Darkreach Chronicles, Part Two
"Research observations: Samples taken from the wooden wreckage presumably left behind by they who would be Bloodwings would suggest that the leather-winged ponies were attempting to construct crude vehicles for transportation. He who would be Lieutenant Warhold believes they might be weapons: perhaps some form of catapults.
"Personal hypothesis: I who would be Chief Engineer Ranort suspect that they who would be Bloodwings were in fact building airships. This is based on the light-weight paneling of the discovered wreckage and the aerodynamic shape of the materials found mostly intact.
"Scientific conjecture: It remains to be seen precisely what form of fuel propulsion they who would be Bloodwings would find for use in the implementation of zeppelins. Until more discoveries are made by the patrols of he who would be Lieutenant Warhol, the hypothesis remains fellacious and unsubstantiated."
"Methane," Kepler said.
"Pfffft..." Flynn looked over from where he squatted beside Wildcard in the common room, piecing together more and more metal digits to construct a prosthetic. "Are you for real?"
Kepler nodded. "While listening to the Crrystalline Auditorry Inforrmational Neurral Emitterr, I've been glancing thrrough the Emerraldinians' sketchworrk." He held up a sheet in question. "Therre arre apparrently larrge beasts that fly overr the mountains and plains of the Darrk Side. They resemble strrange, alien manta rrays." He pointed down through the floor. "I do believe Rrainbow discoverred the fossil of such a crreaturre in one of the rresearrch chamberrs below. Although I do suspect it was an infant."
"If these things are supposed to be flying around..." Flynn narrowed his good eye. "How come we haven't seen any flocks of them?"
Wildcard mutually nodded.
"Well, accorrding to Chief Engineerr Ranorrt's logs, therre's rreason to suspect that equine crreaturres known as 'Bloodwings' werre hunting and clearring down forrests towarrds the Omega side frrom here when Darrkrreach was firrst settled."
"Bloodwings, huh?" Flynn cocked his head aside. "The Dark Vigil?"
"Indeed. They cerrtainly fit the descrription of sarrosians," Kepler said. "Anyhow, I suspect that they found the forrest and wiped it clean forr all of its wood. Then—judging from Ranorrt's hypothesis—they fashioned airr ships from the materrial. I'm talking dozens of them. Now..." He gestured with his claw. "If they herrded togetherr enough of these crreaturres, I could imagine they milked and harrvested them of whateverr naturral propulsion they possessed."
"And you think they sucked methane out of these creatures in order to propel these unseen zeppelins?" Flynn sighed. "Gotta hand it to you, Keps. Either the lack of sunlight is making you crazier or the universe stopped giving a damn countless days ago."
"Ha-hah!" Kepler grinned. "Have we not seen enough strrange things to imagine even crrazier feats?"
"Do you have any idea how concentrated those methane samples have to be in order to propel wooden skycraft?" Flynn grimaced. "I'm surprised—hundreds of years later—we all didn't blow up from lighting a torch."
"It boggles the mind, my frriend," Kepler said. "Perrhaps the Bloodw—er... sarrosians used the compound in conjunction with lunarr magic?"
"So the Trinary War was literally waged via moon farts?"
"Prrecisely."
"Now I'm really scared."
Wingflaps.
Rushing bodies.
Kepler, Wildcard, and Flynn looked over to see two mares arriving.
"Hey, guys," Ariel said, sweating under the weight of a bulging backpack. "We come bearing gifts... or curse."
Kepler's nostrils flared. "My starrs and garrterrs... what a currious smell."
"I hope you didn't bring back any packaged farts," Flynn muttered.
"Even better." Rainbow Dash opened Ariel's saddlebag, and the dim room was flooded with pale blue light.
Flynn's lense instantly retracted. "Great orgasming ostriches... the Hell is that?"
"Mushrooms," Rainbow Dash said. "About forty samples."
"You picked glowing fungae off the wasteland floor and carried it on your person?"
"No." Rainbow pouted. "I carried it on Ariel's person."
"Eh heh heh..." Ariel sweated some more.
"So... uhm..." Flynn craned his neck. "What's the big idea? Are they poisonous—?"
"I was hoping you'd tell us, smarty pants," Rainbow said. "Cuz if they are... we're in it big." She smirked. "There's an entire ravine filled with this stuff north of—er... I mean towards Omega." She looked at the others. "If we close off one of the chambers of Dark Reach, we might be able to cultivage some of our own."
"Difficult to do without rrecrreating the envirronment in which you found them, Rrainbow One."
"Well, they were mostly growing off the dead wood and mulch we discovered in the remains of the ancient forest." Rainbow patted a second saddlebag strapped to her flank. "So... I brought a bunch of samples of them too."
"Ha-hah!" Kepler grinned. "Good thinking!"
"Besides that..." Rainbow fidgeted. "There isn't much to write home about. We found a few shacks that might be remnants of an old, old lumber mill." She sighed. "But nothing's grown since the forests were cleared."
"Do you think we'll ever find out how the trees grew there to begin with?" Ariel remarked.
"Perrhaps if I can study Rrainbow's samples, I might be able to come up with a hypothesis," Kepler said.
"If you're able to, dude." Rainbow nodded. "I don't want to distract you too much from listening to the old Cylindrimanian reports."
"Harrdly a deterrrant! I am positively enrrapturred by those old jourrnals! I can scarrcely keep away!" Kepler gestured. "I simply needed to rrest my earrs and talk theorries with ourr good brrotherrs here."
"In the meantime, Flynn..." Rainbow gestured at the mushrooms. "Could you check out the shrooms here?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
"Flynn... ... ..."
"Hrmmm..." The stallion tapped his chin. "I hate to say this, Rainbow, but I don't know if I have the proper tools to give this a full alchemic test. By 'tools' I mean a frame of reference for specifically what kind of fungus we're dealing with here." He waved a fetlock. "After all, this species is completely unknown to us. It's been growing on its own in the abandoned nooks and crannies of the Dark Side for Goddess-knows-how-long. I'm not certain any pony—sarosian or otherwise—has had a chance to study it before. Finding out whether or not it's poisonous may legitimately be a crapshoot—"
A single talon reached out, snatched one mushroom, and stuffed it into a hungry beak.
Rainbow, Flynn, and Ariel sucked in their breaths—muscles tensing.
Wildcard munched, munched, munched, and swallowed. "... ... ... ... ..." After thirty seconds of staring into abject nothingness, he turned towards Rainbow and smiled with a thumb's up.
"Luna Poop..." Rainbow shook her head, voice hoarse. "Wildcard, if you weren't so suicidal, I'd kill you."
"Well... uh..." Ariel fidgeted. "Does that answer the question then?"
Flynn huffed. "It could several hours from now when our favorite griffon may or may not start hallucinating and experience a diarrheic episode."
Wildcard shrugged and laid back casually on his cot.
"Meh... whatever..." Flynn returned to fixing the metal arm. "If Bard was the one who survived, he would have poured gravy on the shroom first."
Kepler leaned in towards Wildcard. "If worrse comest to worrst, frriend, could I trrouble you forr a methane sample?" A lion's tail whapped him in the spectacles. "... ... ...alrrighty!"
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Wildcard gives no fucks whatsoever.
Hmm...if memory serves, didn't the Durandanans herd around giant flying manta-like creatures, or am I mixing up my story canons?
*Snickers.*
I swear, Wildcard. You're tempting Murphy here.
But for a second, I thought Seraph was being suicidal and ate it because she was fed up with the Herald. Guess not
Jesus, it's a wonder Wildcard can fly with the size of his balls o_O
Anybody reminded of Durandana here?
Pftehehe!
I bet Ariel just loved carrying those 'shrooms!
Or a few days for him to suffer kidney failure.
8347830
8347844
Why dose someone always beat me to the things I think would make a good comment
Wildcard in 10 minutes.
8347830
No, they herded them.
Now to wait for the next link in the chain of life between light and dark.
8347830
Your not, The Durandanans did indeed have flying manta rays, that they called leatherbacks.
Not a goddamn one.
8347878
Herded and milked, iirc.
...Manta ray milk and cheese.
That's still something I find amusing.
-Through the path long forgotten, into the darkness long begotten. Ofolrodi.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembered the manta ray things in Durandana. I remember thinking at the time that those things, while certainly imaginative, were kinda random. Little did I suspect that IC was setting up something for the dark side.
That, or I underestimate the extent to which IC flies this thing by the seat of his pants.
okay, so random thought here, but if they were harvesting Leatherbacks for methane, that pretty much means they were slaughtering them for their flight bladders.
I doubt they were using the wild numbers, if there were any, but actually farming them, probably as source of food, armour and cavalry animal to start with, but as the war continued they began using the food stocks to harvest flight bladders too.
Which probably means they had a rapid gestation and growth, or the Sarosians were just slaughtering Leatherback calves in a bid to get the bladders quicker.
I'd like to know more honestly.
-Through the path long forgotten, into the darkness long begotten. Ofolrodi.
But if Logan is putting the Me into Methane, does that mean Dash has to make like a Parrot, preferably not the Norweigian Blue?
Maybe the question should more be, what stopped the trees regrowing from seeds, and stuump, root regrowth. Or was the whole forest a single tree with lots of trunks growing from the root system, and they cut or polluted a water supply that killed off enough root system to cause collapse?
Dash can always get out and push.
Brilliant Wildcard, brilliant.
Well that's one way to get things done.
So the Bloodwings made airships with a darkside forest and flying manta ray things. And they're all gone now.
So is the Trinary war now just a straight up Red vs Blue battle?
8347830
You're not.
At least wash it down with some booze, Dubya! You don't know where those shrooms been.
I have absolutely no skill in either chemistry or physics, so I have to ask this: What is the process to obtain helium? Because using methane in airships sounds risky as hell.
Indeed.
And now we'll find out whether or not these mushrooms are hallucinogenic.
...If Wildcard starts hallucinating, would he start talking? Because that would be the greatest thing since the quest for grilled cheese.
Damn it Wildcard, I would really rather not see you die! At least not from eating stupid mushrooms anyway.
8348321
If that happens, what would his voice sound like?
A hypothesis that sucks your dick. That's quite the conjecture.
8348292
Helium, as a very light gas, was blasted out of earth's early atmosphere by solar wind, same as hydrogen. While hydrogen was replenished by bombardment of earth by comets rich in water and methane, there was no helium in those comets. All helium on earth comes from radioactive decay (as the alpha particles ejected in alpha decay are simply the nucleus of a helium atom). Therefore, helium is pulled out of underground rock domes, where the gas collects after millions of years of alpha decay of radioactive minerals deep, deep in the earth. These same domes also collect other lightweight materials, such as natural gas and oil.
In other words, most helium we use is harvested from natural gas and oil wells.
8348595
Thanks!
That means helium is most likely disqualified as a viable option for airships on the dark side.
8348788
Wild Speculation: What if the machine layer collects helium which East Horse gets access to?
8348954
Then we would have laughed our asses off during the first book in the Windthrow arc. Can you imagine Rainbow's voice on helium?
8348968
*sarosian squeaks*
Fellacious: The hypothesis is wrong and also sucks dick.
That's what Tara Strong does.
Out of the words this story has taught me, on the whole I prefer Sapphiric, Nebulaic and Smaragdine to this one.
8347969
I'd expect that whatever allowed them to grow in the first place (magic?) just stopped working, and the trees died. The dark side isn't really hospitable to photosynthetic life...
(Or maybe they're old enough to have grown before the Sundering, when the Dark Side wasn't dark. But that was so long ago they would probably have long turned into dust by now.)
After all this, I really hope the shrooms aren't deadly. "Ate shrooms and died" would be a pretty unsexy thing to put on a gravestone.
8349477
"Voice hoarse"
Hopefully those mushrooms provide for a balanced diet.
8348292
Temperatures near absolute zero are needed for one thing.
8347844
I first thought it was Logan who stuffed them in Seraph's beak...
Cmon WC, you gotta chin up! Do we need to get Rainbow singing "always look on the bright side of life" to cheer you up?
Also known as the Skaven approach: always have someone disposable at hand.
I have no idea why Wildcard did that (though, someone would have had to do it eventually), but I guess he's doing fine. Only time will really tell if that's going to stand true or not, so I hope that he didn't just risk his life for something stupid as hell.
Can't tell if grammar error or Color Wheel not knowing how to words.
https://youtu.be/iGvZa3tiYwY?t=42
8349477
Not to be confused with Horse Voice, who writes horror stories.
So the Sarosian airships literally flied around by farting.
Only you, Skirts.
Funny thing about mushrooms. There are those that are edible. There are those that are poisonous. Then there are the kind that are edible only after you cook them, And it may take them hours to days to mess up your inner chemistry.
I know I would be wary to put anything glowing in my mouth.
... ... ... Wildcard goddamnit!
An airship would be real handy right about now.
Wildcard, the fuck?
Feed it to Sera