"Ah wonder if maybe we should bring Dinky in on this."
"I dunno, Apple Bloom, I don't think she likes scary stories," said Sweetie Belle. Glancing back down at her place in The Horror at Red Hoof, she added, "I don't really think I do."
"I don' mean just to help us get through these books," the farmfilly explained. "She knows a lot about science an' stuff, 'specially astronomy. She's even got a telescope in 'er room!"
"So?" asked Scootaloo. "Twilight's got, like, a dozen."
Apple Bloom rolled her eyes. "Ah mean, she knows more about that stuff than we do, maybe she can help us figger out what some o' this means." She pointed a hoof at her own notes. "The stories keep talkin' 'bout how the Old Ones or whatever will return when 'the stars are right', but they're never clear 'bout what was wrong with 'em in the first place. But Dinky knows more 'bout the stars than any o' us, maybe she can help us make sense of it. She's a smart filly, ain't that right, Miss Cheerilee?"
The off-duty teacher looked up from her own book; she'd decided to join the effort by reading The Shadow Over Hoofsmouth after reading about the hippocampi in the paper. "That's true. You remember her solar system model, don't you, girls?" The young unicorn had even included comets and major asteroids.
"Will she want to, though?" asked Scootaloo. "She never joins in when we do anything fun."
"No," corrected Sweetie Belle, "she just doesn't join in when we do anything dangerous."
"That's what I said."
"I think it's a great idea," added Spike looking up from the newest letter from Twilight. "I swear she's gone through every astronomy book we have. She might be able to provide some perspective."
"Alright, it's settled then," said Apple Bloom, smiling. "Ah'll ask her tonight." Her smile faded as she looked towards the window facing the Everfree. "Ah really wish we could talk t' Zecora, though. She's gotta know some stuff that could help, but no, she had to put herself in that weird magic sleep..."
Sweetie Belle opened her mouth to speak, but her eyes glazed over for a moment. "Wait, who're you talking about?"
Apple Bloom cocked an eyebrow at her friend. "You know, the... um." She looked at the others' faces, and saw similar reactions. Ditzy Doo's story about the Valusian suddenly came to mind. "G-girls, Ah think--"
Spike reached across and placed a claw over her mouth, raising a single digit to his lips as he looked around, making sure everypony got the message. He snatched up a stray piece of paper and a pencil, hastily scrawling a note before showing it around.
There's one nearby.
The fillies and their teacher looked around fearfully, eyes darting to every window. Cheerilee turned to Spike and silently mouthed the words, "What do we do?"
Spike thought for a moment before writing some more.
Keep talking. Act natural. Don't let it know that we know.
Cheer, follow me.
Spike led Cheerilee towards the kitchen. "Can you help me look for some stuff in the pantry? I can't see the top shelves."
"Uh. Sure."
Opening the pantry door, he ducked inside and beckoned for her to follow. Making sure they were out of sight of the windows but could still see the girls, he whispered as quietly as he could, "I've got an idea. But it's risky." He took a deep breath. "And I'd need help."
Cheerilee looked worriedly towards the main room of the library, where the girls tried to maintain a casual conversation while they watched her and Spike, unable to hide the fear on their faces. She swallowed once, and turned back to the young dragon, her eyes hard. "I'm in."
"So what does this cutie-patootie mark mean, anyway?" asked Pinkie, prodding Delta Green's flank and ignoring the cocked eyebrow and sharp whicker he gave her in response.
"It's a mystery."
Pinkie finally met the stallion's eyes, her own boggling at his statement. "What?! You mean you don't even know what your cutie mark means?"
Delta grinned. "No, I do. A mystery is what it represents. It has no obvious meaning, and the only clue that it has one at all is its context. That's my talent: Figuring out puzzles, puzzling out enigmas, and enigma-ing out figures."
"You made that last one up!"
"Hey, it's my talent, I can if I want to." His grin grew wide and wicked as he leaned in close to her. "Give me enough time, and I bet I can even figure you out."
Pinkie giggled softly. "Heh, you're funny," she said, smiling.
Delta continued grinning, a determined gleam in his narrowed eyes.
Pinkie's smile drooped slowly, followed by her ears. She swallowed, finding her throat suddenly very dry, and backed carefully away from the pony who, it was now clear, had not been joking in the slightest.
Having deflected Pinkie's probing questions and hooves, Delta returned his attention to the mares examining the row of file cabinets closest to the door, some enthusiastically, others apprehensively. Rainbow Dash was quickly flipping through the endless folders of documents in the open drawer marked CASE NIGHTMARE KRAKEN, while Rarity and Pinkie discussed whether CASE NIGHTMARE MOON was named after Luna's alter ego or vice versa. Trixie stood by Twilight's side as she stared at the label CASE NIGHTMARE SUN as though unsure if she should be offended.
Luna noticed her reaction and stepped towards her. "For matters of such importance, we cannot allow personal feelings to prevent us from preparing for the worst. Before it happened, my sister would have considered my own betrayal unthinkable as well." She turned gaze towards another drawer, CASE NIGHTMARE BEDLAM. "As we both did his."
Trixie stared at the label for a moment before the realization clicked in place. Her eyes wide, she opened her mouth to say something, but swallowed her question as she felt Twilight's hoof touch hers.
"Alright," said Delta, tapping a hoof on the floor to get everypony's attention. "What do we know about this thing? You lot have field experience here that I lack, so what have you learned about it?"
"It smells like fish and seaweed," contributed Rainbow Dash sagely.
Applejack rolled her eyes at her. "Ah'm pretty sure he meant useful information."
"Hey now, we don't know what will be useful yet," said Delta as he scribbled a note on a clipboard. "Any details you can remember might help."
"Um, actually," muttered Fluttershy softly, "that's... kind of interesting. Maybe." All eyes turned towards her, prompting a faint "Meep!" in response, but a gentle prodding from Rarity got her to continue. "Well, okay, this is kind of gross, but... Most marine life doesn't smell like much of anything if it's healthy. Usually it just smells like saltwater. That so-called 'fishy' smell doesn't happen until it's started to, um... rot."
A hint of green started to show on Dash's cheeks. "Ew."
"Um. So anyway, when Twilight blasted its claw with that lightning bolt, a really strong smell came from it. Like... well, like dead and rotting marine life."
"Hm." Delta continued scribbling notes. "Kinda like it was already dead and rotting itself? That is interesting. The literature, both authentic and fictional, is full of poetic references to the creature being immortal or already dead or something like that."
"That would line up with its magic immunity," said Twilight.
"Yeah, I'd heard reports that the Elements didn't work. Is the reason for that what I think it is?"
Twilight nodded. "It's cut off from the Stream, and most likely animated by negative magic."
"Ya know, that's been bugging me," said Rainbow Dash. "How's it casting magic through the, what did you call it, diving suit?"
"It's a bit like putting a magnet on a table, and then pushing it around with another one underneath. Magic doesn't behave quite the same way as magnetism, though; like charges tend to flow together like water or air while opposite ones repel, or so goes the theory. If it lived on positive magic, like we do, then while inside the diving suit it just wouldn't interact with the Stream at all, like a river flowing around a stone. But with negative magic, it could manipulate its own internal energy to push against the Stream outside the barrier. It should have some awareness of magical activity around it, too, as the flow of the Stream pushes its energy the same way."
"That is true," said Luna. "While facing it, I had at one point made myself invisible and harassed it with illusory copies of myself, but it was able to track me nonetheless. It must have enough awareness to sense and locate my own magical signature."
Pinkie turned away from the group and looked around the room. With everyone politely taking turns to talk, a large chunk of her attention had nothing to occupy it. She looked over the map on the wall, where colored string and pushpins marked the movements of the kraken from its first appearance at the mysterious island to its retreat back to the Everfree after its close call against Trixie. She stared at it for several moments as she listened to the discussion, her ears turning to follow whoever spoke.
"Hold on, I missed a step here," said Delta. "What diving suit?"
"That's how I'd described the barrier between itself and the Stream," explained Twilight. "It's what provides its magic immunity and keeps the positive and negative energies from mingling and negating each other."
"Which means we have at least a vague idea of how to destroy it, right?" asked Rainbow Dash. "Just poke a hole in that suit, or remove it completely, and the kraken falls over dead."
Delta grimaced nervously. "That... might not be as good an idea as it sounds. Luna, you had the most direct contact with it out of anyone here, do you think you might be able to estimate how much negative magic this thing has, all told?"
"Hm..." Luna pondered the question for a moment. "Lend me your clipboard, I will attempt some... I believe the modern phrase is 'back of the envelope' calculations." Delta levitated his clipboard and pencil towards her. Pausing occasionally to think, she scratched out a rough estimate. "I would say somewhere in the range of five to ten kilothaums."
"FIVE TO TE-- Your sister tops out at eight and a half, and that's at noon on the summer solstice! And half of that's dedicated to controlling the sun!"
"I am aware," she replied, passing the clipboard back to him. "As I said, it is an estimate, and a rough one. But in terms of raw power... I would class the kraken as a peer to myself and Celestia."
Delta looked over her calculations and made a few of his own. "Five to ten motherbucking-- Alright. If you just collapsed or negated its 'diving suit' or whatever, introducing five to ten freaking kilothaums of negative magic into the environment would kill everything within a four to six mile radius, and I mean complete and utter sterilization. Another six to ten miles past that would be horribly and monstrously mutated in a way that would make the Everfree Forest look like a petting zoo." He looked up towards the wide eyes and slack jaws of six young mares. "So, no. Don't do that."
Pinkie grimaced at the thought, but kept quiet. Failing to discover anything interesting about the map, she scanned the other documents pinned to the corkboard. The excerpts of barely-legible occult writings and news articles of strange relics found in archeological digs proved equally boring. Her mind starved for activity, she glanced towards Delta's desk and saw the pouch containing the powder of Ibn-Gazelle still sitting there. As she stared at it, pondering what Twilight had said, her right front knee suddenly twitched.
Twilight was the first of the others to get her mouth to function again. "What about the Elements of Harmony? Their capacity is in the kilothaum range."
Delta looked over his math again. "Good point. Yeah, a full power blast from the Elements, or any other influx of energy on a similar scale... Depending on exactly where it is in that five to ten range, it might completely annihilate it. At worst, it'll negate enough to keep the affected radius under a mile or so, and drastically reduce the severity of mutation; might even give you enough time to get out alive. Far enough from a populated area, I'd call that an option, but only if the Elements are fully charged and even then as a last resort."
"There's another possibility to investigate: The barrier might not be a hundred percent perfect. Celestia lost some of her free energy -- what isn't tied to the sun or keeping her alive, I mean -- when it struck her, so a strong aura in direct contact might bleed through."
"Right, right," muttered Delta as he continued to write. "Whatever it is, it's probably at least semi-permeable. Maybe there's a way to penetrate it without tearing it open, and inject positive magic without spilling the negative."
"There's another thing 'bout divin' suits Ah think yer forgettin'," added Applejack. "The air hose."
Twlight blinked for a moment. "Of course! Negative magic still follows the laws of thermodynamics; it couldn't function as a closed system. Maybe that's what's important about the stars: When they're 'wrong', it could be prevented from drawing power from whatever source it uses, and goes into hibernation. If we can cut that off, even if it doesn't die right away, maybe we can force it to hibernate again or leave for another world."
"I doubt the stars have anything to do with it," said Luna. "I threw them into utter disarray, and the beast was unaffected. I think it is time we abandoned that line of inquiry; clearly the legends of my own imprisonment have bled into those of the kraken."
Twilight thought for a moment. "I'm not so certain. After all, you weren't moving the stars themselves, just angling the light from them so they appeared to move, right?" Luna nodded to confirm. "Obviously we should keep the possibility in mind, but until we know what was wrong with the stars before now, we shouldn't discount their importance completely. I know this is unscientific of me, but... my gut tells me there's something to it."
Delta stared at the clipboard in front of him, tapping his pencil against his chin. "What else... Those incantations. Did you try those out, Luna?"
"Yes. They were effective, to an extent. Not as much as the seal, but I was able to distract the kraken, though at the cost of considerable pain. A pony's throat is not meant to make such horrid sounds."
"'Considerable pain'?" said Applejack with a snort. "You were coughin' up blood!"
Luna gave her a puzzled look. "Well, yes. That is what I meant."
Rainbow Dash chuckled softly. "You're more hardcore than I thought, Princess. And I already thought you were pretty hard."
"... Thank you?"
Pinkie untied the note from the string and laid it flat on the desk, using a pencil cup and a Manehattan snowglobe to hold it flat. Slowly and gently, she opened the pouch and gazed at the strange powder within, glittering like stardust. She dipped the very tip of her hoof into it, and a small amount clung to it as she drew it back. She brushed it off and onto the paper note, but instead of falling as one would expect, it flew rapidly towards the paper and clung to it, like iron filings around a magnet. Her eyes grew wide as she realized the shape it revealed: A crescent moon.
"And this is the part that's been bugging me," said Twilight. "How the hay do those words and the elder seal even work? Do we have any idea? Is it just a phobia of the kraken's?"
"Near as we've been able to determine," answered Delta, "it or its kind somehow tied their magic to their language and iconography. Or maybe their language is some kind of fundamental expression of their magic." He paused to scratch his head in thought. "We don't really understand the mechanism, but there appears to be some metaphysical process involved when the kraken is confronted by the seal, but it's specific to it rather than a general monster repellent. Same with the words; the kraken allegedly taught some to its worshippers to let them contact it and summon a few smaller nasties, but others learned the language well enough to create ones to ward them off as well."
"Sounds like the kraken underestimated us mere mortals, huh?" said Twilight, smirking. "So, is the elder seal just a 'no krakens allowed' sign, written in its own language?"
"Eh, not quite. We think it represents some kind of inherent weakness, something it's vulnerable to. Maybe something that can even destroy it. But we have no idea what that is."
The wheels in her mind spinning furiously, Pinkie turned to look back at the group. She froze in place as her eyes met Rarity's, narrowed and stern; realizing the unicorn had been watching her, she looked away with forced nonchalance and began playing with a yo-yo, leaning casually against Delta's desk. Holding that pose for a few moments until she felt the heat of her friend's suspicious gaze leave her, she let out a breath before noticing the shadow that loomed over her. Her yo-yo dangling and spinning down at the end of the string, she looked up and saw Princess Luna standing at her side.
Pinkie dropped back to all fours, her yo-yo rolling away and falling to the side at the end of its string. The princess didn't even seem to see her there, as her wings and ears slowly sagged, her eyes locked on the glittering crescent moon on Zecora's note.
"Alright, girls, I'll be back soon," Cheerilee said through the front door. "Don't give Spike too much trouble while I'm gone." Giving them one last reassuring look, she nudged the door closed and turned her eyes down the street.
Her breath caught in her throat. This is exactly what the posters around town say NOT to do, she thought to herself. 'Use the buddy system at all times. Go nowhere alone.' What the hell am I thinking? She let her breath out slowly, her eyes turning towards Canterlot. For a moment, she imagined that she could see the wreckage of the outer wall even from her great distance.
I'm thinking about keeping the girls safe, that's what. Come on, time to pony up. With an effort of will, one hoof stepped off the edge of the porch onto the road, followed by another, and then two more. Keenly aware of the growing distance between herself and safety, she forced herself to walk with an even pace. She had to look calm. She had to look oblivious.
A rustling sound from a bush make her heart skip a beat. She pressed on, hoping her faltering step had gone unnoticed, and concentrated on her gait. Right front. Left rear. Left front. Right rear. Right front. Left...
A soft, hungry hiss came from behind, closer than she would have thought. Her left ear twitched involuntarily towards the sound, trying to lock onto its source.
Her feet were no longer moving.
Her head turned slightly to follow her ear, and cold, slitted eyes met hers.
The creature sprung to its full height, one clawed hand lunging forward like a striking snake. With a sound like a whip crack, a pink ribbon wrapped around its wrist before it reached her, yanking it backwards, and the Valusian let out a snarl of pain as its shoulder twisted at an impossible angle. A green and purple blur leapt from the bushes and climbed the length of the ribbon like a yo-yo. Releasing and retracting his tongue, Spike collided with the back of its head with enough force to send it sprawling forward.
Cheerilee ran. She didn't see what direction, she didn't even care. She just ran. Focusing every drop of her terror into her lungs, she shouted as loudly as she could manage. "POLICE! HEEELLP!!"
The Valusian struggled to prop itself up with only one good arm as jaws that crush diamonds latched onto its neck. Rather than trying to pull him off, it hurled itself to the side and landed on its back, crushing Spike between its weight and the cobblestone road. The impact knocked his grip loose, but didn't even stun him. As it tried to right itself again, the young dragon rolled to his feet.
The monster turned its eyes towards its opponent for the first time, but saw only fire.
It staggered backwards, howling in agony, blinded by the brilliant green light. It tried to shield its face from further harm, but the slightest touch sent out fresh ripples of pain. The blast has lasted less than a second, but the blackened scales felt as though they still burned. Another heavy impact struck its chest, knocking it onto its back. Tiny claws scrambled over it, surprisingly strong, and forced it onto its side. It felt a fresh wave of pain from its injured shoulder as the useless arm was pulled behind its back and held tight.
Suddenly, it was still, and so was its attacker. It heard screaming voices and panicked hoofsteps all around, and felt hot breath against its neck. Its vision slowly returned, blurry at first, but soon able to make out the magenta pony it had stalked as she left the library, running alongside a stocky male in a blue uniform.
"Do you understand me?" Spike asked, his voice low.
The Valusian took a deep breath, and spoke carefully. "Y-yes. Not speak well, but... understand."
"Good. Then understand this. I have very good control over my fire. The setting I hit you with, I call 'toast'." Spike moved closer, whispering into the slit on the side of its head he took for an ear. "I can go as high as 'smelt'."
The Valusian did not reply, remaining silent and still.
Spike chuckled viciously. "Now I want an answer from you before I hand you over to the cops. The pony you're looking for... Zecora. Why her? What do you want with her?"
"The book... She knows where moon princess hid the book."
"Thank you," said Spike, his voice eerily devoid of gratitude, but his tone became bright and cheerful as the uniformed stallion approached.
"Afternoon, officer," he said with a grin. "I'm making a citizen's arrest."
"It's okay, Luna," whispered Pinkie. "I'm sure you had a good reason."
The princess took a slow, uneven breath and opened her mouth to speak.
"A good reason for what?" asked Rainbow Dash, hovering above her.
Luna shrunk down in shock, her eyes panicked. Pinkie glowered at the pegasus, her voice a low hiss. "For keeping a really big important secret from nosy ponies like you, you... you nose-stick-inner!"
"Alright, jeez! Sorry, okay? I'll go."
"Go where?" asked Twilight. "What's going on?"
Pinkie gave Luna a concerned look; this cat seemed determined to crawl its way out of the bag. Before she could explain, a cloud of green smoke gathered around Luna's horn, solidifying into a scroll. Twilight eagerly snatched it, grinning widely. Pinkie and Luna thought they were off the hook until Twilight's smile began to fade. She turned her eyes back towards the princess, her disappointment and hurt plain to see.
"Is this true?" she asked, levitating the hastily-written letter before Luna's eyes.
Luna shut her eyes and struggled to control her shuddering breath.
"You know where it is, don't you." It wasn't a question. Twilight tried to keep her feelings of betrayal out of her voice, but was less than successful.
"I'm sorry, Twilight. I am so very sorry."
Twilight sighed. "Alright... I won't lie, I'm angry. But we know now, and it's not like we really had a chance to go get it before, so--"
"No," interrupted Luna. "I am not sorry I kept it secret, nor will I ever be." She opened her eyes and met Twilight's. The pain, the fear, the regret they held struck the unicorn like a physical blow.
"I am sorry because you will have to read it."