"HAAIAIIGH!"

Twilight's shriek split the air in the dimly lit hallway. She leapt backwards a full ten feet, flapping and scrambling, to land in Flash Sentry's forelimbs. "Don't look!" she squealed, burying her face in Flash's neck and covering his face with her wing, trying to block his view from their certain doom.

Flash staggered backward on his hind hooves, cradling the new princess in his forelimbs and flapping his wings for balance. To his relief the other guards leapt to the defense of their princess and their unfortunately encumbered captain, jumping around them to block the way, spears at the ready.  "Hold!" one of them shouted.

"No no, don't anypony look at it directly! Close your eyes!" Twilight insisted. Everypony froze. They held that tableau for several seconds, eyes scrunched shut, before a youthful voice dry with derision spoke up.

"Guys... it's a statue. I don't think you have to worry." Spike gave the aforementioned statuette a poke with one claw. The "tink" of claw on stone was audible. Blushing furiously, Twilight climbed down out of Flash Sentry's arms. She gave the hapless captain of the guard a miffed look, as if blaming him for the mishap, then turned her attention back to the alarming sculpture as if the sight of her Captain annoyed her. Flash shrugged in helpless bafflement to her dragon assistant; Spike merely gave him a shrug of resignation in return.

"Why the devil is there a statue of a cockatrice in a hospital hallway?" she demanded of noone in particular.

And indeed it was; a life sized marble statue of a cockatrice. The sculpture was standing atop a marble half-pillar, its wings mantled and its thick snake tail spiraling down the pillar. It was, for some inexplicable reason, wearing thick welding goggles.

"I do apologize," said Doctor Elixir. The head physician was escorting them through the hospital. He made his way forward through the group and stood beside the statue. "I probably should have warned you before we came to this wing." He rested one paternal hoof on the statue's back. "This is Henrietta, the very first cockatrice in Our Lady of Sunrise Hospital's emergency petrifaction program."

"Emergency petrifaction?" Flash said. He hastily clamped his mouth shut when Princess Twilight gave him a glare.

"I gave you a summary in the dossier for today's schedule," she said irritably. "Didn't you read it?"

"I, er, yes, your highness... that is I... skimmed it," he said, carefully keeping his face neutral. That was all the time I had for it and the other six OTHER dossiers you sent me today, he finished silently. He managed to keep from saying it out loud. But only barely.

Things had become a bit tense between the new princess and her Captain of the Guard. His loose management style was driving her up the wall. From his side, her demands for ever-increasing amounts of pre-planning, scheduling and listmaking was reaching a breaking point where he could either do his job, or spend his entire day documenting it. Both of them had resorted to rather childish extremes; him dashing off the most rudimentary paperwork he could get away with, her sending it back to be redone in triplicate, him sticking it in his "in" box and "losing" or "forgetting" it...

Twilight groaned and rolled her eyes. "Hey, give him a break, Twilight," Spike said. "I was about to ask the same thing." Spike, as their go-between, was starting to get a little sick of it all. He'd taken to "accidentally" torching a lot of the scutwork when Twilight wasn't looking.

"Et Tu, Spike?" Twilight Sparkle said. She sighed. "Petrifaction means 'turn to stone.' The Lady of Sunrise Hospital uses petrification spells to, well, preserve badly injured or dangerously sick ponies until they can be gotten proper medical help. It's saved hundreds of lives."

"Thousands, I would say," Doctor Elixir said. "We began using the method over fifty years ago, once safe and reliable depetrification methods were perfected. Nowadays we have better alternatives, but back then we really didn't have enough unicorns on staff capable of a proper petrifying spell, so we kept a stable of hoof-raised cockatrices on grounds for the job. Henrietta here was the first. Seems one of the doctors on staff back then, Time Heals, had been doing research into petrification spells, and he was out in the field trying to catch some cockatrice hatchlings to bring back to the lab when one of his colleagues was badly injured in a rockslide. They would never get back to a hospital in time. Doctor Heals had a brainstorm. He got the hatchling they'd caught, made it stare into his injured partner's eyes, and--" the doctor shrugged. "They got him back to the hospital, depetrified him and patched him up. Since then it's been standard procedure for every emergency responder team to carry a cockatrice with them, for just that purpose."

"Cool," Spike said.

"This," Elixir said, gesturing grandly around him, "Is the Henrietta wing. It's a section of the hospital set aside for patients who are under long-term petrifaction."

"Those with... terminal illnesses," Twilight said.

"For the most part, yes. There are also a few volunteers--- ponies who undergo petrifaction for research purposes, so we can study the effects of being turned to stone for prolonged periods of time." Elixir stepped to one of the doors lining the hall. "Here, let me show you..." He pushed the door open. On the other side was a dimly lit hospital room. Inside, on a flat bed of excelsior where a hospital bed would normally be, lay a stone statue of a unicorn pony, couchant. Her head was up and looking ahead, with a slightly apprehensive, yet determined look on her face, as if she had steeled herself to look at whatever had been before her sightless eyes... Twilight remembered red, glowing eyes and shuddered. A nurse was sitting beside the statue, reading aloud from a paperback novel. She looked up when Doctor Elixir opened the door but he silently signaled her to go about her business.

"They can hear?" Twilight asked. She recalled what a certain draconequus had told them after being depetrified.

"Some of them," the head doctor said. "Some can see, some can hear, some can't. It varies from pony to pony, much as it does for those in a coma. We make a point of treating all of them as if they can... read to them daily, newspapers, their favorite books, that sort of thing. One fellow came out after ten years speaking fluent Neighponese."

The nurse nodded, but still set the book down. "I think that's where we'll stop today, miss Daisy Chain," she said, moving about the statue. "We need to do your checkup now..." she proceeded to examine the petrified pony from end to end.

"What's she doing?" Spike said.

"Checking Miss Chain's condition," Elixir said. "Monitoring for any change in the petrificiation, as well as checking for chips, cracks, that sort of thing."

"ouch," Spike muttered.

"Oh, it's less serious than it sounds... depending on the type of petrification, in fact, cracking often is just a sign that the petrification is spontaneously reversing. When it isn't... well, we've actually brought back a pony who was shattered in half. Just magically glued the pieces back together and unpetrified him," Elixir said. "In those cases there are detrimental aftereffects. Scarring, nerve damage, phantom pains, separation trauma. So we naturally want to avoid anything like that as much as possible. Hence the  bedding." He pointed at the bed of shavings the petrified pony sat in.

He picked up the clipboard at the end of the pony's 'bed' and looked it over. "Ah let's see. Miss Daisy Chain, age forty three, admitted for a congenital heart defect. She volunteered to undergo petrification until a donor heart became available for transplant." He smiled. "Well, we have some good news for her. We've just received word that her place on the waiting list is up; we'll be able to depetrify her and perform the heart transplant this week."

"Wonderful!" the nurse applauded. "You hear that, dear? You'll be up and around in no time." She patted the statue on the withers, smiling.

They proceeded on through the wing, looking in on various patients. Some were there, waiting for a transplant or a surgeon to arrive for an emergency operation; others, less happily, were terminally ill patients who had chosen to be petrified so they could wait for medicine to advance just a bit more towards a cure. There were more than a few volunteers, in fact; their stories were as varied as one could imagine. Some were merely making a few bits volunteering for short-term petrification for the researchers.  Others were would-be chrononauts, choosing to take a one-way trip into the next century... most of those volunteers were put under sleeping pills before petrification, to assure they were actually unconscious and to spare them the boredom of waiting for a hundred years to pass. Some, quite bluntly stated, were seeking to cheat death--- suffering from advanced old age and in chronic illness and pain, they had chosen the cockatrice's gaze over the grave.

Those were the ones most deeply invested in the hospital's true research: Longevity.

Flash Sentry had blanched somewhat at that. It hadn't escaped Twilight's notice. She was still miffed at him and took a wee bit of spite in putting him on the spot. "And what are your thoughts on that, Captain?" she asked.

Flash blinked at the sudden question. "Me?"

"Yes, you. You seem put off by the notion..." she let a hint of challenge enter her voice. Well, she was a princess, darn it, shouldn't she be allowed to tweak ponies who annoyed her once in a while? "I'm guessing you think that ponies shouldn't fear death like this, something along those lines?"

"I-- no, actually. I'm a soldier, your Highness," Flash said. "Contrary to what most ponies think, our job is to make sure the other guy dies for his country. We're not in love with death." He bit his lip. "It's just that... well, that seems like a really lousy sort of immortality." He grimaced. "I'd think after a few years of not being able to move or breathe or even blink, most ponies would rather face the Hereafter than go on existing like that."

"That is why, once a year, we depetrify the long-timers for a day," the doctor said seriously. "We let them spend a day moving about, talking with us, get some sun and air... and decide if they want to go under again." He shrugged. "It's surprising the number of ponies who actually find the experience, well, restful. No aches and pains, no chronic discomforts, no tiredness--- plus, the emotions are muted. No pulse to race in fear, you see. No hormones to surge in the veins with grief, or rage, or sorrow... even those that are conscious and aware describe it as incredibly quiescent." He sighed. "Still, for some, the experience eventually becomes... unpleasant enough that they choose to stay depetrified and let nature take its course. We try to comfort ourselves by reminding one another that they go on to a better place..."    

Spike looked cynical. "But, if that's the case, what's the point of all this?"

"How do you mean?"

"I mean, there's an Afterlife. So if they're 'going on to a better place,' why treat them? Heck, why treat anypony at all?" Spike said. "Why not just let ponies die so they can just get to the Summerlands or the Great Eternal Plains or whatever that much faster?"

"Spike!" Twilight said, chagrined.

"Well?" Spike challenged.

Twilight cringed. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Spike was still very young... and could be very blunt. But this was something that she really should have talked about with him sooner... She sat down and put her hoof on his shoulder. "Because every day of this life is precious, Spike," she said. "Some day, past the end of time, they say that this life and the next life will be the same. But for now, we only go through this life one time, and every single extra day we can buy for a pony is priceless."

Spike looked doubtful. "But..."

"It's boot camp, Spike," Flash Sentry interrupted. They both looked at him, puzzled. He flushed, but pressed on. "Before a Guard goes on to, well, the real work of being a Guard, he has to go through boot camp--- just twelve weeks, that's all." He scraped a forehoof on the floor. "Life's like boot camp-- you only go through once. But that's all the training you get for what comes next.... so you want every last day of it there is."

"That's... a pretty good analogy," Twilight admitted. She smiled at Flash, seeming to forget for a moment that she was supposed to be mad at him. "What he said, Spike. The Hereafter may be forever, but it's what we do in this life--- the things we do, the lessons we learn, the ones we love---- that will make us who we are, and that will prepare us for who we're going to be when we get there. And every day we have gives us a chance to add more to that... richness."

Comprehension seemed to dawn on Spike's face a little. His mouth quirked. "Heap up at the buffet line, 'cause you only go through once, right?"

Twilight giggled. "That's a pretty good analogy too," she admitted. "All we're trying to do is make the buffet line as long as possible."

Doctor Elixir stroked his chin. "I'll have to remember that one," he admitted. "It'll go a long way explaining our goals at the next board meeting with the investors."

"Well you are sort of almost there," Spike said. "Your patients would kind of be immortal-- except for that whole made of stone, never moving again thing." His voice was wry. "If they could turn to stone and still move around, you might be on to something."

"Actually, there are a few researchers who are exploring that avenue," Elixir said. "Some rather radical concepts in that area, I must say. Seeing as many of the petrifaction patients are conscious, one of our physicians has been speculating on the concept of transforming the pony into a sort of golem.... he reasons that if we could establish some way for the petrified pony to communicate with the outside world, the next step would be to... well, shrink them down," he gestured with his hooves, indicating something about the size of a desk knick-knack, "and insert them into an artificial or mechanical body...."

"Cool, like Atomo the Living Brain! Only... er, more like Atomo the living stone-statue-inna-robot..." Spike paused. "Maybe you could just petrify their brains?"

Twilight rolled her eyes. Spike and his comic books, she thought, before turning her attention back to the task at hand. From the moment she had heard about the research at Our Lady of Sunrise, she had been both eager to see their work, and optimistic that she might find traces of alicorn involvement somewhere in the facilities. She reasoned that if anypony had a motivation into researching longevity, it would be a lonely alicorn who sought to end their solitude, much as Celestia did. And perhaps the researchers might have tumbled to something in the past century on solving the riddle of alicorn ascension. She had kept the alicorn-detection spell humming  (disguising the horn-glow by keeping her day planner and quill hovering nearby) and kept her metaphorical fingers crossed.(1)

It hadn't panned out quite so well, though. The work they were doing here was incredible, and was advancing medical techniques by leaps and bounds. Twilight made a note to make sure that the hospital received a generous royal grant. But most of their work, while promising, ranged far afield and didn't seem to be unearthing anything particularly revolutionary in the alicorn-related areas.  And she hadn't picked up a single trace of alicorn anywhere, other than herself.

The rest of the tour of their research department was rather fascinating, all the same.  The research of longevity had a surprising number of avenues of pursuit. She had, of course, volunteered to donate a pint of blood for their research, along with a wing feather, some horn slivers, and a lock of her mane and tail. These were all eagerly and gratefully accepted; she was informed that Celestia and Luna both stopped by once a year for that same purpose. To her surprise though they asked for a blood and scale sample from Spike as well. "Dragons are, of course, immensely long-lived," Elixir explained. "But of course getting samples to study is, aheh, a tad difficult."

"Hey, no problem, doc," Spike said. "Say, would you like some of Peewee's feathers? He's a baby Phoenix after all--"

Elixir most certainly would, and was ecstatic to receive them. "Phoenix regeneration research has had some promising, if unusual results," he said. "One doctor made an elixir from phoenix feathers once, cleared up his unicorn patient's chronic digestive troubles, his eczema, cataracts, and his halitosis but--" he hesitated. "Well, we have him under long-term observation now because of the side effects."

"What side effects does he have?" Spike asked.

"He tends to burst into flame at random intervals," Elixir said awkwardly.  

There was a loud FWOOMP from further back in the building. Orange light flickered in one doorway. "Nurse! It's happening again!" somepony yelled frantically over the sound of a beeping smoke alarm. A moment later a bored-looking nurse trotted past with a fire extinguisher in her magical grip. There was a prolonged fwoooooooosh. Steam rolled out into the hall. "Sorry," the pony's voice said weakly.

"It's okay, hon, these things just happen. Lemme fetch you a new hospital gown," the nurse said.

Elixir looked apologetic. "We usually have him in a room with a sprinkler system, but they've been doing repairs..."

Research into age spells was proving disappointing. They either tended to wear off, instantly returning the subject to their true age, or the subject simply aged faster with each application... and the first time was measured in mere months. "Sometimes though they're still applicable for medical purposes," Elixir explained as they passed the laboratory where they were aging and de-aging lab mice. "A young colt can often recuperate better from an illness or injury than an old stallion, even if they're an old stallion by the end of the year. The trick is to adapt the bandages and sutures for a rapidly growing body...."

In the next lab over they were turning lab mice into frogs, and back again. "This shows promise," Elixir said. "We already can make a patient regenerate lost limbs. We're just trying to find a way to do it without having to turn them into frogs first."

The work was obviously not without problems. The phoenix-flammable pony was just one example; research into transferring the lifespan of the sequoia in a clinical trial had resulted in several disgruntled ponies with twigs and leaves where their manes should be, and there was another who had come out of the laboratory unchanged by essence of gallop-agos tortoise save that he moved painfully, painfully slow.

They took time to pass through the regular departments of the hospital, visiting the patients and using Twilight's princessly presence to boost the patients' good cheer. The trip through the children's wing was an irrepressible mood lifter; It was a tossup whether Twilight in her royal finery or Flash and his guards in their polished armor gave the foals there the biggest thrill.

By the end of it they had toured every wing and floor. And not a trace of alicorn or alicorn magic anywhere. Twilight sighed and let the spell wink out. She turned to bid their leave from Doctor Elixir. "Thank you for your tour, Doctor," she said. "We will put in word with the other Princesses to renew your grants, with a recommendation to expand. I hate to cut this short but we do have a schedule to keep--"

Flash Sentry came trotting up. "Um, we might have a bit more time," Flash said. "Sorry, your Highness, my fault but we'll have to delay our departure for a little bit longer--"

"Delay?" Twilight said. Her irritation from earlier returned almost immediately. She started to snap something when she noticed that Flash was sporting a cotton bandage on his foreleg he hadn't had before. "Wait, what happened, what's this?" she poked at the bandage with a hoof. She suddenly realized that there were more of her guards in the hallway than had been there before... a lot more. In fact the entire waiting area was filled with armored soldiers patiently sitting. "What is this?"

Flash looked embarrassed and flexed his foreleg.  "While they were drawing your blood sample, I asked....seems they're running short of pints of the regular stuff as well. So I had a word with the boys, and we decided to top 'em off." He looked over his shoulder at the others. "That right, fellas?"

"Darn straight, sir!" one of them said. The guards lining the halls saluted.

Flash grinned. "Good men."

"Man, I hate needles," one grumbled.

"Awww, c'mon," his seat mate told him. "If you're a big brave soldier you'll get an orange and a cookie!" laughter rippled up the aisle.

"We should all be tapped and ready to re- board in..." Flash looked at the nurse handling the paperwork inquisitively.

"Oh, about an hour, hour and a half," she said.

"What she said." He cleared his throat. "The whole Guard volunteered. Ship's crew, too. Got a lot more volunteers than I expected. Sorry."

Twilight puffed out her cheeks and blew her forelock into the air. She could hardly be mad at him for this, but darn it-- "What brought this on?" she said.

He sobered a bit. "When your Highness decided to make a blood donation, I thought it would be a good example to follow," he said. "They got a lot of sick ponies here. A lot of sick foals, especially. If our princess can open a vein for her ponies, can her guards do any less?"

Twilight gave up. "Okay, good show, then," she said. "Go-- do a head count, or something." Flash nodded, gave her a half smile and strode off down the hallway, shouting out for a roll call. Twilight rolled her eyes. There went the entire rest of the day's itinerary. Of all the un-planned, impulsive....

... exasperating symbolic noble gestures...

Why did she suddenly want to smile? Darn him anyway!

1)Half the sapient races on Equestria had fingers. She knew what they were and why they would be crossed. Next Chapter: Chapter 29 Estimated time remaining: 2 Hours, 8 Minutes