A Realm Of Strange Creatures

by Delvius


Chapter 3 -- An Icing Slide

CHAPTER 3 - Some Proper Introductions




I sat on the base of the staircase within Twilight Sparkle's house (which was a particularly large tree, not on the outside, but on the inside) and at last wiped the last of the icing from my suit's visor. Even still, some of the pink and white stuff stuck to the miniscule gaps in the seal, and for how much that annoyed me I groaned, "This suit once protected me when I submerged myself in lava on the volcanic planet of Thraxos and in the process had none of the magma harden within it, yet it cannot keep out sugary icing from a pony's cake out of it's gaps."

I sighed and threw the napkin aside, and laid my back against the wooden wall of the house, giving the sounds of the party outside a listen. I shook my head, murmuring, "Any sane race would have called on their leaders and alerted their armies to the arrival of armed strangers, yet these ponies throw me a town-wide party which everyone strangely attends... these ponies confuse me."

"Well, nopony would want to miss out on a Pinkie Pie party," Twilight Sparkle said as she trotted down the stairs, also wiping the icing off of her lavender fur. I gave her a quizzical look, and she returned it with a sheepish little smile. "Trust me, when you've lived here as long as I have, well... you kinda learn that some things just happen, even if the circumstances surrounding them are too silly, or they're just plain weird."

"Like a town-wide party dedicated to the celebration of the arrival of someone who'm no one in this town knows and for a while even showed fear towards," I muttered.

"Well... yeah, I guess," she said, and then I heard her hoofsteps coming down the stairs towards me. After a while they stopped, and I looked beside me to see her looking at me with a wide grin on her face as she looked straight at me.

"What?" I asked, finding the look she was giving me rather disturbing.

She backed away a little, composing herself and putting on a more formal expression. She cleared her throat, "I'd like to apologize for how some of us would have received you -- a certain pegasus comes to mind -- and I'd also like to introduce myself. I'm Twilight Sparkle, Ponyville's local librarian and student of one of the ruler's of Equestria, Princess Celestia."

'Princess Celestia?' I thought. 'Oh yes, the one mentioned in the seminar. If I remember correctly, Commodus had once had tea with her.' As I sat there conjuring up a mental of image of my Knight-Magistrate drinking tea with a winged unicorn, I eventually noticed that I was taking long to respond to her introduction, and that she was already starting to give me weird looks.

"Ah, uh, sorry. Just a little thought that came to mind." I cleared my own throat, and raised one of my power-armored hands forward. "Knight Andelius, 3rd Fleet, Second Division, Milky-Way Detachment. A... pleasure to meet you."

She smiled and raised a hoof to shake my hand with, and after we were done she sat down next to me on the staircase and looked at me with that disturbingly wide and overly eager smile again. "So..." she started, looking over my power-armored form and blade.

"So?" I asked.

"So, where'd you come from? How many of you are there? Are you really a whole new species? What do you look like under that suit? What's the suit made of?" she asked in a quick volley of questions that left her out of breath, and I was surprised at the eagerness of her queries; surely I wasn't THAT interesting to these things, right? Didn't anything interesting happen to these things, or were their lives so dreadfully tedious that they really found a knight wearing power armor interesting?

"One question at a time, please."

She composed herself again, calming down enough to refine her mad grin to a more formal smile. "Sorry, just... you're so interesting! I don't think Equestria has ever seen anything like you before, it's just exciting! I'm excited, are you excited?"

'Hardly,' I thought, but I wasn't actually going to say that. Velian might have, if he was here -- Justinian was right about one thing, Velian was indeed a little unrefined and needed a little discipline.

"I assume that's not the question you want me to answer, right?" I asked, even if I already knew the answer.

"Uh... nope. Okay, here I go... whew..." There as a long pause as she took in a deep breath. "Okay, so, may I know from where you're from?"

"Reasonable question. I hail from Ralvain, the home world of the Indaari Empire and the center of the intergalactic community. It is there that I learned just about everything I know right now, save some tidbits of information."

"Like what?" she asked.

"Small tidbits, like where a black hole leads, how to get beyond the speed of light, how to create your own black hole with some surplus star generators, and how to manufacture your own HD screen out of sand and grass," I replied sincerely.

Her smile widened enough to show her teeth. Apparently, something about those minor tidbits of info intrigued this unicorn.

She opened her mouth, presumably to ask another question, when another presence appeared at the top of the stairs. Twilight seemed to notice it first, and turned her head to look up. I followed suit.

Up there stood this... creature, this... thing. It was green and purple, with scaly skin and short, stubby limbs. It was short, standing maybe only 3 feet tall, as opposed to my average height of 9 feet. It looked reptilian, having a sort of underdeveloped maw on it's face. It also looked like it had just awoken from some kind of nap. It's eyes widened as it looked at me, and it rubbed them.

"Twilight, who's this?" It asked in a voice of definite masculinity, as opposed to just about every other creature I had yet met on the planet.

"Spike!" she yelped excitedly, and galloped up the stairs as if to push him down just so it -- or he -- could talk to me.

But I was still processing the fact that this thing had just spoke. "Your pet talks?" I asked.

"Of course he talks -- and he's not my pet! He's my assistant. I taught him how to talk myself, right Spike? Remember how sometimes you'd mispronounce a word and I'd have to ask you to repeat?" Twilight said as she nudged him down the stairs.

"Uh... no?" he replied lazily, obviously still trying to fully wake up.

Finally, he stood in front of me, with her behind him and looking at the two of us eagerly. "Go on you two," Twilight said encouragingly. "Introduce yourself, Spike."

"Uh, right," he replied, then tentatively reached up one of his clawed hands up towards me. "Hi, my name's Spike." Then he said in a tone slightly filled with personal pride, "I'm a dragon."

"Nice to meet you... Spike," I replied, and took his hand and shook it, even if I didn't actually want to.

"Well, now that that's settled, why don't we go meet the others?" Twilight offered. "I'm pretty sure Applejack would want to know for who'm the party's for, considering she wasn't there with us -- probably working on the farm. So, you wanna go?"

"It's not like I have anything else to do here," I muttered, then got up and stretched my legs a bit. "Let's go."

Spike just went back upstairs, yawning as he did. "You two go ahead. I'm going back to sleep." Just before he turned a corner and disappeared from sight, he murmured, "I must be dreaming, what was that thing? And is Pinkie throwing ANOTHER party? Ugh..."

'Hmph,' I thought, 'At least I'm not the only one around here who finds some of these pony's traditions disturbing.'

I glanced over at the doorway and saw Twilight peeking outside. Her eyes narrowed. "Oh my..." she said softly.

"What is it?"

She turned around and looked at me with a grin wider than ever before. She started skipping about, saying repeatedly, "There are more of you here there are more of you here there are more of you here there are more of you here!"

"Oh boy," I said, "I think I know what that means."

Then on my visor Velian and Justinian's faces suddenly appeared, along with feeds of what they were seeing. Justinian seemed to be lying face down in pile of cake (just like I had) while Velian seemed to be trying not to step on the numerous locals as he tried to help him up.

"Hey Andelius, little help over here?" Justinian pleaded.

I sighed, "Excuse me Twilight, but I have to help those louts I call my brethren and make sure they don't do anything stupid."

"I'm going with you!" she said, perhaps a little too eagerly for my liking.

But it's not like I was going to deny her that; I didn't control her, after all. "Fine," I muttered softly, and pushed the door open.

And then I fell forward and slid down the street in a slide of icing. Halfway to what appeared to be a fountain, Pinkie appeared out of nowhere and rode on my back, yelling, "WEEEEE!" at the top of her lungs.

Velian just managed to help Justinian up, when they saw me speeding towards them and their eyes widened. "Move!" I shouted, but it was already too late.

Our impact splattered cake bits everywhere, and once again I found myself mentally screaming, 'Confound these ponies!'