//------------------------------// // Wet Blankets // Story: Pony Class Starship // by Viking Hoof //------------------------------// "So you didn't...?" Cadance turned her head, a worried look ready to fall into anger upon her face. "No! He's not even my type." The worried look scrunched up into confusion. "Your... type?" Hmm, how best to convey this. "I'm of the Imperial persuasion." Aurora cursed as the idiom left her lips, she could see that the royal horse hadn't understood from the deepening scrunch on the soft pink horse’s. "Imperial...?" "I'm..." Damn this Latinized abomination of a language! There wasn't really a word for it in English that she knew of. The phrase was pretty ubiquitous by the time English was even a language to begin with. There were euphemisms, but if they hadn't understood that... Ugh, if you can't go English, then you go Latin. "I'm a tribas, or a tribades. I prefer females of the mammalian sort, and also identify as female, though not human, of course." She'd never cared for pre-imperial history, she was more interested in the human effort, not tribal squabbles. She was clutching at straws, but she could recall, distantly, one of her sociological teachers giving some latin and greek in passing. "I... I guess I follow. Around here the term is filly fooler." Aurora felt servos tense a tad. 'Fooler' was not a word she liked. She could taste the dismissiveness. Hopefully she was wrong, her grasp of English usage was still poor, but she had started to get an idea of what words meant. She still had no idea what sort of government they had, but, things were not looking great. backwards medicine, arms and armament. She had yet to see any slaves, but gods help these four legged assholes if she did. She could feel the itch now to go a viking. What she would give to go raid ZzzZ'q space. "So, the supplies, I can use pretty much any form those materials come in. If you can give me more paper and ink, I'll happily convey the specific mole weights I require. Or would you prefer a general atom count?" Aurora felt a small swell of pride as the pink horse nodded along slowly without pausing too hard in confusion. "I'll get Twilight to go over it." "I refuse!" Cadance winced as Twilight paced the room, huffing in frustration. "Your questions are fine she said, just sign these forms she insisted!" Twilight angrily motioned towards the huge stack of forms on the table. "Every time I bring her one form, she hands me another. I swear they've started repeating.” Cadance put on her best diplomatic face. "I know it can be frustrating Twi, but she's very secretive. I'm sure if you help her out some, she'll open up." Twilight seemed to lighten up a bit. "Plus, maybe you'll find out more about those probes that she kept mentioning. That's what these are for." The impatient purple alicorn took up the pages of her magic. "I really doubt that she uses the gold as a decoration, she really doesn't seem the type. Perhaps... I'd meant to talk with Celestia about using gold as a conductor instead of the obnoxious vacuum tubes her school is trying out. I'd wondered how something as big as her ship could effectively relay commands. That might be how." Twilight re-reviewed the two page material list. "This still doesn't explain how it would propel itself. Luna described it was like swimming fleas were dancing in her hair." “It’s more of a tickling sensation.” The two mares turned towards the dark corner of the room, blinking in surprise as their minds registered the presence of a dark blue mare, as if they had just stepped out of the tunnel and were just then clearly seeing. “Luna!” Twilight leapt over the table, nuzzling up to the majestically long legs of her friend and fellow alicorn, careful to keep her sensitive horn away from Luna’s soft fur coat. Twilight giggled as the softly shimmering mane of stars billowed up and past her snout. “Hello Twilight, sorry if my entrance was a bit… abrupt, but I had forgotten to undo my spell.” Luna blushed a minute amount as she approached the table, looking over both the sprawled out forms and the small but precise list of materials. “This is for those ‘probes’ she has going through our sky? I must admit, their presence is a strange sensation, one I am not yet used to. Does she really need more?” Twilight nodded, pushing aside the forms she had been filling out to reveal a set of notes she had been keeping on what they knew so far, it was still rather sparse for her liking. “You can read over these if you want, she still hasn’t told us how she got here.” Twilight passed the notes over to Luna. Luna paused as she looked them over, turning her head towards the window, and then back to the notes. “Twilight, you say she has the ability to, ‘leave the planet?’” Luna motioned upwards. “She calls it ‘FTL,’ according to her, she uses it to get between stars. She refuses to tell me What it is, but it isn’t teleportation. There is a spike of magic before and after, but rather than the magic coming from her, it seems that magic is flowing back through the world where she was. It’s like the magic is trying to fill the space where she was.” Twilight motioned at the notes. “She used to do it faster, but now she takes an hour to do it, she says that she has to take that long for safety reasons.” “You continue to keep an eye on her, I’ll continue my surveillance from above. Do you think she has noticed me?” Luna glanced again towards the window, a jitter running down her leg. She’d wondered about, even hypothesized about, the existence of alien life, but never had she seriously approached the idea. Yet here she was, her stars had birthed life outside of what she knew. “I don’t think so, she didn’t act any different after you had arrived.” Luna looked contemplatively over the list of materials. “We can’t give this to her for nothing. We are supplying her with materials she needs, we deserve something in return. Press her for information. If she continues to be less than forthcoming, you should remind her of this fact.” Twilight blanched, looking with uncertainty towards Cadance. “You have a duty to protect Equestria from possible threats, Twilight. If we can help her, I’d love to help her, but we can’t go into this blind.” “Luna, if she’s telling the truth, then there are a lot of people that are in trouble. I don’t feel comfortable delaying their rescue. Every day we wait… what if, they are in danger, or are in danger of starving or dying of thirst?” Cadance stepped forward, raising Twilight’s worried face with a hoof. “Twilight, the more we know, the better we can help her. How can we help her save her friends if we know nothing about them?” Twilight glanced back towards Luna, her face didn’t lose its worried look, but solemnly, she nodded. “I don’t think she’s a threat, but I understand.”