Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me

by DataPacRat

Cleanliness is Next to Impossible

The jock had been sent back to the brig, and the greymuzzles back to their village. The bunch I currently considered my inner circle - me, Red, Micro, Amethyst, and Blanche - were gathered around the bridge's meeting table, with the guards either on duty at the front of the ship, or asleep with a secret dormire boost to keep them that way.

"So," I said, "we've got a few choices to make. To help pick between them, it might be worthwhile reiterating our goals. We're not here to make official diplomatic contact, or to reform the local mores on slavery, or to take over a local lordship - but we're also not here to avoid doing any of those, if those will help our goals, or at least won't hinder them. Equestria, and possibly Equis, is facing a doom of an unknown sort - and we're here to collect anything we can which has a chance of helping us head off that doom. I'm focusing especially on magic, including knowledge thereof and portable artifacts, with a minor on valuable locations such as ley line nexii. With those goals, and with what we've learned so far, do any of our options stand out?"

Micro said, "You've been coming up with new spells every few days or so. Maybe you should concentrate on that, instead of all this running around? And making your own artifacts, like the truth wands?"

"You're not wrong," I mused, "but I can still work on a lot of that in the cargo-bay lab while we're flying around hither and yon. I could use more gems to be charged up, and maybe something better than stuffing them in my pockets."

Amethyst, to our surprise, contributed, "Harness."

"Hm?" I tilted my head at her.

"She stepped over, and ran a clawtip in lines along my hide, and in circles around my limbs. "Straps. Hold gems. Under clothes."

I raised a brow. "That... could work. The Musketeers did a good job with the uniforms and my new outfits - think you'd be up to directing them in making what you have in mind?" She gave a firm nod. "Okay - that's one side-project to start. In the meantime - where can we go, that's got the best chance of letting us find out something new about magic, or find some new magical object?"

Blanche shrugged and spoke up, "We don't really know much about this continent or its people - just one ship's charts, and one village's perspective. Whatever passes for a university seems like a good place to hunt for - which means heading to a bigger city, at least. Even if they don't have colleges, urban areas are where scholarly folk tend to congregate, and where we can at least find out the names of any nobles with private libraries. That sort of thing."

Red added, "And we've got a handy reason for looking for a place like that - getting a ruling from this fire-breathing, wolf-eating Lord Fire-bough."

Blanche countered, "Or we could see if Missy can kill him off and take over."

"One," I said, "no killing if we can help it. Two, I've got much more important things than try to run a country. And three - I know you still tend to think the world of me, but I've recently been near-fatally sick, magically exhausted putting Athos's guts and Aramis's brains back together, and just today I was stabbed - so whatever this Firebough character is, if I faced off against him, he'd probably win. If we find actual evidence that me beating him would help our real goal, I'd look for some way to cheat... maybe have Micro shrink a boulder to the size of a pebble, get him to swallow it, and once we started fighting, cancel the magic."

"Ew," was the general reaction from everypony, though Amethyst just smiled wider.

"That's the thing about dealing with existential risk - saving millions of lives tends to trump everyday ethical rules-of-thumb. I go out of my way to be as honest as I can - but if it stops the continent Equestria is on from sinking, or blowing up, or whatever is going to happen, I'll lie, cheat, steal, and even murder. But before you start looking at me funny - that's a very big 'if' to fill. If we can keep all those ponies, and members of other species, alive without using such means, then I'm all for it - that's the ideal solution, the one to strive for if we can. I'm just saying that if that isn't an option, if the choice comes down to saving Equestria or keeping our actions within the limits described by standard ethical codes - I'd rather be an immoral person than let millions die. And feel free to ponder whether or not that's a paradox while you're trying to fall asleep."

---

We went round and round for a while, but our decision came down to the fact that we needed more information to start even coming close to getting the information we actually wanted - so heading for Lord Firebough it was.

Red pointed out that while speed was good, hiding how fast and high we actually could go was also good... so we came up with a new set of standard orders, where the Mikoyan acted as little better than a hovercraft, just a bit higher and faster than we'd let the local village see us move.

Amethyst and the Musketeers quickly came up with a contraption, mostly dark-blue leather straps and metal rings, which had room to hook onto dozens of gems of various sizes, and hold them against my hide. With a few small crystals, and a bit of alteration, I could even wear it with the skin-tight super-suit (though not under it), but it worked better when it was unseen, under my other outfits.

I considered what sort of situations we might all encounter in this continent, and how we could protect ourselves - in particular, how everyone else could protect themselves while I wasn't available. So I drew on my knowledge of the Golden Dawn pseudo-mystical society from Earth for symbolism, and started putting together some 'sleep wands', painted a deep purple-black, with similarly colored gems mounted in a lunar crescent, and some astrological, alchemical, and simply meaningless sigils along the shaft. They looked impressive enough that I started putting together similar wands for the other spells I knew, including an improved, much more spiffy looking truth wand. Doing so ate into our supply of gems - but I, at least, knew the secret that the gems were still good for any spell at all, as long as the right word was known. But if some opponent saw me using one wand for one spell and another wand for another, they might get a false impression of what my magical limitations were.

I was quite willing to bluff to prevent violence - such as to save a life - including when that life was my own.

I still hoped that nothing of the sort would be necessary. I just also hoped that if it were necessary, I'd be sufficiently prepared.

---

After trundling along the coast for a bit, we came across another port-village. This one was roughly the same configuration as the first - only, instead of wolves, the villagers were bears. As far as I could tell, they looked like perfectly ordinary bears when they walked on all fours, which they seemed happy enough to do; but they were also willing to wear belts, use tools, and talk. There seemed to be some sort of mirror image with cows - nonsentient in Equestria, sentient outside. I wasn't sure whether they were descended from diamond dogs, a simple cousin, or completely unrelated - and since there didn't seem to be an easy way to come up with an answer to that, we kept our main mission in mind, and didn't spend long there. Mostly just long enough to trade for some honey, which they seemed to specialize in; Micro and I also picked up some related products, such as royal jelly, beeswax, pollen, and such, as possible experimental reagents, Amethyst seemed to enjoy something called 'bee bread', and some of the crew picked up a few bottles of mead and something called 'honey jack'.

However, this honey wasn't quite as nice and clear as the honey I was used to on Earth, or even in Equestria; a bit of asking around revealed that the bears' methods of extracting it from the hives was, basically, to smash up the hives, and then filter out the eggs, larva, dead bees, and so on. Amongst all the reading I'd done on Earth, I'd picked up some of the basics of nineteenth-century beekeeping: artificial hives, with individual rods along the top the bees could build their combs from, and which could be removed individually without smashing up the whole hive. The most advanced details I could remember, I didn't just tell them, but sold to them, to start collecting some of the local currency. (The main detail of which was having a 'super' section on top of the main hive, with a screen that let ordinary-sized bees in but kept the queen out, to be filled with honeycomb but not eggs; and which could be harvested without removing the honey the bees needed to survive through the winter.)

Once again, my random accumulation of seemingly useless facts paid off. Literally, for once.

---

We passed a few more villages of similar scope, and similar species - no griffins or pegasi, but we did see a few earth ponies, and some individuals of species that were quite unfamiliar - I even caught a glimpse of what I thought might be a wolf-centaur, though it could have been one wolf riding another.

Finally, we started approaching the city whose name the translation spell rendered as 'First Settlement'. Given that we were on the part of the continent closest to Equestria and the Griffon Dominion, I guessed that this might be the first place the rogue griffin ships, fleeing from Celestia's dissolving of their government nearly a millennium ago, might have landed.

We smelled the place before we saw it.

If Equestria looked like something from the nineteenth century, this place looked like something from the ninth. Or maybe Monty Python's "Jabberwocky" - I actually saw a wagon being pulled, with a couple of bodies piled into it.

"New rule," I muttered to Red. "Upon coming onto this ship, everybody washes their hooves in boiled, sterilized water - and if possible, everything that might have come in touch with anything local."

"Hey, don't forget, I'm the captain, so I set the rules. ... Yeah, that seems like a good one. If this is really the city where their lord lives - we may be wasting our time here."

We finally saw some griffons winging through the air, and as they saw our ship coming in above the waves, we became the center of a certain amount of attention. Some of that attention disappeared when Captain Red ordered the ballistas be rolled out for polishing.

Given how our prisoner had managed to sneak aboard, despite our Guard crew, Red decided to keep us at a nice hover, though she did lower the anchor onto a pier when we stopped. A griffin wearing a sash came out of a nearby shack, circled around us, and landed near our mast. Red and I joined him, I used my new translation wand (orange and quicksilvery-silver, tipped with Mercury's symbol holding an opal), and we figured out that he was saying, 'You can't dock this here.'

"Why not?" asked Red

'Ain't got no permit. Haven't paid your docking fees.'

"And where do we get a permit?"

'From the dock-master.'

"Where would we find him?"

'Right here.'

"... Let's cut to the chase. How much?"

'Twenty gold,' he said, which the translation spell simultaneously told me was 'five thousand dollars', and presumably gave Red a similar equivalent in bits.

"You seem to be forgetting something," Red commented.

'Yeah? What?'

"You're the dock master. So that means you're in charge of the docks, right?"

'Right,' he beamed.

"So if I were to take my ship, and park it, oh, right above the middle of town, that wouldn't be anywhere near a dock, and so I wouldn't owe any docking fees at all, now would I?"

'... Five silver a day, plus services."

When he left, Red had Tranquil and Stoke scrub and mop the spot he'd been standing until it shone.

Comments

[Liqwidice]

It's a wonder that they haven't run into a plague ship yet.

[nemryn]

I don't know why it took me so long to realize this, but Missy is basically the Batman of the Chessverse, isn't she?

[DataPacRat]

1250472
In two senses; one, any given ChessPiece is more likely than not to be turned into a species with super-powers, while Missy's about as un-powered as it's possible to be... plus, I've consciously used this trope as a model for Missy - and Batman has has own category in there.

[AppleTank]

together,, and: one comma

Nice world expanding. Lots of new species here. Makes me wonder how big this planet actually is. We got the main continent (Equestria, Griffion Dom, Gem Fido, Marshes, Forest, etc.) to be the size of Eurasia/Russia.

[Destructorspace]

Oopsies - you forgot to mirror the sentience bit, so you described the bears as being sentient in Equestria, and non-sentient outside

Edit: and fixed, within 20 minutes. (probably less, but I refreshed after 18 minutes.)

[Destructorspace]

1250750
If the Chess-verse is using this map... gigantic.
(Actual map is 9144x6400 pixels, this thumbnail is only 779x545, approximately 8.5% scale)
th00.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2012/098/e/d/equestria_and_beyond__rev_8_1_by_hlissner-d46wmzm.jpg Link Here

[Chaos Waltz]

1250750
Well we've got the main continent, this one up here, the southern continent, and my continent to the southwest.

Probably as big as, if not bigger than, Earth.

[steampvnc1880]

Missy's adventures in the Dung Ages.

[strangephantasm]

I don't want to go on the cart!

[Corona Blaze]

1250997tually, to be perfectly honest, Troutking made a map tha spans the equivalent range of earth's size....

That's still barely half of what's on Equis' surface, not counting below and above it such as floating islands, Tartarus cells, etc, etc, etc.

[DataPacRat]

Author's Note: further assistance for unhealthy relative, further chapter delays.

[lamphobic]

1250612

This one comment killed 2 days of my life. I hope that you're happy. You should know the dangers of tvtropes and at least give us some sort of warning.

[AnormalUnicornPony]

I have a feeling Lord Firebough is a dragon....