Work Text:
By this point in their working relationship, Air Shakur had gotten used to random interruptions in her sleep schedule due to Agnes Tachyon’s nonsense. Whether that be texts so late at night it was almost morning, to her by-this-point necessary naps ending with some explosion in the lab. That didn’t mean she LIKED it per se, but she was used to it. Now that the data gathering portion of their study was finished and the results released to others, Shakur had been certain that she would finally get a full night’s worth of sleep.
It was thus an irritating sight to wake up to the sound of her phone vibrating, Doto thankfully still sleeping through the noise. With a quiet grunt, she turned the device fully on, read the offending text message…
…And tightened her focus on the first, and most important line in the message:
“EMERGENCY
Mathematical models have revealed a very disturbing detail regarding Umamusume population numbers! Please come to the lab AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.”
“Tachyon,” Shakur did her best to whisper, to avoid waking up her roommate. “This had better be something apocalyptic, or I’m going to go apocalyptic on YOU.” Nevertheless, she got up from her bed, not even bothering to change out of her pajamas, grabbed her set of keys and exited the dorm.
To accommodate the odd hours that the duo would sometimes have to do to get all of the survey’s data processed, the student council had allowed the two of them a set of keys that would let them get in and out of the door rooms and into the building where the lab was based. It allowed Fuji Kiseki her own uninterrupted sleep since she wouldn’t need to be woken up in the dark to get back in the dorms. Closing her room’s door behind her, Shakur was mildly surprised to see Stay Gold down the hall doing the same thing. The pony’s eyes had far deeper bags underneath them, as if SHE was the one constantly getting up in the middle of the night at Tachyon’s demands.
The former stallions looked each other in the eye, with Shakur raising an eyebrow in surprise. She moved over to where Stego was standing and asked, “Did Tachyon text you too?”
Stay just breathed out of her nose in exasperation and nodded, her eyelids drooping from the late hour. Shakur sighed, rolled her eyes, then led the poor tired soul along out of the dorms towards the building holding their destination.
The empty classroom that had become their lab was once reigned by two queens: Tachyon, who would perform the most absurd of experiments while inside, and Manhattan Cafe who silently grinded away with her coffee beans. There wasn’t enough room to get Shakur her own corner of this space, so she put as little of her stuff in Tachyon’s section as possible. Entering inside, she and Stego were surprised to see Neo Universe sleeping on a futon in the corner, and less surprised to see Tachyon and Cafe both up at this hour. Night owls, the lot of them!
“Tachyon,” Shakur began with a growl, “if this meeting isn’t about the imminent end of the world, I WILL strangle you with your own two hands.”
Cafe gave the scientist an askew glance. “Don’t you mean-”
“I meant what I said.”
Tachyon wasn’t even looking at the newcomers, instead eating what looked like cold tortellini from a tin can in an absent, almost mechanical motion. Her eyes, underlined by bags even worse than Stego’s, focused on everything and nothing, but a small portion of that attention was pointed towards the whiteboard in front of her. On it were scrawled the writings of a madwoman with too much caffeine in her system:
Stallion = Tiny portion of male population
Gelding = Cannot reproduce
Reproduction lopsided
UMAS = NOT CASTRATED
SOULLESS BABIES WILL LEAD TO POPULATION DEATH?!
Shakur walked over to where Tachyon stood, the other scientist not even noticing her approach. Growling, the punk rapped the back of her hand against Tachyon’s shoulder, causing her can of “Chef Umardee” to leap out of her hands and splatter on the one section of whiteboard not covered in scrawl. Tachyon whirled around, her ashen face at first blank before raising up into a crazed grin when she saw who it was. “Shakur, my colleague, just when I needed you! We have an emergency on our hands which we need to find a solution for immediately!”
Over on Cafe’s side, Stego leaned closer to Cafe who watched the scene with desensitized eyes. “So,” she whispered, “How long has it been since Tachyon’s slept again?”
Cafe’s eyes darted towards her Friend, who raised a hand with all of the fingers extended. “Five days, apparently,” she said in return.
Stay blinked rapidly, her overstressed mind slowly working that information through, and along the way it got jammed in her International List of Swear Words. “Merde,” (FR: Shit), was all she could say in response. The last thing anyone needed was an Agnes Tachyon with even LESS sleep than usual. Quietly, she moved closer to where the commotion was.
Back with the scientists, Shakur just rubbed her temples to work off some of the frustration. “Alright, WHAT exactly is the emergency?” This had better be good…
“Well my fellow pursuer of knowledge,” the mad (moreso than usual right now) genius (less so than usual right now) began, “a few days ago I was informed by Neo Universe of a rather distressing detail regarding the males of our former species!”
Stego looked at the portion of the board uncoated with tomato sauce, and nodded when she recognized a few key terms. “Ah, Geldings, forgot about that part.” Shakur looked over to her, and the reincarnator explained “Basically, male horses, just like male humans, could get really aggressive with each other to the point of fights breaking out. To avoid that, most of the guys were sterilized, which made them less aggressive and allowed those with a proven track record to spread their genes around.” She frowned as more memories came to mind. “I knew… quite a few of them actually, back then. There was always something… not off, per se, but certainly less vibrant compared to the stallions.”
“Indeed!,” chimed in Tachyon, “and it is because of their existence that I have become greatly worried!”
The other scientist present couldn’t help the twitch that entered one of her eyes. “And… why would that make you worried?” She asked.
“Because they will soon lead to population death on our end!”
There was a moment of silence as both wanderer and researcher took in that claim with some (read: a ton of) disbelief. ”...How?” both questioned in unison, their tempers fraying at the seams.
“Well…” Tachyon turned back to look at the whiteboard. “Neo Universe told me that approximately 90% of male horses were sterilized and became geldings. The remaining top 10% would then go on to mate with the healthy female horses, reducing the risk of genetic dead-ends from impacting the overall population. Because horse breeding is often carefully managed, the controlled population growth ensured that in most instances the number of horses did not exceed the capacity of their caregivers to provide aid!”
“Skip ahead to the part where that impacts US,” Shakur growled out.
“Well, naturally, I wanted to see if that induced infertility carried on into our new lives! So, after going through some medical files,” a lab coat sleeve gestured towards a five layer cake of boxes, presumably filled with the (questionably obtained) medical information, “I was distressed to see that almost none of the individuals whose information I obtained were infertile in the slightest!”
By this point, Stay had just put her head in her hands. “And WHY is that a bad thing? Most people like having the option of having kids, even if they don’t go through with it.”
“It's bad because with a much greater pool of potential parents around, the Umamusume population risks an explosion that will overtake the original horse population! And as all Umamusume are reincarnators, that means that without soul-supply being able to catch-up with soul-demand, there will either be a greater prevalence of human children being born from Uma mothers than before, or WORSE-” Tachyon gestured back to the mad scrawl on the whiteboard, “There will be a rising percentage of Umamusume born without souls of their own!”
The scientist whirled back around to face the whiteboard, filling more and more of the space with marker-inked equations that made no goddess-damn sense. Before her two interlocutors could interrupt the manic mutterings, both felt a tap on their shoulder. They turned back to look at Cafe, who had walked up to the pair and then pointed towards the sauce-covered portion of the board.
The duo looked in that direction, and saw that, in a coincidence that could only be seen as a miracle, the trails of pasta sauce had converged into crimson legible words. A text that said:
Tachyon dear,
We operate on a multiversal scale. There are quintillions of worlds with horses in them for every world with Umas. We’re not going to run out anytime soon. And besides, we’re goddesses. We can just MAKE more souls if we wanted to.
Sincerely, Darley
P.S. Get some sleep please, I don’t need your soul to return to me right now because you died of a heart attack. Taking 5 “5-hour Energies” does NOT give you 25 hours in a day.
As Stego and Shakur processed the rather casual divine revelation, Cafe’s “Friend” made her way over to where Tachyon was still ranting and scribbling. Using intangible limbs, she lifted the barely-cognizant scientist over her invisible shoulder, marching over to the futon occupied by Neo. She dropped Tachyon onto an empty space on the bed from shoulder height, and the impact combined with the scientist’s extreme exhaustion was enough to send her traveling to the land of dreams in an instant.
Shakur, still annoyed that her evening was wasted for no reason, stomped over to one of the boxes of medical information. Opening the lid to look inside, she confirmed one of her biggest worries about the situation. Letting out a sigh worthy of an elephant’s lungs, she made her way back to where Cafe and Stego were standing. “I think we’re going to need to tell Tracen’s legal team that one of the students stole about half a million Umas medical information.”
Stay Gold’s face fell back down into her hands. “Ёб твою мать”(RUS: Motherfucker…) she muttered.