When the Admiral returned to Vespid’s office she was surprised to find Sparkler still there, chatting with a very bored looking Rook.
“...and she never removes that hat! Can you believe it?”
Rook glanced at the Admiral and smirked.
“See? You get it. You understand me, Rook. You have got to go diving with us sometime. I’ll have to think of some excuse to get out with Granite’s boys…”
“All you have to do is ask,” the Admiral said, tapping Sparkler on the back with a wingtip. Her massive mane stood on end and she jumped back, hiding behind Rook’s tank.
“S—you scared me!” Sparkler put a hoof to her chest, breathing slowly.
“Also, the hat is amazing.”
Sparkler groaned. “Sometimes I forget that you do know how to sneak…”
“There’s moments where it helps.” She took a moment to adjust her cap. “So, I thought I had one of the students relieve you?”
“You did, I just got back early because. Well. Rook!” Sparkler gestured at the seapony’s tank. “She gets me, y’see? I talk a lot, she doesn’t talk at all. Match made in the stars!”
The Admiral looked at the disgruntled seapony. “It would be even harder to get her up there with all the water…”
“Not like we have to worry about that or anything. Your little experiments aren’t getting ponies up there anytime soon.”
“You don’t have to worry,” the Admiral smirked. “Rook and I, though…”
Sparkler rolled her eyes. “Speaking of the stars… I hear I missed a rocket launch that didn’t explode?”
“You would have been bored. They’re more interesting when they blow up.”
“But… rocket!”
Rook tapped on the glass, making sure the two of them knew she was confused.
The Admiral cleared her throat, entering the well-known ‘lecture mode.’ “A rocket is a machine that uses explosive materials to fly through the air, leaving the world behind and entering the realm of the stars.”
Rook’s eyes widened, sparkling slightly at the edges.
“I think she’d like to hear the speech,” Sparkler said, nudging the Admiral carefully.
Tilting her hat up, the Admiral’s eyes lit up with childlike wonder. “In our current world, we are fixated on the past. We spend all our resources trying to reclaim what Old Equestria once had, diving beneath the waves to pick up remnants of a failed civilization. I understand it’s needed, but it has also brought a curse into the minds of our current generation. Ponykind, as a race, thinks only in terms of what is and what was. We don’t give the slightest pittance to what will be.”
She trotted to one of the windows of Vespid’s lab, pointing at the rising sun. In the sky around it were a few sparkling airships. “Even here, in the learned isle of Sanctaphrax, we don’t realize what we’ve done. Old Equestria didn’t have advanced airships, steam engines, or any complex manufactured industry! Yet we fixate on Medicine, Navigation, and History to bring society ‘back’. Bah. We already have society. We don’t need them anymore. We need to do something that’s truly us, to break beyond everything the past ever conceived of doing.”
Jumping on top of a crate of leaf samples, she pointed to the sky with her wing. “And to that end, we are going to launch something so high into the sky that there is no air. With so much force that it won’t fall back down. A new era that turns away from the ocean and toward the stars.” She grinned, pressing her face into Rook’s tank. “You in?”
Rook nodded quickly, jaw hanging open in awe.
“Great, you just indoctrinated a seapony into your wild daydreams,” Vespid muttered, walking into her lab. “She’d be much more useful as a subject of study than stuck with that sub of yours.”
The Admiral frowned, deciding it was best to just get to business. “Have you learned anything new?”
“Lots, mostly stuff you wouldn’t care about. I’ve been gathering information to substantiate Rook’s claims and have distilled several interesting chemicals in her blood. She is from Old Equestria, knows the names of all the major cities we know about. Even knew what Griffonstone was, bizarrely enough. How she knows that and yet was never taught to write is beyond me…” Vespid shook her head. “She’s an intriguing little mystery and I can’t wait to see what she brings back. I call dibs on any others like her.”
“Dibs? Really?” Sparkler groaned.
“Consider it my mission to you. If you see a sensible Wyrd, you’re bringing it back. The sooner, the better, so shoo.”
“We’re stopping by Silver’s first,” the Admiral said.
“Fine, fine, just get on with it, hmm?” Already she was bored of them and driving needles into a seapony carcass for some presumably scientific purpose. They left without another word.
Silver’s abode wasn’t far from the School of Medicine. One elevator ride later they were at Sanctaphrax’s surface. This time there were fewer ponies in the lobby interested to see Rook, but the moment they left the School they were mobbed by students of every school.
“Ugh, he must have blabbed,” Sparkler muttered. “Maybe I should have stayed there all night…”
“I need you awake.”
“For what? We’re just taking care of this and going back to the Algol! I could have slept it off in my cot.”
“We both know you don’t use the cot.”
“‘Scuuuse me if a’ don’ say ‘hair-hammock’ in public!”
The clamoring crowd stopped talking to stare at her in concern.
“Oi! Back off!” She shaped her hair into a fist. “Any o’ you wanna piece o’ me? Ay’ll show ya some real hair-hammocks if yer so curious!”
The students collectively took a step back.
At this point Sparkler realized her accent had slipped and was blushing furiously. Clearing her throat, she lowered her hair-first. “We need passage to Silver’s. Clear the way?”
The herd decided it was a good idea to listen to her request, parting to allow them passage through one of the main tubes. This did not stop them from getting as close as possible to stare at Rook, but they weren’t impeding their progress anymore.
Rook bared her fangs at them, but this did not have the desired fearmongering effect. If anything it made them more curious to get a look at her insides.
However, the crowd was gone by the time they arrived at Silver’s. It was no secret that the stallion hated noise and nopony wanted to upset him. His home was one of the few buildings in Sanctaphrax that wasn’t a tower; little more than a circular stone house with no windows and only one iron door. Somewhat unexpectedly, the door was ajar. Somepony was already visiting Silver.
The Admiral didn’t bother waiting for whoever it was to be done. She waltzed right in, gesturing for Sparkler to bring Rook in as well. Despite having no windows, the interior was well lit with an eerie, unnatural blue aura. It was a mess with massive rolls of paper everywhere—the walls, the shelves, the floor, even coiled up into rolls and wads in random places. Virtually every inch of the paper had some sort of intricate, lifelike illustration on it. A few images of Rook could be picked out alongside the inside organic structure of a dead seapony, several leaves, some careful gear-mesh designs, and endless charts and graphs the Admiral couldn’t hope to discern.
There were two ponies in the room.
One was an extremely elderly stallion whose every last hair had turned white, wrinkles invading every inch of his body. Despite this, he gave off an aura of power with his crimson hat and robe literally sparkling with magic and studded with ornate gemstones of a half-dozen colors. One would think he was the last true wizard in the world, and for the most part that assumption was correct.
He was not Silver. His name was Leyline and he ran the nearly defunct sub-School of magic.
Grumbling in annoyance, he left, barely registering the Admiral’s presence. “If we don’t find a new adaptable magic talent, Silver, the practice of spellcraft ends here! Maybe think about expanding your sights!” He stormed out, not waiting for a response.
“I hope he kicks the bucket soon…” Silver breathed. “Almost as much as I hope to get peace and quiet so I may WORK!”
He slammed his brown hooves on his desk as he stood up, facing them. His mane was a soft black, but nopony would notice that first. The fact that he had no eyes was so jarring most ponies became dumbfounded in his presence. Instead of normal ocular organs, two smooth glass spheres took up his sockets, giving a clear window to the inside of his head. Their purpose, to keep two marbles of blue light rolling around in his skull.
The crystal ‘eyes’ jostled around as Silver’s face poked in the Admiral’s direction. “You. The star coot sent you. Ugh, why must I be constantly assaulted by all the pointless—”
The Admiral slammed her hoof on the desk, making Silver jump. “Let me put this simply. We need one of your eyes.”
“You and everypony on the island, mutant sky rat.” To emphasize his point, he produced a small jar filled with a half-dozen of the magic marbles. “You know how this works. I own the spell, you own the fancy experiments that need to be watched all the time.” He pointed at Rook without batting an eye, and then at his own cutie mark. It was hard to see in the blue light, but his mark was three small, blue dots arranged in a triangle. “And then you give my eye back when you’re done.”
“Oooooh, I see the problem,” Sparkler said.
With a shake of his head, the marbles in his skull clattered around. “Of course you do you daft c-”
“What would I have to give you to launch the eye into orbit?” the Admiral interrupted.
“No amount of money. Iota couldn't get me to give it up.” Seemingly thinking the conversation was over, he returned to his pages. With a levitating pen, he began to fill in more details of a fish one of his far-off eyes were presumably watching.
“Do you see this seapony? Of course you do, Vespid used one of your eyes to observe her all night. You know exactly what she is and what she’s doing. I’ll bring you something back from where she’s taking us. Something unique, something that you can have and none of the scientists here.”
“I’ll make the decision when you get back,” Silver huffed, not looking up from his drawings. “It’s going to have to be something really impressive to launch part of me into a star. I can’t make more. I can only see what I see. Being that high up is bound to get boring after a while. So whatever this mysterious ‘super-treasure’ is, it better be legendary.”
“It will,” the Admiral said, glancing back to Rook, who nodded in confirmation. “And then you’ll give us that eye.”
“Let me guess, or else?”
“I’d rather it not come to that.”
“Oh, it won’t. Now get out.”
Before leaving, the Admiral leaned closer to Silver’s ear. “You’d make more history here than anything else you’ve ever done… think about that.” She backpedaled and followed Sparkler out.
“...That guy’s a piece of trash,” Sparkler muttered after the Admiral closed the door behind them.
“Absolutely. But he has the eye spell, and we need a way to get data back from the stars. It’s the only thing that’ll work.”
“He’s got this entire island eating out of his hooves.” Sparkler huffed. “Let’s just get back to the ocean already. I can feel him watching. Yes, I know none of his eyes are here, shut up.”
With a curt nod, the Admiral led them back to the Sanctaphrax cavern, soon to return to the Algol.