At the Inn of the Prancing Pony

by McPoodle


Chapter 35: Magical Hydraulics

At the Inn of the Prancing Pony

Chapter 35: Magical Hydraulics


There was a bit of a silence among the audience of the amphitheater after the end of the fight against the gorgimera. The loss of a major character is always a bit of a blow, no matter that this was the sort of thing that they were there to see.

“I’m sorry,” Mary Jo told Luke apologetically. “Luck of the rolls, you know.”

“Well,” Susan said slowly, “what I know is that this wouldn’t have happened if we did this the easy way, and stopped paying quite so much attention to namby-pamby goddesses who can’t handle a little blood on their hooves.”

“Watch your words, Susan,” M.J. said coolly.

“I’m not dead!” Luke said firmly. “Just...out for now. Listen, if another character comes up I can play it, but for now, I’m just going to observe. Carry On will be fine, I’m sure!”

“Carry On will carry on?” Gary said with a smile.

Luke laughed, along with a good portion of the audience. “Yes. Yes she will.”

Ellen continued to sit with her head in her hands, looking to M.J. “I didn’t get anyone killed, did I?” she asked.

“No, no one was killed,” said M.J. “In fact, the gorgimera is watching you all with a rather amused expression upon their faces. ‘Imagine, saved by an adventurer!’ the gorgon head says in Equine, shaking his head incredulously. ‘I am quite grateful,’ the dragon head says sternly. ‘But don’t think that gives you any right to my treasure!’ The lion head decides that he has nothing significant to add, and begins using his tongue to arrange his fur.”

“Well, I don’t think we should do anything at this point before Midnight revives,” Gary said.

Mary Jo was doing a little bookkeeping when she looked up with an annoyed expression. “Midnight, you awaken from a dreamless sleep in the Astral Plane. Celestia is hovering about, examining you from all directions. ‘My heavens!’ she exclaims, ‘what happened to you?’”

Ellen smiled, and shuffled her papers before clearing her throat. “‘Um...I tried to catch a stone pegasus using telekinesis alone. I didn’t want Carry On, I didn’t want anypony to get hurt. We saved the creature, by the way!’ Midnight hops to her hooves, eager to show Celestia that she is okay. Then she inspects herself,” Ellen said.

“‘Hm...you saved it? I’m a little surprised, and quite gratified. You do not appear to have been permanently damaged.’ She applies her horn to Midnight’s, more gently than usual, and once again heals her and renews her spells. ‘Unfortunately, I cannot reverse petrification, either in you or in your companions. There is a place in Everhold which will do it for a price—don’t leave them alone with the victim, no matter what you do. There are probably other locations as well.’”

Ellen nodded, writing down the location so she wouldn’t forget. “‘Thank you, Celestia. I...I don’t know what to do though. I don’t think we can turn back right now, but...do you think that you could have Hope come get her? Not because she’s my retainer...’” Ellen trailed off, before erasing something from her sheet. Removing the retainer listing entirely. “But because Carry On is our friend?”

“‘Of course,’ Celestia says kindly. ‘It will simply delay the moment of your reunion by a few additional hours.’ She brings up a map that wasn’t there a moment before, and uses a piece of graphite gripped in her magic to draw a few lines. ‘There, done. Now, being a member short, I advise you to use friendship to get what you need on this journey going forward. Friendship, or persuasion. I prefer the former, but sometimes find that the latter is required instead.’”

“Midnight laughs. ‘I am happy to focus on friendship, rather than killing. Is Hope okay?” she asked cautiously.

“‘Hope is fine,’ Celestia tells you. ‘She succeeded admirably in her mission for me, and soon you’ll see for yourself what she has accomplished. Now, is there anything more you would like from me?’”

“‘No, that should be fine. Do you have any instructions for me, and would you like a hug?’”

“‘Well, I could repeat anything I told you earlier.’ She tries to say this a good deal nicer than I would have. ‘And a hug would be fine.’”

Ellen smiled quite a bit more as she wrote “Hugged Celestia” in the section of her character sheet labeled “Achievements.” “‘Thank you, Celestia. See you next time.’”

“She nods, and then you awaken back in your body.”

“‘Well, that was fast,’” commented Susan as Torn Deck.

“Yeah, seems like Celestia and Sparkle are getting along more; when’s the first date?” Luke asked jokingly.

Ellen’s only reply was to roll her eyes and waggle an eyebrow at Mary Jo.

“I can tell you that it was a very chaste hug,” Mary Jo said with some slight discomfort. She gave Ellen a long-suffering look.

“‘So no get-out-of-jail-free card from your deity?’” Gary asked.

“‘I could turn him from stone into lead,’ Facet volunteers. ‘But not back to flesh, sorry.’”

“So, the monster doesn’t look like it wants to eat us?” Susan asked, a bit taken aback by the odd end of this encounter.

“Nope!” M.J. replied.

“Because I’m awesome! That’s correct, right? I saved the day?” Luke asked eagerly.

“Oh yeah, you’re getting half the experience for this encounter,” Mary Jo said.

“Wait, hold on!” Brian suddenly called from the next table over. “Are you saying you can collect experience from a monster...without annihilating it?” He looked like a Flat-Earther who had suddenly found himself looking down on the planet from the Moon.

“Yes,” Mary Jo replied flatly.

“My mind is blown,” Brian replied. “Uh...you can get back to your game and stuff…”

Ellen, waiting until Brian had looked away, threw up her hands silently and mimed praying to Celestia, while gesturing at Brian’s head.

This earned a fair amount of laughs from the crowd. Brian of course assumed that they were laughing for something he said that he didn’t know was funny, so he stood up, briefly bowed, and sat back down. This generated even more laughter.

“OK, enough of that,” M.J. said. “Bumble, who has been watching all of this from a safe distance, cautiously flies into the gorgimera’s sight and introduces both himself and Carry On.

“‘And we are Chossos,’ the gorgon head said. ‘I regret my wasteful action, and wish that I was capable of undoing the effects of my breath, like the mythical cockatrice.’”

“I tell Chossos that cockatrices are totally real,” Susan said. “Oh, and I introduce myself while I’m at it.”

“‘No way!’ the gorgon head exclaims. The creature then walks over to the pile of treasure, and transfers a gem from one side of the pile to the other. ‘Don’t ever say I never pay off my bets,’ he remarks.”

“Well, I’m awake now, right?” Ellen confirmed.

“Yes.”

“Okay, I go ahead and get up, see how much damage my forehead has or if it was completely healed, then I bow to Chossos. ‘I am happy to see you free of the mind-affecting magic that had forced you to guard this place. Or...has this always been your home?’”

“Well first of all, if Celestia says that you’re healed, you’re at 100%. Then, in regards to your question, the dragon head answers, ‘Our home is the Place of Stone in Tartarus. Unlike what you may have been told, there are parts of that place that are not designed to be a prison, but rather a place where rejected creatures can live as they wish. It is our greatest desire to return there.’”

“Burnished Lore rubs his chin. ‘That’s very interesting, because there’s a good chance that the place we seek has a portal back to Tartarus in it. By the way, you can call me Bernie.’” Gary gave the others a somewhat superior look. “You’ll note that my character did not reveal his full name to a denizen of Tartarus.”

M.J. rolled her eyes at this, before saying, “Chossos goes off in a corner for a three-headed conference.”

Luke sighed, rolling a twenty sided die. “I totally would have stolen a gem, but I’m too stoned.”

“‘We’d like to join your party,’ the lion head says when they return.” M.J. gave a significant look over at Ellen. “‘Friendship for the win’, it would appear,” she remarked.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Susan said, standing up and making a “T” shape with her hands. “How in Tartarus are we going to arrange to split treasure and experience with a three-headed creature?”

“But it’s only one creature,” said Gary as he tried to build a tower out of his dice.

“One creature, with, like...six attacks. I know I’d ask for more than one share if it were me. And one of those heads is a dragon—what if he gets a greed attack?”

Ellen raised a hand to pacify Susan. “‘Chossos, should we address you as one creature, or as three? Understandably we want to address you in whatever way is most comfortable to you.’ Sparkle says.”

“‘We are three individuals internally, but we present ourselves as one to the outside world,’ said the dragon head. ‘It is why we have only the single name of Chossos. Also, it’s the only way we can fill out our taxes each year without going insane.’”

Gary smiled widely and rose to the challenge. “‘You have to file taxes?’”

“‘But of course. There are only two things one cannot escape in life: death, and taxes. And both of them issue from the same place.’”

This punchline got an appreciative laugh from the audience.

Ellen laughed as well, gesturing to Mary Jo while looking to the other players. “There we go. One creature as far as we are concerned. One creature who is our friend. ‘Can I call you Choss?’” she asked.

“‘Choss?’ asks the lion head. Then he roars it out loud: ‘CHOSS!’ Both dragon and gorgon heads soon join in. ‘That sounds a lot better as a battle cry than Chossos. Go right ahead!’

“‘One share is fine with us,’ says the dragon head. His eyes glow briefly as the gorgon head’s obedience band dematerializes and re-materializes on the ground. It then uses a wingtip to remove the anti-mind control band from the gorgon’s head and return it to the group. ‘Here,’ he says. ‘I’ll keep mine on, and that way I should be able to maintain self-control around treasure piles. That being said, however...’ From underneath the glittering pile behind him, a lion’s paw pulls out a dull looking satchel, which is opened, and the entire pile is quickly and impossibly shoved inside. ‘Ours,’ the dragon head says curtly. ‘And if we run into anything else that you can’t possibly carry, and therefore can’t fairly claim as your share, well...’ The bag is plopped down on the gorgimera’s back. It’s a dull green, and looks so dowdy that it was probably sewn by somepony’s grandmother.”

“‘I would be happy to donate to your personal hoard, most especially if we cannot carry any new things we find. I only request that we don’t claim or give away any artifacts that are too dangerous for any of us to own. Those, I will destroy or hide away,’ Midnight proposes.”

“‘Artifacts are more trouble than they’re worth,’ the gorgon head says wisely. ‘Use pot-holders when handling, because some of them use skin contact to infest your circulatory system.’” M.J. laughed. “I am having a lot of fun with this character. Thank you for not doing what I wanted and annihilating him.”

“You’re welcome!” Luke said happily, as he returned from the snack table again.

“OK,” said Mary Jo, “with everything settled, are you ready to continue?”

“‘Hold on,’” Gary said seriously on behalf of Burnished Lore. “‘We need to say some final words for our fallen colleague. I mean, there’s a chance that we won’t make it, after all.’”

Mary Jo nods in acknowledgement. “Facet and Bumble both lower their heads in respect.”

“Ditto,” Susan quickly said.

Ellen bowed her head silently, and Luke looked out to the audience before sloooowly sliding down to be eye level with the surface of the table.

Gary rose to his feet, and put one hand over his heart. With the other, he gestured at his brother. “‘Carry On,’ he intoned. ‘Our wayward foal. There’ll be peace when you are done. Lay your weary head to rest. Don’t you cry...no more. Amen.’” Only then did he allow himself to start laughing.

Luke fell to the floor with a thud. “I’m dead forever now, because Bernie is a jerk!” he cried out from his position under the table.

Of course Mary Jo, as a major fan of all prog rock bands including Nebraska, was joining Luke on the floor, rolling back and forth as tears poured down her cackling face. “OK...O...K,” she finally said, getting up. “‘Is it safe yet?’” She took a few moments to recover. “That...that was Itty Bitty. She has been hiding in the other room this whole time.”

“‘Oh yeah, of course it’s safe!’ Burnished cries out.”

“Gary, you are incorrigible,” said Susan with a shake of her head.

“‘OK, if you say so,’ the white pegasus said, as she peeked her head around the corner. She quickly ducked back around upon seeing the gorgimera in the group’s midst. ‘The horror!’ she screamed. Facet ran a critical eye across Choss’ bag of holding. ‘Well, yes,’ she finally concluded, ‘but Choss is rather nice.’” M.J. saw the rather bored looks upon the faces of the players. “Alright, we’ve stretched this all out far enough. You coax Itty Bitty out, calm her down, and you can finally proceed.

“Choss leads you down the southeast passage, which begins to curve northeast. Stuck in a crevice in the wall, you spot a small wooden tube.

“Scroll case!” Gary exclaims. “Yoink!”

“You take the case.”

“I open it.”

“No checking for dart traps, or…?”

“Well, that would be Carry On’s job, yes?”

“Yes,” M.J. said with a sad nod.

“So I get to just lump it,” said Gary. “What happens?”

“No trap,” said Mary Jo. “Inside the tube is nothing but a piece of parchment with some writing on it.”

“What does it say?”

“‘Going south takes you southwest.’”

“Anything else?”

“Nope.”

“Huh. A riddle.” He writes down the words. “I guess we keep going.”

“The path continues to curve, until it meets another path from the northwest.”

“So both passages converge at the same spot,” said Susan, bent over her map.

“Wait,” Ellen said. “I have instructions from Celestia, right? Is this where they ran out? I remember we have to remove a pile of rocks and go down a tunnel...”

Mary Jo nodded. “The two paths converge, and to the west, there’s a boulder pile. The well-rounded rocks here look as if some pair of giants had stacked them up for a future game of Catch. ‘That’s the entrance to the lower level,’ the lion head of Choss tells you. ‘We blocked it off so nothing could sneak up on us from below.’”

“‘Alright, so let’s start moving it,’” said Susan.

“You spend the next several minutes removing boulders, with the main trouble being transporting them down one tunnel or the other back to the main chamber, so you don’t run out of room.”

Luke, sitting back in his chair, happened to notice Alexia walking over to the snack table. However, instead of getting any snacks, she was using the computer. He wondered for a moment if she was taking an emergency game break on the Apple II. After all, Miner 2049er was pretty awesome.

“‘Hold on,’ Facet said after a moment. ‘There’s definitely something off about this particular boulder.’ It has a blue-green color to it, and by the way she hefts it in her hooves, it appears to be quite light.”

Ellen frowned before rolling a few dice. “Arcane on that, does it look like anything that I know about? An egg or something like that?”

“Nope,” reported M.J. “It looks like roughly-fired clay, with plenty of mud mixed in before drying.”

“‘I don’t remember that one,’ said Choss’ gorgon head. ‘And I know my stones.’”

“Is it ticking?” asked Gary.

“We’re not playing in that kind of setting,” replied M.J.

“Yeah, but is it ticking anyway?”

“No.”

“I turn to our friendly cleric number two,” said Ellen. “‘Facet, any ideas?’ My next step would be to place it far away and hit it with a spell to crack it open.” Ellen mimed shooting a bow.

“Facet puts her ear to the side of the rock and taps it lightly with a hoof. ‘It’s hollow,’ she reports, ‘and relatively thin-walled. She tips it gently from side to side. ‘There’s one...two objects inside, the largest no more than two hooves across and flat, the other half a hoof, and round. Both hard, definitely not moving of their own power. No liquid...’ She puts her snout against the rock and sniffs loudly. ‘...or unusual gas inside.’”

Luke had used his hoodie to make a pillow and was laying on the floor still, while Ellen shrugged helplessly. “‘So, good friends, what is the safest place to crack it open? Or should we leave it alone?’”

“Well, I vote for a good old-fashioned ‘Torn Deck smash!’” voted Susan. “I’m getting tired of not fighting.”

“I cast Detect Magic,” said Gary.

“The rock’s not magic. Both of the objects inside are. The small object is defense magic, pretty strong. The flat object gives off an alteration aura—it’s very weak.”

“Well...” Ellen started, before a hand popped up from under the table.

“Dead mare wants to ask a question.”

“Well...you can ask,” said M.J. with a smirk.

Luke sighed, before he struggled to stand and sit at his normal seat.

“If this thing is clay and hollow, and they picked it up, are they still holding it, or did they set it back down, risking it cracking open on its own?”

“Facet picked it up. When asked questions, she gently put it down and started examining it. Her hoof is still resting on it. And somehow, nopony died.” The last part said deadpan, of course.

“The clay must be pretty thick then,” Ellen pondered. “‘Hey Choss. Is your bag big enough to hold this too?”

“‘Sure!’ exclaims Dragon Choss cheerfully. ‘Mystery rock, added to our...oops.’ Turns out that lion paws suck for fine handling. The rock busts open, and two objects spill harmlessly out. One is a hoof ring, and the other is a stone tablet.”

“Not my fault!” Ellen said quickly.

“The one with the alteration magic. Quickly, I look at it without touching it.”

“There are words on the tablet, which immediately start fading away, starting from the top.”

Four pencils were immediately raised to the ready. Then Luke remembers that he doesn’t have to care, and puts his down.

“‘In the center lies the gate,’” Mary Jo reads aloud slowly. “‘But opening it is sure to vex. / Many are the guards who wait / As you go on to the middle hex.

“‘Randomly sent to find a way / Back to a different iron door; / A seventh time and you may stay / And seek the glowing prize no more.

“‘Confused soon you may be / As unreachable becomes your goals / But the light of wisdom you may see / If you but read the scrolls.

“‘You have won old Eggswife’s prize / Her hoarded cache of magic / And freed the one with yearning eyes / Whose lot was hunger tragic.

“And the tablet is now blank.”

Ellen reread her written copy, and sighed. “If only I had any idea what it all meant. Well, except for the fact that the middle seems like a massive trap. Not sure what we can do about that though, we already knew that it was going to be a trap.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed Gary. “So, shall we...wait, first, I collect the three mind-control bands from the gorg...from Choss, and cast the spell turning them into anti-mind control bands.”

“OK, done.”

“And the ring?”

“It’s a Ring of Protection +1. Who wants it?”

“Well, let’s save Celestia from having to heal her follower all the time, and give it to Midnight,” said Susan. “We’ve got more hit points, after all.”

With a grateful smile, she added the ring to her list.

“Thanks, I just hope I can put it to good use.”

“OK, going down the stairs now?” asks M.J.

“Do we hear anything down there?” asks Susan.

“No. Is anybody taking the tablet?”

“Why should we?” asked Gary. “Does it have any magic left?”

“Are you casting Detect Magic again?”

“Err...no.”

“Oh!” Ellen waved a hand excitedly.

“The floor recognizes the lawyer from Los Angeles,” M.J. drawls.

“I scrawl a note on it to be left for dear Hope. I rewrite what it had before, then I also add in ‘We are headed down, please take Carry On to safety and stay with her until she is healed. Afterwards if we have not returned, your path is your own.’”

“Alright. You go down the stairs. 900 steps, each a pony-length across, and three hooves high.”

“So, a really long way down?” Gary asked. “I gotta say, either the entire level will be underwater, or Eggswife has got to be good with water magic. I mean, the river is on the upper level—that’s not natural!”

“If we all drown, it’s Carry On’s fault,” Ellen joked, as Luke huffed and crossed his arms in reply.

“Well, that waterfall sounded pretty loud at the end,” observed Susan. “Meaning it fell past the level of wherever we’re heading. Do you think that would make it a confined, or an unconfined aquifer?”

“Do you think there’s an enslaved race of cave ponies,” Luke speculated, “whose job it is to run the pumps so that the waterfall water ends up back under the cave entrance where we started? A perpetual cycle of water?”

M.J. shook her head. “It’s magic,” she said quietly to herself. “Why does everybody always have to question magic?”

Ellen grinned predatorily. “I think of the sun.”

M.J. sat up. “Oh, you mean that wasn’t your snarky answer to my question? You hear Celestia’s voice in your head. ‘Yes, my faithful follower?’”

Ellen batted her eyelashes, leaning forward with a dreamy smile. She had been doing this every time she talked to Celestia, but not stated it in character, as part of the joke.

“’Well, Celestia, there’s a chance that the inner area will be flooded, and I don’t have any water based spells, do you have any advice?’”

“‘Oh, it’s not flooded,’ Celestia replies, ‘strange as it might seem. You see, the space between the levels consists of this simply massive sponge.’” M.J. bit her lip as she thought about this. “You know, that would kinda do it. Thank you Celestia, for telling me things even I should have known!” She said this in a silly little voice, so nobody actually thought her odd for talking to herself.

“But how do you drain the water out of the sponge?” Gary asked. “I mean, wouldn’t it drip down everywhere? And what about mildew? Are we going to have to fight green ooze the moment we get down there?”

“Not if it’s a magic sponge!” Ellen said with a barely suppressed giggle.