//------------------------------//
// Behold, Stormhoof Fortress 
// Story: The Olden World 
// by Czar_Yoshi 
//------------------------------//

"Starlight..."

Hooves gently shook Starlight into wakefulness, her late-afternoon nap firmly being interrupted. She snuffled, realized Maple wasn't with her in the engine room chair, opened her eyes... and when she did, she saw the harmony extractor helmet discarded behind her, Maple standing and smiling with her eyes retaining their pink glow.

"Time to get up, Starlight," Maple said, standing over her. "We're almost there."

"There...?" Starlight grunted, rubbing her eyes.

"Land. The Empire." Maple leaned over and started to brush her mane, working industriously. "Gerardo says there's a tugboat guiding us into a dock, so we don't need any more power. We can go ashore now, and..." She swallowed. "Maybe find Valey."

Starlight drooped. That was right, one of her most reliable friends was still missing... "She didn't come back while I was sleeping?" she asked hopefully.

"Mm-mmm." Maple sadly shook her head. "She didn't. I don't believe anything could get rid of Valey, but I guess we'll see soon if I should be worried..."

Starlight sighed. "Should we go upstairs?"

"I think we should," Maple replied, finishing with her mane. "Come on, you. I'd like to see this sight for myself."





"Behold, Stormhoof Fortress!" Gerardo announced, sweeping a talon over the railing of the Immortal Dream as Starlight and Maple exited the stairwell. The ship's engines were off, the noisy puttering of a stout boat roped to the prow mixing with crashing surf, blowing sea wind and the raucous screeching of gulls to fill Starlight's ears instead. Her back was already warm under the sun, every trace of stormclouds having burned off, and the light seemed almost doubled by the bright reflection in front of her.

Crenellated bastion after bastion of gleaming white rock covered an entire peninsula in a mountain of walls so layered it looked like an inverted version of the Stone District. Granite and marble formed cone-tipped towers, hollow bridges speckled with windows, and roadways meshed so efficiently with buildings that Starlight's eyes gave up tracing pathways as soon as they found them, completely bedazzled by the mile-wide megastructure. Flags and banners flew from the highest roofs surrounding a towering keep to one side, depicting all sorts of emblems but most commonly a paw, the central pad a swirl of wind and laid over a sea-blue background.

The seawall of the fortress stood windowless and pristine, undoubtedly twice as thick as the barriers elsewhere and alternating between a straight drop to rocks or the ocean and sprawling wharf complexes, most housing smaller boats with one exclusively for luxury yachts. As the tugboat pulled them further around the castle, Starlight realized it wasn't a peninsula but a full island, connected to the shore by a long white bridge with proud arched support columns and an even bigger town growing on the coast behind. But these buildings were predominantly brown, didn't stack up as high, and devoted their shoreline to cargo freighters and bigger boats the likes of which would quickly clog the inner castle's docks.

"Sure is something," Shinespark agreed, coming up from behind them. Starlight spotted Jamjars lurking in a corner nearby as well, and Slipstream was also present; the entire crew was on the deck.

Gerardo checked something on his talons, then straightened up, proudly puffing his chest and turning to the others. "Stormhoof always was somewhat rich for the likes of me, though we have come into possession of a large quantity of money, and I think it would be highly remiss not to spend at least a day enjoying one of the premier entrances to the Griffon Empire. That said, does anyone have any plans they'd like to pursue?"

"Common sense things," Maple immediately said. "We need to know we have everything we need, and know everything we might have to pay for. If we're going to stay on land, we should find a place to stay, and whether or not we stay on the boat, we need to find a place to keep it. Right?"

Slipstream raised a hoof. "If the boat had power, one of us could stay here and sail it far enough from the city that no one will mind, but close enough the rest could fly here. Right?"

"Definitely." Shinespark nodded. "Unfortunately, our power sources are limited at the moment, and short of getting a shipment all the way from Yakyakistan, with the boat in its present state I see no way we can get more."

"With the boat in its present state..." Gerardo raised an eyebrow at her. "Is that implying something I'm not familiar with?"

"Conventional airships and mana-based watercraft have their own means of propulsion, too," Shinespark replied. "Typically you use a large, refined and properly-cut gem as a mana core, charge it up through exposure to power or by burying it underground for a while, and use it to power conventional systems like motors. This ship's water propulsion uses conventional motors, and one of the first things we figured out how to do was convert harmonic power down into the typical forms of mana energy."

Slipstream brightened. "So all we have to do is pay to charge the boat at a typical port, and then it'll be good to go until it runs out?"

Shinespark cringed. "It's... not that simple. We could, and I designed it with doing that in mind just in case, but... the ship's mana core was one of the things that blew up when it got overcharged facing the windigoes. And Riverfall didn't exactly have many of those when I was making the repairs, so the one I put in... will hold about an hour of charge with the amount of power this ship needs. In hindsight, I really should have tried to get one from the destroyed airships in the skyport, but that would have taken time and been questionably legal and I... didn't."

"I see," Gerardo mused, stroking his chin. "So we could make this ship seaworthy without Miss Maple's constant presence again, but it would require acquiring an expensive manacore."

"And the higher-quality core you get, the more power it can hold," Shinespark added. "And gems that good have become in much higher demand since the airship revolution as well, since extending your flight range to meet key trip lengths is very profitable. So getting a good one... could be difficult. Just looking at the boats moored here, lots of them have gone back to using sails for power, and I'd guess this is one of the richest ports in the world."

"You'd guess correctly," Gerardo told her sadly. "Though, bear in mind that the trend these days is for hybrid power. One equips their boat with a mast and a sail to boost their speed when the wind is with them, or give them emergency backup in a pinch, or conserve energy when speed is not essential and the like."

Shinespark glanced regretfully at the Dream's bare deck, nothing rising where a mast should be. "Maybe I should have thought of that..."

"You have an anchor, right?" Slipstream volunteered. "We could turn the boat off a ways out of port and drop that to stop from floating away, then use our hour of charge to get in and out of port when we need to. It might be small, but it's not useless."

Shinespark shrugged. "Well, we're already going all the way in right now using a tugboat. Getting in and out of port is something the city does for us since they don't want boat owners causing crashes by being unskilled. The big issue is that we'll be stuck at Stormhoof until we find a way to either improve the ship's capacity or get more harmonic power, and even with the amount of money Kero left us, that won't last forever."

Starlight looked uneasily to the side, wondering how long it would take the conversation to turn toward finding a way to use her as a harmonic power source. Before the discovery of the underworld flame and her disappearing, it had been a prospect Shinespark was intrigued by...

"How much money do we have, anyway?" Maple asked, curious. "I don't know very much about money systems, remember."

Gerardo beamed. "Ah, well, the Griffon Empire's system is somewhat complicated, but I'll explain it as best as I'm able. Gold and silver are the raw materials the system is based around. There are exactly two kinds of coins minted from them, silver bits and golden bites."

Starlight blinked and perked her ears, Equestria's name for money catching her attention. But weren't bits supposed to be the gold ones?

"Bites are worth sixteen bits. It may seem an odd number to ponykind, but consider this..." Gerardo made an odd motion with his talons Starlight couldn't begin to follow. "Griffon talons are well-suited to counting on," he went on, "and sixteen turns out to be an easy and effective number to count to on a single side. The coins are measured according to the actual metal rarity, and minted in sizes such that their weight, metal value, and actual value line up! It's quite ingenious."

Maple nodded. "Bites are worth more than bits. How much do actual things cost, like a loaf of bread?"

"It... somewhat varies." Gerardo swallowed. "Here is where things get tricky. Gold and silver are a mite too scarce to use as the basis for finance everywhere, and the tendency of pirates to steal and hoard such coins is part of the problem. At the value of a single bit... it would purchase perhaps a hundred loaves of bread. So, the Empire produces a secondary type of currency as well, known as chips. The Empire is constantly making more, and pays them out as compensation for all government jobs and purchases. However, they make no guarantees on the value, and leave it up to whatever citizens are willing to trade for them. And as they are constantly making more..."

Starlight raised an eyebrow. "Wouldn't that make them worthless if they were everywhere and easy to get?"

"Precisely." Gerardo tapped a talon. "However, because they are so common and possess such a low value, it makes them workable for common transactions and payments, even if they are an undesirable form of storing wealth as their value constantly shrinks. Now! You might think of this as an ideal system for systematically impoverishing those who are already poor enough to have no wealth to store in stable forms of gold, however! There is a catch."

The white city continued drifting by in the background as he talked, the Dream moving closer to the shore bridge and the city's shadow. "Once every year, on what is known as No-Value Day..." Gerardo dramatically narrated. "The Empire ceases recognizing the current form of chips as a currency and begins issuing a new form. And, in the days leading up to this, citizens can cash in their existing chips in return for a small number of the new currency's first run, at which point it is rare enough to be considerably scarcer than silver, and the offered exchange rate in fact considerably ups the value of the total holdings of anyone who makes the exchange."

Shinespark blinked. "Wait, what? Is that even mathematically possible?"

Gerardo shrugged. "Possible or not, they make it occur. I personally suspect some form of behind-the-scenes action to ensure it remains feasible, but whether through monetary magic, slight of talon or loss to themselves, they make it occur."

"My head hurts," Maple mumbled, shaking herself. "What does that mean for us? I just wanted to know the values of the various coins so someone didn't try to rip me off..."

"The short of it is this, then." Gerardo beamed helpfully, even though Starlight had to agree that she had no idea what to do with the information he had just told them. "Gold and silver, like what Kero gave us, are valuable and ideal for long-term asset storage, while chips are cheap and gradually become worthless with time, but are useful for everyday transactions. Unless it is close to No-Value Day, in which case the rich suddenly wish to buy from the poor and everyone turns a profit, which I believe is still several months away. Thus, we will be most successful if we sit upon our gold and only exchange it for chips in small pieces when we wish to make purchases. It really is quite simple!"

Starlight didn't agree, and agreed with Shinespark that everyone making money out of nowhere made no sense. That didn't just happen; there had to be a loser somewhere... but she didn't question it. It wasn't like she was going to be doing anything with money any time soon.

"It looks like they're about to dock us," Shinespark interrupted, pointing out at the tugboat as they entered the maze of a fortress wharf. "We can pay for the boat staying here today and worry about what next later. I'd like to get a lay of the land before planning too much, and like Gerardo said, we can afford to take our first day as a vacation. Who's coming ashore? Everyone?"

"I don't see why anyone would stay." Slipstream shrugged happily, her trademark knit sweater hugged tight against the salty breeze. "It's the Griffon Empire! I'm going to see the sights."

"And hope Valey finds us..." Maple added, parsing through the mess of pegasi and griffons soaring back and forth in the sky. Starlight looked too, and couldn't see a single batpony.

"Yeah," she added. "And hope Valey finds us."