The heroes stood outside the mine, staring at the strange red sticks that Obvious Trader had tied to one of the supports. Whatever he’d been planning hadn’t been finished – there was still almost half a box of the sticks sitting unused a few feet away, and half a dozen he’d dropped while fleeing – but that didn’t mean it was safe to just walk past.
“Are they fireworks?” Derpy suggested. “They look kind of like fireworks. Maybe he thought he could blind us?”
“Enough gunpowder in a confined space could be deadly,” Bon Bon pointed out. “At least, for a pony back in the real world, where we didn’t have magical armor and supernatural durability.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ve got this,” Spike said, advancing on the half-set trap with his shield held out in front. When he was close enough, he reached around and poked at one of the sticks with his sword. The cover tore open like paper, spilling an off-white powder on the ground. “Euugh!” he said, backing away. “It smells like one of Twilight’s alchemy experiments.”
“The sticks aren’t magically active,” Moondancer said, walking up alongside him with her horn and eyes glowing from a Detect Magic spell. “Alchemy minus magic equals chemistry. Although I don’t know how much I can tell without equipment.” She leaned down and sniffed the powder, then poked her hoof at it and took a taste. “Huh. Nitroglycerine?”
“So not fireworks?” Derpy asked from just behind Moondancer, making her jump. She’d picked up the scattered sticks from the ground, and was about to dump them back in the box.
“Derpy, stop,” Moondancer said, calmly.
Derpy froze.
“Put the nitroglycerine down, carefully.”
Derpy dropped them into the box, careful to get all of them inside.
Time seemed to slow down for Moondancer. Derpy. Derpy could resurrect them without that awful curse, so Derpy had to live. That meant she needed to get out of the blast radius before the sticks landed and exploded. But the only spell she had to move things that quickly was…
Her horn flashed brightly. An aura surrounded Derpy, and then the hapless pegasus was hurtling towards the trees at high speed, crunching into the branches less than a second later.
Moondancer landed half on top of the box, barking her shins and stumbling around awkwardly in the snow until she managed to get her hooves under her and realized that time was moving normally again and the explosives had completely failed to detonate.
“Hey!” Derpy shouted, her voice faint from the distance. “What was that for?”
“Woah…” Spike said, looking from her to Moondancer. “Did you just Magic Missile her? With her as the missile?”
“Stable nitroglycerine,” Moondancer said, ignoring them to peer into the box. “This has potential.”
“The potential to accidentally kill us all,” Bon Bon said, keeping her distance.
Moondancer shrugged. “That depends on how stable it is. I should run some tests. Stand back.”
Spike backed away a few feet.
“Farther back,” Moondancer said. “No, farther,” she said again, when he stood next to Bon Bon.
“How far?” Bon Bon asked.
Moondancer looked at the box, and mentally did some math. “Over by Derpy?”
That turned out to largely be overkill. Enough shock could still set off the nitroglycerine, but for Moondancer to manage it she had to fling it into the cliffside with Magic Missile. The resulting explosion was extremely loud, and left a small hole in the cliff, but was nowhere near the widespread destruction she’d expected. Worse, even Magic Missile wasn’t enough to set the sticks off when she aimed them at the snow, so it wouldn’t be reliable to use it that way in a fight.
“Light the fuse?” Spike suggested.
“They aren’t fuses, they’re metal wires,” Moondancer said. “I’d need lightning to set them off, and I don’t even have a spell that shoots lightning at inanimate objects.”
“Good,” Bon Bon said. “I’d rather not have somepony tossing nitroglycerine sticks into a fight where I’m fighting with knives.”
Moondancer dug through her saddlebacks and set a small sack on the ground next to the box of explosives. “I’ll make a cornucopia – it’s the safest way to take some of them with us. Maybe we’ll figure out how to set them off later, or maybe I’ll just have to settle for re-inventing them when we get home and making a million bits.”
“Or maybe we’ll run into a giant rock monster,” Spike said. “Then – whizz-BANG! It’ll be awesome!”
“You never know,” Moondancer said, as she cast the spell on the sack. A dozen of the bright red sticks dissolved into the magic, and the bag plumped up slightly.
“So you can do that with anything?” Bon Bon asked.
Moondancer looked up. “The cornucopia? Sure, anything nonmagical.”
“Could you do that with a bag of golz?” Bon Bon asked. “We’re not broke, but it’s like the priest said – you can never have enough money.”
“Technically yes?” Moondancer said. “But they vanish after a few minutes, so you wouldn’t be able to spend them.”
“How about gems?” Spike asked.
“It doesn’t matter what you use it on, they still vanish.”
Spike lolled his tongue out a bit. “No, I meant to eat. None of the restaurants here have gems on the menu, and I could really go for some rubies to snack on.”
===
With the mystery of the red sticks solved, they moved into the mine. It wasn’t long before they found the train Obvious Trader had been talking about, or what they figured had to be the train – several mine carts resting on a track that led deeper into the mountain.
Derpy perched on the front edge of the lead cart immediately. “Get in! This’ll be fun!”
“Yeah,” Moondancer said, walking slowly towards the carts. “Fun.”
“I don’t see a brake,” Bon Bon remarked. “Derpy, do you see anything that looks like a brake?”
Derpy bent over and peeked at the front of the cart, then between her own legs to look inside the cart. “Nope! Looks good to me!”
“I’m not riding in that thing,” Moondancer said.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Spike said. “The carts wouldn’t be here if we weren’t supposed to ride them.”
Moondancer took a step back. “Here’s the choice – we can walk.”
“Nah, that won’t work,” Spike said. “The track’s probably broken and we’ll need to jump over a river of lava or something.”
Moondancer took three more steps back. “This is not making me want to ride them!”
“Would you rather jump over a river of lava without a cart?” Bon Bon asked. She didn’t get in either, though.
Spike scrambled at the edge of the cart Derpy was perched on, trying to pull himself over the edge, even though it came to slightly above his head, and his armor was awfully heavy.
“How about a compromise,” Moondancer said. “We’ll walk, and if we come to a river of lava that can only be crossed by getting in a mine cart, rolling down the track, and hoping that it jumps to the other side, then instead we’ll give up on our quest and go get jobs in Castle Town or something!”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Spike said. “I mean, sure, there might be some tricky bits where we have to decide which way to go and if we pick wrong we plummet to our doom, but if that happens we’ll just respawn in town and have to try again. There’s five carts here – that’s a lot of tries.”
“We don’t have enough golz for five tries,” Bon Bon said.
“Am I the only one who’s not okay with plummeting to our doom?” Moondancer asked.
“Um…” Spike said, looking at the others.
“I think so,” Bon Bon said. “I’m mostly worried about burning through our golz. A train crash probably wouldn’t hurt that much. It’d be over quick.”
“And I can fly!” Derpy said. “So I mean, I could just resurrect you right there instead of going back to the crystal.”
“Even if we burned up in lava?” Bon Bon asked.
“Wait a minute,” Spike said. “Derpy can fly! Why don’t we hook her up to the cart? Then if we’re going to fall to our doom we can just cheat and have her pull it back to the track.”
Bon Bon looked up at Derpy. “She’s licensed and everything.”
“And you’re not paying me, so it’s all legal!” Derpy added, with a grin.
===
The mine carts weren’t set up to be pulled by ponies, strangely enough – it wasn’t clear how they were supposed to move, although there was a panel with buttons that didn’t do anything that might have been involved. Moondancer didn’t detect any sort of magical propulsion, but that might have been because the mechanism was depleted after long disuse.
It wasn’t too hard to put a basic harness together from some rope they found in a side room, though. It wouldn’t be comfortable for a long haul, but Derpy was only planning to pull the cart in an emergency, and (hopefully) an emergency wouldn’t last long enough for it to chafe. Spike and Moondancer followed her instructions, wrapping the rope around her neck and body and tying it securely in place. When they were done, Derpy tugged against the ropes a little, and they seemed secure.
Bon Bon jumped into the cart, and turned to help Moondancer climb in after her. Moondancer could at least get her hooves over the side, but her attempts to jump her hindquarters over were sadly insufficient until Spike gave her a push.
Moondancer squealed. “Spike! What are you doing!”
Spike’s metal-clad feet dug into the ground as he pushed as hard as he felt he could risk, his claws digging into her thighs. “I’m trying… to get… ugh...” He twisted his face aside as her tail whacked him in the muzzle. “Stop doing that!”
Moondancer squirmed. “Don’t touch me there!”
Spike instantly let go, leaving her stuck on the edge with her forelegs in Bon Bon’s and her hind legs off the ground, with the edge of the mine cart digging into her stomach. She choked, and kicked her legs desperately, until the dragon’s pointy claws were replaced by an ice-cold sheet of metal.
Spike shoved his shield against her. “Yeah, this is working better,” he said. “I can use a lot more force…” With one last shove, Moondancer tipped into the cart, landing in a heap on top of Bon Bon.
Spike waited a few seconds, without any sign of movement from inside the cart. “Um… are you okay?”
“Owwww…” Moondancer groaned.
“Now how am I going to get in?” Spike looked up at the edge of the cart. “Why did they make these things so big?”
“Come over here and I’ll give you a lift?” Derpy suggested. “I’m really good at lifting ponies. Dragons too!”
“Oh, right,” Spike said, laughing a bit as Derpy effortlessly boosted him up over the side and set him down next to the two groaning mares. “Yeah, that was a lot easier.”
Suddenly, he floated into the air, only to slam firmly against the wall of the mine cart with a loud ‘clang’. Moondancer, eyes ablaze, stumbled off of Bon Bon and pointed her glowing horn right at Spike’s face. “Don’t. Put your face. Under my tail!”
“Er…” Spike said. “It was an accident! I didn’t mean anything by it. You were just–”
Moondancer growled. “Don’t. Put your face. Under my tail. Unless you mean something by it!”
Everyone froze, including Moondancer.
“Um…” Derpy said, trying to stifle a giggle without much success.
“I think that came out wrong,” Bon Bon said. “Or should we leave the two of you alone?”
“Or can we watch?” Derpy asked. “Come on, kiss and make out!”
“That’s ‘kiss and make up’, Derpy,” Spike said, managing to twist his head a bit in Moondancer’s grip.
Derpy covered her mouth and giggled. “You could do that too, but it’s not as much fun.”
===
Once Moondancer had died of embarrassment – her corpse curling up in a corner with her face hidden underneath her forelegs – and Spike and Bon Bon had found a reasonably comfortable position to ride in (although Spike couldn’t really see over the side very well, even with the extra height granted by being inside the cart), it was finally time to see how good of a job they’d done on Derpy’s harness.
“Give it a try,” Bon Bon said to Derpy, who saluted with a hoof, then turned and pulled against the ropes in earnest.
Nothing happened. The cart didn’t even budge.
“Ugh,” Derpy said, fluttering her wings for more thrust and lifting slightly off the ground, but still failing to move the mine cart. “You girls are heavy!”
“The brake must be on,” Bon Bon said. “Does anypony see a brake lever?”
They looked around, but couldn’t find anything. Spike even tried pushing all the buttons on the little panel, but none of them seemed to do anything.
“So what do we do now?” Derpy asked, turning around and putting her hooves on the edge of the cart, the harness tangling around her legs.
“Um… I guess we walk?” Spike said. “Sometimes the mine carts are just for decoration, I guess. You get your way after all, Moondancer!”
“Ugh,” Moondancer said, lifting her head to look at him. “Seriously?”
“What’s wrong now?” Bon Bon asked, straining not to grind her teeth.
“I spent all that time psyching myself up for this,” she grumbled.
===
By hoof, the mine was very large, and unsurprisingly very full of monsters. It was a slight surprise that most of the monsters were orcs, to the extent that anything orc-related could be a surprise at that point.
Most of them were ordinary green orcs, at least, so the old fire-based tactics worked well, but the orcish wizards had been replaced by weird ghost-like wraiths that, in addition to casting the area-effect spells that everypony hated since they ignored Spike’s taunting, also drained blood-sugar with a touch that went right through armor and shields. They would have been the perfect thing for Bon Bon to attack first, if they hadn’t been highly resistant to physical attacks.
There were also rock monsters – animated boulders with huge mouths nearly the size of their entire body – that might have been a serious threat if they weren’t a perfect target for Moondancer’s new nitroglycerine-based ‘Explosive Missile’ spell.
When you combined that with a dungeon that was very easy to navigate – the ‘correct’ path was marked by the mine cart tracks, so they knew to search every side corridor first for treasure – the entire experience was...
“Just how big is this mine?” Moondancer grumbled as Bon Bon led them down a side passage off a side passage off a large room with half a dozen exits that had been a short trot from the main path.
“I’m kind of having fun,” Spike said. “I mean, yeah, it’s a lot of fighting, but that’s better than spending days walking across an empty desert or whatever. Do you think there’ll be a boss?”
“There’s always a boss,” Bon Bon said. “Hopefully not another marshmallow.”
Derpy shuddered. “So sticky…”
“Aaand it’s another dead end,” Moondancer announced, as they turned a corner and found the passage clogged with rubble.
“There’s something in the rocks,” Bon Bon said, clamping her teeth on something and tugging. “Spike, can you give me a hoof?”
“Will a claw work?” Spike asked, as he grabbed on to the red-and-white striped metal thing and helped her tug it loose. The rocks rumbled and shifted, but didn’t collapse.
“Is that a candy cane?” Derpy asked, hovering over their shoulders.
“It’s made out of metal,” Spike said. “Maybe it’s what the rock monsters eat?”
Moondancer’s aura glimmered over the curved metal rod, and she brought it close to examine it. “It’s a lever. There’s a hole in the bottom here where a pin holds it in place.”
“Holds it in place where?” Spike asked.
Moondancer tossed it back to him. “Probably underneath all those rocks.”
“Let’s hold on to it just in case,” Bon Bon said.
===
They found the rest of the lever pretty quickly, all things considered – it was on the far side of the mine, but the side-passage that eventually led to it was only a little further down the tracks. Moondancer had no trouble setting the lever back in place, and then stood a few dozen steps back while Spike pulled it.
There was a rumble, and a section of wall slid aside revealing a rough-hewn passage, much smaller than the ones in the mine, that twisted to the side after ten feet or so. Nopony had to say anything – of course they were going to explore it.
‘It’ turned out to be a twisty maze of little passages, all alike. There were dozens of branches and loops and few dead ends, but little piles of golz were scattered everywhere, so they could quickly find the turns they hadn’t taken yet by the piles they hadn’t picked up. The only monsters they encountered were the rock monsters, mindlessly circling through the maze and gobbling up anything they came across… but they were almost as big as the tunnels they were travelling through, so they could only come one at a time, which meant that Moondancer’s Explosive Missile spell put an end to every fight before it even started.
“Okay, now I’m bored,” Spike said.
“We’re almost done,” Moondancer said, looking up from a sheet of paper she’d been doodling on. “I’ve been charting the maze, and we’ve filled in almost all the territory. There’s just one section left in the center.”
“There’s a center?” Bon Bon asked. “We haven’t even found an edge.”
“That’s because it loops around,” Moondancer explained. “Follow me, it’s this way.”
The center section didn’t have little piles of golz, which was probably why they’d missed it. “Clever,” Bon Bon said.
They cautiously rounded the last few twists to see what the prize in the center was.
“Oh,” Bon Bon said to the monsters guarding a small room. “You guys.”
The pair of reindeer – Red and Blue – stared at them, then turned and ran up some stairs they’d been standing near.
“Hey!” Spike shouted, running after them, the rest of the heroes close on his heels.
A few seconds later, they emerged into the blinding sunlight, reflecting off the snowy mountain peak and the clouds below that encircled it. When their vision adjusted, they found themselves surrounded – a dozen reindeer, dressed in half a dozen colors, stood in a semicircle around them, antlers already glowing.
“Stop!” came the voice of a familiar diamond dog from a small log cabin behind the deer, at the very top of the peak. “Let them come.”
“Or we could turn around and leave,” Moondancer suggested.
“The master wants to see you,” said one of the green reindeer. “You should not disappoint him.”
“If this was a boss fight, we’d probably be fighting,” Spike said. “Maybe he has a quest for us?”
“Or maybe some muffins?” Derpy suggested.
“At any rate, I don’t think we have a choice unless we want to fight all these reindeer,” Bon Bon said. “We could probably take them, but it would be messy.”
“I don’t know,” Spike said. “They’ve got two healers. I’m not sure we could stab them fast enough.”
One of the green reindeer raised a hoof to her belly and shivered a bit. Derpy frowned, and swooped down to hug her. “Oh, you poor thing! Are you okay?”
“Um…” the reindeer said, trying to squirm out of Derpy’s feathery grip. “Just go inside, please?”
===
The inside of the house was easier on their eyes, at least. It was also surprisingly bare – a single, wide-open room without any furniture, except for a low table in the center of the room, on which sat a fancy round three-layer cake, with a single candle set in the center, burning merrily.
Derpy squealed and made a bee-line for it, only to be sent tumbling back to the entrance by the Red Ninja, who’d appeared out of nowhere and smacked her with the flat of his blade. “Cake is for winners,” he growled.
“So I guess you want us to fight you again?” Spike asked. “With all those reindeer?”
“I need no reindeer to fight you here,” the hulking diamond dog said. “I will face you with only myself.”
“But… we beat you with three of them backing you up,” Spike said. “We’ll win easily.”
“Then you will have cake,” the Ninja replied.
Spike glanced back at the others. Bon Bon shrugged. He raised his shield. “Okay, then. Let’s go!”
The Red Ninja smiled wide, showing all his teeth, and set his sword point-down in the ground in front of himself. His form blurred, and vanished momentarily, only to reappear a moment later… along with four more copies of himself, spread around the room.
“O…kay…” Spike said, “Maybe they’re not as strong?”
“Dark Eidous Dark Eidous Dark Eidous!” Moondancer shouted, as Derpy’s gun roared… but with five targets, the damage was spread. Spike bellowed at the Ninjas to get their attention, but only two of them squared off with him, which was still one more than he could ward off effectively with his shield. Bon Bon leapt at the back of the one Derpy had shot, but while that staggered him, it didn’t take him down this time either, and while her backstab didn’t trigger their auto-kill counterattack, it did manage to get that ninja’s attention, and the ordinary sword slashes were more than she could handle.
“Explosive missile!” The red stick shot through the air, only to bounce harmlessly off the Ninja’s soft robes. Moondancer desperately tried to cast another spell as the Ninja kept coming. “Bub—” WHACK! Her spell was interrupted, and her head snapped to the side as the Ninja she’d tried to explode slammed her in the temple with the hilt of his sword, dropping her like a sack of bricks.
“I give! I give!” Spike said, dropping his sword and shield as a Ninja knelt on top of his chest, katana poised at the eye-slits of his helmet.
Bon Bon lay still, still breathing but bleeding heavily.
Derpy looked down at the ninjas, who suddenly seemed to notice her presence, with all her friends out of the fight. “No surrender!” she shouted, taking careful aim and completely missing the Ninja she’d aimed at, only for the shot to bounce off the back wall and hit another Ninja in the back of the head. He stumbled, but didn’t fall, and the other three (the fifth keeping Spike pinned) leapt impossibly high to face her in the air, one knocking her cannon from her mouth, another slamming her in the small of the back to drive her to the ground, and the third landing heavily atop her, sword first, pinning her to the ground like a butterfly.
“Owww…. ow ow ow…” Derpy whimpered, and writhed on the ground trying to somehow drag herself off the sword, even though that was topologically impossible.
The Ninjas shimmered and vanished, except for the one pinning Spike, who withdrew his sword and extended a paw to help the dragon to his feet. “You are weak. No cake for you.”
===
“So. That was a complete waste of time,” Moondancer said, once they were all conscious again, and feasting on muffins on the Ninja’s front porch to heal up before heading back into the dungeon. The reindeer were scattered around snowy lawn, ignoring them now that they’d failed to prove themselves against the Red Ninja’s full power.
“We picked up a lot of golz in the maze, at least,” Bon Bon said.
“Maybe we can come back once we’re stronger?” Spike suggested.
“Could we not? I don’t want cake that much,” Moondancer said.
“I do!” Derpy said, “But we’ll have to be a lot lot stronger, because he totally kicked our tails.”