//------------------------------// // Chapter 7: The Fog of Las Pegasus // Story: Spellscribe // by Solaris Vult //------------------------------// Harry trotted through the doorway into the maintenance section of the Stable… She reacted before she even heard the click, covering herself in a shield, magical energy warped into a physical barrier that could absorb any type of energy, as long as it didn’t overwhelm her own magical power put into the barrier. An ear-splitting bang, deafened by the magical field around her, echoed through the room… Harry was slightly perturbed to see a pellet of solid lead, not rubber, fall to the ground this time. “Good job, Harry Potter. Seems you’ve mastered the shield spell,” Sparkweld’s tone was approving for once, even impressed.     “I’ve gotten a bit of experience in the field,” Harry replied, “Saved my life twice now.”     “Make that a third time, not that I was aiming for anything vital, but you never know, my aim could have been off…”     “Compared to a burst of rifle rounds, that pistol is nothing…” Harry remembered how only yesterday that raider aiming for her head, and just how close she came to dying, again, that day, her shield broke right on the final bullet that the raider had fired… Harry was slightly disturbed by the memory, not because of how close she had come to death, near-death experiences were almost becoming routine now, no… It was how she didn’t feel any sympathy, or regret, as she put a magical energy beam through that mare’s head a second later.     “I hear you have a big mission coming up tomorrow, going into Las Pegasus… Be careful.”     “Yeah, I heard from the Star Paladin… At least I’ll be in good company.”     “Yes, but Las Pegasus is a bit more dangerous than other parts of the wasteland, granted it’s not like we’re sending you out east to the Hoof, or up north to Canterlot, but Las Pegasus has more than just bugs, and beasts, and raiders… It was a cloud city, but a low-flying one, and one with many concrete and brick buildings built into the clouds, it wasn’t like Cloudsdale, which vanished into mist when it was hit by the bombs, or Thunderhead, which survived intact and in the hooves of the Enclave… No, Las Pegasus fell to the ground… It is a maze of broken and collapsing ruins, thick mists that are what remain of the clouds that once held the city up, and many, many buried structures beneath the city, what remains of lower Las-Pegasus, before it was flattened by the upper city falling on to it. There are many dangerous things still lurking in there…”     “I’ll be careful, sir.”     “Of course you will, and I will be making damn sure of it, I have set aside all of today to teach you two spells, two very dangerous, but two very valuable spells… Understood.”     “Scribe Silver Heartstrings was going to teach me potion brewing today though?”     “I’ve already spoken to her, she agrees this is more important.”     “Alright then, what are they?”     “You’ve already mastered basic telekinesis, and the shield spell, these are prerequisites for these two spells, and with your level of understanding, you will have an easier time than most mastering these two… Now, follow my instructions closely, for I am not the most proficient with these abilities either, but I understand the theory behind them in great detail.”     “Understood.”     “Create a magical shield, and layer a telekinetic spell over it with opposite magical charge to the standard Telekinesis spell.”     “So, I apologize in advance for my intrusion, ma’am, but-”     “Make it quick, Sir Penwood, I am in the middle of some rather important business…” The woman at the desk, short, pudgy, middle-aged, was briskly writing away with a quill, scratching the paper… The moment she heard a knock on the door she whispered “Fidelia Lacuna” She couldn’t risk the scroll she had been scribbling being read by anyone, not just yet anyway… There was a time and place, and this was not it… Not yet…     “Well, there had been a magical disturbance in a muggle neighborhood Surrey, naturally the proper departments were notified, however the muggle aurors had gotten there before our own, they followed-”     “Hem-hem, get to the point, Penwood…”     “Yes Ma’am, five obliviations were necessary, and the corpse of the magical creature was brought in, normally the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures would have dealt with this, however this creature does not appear to be any kind of creature we currently have on record anywhere in England, or anywhere in the world for that matter, nor does it appear to have been made by accident or on purpose, I was going to inform the Minister of Magic however I was redirected to you…”     “Bring it in then…” The man seemed slightly relieved and with a quick Accio a tray holding some horribly bloated and misshapen mass came in, the woman, disguised, pulled out her wand and muttered “Incendio”, the mass burst into flames, “There we are! No need to worry now, is there Penwood?” She said in her sickeningly-sweet tones. Penwood, with a rare moment of foresight, took this as it was, an order to leave, and promptly did so, not risking angering the toad-like woman. As he left, the woman returned to her previous, and far more important, task… She had already gotten this far, she wasn’t going to be stopped, just a few more years and it would all come together, first though, she needed a few certain people on her side, she already had the Minister of Magic, but there were others of equal importance, and with another hour of carefully planned scribbling, the scroll was complete… She undid the fidelius, now just a matter of putting it into the right hands and waiting for the pieces to fall into place… Harry was ready, she was half-listening to the radio, talking about a group of griffons, Blackwing’s Talons, were trapped in some building in Manehattan by creatures called Alicorns, Harry was unsure what an alicorn even was, it sounded worrying, but she had her own problems to worry about, she had her magical energy pistol, she had a sizeable amount of spark-cells for it, she had just finished reviewing the spells Sparkweld had taught her all yesterday… She was ready… At that moment, the rangers came in, two unknown Knights, Harry was sure she had seen them wandering around but didn’t know their names, Lighting Striker, a more familiar face among the power-armored ponies, and two scribes, of the two she was only familiar with Rosemary, the other was completely new to her. With the group was a paladin, in a slightly more advanced model of power armor, and, to Harry’s surprise, another very familiar face, Victory Flame, her assault rifles loaded and strapped firmly to a foal-sized battle saddle.     “We ready,” The paladin said, it was not a question but a statement, the time was now. Every pony nodded, Harry included, and they began their march out of the Stable. A few hours of hard trekking through the wasteland later and they were approaching the outskirts of Las Pegasus. She had seen it on the horizon, but never in that great detail, here, she could get a far better look at the city… Or rather, two cities… It was like some giant monster had ripped up one city and tossed it into another, creating a pile of broken buildings stacked one atop another with a layer of mist and fog around the base, so thick it almost looked like you could walk on it. They climbed over piles of rubble that used to be buildings, sometimes checking the ruins for anything of use, usually finding little more than a few bottlecaps and some ammo, sometimes finding crappy weapons of no use to anyone but raiders, most of the time finding nothing. The rubble and broken buildings got more and more dense as they moved on from the suburbs to the collapsed city itself… The fog was overwhelming, completely opaque, they stayed glued side-by-side.     “You know…” Victory began, slightly scared, “I’ve heard stories, about ponies trying to explore Las Pegasus, they say the place is filled with ghouls, and if you’re not careful, you can stumble into huge nests of them without realizing…”     “I don’t want to know what a ghoul is…” Harry said to herself, feeling far more scared than she acted. The ground was rough, covered in rubble, and with the fog, just trying to walk forward was a hazard, she very nearly fell into a pit that had been hidden in the clouds. Victory’s words ended up being rather prophetic, they were following some kind of map the Paladin had, and were apparently close, when, suddenly, they heard a strange shriek up ahead… “Ferals, EFS says… Three meters ahead,” The paladin whispered, “Back up slowly, do not make any loud noises or sudden moves.” It was too late for that, as the pony… Or at least Harry thought it was a pony, it was more a mess of rotten flesh in the shape of a pony, leapt out and tried to bite off the head of their paladin, teeth gnawing on hard metal… The ranger didn’t panic, like Harry almost did, instead, the paladin reacted swiftly and calmly, slamming a hoof to dislodge the creature before putting a quick burst of minigun fire into the nasty thing’s head, causing it to splatter blood against the ground, making Harry feel a little sick. More twisted screams echoed around them, “Hostiles east and south, twenty or thirty!” The unnamed knight replied. Rosemary had unlatched his magical plasma rifle and the other scribe-mare had pulled out a magical pistol, an exact duplicate of Harry’s, down to the golden-yellow beam color, and began firing blindly into the fog.     “Cannot take this many in open terrain, move to cover, now!” The paladin responded, Harry and Victory found themselves being hauled on to Lighting’s back as the power-armored ponies could run far quicker than the foals could.     “Foals, act as rear guard, shoot anything coming out of that fog!” Lighting said, and Harry and Victory complied, Harry telekinetically raising her energy pistol and firing at any shadows she saw moving in the mist, Lighting did the same, her bullets tore small holes in the fog that briefly showed many pony-like shapes running toward them, Victory’s assault rifle bangs causing Harry’s ears to ring.     “Target location coming up,” The paladin continued. The mist was a little lighter here, and turning her head back only for a moment to see where they were heading toward, Harry could make out the looming shape of some large building, and a sign that they passed under that she couldn’t get the chance to read, so, she turned back and kept shooting… She must have hit one at least, because there was a bright golden-orange flare of light from in the fog, probably a ghoul being disintegrated by the spells in the pistol’s beam. They were marching up a staircase, and the next thing Harry knew they skid to a halt inside the confines of some kind of lobby, they didn’t bother opening the door, instead the paladin ploughed right through it in his power armor, sending splinters of wood in all directions, after that, he turned, and his minigun started to rip through the horde outside, or at least that’s probably what was happening, all Harry heard were horrible warped screams and the roar of the Paladin’s rotary cannon as he stood resolutely. One of the other unnamed knights, a mare judging from her armor’s build and voice, joined the paladin in laying down fire, letting her magical energy rifle lose with blasts of blue light and “pzzeu-” sounds. Eventually the ghouls must have run away or all been cut down, because the shrieks stopped and so did the gunfire. Harry’s ears felt numb in the sudden silence. Harry took the opportunity to look around the building, it was a lobby, with a desk, several broken computers, a sofa, and many, many display cabinets with… Guns… Magical energy weapons, inside them, the displays had plaques that read “Trottz-200 Pistol - Display model only” Up behind the desk was a sign advertising “Trottz Arcane Electronics - Finest craftsmares of robotics, magical energy weapons, specialist talismans, and arcane electronics in Equestria”     “Remember,” The paladin began “We’re here for a negative-energy induction talisman, nothing more, nothing less, it is critical to the Star Paladin’s project… If you find anything of value you may retrieve it if, and only if, it does not impede our primary objective.”     “Sir, yes sir!” Everyone including Harry announced at once. The paladin, one of the scribes and Lighting Striker searched the bottom floors, which they said would be the most dangerous due to the damage sustained when the city collapsed, thus they would be the largest team. Victory, Rosemary, and one of the Knights were going to search the central floors. Harry was left with the female Knight and sent to search the top floors. They marched up the stairwell and reached the designated areas, fanning out to search the rooms. It was mostly empty, lots of office space, lots of filing cabinets, computer terminals, ancient research and finance papers now coated so thoroughly in mold they were indecipherable. Harry figured it was unlikely they would find anything useful up here.. He had trotted carefully around the bones of a dead pony in a labcoat, and found a computer terminal that still worked, she opened it up… Damn, password protected… She searched her mind for what Rosemary had taught her, about the Ministry of Morale having back-doors into every terminal. She typed out “MOM access requested, show password logs,” and went to work trying to guess the terminal’s password, by sheer luck she chose the right password on the first try, typing in “Candles.” The only non-corrupted file on there was a corporate memo, “Trials for the new Trottz-4501 Rifle will be done this saturday, all but one of the test models have been shipped out to the testing grounds in the MAS hub in Somnambula, one model still remains in the building, this one is to have the firing talisman removed and placed with the other display models, even if the military deny our latest production run, we can sell them to the public as collectors models - Trottz Chief Secretary Crystal Catalyst.” Harry was about to head back to the stairs and report the lack of anything useful on this floor, when she heard a crack from below her hooves, she stared down, the floor here had suffered years of water damage, cracks were spidering out from where her hoof had punched a small hole in the floor, she realized she should run a moment too late, and the floor gave out beneath her. She dusted herself off, her leg hurt a bit, but she had somehow survived that fall with nothing more than a few bruises. She was about to head off and find the stairs again when another noise caught her ears, panicked whispering, “Yes, yes, I heard it, something else is here, there was a crash, please talk to me my Goddess, tell me what I must do… I must find these intruders in my sanctuary, yes, I must find these intruders…” Harry made herself as quiet as possible, sneaking around, trying to find where this other pony was. She turned a corner and found a strange sight… A huge mare, towering over him, trotting around in circles, she was midnight blue, almost black in the light… She had a huge pair of swan-like wings extending from her sides, and a horn… Or, rather, the stump of a horn, it had been broken off, and worse still, half this mare’s face was horribly scarred and deformed, furless and a livid pink. “Goddess… Oh Goddess… Where has your voice gone! Why can I not hear you anymore!” The mare muttered to herself. “The intruder, she is near, I can feel her!” The winged-unicorn suddenly said… The creature raised the stump of her horn and it sparked wildly, a strange semi-transparent shine erupted across the creature, she became transparent for a second, then visible again, then transparent, then fully invisible, then visible… She was flickering in and out of visibility, invisibility, and semi-visibility, the changes in her state seeming to happen in time with the sparks from her shattered horn. In the room there was some kind of nest, like a pillow-fort Harry had seen Dudley had sometimes made when he was a little boy, somehow Harry had always gotten in trouble for messing up the pillows, even if he had seen Dudley was the one doing it… But this fort wasn’t made of pillows, it was made of desks, computers, filing cabinets, gemstones, everything it seems the creature could get her hooves and damaged horn on. Past this nest was the stairwell, barricaded up with an old workbench of some kind. If harry could get past it, she could warn the Knight about this creature… Should he? The mare was clearly insane from her mumbling and ranting, but she wasn’t a raider, she didn’t even seem all that dangerous, and Harry knew the Rangers would try to kill her. Harry carefully made her way out of cover and ducked under a table, he whispered, “I’m sorry,” to the creature, hoping that it didn’t hear her, but still she couldn’t help feel a pang of sympathy for it.     “The intruder!” The mare shouted, it clearly heard Harry’s whisper, and her horn started sparking wildly as the mare flared her wings. Harry thought fast and cast her reflecting-shield, a moment later the mare let lose a wild burst of lighting… Had the mare’s horn been intact, Harry most certainly would have died, the magical lighting more than powerful enough to overcome her simple spell, but as it was, the lighting fractured out from the horn like light through a prism, spreading out in a shotgun-blast in all three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, making scorch-marks on the walls, one of these blasts hit Harry’s reflector shield, even after being divided like that, the magical power behind the winged-unicorn’s strike was more than enough to shatter her shield, but not before the inverse-telekinesis had done its job, and sent that blast of magical lighting back at the caster, the mare shouted in pain, but otherwise she didn’t even flinch from the magical burst. Harry couldn’t make it to the stairwell, not with the barricade, so she ducked through a side door… She sat there in that room, panting, as the winged-unicorn slammed again and again against the door, trying to break it down with brute force, had the door been wood it would have broken, but this door was metal… Harry then heard the mare charing another spell, and quickly backed away from the door as another shotgun-blast of magical bolts had punctured a dozen holes in the metal, luckily none of these blasts hit Harry, but it would only be a matter of time before she broke through. Harry searched the room for some way out, or something useful… There were desks, power tools, wrenches and screwdrivers, in an emergency she could use them as weapons, but her magical energy pistol was better, and as crazy as this creature was, she didn’t want to kill it, this mare wasn’t like the raiders, this mare wasn’t malevolent, she was just scared and confused by the sound of it, and wanted to be with her ‘Goddess’, whatever that was. Harry did find some kind of gun lying on a table, a long, sleek, and advanced looking magical energy rifle, the words “Trottz-4501 Magical Plasma Rifle” painted on the side… It looked like the one Rosemary had, but larger, sleeker, and generally more refined, less like a random assortment of pipes and tubes and spikes and cables, more like a proper gun, rather than a piece of scientific equipment made into a weapon. Harry couldn’t leave it here, this was something the Rangers would want, and, worst case scenario, she could use it against the Mare trying to break down the door.     “The Goddess is not angry with you, the Goddess is pleased with you, and asks you to allow me safe passage, I wish you no harm!” Harry said, pointing the magical energy rifle at the door, just in case… Somehow, Harry was getting through to the mare, “But, how do you know this, do you hear the Goddess’ voice?”     “Yes, yes I hear the Goddess’ voice.”     “You hear the Goddess’ voice, what are her commands, please, I am desperate, I have not heard her voice in so long, I had thought she had abandoned me, I thought she had given up on me… Please, Goddess!”     “She asks that you let me go, as I am not your foe, I am a friend of the Goddess, and she has not forgotten you, she simply cannot speak with you yet, but will, soon.”     “She, she truly has not forgotten me!” There was hope in that voice, hope and immense relief.     “I can help you hear her again, allow me to help.” Harry said, not knowing how to help, but hoping the bluff could at least by her time. Harry opened the door, and saw the huge winged unicorn mare bowing to Her.     “Please, help me… Give me her voice back!” Harry paused, not knowing what, but seeing the horrible burns on the mare’s face, and the crack on her horn, Harry got an idea, and pulled a healing potion from her robes, “Take this, you are hurt, this will help.”     “Are- Are you sure?”     “Please do it, it may help you hear the Goddess again.”     “Thank you, oh thank you, small mare, I will not forget this!”     “Uhh… You’re welcome?”     “You may leave, I thought you an intruder, had I know how close you are to my Goddess, I would never have dreamed of harming you.”     “Umm… Thank you.” With that, Harry quickly climbed up the stairs, and rejoined the mare-Knight, “Harry! You’re alright, thank Celestia, I heard the crash and went looking for you! What’s that on your back?” She said, looking at the magical energy weapon Harry had grabbed.     “Oh, I can explain later, for now, just avoid that floor, it’s all boarded up for a reason.” Two hours later, the Paladin came to find them, evidently Victory was the one to find the talisman they were looking for in the end, Harry was able to convince the others not to go looking on the floor with the winged-unicorn, and they left the building, back out into the fogs… Harry kept his new plasma rifle loaded, afraid of a ghoul jumping out at them any moment, but aside from a brief scare as he nearly tripped over the corpse of one of the ghouls that had attacked them earlier, they made it back to the stable unmolested.