A Journey Unthought Of: Revival of Chaos

by Hustlin Tom


Chapter 48 - Lyra, Adam, Luna, Serana, Celestia

Alarms woke Lyra from her trance-like slumber. As she looked to the door of the examination suite, she saw the scientist who had been doing work on her run out the door leaving her stuck to table.

“Where is it?” she desperately asked to no one as she looked around the room, “Where’s my horn?”

She glanced up behind her, and lying on a medical trolley she found her wand-like horn. “Okay, good to know,” she sighed with relief, and then she started pulling against her restraints, “Now I just gotta get out of these stupid things!”

Here, the Conductor spoke to her, Allow me. The straps rapidly removed themselves from around Lyra’s body, and she quickly got up and grabbed her horn. Your rescue party is not far. Turn to your right when you leave.

“Whatever you say, and thanks!” she called out, and she ran out the door.

The alarms were even louder out in the hallway, it was almost to the point where she had to run down the hall with her ears covered. At the end of that hall she turned the corner, only to almost run straight into Adam’s chest. She gave a little gasp of surprise as she knocked the wind out of him, causing him to deeply cough and hold onto her for a second.

“Adam!” she yelled in happiness, and she gave him an enormous hug, forcing what little air that had made it into his lungs back out, “I knew you’d get me out of here!”

“Hi, Lyra,” Adam wheezed, “Love you too. Can we wait on this?”

“Agreed,” Princess Luna exclaimed as she caught up to the two of them, “We still have to find Celestia and escape from this wretched place!”

“What she said,” Serana yelled over the alarms.

“Follow me!” Princess Luna bellowed as she ran off down an adjacent hallway, “She’s this way!”

The three of them quickly looked at each other before they bolted after her. As they ran down the hallway after their guide, they literally and metaphorically tried to catch up with each other.

“So Lyra,” Adam gestured to their newest friend, “Meet Serana Pryce.”

“Hiya!” she called over to the blonde hair woman.

“Hey,” she responded back curtly. They huffed for a little bit as they rushed around another corner.

“So, I feel like I never get a good answer to this when I ask,” Serana yelled, “but who are you people? Secret agents from another country or something?”

“I’m from around here,” Adam called back, “Luna and Lyra, well, aren’t.”

“We’re from a parallel universe where magic exists,” Lyra explained, oblivious to Serana’s growing confusion, “I spent most of my life as a unicorn until I met Adam, who got transported over to us by-“

Serana shook her hands, “You know what? Forget it. Whatever the hell that was, whether it was code for something else, I’m really gonna need a drink after this.”

The three of them finally caught up with the Princess’ pace. Suddenly, the intersecting hallway they were about to cross into was filled with a large gout of flame. Princess Luna put up her arms and yelled, “Stop!” She reactively used her magic to slowing the four of them down.

The pillar of fire slowly extinguished, and to their left they saw a titan walking towards them, her entire body set aflame. She almost looked as if she were crying vibrant trails of orange plasma from her eyes. The multicolored gaseous hair was the dead giveaway, and Princess Luna’s heart stopped in fear, “Tia? What have they done to you?”

The titan growled incomprehensibly a little in response, before it seemed to recognize her, “L-l-l-l-una?”

“Tia!” she yelled back hopefully.

Princess Celestia rushed her sister, and backhanded her into the wall. Princess Luna had not been expecting the attack, and she slammed into the hard bulwark, dropping to floor like deadweight.

“Luna!” Adam shouted as he tried to run towards her, but Serana and Lyra grabbed and held him where he was to keep him from approaching the burning Princess.

The elder sister picked up her sibling by the neck, who cried out in pain as the fractured vertebrae in her back automatically began to mend themselves. As the Princess of the Night looked into her sister’s angrily burning pupils, she thought that death would be coming for her soon, and that the last thing she’d ever know would be those bright hot eyes.

Instead, they blinked, and she heard her real sister softly plead to her from the out of those burning lips, “Help me.” Princess Celestia dropped her sister and sprinted towards the end of the hallway in the direction the four had initially been headed. Arriving at the doors of the elevator there, Princess Celestia slipped her hands between the panels, slammed them open with pure brute force, and jumped down the shaft.

“Princess,” Lyra called out in concern for her fallen sovereign as she came near to her, “Are you alright?”

“No,” Princess Luna said through tears and gritted teeth, “I’m not.”

“Lean on me,” Adam told her as he helped lift her from the floor, “We still have to get out of here.”

“I’ve failed her,” she spoke softly to no one in particular, “I was too late to save her. Oh stars, is this what she felt like for me all those years ago?” She cried out as her back popped into its correct position at last, and she almost crumpled to the floor again.

“Princess!” Adam exclaimed in fear of her being harmed.

“Lay her back down! We can’t move her like this!” Serana yelled.

“It’s alright. I’m fine,” Princess Luna yelped as she stood up uneasily under her own power, “but I won’t be using my magic again while we’re here; I’ve barely got any left.”

Serana gawked at the Princess’ near instantaneous full recovery, and began to think about the previously ridiculous things Lyra had been spewing not but a few minutes ago. “So,” she said as she slowly connected the dots, “that burning thing..that was actually Tia?”

The Princess nodded as she began to walk gingerly towards the elevator shaft, “Yes, but never like I’ve seen her before; not even when I was Nightmare Moon did she show such unbridled power!”

“Who is Nightmare Moon?”

As they finally made it to the elevator doors, there was a great explosion from below that knocked them all to the floor. They heard a great shriek and a large shearing sound, and watched as the elevator which they had been about to call fell down, down, down until it fell out of sight far below. They heard it impact below with a gigantic bang after a full fifteen seconds of falling.

“Please tell me that wasn’t the only way out of here,” Serana groaned as she started to get up.

“Yeah,” Adam sighed as he got into a sitting position, “That was the only way down.”

Serana looked at him, shook her head, and put her arms in the air, “Why the hell would we want to go down? Escape is up!”

“There appears to be only one option then,” Princess Luna grimaced, “We have to jump down.”

This declaration brought a chorus of objections from Adam and Serana.

“Are you crazy? We just established that escape is up!” Serana yelled.

“There is no way we can do this,” Adam shouted, “We don’t have any ropes or climbing equipment to reach the portal!”

“Containment protocols enacted,” a cold mechanical voice called out across the level’s PA system, “All personnel evacuate. Automated self-destruct activated. Three hundred seconds until internal detonation.”

“The Princess is right, Adam,” Lyra shouted back, “The portal is our only ticket out of here. We won’t make it up to the surface in five minutes!”

Princess Luna nodded and gestured to Lyra “Yes! We still have two magic users: Lyra can take Ms. Serana, and Adam will take me. We’ll levitate our way down to the bottom of the shaft.”

Adam’s eyes bulged and he waved his arms, “No! Nonono! That is a terrible idea! I have no idea what I’m doing, and on top of that I have a fear of heights, ok?”

“We don’t have time to argue. We must press on,” the Princess growled. Without another word she grabbed Adam in a bear hug, easily lifting him off his feet, strode towards the gaping doors, and stepped into the elevator shaft.

Adam screamed in abject terror as they freefell, the red emergency lights flickering quickly past them as they reached terminal velocity.

“Pull yourself together and focus, or we both die!” Princess Luna yelled into his face angrily, before she instinctively looked beneath them: the fiery point of light below them was growing very fast.

His survival instinct took over and all happy thoughts of Lyra ceased. “Oh god I want to live!” he screamed at the top his lungs. The Dominion Gauntlet’s grey lights roared to life with an intensity it had never known, and with an almost cartoonish abruptness the two of them stopped mid-fall. It took a few seconds of heavy breathing and hugging his elevator diving buddy before Adam noticed.

“Hey,” he muttered numbly, “We stopped.”

“For a few seconds I was beginning to deeply regret my decision,” Princess Luna replied shakily as she looked down at the crushed and sparking roof of the elevator below, “I’m just glad you figured it out.”

“We’re floating!” Adam shouted in joy, and he began to giddily laugh.

“Don’t drop me!” she yelled as she felt his arms begin to unconsciously slacken, “We still have a hundred feet or so to get to the doors!”

“Right! Sorry! Okay. Okay. Slowly descend.”

The two finally made it down to the already open doors of the basement floor, where they found themselves inside of a glass paneled control room full of all sorts of incomprehensible knobs and switches. The heavily shielded box offered a perfect vantage point to the large chamber outside where the powered down portal was housed. The giant circular structure took up most of the area of the wall it was located on. The riveted but slightly separated panels that surrounded its edges gave it an unsettling resemblance to teeth, with the darkened interior not unlike an eerie esophageal abyss.

“We have no clue how this works,” Adam finally realized as he looked at all the foreign equipment in front of them, “This might as well be written in an alien language for all the good it does us.”

“Look,” the Princess pointed to the floor, where still molten footprints led out of a door nearby down to the large chamber below, “Celestia must have found a way to access it. If she can do it, we should be able to as well.”

Lyra and Serana appeared at the elevator doors and glided into the room, where they softly landed on the floor. Lyra looked exhausted, and she was taking in huge gulps of air every chance she could. Despite the fact that Luna was her sovereign, she gave the Princess an icy glare and breathed, “Thanks for not killing my boyfriend.”

“Ohh that was fun,” Serana giggled woozily; “I dunno what yer talkin’ about!”

“What’s up with her?” Adam asked as he helplessly tried to look around for some way to be useful.

“Oh, you know. She was panicking, so I hit her with a calming hex, but it’s like I gave her a couple rounds of cider instead. Go figure.”

“One hundred eighty seconds and counting,” the autonomic voice intoned on the PA.

The Princess whirled around in an agitated frenzy before she finally threw her hands up in the air and gave a frustrated grown, “There’s nothing up here that can help us.”

She then rushed out the door down towards the portal itself. Adam joined Lyra in half carrying/half dragging Serana after the Princess. As they finally made it to the bottom of the stairs and began the cumbersome trek to their still inactive gateway of escape, they saw that Princess Luna was standing in front of it investigating the molten footprints her sister had left behind. She then began to think aloud, “Tia had to have forced it open with her magic. Judging by her pace, she didn’t even stop as she approached here.”

She then ran into the chamber inside the portal and began to feel the walls seemingly at random. She then put her ear next to the last panel she arrived at and listened for a few moments. A grin rapidly formed on her face, “This machine operates under the same principles as my Dimensional Phasing magic!”

“So they really did accidentally make a dimension jumping gate instead of a teleporter,” Adam shook his head, “now how do we get out of here if you have no magic?”

As the Princess was about to reply, the giant portal behind them gave a deep grown. The emergency lights dimmed as power was diverted from them towards the gaping hole. There were several sparks of lights emanating from within the giant maw, and with a roar of sound a large window formed inside the gateway. The event horizon seethed with varying shades of black and white that seemed to eat each other every second, only to be replaced by identically hungry waves of energy.

“How is this possible?” The Princess asked in bewilderment, “I didn’t do this!”

Lyra’s eyes fogged over once again, and she spoke in monotone, “The time has come. The Conductor has queued our entrance into his masterpiece. He opens doors to those he deems fit, and he sees all things through all his windows.”

“One hundred twenty seconds and counting.”

Adam looked at Lyra in confusion for what she had uttered for a second, before shaking his head, “Does it really matter how? We can figure this out later!”

“Where’re we going?” Serana asked, now semi-aware of her situation.

The Princess looked at the women she had only just met, weighing the options of the situation and her own ability. She didn’t have the magic to teleport her outside, and even if she did the guards would probably recapture her. What could she do in less than two minutes? She grimaced, “I promise that one day I will help you return to your home.” She then took the unsteady woman and picked her up, carrying her in her arms.

“What’s going on?” Serana asked in growing panic as Princess Luna approached the portal, “Where are you taking me?”

“I promise I’ll get you back here someday,” the Princess repeated, and then she leapt into the portal.

Serana shattered into thousands of particles and was sucked into the abyss, while her guardian returned to her fog-like state when she was consumed as well.

“Ninety seconds and counting.”

“Whatever you do,” Adam told Lyra as he took her hand, “will yourself towards the light: it’s the only way to get out of the nothingness we're about to go into.”

“Adam,” Lyra said in her own voice and way. He tore his gaze from the gateway to look back at her. She took his other hand in her own, and she quickly kissed him. She smiled a little at his surprised expression, before she looked at him meaningfully, “No matter what happens after this, I’m just happy that I've gotten to know you.”

“Right,” he replied dumbly, “I-ah. Ok.”

She rolled her eyes at his flubbing any sort of reply, “I love you, even if you are completely hopeless. Now, let’s go!”

The two jumped through the portal, consumed by its energies, and were transported away. Less than a minute later, the facility entered its self-destruct protocols, detonating a stockpile of plastic explosives through the facility, burying it and all its secrets below several feet of rock and sand.

As soon as the burial was complete, a strange thing came over the staff of Apogee.

"Where are we?" one would ask another.

"Why are we out here?" someone else would ask.

"Why can't I remember how I got here?"

The forgetfulness would haunt all of them until even those self-aware questions would be forgotten, and each would go about their lives afterward as if nothing had happened.

The crystal basin faded, its contents evaporating away as the visions ended, and the blue energy of the Conductor pulsed.

The pieces and players will all soon be in place, it mused to itself, Now begins the endgame.