August 12th
It's been a while since I have escaped the clutches of the Null, the fragments of Grey Holm finally vanishing as I had just slept with ease. Ever since that I felt free, I had no use for the Eyepiece my late friend AS has given to me, yet I have a feeling that all those used are watching me. My fears came true when a familiar seance machine arrived on a package, and my wife asked who sent it.
It seems like my journey has not yet finished without the Craftsman giving me a goodbye gift. How foolish of me. But then, I had other plans. I knew at the back of my head that there was still a spark of curiosity of how the Null worked. To my surprise, both of us were drawn to the Null as we both activated Maggie Cox. I had escaped it while she never fell into temptation.
I do hope that the nightmares of me coming into this red planet will never happen. The one about the train is just too mad enough.
Though it seems like this planet that I and my wife had landed seems a bit peaceful, if nonetheless off. That was after we broke out of the room we were in and made shelter in a cave.
"Must you still write about the Null? Haven't you said you were freed from it and it was all just something you want to forget?" she asked.
I nodded from my modified desk, crumpling the piece of paper and throwing it into the fireplace. "But, because the Craftsman sent that seance machine, it seems like we are being drawn to it again!" I raised my hands to rub my forehead, ridding the headache that had formed. "If only I had come sooner, I would also have saved AS…"
"Yes, yes, I miss his old abandoned manor of his." She looked towards a portrait of a tarot card that had coincided with AS's manor. "A tarot card matched his house. How come?"
"All houses with inhabitants researching the Null have similar backdrops and architecture." I frowned. "I tried to remove any traces of our house."
"But you left the symbol of the Rooms in our spare bedroom along with a round table," she pointed out.
I raised an eyebrow. "I didn't mean that, after I discovered, I had immediately ordered it removed at once!" I explained.
I saw her open her lips to speak when a scratching sound from the seance machine. We both switched our focus when we saw the woman, holding a board with the words "Endless." I frowned.
"Escaped nor never entered, it seems like the Null is still trying to reach into our lives," I have decided. "Luckily, I have created an Eyepiece for you, my lady."
It was her turn to raise her eyebrow. "Why did you create an Eyepiece for me?" she wondered.
"Protection, in case our full attention shifted back to the Null," I explained. "And if we
I sighed as I looked underneath my desk and flipped two switches. I then looked at my desktop and moved my other scientific papers away as a hidden drawer rose up. Opening it, I handled one specialized Eyepiece to her while I took the one AS had given to me. I had modified the lens of both our eyepieces so that we could see all levels of the Null, it could resist anything the Null could throw at us, and enable us to use the Null to our advantage in a means of transportation. I heard her gasp while I blinked as I stared at my desk.
"Okay, to think we fled from it…" we both muttered.
"And to see where all my ink has wasted into when it does not appear, as it seems," I added as I traced what I saw was the Craftsman's symbol, the one behind every tarot card I had seen. I looked up "Wait. My love, move away from that."
She looked at me with complete ridiculousness before stepping aside. At once I headed toward the portrait of the home tarot card and read what I was seeing. She also took a glance and blinked.
"'Thank you for leaving unnoticed,'" I read. "'The Craftsman.' Why, that old fool! Sending me two messages just for thank you!?"
"Who?" she asked.
"Simon Greyson, also known as the Great Khan," I answered. "Also mysteriously known as the Craftsman." Everything shook. "I had not expected this to happen."
"My love, look at the machine!" she shouted as the shaking worsened. When it had stopped, the seance machine had scribblings on the glass and it had conveyed a message.
My eyes widened.
"I have a feeling we are not going to have a regular year, my love." I slid my eyepiece down. "We need to get out of here."
"Yes, and hope it doesn't follow us, the thing that you say you saw destroy a manor that never existed!" she exclaimed as she jumped out of the room.
I blinked, wondering to myself why I didn't do that when I had a chance but then I remembered that all the other rooms weren't closer to the ground, nor weren't part of the Rooms the Null took. I sighed before following her, seeing that she had already packed up. If it were not for the chance that I had also packed a set of clothes on my old briefcase I had retrieved from the train. Then we made haste and ran, my Eyepiece breaking in every step. I was forced to remove them from my eyes before we found ourselves falling from a manhole.
And then I felt the Null. No, we both felt the Null.
"It's weird…" Twilight mumbled to herself. "It's not energy, magic, nor light, yet it reacts like so! I am so glad Princess Celestia allowed me to use part of the royal funding she prepared for me…"
She blinked, her lens from her specialized eyepiece breaking as a doorway appeared and broke a section of the wall where her special machine was pointed, and two persons arrived from the doorway. Both of them shook their heads and immediately crawled away from the doorway as tentacle-like things went out and followed the shape of the wall until it stopped on a certain distance. Twilight Sparkle could only watch in awe before realizing that her machine brought two persons in. Said pair stood up and inspected the room. The one who wore a suit and a broken eyepiece frowned while the other one who had a similarly broken eyepiece and a dress went to calm him down. They soon looked at the doorway which had vanished without a trace except for a rectangular border made of something dark.
"Uh… hello?" she called, noticing the odd behavior of the doorway.
Both beings looked at Twilight Sparkle, violet anthropomorphic unicorn scholar and student of Princess Celestia. The one in suit gasped and attempted to run away from the room, trying to open the doors and the windows, after seeing her machine.
"What's going on?" she mumbled, removing her eyepiece and opening a drawer from one of the cabinets the room had and replacing it. Both persons saw that she had spares and immediately went to search from all of the cabinets, five cabinets with multiple drawers in total, and found themselves matching lenses.
Then, the one in the suit spoke. "Sorry, but it seems like the Null can transport us toward another place, and we panicked considering that we had thought we had left its clutches," he began.
"Yes, and considering that you yourself are making one of those machines," the one in the dress added, "I am worried about how this will turn out…"
"Why?" Twilight asked. She was about to discover the most important item in the universe!
The one in the suit pulled out a pocket watch and checked its time, before flipping the rest of the switches the machine had. Twilight was about to protest when the one in dress moved away and the doorway appeared.
"This." He lowered his eyepiece and he looked around. "Oh, my god… My love, look at this."
The dress woman followed suit and frowned. "This is worrying."
"Uh… what do you mean? Also, why did you get those lenses? Those are still experimental," the unicorn asked, using her hands to emphasize.
"A long and horrendous story, but a colleague of mine fabricated my Eyepiece and the lens that it uses." He raised the eyepiece up. "Until I added a modification of using the Null as a transport, thanks for the stupidity of the puppet master."
"Here we go again," the woman in the dress deadpanned.
"I was about to head home from my latest discoveries when the train passed by a tunnel…"
... And as I rowed myself back towards the mainland, I found her watching," I ended. "I had also learned that my greatest knowledge about this is that I will never know where the Null came from."
Everyone was silent, something that I had the thing when I tell my testimony nobody ever believed in until I heard the violet-horned woman spoke up and asked me.
"What is it again?" I asked.
"I said, how in the world did you even get into a small tower using the eyepiece?" she asked, crossing her arms.
"I have no idea, but it involved the Craftsman's addition to AS's eyepiece," I answered.
She frowned. "Who's the Craftsman? AS?"
"AS is the colleague that gave me my eyepiece and the one that brought me into this mess," I told her, "and the Craftsman is the reason why researching the Null lead to deaths…" I looked at her machine. "The local Craftsman is aware of me and my wife and pulled me here." Something clicked and I frowned. "No, not the Craftsman… the one that lives on the red planet…"
"Planet. Another planet," my wife had solved in surprise regarding our location. "We're not on Earth!"
"You are right!" I figured, pointing at the horned girl. "We don't have such humans on Earth. We surely must be somewhere not on Earth!"
"What?" the unicorn girl mumbled. "You two look like earth ponies to me."
"And also, the recurring symbols are not present here," my wife added to her hypothesis. "Wait. Earth ponies, you say?"
"Yeah, people here are divided into three beings," the girl answered. "There are the earth ponies which are the really strong humans without wings or horns, the unicorn ponies like me, horned humans with increased intelligence and an ability which others call magic, and there are the pegasus ponies."
"Are they, perchance, winged figures?" I guessed. She nodded. "It was predictable, but nonetheless, it seems like not only we are not alone, but it seems like humanoids are a template for intelligent life."
My wife opened up her briefcase and mine and began to set up a machine along the marked doorway. Unfortunately, she took notice of this and began to question why my love is setting up something.
"Oh, you see, we need to go home," I explained for what I hoped to be the last time. "And since a Null machine is present and working, we have decided to set up what I would call a Caller."
"Caller? What does it call?" the violet girl questioned me.
"It calls the Null, or so I hope." I immediately wrapped my arms around my wife and pulled her away as soon as the dark tendrils took my device and smashed it. "Looks like we are trapped here for eternity, my love."
"It appears so."
The girl, which we have not asked her name for some dumb reason, seemed to have snapped. "Why in Equestria do you two talk like that? You two remind me of some idiot who tried to date me!"
She lied about somepony dating her because she was boring, but she was getting annoyed that they were talking to themselves, Trottingham style. It caused Twilight to wonder where exactly did these two persons, obviously not earth ponies, came from, and why they knew too much about her work when she had told nobody but Princess Celestia. She had an epiphany.
"Hold on, are you two aliens from another world?" she demanded. "Because nopony wears what you're wearing, and you guys speak too formal, and there's a creepy doorway on one of the walls?"
"Doorway?" the suited man asked. "There is no doorway on your walls."
She took a look and blinked, clarifying what he meant and blinked again, slower. "That is really creepy. Where did it go?"
"Beyond time and space," he replied. "I don't want to know about it, but neither should you."
The unicorn groaned. "What is it with my work that you two know?" she asked.
"Everything we needed to stay alive," the woman replied. "Look, my husband is right, he had experience, even if I disagree with him."
She frowned. "I don't believe you." She looked at the machine. "But then, I have to finish this…"
"No!"
Dropping the power source she had hidden on the machine, everything shook. A white void appeared and the three found themselves in a room, with a doorway and a round table. The suited man sighed before he approached the round table and begin to fidget with something. The said something was a slider, and the doorway began to show doors of different kinds. It followed until Twilight saw the door to her room and stopped him.
"Ah, let's go then."
We may have broken everything just to get out of that room. I do hope that we can get ourselves home. This place is mad.