Aeorean clapped smartly with a few strange sounds, a fire erupting in the fireplace, a little spark that grew quickly to a cheerful crackle. The chill of the outside became easily forgotten as their hut warmed to comfort. "Seriously, wow. I didn't think I'd run into extraplanar creatures, um, besides what the rift made. Plenty of those!"
"So, what level are you?" Jon asked with a lack of tact. Aeorean looked baffled. "Um... Is that not a thing?"
Aeorean inclined his head. "Level of what? Even for a human, you're kinda funny." Not that this seemed to bother him at all.
Zecora curled on a small mattress that had come with the hut. "I do not know of what he speaks. A thousand mysteries he hides in his cheeks."
Aeorean burst into giggles. "What is he, a gerbil? No. He's a human. He hides things right in his hands!" He leaned up and Jon didn't stop him from touching a quivering equine nose to a gloved human hand.
Jon reached to pet the friendly pony, but Aeorean danced away easily, avoiding it. Another pony he wasn't allowed to pet, aw. "We should try to get some sleep. It sounds like we have a busy day tomorrow."
Aeorean nodded quickly. "Yeah, good idea. If something beats on the door, that'll wake us up." For some, an alarming idea. For the pegasus, apparently a comforting one. He went to an unclaimed mat and flopped upon it, curling up to rest. "Night!"
Zecora raised a brow at that exchange, but did not rise from where she was. Jon took that as a hint that things were winding down, and he claimed what seemed more like a couch, flopping across it with his legs dangling up and over one of the arm rests. Not exactly ideal, but a step up from the frozen ground by a good measure.
Sleep found them all. Aeorean's feathers were their wakeup call as he stood between his two new allies and tickled the faces of both with a wing each. "Wakey wakey!"
Zecora sat up with a snort, batting the wing away. "You have roused me with a snap. Did that have to be the end of my nap?" Despite her complaints, she went to her dropped saddlebag and began fetching things from it.
Jon sat up and threw his legs to the ground, sitting up. "That's one way to start the day." The hut was still there around them. The fire had gone out, but it was warm enough to be comfortable. "You need anything to actually prepare your spell?"
"I..." Aeorean came up short, a little frown shown. "That's a good point. I better work on that." He marched to the door, threw it open with a thrust hoof, and went outside. "Be right back!"
Jon went to pull the door shut. Zecora was... putting things together, and brewing something? "What are you doing?"
"Into danger we will roam." A small puff of red smoke escaped whatever she was working on. "A little dash of some brome." She released some grass into the cauldron, causing it to change colors rapidly into a striped purple and black thing that she resumed stirring. "Potions to protect and potions to attack. All things I want in my backpack." Not that she had a backpack, but she had saddlebags, and that was about the same thing?
It seemed they all had things to do to prepare for the day... except Jon. He got to watch Zecora work, filling many bottles with different mixtures. Not every bottle got something new. Some of her brews, she got into many bottles, creating quite the collection that she filled her saddlebags with. "You need a bandoleer," he noted, breaking the silence.
"Hm?" She continued working.
"A strap over you that holds the potions." He drew a line with a finger across himself in a slash from the shoulder to the opposing hips. "It's going to be hard to be reaching into your saddlebag full of stuff for the one potion you want."
"That does sound convenient. But I can only work with what I have, so kindly be lenient." She nudged the cauldron away and started to clean up, apparently finished with her preparations.
Of the spells he had, few they were, none could just... summon a strap for her. "Sorry."
"There is no need for regret." She soon had it all put away for the next time. "Such a device would be an asset." She walked under her saddlebags and rose up into them, letting them sink into her fur... and further, gone. As if everything she had been working on had just... vanished.
And yet, Jon remembered the saddlebags coming into being in much the same way. "Wait, maybe I'm being the stupid one here." She looked to him silently. "You can draw whatever potion you want from... yourself, can't you?" Ponies did not need bags of holding, for they were one. At least Equestrian ones.
Zecora smiled that knowing little smile of yours. "You are a clever one. What I hold can be drawn on the run." She trotted for the door.
Outside, Jon and Zecora found Aeorean feeding something to a passing deer, though the animal bolted as the two newcomers arrived. Aeorean waved at the spooked animal and turned towards his new friends. "I've communed with nature and I'm all full of magic." He waggled his hooves for emphasis. "I hope you're both ready to walk on some air."
Jon looked after the deer, already quite distant. "Did we just interrupt?"
"Nah." Aeorean shook his head quickly. "Deer are meant to run, and to avoid scary things. I'm the crazy one that gets curious instead. So, ready?" He lifted with flaps of his wings. "'Cause I am!"
Zecora nodded. Jon hiked a thumb at the great big hole they were going into. "So just... walk down?"
"Like it's a kinda steep hill," Aeorean advised. "And here we go." He spoke strange words and his hooves and wings flapped, which almost threw him off balance, but he remained aloft, weaving the spell that settled over his friends. "And done. Walk, but on air."
Zecora trotted to the hole and shoved a hoof out, bringing it down beyond the lip and setting her weight on it testingly, but the air held firm, as if the ground the rest of her was on just extended outwards. "Huh." She dared to join it with another hoof, then all four, standing there floating in the air.
Not to be shown up, Jon hustled to join her, bravely marching out over the yawning nothing beneath them. "Alright, the walking part works."
"Of course it works. Why would I make you do that just for it not to work? That'd be kinda mean." Aeorean rolled his eyes then pointed downwards. "Meet you at the bottom!" He could fly, a fact he was not shy to show off with a swooping dive into the darkness.
Then it came time to walk, but how to do that? They both circled and tried to descend, but it was not like a hill at all. "Wait." Jon raised a foot and stepped up onto an invisible step. "It's stairs!"
Zecora raised a brow, then leaned forward and down, reaching a hoof down to where the next step would be, hoof clopping with the impact. "You are correct."
"Let's get down there before he's wrecked." Jon looked perhaps too smug at completing her line, descending the stair he started from and matching her, the two racing down the invisible steps in a spiral that took them lower and lower. It wasn't flying, but it was getting them there, into the darkness that become deeper and more oppressive, the light of day just a narrow band above them.
"Do I hear you?" came Aeorean's call from below, unseen. "I'm pretty sure. Unless the rift made someone with boots and someone with bare hooves. That'd be kinda funny."
Jon snapped his fingers with a sharp word of magic, causing a glow to emerge from that finger, allowing them to see Aeorean down below, waving at them. It was a cavern bottom, that was plain. "Wow!" but Aeorean had seen something, turning to gape at something that was in the shadows, at least in Jon's vision. A building? He could pick out little more than maybe that, or just a rock formation?
"Oh, right. I can do that too." Aeorean started to glow, casting his own spell of light to combat the darkness. "I bet the rift's in there!" He pointed to the shape in the darkness.
Zecora jumped free of the eternal stairs, looking grateful to have her hooves on solid, and visible, ground. "To glow is not a trick I have. It is good you have split our sources to halve." Her eyes darted from one light source to the other.
Aeorean inclined his head at his new zebra friend. "Put yourself in a corner there. It's alright, happens to the best of us." He pointed into the gloom as he walked towards it, the shape of some forgotten structure of stone coming into view. "This has to be it! Or we'd already be looking at it. Can't really be much else."
Jon completed his journey down. "Are rifts usually really visible?"
"Except when they're not," offered Aeorean unhelpfully. "But usually. If you see another hole in here, could be that. Do you see any?"
"A question." Jon caught up with Aeorean. "What were you doing in the middle of the dark?"
"Waiting for you?" Aeorean shrugged softly. "What else could I do?"
Zecora chuckled softly at the antics of their new companion, advancing to the fore. "This looks strong and old. But who will enter first and be bold?" She pointed to an empty doorframe that led into the interior of the mysterious building.
"I got it." Jon advanced to the fore. "I'm pretty sure I'm a fighter, so taking point is literally my job."
Aeorean followed behind, one ear skewed off at an angle. "You say that kinda funny. We're all fighters, we fight!" He thrust a hoof into the air. "If we weren't fighters, we'd be pretty lousy adventurers and have to go home and take up knitting or something."
Zecora smirked softly at that. "In this, you are correct. Careful, we do not know what to expect."
Jon stepped up to the barrier between the inside and the outside. Instead of stepping inside, he drew his sword and reached up, poking the ceiling, and never reaching it. His blade sunk into something soft and squishy, and it fell in front of him. "Oh shit!" He hadn't actually expected that to work, but he found his first slime.
It fell across the hand that was holding the sword and he staggered back with a howl, quickly scrubbing it off with the opposing glove as both disintegrated, leaving his red and bloody hands behind and the human heaving for breath. "At least... we didn't walk into that."
Zecora advanced with a potion in her maw. "I thank you for finding that before me. What is it you knocked free?"
Jon accepted the offered potion and popped the cork. Chugging it down made the red less angry and the bleeding came to a halt, but he still looked sore in his right hand, as if burned internally. "That... still stings, whatever it was."
"Green slime," noted Aeorean as he squinted at the fallen patch of goopy slime. "Fire can clear it." With a sudden flap of his wings and a sharp litany of primal anger, he unleashed a gout of flames that rapidly consumed the messy danger. "And now we're safe, um, from that at least."
A pity that it only promised to become more dangerous, as opposed to less. Despite this, Jon moved to resume his position at the front, not daunted by his brush with mortal danger, though looking about a bit more cautiously.