“Uhh… Hey, Neptune, Sage, Scarlet…” The young man said, his hands cuffed, being dragged out of the, rather comfortable-looking to be honest, prison cell at the police officer. Neptune just looked on in disappointment.
“This is the sixth time we’ve had to bail you out of prison, have you no decency, Sun,” Sage commented.
“Hey, it ain’t my fault I got caught!”
“It is your fault that you left without us…” Neptune commented.
“I was just sick and tired of all the packing, I wanted to see what Vale was like, plus, ships are fun…”
“Come on, get him uncuffed already…” Scarlet said to the police officer, who obliged, and undid the monkey-faunus’ hands. “Now, let’s go get something to eat, I’m absolutely famished.”
“Ditto,” Neptune and Sun said in unison.
As they left the prison, one of the guards watched them, eyes green behind his sunglasses.
“A dance?”
“A school dance to celebrate the beginning of the Vytal Festival, it’s only two weeks away…”
“That still seems a bit early for a celebration, don’t you think?”
Sweetie and Weiss were sitting in the ballroom, going over the plans for the dance, it was always set up a few days in advanced, team CFVY was supposed to be setting it up, but they had just been called away for a mission. “You want us to help set it up?” Sweetie asked.
“Precisely, you’re semblance would be wonderfully useful for helping set everything up…”
Sweetie looked a little confused, “Pinkie said I wasn’t allowed to help with parties since that one time I tried baking a cake…”
“It’s just a dance, and the rest of your team would surely be of help…”
Sweetie thought about it for a second, then stood up and walked off to her dorm, saying “I’ll go talk to Diamond about it.”
As Sweetie left, Weiss drew out her sheaf of papers and studied them… Telekinesis was the paper she opened upon, showing a very simple series of lines and circles with a line of text circling the matrix. With some help from Sweetie, what she originally went to see the girl about before talk of the dance had come up, she had a basic understanding of what the words meant… “Convert energy:chemical=subject:caster>targeted object=kenetic, force=gravity-2, hold location=0,0,0,” She muttered, cementing the letters in her mind… It reminded the girl of computer programing, and she wondered if semblances were simply that, lines of programming in a person… But, she let go of that train of thought as she reached out, feeling the chemical energy from her own body being drawn out and latching on to the object she wanted to lift, pulling it upward against the pull of gravity and holding it still in a location…
Those numbers, at the end of the code, Sweetie had explained, represented where you wanted to move the object, it was hard at first, but everyone where she lived quickly got used to changing those numbers almost as fast as they could think… Weiss changed one of the zeros into a one, and the coffee cup, in a whitish-blue field, jutted upward a centimetre.
“Why hasn’t Atlas figured this out yet… How did this elusive village of faunus figure out how to use semblance in such a way…” Weiss thought to herself, muttering quietly under her breath…
The mass of magically infused crystal lenses, the arrays of scrying spells, the shell of steel… The immense construction was built into the mountain with a full view of the sky above. Pegasi weather teams had been moved in to clear the sky of any clouds, vapours, or dust particulate, and unicorns cast spells into the air that kept it clear… The megascope, as some had come to call it, was only one of a dozen or so of these monstrous constructions, but it was still amazing to be the one to operate such a device.
The megascope was a kind of powerful telescope, even if that was an astonishing oversimplification of the arcane function. If it could be aimed at the horizon, it would be able to see in clear and sharp detail an individual virus on the tip of a fine needle, hundreds of kilometres away. Aimed into the sky, it was perfect for mapping distant planets and celestial bodies, even things at the other end of the galaxy were only reduced to fuzzyish pictures, rather than completely unidentifiable… The machine was the work of decades of intricate spellcasting to get those crystal mirrors and the scrying magic within them perfect.
It was a point of pride that someone so young, only recently graduated from the academy of physics in Canterlot, was assisting the lead scientist in this investigation, and in such an amazing work of science and arcana. Star Tracker sat on his rump, quill in his teeth, writing down whatever his master, the pony operating the megascope, said to.
On the low table, Star Tracker continued to look through the photos sent from Canterlot, from the surface of some distant planet, it showed views of the night sky on the alien world, and of the alien world’s moon, cracked and drifting in pieces, it disturbed the young astrophysicist. But, at least it was a noticeable landmark, and certainly the kind of thing easily seen through the megascope.
From behind him, the lead scientist, a mare called Oculus, a unicorn, said, directly into Star Tracker’s mind through the use of some telepathic spell, “No, no, mark off Solar-77, I can’t find anything around that star, none of the planets match the profile…” Star Tracker unconsciously nodded and flicked over to another piece of paper, making off another name on the list of stars with known planetoids around them… It wasn’t the most thrilling work, but at least he wasn’t one of those ponies going over the records to see if there had been any mention of a planet with a broken moon in one of the megascope’s previous observations of the sky… Going through all those books must be such a chore.
He flicked his eyes back to the photos, making a small “Hmm…” His eyes were drawn to one slightly brighter than average star in the sky of that distant planet, it was green… There were very few green stars in the galaxy, but there were a hoof-full, glowing green due to some unknown magical phenomenon, one that simple observation hadn’t shed any light on… But, that green star was right next to two others, a red and orange star that seemed to be touching, a binary star… Red and orange binary, relatively near a green star… It stuck some familiarity with the colt, and he went over to some of the star charts he had…
“Red and orange binary, if the general location is where I think it is, it must be… That’s Blastlight’s Star, in the northern hemisphere, but the green, there isn’t a green star next to Blastlight’s Star, unless… No, it must be Blastlight, there aren’t any other red-orange binaries in close proximity to a green star, but, Ather-12 isn’t that close to Blastlight, it’s eighty degrees to the north-west…”
He pondered this for a moment, his train of thought temporarily disrupted by Oculus calling into his mind again, saying “Mark off Ather-91,” But then, a few moments later, he face-hoofed.
“Of course an alien planet wouldn’t have the same line of sight of the stars that we have… It must be facing those two stars in such a way to make them look like they’re next to each other… And, it clearly orbits the same kind of star as Celestia’s Sun…” He paused, pulling out a calculator and doing some quick triangulation, then stood and trotted over to Oculus, “I think I have something!”
The room was a bit small, but Cozy found it, well, cozy… She was sitting on the edge of the bed watching her new companions, Neo, the colourful human, was quiet, and simply sitting on her bed, sharpening a large steel needle… Cinder, a tall human with a dark mane and bright yellowish-orange eyes was glaring at her… They had just settled in from their trot over from the White Fang’s hideout, this Beacon place was interesting, there was an odd magical pressure, and a feeling of unease that the filly quickly got used to.
“I’m curious,” Cinder began, staring at the foal, her eyes drilling into the filly’s soul, she returned the stare, and Cinder flinched, just a tiny thing, but one that Cozy could notice… “What do you want, why did you join the White Fang…” Cinder said, intrigued by the girl, those little pale pink eyes held dark anger and pressure behind them that made Cinder uncomfortable.
“Why are you asking…” Cozy began, “Want to know if you can trust me? Want to know how much of an asset I will be to your little quest, whatever that is…”
Cinder paused, as much as this little girl looked like an innocent child, every word, every movement, screamed to the woman’s heightened senses that she was in the presence of a predatory beast. “Yes,” Cinder answered truthfully, knowing that trying to dodge the question or lie wouldn’t go over well with this monstrous child.
“Well, I want to know what exactly this plan of yours is… And how it will benefit me…”
Cinder was silent for a second, Neo was looking at them both, and Cinder sighed, “I… I am working for a powerful being, and she wants four, powerful, items hidden in the schools, Beacon is our first target… These items, these Relics, are locked behind doors that can only be opened by a kind of special power… I have some of that power, but not all of it, and that's what I’m working to get… The being I am working for is very, very powerful, and I’m sure that no matter what you want she can grant you it, if you do well and please her.”
Cozy smirked, “My family hated me, I didn’t have power, I didn’t have strength, and that’s what they prized above all… So, I’ve come to get my power, to get the strength that was stolen from me at birth… Can this person grant me that?”
Cinder smirked, “That’s exactly what I want, and yes, yes she can…”
Cozy’s smirk turned into a sickly sweet smile that would both melt the heart, melt it until it burned a hole through the person and left them a smoking corpse, “Golly, I better work hard then…” She opened her eyes which somehow drilled into Cinder’s soul, “So, what do we do first…”
Cinder turned and pulled out her scroll, “Well, first Neo here needs to get into the CCTS Tower during the prom, meanwhile, you and I need to work on setting up a grimm attack on the city, more fear means it will be all the easier to set up attacks in the future, and the more attacks, the less guards there will be to the power, and the Relic…” She paused as she saw something on her scroll pop up, “Hm… Seems like Mountain Glenn is a bust, none of the scouts I’ve sent in have come back, I didn’t know it was that dangerous… Guess we’ll need to find another vulnerability, another place to hit the city from…”
The shifting green and purple clouds below had become a common sight after the first month, now Diamond settled herself by trying to map the strange dream… She had discovered that anything she had on her body when she slept, she had with her inside the dream, so, she had brought a scrap of paper and was starting to map the shifting corridors and labyrinthine maze of the dreamscape, soon, she also brought a marker, and scribbled on the walls to help orient herself in the dream, putting a large pink dot on the ground where she began… Her first few maps needed to be scrapped after she discovered that she didn’t appear in the same place every time she slept. “What’s causing all this, why is the dream realm so, stable, here…” She thought, but those were questions better left to a unicorn, and Sweetie certainly didn’t have any useful answers.
The corridors twisted and turned and she had made quite the map, but there was more, always more, the maze seemed to go on forever… Then, she spotted a door, a large gilded door set into the obsidian walls… “That’s new…” She quickly marked it on the map, and continued to trot around until she came to wakefulness, examining the newly marked map sitting in her hands when the rays of morning came into her room.