Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me

by DataPacRat

Clean-Up On Aisle One

I spent a bit of time looking for the limits of the translation spell. Turning one language into another was a complicated task, involving much that was close to the heart of information science; and if there was a clever hack that would let me use it in an unexpected way, such as, say, as an intelligence booster, then I'd kick myself if I didn't at least try to find it. I played with native languages, learned languages, made-up languages, sign language, languages even I only knew a few words or even just a few letters of, codes, sending codes through intermediaries, and so on. I was able to come up with one fairly consistent rule - if a given casting of the spell included at least one live person who understood the method of communication in question, then that understanding was shared amongst all the other people affected by the spell. So, since I knew a few letters of Egyptian, anyone else affected by the spell would be able to know them too, when they looked at an Egyptian text from my notes, while the spell was in effect.

While I was doing that, the crew were training with their new wands, learning how to work in team-pairs; Red was sliding us as unobtrusively as possible eastwards along the coast; Firebough and Ursula were being pumped for anything they'd heard about the lands on this side of Stortrut; and we were generally making progress on all our fronts.

According to our local guides, the local Lord was a blue dragon who was reputed to prefer sleeping to any other activity; his home was a giant set of traps designed not to kill or imprison an intruder, but simply wake up the Lord soon enough for him to be able to put up a decent fight against any challengers. Needless to say, the local population was much happier with a Lord who took such a claws-off approach to them most of the time. After some discussion, we decided to take advantage of his napping, at least long enough to duck into a nearby village to pick up some supplies - food, fresh water, gems, rope, sundries, and such.

I buddied up with Armina for the shopping trip, and we, and a few other pairs, found ourselves in a fairly normal-looking village market, populated by various canine and caninish breeds, so two pairs of us started circling from the left, and the other two pairs from the right. When we met up in the middle, we discovered a problem - none of the villagers on the right would sell anything to those of us who'd started on the left, and the villagers on the left wouldn't even talk to those of us who'd started on the right. I looked back and forth, and finally noticed a detail I should have sooner - all the stalls on the left had some sort of green decoration, such as a scarf, a cloth tied around an arm, or bunting on their stall; while all those on the right had purple ones.

I shrugged a bit - if that was the local custom, it was something we could accommodate ourselves to. I waved all of our group together so we could exchange lists for shopping on each others' sides... but as soon as we started talking, the other shoppers, and even some of the sellers, started walking toward our little octet, until they formed two muttering semicircles.

I sighed. "Alright," I called out. "Anybody care to start explaining, or do we just jump straight to the pointless brawling?"

'What, a greeny too scared to fight? Why am I not surprised?'

I sighed again. "Right. I'll make this offer once: we're from far away, we're neutrals, and we're uninterested. While we're here, anyone who wants to sit down and talk with us, is welcome to. Otherwise, we'll just do things our way."

'And what way's that? Donating some manure to the fields just before you run away?'

"Armina," I said lightly, "Please demonstrate to that good gentleman what our way is."

She pulled her wand from the harness she'd gotten made, and with a quick "Do mi re," the heckler was flat on his back. There was surprised muttering and mumbling, and two semi-circles took a step or two back.

"In case you're wondering," I said, looking around to both groups, "yes, we can knock out everyone in town, and just take everything that's not nailed down. But we've got this funny notion that there's no honor in winning a fight we can't lose - so we're here to trade and buy stuff. If we can do that, we will. If we can't, we'll leave. I don't know what your problems are, and frankly, I don't care - as long as you don't try to stick us in the middle of things. So like I said - anyone want to talk?"

From the green side, an older, greyhound-ish fellow took a step forward. "Who are you?"

I snorted. "The name I use these days would mean nothing to you. I'm a wizard with so much power, I've given parts of it to all the members of my crew - and I could still win against them combined, in a fight. I'm the arbitrator who convinced a pack of diamond dogs to give up slave-raiding and make peace with a pony village. I'm the scholar who knows the laws of a dozen countries. I'm the tactician who, just the other day, sent Stortrut flying away from my ship in a hurry. I can speak in tongues, put light in darkness, force lying tongues to speak truth, cause sickness, cure wounds, sing love into existence, call down lightning, fly through the air, and do just about anything else I darn well put my mind to.

"You can call me 'Missy'."

'That is a rather... boastful set of claims," said the Green greyound.

"I'm feeling my oats today."

'If you have all that power - then why aren't you using it against us?'

"The greater the power you have, the greater the challenges you find to use it on. Frankly, you're not worth the effort it would take to subdue you - unless you insist on it."

'We cannot just let you insult us and get away with it.'

"What insult?"

'You have started collaborating with those who have chosen to side with... them.'

"In case you haven't noticed - we're wearing blue, not green or purple. I don't know what the difference between your two groups is - I didn't even know there were two groups until we got here."

'How could you not?!'

"Easily. But since this is getting to be such a problem for you - it's probably best if we just left, and took our business to some other village, where the only color they care about is the color of our money."

'You are still collaborating with the friends of our enemies.'

A voice popped in from the Purple side, 'We could say the same thing!'

I whispered to all seven of the Mikoyan's crew, "Ready wands," as the shouting started spreading.

A rotten apple was thrown from the Green side, landing by Armina's claw. Then a stone flew threw the air at us from the Purples. I said "Volare," as I whipped one of my wands out (more for show than necessity), and the thrown rock hovered in mid-air. "Right. That's quite enough of-" I said "Volare" again as a second rock came, from the Greens. "Aim wands," I commanded. To the locals, I said, "Last chance."

The instant the third rock rose into the air, as I gave it a quick "Volare", the other seven started with the "Do re mi"s, and I joined them on the next round. It took less than half a second to say those words, and there were eight of us - so in five seconds, everyone in sight, save for ourselves, was collapsed to the ground.

---

"Hey. Wake up." I gave the dog a light kick.

"Huh? Whuh?"

"Welcome back. Aren't you glad that I decided not to just slit all of your throats?"

'Uh... yeah.'

"You should also know that, right now, you can't lie - and you can't resist answering questions, either. Just imagine what would happen if somebody asked you what your most embarrassing secrets were. I also happen to have woken up one of the guys from the other color, and put them under the same enchantment. I'm not going to let you kill each other - but I am going to start the two of you talking, just because I'm curious to see what'll happen."

---

Once I primed them to start saying what they didn't want the other one to hear, it was a tale of petty greed, corruption, a few murders, and general tit-for-tat escalations. With a bit of nudging, I was able to get each one to agree that, from the other side's point of view, their actions had been justified. The whole thing came down to an original incident, involving an overenthusiastic warrior dog and a complicated relationship with a farmer's daughter, and from that which of two sons inherited a farm, and from that cascaded two entirely separate sets of property claims throughout the whole village. But it wasn't about the land, no - it was all about 'honor'. Neither of them was willing to believe the other's version of events, even though they both knew the other one thought they were telling the truth.

"So how do you see this working out? One of you kills one of them, one of them kills one of you, and back and forth you go?"

'Something like that.'

'I guess.'

"And if it keeps going, until there's two of you left, then none - then will 'honor' be satisfied?"

'...' '...'

"If so - I can have that happen right now - without even using magic. Or, I could just let you sleep until someone else comes by, and who, seeing you all helpless, does whatever they want to you all - including seizing all that land both of your sides claim. And there'd be none of you left to seek revenge on them. Is that what you really want? Is there any honor in that?"

They were like schoolboys caught red-handed. 'No...' One even swing a leg back and forth to scuff the dirt.

"Then - if some other solution were available, who would need to agree to it to make it binding?" When they pointed out the figures, I put them back to sleep.

---

"Welcome back to the land of the living. You've got a choice to make. You can either lose some of your petty little feud with your neighbors - or you can lose all of it. I'm shoving you and your counterpart together. You have one single chance to pick who owns how much of what. Anything you can't come to an agreement on - I'll claim as my own, in compensation for you idiots dragging me and my people into your fight. Or, if you prefer to keep on living by the rule that whoever can bash the most heads wins, I can just claim the whole shebang for myself, now; including all your families as mine. Have I mentioned that, among my other scholastic knowledge, I've learned of sexual perversions you've never dreamed of, and among my accomplishments, I invented at least one sex act that had never been previously written about? It involves a piece of anatomy that I don't believe any species on this continent possesses... Oh, and yes, I am always quite short of experimental subjects for my research.

"That's what I thought."

---

"Now, with all that settled - is it possible that, without anybody trying to kill us or make us join their faction or whatever... that we can buy our freaking groceries?"

Comments

[Salacar]

The stuff one does for groceries

[Nathan Traveler]

Cherries: 1 bit
Fresh water: 2 bits
Gemstones: 5 bits

The look on a dog's face when a cow kicks his ass without even breaking a sinfle sweat?

Priceless.

There are some things money can't buy. For the rest, there's Misa.

[Djerid]

i LOVE this chapter. it is a entirely awesome yet superfluous chapter and my favourite out of this story. you, good writer, have made my day.

[Nighzmarquls]

there really is not much more to say...

nice light hearted chapter.

[BlackWing]

Brilliant.

[Destructorspace]

Dat ending.

Also, nice allusion to the escalating challenges that Missy and company are/will be facing.

[Jack D. Knights]

[RealityDowngrade]

It ain't braggin' if it's true. Go Missy!

[Caboc]

I'm getting quite a "big fish in a small pond" vibe from this story now. It's like Missy is a Time Lord in a world with no Daleks or Cybermen and the few enemies she comes across are either one-shot villains she just has to intimidate into submission or vague story-arc villains like the Silence from the last season... enemies who's main trick is that they are just invisible so the audience can't really see them. Oh, and her companion basically exist to carry the wands she made, to drive her places, and provide an easy way for Missy to give lectures on things that no Equestrian is able to know about even though they've got over a thousand years of history and the tech and magic to build skyscrapers and move celestial bodies around.

I guess its kind of inevitable though. I've read some of Methods of Rationality and Luminosity and both seem to start off with pretty interesting characters and an outlook an behaving in an intelligent manner. But then for some reason the word "Rational" gets hijacked to mean that the protagonist wants to become immortal, and then they get to use outsider knowledge that nobody else in the story has access to in order to manipulate everyone around them like chumps. Oh, and if there is magic in the setting, the cool-ass rationalist uses their outsider knowledge to crack the code of it in order to do things that none of the professionals in this universe were ever able to do on their own despite working on it for thousands of years.

Harry found out how to transmute part of an object by by transmuting individual atoms of it at a time. (actually kind of clever)

Belle somehow turned her vampire ability to protect her mind from attack into a total protection of her physical body by just... arguing with her own superpower... I guess? (cop out, didn't like it because that implies that all superpowers are essentially powered by suspension-of-dispelief in-universe and that anyone with any power can bootstrap themselves into DC level superheroics by arguing with themselves).

And Missy... ugh... the ability to cast any spell in the universe so long as you know latin (which apparently only Missy knows). Considering the level of flaunting she's doing with this and the fact that we've got a villain who can apparently traverse dimensions... I am tenuously sticking with this only in the hopes that this bites Missy in the flank later when every Tom Dick and Harry out to get her is carrying magic wands and an Equestrian-to-Latin dictionary. Hell, forget guns. Guns require metallurgy and a knowledge of physics. These wand thing basically seem to require digging up gems (plentiful in Equestria) charging them with magic (any unicorn can do it and apparently so can cows, and any other pony) and remembering simple words.
You've basically established that every single rock or piece of dragon food is now a supercomputer/gun that is ready made and the only reason that Chancellor Pudding-head, Commander Hurricane, and Princess Platinum weren't fielding armies of ponies armed with magic wands is because nobody in the 1,000+ years of pony history ever picked up a gem, held it for a few seconds, and said some random syllables. Even when we've got unicorns like Starswirl the Bearded in this setting (and they might have their own version of Latin since Twilight Jokingly calls Pinky "scientific name: Pikius Pieicus" in Feeling Pinke Keen).

Sooo whatever. Sorry for complaining but I think I'll come back later and see if the world explodes as soon as Missys enemies start exploiting the same glaring cheat codes that she is... or if anyone on Missys team is allowed to show initiative other than her.

[DataPacRat]

1309751
Sorry for complaining but I think I'll come back later and see if the world explodes as soon as Missys enemies start exploiting the same glaring cheat codes that she is... or if anyone on Missys team is allowed to show initiative other than her.

There's no need to apologize; your critique is entirely valid.

In a previous comment, I referred to the "First Law of Fanfiction" - that if you power up your protagonist, then you also have to power-up their opponent, otherwise there's no actual challenge. I'm trying to treat, in general, Missy's excursion to the Northern Wastes as a description of her powering-up process, as she tries to prepare to face her real enemy back in Canterlot - which involves her having taken the various elements of the Chessverse setting that she's had an opportunity to discover, such as Latin-gem magic, and figuring out how to leverage the most possible advantage from them. This latest chapter was, basically, a curb-stomp battle, pointing out how the advantages she's gotten so far have taken her from a lone cow who thought she was insane to something approaching a modern smallarms force-multiplier for direct combat. But as the saying goes, "Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics". Mere physical force is going to have very little impact on her forthcoming conflict - she's going to need an entirely different set of advantages to defeat an enemy she hasn't even been able to find the name of, let alone get a glimpse of to use physical force against.

As for her companions' seeming lack of initiative - you make another point, at least for the way I've been emphasizing things. A couple of dozen chapters ago, I took two of Missy's closest companions, and put them in opposition to her, and explored the consequences ensuing therefrom. I had Missy promote one of her friends to be the true head of the ship - from Missy's view, it was to let her focus on other things, but I've been trying (and, I suppose, not doing too well) to show Red growing into her role as airship captain. I've probably added a few too many redshirts, and not been focusing as much on the main secondary characters' growth as I should have, and could have; now that you've point the issue out, I'm going to try to improve how I handle this area of the story in the future.

[AppleTank]

1309751
Read the Chessverse. If not, here's a short version: at least 5 of them know Latin magic. I'm pretty sure there are more, but I can't recall them.