Werewolf of Knicknik
Twilight was looking at a rat.
The rat was actually part of her equipment going down to Knicknik. It was called a bagrat. His name was Alke. Alke was a bagrat that would grip onto the back of her neck and give her the powers of a lichenthrope, not a lycanthrope, a lichen-thrope.
You might ask why if Twilight was already a werewolf she was getting something else that allowed her to become a werewolf as well. The answer to that question is that the First Administrator is obsessed and that has infiltrated the society he’s ruled over. So you have many races that are werewolves, and then you have actual jobs that are different types of werewolves. Meaning you could be a werewolf and then use magic to do your job as a different kind of werewolf.
“There must always be more werewolves.” The First Administrator said, you could feel the fixation in his voice, even hidden behind those glasses you could see the look in his eyes.
Twilight’s werewolf form was some sort of legionary slinger that wore a pelt of summoned lichen and flung lichen around with the sling. Then would go full werewolf into close quarters combat with shield and claw using the lichen to have a kind of outer shell werewolf form.
The whole thing sounded absurd to her.
Naudia’s bagrat had a similar sling setup but this one was based on giant bacteria, a Protolycaon. This one had a shell made of some kind of magical bacteria and involved summoning and throwing giant bacteria that would drain away at the target before the werewolf would go in and pop them absorbing the material and growing larger until they could split out a similar werewolf.
“I figure when you have materials and magic like this you can do what you want with it.” Naudia said about the class in question.
“Why slings? Shouldn’t we have something better?” Twilight asked.
“You can lift 15 tons with one arm. Even if you couldn’t the important part isn’t the velocity but the payload.” Gwynn said.
“Speaking of which aren’t you going to get dressed to go down there for combat?” Naudia asked.
Gwynn was still wearing her loincloth and bandeau and they were headed up somewhere north.
“I am dressed for combat.” Gwynn said.
“No I mean some sort of armor or something.” Naudia said.
“What would be the point of that?”
“You know to protect you if somebody say tried to stab you in the stomach.”
“If anything got through the zoetic shield, then it wouldn’t matter if I was wearing three feet of plate steel or nothing at all. The shield is my armor so I might as well try to look my best. On top of that in case you forgot your skin is graphene, something like a steel knife couldn’t even pierce it.”
“But won’t you be cold?”
Gwynn just looked at them like they were crazy.
“We have people working in the vacuum of space in swimsuits, how do you think they do that?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Twilight was surprised to see them move directly from the prep station to the loading dock.
“We will have PLENTY of time to brief you on the way down, and then you’re landing basically in the middle of nowhere.”
“Before you go.” The First Administrator stopped them. “I need you to keep in mind that from the perspective of the ponies down below now you are essentially a god. Your bare skin is tougher than any material you have ever known, your magic is more potent than anything you have ever seen. If you use an offensive bagrat ability on a normal pony, probably even Celestia, they will just die, even if it’s some kind of monster like Sombra.”
“Then why are you giving them to us?” Naudia sounded angry.
“Because if you use them on the nerteln they will not die. Even if you cut their head off and burn them to ash, these bagrats are an insurance policy so you can hold out long enough for support to get there. Once you’re better trained you will have to kill that nerteln, but for the moment that is out of your reach.”
With that they went back into the same ship they came in on and strapped in for what turned out to be a very long fall.
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The design of the ship was different than what Twilight expected. It wasn’t going to aerobrake to the ground, it was going to use whatever motive thrusters it had to break to the ground. Twilight hadn’t seen anything that looked like a traditional rocket engine on the ship though.
Looking out the window she saw something huge, something so large that it spanned the horizon and vanished off into the distance. Bustling with activity it looked like a ring hanging above the planet. There were uncountable numbers of ships going to and fro on the ring, Twilight would have guessed tens of millions but she could not be sure by the sheer number of them working there. There was a sinking feeling when looking at how the ring vanished over the horizon even this far up that tens of millions was a drastic underestimation.
“WHAT IS THAT?!” She exclaimed.
Naudia and Gwynn crowded around the window next to her to get a better look.
“Oh that, we’re building that so it’s easier to get up and down from the planet.” Gwynn explained to them.
“Won’t the ponies down there see it, especially something this big?” Naudia asked.
“Naaah, we put screens on the underside of it, they won’t even know it’s there.”
“How much traffic do you seriously expect to be going down between Equestria and… up here?” Twilight asked.
“Everything, and we might need to grab some landmarks. I expect you guys would probably want Canterlot put wherever we move you to.”
Twilight and Naudia could only really stare at Gwynn. The sheer magnitude of what was happening was incomprehensible already and then things just got bigger. Eventually for their own sanity they had to just move on, there wasn’t anything else to do against something THAT big.
Once they had some time to recover Gwynn started briefing them on what they’d be doing when they got down there.
“When we get down there you two are going to split up, Naudia you’re going into Knicknik to scout out what is happening over there and Twilight you’re going to infiltrate the werewolves to figure them out.”
“That seems backwards to how I’d do it.” Naudia commented.
“Yeah, Naudia seems better suited for the werewolves, people in Knicknik would now me as a princess, shouldn’t we be supporting the ponies there?”
“We don’t know who is using the soul magic at the moment, but your skillsets are important, the werewolves might go after a small rat, but the people in Knicknik won’t try and eat you. Also Naudia can just change into any random pony to infiltrate the town. As for you Twilight you’re a werewolf twice over, you’d blend in with them better than Naudia would.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Oh speaking of which you have one more werewolf form Twilight, this was supposed to be sorta a default for you as a wereslime, but the way things worked out it’s just an extra form.” Gwynn handed her another sheet of paper. “It should look something like this.”
The image on the sheet of paper was that of a bipedal lanky wolf thing that looked like if you took Twilight’s maned wolf form and made it stand on two legs and gave it paw-hands.
“Huh, well I guess I’ll keep it in mind?”
Twilight put it away in her saddlebags, which took a moment of hesitation because the bagrat Alke was in one of them sticking his nose out of the pack, along with a bundle of lichen.
“Gwynn, do you know why the First Administrator is so obsessed with werewolves?” Twilight asked.
“That’s been a matter of debate for some years now.”
“Nobody has just asked him?”
“Plenty of people have and they’ve even got answers too.”
“Oh, well that makes things simpler, what did he say?”
“That’s not the point of philosophical discussion, it was different for everybody, the unanswered question at hand would be ‘is there something in there because there IS something in there, or because we want to see something in there?’ Is it because you want to see something in the thing that crawled out from below wearing a dead man's face."
Twilight looked at Gwynn with a judging gaze.
"I can believe all of that, but what did he say to you?"
Gwynn bit her lip and was silent for some time.
"He said 'Werewolves change, I have to believe you people can change, otherwise there's no point.'"
Twilight didn’t even bother to question the other things Gwynn said about the First Administrator. They made sense, and they didn’t sound like the kind of thing she would get answers to just by asking.
“What intel do you have on Knicknik and what’s going on down there, who should we be more suspicious of?” Naudia asked.
“literally nothing at all.” Gwynn said. “The First Administrator said soul magic is happening there and explicitly stopped anybody from investigating before you two.”
“That feels like a lot is being put onto us.”
“From what I understand of the First Administrator’s plans is that since you wouldn’t believe him if he told you your hair was on fire. You’re going to have to follow through this whole rigmarole until you understand the gravity of the situation directly, then he’s going to put you in charge of building a taskforce on Equestria to deal with this sorta thing.”
“Okay then, how much support are you guys going to help us with that?”
“I’m not entirely certain, I’ve heard some rumors about this, but from what I’ve heard we’re dealing with everything up here, and you have to do most things down there and we’ll be supplying you with resources.” Gwynn said. “Since you guys have a gold standard it should be pretty easy to just dump gold at you until things can get done.”
“I still don’t get how you guys don’t value gold at all.”
“Fusion changes your priorities.” Was all Gwynn would say.
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They landed around Knicknik and got out of the ship, Twilight was seriously surprised at what she saw out there.
She knew Knicknik was up north somewhere, and she expected that to be like the Crystal Empire since it was on roughly the same latitude. She was expecting lots of snow, and… igloos or something.
She was not expecting to land in a temperate rainforest so verdant with plants and trees one could almost mistake it for a jungle. There were all kinds of things Twilight normally associated with a jungle out here, just not in the form she expected. Wide leafed plants with bright red berries, ferns, fireweed, and grasses practically exploded to fill out the undergrowth, there were so many trees that depending on where you stood you couldn’t even see the sky. As a forest it was a lot more pleasant than the Everfree, and felt much more alive, like even this far north there was plant life teeming so dense you could practically smell it in the air.
This was what Twilight needed, even if she wasn’t expecting it, this was grounded, this was real, think of it like a cutie mark mission. Unfortunately that brought her thoughts around to him again, the First Administrator which soured things back up.
Gwynn pulled out a device that looked like some sort of futuristic camera and pointed it at the ground, Twilight could feel her charge it with magic from there. When Gwynn let go of it it hung in the air and then seemed to project a hologram, but the… taste? of the magic to Twilight implied that it wasn’t a hologram but merely an extension of the summoning magic she’d been taught. The hologram(for simplicity) was a map of the area which moved at a choppy rate but gave a perfect 3 dimensional map of the area around Knicknik.
“This is the route we recommend you both take to start out, it’s a game trail that will get you back onto what passes for a road out here,” Gwynn poked at a line going through the fully modeled trees which because they were summoned in bent and moved around her finger. “Then you’ll split up, the Werewolves are this direction and Knicknik is that direction.”
The strange rectangular piece of glass in Twilight’s pack vibrated and lit up showing that it was a screen, she pulled it out of the pack to find the 3d map displayed on the screen there.
“You’ll be coming back here to base camp every night since we’re not too far away.”
Naudia buzzed her wings.
“Why don’t we just… fly there?”
Gwynn froze up for a second at that.
“I can’t think of any reason not to, so long as you don’t scare them off Twilight and you don’t blow your cover Naudia, go ahead. The shared walk was put in so you could spend some time coordinating before splitting up but I don’t see a reason you couldn’t do that in the air.
“However,” Gwynn said. “Before you go, you need to demonstrate some ability with those bagrats.”
It turned out Twilight and Naudia underestimated the bagrats, they not only made these new magic spells extremely easy to cast, they also gave them a kind of heads up display with a map and everything. Twilight felt like she would have these spells learned in no time, but she wanted to keep the bagrat around just to be able to do things like track things moving that she couldn’t quite see or have nightvision.
Before they finally got going Twilight had one last question for Gwynn.
“Assuming I make friendly contact with the wereponies, can I promise them some of that artificial meat like we at at that restaurant?”
“Sure, we’ll have a batch cooking up by the time you get back today.” Gwynn said.
Naudia didn’t have anything to ask for and with that they flew off, bagrats gripped onto the backs of their necks and interfaced with their new zoetic shield spells.
-------------------
Twilight and Naudia flew above the forest in silence. So much had changed so suddenly for them.
Twilight felt like she was losing her grip on where all of this started from. Even if it was werewolves she was happy that she was going back out to be among ponies again. It wasn’t the new magic that bothered her, that’s what was tempting her, part of her begging to just lose herself in a branch of magic never before explored by ponykind.
That was the problem, the First Administrator had too many tasty treats to dangle in front of her to ignore. Immortality, a child, new magic, space travel, protection from disease, cancer, famine, a new life for her Dia, a child…
It didn’t help, or more accurately it helped a lot, that this all seemed to be the result of science, not some mad magician, not some ancient spell, understandable, logical, science. It played perfectly into her biases.
All except for the First Administrator himself.
Twilight felt something poke her in the side, it turned out to be Naudia.
“I know we’ve got a lot to think about right now. But we didn’t meet Walden as a joke, keep your head out of the clouds while we’re out here.”
Ironically at that moment Twilight wasn’t looking where she was going and ran headfirst into a small cloud giving her a snow white beard.
That was enough to break the tension and shaking off her faux beard Twilight asked Naudia:
“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
“I think we’re being sent down here precisely to figure that out for ourselves.”
Before they knew it they heard a beep from those tablets telling them they had reached the game trail where they had to split up. Twilight hugged Naudia tight before she let her go.
“Stay safe.”
“You too.”
They kissed once before walking down their respective paths, each reluctant to let the other go and watching behind themselves long after the other went out of sight.
-------------------
It was sometime later, and still somewhat distracted walking down the trail, Twilight didn’t notice the ambush coming. That was a problem, for the other werewolf that ambushed her. What was supposed to happen in a situation like this was that the Werewolf would bowl her over and they roll for a bit before they both realize they’re werewolves and calm down to talk.
Instead this other werewolf, who looked pretty young to Twilight, slammed into Twilight like he was slamming into a stone statue. Twilight didn’t even move an inch, her zoetic shield anchoring her in space, if she couldn’t feel him there or hadn’t heard the impact she wouldn’t have known he was there.
The werewolf limped away clearly somewhat injured by the impact and growled at Twilight. She decided it was time to pull out some stops and growl at him back. Pulling out her wereslime maned wolf form Twilight transformed into a tall wolf and that had an immediate impact on proceedings, especially since her wings and horn entirely retracted.
Now that they were staring each other down Twilight had a look at this werewolf. He looked very different from Twilight, for one he still had a horn on him, in fact he looked like a pony who had taken on some wolf-ish traits, as opposed to Twilight, who had transformed into a wolf. His cutie mark was that of oats, and Twilight thought he looked pretty young.
Twilight growling at the Werewolf had an unexpected reaction for her, she was expecting to have to win over these brutes by force, animals basically. Instead once he realized she was some sort of wolf, presumably a werewolf, he spoke to her.
“Whoa whoa whoa!” He waved his paws placatingly, “I’m sorry I didn’t know you were one of us lady.”
“Then what were you thinking?” Twilight growled at him, that was not a friendly pounce. “That could have hurt somepony.”
“It did hurt somepony, me.” The mystery werewolf joked, it fell flat on Twilight though.
“All right all right, I thought you were one of those ponies from Knicknik, things aren’t going so well with them right now. I’ve been told I need to turn away the evangelists trying to pull ponies away from the pack.”
“Evangelists?”
“Some new doctor has a ‘miracle cure’ over there. Only the first trial didn’t go so well on werewolves, we’ve been told it works perfectly fine on everything else. They’ve been sending ponies around here and we’re getting tired of it.” The injured pony didn’t look as injured now, even if the injuries were minor in the first place. Apparently he could shrug off something like a bruise or a sprain fairly quickly.
“I’m Rolled Oats by the way.”
“Twilight Sparkle.”
“Wait, you’re one of the princesses, I didn’t see your horn, in fact,” Rolled Oats looked at her wereslime form’s forehead. “I still don’t. Since when were you a werewolf anyways?”
“That, is a long story. But I’ve been sent here to figure out what is happening and sort this mess out.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve come here from Knicknik, they’ll tell you lies about us over there.”
“No, I came specifically to your pack first.”
“Good. I don’t want your viewpoints corrupted by those damn cultists.”
As things seemed to be more cordial Twilight eased out of her werewolf form and Rolled Oats out of his. Rolled Oats was a unicorn who retained his horn in werewolf form and looked like he’d lost a large amount of weight recently and he looked young, like the weight had been the chubbiness of a teenager likely from living in a bakery. His cutie mark and name didn’t seem all that werewolfy either.
“Hey, how do you get your wings and horn to retract like that?”
“To tell you the truth I’m a different kind of werewolf than you.”
“Oooh one of those southern species, is that why you’re a tall wolf then?”
“It’s called a maned wolf.” Twilight deflected answering the question directly.
They talked for a bit and Rolled Oats agreed to show her to the pack. Twilight knew she had just been attacked by a werewolf, technically, but it didn’t feel like it. If she was asleep she wasn’t even sure she would have woken up and that was worrying.
Just how strong was she now compared to a normal pony? Sure she had some numbers, but “8e35 times stronger than normal matter” is not a useful number unless you’re an astrophysicist. Even they would likely need more context for that. What scared her was that this was apparently standard, a novice’s skill in this.
“Twilight,” Rolled oats asked. “Why do you have a rat grabbed onto your neck?”
“That…” Twilight tried to figure out how to answer that question. “Is a spellcasting rat, it’s a special rat that lets me cast far stronger spells, for example.”
Twilight cast one of her new spells on a tree nearby it had a bit of long charge up time and a lot of safeties, which she thought she had triggered, until the breeze blew through and the cleanly cut tree slowly topped over. Directly onto the path in front of them. It was a very good thing that the targeting on these spells was so accurate.
“Aww, there’s devils club around here, I don’t want to have to go off the path.”
Twilight realized something and smiled.
“Don’t worry I got this.”
Twilight lifted the tree up straight up and off the ground, it felt heavy but well within her range, and with a grunt threw it into the woods by the base caber toss style.
Twilight was happy about that because it was an excellent example of her strength, the strength of the shielding spell keeping her in place, and it gave her an idea of how much she had really changed. It was satisfying to see the tree fly into the woods like that. However once that feeling faded Twilight realized that she was terrifyingly strong. The tree was at least 80 feet tall and decently thick and her spell hat cut through it like it wasn’t there, smoothly, cleanly. She could move it like it was a simple wooden board with a bit more inertia, but even still it was underher complete control. Her shielding spell even wrapped itself around the tree giving her more surface area to grip with automatically.
Rolled Oats was staring at her his mouth agape.
“Alicorn Strength?” Twilight said unconvincingly.
That hadn’t even been one of the offensive spells, it was a safety spell for cutting things like vegetables without cutting your fingers.