Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me

by DataPacRat

Antiques

I lay where I rolled to a stop for a good while, finding myself not particularly interested in the world - or thinking coherently.

The first thing I thought wasn't in words - it was a memory. A few years ago, I had an interesting little incident. I was walking down the stairs, feeling a bit odd; and the next item in my stream of memory, I was lying in a wheeled stretcher, in a hospital, being rolled to a room with one of the brain-scanning machines. My family was there, and told me that I'd asked "What time is it?" every few minutes for hours, and didn't remember anything but stuff from the last few minutes or from long before the whole thing started. 'Transient global amnesia' was what the doctors called it - which mostly meant that they didn't have any idea what had actually caused it, since it wasn't a stroke, seizure, or anything else they could pinpoint. Which implied that as I got older, the part of my brain most likely to fail first would be the hippocampi, preventing the formation of any further memories.

I wondered if my current brain had bum hippocampi, too.

I realized that I wasn't in the best situation to be wondering about brain damage.

I looked around - and squinted. My glasses had come off sometime during my rolling, and everything past my nose was blurry. I could make out that I was in the bottom of a crater, tilted, so it was probably still on the hill; with a raised lip hiding the ground-level battlefield from me - and, probably more important, me from the battlefield. I looked around the crater - and sighed in relief, upon sighting my glasses. I picked them up with a hoof, and as I got them close enough to my face to get a decent look, winced; the right lens had a big crack running through it, and the left lens was entirely missing its bottom half. I had my one spare pair back in the base-camp crate, but... well, that was back at base-camp. Still, three quarters of a pair of glasses was better than none, so I put them back on. Maybe I could come up with a repair spell, if I got out of here.

The getting out of here was the tricky part. I ran my memory over recent events, trying to recall any further details... and came up with one rather important one. I'd been trotting from one piece of cover to another - and then I'd seen a flash of light off in the distance, and felt my heart surge in panic as I tried to change direction, and then I... ran out of memory.

So, the good news was - I probably wasn't in the middle of an unmarked, unmapped minefield. The bad news - something out there was shooting at me.

I pushed myself against the front wall of the crater, to try looking uphill. I was down... quite a ways, really. Maybe halfway. And nowhere near the route I'd plotted out for myself. Just getting back to that line of smallest gaps between pieces of cover, I'd have to pass through... at least three gaps bigger than the one I'd trotted through. I pulled out my notebook, and checked my map of the hillside (instead of poking my head back up and risking getting it shot off)... going down, instead, would put me even more in the open.

So - I was pinned down by something that might be as mild as a sniper, and might be full field artillery. What options did I have?

I could stay here a while - until I ran out of water, at least. The Mikoyan would be along, and maybe some sort of method could be arranged to lower some food and water down to me from the crest of the hill - but that didn't solve the main problem.

My pockets had a bunch of magically-charged gems, which seemed to respond to Latinate words with useful magic. Assuming I could come up with the right words, what might be a useful spell? Hm... recalling some of the tactical discussions of super-hero role-playing games I'd used to join... super-speed could be useful, if I could climb the hill before a shot could be taken; or invisibility to whatever sensors were being used to target me; or making some decoys to send in various directions while I went in another; or mind-control or hacking of whatever was shooting; or tunneling my way out; or the old standby, blowing up whatever opposed me. So many options - if I only knew the right words. If I survived, I was really going to have to work a lot harder than I had been on coming up with a decent set of spells to cast.

One of the gems was an Ursa bone fragment. I knew how to turn it into a sort of grenade... if only I could throw it close enough to whatever was shooting. I'd never had a good pitching arm even as a human.

I had the Element necklace, which did... absolutely nothing that I knew of. I hadn't even been able to coax a Care Bear Stare out of it. But dangling under the necklace... was a certain golden whistle, on a golden chain. Oh, yeah. This was the reason I'd come alone, and sent the whole airship as far away as possible - the possibly-goddess who'd given it to me had said blowing it would some 'a group of Wardens', whatever they were, to my aid... who would kill everyone around me. And since there didn't seem to be anyone around save for me and whoever had shot at me... that was an option I could actually consider taking.

I ran through the rest of my inventory, but didn't find anything relevant. I looked up at the hillside for a bit, trying to persuade myself that whatever had shot at me had probably used up its last round... and slapped myself upside the head for committing that sin of trying to make the evidence fit my desires, instead of having my beliefs based on the evidence. And the evidence said that if I ran for it, I'd be turned into ground beef before you could say "Quarter Pounder With Cheese".

Welp, if I couldn't hit my main goal of investigating the Battlefield - I could at least learn something about the whistle, and the Wardens. I inhaled, held it up to my mouth... and blew.

---

I didn't actually hear anything - just the hiss of air blowing through a tube. But I tensed up anyway, looking around, up, down, behind me, looking for the first sign that the whistle was actually more than a Cracker Box toy...

The ground to my left shifted.

A sword poked out - followed by a thin arm, a circular shield... and in a scant second or two, an entire warrior had risen from the depths of the earth. Soon followed by another, and another...

They had swords, and spears, and shields, and that classical armor with the leather skirts and helmets with horsehair mohawks. Hoplites or legionnaires, more likely the former, given their shields.

And they didn't have a single scrap of flesh on their white bones.

Ray Harryhausen, eat your heart out.

Now, in general, morbid and creepifying, I got no problem with. But I'd already been warned these were some sort of killing machines, and, well... you try being entirely rational when a dozen animated skeletons pull themselves up out of the ground right next to you, and your life's already in mortal danger.

Once, as a kid, I'd been helping move some furniture, when I saw a TV slowly start tipping forward. I saw the disaster coming, but when I tried to move forward to grab it - nothing happened; I tried to shout a warning - no words came out.

This was like that - only moreso.

And that was even before they started making harsh chattering and clicking sounds.

My sticking point de-stuck as I saw a flash of light from the plain. My eyes widened; my throat loosed enough for me to shout, "Get down!", and I was actually able to push with my hindlegs to knock down the nearest of them.

It was only when I was already in motion that I remembered that, according to Dungeons and Dragons, a number of skeletal-form undead drained life-energy when they were touched...

Fortunately, I didn't turn into a withered husk as I crashed into them (or, depending on how you wanted to look at it, as they let me use my momentum to get them into cover more quickly). Even more fortunately, whatever was being shot fell short, and other than a crash and a shake and my tinnitus getting one notch worse, nothing worse happened than me stretched out in the centre of a stack of self-propelled skeletons.

I'd had better days.

---

"If you're trying to talk to me - I'm afraid I don't understand. Do any of you understand what I'm saying?" I decided to take the nods as agreement. "Well. Okay. I came here to do some special recon." The situation was drawing a more military lexicon from my tactical wargaming days. "I came to collect any useful technical intelligence I could - I hoped to find something I could reverse-engineer to help with my overall strategic goals, or at least just use as-is. If that's impossible, I just want to exfiltrate and evac with a minimum of injury. I don't know what's shooting - I sketched out some maps, and can hazard a guess, but that's about all. I don't suppose you can use your digging trick and take me with you, to, say, the other side of this hill?"

Most of the skulls turned to face the one with the tallest helmet-plume. There was more clicking, rattling, and other percussiony, bone-based sounds. Then he - or possibly she, who could tell? - went back to the hole they'd risen from, and started pushing themselves back down into it.

"Er, do I go with, or...?" Two of them stepped away from the others, crouching down beside me, and... waited. The other ten vanished as if they'd never arrived in the first place. When I made a motion to step toward where the hole had been, they lightly touched my shoulders, and shook their skulls from side to side.

Looked like I was supposed to stay put for... however long.

---

"I don't suppose either of you play cards?"

---

I was started by the appearance of a skeletal hoplite - who appeared by simply walking over the lip of the crater. He/she/it rattled and clicked a bit, and the other two stood. They gestured for me to stand up, as well, and to come along with them. I cautiously poked my head over the crater rim, looking downhill... and when there was no sign of a flash, or anything else about to blow me up, I did as the Wardens directed.

They led me downhill, and out about half a mile onto the plain - to the not-quite-an-AT-AT I'd noted before. Only now instead of missing one and a half legs, it was missing all of them - and, generally, was in smaller chunks than before. My twin guards led me to the honcho Warden, and, rejoining the ranks of the others, became indistinguishable from them.

What followed was an exercise in frustration, as the honcho tried to explain something to me. It involved pointing at the quadrupedal mecha's head, at the spot up on the hill where I'd been, and at my Element necklace, with various nods, head-shakes, and other gestures I had trouble interpreting. My best guess was... a Bearer wasn't supposed to be attacked, but this mecha was extra damaged and attacked anyway, and now it was dead. Or maybe the necklace made me a special target for this one. Or I was a complete idiot for coming here.

After I described my guesses, the honcho heaved his shoulders up, then let them down - if he had lungs, I'd say he just sighed. He turned his skull to the other Wardens, and clicked and rattled at them for a bit; whereupon the whole collection found themselves a bare patch of dirt to start digging down into. In moments, I was alone again.

And I was standing next to the remains of a technomagical mecha from thousands of years ago, which had been built well enough to still be able to shoot at me. Nopony was around to see me, so I let myself rub my hooves together in glee, before getting down to work...

Comments

[ArTic]

Yay, Everyone didn't die! That goddess is such a troll.

[Langly]

Hmm, Human Skeletons...
So, Summon Undead Level 1 ?

[Forevermore]

Finally! It took forever but the Warden whistle finally got blown!

Also that picture was SEXY, so badass and (other than the color scheme) more or less exactly how I pictured them to look!

[skyscraper123]

awesome!

[nemryn]

1137105
Well, not yet, anyway.

[AppleTank]

1137109
Color scheme?

[RealityDowngrade]

Time to pose as a group, because s*yay*t just got real.
media.steampowered.com/steamcommunity/public/images/avatars/54/54667457ccce513e3772aa6a0622e415e88147fa_full.jpg

[strangephantasm]

On the one hand, I was hoping for some kind of traumatic slaughter when the whistle finally got blown. On the other hand...

A bunch of skeletons, with swords and spears, took out a giant mecha. Hot damn.

[Firedon]

Damn, I wanted at least one easily impressed witnessed that started spreading other rumors about Missy.

[musicluvr1974]

1141588 A lightly damaged giant mecha... which the ponified Dunharrovians just turned into a heavily damaged giant mecha.