//------------------------------// // Chapter 3: The Black Forest // Story: Daring Do and the Curse of the Lost Tomb // by Fedora //------------------------------// The train station at furthest south outpost on the border of Haysead Swamp was oddly deserted. The train stopped, and it was just Daring and Scootaround who exited, with a backpack of gear for each of them. No other ponies were on the platform, nor did any more disembark. The train left, leaving the two on the platform, alone. "There's probably some ponies in the town," Daring said. She was dressed in her full adventure gear by now, though her shirt was crisp and clean and her pith helmet was relatively unscathed. She wore a greenish backpack on her back, while Scootaround wore one on hers that was much smaller. The pack contained supplies for the day such as emergency medicine, food, plus canvas parts in case they needed to construct shelter. "Are we going into the town itself, Dr. Do?" asked Scootaround, lifting her cap's brim up slightly. It wasn't a particularly warm day out to begin with, and the sun was partially obscured behind rolling clouds. "No, we've got to get going if we want to make it to the ruins and back before sunset," Daring replied. Scootaround looked confused, and raised an eyebrow. "Sunset? It's only 9 am!" "It'll take us most of the morning to get there," Daring replied, explaining it for the filly, "We'll break for lunch, and then study for a couple of hours. After that we can head on back here to the outpost and stay a night." **** The cracked earth of the badlands contrasted greatly with the forest on the other side. Daring and Scootaround walked along a ridge that divided the two, and were at the highest elevation in the area. They talked and joked with each other as they traveled, occasionally taking a break to rest themselves and drink water, but within five minutes they were moving again. There came a point after much traveling that the trees of the forest around Haysead Swamp grew much thicker. The swampy area was now past them, and they were almost at the southernmost part of North Equestria. Ahead the black forest stretched around , and the badlands extended to the west in a deep basin. The ridge they stood on had grown much higher compared to the forest floor on one side or the dry, dusty basin on the other. The ridge grew bumpier, and ahead they could see that it swooped up to form the craggy peaks of mountains. "This should be the general location of the ruins," Daring said. She glanced around, and to her surprise there were buildings down in the dusty basin. They didn't appear very old, but they had a look about them that made her feel uneasy. "Those the ruins we're after?" Scootaround asked, peering down the ridge. Daring tapped a hoof to her chin. "Something's not right," she thought out loud, "Those buildings don't match the architecture of the period the ruins are from. They look like the kind of buildings that ponies used to live in when I was a filly, and maybe even my dad." "So they're not the ruins?" "Well, we'd better go and check them out anyways," Daring said. She tightened her pith helmet down around her head, and placed a hoof over the edge of the ridge. Scootaround grimaced, her legs looking wobbly beneath her. Obviously the filly was being intimidated by the steepness of the drop between their spot on the ridge and the bottom of the basin below. "Look kid, it's alright," Daring said reassuringly. She even tapped the ground with her hoof to show the filly that it was strong and that it wasn't going to crumble away. "We'll zig-zag down, okay?" she told the filly, pointing with one of her front hooves in a Z formation, "Nice and easy." Scootaround seemed a little reassured by this, and slowly followed the adventurous mare. The little orange filly placed her hooves exactly where Daring had stepped moments before, and didn't bring her gaze up from where she was walking once. **** This place gives me the spooks, Daring thought to herself. Indeed it was like something out of a creepy movie, only real. The grayish sky cast a dead light on a dead town, but for some reason Daring Do felt that she and Scootaround were not alone among the ruins. It was similar to contemporary towns in its layout and architecture. Had it not been completely deserted and decaying in some parts, it could have passed for any other small town in Equestria. "Where is everypony?" Scootaround wondered. Daring felt she knew the answer to the question, but there were two possibilities. "Either they left the town here and ran off, or they died," Daring said grimly. She turned to look at the wide-eyed filly meaningfully. "Kid, there's something very wrong here. Something very, very wrong. At the first sign of anything, let me know," "Okay," Scootaround said quietly. She gulped and fastened her cap more tightly around her head. "Another thing," Daring began, "If you see anything suspicious, don't touch it." "Why do you say that, Dr. Do?" "Well," Daring explained, "I just have this feeling. We don't know all there is to know about illnesses and disease. I never read up on the old outpost like I should have, so I don't know what hit this area. Just... be careful, ok?" They reached the road that ran through the center of the town. It didn't look any better up close. The plants and trees that had once grown around it were now hollow, rotted stumps that had long since withered and dried up in the badlands’ inhospitable climate. The buildings were made of wood, and in some places the shingles of the roofs were coming off. Thatched roofs had caved in in some places, and the sides of the storefronts and houses were pitted and scarred. Boards were missing in some places, and what glass windows there were were broken. The doors swung ajar, some off their hinges completely. Daring made a motion for Scootaround to stay while she poked her head inside a building. The filly remained put, sitting on her flank and digging a hoof into the cracked soil. Daring Do's sense of unease about this place was heightened to the point that she was dreading what may be inside the buildings. She approached the nearest one, which had been a shop of some kind, or possibly a saloon. The doors were completely missing, and so she was able to walk right on in without having to open anything. The light was much dimmer inside due to the overcast skies, but what the sky was able to illuminate was enough to creep the archaeologist pony out. Skeletons littered the floor of the building, picked clean to the bone. None were in the same position they had died in, and all were equine bones. Some were broken up, while some were more or less complete. Mounds of dirt could be seen lying around on the floor of the saloon, and in them were pieces of white egg shells that had been there for several years by now, untouched. There were no other eggs, nor any evidence of what had come out of them. Apparently the inside of this building was made into some kind of nest, Daring thought. She wondered if it was some kind of buzzard or vulture that had made the nests, but that didn't make sense. They didn't nest in dirt mounds, did they? Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of jarring piano chords right next to her. Daring jumped in fright, but by the time she landed she saw that it was simply a rat scurrying across the keys. She shooed the animal away, and looked back at the scattered skeletons. The presence of equine remains usually didn't phase her like this, but then again she was used to dealing with long gone societies. In this case the bones were more recent, possibly from within the late 19th or even the early 20th century. They had to be at least a couple decades old, but it was still very recent. "Dr. Do, I saw something up on the ridge!" came Scootaround's voice from near the entrance to the saloon. Daring quickly trotted over to the threshold and held up a hoof. "Don't come in here," she warned. She herself exited the building a moment later, shaking her head to try to rid herself of the images of the broken skeletons lying about the room. "What'd you see?" she asked, looking up to the ridge where Scootaround had claimed to have seen something. "It was a truck and a cart of some kind," Scootaround said, "The cart was being pulled by some big burly stallion, but the truck was moving by its own. Can they do that?" "Internal combustion engine," Daring noted, "They're fairly new, and extremely rare in Equestria. I don't think I've seen anypony in Equestria with an internal combustion machine before. I've seen a couple outside of the country, though." "So they don't need somepony to pull it?" Scootaround asked, eyes widening. "Did it say anything on the side of it?" asked Daring, "On the cart or on the truck?" Scootaround thought for a moment, and then replied. "The truck was unmarked. The cart that that stallion was pulling was marked with big black letters that spelled CAP." Daring thought about this for a moment. She hadn't heard of any kind of organization with those initials, nor did she know of any major companies. Whoever it was must have been wealthy to have been able to afford a vehicle that propelled itself, unless they were part of some kind of military. Daring had seen a number of military vehicles that ran themselves, such as tanks and submarines. Of course boats had to run themselves unless they were sailing ships that harnessed the power of the wind. "Where were they going?" Daring asked. "They actually went down the other side of the ridge, into the forest." Scootaround answered. She heard a noise off in the direction of one of the other buildings in the abandoned town that made her jump. Daring heard it too. It was like a purring sound, but louder and more audible. There was a hint of a small hiss at the end of it. Daring felt very uneasy about the town. The dead bodies, the nest, and the inescapable feeling of being watched made her want to leave immediately. On top of that, it wasn't the right set of ruins. They had come to look for ruins from an ancient culture, not a ghost town that had been killed off by a weird disease or some kind of horrific infestation of who-knew-what. Those egg shells were bad news. "Alright, let's exit through the other side of town, the one we didn't come in through," Daring decided, "Then we'll hike up the side of the ridge, on the other side of that peak that's between where we were and where we're heading. If I'm not mistaken we'll have better luck finding the ruins we're after." "What if we run into those other ponies?" Scootaround wondered, biting her lower lip. "Well, I'm sure they have a reason for being out this far too. Who knows, maybe they know something we don't. If we run into them then we can just explain what we're doing here. I'm sure they'd understand." **** Up and over the ridge they traveled, beyond the first craggy mountain peak and down into the dark forest below. The mosquitoes buzzed in the thick woods, and Daring swatted at the annoying insects. The forest was dark and deep. It had earned its name as the Black Forest. It was one of the least explored places in Equestria, and while not tropical it was quite overgrown. Daring wished she had brought a machete of some kind to slice through the brambles and the brush that slowed her advance. Scootaround was having an even harder time climbing through the overgrown flora. It was the filly who broke the silence as the two of them ventured further into the jungle-like forest. "I think this is some kind of building," Scootaround said, tugging at the back of Daring's shirt and pointing at something that resembled a thick, craggy tree. Daring turned to peer at what the filly was pointing to. She squinted at it for a moment before its edges became more clearly defined. It was one wall of a structure that had long since collapsed. The stones used to construct it were now covered in leafy vines and plant growth that almost completely obscured them and gave the wall remnants the appearance of a haphazard tree. "Good call kid," Daring remarked. She took a few steps towards the structure before looking around the area. She looked at it differently this time. She carefully observed each and every bush, every small rise in the forest floor where it appeared that there was a mound of dirt. The archaeologist reached into her bag and produced a sketch of what appeared to be a primitive village. Hippologists had long theorized that a group of ponies had left from the Arabian Peninsula to the east and landed in this area centuries before the existence of Equestria. These ruins had been discovered earlier in the decade by an aerial photographer who noticed the top of a stone building. Sketches of the Arabian colony had been drawn, but nopony had ventured as close as Daring and Scootaround now were. As a professor of Equine history, Daring had a lot of questions about this place. Was it really from Arabian travelers and not from a group of South Equestrian ponies that came north? Was it a small part of an even more complex civilization that developed from the colonists? What had happened to the colonists? Had they died out or had they moved on to blend in with the ponies that had come from the north to form Equestria? She also had a nagging question about the legend and the pendant's origin that she hoped to find some more clues about. On the off chance that the legend had a grain of truth, this place could well have been one of the four locations. "One of green leaf, one of snow, one in the rocky ground below, one in the desert outside the gates, that tells of the resting of the king's fates," Daring recited faintly. Scootaround raised an eyebrow. "It's from the legend," she explained, "There's four places where clues to the tomb were hidden. One in the desert, one in the snowy mountains, one underground, and one in the woods on another continent. This is a different continent than Arabia, and its forested." "Seems legitimate," Scootaround said. She stepped up on top of a large plant's root. She saw a couple of stone structures up ahead, but what with the thick growth of the forest she couldn't see very well. She had to get higher. Digging her little hooves into the bark of a nearby tree, Scootaround shimmied her way up and pushed off the trunk and onto the stalk of a much thicker plant. It was somewhat easier to climb, and at the top was a set of thick leaves that looked as if they could support her weight. She was about five feet off the ground, and once she had reached the top of the big plant she was a full six and a half feet up. "Scootaround, check out this map," Daring said, holding the map out next to her. She paused for a moment, not understanding why Scootaround wasn't in the same place. She hadn't seen the filly climbing up the plant's stalk. "Where'd you go?" Daring called, looking around in confusion. "I'm up here," Scootaround called back. Daring peered up at the filly for a moment, and her face paled. "Get down from there this instant! Don't you know what kind of plant that is? Quick, jump off!" "Aww Dr. Do, I'm only trying to get a better look at-" CHOMP The broad leaves closed on the filly suddenly, and the huge carnivorous plant closed its jaws around her. Her muffled screams could be heard from the inside as she hit against the thick fibrous walls of the inside of the plant's head. Daring's heart skipped a beat. Scootaround had just been eaten by a gigantic Bird-eating Trap-Jaw plant. The filly's shrill screams could barely be heard through the thick jaws. "Hold on a second!" Daring yelled, unsure if she'd be able to hear her. She frantically began looking about for something sharp. Once again she wished that she had brought a machete. She had a cooking knife in her mess kit, but there was no time to dig that out. Left without a sharp edge, Daring had to resort to blunt force. The pegasus took off and hovered a few feet off the ground, around the plant's midsection. She was breathing fast, knowing that she had only a few seconds to help the trapped filly. She turned around, reared back her legs, and kicked. The plant was shaken by it, but little had been done to break the stalk. Frustrated, Daring kicked again. There was an indent in the stalk but nothing major. She growled and kicked back again, and again, and again. She put all of the force she could physically muster into a large backwards thrust, her legs smashing into the carnivorous plant's stalk. This time it struck home, bending the plant backwards and snapping it. The head of the plant was thrown down to the forest floor and landed with a big thump. Being disconnected from its body, the jaws no longer had the force to remain closed. The struggling filly pressed against the side of one of the jaws, using the forest floor as something to push against with her back hooves. Daring rushed down to the severed head of the plant and pulled on the same jaw that Scootaround was pushing against, prying it open. With a sudden pop the jaws sprung open, and Scootaround flopped out. She was covered in greenish gunk and her mane was all sticky and wet. On top of that she smelled quite flowery and fragrant. "Eew, what is this stuff?" Scootaround exclaimed, trying to get the sticky greenish slime off from her mane. "That's the stuff the plant uses to lure in its prey," Daring explained. She gave Scootaround a stern look. "Usually they eat birds. The scent attracts butterflies and bugs that the birds eat, and so when the birds swoop in to grab the bugs they get caught in the sticky stuff. You on the other hand..." "Yeah yeah, I know," Scootaround mumbled, but Daring clapped a hoof to her mouth. "Now you listen," she said angrily, "You could have died right then and there, you know that? You could show a little respect for the fact that I intervened. Now I want you to promise me not to touch anything or climb on anything that you don't understand. Do you understand?" Daring released her hoof from the filly's mouth. Scootaround's eyes started tearing up and she sniffed. Daring tried hard to keep a stern look on her face as she looked down at the filly, but something made her expression lighten. She crouched herself down onto the ground so that she was the same height as the smaller pony. Crying, Scootaround threw her hooves around Daring and buried her face in her jacket. Daring could see her back heaving up and down and hear her rapid breaths, and so she tried to soothe the worked up filly by patting her back with her free hoof. "There there, It's alright," she said calmly, "I'm sorry for snapping at you like that. It's just... you gave me a terrible fright there. Just please... please try to be more careful. I don't know what I'd do if I lost you, Scoot." "No, I-I'm sorry," sobbed Scootaround, "I almost got killed by that... that thing. I should've used my head." "Hey," Daring said, lifting the filly's chin up, "It's okay. Let's wipe that gunk off and keep going. Are you going to be okay?" "I think so," answered Scootaround, wiping her eyes off. "Good," Daring replied. She stood up, looking back on the ground for the piece of paper that had fallen down when she had taken off. "According to this, the main sections of the village were wooden. That's probably why there are these mounds of dirt scattered around- that's all that's left." "So what about the stone stuff?" "Well," answered Daring, "That's to the east a little from here. C'mon, let's go check it out." **** The dirt mounds grew in size and shape, and scattered stone remnants cropped up between trees and clumps of shrubs. They were usually in very poor condition and barely resembled walls or foundations at all. Scootaround's eyes darted around the forest. She kept thinking that she saw glimpses of movement, but whenever her eyes snapped to their target there was nothing there. She sighed and itched at her shoulder. Her mane was still sticky and the gunk was now irritating her skin beneath her coat. It itched something terrible, but as much as she scratched with her hooves she couldn't rid herself of the annoying sensation. Daring must have noticed. "If you keep scratching you'll just spread it around more," Daring told the filly, "Wait until we come across some water and try rinsing it off there." "But it itches!" "You hear that?" said Daring, and the two ponies paused. The sounds of the forest could be heard around them from every direction. Scootaround raised her ears, trying to listen for specific sounds and pick them out. She could hear the chirping of birds far above their head, leaves rustling in the light breeze, a creek gurgling as it meandered through the forest, and bugs humming in the.... A creek. She heard a creek. "I hear water," she replied. Daring nodded. "Let's get that stuff cleaned off before anything else if it's bothering you that much," Daring decided. The two ponies turned left and went a bit deeper into the woods in the direction of the sound of flowing water. The two reached the bubbling creek in a matter of minutes. Scootaround was the first to reach the water’s edge, and quickly climbed down the rocky bed until she could wade into the flow. Standing up to her belly in a shallow pool, she tossed her hat up on the bank and dunked her head. After rubbing her mane a few times and rinsing with the water the gunk started to come off. She worked the stuff out of her coat as well, though the flowery smell remained. “This stuff is worse than tree sap,” she complained after encountering a particularly stubborn patch. “Make sure you scrub behind your ears,” Daring joked, and received a splash of water in return. She laughed, and then took a moment to take in the immediate surroundings. On the opposite shore of the creek was a small area where the tree coverage thinned out ever so slightly. A number of stone buildings lay scattered about in various stages of disrepair. Two of them were still mostly intact, and were rather sizeable. Daring held her sketch up and compared the locations of it all: the mounds they had passed, the stone buildings, the creek. According to the sketch based off the aerial photographs taken years ago they were close to the large stone building. In fact, the larger of the two intact buildings looked a lot like the one in the photograph. It had a flat top and sides that sloped ever so slightly down to the base. The stone was rough and jagged from weathering, but it was still standing. Once the filly had cleaned herself off completely, both ponies crossed the stream and went towards the stone buildings. What remained of the stone buildings was largely overgrown with tangled vines and a few smaller specimens of the same plant that had tried to grab Scootaround as its meal. The filly purposely kept her distance from these plants despite their relatively diminutive size. Daring began the long task of doing a full evaluation of the area. She had a journal with her that she had now taken out to jot notes on as she observed each section. Scootaround tried to follow what she was doing, but some of it seemed rather boring. At one point it looked like Daring was doing little more than counting stones in the wreck of a wall. Where was the point in that? Slightly bored with watching Daring work on the evaluation of the ruins, Scootaround poked around herself. Daring had warned her not to touch anything, and she didn’t intend to. The filly skipped around a bit in the dirt, humming a song to herself. She didn’t know the lyrics well, but it was one that Dr. Do played in her office quite a bit. Perhaps it was just one of the few records she had multiple copies of and could bring and play in her office as well as at home, but she seemed to really like the song. Of course the tune kept getting stuck in the filly’s head. At hearing the familiar tune being hummed by Scootaround as she hopped about, Daring smiled. It was Anything Goes by Colt Porter. She remembered having met the composer himself when he had performed in Fillydelphia back in ‘34. That one one of the early shows, and she remembered it well. The song itself was one of her favorites. She paused in her work, while waiting for Scootaround to finish a verse. Without missing a beat, Daring began singing for the next verse. “Good authors too who once knew better words, Now only use four letter words Writing prose, Anything Goes. The world has gone mad today And good's bad today, And black's white today, And day's night today, When most guys today That mares prize today Are just studs, didn’t you know? And though I'm not a great romancer I know that I'm bound to answer When you propose, Anything goes.” Scootaround stopped humming and Daring also stopped singing after that part, and both giggled for a second. “What’s that song about, Dr. Do?” asked Scootaround. Daring thought for a second, picking up her journal in one hoof. “Well, it’s mostly about the world today. It’s saying that in the olden days things were more uptight and restrictive, but nowadays ponies feel a bit more free and they act in a way that would be outrageous by older standards,” Daring explained. “Like how The Princess made that stuff in wine and stuff against the law for a few years and then decided to make it alright to have it?” “No, that’s something completely different,” Daring said, “It’s talking more about courtship, like mares and stallions. You’ll understand when you’re older.” “Phooey,” Scootaround interjected, “Mushy gushy lovey dovey stuff. Yuck.” Daring laughed for a moment, recalling a memory from the last time the filly had said something like that. “Remember when you and I went to see that movie about the big huge gorilla that a group of explorers brought back from the island?” “Yeah,” Scootaround answered, “What about it?” “Remember when the main mare and the main stallion kissed and you yelled something in the movie theater?” “Oh, right,” Scootaround remembered. She blushed at the thought of it. She had made a bit of a foal of herself then, and everypony had turned in their seats to look at her. Daring rubbed Scootaround’s hat into her mane playfully. She then picked her pencil back up in her mouth and continued to write notes down in her journal. Bored with nothing to do once more, Scootaround began wandering off to explore the ruins. She tried flapping her wings a bit to test them out, but they weren’t good enough to achieve flight or lift her higher than a foot or so. It was still fun to try to fly even if it wasn’t getting her anywhere. “Hey Scootaround,” called Daring, “Don’t wander off!” “Sorry!” Scootaround called back, trotting back to where Daring could see her. “Just.. lean up against that wall or something for a second. I’m almost ready to come check stuff out with you, just hold your- just hold on.” Scootaround shrugged, and backed up against the stone wall to a building that was still intact. The stone wasn’t very comfortable at all; it was jagged and rough. The filly squirmed a bit while trying to find a way to lean against the wall comfortably when something happened. A stone block that had been loose was pushed back into place by her weight. As soon as it had slid into place, something happened inside the building. There was a slight rumbling, and some stones fell from a nearby wall and smashed onto the ground. One side of the back of the same building fell away, revealing steps leading down a level. Scootaround gasped. She had found an entrance to a hidden chamber! “What’d you do?” Daring snapped, “I told you to lean up against a wall, and stuff starts falling over? You’ve got to be careful with-” “I did just what you said!” Scootaround insisted, “Look over here! This rock moved into the wall, and stuff fell away. There’s a room or something that wasn’t there before!” Daring paused for a moment. She placed her journal down and looked around the corner of the stone building where Scootaround said something had happened. Sure enough, there were stone steps leading down a level. “Wow, nice find kid,” Daring remarked. She took a few steps back to scoop her journal up and then walked back towards the new chamber, taking a step inside. “You going to check it out?” “Yeah, why not?” reasoned Daring, “This may be something important. Here, hold this for me.” She passed Scootaround her journal so that she could dig something out of her bag. The two ponies trotted into the chamber that had been revealed until they were completely inside the stone building. The lighting was a little dimmer, and the floors of the chamber were dusty and untrodden. The walls were damp and contained grooves in odd places. There was an indent in the center of the floor that Daring accidentally stepped on with her hoof. As soon as she did so a large stone fell into place over the opening with a loud crash and the two ponies were thrust into total darkness.