//------------------------------//
// Chapter 25 
// Story: Just Like Magic of Old 
// by computerneek 
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Princess Flight stumbled in the snow when Twilight’s teleport fairly stuttered to a halt.
Her first thought was that it wasn’t right.  She’d read about that teleportation spell and, though she hadn’t understood it well enough to attempt it herself, she’d understood it plenty well enough to know that it shouldn’t have stuttered.
Next to her, Twilight let out a gasp of pain, and collapsed.  “Ow…” she moaned.
Flight took one glance around, before lighting her own horn with a shield spell.  The teleport had left them both in a pool of warmth…  in the middle of a frozen wasteland.  Her first priority was to keep the heat in.
As she did that, she checked on her magic reserves.  She’d fed Twilight for the teleport; they had agreed that, if something were to happen as soon as they arrived, Twilight’s experience would be more important.
…  Not that it seemed to be helping very much.  With her shield up and doubled for thermal insulation, she turned to Twilight.  “Twilight?  You okay?”
“Ow,” Twilight complained slowly, rubbing her horn.  “That…  That was a terrible idea.  I…  I should’ve broken it up into two separate jumps.  I…”
Flight blinked; that’s what she’d expected Twilight to do.  “So because the power cost scales with the cube of the distance…”  She sighed.  “That would explain why it took so much magic.  You… you didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”
“I think I did,” Twilight moaned.  “Burned my horn.  You must be powerful.”
She winced.  “Um…”  She looked around.
That looked useful.  Visible, behind a dozen or so Wendigoes, was the ice-encrusted form of a large, surface-capable starship.  It was smaller than hers, and didn’t look like it could tolerate nearly as violent of a reentry.  It did look like it had wings, though, so atmospheric flights shouldn’t be an issue.  Assuming she could get it off the ground in the first place, of course.
She nodded slowly.  It most certainly wasn’t on, but the Wendigoes were eating through her shield- and she was fairly sure they wouldn’t get through the alloy.  Once aboard, she could see about how functional it was after however long it had been sitting there- which was actually a hope, because even from this far away, a quick magical pulse told the tale of a whisper of magic surrounding it.
Preservation magic.
She’d have to shatter that spell to get aboard…  but the alloy should be able to stand up on its own for a week or two, if that magic had done its job.
She touched Twilight’s hoof.  “Twilight?  Do you think you can manage another teleport, about forty meters, through some ice and metal?”
“What-!  Why?”
“It won’t be long before the Wendigos get through my shield.”
Twilight scrambled to her hooves, looking wildly around.  “What-!  Oh no.  We’re doomed.”
“Twilight!” Flight barked, and used her magic to rotate Twilight to face the ship, and force her to look at it.  “Can you get us inside that, with an air bubble, or not?”
Twilight stared for a second.  “We found it,” she muttered.
“Twilight!”  She contemplated going to Volume Eleven, but didn’t.
She jumped, as if struck.  “Gah!  Um, why an air bubble?”
“I’ll explain later- can you do it?”
Twilight flinched.  “I can do it.”  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and lit her horn, visibly suppressing a flinch from the pain.
Flight quickly crushed the preservation spell, tied herself into Twilight’s teleportation, and provided the steering component of the matrix through her own horn.  The corner of Twilight’s mouth twitched in a thankful smile as her efforts reduced the strain on the older alicorn’s injured horn.
Then, they both vanished into thin air again.





There was no stutter in the teleport this time.  It was still only her second time teleporting, though, so Flight still stumbled when they appeared, and looked around, horn aglow with a few various scanning spells.
“Owowowowow,” Twilight complained, rubbing her still-glowing horn with one hoof.
“...  Like I thought,” Flight muttered.  Then she glanced at Twilight.  “I got the bubble now, thank you.”
Twilight’s horn stopped glowing immediately, and Twilight sat down heavily.  “Ow…  So…  why the bubble?”
“Sorry for feeding the Wendigoes a little there,” Flight muttered.  “It was either that, or let them reach us.  As it was, another three seconds or so and they would’ve broken through my shield.”  She shuddered, and took a deep breath.  “So in here was the obvious choice.  If the Wendigoes can get through the alloy, we’re done for really no matter what we do- but if they can’t, we’re safe, for now.”  She looked both ways down the passage they’d appeared in.  “When I saw this ship, I noticed it had a preservation spell on it.  Which I shattered- but that means that, long ago, somepony put this thing into storage.
“And if they put it into storage properly, they almost certainly cycled the atmosphere out for something inert- and completely unbreathable.  I would’ve expected it to leak out over the thousands of years it’s been, but the air in here- outside of our bubble- is still one full atmosphere of chemically pure argon, so that preservation spell must’ve done its job well.”
“Argon?” Twilight asked.
Flight blinked at her.  “...  Right, Equestria doesn’t have the Periodic Table.  It’s a non-breathable inert gas.  They fill starships with it when they put them in storage because it’s hard to remove all the air on the surface of a planet, and oxygen- the part of the air we need- is bad for the materials, over time.  By filling it with argon, the ship can last dozens of times longer than it would otherwise.”  She took a deep breath.  “And it looks like, between the argon and the preservation spell, this thing is still in good condition.  You’ll want to heal up your horn before teleporting again, but that’ll take weeks- and we might be able to fly this thing out of here anyways.”
“...  Oh.  What about food?  We didn’t…  bring any.”
“We’ll have to check the kitchen, if it has one, and possibly look into foraging around outside.  Via teleportation I’m afraid, pretty sure the airlocks are all covered in ice.”  She paused.  “Here, I’d like to make the bubble a standing spell, let us go different ways without suffocating.  Sound good?”
Twilight nodded.  “It’d also mean you wouldn’t have to worry about it all the time.”
She nodded.  “That too.  Okay then, here goes.”





Close to six hours later, Twilight stepped into the room Flight was working in.  “Hey.”
Flight glanced up at her.  “Hey.  You doing okay?”
Twilight nodded.  “Been using a warmth spell.  My horn regenerated enough for that, but I’m needing more and more power.”
Flight nodded.  “Yeah.  The Wendigos have figured out where we are, and are trying to freeze us to death, I think.  They’ve gotten the wind up to almost a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, and down to about minus a hundred Celsius.  They don’t seem to have gotten any lower, but that’s still going to chill us in here pretty quickly- the ambient temperature of this ship was about minus ten Celsius.”
Twilight tilted her head.  “What are you doing…?”
Flight tapped a button on the panel in front of her.  “Seeing if I can turn it on,” she stated.  She gestured up at the massive machine the panel was on the side of.  “This is the ship’s power source- a machine called a ‘nuclear reactor’.  If I can turn it on, it is also the ship’s main source of heat.”  She sighed.  “I’ve already verified it’s in working order, and that the fuel is still viable- even checked that it wasn’t frozen.  The issue now is that if I power it on, it’ll melt down fairly quickly- there’s nowhere for the heat to go, since the external radiators are all frozen.”
Twilight stepped up next to Flight, gazing across the glowing panels in wonder.  “So…  how does it have power?”
“I’m spinning the turbine manually right now.  Not a lot- just enough to run the computers.”  She looked up.  “And…  There, that should do it.  By the time that door needs to be opened, it will have been defrosted by the radiator.”  She reached up a hoof, held it over the panel, and closed her eyes, concentrating for a second.  The low humming coming from the massive machine increased.
“What are you doing?” Twilight asked.
“Spinning it faster,” she answered, then touched the button.  A sudden, much louder whine came from the machine, then stopped; Flight recognized it as the control rod motors running cold.  “Giving it the power it needs to turn on.”  She indicated a meter on the display.  “Tell me when that hits two hundred degrees, please.”
Twilight looked at it.  “It says minus twelve,” she muttered.  “And it’s not moving.”
“It’ll start climbing in a second,” Flight stated- right on time for it to become a negative eleven.  “There it is.  That’s the reactor core temperature.”
“And two hundred is operating temperature?” Twilight asked.
“Uh- no, actually,” she answered.  “Two hundred is well below operating temperature.  But that’s when it’ll be hot enough to produce enough power for me to start the life support- and render our air bubbles moot.”
“...  Okay.”  Twilight muttered confusedly, and looked up at the machine.  “What’s that humming?”
“The turbine,” she answered.  “It’s still way cold, so the bearings are humming.  I don’t want to increase the power in the core any further until the turbine has a chance to warm up.”
Then Twilight tilted her head.  “And isn’t minus eleven- no, ten- too low?  Won’t it be frozen as well?”
She shook her head.  “Nah.  The coolant it has in it is antifreeze coolant- good to minus fifty.  And according to the computer, this thing is certified for powered startup as low as minus thirty.  Only reason the radiators were frozen is because they were at minus seventy.  Little heating spell and they’re only minus thirty now.”  She tapped the bottom of the panel.  “Once this gets over about a hundred, it’ll start sending heat to the rest of the ship.”





Almost two hours later, shortly after the temperature meter finally resumed its slow climb after stopping at a hundred for over an hour, Flight’s horn stopped glowing, and she sat down, letting out a sigh.  “Whew.  That was a pain.”
Twilight blinked.  “It hasn’t hit two hundred yet.”
She nodded.  “I know.  But it started heating the water for the turbine from the moment it hit a hundred- and right about when it passed a hundred is when it started producing steam pressure to drive the turbine itself.  Now, it’s producing enough to be self-sustaining.”  She sighed.  “Still want to wait before increasing power or activating life support, though.”
Twilight twitched.  “And are you sure that power wasn’t better spent on a warmth spell?”
She nodded; the argon in the room outside their air bubbles was down to minus twenty.  “Any power spent on a warmth spell is lost for good.  It’s critical right now- so thank you for yours- but there’s no long-term benefit.  Now that this thing’s on, once it heats up a bit more, I can increase power…  and start fighting off the Wendigos.  According to this computer, when running at normal operating temperature and power, this thing produces enough heat to maintain normal temperatures inside at up to minus twenty outside.”
“But you said it’s minus a hundred outside.”
She nodded.  “And if we concentrate the heat output to the inner spaces, we can probably give ourselves heatstroke if we want to.  As it is, I estimate we can keep the inner spaces at normal temperatures, and the outer ones just above freezing, and still have some heat left over to defrost the engines and the like, see if it’s going to be possible to fly this thing.”