Monday.
Professor Oobleck raced around the classroom, “Approximately eighty years ago, the year thirty-forty-one, the largest war in recorded history came to an end. The kingdoms of Mantle and Mistral were facing numerous large grimm attacks, and-”
Sweetie Belle and Diamond Tiara took copious notes, the history behind this world was fascinating, even if the professor didn’t stop to elaborate on what he just said, and they had their pens race across the paper in an effort to keep up. Apple Bloom was generally disinterested, she had given up trying to follow the professor’s lecture and simply trusted that her teammates would gather any important information. Scootaloo was still goofing off with Ruby in the background.
Once he paused for a second, Diamond raised her arm “Excuse me, but you never mentioned the reason exactly why the faunus were aiding the Kingdom of Vale during the second year of the war…”
The rumbling trucks started to slow, and Cozy Glow got to her aching feet, holding her pistol in her hands, “What’s going on,” She called into the cab, “Another grimm attack?”
“Nope,” The driver’s voice called from up ahead, “We’re here…”
The white fang started to dismount from their trucks and retrieving their camping equipment. The feeling of the bumpy road below racing past had been the filly’s constant companion throughout the past two days, and walking around on solid ground again felt utterly alien.
There were a series of large canvas tents, a standard bearing the flag of the white fang, a firing range for those strange weapons the faunus carried, and dozens of masked faunus milling about, setting up more tents. Out of one tent, the largest, came a faunus stallion in a black suit of some kind, a sword on his belt, and an ornate bone-mask with red twisting designs, a pair of black horns jutting from his crimson hair… Cozy couldn’t help but imagine that Tirek creature some of her books mentioned.
Ironwood wasn’t happy… That was clear. “Forgive us general… We tried to track where the perpetrators went, but it’s not just the tracks… There is absolutely no sign where they went, it’s likely that they went into Mantle, but it’s not guaranteed, and even if we did know that they entered the city, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to find them before they cause some other incident, mostly on account of not knowing anything about them.”
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention… You will continue to search Mantle and the surrounding tundra for the next few months, if you haven’t found any sign of these criminals until then, we’ll just pretend this never happened…” Ironwood replied to Clover… Damn, this was a problem, he’ll just have to keep the Ace Ops in Atlas until after the Tournament…
“Yes, sir…” Clover replied.
“One last thing Clover…” Ironwood continued, “If you catch the targets, bring them directly to me… Even if I’m in Vale at the time.”
“Yes, sir…”
Tuesday.
Professor Peach handed out tests to each of the kids in class, and while they worked away on the fourth or fifth questions on their tests, Apple Bloom had already finished the whole thing, and had retrieved some potion making supplies from her bag. She pulled some of those weeds that could, if mashed into a paste, help with repairing wounds, and mixed them together in boiling water with the extract from the plant that, when ingested, would speed up one’s aura recovery. As she did this, she poured a bit of her earth-pony magic into the plant matter as they were ground and boiled.
The trees in the room swayed toward the filly, and the plants started to gravitate in her direction, but this went unnoticed by the students as they continued working on their tests. All the while Apple Bloom brewed her potions. Condensing the vapours coming off the boiling plant-water and putting the ever so softly glowing green liquid into a glass bottle.
Twilight approached a building, it advertised itself as: Atlastec Scrolls, and she wandered her way in, the woman at the counter glared at her, but, unlike some of the other humans she had encountered in this town, didn’t refuse her from the store… The discrimination she had already come across in just a few days had been unsettling, sure, while most ponies had a distaste for other creatures for their various differences, there were few for example in Canterlot who would not willingly approach a griffon, seeing as they are predators that could easily tear apart and eat a pony, even the most discriminatory of ponies were at least polite to others… It appeared that the humans were far more aggressive in their disdain for the Faunus, which struck Twilight as particularly odd, as they seemed far more similar than, say, a hippogriff and a dragon.
She had to suppress her excitement and keep her exponentially growing list of questions in the back of her mind, that more than anything made the humans wary of her. She approached the counter and said, “I would like five of your best Scrolls please…”
“Seven-thousand and five-hundred lien…”
Twilight nodded… The currency these humans used seemed particularly strange in her eyes… The flimsy cards made from that plastic material the humans synthesized from different chemicals seemed so… Fragile, surely a metal coin, like an Equestrian Bit, would be far safer to handle, less prone to being lost or destroyed. Last night, Celestia had sent her a letter, with it came several hundred gold bits from the Canterlot treasury to fund her expedition, and so she drew a bag from her pocket and said, “I don’t have any lien, but I’m sure this will suffice.”
The woman at the counter looked skeptical, but then Twilight dropped the heavy coin of solid gold on the counter, and with a loud thump of heavy metal, it gleamed in the electronic light. The woman’s eyes went wide when she saw the chunk of rare metal, and, just taking two from the hundred-bit bag, went to retrieve the scrolls for this strange, wealthy, faunus woman.
Once she returned to the apartment, she had Spike send one of the scrolls to the princesses.
Wednesday.
A young man was walking down an alley in north Vale, taking a shortcut back to his home, it was the early morning, the sun had yet to rise, and in the lamplight he thought he saw a sliver of green light in the shadows, but dismissed it as a lost canister of dust or a stray piece of electronics.
He power-walked further into the darkness, wanting to get home before his wife woke up, but a strange presence behind him sent chills up his spine… He turned, seeing in the shadows a pair of acid-green eyes, large and round, like those of an insect. He staggered back preparing to run as the creature approached, a being, with a large head atop a disproportionately small body, all made from black chitin, muzzle filled with a pair of venomous fangs and fly-like wings flaring from a beetle’s shell on it’s equine body, the creature coming up to his chest in height.
From a wickedly curved and gnarled horn, the creature unleashed a wave of green energy that made the man’s body freeze in place, and he watched, unable to open his mouth to scream, as the insect-horse suddenly burst into green flames and transformed into a perfect replica of the man.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the best news for you all…” Pietro said as he marched into the clinic on his legged chair, something that Twilight spent hours fawning over, the first time she saw it… “Looks like Ironwood’s too busy with the preparations for the Vytal Festival, I won’t be able to talk with him about your missing siblings until three months from now, at the very least…”
Rarity and Rainbow Dash scowled, Spitfire muttered something about bureaucracy, but Twilight looked curious, and part of Pietro was afraid he had just started the girl on another crazy rant… “What’s the Vytal Festival?”
“Oh, you don’t know?” Everyone shook their heads. “Well, eighty years ago the great war came to an end, the peace negotiations were on the island of Vytal, just off the northern coast of Sanus… Since then, to celebrate the end of a great and terrible war, every two years, one of the kingdoms around the world hosts a great tournament, where our fighters can duel each other for the fame and glory of their kingdom…”
“Fascinating, a human holiday… The celebration of peace following the end of a great war, similar to Nightmare Night back home! You need to tell me more about this event, I’d love to see it for myself, when is it happening?” Twilight was starting to dance in place again.
“Oh, umm… Well, last year the kingdom of Mistral was the victor, thanks to the efforts of Team Indigo,”
“Wait! Pause… Spike!” Twilight said… Then, crawling from those bags she wore around her waist came a… Thing, looking like an elongated lizard with a pair of bat-like wings and clawed hind legs with a long serpentine tail and sharp snake-like head.
“W-What in the world is that thing?” Pietro said, “Some kind of pet lizard? I’ve not seen one with wings like that…”
“Hey! I’m not a pet!” Spike replied, angry.
“I-It can speak?”
“Of course I can speak!”
“I-I… What… In all my life I never-”
“I can tell you about Spike later…” Twilight said, “Spike record this information please…”
As the fillies learned on their first day, the last two days of the school week, Wednesday and Thursday, were both rather unique, as opposed to the standard schedule, the half of the day following lunch were both dedicated to particular classes. Ann Greene began her class by instructing the children, of all things, to play a game of hide-and-seek… This proved to be more intense than any game of hide-and-seek the fillies had ever experienced before, as the whole school was involved, every student was instructed to hide somewhere in the school, and the teachers would be searching for them. Credit was determined by how long one managed to stay hidden.
Apple Bloom and Diamond were found within the first few dozen minutes… Apparently hiding under one’s bed was not a very good hiding place, at least they did better than Jaune. Hours passed, and slowly, one by one, the captured students were brought toward the courtyard where they had been gathered at the start of the class… Sweetie didn’t fare too much better than Bloom or Tiara, but she at least had hidden herself in the bushes near Beacon Cliff, and thus had lasted a good half and hour longer than her teammates… Scootaloo was one of the last to be rounded up, apparently jumping up to hide atop a cloud floating above the school, one she created using her magic and had used some wind dust to launch herself and her cloud p into the sky… It was, of all things, a nevermore flying by to attack the hiding filly that revealed her location.
Toward the end of the day, Nia Whitemane and Pyrrha Nikos were brought in, and no one else was dragged back after them… Sweetie noticed that Blake was never found.
Thursday.
Team Sunbird trotted into the combat arena, a large square building that they had gotten plenty of experience inside over the past few days. It was constructed out of wood and plaster, like much of the buildings in Mistral, Lionheart was watching the students intently as they gathered on the bleachers on the sides of the building as, from the other side of the arena, Team Sun approached…
The countdown began, and the two teams prepared themselves… Sun leaning on his gunchuck-staff, much like how Silver dug the bottom spearhead of Diamondlance into the ground. Silver Spoon had gotten good with her spear, it was a long silver polearm with both a revolving firearm and glaive head on either end of the weapon, the two triggers on her spear’s handle fired the front and back guns respectively.
Sage raised his massive greatsword into the sky, as Rumble flapped his wings, floating a meter off the ground, taking aim with Pegasus, a water-cooled machine gun, the water jacket filled with fire-dust that could be launched from a nozzle above the barrel.
Scarlet took aim with his pistol as he drew his cutlass. Button Mash replied by drawing his sword and shield, his sword featuring a pistol built into the guard, and his shield transforming into a shotgun.
Finally, Neptune took aim with his energy rifle, as Dinky took aim with her musket… Unlike the other weapons, it didn’t fire bullets, but rather a drum of dust mounted to the side fed dust powder right into the firing chamber.
Lionheart finished his countdown with a cry of, “Begin!” and with that, the two teams fought.
Ironwood let out a weary sigh as he was dragged into a hospital… “What is it now… I already have enough to worry about…” He said as he was led into an immaculate white ceramic-plated room, inside which two surgery tables were laid out in the center, atop which were the naked forms of two men.
“Sir… One of these two was a soldier by the name of Abraham Locke, the other is a citizen of Mantle by the name Leo Cathedral, one was found at the site of a large crater out in the tundra, the other on the side of fifth street in downtown Mantle.”
A sinking feeling arose in Ironwood’s stomach, something related to the incident no doubt… “What is it?” He asked the doctor.
“They were originally mistaken for dead, but, when they were being taken to the morgue, a more thorough examination revealed that to not be entirely true… They seem to be in a state of… Suspended animation… For lack of a better term.”
“They’re in stasis?”
“Yes and no… It’s nothing like the stasis devices we have access to, this something different… They don’t have a pulse, they don’t breathe, we don’t even see any neural activity, for all definitions of the word, they’re dead, except they still produce body heat, and even make slight movements, as if they’re bodies are still sending electrical impulses to their muscles… It takes a considerable amount of force to move their bodies… The best analogy I can come up with compares them to metal mannequins with rusted joints.
“Have you tried a more invasive inspection?”
“After all our scanners concluded that they were dead, we tried cutting them open… A simple scalpel had minimal effect… As if their flesh was as hard as stone… We tried a bonesaw, but we bearly cut the skin… Eventually, we moved to dust augmented circular saw, and that’s when the more… Unsettling, discoveries were made.”
“Such as?”
“Well, their blood isn’t just stagnant, it’s sold… Not frozen, but solid… Observe.” The man drew a saw from a desk and proceeded to remove the arm of the Mantle citizen, and raise it up… There, blood could be seen in the exposed arteries and veins, but it didn’t flow out at all, it was merely stuck there as if it was painted on… This had to be some kind of magic, some kind of strange alien trick created by Salem, something! “The good news,” The doctor began, “We can cut them up all we like and as long as we put them back together properly, they won’t be harmed permanently. The comment drew Ironwood’s eyes to the numerous sewn up scars along the two men’s chests and limbs.
“Do you think there’s any way we can remove whatever is doing this?”
“I’m guessing it’s the work of someone’s semblance, so there’s no way to know for sure… We’ll try bringing in some people who might be able to help, but there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to undo it unless we force the perpetrator to undo the damage… Even then, some semblances aren’t able to undo their effects.”
“I understand… Keep on studying them, I want a full report later this week, if you are unable to undo the effects, keep them safely in storage, I don’t want these subjects dying if at all possible.”
Harold’s class took place inside the workshop, and each of the fillies were instructed to lay out their weapons atop the workbenches, and the teacher inspected everyone’s weapons as the students show off their functions… It was a fascinating class.
That Nora girl watched with interest as Apple Bloom showed off her autocannon in hammer form, and Apple Bloom realized that, in her whole time at this school, she had yet to use Applebuck as a hammer during a sparring class… Well, there was really no point to it, it wasn’t as strong in that form, and what kind of idiot would fight close up when you could engage at range, particularly when fighting monsters, none of the grimm Apple Bloom had seen were particularly good at ranged combat.
Sweetie Belle explained how she channelled her energy through the dust crystal at the end of her halberd rather than using the energy inside the dust, therefore preventing the dust from being used up, to a rather confused professor and entire class.
Scootaloo’s pistols had a glaring flaw, one she realized all the way back during her fight with Dove, and that was they chewed through ammo, and didn’t have a good melee attack, the professor gave some comments to her about needing better bayonets on her pistols, and pointed to Ren’s guns as another example of a student who needed a better melee weapon.
Diamond looked at the cracked crystal on the guard of her sword… Her sword’s energy field still worked perfectly, but she hated that crack, and so she drew a small crystal of red dust and set it, giving the remnants of her cracked hard-light dust crystal to Apple Bloom, perhaps she could make another dust potion from it… Diamond cringed at the way the pink and red clashed with each other, but ignored it, red was the only kind of crystal she had on hand at this time.
Diamond was surprised when she went to test her repairs… The moment she let her magic flow into the sword, the red crystal turned pink to match the others, and now, her blade was not only wreathed in a field of light, but also a twisting blaze of pink flames.
It was late, Twilight was sitting on her bed, playing with all the different settings her scroll had, when Rarity approached… “What is it?” The alicorn faunus asked.
“Well, I realize that we never checked the machine Discord gave us back in Ponyville…”
“I asked Pietro about it, he just said it was an old scroll, not much else unique about it, so I’ve just been keeping it in my bag, don’t really know what to do with it now that we all have our own scrolls…”
“I also had another question…” Rarity said, “Do you remember when you used those stasis spells on that guard and the drunken loudmouth a few days ago?”
“Yeah?” Twilight asked.
“Well, what exactly was that spell you used… I’ve not seen a spell like that before…”
“Oh, it’s very simple… The basic pattern was created by Starswirl the Bearded, as you know he was a master of time manipulation, the original idea behind the spell was to freeze a target in time, and while it succeeded… The time flowing around them meant that they couldn’t be interacted with, they would simply stand there, frozen in time, unable to be moved, unable to be harmed, unable to be affected by anything other than magic… I changed that spell around a bit so that way each individual cell of a target was frozen but not the individual itself, that way the target could be moved around and affected by others while being perfectly preserved… I was going to suggest it to the princess for use in the field of medicine before this whole Discord this happened.”
“Intriguing…” Rarity said… “Can you teach it to me?”