//------------------------------// // Chapter Fifteen, Questionable: Cool information. // Story: Airship Mauled // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// -Kuril- “What are you doing there Maries?” All three heads turned to me, hardly did I ever need to address them separately. “Going over Jade’s case file to make sure there isn’t anything we missed solving during her visit to the court room.” Mara answered her eyes going over some documents, Maria was look at her own documents off to the side and Marie was reading some kind of action adventure novel. Maria spoke up next. “Don’t want any unexpected surprises to come back and bite us later, Marie is keeping us all entertained with a good story. Otherwise this would be really, exceedingly dry stuff and we’d eventually die of documentation overload. While they can call Jade back into the courtroom for a review, they can’t change the not guilty ruling without a very justified reason that she is actually guilty of something. They could try something sneaky, but Celestia being judge means they’d have to have her there and Celestia would definitely notify Jade directly of having to visit Canterlot. Another thing is they have no evidence to convict anyone of stealing the gold airship even if they saw you, they can’t actually prove that you were there thanks to the illusion dust causing so many hallucinations in the area. Who knows what anyone actually saw, so even the ‘Circle of the Concise’ wouldn’t be able to do anything useful without the right questions being asked.” Marie flicked her tongue and the page turned in the book, she seemed too intent on the book to really talk. I took a hint and moved on from them to see if anything needed doing in the kitchen. Nope, things were clean and Fresh Start must be working hard today. “Well that’s nice to know.” I now had a pouch of illusion dust at my hip, a good witch always needed a bit of quick magic on paw and I had plenty left over from the heist. I was even working on my own unique powder concoction, I was still trying to work the explosiveness out of it and a few other small bugs in the magic involved with what I wanted my own original magic powder to do. Alchemy was quite fun and I should have gotten into it years ago, it seemed like a talent a witch like me would use when it comes to brewing intrigue. Zecora was a great friend, but it was a little far for her to travel from the Ever Free Forest to here when she wanted something other than a meal. Ponyville hasn’t exactly been kind to Zecora yet thanks to the fact that she was surviving in a very dangerous place, but the ponies there weren’t bad people even if they were all shunning her for no reason whatsoever. My daughter had spent a solid week in the Canterlot dungeons and walked away smelling like roses. I was happy to have taken part in the heist, the entire thing was a bit exhilarating even if all I did was pilot The Ardent Survivor. I didn’t know what to use all the gold for, but I was thinking a library and expanding our farm land outwards. We couldn’t really supply Zecora with the stuff she wanted or needed. So we also needed general stores here in Airship Mauled too. As mayor, I guess it was my duty to plan it and I needed Sekhet here for that to work things out. I guess I would also need Maries, if they’ve learned anything about the related laws and some other things I needed to be aware of. The obscure rubber chicken law that Pudding Head got passed was the only one I knew about, because Jade wouldn’t stop giggling about it. While Jade and the others were away on a trip to help out Fluttershy in moving a bunch of cute furry little rodents, I didn’t have much going on. As an Abyssinian I would have had some trouble with resisting my baser urge to eat a lemming, unlike Jade who wouldn’t have that problem as she was quite a maverick with her love of fruit. I wasn’t about to eat the rodents Fluttershy had befriended around here at any rate, but that urge to try was still there. Knowing Jade was completely safe wherever she was, I could see the fire was still going while standing at the door to my restaurant, unless I got customers I didn’t really have much to do and had a lot of free time since I couldn’t currently do my job as mayor. Getting customers was actually becoming more of a regular thing around here, I looked to Fresh Start as she started taking care of the tables and making sure the restaurant was clean. It seems we weren’t going to be very busy today, so I really didn’t have to do much cooking aside from feeding the local hungry mouths. I currently didn’t feel like working on my powder concoction at the moment and finally decided on what to do. I went to see what Jacky was doing. It appears she was still working on gaining a talent with that bow Jade made for her, she seemed intent on figuring out how to be an archer. She was an expert at using cannons, wouldn’t practicing that be a better use of her time instead of trying to figure out the random physics breaking omnidirectional arrow shooting bow? I stood by her watching as she incidentally launched a tomahawk and a chicken among the many arrows that seemingly veered away from the targets or rarely, if ever, struck them. She had a good handle on rapidly firing them at least. I commented on it. A few moments after commenting that the chicken shot was unusual, Jacky just sat there with a sudden dull look in her eyes. “…. I figured it out…” Her eyes lit with a brightness I haven’t seen before, my parrot daughter’s tail lifted upwards and she looked to me with excitement building on her beak. She pulled me into a tight hug while shrieking a happy sounding bird noise in my poor ears. “This has been bugging me and making me angry at myself since forever, but you’ve helped me figure out what I’ve been doing wrong this whole time. Oh my goodness mom, thank you!” “Well you’re welcome for whatever you figured out thanks to me, we should pull Ms. Cluckin out of the tree you fired her into and get her back to Mr. Refreshment.” My parrot daughter had the wherewithal to look both ashamed and sheepish about it. “After that you can tell me what you’ve been doing wrong. Since you’re the one that fired her, you’re going to retrieve Cluckin and take her back to Mango. I’m going to stow the Pukwudgie tomahawk away for some magical alchemy study later.” That was something else I had to work on, I guess I did have something more to do. I almost forgot we had a lot of untested magical alchemy ingredients just lying around. -Ten minutes later- “So to give you an idea of what I’ve figured out… who made this bow?” Really Jacky? I’m sure we both knew who made the bow, but I guess you wanted me to humor you. “My daughter Jade crafted it with her bare hands. You know this, I know this and everyone who was at your birthday party certainly knows this since she handed it to you.” I gave her a slightly bored look when she pointed at me excitedly, I just had to ask. “What is your point about this?” “It’s that she, Captain Jade, made it!” Jacky I still don’t get where you were going with this. “Captain made this bow and we both know that she can’t stay away from doing something completely abnormal for too long! So why would we think she’d construct a completely normal bow?” “I don’t see what’s so abnormal about… oh.” It may have just occurred to me that this is my kitten we’re talking about here, and that meant a number of things. Not all of them were good things. “It’s not exactly a normal bow now is it?” “Exactly that, she used magical alchemy in every single part of this bows construction!” Okay, that might have some implications as to why your luck has been quite bad with the bow Jacky. Though that would only ‘almost’ begin to explain the shooting arrows straight backwards. No other bow in the world could possibly do something like that while trying to fire it normally. So yeah, it wasn’t normal at all in any stretch of the imagination come to think of it. “She magically sustained the parts separately and after she completed it as a whole single object. She never actually fully tested what would happen if you mixed so many various magical properties like the self-sustains that come from sustaining the constituent parts and as a complete singular object. She figured the various casts to make it permanently sturdier and water proof was all that she did to it, I don’t think she even considered the implications of what she’s made here.” “So I take it you now know what the bow does and what have you been doing wrong?” At my question, she silently held up a talon and then walked off in a frighteningly good mood. Not that her usual mood was depressive, it just seemed like that by comparison. When she came back she was holding a bowling pin, a kitchen knife and half rotted mango, she gave me a smug look. “Watch and be amazed as I use this magical bow to do very unusual things!” She proclaimed proudly, I sat down and waited for her to get on with it. “Which target do you want me to shoot the knife with?” “The distance one… Jade didn’t seem to have any problems with firing arrows straight.” There were five targets, the middle, left and right targets were almost the same distance away. There were two other targets that were close and far away. I obviously chose the hardest target for her to hit. If she was about to do something impressive, then Jacky may as well go big. “To explain why Jade didn’t have that problem, we'll say my luck may be a deciding factor in normal arrows going wonky." She put the knife to the string and pulled back, the knife wasn’t even big enough to lean against the wood and yet she was aiming it like it was an arrow. "This bow only magnifies that issue to a bizarre degree.” “Bizarre doesn’t begin to cover the backwards arrows or the spinning butt slappers.” Crossing my arms I waited for an explanation to that. “Don’t know what to tell you about that, but watch this carefully.” She released the string, instead of hitting the wood of the bow the knife shot forward on an arc as if it were an arrow and struck the distant target. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, only to blink again in disbelief. Jacky smirked took up the mango did the same thing by shooting the left target with unerringly good accuracy, said target now had bits of splattered fruit all over it. Jacky then fired the bowling pin, the butt end of which knocks the knife out of the far target when it collided with it. “Is it just me or is every one of those objects flying from the bow as if it were an arrow?” That was kind of amazing, why hadn’t we figure this out previously? I knew the answer as soon as I thought it, who would fire something that’s not an arrow from a bow? “Because this bow can fire just about…” Jacky stopped and stared at the bow, held it horizontal and pulled the string with nothing in it. She released the string and a horizontal crescent of destructive light leapt from the bow and cut the right target into two burnt halves. “Anything…” I quickly put out the fire Jacky caused with a few bursts of water from my mouth, fish scale necklaces were always a magical alchemist’s friend. Turning to Jacky I had a few words to say. “Did you just fire a concentrated spray of sunlight from the bow?” It seems I had taken my eyes off of Jacky for too long, for my words spooked her from what she was currently doing. Her feet were on the string of the bow, her hands were on the wood pulling it up to stretch the string. She reflexively let go of the bow and started to turn towards me as if to answer my question. Instead of the wood of the bow logically slamming into the ground or into her toes, the string instead went up and launched Jacky into the sky. I watched as my flailing and screaming parrot daughter came down into a tree a few hundred feet away. This was followed by slamming into multiple branches on the way down to the ground, oh and a fire wasp hive fell onto her lap. “Why-hy-hy-y!” She whined in pain after coming to a rest on the ground. Her whining turned to whimpering as a ton of bright red glowing insects flew out of the hive and started aiming all their mandibles straight for her. “Uh, can we talk about this guys? Mom, please go get some yarrow and plantain leaves. Captain’s absurd pain tolerance doesn’t tell me how much this is actually going to hurt.” The fire wasps descended upon Jacky in a buzzing angry hoard, she started running for the river while screaming as if she were lit on fire. I calmly walked up to the hive and picked it up, I was going to move it much farther away from here. Fire wasp hives were immune to fire and smoke did nothing to the wasps themselves, horrifyingly difficult to get rid of compared to normal wasps. On my way back from ditching the hive, I sighed loudly as I thought about how cool that bow was. Jacky fired herself from the obviously magical bow, one with a very unique effect of being capable of firing anything the string hits. I better write this one down as a unique magical alchemy ingredient. A bow that could fire any object that has no aerodynamic capacity whatsoever that could be put to the string as if it were arrow dynamic. I literally could not think of a better term for what the bow does, it literally makes things fly with the dynamics of an arrow which was unfortunate for poor Jacky who followed the arc the bow had launched her into. I’m actually kind of envious of Jade’s friends now. -Jade- “So that’s how you get ink from a giant squid.” My words were met with odd looks, I rubbed at my nose with a tissue. “Have you ever gone to a therapist for this Jade?” Why would I need to go to therapy for this Cheerilee, the squid ink spaghetti was delicious. “Nope, mom made some really good spaghetti and it was all worth the effort.” Still didn’t understand the incredulous looks I was receiving. “The squid ink sauce did need some parmesan to make it taste really good.” “Sounds intriguing, may I perhaps inquire something.” We all turned to the large four winged blue serpent with glowing green eyes. “Did you manage to destroy the one who had possessed me?”