“Nothing, absolutely Celestia damn nothing.” Deep Analysis burst through the doors for the hall with the force of an angry farmer. His usually messy hair was even more frazzled than usual. Behind his was a procession of dozens of books and papers magically floating behind him before being slammed down in a barely organized pile on a table that had yet to be fully covered. “There is absolutely nothing to prove that a single thing has ever lived on or near the Spires. For all intents and purposes, the only living things that have ever gone near them have been the fools that have tried to best the damn things.”
“Mm-hmm,” Lucky Charms seemed partially distracted, “besides the windigos, Bighoof, and some other mythical creatures of course.” He placed the notebook with the translation on top of the table of books his friend has just dropped. “Your research was as inefficient as usual.”
“My research is never inefficient, the ponies and griffins in charge of organizing and collecting the information just don't know how to do their jobs. I can't count how many hours I’ve had to spend trying to find reports on the changes to national borders that have happened in the last thousand years because some smart ass filed them in the legal section rather than the geographical section.” Deep Analysis released a growl of frustration before making his way over to his friend, but more importantly, what would hopefully be a translated entry... or twelve. “Let’s hope you made more progress than me.”
“And yet you forgot about yak’s all on your own…” Lucky Charms mumbled. “Well, I did learn a few things about the Spires,” he said aloud again, “though, it is more or less just the beginning of their journey for now. You know, leaving the beloved wife, face the first few obstacles and such.” He paused for a second and scratched his chin. “With the usual mistakes and errors that lead to one’s own downfall of course.”
“Like what? Going to the Spires in the first place? This stallion was supposed to be a professional, I doubt that there could have been much that would have been fatal.”
“Too much Self-esteem is often named as a reason for deadly sport accidents you know? Anyway, our skilled little novel writer here,” Lucky Charms pointed at the translated notes, “missed his time-window by accident and then rushed everything. He thought he could handle the weather and also that his comrades would be slightly more resilient against the environment than they were. Obviously, even with the journal saying they made it to their desired location in time, given the outcome of him being frozen and the rest of the team missing, he was wrong.”
“Let me see that.” Deep Analysis grabbed the translated portions of the journal with his magic and began to quickly skim over what had been written. After about two minutes of his eyes traveling over the papers and shuffling through them to get to the next page, he finally slammed them down in a huff. “I would hardly call that a mistake. He had to foalsit two of the ponies traveling with him, and I hardly consider him rushing everypony to be unwarranted. The storm freaking reversed course on them, what the actual Tartarus. Storms don't do that… ok, maybe they do occasionally, but I have never heard of a super-cell of that magnitude turning around, especially when it’s over land. And look at how he described it, this was a blizzard out of some cheesy disaster movie.”
“And that is exactly the point.” Now his friend smiled in victory. “The weathers change surprised them, and every expert would have just canceled the whole thing and waited till the next window. But not so with our little adventurer here, he rushed towards his first resting point, he went anyway, and, it was all planned under his oversight.” Lucky shook his head in disapproval. “Going on this trip with a poorly chosen team, under time-pressure, and with a lack of equipment we have today.” Lucky gave another shake of his head. “This expedition was going to end in disaster from the outset.”
Deep Analysis raised up a hoof and opened his mouth in preparation to yell back, but quickly lowered his hoof and just glared. “OK, I’ll give you that. But to be fair to the guy, he didn't exactly choose any of that. His queen ordered him to go, with a team he didn't organize, and in a time frame, he said he was not a fan of. In all fairness, he probably fared better than I would have given him credit for.”
“Maybe, maybe not, point is, if you read this more carefully, I think he was kind of eager to go. Yes, he is grumpy and all that, but below the surface, it sounds like he wanted to go for his queen. He didn’t want to leave his wife and such, yeah, but it definitely feels like his adventurer side got the better of him. I mean, if his queen demanded his expertise in the first place, she surely would have listened if he told her they would need to wait just a little longer, or, if he would have insisted on better suited expedition members.” He shrugged. “But no, he didn’t, and when the storm came, he rushed everything.”
“Thanks for that. I just had the time of my life trying to find any information on anything that could be considered living inhabiting the Spires, and then I get to hear how the pony we found probably doomed his party because he wanted to play Daring Do. That's what I needed today.” Deep Analysis cleared his throat before continuing in a poor imitation of Lucky’s voice. “Hey, I know you just popped every artery in your brain trying to find information to prove that ponies wouldn’t fall so far as to kill each other like a pack of rabid timberwolves, but did you know the leader of the party doomed them from the start because of his incompetence?”
“Thanks, Lucky for reminding me I shouldn’t be so optimistic. Really helps.” Deep Analysis scowled before slamming his face against the top of the table.
“Hey, what are friends there for?” His friend tapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. “Besides, you may be in luck today! From what it seems, something got him, and probably the rest of his team, before his incompetence in the form of the weather, lack of equipment, and the team's lack of skill could get them! If that isn’t uplifting for you,” he sprung up, his wings in the air, “what is?”
Deep Analysis turned his head to face his friend, giving him an unamused stare. “That's your idea of cheering me up? His team didn’t die the slow horrible death of freezing, they died the painful quick death of being torn limb from limb. You have a funny way of trying to cheer me up, you know that?”
Lucky smiled innocently. “You know I'm always an optimist!”
“Now all that’s left to do is find out what this stallion did to become so hated by the rest of his party that a windigo decided to use him as a meal.”
“If, a Windigo took him that is! We not sure about that yet!” Lucky interrupted him.
Deep Analysis raised his hoof into the air and began waving it around before continuing. “Yes, because obviously the pony frozen in magical ice so cold that no amount of heat can melt it came for something other than a windigo. If you have any alternatives now would be the time to voice them.”
“I surely would name some, if my good friend dweeb, I mean Deep, had found some during his research, however, let me quote Sherlay Hays here: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Therefore, we haven’t removed everything impossible yet, so the answer is still up in the air.”
“Well, unless you have faith that the spires are actually a part of the world that leads to Jötunheimr, and they met a frost giant or two, I don’t know of any alternatives.”
“You read too many of these comic books, Deep.” Lucky face winged theatrically. “The next thing you're going to tell me is that the power ponies are to blame. You should take this more seriously, really!”
“First off, the comic books borrowed from old crystal pony religious stories, second off, I don't see you going out of your way to dredge through, like, three libraries worth of books trying to make heads or tails of what we’re finding here.” Deep Analysis was about to continue before he noticed that Lucky was sticking his tongue out at him. “Really? Of all the times you chose now to make light of what's going on?”
His pal just shrugged. “What should I say, it’s not like this frozen stallion is going anywhere, anytime soon. He waited for you a few thousand years more or less, this thing here isn’t exactly time critical you know.” He blinked, “And you tend to take things far too serious and get consumed by them to the point you start to get nothing done at all. Better to lighten up the situation now before you reach the point where you lock yourself up with your books for a few days straight and sleep a week in one row afterwards.”
“Well, seeing as you are determined to irritate me as a means to stop me from doing what I usually do, and just about nothing that's been translated so far even gives us a clue as to when this stallion lived, I’m just going to wait for the next translation to show up. Hopefully, the stallion had the foresight to include important names or something so we can pinpoint a time period.”
“Well, there is some kind of clue in the translation already, in the matter of the time period that is. As you read, there is an outpost mentioned, about…“ he took the notes and skimmed through them for a second, “nearly two days away from their starting point, near a location of ‘Ruck Ridge’. This means, if you find Ruck Ridge mentioned somewhere in the archives, or said outpost, you have at least a clue for the earliest time his expedition could have happened.”
“One problem, I already know the outpost. Grey Spire. It wasn’t that hard to figure out. He said it was the westernmost outpost and right next to the Spires, only one outpost fits that description. It's actually the only outpost from before Sombra to have survived. So unless a three-thousand-year period of time is a good narrowing down of possibilities, we are still just as lost as we were when we started.”
“Okay, so you have the latest and earliest point in time this expedition could have happened, a time-span of three thousand years. That's a start, if you crosscheck this information with the first discovery of yaks in pony history, compare their equipment with what they invented during the years, and, with a little luck that is, you get a good idea of when this would have occurred.”
“That’s… actually a good idea. Let's see, the first contact with yaks was about a thousand years before Sombra, the clothes our frozen companion is wearing started being worn from around a millennium to a millennium and a half after Grey Spire was built. So that gives us about a thousand years to work with.” A smile worked itself onto Deep Analysis’s face. “And I said that a super-cell of that caliber should never reverse course. If I look into the records from that thousand year time, I can figure out what expeditions to the Spires occurred.”
“And if you ask your pal Lucky Charms nicely and admit that he is the smartest pony around, I may tell you an even better indicator for the year,” now he gave Deep his best smile, “but only if you ask really nicely that is.”
Deep Analysis gritted his teeth before sighing and hanging his head. “Fine. Oh, wise and genius birb of knowledge, what, pray tell, is this indicator of the year you know of?”
“Hmm, I think you can do better than that, I think you say it better kneeling, don’t you think?” His mischievous smile got even brighter.
“Charms, I’m tired, I had to deal with you being you, and I finally had a breakthrough as to when this might have happened thanks to you reminding me I tend to examine the forest and not the trees. I am REALLY not in the mood right now to deal with you being the stereotypical griffin and demanding more from me.”
“You had a breakthrough, because I reminded you?” Charms snorted. “More like I pointed it out.” He hovered in the air and crossed his forelegs. “It's always me doing the work and the thinking while you take the credit.” Looking down on his friend, he noticed the exhausted face of Deep. “Fine, okay, one last time I let you get away with this!” Slowly he flew over to the pile of books, grabbed the translation along with the original text, and landed with both on Deeps back, sitting there like a storyteller.
“If you take this text, the original one, and look… here,” he pointed at a certain spot, “you see the words our frozen friend uses. Of course, I can’t read the text in a whole, but some words are still the same as in the original of Shakespony! And that means…”
“That this was around the time of Shakespony? Charms, I study equipolgy, not linguistics, I would have just as much luck at figuring out when old ponish became middle ponish as a child.”
“No, stupid!” Charms gave his friend a light slap with the notes. “The word Tartarus, Tartarus is a place in Equestria! A place that had to be discovered first! That he not only knows it, but also it already had become a phrase means that the expedition happened after ponies discovered Tartarus!”
“Your right! Tartarus was found around two thousand seven-hundred years before Luna's banishment. That narrows the time frame to about two hundred years.” Deep sprinted back out the door, forcing Charms to jump into the air to avoid falling off his back. “I’m going back to the library to see if there are any reports of a super-cell in the two hundred years after the discovery of Tartarus.”
“Book-horse!” Charms yelled after him.