When Marble returned to the campsite, he couldn’t believe Sunny managed to get so much done. As he walked over to the bench, he glanced down at a set of surprisingly good-looking saddlebags, an actual waterskin made of some leaves, a decent length of rope, and an actual bedroll.
All of it seemed to be made out of leaves, bark, and vines.
“Ah! Marble!” Sunny said without looking up. “There you are. Do you still have the woven bag I made you?”
“I...I do,” he replied, wearing the bags she was talking about.
“Can I see them?” she asked, holding out a hoof.
“Sure,” he said, sliding off the bags, which Sunny took before snapping the middle strap in half before she slipped woven bags into the leaf bags she made.
“There you go, that should make it a little more comfortable to wear without losing any of the woven bag’s strength. Where are the canteens I made you?”
“The other pouch,” he replied.
She nodded before pulling out the three coconuts. “We can still use these, but they don’t really carry enough for us to rely on them. So I’ve done my best to try and make an actual water skin for you,” she said, uncorking one of the makeshift canteens and pouring it into the waterskin. A small leak formed, but Sunny moved quickly and plugged it with a bit of pitch she had warmed up by the fire. She used magic to press the pitch down and sealed the hole before checking it one more time. “There you go,” she said before handing it over. “There’s a layer of leaves, then pitch, then more leaves, which should make this a little durable.”
He nodded before inspecting the strap, which had been made with woven vines.
“It seems you’re a mare of many talents, Mrs. Smiles.”
“I like to work with my hooves,” she replied.
Marble nodded. “How did you get the vine woven like this?”
“The lost art of rope making,” she replied. “You need to spin it and weave it together before you can make it nice and strong.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Please do. It’s all I have,” she replied with a smirk.
“What about the bedroll?” he asked.
“More banana leaves stuck together with more pitch with a layer of softer material stuffed in the middle for some padding. You should probably give it a night before trying it out, so the pitch doesn’t stick to your fur when you lay down on it.”
He nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Hopefully, that will make the rest of the trip easier on you. Not to mention how we can turn these coconuts into something more useful.”
“What do you have in mind?” Marble asked.
“That depends on what we can find out here,” she replied. “But they can be used as backup canteens until then.”
The gleam in her eye made Marble worry a little, but he decided that he wouldn’t press her on it just yet.
“Did you find anything in all your books?” Sunny asked. “By the way, you missed lunch.”
Marble glanced at a small pouch made with leaves. “A couple of them might be promising,” he replied as he opened the small package to reveal some more sliced fruit. “I won’t know for sure until I get them translated.”
“Any maps?” Sunny asked.
“No.”
Sunny nodded. “That’s a shame. Did you check behind the books?”
“What?”
“It’s a classic hiding spot for important documents,” she replied. “You always need to check behind the books just to make sure you don’t miss any secret compartments or anything.”
Marble sighed. “Look, I’m sure this will break your heart, but this isn’t a Daring Do novel. We need to actually follow the rules of sanity and the universe. Pretending to be an adventurer in a world where every ruin has some kind of intrigue doesn’t help anypony.”
Sunny smiled knowingly. “I’ll tell you what then, Marble. How about I check, that way, I shatter my own expectations, and you won’t have to hear how insane of an idea it is.”
Marble glanced at her. The way she said that made him immediately suspicious. The mare was counting on the secret compartment being there, and the confidence rolling off her made him doubt himself for a long second. He blinked before he shook his head. “You can go ahead and try, but I’m telling you, this is a ridiculous idea.”
Sunny smiled. “Alright, thank you! I’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”
Marble watched her leave and sat down on his bench before he began to eat the food Sunny left for him.
She’d be back in a little bit. After all, there was no way she’d actually find a map.
No way at all.
---☼---
Sunny wasn’t necessarily counting on finding a secret compartment or anything. Honestly, it didn’t make much sense for there to be a secret compartment, just because no one was allowed in the Windtowers anyway. There’d be no real need to hide anything further.
Though, what she did have was a spell to help her find a map. Perceive Matter spells could be used to find objects, either as specific as an emerald ring worn by a relative engraved with images of various alchemical symbols to something as general as a table.
As she entered the room, she cast a spell and began searching for a map. One of the books lit up to her sight but flipping through it revealed that the pages might have once been a map burned into illegibility.
She glanced around again before she realized that her spell still recognized a map in the room. Sunny glanced around before her attention fell on a bookshelf.
Wait...had been right?
Was there actually a secret compartment behind the bookshelves that had a map in it.
“Oh, he’s going to hate you for this,” Inner Celestia said.
“It’s not my fault!” Sunny whispered to herself as she pushed the book aside. “I didn’t put this here.”
“He’s going to be so mad.”
“I was expecting to be wrong!” she hissed. “I didn’t want this!”
Inner Celestia laughed while Sunny opened the wall to reveal a small alcove with a small folded piece of bark with a painted map.
She sighed.
Great, now she needed to actually present this to him.
She bit her lip. She needed an excellent way to spin this.
---☼---
Marble blinked when Sunny returned with folded bark and a smile as wide as could be. “Told you,” she said.
“What?”
“I’ll be honest,” Sunny replied, “I wasn’t actually expecting to find a map, but I did have a spell that helped out.”
“What?” Marble asked again.
Sunny rattled something off, but Marble wasn’t listening to her anymore. He just stared down on the map she produced that she somehow got from somewhere.
Somehow, beyond all reason, Sunny went up there and found a secret compartment with an actual map in it. Why? Why did this mare have an incredible skill for making lucky guesses? Why was Mrs. Sunny Smiles breaking every known rule about archeology as though they were her pastime? Just...just how?
He glanced back up at Sunny, who held out the map to him. “Do you want to read it?” she asked.
He sighed before opening up the folded pieces of bark.
Inside was a beautiful piece of ancient artwork that had been perfectly preserved by whatever hidden chest that Sunny found. It marked five towers and two temples, all painted with careful hooves and carefully chosen pigments. Jaguars and other monsters decorated its edge, and a simple symbol that marked north sat in the bottom left-hand corner of the map, off in the sea they just left behind.
And as Marble stared down at the piece of bark in his hooves, he realized a great and terrible truth. This one map was probably worth more than all the books he had in his bag. This one item that Sunny found in less than half an hour would be of more use than all of the books he spent the day scouring through.
He pushed the thought aside. “Okay, so we have a map. How does that help us?”
“Well,” Sunny said. “For one thing, we’ll now have a general idea of how to get through the jungle better. It might very well keep us from getting lost.”
“Good,” Marble muttered.
“But that’s only half of it,” she continued. “We can now move from tower to tower and to the various ruins along the way. This should help us by giving us some extra shelter, and it’ll help you figure out if there’s anything else you can salvage from the trip.”
Marble glanced up at her. “Didn’t you say that you were the one that wanted to explore?”
“I might have.”
“Doesn’t this fall exactly into what you want to do?”
“It does,” she admitted. “While it also helps you and gives you the chance to make wonderful discoveries about the Lusitanpec ponies, while also giving you a map so you can lead the university back here.”
Marble shook his head. “How convenient.”
She nodded. “Look, it’ll work out, I promise. Besides, you can’t tell me you don’t want a tour of these temples and Windtowers.”
Marble sighed.
This was a bad idea. Jumping into the trap-filled ruins were dangerous all on their own. Never mind the dangers of actually crossing the jungle. The ruins would probably kill them both the moment they got inside. Not to mention the fact that they could only carry so much with them. They’d laden themselves down quickly, and then they’d have too much to worry about, and it might just slow them down, which would be a terrible idea in a survival situation, which they were in.
The worst about it, though, was that Sunny was right. He did want to go into all those temples.
“Fine,” Marble muttered. “We can make our way to this temple here,” he said, pointing to a pyramid marked with an image of the Coatl flying above it.
“That’s a ways away,” she remarked. “Don’t you want to try the closer ones first?”
“Yes, but it’s the one most directly on our path.”
“Sure, but this temple is closer to us,” Sunny said, pointing to another pyramid.
“It’s out of the way, though, isn’t it?” Marble asked. “We’d have to travel more northeast to get to this one.”
“Sure, but we can make up the time by traveling longer now that we know where we’re going.”
Marble nodded. “I suppose.”
“Great! Then that’s where we’ll go next. In the meantime, I’m going to get dinner, get ready to take the first watch again.”
Marble sighed as Sunny disappeared back down the stairway and back into the jungle to find more food for the night.
She would give him the first watch again.
---☼---
The morning was cool today, though Marble knew that wouldn’t last long. Within the hour, they’d be sweating again until they were soaked all over again. Still, it seemed that everything else in the wilderness was trying to make use of the cool morning as well. Animals and insects screeched and buzzed loud enough to wake the dead in the morning air and left an annoying ringing in Marble’s ears.
“If I read the map right, we should be at the temple in five more days,” Sunny said. “Provided nothing throws us off the trail.”
“And the likeliness of that happening?” Marble asked, hovering above the mare.
“More likely every time we talk about it,” she responded.
“What?”
“Hasn’t that ever happened to you?” Sunny asked. “You mention a thing that you hope doesn’t happen, and then the universe act like it heard you, and then the thing you mentioned actually happens all of a sudden.”
“I mean, sure, I think everyone has, but that doesn’t actually mean anything, does it?”
“You’d be surprised,” she said with a smirk, but Marble just shook his head.
“I don’t know why you’re surprised. We knew she was crazy.”
Sunny crept forward through the underbrush below him, hacking away at the vines and in front of her before she suddenly lurched.
“Are you alright down there?”
“Yeah, I just...I think I found a road.”
“What?” Marble asked before he descended down to her.
Sunny pulled herself up onto an unseen surface and carefully reached out with her hooves. “Yeah, I think this is a road.”
Marble dropped down next to her, and his hooves passed through the foliage before they landed on hard stone. He reached out with his own hooves, feeling out how far the stones went. “I...I think you’re right.”
Sunny’s horn lit up, and the foliage around her began to move. They cleared the area around her, revealing cut stones beneath them. The road seemed to surface beneath their hooves, and Marble blinked as he watched as it very clearly led toward the northwest.
“Well, well, it looks like we found the road,” Sunny said.
“Could you do that the whole time?”
“What?”
“With the plants?” he asked, motioning to the clear stone that surrounded them in a radius. “Because if you could, I have no idea why you decided to clear the stuff in front of you with a machete.”
She shrugged. “Would you believe me if I told you that it takes more work to do this than to chop through them?”
Marble raised an eyebrow.
“So the road runs this way,” Sunny said, pointing down the road.
“So it does,” he replied.
“What do you think, good sign or bad sign?” she asked.
“Wha—? Why would that ever be a bad thing to know where the road is?”
“Because it could be leading us to a village that isn’t anywhere on the map.”
“Even if it does, that’s still a chance for us to find a place to rest. Sure it might not take us to the temple, but it’s still better than nothing, isn’t it?”
“Okay,” she replied. “Then let’s follow the road.”
“What? That’s it?” Marble asked.
Sunny glanced back at him, a questioning look on her face.
“You’re not going to tell me why I’m an idiot for choosing to go down the road? No argument back and forth that wastes hours?”
Sunny smiled. “It sounds like you’ve done the thinking for the both of us, and I’d rather not tread on that ground if I don’t have to.”
Marble glared at her as she began to pick her way down the road. “You make no sense, you know that?”
“As a...old acquaintance of mine once said: What fun is there in making sense? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to spit those words out of my mouth.”
Marble smirked as Sunny opened up her water skin to get a little water into her mouth before spitting it out. “If that’s the kind of reaction he gets out of you, then I might actually like him.”
“You wouldn’t,” she replied. “There are lots of ponies that think they might enjoy his company, but as far as I know, there’s only been one pony that actually became his friend. Poor thing was so socially starved he’s thinking about marrying the poor mare.”
Marble glanced at her as she maneuvered around the thinner underbrush on the road. He wasn’t sure what to do with that information, so he simply let the conversation putter out before he took to the air and began following behind her in the air.
“What about you?” she asked suddenly. “Do you have any friends that would also hate me?”
Vanilla would love you.
The thought made Marble freeze for a moment before his body lurched to keep him airborne. His sister would have loved to meet this mare, who was so crazy as to actually leap hooves-first into the jungle with little-to-no thought for her own safety. Vanilla would have loved to dive down into the mud with her and wrestle a crocodile or two.
It shocked him slightly to realize it, but Vanilla and Sunny would have made a team that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep up with.
It took him a few minutes before he realized that he hadn’t answered the unicorn as she continued to make her way through the jungle. It took him a moment more to realize that Sunny didn’t press him.
“So, uh,” he began, trying to think of something to fill the gap that Sunny left him. “What do we do if we run into a village? Can we just sleep in a broken-down house?”
“That depends on if it’s well built enough that it doesn’t have any holes in the ceiling,” she replied. “And if it isn’t the home of a nasty little creature that wants to eat us both.”
“And what’s the chance of a creature like that being able to fit into a broken-down house?”
“Not as unlikely as you think. Thessalhydras are surprisingly compact.”
“You keep talking about those, but you haven’t actually told me what those are.”
“Terrible,” she answered.
“Wonderful. Trying to get on the Manehatten Times Bestsellers list with that description.”
“Okay, look,” she said, chopping a vine out of the way as she looked back up at him. “Imagine a hydra.”
“Okay.”
“Now, make it from your nightmares. That’s a Thessalhydra.”
“You keep using words, but they’re not doing anything. You know that, right?”
“Look,” she said, “I’ll be honest, the only way to really describe how terrifying those things are is to see one, and if I have my way, we won’t see one.”
“Sure,” Marble grumbled as he nodded.
“The good news,” she said, continuing forward, “is that we haven’t heard anything yet. Typically Thessalhydras make a lot of noise when—”
A deep, throating noise that reverberated through the jungle cut her off. Birds squawked in alarm and took flight while vermin of all types pushed their way toward the ponies.
Sunny sighed. “You know how I was talking about the universe listening earlier?”
Marble just sighed.