It's been a while, hasn't it?
Woah there, careful Kid, you've been out a while, don't rush to get up so soon just yet. You and I have a lot of catching up to do.
"A demonstration?" Rucks raised a brow.
"You claim to be capable of finding another object like the Crystal Heart. Therefore, a demonstration would be perfectly acceptable, would it not?"
Rucks was now standing up, taking slow steps to the foot of the bed, near the exit of the room. His rifle hung tensely from his back. "I'm afraid I'll need your help again with that Queen. But all I need in the direction of a mountain, or a quarry if there's anything like that here." He turned the knob, and the door opened with a creak...
Ponies hit you with something strange, didn't they? Well, something stranger still happened again, turns out in the time you were gone, someone took an interest in us. A little bit of talk between us and she was able to wake you up. In exchange for something.
Oh, don't give me that look.
The pair was now at the heart of the bastion, once again inside its inner workings. The heart was stored here, and it would seem that the Queen had a reaction to seeing this place, if the odd slight buzz of her wings was more than just an anxious tick.
"There's a series of ravines and basins in that direction," Chrysalis said, gesturing to the area with her hoof. Rucks aimed a telescope somewhere off to the north-western area that was pointed to. "Thank you kindly." Rucks worked with dials on the thing, propped up on a box on three supports with a variety of gears and rotating knobs fashioned from a brass metal. An eyebrow perched itself up high as he stepped back, taking a slip of paper and pencil and writing in an unreadable script of angular lines and dots. The language of the Caelondians.
"Well then. Seeing as how the land isn't broken it'll make finding it easier. But mining for it will take time." Rucks turned around, his focus taken away from comparing a blue gemstone to the readings he took from the telescope. Scouring all of Caelondia is one tough feat to find one measly core, hence the Detector was made in the unlikely event the Bastion was damaged.
He was very glad he had pitched the addition to the crew.
"Queen Chrysalis?" He asked softly, noticing the changelings stare at the conical wood housing that stored various blue crystal outcrops. The main heart of the Bastion. Great, he just had to have been foolish enough to lead a stranger into the Bastion's heart, and now he was going to pay the price for it.
Unless he was quick on the draw, and his hand flew...
Turns out they needed that Core you got too, and badly, from the looks of it. Originally I only thought to give her what she wanted soon after we picked up the new shard, but the Queen may have suggested an alternative.
A Bastion of their own.
...And stopped at her voice.
"How did you make this floating contraption? There's so much power inside of it, it's almost making me nervous." That buzzing voice was quiet, unlike the harsh tones it had naturally used. "I don't recall you ever told me the name of this floating rock."
"This here is the Bastion, and that-" He pointed to the structure she was staring at, glowing with faint blue lines running up and down its many cracks. "Is its heart. A sight to behold ain't it?."
"Why does it need the Crystal Heart, it seems it has much of the same gem inside of it already." The changeling reached out a hoof, feeling the pulsing light. "What purpose does this... Bastion, serve?"
Rucks was silent for a moment. "It's a mobile safe-haven... The Bastion was designed against sieges that would rip up the ground from under you, use the power stored in itself to keep the land together as best it could."
Slowly the elderly human approached the core construct, closing distance with the queen in tandem. "Not even calamity can bring it down, bring a core around a wasteland, it'll grow to what it once was again."
We talk for a spell.
Ol' Chryssie seems to be a shady character, but then again, so did we. The world we find ourselves in? Let's just say it's nothing like our own, and I don't just mean the lack of a calamity.
I'm more worried about the amount of space we'll have here on the Bastion for ourselves, we might be getting a few new tenants. They're a bit... Unique.
They call themselves changelings. Shapeshifting bugs that feed on emotions, as it turns out the pony reaction of attack first, ask later is nothing new, to them at least.
Rucks was slowly finding himself swayed in the tide of the conversation. The two found themselves in a sympathetic headlock, with both sides with an equally rough history.
The Changeling Badlands was once a vibrant hidden forest around a collection of brilliant lagoons, before its water was drained and the bug-ponies forced into the open and driven back. The four humans were the sole survivors of an event so catastrophic it shattered their land and forced them off to a new world.
The reason behind their evacuation was kept hidden, much like the changeling queen was doing with her own history no doubt. But even if so, he had come to an agreement, and surprisingly enough found himself growing excited on working on the creation of a new vaunted safe-haven for the changelings.
Besides, if they were being hunted, putting more of themselves in the sky would help hide the location of the true Bastion, a point that Queen Chrysalis made very clear to him. "Now just to repeat. You want one for your own hive?" The elderly man tampered with his spyglass, taking a glance to someplace far to the east while jotting something down in his mother tongue. "I won't deny you it, but I'll need workers."
"That can be arranged. You stated that the child would help find one of the cores needed for this project, I will need an estimate of when this will be completed." The Queen buzzed.
"He'll be up as soon as you know it, thanks to you," Rucks answered cordially, arching a brow as he turned the spyglass somewhere to the southeast. "Now that just leaves putting a piece of your home back to the way it was."
Logistically speaking he wasn't sure what to talk about aside from the cores. Though time was a good concern, seeing as how it was working against them when branded as hostile. "The Badlands is a large expanse far away from here, does this thing even fly?" She gazed scrutinizingly at what seemed to be a bundle of stitched-up sails hanging from the roof to the floor. Rucks just chuckled. "You'd be surprised. I can steer her there, but it may take some time. In the meanwhile, I've got some good news for you."
In the time they'd been speaking, Rucks took aside a large sheet of parchment with a menagerie of drawings, scripts, and diagrams...
I ended up finding two cores that day. It's hard to believe that one is inside of the Queen's home, the issue with that is it's just too young to be of use, and confused. But we did find the hum of one in a spot called Galloping Gorge. Find the Core at Galloping Gorge, we can wake up the one Chrysalis has, and maybe it'll be like Burstone Quarry. With fewer Rattletails to deal with, of course.
Ready to get back to work, kid?
There we go, that's the stern look we all see.