Meanwhile...

"You must be mistaken."

"No, mistake, Lady Design. The Princess has decreed maximum security in response to the threat, and your brother's research and designs would help in this endeavour."

"...Every word in my sentence was short and simple enough to understand. Was there something wrong in the order in which I placed them?"

"...With all due respect, Lady Design, this is a royal order."



Her older brother's lab had never been opened after he left Canterlot, and she had never been inside before. It was larger than she expected. Neater too, but expectations were so low on that front that it was still messy. There were many desks streamed with papers and parts, many shelves that had folders full of creased and folded papers, as if just shoved into the files until they fit. The walls were plastered with designs and notes, most indecipherable, but all a bit...

It was unnerving, she thought, it was amazing how anypony could get any work done in this place where sanity had seemed to have forsaken. Elegance shook some distressing thoughts out of her head. Her brother was a bit eccentric, but he was not insane. Even so...

She got to work, sifting through the folders and files to try and confirm the non-existence of these 'defensive mechanisms' the guards seemed to think Intelligent had designed. She was sure that he wouldn't do that. Maybe before, when he thought of most ponies as 'resources' (goddesses that was a dorky phase), but not now. Now, the mere thought of harming other ponies frightened him. She couldn't think...

Oh yes she could, she amended, putting down a file entitled Village of Blank Flanks. There were a disturbing number of reports done on the atrocities done to ponykind in the name of science. Pony dissection, dumping of slood on communities, the works. All done in secret, of course, but it seemed that Intel was dragging these things to the light. More distressing was his own comments on the experiments.

"We didn't even learn anything..."

"It seemed that the place was chosen out of spite, rather than any scientific..."

"...who would do this? Really?{Paragraph deleted for personal opinion}"

Maybe the whole 'Intelligent has gone insane' hypothesis (only a hypothesis, she stressed. Not a theory.) had some creedance. This work was enough to drive anypony mad. But it wasn't the bulk of the work thankfully. Most of it was pure Intelligent being his rather elaborately incomprehensible self, yammering on about 'uncertainty' and 'ambience'. Most theorectical stuff, nothing that can be described as a weapon.

Then there were those three letters. AME. A single reference to this and that was it. Elegance scoured once, twice for more about it, but to no avail. Then she remembered. "Intelligent, you still don't think that..."

She walked over to the wastepaper basket and emptied it. When they were still foals, Intelligent stashed a diary (he insisted it was a 'journal') underneath a false bottom. He never found out that Elegance found out, so he didn't change.

He still hadn't, she thought in triumph as she retrieved the documents from their hiding place.

"Thank you," said a voice that wasn't hers, "We were looking for something like that."

Elegance barely had time to react when a sharp sting hit the back of her neck, and she knew no more...