-Inside the pyramid, Jacky-
“Can I please get the recipe for this?” It seemed Fluttershy was as sweet and gentle as ever, she pulled some paper and a pencil out of her saddlebags. “My friend Pinkie Pie would love this!”
“Sure thing, papyrus certainly has gotten fancy in this day and age.” Cheerful quickly started rattling off a recipe for Fluttershy, who dutifully took it down despite how fast she was babbling it out.
I turned to Baast and away from the ghostly pink cat teaching Fluttershy a recipe for these nifty sugar cane cakes and the recipe for how to get various shades of food coloring using fruit in various difficult sounding icing mixes.
“Do these trials get any more dangerous than this? I’m asking because my luck quota is going to eventually need to assert itself in a horrible manner.” A bit of rock fell from the ceiling to smack me in the head. I rubbed at the pain coming from my skull. “Like that, only three times worse.”
“Well if you mistreated me or gravely insulted the first two trial givers, then the next one would have certainly stopped any further attempt inwards cold.” Did Baast really believe the next one was that dangerous? “If you finished your cakes, then we can move on to the next trial.”
“Wait, can I ask you something first Baasty?” Now that Cheerful had our attention she clapped her paws together in a manner of prayer. “If these guys can free you of your obligations, can I be the one to run the pyramid in your stead, please?”
“I’m only going to say no, because I know what you want to do with this pyramid. Besides, you’re not supposed to haunt the place forever. Anubis would be quite cross if his services were abused too much.” The pink cat pouted at Baast and crossed her paws. “If you truly wish to do so, then take it up with Anubis yourself. Just know that I, sadly enough, will not be able to aid you.”
“Righty O’, you have your rules and stuff… most of them are not very fun, but I can understand.” Cheerful grinned brightly. “I’ll definitely do that, you’ll see!”
“I should be more concerned than I currently am about this, but I’m sure you’ll be just fine Cheerful.” Baast simply shrugged and turned to us. “Let’s continue on then, follow me. The next trial will prove to be the stopping point for most invaders anyway.”
“As if Grassy and Cheerful were going to stop anyone.” Daring was being a little bit too critical of them. “Pyramids like this are supposed to be filled with death defying booby traps around every corner!”
“Oh you’d be surprised with how well Grassy and Cheerful can actually stop people, some people would never admit to a truth they’d rather not speak and others have mocked Cheerful to their own detriment. Don’t underestimate them just because they went easy on you. Cheerful could have made you do a trial based on art.” Baast started forward down the set of stairs beyond the cake empty platters. “As it is right now, you’d be right from your own personal perspective. I will add that they are being more like tests of character for this next trial. I will also state that this place doesn’t really need traps and that they have a good opinion of all of you so far.”
“Oh and thanks for stopping by again Nefer, Baast gets really lonely being cooped up in the pyramid all the time and you’ve likely made her day just by showing up!” Cheerful yelled from behind us as we started down the stairs exiting the room that was larger than the one Grassy Snack had.
“Well she seemed really nice to me.” Nefer stated jovially. “Seems like she’d let everyone go by her.”
“Trust me, Cheerful is far more trouble than she seems.” We were descending deeper into the pyramid following Baast, the sconces on the walls were now glowing a shade of yellow light. Previously they had been green and then pink.
“Jacky, what happened when you faced off with the Storm King?” Mom looked in my direction and asked out of the blue. “More specifically, what happened to you afterwards?”
“Is the Storm King still running around?” I really need to catch up on some things.
“Nope, I had a hoof in taking him down personally.” Then why didn’t Fizzle sound happy? She answered it with her next few words that left me reeling. “I don’t like the blood on my hooves from when I was working for him as his commander. The guy was an utter nut job, on that everyone can agree.”
Oh… she actually worked with that lunatic?!
She also put him in Davy Jones locker, this made me curious as to the other things I’ve missed over the last few months.
I quietly adjusted my jetpack and stayed quiet for a bit, after a minute of silence I decided to answer mom’s query.
“So the Storm King winged me with a petrifying orb, I flew back to the Ardent Survivor and our one ship assault on their fleet was fairly devastating up until they caught our ship’s balloon with several harpoons.” I recalled that stormy weather, the chill in my blood as I painfully and slowly turned to obsidian glass while working on a time limit. “I told Flotsam to blow the balloon and ordered my crew to do several things in quick succession. The slow transformation and my cursed luck made it one of the most painful experiences in my life. Didn’t hold a candle in my heart to blowing the balloon and making the Ardent Survivor fall out of the sky on purpose. Nefer if you would continue from here.”
“Captain Blackcap had a plan, she asked me to get the Animating Album and said I would know what to do with it soon enough. I figured she wanted me to get it to her before she fully turned into a statue and she shoved it into the portion of herself that was already turned to obsidian stone. That was more than half her body…” Nefer’s ears wilted as he remembered what happened next. “We did everything she asked and the ship sunk to the bottom of the sea, the unfortunate problem is that we weren’t able to come back up.”
“The Animating Album, as we have come to discover sometime after acquiring it, destroyed an entire civilization and is considered cursed for the wrong reasons. It makes inanimate objects have a life of their own as commanded by the one who last wielded it.” I shuddered when we found out why the ruins were so simple to access and the album was just sitting there untouched. “It’s not so much as cursed as the creator of it was an architect that built a city using it, the album can only work on things below a certain size. However if the album is still attached to something and that thing increased in size through construction or other methods, it is able to surpass the limitation on the size of the things it can be attached to that way. The Architect was not given credit or accolades for his work and was a person of lower class standing. Some high class girl took all the credit for his work when she didn’t do a single thing to build the city that the album was still attached to. The Architect decided to erase the city and the pages in the album by having it attack itself. The last thing he ordered the album to do was to only work for those who would not abuse it too much, anyone that tries will quickly find out why it could be called a cursed object. That was the thing that came out of me when mom hit me with the phoenix feather.”
“How did you survive the impact if you were turned to obsidian glass? I’m sure you were likely an animate statue at that point, but you should have shattered with the forces enacted on you.” Fizzle quivered slightly and then said. “That’s how the Storm King went out, I almost died that way too...”
“That nearly gave me a heart attack.” Mom stated with shiver as she hugged herself.
“I was incidentally encased in a sold mass of Abyssinian Catsup that Savannah bought while we were in Palicoast, several barrels of the stuff broke open. When the ship hit the water, I was encased in it to the point it cushioned me from the shockwave. When I woke up I was afraid I had landed on Gene and killed him, given he was near me before the impact.” I sighed with relief that hadn’t happened, I couldn’t see anything until some had lit a lantern. “Apparently my crew suffered the smell for weeks after that, then things kept getting more and more complicated. We got stuck at the bottom of the sea, was moved by some enormous sea monster that we never saw and ended up in a cave system inhabited by hyper intelligent killer goldfish. If you’re going to ask, they were the size of regular goldfish and they were exceedingly dangerous despite that fact. Also there was this short red sorcerer Abyssinian with a watch that kept trying to kill me because of something about ‘swatting cats’ and my descendants causing him nothing but constant grief. I really wasn’t listening because he kept summoning carnivorous dinosaurs to attack us, by that point we had treads on the Ardent Survivor. It’s a fairly long and involved story….”
“Those goldfish were scary, I feel bad that we ended up rendering their entire civilization stupid.” We stopped at a pair of ornate doors with strange long necked beings on the handles as Nefer finished that statement.
“Yeah, that was not one of our prouder moments, but they were all trying to kill us at the time Nefer.” I remembered what we did to topple their advanced civilization and felt that it was for the best. They threatened to kill all beings bigger than them on the ‘surface world’ to prove their superiority. “We went down a lot of tubes while we were down there.”
“Word of warning before we enter.” Baast stopped in front of the door and turned to us. “No sudden movements or acts of aggression, do you understand me? Do not harm any of the being in this next room.”
“Is this going to be what I think it is?” Did Sekhet actually look giddy as she said that?
“Yep.” Baast stood up on her hind legs and pushed both fifteen foot tall doors with an impressive show of force. We just stared at what was in the room beyond and froze, there were a lot of them whatever they were.
-Fluttershy-
“Hello… I’m Quiet Voice, please… enter.” In front of us was a yellow furred cat with pink lining the inside of her ears, she was highly familiar to me and I didn’t understand why. Her eyes reminded me of something I think I once saw in a mirror. She also only seemed to speak at a whisper. “Do not worry, the serpopards will not attack… unless you actively seek to upset them. My trial is simple and hopefully profound… I want all of you commune with any being in this room. Only the chimera gets a pass, they are already communing with themselves and are basically part serpopard already.”
“You seem familiar.” I couldn’t stop myself from saying this.
“I should be… I’m quite proud to meet and know you. You are a wonderful being.” Looking beyond her with a blush my face at the compliment. Throughout the large room there were varying kinds of long necked large cats, when I saw one open its mouth it had snake fangs and I blinked. “Now what do you think of them?”
“They… are… so…” I slowly started. “Adorable!”
“You even have a group of golden furred ones, how long did that take to happen? Giant chicken breeders have an easier time getting golden feathered chickens than that. You told me about this and I finally get to see them!” Sekhet was as excited as I was and she was even bouncing a bit on her paws. That was a little strange…. but cute large animals! “Ooh there’s a black one with green spots!”
Sekhet made her way over to the one she pointed out and started affectionate pet its elongated neck making it purr.
“We’ve lost both Fluttershy and Sekhet… this might not end well.” Oh what did Fizzle know?
I immediately went to cuddle one!
-Kuril-
I calmly walked up to Quiet and looked at her.
“Your Fluttershy’s past life.” I said bluntly as I sat before her.
“Very astute, would you commune with me?” I nodded to her.
“My name is Kuril La Perm, witch of good taste.” I introduced myself while patting my lap, Quiet came over to me completely silent and crawled into my lap at the offer I was making. I rubbed her behind the ears and she purred.
“Well met Kuril La Perm, you have been feeling much happier lately and you’ve heard some good news recently. That’s nice.” I blinked at the ghostly anugyptian in my lap as she smiled up at me. “In life I helped the moods of those who were angry or sorrowful, I was always a listening ear and a soft whisper for those who needed someone to be there for them.
Blade moved up next to me and glared at her.
“She’s already a ghost Blade, find a serpopard to commune with. It’s apparently her trial and her rules… or… she did say you could commune with anything in the room. How about you commune with me?” I smirked as Blade blinked and leaned back in shock with a blush on her face.
She started to tap her front hooves together while looking away from me shyly.
“She loves you very much and wished she could tell you so many things, she is also sad that she can’t remember the warmth you two shared previously.” Looking at Quiet, Blade blinked and smiled a little as she sat down with us.
-Daring-
That Nefer ran off to play with the little serpopards and Jacky turned to start communing with Baast, possibly out of self-preservation on her part. As unlucky as she was, Jacky really didn’t want to be in a room with several hundred deadly creatures.
“So… commune with a deadly poisonous creature or each other.” Turning to see if anyone wanted to commune with me, I found myself standing alone. I really needed a partner in life. It wasn’t going to be Ahuizotl or Caballeron, that’s for sure. I looked for one of the most dangerous and meanest looking serpopards. I proceeded to move over to the one that fit my criteria and sat down in front of it to look it in the eyes. It stared back in challenge. “So… how’s life around the pyramid?”
It made some growling noises.
“Yeah, I can see that you can’t complain.” I probably actually understood most of that, been around Ahuizotl’s cats too much not too. “This trip is so boring now, especially after fighting on our way to get in here. Say, would you be interested in a quick dust up?”
The serpopard stood up and made some challenging noises, which sounded good to me.