Jordan waited at the front porch for the auctioneer to reach the house, and she waited, and she waited, and soon, she began to wonder if something was wrong. She'd permitted the guards to let the mare in what seemed like an hour ago. The driveway was long, but it wasn't that long. She checked the time of the last call; it had been thirty-eight minutes. Walking up to the house took five minutes at most.
Something was wrong. If that mare had come onto the property, she had wandered off somewhere other than the house, somewhere she was not supposed to be. Was Carmen even the real auctioneer? Jordan felt nothing but shame that she hadn't done anything to check that. Who knew who that mare was or what she was doing right now?
Maybe she should find Andrea, but if she got Andrea involved, it amounted to admitting that she had screwed up–that she had made a decision without Andrea and the first one had been a mistake.
No, that was stupid. It was going to be embarrassing and humbling, but she was going to go find Andrea. There was someone on the property who didn't belong here and had some sort of nefarious intent. She would be a big filly, admit her mistake, and see what they could do to correct it before something terrible happened. Andrea was going to cuss her out.
Rather than search all over the property for Andrea (she really should have gotten Andrea's phone number by now, which made her even more embarrassed), she headed back into the house and went straight to the guard room.
When she got there, the guards seemed to be waiting. One of them smiled.
"Judging by how quickly you rushed in here and the look on your face, you already know what you did," the guard said with a chuckle. "Miss Portsmith said to wait an hour to see if you'd figure it out. She was hoping you would; we all were. You had us worried that you wouldn't with how long you were taking. She's sitting with the intruder behind the chapel. She's waiting for you. She kind of needs you to help extract her. We'll let her know you are coming."
Jordan gaped. "She already caught the intruder?"
The guards all laughed.
"Do you honestly think we weren't on high alert?" one of the guards asked. "Miss Portsmith was expecting something. We did as you told us, but right after you gave us the order to let that mare in, we phoned Miss Portsmith. It didn't take long for Miss Portsmith to find her failing to sneak into the vaults. Truth be told, our intruder is probably going to be glad she was discovered quickly, but I won't spoil why. It's rich."
Jordan's ears sagged. They had known immediately that she had screwed up when she had told them to let the mare in, and they didn't say anything to her about it. Instead, they'd gone behind her back and told Andrea about it so Andrea could fix it. Yeah, they'd known they could deal with it, but they didn't respect her enough to tell her that what she was doing was a bad idea.
One of the guards gave a polite cough. "You might want to hurry. That mare needs you to get out of the bind she's gotten herself in. You're the only one who can do complex magic while on the property, and she needs that right now. Amicus Curiae is looking for the appropriate spellbook as we speak."
Wait…what? What exactly had happened? They told her they weren't spoiling the surprise, but it seemed that the intruder had run afoul of one of Auntie Sunset's defenses. Many of Auntie Sunset's defenses were nasty and brutal. How could they even be jovial about that? Even if it was a thief, she didn't want them in pain or dying.
She turned and galloped from the guard room to the front door, took a moment to orient herself and remember exactly where the chapel was, and then galloped to that. The chapel was a small, rectangular building that would be easily overlooked if not for the stained glass windows. Without thinking, she entered the chapel, found it vacant, then remembered they said behind the chapel. After circling into the trees behind the chapel, she found Andrea lying on the ground, watching a red-furred earth pony mare stand rigidly in place a foot or so away. Two human guards leaned against the chapel, looking bored.
Andrea looked over to her as she approached. "Took you long enough, although I should be happy you at least figured it out without being told. Meet Carmen Sandiego, a mare likely feeling much more embarrassed and a fuck-up than you are right now. Forgive her if she doesn't wave; she's having issues with her legs and hooves. So nice of her to trap herself for us–saved me a lot of time tracking her down."
"Do you have to rub it in?" Carmen whined through gritted teeth.
Andrea chortled as she stood back up. "Ohhhhh yeah, I have too. It's just too good."
Jordan slowly approached and took a better look at the mare's hooves; they seemed to be embedded in the ground. They didn't seem to be that deep. It should be easy for her to pull them out.
"I don't understand what's going on. How is she trapped?" Jordan asked in befuddlement
Andrea smirked. "Unicorns like to think they have a monopoly on being mages. It simply isn't true. Other tribes can cast spells, too, even if their selection is more limited in what they can do, and the spells have to align with their natural tribal abilities. You should know this better than most since you got to see Wild Growth at her height. Carmen here is an earth pony mage, not nearly as powerful as Wild Growth or even half as powerful as Phobia's newer bodyguard, Wallace, but Carmen still has some fun tricks. With a bit of complex earth pony magic, she can phase through solid objects, primarily walls or the ground. She had no idea Sunset's defenses against complex magic would catch her earth pony spell. Her hooves aren't just buried in the dirt right now; they're phased into it. She can't pull them free from the ground because they're part of the ground for the time being."
Carmen hung her head. "And my leg muscles lock up when I'm phasing through the ground, so I can't even try to lift them right now."
Jordan's ears flattened. "Is that painful? Are you hurting?"
"Honestly, I can't feel my hooves, and that's probably a bad thing," Carmen replied dryly. "Please, get me out of here before my legs die from lack of blood flow."
Andrea lifted her leg and tapped her phone. "Hey, Ami, any progress on finding that spellbook? Kinda want to get this pony loose. She's just a thief, not a terrorist. I don't have any desire to actually hurt her."
"Do you know how many spellbooks Sunset left in the unrestricted section?" Amicus replied in frustration on the other end of the line. "Do you also know how much I know about magic to even know what I'm looking at? The answer is zilch; I know nothing. Where's Jordan? I need her to help me look. She should at least have some clue what she's looking at. I could be looking right at it and not have a clue."
Auntie Sunset had an unrestricted section of spellbooks? Jordan didn't even recall seeing one spellbook in all her looking around the house. Where was it? Why hadn't anyone said anything to her about it? The answer to that was easy: they didn't trust her.
"Where are you, Amicus?" Jordan asked, loud enough that the old earth pony should hear her perfectly.
"Are you crazy? I can't tell you that while that thief is standing there to overhear!" Amicus exclaimed. "Come to the foyer, and I'll come get you."
Jordan didn't think she could feel any worse, but it kept happening. She almost made another foolish mistake less than an hour after her last big one.
She sighed and began walking. "I'll be right there." At least they would let her learn the spell to get the mare unattached from the ground, if only because her jewelry made her the only one capable of casting complex spells on the property.
It only took her a minute to get inside and find Amicus looking frazzled.
"Come on! I'm inviting you into my room," Amicus said as she turned and started marching back up the stairs.
Auntie Sunset's secret library of unrestricted spells was in Amicus's room? Well, Jordan wouldn't have thought of looking for spellbooks in an earth pony's room. She'd been in almost every other room and would have noticed a bunch of spellbooks.
When they entered the room, Jordan saw that one of the bookshelves had been practically dumped out on the floor, and Legal Brief was randomly picking up books off the floor and flipping through them.
"All these magical terms are nonsense to me," Legal Brief moaned as he tossed a book and picked up another.
Amicus looked at the heaps of books on the floor and shook her head in despair. "Me too. Jordan, you'll have to figure this out. Don't trust whatever the covers say or the first few or last few pages of each book."
Jordan levitated the closest book to herself and looked at the title, The Fundamentals of Effectively Breeding German Cockroaches. She opened it up and flipped through the first few pages; it seemed precisely that. Who the hell would ever write a book about this? She looked around at other books and saw such titles as Modern Account Practices And Investing 1919 Edition, Asbestos, the Wonder Building Material, A Guide to Better Lead Paint Mixing, Bill Cosby: America's Dad, The Mushrooms of North Africa: A Field Guide, and Comic Books: Satan's Greatest Weapon Against Christianity. Who would read any of this? These weren't spellbooks; it was a library's rejected book collection. The thought of book burning made her sick to her stomach, but if she were freezing, she wouldn't object too much to these being used for kindling. People might get dumber or die of boredom reading this garbage. Did that book over there say The Societal Benefits of Rape?! What the fuck???
"You have to start in the middle of the book," Amicus stressed.
Jordan used her magic to open the book to its exact center and found what looked like a table of contents listing out various spells. The page to the left showed entries at the book's first part, beginning with page thirty-two and ending with page one-hundred-nine. The right page table of contents started with entries on page one-hundred-twelve and continued to page one-hundred-eighty.
"My little sis had a spell to disentangle matter that a magical mishap had fused. I know she did," Amicus said as she picked up and tossed books. "She screwed up some spell once and had to create a countermeasure. I don't think it could be that dangerous, so it must be in one of these books rather than the ones in the vaults. She kept all her unreleased spells that she thought were no danger if they were discovered in this collection. Most of this stuff has very narrow or seemingly pointless applications."
"That should fix that thief's hooves if we find it. I can't imagine having her hooves fused into the ground is healthy," Legal Brief said.
"If these spells are so safe, why didn't anyone tell me about them?" Jordan asked.
"Because you didn't seem that interested," Amicus answered. "It's not like this is world-changing stuff anyway. This is my sister's junk spells."
Jordan started looking closer at the table of contents. "No. There's no such thing as a junk spell, according to Auntie Sunset. Her work was built on the failed spells and ideas of others. You just have to find the right use. These spells might seem pointless, but they aren't. She set these aside for a reason."
Amicus raised a brow at her. "Well, don't get caught up trying to figure out why. We just need to help that mare before she gets permanently injured. The spell in question can't require much power because my sister cast it, and she's magically weak."
Jordan started flipping through the book, using her skimming spell to look for key terms that she knew had to be somehow associated with the spell. The first book turned out to be missing what she was looking for, so she discarded it and started on a second. Both the earth ponies glared at her.
"I'm using my magic to search quickly," she explained before Amicus or Legal Brief could complain she wasn't putting an effort into looking. "Book skimming is one of my signature spells. Princess Twilight taught Auntie Sunset how to skim, and Auntie Sunset taught me how to do it. I'll find the right spell faster this way, but I may need to take the book with me when I find it."
Amicus shook her head. "I don't like that. Sunset was less protective of these books, but she still hid them with me. It should be a simple spell anyway if she could cast it."
Jordan continued to flip through books rapidly. "It's a common misconception that less power means less advanced. You'd be shocked at how complex a spell can get while only needing a little power. My skimming spell used hardly any magic power, but it's a lot more complex than most spells. Auntie Sunset might have been magically weak, but she can still pull off spells most unicorns cannot because of all the intricacies involved. The spell we're looking for might be one of those, especially if it isn't common knowledge. I won't try to pull something like that off from memory. It could hurt someone if I do it wrong."
"I still don't like an outsider even seeing the book. I'm supposed to keep these things safe," Amicus insisted.
"Get some wrapping paper, construction paper, even lined paper, and I can throw together a book cover real fast," Jordan said dismissively. Her spell caught something, and she paused to read the entry. Yes, this seemed like it was it. She turned the book over and looked at the title–Lyndon B. Johnson the Antichrist: A Biblical Proof of the Mark of the Beast and the End Times From America's Top Theologians. Wow… just… wow, and it wasn't even close to the worst book title in the batch. If Auntie Sunset planned to disguise her spellbooks as the worst imaginable books that no sane person wanted to read, she did well.
Legal Brief came over carrying a box packed with Christmas, birthday, graduation, and general congratulations wrapping paper and dumped it right in front of her in a big pile.
"I didn't need this much," she said with bemusement.
He shrugged. "Figured you might want your pick. The older you get, the bigger the family gets. We have many grandfoals, great grandfoals, nieces, nephews, grandnieces, grandnephews, great grandnieces, and great grandnephews, so we always have a lot of presents to buy each year, so we keep a lot of extra wrapping paper around. By the time you reach our age, it is a full-time job keeping track of them all. They multiply like bunnies. There's always someone having something going on."
"We have three calendars dedicated to keeping track of each major branch of the family," Amicus said with pride. She frowned at her husband. "Did we ever mail off those baby blankets and diapers to Arachne? We were so caught up dealing with Sunset moving to Equestria; I don't remember."
Legal Brief kissed his wife. "I took care of it, love."
"What about Yorik's birthday present?" Amicus asked. "He's turning sixteen. That's a big birthday."
"All taken care of, along with Rose's," Legal Brief confirmed. "I also got something nice for Edgar's baby shower–and booked our plane tickets to attend next week."
Amicus shook her head in exasperation. "This is why I need you. I would have completely forgotten Rose, and I hadn't realized Edgar's baby shower was so soon. When is she ever going to change her name? She's pregnant, absurd as that is at her age, and still using that name."
Legal Brief laughed. "You always fuss about that, and you know she does it to annoy everyone."
Jordan tried to ignore the two earth ponies' continued yammering about their extensive family and made a quick book cover out of one of the birth papers. When she was finished, she grabbed the book with her magic.
"You are going to help us put all these books up later, aren't you?" Amicus asked as Jordan opened the door to leave. "Putting books away is a pain for elderly earth ponies."
Jordan rolled her eyes. "If you insist. But first, let me free our intruder from the ground and figure out what to do with her."
"TOUCHDOWN IN TWO MINUTES! EVERYONE TO THE BRIDGE NOW!"
Jessica flattened her ears at Rebecca's yell over the intercom. She knew the Dreamwarden was excited, but Rebecca knew how sensitive her hearing was. It wasn't like everyone didn't already know that they were getting close to landing. She was sure that everyone on board had been monitoring their windows like she was right now.
The planet's perfectly smooth surface they'd seen from a distance was now clearly a fiction. The planet's entire surface was covered in buildings and streets of various sizes, occasionally punctuated by a tower or a bridge. Everything seemed to be built of the same material, and aside from some shadows, nothing seemed to be any other color. Some streets were narrow, while others were massive plazas. Bridges would sometimes link buildings, but there was no sign of rivers or streams or anything resembling a canyon. It was hard to tell from this perspective, but the ground elevation seemed almost uniform across the surface, with no hills or mountains. There was also no sign of any meteor strikes, not even debris. Even if the planet was tectonically inactive, there should at least be signs of impacts, and the Devourers had supposedly attacked this planet, but there was nothing on the surface that showed any such thing had ever happened. There didn't even appear to be any charring from the intense surface temperatures it must have previously had up until nine hours ago. It truly seemed to be frozen in time, untouched by anything. Its defiance of everything she understood about how a planet should work was unnerving, overwhelming her sense of excitement that she should be feeling for landing on an alien planet.
"HEY! GET TO THE BRIDGE NOW! IT'S IMPORTANT!!"
She tore her gaze away and headed towards the bridge. It was time to see what Rebecca intended to do here.
It seemed everyone else exiting their quarters was on edge. The way they moved betrayed their nervousness. This wasn't just some other planet. This was a living entity that watched them and reacted to them, a living entity that they didn't know the intentions of.
When they reached the bridge, they found Jonathan at the console, piloting the ship, and Rebecca at the window, bouncing in place like a child told to wait one more minute to open their gifts.
"The big plaza! Land in the big plaza!" Rebecca said excitedly.
"I know, Rebecca," Jonathan said with exasperation.
"Land right in the center!" Rebecca said, still bouncing.
"I know, Rebecca," Jonathan said through gritted teeth.
Rebecca turned and looked at him. She continued to bounce, and she had a wing boner. "You don't seem that excited."
"I'm trying to focus on piloting the ship," Jonathan answered in a monotone.
"You know where we're going?" Charlotte asked.
"The big plaza. Didn't you hear?" Jonathan replied in the same monotone. "Don't worry. Her coordinates were precise. Sha'am's memory is apparently better than the rest of the Dreamwardens' memory."
Rebecca stopped bouncing. "Well, she has an extra advantage from having been in the Story–with a capital S. She's like a pseudo-Storyteller. Do you all remember Sunflower Smiles? Sunflower is a Storyteller, too."
Terrance raised a hand. "I have no idea who that is."
"Me, either," Smiley said.
"Hmm, what about Jenny?" Rebecca asked. "You know, the lady who tells stories while doing elaborate illusions. She was involved in that bad business with a faction in the government trying to spark a human-pony war back during the same year as ETS. She's basically a direct line to the Narrative, which is like the embodiment of the will of the Story."
"I think I'm just getting more confused," Terrance answered.
Luna sighed. "How about we just move on from the subject? Is there a reason we are landing here specifically?"
Rebecca rapidly nodded. "We might have found a similar plaza somewhere, but with how big this planet is, it could take a long time to search. We're going to be landing where the traders from Triss's race used to land and do business way-way-way back in the day. I'd tell you the race's name, but I can't make all those sounds, and I don't want to give them a simplified nickname that Triss disapproved of and get her nose all out of joint about it–Junk Peddler is a profession and class, not her race's name. Anyway, they'd park a small fleet of ships in that plaza to do their business and fly away again a day or two later. What the plaza is supposed to be used for is anyone's guess since whoever built it died before the universe came to be, but it has always made a nifty dock."
"I'm not even going to attempt to get a further explanation for that," Charlotte muttered. She then cleared her throat and then spoke up. "What do we do when we land?"
"Which we are doing now," Jonathan said as we saw the buildings in the distance become more level with our window, and there was a slight shake as we contacted the ground.
Rebecca hopped and faced us. "Right! Now is the time to explain to you how to not end up vanishing forever."
"That is a good thing to know," Ashley muttered.
"It sure is!" Rebecca said happily. "Everybody gets a buddy. No one goes anywhere without your buddy. Back in the day, Triss's race had this thing called soul friends–it's like best friends, but closer, but not romantically or sexually. Everybody traveled around with their soul friend when they were here. I don't expect everyone to make soul friends with one another, but you keep your buddy with you always. No wandering off alone, no going into a building by yourself, no going around any corners by yourself. If you go off by yourself, even for a few seconds, even if it is just over there–wherever there is, you might not return."
Rebecca didn't tell them this until two minutes before landing?! They'd all been in their quarters by themselves! If anyone had delayed an extra minute, they'd have failed the first rule!
Luna looked around at them. "We should team together with whoever already has the closest bonds of friendship. Jessica and Charlotte, you are teamed together. Terrance and Smiley, you're teamed together. Jonathan and Ashley, you will be together. I will be with the Marshmallow."
Jonathan nodded. "That sounds about right. Either Ashley or I could team up with Rebecca, but considering she's got your memories floating around in her head and you are both Dreamwardens, you two are probably closer. Jessica and Charlotte are childhood friends who went through the Cataclysm of Riverview together. I'm not sure about Terrance and Smiley."
"We never really met any of you or each other before this. I don't want to vanish," Terrance said nervously.
"A good time to make a good friend! Remember, friendship is magic–and it keeps you alive," Rebecca chirped. "Still, maybe you two should stay with the ship and guard it. We don't want to leave it alone, either. It isn't just people that can vanish if left alone, and I would like to keep our way back home."
"That would also be a good thing," Charlotte said dryly.
"What do you mean by keeping together?" Jessica asked. "If this is a life or death matter, we need to be clear on what to do. Do you mean we can't have our partner out of sight for a second? That could be difficult."
"You don't have to see each other, but stay in the same room, part of a street, and so on. Theoretically, anyone in the same area looking around should be able to spot both of you," Rebecca explained. "Being somewhere it would be impossible for some imaginary person standing nearby to see both of you is a bad thing. Imagine there is always a third person watching you. You and your buddy don't have to see one another, but that third person needs to be able to see you and your buddy."
Luna looked out at the plaza beyond the window with a frown. "I'm not certain that such a being is imaginary. We are still being watched. My fur is standing on end."
Rebecca shrugged. "So don't let what's watching you see you alone. It's easy-peasy."
One, two, three, four… Jessica counted to herself, trying to keep her temper under control. Rebecca's carefree attitude in the face of this kind of danger made her want to scream.
"There's some other simple rules," Rebecca continued. "Never go downstairs, not unless it is your only available path."
"What's downstairs?" Smiley asked.
Rebecca shrugged. "The basement? Who knows? Not me. I only have one memory of the downstairs, which was reached through the upstairs in a tower, and it was the only path to take at the time since the tower door vanished on us–which we should have seen coming, considering it normally didn't have one. I, and by that, I mean Joss, tried to tell Triss it was a bad idea, but she was always ready to jump into anything without thinking it through back then. It did turn out okay-ish, at least in the short-term, even if it was confusing how we went up a tower and came out of the basement in another building. Typically, going downstairs is a good way of vanishing. There's nothing like going downstairs just to have the stairs vanish. Upstairs, you can at least find a window or something to escape out of, but you probably won't even see any stairs going down, so don't worry too much."
Really helpful.
"Also, don't panic if the geography or building changes from what you were looking at just a moment before," Rebecca continued. "That doesn't happen much, but it can. I will give everyone a tracker for the ship and shortwave radio to contact one another if you get into trouble. If the geography changes, you and your buddy should just do your best to make your way back to the ship. Also, it is very, very important to try to keep a positive attitude. Jeg'galla'gamp'pi likes good vibes. It likes friendship, family, and comradery. If you're angry, upset, or fighting, it can tell, and that might upset it or make it uncooperative. We don't want it to be upset or uncooperative."
A planet-wide city that could change its layout on a whim and defied physics at every turn.
"Is there some way of communicating with the planet?" Jessica asked. "If people lived here at some point, I'd assume they had some way of talking to the place that could decide their home just didn't need to exist anymore."
Rebecca shook her head. "Sorry, it doesn't communicate. You can get a feel for its mood sometimes, but not always. Most of the time, it is just watching. You will feel that, too. Luna is right. You spend about five minutes walking around, and you can't help but feel that you're being watched. Sometimes, you'll swear you saw something just out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, there's nothing. Just take some deep breaths and think happy thoughts. Talk to your buddy about stuff and joke around; that takes some edge off. Nothing is going to jump out and get you. There's nobody here but us. If there were, Jeg'galla'gamp'pi would cater to them, but everything is set up to be nice to us."
Deep breaths. Happy thoughts. Focus on the fact you are living your foalhood dream. You're about to explore an alien world with the ruins of some alien civilization. This is a great day for science, she thought to herself.
"And you still haven't told us what exactly we're looking for here," Charlotte said.
Rebecca blinked. "Oh? It must have slipped my mind in the excitement. You're looking for anything you can pick up, and I mean anything. If you find so much as a few stray grains of sand or pebbles, you better collect those. Anything bigger would be great, too. We aren't just the only living people here; we and our stuff we brought are the only things that aren't all part of the one solid piece of Jeg'galla'gamp'pi. Nothing here is put together from parts. Everything from the ground to the buildings to the bridges and towers is the same unbreakable object. If you find anything that is a separate project, then you grab it. That is Jeg'galla'gamp'pi giving you gifts. We're picking up where the Junk Peddlers left off."
"So…we're gathering samples?"Jessica asked. She could deal with gathering samples.
"If that's how you want to view it," Rebecca answered. "Just keep looking around. Double-check over areas twice because there might end up being something there that wasn't a second before–this place does that a lot. If you pick up something and it glows, don't be afraid. It won't hurt you. It just means you found an extra-special something that is meant just for you! I don't have a lot of expectation we will find anything specifically meant for anyone here, but it would be exciting if we did. Any time anyone finds anything, you and your buddy should return to the ship to drop it off. You don't need gloves or bags or anything. Nothing can hurt you by touching it here, and you can't damage anything–unbreakable means unbreakable. Try not to swallow anything; unbreakable things going down the hatch can't be good for your tum-tum."
Jonathan walked over to the packs in the corner. "I'll hand out the trackers and radios. Let's get to work."