatively, she opened her eyes again.

"Then once that was done, I removed the individual organs. Heart, intestines, stomach, you get the deal. I removed a few of them by hoof, and some of the others through the machinery when I needed them." She gestured to the remnants of blood on a few of the machines. "As expected, it all got a little messy, so I cleaned up most of it. Thought I'd keep a little to analyze the bacteria on it though."

Rainbow struggled to keep her breathing easy. Twilight was talking about taking out a pony's organs like she was going to get a cupcake from Sugarcube Corner. What had made her seem so deranged as to do that? It made her want to vomit.

"I left the brain for last in the living ones" the unicorn said casually, moving away from the strapped-down pegasus to hold up a jar with said organ floating around in it. "I wanted to really analyze every bit of it - the right and left sides, the cortex, the hippocampus - and I wrote it all down in my notebook over there." She trotted back over to her subject. "Pages are a primary source of information, one of the only true ways for information to be accurately passed down through generations!" Twilight raised her voice by the end, as if she were talking proudly to a literary audience, before going back to a more conversational tone. "So, I've got to get every little detail down. Every. Single. One."

She poked Rainbow's chest on the last three words to emphasize her point.

"And after I sterilized the skeletons and had examined all the organs of those ordinary ponies-"

Rainbow Dash opened her mouth to ask what her friend meant by 'ordinary ponies', but Twilight raised her hoof in a 'Let me finish' gesture.

"-I knew that I had a good preparation under my hooves - working on live ponies is very different from working on dead ones."

The captured pony trembled slightly. Was Twilight implying that she was going to do some awful experiments to her?

"As to what I meant by 'ordinary ponies', hehehe," without warning, the unicorn placed a sort of helmet firmly on the captive pony's head, hooking it up to a scanner, "you're going to be the first one to find out, Dash!" The unicorn raised her head in laughter, her mane noticeably becoming disheveled.

Dash's breathing and heart rate increased, which showed clearly on Twilight's monitor with a pulsing, glowing diagram and a rush of numbers.

"Good, seems like the equipment is working ship-shape!" the unicorn said brightly. "The rate of oxygen going into your lungs has increased by about 10%. Keep it up and you'll be at 20%!"

The pegasus moved her wings frantically, trying in vain to escape, but it was no use. She could barely even move her wings to start with, let alone attempt to fly and break free.

"Ah, now you're at 20%!" the unicorn exclaimed, jotting down some notes with a gleeful laugh. "Careful, I don't want your lungs to explode, but especially not your heart. If your loyalty isn't in your brain, we might find bit of it there. And in any case, I can't find your loyalty properly if you end up dying from your heart exploding."

Now Rainbow Dash's terror was increased at the thought of her dying, but she also felt confused at Twilight's words. Loyalty? She knew of course that she had power of the Element of Loyalty, but what did that have to do with her friend's messed-up behavior? "What do you mean?"

"Well, you see," Twilight explained, "carefully examining the bodies of those two ponies over there gave me all the first-hand notes I need as to how a pony's body works ordinarily. You know, no Elements of Harmony involved. Think of how long the Elements of Harmony had for the most part been forgotten by ponydom."

She moved toward the table placed underneath the giant-egg-beater-and-scalpel device, disconnecting the snaps on the wheels which kept the table in place, wheeling it away. As she trotted back over to the table that Rainbow Dash was strapped down to, Twilight continued to talk as she unhooked the helmet from Rainbow's head, setting it aside. Following that, she freed the wheels at the table from their hold at the base to make it mobile, listening with satisfaction as she heard the other pony's breathing increase into short gasps.

"You know how many books I've found that detail the Elements of Harmony? Only two: the reference guide and the brief mention of them in the book where the Mare in the Moon tale was mentioned. That's it. Nothing about their history, nature, et cetera. Nothing that explains what causes the Elements to be housed inside a specific pony."

The pegasus frantically tried to struggle even more as the table where she lay was wheeled over to the large machine, eyes widened in terror as she looked up to stare at the egg beater-looking apparatus with the looming #10 scalpel blade glinting above her head. "Twilight, let me go!"

"I counted out the process being a spiritual passing thing," Twilight went on, ignoring her friends' protests, "because if that were the case that would imply that one could only wield an Element's power once the previous owner had died. But Celestia and Luna are still around, and Celestia was able to use all six of them. And when Nightmare Moon seemed at first to destroy the Elements, there was a certain spark that allowed them to be used by us. Something within us." She briefly went out of Dash's sight again as she bent down to secure the table's wheels into place. "So I figured it had to be a certain biological spark that only can be found in certain ponies. And you are going to help test my hypothesis."

It was then that Rainbow Dash caught on to exactly what Twilight intended to do. Twilight was going to try to find the Element of Loyalty from within her! She tried to move her legs as much as she could to get out. But the metal cuffs still held firm, unrelenting no matter how much the athletic pony tried to kick. Worse than the rock that had pinned her wing back at Ghastly Gorge.

"Hey, don't waste all your energy, Dash," Twilight warned. "I haven't even really started the procedure yet!"

Whether it was because she was growing tired or because the scientist's statement had stunned her, Rainbow slowly began to stop struggling, though her breath was still quickened. "Can't you just, I don't know, take an X-Ray or something and let me go?!" Her voice didn't have her ordinary confident bravado; it was now bordering on terror.

"Sorry," Twilight said with a wave of her hoof, pressing a few select buttons on the mechanism above and turning a few dials. "What if Discord returned, or the Windigos, or a power worse than that? What if the Elements of Harmony would be needed again, but no one would know how to find them in certain ponies, what to look for? The ones meant to next wield the Elements might be unknown, and it could be too late". She looked at her friend with an almost pitying expression, but having a glimmer of urgency. "Don't you want to help with that? Don't you want to help further science, our defense mechanism of friendship? Don't you?!"

Rainbow Dash was breathing heavily, keeping a determination in her gaze. But that faltered along with her voice. "I just want to get OUT OF HERE!" she shouted. "SOMEPONY HELP!"

"It's no use shouting," Twilight chided, glancing upward as she pressed a green button on the far right of the egg-beater-scalpel-thing's control panel. With that, the table began to tilt vertically, so that the pegasus's rainbow-colored mane was directly under the mechanism itself. "We're about half a mile underground, and in any case I've made the walls soundproof."

Rose eyes uneasily glanced upward at the dangerous-looking equipment above, awaiting its master's command. "L-Let me go! Please, Twilight!"

Twilight didn't immediately reply. Her hoof hovered over a lever as she looked Rainbow Dash in the eyes. "Do you know why I chose you first?"

The captive pony shuddered, but said nothing. The nightmare-atmosphere was something that she wanted to ignore. But this all felt to real to be a nightmare. Despite the cold, murderous, forsaken dungeon of a place, and Twilight's insane logic, Rainbow Dash knew that that this was no nightmare.

"It's because of your element being loyalty. If you noticed one of our friends - like Pinkie Pie, for example - vanished under mysterious circumstances and it seemed something bad had happened - especially if they were in mortal danger - you'd search high and low until you found them. That kind of relentless searching would have had me get found out, so I figured I'd start with the pony who would be most likely discover what was happening." The unicorn shot her friend a demented smile. "And I think that I'll see just how far that loyalty can go."

With that, the lever was pulled, and the apparatus began to whir to life. The egg-beater-like part lowered slightly, but otherwise stayed motionless. The scalpel, on the other hand, moved slowly down toward Rainbow Dash's head.

Rainbow flailed, trying to move, but the tight metal grip around her head prevented her from moving it at all. Cold sweat dripped down the pegasus's face, her heart was pounding in her chest, and her eyes were moving around wildly. And the smell of alcohol and organs wasn't helping matters, only increasing her fear and bringing her back to the reality of where she was. "Twilight, don't! Please, DON'T!"

"No use flailing," Twilight reminded her. "You'll just tire yourself. And if you move, the #10 scalpel won't be able to slice through to your skull properly."

That only caused the captive to attempt escape even more, but her head was unable to budge. Her rainbow-colored mane hung around her head, but other than her mane now looking disheveled, trying to get her head free had no effect.

The sharp surgical instrument lowered itself closer and closer to the pegasus's head, slowly cutting off part of her mane, inching closer and closer to her skin. Finally, the scalpel connected with the pony's epidermis, beginning to slice through.

"NO! PLEASE, STOP! NO!"

Rainbow Dash cried out at the pain that was going through her head like fire, screaming as the sharp edge cut down deep, severing muscle and tendons all the way down to her skull, the blade impacting the skull in a way that sent a vibration through her head. After getting to the proper depth to graze the pony's cranial cap, the blade began to slowly carve around in a large circular motion, extending around to most of her head. The screams emitting from Rainbow's mouth intensified as the motion of the scalpel continued onward, cutting through the layers of skin and muscle which guarded the skull, splitting each part it came in contact with, causing a little more blood to flow as it was cut away.

"Good thing we're underground and I have the walls soundproofed," Twilight said as if Rainbow wasn't screaming at all. "Otherwise your screaming would be heard by everypony. Don't worry, that scalpel will be done hitting your nerves in a few seconds."

Those seconds couldn't come quickly enough for Rainbow Dash, but at last she felt the blade slowly pull out from her head, taking a few remains of blood and remnants of muscle along with it. All that attached that cut part of her skin and muscle to her head was the part within the circle's diameter. Rainbow's breath came out in heavy, gasping sobs, and tears ran down her face as the pain stayed with her, stinging and pulsing.

Twilight quickly got a cleansing cloth and a plastic bag as she retrieved the scalpel from its grip on the machine. Taking care not to spill any of the blood, she wiped the remnants off of the scalpel and guided them into the plastic bag. "For analysis purposes, of course." Quickly after, the mare got a bit of her sterilizing alcohol and used it to sanitize the scalpel. She wasn't finished using it yet.

"Still awake, Rainbow?"

Dash didn't answer. Her teeth were clenched as she tried without success to hold in her sobs. What little was left of her mane was splattered with blood, a wide and deep crimson circle etched within her head that was still pulsing in waves of pain.

Unfortunately, even after all she had been through, the torment was far from over.

The demented unicorn cantered over to the control panel once again and pressed another button, a whirring noise activating the egg-beater thing above. In a few quick seconds as it lowered, the apparatus split open so that the egg-beater appearance was now a wide, claw-like grip. Lowering as its target managed to look up with scared, pain-filled eyes, the claw-grip fit snugly into the cut-in circle that the scalpel had carved, slowly lifting it up to remove it.

Dash screamed as the claw-grip, too, dug in to the point on brushing against her skull. Even worse than the scalpel, the claws dug in under the diameter of the circle of skin, severing any clinging remnants of muscle still tethered to the skull. It was as if someone had lit a match just above Dash's skull and was burning the muscles and tendons away. Her body convulsed as she screamed, trying to grip her way out, trying to will herself to be free from this torture and pain.

Like a twisted jack-o'-lantern, the claw-grip slowly dug underneath and lifted that cut-out circle out of the pony's head. Now her skull could clearly be seen to Twilight - more specifically, the part of her skull that would need to be removed in order to get to her brain as the skin circle was discarded from the machine. She'd have it all sewn up again later.

"Now, there's a little more before we really can find that spark."

Rainbow was panicked, beginning to slip from consciousness. What was it that her friend had in store for her? Could she even call Twilight her friend now?

In a flash, Twilight returned with the scalpel, now sterilized and ready. "Soon we're going to really test your loyalty."

Dash cried out and winced with each jolt of the saw slicing through her skull. She hadn't ever expected this to happen. She just wanted to go home, be away from all this.

"TWi-TWILIGHT! PLEASE, LET ME GO!"

"Ah ah ah, we still have a bit of work to do," the scientist said in a scolding tone. Raising the machine back to its former position, Twilight brought a platform over herself so that she was high enough to reach a proper view of the pony's skull.

"I can't do the procedure sideways," the unicorn explained to her sobbing captive. "After getting your skull open, I mean, but starting out like this makes it easier. Efficiency gets things done faster!"

Rainbow didn't care about efficiency getting things done faster - she wanted this to have never happened to begin with. She wanted to escape, or wake up and find that this was all a nightmare. Something, anything... "P-Please..." Rainbow's voice was fading, growing tired from the agony and slipping away.

Twilight was about to lower the scalpel into the pegasus's skull, but then she noticed that her subject was quickly falling unconscious. No, that couldn't happen! "Hold on, I seem to have forgotten something," The unicorn set the scalpel down briefly and trotted to a cabinet, looking through a myriad of tools and syringes, finally picking a syringe that seemed to be just the one she was looking for. Closing the metallic cabinet, the deranged pony hurried over and injected the helpless pony with the needle.

Despite the pain she was in, with the pinch of the needle only adding to it, Rainbow Dash felt a sort of energy through her. Not the kind of energy that would aid her her being stronger to try to escape; this energy was simply keeping her awake. Sleep did not take her away from the agony, though she longed for it to.

"It's adrenaline," Twilight explained, coming up to the platform and picking up the scalpel again, "it should keep you awake for as long as I need to do this." She laughed, lowering the surgical tool again. "Now, where was I?" Carefully steadying her hoof, she dug the scalpel into the shining white skull, ignoring the screams and pleas of her friend as the sound of bone cracking reached her eardrums. She only cut a specific area - just enough to reveal the brain - but Rainbow was still crying from the blade slicing through bone.

At last, Twilight lifted the scalpel away and went to place it on a nearby table. What happened next, however, brought Rainbow Dash no relief. Only more terror.

Twilight hooked up another machine to the table where her captive was suspended from, wires being placed and wrapped around Rainbow's limbs, with a few others directly near the thinking organ. The machine these wires connected to looked to Dash like a combination of an X-Ray machine and a heart monitor. It also had a dial on it, and that dial...

Oh no.

Even in Dash's weakened, terrified state, she realized what the dial was. It was a dial that controlled the level of electricity. Twilight was going to shock her!

"TWILIGHT, NO!" Dash begged. "PLEASE, STOP! NO MORE!"

"Now now, Dashie," the scientist said as if she were talking to a small child, "I have to do this to get a reaction from your brain. Your brain stores memories - of your former actions, your friends, yourself..." She laughed as she patted the top of Dash's head, just around the skull. "It shows you who to be loyal to. If I can manipulate that..."

Dash's terror only grew, now knowing the full extent of Twilight's plan. She was going to tamper with her emotions, her memories. The deranged pony was so desperate to find that Element that she- "NO! TWILIGHT, NO!"

Twilight only smiled, switching the machine on with a spark and turning up the dial. A powerful electrical shock went through Rainbow Dash, her limbs convulsing and twitching from the electricity surging through them. The shock while intensely painful, didn't last as long as the other experiment... Rainbow felt a glimmer of hope - was it over?

"I was just testing it," Twilight clarified at the short duration of the shock treatment. "Now I know that I can administer the shocks to your brain properly."

Rainbow's hope was crushed.

"Every movement and brainwave is now being recorded on that machine. Since I've analyzed everything in normal ponies, I'll know when there's a difference and exactly when it occurs. Once the genetic quality of the Element shows itself, I'll get the spark out and analyze its genetic signature. Then it might be a bit easier to find it in the others."

"No, you CAN'T!"

"Oh Dash, you're tied down, and it's just us down here," Twilight rambled as she came over and picked up a long, pointed instrument. "I can do whatever I want." She came closer with the instrument, and as the unicorn came closer she pressed a button on its side. A faint spark manifested itself on the pointed end, as Rainbow watched with horrified eyes. "Now, Loyalty, where are you?"

With that, Twilight leaned over part of Dash's brain and poked it with the charged instrument.

Dash screamed as the neurons in her brain were shocked, their pathways shifting slightly. Images flashed before her eyes, which revealed themselves on Twilight's monitor. Mental images of setting her own goals and dreams, of helping out her friends. Memories that, even through the pain, brought the suffering pegasus a glimmer of hope, of happiness.

"Even when you were under Discord's influence, you had loyalty. A loyalty to Cloudsdale, even if Discord had corrupted your view of it. Loyalty was still there in some form, the effect wasn't neutralized completely. Huh, perhaps if Discord did this brain work he would have found it." The unicorn raised the small instrument over Dash's brain. "But let's change things up a bit."

With another shock to the brain, to the hippocampus, things began to change.

The images that came to Rainbow became twisted and distorted, images that only she would see were it not for the monitor that revealed them to the other. Images of her friends being twisted, unrelenting, even abusive.

"You think anyone cares for you, Rainbow?" Vision-Fluttershy said. "Well, you thought wrong!"

Vision-Pinkie kicked Rainbow to the ground, holding her down and looking at her wing, a knife in her hoof. "Want to help me make cupcakes, Dashie? You look like you could really help with them!"

"Try another Sonic Rainboom," Vision-Twilight taunted. "If you aren't careful you might die from crashing into something at that speed."

It was clear that, with every shock, the pain for Rainbow Dash grew. She screamed in utter agony, whether from the shocking that Twilight was doing to her or the visions that warped her mind. Altering her memories. "Hey, the brain fills in memory gaps anyway, so you can't be sure if an experience really happened the way you remember it. I'm just changing things up."

Rainbow shouted through her pain, trying to brush these visions away. "STOP! YOU'RE NOT REAL, YOU'RE NOT REAL!"

But the visions were relentless, unyielding. Rainbow's friends - could she call them "friends" in these visions? - tortured her, trapped her, maimed her. And she felt every bit of it, thanks to the way that Twilight was altering her sensory input as well. Every cut, every taunt, every hack of a saw or knife that caused her blood to splatter. Physically she'd recover, according to the events of the memories. Emotionally, however, she would not.

The biological readings, for an instant, changed. Like something was showing itself in Rainbow's body. In her brain, where her memories were stored.

"NO! NO! Y-YOU'RE NOT!" Rainbow screamed, writhing, trying to get away, the agony becoming too much, physical and emotional. The fabricated "memories" were overwhelming her. "Y-Y-YOU'RE N-NOT MY F-F-F-FRIENDS!" She attempted to move, to kick them away, her eyes revealing anger. "F-F-Friends? W-W-What ARE they?!"

Another change.

"Well, well, now we're getting somewhere," Twilight said eagerly. "It seems I've broken your loyalty to your friends..."

"What are... f-f-friends?" Rainbow Dash gasped out, her breathing heavy, tears streaming down her face. She had become so broken that she couldn't remember what friendship was. All she remembered was pain.

"Now time to break your loyalty to Cloudsdale."

"C-Cloudsda-"

Another firm shock, focusing on a different part of her memories. Cloudsdale, her former home. Any happiness there became short-lived.

The Weather Factory, where Rainbow had once showed them, became twisted. The fabricated memory took place when Rainbow was younger - going backwards in time would have a more lasting effect, a built in mistrust Other pegasi dragged Rainbow, terrified, to another part of the factory, hidden. There was a machine, a machine that had the colors of the rainbow pouring out of it. She watched in terror as before her memory-altered eyes, one of the head pegasi there - a dark red one - trapped a helpless younger one in, probably one just out of flight school like herself in the "memory", and had them torn to shreds as they were killed to make the flowing colors of rainbows.

She watched this happen again and again as Twilight looked at the monitor. Nopony really knew how rainbows were made - this could in fact, be the true explanation. But either way, it would break Rainbow's loyalty to the city where she had lived once.

The scene shifted, as another pegasus - a gray-blue one with a green stripe through her blue mane- brought Rainbow herself to a similar machine and brought her closer, slicing the very tip of her hoof, to which Rainbow cried out. From within her bounds the pony screamed and gasped, wings fluttering to try to get away.

"Be lucky we haven't done more to you," hissed the lead pegasus. "Perhaps you could be of some use." He got close to the broken pegasus. "The other bits of weather are made in the same way. Failure pegasi. At least, to a small degree."

Twilight knew for a fact that was untrue - Rainbow Dash had showed them herself as to how the other aspects of weather were made. But corrupting Rainbow's memories would further her doubt and fear. Fracture her loyalty.

"The rainbows are their main use, of course. We've got to get the colors somehow, so we use the total remains for that. The other aspects only have a little in them, they're not as hard to make."

Rainbow shuddered, both within the "memory" and without.

Within the memory, Rainbow Dash believed she had never gotten her cutie mark. She had performed the Sonic Rainboom, but no mark accompanied it.

And Twilight decided to make the memory worse. She was going to get Rainbow to do her job for her. After all, Rainbow's book truly needed the marks for her cover. So she leaned over and administered a few more alterations to the broken pony's neural synapses.

"We ought to give you your mark now," a tall, jet-black pegasus hissed.

"M-My mark?" Rainbow Dash gasped out. Even with what had happened outside her body, the pain was more primarily focused on this memory, so her head was for the moment released from the focus of her trauma.

"Yes." The blue-gray mare from before casually trotted over to another device that stored part of the rainbow colors in a tank, probably in storage from that dreaded part of the Factory. Getting a long metal rod with a shape carved into it, she poured colors into it and watched them swirl. "Hold her down tighter!"

The other pegasi complied, restraining Rainbow and holding her down, so that her bare flanks were exposed. The young cyan pegasus struggled and cried, trying to get herself free.

Twilight strongly suspected what was coming in this alteration. But if I burnt the marks with an iron to accompany this, her marks would get scorched. What kind of book cover would that be? So she continued to watch, taking down notes with each reaction.

A gray pegasus chuckled and showed the mark to Rainbow. It was basically the shape of her cutie mark. There was a burning pain on each of her flanks as the cyan pony thrashed, forming her mark with the rainbow remains of unfortunate pegasi. Rainbow Dash screamed as the mark was mixed into her skin, seeping through.

The pegasus shrieked aloud in agony, the "memory" from the alteration coming into her waking world. "NO! PLEASE, PLEASE, STOP!"

As Twilight observed the torrent of altered memories, she realized that now, as far as Rainbow Dash was concerned, her mark had been given to her by the murderous ponies of Cloudsdale. It wasn't something she got naturally. It was something she got because the place she had grown up in tortured her, hated her.

"I'LL GET RID OF YOU!" Rainbow Dash screeched as she flailed around, though whether she was talking to Twilight or the ponies of her memories or both, it couldn't be said for sure. The adrenaline and power of the memories was giving some strength back to her voice, but it was a voice filled with agony and terror. "THESE MARKS! THEY'RE EVIL! THEY ONLY REMIND ME OF PAIN! I'LL RUN! I'LL GET AWAY FROM YOU, ALL OF YOU, AND YOU'LL DIE! EVERY TRACE OF THIS TERRIBLE CITY!"

Twilight grinned as she took some more notes, analyzing the effects that these memory-alterations were having on her subject. There was another pulse in the signature, a faint red light. As if the Element's essence was beginning to separate itself from its place in the captive's brain.

Hurrying again over to her syringe cabinet, she picked up two particular ones, one filled with a milky white liquid and one containing a light blue substance. Then, as an afterthought, she put down the one that held the blue liquid. I won't be able to analyze her mental break for too long if I make her hypersensitive to pain... I just might save this. Cantering back to the table her subject was suspended from, examined her subject, waiting for the perfect time to insert this substance into the pony.

The pony was brought back to the present from the pain in her head, coming out of her memory-trauma state. She wasn't sure whether it was those ponies who used the strange word "friends" or the monsters of Cloudsdale. She had loyalty to no one. No one except herself. Everypony else she mistrusted and hated, and everything to go along with them.

And that loyalty to herself would be the last thing to go.

Through the haze of pain that was coming back to her, Rainbow Dash opened her eyes, the visuals of the memories leaving. She took one look at Twilight and snarled at the sight of another pony, though she was now barely able to move.

"Rainbow, Rainbow, Rainbow Dash."

"Y-You know m-my-?!" the weakened pony gasped. She was in such a delirious state that she had no idea how anypony could know her name, believing she had excluded herself from ponykind as much as possible. "H-How... I n-never told-"

"Never mind that," the unicorn interrupted. "Now, there's one thing I need you to do for me."

Weakened as she was, Rainbow allowed a gaze of hatred to fill her eyes. "N-Never... can't t-t-trust a-anyone." Even in her trembling voice, she managed to spit out the words, even as she cried out from the burning pain in her head when Twilight touched it.

"Have you no loyalty?"

"O-Only t-to... myself," came the gasped reply, the pony's body hanging limp. The adrenaline drug was still in effect, keeping her awake and preventing unconsciousness from coming.

Twilight grinned. "That was exactly what I hoped to hear.". She quickly picked up the syringe and inserted its milk-white contents into Rainbow Dash. She observed a differing pattern in the pony's brainwaves - her sense of reality was altered, confused. She placed her hoof now on Rainbow's flank, just over her cutie mark. "These marks are from Cloudsdale, aren't they?"

The pegasus froze.

The unicorn smiled, watching carefully and calculating as the look in Rainbow Dash's eyes became distorted, mistrustful, angry. "As long as you have them, you can't truly be free."

A pause. The pony looked down at her own body. Stared at the marks on her flanks, as if they were all she could see. The one thing she focused on.

She didn't care that they were part of her own body. She wasn't even aware of it.

All she was aware of were that these marks were from Cloudsdale. From that evil, evil place. That forsaken factory of pain and torment. Keeping her there. These marks reminded her of that. The mark of the Factory. The City.

They had to go.

Rainbow bared her teeth, tried to lean over to her own flank, just as Twilight pressed a switch on the wired connection to untangle their grip on Rainbow's limbs, and pressed the button on the table's side to release the fading pegasus from her bounds. She fell to the ground, landing hard on the metal. But all that mattered to her were the marks. With a wild, frantic look in her eyes, the broken pony leaned over fiercely to her own flank and began to tear her own skin off as hard as she could.

The pain became unbearable. The pegasus screamed in agony, but the main desire was to rid herself of these marks. To destroy them from her sight. Her loyalty to herself was completely gone.

"AAAH! I'll kill you!" Rainbow bit her own muscle with her teeth and pulled hard at the tendons, going beyond the skin to get the horrible marks off. "Hahaha, you think, aaah! You think you'll r-r-run?!" The pegasus laughed insanely even as her mouth was filled with her own blood, chewing on her own muscle like a cannibal. "Not from me!"

Rainbow Dash had lost all her former loyalty. And sanity.

The machine that tracked her biological signature went haywire at her brain as a bright red light, like a tumor, appeared at the pony's brain. The component of the Element of Loyalty was now detached, with the pony whom it belonged to no longer needing it. Like getting a tumor in a limb and having to get it amputated. Eagerly, Twilight quickly grabbed a pair of tongs and removed the orb-shaped, sparking energy form while the other pony flailed, placing the Element in a jar for now.

She now had the component she needed - it might be a bit easier to find the others - but she still was definitely taking notes on all this. It was an experiment, seeing just how far Rainbow would break. And breaking she was indeed, her brainwaves pulsing with anger and desperation and hate. Luckily the skull and brain were intact enough to be still secure in her head.

The pegasus coughed and spluttered, tearing off part of her right flank with a harsh rip, throwing the mark off to the side as the blood attached to the underside stained the metal floor. "I-I'll kill you!" she gasped. "Die, stinking Cloudsdale! All of you! THESE MARKS MUST GO!" The last phrase was turned into a howl of pain as she tore off some of her own muscle. Uncaring about the pain, or perhaps even too delirious to notice, Rainbow turned and bit and tore at her left flank, tearing desperately at her flesh to get the mark away.

Twilight was taking notes furiously now, analyzing the drug's effects. It was doing just as she had hoped - Rainbow Dash's perspective was so warped that she wanted all connection to other ponies to be severed. And she was providing covers for Twilight's book. Perfect. She wondered if the effects would have further potency.

They did.

Rainbow Dash was in a complete mad delirium. All she saw were those marks, the marks that she believed connected her to Cloudsdale. Her mind, her loyalty was completely shattered, even to her own body.

Amidst the cries of pain and tearing of her own flesh and muscle, nearly coming to the bones of her own skeleton, frantic words flew out of Rainbow Dash's mouth.

"I-I... I'll KILL THEM! ALL! All connections - they'll be SEVERED!" The pony bit off her own tendons around the cutie mark, stripping it, too, from her as she screamed. "Severed, haha - ha!" Tearing off her muscle, she tried to stand, seeing something that only she could see, but she only fell to the ground instead. From Twilight's monitor, it was the red stallion of the factory.

"See this pain?! Ha - look! Your marks can't hold me! What would having them mean to you? That I'm loyal?!" She spat the word "loyal" as if it were the worst word a pony could say. "What is loyalty?! I - agh! I have none! Look! YOUR MARKS ARE GONE!"

A pause in the frantic shouts as the pegasus tugged at one of her own wings, biting it and tearing off a chunk, gnawing at the bone, screaming from pain and at the same time shouting insults. Twilight guessed that the deranged pegasus was doing this to further sever herself from Cloudsdale - if she attacked her own wings, she wouldn't be like them.

Rainbow thought she was attempting to kick the red pony to the ground. But really she was attacking herself. Her skin, her blood, everything. The pony stared directly at the blood pooling from her, but according to the monitor, all she saw were other, menacing ponies, ready to attack her. She didn't care that the blood was her own. She just wanted to escape, get away.

"Look!" she coughed on her own blood, wearing a demented smile. "LOOK! No marks on me noooowww!"

A pause. Pained, she listened to the words of the other ponies, only heard to her in her mind, made known to Twilight through the monitor.

"The marks bleed within you, remember?"

Twilight echoed the words aloud. This would be interesting, the drug was having a much greater effect than anticipated. She could have simply ended Rainbow's suffering right then and there, but it was an interesting process for her to watch.

Breathing heavily and frantically, snarling, frothing at the mouth, the traumatized pegasus dug deeper into her flanks, biting, threatening to tear all shreds of muscle in her own legs clean off. She tore at herself, going down her legs and even starting to bite at her front legs, watching her blood and muscle escape her body's confines, though her flanks were still her primary target. There were screams, but also mad fits of laughter as she chewed into her own muscle, swallowing it as if she were starving in her self-cannibalistic desperation.

Primarily alternating between one flank and the other, losing a lot of blood from her myriad of self-mutilations, Rainbow Dash spat out more angry words. "Can't... if I tear out veins... no blood to flow then! I'll purge my cursed blood of them! A little more and I'll break FREE! FREE from your false LOYALTY!"

The unicorn looked on as the other pony's body convulsed, seizing up at the trauma of flesh and muscle being torn off from bone. She could see the brightness in those small, darting rose eyes leaving, fading, dying.

Taking effort to swallow more of her own flesh and muscle, the pegasus's efforts were weakening. Her snarling diminished to angry breathing, but her eyes still had a look of hatred.

Blood dripping from her mouth, Rainbow Dash's eyes managed to turn away from her cutie mark as fast as possible and focus on Twilight. "Heheh."

Twilight leaned in a little closer, noting detail after detail even as Rainbow was struggling to speak.

The final look in Rainbow Dash's eyes seemed partially directed at Twilight, partially to her memories, and partially to herself. To every bit of loyalty that had been severed from her.

"The... The marks will curse you t-too... I HATE you..."

With those spiteful words toward her three-way severed connections of loyalty, Rainbow Dash's head lowered completely. The brain activity within stopped at last.

Twilight smiled as Rainbow Dash left the world. Those words that she had said all showed just how far Rainbow's loyalty had been broken - much greater than anticipated.

She looked at the jar that contained the Loyalty Essence - she had the data itself, and with the measurements that had been taken by the equipment she could get it more fully.

The unicorn looked at the bleeding body of her friend. The muscles were torn, and the pegasus had nearly - but not quite - bitten at her skeletal structure. It worked out well - now she'd have a skeletal model of Rainbow Dash. She decided that she'd probably sew up the skin - it was mainly the muscle that the pegasus had devoured anyway.

Except...

Twilight went over to where the parts of Rainbow's skin were that held the cutie marks. "Just gotta clean these up a little, and then attach them - nice new cover for the book!"

Then she realized she needed to get quite a few laminations to house the organs in - they, along with the notes taken on Rainbow's progress, would make up the "pages". A full comprehensive book on her dear friend Rainbow Dash.

The scientific mare knew she had a lot of cleaning up to do - cleaning everything, getting Rainbow Dash's parts in order, and soon deciding to pick out her next victim.

"It was nice knowing you, Rainbow. But I have a few preparations to do."