//------------------------------// // Regaining Resolve // Story: [Forlorn Ascension]|[Rites of Dominion] // by Desrium //------------------------------// Phineas looked around frantically. Lights flickered. Shadows were strange and ominous. Shrieks and screams echoed throughout the ship. He panted, his breath visible in the air, his body gripped by an unnatural frost. He heard whispers all around him. They grew ever louder and louder until finally they too became screams and cries. Phineas started to run, distant explosions making powerful thuds elsewhere in the Iopteryx. He passed bodies on the floor, impaled by support beams and sliced by jagged sheets of metal. Their eyes stared off into the blue, their mouths hanging limp, blood matting their fur. The blood strewn across the hallways painted streaks and splotches of red. Phineas gasped but pressed on, running not to a destination, but running for the sake of running. He ran because there was nothing else for him to do. His hooves thumped against the flooring as he went. The ghostly wailing of grinding metal gnawed at his eardrums. The corridor he charged down grew impossibly long as he stared down its length. Features on the walls distorted, stretched out and unrecognizable. An acrid scent filled the air and his throat. Without warning Phineas found himself choking on the overwhelming stench of blood. He swayed from side to side, getting dizzy, then he fell to his knees, gasping. His eyes were clenched shut. When he opened them again, his blue pupils were small as needle tips in a sea of white. And they were affixed on the floor seeping blood, flooding. Phineas -hacking and coughing- raised his front hooves to see the dark liquid running off of them. "You could have saved us!" he heard many voices say in unison. The crew of the Iopteryx... and others. Random voices that he had heard over his life, a mare he might have overheard one day walking down the street. A stallion he might have asked for directions. A filly and colt that he might have given advice to. Countless others. "No... no! I refuse to have your blood be on my hooves! I could have done nothing-!" Phineas shot back with water in his eyes before having another coughing fit. It was unclear if he was tearing up from his soaring emotions or the choking odor. "You slept as we died!" "I had no choice!" "You should have died with us!" The elongated hallway bent upwards into an arc. Phineas was swept down it in a morbid torrent, fighting to keep his head above the blood which stained his silver coat. He saw the walls fail and the glowing blueness that was the celestial pincer slicing through the hallway. The screeching of bending support columns and struts was deafening. The crimson current was then nullified by weightlessness. Large globs of blood undulated as they drifted forth with tiny droplets trailing them. Phineas was groping at his neck. No air. He was suffocating. The dreamscape starship fell apart around him and Phineas was cast into space. There, small, alone and exposed, he looked up at the Iopteryx. It was many hundred times his size. He could practically feel the might and majesty of the celestial terror radiating like the light from the many bright points dotting its body. Its movement was of indescribable grace and unbridled horror. It was not any lumbering monstrosity in spite of its great mass. It turned its body about towards the pony, and though it had no eyes or face to speak of, Phineas felt as if he were being torn apart in a gaze of torment. As if the monster from beyond the stars was staring into the deepest depths of his being and was eroding away the layers around it with every passing second. He felt as if his soul was being molded to the whims of the Star Terror. "Never... safe..." the monster spoke. Phineas was paralyzed with fear. Its voice was... wrong. It was a legion of voices speaking as one but not in synchronous. The sounds blended together, languages of completely alien tongue being shaped into comprehensive speech, a disconcerting blend that instilled the most primal of fears in the silver stallion. The sensation of suffocation was no more. There was only fright. His gaze was then forced down by an influence he could not resist. His hooves were pried from his throat so that he could look at them. His forelegs were impossibly thin. His flesh was aged to the point of rotting, devoid of fur. "You will die with us," he heard the voice of Amethyst Shine say. *** Phineas jolted up into sitting on his cot with the lights in the room slowly brightening. He was gasping for air and feeling unending relief that he was able to do just that. Phineas felt his face and body as he panted, reaffirming his grip on reality. He was all there. He looked at his hooves and found them to be blood-free. He was okay, he was safe in his bed. This was not the Iopteryx. There were no haunting voices beckoning his demise. He fell back into the cot, the back of his head hitting the pillow. He was still pulling in breaths when he laid a hoof over his chest and felt his heart thumping away inside. He had been writhing in a cold sweat in his sleep. The first natural sleep Phineas had in over three centuries came so soon after his awakening and brought with it a most disturbing nightmare. "Post traumatic stress, punctuated with stasis sleep and compounded by emotional instability," Phineas told himself once he was breathing at a more regular rate. "This was to be expected..." He ran a foreleg over his eyes to rid them of the moisture that was there. He could explain it way all he wanted with various theories as to what brought about the unpleasantness, but that did not change the fact he dreamed the things he did. From ponies from a past life demanding his death to the Star Terror, it was more than evident that something was not quite right with Phineas' subconscious mind. "I didn't abandon them, I did everything I could have done to help in any way when the Iopteryx was being destroyed," he thought, staring up at the paneled ceiling. "So why do I feel... guilt... for living when so many have perished?" He rolled off of the bed and bucked it back up and into the wall. "I am Phineas Startrot, damn it!" he snarled, angry at himself for this sudden dip in spirit. How could he have fallen like this after facing the obstacles he had faced? He was a pony disowned and left to the claws of the world but he had fought the adversity and he won. He was in the grip of a peril greater than anything he knew and lived. "I am better than this! I don't feel sorry for myself! I don't pity others!" he went on to say, heading for the cockpit door. "Three hundred years or no; that does not change!" He put on his spacesuit. On his right foreleg, wrapped around the gray armor was his PDA and strapped to his flanks were his toolboxes. A good engineer always had their tools. The canopy went up and Phineas went down the ladder. He walked across the hold to the giant door. A panel on the wall blinked several times and he waited as it raised up. He felt the rumble of machinery which controlled the hulking metal slab. The walls of the hallways beyond the cargo hold were black. Yellow lights lined the floor and the seams in the metal plating also emitted a faint yellow light. "Well this will be fun," the silver stallion thought. Fun indeed, for he found navigating the unfamiliar and downright alien layout of the Shu'badi ship exceedingly difficult. There were no strips of colors denoting which hallways led to which part of the ship, so Phineas was walking through a maze. "Ugh, I really should have thought this through..." he mumbled. He raised his PDA light up to a wall terminal. Its screen was a shimmering blue and its text were symbols he rightfully did not understand. However, the device on his chest piece was readily compensating; the screen flashing once and in an instant the interface was completely altered. The symbols were replaced with letters in which Phineas could read. He looked down at the thing, smiling underneath his helmet. The future was not all bad...all things considered. If this small electronic was anything to go by, he was living in a galaxy many times more advanced than the Earth he knew. "Amazing piece of technology, this is!" While marveling at the invaluable usefulness of the Universal Translator, Phineas went through the terminal database, finding in-depth blueprints which he desperately wanted on his PDA. Sadly, a gap of 378 years and incompatible technology made that impossible. "I don't suppose you serve as an information dump too, huh?" he joked, then realized he was talking to a machine. Before he could question his sanity extensively, the voice of Gaali reached him. "There you are!" Startled, he looked over to where she was at the start of the hallway. "Oh, you were looking for me..." he said. "Of course we were! We were looking for you since we detected the hold's door opening. Why didn't you wait for one of us to get you? You didn't think you'd just instantly know how to get around the ship, did you?" "I'm... not in the most logical state of mind right now." "Clearly you aren't. If you didn't get the idea of using the Translator on that terminal we would still be looking for you!" "I suppose that means I'm not too far gone," he said then chuckled afterwards. "Startrot... I don't believe this is a mater to joke about. You might need some mental evaluations to make sure you still have all your faculties after your stasis..." Gaali said with some concern in her voice. Phineas mulled this over. "I... would have to disagree. My shuttle would have informed me if something had gone awry; I was only a bit... impulsive when I left it." "Uh... huh," Gaali said flatly. With her visor covering her features, Phineas didn't know what to make of her reaction. "Well you seem to be in a better state of mind now than you were a few hours before... what are those things you have on you if I may ask?" Phineas looked down at the PDA and at the toolboxes. "These? These were my best friends 378 years ago!" "Are you certain that you do not need mental evaluating?" "No I mean, they were what I depended on to do my job. As Chief Engineer it was my job to make sure the ship I was on was in top notch condition and well... I always had my tools and PDA with me." "So why do you have them now?" Gaali queried. "Well... I was hoping that I could join your crew, take up my old role as an engineer. Granted... it'll take some study before I can properly tinker with anything on board but I'm good at learning and applying myself." Phineas offered. "You... want to join..." said Gaali slowly, ruminating on the words as if to glean some bit of extra knowledge from doing so. "Well, you and your friends pulling my shuttle in was the reason I woke up from stasis in the first place. Now that I'm here I might as well do something worthwhile. I'm a pony living in the future on an alien spacecraft... I might as well start learning how things work nowadays." "I see..." Gaali replied thoughtfully. "I suppose I can have you apprentice with our current mechanic, Tsubar. Know that our technology might... will be vastly different to what you might have worked with." "Does this ship use some form of Spell-core engine?" Phineas asked. "Well... yes. Most ships use Spell-cores or Spell-matrixes in some way or another." Gaali answered. "Then I'll manage. Do you think Tsubar can make this work with the ship?" the silver stallion went on to ask, holding his PDA up. After a thoughtful hum, Gaali replied: "He might be able to... something tells me he would be more inclined to take it apart and rebuild it though." Phineas smirked underneath his helmet. "I think I'll like this Tsubar guy..."