//------------------------------// // Night in the wild // Story: Trinity - Nature // by Ice4smaster //------------------------------// Night in the wild Special thanks to Alexstrazsa for editing the story. As the sun began its descent behind the horizon, Vinyl and Trixie shared a concerned look. They had been searching the thick forest all day for Octavia, but their efforts were fruitless. The frightening thought of Octavia perishing had poisoned their minds on more than one occasion, and the gravity of the situation made it clearer than ever the dangers the forest held. “Trixie thinks we should return to the camp,” Trixie said, in a quiet tone. Almost instantly, Vinyl’s head snapped back, and Trixie could swear she saw a harsh glow radiate from her eyes. “You coward! You’d leave her alone in this messed up jungle!?” Trixie fell back on her haunches from the verbal onslaught Vinyl had given her. After a moment, Trixie composed herself and attempted to be the voice of reason. “Tri... I think we need to stop now, Vinyl. Don't get me wrong, please, but soon it’s going to be pitch black out, and while we can light the way with our horns, we’re in the middle of a tropical rain forest on an desolate island.” She sighed and shook her head. “I do hope she is alive and will try to make her way back to us, but we’re in just as much danger here. If we can help it, we shouldn't push our luck." “You can call me a coward, and you can call me names, but for now it would be better to return to camp. Tomorrow we can focus on the search again, but right now it’s about to become night, and that’s when most predators will be active. While I’m adept with a small amount of combat magic and other spells I’ve learned on my travels, I’d rather not put them to the test if not necessary, and, no offense, but I doubt you’re very versed in such magic.” Vinyl was boiling, and was very, very tempted to buck Trixie in the head repeatedly, but she understood what she was being told. Trixie was being sincere, and she was also right. Vinyl didn’t know of any combative or defensive spells that she could use. She forced her eyes shut and took several deep breaths to calm herself before speaking up. “Look, I hear you Trixie, and you’re right, and that makes me damn angry... but you’re right. It’s just… all of this is… so not cool.” She dropped her head in defeat as the anger began to evaporate. Vinyl suddenly felt a hoof on her shoulder and looked up, meeting eye to eye with Trixie. Trixie looked at her for moment before averting her gaze towards the ground. “I'm sorry, Vinyl, and I feel horrible, but… this is the best we can do at the moment. Hopefully, she’s alive and well.” “Yeah... Guess we better leg it, then, before things gets more messed up.” Their eyes met again and they silently agreed before trotting back towards the shore. They were both on high alert, listening to every sound of the forest as they disappeared into the depths. Octavia stretched her legs and faced her back towards the fire. She tried not to look at it, as she still felt primal fear course through her veins as two of the felines roasted above the flames. She knew this was 'natural,' but her nerves and guts didn't approve of it. “Are you alright there, Octavia? Heh, all things considered...” Dave asked, with a touch of guilt, knowing full well that butchering and preparing the meal wasn’t an easy thing to stomach. That the pony was an herbivore only added insult to injury. However, he was quite hungry, and he had spent most of life fighting to survive and knowing that there was no room to waste food. Octavia gave a slight smile as she turned halfway towards her human companion. “Thank you for the concern, and yes, considering all that I been through today, I am aright. Shaken up and frightened, but still alive and in good health.” She sighed and looked up. The canopy of the large tree blocked out most of the night sky, leaving only a small space for the moonlight to pierce through. Even still, the light of the fire outshone it, giving the area a strange but calm atmosphere. “Though, I must apologize for showing my back to you. It’s just very taxing on my stomach to see a once living creature being cooked on a fire, even if it was after my own coat.” “That's okay, Octavia. Honestly, I have to commend your strength and composure. Surely you’ve never been in a situation like this before, and you’ve gone through hell and back in a days’ time.” He paused for a minute, allowing the quiet of the night and the fireplace to fill air before he continued. “I’ve seen many horrors in my lifetime... many I tended to bury deep in my mind... and when I was first confronted by such, I wasn't even half as collected as you are. So, I really mean it.” He shifted his eyes back to the flames and watched them lick at the meat. Octavia took a deep, calming breath and turned around slowly. “Thank you for the compliment. It's not something I thought I’d ever be praised for, but it is nice to hear nonetheless.” She cringed as her eyes met the soon to be ready food, but she steeled herself and sat closer to the fire, leaning back and closing her eyes. She figured it would still be a nice gesture to sit closer to the human and face him, regardless of the disturbing scenario. She breathed in more slowly, then closed her eyes and leaned back, supporting herself with her front hooves. Her ears perked up in surprise as she felt the humans claws—no, hands—rest on her shoulder. “Heh, you’re being brave there, little pony, but you don’t need to push yourself.” He chuckled softly. “Just relax and enjoy the warmth of the fire. It's a chilly night.” She opened her eyes and stared up at the canopy as she replied. “Quite so... I just hope the others are fine, and had better luck than I.” Dave perked up at this bit of information. “Others?” he asked, turning to face the small grey mare before him. “Ah, yes, I must have missed that bit before. I wasn’t washed to shore alone.” Her eyes met the humans. “It was three of us. Myself, Vinyl, and Trixie. You see, we had been working on the ship together, not as friends, but as colleagues.” She laughed softly at the memories of their antics. “We have quite a special talent to get on the nerves of each other, yet we could laugh at it and shrug it off. I'm a cellist, and I’m used to a refined taste and classical music, while Vinyl is the exact opposite.” She couldn't help but frown at the mere thought. “This… dubstep… that she claims to be music is just nerve racking. Anyway, she’s a nice and easygoing pony at heart, but everything except refined and well-mannered." “As for Trixie, she is a magician, an illusionist, and she’s very good and talented, but the one thing that surpasses that is her own ego. She can also be a bit… okay, quite cold on the surface, and underneath as well, but once you get to know her and can overlook her awkward ways of socialising, she is a kind pony.” “Sounds like an unlikely trio to me, hehe. I look forward to meeting them. That is, if they don't run away screaming bloody murder.” Octavia chuckled as she tried to imagine their faces. “Though, you may want to be careful with them. They are unicorns, and can use magic. Sure, they’re physically weaker than myself, but magic is… heh... it’s really just cheating, from what I’ve seen.” “Oh... Magic, you say?” He nodded and made a mental note to not provoke a demonstration aimed at him when they met. Better safe than sorry. ”What’s this magic like? I’m curious, because we don’t have magic.” “Now that’s a statement which would definitely make a certain alicorn explode in disbelief,” Octavia mused, before moving on to the explanation. “Although I’m not a unicorn, I grew up among many, so I have a basic understanding of it. Magic is referred to collectively as the manipulation of mana space, which is present everywhere. Unicorns and alicorns are able to tap into this field directly, as they are able to absorb and use mana. Doing so causes many different 'magical' acts, and the pun is intended.” Dave laughed and continued listening to the pony. He was in the same spot Octavia was earlier when he was explaining the multiverse theory, and how they were able to communicate. “Basically, they’re able to levitate objects or even change them completely, such as turning a rock into an orange. The more skilled and powerful unicorns are even able to teleport, create shields, or use lightning bolts. Trixie is capable of those, but it’s taxing for her, even with how well versed she is in the arts of magic.” Now that was worrying news. He had fearsome strength, stunning endurance, and senses augmented much greater than the average man, but the fact remained that he didn’t have a military-grade cybernetic body. Sure, he was well trained in combat and could defend himself—considering how much he been through already in his 217 years of life—but in a head-on confrontation, he wasn’t sure if he could win against a skilled unicorn. In the meantime, Octavia continued. “But unicorn magic is shunned by the alicorn princesses, and they’re the rulers of Equestria, which is where I’m from and where most ponies live.” Silence took over as Dave pondered the new information. “Well, that’s sure impressive, and intimidating to boot.” Octavia chuckled at the remark and smiled. “As I said before, it’s cheating, haha.” The night went on, and they continued talking idly by the fire. Trixie and Vinyl neared the shore when they came upon an open field with a small lake. Noticing the water, they decided to stop. “Oh mare, I'm thirsty!” Vinyl began trotting towards the lake, but paused when she heard a loud clearing of the throat behind her. “Don't rush, Vinyl. We should use a water purification spell before drinking from here, just be on the safe side.” Vinyl sighed in annoyance. “Yes, momma Trixie.” Trixie couldn't help but chuckle at the remark. She trotted beside Vinyl and levitated a large bubble of water into the air whilst casting a purification spell. The little devil in her couldn't resist giving a smug and boasty 'trademark’ smile of hers to Vinyl. “The Great and Powerful Trixie gladly shares clean water with mundane unicorns.” “Oh, har har, Trixie, but no funny additions to the water!” Vinyl stared daggers into Trixie’s eyes, but after a few moments, she smiled. “Unless you can turn it into some good booze.” Trixie smiled and shrugged. “Trixie can not promise anything.” The two chuckled, needing something to take their minds off their worries. As they drank the crystal clear water, they realized just how thirsty they actually were. “We must definitely come back to this spot, but Trixie advises never to do so alone.” “Hmph. I can agree with that, especially now. I hope Octi is alive and kickin’.” “As do I, but for now we should head back to the boat. As hard as it might be, we really need every ounce of sleep we can get.” Vinyl nodded and jumped up to all fours. Trixie followed suit and they continued their walk towards the shore. The early night air had already grown cold, and the darkness hid many creatures from the eyes of their prey. A pair of green eyes flickered for a moment in the shadows, and a chilling wind blew over the two mares like a warning. They paused for a moment and looked around, then at each other. With a quick nod, they agreed to get back to camp as soon as possible. “...Do you mind if I ask about your world, and how you came here?” Octavia was comfortably laying on her side next to the fire, bathing in it's warmth. Dave wasn’t far off either, sitting down and leaning back. “I don’t see why not... But it’s not a happy story, Octavia.” Octavia nodded in understanding, and after a few moments, he spoke. “Guess I better start with a bit about us—meaning humans—before I get to how we ended up in your world. We’ve kind of always been an outsider in the natural world… not fully in tune with it. We started at the bottom, as prey, and we were weak. We lacked fur, and we weren’t as fast. I guess I could say we had a rough childhood for a species. “Living was difficult and short, while dying was easy. The only thing we possessed were our hands, our minds, and our hearts of fire, with an unfillable hole,” he said, pointing to each place on his body in turn. Octavia blinked, cocking her head to the side. Dave simply smiled and continued. “You see, we have a burning desire to always want more, know more, and grow stronger. Simply put, we never have enough. This is our driving force, but also our biggest curse. We just can’t rest. We want to breach more barriers and find whatever might lay beyond.” He paused and grabbed a pair of fruit, then gave one to Octavia. “This is our yin and yang. We dare to dream and imagine, and this elevated us above the world around us, as well as systematically destroying and reshaping it into our own designs.” He then lifted his hand and motioned around him. “Ironically, this is what left us in such a position that we needed to seek out a new world. Although many prefer to sweep it under the carpet, our own nature is what contributed to our downfall.” He looked up to the canopy above, watching the light of the fire reflected on the leaves. “We conquered every corner of our world, and from a few hundred being hunted, we became billions who were the hunters. We built massive cities of stone, metal, glass, and plastic. We extended our own life spawn many times over, from the average twenty to thirty up to seventy to a hundred. We designed all sorts of machines and devices to further us, from vehicles to move faster on the ground to aircraft to fly to submarines that moved beneath the water. We even created extensions of ourselves. There were also weapons of war and tools of incredible proportion that could tear down an entire mountain in a few years, just to extract the resources hidden in it...” Dave glanced upwards, looking into Octavia’s eyes. “We had it all. Not perfect, not in balance or harmoniously, but we had everything, and the potential to be good and evil was always there within us.” “You are a strange being... but truth be told, the way you describe yourselves... you’re like us ponies, but without limits. It’s as if you can be the greatest good and the most horrid evil at the same time. Almost… switchable.” “That's a good way to put it, I suppose. We can be quite moody.” He chuckled, while Octavia nodded and gave a slight smile. They both bit into the fruits they held. “But to continue, we had one nasty wake up call. That's how we ended up here.” He took another bite, savoring the taste of the fruit. “I was actually there that time. Thirty-two years old, and I looked totally different. I had my natural body.” Dave pointed to one of his glowing eyes. “As you can see, this is an artificial body. Convincingly realistic, but 80% of me is a machine. I’ll go into that later.” Octavia’s eyes grew wide after this revelation. The cyborg caught this and laughed. “Yes, that's why I have such incredible strength and endurance.” He shook his head and carried on. “So yes, I'm 217 years old, and this disaster happened quite a while ago. A massive asteroid hit our world... a rock from the sky?” He asked, unsure if Octavia knew of such a thing. “So, a large falling star.” “Yeah, you could say that, but… this one was the size of a mountain, or two.” Octavia sat quietly and attempted to imagine such a thing. She knew what kind of damage a small space rock could do, as one happened to fall from the sky when she was a little filly in Tottingham. She nodded solemnly as she began grasping even a little bit of the magnitude. “So, yes... the impact and the immediate effects of it killed two third of our population in a days’ time. From eight point five billion people down to three in under twenty-four hours. Thing is, I could consider them lucky, seeing as how they didn’t need to go through hell to survive. After a decade, most of our society was nearly obliterated and only a few million remained. There were a few population centers near the equators, where it was slightly warmer than in a deep freezer.” He closed his eyes, recalling painful memories. “To survive, we had to do many horrible things.” After several moments of silence, he opened them again, only to be lost in the flames in front of him. “But I survived. The will to live pushed me so far... I even... lacking better wording, cast my flesh aside to be replaced by a new body of metal and wires. I went through many upgrade over the course of nearly two hundred years, until I got the body I posses now, and it is truly a fine piece of work." “Now, our numbers still drop. It was very hard to get by, and it still is. Our world is a frozen hell, and there are a little over twelve million left back home on Earth. Our salvation was the discovery of portal technology. We were able to breach our own reality and venture into new ones, until we found this reality. This universe.” “I-I can’t find the words… By Celestia...” Octavia looked into the fire blankly as she tried to comprehend such a hardship. She knew she couldn't, because the only beings who could grasp such a thing were the princesses. “This is your second chance to live again, truly... and you fought for it with every bit of your soul.” Dave simply nodded. They sat there for a while before Dave broke the silence and tapped Octavia on her shoulder. “Time for bed, my little pony.” Octavia raised an eyebrow at the unexpected gesture. “Excuse me, grandpa, but I’m a fully grown mare, thank you very much,” she said, in a strict tone. After a few moments, the two of them both chuckled. “Well, gramps is sure tired, and he’s gonna catch some good z’s.” “Old indeed.” “Hey! Missy, you're grounded.” “Gladly.” They broke out in laughter and laid on their backs, cherishing the moment before they drifted off into slumber.