Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 07 Journey of the Imaginary Emperor

Journey of the Imaginary Emperor

There was another feeling of being jerked around and all their seats automatically swiveled back facing towards the cabin and giving both Naudia and Twilight a view out the window at a green and blue ball, that they didn't get to examine. There was an audible CLUNK on the hull and they were pushed back into their seats, and it felt like every part of them weighed three times as much.

There wasn't really all that much noise or anything, clearly there weren't any engines firing. They were just accelerating for some reason.

"We just connected to the skyhook, and this acceleration will go on for about three to four minutes while we get up to speed." Gwynn said from behind them.

"How are we accelerating? Some kind of magical engine?" Naudia asked in a noticeably more strained voice than Gwynn.

"We've got a magnetically accelerated cable that's a couple hundred miles long that swung around and snatched us up when we got into orbit."

"How did we even get into orbit in the first place?" Twilight asked.

"With the way our warp drive works it's easier to just warp from ground level to a planet rather than try and use a rocket to shoot out of the atmosphere, since it drops us at orbital height but lacking orbital speed."

Twilight wasn't feeling up to a high acceleration lecture at that time or she would have asked more about the mechanics involved. A voice came back over the intercom, sounding about as strained as Twilight felt.

"Prepare for zero G, we will be disconnecting from the skyhook in thirty seconds."

After what felt like a lot longer than it actually was there was another audible CLUNK and the weight lifted, all of it. It was a very very strange feeling as Twilight's hair began to frizzle out and Twilight floated against her seatbelt. It was then when somebody poked the release on her seatbelt and while there was no retraction that caused her to start floating out into open air.

Frantically Twilight began to try and swim towards the chair as she gently floated away from it. She knew this feeling, and she was beginning to panic.

Nobody else in the room seemed to be panicking, granted Naudia was still belted in.

"Is there something wrong?" Gwynn asked gently pushing Twilight back towards her seat.

"What happened to Equestria!?" Twilight said barely controlling herself.

"Well yeah, that's what zero G's is, we're in orbit around Equestria." Gwynn pointed out the window at the blue sphere Twilight hadn't gotten a good look at before. Out beyond the window took a long second for Twilight to get a handle on, but it was still there, it was all still there.

It was huge, indescribably huge, you could see clouds and ocean and mountains. Equestria dwarfed her, even looking down on it from this distance Equestria imposed itself upon her with it's vast expanse of cloud sheathed green beauty. Ponyville was so small she couldn't even make it out from here, she could barely recognize Canterlot as it started to move over the horizon.

CLUNK

Twilight was pulled out of her stunned silence because she bonked her horn on the window trying to get a better look at Canterlot.

"Is that really Equestria down there?" Twilight asked.

"If you want a better look the viewing area downstairs has opened up." Gwynn said pointing at a ramp that had opened up in the middle of the isle.

Without needing any prompting Twilight went straight over, or would have had her swimming motions gotten her any distance towards her destination.

"No, no no you have to pull or push off something, you can't swim in air even if we're at zero G. Like this." Gwynn demonstrated by perfectly navigating herself through the hole in the floor.

Inelegantly Twilight pulled herself along downstairs, along the way she accidentally bumped somepony with her flank, she turned around to apologize and stopped apologizing, because one look was all it took to tell that there really wasn't any need to apologize to Naudia.

Downstairs was a fantastical viewing platform that would have been impossible to use outside of freefall. The entire floor was glass? Twilight wasn't sure what it was, but it was clear and the seats were on the ceiling.

There really was nothing to say about what she saw outside that viewing glass. If you scratched around you'd come up with edges in to describing it by how you felt about it.

'Humbling'

'Small'

'Precious'

Like the vastness of it could swallow you whole.

Naudia took advantage of the situation and pulled Twilight into a seat next to her on the ceiling, flipped the armrest between them up and held her close.

After a while they started a little game of trying to guess where they were flying over. However that gradually became harder as the ship slowly began to rotate it's belly upwards taking Equestria out of sight in favor of the dark starless abyss of space that loomed above them, devoid of light all except for one point of light.

"That's our destination, Zaohm." Came Gwynn's voice from beside the still seated couple.

That brought to mind one of Twilight's many questions that got swept away in the chaos of today, which all came flooding back with this one at the forefront.

"I have a lot more questions than I think I have time to ask but one I think I really need to ask you Gwynn." Twilight probed out. "What is with that neon blue wolf thing you were inside of earlier?"

"Ahh perceptive aren't you, I was wondering if you were going to ask if I turned into that. That's my werewolf form."

Twilight gave her a skeptical look.

"I can show you," Gwynn said floating up out of her chair. "see!"

The bodypaint in Gwynn's fur began to glow for a moment and then flew up out of her fur and formed into that same creature Twilight saw in the doorway of her bedroom earlier today. Acting on instinct Twilight poked her hoof at the strange glowing fur, it felt like fur for a bit, then her hoof bumped into something as unyielding as a brick wall.

"It's a… shield?" Twilight asked.

"Not quite, can you feel it?"

Twilight focused on it.

"It's alive?"

"Yes, it's a Zoetic Shield, a summoned in living shield that is stronger than you can possibly imagine."

"Oh come now, it can't be that strong, there is a limit to how much magic you can pull out of your body before you collapse." It was Naudia who spoke up.

"That's only if you're doing everything internally, like you ponies do. We manipulate the energy of quintessence."

"So wait, does that mean the standard model is accurate down to Planck distance?" Twilight butted in.

"Huh?" Gwynn looked visibly confused.

"She's asking if the standard model is valid at Planck distances or not, it's a physics thing, we had a bet on which it would turn out to be, and SOME-pony sounds like she might be trying to get out of taking me to John's of Bleecker St. For pizza by using an outside unverified source."

"Sorry, I'm not a physicist, I know how our magic works but I've never looked any deeper into it."

"Either way with that much energy at your disposal you could… create matter." Naudia said.

"We've got one better on that, we've got Magmatter."

Both Twilight and Naudia looked very impressed by this.

"Well why don't you keep it up all the time? Why isn't this entire ship made out of magmatter?" Twilight asked.

"It's temporary, you need energy to pull energy out of quintessence and somebody needs to maintain that. Don't ask me why, the physics of it are way, WAY above my head." Gwynn shook her head.

Twilight noted that it was actually her wolf head that shook as if that was completely natural for Gwynn.

That was when Naudia poked her shoulder with her hoof, pointing out the window. Their destination was creeping into view.

----------------

The thing they were approaching was huge, huge to the point where it was impossible to get a fix on how big it actually was. Tens of miles at the very least. It resembled a whale skeleton Twilight had seen in a museum once, complete with the otherworldly, seemingly empty skull. The skull resembled three long ribs that met in the center and they looked like they would open up and shoot out some kind of world ending laser. Seemingly built into the skeleton itself was an entire space station with no visible thrusters or things Twilight would normally associate with Sci-fi, the buildings resembled moss growing off of the bones and almost hid the four huge cylinders housed inside the ribcage.

As they came closer the legions of smaller ships coming in and out and blinking out of existence came into view. They looked like flies at first, that only lasted until one of them started approaching them.

The ship that approached them was big, not as big as Zaohm by a long shot but it was very strange to look at. The fuselage of the ship was white but it was plantlike, like somebody had shaped a spaceship out of a tree, there were big panels of leaves in a dark green, strange organic looking attitude thrusters on all sides of the ship jutted out. not a single transparent panel was visible on the entire ship and the closed off and bulky pointed look of the ship was accentuated by what were very obviously batteries of weapons.

"Why does it look so different than this ship? Why weren't we picked up in some heavily armed warship like that instead of this touristy train thing?" Twilight asked mentally comparing it to the ship she was in.

"We actually bought this off of a planetary tourism company, hard to find, and the tech is probably millions of years old at this point as it's just such a small market." Kuiguk had joined them a couple seats down. "Glad they did honestly, now I can tell my kids I've been somewhere touristy like a planet."

"You've never been to a planet before?"

"Nope." Kuiguk replied idly petting his giant pet spider.

"Have you Gwynn?" Naudia asked.

"Never, Equestria is the first planet I've ever even been close enough to see."

Naudia had noticed that more of the passengers from the cabin had meandered in here during the trip.

"Have any of you ever been to a planet before?"

What she got was a unilateral chorus of negative replies.

"Well why not?" Twilight asked for both of them.

"Planets just don't factor much into our thinking, they're cool to look at I'll give you that, but at the end of the day they're just not efficient enough." Kuiguk said.

Unconsciously Twilight and Naudia turned to Roshin again.

"As far as I know Yunguaq migrated to planets, and only occasionally."

Now they were getting close enough to actually make out details of their destination, they were docking on a strand of the strange plant-vine-moss structures next to a much smaller spinning structure. The whole thing was strange, like they were wonky buildings built to look like gigantic greenery, out of gigantic greenery with windows and far, FAR more wood than Twilight would have expected from anything coming from space.

The strangest thing came when they docked, down below where they docked there were people walking around on the surface of another ship that was docked next to them as if it was a beach resort, literally. Everyone there was wearing fashionable beachwear, carrying strange tools and seemed to be having a fine time working in the vacuum of space, in bikinis and shorts.

The other ship was huge and seemed to be undergoing a LOT of work.

"What are they doing down there?" Twilight asked.

"Working, it's your typical maintenance job." Gwynn said.

"Yeah I can see that, but they're in vacuum, how are they working down there, why are they going around in beachwear to do it?" Twilight stared as one of them glooped a thick paste over a section of the plant-hull and spackled over it with a wooden tool.

"The usual way, zoetic shield stuff, as for why they dress like that I've heard two reasons, one to attract people to do that job and secondarily I've heard that the original astronauts had to wear diapers and clunky suits, nobody wants to do that if they don't have to."

Twilight noticed a portable outhouse nearby with a drainage tube and even presumably a hand washing station hooked up next to it.

It finally hit home to her just how alien these people were. She knew almost nothing about them but seeing the strange menagerie down there, the snake-moth creature, a fat scaled rodent, a rat she could swear was made out of jellyfish, the cloudy banded and strange skin of a lizard monster. The gulf between them only seemed to grow wider.

----------------

The first thing Twilight noticed floating through the floating gangway that they was that something was looking at her from a cubby in the corner of the gangway.

At first she thought it was a cat. It certainly looked like a cat, it looked like it had cat ears, two lamp-like yellow cat-eyes, and a calico coat. The first thing that tipped her off that it might not be a cat was how it stared at her, it could stare with the same intensity most people could only manage with a glare, it’s two yellow eyes locked on her every movement.

What really tipped her off that this wasn’t a cat was when it stretched out towards her like an amorphous blob to get a better look at her.

“Eeuuuhhh, what is that?” Naudia said.

“That’s a looking cat, it’s watching your behavior to see if you’re doing anything suspicious.” Roshin said from directly behind them, making them jump. “New inputs, so it’s looking at you for a baseline to learn your body language.”

The looking cat began to oscillate it’s body to “swim” through the air to keep up with them.

“It’s creepy, I hate it.” Naudia said.

“I dunno, I think it’s kinda cute in a creepy way.” Twilight said.

Twilight was pleased and Naudia drew closer to her so Twilight could put a wing around her after they found out there were more, a lot more, waiting down the hall. However that turned out to be a bit much even for Twilight and all the hundreds of lamplike eyes staring at her hurried them through a door which shut behind them silently.

They bumped into each other in the new hallway unexpectedly, and for an unexpected reason. As soon as they were in there the hallway began to move and they were pushed into the padded side of the hallway until things evened out and they realized that gravity, or at least spin-gravity had returned. They untangled themselves awkwardly and looked around at where they were at.

They were in a very dimly lit hallway, like a theater with little lights marking the way forward and only then did they realize they were alone, nobody else had followed them through. An arrow lit up on the wall on either side of them pointing for them to go forward, and it followed them down the hallway along the wall.

The end of the hallway opened up to a cavernous space that was completely dark, they could feel how huge the space was but only one spotlight was lit up. The arrow on the wall slid onto the floor and beckoned them onward into the singular pool of light.

As they reached the center of the pool of light it started.

A spotlight came on small and distant, it lit up only a single violinist who was hard to make out and even hear as they played the opening notes to a song. Twilight was quite disappointed, this was quite a large field she was in and to just have one violin player up far away in some stands playing like that was underwhelming. They would have been much more at home in a tiny restaurant or bar stage.

Then she heard a voice from up above her and following a light caught sight of a single figure flying around on one of those flat rats singing, similarly distant and far away.

She watched the figure on the rat for a moment before she realized there were more instruments off in the distance, looking back at the lone trumpeter she realized a small orchestra was illuminated around them now. The light around them was growing illuminating a larger orchestra and as they were lit up they began to play showing more and more of the stadium.

Above Twilight more flying voices had joined the choir and there was actually a decent sized choir up there now, a menagerie circling in white robes no two were alike.

As the light began to uncover layers of strings and brass lined up she realized why that initial violinist was so far distant in the stands. The light reached the edge of the field she was standing in and she was right as it began to expand outwards around the stadium. A quick look was enough to confirm that this was bigger than any stadium in Equestria, for a single band.

The chorus above was a veritable circling flock and as the light reached halfway around the stadium a great chandelier was revealed above her gleaming, huge, and with an entire choir in it's delicate multi-leveled grandeur.

As the light finally reached the other side of the stadium and the sound became almost overwhelming the stadium orchestra prepared for it's crescendo as great drums played from somewhere underneath Twilight vibrating up through her legs. A set of double doors rose out of the dirt embedded heavily in amber, a masterwork tessellated border told a story Twilight couldn't follow as the amber in the door began to light up, filling like liquid gold.

As the orchestra reached it's crescendo all the lights in the room went out and instantly all the instruments were silenced leaving Twilight to only watch as the double doors ponderously opened to reveal a figure. She could never forget that figure, for even in the dim pool of light they both stood in she recognized that thing, that hateful, monstrous thing.