//------------------------------// // G5.05: Datamine // Story: Message in a Bottle // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Lucky stepped out of the transit rail into a brightly-lit room with metal walls no different from the one they had left. Indeed, for all they knew, they could’ve spent the last two hours (plus who knew how long to accelerate) riding an unpleasant carnival attraction. They hadn’t even been killed by the chairs when they stopped. The interior of this second base had been built to the same design sense as the first one—metal and stone construction, tall rooms with wide hallways that got wider or skinnier to show whether they were central to the design of the base. It had a similar food-preparation area, though some of the dishes it offered them were different. They ate quickly, both conscious of how every moment they spent here pushed the boundaries of those who waited. Flurry Heart didn’t think one day later would make much difference, but she would be returning days late. The most vulnerable member of the royal family couldn’t just go missing for several days without the nation reacting. She really can’t bring back stories about me being anything other than a pony, or we’re all fucked. It wouldn’t matter to the other princesses that Flurry Heart had decided to come on her own, she was sure. But there was no sense worrying about that kind of thing just now. She had more important worries—such as solving the ultimate mystery of who had built the ring, and why. That kind of mission was worth a little personal risk. Lucky confirmed that the map (which this facility contained as well) responded to spoken commands, so long as Flurry Heart spoke them. It didn’t seem to matter she didn’t know the “forbidden” language that Alicorns kept to themselves. So, they followed the illuminated path into an elevator that rocketed them upward for nearly a full minute, before finally slowing to a stop. There was a single hallway outside, leading through a room of more unidentifiable equipment with a solid blast door on the end. They got to the end, and for the first time one of the doors refused to open. The door chimed harshly at them, before repeating in a synthesized voice “Hostile environment egress failure. Protection required.” Lucky pressed the obvious glowing button twice more, and got the same response. “You aren’t supposed to hear that!” Flurry Heart said, annoyed and a little frightened. “Stop pressing that!” “It says we can’t leave without protection,” Lucky said, ignoring her. “Unless… unless you can understand it.” “No,” Flurry Heart grunted, annoyed again. “Mom hasn’t taught me yet. You shouldn’t know either.” “Well, maybe we should go back. Those looked a little like lockers, maybe they have something we can wear. Whatever’s on the other side of the door must not be safe otherwise.” “Maybe we should go back,” Flurry Heart repeated. “Or… go find something else? If it’s dangerous, like you said.” Lucky considered that for several seconds. Going back sooner was the more sensible option for the princess, for sure. But what about Lucky herself? Lightning Dust would probably be arriving at the other ruins in another few hours. If they got right back onto the transport system, they might arrive right when she did. Or we could explore a little further, and let Mom wait a few minutes. She isn’t gonna be any more upset, right? “Let’s just see,” Lucky said. “If there’s no gear, we’ll go back.” “Okay.” There was gear, as it turned out. A raised platform in the previous room was glowing for them now, ready to receive whatever pony wanted to climb up first. Lucky wasn’t afraid to go first this time, since she could read the words “Armor Fabrication” written on the side of the machine. Lucky removed her saddlebags, before climbing up onto the platform. It took only a few seconds. The whole space on the platform filled with thick smoke, condensing around Lucky, clinging to her body, getting thicker by the second and buzzing like a swarm of bees. It was a good thing she’d removed her saddlebags. “More magic!” Flurry Heart’s face lit up as she approached, her horn glowing slightly. Lucky couldn’t see any more than the faint glow through the smoke. At least for another few seconds, until the machine finished its work. There was no missing a space suit when she saw one, though this one was clearly superior to anything her own people had ever made. Lucky strode forward off the platform, feeling cool against her skin, the fabric apparently flexible and easy to move in. There was a little machinery on her back, covering her wings, and an attached helmet. Though the suit had a helmet, it remained open around her face, permitting her to continue breathing the air they were in, as well as talk to Flurry Heart without difficulty. “Well, this is… kinda cool.” She tensed her wings experimentally, and the back of the suit opened like an iris, allowing wings covered in a paper-thin layer of suit to emerge. She flapped them without resistance, lifting into the air for a few seconds. “Now that is a feature the Pioneering Society needs to copy,” she muttered to herself in English. Flurry Heart went next—it took the Fabricator only moments, just as it had with her. The Princess’s armor looked a little different—there were gold lines down the side for one, as well as a large protrusion on her helmet for her horn. Otherwise, it looked almost identical. “Now this is something we can bring back!” Flurry Heart exclaimed, her own wings twitching with anticipation. “You think this armor is magic? Maybe it can… let us breathe underwater, or fly into space, or…” Lucky opened her mouth to object, then realized she wasn’t sure about the space thing. Ponies shouldn’t be able to fly at all given their mass, so who was she to say? “Let’s test them out. Not those aspects right now, though. The place we’re going was supposed to just be out on the surface. I don’t know why it would be so dangerous, but I guess we’ll find out.” They approached the airlock slowly, hoofsteps muffled now. Lucky left her saddlebags where they were—if something could hurt her, it would probably destroy paper and computers too. There was no use bringing a helmet when the one she was wearing was probably better. I hope I can bring this back to the human city with me. I bet we can learn a lot about the builders from this suit. Maybe if things weren’t as dangerous as they seemed, she would go back and send a message off to Olivia. Let her know what she had learned so far. As little as the major cared about the details of her translation, she would probably care about this. The door to the armor room shut, and there were a few seconds of harsh, hissing gasses. Without prompting from her, the helmet closed again over Lucky’s face. It was clear, though overlaid with all kinds of information she didn’t understand. One part looked like a temperature gauge, and she thought the second one was an external pressure monitor based on how fast it was dropping. Maybe I misjudged the map? It would make sense to keep something you wanted to preserve under vacuum. “It’s really loud in here,” Flurry Heart said, her voice sounding almost natural from inside the suit. “What’s going on?” “Wherever we’re going doesn’t have air,” she answered. “This thing we’re in is called an airlock. It’s emptying the air out before we can leave.” “Oh,” Flurry Heart said, a little of her old excitement returning. “I change my mind about this. It’s gonna be crazier than a Daring Do adventure. I guess science fiction is okay too.” Lucky couldn’t help herself—she laughed. Laughed loud enough that she could see Flurry Heart glaring at her through her own helmet. “What? You’ve had adventures more exciting than this?” Let me tell you the one where I cross the galaxy and a machine made me into a little girl, she wanted to say, but she didn’t. She wasn’t stupid. “No. It’s just… I never got around to reading fiction. Now I’m really curious what kind of science fiction ponies write about.” The door on the other end opened. There was no rush of air as it did, no sound at all in fact other than the faint sound of machinery from within the suit. It was far quieter than an XE-301 would’ve been. Not silent, though. Whatever the suit was doing wasn’t magic. The display changed, and she could read a little more of what it said. “External vacuum,” said one little line of text. “Two days oxygen remaining.” Another displayed an external temperature in units she couldn’t read, but she had a sense that the number was very high. She felt no warmth on her body though—however the suit worked, it seemed better at cooling than human space suits. She could see light in the distance, through a corridor cut through the stone at pony size. Flurry Heart fit, but if she were the size of an adult Alicorn she might’ve had some trouble. “Now this is more what I expected when you told me there was a lost temple in the north,” Flurry Heart said, as they crawled through the tight quarters together. “Ancient stone ruins, crawling through the dark, cutting through spiderwebs.” Lucky hadn’t even noticed them, but they weren’t spiderwebs. Nothing can live in the vacuum, she reminded herself. We won’t find anyone here. It’s safe. If there had ever been spiders here, they were all dead now. Besides, the fibers looked more like half-melted plastic to her. They emerged from the corridor, onto a floor that clicked under their suits like metal. Not the untouchable alloy her helmet couldn’t identify, though. This was steel. She could see small patches of greenish rust at uneven intervals. A chemist would’ve known what that was. The material the balcony was made from was hardly the first thing on her mind as she made her way to the edge. She ignored the glowing lights flashing in even array, pointing her to the right. The direction system could wait a moment while she looked. Lucky Break had seen a few illustrations of what Canterlot looked like, with its mountain palace surrounded by smaller buildings cut into the rock. What she saw now looked a little like she was standing in that palace, looking out at the city… if the city had been built by ponies with an approximately human level of technology. The structures were glass and metal, though many windows were missing and strange corrosion covered some of them. Plastic components had melted here or there, and there were patches of thick, discolored residue on the ground at random. It was hard to see through the dense buildings, but it looked like there might be the remains of vehicles on the ground far below—cars? Or something like them. It looked like New York, or maybe London. A western megalopolis left deserted. There were brown, scarred patches of ground where plants had once grown. Nothing lived now, not even rats. The sky wasn’t blue, but black. Like standing on an asteroid, or the moon. No stars shone up above, though Lucky suspected she might be able to see some if she could cover up the “sun” well enough. Another section of the display had changed from black writing to bright red. “Ionization Warning: 45 minutes before dosage tolerance exceeded.” Flurry Heart leaned on the edge of the railing, staring out at the desolate city with horror on her face. She shivered as she spoke. “Y-you aren’t a time traveler, are you Lucky? That isn’t why you know so much, right? You didn’t take me into the future, after Equestria is…?” “No,” she said, resting one hoof on Flurry Heart’s shoulder. “It’s a coincidence, that’s all. Whoever lived here liked building castles at the top of hills. It isn’t Canterlot.” “Oh.” Flurry Heart shook herself free, her face relaxing. Her eyes were still wide though. “What happened to the ponies who lived here?” Lucky wasn’t sure it had been ponies, but she didn’t say so. The doors did look about the right height, unlike in the station. But Equus had many races living on it, not just ponies. Lucky didn’t like the idea of however many residents had once been here—millions, if the density continued as far as it looked. It was easier to picture other species dying. She didn’t know griffons, or minotaurs. It wouldn’t give her nightmares to think about creatures she’d never met dying, even if it was a tragedy. Ponies, though… Flurry Heart seemed to be thinking along the same lines, because she backed suddenly away from the balcony. “We need to look for survivors.” “There aren’t any.” Lucky looked down, shoulders slumping. “Princess, I’m sorry. There’s no air out there.” And she didn’t know how that was possible. Any body with mass ought to attract its atmosphere evenly, right? But the Alicorn didn’t know that, so she didn’t need to know why this didn’t make sense. “With no air, this ruin could be older than it looks. It could be thousands of years old. Longer.” That was even more disturbing than the air. She needed to remember to bring a sample of irradiated material with her. That should allow them to determine what was producing the radiation even now, figure out its half-life, date whatever had happened here. But that was a job for human scientists, not her. Lucky hesitated a moment, wishing she had brought her mom with her on this adventure instead of the princess. Flurry Heart shook her head. “It can’t be that long! It looks like they just left! Maybe they ran somewhere safe, like where we just came from! The door was right here!” It was possible. Didn’t seem very likely, given the state of things. It didn’t seem from a glance like people had removed their belongings. I would think they died where they stood if I could see the bodies. “Princess, if they did get away, then they don’t need us.” She pointed back towards the path, where it was lit up with still-functional lights. The only patches of ground without strange greenish corrosion. “Maybe you could come back with more ponies from the palace. Guards, maybe another princess too. But I’m not a rescue pony, and I don’t think you are either. What would we do if we found anypony?” Flurry Heart stopped, considering that. “You sound like my dad.” She shrugged. “I’m as upset as you are, Princess. I don’t know what it is to be a princess, but I don’t like the idea of ponies dying either. It’s just… we can’t help them. But maybe we can learn what happened, and warn the ponies back in Equestria. We don’t want what happened here to come back.” Or to find our new colony. Whatever killed this civilization could probably kill us too. They found their first body just a little way into the palace—identifiable only because whatever its clothing and implants had been made from was sturdier than flesh. It had clearly been a pony—an adult male, judging by the size of its armor. It had a reinforced skeleton a little like Lucky’s, with occasional wires and a few unidentifiable devices concentrated in what would’ve been the torso. Lucky tried to pick up some kind of weapon, and found it crumbled away in her grip, breaking into several plastic pieces. Flurry Heart stopped five meters away, refusing to get any closer. Her voice sounded fearful over the radio. “Th-that’s… a skeleton, isn’t it? I can see the skull… that was a unicorn.” She shivered, turned away, then Lucky heard retching. Lucky hadn’t even noticed that, but the princess was right. There was a horn protrusion at the front, or at least the remains of implants connected to it. It was hard to guess at what it all might’ve done—the wires were covered with greenish corrosion like the steel of the floor, and other components looked like they’d gone brittle. The glowing path was leading them through the palace—there was no mistaking its layout now. It wasn’t the same building as in Canterlot, but then places like this were often very similar. They all had large throne rooms, with ballrooms for guests and then smaller rooms for more practical things spread around them. These other patches of slime and chalk everywhere, I wonder if those were ponies without implants. She wondered, but wasn’t about to point out to the princess that she’d walked through several of them already. Hopefully the helmet could handle somepony vomiting inside it. Apparently, it could, because a few moments later the princess had straightened. Her voice had gone cold and distant—a little like when Lucky had used the forbidden language, but with less of an undertone of anger about it. “Nopony to bury them,” she said, almost a whisper. “It’s like… the stories of the Windigos. Only with less snow.” Lucky knew the story, at least in passing. Before the tribes united, strife had them always opposed to one another. She suspected a war, sanitized by the infantilizing of pony culture. In any case, magical creatures called Windigos had brought eternal winter, starving everyone, and burying whole cities in ice. The survivors, few apparently, had fled to new lands, which were very nearly overrun with the same problem before they united and their mutual friendship banished the enemy. She supposed that it might be a natural conclusion for a princess who had no other context for this genocide. “They were ponies too, so it’s possible,” she said. “The survivors might’ve all got on the tram and rode to where Equestria is now. Not sure how you would’ve regressed as far as you have, though.” The princess said nothing to that. They started walking again, together through the ancient, modern palace. There was little to read, and little survived of the art that must’ve adorned it. They even passed an empty throne room, though it had only one throne. If any familiar motifs might’ve been reproduced in this palace, they’d been destroyed. They left the palace and stepped out onto a street, though it was linked to another building by an intact walkway made of the same metal as the installation itself. The building also looked different from all around it—no corrosion, no visible damage at all. The path leading up to it was… not a pleasant sight. There was the wreckage of many bodies here. Thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. It was hard to tell them apart, hard to know how many implants to expect from each pony. Most were wearing very thick clothing, though only scraps of it had survived. Bits of fluffy jackets and coats destroyed by time or heat or both. Here and there a few fragments of bone had survived, though exposed like this there were not large chunks. The street itself had only eroded a little. The walkway with its light looked unchanged—not even scratched by time. Flurry Heart made it as far as the end of the path, before collapsing to the ground to weep. “It’s alright,” Lucky soothed, though the princess would not let her touch her anymore. “I’ll… I’ll go on ahead. It shouldn’t take too long.” The airlock doors opened for her without prompting, sealed behind her, and air began to hiss. “Datamine pressurizing. Please wait.” The exposure warnings on her suit vanished as well, and the air smelled—well, exactly like she had imagined. Like ancient decay, sealed away for many years. Then the door opened. It was a good thing Flurry Heart hadn’t come with her. The doors opened to something like a refugee camp, built inside a warehouse of incredible size. There were thousands of bodies—all of which were shriveled, some of which still had bits of fur. Many were intact enough to identify them as ponies beyond any doubt. The stench wasn’t fresh rot—they’d been here a very long time—but sealed away from the elements, they hadn’t quite finished rotting either. Lucky lifted into the air, flying above the failed camp with its many dead. There were lights still guiding her forward, over many levels of shelves and machines whose purpose she didn’t know or care to guess at, just now. Though it did strike her as a little strange with floorspace such a premium that no pegasus might’ve chosen to live on the higher levels. There were plastic crates and other cargo devices stacked there, but no tents or bodies. Lucky could feel exactly what the princess must feel, looking at this city. This was the desolation that might’ve come to Earth, if things had gone differently. But you’re still around! she thought to herself, as she flew towards an open doorway nearthe ceiling, with the light terminating in its door. If the builders wanted ponies dead, why does their machinery respond to us? Why does it know how to make us armor and food? Why allow us to travel around the ring? Something just wasn’t connecting for her, something the smarter crew of scientists and specialists probably would understand. It was a shame she didn’t have a camera to show them what she had seen. I should’ve brought the helmet. The conditions outside might’ve destroyed it, she wasn’t sure. But maybe it could’ve shown a few seconds of this. Maybe there was something still intact in the building below she could bring back with her, to prove what she had seen to Olivia and the others. Maybe they had written or recorded something she could use to learn what had happened here. It wasn’t why they’d come. But that didn’t mean the death of previous civilizations on this ring was uninteresting. Whatever had killed them might well forecast the dangers human colonization would face. Lucky Break landed in a much smaller room, with huge glass windows overlooking the facility. It wasn’t empty, as she had hoped based on the lack of pegasus ponies in the camp. There was only one pony here—an Alicorn, judging by the body. It looked more intact than many of those below, as though it were reluctant to rot. Unfortunately, that meant the stench was the worst, and Lucky lowered her visor manually so she wouldn’t have to smell it. The pony had been about the same size as Celestia, though they were bald now. The pigment in their cutie mark was gone too, though it looked like it had been vaguely tree-shaped. It looked as though this pony had been standing at something like a control panel, with numerous raised sections that might be buttons, as well as glowing areas that could be screens. Her clothing resembled those the others were wearing—thick, woolly, but less like it had been made in a factory. This pony had a tailor. After the corpse, the next thing Lucky noticed was the pad of paper resting on the control panel. Well, it looked like paper. Clearly it must not be, if it had survived so well, though it was a pad of thin sheets with a little pen to go with it. Lucky tugged it down to the ground, and a thick lump of glass clanked down with it. A small object had been resting on it, which she hadn’t even noticed. It was a perfect cube of glass, with tiny reflective etchings and lines on the inside. Lucky might’ve had to guess at what it was, except the flowing handwriting on the paper told her exactly. It used the same language she had seen in the base, though somehow less precise. A less formal version of the language, maybe. “I told you I would not leave them,” it said. “Take this, and remember us. Ensure our mistakes are not repeated.” No signature, no more details. Whoever this Alicorn thought was coming never did. They didn’t take the cube. Lucky did, tucking it away along with the note in one of the many pouches on her back. Looks like you ponies have holographic storage medium too. Cracking whatever compression or encryption they used was going to be no mean feat, Lucky knew. But the Forerunner was smart, and it had time. It would figure it out eventually. Lucky made her way up to the controls and gave them a few commands. She asked it questions, as they’d done to the map. The Datamine did not respond to spoken commands, it seemed. The screens suggested it was still functional, but “Insufficient Permissions” flashed each time she tried to do anything. She even hammered some of the buttons at random. This got shutters to close over the window, switched the lights off and on again in the room below, turned on some slowly humming machine... She might’ve stayed there for hours, except of course that wasn’t possible. Flurry Heart would be just as vulnerable to radiation as she was, and anyway the princess had seen things that had greatly disturbed her. If she came in here looking for Lucky and found a dead Alicorn, well… that would make things even worse than they already were. Olivia could come back with a human crew. They could ride this out here, take as much time as they needed. She wouldn’t bring a child who would certainly be having nightmares about this experience. Just be glad you didn’t come in here after me. “Flurry Heart, can you hear me?” she asked, as she flew over the dead refugee camp. “I’m almost out. We’ve got to go back.” “Yeah,” Flurry Heart answered. She still sounded upset, but at least she wasn’t crying anymore. “That’s good. I want to go home.” “We’ll go straight back,” Lucky agreed. “I’m on my way out now, one sec.” She could only hope the young princess would remember the fun adventuring parts of this more than the desolation at the end. As she left, something deeper in Lucky reminded her she would be having nightmares tonight too. I’m not any better than these ponies. They were like us, advanced. They still died. Whatever got them could kill us. She hoped Lightning Dust would be able to forgive her for her curiosity. Hoped she would make it back soon enough to compose a proper report to send to the Forerunner. This changes the game. If I make it back, we can come here and learn everything we want to. A good cross-disciplinary team is all we need. Assuming the information was there to find. Lucky still didn’t even know what a Datamine was, despite the trip it had taken to get there. It’ll be alright, she told herself, greeting Flurry Heart with a hug. The princess clung to her so tightly for a moment she worried that her suit’s integrity might be compromised. “What was in there?” “B-bad,” Lucky coughed, biting back tears of her own. “It was bad, princess. You don’t want to know.” To her surprise, Flurry Heart didn’t argue the point. She was silent all the way back to the base. Lightning Dust had very nearly run out of patience waiting for her daughter when she heard hooves echoing from down the hallway. They did not move nearly as fast as her daughter’s normally brisk pace—suggesting tiredness, injury, or maybe both. The other set of hoofsteps would be the princess, then. I shouldn’t be helping you get out of this, Lucky, she thought, rising to her hooves and stretching the soreness out. Lightning Dust hadn’t come empty-hooved. She’d used some of the gemstones to buy as much food as she could carry, along with new camping gear. Even still, most of the gemstones were untouched. It wasn’t a bad replacement for what her daughter had stolen, really. Unless you two just saved Equestria from horrible monsters, stealing a princess will be a lot harder to make up for. Lightning Dust wasn’t sure yet what sort of punishment she should impose on the filly for doing this. It was very hard to think of punishments when she was so happy to see the little troublemaker walking down the hall. They were both there—Lucky and the missing princess, both dressed the same way. They wore strange fabric suits, though the cloth was pulled away from around their faces. Even their manes and tails were covered. It looked a little like the armor Lucky kept in their apartment. It looked like that, only much friendlier, better tailored. But there was no mistaking her little filly’s face inside, or the way she walked. Not quite a proper pony walk, her stance always a little uneven. It had taken Dust nearly a month to notice that. She didn’t wait any longer, came running right past the princess and tackled the filly to the ground with all the force she had. It was far more painful than the loose-looking suit suggested—felt a bit like tackling a stack of bricks, stiffening when she gripped it. But she didn’t care. Didn’t care about anything, just then. “You have no idea how much trouble you’re in,” she said, amid furious tears. “No idea at all.” The filly met her gaze with empty eyes. She didn’t resist, didn’t even squirm under Dust’s grip. Dust had seen that expression only once—on the face of a veteran of the solar guard, when he had explained what Tirek had done to the rest of his battalion. Lucky looked that way. She clung like a foal might, which wouldn’t have bothered Dust just then except that whatever she was wearing made her grip like an earth pony. She groaned, adjusted herself a little so Lucky wasn’t grabbing her ribs. Pegasus bones were strong, but not that strong. Dust glanced up for a second, just long enough to see the princess had the same look on her face. Was standing there even now, quivering in terror. What had these fillies seen? “Come on.” Dust had only been this close to a princess on a few occasions. None of those had ever been pleasant. Yet for the first time, it was the royalty of Equestria that needed strength from her. Princess Flurry Heart was apparently the least disciplined, the least clear-headed princess in all Equestria. The only one who had ever been born into the office, as far as anypony remembered. Maybe that meant she wasn’t so bad as the others—not like Twilight Sparkle at all, despite her father. “You wouldn’t b-believe—” Lucky squeaked, before her words melted into indistinct sobs. “Th-the massacre we—” “Shh.” Dust tugged the princess into their hug. Held both ponies until they stopped their numb weeping. It took a long time, but Dust didn’t care. The young princess made no sign of her office—Dust wouldn’t have been able to tell at all, except she had a horn and sleeves for her wings. “I hope you learned something,” Dust said, when Lucky had finally fallen silent. “About how not to be a complete idiot. I know teenagers don’t like boundaries—but is it really that unreasonable for me to expect you not to foalnap the princess?” “I wasn’t foalnapped!” Flurry Heart protested, pulling away and rising to her hooves. She reached up to straighten her mane, but of course the suit covered it. “I told Lucky to go. I instructed her to bring me.” “Really?” Dust met Lucky’s eyes, but didn’t protest. “You’ll have to make sure to tell your parents that, Princess. They’re very worried about you.” Flurry Heart looked down, crestfallen. “Are you the rescue, then? There’s a carriage waiting outside to drag me back to my room for the next… thousand years?” “No!” Dust raised a hoof. She wasn’t sure how the princess could think that, given the way she’d just acted. But I guess it makes sense she would think the world revolves around her. “My daughter Lucky got a little overzealous with her exploring again. I thought she had more sense than to involve anypony else, but…” She sighed, thinking very carefully about what she would say next. The princess sounded quite convinced about what she was saying. She shouldn’t ruin Lucky’s hard work in that regard, and make it even more difficult for them. If Princess Cadance, or worse Celestia herself got even an inkling the youngest princess had been the victim of anything, no force on Equestria or beyond it would stop them from being hunted down. But if the Princess takes credit for this whole thing… Then she would be reprimanded, Lucky perhaps apologized to formally if she was contacted at all. All that passed through Dust’s mind in a few seconds, and she rose to her own hooves, helping Lucky to do the same. “Princess, I would not presume to tell you what to do. But we would be honored if you would accompany us back to the Crystal Empire. I was not sent by your parents, so what you do by them is your decision.” “Oh.” Flurry Heart relaxed. She still looked vulnerable—even some time to recover had not been enough to erase whatever they had seen. Dust intended to ask her daughter about it, eventually. Not now. Just now, they had a long flight back. Dust would have however long it took to fly back to think of a way to get “separated” from the princess before they reached the city.