Chapter 13 - A Little Fall of Rain
Vinyl gently shook Tavi with her hoof. “Tavi. Hey, Tavi. Octavia come on,” she said.
Her friend didn’t answer.
She lifted Octavia’s head and patted her cheek, as she tried again, “Tavi! Hey! You okay? Seriously, you just faint or something? Come on, wake up!”
Still no answer.
Vinyl bit her lip as she looked around. The walkway was basically a giant puddle at this point and while she didn’t know why Octavia had collapsed, she was pretty sure getting soaked by all that nasty, freezing water wasn’t gonna help. Too bad the umbrella spell and a levitation spell would be too much magic to manage at once. Getting her off the ground wouldn’t matter if they just got rained on instead.
“Please, Tavi, come on! I really need you to help me out here!” Her heart hammered in her chest as she tried to think. Had Octavia been sick? She’d never mentioned a medical condition or anything, right? But would she have? But what the buck would cause her to just drop like that? And what in Tartarus was she supposed to do now? Octavia had been the one who’d worked out how they were getting to Filthy’s, and Vinyl didn’t remember how to get back to the docks.
She paused in the middle of patting Tavi’s cheek again, frowning as she finally noticed the surprising warmth and the tiniest tingle whenever her hoof met the fur.
A thought crossed Vinyl’s mind. She’d thought Tavi’s eyes had looked funny right before she’d collapsed, but had just passed it off as a trick of the light. If it wasn’t, that was something. Fever, flashing eyes, and basically oozing raw magic happened when a Unicorn’s magic got blocked up because they were sick or something.
Of course, it didn’t make sense for something like that to happen to an earth pony, but...
Locking the umbrella in place so she didn’t have to focus on maintaining its position, Vinyl cast her magic tracing spell. Two energy intensive spells might been too much, but she could manage a bunch of low impact things at once.
As she focused on Octavia through the electric blue haze of her own spell, her stomach dropped.
Tavi shone brighter than Vinyl’s gear in the middle of a show, a rainbow of magical energy churning and coursing inside her. The only thing brighter than Tavi was her saddlebag, shining like a little rainbow star.
The same saddlebag Octavia had stuck the Element of Harmony in.
The rock. It had to be the rock doing it.
“Oh buck, oh buck, oh buck,” she said as she rushed to open the bag, her shaking hooves making the latches impossible, right up until she remembered she could manage with telekinesis. Internalizing raw magic was really bad for unicorns, so she was pretty damn sure it was bucking terrible for an earth pony to do it.
Once she pulled the rock out, she didn’t even need her tracing spell anymore. Raw magic arced across its surface, sending an unpleasant tingle up Vinyl’s foreleg. Whatever this thing was doing, it wasn’t just leaking magic, it was was pouring it straight into Tavi.
Vinyl took a few deep breaths, forcing herself to relax. She didn’t need to panic. Even if she didn’t know why the rock was acting up, fixing this problem was pretty basic magic: cut the connection between the source and the subject and magic stopped flowing. She’d still have to worry about the magic Tavi’d already been exposed to, but she could at least stop it from getting worse.
The scale was larger than she was used to, but she just needed to treat is like the capacitor on a magic circuit. Focusing on the rock, she began to build a shell around it, keeping her magic from touching the rock’s. If she just tried to cut it directly, it’d just arc back around. The cut needed to be one-hundred percent complete. So, enclose most of the capacitor like so, and then she could just block the f—
It felt like forever had passed before Vinyl could do anything more than lay in the icy rain, biting back tears and wondering if the backlash had shattered her horn. “Buck me,” she whimpered, cringing as she watched magical energy arc violently across the surface of the stone, the water around it hissing.
After another moment, she forced herself unsteadily to her hooves, wincing as pain ran from the tip of her horn all the to the tip of her tail. She’d been whacked by magical backlashes before, but that had been on another level. Getting hit by Trixie again would’ve been better.
“Stupid rock,” she snarled, wincing as the effort of being angry made her head throb, “Stupid bucking rock!”
Taking a ragged breath, she looked at the still unconscious Octavia. Despite being as drenched and probably as cold Vinyl, she wasn’t shivering a bit.
Okay. Plan B then. Get out of the rain, then figure out what to do about Tavi and the rock. That sounded good. She could still make out the faint glow of the greendome through the rain and clouds. If that’s where they kept the plants, it’d be warm and drier than out here, right?
Besides, it was probably the only place on the station she had a chance of finding right now.
Scooping the rock back into Tavi’s saddlebags, she tried to get her bearings and figure out which stupidly narrow and inconvenient alley might actually get them to the dome. Hopefully they’d get lucky wouldn’t run into too many more dead ends.
Without thinking she started to lift Tavi with magic. The pain hit her like a ship, the world spinning around her as she struggled to stay on her hooves and not vomit. The sound of the raindrops reverberated in her head as she squeezed her eyes shut and just waited for everything to feel okay again.
After a moment or two, she just settled for not absolutely terrible. “Okay. B-bad idea. M-magic ain’t happening right now.”
If that were the case, she’d have to move her friend the hard way.
“Sweet Luna,” she grunted struggling to scoop Tavi onto her back. “You’re bucking heavy, you know that? I’m glad you left your cello on the ship, ‘cause there’s no way both it and you’d be coming with me.” Vinyl forced a smile as she glanced back at the unconscious mare, making sure she wouldn’t fall off. Testing it with a few cautious steps, she added, “Bet you’d get super pissed at me for leaving it, too.”
As she walked down what looked like a real walkway instead of a back alley, light flashed somewhere deep in the clouds ahead and thunder roared, shaking everything around her. She nearly slipped as she started, her heart surging in her chest. “That was thunder,” she muttered to herself, forcing a nervous laugh despite the pain the rush of adrenaline brought. “Just thunder. Not the station busting or anything. Didn’t know it could get so loud.”
Shaking her head, she raised her voice as she said, “You seriously used to put up with this kinda bull, Tavi? ‘Cause I gotta say, this is really bucking miserable.” She whipped her bangs out of her face, hoping they’d stay that way for at least a few seconds. “Seriously, if your homestation was anything like this, you made the right call moving to a real station. This place sucks.”
Things really were bad. Octavia weighed a lot more than she’d expected. It was only a few moments before the combination of the biting cold, the pain from her horn, and the weight on her back had her legs shaking. She really might not have the energy to make it to the greendome, let along Filthy’s place.
No. They were gonna get to Filthy’s place. What else was she gonna do, tuck Octavia in a corner somewhere where she might get abducted? Curl up under an awning together and hope they didn’t freeze to death before the rock killed her?
Nuh uh. Tavi dragged Vinyl’s sorry flank all the way to Hooves’, so she could damn well do the same for her. She was Vinyl Scratch, the best DJ in the Empire and a unicorn who could do anything she put her mind to.
Ignoring the aches, pains, worries, and biting cold, she focused on the sounds of the station around her. The rain might have sucked to be walking in, but the rhythm of it hitting the metal and plastic all around her sounded nice. Even the roar of thunder, now that she expected it, contributed to the melody of the storm.
It’d be awesome to listen to from the comfort of her apartment, laying in bed, staring up at the ceiling.
She wondered if Octavia had ever done that. Seemed like something she’d do: relax, listen, and be inspired to compose some beautiful piece or something. Maybe they could do it together sometime. Maybe she’d do a track about a storm, or use the sound of rain in a track, or something.
Lotta cool bull she could do with that concept. Buck it. She could do a an EP all about the sound outside Manehattan. Maybe even have Tavi collaborate with her on a track or two.
That’d be pretty awesome.
How’d Manehattan not recognized Octavia’s talent? Vinyl wouldn’t say it to her, but she was jealous. She could spend weeks at her console and come out with a whole lot of nothing, but every time Tavi touched bow to strings, it was amazing. That mare should’ve been playing all the fancy concert halls on the top tier, not on the walkways for whatever Bits ponies would donate.
Vinyl didn’t care if her scene wasn’t Tavi’s scene, she’d damn well find a way to get her music out there.
Plus it’d be a pretty good excuse to keep hanging out after all this was over.
By the time Vinyl finally pushed through the greendome’s gate and into the welcome, rainless warmth, half-frozen and barely even aware of what she was doing, the flood of relief nearly floored her. “Thank Celestia,” she gasped, sagging against the inner edge of the gate’s frame, her teeth chattering.
As she basked in the warmth and tried to catch her breath, Vinyl looked around her. She might as well have stepped through a portal to another world. The lights in here shined as bright as midday in Manehattan. No clouds, no rain, just little trees as far as she could see, all jammed so close together it was hard to tell where one tree started and another ended. There must’ve been thousands of the things. Glancing up, she changed that number to tens or hundreds of thousands; unlike the rest of the station, the greendome was tiered, and every single level she could see was packed to bursting with plants.
Even Central Park didn’t have half this much green.
To her immense disappointment, none of the trees seemed to actually have any fruit or anything on them. She hadn’t realized it, but she was starving. Just another reason to make it to Filthy’s, as if she didn’t have enough already.
She glanced back at Octavia. Still unconscious. Still breathing. Still not shivering or anything. Still pretty warm despite being absolutely soaked. Overall, probably not great on the whole.
She needed to get to Filthy’s. The question was how. About the only thing she remembered was that Filthy lived on the back of the Flim Flam Fields building, and that they’d been planning to cut through the Greendome to get there.
Pushing off the gate, she started walking again. At least this dome had an open path cut right through the middle of it. As long as she came in on the right side, it should be a straight shot to at least get near Filthy’s. She could work out the next step while she walked.
“Come on, Vinyl. You gotta figure this out.”
~~~~~
Octavia shivered as she trotted through the misty orchard with Rainbow Dash, struggling to ignore the incessant, high-pitched ringing in her ears. She didn’t know when it had started, but it was starting to drive her to distraction. Between it and the glimpses of movement out of the corner of her eyes, she could barely focus.
She cringed as a wave of nausea washed over her, forcing her to stop for a moment. That was not helping matters either. Was it this place making her feel sick in her head, or was it wherever her body was actually making her sick?
As that thought flitted through her mind, she frowned. What was happening with her body?
Had she just been walking and then collapsed out of nowhere? Did she look asleep? Unconscious? Dead? Was Vinyl trying to find help, or was the fool unicorn doing something stupid to try and wake her?
Maybe it was Vinyl’s fault she felt so sick. Maybe it was her fault she was stuck here. Maybe Vinyl had simply abandoned her on the walkway in the rain and freezing cold.
She shook her head violently. No. Vinyl would not do that to her. Vinyl was her friend.
Of course, she’d thought that about other ponies before too.
The inner monologue stopped when she finally noticed Rainbow Dash looking at her expectantly. “Yes?”
“You been listening to me at all?” Rainbow Dash asked. Octavia’s blank stare apparently answered the question well enough as the pegasus continued, “Guess not. I’ve been trying to tell you that…”
Octavia nodded vaguely as she listened. On top of everything else, she still could not shake the feeling that she had been here, in this very orchard, before. Which was impossible. This place wasn’t real. It was an dream created by the Elements. It was Rainbow Dash’s world. “That sounds good,” she said, lacking anything better to contribute.
“Hitting a solid wall of clouds sounds good?”
“Huh? Oh. No. What?” Pressing a hoof to her head, she tried to ignore the rinigng and focus on what Rainbow Dash was trying to tell her. “No. I… Sorry. I’m fine. I am just having a bit of trouble concentrating right now. What did you say?”
The pegasus rolled her eyes. “For the last time: I said I was right and we’re not going to be able to get much further if this keeps up.” The fog clung to Rainbow Dash as she pushed some of it away with a wing. “Haven’t you noticed how obnoxious this stuff is getting?”
”No,” Octavia said, her tail cutting through it with ease. “Besides, it does not matter. We have to keep going until we reach your Ponyville. If there really is an impassable wall of clouds, we will find a way through.”
“Well, I can definitely appreciate that kinda confidence,” the pegasus said with a smile. “You got any ideas about what we’re gonna do if we manage to get there?”
“No.” Sighing, Octavia sat down. “I barely know anything about magic or the Elements or what this place even is. And, unfortunately for me, you seem to know even less.”
“Sorry. I’m a pony of action, not an egghead,” she offered unapologetically.
Octavia lacked the energy to glare. “All I can do is guess at the best course of action, and my best guess is still that the your Ponyville, the one here, and Ponyville Station are connected somehow. I mean, it cannot just be coincidence that they have the same name, right?”
Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Makes sense to me. Still not sure we’re gonna be able to make it, though.”
After taking a few deep breaths to try and quell her nausea, Octavia pushed herself to her hooves and started walking again. “There is only one way to find out. Besides, what sort of ‘pony of action’ would let a few clouds stop her?”
“Hah! Okay, you got me there!” She dropped a wing over Octavia’s back and grinned. “You keep surprising me, you know? I really thought you were gonna be a totally prissy pony.”
“And why would you think that?” Octavia asked idly, focusing on the middle distance. If she stared hard enough, she could almost convince herself that, despite the thickening fog, there was something glinting in the distance, that she was not simply wandering across some endless dreamscape, slowly being driven mad by that obnoxious noise in her ears.
“Dunno. Guess you just remind me of somepony I used to know.”
~~~~~
As Vinyl trudged along the path, the welcome warmth having already transformed into an unpleasant, chafing, stickiness, she wracked her brain for ideas. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember exactly where they were going. She could even see the stupid bucking map on the stupid bucking tablet sitting on the stupid bucking dining area table, but she couldn’t remember anything about it.
Besides, at this point, she wasn’t even sure she could’ve gotten to Filthy’s with the map.
Who in Tartarus built stations like this? Docks to the greendome should’ve been a straight shot, not a bucking maze. But no, walkways just straight-up ended when two buildings apparently got built into each other or whatever. Bunch of idiots put this station together out of scrap and junk.
You couldn’t go wrong in Manehattan as long as you stuck to the edge of a block. She’d only gotten lost like, what, once or twice on her first trips down the the lower parts of the station? Here, everypony probably got lost just trying to get back home.
If they even went outside. Would certainly explain why she couldn’t find anypony.
Still, asking somepony for directions would’ve been nice, but the whole station seemed empty. Not a single pony out on the walks besides them, and damned if Vinyl had figured out how to get into any of the apartment blocks or houses or whatever the buildings around here were before they got to the greendome. All of ‘em had been locked up tight, and nopony seemed eager to open up.
She sighed. Finding Filthy’s and getting Tavi there really was completely up to her. Not exactly a moment of heroism she’d brag about in the club, but one she certainly wasn’t gonna totally buck up either.
Her mind wandered as she walked, idly staring at the trees and their glistening leaves, searching for anything to keep her distracted. Eventually her eyes fell on the shimmer purple of the dome’s surface and the blackness beyond. Was Ponyville always this dark outside the greendome?
It wasn’t just the rain, either. No neon signs on the buildings, no network screens shining out over everything, the walks’ running lights had barely been on...
Maybe they always shut themselves up inside during these storms? Especially if they lasted a whole week or whatever. Vinyl’d done it a few times for Manehattan’s little showers, so she couldn’t blame ‘em. That’d explain why the station seemed so lifeless, too. If nopony wanted to be outside, then they could just run everything outside the apartments at a minimum.
Which gave her an idea.
She could try casting a seriously ultra large magic tracing spell and see what places were using a bunch of power. If the station really was running low, there should only be a few bright spots, and one of them ought to be a big, fancy building, like Flim and Flam’s offices.
The thought of casting a spell made her horn throb, but what other choice did she have? Wander around with Tavi on her back and hope she found the place before she fell over? A twinge in her back – and legs, and neck, and pretty much everywhere else – told her that’d be a pretty damn short trip.
Besides, the spell barely took any effort anyway. Shouldn’t be too tough to do one that was only like, a hundred times stronger than she usually did. No big deal.
“Okay, Tavi. I’m gonna get things done,” Vinyl said as the edge of the dome and the gate back out into the station came into view. She grinned back at her unconscious friend as she trotted towards the gate, trying not to think about what awaited her on the other side. More rain, more cold, and a very, very bad headache was not something she was looking forward to. “Just a bit further and we’ll get you help, I promise. So I need you to keep hanging in there, ‘kay?”
Pushing through the dome’s gate, the returning storm wiped away her warmth in an instant, the rain hitting her like a smack in the face. She wanted to turn around, go back into the greendome and just lay down, but she resisted the urge.
Trying to cast the spell hurt, daggers of pain lancing through her head as she gathered the necessary magic, but it hurt a lot less than she’d expected. It still took a few false starts, but soon she managed a haze of magic right in front of her eyes, and through it, the flow of nearby magic.
Bracing herself, Vinyl poured even more of her magic into the spell, her view of the station dulling as the flow of magic swallowed it. Soon she couldn’t see anything but the magic all around her.
She felt sick for a moment, lurching as she tried to keep balance on a surface that no longer seemed to exist underhoof. The spell nearly broke as panic seized her, but, with a few deep breaths and the rain reminding her that she really was still standing in the middle of Ponyville Station, she managed to hang onto it.
She hadn’t really considered how totally overwhelming the flow of magic in a whole station might be compared to just a couple devices.
After a few moments of staring though, she started to pick out the basic shapes of things, like the dull and sluggish magic of the walkway lights, the brilliant brightness of station generators way below the walks, the mish-mashes of color and intensity that must have been buildings...
Too much stuff to sort through, though. She didn’t care about the super low power stuff, so she adjusted the spell, filtering out the weakest sources and leaving the stronger ones intact. Shivering as the rain poured down around her, she also tried to filter the strongest stuff too, leaving her with the absolutely minimum amount of visible magic to deal with. Then all she had to do was ignore flows that weren’t the right shape to be power moving through a building and focus on the biggest of those and she’d find the Flim Flam Fields building.
Unless her guess was totally wrong, in which case they were screwed, but best to not focus on that one.
Her horn throbbed and her head ached as she struggled to maintain the spell and understand the mess of color and movement that looked for all the universe like Crazy Horse’s dancefloor on a bad night after a few drinks. In the end, she had to guess. There was something in what she was pretty sure was the right direction that looked like a pretty large building that had a pretty good amount of magic flowing through it, so that met all her requirements.
Might as well see if she was gonna be the awesome heroine or she’d bucked up bad. Hopefully her genius plan didn’t actually turn out to be stupid.
Releasing the spell, she took a shaky breath as the station slowly settled back into place. She didn’t even wait for her eyes to adjust back to looking at real things before she started walking. Not like she could see real clearly out here anyway.
The trek somehow managed to be even worse than before, the strain of carrying Tavi and the water and the biting cold all sapping what little energy she had left, but she walked steadily forward, running through old episodes of Power Ponies, working out new basslines, considering what sort of synths to build around a cello piece, wondering how she was gonna rub this act of heroism in Tavi’s face, and whatever else she could think of to keep herself distracted until the tallest building she’d seen in Ponyville emerged from the mist.
She let out her breath as the rain sizzled and crackled on the lights above the sign: Flim Flam Fields.
She wanted to run and jump with unstable giddiness, but she settled for continuing to trudge around the back of the building until she found a door with a call panel and the name she was looking for on the directory. She slammed her hoof against the button, shivering as she waited for it to respond. “Come on, answer, answer, answer...”
It rang. And rang. And rang. And—
“Hello?” Filthy’s voice crackled through the speaker.
“Oh sweet Luna, thank you. Filthy, it’s Vinyl! Open the damn door.” Leaning against the wall for support as relief drained the last bit of her strength, she laughed and looked back at Octavia. “We made it.”
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Wooohoo! A very lovely update, and vinyl just stepping up to the plate here and swinging it out of the park.
focus on maintaining it’s position
Raw magic arced across it’s surface
The sound of the reverberated in her head
then they could just run
runeverything outsidesynths to build
aaround a cello piece1. Its.
2. Its.
3. The sound of the... What?
4. Extra Run.
5. Extra A.
It's back! Been entirely too long. Great chapter though.
6896628 Fixed. Thank you as usual! Remember folks, proofing while half-asleep mixes up its and it's.
6896724 That and many others. Oh god the many others..
I've been reading this and I'm curious, why did you take a break from writing it?
6897444 Short answer is a combination of time management failures and trouble getting the chapter into a condition where I felt it wasn't complete trash, which in no small part fed into said time management failures.
6896770 Oh god I failed so hard in proofing this chapter!
6899166 It's no problem, we all miss things now and then.
6899166 Also I totally did another heavy revision after your last pass, so you can't really be blamed for that. :p
Yessss
You're doing mighty fine job, y'know?
I just wish there would be a whole book on my shelf. All these weeks of waiting.. But i'm sure i won't forget this one.
Ok i just read your big blog post, i wanna add something.
I do not know much about you, i do not know a lot about whole universe of MLP:FiM Fanfics.
But i have read my fair share of books on this planet.
You're talented. This story is deserved to be known. Maybe there is not a whole cheering stadium of readers out there - but imho it's more about this story being kinda late for the big MLP boom of the internet.
This plot is great. And while your writing of background/not-so-main characters sometimes differs from main fanon lines, they turn out to be really good - sometimes nicer than said usual fanon lines of development.
All in all, this story is far better than most here. Well, potentially, because it's not finished yet, but if you'll keep pushing it just like that it will be. This will be a long run, i suppose, but you'll get there.
6897651 Well, at least you're taking the time to critically analyze your own work.
I've read far too many fanfics where I'm already cringing after reading the first few lines of the first chapter!
Anyway, as long as no vampires, humans wearing Darth Vader masks, or Villain Sues/Villains With Whom We All Must Agree (two of the types of villains I hate the most) show up I shall continue to be pleased.
(And then the next chapter has humans who are vampires in Darth Vader masks who have all the powers and make everyone agree with them... also Pokémon.)
rlv.zcache.ca/mega_rage_comic_face_post_cards-r8692dffa8468488faeb624cefcbb9254_vgbaq_8byvr_324.jpg
Just started reading this fic a couple of days ago, seriously enjoying it! Can't wait for the next instalment.
6901567 Well, I certainly appreciate the very kind words. =)
6901946 *sighs and goes and rewrites the next chapter*
6903136 Glad to hear it! I will try not to make that wait too long.
Not to sound rude, but as a fan of this, since you haven't updated or posted, I know you're busy with school/class/college/etc. but please put it on hiatus :P
7085656 Not rude! Also not on hiatus, though. My chapter turnaround is just a bit slower than I'd like.
In fact, I expect we'll be seeing a new chapter in... hmmm... two weeks at the latest?
I'm also hoping I'll also be slowly, slowly, getting closer to monthly-ish releases again. =)
(Also, my main point of failure is work. I wish I were I were still in school. >_>)