Ultra Violet - 19th of Harvestide (Nightmare Night), 4 EoH
Fuckoff Deepass Hole - Limited Perfection (Subruins)
Violet fell and fell and fell. The drop was long enough for her to revise her depth calculations for the hole several times. Something about the geometry created an optical illusion, and something about the materials of the bottom made her other systems register a different distance to it each and every time.
I’ve hit terminal velocity of 66.46 meters per second. I’ve fallen for 51 seconds. I’ve covered 2.89 kilometers. I’ve either got 893 meters left or 786ish…? Violet calculated while simultaneously checking the remaining drop distance again. The timing on her slowfall had to be perfect.
Ordinarily, Violet had no power problems. Her mana tap always pulled in what she needed. But as soon as she’d dropped the first kilometer, the flow of mana had started to slow.
The local mana is being tapped by something bigger than me… I can barely trickle charge, so all I have for sure is my stored mana. If I slow my fall for three seconds I’ll be out of main power and running on reserves. I’d rather not lose half my speed and thinking power, and be unable to fight… If I slow my fall for half a second I’ll have half a day of main power left, six hours if I reserve about three minutes of boosted running and punching.
Violet twisted to look down the mystery pit. The tile floors below are registered as being 1892 meters away. I hate this so much…
Wait! What is this, thaumic lensing!? Violet thought as she plunged through a dense, nearly tangible, layer of flowing mana and her processors all briefly quenched.
Lidar and Radar reported the floor as being 420 meters below her when she re-activated. Violet’s system warnings lit up like a christmas tree. Avionics packages she didn’t even know she had began screeching their warnings in microcycle time. [Terrain! Terrain! Pull up! Pull up!]
Violet grit her teeth, focused everything she had on her magic, and pushed downwards, slowing her fall as fast as she could, power conservation be damned.
200… 189… 134… I’m not decelerating fast enough. Crapbaskets…
Violet slammed legs first into a cold blue-white metal tile floor at nearly 24 meters per second. She was offline before she could register the echoing boom of her own impact.
⁜ ⁜ ⁜
Samhain - 19th of Harvestide (Nightmare Night), 4 EoH
Divine Forgeheart - Limited Perfection
Sam walked into the palace hall, proud of June for focusing on the mission, but more than a little nervous about how she was responding to the downturn their mission had taken.
She’s not trained with that thing. Melee combat is harder than everypony thinks it is. Not just the technicals, either, Sam mused to herself, wondering if June would have it in her to split an enemy’s head open at leg’s length.
Turning her attention more directly to the mission, Sam looked over the red-glowing runes on the walls with a critical eye. “June, are those wall-runes messages, decorations, or arcana?”
“Yes,” June answered with blunt simplicity.
“All of the above?”
“Correct.”
“Are any of them things we should be aware of?” Sam asked, going a little light on June given the circumstances.
June stopped for a moment and turned her head, looking across the hall, her ears moving as she focused.
“They look like… Mostly readouts. So and so is offline, this and that is out of stock. The door Fluttershy wants us to go to is labeled Command and Control,” June reported then resumed her march to the door.
Sam squinted through the darkness, taking note of a message scrawled on one of the walls in what she hoped was not dried blood, but felt deep down probably was. There was another message further down the hall, and another, and another. All placed at different heights and at irregular intervals.
“What about the graffiti?” Sam asked, biting her lip.
“Nothing useful.” June muttered.
Okay. She’s traumatized. We need to zone her back in. Here’s hoping I can do that like I would have any of my girls…
“Well, we have our mission. It’s time we get back to it. Junebug on point.” Sam turned to look over her shoulder and nodded to Trixie. “Fall in.”
Trixie trotted up to take Sam’s left flank and the two mares proceeded to march along behind June. They passed through the archway Shy had indicated and entered a long corridor plated entirely with tiles of mirror polished silver and interrupted by grand door after grand door.
Sam took a quick look through the white coral door on her left, taking note of a vast mage’s laboratory. Wait a minute…
“Hold on a moment, I think I’ve discovered something.” Sam said as she backed up out of the silver hall into the main hall, and checked the adjacent archway.
“What is it?” June asked, clearly interested though still greatly upset.
Sam found herself looking down another long hallway, this one walled with thick plates of emerald, and while the graffiti continued down it, there was far less of it.
Sam looked through the first doorway on its right. The clear obsidian door led into a colossal alchemist’s lab with absolutely nothing in common with the mage’s lab but the presence of whiteboards and lecterns.
“Oh… Oh no…” Sam groaned, moving back to the others. “Girls, we have to stay close and not get lost. This building, on top of being buck-ass huge, is dimensionally transcendent.”
“What?” Trixie asked, her eyes narrowing with extreme irritation.
“It's bigger on the inside,” Sam clarified. “Like your saddlebags.”
June facehooved. “WHY?! How much space did they need?”
“Buck if I know,” Sam grunted. “But this hall has a wizard lab, and it should overlap with the alchemy lab accessed by the other hall, but it isn’t.”
“Great!” June said as she took a deep breath.
Sam pressed her hoof to her radio. “Fluttershy, this place is bigger on the inside. We need directions.”
“Um, hold please…” Shy replied. “Something’s happening with— EEP!”
The radio crackled as Enox patched into it again. “Round two, Sam. This time it’s big oily tentacles. Like some kind o’ floor kraken.”
“Do you think they’re nice tentacles?” Fluttershy asked out of pure desperation.
“No,” Cadence replied. “Nice ones are always purple, blue, or green. Sam… This is it. Blood Moon is fully risen.”
Fluttershy squeaked through the radio. “Oh no! Um… Scanners show the interior shifting. I— It isn’t. It can’t be. Um… I think they don’t know what to make of the interior’s size. Um… The throne room is accessed by the hallway you started in, but I can’t tell you which door takes you to it. I’m sorry.”
Sam shrugged her wings. “No problem, Shy. Girls, search every door for the room with the chair.”
Trixie pointed down the several hundred meters of silver hallway. “Wouldn’t it stand to reason that it’s the one at the end?” She asked, adding, “June?”
June shrugged her wings also. “That’s how we would do it. Minotaurs would have it be the first on the right. Gryphons, in the center of the main hall we just left. Every culture is different.”
“Then we peek in each door,” Sam said, this time hardening her voice to make it clear that was an order.
June nodded, turned to try opening the live oak door to her right, and growled as it remained closed and locked. “Alright then,” June mumbled to herself, taking a step back to inspect the door for wards. “This door isn’t warded, at least, on this side. Third from left, I’ll axe it down if we don't find anything anywhere else.”
“Noted,” Sam affirmed as she poked her head into the next opal and pearl door on the left. “Uh… Lecture hall?”
“Bone collection display.” Trixie announced from her own graphene door.
June trotted to the next hammered steel door and peeked inside. “Oh! Old biomancy chamber. Very primitive.”
Sam moved along and pushed the next set of red granite doors open, peeking inside to find a room with a dais and an elaborate magic circle in the floor. The dais held a bowl atop it with a brass mechanism to tip the bowl, and the circle’s lines and runes were all linked and hollow, forming channels which traced back to the bowl.
Sam grit her teeth. “Blood magic ritual chamber.”
“Wait, really?” June asked, trotting over to take a look for herself. “Oh! Oh yea. Sure is, Flowing school, first era, very nice metal fixtures. Very modern for what it was.”
Sam spat on the floor, remembering things she rather wouldn’t.
“Hey, Sam? We can move on,” June said, remembering just how much blood magic her textbooks said the gryphons used during the war.
“I’d really like that,” Sam said with a sharp nod. “But… I want to make sure it’s not armed. I need a second.”
Sam stared over the room’s arcana, checking for any sign of a charge in any of its components.
“Strange,” June commented, also looking over the chamber. “This would be bleeding edge today… Pun not intended. My professor said they used harmony magic, mostly.”
“It’s clear,” Sam pulled her attention away from the room. “Sorry. That’s the kind of circle they’d use to extract mana from some poor bastard. The camp I was in had three.”
June nodded and closed the door. “Well, every culture dabbles in each school a little. Let’s move on.”
“Office,” Trixie called out from the next door down, this one peridot.
Sam put the past behind her and picked her next door. Bronze. She pushed it open, took a quick look around, noting drawings of pony body parts on many blackboards as well as an entire nervous system simply suspended in a stasis bubble in the center of the room.
“Anatomy… Dissection… Lab? Thing?” She paused. “What do you call this? It’s clear they were studying anatomy.”
June poked her head into the room for a moment. “Vivisectionist laboratory…” She said trailing off as she started to have a few theories.
“Big room full of tubes of blue stuff!” Trixie called out.
Sam moved to the next room, pushing the door, teak, open. “Big room full of tubes of yellow stuff,” she said as she looked down a short stair to a stone lined room filled with huge crystal cylinders the size of large beds.
“Um… A weirdly big morgue?” June said, sounding more suspicious than surprised.
“I don’t think this is a palace. Or at least, not the throne room wing,” Sam said as she backed into the hall and pressed down her transmit button. “Shy? This place seems like a laboratory. Are you sure it was the sixth hall on the left from the main hall?”
“Yes, try… One at the end.” Shy answered quickly, making Sam wince with how out of breath her voice sounded, and the accompanying sound of a magazine being replaced and a gun cocked. “Got to go!”
“Uhhhhhh!” Trixie half shouted. “Girls? Um… I— I really don’t like what I’m looking at.”
Sam raced down the hall to Trixie’s side. The mare was holding open a woven gold sheet door with one hoof, looking into the room in a mix of horror and revulsion. June arrived a mere moment later and the two looked through the door together.
The room was small, dominated by a large table on the far wall, a scroll case on the other, and two of the large crystal tubes, one broken and empty, the other filled with a green fluid in which the body of a brown and gray male alicorn floated. Minus his heart and lungs.
Those were located in a stasis field atop the table. Along with a silver tablet inscribed with golden runes seemingly made from light itself. A dark stain and a thick puddle of dust saturated the floor just in front of the tablet’s resting place.
Somepony fully decayed there. Sam noted.
“Okay…” Sam said slowly, taking a deep breath. “We’re on a mission. It’s time critical. But I think all would really like to know what the buck is going on here. June, can you read that tablet from here?”
“Buck the tablet!” June waved a hoof in dismissal and pointed to the suspended alicorn. “Look at his cutiemark, a geode. Look at the label on that tank, right at the top on the metal where the lid is. Same geode.”
Sam glanced between the two marks then nodded. “Okay. Tubes are labeled for occupants. That’s not more important than—”
Trixie and June took hold of Sam’s head and turned her to make her look at the broken tube in the room’s corner. More specifically at the top. Where its label was.
“That’s Luna’s cutiemark,” Sam said on reflex, followed by a quiet. “Oh…”
Having pointed out the most blatantly important thing in the room, June’s mind processed Sam’s request. “Wait, tablet? Oh! Yes. Yes I can read that from here. Mostly. Want me to get it?”
“No. Trixie, float it over. We need to know what the buck happened here.”
Trixie lit her horn and levitated the tablet to June. Thankfully no alarms or traps went off. June took the tablet, frowned slightly. “Uh. I can paraphrase this. It’s quite dense and technical and I don’t know a lot of the runes.”
“Read what you can,” Sam ordered.
June nodded. “Okay, it says… Grand King of Crimson, I write you this formal complaint document to demand punishment for my lesser colleague, proper noun of some kind that I think is Blue Ice. Blue was correct, Ascended Alicorn Three, proper noun that translates to rock, but it’s all… very emphasized and regal-ified so, I should probably say it proper as ‘Petra’. Ahem! Petra’s lungs were defective. The union of the Shards was not performed to standards. The alchemists have been punished with— I’m not translating that, uh—. However, Blue has forgotten the self-restoration word I don’t know abilities of all finalized Ascended would restore any minor deformities within the flesh to the blueprint specifications upon animation. Petra would have had full respiratory capabilities within four moons. Deanimating him, performing an extraction and examination, and relocating Moon’s sarcophagus? No, tank? Yes! Moon’s tank, to the diagnostic lab safely, without disturbing our one and only… Prototype? Yes. Prototype. Cost us a great deal of time and blood. Only to end with an unnecessary expense and waste of my limited time as the dismantling of Water’s Shards is currently ongoing and thus left to my apprentices. I recommend Blue be fully exsanguinated to contribute to the reanimation of Petra. Title I don’t know how to translate, proper noun I think is Uh… Apartment? Some kind of dwelling.”
Trixie and Sam stared at June for several seconds until June switched her translation thinking off and her critical thinking on. Her eyes widened slowly. “Oh… Okay so—”
“So the First Kingdom was building Alicorns… Specifically, ones like Luna,” Sam said bitterly, before adding, “With blood magic.”
Sam grit her teeth hard. The specific phrasing was not lost on her. Built from shards they ‘dismantled’, while being made of flesh. These sick fucks were taking ponies apart to make their Alicorns… Luna’s a weapon, like I was, plain and simple. Twilight’s ascension was witnessed, but… Where did Cadence come from? There is another way. Did Celestia do what her ‘parents’ did, or did she find the other way earlier? Victim, or villain?
“Probably actually Luna, not like her,” June said with a worried tail flick and intrigued wing flutter. “Their word for moon is luna… Sun is sol. There’s a word that means ‘center of the home’ but is also used to mean ‘heart’ and ‘source of life’... And that word is ‘estia’. Sol Estia. Life Giving Sun. If you never saw it written down, with how Equish’s phonetics works you’d spell it—”
“C, e, l, e, s, t, i, a,” Sam spelled out, taking a deep breath. Buck me… This is real. This happened.
“Does it matter where they came from?” Trixie asked. “We all know they’re ancient. We know what they are like. What they do.”
“I don’t care about that,” Sam said quietly, staring into the tank at the suspended body. “I care about that.”
June looked at the tank and nodded slowly. “Yeah… You can apparently just make them. Should… Should we radio this in?”
Trixie shook her head. “No. This shouldn’t go over the airwaves. You never know who is listening.”
June sighed in relief. “Good. I don't think we should either. Like, in general… The graffiti everywhere? It’s all… Mad rambles. Laments. Stuff like ‘I am not whole’ and ‘two thirds dead, yet I live’. Been… Trying to ignore it.”
Sam flinched at June’s elaboration. So that’s what it says… No wonder she didn’t want to translate before. Just unnerving mad babbling.
“Luna trusted us to do this. She clearly came from that tank. She knew we’d probably find this. She trusts us to say nothing. We should keep quiet, learn why she wants to keep this hidden, then act. If we need to.”
“We tell nopony,” Sam agreed. “We have a mission to do, and this isn’t it… We also probably don’t want the world to know you can just build an Alicorn from, well—”
“Ponies,” June nodded in agreement and tucked the tablet into her saddle bag. “If I can be frank, this, this whole blood magic alicorn factory horseapples? Way above my paygrade. Right?”
Sam took a deep breath. “Yea… I’m just a soldier. This needs a mage.”
“It’s actually entirely within my training and job description,” Trixie disagreed.
Everypony turned to look at her. “CARE Field Agents have it rough, okay? I’m so happy I got transferred to Safe Class Retrieval.”
Sam stepped over to Trixie and hugged her close. “I’m glad you’re off shit-duty too.”
“G— Girls?” Fluttershy crackled over the radio, whispering so quietly they almost didn’t hear her over the static.
“Repeat that, Shy, over?” Sam said, grateful for the distraction.
“I bucked up. Can’t be loud. It doesn't know I'm here…” Shy apologies. “The city network, Limited Perfection, it’s not— It thinks! It’s doing something near you, I think. Be careful!”
Before Sam could even begin to process Fluttershy’s warning, the hallway flickered and sparked to life. Illusory decor shimmered into existence.
Tapestries, murals, and engravings depicting the creation of Alicorns through magic, then of larger alicorns through a mixture of surgery, magic, and alchemy, then creatures like Celestia emerging from nothing but blood into which ponies had walked, simply unfolded from nothing. Blood red banners, simple and square with gold edges and tassels but no device manifested every dozen meters down the long hall.
But the girls didn’t care about that. They cared about the ever shifting patchwork of tv-static and detailed orange furred alicorn shape that ripped its way into existence at the end of the hall.
And the warbling mechanical mixture of distorted pink, brown, and white noise it emitted from its mouth as it walked towards them.
⁜ ⁜ ⁜
Ultra Violet - 19th of Harvestide (Nightmare Night), 4 EoH
Bottom of a 4km Hole - Limited Perfection (Subruins)
Violet opened her left eye, then promptly narrowed it as she realized her right eye refused to respond. She turned her attention to her repair systems, took note of the damage they were working to repair, and sighed.
“Okay… I need a way to compensate for random layers of dense magic,” she said, her voice raspy and mechanical due to vocoders taking up slack for her damaged larynx.
She moved her head, wincing at a few pained twinges from her spine, and looked up at the distorted faint shimmer above her.
What are you for?
Violet opened a diagnostic suite and checked her basic systems. She was good to stand up and walk, and would be fully repaired in close to half an hour. Then she’d be fully out of juice for her poor overworked nanites. And then she would start to die, if more damage happened.
Violet moved her legs and started to push herself up, prompting her everything to protest with sharp stabbing pains that the damage reports had really understated. Violet whimpered and lay still for several minutes, doing nothing but tracking her repair systems.
Okay, let’s try again now. She thought as she pushed herself up again. “Ow… Owie… Ah!” She audibly protested, though managed to push through the aches, pains, and electro-mechanical protesting.
She patted her barrel just over where the nanintes were housed. “Sorry, girls. I promise I didn’t mean to hit the floor like that. I’ll get all of us oil shakes and battery acid or something later.”
Violet looked down, wincing as her spine protested again, and looked for where she’d landed. Okay, that tile is dented. I hit it, then I must have bounced over here? That’s about six metters. Over some rocks… Jagged ones. Must have fallen from the crevasse.
Better tell them I’m okay. Violet reached up to her helmet to use her radio. “Girls? It’s Violet. I’m hurt but repairing. I’m down at the bottom, under some weird layer of like, semi-solid mana. No idea what that’s about. Over.”
She waited several minutes for a reply, but none came. Violet frowned and looked up again.
Is that cutting off my radio? She wondered as the feeling in her left hoof came back online and she could feel her helmet’s radio had been pierced by one of the rocks she’d bounced off.
“Oh.” Violet said, frowning to herself and pulling the rock out.
She checked for her saddlebags. Fortunately they had remained strapped on and closed. Opening the left bag, Violet began to fish around for her climbing kit to scale the wall. A soft beep in the distance made her ears perk and swivel to her left. Violet frowned and looked up, attempting to turn her night vision up to see into the distance of the large space she’d fallen into.
What the heck beeped?
Her still-monocular vision remained at the medium brightness she’d set it to earlier.
Okay, that’s still being fixed. She thought, reaching for her lantern to turn it on.
Like the radio, the rocks had very much disagreed with her lantern's intact and functional state. It would be of no help to anypony anymore.
Deciding she could climb back up anytime she wanted to, but really didn’t want to fall back down here later, Violet put her climbing kit back into her bag. She withdrew a box of glow sticks instead, reading the label quickly.
“Twist top to select color, snap to activate. Glows brightly for two hours, then dimly for another four.” Violet said, nodding in satisfaction then setting one stick to green, snapping it, and dropping it where she’d fallen from.
There. Just in case my mapping systems are offline.
Violet limped her way towards where she remembered the beep coming from, her rear left hoof dragging slightly due to some still disconnected myomer fibers keeping her from pulling it up properly. The beep sounded out again after a few steps, coming from somewhere slightly to her right of where she’d remembered. She turned, peering into the darkness.
She could see the outline of some cables patched into a wall, what looked to be a console set into that wall at a height she’d have to rear up to reach, and then, for just a split second, a pulsing amber diode.
Violet turned, making her way to the console. As she approached and her night vision improved, she could make out a doorway set into the wall, and began to appreciate the differences between the place she found herself now and the First Kingdom ruins above her.
This place is all metal, hard lines, and minimalist. I can sense low level electric currents in the walls, not the high-energy manaflows from the ruins. And I can’t see anypony who would build a city like that making a console like this and having cables just run out of some conduit in the wall and patch into jacks on it.
Violet turned her attention to the cables spilling out from the wall. They were neat and orderly, and came out from not a hole but a panel with a hinged door. Within the cable cabinet was a spool so the wires could be neatly wrapped up and stored fully away out of sight.
Or, maybe I’m wrong? I guess I can check for magic by seeing if the hinges are rusted shut. Violet mused. She reared up and reached for the cabinet’s door, swinging it out of curiosity.
The door swung freely without so much as a creak or hint of friction. Violet mmmed, almost dismissing the differences as whatever possessed the First Kingdom to make their city’s districts in entirely different styles, but then her night vision came back to full strength.
The door was marked with runes, but not the complex glyphs of the First Kingdom. These runes were simple constructs of a few lines, sometimes as few as two, and even a few consisting of a single line with a curve or bend. Her database pinged her, prompting her with the knowledge she had this language on file.
It had come with the data download she’d been given by the unknown network on her first day.
Violet pulled up the language files and fed them to her linguistic processor. The door’s markings read, [Emergency Network Connection Point].
Violet frowned, raising an eyebrow. “Okay, so maybe this isn't the First Kingdom’s. I did fall a long ways. More than enough to be geologically significant…”
Musing on the idea of the city above having been built atop a more ancient set of ruins, Violet turned her attention to the console. The amber light winking on it took the form of a single LED stuck into the top panel next to a single button.
Violet looked up at the network cable compartment. Everything was connected. Why not? She mused and pushed the button.
The amber light projected outwards, proving their source to not be an LED at all as it projected a holographic display and runic input field into the air… Slightly too high for Violet to reach without jumping up.
She turned her attention to the screen, which was displaying nothing but complex technical messages relating to faults and malfunctions next to system labels. Most of them were red, indicating some sort of key failure. Of the few green systems, Violet couldn’t help but notice one was labeled [Structural Preservation Field].
That’s probably what that mana sheet is. She noted, continuing to read. The next green system to catch her eye. [Door Control].
Violet sat back for a moment and put a hoof to her lips. How much do I want to explore this? I could check it out for a little bit and still have the energy to climb back up. If the First Kingdom knew about it, which, I mean, come on. They have a cavern going right to it, then maybe they made some stairs or an elevator to explore this place? It’s worth looking for one. If I fall again while climbing, which is likely since I’ve never rock climbed before, I don’t think I’d survive another crash, and that mana field makes timing a slow fall a real pain in the everything. Or maybe they have a universal charger I could borrow. I should have brought mine…
Violet pondered for another moment, then removed another glow stick from her bag. She set it to green, cracked it, and dropped it at the base of the console.
I’ll leave breadcrumbs. Just in case. Violet thought as she jumped up and reached out to tap the Door Control button.
The display warped and distorted as ancient failing mechanisms did their best to keep up with the thousands of requests and checks the input demanded. When it cleared up it displayed a new message. [Emergency Situation Active. Remote door controls disabled. Activate manual overrides for non-security doors, y/n?]
Violet’s database indicated that y stood for an affirmative, and n for a negative. She hit y on the input panel. A pale white light flickered to life a short ways down the wall to her left, revealing it to be set into the trim work around a pair of sliding doors. A second smaller green light blinked on, this one set into a small panel next to the door labeled, [Manual Override].
Violet picked up her glow stick and tossed it over to the door, then trotted over herself and pulled the panel open. Behind it was a simple lever, which she pulled, prompting the doors to open with a soft hiss. A rush of wet air, thick with the musty stench of ancient decay.
A lot of things died in here… And the air hasn’t circulated at all, Violet noted. Good thing I don’t breathe… Also, I guess that structural preservation field keeps rot fresh. Gross…
She moved through the door into a fairly spacious if plain corridor with the same hex-tile floor as the room she was in and simple smooth bulkheads on either side. The ceiling appeared to have once been covered with panels of some kind, but they had rotted away, revealing ducting, cable runs, and pipes going across the once-closed-off space.
The corridor stretched out into the distance, crossed by several other corridors and dotted with doorways here and there. There were even signs, though they were of little help as they all read something like Sector 4A, 4B, 4C, and so on.
Violet squinted as a pony does when straining their vision and searched for any signs of slime, mold, or slime mold. It’s clean, she noted then trotted down the corridor to explore.
Her hooves clicked on the metal floor, producing a metallic echo that made her feel like there were other ponies in the twisting corridors. Much to her disappointment, the majority of doors in this new space were clearly security doors as their manual override panels refused to open for her, and she wasn’t willing to try breaking into one. Yet.
Violet dropped a glow stick at every turn she made, making sure she could find her way back after her quest for anywhere to go other than pointlessly wandering the steel maze she’d discovered. The entirely empty, unnoteworthy, maze.
It’s a bit scary that I can smell old rot, like a swamp, but there isn’t any sign of bodies in here, Violet said to herself as she began debating turning back and just risking the climb.
Just then, right on the edge of her night vision’s range, she saw a sign which had the politeness and compassion to be something useful. [Power Substation]. Its door panel glowed a dim green.
Violet jogged down the hall and took a look at the substation door. It was closed, but she could hear a faint hum coming from within the room. She quickly popped the manual override lever, and the doors hissed open, revealing a room filled with electrical equipment she couldn’t recognise.
No sign of a generator… But lots of… I guess transformers, distributors, and… Well that power cable going into the floor looks real thick. This must be connected to a power plant, Violet noted, carefully looking for anything along the lines of a circuit breaker. Or a universal charger.
Instead she found a console, again set into the wall with a single amber light and button. The console flicked to life, displaying far fewer options than the previous one. Most of them were things she was pretty sure she shouldn’t buck with, or labeled as [Error: Main Power Offline], but one option stood out as pretty pertinent to her current situation.
[Emergency Power]
Violet jumped up and pressed the emergency power option. The display changed instantly, listing dozens and dozens of options, all of which Violet ignored because the first one was a toggle switch set to off. She hopped again, and batted the toggle.
A distant metallic thoom made Violet’s ears twitch. Oh wow, that was a massive rel—
Another sounded, echoing through the facility. Then another, and another, and another. Violet poked her head out into the hall, watching as sections of red strip lights set into the edges of the walls and floor flicked on in ten meter spans in time to the relays. Occasionally a hologram would flicker to life, filling a wall section with a map with a blue line tracing a route and red text reading [Evacuate!] and pulsed in and out to draw attention.
Other wall sections hissed and morphed, sliding open to reveal machines set into recessed cabinets. There were open lockers, large bulky machines with two doors on them labeled Recycler, vending machines that Violet somehow intuitively knew were filled with first aid supplies, food, water, and occasionally power cells.
Violet took a quick scan of the cells. They were not compatible with her systems. I might be able to modify one in a pinch… But lets keep looking.
“Well… Now it's at least more interesting,” Violet said out loud as she trotted to one of the holographic maps.
It filled a 4 meter by 3 meter section of wall, and while it didn’t have labels for the rooms, it did mark its location with a star, and the route it traced out did end at a small room with a label. [Surface Elevator 08].
If these wall panels are working, the elevator could potentially be working, Violet reasoned. Also I think those are stairs next to it… Right, let’s check things out!
Quickly memorizing the route on the map, Violet jogged down the hall, still dropping a glowstick at each turn. Violet began to mentally play out her route as she moved, mostly to keep her mind off the lingering odor of rot and decay. Left, left, right. Past a dozen rooms, around a bit of collapsed ceiling and ventilation ducts, over the corpse—
Violet stopped in her tracks and turned around to look at the first body she’d seen. It wasn’t a pony, and while its flesh had decayed away entirely, along with its bones, it was clearly a corpse. She could tell by the simple fact that the floor around it was stained darker than the rest of the sterile tiles, the organic-shaped bone-like bits of metal that had once been cybernetic implants which spilled out of the body armored suit where a head and neck had clearly been.
“Okay, smell explained,” Violet said quietly, relieved to have found a reasonable explanation.
Its armor suggests it was bipedal, Violet mused, pulling up her database to check for any species on file which her creator had known of that would have matched the general shape the chrome colored armor plates and black jumpsuit implied.
There were dozens. Biped, about two meters tall, with four limbs and a head was a common shape, galactically speaking. Though Violet was forced to admit this particular sample appeared to be quite archetypal.
No tail, no wings, no claws, probably no carapace given the alloy body armor… And nothing is on file as having lived here. That said, something had to have built the stuff my creator found in orbit, and the First Kingdom’s stair-mural implied they were going to go claim those things, so they didn’t build them…
Violet took another look at the body, wondering what killed it. It was splayed out in the corridor, laying belly down with a large burn hole through the segmented armor’s back. So that was an easy answer. Fortunately for Violet, rather than proving to be an easy waste of time, looking down brought something to her attention.
The creature’s weapon. A short pistol-like gun, remarkably close in formfactor to the energy weapons her creator had aboard their ship, lay a few meters from the body, having obviously been dropped and skittered to the edge of the wall when they had died. The weapon was designed for hands, not hooves, but Violet walked over to it anyways.
Souvenir! She thought with a smile and reached down to pick up the weapon.
Her hoof made contact with the dull silver blocky weapon, and a light on the handgrip blinked red. “Emergency Situation active. Recalibrating form factor for user.” the weapon said in a tinny, slightly garbled synthetic voice.
Violet pulled her hoof back on instinct. The weapon melted into a puddle of silver liquid, then flowed upwards, forming itself into a bracer that would fit perfectly on Violet’s foreleg with the same green crystal emitter located on a slight protrusion from the back, and fitted with an elegant trigger system that ran down to her hoof so she could squeeze her frog to fire the weapon.
“Cooooool!” Violet couldn’t help but squee. She debated with herself for a few moments, then slipped her impact gauntlet off to put the gun on. The metal was cold, but comfortable. It also felt thin and elegant enough for Violet to put the gauntlet back on.
Violet slid the gauntlet back on, which left the emitter just clear of the rim. Oh my gosh! It took into account the boot and everything.
She scarcely had a moment to admire the ancient alien technology before a faint clicking reached her ears, making them twist and twitch as they searched for its origins.
Tak. Tak. Tak. Tak. Like a dog with long nails creeping across a kitchen floor in the dead of the night. That’s not a pony… Violet noted with a worried frown.
She raised her new weapon up to a firing position, which activated a holographic sight. This would have been another marvel if not for the red text blinking within the orange square of the targeting field. [Power cell depleted. Reload required.]
Damn it! Violet thought to herself then turned to the corpse, quickly searching it for anything that looked like a battery.
There wasn’t one.
Okay. Stay calm. I still have the punchy-boots. Do I turn around and climb, or avoid the tak-ie thing and try to go for the elevator—
Violet jumped as one of the holographic maps ahead of her emitted a burst of static, blanked out, then flickered back to life as a series of bright red alphanumeric text. An organic would have assumed it was nonsense. Violet instantly recognised it as machine code which would display text.
She trotted down the hall a few more steps, just enough to get a good angle on the hologram to read but not execute the code.
It’s just plain text… Violet noted, frowning and interpreting it.
[They live in the ducts.] the hologram’s text reported.
Violet took a step back and craned her neck upwards, looking at the ventilation duct and strained her ears. She didn’t hear anything in the vents, and the tak tak tak seemed to come from the floor, just distant. Less distant than before, but certainly not too close and not in the vents.
Who sent that… And are they wrong?
Faced with the unknown creature, unknown friend or trickster, and an uncertain escape route, and the known difficulty of climbing back out and that she wouldn’t survive another fall, Violet took a deep breath like she saw Sam do when she was trying to be braver.
Let's not be stupid. I can be very careful with the climb. Hammer the pitons in real carefully… Wait, do I even have three kilometers of rope and pitons? Of course not. There’s no way I do. But I can free climb. My grip is better than a pony’s, so I should be able to—
Another sound reached Violet’s ears, mixing with the distant softly echoing tak tak tak of the distant creature. This sound was a squelching, oozing, slick noise. Like the time she’d sat in the rotting remains of her creator’s ship. The sound was behind her. The sound accompanied a sharp increase in the rot smell.
Violet whipped her head around. A colossal mass of diseased-looking rust-colored slime oozed from the collapsed ductwork behind her. Its form moved upwards as it slipped free from the duct, taking on an amorphous shape… Then sprouted several eyes which opened one by one to look at Violet hungrily.
“Elevator time!” Violet yelped, bolting down the hallway as the abomination behind her burbled out a deafening, high-pitched, discordant screech.
It had found prey.
⁜ ⁜ ⁜
Junebug - 19th of Harvestide (Nightmare Night), 4 EoH
Divine Forgeheart - Limited Perfection
June stared at the flickering apparition, her mind raced with possibilities. The ever shifting patches of holstine-but-static making the alicorn’s appearance were entirely new to her. She knew of no illusion or transmutation effect that could cause such a thing.
Oh dear Cadence no… Please, please, please, please don’t be some kind of sci-fi novel hell! June begged of reality, as she started to back up down the hallway.
Sam shouldered her rifle and aimed it at the apparition in what she believed to be the mother of all bluffs. “Halt and identify!”
Trixie pushed magic to her horn, letting it burn with her aura to show she was ready to back up her friend. June gulped and drew her axe to try and help the intimidating aura of three tiny mares facing off against some kind of monster.
As her hoof touched the axe, June felt the shard of a consciousness within feed her some advice. <Swing up into the chest.>
June nodded, shifting up her stance.
The apparition stopped a few seconds after Sam’s order. It continued to emit its sickening mechanical hisses. The noise slowly morphed into discrete instances.
Sam’s mech-gauntlet tightened around the tigger. “Okay, now identify yourself!” She demanded.
The entity’s hissing morphed into almost words, then words. Crude, barely comprehensible, but still words.
In Equish.
“City-thought-object. Flawless Subtract Some.” it said, making the three mares blink.
June frowned sharply. Something about the entity’s word order was slapping her mind in the face. She knew it from somewhere.
“What?” Trixie asked, genuinely uncertain of what it had tried to say.
“City-thought-object. Flawless Subtract Some.” it repeated.
June’s eyes widened as the word order and choice hit her like a brick. “It’s speaking like a shitty translator program! Swapping Amilic words for Equish without changing the—” June smiled like an idiot. “The network Fluttershy connected to! It’s hacking her back and using her translator!”
“Are you sure?” Sam asked, refusing to take her eye away from her rifle’s scope.
“Yes,” June replied, clearing her throat. “It said it’s a City Brain, or maybe mind? It’s name is Limited Perfection. This thing is the city we’re in!”
June turned her attention to the apparition and called out in Amilic. “Hello. I speak some of your language. You speak our language poorly. May I translate for you?”
The apparition flickered, nearly vanishing, returning with a pleased expression. “Translation optimal. Shard construct-mind capabilities pathetic. Query: Shard group Unknown appears lost. Please state destination and sponsor.”
“What did it say?” Sam asked, still training her rifle on her target.
“Well, for starters, it’s a projection of some kind. So that gun won’t hurt it,” June said, hoping Sam would take the hint and lower her weapon. “And it knows we're lost and wants to give us directions. It also thinks Fluttershy’s computer is garbage.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to just tell it we’re looking for the throne room,” Sam said out loud, unnerved enough to forget it was partially translating Equish.
The apparition’s ears perked in a welcoming manner. “Clarification required: Destination central command and control?” it asked June.
June took a deep breath. “Well it knows now, Sam,” she said before switching back to Amilic. “We are here to return an artifact belonging to the Archmage. We need to reach his lab below the throne room.”
Limited Perfection paused momentarily, playing back the city archives to locate any point other than now when anything might have been taken from its care. It found several, then focused on instances where any item of power was removed. It found one.
It then observed from its own logs it had determined this group had entered the city to return the stolen item, and had forgotten this information. It filed a maintenance request for its logic circuit and memory core, then turned its attention to the ponies.
“Clarification: Shards’ mission to return Archmage Medies dimensional multi-tool?” Limited Perfection asked.
“Yes,” June confirmed, hoping it wouldn’t or better yet couldn’t attack them to reclaim the artifact.
The city-mind’s projection whinnied happily as it knew how it could help, and thereby fulfill its primary directive for the first time in millenia. It moved to the side of the hall and pointed to a door which looked to be slightly ajar.
“Artifact precise return location unknown,” Limited Perfection informed with a distressingly sad expression that instantly flicked to happy optimism. “Thief corpses contained within Command and Control antechamber. Documentation present on corpses. Recommend searching before progressing Command and Control Approach Hall. Archmage chamber hatch functional!”
June blinked several times. “Oh. Uh… Thanks?” She said in Equish due to sheer surprise.
“Welk!” Limited Perfection replied in hilariously broken and Minotian-slurred Equish.
“What?” Sam asked, still sounding more than a little nervous.
“He said it's through there, and that Grape’s teams’ corpses are in there and have notes,” June answered. “Also the door we need works.”
Sam frowned sharply and lowered her rifle just a little. “So it’s… Friendly?”
The apparition shook its head at the word friendly. “Fullness helping,” it corrected.
June giggled and put her axe away. As scary as the clearly damaged projection looked, it certainly seemed harmless. “Girls, we saw what this palace can do when it vaporized those sister dropping monsters. If he wanted us dead, I’m sure this hallway would have been filled with plasma by now.”
“Good point,” Sam admitted, nodding to herself and lowering her rifle to a ready position.
“Yea… I can sense some of the auras in here and there’s absolutely defense wards.” Trixie added. “So, I guess it’s not hostile.”
Limited Perfection, wanting to correct the misconception, looked to June and spoke in Amilic. “Energy waste of plasma engulfment unacceptable. Teleportation into solid mass efficient.”
June’s flinch caught Sam and Trixie’s attention like a brick through a window. Sam snapped her rifle back up, Trixie ducked into the room with the alicorn in a tank.
“It’s okay,” June said through a grimace. “I um… It just corrected me on the plasma thing. It would just telefrag us. So. Yea.”
“Oh,” Sam winced and put her weapon back down.
“High fortune for mission,” Limited Perfection wished the three mares. “Venture gift shop for safest departure. Food offering on discount availability for beneficent!”
“He said good luck, and apparently wants us to see the gift shop for snacks on the way out,” June added as the apparition flickered out of existence.
“... Okay, I’ll go so I don’t get telefragged, but I do not want to know what a blood magic factory has for snacks in a gift shop,” Sam said with a shiver.
June nodded in agreement and began to fast walk to the slightly ajar door.
“Why is there even a gift shop?” Trixie asked, more than a little confused.
“With all the space in here, it’s weird there’s just the one,” Sam said.
“Fair,” Trixie agreed with a nervous chuckle.
June reached the door of shellacked lilac flowers and pulled it open. The room beyond was so obviously a waiting room it almost hurt. A medium sized room with benches, a desk, and two double doors going deeper into the structure. All made from fine black marble, trimmed with gold, and lit with motes of magical light. The walls were white marble, the floor was black and red bloodstone, and also littered with pony skeletons and expedition equipment.
“Oh, yea… This is the room,” June called down the hall.
Sam and Trixie quickly caught up and looked inside.
”Yep,” Sam agreed, trotting into the room, still on her hind legs to more efficiently use her minotaur built weapon. “... Clear. Corpses look like they died running. Does that track with the reports?”
“Yes,” June said as she stepped in and began to check the skeletons. “Though that would be the first thing they didn’t lie about.”
It’s been less than a year, and there’s not much moisture here… These should not be bones. She considered. No, bones aren’t right. It’s warm and dry, so after six months only some bone should be exposed. Thank you, forensic archeology clas—
June’s thought stopped dead as she realized the implications. “Uh, girls? These shouldn’t be bones yet. It’s too hot and dry. There should be most of the meat and skin… Also, the reports said the trap that killed them was magical mummification. So—”
Sam nodded and bent down, picking up a small attache case. It had claw marks cutting through the outer lid. “Yea… Something ate them.”
“Yes,” June agreed, drawing her axe again, then bending back down to the skeletons to examine them again.
Maybe I can find some idea of what did it… Hopefully not the bugs. I don’t want to— Well I do want to kill a few… But I don’t want to fight them to do it.
“Let's find the papers,” Sam said to keep everyone focused.
Sam opened the case and rummaged within it. “I have some notes here. Looks like documentation of… Yes! This is how to open the door below the throne.”
“Great!” Trixie said standing up with a thin smile. “So, we have a hall between us and our goal, and some corpses here that—”
“There’s no tooth or claw marks on the bones,” June reported, looking up to her friends. “But there are some odd scrapes. Like what you get when the meat was pulled off instead of cut off.”
“What?” Sam asked, her eyes going wide. “What the buck can do that? Were they slowcooked first or something?”
June shrugged. “I’m just telling you what happened.”
“Hey, I found a map,” Trixie reported, standing up from a skeleton in the corner. “It was in the saddlebags.”
“Good. Too bad we don’t need it though,” Sam said, refocusing on the task at hoof.
“Uh, we might?” Trixie disagreed. “I took a quick look, found this room, and the hall after it has a skull drawn on it. There’s a back passage we could use like, ten doors down.”
June frowned slightly. “How much do you want to bet that whatever killed them is what the skull is warning about, and they forgot to heed their own warning?”
“If that’s true, why are the doors closed?” Sam countered, gesturing towards the fully shut inner doors.
“Huh,” June said as she turned and saw the doors were indeed fully latched. “Well… Monsters don’t close doors. And this door was ajar…”
Trixe nodded as she followed June’s logic. “Limited didn’t open the door for us, he just pointed. So he can’t open and close doors. Meaning whatever did this to them…”
“Came from the hallway,” Sam finished, sighing and shaking her head. “Okay, girls. We’re going through the inner doors. I want everypony on full alert from here on out. Especially when we’re leaving. That’s when they died, so that’s probably when we’ll be at the most risk.”
“Right,” June and Trixie said together.
Sam moved to the doors and took a kneeling shooting stance where she could fire into the doorway once it was open. “Trixie, take position to my left. June, you’re melee so you open the doors.”
Trixie fell into position as June stepped over to the door and took hold of the door knob with her free hoof, looking to Sam for the ‘go ahead’. Sam nodded to June. June pulled down on the handle and opened the door.
A wave of hot, humid, rancid air surged over the three the second the door moved. June’s mind screamed at her to close the door, but her muscles were too busy pulling it open to react. The door swung open, revealing a brightly lit long decorative hallway lined with the remains of tapestries and sculptures which was now little more than the den of its inhabitants.
A large colony of pony-sized, saurian creatures turned, looking up as the door swung open. They had the body of a crocodile, albeit with legs seemingly on loan from a maned wolf and a draconic face. Their slate gray scales were thick and bony, resembling armored plates more than the scales of a crocodile. Their talons glinted in the dim light much like steel under the warm light of the moon.
They howled at the food smell coming from the door.
Sam fired on reflex. Her burst of fire struck the nearest saurian, audibly ricocheting off its armored hide and making it stumble slightly. Its claws made a distinctive tak-ing click as it moved, turning to hiss at the ponies.
The colony roared in unison, pleased to see such a mighty bellow from their prey. The battle would be leg—
June slammed the door shut. “Back passage!” She shouted.
“Yep!” Sam agreed.
The three turned and started to run for the hall. June’s ears swiveled as she heard a click. She turned her head, looking over her shoulder to see one of the canine-saurian-hybrids had opened the door by pulling the handle down with one of its claws.
“THEY CAN DOOR!” June screeched, putting on all of her speed as she shot past her friends.