Paper Prince

by JLB

Days Twenty Eight to Thirty Three: Escort

Author's Note:

Non-English parts of this chapter are just there for flavor. You won't find much interesting in there. Not a lot, anyway. There aren't many, don't worry.

As for the length compared to the other chapters, I have no excuse.

“I swear, whoever put up a roadblock in an undead forest…” Blueblood heard the chief engineer grumble in exasperation as he and his crew measured and generally observed the massive blockade made of dark concrete that stood in the way of their carrier.

The huge, dark green plastic-covered blocks were bigger than even the vehicle that they had driven through so much of the accursed terrain, and stretched a lasting expanse.. Coming across these was more than a little unexpected, as the past dozen or so kilometers had been absolutely inhospitable. To think that something this big was carried there from either direction was alarming.

The Prince shuddered to think what this could have implied, primarily because he had absolutely no idea, and that gave him a slight twitch of the nerve. Somehow, however, it lifted his companions’ spirits a bit when they first saw it and got over the fact that their old direction was no longer an option. Nobody would explain it to him, as appeared to be the norm for the past few days, so he was left to ponder by himself. Eventually, when the other ponies returned from their examination with much more disturbed and solemn looks upon them, it seemed only fitting that he be left out of the loop.

So he sat by himself, in the VIP cabin, staring out the window and pondering. As he did so, the ponies outside gathered round and appeared to be talking, arguing even. That only added more building blocks to the puzzle that Blueblood was already ill-equipped to assemble. Raven seemed to be holding her own against the technical crew, while the chief engineer appeared to be overly insistent about something roughly in their carrier’s direction. Both parties looked distant, as they had been for some time. The stallion’s eyes had began to burn, and he let out a shrill sigh.

The Prince truly did feel somewhat blue about the strained relationships, although he understood - very few of them, including even Raven, made contact with him after the incident some five days back. He made numerous attempts, forcing himself to overcome coughing fits that happened whenever he would even think of talking to ponies of lower stature, and yet each time he was vehemently assured that nothing was out of the ordinary and he should return to his room. That left his mind somewhat content, but a lingering feeling of distrust began to settle within him.

The regular sessions where his snout would be connected to some awfully loud mechanical apparatus and he could very clearly feel it attempt to suck something out of him were also becoming a bit of an issue. Inquiries on the nature of that particular treatment bore few results, it being explained away as for his own good. Raven in particular would have her horn lit around him particularly often, and the feeling of her eyes piercing his back whenever he turned around became commonplace. All that, the stallion had no idea how to interpret. As far as he was aware, this merely coincided with the many insanities they had encountered on this journey, and his timetracking attempts had told him that they had just crossed the four week mark.

Unable to tell much more from the arguing ponies’ looks and glad that he underwent the last suction procedure an hour ago, he laid down on the couch and sunk his face into an open paper. Some minutes later, he realized that he was laying on the map of the region, and gave it a passing glance. After spending time to find the approximate area they were in, the Prince actually pinpointed the location where they had stopped. Looking over the map a bit more, he saw nothing that caught his interest, and he went back to slowly pondering. His eyes started to close, and the low hum that perpetrated his head every now and then came back.

That was when he realized that beyond this blockade was a much plainer barren expanse that lead directly to Equestrian ground. As a matter of fact, this was a border of the Frozen North never often exploited, and it seemed that in order to reach it, they must have gotten lost in the forest that was meant to take them to the border city of Pierce Heaven. Quickly, he put together that this meant they were infinitely closer to release from this terrible predicament, even quicker he realized that their only issue was taking care of the roadblock, and swiftly, he began to theorize as to how they could bypass it - perhaps, with some relatively complex magical manipulation, the null-zone of the forest could be denied, and—

“Prince Blueblood?” Raven’s voice rang sharply in his ears, and Blueblood fell straight off the couch, coughing up spittle and staring at her alarmedly. She returned the stare with one of her own, eyebrows raised and furrowed, a strangely tense look on her face, suggesting that—

“Another treatment, sir. Lay back down on the couch and I will get the apparatus. Do not touch anything and you get a sandwich,” she said monotonously, backing away from him with a hoof carefully outstretched, eyes now clearly piercing his, as if facing down a large territorial animal.

“But I’m—”

“It’s a very good sandwich, Prince Blueblood, I assure you. Just lay down and keep quiet.” The stallion was left to sigh and do his best to increase trust in himself among his closest peer, shuffling back atop the couch. He could not help but feel a little empty inside for how they treated him. Albeit his was effectively what his performance as… anything, called for. A prince in name only, causing all these disasters. It was only right. Only right that they—

Raven forcefully lifted his head and stuck the device’s hose onto his snout, pressing his head down. As it began to hum unpleasantly, she got herself to stop staring at the Prince’s face.

The extremely disturbing fact that, evidently, being probed by ancient wizards left an alarming chunk of their magic within one’s system, was moving over as her top issue. Now she had multiple big problems to deal with, not just the fact that the pony she was meant to guard was turning into a radioactive, possibly possessed mess.

Having found a demolished bunker hidden in the rocks behind the roadblock was definitely one contestant. It was built to overlook the patch of forest before the roadblook - clearly, somebody’s unsanctioned attempt at security. If it was sanctioned, she would have known. Moreover, it was made out of materials Equestria simply did not possess, as was the roadblock, in fact. The roadblock, curiouly, was much fresher than the bunker. Alien presences in the region were to be expected, but so established and consistent?..

That issue sorted itself out, rather unfortunately so. The extremely sturdy material had been subjected to force that could only have come from a similarly officially nonexistent weapon. Five times larger in shell size than the regular griffon-made marksman gun, and packed with impact holes from shells that exact size to boot. Something had been made that destroyed something that could not have been made. Worse yet, it was not an anomalous presence, not as far as they knew. The bunker, at the very least, was pony-built.

They found a body underneath the debris. A single pony casualty of the apparent assault.

The engineers said that the armor he was equipped with was entirely unheard of and borderline inconceivable by Equestria’s standards - safe for not having been hit by the massive shells, it appeared that he only died due to the debris burying him and impaling his helmet. The dark green and grey was also of a design never seen anywhere else, making the pony himself look like something out of a cheesy comic book, only all too disturbing in real life. The secretary, herself that is, managed to recover an identity document from the mess that was his body.

That pony - Rough Rider - had gone missing months ago from the Canterlot Royal Guard, and was repeatedly reported to have outstanding service records, entirely countered by horrific discipline records. His family never filed a missing pony warrant, leaving it to an anonymous tip for his disappearance to even be recognized. The document went to her pocket, to be returned to the family and give them resolution whether they wanted to or not. In the end, this finding, however grim it was, raised a whole new bunch of questions and implications. There was an awful lot of vital information they could not even have come up with prior.

The fact that they were crossing an entirely accursed, dead, wild region with a radiating Prince and far too many things coming on without warning… As unfortunate as it was, it cost them their social integrity. In short, Raven and the rest had an extremely unpleasant talk, and the gist of it was that both parties were equally displeased with the other’s choices as to what they should do next. The tech team won thirteen to one, and evidently, they were going to bust through the barricade somehow. If only that was the only major significant issue with their group, that would have been fine. She would just have had to dig a lot of graves and lead on all by herself from then on. Unfortunately, surprises were all too plentiful, and all to unpleasant to be thought about.

As such, she came back with an excuse of treating the Prince with an apparatus that was slowly starting to feel like overly noisy placebo. Thankfully, it gave her time to distract herself and reset her mind. It was rare that that happened, but Raven was close to developing a nervous tic. Not anywhere near a breakdown just yet, of course, but a tic was well on its way.

“We are going to need a miracle at this rate, I think,” she mumbled to herself while still holding Blueblood’s head tight as disturbing light poured out of his wide stretched mouth into the isolator machine. “Somehow I think the only ones we’re finding here are the bad kind.”

While the device finally disconnected from Blueblood with a loud “cha-pop”, leaving him unconscious as it always did, she looked at the direction engine room behind the bathroom quarter. Shaking her head, the mare sighed and left a sandwich on the table in front of where the Prince lay, and went to the main section of the carrier. Despite the constant repairs and the occasional retrofit upgrade changing things every now and again, the vehicle had become a second home to most of them. The fact that there was a bit more than just a door dividing the so-called house was going to be a problem, but, thankfully, none of the tech ponies were present there as of yet.

Without much direction, she shrugged and flicked on a small radio that had been entirely useless ever since they entered the wastelands. The rabid, wild air of the Frozen North ate up and distorted even the most powerful of magic communications, to say nothing of primitive radio waves.

Raven’s eyebrow rushed far, far upwards when she heard non-static noises come out of the thing. She fiddled with the frequency a little, and eventually got a clear transmission. It was music. The mare was a bit overcome with the fact that anything got through at all, and the implications of it, remarkably many of them positive, but even through that she could tell it was not very good. The music, that was. Before she got to purging that thought from her mind and informing the rest, she realized that the (poorly) singing male voice sung in a language she could not recognize at all - and that was with her being at least quintlingual. Something nearby was equipped with a receiver so powerful, it caught wavs from extremely far away.

“I don’t care where you’re catching this from,” she muttered to herself, hurrying towards the door. “But if somebody’s transmitting this from nearby, I won’t mind a freaking deer getting us out.”

Just as the mare got herself out the door, coat fortunately on, an extremely loud noise made her brace against the frame of the carrier and grind her teeth. It was a roar, a boom, a screech, a series of chugs, and, most of all, a heavy crash, as if something slammed into one of the massive, spindly trees, and brought one of them down.

Her hearing recovered by when she reached the other end of the vehicle, and just in time - all the warning she had before a heated metal slug, reeking of ozone, flew by her face, was a yell.

“That all your surprises?” a rough, hoarse, heavily accented male voice barked from a small elevation above where they had stopped.

“The hell did you shoot her for?!” Raven heard the chief engineer shout out, somewhat able to hear him over the quickened heartbeat she was trying to fight, pressing herself to the metal of the carrier on the other side.

“I don’t like me any surprises,” the voice replied in what was, quite painfully, some crude manner of impersonation. “Now she comes out alright.” The mare pondered for a moment what that sentence meant, as the roguish accent and the messy intonation made it unclear if he was ensuring that she was not hit, or telling her to come out.

“Who are you and what do you want?” she shouted from her cover, peeking her head out and getting a look at who exactly almost killed her.

“My name is not important,” the attacker replied in, once again, an obvious impersonation, although this time a much different one. By that point, it had come from confusing to unsettling. “I come for you.”

“And what does that mean, exactly? The hell are you pointing that motherload at us?” the chief engineer shouted at him in Raven’s stead.

“No funny business when I’m on the job,” was another voice-shifty reply. “You’re coming with me.”

“Cause you have a gun and we don’t?” the bulky stallion asked venomously, whereas Raven took short steps towards the other end of the vehicle, trying to get to the opening from a presumably blind side. On the way, she locked Blueblood in.

“Nope,” the attacker replied. “I’ve got me many.”

The mare covered her face with a hoof, partly in reaction to just how their newest problem sounded, and partly to cool her head off with a bit of snow. She had been trying to figure out which species he was, but the weird tone and pitch shifts with nearly each phrase made it difficult. What impediments and abnormalities carried over, though, made him pretty Capric. Rough vowels, some palatalized consonants, an entirely backwards syllabic and rhythmic pattern.

It would have made sense, too - the goat vassal state was relatively close to the Frozen North border. Only there was a slight problem with trying to deduce where the threat came from, which was that despite being Equestrian territory, the most even she ever heard of that nation was news from the capital city of Gueldergrad. And, if truth was to be told, it always unnerved her how neat and clean everything sounded, and how little effort ever went into making any sort of contact with what was their own state.

She never minded it before, not seeing the goats as major players on the political stage, or as personal adversaries when sent on missions for the Princess, but currently it was very much a problem.

Peeking around the corner and looking at him again revealed that the problem was rather massive.

“What do you need from us?” the chief engineer asked.

“Aeehhh…” the goat fumbled, his voice shifting into a much more consistent, higher-pitched, smoked-out tenor “You. I need you. You’re coming with me. That clear? You’re being… ehh… rescued. Right. You’re all being rescued.”

For starters, the goat was pointing an absolutely gargantuan gun at them as he said so. It sat on one of his broad shoulders, but in sheer size, it was nearly half as big as its wielder. Raven was not a gun expert, not being a griffon and all, but one thing was clear to her - this was far beyond what any kind of official modern gunsmithing was capable of. Its many end holes spun, whirring slightly, and steam came out of its back. A big box hanging on his flank was connected to it with a wide, flat cloth.

“Okay… Okay. We’ll come quietly… but we have one more,” the stallion negotiated further.

“Yes, you do. He’s like this, right?” The goat spoke in what must have been his original voice, and pulled out a picture of Prince Blueblood with one hoof. The fact that he kept balance standing on three hooves while still keeping the gun aimed was intimidating. The fact that the picture was a photo, and taken from an upwards angle, and recently so, judging by Blueblood’s clothes - but not his physical state - was disturbing. A meek green filter was platered over it, but Blueblood slouched over on a couch was visible.

“What do you need him for?”

“Same thing, stupid. We got room for all here.”

The next problem was that he was right, and there was room for all. Parked next to the goat was… a landship. A legitimate landship, like in the schematics she had once seen shared by griffon engineers. Only real and in the metal, and… far more advanced. It was not as pompous as expansive as their carrier, but taller, wider, more efficient-looking. Its design was angular, and the greyish-green camo paintjob made it look smaller than it actually was. Many window-holes on its sides had other guns peeking out, with red lights flashing above them. On top of it was an absolute giant of a cannon, located on a rotating platform. Scratches and bumps peppered the hull, the expected signs of passing through the Frozen North. Only it seemed that, unlike their vehicle, it had not yet required any extensive repair.

Last Raven checked, their vehicle was the most advanced that ever treaded any Equestrian ground. No others were meant to have been produced. Especially not by their own forgotten states. She had officially developed that tic, and her eye began to twitch.

“Tell her to come out.”

“I’m coming out, I’m coming out,” Raven announced, stifling a sigh. The original plan, which was to sneak around and take him down while he was distracted, was not panning out particularly well. She held her head down and put up a hoof to show she was not armed, but still felt the gun point its many maws at her, causing her gut to sink a little.

“All the family here yet?” another twist of the voice took over the goat.

“Ah… The Prince, we need him too,”

“Yeah, right. Pull him out.” The goat accentuated that with a swing of his gun, which did not even tip him. An engineer he pointed it at got up and slowly backpedaled, going to get Blueblood.

The goat himself was part of the reason the sneak attack was not working. Whoever he was, and however strange his way about Equestrian was, he was a bit of a problem. Standing in the rather chilling cold, on his body were only a white and blue striped legless shirt, a set of winter goggles, and a belt with copious pockets. On top of his head was a blue beret with an ornate set of laurels surrounding two crossed scythes - the Capric national emblem. While goats were normally taller and less muscular than ponies, this one was massive in both regards. Without even meaning to seek them out, Raven could spot bits of his biceps even through the thick dark coat. That coat was razor-cut below his neck, making a tatoo-alike of a bell with an equine skull within it.

Once again, Raven was not an expert in northern parts of the world, but plain common sense said that this was not someone to be trifled with. Definitely not alone.

They exchanged looks with the chief engineer. The mare stared at the stallion, both showing some considerable disdain for one another. She was not necessarily too happy about having to be stuck there with these ponies, not only being sick of the present company, but also having learned a thing or two about them during the big argument. He had the same thoughts, no doubt. Still, he nodded once. The secretary’s heart ran a little quick, but she calmed herself before it would be noticed.

Blueblood evidently went through his own set of discoveries as he was being forced out of the carrier, but kept quiet. Apparently, having approximately eight gunholes stare at him forced all the disbelief to remain pent up. That… complicated things a little, as him complaining and making a large fuss would have been beneficial. Raven was forced to make a move.

“You need the Prince alive, right?” she spoke slowly, calmly, trying to be as unsuspicious as possible.

“I said, you were getting rescued. You deaf?” the goat replied, slurring a little. He also managed to keep track of all of the ponies present while so doing.

“You pointing this big freaking gun at us isn’t helping that fact,” the chief engineer said with a grunt.

The goat looked first at him, then at Raven, then at the Prince, then at all the others. He especially centered around the Prince, who was still a little groggy after his treatment, and bore a few of the marks of previous encounters.

“I want no funny business, understand?” he said in what accounted for a normal voice, somewhat more high-pitched than the many apparently token phrases he had been using.

With that, he kicked the gun on the side, and the barrels quit spinning. He backpedaled and kicked his vehicle, causing a door to open vertically, falling right down on the snow and causing a pile to roll down. It hit the Prince right at the end, but not even that had him swearing, or complaining, or speaking at all. He was dug out, and in the meantime, Raven returned to her original point:

“The Prince is sick. I have to get his medication, or it will not end well.”

“I know your sick. Go on, get to the carriage!” the goat’s voice took a complete turn for the lower pitch, almost slipping into another accent. “Ziegel, ziegel, ai lu lu!”

From then on, there was no more communicating in any language, as every attempt at prolonging the conversation was shut down. Once again under gunpoint, many of them, they were lead into the inner part of his vehicle, with considerably worry in tow. Nobody had any delusions about this being rescue - not even Blueblood, if he would speak at all, instead of limiting himself to skulking and staring. The list of problems was ever growing, even in spite of how, after the door was locked, the goat left the vehicle. Nobody felt very adventurous, seeing how the steamwork turret guns peeking out of most windows were clearly equipped to rotate.

The only thing to fill up the awkward silence to follow the capric’s departure was the view from the few clear windows - their carrier was moving over, and getting attached to be towed. A weight fell off not only her heart, but most others. In the case that they found a way out, they would not be monumental failures in the eyes of their command.

The interior of the landship, which they had some time to examine, was about as perturbing as its owner. Most tech ponies looked for tools to abuse and take over the driver when he returned, but nothing appeared to be much sharper or heavier than a hoof or a horn. A small room absolutely full of firearms was barred away, and nobody had welding equipment on them. Just to annoy Raven, each and every one of those looked infinitely more advanced than any firearm she had ever seen, and she got to see early prototypes mere months ago.

The interior itself was very spacious - larger than the two sections of their own vehicle combined. Much wider, too. This was not going to be a repeat of the black hole incident Raven had years ago during her travel to a southern ruin, at the very least. There were two more small rooms - a storage room full of heavily canned food, including meat, and a restroom. Raven was no tech pony, but everyone else was - their gazes were all over the place, and more than a few had their jaws hanging out. She never asked anyone for a clarification, knowing how well that would end. Not that they could help her. Not these ponies.

Improbable technology beyond official Equestrian understanding, however, was not all there was to be taken by. The area they were staying in was… “customized”, Raven found a euphemism.

Posters of varying degrees of quality, appropriateness, and age, littered the walls when Sad-Arabic-looking carpets (who would hang a carpet on a wall?) were not. Notes written in what must have been Capric were pinned down at random. A big refrigerator unit was bolted into the floor near the sink. Glass bottles were in abundance, placed in plastic boxes. Borderline ancient dirty dishes were in a sink in the corner of the “room”. Two couches were at the opposite sides of the room. A single carpet was where it belonged, on the floor, albeit it only covered the very center despite its massive size. Books (some with Equestrian titles) and magazines (mostly comic books, upon further inspection) were held in glass casings on bookshelves that were nailed onto the walls, atop the carpets. The sheer size of the comic book pile, with even a box of what must have been videotapes - something that Equestrian playmakers were enthusiastic about before the market was overflooded with low quality production - gave her an idea as to where the goat learned Equestrian from, as well as the source of his mannerisms. A flatscreen projector hanging from the ceiling, complete with a tarnished Griffon-made “entertainment center” bolted into the floor, was directly adjacent. Clear signs of misuse were on both highly modern devices.

All of it positively stunk of alcohol, smoke, and ozone. Come to think of it, the same applied to its owner. By when he returned, Raven and the engineers had finally murmured a bit more between themselves.

“Okay, the gang’s all here. Now, no funny business, no goofy times, and everything is ooky-spooky,” he said, still pointing the humongous gun on them, and slowly advancing into the driver’s cabin. There was another small room between it and where the ponies were held - in it, a bunk, a sink, a refrigerator, and some other implements were located.

“Alright. No problem,” the chief engineer said, nodding. “Where are we going?”

“Where you belong.”

Whether Raven wanted to or not, her chest panged when he passed near her, pointing the gun her way as he did so. As if the many other guns were not enough.

“Equestria?”

“Uhuh. Right.” Once again, the goat’s voice made it utterly impossible to tell what he meant.

“Okay. We’ll settle down.” Upon hearing that, the secretary prepped her limbs a bit.

Just as the goat turned to point the gun at the bigger clump of ponies, who had moved as far to the side as they feasibly could, she heard a very soft tap on the floor. Her heart beat fast, not racing yet, but less than happy with where she was going.

Still, she lunged ahead, hoping that the guns could not turn all the way around, and throwing herself right at the goat. With great fortune, Raven did live to the part where she jabbed her horn in the side of his neck, and a sharp pen in a supposed weak point by the chest. The chief engineer then rammed into his other side, aiming for the head with a heavy bottle.

Less fortunately, a painful thud sent sparkles into Raven’s eyes when her horn hit the goat, and she felt the metal ink pen palpably bend upon impact. A pained yell sounded out, a male one, but her blurry vision showed the bulky stallion falling back on his haunches, a big red mark on his forehead, with two harsher parts at the top of it. Horn roots. The goat swore in his language, tilting a little himself, having lost some of the balance to the attack. A few bits of glass were stuck in his forehead, but most other parts of the extremely thick bottle that was used to assault him simply fell down on the floor.

Without another alternative, and fully realizing that she was charging someone whose skin was hard enough to deflect a rather sharp horn, Raven attacked again. This time, she was pushed into a corner, and decided that another series of monotonous neurolinguistics sessions with Blueblood were worth it - she went for the jugular vein. Instead, she found the goat’s forehead, and was flung meters back, head pounding after the heavy hit, and screeching due to all the gunfire in the room.

It was all or nothing, them either getting murdered or taking both vehicles for themselves lest they meet with a terrible fate. Now, it seemed, they had the added bonus of having to wait until said terrible fate. Not that there was any chance that they were being taken anywhere good to begin with. Only now, their escort would be less than pleased with them.

On the bright side, said escort appeared to be more or less impenetrable, so—

“Ах ты ж епт…” she heard a heavy blast, and then - the goat cough out in definite pain and his gun bang against the wall. A heavy crash and a lot of metal noises followed.

By when Raven got her head up, Prince Blueblood was already racing towards her, a forcibly turned around turret right behind him, smoking a little. He shook her, looking worried, but only worsening the immense headache and the rotating stars in her eyes. She became worried just as well - at the glow in his eyes, and at the slight mist leaving his mouth. This was a new relapse record.

Now they were having Blueblood issues, less than an hour after the last suction. At least one issue seemed to have dealt with the oth—

A sharp metallic sound sounded thrice from different parts of the room, and a guttural growl came from the driver’s cabin. Raven lifted her head and groaned. When the goat stumbled, having taken a slug, that was where he landed. In the driver’s cabin. Where he was headed.

Evidently, he landed headfirst onto whichever of the many, many buttons on the driver’s panel raised huge, electrified metal bars out of slots in the floor. Now, he stood upright, having just a few seconds ago pushed the slug out of the side of his chest. Blood poured out of it, but not too extensively. Not a lethal wound.

“Okay…” she heard the goat mumble out after gulping audibly. Blueblood helped her up, all too cautiously and reliably, and let her lean against him while she regained her vision. “I say I am rescuing you… I free up my fucking room for you… and then… Да пошли вы нахуй, блять.” He waved a hoof at them discardingly. “Now sit there and think what you’ve done. Don’t want to see your asses no more. Enjoy the fucking road.”

With that, a huge black sheet of metal blocked the view of the driver’s cabin beyond the electrified bars. All of the sentry guns, including the one that peeked out just enough for what must have been its rotating switch to be visible, retracted sharply into the hull. The same bars locked out the free windows, before and after the thick glass, and the other rooms.

“Food in the fridge, if you need the toilet - you ping me. No. Funny. Business. Fucking horses,” Raven heard his voice come from the bathroom door, heavily distorted. Evidently, that was a speaker.

Soon enough, the rest of the ponies came to. They all had a big staredown, Raven drilling the engineering team and them drilling her. Nobody said a word, not even Blueblood, who had sunk into a corner, surrounded by posters. The big stallion was the first to break the silence.

“Well, I guess nobody wins now.”

“Uhuh. That’s great, isn’t it. Not we don’t get to be rebels, do we?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. You keep telling yourself that’s what we need. You know what? We don’t need this. Do we, guys?” he looked at his suite, who kept quiet as they normally did, albeit in a slightly less convenient fashion this time around. “We are going to find a way out of this hole. You sit in this corner along with him, and do what you do best. You know what that is.”

“I can’t exactly do that right now, can I?”

“I meant be freaking useless. You can do that anytime. Now excuse me, but we have an utter pile of manure to explore.”

“Anybody touches anything I don’t like, they get a hole in their head,” the goat’s voice from the speakers reminded them of his existence. Behind the accent and the distortion, it was barely audible, but a series of chirps from the hull made the point very clear. Clearly, there was no more luck with just a single gun being ever so slightly out of place - enough for their dimmest member to turn it against the driver in a disturbing display of intelligence. Said member sat in his corner, staring at the rest of the ponies with unpleasantly glowing eyes, a wispy mist coming out of his mouth still. The secretary could only scowl at the thought of how had she stopped him from ever encountering the… lich, this, and his unnerving mental symptoms, could have been prevented. At the rate they were going, being executed via gunfire may have been more preferable than having a wounded - military? special forces? bandit? - goat carry them to their doom.

Eventually, Raven just crashed herself on the allotted couch, and buried her face in her hooves. Her head ached like death, her options were very limited, her companions were either distrustful or infected by some ancient magic. In short, her task was becoming very difficult to accomplish.

Then the music came on - all too similar to what she heard on the radio less than an hour back - and life became utter misery. The mare laid down on the couch, and covered her head with her hooves entirely, not even throwing off the coat that she still wore. Around her, metal noises were prevalent, and a much different chug of the mechanical engine started to come alive, covering up the muttering of the dozen of technicians who, no doubt, examined the construct in clearer detail. Soon, the landship had begun to rock, having began to move, and her body finally conceded, drifting away. A soft touch of a big hoof brushing her head was not enough to pull her out.

She woke up in what must have been very early morning, as there was actual sunlight coming through the windows, when they weren’t occupied by guns. Absolutely nothing had changed about the room, as it seemed that the tech ponies found nothing they could exploit. If they had, they would have said something. With how she spent at least half an hour visibly awake, but not moving due to her headache, that was not happening. They were instead mostly asleep, some of them playing cards that one of them must have had in a pocket when they were taken. All the attention she received from that side of the room was a tired glare from the chief engineer, who was looking out a window and into the white expanse. Apparently, they had left the forest.

The landship was rocking ever more, much more stably than their carrier ever did. That caused her to turn sleepy very shortly, and, with the help of the alcoholic, ozonic smell ever present in the room, made any thought a difficult one. Then again, all she had on her mind was rather unpleasant. Nothing was there to alleviate the grim atmosphere.

Blueblood did try to come in contact with her, but she could not help but shudder away from him - by that point, the glowing of his increasingly sad eyes made him visible even from his dark corner. A few previously half-empty reeking bottles were near him. So it did disturb her more that he wished to give her an alcohol-washed rag for her head wound. Just the fact that the Prince somehow managed to arrive at that first aid solution. Then again, from her observation of his behavior after the unfortunate accident, that was a noticeable symptom.

Thankfully, he took no for an answer, and she spent the rest of the day in relative peace, curled up on the couch and listening to the terrible music the goat’s radio was somehow receiving. Occasionally, his voice would come through on the speaker, but unless it was someone needing to use the restroom, it was nothing more than incoherent mutterings in a language none of them understood.

Raven attempted to get up and prepare food, but found that one of the engineers had taken up position as cook.

Those were all the events of what her biological clock was the entirety of the next day. Spent in the alcoholic odor that far outmatched anything Blueblood ever smelled like at the onset of their “adventure” and affected by the constant rocking, it passed quickly.

The next day was not a major change in that regard. The engineers had begun to give up on reverse-engineering anything the landship’s interior had to offer, and the metal bars continued to be very visibly electrified. To cope, most of them had begun to peruse the comic and regular books, although the majority were less than pleased. Some argued about how exactly the projector must have been broken, and nearly arrived at a conclusion, but the chief engineer discarded the idea of fixing their kidnapper’s stuff. In the end, their main technical accomplishment was creating a makeshift flashlight to be able to read in the dark, which, in that part of the North, was what five sixths of the day consisted of.

Blueblood was entirely quiet, still sitting in his corner and looking gloomily at the rest of them. That unnerved Raven progressively more and more the sadder he got. Fortunately, the headache helped combat that. By that point, the Prince was simply emitting too much magical and regular radiation for anyone to approach him all too safely.

Slowly, she was starting to realize that their main mode of escape would be either if the driver would be killed and the systems disabled by some creature or event, or if he died from radiation poisoning due to Blueblood. In both cases, they were more or less doomed as well. Still, Raven clung to hope, wishing for something to happen that would break them out. This was, after all, the Frozen North. Something had to be dangerous enough. Where they were going… she did not want to end up.

When they evidently passed through an entire pack of much the same wolves they had encountered many days ago, and left the entire pack “shredded to guts and bits”, according to the engineer that was looking out a window at the moment, that hope simmered down a bit. A few hails of gunfire and what must have been very unsavory words from the driver, and all pony heads in the vehicle were pounding, while all the wolves outside were demolished. Unless there was extreme overexaggeration in place, it was not a good sign for most physical things to come up against the landship. It also explained how the goat got to their position with just a few scratches and bumps. To think that a sattelite nation somehow possessed machinery that allowed one to traverse the Frozen North almost effortlessly...

Since this show of firepower left only terrain, weather, magic, and Blueblood as possible solutions to the problem - all of those would absolutely inevitably take toll on them as well - Raven decided to go with gross overexaggeration, and stared back at the engineer part of the room with increased disdain. They had not shared more than a few words over the entirety of the two days.

On day three, Raven’s head wound appeared to have been reduced to very plain painful thump here and there. Only it was with a slight sizzle on her forehead that she woke up, and Blueblood looking guiltily at her. The mare checked herself nervously for radiation poisoning, thankfully, to no avail.

Not that it much mattered. Some hours into her having been awake, they entered an absolute blizzard of a flash freeze. Even inside the thickly plated vehicle, which was heated in a manner not unlike their own was, the temperature dropped quite significantly. They could clearly hear ice cracking outside - and, according to the engineering team’s highly disturbed announcement, that was the moisture around the four wheels turning into huge clumps of ice before the wheels finished a full cycle. And yet, all that resulted in was more bumps in the road.

That said, it also resulted into all of the ponies having to gather in the middle, because the temperature really was low for a long time. Everyone but Blueblood, of course, who understandingly curled up in his corner. Raven was let into the fold, but felt decidedly unwelcome there. The incredibly awkward huddling up went on for about three hours, where only the engineers’ talking about brain-melting things engineers talk about, all allongside the similarly brain-melting radio kept her company. When the flash freeze ended, most of them lost consciousness to the severe, harsh change of temperature.

Raven awoke on day four, but only knew that because Blueblood told her that when she woke up, blinking incoherently. That was how she found out that it was the by now positively glowing prince who would daily bring her breakfast before she woke up. They shared a very heated exchange in which she tried, in horror, to escape what was effectively a plate of magical radiation (regular radiation would have aired out of Blueblood by now, Raven knew), while he tried his best to convince her to eat something. Eventually, she had to shriek at him to back off and never touch anything again until they could get the suction device back, causing the stallion to depart to his corner, crying audibly. He covered himself with a muddled poster of some circus announcement with an elephant-like creature on it that fell of the wall. However they related by that point, Raven could not bear looking at him in such a state.

So she laid on the couch, spending the few of her thoughts that remained alive in the repugnant odor by trying to imagine all the possible ways she could exploit any sort of hiccup on the vehicle’s part. It could not have been perfectly designed - something had to give out at one point or another. They crossed many regions, going through places they had not even paid attention to on the map, and yet nothing of note happened to the landship. Some gunfire would occasionally sound, but by that point, all of them were so dazed that it simply did not much register. The engineers took it a bit worse for wear, as, unlike Raven or Blueblood, they were not in a repulsive social vaccuum. As such, they were more sane.

The mare herself was becoming more and more sure that something was turning cranky inside her head. All the hurdles she had overcome, one way or another, to be ended by an armed forces renegade whose knowledge of Equestrian came from terrible comic books and even worse videoplays. She figured out his origin by then - the bits of uniform and the overly accurate firing and driving pointed towards him being a high-skilled, arguably high-ranking deserter. Probably a mercenary, however wild it was to imagine such an institute existing in Equestria, and outside of comic books. Her encounter career may have been topped with the ancient, prehistoric, uneasy implication-instilling Arabian lich, but this looked to be where it would end.

At least, she thought, there would be not much shame in living after her mission had failed entirely. Something told her everyone but the Prince would end up disposable. That particular thought did not make life’s prospects much brighter, and so she ended up dozing off, distanced from everyone else in the room.

That day’s unpleasant revelation about the landship came in how an all too familiar sort of howl started to emit from outside, echoey and full of angst. Another wraith - more than one, in fact. Even in her state, covering ears with hooves out of sheer reflex, she heard their voices clearly. They curdled her stomach, and sent chills down the spine. Pony voices, too. Someone Equestrian. It was not all too clear, but she heard the same phrases repeated over and over.

In a half hour of exposure, the whirlwind of ghastly “Why did you bring them?”, “I can’t reach the Command”, “...you never told us...”, “Come again, TACCOM?”, and the like became absolutely omnipresent, some of the room’s furniture turning faintly green. Faint bits of obscure encyclopaedic knowledge suggested that they were passing by a pack of old wraiths, and at least some of the disjointed, garbled speech must have been what kept cycling in their minds long after their deaths. Ghostly, reminiscently armored silhouettes began to seep into their cabin through the hull, stretching out their hooves violently toward the ponies, and avoiding Blueblood’s corner entirely. It looked predictably grim, until the driver’s voice shouted through the speaker at deafening volumes:

“А вот хер вам, бесота поганая!”

While none of them knew what that meant, all of the passengers were thrown against the walls and furniture, one of the engineers nearly breaking the projection screen. For a few moments, it felt as if they were in flight, as the rocking disappeared entirely, and the vehicle’s center of weight shifted drastically. A severe crash, however, had them thrown against various other objects, and the pur of the motor soon resumed. Remarkably, the projection screen now appeared to be working.

The driver/abductor did not hear news of this until the next day, though, as, evidently, the only pony awake after that particular romp was Prince Blueblood. When Raven awoke, he was sitting in front of the projector, while the engineers had all backed down into the kitchen area, shouting for her to wake up. Strangely enough, the mare felt as if she woke up on her own. Perhaps, it was the blurred, slowed down nature of her perceived reality that caused that. Even as she got up, she felt less than well. Her assumption was radiation exposure.

“He’s… doing… something. I don’t know how he figured this crap out,” the large pony said to her with the side of his mouth, looking more than worried. “You’re the expert on creepy magic stuff here. The hell is this?”

“I thought…” Raven was about to remind him that she was useless, but a wave of nausea came over her. “I… I think… I think his infection is turning him into… I don’t know… probably a magic source like what caused the anomaly? Ancient non-unicorn magic is not my forte.”

“Well, I don’t think we’re allowed back to our old carriage no more. He won’t listen anymore, no matter how hard we try. What a dumb way to go...” He shook his head, evidently following much the same train of thought as Raven over the days. His head looked just about as bad, too. He seemed to have come up with sanitizer just as well as Blueblood did.

The secretary sighed, staring at Blueblood staring at the screen. Then, she looked at the tech crew. Something became apparent.

Despite the… violent, and less than disclosurable, nature of their argument days prior, they had been clumped up together in a large, but not any less foul den. Over the days, they kept up the disdain, especially after their attempts at teamwork lead to the situation turning for the worse. Whether she liked it or not, but her negativity toward them, much like the opposite, was starting to run on fumes.

If they were going to go, they would at least have to do so amicably.

“You’re talking again?” the Prince asked, still sitting still and staring at the screen, watching some mindless movie without sound, subtitles pasted poorly at the bottom.

“Might as well,” the chief engineer sighed, shrugging.

“Finally. You know, for ponies from a nation that values friendship so highly,” Blueblood said in a calm, slightly higher pitched voice, likely deteriorated from days of non-use. “You sure didn’t take long to get at each other’s throats. I’m glad to see none of you stab another in the back, but still…” He sighed, in a slightly shrill voice, coughing slightly. “None of us are all that good at this.”

“What is he talking about?..” the bulky stallion whispered to Raven, finally being able to vent his unease.

“Don’t mind him, he is not himself when this happens… I believe,” she whispered back.

“By “this” I mean very, very basic things, Buster,” Blueblood answered calmly, cocking his head a bit, mist seeping out of most his orifices by then. “I think we must be around close now. I feel as much. The ship veers a little every now and then. I take it as change of direction. If I’ve been right in following the patterns… And if I remember the map…”

“How does he remember my name,” the chief engineer said plainly, staring right at Raven.

“He looked at the map?..” she spoke out in unison with him.

The Prince sighed while there was very slight unrest among the rest of the ponies. His bright gaze turned toward a window, beyond which only pitch blackness was visible.

“This is a good place, I think.”

With that, he rose up, stopping the previously dysfunctional projector and recorder at a frame of a video where an oddly shaped compass lay covered in someone’s blood. The mare was not paying much attention to it previously, but that frame set chills down her spine. Everyone let him pass to the bathroom door, and press the red button. He scratched his temple with a hoof, and took a deep breath. Subtly, he turned to Raven, and said:

“If this doesn’t work, remember me as a failure.”

The speaker audibly came alive, but before anything came from the other end, the unicorn spoke first:

“I’ve fixed the projector. Want to check it out?”

“You what?”

“Fixed the projector. It took some time, but that was the least I could do for giving us a ride.”

“Somebody got a brain in there?”

“We’ve always had them. It just takes time for a pony to adjust to new environments. I apologize on behalf of my followers. We could take a break. You have been driving with a sum of six hours slept. That’s not great.”

“I’m fine.”

“But you’ll get us there more reliably if you’re not sleep-deprived. You know that for a fact.”

“I’m not… derprived. You’re derpraved.”

“The recorder is working too, by the way.”

The landship stopped with a halting screech. The ponies shook in place a bit, but nobody fell, and everyone kept to the walls, while staring at Blueblood. As for him, he calmly walked toward the entrance to the driver’s cabin, and stood right in front of it. The stallion only flinched a little when the bars sparked one last time, and retracted.

Something came together in Raven’s head, and she followed him. So did the chief engineer, whose name even she had left out of her memory prior to Blueblood’s sudden rediscovery. With nods, a few of the engineers spread out closer to the room, not suspiciously enough to be instantly noticed.

The metal sheet slid up, and the significantly disheveled goat stumbled out of the cabin. Somehow, he had gained a stubble atop his thick coat, and still wore the beret. His goggles, however, were currently missing, hanging from a pine-tree air freshener that dangled across the windshield. His now visible blue eyes readjusted to the relative darkness of their room, but not for too long. Right away, he caught eye of Blueblood.

“Ебать-колотить…” he whispered something, legs giving way for a second, jaw hanging open. So did Raven’s, as she noticed a large red scar on his forehead, but not for long. Instantly, everyone went in to wrestle with him, dragging the massive goat into their room. Strangely so, it was not so much of a fight, as the goat instinctively tried to scramble away from Blueblood, who stared him in the eyes with his own, glowing orange by that point.

“Get. H-him. Out.” The Prince shuddered as he did so, his head and ears twitching, eyes never once blinking. Hoarse, coughing bleats were all that their kidnapper responded with, trying to blabber out something none of them would understand in any case.

Before the ponies could respond, the goat blinked, and his own eyes took on an orange glow. Suddenly, he turned around and rammed a section of a wall repeatedly, until a switch ejected from it. Hitting that switch caused the door to open wide, letting a snowstorm into the room, and somehow turning it even darker. The goat needed no further convincing, trotting outside on wobbly legs, breathing heavily. The door closed behind him, a section of it remaining open, hard glass separating it from the outside world. It turned out that that entire time, they could have had a bigger window.

The moment that happened, Blueblood fell face down on the floor, grunting in pain in a much shriller voice than his own already was. The glow and mist became weaker, albeit not absent, and the abject silence was interrupted by the sound of hooves against metal as Buster rushed into the driver’s cabin, ushering the rest after him.

Raven was about to start contemplating just what exactly had happened to the Prince after ancient magic touched him right through the mouth, but her attention was taken when the glow was removed from Blueblood completely - just as more hammering began to sound. This time, it was hooves against glass.

“What did you do?!” the goat’s muffled, accented voice came from the other side. He was already covered in snow. “How the fuck?!”

The mare just stared back at him, busy with the same question. Their abductor stared at her from the other side, growing more and more of an ice coat by the second. He breathed heavily, looking to his sides, and hung his head for a few moments.

“You were going to kill us, weren’t you. You’ve killed before,” she pressed her hooves against the glass, and stared right at him. It was a better alternative than finding out what was going on with the Prince. Her mind was so eager to get away from the issue of Blueblood that something finally clicked within it. “You set up that roadblock, you took out that outpost. I know who you are.”

“You can go fuck yourself!”

“What didn’t you like in your special forces? What wasn’t good enough? Why would you… take all this and take off into this damned waste? You knew how this would end.”

“They’re idiots! You’re… idiots! You don’t do anything, we never do anything! Nothing! Nothing is going on!” he rammed against the glass, but his nation’s design proved to be too hard even for that. “You… We have no lives! You don’t have a life! And now… me too! Fuck you!”

Raven scowled, lowering her head, listening to the freezing goat rant. With how his military was evidently making research years beyond what it was ever expected to, and with how it was expected to never, in fact, be used, she could but sigh. Even more so over the fact that documents like the case of a “newspaper rumor” about a Capric military office having a “mishap” were always to be sorted for the trash bin. Only she read them anyway.

Rough Rider, the pony whose life he had taken, was the same, she realized. It would have been poetic had it not been sickening. Both of them were rendered useless by the machine which she was a cog of. Of the hundreds of cases that went through her before being destined for paper-mache, many were similar. There had always been dissent, there had always been problems, and not only with their national militaries. All of it was locked away and discarded so that there could be peace of mind.

Not in here, there would not be. The Frozen North, she was starting to realize, was where things nobody wanted to talk about had to go. They did all too good a job of making anywhere else unwelcome. They did a good job, Raven realized. She did a good job. Only not for her own sake at the moment.

The fact that all of this had to even be considered - “Machines” and “cogs” and all - told her that she indeed was losing it. She knew better. A certain somebody did not. More than one somebody. That was the true problem.

“We can’t let you in anymore. Sorry.” She sighed. “You can give us your name. We could tell your family. Not… everything, but that’s the least I can do for you.”

“Morozov.” A blink of recognition in her memory. The papers made it seem as if he was “injured” in the “mishap” and sent to “vacation” shortly after the military office precariously shut down for “maintenance”.

“Sorry. This is just how it is. I know it’s cold out there, but… You were fine before, maybe you’ll make it now.” The mare pressed her head against the glass. Just as she did that, strong pain turned up in her forehead, a strong kick knocking her back.

“FUCK YOU!” the goat yelled from behind the glass, evidently having been edging her closer to the glass so he could lash out for the last time.

Raven spat on the floor, holding her head in her hooves. To think that she almost shed a tear… That said, she did, but it was out of pain. The special forces reject, expelled officially, no less, with the scarring on his head showing as much - she remembered the details of that particular paperwork case now - continued to shout from behind the glass, but she understood none of it.

“Я вас всех поубиваю, суки! Вы что, думаете, что мне холодно?! Это вам холодно, блять, а мне - нет! Я в холодной воде по яйца ходил! Хуелобы сраные! Я вас на завтрак, уроды, сожру, и добавки попрошу! Вы еще—”

A spectral, eerie howl emitted from the outside world, coupled with unpleasant, screechy clanging. Just as that happened, the engine came back to life, having revved down in the time it took to take the driver out.

“Ну вот и гости пожаловали. Ну, здрасте, бля! Я поляну крою! Куча коней, бля! Скоро, суки! Скоро! IT IS A GOOD DAY TO DIE!”

The next day, when they arrived at a good stopping point, it turned out that their own carriage was missing one of the two mechanical torches that were attached to it. Blueblood remained unconscious for three more.

Raven and Buster’s technicians tolerated each other’s company, despite volatile differences, until more or less the very end.