//------------------------------// // Chapter 6 // Story: Sunset Expedition // by MysteryMan97 //------------------------------// Sunset Shimmer was speechless. Well, that wasn’t exactly true, it would be more accurate to say that Sunset had run out of ways to express how she felt about her guests' explanation. What sort of perverted Unicorn goes to another world and tells them they can only be approached by female virgins!? Was it Starswirl? If it was then I am renaming that river, he does not get a river named after him if he spread that sort of myth about us! She berated the nameless idiot in her mind as she paced silently through her camp and Gertrude sat off to the side, nervously watching her. Alright, calm down Sunset, she just told you a myth, and she just survived her flying ship crashing down in the middle of a field, freaking out like this won’t help. Just… just calm down, get the spell going again, and talk it out. With a glow, the translation spell reactivated and Sunset turned to face her guest. “So, that rumor is not true, in any way. I have no way of telling if you are a ‘maiden’, and honestly I don’t know why I would care if I could.” “I understand, and I apologize for repeating such a slanderous claim about your race.” Sunset shrugged and sat down across the fire pit from her guest. “It’s alright, it’s not like you’re the one who came up with it.” and when I find out who did I’ll make sure every history textbook in Equestria talks about what a pervert they were! “Anyways, tell me about yourself! Or I can tell you about myself, either works fine, It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk to someone that I really don’t care what we talk about as long as we talk. What do you want to talk about?” Gertrude was not prepared for a unicorn, a magical creature of myth and legend, to babble at her like an eager child, but after the initial shock died down she found herself swept along with Sunset’s enthusiasm. “Well, perhaps we could trade stories about our homes?” She pulled out a notebook and prepared to write. This is it, a chance to be the first human to discover an entirely new civilization! “Well, like I already mentioned, I wasn’t thinking right when I came through the portal. You see, I’d just gotten in a big argument with Princess Celestia about my magic studies and how much respect I deserved, and I was convinced that if I just went and tamed a new world I’d get the respect to convince her to make me a princess. Of course, at the time I was just angry that Cadence got to become a Princess and I didn’t, but after I took a few moons to think it through I realized why that was a stupid idea.” Gertrude stared at her for a moment, her pencil frozen over her notebook as she tried to process what she’d just heard. “I’m sorry, but I feel like I am missing something. Could you explain more about this… Princess Celestia, and Cadence, and… becoming a princess? Do you mean she was adopted into the royal family?” Before Sunset could respond, her stomach growled, and she blushed in embarrassment. “Maybe I should get some food going first, and we can tell stories while we eat?” Gertrude nodded in response, and Sunset got to work building a fire, chatting the whole time. -----  Well this dinner has been… enlightening. Gertrude thought, watching Sunset out of the corner of her eye. The tales about her homeland, a land ruled by an immortal Princess, who refused any higher title despite ruling a realm large enough and rich enough to overshadow several empire on Earth, such as the Austrians, the Japanese [1], or the Ottomans, and who raised and lowered the sun and moon every day had quickly passed beyond even the wildest adventure fiction and risen straight into the realm of pagan myths, with the noted exception that judging from Sunset’s own magical abilities there was likely much more support for these stories than most pagan tribes had for their religions. However, when she had asked Sunset if this Celestia was some sort of goddess, the unicorn had laughed at the very idea! “Celestia doesn’t like being worshiped.” she had said. “She said that anyone who asks to be worshiped doesn’t deserve to be worshiped.” Sunset told her, and if that wasn’t enough the tale of Princess Cadence left Gertrude stunned. It sounded like something out of a fairy tale, and yet Sunset insisted it was real, and as she explained Gertrude finally understood what her host had meant when she called herself a “spoiled brat”. If there exists a perfect example of entitlement, demanding that an immortal ruler raise you to her level before you have even reached 20 years of age is it. The Englishwoman though as Sunset focused on her bowl of soup, avoiding eye contact as she finished recounted the story of her arrival on Mercury. Although she at least seems aware of her own hubris. “Well, that is quite the tale.” She said diplomatically. “Yeah… looking back I made a lot of mistakes coming here, and Celestia is probably angry with me… but hey, I’m the first unicorn to meet a human since… well probably since before she took the throne! Plus there’s this whole empty world to explore and new magic to study, so that’s nice…” she trailed off, staring at the fire with a sigh. After a few heartbeats of silence, Gertrude spoke up. “Perhaps we should discuss a different subject. Would you like me to tell you about how I came here and my own homeland?” Sunset nodded, happy for the change of subject, and Gertrude began to speak. “I am from London, capital of the British Empire and home to Queen Victoria herself. It’s a vast city, full of industry and wealth, sitting at the center of an empire that stretches across multiple worlds. Those worlds are linked by ether fliers, ships that rise high enough into the atmosphere of a world for ether propellers to grab onto the ether that all planets exist within and journey to distant worlds. My father gained most of his wealth through shipyards that turn liftwood harvested on Mars into ether fliers, and my ship is a prototype from his factory, which is likely why I’m still alive after that crash.” With a sigh, she thought back to the happier times of her childhood. As a child I would read the tales of the expeditions to Venus, adventures across the dusty canals of Mars, even though my father said it was ‘improper for a woman to go gallivanting through the ether’ I always wanted to have some adventures of my own but… my father disapproved.” She said, the memory of her father reprimanding her for “undignified” behavior coming back to her. “When he came to me two months ago with the news that I was to be wed to the heir of some noble house to improve our families standing, I was furious. He had with one move crushed my hopes and dreams of being an explorer, and in my anger, I stole a ship from the yards and charted a course. After that, I spent nearly fifty days weightless in the ether between worlds, and when I arrived on Mercury, my inexperience caused my ship to crash.” Leaning back, she was amazed at how much lighter she felt having admitted her sins. Father may never forgive me for this, but I don’t care. I’m on Mercury having dinner with a Unicorn, and he’ll never be able to take that from me. “Wait, wait wait, hold on a moment.” Sunset spoke up. “Why would you being a woman be a problem? I mean, I could understand it if he was just overprotective, but why would your gender have anything to do with it? Aren’t you guys ruled by a queen? Why would she allow people to say women can’t go on adventures?” Gertrude said nothing, staring at Sunset with a stunned expression as the unicorn waited for an answer. After a few moments Sunset noticed tears forming in the Englishwoman’s face, and she felt a wave of guilt. “Look, if you don’t want to talk about it that’s fine but-” “No, it’s just… it’s nothing. I was simply not expecting your response.” Gertrude responded, her eyes still watering. The two sat in silence for a moment before Sunset moved over to Gertrude. “Look, I don’t know much about humans, or comforting people… or even being friendly… but you know what? If your dad wanted to keep you from being an adventurer just because of what junk you’ve got, he’s a jerk. In fact, that ship you took? That’s his payment for being a jerk to you and telling you you couldn’t be an explorer.”  At that, Gertrude let out a soft laugh. “That is certainly a unique way of putting it.” “Huh that worked?” Sunset asked in amazement, drawing an amused look from her new friend. “I mean, I’ve just never really done this whole comfort someone thing before, I was kind of a jerk to all the other students back home…” She trailed off awkwardly as Gertrude chuckled to herself. “So, moving on now that that’s out of the way, I have about a million questions for you and I need to ask them quickly since I think I’ve only got a few minutes left in these crystals… and they’re my last ones, and they only recharge about two and a half crystals a cycle… I might not have thought this through. “What is this… charge?” “Oh, well for some reason this planet has a really low level of background thaumaturgical energy relative to Equestria, which means that my spells have to rely entirely on my internal energy reserves instead of any in the environment, which burns through my reserves like crazy, so I used a few of the crystals I brought with me to rig up a device to concentrate what little energy there is into some other crystals so I can use them as a reserve for spellcasting. It’s actually pretty simple once you understand Starswirl’s fifth theorem for Thaumaturgical interactions and how it interacts with Mistmane’s theorems and… and that can wait for later.” She said, visibly restraining herself. “Sorry, it’s just been so long since I talked to someone and this whole situation is so weird that as soon as a topic I’m comfortable with came up I just started babbling and wow I sound like Twilight when I ramble.” “Who?” “Oh, Celestia’s new student, a bit younger than me, smart girl, likes to babble about stuff she read.” Sunset sighed and shook her head. “I miss the little brat, even if she did cut into the time I had with Celestia.” [2]  Gertrude nodded as she tried to find the words to respond to the exposition she had just received. “Well… perhaps we could work together to make a plan for the future?” Sunset smiled as she rushed to pull out her journal. “Alright, let’s start by talking about what our plans were, then we can figure out how to work together! My plan is pretty simple, like I said I’m just going to wait here until the portal opens, go through, and try to make the connection permanent. What’s your plan?” She seems incredibly friendly. We have only been speaking for less than an hour and she already is looking to make plans with me stretching months into the future. Perhaps it is a result of being alone for so long? I know I would rather stay near her than be alone again, and I only spent the few weeks of my trip alone. “Well, originally my plan was to visit Kelvins land...” she trailed off at Sunset’s look of incomprehension. “The coldest portion of the night side of Mercury, there are constant electromagnetic storms that stir up the frozen air, and everyone who has studied Mercury is convinced that something is beneath the ice, waiting to be discovered. I have the maps and charts in my ship, but they’re incomplete. However, I was more referring to our plans for the next few days and weeks.” Sunset nodded. “Right, yeah that makes a lot more sense. Maybe as a first step, we could see about moving your ship over here to my camp? Then we can go over each others notes and be nearby if something attacks.” “Is that truly a major concern?” Gertrude asked, and in response Sunset showed her her scarred flank. “I got this scar when a monster a couple times my size jumped in here and ripped up a lot of my camp.” She said, watching as Gertrude’s eyes widened and she agreed that staying close together would be for the best. After that, the discussion turned to where to put the ship, and if it could even be moved, and before either knew it the spell ran out of power and they were stuck making incomprehensible noises at each other, and after a few moments the two simply parted ways as neither could understand anything more than basic body language. -----  [The next day] Sunset stood just inside Gertrude's ship, watching as the human woman unloaded a chest full of books and maps about all the worlds known to humanity. As she did, she looked around at the strange wood that made up most of the ship. Contrary to her initial impression, the metal plating was merely a thin layer outside a solid hull of “liftwood”, a martian wood that was somehow lighter than air. “So, this liftwood stuff the inner hull is made from… you said it’s only found on Mars?” She asked Gertrude, who was currently going over diagrams of the ships systems to figure out how to get it flying again. “Not just anywhere on Mars, only in liftwood highlands on Mars, every attempt to grow liftwood outside those areas has failed, and the Canal Martians have been making attempts for centuries.” Sunset pondered that. Trees whose wood could float and be fashioned into massive ships that flew through the sky… she would have to research it. Maybe Gertrude had some spare planks she could borrow? After all, who would build a ship and not include a few planks to repair damage with? Shaking her head, she picked up one of the books she had been given and began to read: “WELCOME TO Conklin's Atlas of the Worlds and Handy Manual of Useful Information, or Conklin's for shor,. an extensive, but by no means exhaustive, collection of maps and essays concerning the worlds of the inner Solar System.” [3] Skimming through pages after page of introductions and sources that the author had used, most of which meant nothing to her, she finally got to the good part. First off was a diagram, the sun, four planets, and asteroid belt of the inner solar system laid out as if looking on them from above, with the “ether wakes” of each planet shown. Huh, just like ships through the ocean… except with planets. This ether gets more interesting the more I read about it. She thought as she read, flipping through pages and making notes of important topics when all of a sudden the words lost all their meaning and she found herself staring at a pile of nonsense. With a sigh, she looked over and confirmed her fears: Gertrude had left the room, and the spell had collapsed without close contact between them. I need to figure out how to communicate without this spell, with it I can only read for an hour a day and only when I’m near Gertrude! There’s to much to learn for me to go that slowly! After tracking down Gertrude and explaining the situation, Sunset found herself lounging on the upper deck of the boat as Gertrude checked the machinery that let the ship actually steer when in the air. Turning back to the book, she continued onwards. Mercury: The World River Huh, I wonder why they call it that… no way. No bucking way. THE RIVER GOES ALL THE WAY AROUND THE PLANET!? WHAT?! Re-reading the book, she took in every word. “…circles the globe, its flow driven by Coriolis effects rather than gravity. The World River is fed by rains and drainage from its watershed. And when the World River winds near the Ice Sheath, it is fed by the icebergs of continuously crumbling glaciers…” This is insane! How can something like this even exist? There’s nowhere near enough magic in this world to keep something like this going, so it can’t be tha… Her mind went blank as she turned the page and read the next part.  “Waterfalls and currents are encountered more often than not on the World River. Quite unique, though, are the so-called Water Stairs, where the River flows over several stepped plateaus with an altitude difference of nearly 330 feet, or 100 meters. The real peculiarity is that the waters flow uphill!” Blinking, she stared at the helpful drawing of the phenomenon in front of her, her mind trying to square the minuscule amounts of magic in this world with the image of water flowing upwards. “Gertrude!” “Yes Sunset?” “Is this book accurate?” “Yes! Conklin’s is the finest collection of knowledge on the inner solar system there is!” This is magic. The World River is magic, it has to be… I need to run tests, I need to research these falls… but I can’t go there, if the portal opens… I’ll open the portal, then I’ll go. In fact, once the portal opens, I’m traveling all the way! I’m getting a boat, and sailing down the river until I get back here! Yeah, and then I’ll actually get to see this stuff and work on it myself. With new determination, Sunset got back to work, making a note of all the landmarks of the World River as she made a list of sights to research on her next great adventure. Of course, she would have to survive her current one first, but she was more than confident in her own ability to do so. -----  Gertrude was exhausted after hours and hours of running over the propellers and control surfaces on the outside of her ship. At first, she’d been able to talk about some of the wonders of the solar system with Sunset to stave off total boredom, but soon enough the unicorn had run out of thaumaturgical energy and the conversation had stopped. Thankfully, without any way to read the books, Sunset had started helping her go over the hull, taking advantage of the fact that words really weren’t needed when she could just rap her hoof on the metal to point out holes for Gertrude to mark. However, even with Sunset’s help, the conclusion was not good. The ship had lost most of its momentum before hitting the ground, and the steel around it was designed to survive the harsh environment of the wilds of the solar system, but even with that the bottom of the plating had been torn open by friction, and rivets popped out and plates separating all along the outer hull even at the top of the ship, completely opposite from the impact zone. Beyond that, the liftwood inner hull had warped and several boards had shattered, which was why the normally lighter-than-air ship was resting in the Mercurian soil instead of floating away.  Looking at the solar boiled, which concentrated solar energy to power the ether propeller and other systems on the trip, Gertrude considered how much weight could be saved by removing it. This ship needs a shipyard, or at least a skilled team of workingmen, before it will fly the ether again, and until then this and the ether propeller are just dead weight. But how could I remove them… She turned to look at Sunset, who was roaming over the ship as if she could understand it just be feeling it with her hooves. Of course, given everything else she’d seen from the unicorn, she would not be surprised if that was the case. With a small grimace, she clambered back down into the ship, her muscles aching even under the lower gravity of Mercury after more than 40 days in zero-gravity. Looking around, she watched as Sunset continued to prod at the exposed liftwood, the curious unicorn varying between acting like a normal animal at one moment and an intelligent, insightful woman the next. The contrast was stark, and as she watched she found herself thinking about the future. Eventually, Sunset would reopen the portal to her own world, and when that happened, what would happen to humanity? Or if the men who ran the empire decided that Equestria would go the way of India, what would happen to Sunset’s people? Her peoples casual gender egalitarianism stood in stark contrast to the morals of Britain, where men and women are explicitly divided by law, and Gertrude had enough experience with the sort of men who rose to power in London to know that they would not take kindly to nonhuman women treating them as equals. The greater contrast though, was between how Sunset described Princess Celestia and what Gertrude knew of Britain's own ruling class. The upper levels of British society still refused to treat men like her father as their equals because of his lack of a noble title, something her arranged marriage was supposed to solve for his eventual grandson, and the less said about their treatment of men who had to work the mines and fields to feed their vast estates the better, meanwhile according to Sunset Celestia had taken her in as a student, giving her hours a day of personal attention to teach magic despite her complete lack of a noble title. The contrast was stunning, and Gertrude worried that some of the men, especially the ones her father had over for dinner regularly, would see the existence of a nation that went against the “natural order of things” as an insult, one they must correct as soon as possible. With a sigh, Gertrude turned back to the hull. It’s silly to worry about these things now. I have much greater problems that I must handle before those questions need to be answered. -----  Expedition Log: Cycle 323 Ever since Gertrude crashed, everything has changed. My entire routine has been disrupted, there’s more work to do to get her ship over to my campsite, and the more we tell each other about our home the more questions I need to ask her. However, I only get enough power to run the translation spell an hour or so a day, and that’s if I do nothing else with that power. Needless to say, my life has gotten a lot more interesting. The first major issue we had to deal with was her ship, after all with how far away it is from my camp it makes pooling resources and working together very difficult, so she pulled out some manuals and we tried to figure out how to get a damaged airship back in the air. In the end, we ended up carrying a lot of her supplies to me camp on foot, which was painful with my injury and burned a lot of power from teleporting over Starswirl’s River, but once we started carting out her books and clothes we finally got the ship light enough that even with the damaged liftwood segments it could float, and then I got to ride in it! I know there’s balloons and pegasi carriages back home, but this was something special, this was an actual ship that went through the sky like it was water! After that, we put it on the hill just a few yards east of Camp Sunset, which was difficult because the hill wasn’t exactly flat, but the only flat lands turns into mud whenever it rains, and we were worried that the ship might just sink into the muck if we left it there. Anyways, we put her supplies back in and a few big rocks just to make sure it wouldn’t go anywhere, and then we had a meal of canned food from Earth, and I learned something very interesting. “So your home world has all of these same foods?” Gertrude asked, looking at her with surprise. “Yeah, that’s weird…” Sunset said, frowning at a can of apples as she chewed her last bite. “They even taste like apples… I mean I’ve never had an apple that tastes like this specifically, but I can still tell from taste that it’s apple.” “Fascinating. With your world being host to many of the same plant species as our own, and the myths about races from your world… There must be some sort of connection, deeper than a few wayward explorers.” Turns out they have apples, hay, carrots, and all sorts of other Equestrian plants on Earth as well. There has to be some sort of connection there, I mean, the word for their home planet is the same as Earth Pony, that can’t be a coincidence! Also, apparently they have ponies on Earth, but they are basically just animals, which was kind of weird to hear, and if I’m being honest it just raises even more questions, but that’s a mystery for someone else to solve. Unfortunately, the ship's library is nowhere near enough to confirm anything, and we’ve basically agreed that it’ll be something we have to figure out once I stabilize the portal home. I mean, I say “we” but really it’ll probably be a load of researchers from Canterlot, because it’ll be a lot of book work and I’d rather go out and get hooves-on work done. Fortunately, we have a few leads for that: There are several structures throughout the inner solar system that seem impossible, or magic, the World River is one of them, and I’ll be trying to look into it if I can avoid getting eaten by the things that live in it. Longer term, there’s a few other features that I could look into, but the big ones are The Needles, a series of spires made out of a metal that no explorer has been able to get samples off of. They are clearly not natural, being giant obelisks much like the one the portal is located in, except made out of metal instead of stone and being much larger. They are spaced around the planet, 42 in total, and from what I’ve read about them they are all perfectly located on the midpoint between the day side and night side of Mercury. Some are in the middle of the World River, or when the river turns off the centerline they are on mountains or down gulleys, but they are always right in the center.  Once I’ve gotten the portal open permanently, I’m going to find the nearest one. According to Conklin’s, they are all 226.78569 miles apart, one forty-second of Mercury's circumference. I could go now, with how much longer it will be until the portal opens I’ve got time, but… I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel safe to wander off ever since that monster attack, and Gertrude's ship barely made it from the crash site to the camp. She says she can get the engines fixed if I give her enough time, and if she can we could use the ship to visit the nearest Needle, but if she can’t we’d have to go on foot, and with my scars that’s just not happening. On a more positive note, I think we’re finally starting to work out a way to understand each other without the translation spell. Neither of us can talk without it, but we’ve got things like “come here” and “lift that” handled, which makes it a lot easier to focus on work when I don’t have to keep the spell running. Anyways, I’m going to get back to work soon, we’re going to go over old survey reports and try to figure out how far we are from the one outpost her people have here, Princess Christiana Station. I was surprised that she didn’t know, but I guess she wasn’t really paying attention when she started crashing. ----- [Princess Christiana Station] “She’s not here.” David Williamson spat out the words as if they were a curse. “Our easy payday just got a lot harder lads, no one here’s seen any sign of her.” A wave of muttered cursing came from his crew as he pressed on. “But we always knew this was a possibility, and we’re equipped for the task. The good Miss Bell thinks of herself as an adventurer, and the governor had a list of sights that warranted further investigation’ that the last few surveys found, I’ll be working with his assistant to make a list and an itinerary for the trip.” At the murmuring from his crew, he raised his hands in exasperation. “Look, I ain’t happy about it either, but if we want to get paid we’ve got to try. Now off with ye, the governor wants me to meet some boffin in the laboratories they got set up here, so go on and enjoy yourselves, this is the only civilization on the entire bloody planet and we won’t be back for a long while.” With that, the men scattered with a load of grumbling, taking in the “civilization” of a small station with fewer than a hundred people that is, when the planets orbits are best aligned, 35 days from Earth. As they did, David shook his head as he looked out on the eternal sunset. While he'd always known that they might have to search the planet for Gertrude, something about this whole situation felt… off, as if he was meddling with something far bigger than himself. As quickly as it arrived, the feeling was gone, and he turned back towards the governor's house. There was work to be done, this was no time for baseless superstition.