Chapter Three
A Slight Miscalculation
Two long-range teleports got me within a couple of leagues of Nebula's estimated position. When I paused to take another reading from the locator and confirm my course, I realized I was in familiar territory.
The pass through the jagged granite peaks below me was guarded by a little stone tower flying a red banner marked with a black aurock's head. I was at the edge of the territory claimed by the free city of Twilight Town.
Despite the designation and name, it was neither a city nor a town. It had grown substantially in the years since I'd unintentionally founded it, and it was rather too large to reasonably be called a town any longer. Nevertheless, the name stuck because Baroness Buzzy—who was really no more than an elected mayor despite the title—was fond of the alliteration. The term "free city" simply meant it was self-governing and unaffiliated with any larger state.
I quickly took another reading and found that Nebula was either very close to, or actually over the town. It made no sense. The people of the town knew Nebula. I'd visited them on many occasions, and strangers showing up in possession of her would be instantly suspicious. Perhaps the thieves didn't know that, and had merely headed for a refuge with a reputation for lawlessness?
Not that my town was a hive of criminal activity! I would never have countenanced an outright den of iniquity. It's just that the founding of my town was in circumstances that were… unusual, and there is a certain free-spirited culture in the Undiscovered West that can be misunderstood by ponies in more settled lands. Twilight Town was a free-wheeling trading hub, so naturally a significant proportion of its transient population could be considered to be on the less-than-legal side of commercial activity. It was perfectly understandable, and it was going much too far to label the less respectable ponies as thieves, pirates, and smugglers.
Still… I will admit it isn't the sort of place a wise pony walks around with her saddlebag flaps unfastened.
The folk of Twilight Town knew me well, but they knew an aspect of me that was very much at odds with my usual appearance. When I'd founded the place, I'd been under the influence of an appalling amount of dark magic, and I had looked quite... unpleasant. Not the simple dark magic using vagabond that had frightened Flurry as a foal, but an all-out, nightmarish monster.
But to the Twilight Folk, that monster was me. I had once tried to visit appearing as I normally do, and they took me for an imposter. They called me a Canterlot ponce and threw rotten fruit at me, actually. So, if I was going into town to claim my airship, I was going to have to look the part.
I landed on an outcropping out of sight of the guard tower and brought up a dark magic adaptation of Petunia's Polymorph spell. With all the strange and wild magic that was typically used in Twilight Town, a simple illusionary disguise spell wouldn't be suitable. Even if nopony detected the disguise spell, the flow of mana needed to keep it going would be a red flag to any magically sensitive and suspicious ponies… of which, there were more in the town than one might expect.
So I used an actual transformation, physically morphing myself into my "Nightmare Twilight" body. It took a great deal of energy to make the change, but required none to maintain. By any test, I would truly be that terrifying dark alicorn that the Twilight Folk loved so much. The spell worked perfectly, and within minutes, I was on my way again.
I buzzed the pass and called out, "Not sleeping on the job, are you, my little subjects?"[1]
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[1] No, they are not my subjects, and I have never (well, hardly ever) exercised any royal authority over them after I'd managed to rid myself of the corrupt mana. But they still insist that they are my subjects and I am their queen. I indulge them, that's all.
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There came a cheer and shouted greetings from the guard tower. A griffin courier flew up to greet me. "Welcome, Your Majesty! It's so good to see you again! Shall I escort you into town?"
I smiled back at him, not bothering to hide my jagged fangs. Griffins eat meat; they understand. "That would be kind of you," I said. We banked onto a heading for the town and began to slip down into the lower, warmer air. "You haven't seen Nebula recently by any chance, have you?"
"Oh, yes, Majesty!" the griffin chirped happily. "Your crew brought her into town early this morning. There was a bit of a delay getting the gate ready, but Captain Skyla helped out and they ought to be passing through… well, any time now."
"Gate…?" A younger, less experienced me would have wasted precious minutes sputtering and asking futile questions. The older me teleported an instant after suspecting what sort of gate the griffin was talking about.
I appeared over Twilight Town in a flare of light and a burst of dark vapours. It took me a second to orient myself and grasp what it was I was seeing. I was seeing half of Nebula. Her bow had already disappeared into a shimmering surface, framed by jury-rigged metal beams and cables. It was crude and inelegant, but it was undeniably a dimensional portal.
"STOP!" I bellowed. "REVERSE ENGINES RIGHT NOW, AND I'LL SPARE YOUR LIVES!"
The town below me and the area around the improvised gate became a buzz of activity and shouting voices, but the crew aboard Nebula didn't obey. In fact, the slowly spinning props suddenly ramped up to full speed. Nebula was shielded from magical attack in a half-dozen different ways, so trying to grab her or even teleport aboard was futile. I dove for her quarterdeck screaming in outrage.
There was a flash of white to my left and an old friend called out to me. "Majesty! Is this not what you commanded?"
I didn't answer Ao. There was no time. The kirin asked no more questions, but arrowed down alongside me, her aura sizzling.
A blast of magic shot up from Nebula's quarterdeck, startling in its sheer power. Ao dodged left and I dodged right, and we kept on. I would have formed a conic shield in front of us for protection from further blasts, but as I wasn't planning on slowing down before I was on the deck, it would have hit the planks with damaging force. I made do with snap-defence planes against the two shots that came before we crossed over Nebula's stern. They packed such a wallop that I darned near got a chunk of shield energy in my teeth.
If I hadn't been so enraged—or desperate to get on board before Nebula completely disappeared into the portal—I would have recognized the energy signature in those blasts. If I had, I would have been less brutal about taking down the green unicorn mare that had been trying to knock us out of the sky. As it was, I had slammed her into the deck and had one blade pressed against her throat and one against her belly before she could react.
"Order the helmspony to back engines or I'll carve you li—" The shimmering plane of the gate washed over us, and we were twisted through the substrate of the multiverse. "—ke a… Oh stars! Flurry Heart?"
Her kohl rimmed eyes were huge in terror. The green mare had been a disguise spell! My own hooves were still as black as a tax-collector's heart, and I realized that Flurry might not even recognize me in my current form. I got off of her and flipped my blades back into their sheaths. "It's me, Twilight. The owner of this ship."
Her apparent alarm didn't abate much. "Oh… uhm… Aunt Twilight… really? Ah... this isn't what it looks like."
It turned out that it was exactly what it looked like. But we didn't have the luxury to debate about it right then. Nebula's engines jittered and slowed. I looked to the telegraph, but the indicators matched the position of the handles. All four engines should have been at full ahead.
I know how Nebula behaves. Perhaps not quite as well as Fluttershy, but better than any other living creature. Something wasn't right. At full speed she should have run steady and smooth, but she was wallowing and yawing like a hot air balloon.
I shouldered aside the pony at the helm and took the wheel. Slow. Unresponsive. Celestia trample it, my ship was in trouble!
I shoved the helmspony back toward wheel. "Keep her straight and steady!" I snapped, and took my first good look at the world we'd entered.
Over the stern rail was a huge arch of red sandstone, with three deep markings near its apex. It must have been the congruent connection to the portal in Twilight Town, but there was no shimmer of thaumic distortion beneath it. The gate had been closed. Around us was a maze of more arches and pillars of the same sedimentary stone. For an airship unable to maneuver well, we were in a very bad place. Nebula was considerably tougher than she looked, but a collision with a stone bluff, even at moderate speed, would do severe damage.
I grabbed at the ballast controls and began dumping tanks 1 and 4, at the bow and stern, respectively. We began to rise but the tanks went dry long before they should have. If Nebula was short on ballast in her end tanks, the same might be true of her center ones, and I didn't want to take the risk of flying without any ballast at all.
"Ao!" I shouted. "Go forward and see if we're going to clear those cliffs!"
The kirin arrowed up and around the envelope and returned almost immediately. "Nebula will be above it in time, Majesty!" she called out.
I turned to the ponies on the main deck. They were all staring up at me, wide-eyed. "Drop the ground anchors as we top the crest," I ordered. I took hold of the telegraph handles and rang for slow ahead. The engines slowed, sputtered, and almost died. I rang for half ahead, and they steadied, but at a rate that would have barely equaled dead slow.
When I turned back, the crew ponies hadn't moved. "READY THOSE ANCHORS!" I bellowed.
Two of them fainted, and a third fell to the deck, gasping out, "Please don't kill me," over and over. None of them moved to obey.
I didn't have time to roll my eyes or smack my forehead with a hoof, so I reached out with my magic… and got a nasty surprise. I could feel the anchors, but I couldn't lift them. They were barely over a half ton each, but I strained at them like they weighed as much as mountains.
I tried concentrating my levitation field on only one; it didn't budge. I leaped over the wheel and flew across the waist to the fo'c'sle deck and landed beside the capstan. Whatever was affecting my magic, I could still lift relatively light objects, and I was able to loop an anchor cable around the barrel of the capstan. I took up the slack and began to lift the larboard anchor from its place. It took a ridiculous amount of effort and I was sweating in minutes.
Fortunately, Ao had a better time persuading Flurry's ponies to tend to their duties and, eventually, four of them took over from me at the bars of the capstan.
I flew forward over the bow and made sure the ground anchor set well, and judged the wind calm enough not to require a second. My wings felt heavy and I began to think there might be something seriously wrong with me. I returned to the quarterdeck, rang the telegraph for All Stop, and turned to face my niece.
"Flurry Heart," I said, in as calm a voice as I could manage, "I am very disappointed in you."
"I just wanted to… to... " She squeezed her eyes shut and turned away from me. "Could you please drop the disguise? You… you're kind of wigging me out."
I almost refused, but as angry as I was with Flurry, I still loved her, and bolstering a righteous lecture with a terrifying visage wasn't fair. I was absolutely certain that the facts of the matter were entirely sufficient condemnation. So I concentrated on the matrix for Petunia's Polymorph and got another unpleasant shock. I could hardly keep the structure stable, let alone power the cursed thing.
I felt the tiniest bit of panic nibbling at the back of my mind, but Flurry's deepening frown of worry focused my concentration. What was happening? I didn't feel bad, just magically weak. What else was wrong? Nebula's engines...
Nebula's engines ran on mana-charged crystals, which is why it took me so long to suspect what had happened, but their control system relied on active thaumic flow. Coupled with my own magical strength seeming to be terribly reduced... "Flurry, shoot a blast of magic at one of those rock spires. Use all the strength you can muster."
She was confused and still skittish, so it was understandable that she hesitated. I repeated my request again, in the softest, most reassuring voice I could manage. "Please, Flurry," I added. "This is important."
She nodded and let loose with a bolt of energy. It should have blasted a big chunk out of the hoodoo, but it spattered off the rock like water.
That pretty much confirmed it.
"What's wrong with my magic?" Flurry asked me. "That should have…" she trailed off, looked back over her shoulder at me, and winced. "Could you please change back now?"
I shook my head, sadly. "I'm sorry, but I tried; I can't. This isn't a simple disguise spell like yours was. It's a true polymorph, and I can't gather enough mana to make the transformation."
"What's happened to us?"
"Oh, we're just fine," I told her, despite it being almost entirely untrue in the general sense of the phrase. "It's this world that's the problem. I'm pretty sure its natural cycles are sparse and not very robust. We're capable of channeling just as much thaumic force as usual, but the substructure of this universe isn't able to provide us with more than a trickle."
"But I researched this world with Sunburst's mirror! I saw unicorns using magic just like they normally do!"
I shrugged. "Typical spells don't require much energy. I can do some tests to determine the exact flow limit, but that doesn't change the essential facts. You, my darling niece, have stranded us on a low-magic world."
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