15 The Invisible Fortress, Day Three
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My Little Exalt
THE INVISIBLE FORTRESS, DAY THREE
by: Lithl
special thanks:
Rhanite
Saekwaka
Dear Spike,
I'm sad to say that we've had to lock up Pinkie for the time being. She says she doesn't remember what happened, but all the evidence points to her as the culprit in Mahina's murder. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of investigating the issue, and the Guardian's attention was elsewhere at the time, so he doesn't know anything more than the rest of us.
I know, I don't get it either. Rarity says that she and Applejack both overheard Pinkie on the speaking tubes, plotting to kill AJ, too! I don't know what's going on, but it's probably a good thing Fluttershy is still treating Applejack's injuries.
We buried Mahina and her friends in the valley outside the Fortress. Most of the original Solars are entombed inside, but we don't have the tools or the time to build a mausoleum for her, much less one to fit several humans. Rarity managed to make headstones, but none of us knew what to say. Pinkie was the closest any of us got to Mahina, and that was just a song about a nightingale. I suppose they were pretty close when Mahina...
Anyway, with AJ out of commission and Fluttershy tending to her, and Pinkie locked up, there are only four of us left to search for the Final Retreat.
"Oh, Celestia, what is that smell?" Rarity's attention to detail was invaluable, but she also got upset over the smallest things sometimes. The complaints were beginning to get on Twilight's nerves.
"Calm down, Rarity, it's not that—" Twilight stopped. "Okay, it is that bad," She covered her nose and tried to find the source of the smell.
Her trek led her down the second-floor hallway and across one of the bedrooms. When she pushed through a door on the far side of the room, the two unicorns were assaulted with the smell of a sewer. The room contained many tablets bearing architectural sketches, as well as a drafting table with a number of pieces of charcoal still sitting, ready to draw. The far wall was taken up by a scale model of the manse and the mountain behind it. The entire room was covered in filth.
"Ahy fink we're at ze ottr wol," Rarity tried to speak, but it was difficult to understand her with a hoof tightly clamped over her nostrils. Twilight managed to piece together the sentence after a moment, and used her telekinesis to tug at one of the fouled curtains hanging from the wall. She brightened up when her suspicions were confirmed: windows!
Twilight busied herself with opening the three windows around the room. Rarity remained steadfast at the threshold. Rarity did not need convincing when Twilight urged her out of the room, but she was confused when Twilight shut the door, remaining inside the filthy workroom.
Moments passed, and Rarity began hearing the sound of forceful winds from inside; air was even being sucked through the crack beneath the door, and she could hear stone smashing against stone. Rarity was about to reopen the door and investigate, when the noise abated and the door swung open under the power of Twilight's magic.
Everything in the room that hadn't been nailed down – or grown from the stone of the mountain by whatever magic had built the manse – was gone. Streaks of grime around the edges of the windows suggested where all of the detritus had gone, although not how. Twilight stood alone in the center of the cleaned room, no longer covering her nose. Rarity lowered her hoof towards the floor; the air still reeked, but at least she could breathe without gagging, and the open windows formed a cross breeze that would probably clear away all but the smallest traces of the scent before nightfall.
"How—"
"I summoned a small tornado," Twilight smiled innocently. "It's a spell that's supposed to be meant for travel, but it's still a tornado, right?"
"I... suppose." With the filth removed, Rarity could see that like all of the other rooms she'd seen, there were several mirrors for the Guardian to appear in. "So, was this Bax's workroom or something?"
"I can't think of anything else it could be. I feel a little bad about destroying those tablets with the blueprints on them, but it was difficult just to breathe in here, much less clean it in a conventional way." Twilight walked over to the model of the manse, one of the few features of the room she hadn't blown out of the windows. Unlike the full-size version, it was easy to distinguish the model from the surrounding mountainside; the optical illusion used to hide the building seemed to only work at the correct scale. "Hey, look here. There's an inscription on the front steps."
Kal Bax
Builder of Manses
His Work is His Monument
"Not that I don't appreciate the cleaning effort, dear," Rarity said, "but do I have to search this room? It still smells."
Twilight rolled her eyes. "Fine. You go start on the next room; I'll just finish up in here. Look, there was another mask on that door over there; it must have been somepony's – someone's – bedroom. Probably Kal Bax, if it's attached to his workroom."
As Rarity entered Bax's bedchamber with an indignant flick of her tail, Twilight returned her attention to the model of the manse. With some careful probing with her telekinesis, she found that she could open it to any of the floors, including the basement and the attic. The model didn't include any furniture, so she wasn't hopeful that it would prove to be a map to the Final Retreat, but a scale model of this size inside the building it was a model of surely had some kind of significance.
To that end, Twilight scanned through the model of each of the floors systematically. She couldn't help but marvel at the detail of the model. There was some sort of amphitheater or arena in the basement that was even floored with sand.
When Twilight's investigation reached the second floor, she paused. The pillars that were topped with the orbs that supposedly controlled the manse's active defenses looked... off. They were not evenly spaced across the room in the model.
Twilight galloped out of the workroom to get another look at the defense controls. When she got back to the parlor, a quick scan confirmed it: the pillars were evenly spaced, in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Twilight galloped back to the workroom, and the model still had a pillar throwing off its otherwise perfect accuracy.
"Hmm..." Twilight nudged the errant pillar in the model with her telekinesis, and it slid across the model's floor without resistance. "Curious." On a hunch, she pushed the pillar into its correct position. She heard a click from deep within the model mountain, and then the model began to unfold. Twilight quickly took a step back, and was poised to run at the first sign of another trap.
Instead of another deadly trap, however, the model of the manse and mountain became a throne. A human skeleton was sitting on the throne, covered in a white marble robe with golden veins throughout the stone. The skeleton cradled a book in its lap, and a rune-covered tablet rest at its feet.
Twilight stood for a moment, stunned. Then she laughed under her breath, "'His work is his monument,' huh? Clever." Twilight crept closer to Bax's skeleton, and investigated the book. The title on the cover read Manse Construction in Old Realm script. Twilight lifted the book out of Bax's lap and scanned through the first few pages; the book was apparently Kal Bax's ultimate treatise on the art of manse construction, and Kal Bax himself was supposedly the best in his field.
Twilight glanced down at the tablet sitting at Bax's feet. With a single glance she could recognize its sorcerous nature; she even recognized a few symbols from Erymanthoi, Erymanthoi, What Do You See?
U'awa had said there was a tablet binding the demons to the area, and that destroying it would release them. While he hadn't given a description of it, Twilight could guess what the tablet at Bax's feet was, given the context.
Demons could not be trusted. Applejack had once said that "a good lie always carries a seed of truth," so destroying the tablet probably would release the demons from their binding to the area around the manse – why else would U'awa want it destroyed? The question was what would happen once that binding was gone? U'awa claimed that they just wanted to go home, but Twilight was skeptical. Even if U'awa was telling the truth about the Founders' desires, what about the demonic fauna? Destroying the tablet would release them into the world as well, and Twilight did not want to be party to that.
Still, Rainbow had already expressed her desire to "help" U'awa. Zecora had sided with Twilight on the issue, but Twilight hadn't heard the opinions of the others. Fluttershy would certainly want to help, and Rarity heard the lies directly from U'awa's lips, so those two were probably a lost cause. Applejack would probably be sensible and not believe the lies of a demon, being the Element of Honesty and all. That left Pinkie Pie as the tiebreaker, and she had apparently snapped, so there was no telling what her opinion on the subject would be, if she was even worth listening to. Then there was the possibility that Rainbow Dash would simply act without thinking and smash the tablet before a consensus could be reached.
Twilight recalled once during her studies with Celestia – the real Celestia – when her mentor taught her an interesting game. The "game" turned out to actually be a lesson in futility, as the only winning move was not to play. Once Twilight learned the lesson, Celestia brought out a chess board to play an actual game, and Twilight hadn't thought much more about the other game since. However, the situation with U'awa and the Founders made Celestia's lesson flood back into Twilight's memory.
The only way to ensure that she won the argument against destroying the tablet was to make sure the argument never happened in the first place. If nopony could find the tablet, nopony could destroy it.
"Rarity, I'll be right back, okay?" Twilight called out. "I need to... uh... use the little filly's room!" She grabbed the tablet and the book in her telekinesis and ran off before hearing Rarity's response.
One of the few bits of progress we've made so far is on food. We ran out of the rations we brought with us, but Rarity and I managed to find a summoning circle used by the original Solars to conjure food. According to the letters written by Ozandus, the conjured food could not sustain a human at full health indefinitely, but poor food is far better than no food and the Solars lived on the stuff for years; we don't intend to stay away from you for that long!
The circle was damaged, and the Guardian said that some demons had destroyed it out of spite some decades past. However, with assistance from Rarity to help manipulate the metals that formed the circle and directions from the Guardian, I managed to fix the circle, and the Guardian had witnessed the Solars performing the spell to conjure the food from thin air often enough that he was able to teach it to me.
As the only sorceress among us, I'm now the only pony able to get us any food.
Rainbow Dash stood alone in the basement, already tired of exploring empty storerooms converted into tombs for the fallen Solars. She'd explored the ones she could manage to pry open, and they'd all been trapped... but whoever had lain the traps seemed to have done so halfheartedly. Even without her exaltation, Rainbow was confident that she could've avoided injury. So much for real-life tomb raiding being like a Daring Do book, she thought.
Rainbow trotted over to the speaking tube protruding from a nearby wall and maneuvered the levers to call upstairs to the smithy, outside the cell they'd found and locked Pinkie into. "Hey, Zecora, I don't think there's anything down here; I'm about to head back upstairs. Do you want me to swing by the dining hall and bring you something to eat?"
Rainbow paused to give Zecora a chance to reach the other speaking tube and reply. The reply was... odd. Behind Zecora's voice there seemed to be some sort of rhythmic drumming; it didn't sound like metal-on-metal that she might've heard if somepony were smithing something in the room, but rather more like a tribal drum from Zecora's homeland. The words Zecora spoke didn't help with the creepy atmosphere created by the rhythm, nor did that fact that her voice seemed to have dropped by an octave.
"Rainbow Dash, we want you! I'll wear your skin like a suit!"
"Uh, Zecora? Are you okay up there? How's Pinkie Pie doing?"
"Give up, dear Rainbow Dash; your friend's soul is beyond reprieve! Surrender now: at least you'll be spared from the worst..." Maniacal laughter began to echo through the tubes, before Rainbow hastily shut off her connection.
First Pinkie Pie goes crazy and murders Mahina, now Zecora's lost it and wants to turn me into an article of clothing! Sure, I'd make a pretty awesome suit, but I like being Rainbow Dash, not Rainbow Duds!
In the shadows generated by the unreliable lighting, Rainbow stalked towards the prison cell. She ducked her head low and around the corner separating the smithy from the spinning room, and got a clear line of sight directly to the iron bars that were meant to hold Pinkie in one place – a shaky proposition at best, considering the pony in question, but the best option at the time.
The cell door was wide open. Neither Zecora nor Pinkie was anywhere to be seen. Two holes in the far wall of the cell marked the absence of the golden chains that Pinkie had been locked into. Alarmed, Rainbow dashed forward, and found a small stone statuette lying on the floor just beyond the cell's bars. The base had been broken off, and when Rainbow looked up, she saw that the ceiling held many more similar objects, including a broken base. Why is it that nopony ever looks up? There was a small amount of blood on the face of the figure, along with a hooful of droplets of blood on the floor nearby. Just a little blood – surely not fatal – but Zecora and Pinkie both missing was... worrisome.
"I gotta go tell the others." Rainbow's stomach growled in response. "... Right after I grab something to eat."
Rainbow felt two thin objects lock together around her throat and begin to constrict, cutting off her air flow. She gagged and bucked on instinct, connecting with something light, issuing forth a metallic clang. The pressure around her throat lessened, and she tumbled out of the grip, spinning to see her attacker.
Before her stood a bronze stick figure, humanoid save for the lack of a head. The automaton was light – probably mostly hollow – and Rainbow's kick followed by her roll had caused it to stumble back a few paces, ending up near a worktable that had been upended at some point in the past, scattering tools over the floor. Rainbow stood ready as the headless automaton scooped up a large hammer from the floor by its feet before charging blindly (hah) with the weapon raised.
Just before the automaton was within striking distance, Rainbow Dash reared as her golden aura flashed her cutie mark in the air. Heatless white sparks dripped from one forehoof, which she plunged into the thing's chest as it began the downswing of the hammer.
A flash of light emanated from the point of impact, and Rainbow left an impression of her hoof deep in its metal chest as it flew end over end across the room. The automaton only stopped flying when it reached the corner formed by the far wall and the ceiling, its upper body embedded deep within the stone. The thing's legs swung briefly from the momentum before hanging still and limp.
Rainbow stared at the hoof she'd used for the punch. "Hah!" She laughed, "Take that, AJ!"
In more upsetting news, despite her confinement, Pinkie has escaped. I suppose that shouldn't come as a huge surprise, considering who we're talking about, but the chains she was locked into ought to have drained her of her magic within minutes, and she had been there days before her escape. It seems the chains were ripped out of the stone wall, as they're missing as well.
Perhaps Pinkie's escape was likely assisted by Zecora, because that... zebra disappeared at the same time. Pinkie losing her mind is somewhat understandable, considering the fact that her mind was hardly there to begin with. However, I thought Zecora would have been more stable, her unhealthy fascination with me aside. Rainbow Dash claims that the broken automaton in the smithing room attacked her, but it was clearly nonfunctional the last time I was there, and nopony acting as a guard ever mentioned it moving during Pinkie's entire incarceration.
I suspect something about this place is getting to ponies, and Rainbow Dash is probably going to be next. I'll have to keep an eye on her in the future.
Twilight finished her message to Spike and watched the cherub zip away before laying down for the night to sleep. The beds weren't the most comfortable, being largely made of stone and with most of the upholstery and blankets and such throughout the entire manse destroyed by time, but at least they were heated, and they staved off the chill of the northern winter night. She still had her sleeping bag from the trip up that she could use, too, which increased the bed's comfort just slightly, and her bag worked well enough as a pillow.
The trouble with Pinkie and Zecora kept Twilight awake, thinking. What could have gotten to the two mares? Was it getting to Rainbow Dash now? Twilight turned out the light, closed her eyes, and started calculating perfect numbers in her head to calm down her mind and get to sleep.
Twilight had passed the thirty-three million mark when a shaft of light fell over her face. Her eyes snapped open to reveal a silhouette standing in her open doorway. "Who's there? What is it? I'm trying to sleep!"
The figure advanced, and Twilight noticed his masculine curves. There shouldn't be any stallions in the manse...
The stallion didn't speak, but as he drew closer she saw the light playing over the edges of his silhouette, revealing the presence of black and white stripes – Zecora, using the ability she'd learned to turn into a stallion.
Twilight breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank Celestia you're okay, Zecora! We were so worried about you when you and Pinkie both disappeared. Do you know where—" Twilight stopped talking when she noticed another very... prominent masculine feature being sported by Zecora's new body.
"Shh," Zecora was close enough to place a hoof on Twilight's lips. "Just be quiet and this will all be over quickly." Her voice – his voice – was much deeper than Twilight expected it to be. "Relax, and this will hardly hurt a bit," he said, as he climbed onto the stone bed.
"Zecora! Zecora, what are you doing?!" Twilight cried, as the muscular stallion-Zecora held the unicorn down. "Zecora, stop!"
The door slammed closed, plunging the room into darkness.
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I dunno how my story has gotten enough attention to warrant an "updated story" feature slot, but THANKS GUYS!
I'll try harder to get my next chapter out sooner.
Did... did Zecora just rape Twilight?
I finish reading, scroll down, the Geico Gecko's there, going, "Well, hello."
2498930
Let me put it this way, if you know anything at all about Dungeons and Dragons, you probably have heard of the Tomb of Horrors, correct? And how it eats parties alive? The Invisible Fortress is kinda like Exalted's version of the ToH. And IIRC /spoilers/ the Animating Intelligence is driving everypony in the Circle insane as a result of having been created by a bunch of Late High-First Age Solar's who survived the Usurpation. So its paranoid and crazy as hell, and was directly responsible for pretty much driving everyone in the manse to kill each other/spoilers/.
2500354
i.imgur.com/yERyqXM.jpg
Edit: It scares me that this was the only SFW r63 Zecora picture I could find. There were several pornographic ones, including ZecoraxTrixie, both hit by the r63 bat.
2502457For Twilight's sake, I hope her Solar Exaltation helps her fight Zecora off, and that Zecora regains her wits. Rape is a subject I try to avoid, unless it involves stopping rape.
2502832
Rape is a serious subject and should not be taken lightly.
That said, mentally scarring fictional characters for life is what being a writer's all about.
2501576
Well, that explains things. And I do love a good descent into madness or seven... so long as they're temporary.
Oh, and I can't help but wonder: that was a travel spell. Where did Twilight send all those Late First Age blueprints?
2503720
Um, I'd have to look up Stormwind Rider, but I think she probably didn't really direct the spell at anywhere in particular, so the answer is probably "somewhere outside". Anyways those blueprints may be from a manse construction prodigy, but its the kind of thing any Twilight caste can replicate if they sink enough of their time into it. These guys DID elevate human civilization from "Stone Age" to "Glorious Magi-tech Golden Age" in about a century after all.
2503720
Out the window. Stormwind Rider may be a travel spell, but it functions by summoning a small tornado... and riding it. Anything or anyone not being carried inside the magic tornado is still subject to the fact that there's a tornado (even if it is relatively small).
There's a reason stuff like Stormwind Rider is illegal to use in Yu-Shan. A tornado disturbs a lot of stuff, which could piss off a god if you ruin his or her tea ceremony.
Of course, the blueprints were scribed to thin sheets to stone, not paper or scrolls. Launching slate out a second-story window at 40+ mph* rarely ends up well for the slate.
At least she didn't destroy Kal Bax's book.
* The Stormwind Rider spell doesn't say how fast the winds go, but F0 tornadoes have 40-75 mph wind speeds. Stormwind Rider itself can move at 100 mph, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's how fast the cyclone rotates.
2503805 2503822
Oh, ruin my fun, why don't you. And here I was, imagining some lucky schlub on the Imperial Mountain discovering lost secrets of a bygone age... then throwing them away because of the smell.
2503836
Hahaha!
That'd be hilarious. Unfortunately, actual teleportation over any significant distance is pretty freaking hard to come by in this setting. IIRC the easiest access to teleportation a mortal/exalt can find is teleportation back to your manse. Spirits, of course, have the charm "Hurry Home" which can return them to their sanctum. There are several charms that offer short-range teleportation, but they give you a few yards at best.
You need high-level magic or artifacts, or a manse with multiple locations in order to teleport across Creation. (Of course, there are other means of long-distance transport that aren't teleportation. For example, Mountain-Crossing Leap Technique lets you jump at 240 mph or better, depending on your essence rating.)
I actually play Exalted every Friday... MRW i saw this: OOOH SNAP!
2502854 Such a playfully cruel comment
I like this story. Trying to read it regurarly. Especially atmosphere reminding me of RPG sessions. It's almost like girls and Spike are playing in Exalted with Luna as GM :P
But I don't like how characters seems.... less emotional? Less alive. I don't know how Twi can be so relaxed about the fact that basically her friends have gone nuts and want to murder rest of them. She seems concerned only about the fact of insanity not being visibly fazed that her friends are in trouble.