Act 3 Chapter 48 : Death At Work
"Trans-dimensional travel is well known to exist in the upper echelons of Equestrian academia, but the term most frequently associated with it is 'ill-advised'. Most ponies go through their daily lives never really considering the possibility of other universes. Many would be distressed to discover that Princess Celestia was, at one time, an avid extra-dimensional explorer. Several of our most beloved modern conveniences are products of those ventures. Espresso, the dishwasher, and toaster pastries all hail from shores most distant.
Equestrians, on the whole, are a progressive and curious species with many great explorers to their credit. Many have cutie-marks dedicated to exploration and filling in the great, empty sections of the map.
Why then do so few opt to adventure in the Great Beyond?
A part of the issue may stem from just how 'great' any given 'beyond' happens to be. Some 'beyonds' are greater than others. More than one ambitious magician has set their sights on finding new worlds to plant an Equestrian flag on only to discover they'd misjudged the scale of their new home and buried the butt of the pole in the backside of something that eats mountains for supper. There is an entire cabinet in the basement of Canterlot Castle dedicated almost exclusively to ponies who decided a change of scenery was necessary and found themselves devoured whole by the new scene.
Another problem - and one which may play a more significant role - is that opening portals to different places tends to mean one won't necessarily find another world on the other side. There was, until the invention of the 'camera on a stick', no particularly good way to know what you might find without stepping through. The 'eaten alive by giant creatures' cabinet has a neighbor labeled 'stepped out into deep space and forgot to tie the rope around their waist first'."
- The Scholar
The Shine felt the pounding of Justice’s heart against his ribcage as he propped his weight on the glass, standing on his hind legs. She watched as, with agonizing slowness, he aimed the Other’s cannon through the quickly opening gap in the doors. It was strange to feel the Other’s affection for him, though upon second consideration, not entirely unexpected; he was a truly excellent killer after all.
The cannon chuffed, and a smoking shape spat from the barrel, arcing into the darkness where it was almost instantly lost. The Shine examined the interior of the shopping center, listening to the distant whisper of hooves on concrete. Death was coming ever so soon.
‘Their vision is sensitive after the mutation,’ The Talent whispered, ‘Wait for the flashbang to blind the mindless ones before you kill them. The two on the end were sleeping together before they were transformed. The one on the left is experiencing intestinal distress from the magic in his body and his partner had a concussion three months ago that causes the sight in his right eye to blur at the periphery.’
A volley of bullets tore into the glass beside her, though they only left a spiderweb of thin cracks. The mindless ones had begun firing. She glanced at the impact pattern. Long rifle caliber and assault weapons, but nothing armor piercing.
The first grenade detonated, letting out a spray of smoke that billowed up, blinding the mindless ones. They were wearing P.A.C.T. issue defensive gas masks, but that still left them unable to see through the thick fog. A pegasus amongst their number flapped her wings and began to fan the smoke away, while a unicorn brought up a pink defensive shield.
Behind her, the skeleton was readying himself with some quick stretches. What he might have to stretch was irrelevant, but it was a curiosity, nonetheless. Silence was giving his staff a few experimental swings with his magic. They would need to know the truth of that staff, soon, but the Shine was more concerned with their immediate needs.
‘The ones on the balcony were not affected by the smoke and they are holding their fire, waiting for somepony to move inside,’ The Talent murmured, ‘Two of them have grenades; the recruit partnered with the cruel mare in hopes he would wash out, and the stallion wearing the charm bracelet his daughter gave him.’’
The second and third grenades arced into the shopping center, sailing over tables and chairs to land against the barricade. Gunfire had become a constant crackle in the air as the defending ponies unloaded their weapons at the door. The Shine momentarily considered detonating the considerable ammunition stocks lying behind their barricade, but it would introduce an element of randomness outside what was acceptable. Still, if there were no hooves to pull the triggers, the ammunition mattered little.
A concussive burst filled the building, popping a dozen ear-drums. Muffled shrieks echoed through the halls as the defenders were simultaneously blinded, then pumped to the gills with unfocused magical energies. The unicorn’s shield collapsed with a sound like shattering stone as he pitched over in a twitching heap, blood gushing from his nose.
‘It is time. You have two options. Smoke is blowing across the left balcony, while the right balcony was closer to the flashbang. Enter now.’
Giving one last look at the others, the Shine grabbed the edge of the doorframe and launched herself through.
----
It took a moment once the doors slid open to get a solid accounting of just what we were facing and I didn’t even see Taxi move until she was halfway down the concourse. I’d thought Zeta the zebra was fast, but she had nothing on my driver at full chat. Her hooves sounded like a typewriter as she sprinted to the balcony nearest us and vaulted to the top of a cold drinks machine before leaping over the railing onto the second floor.
In the dim illuminance of the shopping center’s emergency lights, I could just make out a line of armored ponies behind a pair of upturned metal tables at the far end of the room, although two of them were slumped across it like broken dolls and another’s hooves were poking out from behind the cover in a fashion that tended to indicate he or she might be unconscious.
I only got a second to look before a stallion with a heavy assault rifle recovered from the flashbang enough to aim downrange and try to take my head off with a quick burst of gunfire. He hadn’t noticed my driver moving down the balcony towards the pair of soldiers at the other end.
Neither had they.
----
The Shine’s nerves burned as she flew toward the two armored ponies, weapons jutting over the balcony toward the door as they unloaded round after round towards Justice’s position.
The trooper closest to her was a sweet, lonely colt whose parents died before he was sixteen. He’d entered the P.A.C.T. at eighteen and threw himself into his studies along with a vigorous regime of bodybuilding. His slowly manifesting mutation had only increased his girth.
He hadn’t thought to adjust his chest straps, just yet and it left a small gap just below his foreleg. As she fell upon him, her first knife slid into that space like a blowtorch through tin foil. He only had time to feel a brief pinch as she sliced his aorta wide open.
His companion stared, wide eyed, as her partner died in the half second it took for the Shine to use his falling corpse to launch herself into the air.
‘This one is a sadist. She enjoys watching the creatures she’s killed suffer. Her brother’s disappearance was never solved. She buried him by the stream near her family home.’
Shine’s lip quirked into a smile as she wrenched a long knife out of her vest and flashed across the distance in the blink of an eye, leaving the weapon buried in the trooper’s upper back, between her shoulder blades. It was not a clean strike, but it was enough to sever several nerves and nick an artery. All four of the trooper’s legs went lax and she sagged against the railing, then slid onto her side. One malevolent eye flickered in the Shine’s direction and she tried to shout something, but her muzzle could only flop uselessly open as her tongue dangled from the corner of her mouth.
‘Death by exsanguination in two hours. Move on.’
Turning back to the body of the younger stallion, Shine pulled him around by his collar until she could get to his combat vest and snatched a light fragmentation grenade off his belt. Pulling the pin, she leaned over the railing, wound up the throw, and pitched it as hard as she could.
----
“Shouldn’t we be in there...eh...helping yon mad filly?” Bones asked.
I winced as the balcony opposite Taxi’s position exploded, sending a pair of shrapnel-riddled bodies cartwheeling into the open air. One of them crashed face first into a dining table, while the other skidded across the marble floor to stop in front of the doors. The trooper lifted his bloodstained head for a half second, blinked at us, then went limp.
“Do you want to get in her way?”
----
Almost before the bodies had landed, the Shine was mid-leap from the balcony, aiming for a spot just behind the two metal tables covering her foes.
‘Drop onto the spine of the one nearest you. He has an old back injury. His eighth and ninth vertebrae should snap under your weight.’
Tilting herself toward the stallion, she landed rear-hooves first. The stallion let out a dull squeak before his lungs seized as she drove him to the ground, then wrapped a leg around his neck to deliver a quick wrench that broke it. He was dead before his gun hit the ground.
Shine hauled his body up as a shield, aimed his gun at his companions, and pulled the trigger bit. Despite their body armor, the small herd of troopers were not prepared to have a pony firing an assault rifle, point blank, into their flanks. The first, a short mare with a poofy mane, died in an instant as a bullet tore out her throat, then another proceeded into her brain. The one behind her had the good sense to drop, but that put him in line for the next few shots.
Yanking the body along with her, Shine let herself fall backwards as one of her opponents finally drew a bead and unloaded his rifle into the corpse, splashing viscera across her face, though most of the shots were absorbed by the body armor. She felt a single, sharp sting in her back leg, but ignored it as she brought the gun up and fired the last few bullets in the clip into her assailant’s face.
Three left, and they were turning their guns on her.
A knife snapped into her hoof and she flung it, though before it could reach the most distant of the troopers, she was up and flying toward the nearest one.
‘She joined the PACT to fight monsters after her village was destroyed by a hydra. She hopes to find her little brother again one day. Her right knee is weak.’
Shine ducked low, then slid under the mare, snapping her kneecap with a quick strike. The agonized scream was silenced almost immediately by a blade buried in her throat. Behind the final stallion, the furthest trooper lay on his back, his one remaining eye fixed on the end of the knife buried in the other.
She regarded the last stallion for a moment. He was shaking in terror as he held his gun up, aimed squarely at her face, his trigger clutched tightly between his teeth. He gave it a tug.
The weapon clicked.
He tugged again.
The empty chamber clattered softly. He let the trigger bit drop.
‘He has a wife at home, waiting for him. She’s still wondering where he is. It’s been a month since the mutation took hold. She’s still waiting.’
Stepping forward, she pulled one more blade from her vest and drove it between his eyes. As he died, there was a look of quiet resignation on his face, alongside perhaps a modicum of relief. For a moment, the Shine spared a thought to how the Other would respond if she were in the same position. After short consideration, she concluded it would probably be quite poorly.
‘You are bleeding from a wound in your leg,’ the Talent murmured, pulling her attention back to the needs of the moment, ‘The barrel of that rifle is still hot enough to sear the skin shut. There are additional ponies upstairs who need to die. Move quickly.’
Shine picked up the still smoking gun from the body and turned to attend to her injury.
----
After what felt like an eternity, the gunfire fell silent.
I glanced at my companions. Bones was flexing his knee back and forth in a slightly disturbing fashion, studying the way his leg moved, while Limerence sat against the wall with his eyes closed, taking slow, deep breaths. As the last shots rang out, Lim opened his eyes and pushed himself up.
“Well, that...uh…” I trailed off. I couldn’t really think of any way to postpone looking to see what was left of my driver.
Bones beat me to it, sticking his skull out for a moment to peer into the darkened shopping center.
“Damn if that don’t beat all,” he muttered, then fluffed the edges of his tweed coat and trotted inside.
The librarian and I exchanged a quick, silent conversation to the effect of ‘Well, nopony is shooting the walking skeleton, so how bad can it be?’
I peeked around the edge of the door and immediately wished I hadn’t.
The sight before us was ever so much worse than my battered imagination had room for.
The metal tables had been overturned and lay flat against the floor, revealing a heap of butchered corpses spilled across one another like a pile of bloodstained army figurines. An upper balcony on our right was largely gone, with only a twisted metal railing sticking out to mark the place the explosion had torn it off its moorings.
Every inch of the windows on either side of the entrance was riddled with bullets. Empty casings glittered amongst the bodies, and bits of broken debris carpeted the marble floor. Pools of blood and sprays of red and pink covered most of the broken front window of a small hair salon on one side of the former enemy position.
It was a massacre laid out in violent, eerie tableau.
Taxi was also nowhere to be found, though I thought for an instant I could hear hoofsteps upstairs.
Bones was casually going from body to body, ripping open ammo pouches and collecting weapons from the dead. He kicked over a particularly hefty stallion and yanked a knife out of the corpse’s eye socket, studied the edge for a second, then tossed it to one side.
“Are...are they all dead?” I asked, softly enough that I thought I might not be heard. I already knew the answer, but I needed to hear somepony else say it.
“Aye, most,” Bones replied, then used his boney stub of a tail to point toward the second level. “I hear some breathing up there. Not much breathing, mind you. Sounds wet. And before you get all panicky, it’s not your girl. She started on that side.”
Trotting to one of the tables, I hopped on top of it and lifted myself up on the tips of my hooves. Wedged against a pillar on the second floor, I could just make out a tuft of dark orange fur, smeared with blood, sticking out between two slats in the railing. A steady trickle of blood dribbled over the edge, plink-plink-plinking onto a garbage can on the lower level.
Limerence picked up one of his knives from the pile Bones was quickly creating and wiped it clean, then pocketed it. “Detective, if Miss Taxi was capable of this, why have we not been making use—”
“That wasn’t Taxi, Lim. That was...something else,” I said, interjecting before he could get that thought off the ground. “Believe me, we don’t want to try to ‘make use’ of her. The...the Shine, or whatever she called herself, is not a discriminating actor. She is a prairie fire. Last time this happened, a whole building full of mobsters died...along with her former partner.”
“Ah…I...I see,” he replied, a little awkwardly. After a moment’s thought, he added, “Do you think it perchance a case of ‘Talent Failure Syndrome’?”
I stepped carefully over a puddle of mixed fluids that might have been blood or might have been soda, then edged around until I could stand beside the pile of dead ponies. Almost all had died instantly, based on a cursory examination; it was quick, efficient killing.
“Not a chance. Cutie-Mark Collapse doesn’t come with side of slaughter. My driver…” I hesitated, then sighed and continued on, “Sweets is damaged, Lim. She’s the best friend you could possibly want, but her past is a bloody mess. If there are answers for what we just saw, nopony ever survived looking and stuck around to tell the tale.”
“I can’t say as I especially like sitting back while somebody else does the wetwork, but she’s the kind of efficient that makes me want to put my hooves up. Preferably in the next county,” Bones mused, using his hooftips to pull the lips of a dead mare open, revealing two rows of viciously sharp teeth. A wisp of smoke rose from the mare’s throat, and he did a quick two-step back as the body burst into a violent gout of green flame. I ducked to avoid losing my eyebrows as the corpse disintegrated within seconds, leaving nothing but a thin, smelly ash and a scorched skeleton behind.
Around us, the other bodies were already beginning to smolder, filling the space with the scent of burning flesh. I covered my nose with my sleeve and pointed toward the stairs up to the second floor near the end of the hall.
“Bones? Do you know where they’ll set up next?” I asked.
He shrugged and picked up the bundle of guns, slinging two of them over his shoulder and pocketing three magazines for each. “Well, if I were setting up another ambush, I’d want to control the elevator. There’s probably a few before that point, too, hidden in closets. Fifth floor. I’d also set up a few traps in the halls between here and there: claymores, trip wires, and such.”
I considered the situation for a moment, then nodded at the stairs just as the next body caught fire and began to burn. “Let’s keep as close to her heels as we can. Move up, but don’t assume just because she’s been by an area that it’s safe.”
----
‘Next hallway. Two tripwires attached to grenades. Jump the first, slide under the second. A stallion who wished he could be a professional bungee jumper is hiding behind a trash-can at the end of that hall. His shotgun will be useful. Take it after you kill him. His watch will go off in eight seconds and distract him.’
Shine drew her knife and began taking deep, sharp breaths, preparing her airways for the sprint. Her heartbeat was elevated and the Other was restless. It wouldn’t be long now.
She heard the soft ‘meep meep’ of a watch alarm.
‘Go now.’
----
“Watch yourself here, colt,” Bones murmured, pausing a few meters down the hallway. He pointed toward the beige carpet that seemed to grow from the floor like some kind of discolored moss. It took me a minute to pick out the thin piece of fishing wire running across at hoof height. It was strung to the wall, then up to the ceiling where it disappeared behind one of the tiles. “Mister...eh...Limerence, was it? Don’t suppose you have anything in your collection of spells that might help us.”
Limerence frowned, opened his mouth, then let it fall shut. He pursed his lips, then exhaled a long, drawn out groan.
“Yes, sadly, I do have a spell that will find tripwires. I cannot say I am pleased to use it, nor have I cast it in many years. A moment.”
“Wait, why sadly?” I asked.
He’d already shut his eyes, and his horn was glowing brightly. “You’ll have to give me a moment to remember the exact shape of the arcana. It is a very simple magic, but one I haven’t touched since I was a foal.”
“Lim, tell me ‘why sadly’?”
He cracked one eye at me. “Because it is a prank my brother enjoyed pulling on me when he could still use his horn. Step back.”
I backed away from the tripwire as Lim’s expression hardened. A thick, bright blue spray of something like yarn shot from his horn, spurting all over the hallway with the force of a high powered water-gun. It dangled off the walls, gathering in sticky clumps on every surface it landed on.
“Silly string?” I scoffed, picking a bit of the stuff off the wall and sniffing it. The odor was rank and chemical.
“Don’t mock that which is effective,” he grumbled, pointing at ground where a bit of the sticky substance dangled from the nearly invisible wire a bit farther down the hall.
“I don’t know, Lim. Effective, yes, but this might deserve some mocking.”
“Then you will wake up silly-stringed to your bed!” he snapped.
I let out a soft snort. “If I wake up tomorrow, I won’t complain, however it happens.”
Somewhere ahead of us, I heard a few soft snaps that sounded like popcorn.
“That’s gunfire,” Bones commented, raising his head.
I nodded. “Limerence, you’re leading. Silly string everything.”
----
Shine worked the tip of her blade into the wound on her shoulder and carefully flicked a bit of glass that’d managed to dig its way between two muscles onto the bloodstained floor. It was going to be painful, later, but that was an issue for the Other to deal with. Pain was an inconvenience.
‘You are suffering minor blood loss. Bandage your wounds and move on,’’ The Talent whispered in the back of her mind. ‘There are three targets left. One of them has a short range stun rifle. He is suffering arthritis which will make him slow to fire. The others are armed with standard P.A.C.T. issue assault rifles and they are behind cover at the end of a long hallway. Rig the shotgun to explode from a sharp impact.’
----
We found a third set of remains slumped against the scorched remnants of a door. One of Limerence’s knives, the handle burnt to a crisp, was stuck between his ribs. There wasn’t much to identify him besides a wrecked kevlar vest and a few blackened bones. Bullet holes in the far wall told the story. He’d had time to fire a couple of shots before she was on him, but his aim was probably spoiled by the dented fire extinguisher resting near what was left of his head.
“That filly is moving fast,” Bones murmured.
“Detective, there’s a bit of blood here,” Lim said, pointing to a few dark droplets on the carpet. “I think it’s Miss Taxi’s.”
“I hope to high heaven she doesn’t remember this,” I muttered, tugging at the strap of the P.E.A.C.E. cannon where it was digging into my shoulder. “Lim, let’s see what’s ahead.”
Limerence’s horn flashed, and he sprayed a thin string to the other end of the hall, revealing two more tripwires.
----
‘The Other will be here soon.’
Shine stared impassively down at the last of those she’d killed. The pony with the stun weapon was already burning, while his companions had just then begun to smolder.
She pulled the nearly empty vest of knives off her shoulders, then shrugged out of it. It was soaked with blood, some of it hers, some of it others’, but Silence would need it soon, for the confrontation. Tugging one of the remaining usable blades from her prey’s throat, she laid it atop the vest.
‘You will lose consciousness in two minutes.’
For a moment the Shine mused upon the possibility of remaining in control. It would be easy to drown the Other in sadness and guilt. She was almost waterlogged with it anyway. Still, that was not what Justice needed; Justice needed his friend. The Shine could never be that, nor did she wish to try.
She considered leaving them a note as to what was coming, but beyond the gate, there were too many variables for it to be useful to them.
Padding away from the bodies, she sat down against the door of the elevator, not really feeling the cold metal, but aware of it in a distantly logical fashion. The coolness of it felt good on her sweaty body, or would have, if such things concerned her in the least. Slick blood coated every inch of her body, but it was drying quickly in the chilly air.
‘The Other returns,’ the Talent ordered, ‘Put your head on your hooves, lest you damage her nose.’
She obeyed, closing her eyes to wait for quiet oblivion.
‘Maybe this is what it’s like to die,’ the Shine thought.
For just a second as she faded away, the idea brought back a tiny smile.
----
“Whatever else I’ll say for these things, they clean up right easy,” Bones quipped, peering around the corner. “Give me a broom and a dust pan over sponging corpse juice out of the carpet for six hours.”
I put a hoof on my chest and took a few sharp breaths. Five floors with adrenaline and anxiety following you the whole way up and no elevator to make things easier was exhausting, magical heart or not. Intermittently finding dead bodies the whole way up didn’t help.
Limerence blotted his forehead with one of his seemingly innumerable handkerchiefs and quickly checked his watch. “We are at forty-six minutes mission time, Detective.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Bones replied. “The Office has a bit of a ‘time compression’ effect when you’re inside. Four hours in there is about two hours out here. The elevator up to the Vault is just ahead. Once we’re inside, we’ll have plenty of time.”
From somewhere close, I heard a frightened squeak, followed by panicked breathing.
Raising my voice, I called, “Sweets? That you?”
“H-Hardy?!” my driver called back, her voice cracking with the strain. “Where am I?! Where are we?! Where are you?”
“Are you safe?” I shouted, cantering down the hallway toward where I thought she might be. Limerence sprayed a quick blast of silly string ahead of me which picked out a pair of tripwires. I hopped both without incident, and galloped on.
“T-there’s...Oh Sweet Celestia! Who are these ponies?!”
“Tell me you’re safe!”
“I’m covered in blood and there’s three dead bodies here and they’re burning!”
I kicked my trigger into my mouth and charged around the final corner to find a barely recognizable mare with her mane drenched in ichor huddled against the shiny double doors of an elevator at the far end of a bullet-riddled hallway. Three corpses, all aflame and putting off a noxious smoke, were heaped together against one wall. Unlike the other floors, this one only had a single hall and no doors leading off in other directions.
Taxi was quivering as she stared, eyes wide and frightened, at a blackening skull with a knife-blade stuck through its temple that’d rolled away from the rest of the pyre. Her gaze jerked up as I came around the corner, and she tried to stand, but her back legs wouldn’t hold her weight. I slowed, watching for more traps, though it didn’t seem they’d bothered with the final stretch.
“H-Hardy...d-did I kill these p-ponies?” she stammered.
Rather than answer, I pulled a healing talisman out of my pocket. It looked like an adhesive bandage with a good sized blue gem mounted in the center and must have cost one of those rich bastards in the Cult of Nightmare Moon’s little pervert’s gallery a fair bit; considering the expense, even hospitals weren’t inclined to use healing talismans except in life or death situations. Edging around the burning bodies, I knelt beside my driver and pressed it against her side.
“You’re in shock, Sweets. Are you injured?” I asked.
“I-I don’t think I am,” she muttered, looking at her drenched forelegs. “My flank hurts a little and I h-have some nicks and cuts—”
“Just rest. Get your breath,” I said. The gem began to glow, and the muscles in her neck started to relax.
I was so focused on my driver, that I barely heard Limerence and Bones approach.
“Filly, I don’t know what sort of magics they’ve got ponies tripping on these days, but I haven’t seen knife work like that since Miss Scootaloo took down Paxis The All-Devouring from inside his stomach,” Bones commented, chuckling as he trotted up to the elevator and ran a toe down the doors.
“Dammit, Bones,” I growled at him, “She doesn’t remember.”
“What? Ah, crap. I’m sorry,” he apologized, “You’ll take care of her, though. Wouldn’t be a Hard Boiled if you didn’t. Now, let’s see if I remember the top floor codes.” He turned back to the elevator and slid a tiny panel open with yet another keypad hidden behind it. After a few quick presses and several soft beeps, the panel snapped shut. “I’m fairly sure the call button is active, now. We should be good to go. If we’re not...well, we’ll find out in the basement when the elevator drops into a pool of acid.”
“Bloom doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as ‘overkill’ does she?” I asked.
“Not so long as I’ve known her, no.”
“This will kill my dry-cleaning budget,” Lim said, picking up his collection of knives and their attendant clothing. Despite their bloodstained condition, he still tossed the bandolier back around himself, doing up the zipper with a quick burst of magic. “Mister...ahem...Bones. I would appreciate if you would brief us on what, exactly, we are going to face within this ‘vault’ of yours.”
“I wish I could, Mister Limerence, but the place doesn’t lend itself well to descriptions,”Bones replied, shaking his head. At the librarian’s dubious expression, he sighed and continued, “Well, it’s just a vault, like it sounds. There’s a...a ‘gate’ thing built by a very old and—hopefully—very dead wizard by the name of Starswirl. He was there during the war. Nopony knows what he got up to, but he vanished sometime afterward. You step through and you’re in the Office.”
Lim persisted. “And what is the Office, exactly?”
“It’s...it’s like the idea of ‘an office’ given life,” he replied, swirling his hoof in the air as though looking for the words. “There’s staplers and typewriters and filing cabinets, or at least there were the last time I was here. It changes sometimes when you’re not looking.”
“Go on,” I said. “Might as well hear all of it.”
“Eh, there’s a sort of ‘control room’ that seems to work the place, but we only managed to decipher about ten percent of what anything did. It’s in this language that’s a bit like ancient Equestrian, if you had six mouths with three tongues apiece. What we did decipher scared the Tartarus out of us so bad we just decided to use the place for target practice.”
“Wait a second. Clarify this for me. You found another dimension full of terrifying eldritch language and your response was to set off fireworks in there?”
He shrugged and picked up a boxy looking device with a wooden stock and a crystal of some kind jutting out of its end from beside the heap of burning flesh. “If somepony gifts you a shooting range where you don’t feel bad about collateral damage, you use it. Not that any gun Apple Bloom ever came up with ever managed to do permanent collateral to that pit. Not even the Crusader.” Cracking part of the device open like a shotgun breach, he poked at the interior for a moment, then snapped it shut. “Hrmph. That’s one prototype accounted for. Too bad it’s nonlethal. Makes me wonder where the rest are.”
Taxi let out a little moan and stretched out her back legs. “Mmm...those h-healing talismans really work...”
“We’ve only got a few, so don’t get too used to them. What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked.
Her eyes shifted left, then right, before centering on the bodies again. “I...I was in the courtyard in front...in front of the Office and I think I saw something on top of the gate. I thought, ‘It would be horrible if those were heads’. E-everything after that is a b-blur.”
I felt like there should be a lot of nervous glances back and forth behind her back just then, but Lim was still studying his knives, and I couldn’t really tell where Bones was looking.
“You got us up here, Sweets,” I said, at last. “We’re here, we’re alive, and the world can still be saved. Those mutants were out to kill all of us. Focus on that.”
My driver’s teeth clenched as she turned to the burning bodies once more, then put a leg around my shoulders and hefted herself up to a standing position.
“For a stallion who’d make a terrible psychologist, you do have a way of motivating somepony,” she grunted, then tapped the button beside the elevator. It let out a loud ‘ding’, then that synthetic feminine voice played over a tiny metal speaker.
“Office Security protocols are currently offline,” the voice said, “Portal open. A Defiler level interdimensional breach is occurring. All Crusader Agents to the Vault.”
“Whoaboy! Now we’re in the crap,” Bones muttered.
“Bones? What’s a Defiler level...whatever the machine said?” I asked, trying to keep fear out of my voice.
“Bad news,” he said as the doors of the elevator slid open, revealing a stark, white box with a rail around the outside edge. “It means something is spilling through from the Office. Bastards must have turned it on.”
“Turned the Office on?” Limerence inquired. “How does one turn on a pocket dimension?”
Bones peered into the box, then trotted inside and turned to face us. He had no expression to read, but his voice in my head sounded distinctly worried.
“Look, you have questions, but I don’t have answers. If I could do a solid briefing, I would, but it’s been thirty-seven years since I last set hoof here. We ran magical decryption algorithms on the language in the control room for five solid years and managed to get bupkis, but what we did get suggested the place was in a sort of ‘standby’ mode, waiting for...something. Most of our efforts were bent toward destroying it. Maybe whoever managed to break into Apple Bloom’s security system figured out something we didn’t. You want to stand around down here asking the dead guy who’s been sitting in a hole for thirty years what he remembers, or do you want to go upstairs and assess the situation?”
There was a bit of silence for a few seconds while we all evaluated whether or not we even wanted to get in the elevator. It was almost assuredly a deathtrap, and as I’d died very recently, I wasn’t looking forward to a repetition.
The door dinged impatiently, and Bones quickly stuck his leg in the way before it could close.
I sighed and stepped over the threshold, trotting to the back of the elevator car and propping myself against the wall. “Bones, do you have any of that bourbon left?”
“Nope. Sorry, colt. Drank the last of mine beside the pit in the courtyard,” he replied, the collection of guns dangling from his shoulders clacking against one another.
Taxi looked back and forth between me and my grandfather, then limped into the little box and sat down, before turning to Limerence who was staring at the front of his vest of knives, seemingly lost in thought.
“Lim?” she prompted.
He lifted his head and exhaled through pursed lips. His face was a mix of complex emotions, but foremost amongst them was quiet resignation.
“Oh, nothing,” Limerence replied, “Just remembering some of the stories my father told me of his youth, spent reclaiming lost and dangerous artifacts from all across the globe. I sometimes asked myself why a sane pony would put themself in such positions. I have, in recent days, come to the conclusion that no sane pony would.” With a slightly hollow smile, he trotted into the elevator and pressed his flank against the railing, leaving a streak of blood. “Shall we?”
----
It took me a minute to realize exactly why my anxiety level started to climb the second Bones touched the ‘up’ button.
How many times had I been traumatized after an elevator ride? There was Tartarus, the Monte Cheval, the Moon Walk, that meeting with Stella, and how many others? I’d bled and cried at the end of an awful lot of rides in tiny boxes.
----
About two thirds of the way to the top floor, the sweetly mundane muzak pumping through the speakers above us cut out entirely, and the car gave a light jerk on its rails that rattled us something fierce. Taxi, having reclaimed her P.E.A.C.E. cannon, reared back on her hind legs and hefted the giant blaster toward the closed doors as Limerence floated a pair of knives into mid-air and Bones put one rear leg against the wall, ready to launch himself at anything that might come through.
Overhead, the lights flickered for a moment, then stabilized as the car continued upward into the unknown.
Slowly, we all relaxed.
“I don’t suppose elevator maintenance was high on their list of priorities,” I quipped.
“Doubt it, although anything Bloom built or oversaw that breaks down is a bit of a cause for—” Bones started to say, but he was cut off by a shrill explosion of sound from the speaker that set all of us slapping our hooves over our ears.
It was agony.
Spots appeared in front of my eyes. My teeth shook in my head. I felt instantly dizzy, rocking on my hooves as the blast of noise nearly flattened the three living members of our party. Even Bones seemed shaken as he braced himself against the wall.
Worse, the volume seemed to be increasing the higher we rode, and I would have sworn I heard something resembling a voice within the racket. It was impossible to shout, or scream, or cry over the auditory torment. I couldn’t give instructions. I couldn’t even think of an order that might save us from what felt sure to be imminent death or deafness.
‘...work with us…’
My front legs collapsed, and I was sent onto my stomach, tears streaming down my cheeks. Taxi clutched at her skull and she rolled onto her back. If she screamed, I couldn’t have heard it.
Limerence, drawing from some reserve of will I don’t think I’d have possessed, lit his horn, and suddenly we were in silence, with only the panicked sound of our own breathing echoing around the inside of the elevator. My ears still rang like a dinner bell.
“Sweet mother of mercy, what was that?” I moaned, rubbing at the side of my head with the tip of one toe. “Some kind of defense mechanism?”
“Not one of ours, if it was,” Bones murmured. His scratchy voice was about the only thing that didn’t sound like I was hearing it down a pipe. “Those speakers aren’t designed to make a sound that powerful. I’ve heard noises as loud before, but only standing in front of a pissed off dragon who wanted to tell me about myself.”
“I must say, with a certain degree of alarm, that the sound is getting louder,” Limerence said, his horn still glowing, softly.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“I am maintaining a bubble of quiet around the speakers, but they are not the source. Whatever is projecting the noise is much, much more powerful and has...altered their internal structure in some fashion,” He gritted his teeth and glared at the ceiling for a moment. “It’s trying to make me stop casting. I seem to be able to hold it at bay, for now, but if I didn’t know better, I would say there’s a memetic component to whatever that is.”
I cocked my head to one side. “A...memetic component is something that messes with a pony’s brain, right?”
“Whooboy, I don’t fancy that,” Bones murmured. “Memetics are dangerous. They’re separate from mind magic, insofar as they dig into your mind and won’t let go, even after the casting has stopped. We studied them in the war. Sweetie Belle decided the risk of turning an entire city into drooling lunatics wasn’t worth the military edge of weaponizing her voice.”
I almost choked on my own tongue for a second. “An...entire city?” I gasped.
“Damn right. It took fourteen of the best mages in Equestria to incant them, and Sweetie Belle used the magic exactly once, on three volunteers.She tried to force them to make her tea.”
“What happened?” Limerence asked, cautiously.
“There wasn’t enough of their minds left to keep bowel control without a direct order.”
The unicorn’s upper lip curled as his horn brightened another few degrees of intensity. “I...see. What would happen if a memetic were projected along a sound wave carrier powerful enough to—” He hesitated a moment, then shuddered, “—deafen us for life?”
Bone’s glowing eyes flickered a few times. “That’d be bad, yeah. Can you hold it together?”
“For now, yes. Silence is my talent, and this spell is extremely efficient. I would not, however, wish to become distracted or startled while we are in range of these speakers.”
Bones flicked his eyes toward the quickly increasing numbers above the door. “There’s a hundred of those speakers on the top floor! You think you can throw that spell around all of them?”
“Ah…No, no I can’t,” he replied, expression growing worried.
Thinking quickly, I asked, “Lim, can you maybe throw some kind of shield around us so the silence only affects the outside of it?”
“I can, but...it will be inefficient and temporary,” he replied.
“Our brain matter is about to be temporary, Lim!”
“Yes, of course.” Shuffling through his pockets, he pulled out a green gemstone set in a golden socketed face shaped like a snarling goblin. “I suppose I took this from the Archive with the intention of using it.” He turned it over in his hoof and stared wistfully at the gem’s faceted surface. “Sad. It is the last of five in the world. Hrmph. I suppose there must be a world left to miss such things.”
Dropping the gemstone on the floor of the elevator, he stepped on it. A hot burst of air filled the elevator as a swirling green mist rocketed up around his hoof. Limerence shut his eyes and inhaled as the mist seemed to gather up into a thin stream that shot up his nose. As it did, his horn’s light intensified and a thin, spherical shell of baby-blue light formed around us. The sounds of the moving elevator fell away, leaving us in a bubble of absolute calm.
Opening his eyes, the unicorn exhaled. A bit of that strange mist seemed to be leaking from his pupils.
“Mmm, Father never told me they were so lovely to use,” Limerence all but moaned.
“Lim? Imminent death?”
His gaze centered, and he stood a bit straighter.
“Apologies, Detective. You have your time. The effect of a Mox is brief, but it will last the day. Tomorrow...well, I am becoming used to magical hangovers.”
As I was about to say something to the effect that we should come up with a less poisonous cure for the effects of burning through his entire magical reserve than those lotus petals, the elevator stopped and my driver tugged on my sleeve.
“Hardy,” Taxi whispered, “Look.”
Her trembling hoof was pointed at the door of the elevator. I squinted at the spot as something strange began to creep through the crack between the steel doors. It looked like some kind of creeping moss, beige and ugly, growing on the metal. The leading edge seemed to blow in an unseen wind as it grew, spilling across the surface of the doors in pulses eerily similar to the beating of my racing heart.
“Bones! What are we looking at here?!” I barked, pressing myself against the wall of the elevator as the odd substance started to work its way across the floor.
“Damned if I know, colt! It almost looks like...eh…” He leaned forward a little, his nose almost touching the outside edge of our shield. The lurching growth stopped just short of the magical sphere, but was still moving slightly, as if it were somehow alive. Shaking his head, Bones sat down with a soft click as his tailbone hit the floor. “Colt, I know this isn’t going to be a comfort, but...I’m pretty sure that’s carpet.”
I blanked for about five seconds.
“Carpet?”
“Carpet.”
“Carpet. Bones, please...clarify for me. Are we both talking about something you put in front of the door to wipe your hooves on?”
“Aye, that’d be carpet, yes.”
I tipped my hat back and mopped my forehead with a fetlock. “Is carpet normally infectious in the Office?”
“I’ve no idea. Still, sure enough, that’s the carpet that’s everywhere inside the portal. You want to ask any more questions I don’t know the answers to?”
“Only the one,” Taxi added. “Are we thinking that’s dangerous?”
Limerence cast a quick glance at the ceiling, his horn still gleaming as he maintained the shield. “I couldn’t say for certain, but short of pressing the ‘down’ button, hoping the elevator will descend, and then perhaps trying to blow up a building made to survive dragon attacks from the outside, I don’t see what our alternatives are.”
The doors slid open on a scene so bizarre my eyes refused to acknowledge it for a moment.
My friends and I faced a short hallway at the end of which lay something closely resembling a bank vault. At first I thought the ceiling was somewhat low, but that was a trick of the light; it was actually three times my height. A circular door with a great wheel set in the middle of it was mounted on a wall covered from floor to ceiling in the strange, spreading carpet. It’d been propped a few inches open by what appeared to be a vase or pot of some kind, also freshly carpeted. Even the ceiling had a layer of the fluffy sproutings.
“Reminds me of the time I spent in a mental hospital after I lost my cutie-marks,” Taxi murmured, her tail tucked tightly between her back legs. “Hardy, I hate this.”
Taking a sharp breath, I trotted forward, pushing my hoof through the wall of the shield. Limerence winced, but the spell held fast.
“Hardy, don’t!” my driver gasped, but I forced myself to ignore her. With the greatest of care, I brought my hoof down on the carpet. The surface was pleasantly soft and reminded me of petting an alpaca wool blanket I’d picked up at a flea market a few years back.
“If they’re guarding this place, then they must think it’s vulnerable,” I replied. “That means they’ve got some way of moving around without the rug growing all over them or the P.A. melting their brains.”
“Colt, you could have let the undead guy do the potentially lethal experiments,” Bones grumbled.
“I could have, yes,” I said, rubbing a hoof through the odd surface of the carpet. “But I didn’t.” Stepping to the edge of the shield, I lifted my trigger and held it in one side of my muzzle. “Now, let’s figure out how those ponies were moving around in here without the sound system trying to squish their minds.”
“It is best we stay close to one another until we do,” Limerence murmured as the bubble around us pulsed a few times. “My shield is experiencing force equivalent to being trapped under an avalanche every ten seconds.”
----
Mundane and, yet, dangerous. Horrible, and yet, completely normal.
After spending a solid half hour finding the remains of ponies my driver’s alter ego had left behind, something as simple as ‘too much carpet everywhere’ seemed downright pleasant. That didn’t take away from the strangeness of what we were doing, nor the fact that Taxi had somehow killed an entire building’s worth of ponies twice. Sadly, the encyclopedia and index worth of questions I needed to ask her about what we’d just witnessed would have to wait.
----
With my driver clumped against Lim’s right side and myself pressed against the other, we worked our way toward the vault. Listening for danger was futile; there was no sound from anywhere outside the shield. Smelling danger was out of the question; I couldn’t smell anything stronger than Lim’s fear, Taxi’s exhaustion, and Bones’s cigarettes.
That left visually appraising the potential dangers of a hallway full of enchanted carpeting leading to a secure room which supposedly housed a portal to another dimension. I had to resist the urge to whistle. The threat contained so many unknowns that, in practical terms, we might as well have been blindfolded too.
Bones was on point duty, but nothing seemed inclined to take a bite out of him just yet. Shuffling along, I had to take a moment to enjoy the softness of the carpet on my hooves; for something almost certainly arcane, it was pretty comfortable to walk on.
We made it to the vault door without dying, and I quietly counted that another victory in a week that had too few. I couldn’t tell many details about the pot that’d been propping it open; it seemed to have deformed slightly from whatever shape it’d originally been, as though it were gradually melting.
“Are we really doing this?” Taxi asked, half under her breath.
“Yeah, we’re really doing this,” I replied. “If you can think of somepony more qualified, let me know, because I’d really rather we called them to handle this one.”
Once the bubble of silence around us was close enough, I wedged my nose into the crack in the hatch and heaved. It was lighter than I’d expected, and the door swung open in total silence. With the blood rushing in my ears, I blinked a few times, trying to get my vision to adjust to the dim interior.
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Into the vault prepare for anything, encluding eldritch horror.
This chapter was badass, freaky, nostalgic, and sad. I have no other words besides 'good job' I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Professor Karma
Gabriel Vs Defiler in Discords Office?
Blowing up The Moon seems so much easier now.
Holy throne... Poor Sweets...
My god it’s full of stars
"has set his sights on finding new worlds to plant an Equestrian flag on only to discover they'd misjudged the scale of their new"
Pronoun mismatch (his/they/their).
There also appears to be a horizontal rule missing after the Scholar's Note.
It is indeed for the best that The Shine took over, as if The Talent were to try and tell Taxi how to deal with the mutated ponies she would’ve been killed after the first one upon learning his background
Also I get the feeling that inside the vault, The Office is actually going to look so mind numbingly boring (aka just a plain, albeit never ending, office) it will freak out Hardy, Taxi, and Lim more so than if they were to walk in on Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath going at it hot and heavy to the tune of bad 70s porno music played on a theremin...
... to which Bones would just shrug and say it is just another Tuesday.
8904846 It's...mmm... You're going to wish I'd gone with that. That was the initial concept.
-Chessie
Well, this is a welcome surprise! Those poor ponies. I can't imagine what will happen once (if) Twilight gets into Detrot. Good work, Chessie!
8904931
.....
pics.me.me/please-hold-me-im-scared-5618934.png
Chessie, I must congratulate you on your creative mind.
You have for 123 chapters had me contemplating just how the situation could get worse and not once have I thought that the situation was one where things could only get better.
I eagerly await the next chapter and while the journey is long and filled with pitfalls, I'm reasonably sure that the light at the end of the tunnel isn't a thermonuclear flash.
RIP, Mox Emerald.
(I consider myself lucky to own a set myself, along with a Black Lotus and other ancient bits of cardstock spellcraft.)
8904846
Why do I geet the feeling that you're goading Chessie into being more diabolical?
Wow, just wow. Can I just say, poor Sweetie Belle. She destroyed three minds completely with her voice. The poor thing must have been horribly traumatized by that...
8905927 Less than you'd think...
-C
I don't really have any words for the eldritch horrors that came from the Office, it's like the creepiness of the Dunwich building from Fallout 3 mixed with the immersiveness and general creep factor of FEAR, none of which are things I really have experience with (nor do I really want to). I actually expected an endless white expanse of an indestructible playground, not a portal to the void realms with whatever classifies as a Defiler-level being in transit.
Then again, there was that train...
The way the Shine works reminds me of the kind of stuff I see some people pulling off in games like Dishonored. Incredibly efficient and sometimes messy ways to kill everyone, plus an item to listen to the personal and often sympathetic histories of everyone you kill. Except it's permanent.
8905989 Let me guess, those volunteers weren't volunteers were they? I'm guessing criminals that deserved it? Dragons perhaps?
Or had Sweetie become hardened by war and conflict at this point?
8906078 Don't forget: there was a long time where we thought the Cutie Mark Crusaders were all going to get talent marks that were just a mushroom cloud expanding over a map of Equestria.
-Chessie
Ah, another magic player. The way things are going makes me think that they will see the cover of a Call of Cthulu rpg, in real life. Y'know, they get to the portal, and when they look in - they see a giant eye ( attatched to a miles high monster) looking back... . Risking spoilering things, I get the impression thet this whole mess is a Discord plan from the beginning. Who better to save Equestria than him? Starting during the war, all he would have to do is make some subtle sugestions, and insert a bit of chaos, then set things up with Taxi and Hardy when they were kids. Doesn't it strike anypony as odd that Hardy had a hell of a life, but didn't crawl into the bottle or go insane after Juniper's death. Not only that, but Juniper keeps popping up to give him guidance/clues, and he has the luck of the damned? I think that hardy & company are the new "Elements of Chaos", and (reformed) Discord is working behind the scenes to defeat the big nasties with them, with or without the diarch's knowledge. After all, it's easier to apologize than ask for permission, and even The Family couldn't plan/counter the chaos that Discord's champions can cause.
Sounds like enervation.
8905571
Pffft, puh-LEASE! Do I look like the kinda guy who would....
i.giphy.com/media/3o7ZeEZUzRjyvWuuIg/giphy.gif
i.giphy.com/media/3oKHWvUUMPQhCOCT72/giphy.gif
8906361 Nawww, Discord isn't in on this one. Sorry. Cute idea, though.
-C
Although many are the words of praise, this concern weaves in another tangent. While our heroes have decided that failure is not an option, I don't know how much internal mental pony hide is left to cover over these wounds of the soul. Either they have somehow adapted and are not much "pony" anymore or their going to be "somewhat high functionality insane" in the eyes of other ponies and find themselves sidelined as the crusaders came to be.
Will they be able operate in a world that they survive to see even if they win? And will the rest of the ponies be able to grant them room to recover? I fear their a bit far gone. It won't seem that way to them of course. It never does.
8909991
Welcome to the hero's dilemma.
-C
8910000
What is funny is that sometimes it's expected for the heroes to both win and perish doing so. This way they secure the reward for others and never have to suffer the living that comes with surviving victory. A win-win for some members of the community. This way everyone can go on with their lives with a minimum of fuss and the heroes get some places named after them that in death they should be grateful for. Survival is never publicly decent if it inconveniences others. There are reasons the old and wounded are hidden from the sight of others.
So how much was the Talent's voice inspired by Dishonored? Because it sounds just like the secrets the Heart tells you.
8911556
I haven't played it, so...not at all, unfortunately. I may have to go back and give that game a go.
-Chessie
And the madness rolls on...
Hmm... considering the last time we saw the Shine in action was Taxi telling the story to Hardy, is this the first time we’ve fully broken away from Hardy’s perspective?
This close to an eldritch hole in reality, that almost makes sense.
Anyway, as intense as ever.
Mmm...nothing like a bit of eldritch horror to spice things up a bit.
Ooof, that’s a spicy cliffhanger
I love you. Thank you for continuing to write.
Anyone else get the feeling that the eldritch being that makes its home in the Office might well be the Scholar? No clue why, but it feels fitting.
Magic induced orgasm lol.
If not further away.
If it's stupid but it works, it's not that stupid.
Send the bill to the law firm.
I wonder if that's deliberate, or accidental, by DW and his siblings?
That sounds a lot like something out of Project Horizons.
And very subtly horrifying, at least when one ponders being suffocated by having a carpet grow over the inside of your lungs.
I've lost found of the number of games where I've accomplished this task.
Hardy Clearly needs to read more creepypasta
If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.
8907553
One wonders what he is doing, though, especially since he can move the sun and moon on a whim. I don’t see why he couldn’t deux ex machina his way into the story, really.