Having been granted rulership over the city of Vanhoover, and confessed their feelings for each other, Lex Legis and Sonata Dusk have started a new life together. But the challenges of rulership, and a relationship, are more than they bargained for.
“Right over there. You see it, sir?”
“I see it,” answered Block Party, looking through the binoculars at where Spit Polish was pointing. The sight of a building on fire near the wharf was clearly visible, but only barely. There were too many buildings in the way and not enough other light sources to see anything going on around it.
“I think that if we have the local pegasi grab some buckets and fly down there, they should be able to put it out before it gets too bad. They’ll be right next to the water, so they shouldn’t have too much trouble, and-”
“No.”
Spit Polish stopped talking immediately, just to be safe. Everypony knew that Block Party hated to be interrupted or talked over, and that the penalty for doing so was severe. Peachy Keen was still limping from the last time she’d made that mistake. It was only after he’d been silent for a few moments that Spit Polish felt certain that Block Party wasn’t going to elaborate, meaning that it was safe to speak again. “Sir, we need to put that fire out! If it starts to spread, there won’t be any way to stop it! The whole city could be at risk!”
“I said no,” came Block Party’s soft reply. He put down the binoculars a moment later, turning to look Spit Polish directly in the eye, and the other stallion had to fight down the urge to back away in fear. Block Party’s expression hadn’t changed, still looking calm to the point of almost seeming bored, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d had that same look on his face while he’d been punishing Peachy, after all.
Seeing that Spit Polish wasn’t about to try and argue with him again, Block Party started to explain his thinking. “That building is on the other side of Vanhoover. Sending a team of pegasi there, having them fight the fire, and then flying back, is too much. They’d never be able to do all of that without stopping to rest, which means they’d be at risk.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “Even if they aren’t torn apart by ghouls, do you want to be the one to tell them that we can’t let them leave the city because they might be infected?”
“N-no, but-”
“More than that,” continued Block Party, causing Spit Polish to immediately cease talking, “we have to consider that it might not be so bad if the fire does spread. Doing so would doubtlessly kill a lot of the ghouls infesting the city, which means we wouldn’t be stuck waiting for them to starve or turn on each other.”
Spit Polish’s eyes widened in horror. “But sir! There are still survivors in the city too! We know that! If a fire spreads, they’d be at risk too! We can’t ju-”
“Stop.”
Quieting instantly, Spit Polish felt his nervousness increase as Block Party gave a soft sigh, a look of disappointment crossing his face before it returned to its usual look. “We’ve been through this before. We’ve all had to make difficult decisions, difficult choices about what’s best, not just for ourselves or even for Vanhoover, but for all of Equestria.” Sweeping a hoof back in the direction of Vanhoover, Block Party continued. “We know that whatever this sickness is that’s turning ponies into ghouls is contagious. That’s why we can’t let anything in Vanhoover leave, whether it’s the ghouls or other survivors.”
Spit Polish bit his lip, ears folding back and eyes lowering as he remembered the numerous times that they’d had to force surviving ponies to turn away and head back into the city. They’d begged and pleaded to be let out, many of them asking for them to at least take their foals, or their parents, or their friends. In return they’d received harsh warnings, and when those hadn’t been enough, thrown rocks or blasts of magic or anything else that would drive them off. There’d been one a few days ago, a crystal stallion that hadn’t even asked to be let out, just for them to please spare some medicine for a sick friend of his. The look that he’d given Spit Polish after his rock had hit him was one that still haunted him.
Block Party seemed to sense his unicorn lieutenant’s wavering resolve, because he strode forward and put a hoof under Spit Polish’s chin, making him raise his gaze until they were making eye contact. “We absolutely have to keep this quarantine intact. Say it.”
Swallowing nervously, Spit Polish nevertheless responded immediately. “Nothing gets out.”
“That’s right. Not one pony. Not one ghoul. And especially not one word about what’s happening here. If the princesses find out, they’ll want to show up in person, and if that happens and they get infected, it could be the end of everything.”
Spit Polish wanted to protest, to insist that the princesses would be able to fix this the way that they had always fixed everything. But he knew it would only earn him a beating if he tried, and besides, Block Party’s logic wasn’t entirely wrong. There was a chance that the princesses could get infected, even if Spit Polish didn’t think it was a very large chance. And, as much as he hated to admit it, a small part of him didn’t want the princesses to just show up and fix everything. He and everypony else here had done terrible things – had needed to do terrible things – in order to try and stop the situation in Vanhoover from spreading beyond the city. To have the alicorns make it all better in a blast of rainbow-colored magic felt like it would belittle how hard they’d worked and how many of their principles they’d been forced to compromise in order to protect Equestria.
Once again, Block Party seemed to pick up on his lieutenant’s feelings, and lowered his hoof from under his chin, even as the corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. “Good. Now, I want you to continue keeping an eye on that fire. If it starts to spread, I want to know in what direction.”
Spit Polish nodded, and Block Party turned to leave. But before he had gotten more than a few steps, Spit Polish called out to him. “Sir?”
Stopping, Block Party gave the barest of glances back over his shoulder. The sight made Spit Polish gulp, but he continued. “I, er, didn’t have a chance to tell you before. That ship, the one that we saw entering the harbor yesterday evening…it’s docked at the harbor now. It has been all day, ever since the sun rose.” He paused for a long moment, and the silence was so oppressive that it was almost tangible. “What should we do?”
Block Party turned his head back, leaving Spit Polish unable to see his expression. “Nothing for now.” He started to walk away again, speaking as he moved. “We’re stretched thin enough that we can’t afford to do anything about one ship that’s just sitting there. If it tries to leave, then we’ll take action, but until then just keep an eye on it.”
“…yes sir,” replied Spit Polish, his voice thick with confusion. Block Party’s casual attitude towards that ship seemed completely at odds with how strident he was about maintaining the quarantine around the town. It made perfect sense that they didn’t have any sort of naval presence – all of Vanhoover’s docks were part of the quarantine zone, after all, which made it rather difficult to have any sort of patrol boats – but if whoever had sailed in on that ship decided to get back on board and sail away, they’d be very hard-pressed to stop them. So why was Block Party so unconcerned about that?
Mentally shrugging, Spit Polish turned back to regard the distant fire, hearing the other stallion walk away. Asking for an explanation would only get him a fresh set of bruises, he knew. Block Party doubtlessly had some sort of plan in mind. After all, he was the one who had gotten them together and organized everything after it had become obvious that no help was coming. All that we need to do is follow his orders, Spit Polish silently assured himself. If we just do what he says, eventually everything will go back to normal.
He had repeated that to himself over and over in the last several weeks, almost like a mantra. He was sure that if he kept trying, he’d even start to believe it soon…
Block Party barely acknowledged the ponies that he passed, though they all made sure to step out of his way and nod respectfully as he did. A few approached him, wanting his opinion about some minor matter or another, but he instructed them to take it up with one of the ponies that he’d designated as his primary servants and kept moving. Right now he had more important things to focus on.
Keeping an entire city under quarantine meant that the ponies guarding it had to live outside of the city proper. The result was a virtual shantytown that now ringed the northern half of the city, composed of little more than tents, lean-tos, and poorly-constructed shacks. The only real building was the train station, which was located just outside of the city proper, and which now served as his personal living quarters and base of operations. Of course, the “operations” were a sham, and the knowledge of that always made him have to struggle to keep the smile off of his face. As it was, he was still amazed that no one had figured it out, though he shouldn’t have been. When things seemed hopeless, anyone would believe a sweet-sounding lie, he knew.
Vanhoover, like apparently all cities in Equestria, was a city without walls. Even considering that there was an ocean to its west and a river to its south – beyond which lay miles of impassible marshlands – you could still enter or exit the city anywhere along its northern or eastern edges. True, he had ponies patrolling along those edges, but there was no way that a ragtag group of desperate, half-starved individuals could keep watch over miles and miles of a city’s edge.
What they could do, however, was serve as a deterrent. Ghouls were naturally cowardly creatures, and even the appearance of serious resistance would be enough to keep them inside the city where feeding was less dangerous for them. At least until the food supply, in the form of the surviving ponies, grew too thin to satisfy their appetites; then they’d likely attack en masse, which would probably result in the ponies outside the city being slaughtered, but he didn’t really care about that.
What he did care about was the other function the patrols served, which was to keep the ponies of Vanhoover pitted against each other. The sight of watching friends and neighbors turning on each other, driving their kin back into the filthy, dangerous city, even as they cried and begged for help, gave him a warm glow inside. It was a situation he wanted to preserve as long as possible, before the ghoul plague finally burst forth from this city like maggots erupting out of a corpse. It probably wouldn’t be much longer now, in all likelihood.
But in order to do that, he had to keep up the farce about a quarantine, and a ship blithely sailing into the harbor ran counter to that. As it was, it was enough to make him frown; the sahuagin and their ilk should have taken care of the ship’s crew before they ever reached the docks. That they hadn’t – or worse, couldn’t – was enough to warrant an inquiry as to what was going on.
Entering the station and locking himself in, Block Party quickly checked to make sure he was alone. Confirming that he had the building all to himself as usual, he concentrated for a few moments before he began to speak. “Oh Great Lord of the Deep,” he intoned, unable to resist the urge to roll his eyes at the grandiose title that beast insisted on, “the ship I alerted you to yesterday made it to the docks. I want it destroyed, if you please.”
The magic only allowed for twenty-five words to be sent, but it also laced the words with the power of suggestion, and he knew it would be difficult for that thing to resist. Sure enough, a moment later a guttural voice responded. “I am most displeased. My slaves have failed me, to have let such a thing continue to exist. I will take care of it personally.”
Block Party smiled. The spell was over, meaning that nothing else he said would be transmitted, but he couldn’t resist speaking aloud anyway. “I look forward to your results.”
Some of the questions about Vanhoover's situation are revealed, and the answers are grim.
Are things about to get even worse?
Page generated in 0.094 seconds
Total duration
583 users online
851,740 hits today, 2,130,388 yesterday
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
...I'm sorry what? Ok YES it would be bad if the princesses got infected with a zombie virus...but this is just braindead stupid. No wonder things in the city have gotten so bad, because no one KNEW they were getting that way to send an appropriate response, because these morons have been suppressing the news supposedly out of fear of a worst case scenario, but more likely to cover their own asses...
...And that not only confirms it, but is even STUPIDER than the news suppression. If the Princesses could have Twilight and her friends rainbow-blast the city back to normal, I'm sure any survivors woulds say 'FREAKING DO IT!' But nooooo, let's let things go completely to the nine hells because your PRIDE might be hurt!
Ok this guy is just a freaking monster...
...Who is secretly working WITH a monster. (Also 25 words exactly for the sending spell.)
You know what? I was unsure of whether Lex taking over Vanhoover was a good thing because of what it might do to Equestria as a whole, but now...he's pretty much been proven right. Not only are the remaining officials failing to do anything to help, they're actually hindering chances of making any sort of progress towards saving the city at all! Plus it's doubtful that any survivors are gonna really want to be under Equestrian rule again after they were pretty much left to die, and the Princesses were useless because they had no idea what's been going on. At this point, Lex deserves his mini-kingdom.
I had my suspicions that locals was somehow involved and having what I assume to be what remains of the local guard garrison setting up a quarantine is the most logical option given the nature of the infection. Block probably tells train conductors and any messengers that come by that Vanhoover is uninhabitable or that the reconstruction is still ongoing. This way, he can also keep his 'followers' supplied by making requisitions from the Crown while maintaining his cover story.
However, Block Party's role as de facto leader of the group is odd given his apparent abusive behavior. I would assume that Block was a high-ranking guard who saw opportunity to take power when the ghoul infection struck so the remaining guards follow him due to protocol with him maintaining control by bringing down any individual who threatens his rule.
His knowledge of the otherworldly creatures within Vanhoover and his contact with the Lord of the Deep is unusual. I suppose he could have learned of the ghouls and sahuagin from the survivors who tried to flee the city but that wouldn't explain how he learned of the Lord of the Deep or how he came into contact with it. Regardless, another faction has entered the picture to make things even more difficult for Lex.
Addendum:
I just realized that Lex could use Block's quarantine as a way to boost his image among the survivors while also showing the problems with the way the Crown rules Equestria.
Is this a tin pot dictator who has found out how to use Everfree magic to control a demonic? entity far more powerful than them, or is he actually a parasitic infestation that came along for the ride and is working to spread Lord Nurgles desires?
If Big and Ugly is going after the ship, just have to hope that Lex has time at the least to recover his spell list twice, just so he can look up some healing, use slots to gets some points in it then a second refresh so he can have at least a tenth chance of surviving the next barney, never mind winnng.. then again with Ugly, if you dont win, everyone loses.
8033299
I'm of the opinion that one of the worst things a story can do is proceed in a manner that defies plausibility. That doesn't mean that everything has to function according to real-world rules (obviously), but that it should maintain internal logic and self-consistency. That's particularly true when it comes to how the characters engage with and react to the world around them. It doesn't mean that they'll always make the best decisions possible (and indeed, that would be rather unengaging if they did), but that the decisions they do make are understandable within their given context.
As such, I was worried about trying to make something that seemed immediately counterintuitive - that is, not only not summoning the princesses, but actively trying to keep them in the dark - be presented plausibly. The idea being that if they just showed up, they might contract the disease that was turning everypony into ghouls, and if that happened then it would be a crisis of irreducible proportions.
Given that, does your characterization of that particular revelation as "braindead stupid" mean that you think it doesn't come across as plausible?
It's not a question of pride, but a question of guilt.
One of the best ways to control someone is to make them complicit in doing something that they're ashamed of, and then dangling the possibility of personal absolution in front of them by offering the (sophistic) interpretation that what they did wasn't really wrong, due to extenuating circumstances (or any other explanation that sounds good on its face). So long as you can convince someone that they're not really the bad person that they think they are, you can exert a powerful degree of control over them, since now you're responsible for their self-image. That's what's going on here: Spit Polish (and, it's implied, other ponies like him) have done terrible things, with Block Party having convinced them that it's for a greater good, and they want to believe it, because otherwise they'd have to admit that they knowingly did something unconscionable. What Spit Polish is thinking is that having the princesses show up and fix everything now, after he's already done those things, would ruin that idea that he had to do them.
This is an idea that was presented much more poetically in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, specifically in the story-within-a-story "The Grand Inquisitor," wherein the Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that "anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him."
Yes. He is. But what kind of monster?
Fun fact, this wasn't a sending spell per se, but was a close variant spell that's also in the Core Rules. Can you figure out what it was?
Woot! Another convert to the cause!
Slightly more seriously, Vanhoover's troubles (and Tall Tale's, for that matter) illustrate the salient point behind Lex's assertion that an active government is better than an inactive one: that Equestria has changed, and that they need to change in response to that. Had the elemental bleeds not occurred, Lex's points would probably have been little more than academic, amounting to a desire to put himself in charge because he could make things slightly better than they already were; essentially, he'd have been making the perfect into the enemy of the good. Now, though, with Equestria subject to the depredations of what you'd find in a D&D/d20/Pathfinder multiverse, his solutions are just what the doctor ordered.
The irony is that he's not so morally bankrupt that he'd be glad that these disasters justified his rule.
8033367
I wasn't sure how much detail to get into regarding the nitty-gritty of Block's machinations, but that's pretty much spot-on. I mentioned that he had taken over the train station as his personal headquarters because I wanted to at least somewhat address the issue of Vanhoover having a rail line that acted as the city's major connection to the rest of Equestria, barring maritime travel. That, and I made sure to make it clear that they're suppressing the information about what's going on here. My hope was that presented enough of the pieces that the rest of it was self-evident.
The nature of Block Party being in command despite being physically abusive towards anypony who challenges him, even slightly, might have been my personal bias slipping through. I perceive it as readily self-evident that an abuser can still be relied upon by those he abuses, as we unfortunately see in far too many relationships here in the real world. The way this works is that the abuser is also seen as a caregiver, protector, and/or provider, making them indispensable to the one they're abusing. Throw in that an abuser doesn't hurt their victim for no reason the way a bully would, and it can make the abused think that it's "their fault," - or at least that it's manageable so long as they avoid the abuser's triggers. All of those things are reasons why someone in an abusive relationship won't immediately terminate it once they start being victimized.
In this case, we see that Block Party doesn't beat Spit Polish up during their conversation, and even goes out of his way to reinforce the "rightness" of what they're doing, which was intended to act as an offset to how Spit Polish remembers the bad things that their leader has done.
Unusual indeed. Lex now has yet another individual - or possibly group - of enemies that he's going to need to deal with.
At this point that seems almost axiomatic. Vanhoover is crying out for someone to save it, and he's taken it upon himself to do so, without having to be prompted.
8033378 One can only hope that Lex will make a quick recovery, since at this point he and his band of ponies are the best hope that Vanhoover has. But that will likely take some time, and the Great Lord of the Deep said that he/she/it is going to personally take action...
8034257
Heh, I didn't say it wasn't plausible, I said it was braindead stupid. As in they must be braindead if they actually think that suppressing the news of exactly how bad things had gotten was in any way a good thing. In fact the sad thing is that it's perfectly plausible for people in this situation, especially under a corrupt leader (and especially one who apparently also is backed up with by mental manipulation magics or similar powers), to go along with such a plan.
Not sure yet. A doppelganger is one possibility, especially given the enchantment magics, but given the Everglow origins it could be one of their kind of changelings.
8034257
That's a good question actually:
Since we are only talking from Mr. Totally-a-pony, it could easily be Flesh Puppet, since it would require him to have a zombie near the Lord, but since we don't see the Lord's location anyway, it might be possible. Sure, we didn't get information about the string, but since said string is, supposedly, nearly invisible, we wouldn't be able to see it either way. Though the fact that he's so concerned about minor undead makes me thing that he's not really a necromancer.
Spirit Bonds wouldn't make any sense, at least I don't think it does, unless he didn't call the Lord directly, but even then... It just seems like too much of a hassle to do every day.
Mage’s Decree could be used that way... Yet, why would you use that instead of a simple Sending?
Dream Council is very specific. Too specific, IMO, to have been used here.
Thus, my guess would be a "Demand". It would be a ballsy move on the "pony's" part, but it's the next logical thing.
8034596 When I said the Core Rules, I meant the Pathfinder Core Rulebook; like the 3.5 PHB, it's considered to be repository for the "standard" spells available.
That said, you're correct! The spell used was demand, which functions like sending, but allows you to build in a suggestion effect.
8034730 Huh, didn't think I would be, actually. I mean, Demand is an eight level spell, which means that, unlike Aria in the last chapter, this guy is a serious spellcaster (or at least someone with a powerful SLA and probably some more).
8034811 One of the basic rules of telling an adventure story: the challenges need to keep increasing.
8035221 Now I'm just imagining that, two years from now, I will look into my notification and see that this story, now with a picture of Lex wearing Simon's glasses, just updated with chapter 200 "Believe in the me that believes in you" XD
No typos..........
Well then. That happened.
8256872 Woo-hoo! No typos!
And yeah, Vanhoover's troubles are even worse than Lex knows.