12. Adventures in Nostalgia, Part 2
Our contact had betrayed us for reasons unknown, the entire building was lethally trapped, and our toughest soldier was dead. Our night was getting worse and worse.
We filed back into the penthouse, off the open, exposed, and lethally-trapped rooftop. I didn’t brush Danish’s ashes off my coat until we were in Ngyuen’s office. I was glad I hadn’t eaten that day. Butch sent Poke and Trevor to check on our prisoners, Cheese to check the windows, and Gina and Griz to secure the entrance.
Sergeant Butch swore in frustration. “This doesn’t make sense! Even if the Easties could mobilize every fighting deer in forty miles and send them surging through the streets right this second, they’d still have no hope with a front-on assault! They don’t have the materiel, the air support, or the artillery. They’d need to level a city block an hour to have any chance of pushing the Western side back far enough. Damn it, Gilda, if you or the rest of the spooks have been holding out intel on us, I swear I’ll strip your damned gizzard out!”
I started sorting through Ngyuen’s desk, trying to see if there was anything that could help us, an explanation of whatever scheme or double-cross she had pulled, laid out in short words and simple sentences next to an ‘off’ switch for her doomsday device. Even if that had existed, I would have been useless. I couldn’t pick up a piece of paper without my claws near-shredding it. The words on the page were a jumble. I was trying very hard not to throw up.
Trevor and Poke came back first, shaking their heads.
“All dead,” said Poke.
Butch swore softly. “Suicides?”
“Magic,” said Trevor. “Whatever spell Ngyuen cast killed her guards as well. Very thorough.”
We followed them into the room downstairs and saw the bodies. The red runes running along their coats were still smoking. I could hear a kind of buzzing, and I couldn’t tell if it was something magic, something distant, or just my mind playing tricks on me. It felt like all three.
Cheese came in. She didn’t have a ‘good news’ sort of look about her.
“Cheese, report,” said Butch.
“Bad news and worse news, sergeant. Bad news is that all the windows are trapped. Ngyuen’s spell goes all the way down, you fly, you fry.”
Butch’s claws wore tracks into the carpet. “Damn. What’s the worse news?”
“There’s a sea of deer in the streets and I think they’ve found the dead sentries below. We’ve got a detachment coming up to say hello.”
I think that’s what they said. It was blurry, and I was still looking through a clawful of papers I’d picked up. Building blueprints from Ngyuen’s desk, supposedly of D’hotel Veritas. I had seen the damn blueprints of the hotel, and these were not those blueprints. They looked like no hotel blueprints I’d ever seen, and at that point in my career I’d seen enough hotel, bank and embassy blueprints to last three lifetimes. They looked more like some thaumaturge’s patent application than a hotel.
“—find a secure place in the hotel to hide.” That was probably Trevor.
“That’s a long shot. Doesn’t matter how well we hide, any good search team will find us and stick us on spits. We might as well fight our way out, it’d end up the same either way,” replied the sergeant.
“Sewers,” I said. It was the first thing I’d said since Danish got killed.
“The entrance is in the street,” said Trevor, “We’d be shredded the moment we stepped out of the hotel.”
“W-we’re gonna make our own entrance,” I said, still trying to stop shaking. “There’s a main line next to the basement. We’ve got enough bombs to mousehole through the wall, and then it’s less than two miles to get far behind friendly lines. Give Cheese two minutes and she’ll bring down the freakin’ basement behind us.”
Butch nodded, and her head snapped across to look at Cheese. “Can we do this?”
“It’s gonna be tight, sarge. If I had time to set up the charges just right, I could knock through that wall no problem. I don’t got that much time.”
Trevor cleared his throat. “Would some more explosives help?”
“Gimme another ounce of TNGB and it’ll be a breeze. Why, you holding out on me?” Cheese gave him a hopeful smirk.
Trevor gestured to Poke, who stood by a door tucked neatly behind two couches. Poke swung the door open, revealing a walk-in closet filled with bombs, belts of darts, cans of wiley pegasus, experimental carbines, crossbows the size of a cub, exotic knives, spears, bladeslingers and every other type of small arms imaginable. This was Ngyuen’s private stash.
Cheese looked at the weapons. “This’ll do,” she said, and then dove in to take everything she needed.
We all memorized the escape routes and headed out of the penthouse and into the corridor. Whatever magic had sealed the outside of the building had also sealed the elevator shafts — I guess they figured they’d rather defend stairs than an elevator shaft — so we hustled through the door with ‘sortie de secours’ written above it and down the stairs. Poke took point, his handbow strapped to his chest for easy access.
Two flights down and Poke’s fist shot upward. We dropped and huddled against the wall of the stairwell, keeping our profiles as low as possible. The spiralling stairway went down hundreds of feet and was well-lit by strip lighting. If anybird glanced our way, there would be no shadows to hide us in.
Dozens of hoofbeats struck concrete steps in the depths below us. I slid up to the railing and peered over the edge. Ten storeys below us were at least two dozen deer, thundering up the stairs, visible only by their spears skittering from their shoulder slings.
I felt a claw grab me from behind. Poke led the squad into the door to the side, and Griz dragged me through before I gave our position away. We were only two floors under the penthouse, and already the stairs were a no-go.
Cheese jammed the door shut behind us with glue and a dagger as Poke scouted ahead and made sure that this new corridor was clear. The rest of us hugged the wall tight, crouching down and staying quiet. I wracked my mind thinking of a different route.
Sergeant Butch jabbed me. “Spook, where now?”
I had a damn good idea, but I took out the blueprints just to double check. “Hotel laundry,” I said. “We’re on the service floor, the laundry is at the far end. There’s a service entrance at the other end of that, with a flight of stairs and cargo elevator. It doesn’t go all the way down, just ten or so storeys. That’s enough to get past the deer on the stairs, slip back down on the seventh floor, then get to the basement from there.”
“Good enough. Griz, you’re on point.”
We slipped down the hallway from door to door, checking under each one to see if the room was clear. Only the final door to the laundry had anyone behind it, casting shadows from the flickering lights behind them.
Cheese used a tiny mirror, slid between the door and floor, to look into the room. She gestured us all to move back.
“Squad of ten deer,” she whispered, “Six set up behind cover with dart guns aimed at the door, two guarding the rear stairs next to the alarm, two sat up on washing machines providing overwatch.”
In harsh whispers and quick gestures, Butch gave our orders. Cheese tied a piece of string to the laundry’s doorhandle and stood well to the side. Poke and Trevor knocked a crumbling tile off the ceiling and flew up into the subspace. Me, Gina, Griz, and the sergeant all slipped into the next room along, and set up two mouseholing kits on the wall adjacent the laundry.
We heard two light taps from the ceiling tiles above us, and then we counted down from ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Five. Poke and Trevor would be dropping down now.
Four.
Three. Alarms disabled. Cheese in position.
Two.
One.
Cheese yanked the string and pulled the door wide open. The deer in cover panicked and shot at the door, sending dozens of darts and bolts whistling through the air and burying into brick on the other side of the wall. They screamed for the alarm but the two sentries at the back of the room were dead already.
Griz and Gina pressed the switches. Two holes exploded through the walls. The rubble alone took out another pair of deer. The sergeant let two knives fly and killed both deer on the washing machines in an instant.
One of the deer had the brains to turn and shoot at me, nearly clipping my left wing. Gina had the better aim, shooting her handbow into his neck.
Two of the deer panicked and charged us with their spears. They were slow, and unprepared. I wrenched one’s spear away from him as Butch set on him with his own knife, and Gina and Griz made short work of the other.
The final deer made a run for the alarms. Poke grabbed him and hauled him into a drying machine, turning it on its maximum setting with a slap of his claw. The poor bugger broke his neck on the first turn.
We wasted no more time and regrouped, then went through the back door of the laundry room into the service stairway. I noticed one thing: the lock on the stairway door was new and good quality, as good as the ones in Ngyuen’s own penthouse. I hoped the deer wanted to stop people coming up the stairs, not from coming down.
Down the stairs, everything became stranger. The laundry lift running down the stairway shaft had been modded to haul construction materials, with new, high-quality ropes and engines running it.
As we slunk down the steps, the floors changed too. The next floor down looked the same through the glass pane of the doorway — a service room leading to a corridor. The next three floors looked nothing like that. They were hollowed-out shells, like something you’d find in a construction site. The pillars to hold the walls and floors in place were there, but there were no dividing panels for walls, the floors and ceilings were unpainted concrete with only a metal skeleton of the subspace. At the other end of the massive room, plastic tarps formed a semicircular wall from floor to ceiling, blocking off whatever was on the other side.
The next floor after that looked even creepier — again, bare except for a tarp, but this time with the same runes Ngyuen scrawled everywhere chiseled into the floor. The floor after that was full of nondescript crates, and I saw that the tarp was taking up a lot more of the room.
The floor below that one was filled with stacks and stacks of munitions. Magical charges. Barrels of liquid fire the size of ponies. Things I’d either seen in very old military history books, or very classified schematics.
We tried to go down to the next floor, but the staircase and door below were buried in a mixture of dust and rubble, as if someone had excavated everything in the next few floors up and buried it all down here. We went back upwards, to see if we could cut through whatever had been created in the middle of the building.
Poke went through first, swearing softly in awe of the munitions around him. He moved slowly but smoothly, never putting down all his weight on one claw in case of tripwires or pressure plates.
The ceiling of this floor was different. Strong steel girders were welded above us, with hooks, winches and pulleys. Any one of the giant crates of destruction could easily be hefted up and slid around this makeshift warehouse on the system. It seemed like a whole lot of effort just for a warehouse.
There were no other exits except the stairway behind us, and the tarp in front of us. Whatever was behind it and the reason Ngyuen’s own blueprints were so messed up were one and the same, I knew.
We crept through the rows towards the tarp. The roar of the fighting outside and the buzzing of the magic shell were almost mute, and every little rustle of our webbing and kit sounded like a dull roar.
Poke got to the tarp first. It was a curtain, held to the ceiling with thick ropes and bolted in place in five-yard intervals along the floor. He slid a knife under it, lifted the plastic an inch off the ground, and peered underneath.
“Sarge, you gotta see this,” he breathed, without his normal cocky-asshole tone.
The sergeant knelt down next to him, peered under, and stood back up. “Chingis... this is insane...”
She took out her own knife, and opened a bird-sized slit in the plastic, which she parted and entered. We all followed.
I saw exactly what Ngyuen had been trying to keep secret. What had been worth all this magic and murder.
Giant chain lifts ran up a hole running up through seven floors of hotel, and down through half a dozen more. A glowing form shimmered softly in the depths of the hole. Consoles and constructs of foreign magics lined the sides of the room. On every floor of the hotel, munitions could be lifted by crank and chain and engine to almost the top of the building, and dropped squarely into the shimmering thing below.
A portal trebuchet.
“Chingis...” repeated Sergeant Butch, “They could level a dozen city blocks in an hour with this thing. All this time, Ngyuen was setting up an artillery piece, right on the Western frontlines. We need to bring this thing down.”
“Uh, sergeant, you realise that’s a suicide mission, right?” whispered Poke. “Nothing against going out in a blaze of glory, but that’s exactly what it’s going to be.”
Trevor shook his head. “No, Poke. It’s suicide not to destroy it.”
“How’d you figure that?”
“Our closest three safehouses are all in western territory. If this siege engine is still standing tomorrow, two of those safehouses will be rubble and the other will be overrun. Even if we flee to our next safehouse outside the city, the eastern forces will catch us up.”
Poke grunted, but said nothing.
“Cheese, go back out into the hall and rig those munitions to blow, especially the wiley pegasi. They’ll have a hard time shooting this thing with the building on fire. Trevor, Gina, go help them.”
“Yes sarge.”
“Poke, Griz, keep an eye out for any deer. Stay out of sight, but if anything tries to raise an alarm, slot the bugger.”
“Yes sarge!”
“Gilda, find the closest escape route to the basement. This is not a suicide mission, and we will make it out of here in one piece.
“Yes, sarge,” I said, almost believing her.
“Right. You have your orders. Get to work!”
And that was when everything went wrong.
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HOLY CRAP IT UPDATED. IT MUST BE MY BIRTHDAY.
Now to read!
Really? A "Burn Notice" rip-off? Wow, like that hasn't been done. It's my favorite American show, so I have every right to be pissed.
4389580
Considering it was started in December 2012, no, it hadn't been done. I was ripping off american TV before the rest of these Johnny-come-lately LoHAVs and FiveScorers and Chess Game morons even got into Friendship is Magic.
Hey Chuck, how much of this did you end up rewriting?
Should I read the whole thing again from the begining? or am I okay to pick up where you left off and read the new chapter?
4389595 No, the day the first one came out (which was in 2007, I believe), people had ideas for the show. After a few episodes, fics started popping up all over the interwebz. I should know since I tried to write one. So, no, this is not original. Even from your logic, this story came out FOUR YEARS after the show came out.
4389599
The rewrites never got off the ground. I ain't rewriting, I'm just going to work through and finish it at whatever pace I can manage, in all its unpolished glory. So, if you remember the plot, you can just carry on through.
4389614
This would be true if I were writing on a Burn Notice fanfiction forum. But I'm not. I write pony fanfiction. And before me, no, there were not BN/MLP crossovers.
Also, you're an incoherently angry dork with terrible taste.
OHMYGOSHOHMYGOSHOHMYGOSH!!! IT'S STILL ALIVE! I can't believe it! I adore you!
4389632 Okay, FIRST: I am a dork; you can't hold that against me. THIRD: I hardly ever get angry. Frustrated? Yup. Upset? Daily. But, anger doesn't come easily. Anger triggers a reaction in my sub-conscious, which quite literally turns me into a different person. I have seen a doctor about this, and no, it's not normal. SECOND: *did that on purpose; who says I don't have taste?* I WROTE one, as well as a few other people (meaning most of an entire school) wrote some full-length stories or crossovers for a contest. We then submitted them to internet. Still wanna keep going? I call it like I see it. I never said this wasn't GOOD, I just said it wasn't original. Maybe if this was a crossover fic with Fee (Best Character!), Sam, (who is your profile picture), and Michael went to Gaia as ponies or griffons, you would most definitely have a fan, a favorite, and a like. Re-read what I wrote. I never said anything about your talent OR your writing ability, just how unoriginal this is. And, even if it hadn't been done (which it has), there are SEVERAL of these types of fics out there. Retelling a show, book, or other from an episode point of view with ponies. So, either way, your argument is invalid.
4389666
Okay, two things:
1) What, specifically, have I ripped off Burn Notice apart from the intro and the very basic concept of 'spy is cast out of organisation, has to work to unravel mystery around it while surviving?'
2) You know that the original concept of Burn Notice was not actually original to Burn Notice, right? And that the entire show is in fact meant to be a rip-off (or what smart people would call a homage) to previous works in the genre?
4389738 Okay, for One, it's an episode-type thing. Of course you can't use cars or things like that (good job with the explosions, BTW), 'cuz it's Gaia. Ponies don't have that stuff. As for Two, I know that. Most of the ones before (talkin' to you, Borne and Bond!) were CRAP. BN was the first Good one. Still wanna piss and moan?
4389784
...you know that Bourne and Bond aren't actually the main things that Burn Notice is based off, right?
Awesome! I thought you got caught in a fan for a while there. Love the new chapter and I hope more's on it's way!
4389839 *Thanks Cage!* No. I did not know that. YOU FUCKING IDIOT! OF COURSE I KNEW THAT!!! I was saying that they are similar, as well as examples of awful incarnate.
4389947
...Yeah, you're kind of a moron. I'm going to talk to someone who isn't a frothing idiot.
4389955 No, YOU are the idiot. Goodbye.
Excellent update. I really like this story.
Odd comments, I imagine some folks find it hard to walk with their panties bunched up like that.
4389955 Hopefully not a frothing idiot, and from a fan who really appreciates and deeply enjoys this story, I apologize for the snide ones out there!
This really has been a fascinating story. I've liked the references you've thrown in the past (such as to, say, Twilight's time in Tarontoland) and the unique spin and feel you give each character, and the backstories for the characters. Seeing this bit about Gilda is fascinating and again, super happy you added another chapter. This was a story I'd feared dead for good, and glad to see the fears unfounded!
So, thank you.
4389617
Oh well. Not going to complain if it just moves forward.
Is there any schedule for this, or is it going to be running on Steam time?
4389595
Oh, Chuck, don't you know...? The only way to gain victory against a troll is by ignoring what it says and deleting the comment to prevent feeding it.
Some people just want to watch the comment sections burn...
Okay, although this is a great, tightly-written action scene with suspense ramped up to about fifty-three... I laughed a lot at the deer shoved into the dryer.
Great to see an update.
4389580 I suppose you do, since no one has the right to tell you how to feel. But why should the rest of us care?
Because you're a "true fan"? I suspect most of the folks reading this are fans too. Based on his nom de plume, Chuck certainly is.
Or maybe it's because it's not original work? Perhaps you're unclear about the nature of fan fiction - by definition all fan fiction is based on properties created by someone else. If that sort of thing offends you why are you even on this site?
Also you might want to learn the difference between a "rip-off" and a homage. Granted it can be hard to tell sometimes - but if Chuck really wanted to rip-off Burn Notice, I suspect there would be fewer magical ponies.
Or a ponified Mike and Sam and Fi and Jesse flying around doing stuff...or it could just redo a episode with Pony characters instead of something.
4389595
Hey, man, don't worry about that overly serious butthurt guy, I mean, seriously, why does he need to argue with you? He's probably a troll, or something, so you don't need to worry to much.
This is a pretty awesome story, and just so you know, the fact that its unpolished doesn't matter. It's got a good tone, excellent pacing, and all sorts of awesome.
And the fact they are tactically clearing the building with swords and bows is just delicious. Also a Deer Tet Offensive is pretty cool.
4389955
Hey, Chuck? Did that guy just say that James Bond was terrible?
I could've sworn that's what he said, but I must have earwax in my eyes.
Anyways, four hooves up for the return of Banishment Decree!
Yay! I'd given this fic up for dead, but it's back! Yay!
4390635 Huh... I think he did...
4389595
As one of these "Chess Game Morons", I'm not sure how I feel about this comment. Other than this fic is great...
Though even I think some of them are complete crap...
I was watching Ponies since I was a kid. Give it up for the babysitter...
A year and a fucken half. God damn, Chuck. God damn. And I thought I was bad with updating.
But hey, it's back! Thanks Chuck, this actually did make my day (which was a steaming heap of shit up until then)
Now I'll just sit here quietly for another year and a half for the next one.
4389580 It's not a rip off. Maybe you should shut your face and read the WHOLE damn thing before casting judgement.
4391416
My biggest problem with the Chessverse is that the setting as a whole never reached Endgame before they all kinda petered off. (Of course, there are crap fics in the group, but Sturgeon's Law applies everywhere.) Even the stories which reached a completed status never went all the way to Endgame.
4392673 That was a mix of overinflation of the group which added a whole slew of bad stories that made it hard to continue, procrastination and laziness, and the site moderators cracking down on us because of the first thing. There are a few of the originals still going, but most are dead. I try to continue, but writer's block is a bad thing...
4389666 ... I haven't seen anyone act this stupid in a long time.
Believe me when I say I can be one of this site's most outright jackasses.
You however? Well... What basic do you have for saying the author to this story is an idiot?
Give me your evidence. I am certain you have something to back you up on this.