“Ground Control to Major Twi”
“Twilight,” Whom murmered, desperately weak and drowsy. “It's okay, if I go, then that's okay...”
“What? No! No, it's not okay,” Twilight said, distracted from her busy calculations and steady work keeping the oxygen generator powered and the gas levels balanced as best she could. “We'll get you safe; this is all my fault, those creatures would never have destroyed your home if I hadn't turned up.”
“Home, yeah...” Whom wheezed, reddened cheeks standing out even against her general pinkness. “Twilight, the time I spent with you was the best...”
“Don't.”
“Best time I ever had... even if I didn't... get to see Equestria...” she sputtered, regardless. “Never had a friend before...”
Whom passed out, then stilled even her slight movements. Out of time. Has to be now. Twilight pulled the wire off her horn and slipped out of the sphere, pushing her way through the material as fast as it would rearrange itself. Using her telekinesis, she grabbed onto the exterior surface and tugged, inadvertently adding to the speed of the spin she had started earlier, to avoid any one part of the makeshift spacecraft being in direct sunlight for too long. The half-dark planetary globe was much closer now, and the blotchy shape of a very familiar place could be seen glowing in the thrall of sparkling rays, which cast long shadows, picking out the higher mountains.
Equestria itself was laid out around the foothills and caldera of Mount Avalon, which for a moment she could not find, but then she tracked lines of geography, the silver strings of rivers that she knew, and found that only a grim pall of thick smoke, like a smudge of ink, hung where rightful knowledge said she should see the capital. She gulped, heart suddenly very close to mind. A horrible sinking feeling came over her, which was nothing to do with the gravity. Something has happened whilst I’ve been away. Oh, ye Gods. She glanced down at the sphere, then back ‘up’ at the planet. It’ll have to wait. One crisis at a time.
The vast deserts that were to the south of Equestria were a ruddy yellow band, getting narrower as they approached the pole, ending in a sudden, faded transition to luminous emerald green, where the forbidding lands beyond those of the Diamond Dogs lurked. This was where changelings and minotaurs and all the other monsters of the world were rumoured to dwell, and from which no pony expedition had ever returned.
The icy strip to the north was covered in dense clouds, but there would have been nothing much to see. Besides wildlife like ice worms and their tatzl cousins, little crouched below the northern wall of the vast glaciers that made accessing the pole impossible. There was a tiny dot of bare, cold light about half-way through it, and that she knew must have been the Crystal Empire. It seemed so alone, set apart from the rest, and it suddenly occurred to Twilight how lonely her sister-in-law must be, even with her own beloved brother at her side.
In the west were darkling shadows, and only the weltsea was there anyway, a fierce and iceberg filled span that bracketed the other route to gryphon lands, a nearly-impassable monstrosity plagued with supertyphoons and currents so rapid they would suck whole boats beneath the waves in an instant. This was also the ancestral home of the hydrae, post-sapient creatures from another epoch in Equestria's long history, content to perch on ice cliffs and hunt whales for food, only occasionally straying inland for one reason or another. To the east, which was hard to see as it was in direct light and almost beyond the curve of the planet, was the narrow limb of the start of the dauphine sea, a lush blue bordered by the marshy, city-strewn coast, like the black specks of water skater nymphs in the muddy brown of a millpond. Gryphon climes were removed from view by the curvature, a fitting testament to their usual distant and mysterious nature.
As awed as she was by the immense and unbelievable sight of her own world from space, Twilight's mind soon came back to Whom, who was rapidly running out of time. All the hydrogen they had been collecting recently, a byproduct of the water cracking, had given her the idea she hoped would save the innocent pink creature. With a little oxygen – and she had stolen some of their precariously small supply – it would combust, explosively so. If this blast was focused, her calculations told her, it would produce thrust, perhaps just enough to have them enter the atmosphere, instead of, as they were currently on course to do, bounce off and go spinning into void. At that moment, Twilight wasn't scared of which outcome of that consequence she was scared of most; being trapped in space forever, immortal and undying, or be trapped in there with someone that she could not save, her undecaying but dessicated corpse mocking her for all eternity.
Stopping the rotation of the sphere with some carefully-calculated dance steps on the exterior shell, she cautiously edged over to the part she knew contained the bubble of hydrogen. It had ballooned out, like some pustule about to burst, and was straining the limits of what this amount of magical material could be expected to do. Lines of blue and purple magical discharge appeared occasionally across it to indicate this, and she knew it would be a moment's work to break it. Nozzle, she thought, after as many seconds worth of thinking as she could risk. Spray out like Applejack’s hoses. Pressure's key. Velocity of the exhaust. Note to self: invent new field of science to deal with this when you get home. She spoke to the material in thaumic words and whispers, shaping it like a potter with his clay. Her brow furrowed, and the sharp heat that was penetrating her head became worse, actual sensations of pain dulling out. Waste can't escape very easily; natural I'd burn. Or, pyrolyse. No matter. The work done, she almost unstoppered the newly formed nozzle as she lost focus, nearly discharging the unreacted gas. Concentrate! Damn you, you stupid mare, concentrate!
The temperature in her horn was starting to become dangerous to the magical output itself, requiring more and more of her attention to compensate for the additional entropy in the system that the lack of adequate cooling produced. The hornstuff was starting to ablate, charring and boiling, gases and vapours crawling quickly over her skin, stinging her eyes - though most of it exploded out into space. In a final moment of clarity, she heavily reinforced the entire structure, timed the spell that would ignite the oxygen and hydrogen mixture in the chamber to go off at the same instant as that which would open the nozzle's business end, and fed the last energy she could muster into that interwoven tapestry of different magical complexes. She latched on to the nozzle like a foal grabbing its mother's neck, knowing it almost certainly wouldn't be enough, and just had time to think I really need to stop drinking, before everything went a blinding and iridescent white, as though she had stepped into the noon sunshine from a darkened room.
*
Twilight could not possibly have noticed him, but lurking nearby was a certain spirit, slithering through the void of space as though it were a merry, green-lined stream and he was lying in a rowboat, enjoying the sunshine. When he saw the purple Princess climb out for the third time and set about making her last adjustments, he raised an eyebrow, but did nothing more, not until the hydrogen and oxygen exploded out of the nozzle, enough fuel present for only the smallest of sputtering burns. Almost, he thought, idly. You almost had it. Good effort, I respect the enthusiasm, honestly, but that simply won't do, just look, you can't go hitting planets at ninety times the speed of sound and at that kind of angle, you'll kill... well, you'll kill someone, anyway.
He sighed, and a cricketing outfit appeared around his oddly proportioned and apportioned body, complete with giant, fuzzy shin pads, a pristine white shirt with a googly-eyed caricature embroidered into the breast , a black helmet bearing the same logo, and a giant cricket bat, which was greatly oversized and seemed to have been hewn from granite and reinforced with gleaming bands of tungsten and iridium. He flitted ahead of the sphere, kicking his legs in an approximation of the back-stroke, until he was well out in front. Then, he spun upright, wriggled his tail, swung the bat a few times, and was in just the right spot to deliver a juddering whack to the makeshift space capsule.
The bat was vapourized by the collison, its heavy build flashing instantly to so much plasma, but this change in velocity and vector it had managed to impart was again just right to place them on a highly precise and razor-sharp new route, along which they would safely enter the atmosphere... somewhere, anyway. But alive, and that, I think, fills my mission's remit rather nicely.
“Deus ex Machina, Twilight Sparkle,” said Discord, then he vanished once more, eyes and smile lingering for a moment longer.
*
Twilight lost track of the sphere a few minutes after it began to interact with the top layers of the planet's atmosphere. To be fair, this was because she herself had begun to interact with it, and had faired off rather more worse. The speed they were traveling at caused a great deal of friction, which lit up the ever-denser air that they encountered with, at first, tenuous traces of wispy fire, green and red, but then which had progressed into a furious and constant lick, like they were being held in the flame of a welding torch. Something had put a bit of a spin in the capsule once again, so there was, at least for her, no escaping it.
The continuous degeneration and regeneration cycles were rather getting to her, as it only afforded a few seconds out each minute of actual physicality, most of which she spent throwing all her thaumic strength into maintaining the structural integrity of the capsule. The rest of the time she was forced to exist as a weird cloud of exhaust gas and carbon plasma. This version of her was blown further and further back away from the capsule with each passing second until, finally, she could not sense it anymore. She would have thought Good luck, Whom. You're on your own now, had she been possessed of the faculties to do so, but alas, she was not.
So now she fell, and the long trail of her smudged across about a thousand horizontal kilometres and fifty or so vertical ones gradually began to recondense. By the time she passed through eighty kilometres of altitude, it had formed a thirty metre by one metre jet-black rod of various glass-like materials, which was a shape it retained right up until a ten kilometre height, whereupon it drastically shortened itself.
Some time later, in the middle of the vast ocean of sand that sat to the south of Equestria, the rod impacted the desert floor at a very respectable fraction of the speed of sound, immediately digging a deep crater and throwing up a towering mushroom cloud. Eventually, the cloud settled down again into a bell-shaped, hovering spectre over the sand. Several kilometres away, a furry, wet-nosed and white muslin-hooded figure, tall and lean and billowing due to his dress and the gently insistent wind, stopped eating his breakfast of dates and dried apples, stood up, and began to wonder what all the fuss was about.
*
“مهلا! من هو هذا؟"
Twilight barely heard the voice, but in the silence of the desert, broken only by the crackling tinkles of her body congealing, and the impact glass which the force of it, as well as the excess heat of her magical recombinations, had produced, but which was now rapidly cooling, it was impossible not to. There was also a certain unusual property about the voice, as if it were being spoken sideways, but Twilight was sure that this was merely an artifact of the situation she found herself in, that is to say, upside down and buried halfway up to her flanks.
Someone began to dig. She heard the quick, scraping sounds of it, then something grabbed at her barrel, and the fight response began, as soon as she felt the tips of claws scrape across her skin. A wicked bang filled the air as she struck out in the vague direction of the threat with the first spell that came to mind, one she normally used to plate metals with aqueous solutions of other metals.
"أنت مخلوق الجهنمية"
There was the stink of singed fur, and the owner of the voice grunted. The force he'd exerted had been enough to pull her free however, and the brightness of the sun above blinded her for a moment, even as she beat her wings and lanced upward, pausing only to stop and look down after five or six seconds, after which the adrenaline began to subside.
Below, a white clad figure was shaking his fist at her, standing in the middle of the crater she'd made, shouting in a language she didn't understand but which, even from height, still sounded as though it were being spoken sideways. Coils of smoke were drifting away from him along the sand, though he didn't seem to still be on fire. After a few minutes of circling him, riding out the rest of her adrenergic spike, she began to descend. Her memories felt strange. Nothing seemed to be in the right order, like she was waking up from a long and dreamless sleep. I was... on the Moon... and then... Oh, by the superfluous hairy third nipple of Starswirl the Unshorn, Whom!
She landed in what was probably the most graceful way she had ever managed, and barely noticed. Whom must have come down by now, but it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. She scanned the horizon, an undulating and confusing landscape of heat shimmers and steep dunes covered in slow ripples, but nothing presented itself. The heat on the sand tingled against the frog of her hooves as she practically fell down the lip of the crater, stumbled but recovered in time to gallop up to the figure, who paused in his litany of odd words.
“Hi, hello, I'm sorry for shocking you but really you deserveditforsurprisingmelikethatanyway--” she babbled with extreme rapidity, stopping only when she realized the figure wasn't a pony, but a diamond dog, and she yelped, for at that moment he had drawn out a long, almost needle-like silver blade, with inscriptions on the blood channel, and a simple wooden guard. The tip trembled, and the reality of everything dawned. His heavily furred features betrayed an expression of immense fear, strikingly blue eyes open as wide as they would go above his long and neatly combed beard, now slightly burned around the edges, which flowed out of his muzzle like the open pages of an impossibly wide book.
“D-don't worry, I'm not going to--” Twilight started to say, but then stopped again, as she realized the diamond dog had rammed the knife as far as it would go into her neck. “Ow, that hurt!”
“!مخلوق لا يمو”
“Would you stop speaking like that, please?” Twilight said, very gently using her magic to withdraw the clawed paw from her personal space, knife sliding out as she did. “It's very difficult to understand what you are saying if you are going to speak it the wrong way around.”
At that point, the diamond dog did what most sensible creatures would do when faced with such a challenge, and ran off. He broke into a respectable sprint, leaving his knife behind him. His feet, on which he was wearing some kind of wide-soled canvas and wood shoe, threw up sprays of loose sand and dust as he headed away into the distance. Twilight rolled her eyes and sighed, before going after him in what she hoped was a non-threatening way. Things were not turning out in the way that she was intending.
*
“All I want to know is the precise speed of the surface of wherever it is that we are right now! Is that really so hard? Look, if you tell me the latitude and longitude I can work it out! ” Twilight bellowed, hovering shakily near the entrance to the diamond dog's tent, from which he was now throwing rocks and chanting some sort of mantra. “Then I will be out of your mane! Uh, fur. Whatever, I'll be gone for good, I swear it!”
*
Princess Celestia drifted through the cloud layer nine kilometres above a tract of countryside somewhere between Canterlot and West Wingshade. The thick and nearly pliable water vapour parted and rolled obediently down her barrel and flanks. She held her golden-shod hooves just so, that it appeared she were in the middle of one, infinite bound. Occasionally, she gave a powerful flap of her wings in supplication to the idea that she was an object bound by the laws of physics, required to provide thrust and lift and all those other pesky mortal things in order to maintain flight, but this was, as many things about her were, a carefully constructed lie.
Dealing with the travelers from elsewhere had been relatively trivial, in the end. They did not have much useful information, nothing that she did not already know, but then again, she was not really expecting them to have. If anything, it had been a useful measure of timing, and an effective way to gauge how far along the schedule things were, especially in the absence of any ability to directly probe events without disturbing them through the very act. Objective sense, she thought, cooly. Now there would be a useful thing.
So, once she had kept them lofted there for long enough, she'd delved into their minds, and they were such interesting places, full of odd locales and sensations and recipes for something called bitter, and carefully removed all traces of their encounter, but not before purloining aforementioned recipe. Then, she'd left them just outside West Wingshade, somewhat dazed but generally unharmed. All wanderers and wayfarers have the right to take part, after all. I have to wonder, though, how many of them like this place so much that they decide to stay? The larger ones could not, the standing fields cannot hold them. But the littler ones, they could. There are so many of them, it would be only a matter of a few adaptations for appearances sake. Take a mate, take up work. Toil in fields, come home and have your pony wife for dinner, yes, I can see that being very attractive.
Something appeared in the expanded field of her consciousness, which was very wide, even without her particular effort. It was a point of mass, too weird to be anything else but an imminent teleportation event. The wormhole terminus began as a speck of this odd stuff a few micrometres across, then quickly ballooned and disgorged a dragon shape, with different arms, legs and two yellow, googly eyes.
“Ave, Satanas,” the wyrm shouted, as the wormhole fell back on itself and collapsed after it had allowed passage of its strange cargo. “I thought you might like a status update.”
“Warm greetings to you, Discord,” Celestia said, refusing to match his high tone of voice, retaining her composure in the knowledge he would hear her regardless of whatever the apparent volume was.
“Her Very Purple Highness returns from the moon,” he bellowed, donning a pair of bizarre, thick rimmed flight goggles as he lept through the air and coiled himself around the Princess, one-fanged mouth rolling up beside her ear, voice dropping to a whisper to say: “She has the uranium, the funny flower and the big squid eye, so I make that about half of the shopping list.”
“Any troubles so far?” Celestia said, still with her expression of immense serenity and love which she wore without fail.
“Nothing that she could not handle, nor I prevent,” Discord said, looking coquettish. “I don't mean to speak up of my fabulous deeds of immense heroism, magical cunning and derring do, but--”
“Continue your observations and intervene as required,” Celestia said, turning to face him, magenta eyes locking with his own whacky organs. “That will be all.”
Discord vanished without saying another word. Nearby, another wormhole terminus opened up, admitting his invisible form. Celestia drew in a deep breath and continued on with her flight, lazily heading back toward the capital which, if the terrific bang that had come her way some time before was anything to go by, was just starting to come along nicely.
*
Astrapios was sitting in his quarters, listening to the ship's evening noises. His hearing was unusually acute, even for a hippogryph, and when he stilled himself, taking low, regular breaths, he could hear things at remarkable distances. There was the cold and slippery whisper of the bow of the Barely Eagle as it cut a path through the ocean, the thuds and clunks of self-adjusting rigging equipment responding to changes in wind conditions in order to keep the boat pointing in the right direction, and the soft orbit of breathing and the beating of hearts; a pair of rapid beats that marked the twins, the strong and protracted squeeze of the zebra, and a higher, nearly choral tone pair, those of his new passengers.
They were the most troubling to his mind, as of late. The fact that he had been run out of Port Dauphine by an angry, baying mob was not of fantastic concern. He'd been chased out of bigger towns by angrier mobs, louder mobs. Most of them didn't even have beaks, and they'd posed little threat to him. By the time they'd made the round trip to the broodlands, during which he could prepare a new edition and perhaps recruit some fresh models, things would have blown over, as inevitably they always did. It was a shame about the lost stock, which would almost certainly have been rapidly 'lost' by the printers, but his readership would understand. The report of the near-lynching at the courthouse would make its way into the press, and all would be well.
He wondered for a moment what had happened to Ruffley. He'd last seen the harried stallion pleading with old Judge Quarter, trying to get him to speak to the crowd which had assembled in the circular courtyard during one of the recesses in the proceedings. That had been moments before said crowd had suddenly turned from a mood of bubbling disapproval to downright murderous violence. That had been rather strange, in retrospect. It was as if some force had reached into their minds and flipped a switch, and just like that they were eager to spill blood.
No, it was the unknown factor of the two unicorns currently milling around on deck, up to some sort of magic, that bothered him the most. He hadn't been able to turn down their offer. So much money was always hard to say no to, especially with the amount of it the Barely Eagle sucked down, both the publication and the boat itself. The coinage was now safely secured in the four metre cube below his desk, hidden behind a zebric puzzle lock, along with the other valuables.
But now he was involved, as much as he had tried to distance himself from their plans, as much as he had spoken jokingly of becoming accomplices in order to provoke some hint in their easily readable pony body language, that was simply the case now. Their obvious concern and consternation at finding out the length of their passage was also deeply worrying. Who were they, that they needed to be so far away so quickly, yet had no idea of the actual logistics involved? What could they possibly be trying to do in the broodlands? And for that matter, how were they going to survive? All sensible herbivores only traveled to carnivore countries in large numbers, on carefully organized expeditions, preferably heavily armed and armoured.
Whilst the eating of sapient creatures was officially outlawed in all nations Equestria had relationships with, even if those were only to do with trade, there were still dangers. Government policy worked a little differently in the broodlands than it did elsewhere. Individuals were far less law abiding, for one thing. It had been a serious culture shock for Astrapios, when he'd first arrived, finding out that he could leave doors unlocked and not need to watch everyone, and that weights and measures were what they were sold as, that the beer wasn't watered down, and so on. But it meant that at home, a lone pony or two, in a dark street, possibly late at night, would likely represent an irresistible target. More so if they left the coastal regions and ventured deeper in, where even alce and hippogryphs were eyed with suspicion, and simultaneously evaluated for their worth as food items.
Astrapios slipped his beak over the neck of the bottle on the desk in front of him and lifted it up, emptying some of its fire-apple red contents down his gullet before setting it back down again. He licked the traces that were left from around the hooked tip and sighed, feeling the strongly alcoholic fluid start to work its magic. Nothing to do about it, he thought. We'll just have to wait and see.
At that moment, quite unexpectedly, the wind began to pick up, sending a low and ghostly sound racing through the timbers of the ship. Chills raced up Astrapios' spine and, for once, they weren't caused by the drink or the kindly and insistent machinations of a pretty set of twins.
*
The gryphon's powerful, slender thighs, all at once a mixture of barely hidden power and soft, feminine need, moved slowly through the shadows of the dingy hotel suite. Outside, the light from the Hilt Once Hotel's bar sent oily beams even through the heavy curtains, occasionally picking out for the eager hen's prey her marble-smooth talons, honed to razor sharp perfection, and that hooked beak, hanging like the tip of a knife. She circled him, eyes fixed not on him, but on his body, brilliant sapphire pupils tracing the lines of his larger muscles. That old familiar feeling, of wrongness, of rough miscegenation in the dead of night, shot up his back and through his loins. At once, blood began to flow to his--
“What are you reading, darling?” Emboss asked, peering over the front of the book Truth held in magic.
“Oh, nothing,” she said, gulping and closing the book a little too quickly, hiding it from view. “Nothing at all, just some old novel I found in our room.”
“Right, right.” Emboss nodded, waving a half-worn stub of chalk around in the air. “I'm almost done with these pentagrams.”
“Mrs Spun Glass used to have four, if I recall correctly.”
“Well, I've done you six. Are we ready to start?”
“I really think we should ask permission before we unleash half-remembered spells on this poor hippogryph's boat, you know.”
“It's fine, really, he even said we were welcome to get out and push if we wanted to, and this absolutely counts as that.”
“He was being facetious, sweetie.”
“This thing isn't a little sailing dinghy, it can probably take a lot more than you can dish out!”
Truth bit her lip and stood up, unfolding her legs from beneath herself. She placed the book behind her back left hoof and gave it a gentle kick, sliding it across to the other side of the main deck, where it came to a halt near the largest central mast.
“Is that a challenge, O dearest husband?” she said, in a sweetly menacing tone of voice.
“Lets see if you've got it in you!” Emboss huffed and stamped his hoof. “Come on, I'm waiting!”
“Right,” Truth growled and nearly galloped over to the point where the points of the six chalk pentagrams met. “Stand well back!”
Truth drew in a deep lungful of air and spread her front and back hooves out, closing her eyes. The soft surrusus of the standing magical background field drifted through her mind, barely audible at the best of times, but which now seemed somehow louder. Thaumic potential energy began to translate itself into the real world, and she heard Emboss whinny as his horn jarred uncomfortably, the building force creating sympathetic vibrations within it. She recalled the particular feeling that she herself had felt when watching Mrs Spun Glass do her work, working backwards to figure out what that mare had been doing.
A lick of telekinesis lashed out, bending the deck planks. She quickly corralled it and, moments later, it became clear what needed to be done. She wasn't sure if this was what Mrs Spun Glass was actually doing, but it seemed right for their purpose. Gas was really just a sort of spread out liquid, and moved in the same way. It could be funnelled, if under pressure. Bands of telekinesis grew thicker and stronger, flowing upwards and outwards toward the clear, blue sky then trailing backwards.
The farmost part of this growing bundle of spellstuff began to resemble a trumpet, widening and expanding. The other end grew needle thin. As soon as she had overseen this, or guided its construction, a deep and cloying feeling of exhaustion suddenly came upon her. With the nature of magic being what it was, she wasn't sure which of these were true; whether it had been a thing of her making or something else, the magic itself begging to be formed into shapes that it wanted.
She struggled on, gritting her teeth. It was like sprinting up a hill, only the incline was becoming more severe with every passing moment. Adrenaline spiked, and her lungs began to work like bellows. Sweat stained her fur and ran into her eyes, which would have stung had she not had them screwed so tightly shut. Heat attacked her scalp, and the smell of singed mane filled her nostrils.
There was one last thing to do, and then it would just be a case of maintaining the design, a far easier thing, if her long-ago education in the magical arts was anything to go by. The air had to be made to flow. She formed a fist of energy, punching and ramming atmosphere into the funnel. Air was squeezed and squashed down the funnel, getting hotter and denser. It exploded out of the tip at the other end, and a few moments later she felt a strong, warm wind roll over the ship.
The sails filled with a sharp snap, all their parts becoming tense. The acceleration was strong and forceful, and the rhythmic sound of the prow slamming into the water became more rapid and intense. Truth felt the need for magic drop away, and the telekinetic structure glowed brightly, a self-reinforcing loop of energy being drawn out of the background now powering it.
“Hooray,” she mumbled, seconds before her head hit the deck.