Lateral Movement

by Alzrius


663 - Things Are Looking Up

“Shadow, get your butt out of my face!”

“I’m trying, Mysty! But it’s hard to move when Valor’s right on top of me!”

“If I move now, I’ll lose my grip on Woodheart’s horned rabbit thingy!”

“His name is Littleknight, he’s an almiraj, and he can’t help himself! That awful unicorn did something to him! He’d never attack me like this otherwise!”

“Meep meep!”

From her place on top of the heap of mares, Spinner cradled her lute – thankfully undamaged by the fall – as she extricated herself from her friends. “At least there’s nowhere to go from here but up,” she chuckled weakly.

“Not the time for bad jokes, Spinner!” groused Shadow, managing to squeeze out from between Mystaria and Valor.

That freed up enough room for Valor roll free of the others, only barely managing to keep hold of the squirming form of Littleknight, still trying to obey the order he’d been given to attack Woodheart. “Mysty, anytime you want to do your thing and fix whatever spell that stallion put on this little guy, that’d be great!”

Groaning as she crawled toward a corner of the pit, Mystaria took a moment to rub her aching head before casting her ‘detect magic’ spell, frowning as she peered at Littleknight. “That’s odd,” she muttered after several seconds.

“What?! What is it?!” fretted Woodheart, looking torn between wanting to hug Littleknight and not being able to look at him in his current state.

“I can’t see any magic on him at all,” answered Mystaria with a frown.

Valor cocked her head, her innate toughness letting her ignore the way Littleknight sank his teeth into her foreleg as she was momentarily distracted. “What does that mean?”

“It means that this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” huffed Shadow, eyeing the grate across the mouth of the pit appraisingly.

That earned the masked mare a scowl from Valor. “You always make it sound like I’m the one getting us in trouble, but I seem to recall that you’re the one who got us kicked out of that caravan we’d gotten ourselves hired to guard. Without being paid, for that matter.”

Shadow shot the other mare a sharp glance at that. “That’s not fair and you know it! Yes, I spiked the campfire with flash powder, but it was just supposed to give those two braggarts who kept chatting up Mysty a scare!”

“It did a little more than that,” muttered Mystaria as she continued examining Littleknight.

Shadow Star threw her forelegs into the air in exasperation. “Look, those guys were clearing making up all those stories! I’m sorry, but no one faces down a dragon all by themselves and makes it out alive, much less slays it! I figured that when the flames shot up unexpectedly, they’d scream like little girls, fall on their asses, and maybe wet their pants! I didn’t expect it to attract a swarm of giant bug monsters!”

“They were ankhegs,” noted Woodheart distractedly, hovering over Mystaria’s shoulder fretfully. “And that was a nest, not a swarm.”

“It was enough to make sure we had to trudge here on our own, with barely enough money for our rooms and a hot meal, was what it was,” snorted Valor.

Shadow bristled, the tension in her jaw making it clear that she was gritting her teeth behind her mask. “At least I didn’t pick a fight with a necromancer’s girlfriend and get us all captured!”

“I don’t think he’s a necromancer,” spoke up Mystaria, sighing as she stood up. “Did anyone else notice his left foreleg?”

“I think we were all a bit more concerned with the glowing eyes, twisted shadow, and skull mask,” pointed out Spinner ruefully.

“That stallion – Lex – has barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg,” continued Mystaria. “That’s the holy symbol of the Night Mare.”

Shadow Star raised a brow. “I thought you said he was probably a wizard studying at that Bright Night place. Now you think he’s a cleric?”

Mystaria shook her head. “I’m not sure. He might study arcane and divine magic both, like me. But at this point, there’s not enough evidence to be certain.”

She gestured upward, at the black crystal lattice sealing the entrance to the pit they were stuck in. “I don’t recognize whatever magic he used to create those black crystals, and the spell to create a pit like this isn’t divine in nature. But the fact that he’s actually wrapped his foreleg like that, instead of just tattooing the image of wire around it – or carrying some other symbol of her faith that isn’t nearly as painful – says that he’s extremely devout. The fact that he’s apparently able to make Littleknight turn against Woodheart, without using any sort of magical compulsions that I can determine, is also concerning…”

“So you can’t undo whatever that stallion did to him?” Almost in tears now, Woodheart looked between Mystaria and where the almiraj was struggling to free itself from Valor’s grip, still meeping. “He knows what he’s doing, and he doesn’t want to, but he can’t help himself, and it’s breaking my heart to see him like this!”

“Don’t worry,” soothed Spinner. “It’ll be alright.”

“Our present circumstances suggest otherwise,” noted Shadow Star sourly.

“On the contrary,” retorted Spinner with a smirk. “As much as you might have thought I was just exercising my peerless wit when I said there’s nowhere to go but up, I really do think things are about to get better.”

The other four exchanged skeptical looks. “And you think that because…?” prompted Valor.

“Experience,” replied Spinner glibly. “Look, this is exactly what Valor was talking about before she ticked off tall, dark, and angry. We’re Fail Forward, right? Well this” – she waved her hoof to indicate the hole that they were sitting in – “looks like failure to me. So what comes next is the ‘forward’ part. All the more so since we’re following our usual pattern.”

“We have a usual pattern?” Shadow Star didn’t bother trying to hide the doubt in her voice.

But Spinner only scoffed at her friend’s apprehension. “Are you kidding me? This is how things always go for us! We try to earn some easy money with a simple job. Things go pear-shaped when you try to prove you’re smarter than some obvious blowhard, or when Valor decides that she’s going to bully a bully.”

“Hold on!” frowned Valor.

“That’s overstating things!” huffed Shadow Star.

But Spinner continued as though she couldn’t hear her friends’ complaints. “Then we get in a few fights, Woodheart strips down for everyone’s viewing pleasure, Mysty comes up with a plan, and we manage to get away none the worse for wear with a few more coins in our pockets than we had when we left. After that we kick back until we need some more money, and the whole thing starts all over again.” She gave her lute a quick strum to underline the point. “See? So there’s nothing to worry about.”

Silence fell for a moment as everyone considered that.

“That’s kind of simplistic, and a little reductive, don’t you think?” replied Mystaria at last, her expression pained.

“I notice that you forgot to add how another reason we tend to get in trouble a lot is that you make predictions which turn out to be wrong almost as often as they’re right,” complained Shadow Star.

“Or that you like to talk about how you’ve been everywhere and done everything,” added Valor, “even though half the time you’re either repeating things you’ve heard somewhere else or you’re making it up as you go.”

“And you didn’t mention Littleknight!” pouted Woodheart, reaching a tentative hoof toward the almiraj, only to snatch it back when he snapped at her. “He’s been a big help too, you know!”

But Spinner just waved a hoof, as though the others’ criticisms were nothing more than a few errant flies. “Look, the important thing is that this is almost certainly as bad as it’s going to get. All we need to do is make nice with the Night Mare’s nutjob up there, and then we can go back to worrying about how we’re going to find that old temple in this awful weather. In fact…” Her eyes twinkled as she shot Mystaria a grin. “Didn’t you say the place we’re looking for used to be consecrated to the Night Mare?”

Mystaria frowned, but nodded thoughtfully. “That’s what I’d heard. Supposedly something happened and it was abandoned years ago, but I couldn’t find any details, including its exact location. If Lex has an idea about where it might be-”

“Then maybe we can help each other out,” nodded Shadow Star, picking up on the idea. “He might be a tough bastard, but trudging through the wilderness during a blizzard isn’t exactly something you want to do with only one or two people. If we offer to help him ‘recover’ any relics that are still there, we might just earn a fat reward for our trouble when we take them back to the Great Temple in Viljatown.”

“More importantly, maybe there’s a clue as to what’s causing this unnatural weather there?” asked Valor, shooting Mystaria a questioning look.

“It’s possible,” admitted the mare. “The cold isn’t an official part of the Night Mare’s divine portfolio, but she’s often associated with it. At the very least, it’s worth checking out.”

But Woodheart shook her head. “I want to help everyone too, but I’m not doing anything with that unicorn until he fixes Littleknight!”

Mystaria raised a hoof like she wanted to put it on her friend’s shoulder, then seemed to remember that Woodheart was still naked, lowering her foreleg with a grimace. “I’m sure that if we can work things out, he’ll undo…whatever it was that he did. Maybe he’ll even give us an explanation about what magic he was using. Bright Night might not be the most responsible institution in the Empire, but it’s had its share of breakthroughs in magical research over the years. In fact, it was an alumnus of theirs who initially proposed the theory that psychic magic and psionics were different disciplines-”

“Okay!” interrupted Spinner quickly, knowing better than to let Mystaria hold forth when it came to magic. “Now this is what I was talking about: putting the ‘forward’ in Fail Forward!”

“Yeah, well, don’t forget that this all hinges on getting that Lex guy to listen to us in the first place.” Shadow Star canted her head upward, at where the black crystals were still covering the entrance to the pit. “Because he doesn’t seem like the chatty type, what with not having glanced down here once so far.”

“He might not need to,” murmured Mystaria, glancing at the walls of the pit. “If I remember my magic lessons correctly, the hole created by this spell doesn’t last very long.”

“Wait, what?!” Valor’s eyes widened, and she only belatedly caught Littleknight as the almiraj came close to wriggling free. “You mean we’ll be buried alive?!”

She calmed down only a little when Mystaria shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. This hole is actually an extradimensional space, like my bags” – she nodded her head at her saddlebags – “which means that when the spell expires, the hole will cease to exist and we’ll all be instantly moved up out of it harmlessly.”

“Even with that grate there?” noted Spinner, suddenly looking nervous.

“Er…” Realizing she didn’t have an answer to that, Mystaria felt her pulse quicken. That Lex fellow had been furious, but surely he wouldn’t try to kill them over what had happened, would he? For that matter, would sealing up the hole necessarily hurt them? A collapsing extradimensional space would shunt things back to the nearest point of stability, so it wasn’t like they’d be shoved through the grate…probably.

“I think-”

But Mystaria didn’t have a chance to finish her thought as the pit they were in suddenly vanished.

Fortunately, the black crystal lattice over the top of it did as well, and before any of the ladies of Fail Forward could so much as gasp, they found themselves standing in the middle of the inn’s common room again.

And standing across from them, apparently in expectation of their being released, was Lex.

Okay, the good news is that he apparently wasn’t trying to kill us by sealing the hole up, noted Mystaria as she let out a shuddering breath. Plus, he’s not flickering anymore, even if he is still wearing the skull mask. So…he’s signaling that he doesn’t want to keep fighting, but is ready to if we keep going at him? Glancing behind him, she took note of his pegasus companion, regarding her and her friends with an unfriendly – but not hostile – expression.

Glancing at her friends, they each gave her a quick nod – her telepathic magic having expired a little while ago – and Mystaria inhaled deeply, steadying herself. Alright, I can do this. Luminace teaches us that it’s not enough to know how to use magic; we also need to understand the virtues of tolerance, respect, compassion, and humility. That’s how we make sure to conduct ourselves responsibly, not just as spellcasters, but as ponies.

Clearing her throat, she took a single step forward. “I-”

“Are the five of you still battle-ready?” demanded Lex.

Fighting down the urge to wince, Mystaria raised her forelegs in a gesture of peace. “We don’t want to fight! I know you’re still angry over-”

“That’s not what I asked you,” interrupted Lex, his voice colder than the blizzard raging outside. “Are able to continue fighting?”

Mystaria couldn’t help the way her ears folded back then. “That’s…”

“You’re damn right we are!” huffed Valor, taking a step forward. “And if you-”

“Good,” answered Lex, not bothering to listen to the rest of her answer. “There’s a throng of monsters heading this way. They’ll be here in less than five minutes. Now, tell me what magic, weapons, and resources you have at your disposal so that I can develop a plan to best utilize your abilities.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…okay,” murmured Spinner. “Maybe I called that whole ‘this is where things get better’ part a little too soon.”