“Sir, a blue winged horse with a horn has been found in the rubble near the ship,” Dominic said as the rest of the briefing room looked at the hulking marine like he lost his mind.
“If Bill needed me to take a look at something out there, he could have called me out there with something far less obviously bullshit, you know,” Jack responded, leaning against the table.
“Who knows, Captain,” Nicole said with a smirk on her face, “Perhaps we’ve actually crashed headlong into a magical petting zoo and rather than fixing our ship we can ride home on a couple borrowed pegasi.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake you two,” Clark groaned, “Though we are on world that was probably screwed with, I suppose it might be a possibility.”
Jack began “If there is a blue horse outside I will eat my-” but stopped himself as a projection of the winged beast amongst the rubble flashed into existence in front of the marine.
“Can we hold you to that, Captain?” Nicole asked, leaning back in her seat with a wide grin on her face.
Ignoring her, Jack stepped forward and took a closer look at the image, spending several seconds looking closely at the finer details. “Long mane, extreme difference in length from the rest of the visible hair indicating that it is probably not a survival feature for insulation, unlikely to be present in a species made for the wild given its chance of getting caught on the environment, smoothness possibly indicates hair care. Mark on the behind, clear image of a crescent moon in a coloured splotch, equally unlikely to be natural. Various wounds, maybe significant blood loss…” he said, finally turning back around to face the non-marine population of the room with a serious look on his face. “I’m going to need to see this horse ASAP, it might be the key to finding whatever human presence there is on the planet, this thing is obviously cared for and I don’t see the damn thing combing its mane without hands.”
Pearce, who had been silent up to this point shrugged and said “Medbay still had power when I passed by it on my way here, you might be able to fix the horse up.”
“Good, then I may be busy for the next bit,” Jack said and turned to leave before halting himself and saying one last thing to the crew “Oh, also, you all are dismissed to start repairs; drones should be a priority to help everything else go more smoothly.” It was then that he took his leave, Dominic spinning to follow him.
“Sir, there is a large drop outside of the non-blocked entrance, you should just let me grab the horse,” Dominic said as he trudged along behind the speedwalking Captain, who seemed rather hurried, albeit understandably so.
Jack seemed to think on this for a moment, eyes drifting up and to the left, looking at nothing. “How big is the drop, exactly?” he questioned, seeming to snap back to reality.
“Twenty or so feet, sir,” the marine said, a tone of hope in his voice. Perhaps he wouldn’t do the dumb thing.
For a few seconds Jack was lost in thought, before snapping his fingers and saying “No need! I know where a ladder should be stored that should reach. By the way, is the air breathable or do I need an environmental skin? ‘Course, I’m expecting breathable given this is probably an engineered world, buuuut…”
“No, sir, the air is breathable,” the marine sighed in defeat as his superior officer sprinted ahead and went digging in a supply closet with all the appropriate zeal that comes with being the most senior officer with nobody to say no to his bad ideas, pulling out a third of a meter by a third of a meter by three five centimeter rectangular prism.
Hurrying up to the airlock, the Captain slammed the button to cycle air and the marine followed, barely getting through in time before the door slid shut. A few seconds later, the external door opened and Jack walked to the edge before holding up the square, pressing a previously unseen button and watching an ultra-thin ladder materialize from the bottom of the device; making sure to wedge one of the legs rather well against a rock before starting to climb down hurriedly. “Mind showing me where the horse is?” Jack asked to the marine watching him from above.
“I’ll do it instead. Sir, why are you out here?” An unexpected voice, Bill’s in fact, asked. At the same moment, Dominic hopped from the airlock cleanly to a nearby rock with a loud thump, then to the top of the ship to provide proper overwatch.
“To bring the horse to the medbay,” Jack stated like a simple fact and turned around to face the marine followed by a moment of silence between them.
“Alright, but why?” Bill asked, deadpan, “You should be inside where there aren’t any things to kill your body. We have, what, maybe a half working PA system running for you to puppet if you get eaten by a plant or whatever there is out here?”
“Pssh,” he scoffed, brushing the criticism off, chuckling, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve done more with less.” Bill sighed deeply in response after a few seconds of of Jack refusing to elaborate.
“Alright then, this way sir,” the aged marine responded, turning around.
Nodding, he followed as directed, stepping over the rather nasty rubble with his guide. After perhaps a minute of walking the two of them came across the blue horse which was laying in the rubble, rocks cleared off of it. Thankfully, the horse was still breathing and had not expired, although not for long by the look of those injuries, by Jack’s estimation.
Even then perhaps six feet in height if it stood up, the horse was lying there as peacefully as could be given the circumstances and deep gouges, and the fact that that whole wing really didn’t look right, besides being a wing on a horse. “Mind helping me get it to the medbay?” the Captain asked as he circled around to the front, examining the surprisingly undamaged horn rather closely as he worked out a good place to lift it from, eventually deciding on grabbing it around the shoulder.
In response, the marine put his gun away and crouched down before lifting it effortlessly, slinging it gently enough over his shoulder. “That works too, I suppose,” Jack said happily, turning around and making his way back towards the airlock.
Behind him he heard Bill’s bootsteps start thunking behind him again, following closely as he climbed the ladder and commanded the door which had closed automatically behind them earlier to pop back open, Jack climbing back up and Bill actually using the ladder, probably, he figured, to not jostle the subject too much. After the door closed behind both of them the airlock cycled and Jack was off again with a marine in tow as he swiftly walked towards the medbay.
Reaching it too, the door automatically opened and he took a nice, deep breath of the air in the sterile room, breathing in the pleasant, to him, scent. “Set it on the table,” he said, “I’m going to be here for a while, I think.” Perhaps… ah, yes, that would be the perfect way to stabilize it without too much of a draw on their momentarily limited supplies.
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Luna’s eyes shot open as she came back to the world of the living, a dull pain thumping in the back of her head as greenery greeted her. Shakily, she got back up on her hooves and it became rather blatantly obvious to her that this was very much not the forest she flew over… however along ago, it was rather hard to think at the moment.
While the ground was covered in dirt and had plants growing out of it, all four walls of her little rectangular prison were rocky and above was entirely blocked off by plant growth, with the occasional small hole to let light in. Anypony with half a brain could tell that this was a prison made to not look quite like a prison at first examination. However, despite that fact there was something that troubled her even more: something about this felt wrong on some level. An involuntary shiver crept up her spine as she continued to look around, checking for any sort of exit.
She wondered who her captors were. Perhaps when the object crashed in the forest of Lecta something happened upon her when she was unconscious, and their plan was to hold her for ransom. However, she dismissed that notion almost immediately. After all, it was rather obvious that whoever it was didn’t think very highly of her, given their extremely primitive attempt to trick her into thinking that she was in some sort of natural trap with nary an illusion spell in sight to make it less obvious; anypony that knew of her value would know better than this.
Horn lighting up bright, she began to cast a spell to teleport but as she began to trace a path in the ambient magic for her to follow what could be best be described as magical turbulence flung the trace off hard in a spiral. The plan of merely going straight up as high as she could in order to hit open air was a bust, then, who knew where she would end up? It could very easily result in instant disintegration if the path changed or broke. She would have to find another way out. Short range wasn’t much better of an option for her either, without knowing where to go, but perhaps if she could figure out how to correct for the turbulence…
The fact that they thought that this would work pointed towards them having little to no contact with ponies, but she could not think of anywhere in the Forest of Lecta that something both sapient and capable of construction of a cell like this could hide and not be found.
A grim possibility crept into her mind. What if what captured her was something that came aboard the crashed object? Not only would it explain her captivity, it could also potentially explain the object’s origins. She would have to be prepared for anything, were that the case. Who knows what could have been aboard if they came with prepared cells?
Carefully, she scanned along the side of the walls of the structure, hoping that there was some hint as to how to get out. The walls appeared to be sealed shut with no intermittent breaks in the rock walls that might indicate a door, nor was she aware of any enchantments to conceal a door that would survive exposure to that turbulence even short term. She felt out with her magic again, feeling the natural currents… and it became rather obvious that the light source above was not sunlight, there was none of the inherent magic associated with sunlight coming from it.
Walking up to the wall, Luna tapped a roof on the rock wall, confirming that it was, indeed, real rock. The fact that her captors were able to replicate sunlight mostly accurately and make the rock seem natural in its placement to the point of leaving no trace of was rather impressive in its own right, but also quite worrying. After all, that implied a good deal of magical mastery to recreate it so flawlessly, as normal means would leave visible tool marks… Ah, unless they carved it from natural rock instead, that would make the job much easier.
Perhaps there was something underneath the dirt that might be of some use to her? Picking a spot where there wasn’t much vegetation aside from moss to get in her way she begun to dig into the dirt with her hooves, slowly shoveling away the rather sandy soil. About a hoof and a half down her hoof hit something that felt like cold metal and a shiver similar to the one that went up her spine earlier sprang forth,creeping up her leg like a cold dread.
It took a few minutes, but she cleared some area around her dig site and withdrew her hooves, spotting a floor made of grey metal that just radiated that very same feeling of wrongness. Luna took a step back, shaking her head to clear her mind.
She had a feeling that there wasn’t going to be a hatch buried somewhere under the dirt, with so much dirt on top of the floor it would have been impossible with them to close it in such a way that didn’t leave an obvious pit. With the walls and floor out, that left one option on where the entrance was. Looking up to the fake canopy with light streaming from out of it she kept a close eye for any irregularities. There, Luna spotted it, off towards one of the corners of the room was a very faint outline of a rectangle where the light minisculely dimmed behind the vegetation.
Stretching her wings out, she flapped upwards and took off, rising towards the dim spot. As she approached, she grabbed onto the overhanging branches and squinted her eyes, shiver running down her spine again as she looked directly at the lit panel then exposed. Nonetheless, it was there, a small rectangular outline indicating some sort of hatch, albeit with no way visible way to open it from this side. However, short range teleportation wasn’t rendered impossible by the disruption, and now that she knew that she wasn’t going to teleport into a wall on the other side she could get out safely.
Horn lighting up brightly once more, Luna focused her magic into a short ranged teleportation spell, tracing a path carefully, feeling out the differences and compensating for the distortion… and readjusting as it slowly shifted under her grasp, and finally releasing the spell, disappearing in a flash.
When she reappeared, she was in a gray corridor, and the now quite disorienting feeling of wrongness returned in full force. Looking down at her own hooves the metal compelled her to find some way, any way, to get away from it. Then there it was, a distant, loud, shrieking of a klaxon, tensing her up even more than she was already.
They already know, she realized, looking around the smooth metal corridor for an escape route. With really nothing to go on, she ran, looking for anything that might be a way out of the ominous, disconcerting corridors.
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“Strike One, set up,” Jack Fair commanded from his pod, watching through the now operational cameras of the craft as the creature fled, manually marking her as a target in the craft’s systems as the automated method to do so was apparently down too, so the marines would be fed constant data as to the escaped creature’s location. “Watch, but do not engage, until you can take her down for sure without her harming herself or any of you. I want to figure out what we’re up against here. Prep non-lethal measures.” He should have known that something was going to go horribly wrong when the creature’s hair started looking like the night sky after she woke up, but at least the damage to the in-craft comms and cams was mostly superficial, thank fuck Nicole could bang the repairs out in the few hours of time they had free since recovering her.
“Orders confirmed, sir,” Bill responded directly, with no other voices joining in. Standard operational radio protocols, it seemed.
It had caught them off guard when the creature demonstrated the ability to bloody teleport, to say the least. It would have been one thing if it used a miniature wraith drive-esque mechanism, but the fact that she materialized on the other side quite literally the instant that it left, judging from the camera feed frame by frame; it told him that there was something else at play here. Additionally, the fact that it had figured out where the hatch so fast pointed to a startling degree of intelligence… He quite hoped that she wasn’t actually just another human or created client species in a weird body panicking over the situation.
“Setting ambuscade,” the aged marine said, cameras confirming that half his squad were set up at the next corner the creature was going to pass by and the other half at the previous intersection, with plasma throwers, rail guns, and laser rifles swapped out for shock sticks and stun guns.
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Every corridor of this damned place seemed the exact same to Luna as she sprinted through it; how the actual inhabitants of this place didn’t get lost was beyond her. Up ahead, she heard the faint repeated tapping of metal on metal. Hoofsteps? It could be nothing, but she couldn’t afford to take any chances. Horning lighting up brightly as she traced a path in the magic once more as she ran, she teleported past the next intersection in a flash of light.
Immediately behind her there was a rush of activity as the sound of metal on metal intensified in a flash. Indeed, definitely an ambush. Cautioning a glance behind her, she finally got her first glimpse of her captors, her eyes going wide. Four hulking two-legged beings of gray metal sprinted behind her, smooth, featureless carapace giving an impression of menace. Not a word came from them, no command halt or to stop, no indication that they were going to do anything but attack with those mysterious baton-like weapons in their hands. A strong gut feeling told her that it wasn’t exactly a good idea to directly fight them unless it was her only option, she’d likely need powerful spells and pumping the required amount of magic through the turbulence… Brr.
Turning her head back around, she rounded a corner as she continued to run, horn lighting once more as she put a shield back up as a precaution. A dull thud-clink sounded as she felt several small... somethings bounce off her barrier, albeit with not much force and she did most definitely not want to figure out what happened if those hit her.
The boots thundered closer and closer as she became aware that the creatures were closing rather quickly despite their two legged gait, and these corridors were too narrow to risk flying, corners would be a nightmare if not impossible. Without a second glance backwards as the boots closed she teleported a good deal forwards once more, broadening the gap. Her pursuers sounded undeterred by her new found lead and continued on regardless, but a devious plan crept into Luna’s head, sure, a complex spell to actually deal with them long term required too much power, but something incredibly simple, perhaps?
She slowed down a bit, to let her pursuers close the gap and give herself a bit of time to channel some more magical energy, preparing three spells in sequence. In a flash the first went off as she teleported forward once more, but this time she faced her pursuers without halting her pace. Spell two executed as she created a simple barrier directly in front of her, perhaps ten hooves ahead and a mere five hooves from the lead pursuer.
As the one in the lead met the wall head on, it went bounced backwards off the reactive field, although not as much as Luna expected, pointing to those metal frames being even heavier than she thought. Near instantly, however, the other two braced themselves after seeing the first go ever so slightly airborne, but they were toppled as well nonetheless, even if it was not as far as the first, yet there was no crack of anything breaking when they hit the ground, just the sound of metal screeching as they slid across the floor and one bounced off of a wall, cracks appearing in the large shield.
With her third spell, Luna dropped the temporary shield and teleported forward and bolted once more to increase her lead, but a horrible realization suddenly dawned upon her: there were four when the chase started. The sound of metal impacting the floor to her side was all of the warning she got before she was bodily tackled by the missing fourth, tumbling them both into a wall, shield nearly collapsing with a sharp pop as she was thrown against it and subsequently the wall. As she was still getting her bearings past her swimming vision, the creature went to work, as it wrapped the inside of its arm around her neck, with the weight making it impossible for her to roll it off her.
The angle it had her at was from the back, nullifying most of her close range capabilities out of the gate, especially given that her wings were pinned against the monster’s bulk. Without much of a choice she began charged a spell, a nearly skin tight shield, made difficult by her rather heavy distraction trying to both strangle and beat her into submission but she got it up just in time, the baton just cracking against the field as it formed. Out of better options, she focused on keeping her head out of the way of the creature’s swings and bringing her hooves up to her neck to try and pry the arm off, trying to come up with a way out.
She teleported, or rather attempted to, before she realized that being this close to the creature intensified the effect of the turbulence something fierce, focusing hard on correcting the path to get her elsewhere.
With a crack, her field gave around her neck, and the creature drove its pounding weapon into the weak spot with surprising speed for its bulk, sending a painful shock through her entire body, muscles spasming. Involuntarily releasing her spell, she teleported out of the creature’s grip, although coming a bit short of the distance that she wanted to get out it. She dared not use anything in extremely close quarters of the caliber that would be needed to pierce that armour, especially given that just revealed information.
However, something became apparent rather quickly as she attempted to get up to continue the escape: the muscle spasms from the contact with the creature’s weapon were not letting up, they were in fact getting worse. Twitching, she yelled out before collapsing entirely once more, unable to maintain the concentration needed for any spell. The four giants then approached, the other weapons at the ready. There was the soft sound of air whooshing and she felt a small stabbing pain barely noticeable amongst the shocks. Just managing to look down, she saw a dart sticking out of her barrel from the corner of her eye.
Then, just as suddenly as the chase started, it ended as she blacked out for the second time recently.