Chapter 17: Non-Player Character
At the Inn of the Prancing Pony
Chapter 17: Non-Player Character
Midnight looked around at the approaching adventurers. What she really wanted to say, more than anything else at that moment, was “Go right on ahead and loot the place, but we need to go,” followed by some strenuous running. However the strangest thing took place.
She said absolutely nothing. She didn’t move, she just stood there, watching the scene unfold against her will.
The slender earth pony Torchlit walked past her like she didn’t exist, peering down at the town. “Where is it, where is it…” he muttered to himself for a few seconds. “Bingo!”
Two pig creatures...orcs, they had called themselves...dressed in skimpy dresses emerged upon the stage from behind the curtain, carrying between them a great chest filled with treasure. Coins mostly, but also more than a dozen gems of various sizes, colors and quality. Most obvious because of their glint were a fire opal, an oriental amethyst, and a hypnotic black pearl.
“There!” exclaimed a female voice, somewhat garbled from too much phlegm in the throat. “I must have that pearl!” A pink foreleg pointed.
Hope turned to see who had just spoken, and fell over to the ground, her mouth agape in shock. “You!”
All eyes turned to the new pony, a pegasus with a light blue and pale red mane. Her left wing was noticeably larger than her right. The pegasus looked down at Hope, and rolled her eyes. “You’re not supposed to recognize me,” she said gruffly. She looked off into the eastern horizon for some reason inexplicable to Midnight, a look of profound disappointment washing across her features.
Midnight, unable to move but for being yanked to look, unable to speak, felt her hoof moving of its own volition, rising...ominously rising...to point at the pegasus.
“What are you?” she then asked lamely, while in her mind she screamed in frustration. She had meant to ask her ex-companion how she recovered so quickly, but it didn’t seem that she was allowed to speak any line that hadn’t been roughly shoved into her brain for her to say.
“I am the future of Equestria,” the pegasus proclaimed, putting one hoof up on a rock that Midnight could have sworn wasn’t there a second ago. “The new leader of the band of adventurers that will wipe all monsters from the face of…” (An uncomfortable pause, involving staring at the eastern horizon.) “Equus!” She gestured at her cutie mark, which portrayed a badly drawn pony skull wreathed in flames. “I...am...Skull Flame!”
“Soul Cleaver?!” Hope asked in an unbelieving squeak.
Midnight fought with all her might to speak, to shout out or even signal that she was helpless in her own body. To ask somepony what was going on. She knew that “Soul Cleaver” was the name of the dead pony, but how...
Oh wait, she was being required to say something stupid again. “The legend lives on,” she said.
“Skull Flame” looked down at Hope. “You’re that pony that talks, aren’t you?”
The unicorn, Vaya Con Dios, summoned a gag to cover Hope’s mouth before she could reply. “None of that, now,” he said darkly.
“Aw, come on now!” the pegasus named Swipe said. “She’s the most fun we’ve had in this entire campaign. And look, she’s almost made it to the Inn in time for the…” He seemed to look annoyed that his last word had been snatched from his lips before he could say it.
“So, what do you think?” Torchlit asked Skull Flame, pointing down at the village. “Think we can take the treasure?”
“Oh, no question,” answered Skull Flame. “But how do we guarantee a 100% kill rate?”
Hope struggled mightily against her magical muzzle, trying to make her thoughts known.
“We could stand to use some backup,” said Vaya.
Skull looked over at Hope. “I’m not bringing her.”
“Alright, then what about the unicorn?”
“I live to serve!” Midnight replied, straining with all her might to roll her eyes, impale herself on a nearby log, or give herself a heart attack, all without success.
“Now hold on,” Swipe complained, “before we throw the … to the wolves, I wanna ask a few questions.” Midnight observed the missing word in the thief’s speech. She was fairly sure that he was referring to her. So was it an insult that he had been censored by his god from speaking? Or something more, some hint that would be invaluable in her studies if she only knew?
Meanwhile, Swipe had wrapped a hoof around the edge of Hope’s gag and pulled, which caused it to vanish. “Who’s your friend?” he asked in a smarmy tone.
Hope looked at Midnight with a calm, cold look. “She’s my master,” she said. “She bought me on the slave market in Horn’s Reach. She’s taking me to Hoofington to sell me to the highest bidder. Maybe you could even buy me.” She looked over at Swipe with a sultry look. “I bet you’d like that,” she said as she licked her lips.
Swipe turned to Midnight. “Is this true?” he asked. “Th...the slave part. I don’t think I want to know the rest.”
Midnight discovered to her horror that the process affecting her went both ways. Not only could words be shoved into her brain for her to say, but also that it was possible for things to be yanked out of her thoughts and memories, for inspection by the thing that gave adventurers their marching orders. She felt something invade her mind, searching around for anything attached to the concepts of “That Annoying Earth Pony” and “That Unicorn Chick”. Desperately, she tossed chemistry equations at it as she tried to think. What was Celes...Hope trying to gain with such a story?, she asked herself desperately, a complete...fabrication? Was it possible that they couldn’t tell the difference between real memories and false ones? Desperately, Midnight tried to summon an image of what buying Hope would have looked like. She had nothing but fairy tales to guide her, but there was that one that was very well illustrated…
“Yes,” Midnight said the implanted word with callous indifference, though her heart was pounding hard enough to make her dizzy.
Swipe laughed. “Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it!” he crowed to Hope, before advancing uncomfortably close to Midnight. “So, what’s your story?” he asked her. “Are you loaded? Flat broke? Have a collection of scrolls that you’d like to share with your new best friends?”
Before she could stop herself, Midnight thought of the potions that Firebelle had given them, tucked away in their cart. By the time she started thinking of wooden ducks, it was too late.
“Not that I would want to give them to you, but I have some potions hidden away in those bushes.”
“Sweet!” exclaimed Swipe. “Torchlit…?”
“Already on it,” Torchlit said, digging his way through to the cart. The sound of a couple of gourds of water could be heard being shaken and then tossed contemptuously to the ground, where they shattered. “Ooh! Found them! Oh. They’re just Class 1 healing potions. I can make stronger juice in my sleep.”
“The shame!” Midnight involuntarily exclaimed, covering her eyes with one forehoof. “It appears I will never be the equal of a true master of the craft!” Her voice was oddly accented, like she was attempting to imitate the earth pony before her.
All of the adventurers save Torchlit burst into raucous laughter at this line. “Oh, man! You nailed him!” Swipe exclaimed, his words aimed once again at that mysterious spot to the east.
“Why must you always mock me?” Torchlit said petulantly.
“Because you’re so pathetic!” exclaimed Vaya, giving him a noogie.
“Team...focus,” Skull Flame warned in a low voice.
The others instantly fell into attention before her, a mocking smile on Swipe’s face.
“So you’re just a potion maker, huh?” the former Firebelle asked.
“Well, until I ran out of money and turned to slave-running instead,” Midnight replied in a matter of fact manner, though in her mind she was raging at being called “just” a potion maker.
“Right, then,” said Skull Flame. “You’re kind of big, so Torchlit, you use her as cover while you’re lobbing your bombs. Vaya, use that staff of yours to bash some skulls, and Swipe, live up to your name and swipe us some gems. I can see from here that the coins are copper, so don’t waste your time with them.”
“Excuse me?! I am not ‘big’.” Midnight objected, agreeing for once with her compulsions.
“Pony, if I tell you you’re a pegasus, then you had better start flying!” She looked to the others with an expectant grin. “Huh? Get it?”
Swipe wiped his jaw with one hoof. “No, sorry. Not feeling it. And neither is Foaltus.”
“And what will you be doing, oh Fearless Leader?” asked Hope.
Skull Flame rolled her eyes. “Vaya, please silence...silence...unicorn, remind me what her name is.”
Several seconds passed, during which each of the adventurers in turn focused their attention on Midnight. “Hope Springs,” she repeated in her head as often and as loud as she could. All thoughts of the other name were shoved deep into her subconsciousness.
“H...ho...Her,” she finally said. She clamped her jaws together, to keep the fatal word “Highness” from leaking out.
“Hope Springs,” Torchlit said with a roll of his eyes.
“What, do you memorize them or something?” asked Swipe. He flew up into the air a bit to assert some sort of superiority.
“Well, somebody had better do it, right? Remember that time when we ended up knocking out the wrong griffon because somebody mixed up our employer with our target?”
“As I keep saying, I meant to do that!” roared Skull Flame.
Midnight recoiled from the raging pegasus, but couldn’t do anything but return to her neutral stance.
“Or...Soul Cleaver meant to do that,” Skull Flame added after a moment. “Ugh, whatever.”
“Um...guys,” Swipe warned, his eyes fixed on something behind the others. “I think we’re about to lose initiative.”
“What?” asked Skull Flame, turning.
And then she was swarmed by about thirty orcs armed with polearms.
Midnight was still locked in position, but she felt herself being slowly dragged away by Hope’s hoof hooked around her leg. She could do nothing but stare as dozens of the creatures from the village swarmed the adventurers.
It seemed like they would be drowned by a living wave of adversaries, but there was a sudden and nearly silent explosion emitted by Vaya’s staff, which caused the creatures to be propelled suddenly through the air, some of them ahead of Hope and Midnight. Swipe was nowhere to be seen.
“This thing affecting you had better have an area of effect,” grunted Hope, pulling Midnight further and further away from the battle. So far, the creatures seemed to utterly ignore them.
There was a brief shimmer in the air, and suddenly Swipe was standing before Skull Flame, presenting her with the black pearl. It appeared from Midnight’s vantage point that there were reptilian eyes inside the pearl, staring out at the eager pegasus.
Without a word, Skull Flame shoved the pearl into her mouth and swallowed it. Immediately, she doubled over and hissed sharply.
Midnight’s muscles began to unlock. A few seconds later, she was free.
“Run!” Celestia urged her, as she ran away from the village with all of her might.
With a scream, Skull Flame’s wings were ripped apart, to be replaced by two magnificent dragon wings, a pure black in color. “So...much...power!” she cried, her voice becoming inequine as her body began to bloat.
Midnight ran then, sparing only one more glance back at the terrifying new version of Firebelle that was being born at the center of all this, and then she only saw Hope’s tail bobbing through the brush.
The swamp that contained the orc village ended in a wall of thorns. Celestia used her earth pony powers to push through it, and they emerged at the outskirts of Hoofington.
Celestia and Midnight ran into the town. They saw the Inn almost immediately, but ran past it into another alley. Celestia carefully looked around, and especially up, before finally returning to Midnight and nodding mutely.
“I couldn’t speak!” Midnight cried. “I couldn’t move, I was useless, I couldn’t...” She coughed on the words, fear and exhaustion warring with each other as her eyes searched around the alley for something that wasn’t there.
Celestia embraced the terrified unicorn and held her until the shaking subsided.
“The cloak is gone, the gold is gone, I don’t...”
“We’ll go back,” Celestia said calmly. “We’ll go back after the fight is over. I honestly don’t think they’re even going to remember that cart after they’re done, and the orcs will never find it.” She looked angrily to the east. “I didn’t know that’s what they did to other ponies. The adventurers seemed confused by the way I answered their questions, but I had no idea that that meant that most ponies came under their control. I’m so sorry, Midnight. I saw it happening in your eyes, and I did what I could to distract them, to give them the sort of story they wanted, so they wouldn’t ask any awkward questions. I’m sorry that I made you out as such an awful pony...again. I do that too much.”
Midnight just tightened the hug.
“I...I know I’m not. I just...they wanted me dead. No, worse. A shield. I was the same thing as a slab of metal to them. I thought I’d at least be able to stand my own, if something bad ever happened, but this...”
“And if you had been wearing that cloak?” Celestia asked.
“It might...I don’t know.” Midnight released Celestia and sat with her back against a wall. “I don’t know if it will be enough,” she admitted. “There’s no way of knowing.”
Celestia held the unicorn at hoof’s length. “Midnight, if you’re not sure you can stand up to it, if you are not absolutely sure, then you shouldn’t go in there with me.” She looked down at her hooves. “You’ve taken me this far, for which I am immeasurably grateful, but I really don’t think I have any right to ask more of you, especially after what you’ve been through. I, I think—”
“Let me think on it,” Midnight pleaded. “I am shaken, yes, and I know this is beyond me but... Give me a night to figure out what I want to do. Then...then I’ll decide. But no matter what...” She held out a hoof, smiling a bit despite all of what had just happened. “I’d like to still be your friend.”
“Always,” Celestia said, taking that hoof in her own. “Always.”
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Murder hobos.
Murder hobos everywhere.
I try not to be like this when I game. I'm mostly successful. Mostly.
5132807
I had a very formative early experience in gaming. It involved taking vengeance on a goblin tribe for raiding a human settlement. "Vengeance" turned out to mean "genocide", with deliberate efforts to ensure that the goblin base (a fort) had no exits by which they could escape our assault.
The fort had originally been owned by the humans being raided, but not recently. The goblins had made it their own settlement in the years since they had driven off its owners and successfully discouraged two attempts to take it back. They'd had time to recultivate the forest around the fort as a deliberate defensive strategy. Specifically, druidic magic had made the forest nasty. The goblins had even built a new temple on the grounds. It was an ugly, crude temple, but a recognizable one, with holy symbols very much like the one my cleric character was wearing... I was playing a priest of a neutral god, and had not even considered the possibility that the goblins would have any recognizable culture, let alone shared faith with the other people of the region. It was a "What have I done!?" moment for both character and player.
As a response to small scale raiding, the extermination response was not proportionate. We weren't even trying to reclaim the fort. Talk of cutting off retreats made me uneasy, and going room to room rousting out unthreatening goblins made it worse, but it was finding the temple after depopulating the fort when the viciousness of attempting a 100% kill rate really set in. I've never done that again. Even against enemy armies, I now try to leave survivors for the GM while gaming. My characters wield less than lethal weapons. They treat incapacitated enemies as being as good as dead. They regard their victories as complete without taking steps to finish off enemies unless said enemies are mindless threats. There are still fatalities, but they are no longer the majority. A hero whose road is paved with corpses isn't much of a hero, anyways.
Surprisingly, my playing style is not all that appreciated by GMs. I tend to mess up their plans by ensuring the survival of people who they expected would end up widely distributed. I am the antimurder hobo.
Looks like Soul Cleaver/Skull Flame is one of those godmodder players that doesn't have much creativity and just wants get their murder boner on... I mean he didn't even try to differenate his last character or bother to give her a proper cutie mark.
That or a GMPC
5134466
Which says more about the GMs you play with than anything else, really. With a good GM, half of the incapacitated enemies would merely be faking it until they could ambush you, and the other half would develop a massive revenge complex after they woke up.
5135126
That's the kind of bad GMing I'm complaining about. I don't have problems with bloodthirsty fellow players, only bloodthirsty GMs. I'm tactically competent enough that I hold my own in fights and having them be "faking it" requires heavy duty plot. This is either good (and I'm helping the GM) or it's bad (and the party complains at the GM rather than me).
Having every surviving random mook develop a massive revenge complex is bad storytelling. Pulling out an exceptional individual to play rival or having a few of them show up snivelling under the command of new villains, these things are cool. It's the possibility for that which helps encourage me to be less lethal. Having the whole lot of them be ready and willing to get their butts kicked repeatedly is dumb.
Man, this is disturbing even for the NPC ponies.
Hah! It appears that talking is not completely a free action.
I suppose that explains why the healers' willingness to take in the stoned Firebelle was contingent upon seeing her preliminary character sheet. That must have set her up as a convenient go-to for a mid-campaign replacement character.
5135460
Well, I'm not really talking about bloodthirstiness in particular, here. More generally, a good* GM will take note of your playing style and then use that to create scenarios which create a unique, handcrafted challenge. It's about making sure that your habits create complications further down the road, more than it is specifically about a desire to see monsters die.
*'Good' according to a certain school of thought, at least.
(And also, my original statement was facetious to begin with, anyway.)
I'm a tad confused as to what exactly is going on in this story. Is it really a story or a bad joke about role-playing games?
5137505
Err qua? I meant that it seemed as though Luna had a part in the story outside of being banished. Frankly on the first read through it seemed like something the events of canon had happened, but something strange had happened to take Luna out of the picture again and that someone(s) in particular was singling out Celestia for special treatment.
Also, blue text?
I don't see anywhere in the story where it is ever directly implied that Celestia tried to kill herself. There is that cryptic statement in chapter 13 that "“Alicorns can’t die by their own magic,”", but that's kind of vague Her reasons for sleeping were never given, beyond trying to escape somethings Why the heck the whole curse thing? I hope you'll get around to explaining these thing. The story feels a bit patchy at times, since it doesn't seem to explain enough of anything to make sense. Also, it feels like it's long-winded rpg joke.
P.S.
I'll be blunt and point out that I find stories that don't make much sense exceedingly frustrating and also that taking efforts to hide details from the reader (or the appearance of such) is authorial trickery. Hopefully things improve.
5137624
And here we have me going on forever not being subtle. Spoilered for everybody's own good.
Look, this whole thing is authorial trickery, so you might as well find a different story to follow instead of this one.
I'm trying to get into Luna's head, but I don't think she's the sort of character to have a dramatic flashback or soliloquy where she explains what makes her tick. So I'm peeling her like an onion, by having her make mistakes in this story she's supposedly writing and in the associated blogs she's also supposed to be writing; these mistakes reveal more and more of the things she doesn't want you to know, because she's too clever for her own good, because she thinks that no one can help her, because she's putting herself in a Hell of her own devising.
She is never going to come out and admit that she sometimes thinks about suicide over the fact that Nightmare Moon killed so many ponies and she let her do it. She won't tell anybody about the overwhelming feeling of guilt, over the fact that she did and allowed to happen so many horrible things, and that she will never be punished for it, because Celestia would break if she would, and Equestria would be doomed if Celestia broke. So Luna makes up a Celestia in a similar situation and beats around the bush about it, by giving Celestia permanently black hooves, having her stand on a block that has been pulverized by thousands of lightning strikes, and having her tell you that alicorns are physically incapable of killing themselves.
This whole thing is about the role-playing. Everything I type that isn't in blue is the character of Luna responding to comments instead of me, which is yet another chance for her to reveal something. I mention that "Twilight" is reading the story, in hopes that somebody will step forward to pretend to be her. This is all a game, you see, a big role-playing game.
So let me be blunt. This is not a story about Celestia trying to find out who or what took over Equestria. This is a story of a damaged soul trying to heal herself by writing a story about her too-perfect sister. If you want action, or unambiguous drama, then move along, because this story is just going to frustrate you.
P.S. And it is a big RPG joke. A character in a show who is constantly being interpreted better by the fans than by the show writers is complaining about having her actions and thoughts dictated by others.
5137967
Well, thanks for the clarification.
5137390 You're new to McPoodle's writing aren't you?
5138143
Not exactly. It just takes a while for the depths of some author's strangeness to become apparent. For what's it's worth I think this "story" needs at least one more tag (like comedy?) and possibly one or more tags that don't exist (meta?).