//------------------------------// // Appearance // Story: Crashland: Equestria // by computerneek //------------------------------// Ponies all across Equestria missed the momentary blaze of light in Princess Luna’s night sky.  Even the Princess of the Night herself missed it for hours after it happened. Four hours, thirteen minutes, and twelve seconds after the flash first occurred, Princess Twilight is testing her brand new telescope.  It’s the finest Equestria could produce, with the clearest image yet on faraway objects.  She’s trying to see exactly how far she can get, and potentially find some details on some of the stars in Princess Luna’s night sky.  Thus, she’s discovered numerous faint specs that her old telescope simply couldn’t see.  She’s all the way up to maximum magnification, examining one of these specs. Four hours, thirteen minutes, twelve seconds, and two hundred eighteen milliseconds exactly1 after it occurred, the flash reaches Twilight’s telescope lens- and happens to be in her field of view.  She flinches from the light- but watches the daylight-bright glare in the middle of the darkness die down to nothing just as quickly as it had appeared.  Wait, not nothing- there’s now a faint speck of light where it had come from, rather than the blackness there had been before.  She focuses the telescope on it, and charges her horn for a complex spell she’d come up with, for finding the distance to the various celestial bodies. This spell, unlike most magic, travels faster than the eye can see.  About a hundred thousand times faster, if her measurements are correct.  All it does is travel to the target of her inquisition and return.  It only barely works on the dim specks she saw on her old telescope, now bright and clear, though it can take close to a full day to get back on those2.  As long as she logs the time it took correctly, she can then compute the distance to whatever it is she sent it at.  She finally releases the spell- and yelps audibly as it returns, almost instantly. Celestia’s sun reflects this spell so fast it’s like she’s sending it at herself.  She considers using a slower spell, one that’s more useful for objects near Equis itself- like meteorites.  The one she used to help Luna time a meteor shower for the perfect moment last weekend.  It travels at only a hundred times the speed of sight- and had produced a bounce time of about ten seconds off of Celestia’s sun.  She doesn’t really want to use it; her first spell bounced off this new object in about half a second, meaning this new spell should take around eight minutes- and offer her a more accurate distance measurement, as an integrated part of the spell, despite being right at its maximum range.  She glances at the clock and sends it on its way. It never comes back. She curses to herself as she plows her way through blown control runs and fried circuits.  She had managed to keep the ship in one piece- only for a rift energy pulse to blow out all of her forward rift sensors and destabilize her rift engines.  Now, she’s battling to get the one system capable of protecting the ship from such pulses working before the next one comes by- even without word from the captain. She’s already decided she’s lucky; the damage that disabled this automatic defensive system was merely a few blown power runs; the control links remained fully functional, even if they don’t carry enough power to operate the shield, they were able to verify complete operability, given she can restore power to it.  She’s lucky in that regard, as well- not only is one of the power runs nearly intact, but the container of spare cables remained perfectly unharmed!  Bonus, the break in the run is only right outside Main Engineering, where she was stationed as the ship’s chief engineer. She links the cable and dashes back to Main Engineering to activate the line.  The self-test takes a quarter of a second before that new cable takes on its maximum design load.  It’s not as heavy as the rest of the power runs- but it’ll work.  The computer is smart enough to limit the flow, even if it lengthens the shielding unit’s startup time and reduces its maximum output.  At least it’ll still cover the entire ship- and protect them against boarding parties and kidnappers.  Most of them, at any rate- any that realize her entire forward sensor suite is out won’t have any trouble getting small craft in close without getting shot at. She watches the numbers on her control panel for a few seconds, keying in a few com codes- and is thence present to spot the alert that shoots back through the system when something slams into the shield right after it finishes covering the ship.  With no response from the Captain, the Exec, or Engineering Two, she takes off to start putting the damaged control runs back together on an intact forward radar array. While she is away, the internal biosign scan she’d kicked off comes back, displaying its dismal results on the abandoned screen. Almost three hours after first light, Rainbow lands on Twilight’s balcony.  “So, anything new?” Twilight scowls at her friend.  Ever since that steadily brightening dot appeared in the sky a week ago, she’s been working everything she possibly can to find out what it is.  Only problem is, it seems to simply absorb everything she throws at it, like it’s not even there.  She’d managed to confirm this the day before with a series of spells she custom-built for measuring the empty space- they’d started to get back but, the moment they reached near this speck, they simply stopped.  Disappeared. “As a matter of fact, yes,” Twilight answers.  “It’s close.  Like, close enough a simple sight-speed spell would take only eight and a half hours to get back- if it ever came back, that is.”  She huffs indignantly. Rainbow huffs slightly.  “So, far enough we don’t have to worry about it?” she asks. “No, it’s close enough Princess Luna might be able to reach it.”  A sideways glance at the clock tells her to expect her repeated space-spell to cut off in about twenty seconds; it’s another hundred-times-sightspeed.  “I’m measuring how fast it’s moving right now.” Silence holds for perhaps ten seconds before Twilight gasps- and starts scribbling down numbers.  Her spell had cut off a full three seconds before she had expected it to.  A spell she’d started yesterday had recorded the time difference very precisely- at 3.376 seconds, with an impact time almost exactly twenty-four hours apart.  Finally, she stares at her page. “That thing is moving…”  She pauses, scribbles a few numbers, and looks back at Dash.  “That thing is moving fast enough to wrap around the entirety of Equis in just over a minute3.”