//------------------------------// // Chapter 2 // Story: The Transcredible Exploits of Captain Marshal Overlord Rain // by Skyekun //------------------------------// The giant bay doors leading into the outside world positively dwarfed the captain as she stood before them resolutely, head held high and a look of fierce determination on her face. Anything could be waiting out there beyond the confines of the warehouse, and while she’d gotten the barest of glimpses during her mad dash for shelter, this was going to be the real deal. She would press headlong into the unknown, confront it, and uncover the mystery of what happened to the ponies who once resided here. ‘This could be my greatest challenge yet,’ Rain thought to herself as she strode quickly for the recessed control panel at the edge of the doors. ‘I cannot afford failure, no matter the cost. First goal, I need to find some sign of civilization. Ponies must have moved beyond this storage facility, there has to be a civilian encampment somewhere nearby. I’ll have to find some kind of road and follow it.’ A swift kick dislodged the panel, and with her superior hacking skills the lockdown was overridden in no time. Alarm lights and sirens blared as the heavy, gargantuan doors began to slide apart, and Rain moved toward the widening gap to get her first solid glimpse of the outside world. Stepping outside, the captain was greeted with dust. It blew inside, carried on a brisk, sharp wind that failed to cut through her enviro-suit but chilled her to the bone anyhow. Her jaw hung just a little; this world was dead. Rust red dust covered everything as far as the eye could see, interspersed with slate gray boulders half buried by erosion and time. Here and there dead, petrified trees dotted the landscape. They were only a few ponies high, their thin spindly branches reaching for the cloudy sky like grasping fingers. They drew Rain’s eyes up to the cloud ceiling above her, which locked her in like a mottled gray and red prison. The world was nearly monochrome, and she felt a shiver up her spine at the lonely desolation of it all. “Sun and Moon above, give me strength,” she whispered, letting one rare sign of weakness show through her ironclad nerves and her unrelenting will. She reached up and flicked on her HUD, the enviro-suit’s internal CPU whining to life as the screen of her helm lit up with data. It quickly triangulated approximate distances to key points around her, highlighted anything deemed a point of interest, and labeled anything known to the internal registry. An emergency warning flashed almost immediately, making her frown. “No satellite uplink… Base, this is Overlord, come in.” Silence met her hail. “Base? Base!” She grimaced and stamped a hoof, sending up a light plume of dust. “Blast! It looks like I’m on my own then, I can’t even get a patch through to our servers to compensate for the failed linkup… I’ll have to make due with the onboard data and hope for a solid signal later. Let’s just hope the satellite’s out of range and not down for the count.” She snorted softly and set off into the unknown, leaving the relative safety of the warehouse behind her. Rain knew the wisest course of action was to travel straight forward as much as possible. It was unlikely that the road, had there been one under all the dust, would wrap around the giant warehouse. Traveling straight off into the distance would give her the best chance of spotting something. She kept an eye on the numbers on her HUD; the horizon was several miles away, a small mountain range of weathered round peaks in the great distance. If she looked a bit to her right, the range terminated in a massive mountain, bigger than anything she’d ever seen before. Rain stopped short for a moment, taking it in with a muted gasp of awe. It was a feat in itself that she’d yet to notice it. It seemed to rise up in stages, as tired and weathered as the rest of the range but defiant in its own right, continuing to push up as it spread out, looming to heights that her HUD could not even register an estimate of. Something like that could be seen from space, she imagined. That thought made her pause. “Wait… The largest mountain in the Equestrian heartland is Canterlot Peak. That mountain is the wrong shape entirely, and what’s more it’s far too big…” Mounting horror filled her as she called out into her comm. device sharply. “Base! Base, copy! I need coordinates for my current location immediately! Barring that, I need coordinates for my dropship landing site! I suspect I’ve been dropped in off course, likely a great distance!” Silence again met her orders. Growling, she switched to the emergency frequency and tried again, only to be met with static. “Great… I’m lost, too. Really, really lost. Now I have to figure out where I am and what happened to everypony.” Rain set off again, updating her mental checklist of objectives and lamenting that she lacked a more advanced suit which could track them for her. A pity she had little more than a thin biohazard casing keeping the elements out. A better suit could also negate a little of the gravity, allowing her to walk easier. As it was, the thick dust was making every step a bit like slogging through ashes and snow. It adhered just enough to itself and had just enough weight to make movement a strain after a while. The captain had yet to cover much ground, but she knew that would change. Hours passed. With the unending clouds overhead it was hard to tell, but the HUD’s internal clock now read 2:03, listing out the time passed since activation. Rain’s legs burned with exhaustion but she pressed on, lumbering and marching over dunes of thick dust and around rocky outcroppings. She could feel the inside of her suit was damp with sweat, making the journey all the more uncomfortable, but there was nothing she could do about it. The wind had yet to abate, either. In fact as time passed it had grown worse, and Rain was facing down the beginnings of a dust storm. She picked her pace up, panting softly. There was no point in it as she had no concrete destination, but she had to keep moving. She kept her thoughts from wandering, trying to focus on the mission. It was too easy to think of other ponies, loved ones in times long past… Of her possible end here in the dunes, swallowed whole and buried till the ends of time. She tried to count her hoofsteps, the simple cadence of her haggard march something concrete for her mind to focus on, but after hundreds of paces even this faded into mental static to match the red-bleached world around her. The wind had picked up into a full blown dust storm by now, howling in fury as it clawed at Rain and tried to break her. Red flashes of text and emergency readings popped up time and again on her HUD, trying desperately to warn the wearer of the folly of being out in such conditions. The captain grit her teeth and pressed onward, her pace slowing to a mere crawl against the brutal onslaught of nature. She had to find someplace to ride this out, she knew it… Even a pony of her caliber would fall to this storm before too long. Like a lifeline thrown to her in a hurricane, a green pulse of light flashed across her HUD. Her gaze snapped to the circle it was painting on screen. She ignored the text, commanding it to zoom for a better view. The resolution was terrible, but there was just enough of a break in the storm for the system to detect unnatural formations barely a mile away in a shallow valley. They looked like buildings! She’d done it, she’d found a city! Rejuvenated by her find Rain double timed and pressed on, nearly tumbling down a nearby embankment and struggling against the storm as she made for the site. It was taking all of her strength but she was determined, and the will of a pony like Captain Rain was not something to be taken lightly. One hoof in front of the other, ignoring the sweat and fatigue and burning muscles, she pressed onward. It took just under a half hour of effort, but finally the outermost building loomed into view and she threw herself through the closest open doorway, letting blissful exhausted sleep overtake her. The journey had been long and arduous, but she could wait it out here and search for help and answers when she awoke. As Rain slept, she dreamed. Memories of a life long since left behind drifted through her subconscious hazily, warm summer nights spent with family in the back yard. Her head rested against her older sister’s side as they gazed up at the stars together, their other sister beside them in the grass. Her mother brought them all drinks, and watched with a kind smile as her two youngest chased fireflies together. A meteor shower drew their eyes to the majesty of the heavens, and together they reveled in the sublime. She dreamed of lazy weekends about the house, playing tag until they collapsed in a fit of giggles. She was so carefree back then, so happy, her heart was free and soft and warm. Her oldest sister would distract their mother while the two youngest tried to filch ice cream, but in the end they would make four bowls and all would share. Her face always ended up the messiest, and she would laugh and laugh at it, they all would. Those days were like another life now, lost in the sands of time and the hazy depths of memory. Darker dreams made sleep turn fitful, thoughts shifting to times of sadness and loss. A world against her, a pony struggling for every shallow victory and every almost-failure. Her heart was heavy inside, but she could never show it. She chased the very dreams she secretly doubted, and longed for the things out of her reach. Despair clutched its icy claws at the recesses of her soul, encroaching in on her, threatening to turn her cold and rigid as ice inside… Rain awoke with a start, heart lurching as she gasped and sat bolt upright. Instinct took over and she leapt back against the nearest wall, eyes scanning for any signs of danger. There was nothing, a plain empty room of soft shadows and a single dusty doorway leading out into the quiet world beyond. She shivered and banished the receding dreams back into her deepest subconscious where they belonged, focusing on the here and now instead of on the once-weres and might-have-beens. Rising back to her hooves, Rain shook the light layer of dust from her suit and began the task of critically examining the place she had found herself in. The walls resembled nothing she’d seen on any space station of pony make, or in any city or base she’d been stationed at. Most military institutions were out-of-the-box type deals, made to be constructed quickly, be utilitarian and functional, and able to be disassembled with little difficulty. The walls here were not uniform, instead bearing slight waves and wobbles to them that were mirrored by waving inlaid lines and patterns. Moving closer, Rain inspected one of the nearby patterns and determined that some form of translucence could be passed through them. Though dead now, it seemed that the walls were designed with lights build right into them. Rain frowned a little, circling the small room slowly and thinking. Civilian outposts did tend to have their own flair and architecture, usually based on long-held cultural standings of the planet or the settling subgroup… But this was the pony homeworld! She knew the designs of the buildings here, she’d grown up on this planet! But… She was off course, perhaps she’d come across a small outpost belonging to an unknown cultural group. That thought was comforting, but the captain could not banish the quiet sense of unease growing in her stomach. Something was not right here. She made for the door and rounded the edge of the building’s exterior, keeping close to the side. The sight waiting for her beyond was enough to make her stop short and gasp once again. She was on the main road of a small city, skyscrapers stretching up toward the dead sky above. Windows were busted out here and there, and the street was coated in a thick layer of red dust which seemed to be the one great unifying factor of the world. But the buildings themselves… Rain had never seen anything like them. They almost looked organic; twisting, angular spires that jutted out oddly here and there, some listing to the side, some with strange ledges halfway up, others with sheer tops and hunched antechambers at their bases. The predominant color was a dull blue-gray, but there was much more to them than that. Here and there were brighter patches, rounded half-spheres of sickly green or violent red. Elsewhere jutted out long, narrow spines of pale yellow. The truly damning part however was the language. Carved right into the buildings themselves were characters of a language Rain could not even begin to guess at. Looping, sharp, and complex symbols ran vertically up the sides of the skyscrapers, driving the thin razors of disquiet deeper into her veins as the unease in her gut blossomed into full-grown alarm. Rain knew, she just knew, that no pony culture on the planet wrote like that. Something was wrong, something was very, very wrong. Her leg muscles snapped and sprung like pistons as Captain Marshal Overlord Rain bolted at full gallop down the street, her mind in overdrive and her body reacting to match. She looked quickly back and forth at each passing locale, trained eyes scanning for patterns and likely functions before discarding each in turn. She needed to find the center of this settlement, or a government or official office! Something, anything that would clue her into the reason for this place. Her hooves beat out a muted rhythm against the dusty road as she tore along wildly, her attention snapping ahead and something loomed in the distance. It wasn’t big, but it was right at the crossroads in the center of the small city. Details began to clear as she drew closer, as did her mounting horror. The captain skidded to a halt, staring in mute shock at the object before her. It was something that must have passed for art, somehow. But the ‘how’ of it eluded the viewer in every possible manner. The odd angle and strange patterning of the buildings around her were taken to the extreme here, creating something that could only be considered grotesque. Warping, bent angles that seemed near impossible met with structures that seemed to vaguely suggest the shape of a living thing, albeit it in a profane and twisted fashion. Rounded, bubbled shapes terminated in sharp, bent points. Jagged lines of strange metal were thrust through things in menacing fashion. The “artist” must have truly been insane, Rain realized. It was more than that, though. No pony settlement anywhere would allow this in the center of it, dominating the social landscape! Unable to stare at the thing any longer Rain turned and opened the emergency hailing frequency, forcing down the icy grip fear was trying to take on her insides. “Base! Mayday, this is a code red! I need immediate access to satellite positioning systems and a secure patch-through to Central Command, this is a Code! Red! This is not a drill, I repeat, NOT a drill! Do you copy?” Her earpiece met with static and the captain let a word slip which she would not repeat in polite company. The emergency line was completely dead. She had to think fast and work with what she had… Base was gone, she had no access to any military resources. The local satellites were down, all she had at her disposal was her enviro-suit… “… Which is pre-loaded with basic data and local information!” She finished out loud with a shout of triumph. “Captain, you’re a genius! Computer! Access all local points of interest and display a map of Canterlot and all surrounding territory in a radius of 50 miles! Cross reference and triangulate local position based on any overlapping data, execute!” The helmet’s screen went slightly more opaque as the onboard CPU began to follow the command. Rain waited patiently, but after the first thirty seconds things began to grow a bit more tense. It must have been a much older suit than she’d previously- ERROR: SEARCH QUERY ‘CANTERLOT’ NOT FOUND. The captain’s blood ran cold as the bright red message flashed before her, taking up the whole of her vision. Her eyes widened in disbelief and she staggered back a step, dropping onto her rear as her back legs gave out. She shook her head a little, unable to accept what she was seeing. “That’s… That’s not possible,” she denied softly, her tone growing louder and more furious as she grew more frantic. “That is NOT possible! Canterlot can’t be gone! Canterlot is Equestria’s heart, our WORLD’S heart, this isn’t possible! Computer! Access all global points of interest, display all and search for locale: Canterlot! Execute!” She waited as names began to scroll, faster than she could even read. They lasted far too short however, and her heart sank at the result of the search query. RESULTS: 411 REGISTERED POINTS OF INTEREST, NONE MATCH SEARCH TERMS. The home world of the pony race would have far more than 411 points of interest registered in the local database. In fact, at Rain’s last remembrance there were well into the millions. A small city or large town may contain that many, but globally? Not possible. And Canterlot was not among then, nor did any search terms arise with it in the name. It didn’t seem possible, but the captain was forced to accept the only logical conclusion. Iron resolve weakened at the revelation she sunk in place, eyes unfocused as she stared off into nothingness. “This isn’t Eqquis Prime… I was sent to the wrong planet…”