Heat rose in a visible wall, a twisting, shimmering curtain that distorted the clouds not so far above. Patchy, fluffy and white as snow, they did a passable but imperfect job of shielding Ironridge from the midday sun... though I knew from experience that nothing short of a nightly monsoon would tame the city's heat. And seeing it from this angle only made it that much more obvious how hot Ironridge really was.
Corsica and I were outside, on a lower deck that formed part of the roof of the Ice District, low enough down that we couldn't see over the top of the dam to the west. The wind blew steadily north, and while it was plenty hot out, it wasn't roast-alive hot... except when an occasional gust blew east. Then, the hot city air would billow over the dam, and we could look straight up and see the air begin to shimmer there, too. Where we were, it was maybe as hot as the day district at night. A stone's throw away, it looked unsurvivable.
"Well, this place is good enough," Corsica said, wandering over to a railing. The deck reminded me vaguely of the deck of an ocean ship, though I had never been on one of those, so it was more my idea of what one should be like - wide, industrial, plenty of room for whatever activities one did on the deck of a boat.
"Crazy how much cooler it is here than just over there," I mentioned, motioning at the dam.
Corsica shrugged. "Wish I knew why."
"You been looking into that?" I tilted my head. "If we're gonna sync up, the weather seems like a decent place to start. I remember you were talking earlier about how you thought Cold Karma might be manipulating the climate somehow to make their product more necessary."
Corsica shook her head. "I have looked, and I'm not so sure anymore it is their doing. At least, if it is, it's being done by a very small faction within the company that's hiding their involvement from everyone else, including the top brass. If you looked around the Ice District upper floors at all, you'd see they don't seem to know why the crater's getting hotter, and are spending a large amount of time and energy trying to figure it out."
I had seen signs indicating meteorology labs... I nodded.
"It seems counter-intuitive, at first," Corsica went on. "But it makes sense. The rate at which Ironridge is currently heating is faster than the rate at which Cold Karma is developing new efficiencies in their cooling process, which means they're not on a sustainable track. The way things are right now, today, Cold Karma is hugely profitable. But it's actually less profitable than it was, say, three years ago, because there are parts of the Night District they previously could service that have now been evacuated and are no longer paying for air conditioning. It's also taking more energy for the same customers to reach the same temperatures - any extra environmental heat beyond the level ponies will pay to cool down to is bad for business. And that trend has been accelerating for a while now. Ironridge passed the climate of maximum profitability many years ago."
My backwards ears folded.
"If the city becomes completely uninhabitable, everyone loses," Corsica said stiffly. "But they're also worried the heat could vanish as abruptly as it came. No one knows why it's here, so no one knows it won't. And finally, if they did discover a cause that they could interfere with, that would give them even more power: instead of being the ones to keep ponies homes cool, they could be the ones who keep the entire city cool. The climate is what every sane pony with a business sense is laser-focused on, and their ability to do real work and make progress makes Icereach look like a joke. I didn't understand what it would look like until I saw it. You won't either."
"It's clearly not natural, right?" I glanced at the dam again. "There's no way a phenomenon like this would be so sharply localized. Is there?"
Corsica shrugged again. "Hard to tell. Ironridge has always had a warm climate. Not unlivable, but warmer than this right now down in the Night District during the day. Basically, there's no way to know if Ironridge always had magic heat and its magic heater is now broken, or if its heat was always natural, and there's now something compounding that. Then again, it also depends on your definition of natural. Weather patterns have certain natural laws that affect their behavior, but it's well-documented that powerful magical effects and concentrations can interfere with those. Do you count the storms that come down from the Aldenfold as natural? Those are probably only there because of magic."
"So who in Cold Karma pays attention to this stuff?" I asked. "You said the ones who are sane and have a business sense. Is that, like, two percent of the company?"
Corsica wryly laughed. "Actually, it's about fifty. For every Egdelwonk, there's someone they keep around to maintain the facade, and that involves providing legitimate services."
I tried to hide my chagrin. "And where's Lilith fit in all this? Don't tell me getting framed, arrested, kidnapped by her from jail and then left to wander around her secret underground school before getting bailed out by Kitty who is secretly crazy strong counts as sane?"
Corsica's brows rose in concern. "That's where you were the other night?"
I sighed and looked away.
"...Maybe I should let you go first," Corsica said, sounding slightly remorseful.
"Nah." I waved a wing. "I'll go in a moment, just finish your thought first."
Corsica sat down. "What I was going to say was that Cold Karma is actually simple, if opaque. Everyone on the board of directors is there for a reason, and it's rarely to provide essential services to the ponies of Ironridge. Essentially, think of Cold Karma as an umbrella corporation that actually consists of several different companies, each with their own leader and purpose, all of whom collaborate to sell air conditioning as a means to stay in power. And there are some ponies who are legitimate, because it used to be a real air conditioning company before it got hollowed out and repurposed like this. But for the most part, it does other things."
I nodded. "Which are?"
"Since you asked about Lilith," Corsica said, "she has a single-minded focus on batponies. Forget that social movement in the Night District, she has real power and wants to increase the number of batponies in Ironridge by any means possible. For her, 'societal planning' means engineering more batponies into the population. And because her organization doesn't stand on its own, but has Cold Karma as a front, that means all ethics concerns and public relations considerations are out the window."
"I mean, I know most of that," I told her. "Doesn't make it seem any more sane. Why's she so bent on this, anyway?"
Corsica shrugged. "Beats me. Egdelwonk told me to figure it out myself, and believe me, I've been trying. All I know for sure is she's an immigrant from the Griffon Empire. Maybe she has personal connections to that tragedy and takes your species' scarcity personally."
"The place I got teleported to," I said. "It was like an underground school or research facility. Some of the batponies I saw there looked like they were there by choice, and a lot of them were pregnant."
"Yup. It's both," Corsica said. "An academy designed to get batponies a leg up in society, with an emphasis on family and all that. Remember how batponies always breed true, so you only get batpony children if both parents are also batponies? That rule means the smaller the population is, the more effort you need to spend keeping it insular in order to make it sustainable. That's what the school designed to do."
I frowned. I felt like I had heard that somewhere before...
"...And the research section of the place is focused on finding a way to break that rule," Corsica finished. "To make it so batponies can be born to mixed-race couples. As far as I'm aware, they haven't made any progress, but Lilith is adamant it can be done. Strongly enough to make me wonder if she isn't just boosting morale and actually knows something, but that's just speculation."
I nodded slowly. "Is the school also designed to be creepy? I wasn't exactly in a touristy mood when I went down there, but it felt..."
"Beats me," Corsica said. "I've never been there. Lilith excluded, it's mostly a batpony-only place."
"How are you supposed to get there, anyway?" I asked. "I'm pretty sure the way I got out wasn't the front door."
Corsica shrugged. "Dunno. Why? You want to go back there, or something?"
I took a deep breath. "I found Leitmotif in a dungeon down there."
Corsica hissed. "What?"
"Yeah," I said, shuffling uncertainly. "She didn't look so good, and she sounded extremely paranoid. Part of me wants to relish the irony, but that got old after a few minutes. I'm kind of thinking we should try to save her."
Corsica raised a dangerous eyebrow. "You remember what she did, right?"
"No," I said hollowly. "We never learned what she was up to in the first place, remember? There's so much about the Aldebaran incident we still don't know. I don't even know for sure if she was a good guy or a bad guy. I do know she was once Mother's best friend, that she surrendered to the authorities at the end, and that she never physically hurt us, which was a lot more than she could have done if she really just wanted us out of the way to steal our identities. And I also know that if anyone could shed some light on what happened back then, it would be her."
Corsica was quiet.
"...And besides," I sighed. "Even assuming she was a bad guy, wouldn't leaving her there make us the same as her?"
"Have you got a plan for that?" Corsica eventually asked. "You don't just march into Lilith's domain and steal something with impunity, especially if that something is a prisoner. Especially if she's already got an unhealthy interest in you."
I hesitated, then pulled out Egdelwonk's contract. "Working plan as of about an hour ago: go in, find her, then use this as an escape route."
Corsica read it, then barked a laugh.
I tilted my head. "Is that a good laugh or a bad laugh? Actually, what do you think of working for Egdelwonk so far? I wouldn't be signing away my soul with this, would I?"
"...I knew what I was signing up for," Corsica said after a moment's thought. "Egdelwonk is... a good boss. His assignments don't make sense and won't give you a sense of purpose or meaning in your life like work is apparently supposed to. You'll learn a lot, including some things you probably didn't want to know. You also have a lot of freedom and power to pursue your own agenda. The worst part is his random, unannounced check-ins. The guy can teleport between trash cans, as crazy as it sounds."
My shoulders slumped. "Yeah, I know about that part. He's been following me for a while now."
Corsica blinked. "You sure you're not already working for him? That's the biggest downside."
"Well, he did give me an assignment he said I could start on if I wanted to get a head start in anticipation of joining," I admitted. "But I pretty definitely didn't sign anything."
"He's ripping you off," Corsica sighed. "Anyway, I don't regret it. I don't know what end all my work is going towards, but I've learned things I'm probably better off having learned. Such as why Cold Karma's executives seem so interested in us."
I leaned in closer. "You figured that out? Because that's the least-sensible thing that's happened so far. I know there are normal ponies in Ironridge; I see them every night. Or day! But with me in particular, nobody feels like they have to play by the rules."
"Not just you." Corsica shook her head. "Both of us. And maybe Ansel, though I haven't poked my nose too deep into his affairs."
"...Well?" I tilted my head after waiting a moment. "You gonna tell me what it is, or not?"
Corsica stood up. "Remember when we were in the hideout, and Elise was talking about Yakyakistan's reasons for censoring windigoes in Icereach?"
"Yeah." I rubbed an ear, suddenly uneasy. It had been frustratingly vague, but the general gist was that the church of Yakyakistan wanted windigoes hidden from public knowledge because public windigoes would be bad for their dogma. "Which pertains to us because...?"
Quietly, I said a little prayer that the answer wouldn't be something I really didn't want to learn. But odds were it would be. Windigoes, after all, had an unhealthy interest in us too.
"She talked about Yakyakistan's reasons for agreeing to the silence," Corsica said. "But she wouldn't talk about Ironridge's reasons, remember?" She turned to leave, waving for me to follow. "Come on. This is something you'll want to see for yourself."
A narrow bridge connected the deck of the Ice District to the mountains to the south, and soon, we were in the Sky District. The temperature wasn't too much worse than when we were there at night, and it continued to grow cooler the further from the crater we went. I had never experienced normal outdoor weather - first the bitter mountain cold of Icereach, then the infernal heat of Ironridge - but I almost wondered if what I felt right now might be it.
Except for the fact that we were still clambering through mountain peaks that by all rights should have been like Icereach.
There was a road, at least, and a much wider and more solid one than the path to Dead Herman, that felt like it had been established more recently and through more industrial means. In the distance, a tall, metal spire loomed: Skyfreeze Tower, a part of the skyport that for some reason hadn't been destroyed, but I had never really learned much about. When I asked Corsica, she told me it was the government headquarters prior to the Steel Revolution, and currently the lair of Ironridge's tippity-top upper class, full of private villas and stuff. Ponies who were too rich to need to flex their social standing by going out in the Day District during the day, and the like. I decided we could skip paying the tower a visit.
Fortunately, it wasn't where we were going. We followed the road all the way to the tower's base and then left the trail, pressing on to the southwest. The going became much harder, gravelly, post-glacial scree crunching underhoof, the land rising and dipping in sharp hills that had been carved and sculpted by ice, but I was used to wandering Ironridge and apparently Corsica hadn't been slacking on her exercise, either.
The temperature dropped further as we left the crater behind, becoming less oppressively hot and then mildly warm and then comfortably cool, and whenever we crested a hilltop, I could see snow covering the ground in the distance ahead. Miles to the south loomed the Aldenfold, an imposing, vertical wall of gray I had to crane my neck to see the top of, a sheer cliff backed by range upon range of mountains stacked ever higher, the roof of the world. Looking up at them, I felt like I was at the bottom of a deep, deep canyon, rather than atop another mountain range that would have been respectable on its own in any other company.
I asked Corsica where we were going. She told me to wait and see.
Wisps of cold air drifted past me, and the sky became a deeper blue. Looking back to the north, all of Ironridge could fit in my field of view; the heat distortions caused by the air rising from the crater were all the more apparent now that I could see both of its edges at once. It was like the crater was a projector, blasting a beam of heat into the heavens, or a spotlight shining into a dusty room.
That's not normal, I told myself. That heat had to be being caused by something.
"How do the plants survive?" I asked on a whim.
"Huh?" Corsica glanced over at me.
"In the Night District," I said. "It's full of trees and greenery and stuff. I get that they were used to hot climates before, but if Ironridge has really gotten so much hotter so quickly, wouldn't all the trees be killed by the heat?"
"That's one of the things Cold Karma is studying," Corsica said. "If anything, the forest has grown more vibrant in the last twenty years. There was a cold snap during the Steel Revolution that damaged it heavily, and since then it's rebounded to much more than it once was. It's possible these trees were always suited for hotter weather and the conditions of the past eight hundred plus years were stunting them, but that doesn't make sense either. If we assume the heat is caused by something magical, it might be possible that magic causes the heat to affect the plants differently... but that's just wild conjecture. Who knows if such magic even exists?"
Suddenly, a memory flashed through my head, one from the day I left Icereach, or perhaps the day before. Mother was wearing my bracelet, turning it on, showing me something about its power...
"Those flames don't set things on fire. If they did, you wouldn't be able to turn it off once it's burning. And the scars aren't burn marks. They're more like a... price. And not one you can pay by accident."
Magical heat that wasn't really heat. I felt hot when using the bracelet, sure, and it protected me from the cold, but the fires it lit didn't burn things, and could vanish as easily as they came.
What Corsica was talking about really did exist. I suddenly wondered if there might be a connection between my bracelet's power and the heat that was afflicting Ironridge, and if so, if there was a connection between that and the reason Cold Karma was so interested in me. After all, I was fairly sure Ludwig had known about my bracelet...
I took a deep breath and shuddered. Whatever Corsica wanted me to see in the mountains, I'd see. And then, if it didn't explain or contradict this... She had seen me using my bracelet, while possessed in the storm. Maybe it was time to tell her everything I knew about it in return.
We reached the edge of the snow. It was properly cold out, a little colder than Icereach had been on the day of the avalanche. Ironridge, by now, had to be miles away, and the Aldenfold loomed ever higher in my vision. Scents and sensations I had been missing for weeks now came flooding back to me as white crunched beneath my boots and frost stung the edges of my ears. I was home.
And still, we marched south.
"Exactly how far are we going?" I asked, the skyport visible back to the north - two stands of cracked, lifted domes, the collapsed hangar that housed Fort Starlight, and Skyfreeze Tower side by side. "And how'd you find this in the first place? Were you really just out here exploring for no reason?"
"We're almost there," Corsica told me, the snow piling up higher and higher. "And you'll see. You'd better not already know this, by the way, or I'll feel like a doofus for dragging you all the way out here."
"I'd say it's worth it just for the weather," I sighed happily, tightening my coat. Corsica, as usual, wore only her shoes and ear ornaments, and had perked up visibly in the cool weather as well. She nodded in agreement.
Periodically, as we marched, we passed by twisted heaps of metal and debris, parts of the skyport that got blown to the south by the storms that tore it apart. That struck me as slightly odd, given that storms usually blew northward instead, but I kept my questions to myself, the weather weighing on me like a vigil of silence, demanding that I appreciate it and not fill the air with words instead. We hiked along a river, flowing northward from the Aldenfold, cold and glacial. At one point, Corsica stopped for a drink, and I did too. Wonderfully pure.
And then, at last, we came to a structure.
I wasn't sure what it was at first. A low, circular dome, it was covered in snow, too regular to be natural yet not shaped or designed like any building I had ever seen. It was situated in a valley, clearly not intended to be a landmark. But there was actually a bit of a trail leading down to it. And, when Corsica lit her horn and cleared some snow away, it had a door.
The door was recessed into the dome, carved and made of stone, with an architectural style that felt more like it belonged in Icereach than Ironridge. A high-tech lock panel was indented in the wall leading up to the door, though, and as I inspected the carvings, they felt quite new compared to the ancient chapel from my home. At a guess, I would say this building was erected somewhere within my lifetime.
"What is this?" I turned to Corsica and tilted my head. "Where are we?"
"We're here," Corsica said. "Give me a moment to open this. It's complicated, and I've only gotten the spell right once before."
She concentrated on the lock, horn glowing. Rather than ponder what she was doing or where she had learned how to, I took a moment to inspect the carvings in the door instead. The dominant one was a hexagon inscribed minimally within an upside-down equiateral triangle, so that each of the triangle's sides touched the hexagon once in the middle, and three of the hexagon's points weren't touching the triangle at all. I had seen that symbol before, I knew, and was fairly sure it related to the church of Yakyakistan, but I had no idea how.
If I wasn't about to find out, maybe I could ask my co-worker... What was her name, again? The religious one... Lalala! Her! For a moment, I winced, realizing my last few days had been so hectic I had completely forgotten ponies who were supposed to be important to me in a normal capacity. Relationships with co-workers were the kind of things normal ponies had to put time and effort into, and my life was so abnormal that those didn't even rank on my priorities list.
Maybe Corsica was about to give me a reason for that.
"...There we go!" Corsica grunted, and suddenly the symbol on the door glowed a deep midnight blue. Then, with a rumble of stone, the door split down the middle, and began to slide open.
Inside, it was dark, until the twin lights of my bracelet and Corsica's horn moved through the door. The domed ceiling was marginally ornate, but looked like it had been built in a hurry, and not artistically consecrated like the chapel. There wasn't a floor; just regular, stone mountain ground, rough and uneven and likely unchanged since before the place was built. It was just a stone dome, built and sealed to keep this place in the dark.
I held out my hoof, illuminating a natural depression in the floor. Two things reflected back at me: broken machinery, and ice.
Lots of ice. Unnatural ice. Not ice that formed flat on the floor like a frozen puddle, but ice that rose into the air, twisting in three-dimensional sculptures, or else patterned itself into runes, so perfectly faceted that it looked more like a diamond than a sculpture that could melt. The pattern was symmetrical, like a snowflake, and also organic, like a spider web. At first, I was certain it was the work of a windigo.
But then I looked again, and was only half-certain. This ice felt... old. Too deliberate for Ludwig's chaotic personality, too cut off from any power source to grow and change, more like an arrangement of fake flowers than a real flower growing in a greenhouse. And there was something primal about it, and also something harmonic, and also something lesser about it, that would have been greater if it was alive. This was... I breathed in. It felt like a commemoration of something that had happened here to the land, rather than the thing that had happened itself.
And then I looked at the machine wreckage, closely tangled up in the center of the ice. Silver and shiny, smooth exteriors that had been split open and scattered by some sudden force, but little damage from the weather or the decay of time. The exteriors had clearly been rounded, though. Cylindrical, if what looked like a surviving internal frame was any indication.
Combing further, I saw what might have been fuel tanks. And then what was unmistakably a rocket fin.
"What...?" I stared at Corsica, ears down, unable to put two and two together. Something about this place stilled my heart. Whatever connection was waiting to be made, I didn't want to make it.
"It's a rocket," Corsica said. "A working one. Fired by Yakyakistan twenty years ago, during the Steel Revolution. Instead of cleaning the place up, they built this dome and locked it in here, right where it crashed."
I looked again at the wreckage.
"Carrying a cargo of windigoes from beneath the Yak Hoof Glacier," Corsica went on. "Not an accidental crash, either. They were responsible for the cold snap that ended the old weather patterns of Ironridge and started the new ones. They were involved in that fight. I'm certain Elise knows, and was avoiding telling us. I think that Starlight filly Jamjars and Elise talked about was the one who beat them, but it's hard to know for sure since they've been so swept under the rug. It's also possible they were never really defeated and are still in Ironridge today. Hard to know. But that's not the important part."
I stared at her in disbelief. "That's not the important part?"
Corsica turned to the rocket and nodded, not making eye contact with me. "This rocket predates the Icereach institute. Yakyakistan built them on their own. It was one of two ever launched, outside of tests. The second delivered a payload of explosives to the Griffon Empire shortly before their war. In both cases, they weren't meant to explore space. They were meant to drop weapons on Yakyakistan's enemies."
"Then what are they doing in Icereach?" I whispered.
"It's hard to find good information about them," Corsica said. "But it's likely the second rocket wasn't actually fired by Yakyakistan themselves, and instead was hijacked by a rogue agent based in the Griffon Empire and used for their own purposes. Either way, one almost destroyed a friendly neighbor, and one was stolen for use in a war on the other side of the world. Yakyakistan couldn't control the power they had created, but they didn't want to get rid of it, either. And so they sealed it away. All the 'research' we did in Icereach? The reason there were never any tests, the schedules kept getting pushed, but we still put so much time and effort into those rockets? It's because we weren't building them. They were finished and fully operational all along. We were maintaining them in case things ever changed between Yakyakistan and the rest of the world, and they decided they needed them again. Icereach isn't a research colony, Halcyon."
She turned to meet my eyes at last. "It's a weapons depot."
I was frozen in place. "But you said this was about why everyone in Ironridge is interested in us. What do we have to do with those rockets? Other than being from Icereach?"
"You remember how evasive Elise was about Icereach's censorship when we were in the hideout," Corsica said. "How she talked in very narrow terms and wouldn't tell us the big picture. I don't know for certain, but... Ironridge knew about the rockets and knew what Yakyakistan wanted to hide in Icereach. I think Ironridge wanted to use the colony to hide its own weapons, too."
My blood ran colder.
Corsica pointed at my bracelet. Somehow, I already knew.
"I don't know this for sure," Corsica said. "But too much makes sense. Do you remember when Elise and Graygarden were answering our questions in the aftermath of the Aldebaran incident? Something Elise said was that she came to Icereach to take up her post on the same airship flight that brought you and your family as refugees. I wasn't born in Icereach either - I came in with Graygarden when I was only a few months old. What do Elise and Graygarden have in common?"
I wracked my brain, but I couldn't think.
"They're foreigners," Corsica said. "And Icereach is almost entirely made up of natives who predate the institute. Ever since I learned that, I thought they were just imported corporate bosses, but what if they were actually sent here to watch over things the rest of the world wanted hidden away? Specifically, over..." She swallowed. "Us?"
I held out my bracelet. "You mean you...?"
"My special talent." Corsica shrugged. "I told you it's special, right? And I got it while I was unconscious, which isn't a normal way to get one. And it's... powerful. I wonder if something about me was... marked at birth or destined to have it, or if I always had it and it was waiting for the right time to manifest, or... Look, you've seen the way some ponies behave around it. And I know your bracelet does more than you let on. I haven't pressed because it's clearly personal, but I saw you using it to chase me through that blizzard. The important part is, my talent and your bracelet. I think those were hidden away in Icereach on purpose. And everyone in Ironridge who knows about them wants them."
"My bracelet, maybe." My throat was dry. "Elise didn't have an existing obligation to us. But you're Graygarden's daughter. You think someone randomly tapped him to lead the institute just because you're important and he was related to you?"
Corsica's face darkened. "Don't you ever tell this to another soul, but... I was adopted. Shortly before he came to Icereach. If you've ever wanted to know why things deteriorated between Graygarden and me after the avalanche, it involved the manner in which I found out."
"...Then what do we do?" I whispered.
"Same thing I've been doing for a while now," Corsica said, her shoulders straight and her voice gruff. "Stay the course and don't let anyone get their grubby hooves on me who doesn't deserve to. I've been going back and forth on whether to tell you. Part of me thought you're enjoying your life in Ironridge and don't need to be thinking about a thing like that. Another part of me thought you're in danger and might as well know so you can protect yourself... even if we're playing with forces that are so much bigger than us, there's nothing we can do."
"Unless there is something we can do," I pointed out. "If Cold Karma is interested in us because we're powerful..."
Corsica shook her head. "I don't know what kind of power your bracelet has, and I'll leave it up to you to tell me. I still don't feel like talking about my special talent. But even if we could blow up an entire company, do you really think Ironridge would be better off for it? They need Cold Karma to stay alive. And Cold Karma does much more than just air conditioning. They provide policing and the rule of law. They run the military that defends our borders from the likes of that pirate king who's in the news so often. For all her creepiness, Lilith does more to actually help stop batponies from going extinct in a few generations than anyone else. Ironridge is wound tight enough to burst, but it's such a delicate balance, there's no way we can actually fix something without breaking everything else. Even if you could rewrite reality in accordance with your whims, it would be too much."
I hesitated. "So... does that mean you'd rather not know the stuff I've been figuring out?"
"Beyond finding Leif in a dungeon?" Corsica slumped. "Spill it."
I took a deep breath. "I'm all but certain Cold Karma is using windigoes somehow to power its air conditioning. I think but don't know that Kitty is possessed by a windigo just like you were. If she is, Jamjars knows. And I also think Jamjars owns the hideout where Aldebaran took us."
Corsica sat down and swore.
"That's why I need to rescue Leitmotif," I said. "One of the reasons, anyway. Her real name is Senescey. But we saw her have a break with the Composer. Whatever her story is, she's the one pony we can trust to not be in on the windigoes' schemes."
Corsica slowly nodded. "When she captured us. Do you suppose she knew...?"
"Doubt it." I shook my head. "Elise pointed something out to me when we were in the hideout: Aldebaran didn't know about my bracelet. They didn't try to take or copy it when disguising as me. Which means if you're right about this being something Cold Karma is after..." I held out my leg, the bracelet glowing in an emerald circle. "They didn't let Aldebaran in on it."
Corsica sighed. "What about Gerardo? What about Elise? What about that friend Gerardo told us to go to if we ran out of other options?"
"Valey?" I perked up. "I met her. She's got a semi-secret fortress in one of the skyport ruins. She's... weird, but probably not worse than Egdelwonk." I blinked. "Speaking of Egdelwonk, he's not after your talent too, is he?"
"Sort of." Corsica shook her head. "He clearly knows about it. More than I do, for sure. But he acts like he's more interested in teaching me about it than using it for his own ends. In the least-direct way possible, though..." She slumped. "Big surprise, I don't know everything about my own special talent."
I stepped closer. "I don't know... well, hardly anything about my bracelet, other than that it belonged to Mother back in the Empire, and she likely stole it from somewhere important."
"Great." Corsica didn't sound encouraged. "So neither of us is in control of the powers we've been saddled with. What do you know about Valey? I know she supposedly helped protect the city from windigoes during the Steel Revolution, but not the specifics. These days, she's a public bogey who's more myth than reality, and by all accounts is obsessed with trolling an organization in the Night District called the Zero Armada that's supposedly a pro-batpony activist group."
"Didn't know she had it in for those guys," I said. "I know basically nothing about her other than that she's kind of weird and mean. What's with the Zero Armada, though? I keep hearing about them in passing..."
"They're probably the most influential cultural group in Ironridge," Corsica said. "Every time you see anyone express an opinion on batponies, it's probably being colored by them. I haven't looked into them too much, mostly because I hate the Night District. But they're..." She hesitated. "They're less pro-batpony and more anti-anyone who isn't pro-batpony. Organized like a religion. It sounds to me like an energy sink for disaffected ponies with too much time on their hooves and not enough outlets. You think they have anything to do with this?"
I shrugged. "Who knows? Probably less than Cold Karma."
Corsica sighed. "Right. So, what do you want to do about Jamjars?"
"Until I know for certain, nothing." I shook my head. "If she's playing at anything involving us, I think having us on her team but with some agency of our own is exactly what she wants. She might not be being honest with us, but I doubt she's going to suddenly lock us up unless things dramatically change. If I had to guess, and if you're right about these being powerful enough to interest Cold Karma, I'd say Jamjars wants to convince us to help her of our own volition."
Corsica put her chin on a hoof. "Then she's probably playing the long game, considering how obtuse she is about her own goals. Unless she's elaborated any for you about these Writs of Harmonic Sanction she's supposedly chasing for Starlight, and how all that fits together?"
"Nope." I looked down. "It's pretty likely there's some major context no one's telling us, though. Especially if there's stuff out there like what you found out about... this place. Valey and Gerardo might know, though, since it's so clear they have history with her. Maybe we should go see Valey, tell her what we know, and see if she'll make a good-faith bid to tell us everything and recruit us?"
"I'm not fond of getting recruited," Corsica said. "And anyway, I've already chosen a side with Egdelwonk. He might be fine with it, though. I guess we could." She thought for a moment. "Maybe Leitmotif really is our best way to go."
"...I should probably tell you some other tools I've been hiding," I said after a moment's hesitation. "First, the hideout had a teleporter. It's probably the intended way in and out. I don't know how it's powered, but it's probably by Ludwig. I stole the pattern card pointing to its destination."
Corsica perked up. "So you're saying we might be able to find out for sure if it goes to a place that's tied to Jamjars? You're not certain about her being in on this, then? And this is a way to verify?"
"Yeah, I'm not certain," I started. "But it's way more than that. Valey has the same kind of teleporter, so we could go straight there in person. And assuming there's also a teleporter to send someone to the hideout, we could go back there too if for any reason we wanted to. Like, say, to ask Ludwig to tell us how to know for sure if someone's possessed by a windigo."
"You mean Kitty." Corsica gritted her teeth. "...I'm not looking forward to dealing with Ludwig again. But I could, if it's important. I pushed him around once, and I can do it again. He'd probably even help us willingly if we could frame it as us being the underdogs in a fight. But whatever we do, we shouldn't do that unless we're prepared for things to escalate very rapidly."
I slowly nodded. "Yeah. And, one other thing... When I was looting the hideout, I found three Writs of Harmonic Sanction."
Corsica's ears rose sharply. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah." I nodded again. "I accidentally used one on myself before I knew what they were. There was a note with them that made it sound like someone stole them in Equestria and brought them back up here, and I recently realized they're probably for Jamjars."
Corsica let out a breath. "The land south of the Aldenfold... Jamjars, what are you up to?"
"I dunno," I said. "But we're going to find out."
Corsica snorted in solidarity. "You wanna go to Equestria, right?"
I tilted my head. "Well, that was the idea. But we'd also need an airship..."
"It sounds like a good way out of this mess," Corsica said. "We're obviously not going to be able to live here long-term. At least, not with the stuff we have on our heads. Maybe you could give up your mother's heirloom, and maybe it wouldn't doom the city to something nefarious, but how do you give someone your special talent? I say we use the writs on the three of us - you, me, Ansel - and then we get an airship and leave this place."
"You think we can just get an airship?" I asked, remembering Coda's offer to pay me one in exchange for a job.
"We're power players now, like it or not." Corsica shrugged. "We've already got stuff ordinary ponies never see, like a house in the Ice District and jobs with Egdelwonk. I doubt it's impossible. Wanna make that our end goal?"
I proffered a booted hoof. "It's a deal."
Corsica took it.
"Step one," I said. "Rescue Leitmotif. I've got a few ideas on that. Step two: get an airship. I might also have an idea on that. Step three: fly to Equestria and hope nobody there cares about my bracelet or your special talent."
"I've got some ideas of my own," Corsica said. "Let's split up and pursue these separately for now. Better not to have all our money on one gambit. In the meantime, if you're seriously considering working for Egdelwonk, lemme know if you want an invite to any co-worker social events. I've got a... friend... who's a little out there, but knows a lot about Griffon Empire history. You might enjoy picking his brain a little."
"Gotcha," I said, stepping away. Step four, I added in my mind: I still want to get to the bottom of the Aldebaran incident. Flying away is good, but first I want to understand everything that's been going on.
We shared a look of understanding, and left the rocket crash shrine. Corsica sealed up the door again, and we started on the long hike back to Ironridge, the sun several hours lower in the sky than when we started. I had a lot more questions than when we started, but they were clearer questions, better defined and more targeted to what I knew was going on, rather than the general sense of directionlessness that had been plaguing me since early into my Ironridge career.
Things were starting to make sense. I couldn't see the other players' hands, but I could see the game board, and I had a vague idea of what was in my own hand. And, most importantly, I had an ally.
I looked at Corsica as we walked. She looked tired, though it was hard to tell if it was a general exhaustion or the specific kind that came from overusing her talent. Probably a mix of both.
She didn't want to tell me everything about her talent, and had admitted she didn't know everything about it in the first place. I didn't want to tell her everything about my bracelet... or my own talent, or my mask and my state of mind and the magic that empowered it, either, and I definitely didn't know everything about that. But someday, if I was going to talk about it, she was probably the pony I'd choose to share it with.
Hopefully, on the other side of Ironridge, we'd find a place that was less overbearing, and we could slow down and see to matters like those for real.