“Wait!” Twilight yelps, stopping suddenly, only a few minutes after they entered.
Everypony stops around her. “What?”
Twilight points with her hoof, towards the ring. “What’s it doing?”
Everypony stares. The shifting masses of energy have increased- but the thing underneath is spinning even faster, glowing brighter… As if charging. A low, sourceless hum can be heard building in the air around them.
“Uh, should we run?” Applejack asks.
“Look!” Fluttershy exclaims, pointing at a Minotaur-like creature standing up close to the round thing. The creature is in the giant thing’s shadow from the sun, but the ring thing’s glowing is making the creature visible again. Fluttershy’s attempt to take off fails. “What about…?”
Her voice dies out in terror as the ring thing suddenly disappears into a whirl of light- and a chasm of moving magic, perfectly aligned with the giant thing’s body, alongside the crack of thunder. The ground quakes underneath their hooves, but the minotaur-thing seems more relieved than worried- if she’s reading its body language correctly, from this far away.
She’s glad she’d come out to look at it. The nearby sensors are too badly damaged to notice- but the engines were unstable. Nothing a regular operational cycle won’t fix, at least- so she’s invoked one. She watches the energy buildup as the engine charges up from standby, and lets out a breath when it finally comes on. Normally, this power level- being minimum- would almost instantly propel the ship backwards to lightspeed… But the forward warp engines flicked on at the same moment, balancing the enormous thrust expertly. She watches the thrust pillar driving away from the engines, flickering only twice before it stabilizes itself the way it’s supposed to, disappearing smoothly into the air. Nevermind that there is no air within thirty feet of that energy plume.
The test cycle holds for twenty seconds before the engine returns to standby. She watches the pillar fade down to the smooth roll the engines are supposed to have. She nods to herself and heads back into her ship, to make sure the other engines have stabilized properly.
Twilight stares. Discord, who had recovered from his second encounter with the wall and run in after them, falls flat on his face.
Forget the power that had been boiling off of it. It had just demonstrated the ability to freely use more power than it would take to vaporize the entirety of Equis… and when it finished, the boil had not returned. Instead, the visible mana had reduced to a ring around the edge of the thing, constantly rolling back in on itself. Rolling, not sparking, not flashing, not curling. Rolling, smoothly and steadily.
Mana does not work this way. The boil had been a high-powered version of what a unicorn could feel if another unicorn started losing control of a spell halfway through; their mana basically goes haywire. Such is the nature of mana- it goes everywhere, often destructively, until it dissipates. Unless, of course, it is directed, whereupon they can use it for far more beneficial tasks. Teleportation is considered by many to be the mark of an expert spellcaster; even the slightest mistake in such a spell will often destroy whatever is being transported. Self-teleportation is often reserved to the select few powerful enough to get into Celestia’s school for gifted unicorns- and, usually, to those of them that get in.
Whatever this is, it’s already demonstrated enough raw power to teleport the entirety of Equestria someplace- and the ability to somehow control all of that power. Even now, that calm roll can only be an ongoing spell.
They’re still staring when it suddenly goes dark. It goes in two stages, though- the mana whips out of sight in less than a second, before the spinning surface underneath seems to bleed some sort of energy- certainly not mana- as it stops spinning, the glow fading down to blackness.
She drums her fingers on the control panel. She has ordered repair priority for the interstellar drive components; even though most of these are still in working condition, they are providing the power to keep the ship running and she wants them to stay that way. Second priority is all of the ships’ rift sensors; if these engines are working in N-space, she needs to know why.
She’s even ordered a full maintenance cycle on her ship’s main rift engines. These massive coils, not far from the heart of the armored mass, are the components that launch the ship into rift space- the components theoretically capable of interdimensional travel. It takes weeks for a cold start- hence why the ship has two of them. That way, one can be shut down for maintenance while the other keeps the ship well beyond lightspeed; objects in rift space will almost instantly fall back into N-space without an active rift engine. It only takes one for an emergency evasive, a high-speed jump chain, or even a long-range jump- though both must be working in tandem to pull off some of the ship’s more spectacular maneuvers. When that rift surge had hit the ship upon her arrival, one of the two had gone into emergency shutdown- several of its control coils had blown- while the other held only barely shy of such. Even now, it’s only barely functioning- and providing the ship with a link to rift space.
With this link, what rift sensors she has are functioning. The rift shields are functioning, the warp engines- and rift reactor- are more than just hunks of meaningless metal. The automatic system is currently working on the disabled engine. Once it’s online, she can shut the other one down for its repairs and sleep soundly at night. She can also utilize some of her ship’s fancier features- like the one that should let her explore ‘as a native’ without changing her own form- without having to worry about overloading damaged components. Even cycling the warp engines had been hard on them, in this state.
So she lives, and she waits. She has so many repairs to make.