//------------------------------// // Home Invasion // Story: What Now? // by Q-22 //------------------------------// The past few days had been nothing but curveballs. This was no exception. Ghost was a little worried. More than a little, really. More like...mildly worried. Passively concerned? Deeply sick with fear? They all worked, depending on how he thought about the situation. He'd gone off to scan something interesting for one second and suddenly his Guardian was just gone. This wasn't the first time his Guardian had been spontaneously teleported, but it WAS the first time the two had been separated by it. Adding to the concern was how his Guardian wasn't dead. If he was, then he'd be able to revive him. Yank his body from wherever it was before and pop it back to where he was. Ghost didn't understand why most other Ghosts never talked about how they could do this, and why they didn't do it more often, but that was beside the point. He put the thought aside as he continued to scan the patch of flattened grass where his Guardian had been lying just a minute ago. Nothing. Still nothing. More nothing. Just the grass, dirt, and the stone below. The only thing he learned was how pristine the soil was. Interesting, but not important. He put his worry down by thinking about how his Guardian might tilt his head when he inevitably told him about the soil quality. He never talked much, but that was fine. Most of his communication was visual. Body language, facial expressions, the amount of Light concentrating in his hands, and a thousand other little cues that helped piece together what his Guardian was thinking. He stopped his scanning and huffed- well, chittered, really -and looked about the spot again. He paused there for a moment, just looking, before swinging around and flying off back into the castle proper. He doubted he'd be able to figure this out on his own. --- The Guardian felt as if he had just bellyflopped into a pool of oil. Given the distance his body was just magically displaced, it really wasn't too surprising. His head breached the surface of a dark pool, pitch black fluid noiselessly dripping off of his disturbingly dry mane and fur. There was no concussive sensation and he was just as awake as he was when he was lazily wasting time in the gardens, so, he figured he had probably just arrived. Maybe. Everything is subject to question when you've just been schwooped off by a handsomely rumbly voice with magic tissues. His nose DID feel a lot clearer though, so, there was that. He stood up and looked around, taking note of his surroundings, studying in depth and detail the total darkness he found himself in. Mmm, yes, so much to be learned from seeing absolutely nothing. Channeling just a litt- okay, a lot, on accident, of his Light into his beautiful beautiful horn resulted in a nice, toasty jet of Solar energy. In layman's terms, his horn was on fire, sprouting off flame into the air, and blowing his mane out of his face harmlessly. Lovely. Pivoting his attention forward, he saw what he could see. Before and around him was a whole lot of mossy rock. It looked fairly cobblestone and formed a very wall looking wall in front of him. He turned around, and beheld a stairwell made of a slightly smoother stone, though it was mostly covered in moss. Up the stairs was a big stony hatch, one that he figured would look great if it didn't exist anymore. Ghost wasn't around to open this door, so he'd have to do it himself. He looked for a button, didn't find one, and did a very Titan-ish thing. The hatch crumbled as a semi-circle of Void smashed through it, sending sizzling bits of granite across the courtyard. The Guardian steadied himself afterward. "Good to know that still works," he muttered, the sounds of an outdoor setting quickly settling in. Birds were around, and not just pigeons or crows. He'd seen and heard a few pre-Collapse recordings, so, he could recognize all the extra noises. There weren't a lot of different birds left around the Earth he left. Not that he'd seen, really. His life had kept him rather busy, so exploring the rest of the planet he hailed from hadn't been much of a possibility. His hooves clacked noisily on the cobblestone ground, eyes skimming over the area around him. What he had presumed was a courtyard was actually the deteriorating interior of a large stone hall. The roof had completely collapsed, and the "cobblestone" he was walking on was, well, the roof. The hatch he had blasted through must've just been another piece of rock. Despite the lack of a ceiling, the walls of the pale structure were still marginally standing, despite the telltale wear-and-tear of time. Vines and other foliage had crept up the sides, flowers blooming along the more successful plants near the top of the walls. Mosses and lichen dotted the lower bits, and the occasional patch of weeds cropped up from the broken and eroded ground. There was a large, rotted-looking wooden double-door at the far end of the building, conveniently unblocked by any of the rubble. The Guardian made a note to check it out once he was done looking around elsewhere. There was plenty of sunlight to make everything nice and noticeable, so he looked around for any hints or clues. Useful details. Things he might need to know should the knowing of those things prove useful. Curiosity was only a part of it. Experience alone was enough to get him to start looking around. From the hole he had charged through, there were six visible stone columns that used to hold up the roof. Four of them were completely collapsed, partially sticking up from the condensed rubble in shattered heaps. Two were mostly intact, being the two closest to the door. A look behind him confirmed the existence of two more columns, also mostly intact. The collapsed pillars would make useful low cover, and the larger ones could be used for quick hide-behinds. Maybe if he kicked them hard enough, he could collapse them? Maybe. Might just break his legs, though. He DID know how to heal himself, so, it would only be a temporary issue. Maybe. If anything else had ever been in the room he was in, it was covered in stone from above. He took a few minutes to pick through the rubble, but only found the occasional collection of bugs. He'd have to remember where they were in case he was out here long enough to starve. Light could do many things, but it couldn't fill stomachs. Not in a meaningful way, anyway. As he moved towards the wooden door from all the way across the room, he heard a wet splat behind him. It had come from the hole he had come out of, so naturally the only thing to do was roll forward and skitter behind one of the larger bits of debris. He forgot he didn't know how to roll in this body and landed flat on his back, exhaling sharply though his nostrils as the pain flared. It did get him away from the oily, pitch black look-alike that had, for all intents and purposes, just smacked it's chitinous hooves into the ground where he was just standing. Said hooves immediately cracked apart, spilling that dry black fluid out onto the stones. The thing made a gurgling hiss of a noise before slipping back into itself and hobbling forward, pulsing a bit. The Guardian rolled himself around and flung his head in one motion, doing his best impersonation of flinging a Dawnblade at the thing. A good bit of Light was put into the effort, and a single slice of firey purging was sent at the thing. It was ash on the stone a moment later, a neat little explosion making a nice, echoing boom that shook the walls just a little. The Guardian stood, eyes focused on the dark stairwell. There might be more, experience dictated. He waited a minute. Two minutes. Five. He blinked, and there was another, slowly pulling its oily self up the stairs, its head just barely above the top of the stairs. Since it had worked the first time, another slice of flaming death cremated yet another horribly constructed double of himself. He really didn't like it when things that weren't him started to look like him. Something else had done that before, and it didn't end very well. At all. Two more of the things had come crawling up at him, and he didn't want to be babysitting the weird pool of gunk forever, so, an idea was had. After the fifth was dealt with, he took a deep breath and floated upwards, Light keeping him uplifted as he concentrated. He didn't have hands for this, so, all of the juice went to his horn. Angled down the stairs, he inhaled, lifted his chin upwards, and channeled a rocketing blue-white storm down the stairwell. Immediately he was hit by the stench of ozone, the torrent of air-cutting Arc energies buzzling deliciously. A line of scorched stone trailed along the ground in front of the dark hole, leading into it, and right to where the pool would be below. A foul burning smell eventually made it's way up, making him wrinkle his nose and sneeze, breaking his concentration and subsequently breaking his hold on the little storm he had going. A skull-ringing pain erupted in the general area of his forehead as his horn exploded somewhere in the middle, the torrent of arc energy thundering up into the sky, flashing out angrily over the surrounding area. He fell slowly to the ground, breathing erratically as he felt the new sensation. He rated it a four out of ten on the pain scale. Maybe a five? Wasn't as bad as making a crater in the ground in the Last City, so, definitely a four. He made a noise with his mouth, something like the sound a child makes when they sneak a sip of wine when their parent isn't looking. It was the most he did in reaction to his horn blasting off. He could see the top half impaled in the far wall, smoking from one end. His own half was smoking a bit, too, all burnt and sensitive on the stump. It wasn't that bad, really, he had just been using it as one channel for his Light. He had others. He cautiously stepped down the stairs, setting what was left of his horn alight so he could see. What had been a creepy pool of evil oil was now a very crispy looking room of burnt rock. Lovely. And with that, he trotted back up and kicked what he hoped was a grenade back down behind him. The juicy sound of a Void blast made him smile a little as what was left of the room was...negated. He glanced back for a mere second, just to make sure he wasn't being followed (as the paranoid often do) and turned to be face to face with a set of scrutinizing orange eyes. They glowed a little, matching his own silvery eyes, and they stood there lighting up each other's faces for a minute. Eyebrows furrowed, foreheads tensed, and nostrils slowly tugged up just a tad. Tan coat, more curved horn, big leonine mane (also orange, though a brighter hue than the eyes), smaller-ish snoot. An interesting complexion, really. Different from all the other ponies he'd seen so far, but still similar enough to consider being a pony. Two genuine, joyous, likely insane sets of laughter filled the deteriorating structure, echoing mildly. They didn't know each other, obviously, but they knew enough from how the other existed that there was at least one thing in common.