The door to the tavern opened, and the five renegade Equestrians therein found themselves looking at a flock of pegasi looking to squeeze their way into the ‘Dancing Hippogriff’ and get some well-earned rest and relaxation after a hard day of tending to the vaporcano. “I can’t believe they want to start winter off that cold…” one mumbled.
“Especially given how cold the last one was…”
“Cloudsdale knows what it’s doing, guys – uh. Hmm.”
The pegasi stopped just inside the tavern’s door, looking sidelong at the Equestrian renegades in surprise at seeing them all there. Captain Dinky carefully set aside her tea. “Ahoy!” she called, as she, Scootaloo, Featherweight, Snails, and Twist all stood. “We five are the crew of the good ship Rosedust, and we’re here for one of the keys for the legendary lost treasure of Dread Cipactli! But you were busy so we came to this tavern and had some tea first.”
The pegasi that had piled into the tavern – there were half a dozen, the rest of the crew having decided to go home – looked confused for a moment, before one of them perked up. “Oh, that thing Pinkie Pie was here for all last week,” he said. He was the leader of this group of pegasi, with a slate-gray coat and silver-blue mane and tail. Dinky knew of him – Thunderlane, he was called, one of the deputy managers that tended the vaporcano. He looked between them. “Where’s Rumble?” he asked.
Scootaloo screwed up her face at that. “He’s part of a rival pirate crew,” she said. “With Captain Pipsqueak and the dread pirates of the Hispaniola.”
Thunderlane grinned. “That sounds like Rumble,” he noted, trotting in so that the rest of the pegasi could come in as well. He looked them over. “Well, I’ve got good news, and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that we’re all set-up and you can try and get that Storm Key whenever you like. The bad news is that only the pegasi in your group can go after it.”
Featherweight and Scootaloo looked between each other, as the rest of the crew looked at that. “Why?” Featherweight asked after a moment.
Thunderlane smiled, and gestured for them to follow them from the tavern. The crew of Rosedust did, and found themselves being led across the pegasus aerie, through its twists and turns and even through a long tunnel that almost certainly extended beneath the water that separated the twin Isles of Storm. At length, the pirate ponies and their pegasus guide found themselves standing before a door that, were this the far-distant town of Ponyville, would have been set into the base of the cloud silo.
“We don’t have vapor in the cloud silo right now, since winter is coming up,” Thunderlane said. “Instead, we’ve got…”
He opened the door, and the five pirates gasped. Inside was a vast chamber, the frozen heart of the vaporcano. Its insides were slick with rime, coating the walls and extending down as far up as the ponies could see.
“Oh!” Twist exclaimed, as she stuck her head in a little and looked down. “So that’th how all the cloudth fit in! I alwayth – always – thought the silo looked a little th – small for all of Ponyville…”
Snails smiled broadly. “Of course!” he said. “My dad and my sister have taken me down sometimes.”
Indeed, while the crater of the vaporcano – the inside of the cloud silo, whatever – was fairly broad and stretched up high into the sky, opening the doors revealed that structure extended beneath the surface as well, into a large cavern. Inside the ponies could hear the moan of winds and a constant shimmering, as glow-gems set into the ceiling reflected off the snow, ice, and clouds in the cavern beneath – hundreds of clouds, maybe even more than that, the great majority of them white with a faint blue tinge with small pieces of ice sticking out of them. An underground river flowed through the cavern’s center, its surface covered with ice several inches thick but flowing water apparent just beneath it.
“Okay,” Thunderlane said, looking back to the foals. “So that’s why you’ll need pegasi to do this,” he indicated the chamber. “I can take the rest of you down to the ground, if you want, so you can watch and maybe help by telling Featherweight and Scootaloo where to go, but the key’s a place where only a pegasus could reach it. And even with a cloudwalking spell it probably wouldn’t be safe for an earth pony or unicorn due to all the ice.”
“Pegasi can grab hold of ice really well thanks to our magic,” Featherweight explained for the benefit of Twist – Dinky and Snails both knowing this already thanks to their parents being pegasi.
Thunderlane, meanwhile, had reached just inside the chamber, and produced two hard hats, putting them on top of Featherweight and Scootaloo. Dinky couldn’t really think of a way for hard hats to make sense when playing pirates, but at the same time understood that safety came first. “Don’t take these off,” Thunderlane said, his tone serious. “We’ve never had an accident down there, but that’s no reason to get sloppy.”
The two pegasus foals nodded, and Thunderlane smiled, stepping into the chamber – the vaporcano’s caldera – and spreading his wings, hovering in place in the updraft for a few moments more. “There are clouds everywhere, so you two won’t have to worry about falling. I’ll be nearby just in case. In the meantime, let’s get the rest of you down.”
Thunderlane took Snails and Twist down first, scooping each up under his forelegs and gliding down into the cavern, descending in a long, lazy circle and setting the two foals down on a broad and flat section of the vaporcano's floor, well away from the underground stream that in the foal’s minds was the source of the vaporcano’s constant stream of clouds. Dinky went down next, eyes wide as she took in the sight of the ice and even a little bit of snowfall from some of the more compressed-together clouds.
Once they were down, Thunderlane looked back up to Featherweight and Scootaloo, and waved a hoof. The two looked to each other, and Featherweight swallowed. “I…can’t really fly yet,” he noted. “I can sort of glide…”
Scootaloo shrugged, small wings buzzing and providing only a little lift to assure him that she wasn't any better off. “There are clouds everywhere, though,” she noted, leaning back a little and tensing, then leaping into the vaporcano without hesitation and with a cry of delight. The updraft within the caldera caught her for a moment, pushing her up a little before gravity took over and pulled her down. She fell only a few feet before landing on the nearest cloud, which gave a little bit underneath her but didn’t break. The young filly grinned brightly, looking up at Featherweight and beckoning him down. “Come on! It’s fine!”
Featherweight steeled himself a moment, spread his wings, and leaped down after Scootaloo, landing next to her after catching an updraft of his own. With all the ice contained in the cloud it felt a little like ice covered in sand or small bits of gravel. Scootaloo was grinning as she tapped at the cloud beneath her front hooves, occasionally letting her hooves slide into the cloud and come back out slick with soft rime. “I never get to cloud walk!” she exclaimed, standing and trotting in place a little, then letting out a huge grin, jumping off of the air, an letting herself fall straight through the cloud beneath her.
“H-hey!” Featherweight exclaimed, quickly digging down through the cloud and sticking his head through the other side. Scootaloo had fallen only a few feet onto another cloud directly beneath the one they were on. “That’s not safe! You should always check to see if there’s a cloud under you if you’re gonna do that!”
Scootaloo affixed Featherweight with a look of mild annoyance, but sighed. “You’re right…” she admitted, glancing around. The clouds were relatively thickly packed around the edges of the cavern, but comparatively sparse near the center where the caldera of the vaporcano was located. All in all, the cavern was probably a thousand feet from end to end, and about three or four hundred feet tall, every surface of it coated in ice of varying degrees of thickness, even patches of the underground river coated over in natural ice bridges. The two pegasus foals looked between one another. “Where do you think the key is?” Scootaloo asked.
Featherweight shook his head as he leaped from his cloud down to another, slightly below Scootaloo’s. “I wish we knew what it looked like…” he moaned, glancing around. “What was Pinkie’s clue again?”
“Look up,” Scootaloo provided, doing just that. The two of them only saw the frost-coated ceiling of the cavern from where they were, and not a whole lot of it since they were still relatively near the ceiling still. “There’s a lot of ceiling to search.” She bunched up a little and then leaped to another nearby cloud. “Especially if we have to keep going like this, hopping from one cloud to another…”
“We could try moving the cloud,” Featherweight noted, as he dug his front hooves into the cloud underneath him and began beating his wings as hard as he could. The cloud began to move, slowly but surely. He grinned widely for a few moments, but as he gained speed he began to feel that something was wrong beneath his hooves, and slowed to a stop. “Huh?” he asked, not sure what he had felt.
Scootaloo had copied the action, and smiled widely as her cloud began to move as well. “Awesome!” she exclaimed as her cloud began to pick up speed under her. “It’s just like with a scooter, except…” she banked her cloud, left and down, towards the cavern floor, and began picking up more speed. “Except I’m flying!”
“Wait, hold on – ” Featherweight began, somehow knowing what was going to happen just before it did. The cloud beneath Scootaloo began to tremble at its front, and then break apart, small bits of cloudstuff tearing off of it and collapsing into water droplets or snowflakes. Scootaloo noticed and slowed her cloud quickly, but by then whatever damage had been done to it was too much, and the thing began breaking apart beneath her.
True to his promise, Thunderlane was already beneath Scootaloo when her cloud gave out, and she fell only a few inches onto his back. “Oof!” She exclaimed as she landed, then looked to Thunderlane. “What happened?”
Thunderlane flew up a bit, landing on another nearby cloud and settling down there so that Scootaloo could climb off of him. “Clouds aren’t really all that stable,” he explained. “Your magic isn’t really strong enough yet to hold one together if you move it too fast. You’ll have to move any clouds you want to slowly.”
“Aww…” Scootaloo moaned, stamping a little at the cloud under her. “But I was flying…”
Thunderlane shrugged, as he hopped off of the cloud and hovered in place. “You have to take things easy for now. I bet you weren’t really all that fast on your scooter at first, right?”
Scootaloo thought a moment, before nodding. “I guess,” she conceded.
Featherweight, meanwhile, had taken Thunderlane’s advice, hopping down to a lower cloud at first and looking around at the ceiling above, wings beating in slow sweeps to provide only a little thrust. “Anypony see a key?” He called down to the foals below.
Dinky, Snails, and Twist had been doing little else but looking up and around since arriving, both to search for the Storm Key and taking in the sight of the icy cavern. “No…” Snails moaned. “This is way harder than finding the Crystal Key…”
“It’s gotta be around here somewhere, though,” Dinky said, even as she pulled her cloak tighter around her against the chill of the cavern. She knew she shouldn’t stay down here too long, it was too cold, but on the other hoof she really wanted to find that key and get the treasure of Dread Cipactli.
Twist, meanwhile, frowned. “I bet that…” she reasoned, trotting forwards and towards the center of the cavern. She squinted, adjusting her glasses as she looked straight up. “Up there!” she called after a moment, spotting something glinting yellow, standing out against the blue and white of the rest of the cavern. “Frothen to the top!”
Featherweight and Scootaloo both navigated over, leaping from cloud to cloud and pushing a few clouds as they went to move back to, essentially, where they had started, Thunderlane following nearby. Indeed, suspended in mid-air at nearly the top of the vaporcano's caldera – or to the roof of the cloud silo, whatever – was something round and yellow.
“That’s got to be it,” Scootaloo decided as she joined Featherweight on one cloud. “This’ll be easy! All we’ll have to do is move a cloud up there…” she dug her hooves into the cloud and set her wings buzzing, Featherweight joining in. Together, the two of them moved the cloud slowly but surely up and towards the hole in the ceiling that lead up to the cloud silo. Maneuvering the cloud straight up was a little trickier, but Scootaloo figured out a method by digging herself into the cloud and then sticking out from the bottom, wings pointed down towards the cavern floor. Once it was close enough to the ceiling’s hole, the cloud began to pick up speed, shooting up the caldera as it was caught in the updraft there – but it promptly broke apart when it was no more than halfway up, the irregular current and speed of the updraft causing it to collapse
The two foals managed to get their wings out and slow their descent enough for Thunderlane to easily catch them. “Oh, come on!” Scootaloo moaned, glaring up at the key even as Thunderlane deposited them on a nearby cloud. “How are we supposed to get to the key if the cloud’s gonna break apart when we try to get up there?”
Featherweight sat back on his haunches, one hoof to his mouth as he thought. Neither foal bothered asking Thunderlane for help; it was doubtless that Pinkie had made him Pinkie Promise not to help them beyond keeping them safe from falls. “Hey, how much do you weigh?” he asked.
Scootaloo looked at Featherweight, one eyebrow raised. “I dunno,” she admitted after a moment. “Why?”
“Just got an idea,” Featherweight said, looking around for a few moments. He hopped to a nearby small cloud, just big enough for him, and then began moving it back towards the caldera. Just as it was about to be sucked up into the updraft, and take him with it, he let go of the cloud and left it to drift forward under the momentum he had given it, while landing himself on another cloud. As the two foals watch, the cloud was dragged into the updraft and carried up the caldera – all the way to the top, until it hit the ceiling and burst apart into snowflakes that quickly got caught on the roof and froze in place.
“Ha!” Featherweight exclaimed. “See? A cloud can make it to the top, but not if it has us two on it. We’re too heavy. Bet we’re too heavy if it’s just one at a time, too…”
“But…if we’re too heavy one at a time,” Scootaloo said, “and too heavy if there’s two of us, how are we supposed to get up there?”
“Ooh!” Snails exclaimed, from below. The two pegasus foals glanced down at their friends. “I know! Get a bunch of clouds together, and send them all up, with one of you going up the silo and the other sending more clouds up. Then whoever’s in the caldera can jump from one cloud to another as they go up!”
“Thith dothn’t theem – gah! – this doesn’t seem safe,” Twist noted uncomfortably, shifting from one hoof to the next.
Scootaloo waved the comment off. “Not anymore than climbing a tree! Right, Thunderlane?”
Thunderlane nodded. “Actually back in Cloudsdale this is how a lot of foals learn to fly. I’m here, and there’s plenty of clouds to land on; I’ll make sure of it.” He shifted a little from where he sat. “Just…try not to use up to many clouds. We have a surplus we have to go through since we got that Everfree rain two weeks ago, but not a huge surplus.”
The two pegasus foals nodded, then set to work wrangling some clouds. It wasn’t easy, what with needing to move slowly lest they disrupt the clouds they were moving. Still, in a short while they had managed to gather up a decent collection, positioned near the caldera’s entrance. Scootaloo eyed them, then looked to Featherweight, mentally comparing his thin frame to her own somewhat more robust one. “You’re lighter,” she decided, “so you’ll probably be able to get higher before your cloud burst apart. I’ll send clouds up when you need them, you get the key.”
Featherweight swallowed at that, but then nodded. “Okay,” he said, digging into the cloud beneath him and beating his wings, Scootaloo following nearby with a cloud of her own. Before he knew it, he was under the hole of the caldera, its updraft pulling him and his cloud upwards. Featherweight steeled himself as he felt the cloud beneath him trembling against the weight of the pony on it pressing down, and the push of the updraft pulling it up. At the last possible moment before it burst apart, he leaped off of the cloud, wings fluttering a little and gaining him a few more feet before he began falling down – onto another cloud already rising that Scootaloo had readied for him.
“Ha!” Featherweight exclaimed, smiling brightly as he ascended past where the previous cloud had been destroyed, now nothing more than a swirling collection of snowflakes caught in the updraft. The cloud beneath him was already trembling, but he was ready, leaping from it and onto another. Each time he let the updraft catch his wings and lift his light frame up, gaining a few extra feet with each cloud as a result. By the time he leaped onto his third cloud, he was close enough to the Storm Key to see it: a round, clear ball, looking almost as though it was made of ice, and inside was something that was shaped like a yellow lightning bolt. The ball was about half as big as Featherweight’s head, and suspended in the air by long, thin strands of ice that connected like a spider's web to the caldera's rim.
Two more clouds later, and Featherweight was close enough to the key that he could try and dislodge it. He positioned himself directly beneath it as his cloud ascended, then leaped up and bucked at it with his front hoof. The ice that held it in place wasn’t thick, and it came loose and fell into his waiting hooves easily as he fell back down and onto the cloud.
“Yes!” Featherweight exclaimed as he landed back on another ascending cloud. He made sure he had a good grip on the still ice-covered ball – though beneath the ball it felt like plastic – and then let himself fall through the ascending cloud, spreading his wings against the updraft to slow his descent through the shaft. Gravity did most of the work for him, and within just a few moments he was back down in the cavern, away from the updraft of the vaporcano's caldera. He let out a whoop of glee as he glided down towards the cavern floor and the rest of his friends, Scootaloo following his descent by hopping from cloud to cloud, wings buzzing to slow her own fall for the last twenty or so feet.
“Got it!” Featherweight exclaimed as his friends joined him. He looked at Scootaloo. “We got it!”
“Yup!” Scootaloo confirmed. “Teamwork! Just like the Wonderbolts, or the Night Guard.”
“Or a good pirate crew!” Snails added, leaning forward and poking the key. “What is it? It doesn’t look like a key…”
“It’s a magic key,” Dinky said, nodding her head with certainty. “It’s…lightning trapped in a ball of ice! Magic ice. So it won’t melt.”
“Cool!” Twist exclaimed, taking the Storm Key as it was offered to her and looking it over before passing it along. “And, wow, Pinkie – uh, Ethpada Noche – really went to a lot of work to hide hith treathure’th keyth…”
Scootaloo, who’d been handed the key next, turned it over in her hooves. “Nevermind the treasure, I wanna know what the locks look like…”
The other four foals nodded, while Featherweight was hoofed the treasure map by Captain Dinky. “Where to next, Doctor and Navigator Featherweight?”
Featherweight spread the map out before him, looking it over. “Quills and Sofas,” he said, then considered. “The, um…Fortress Island?”
“Fortress Island it is,” Dinky said with a nod, confirming the foal's name for it in their little legend.
“And the key there is called the Feather Key. The hint is…all you have to do is make it to the other side.”
“Huh,” Snails said. “That sounds easy!”
“Right!” Dinky said, then turned around. Thunderlane had joined them on the floor of the cavern. “Okay, Mr. Thunderlane. Could you please escort us out of this here vaporcano, so that we can get back to the Rosedust and back to our treasure hunt?”
Thunderland smiled, and gave a great flourish of a bow. “Of course,” he said, then pointed off to one side. “Stairs are over there, they lead back up to the weather patrol station.”
The five pirates turned to look in the direction he pointed, and in fact saw a door that was clearly marked ‘exit.’ Dinky considered a moment. “More fun to fly in?” she asked, guessing why they hadn’t just gone this way in the first place.
“More fun,” Thunderlane confirmed, as the small herd of ponies began walking over to the door.
---
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away and across the vast expanse of the Southern Sea, the RES Diamond Tiara cruised steadily through the day, its magic figureheads doing all the navigating and leaving the only crewmember aboard the ship, the scholar-adventurer Sweetie Belle, with nothing to do but relax as the ship made the trek from one end of the Thousand Islands to the other. It had maybe been a little mean of her to trick her captain and other crewmates into getting off the boat and into dinghies to traverse the Sea, but then again they were in pairs and weren’t going all the way across the Sea by themselves.
Also the RES Diamond Tiara was really, really comfortable, and the figureheads were surprisingly good conversationalists for animated wood.
“…and so that’s how we got covered in tree sap for the third time,” she finished.
The two figureheads chuckled a little. “So are you going to be trying for number four, or…?”
Sweetie giggled a little. “Oh, it’s already happened way more than that,” she said. “All of Scootaloo’s ideas for getting our cutie marks pretty much always end up with us covered in tree sap.” She shrugged as she hung out over the edge of the deck’s railing, watching the waves pass beneath her. “I think that she should just try something else that isn’t so messy. She’s really good at dancing. I bet that’s her special talent, she just hasn’t realized it yet – oh, Tootsie Flute! Truffle Shuffle! Hi!”
Sweetie waved at an approaching ship she hadn’t noticed, a small private yacht that flew Equestrian colors but obviously wasn’t quite as fine as the Diamond Tiara, though it was nice in its own way. Aboard she could see two faces she recognized, Tootsie Flute and Truffle Shuffle, who were officially special someponies with each other now, much to the former’s delight.
The two stopped and stared at Sweetie. “Where’d you get that carriage?” Truffle asked in amazement.
Sweetie chuckled again as her ship came to a stop alongside Tootise’s and Truffle’s yacht. “It’s not a carriage, it’s a ship,” she said, “and we’re hunting treasure! Me and Diamond Tiara and Alula and Silver Spoon and Firelock. We have a map, and we split up to get the keys on our map faster than Dinky or Pipsqueak and their crews will get theirs. Mine is at Sugarcube Corner!”
Tootsie and Truffle looked between each other. “We’re going there now,” Tootsie said. “So this is a treasure hunt game?”
Sweetie nodded, then brightened. “Oh! Except…” she opened up the door to the carriage – she couldn’t think of a nautical equivalent for the action – and revealed the treasure chest inside. “We already have the treasure! We just need to get it open.” She thought a moment. “It was all set up by Pinkie Pie, so the treasure is probably just chocolate coins or coupons for Sugarcube Corner. But that’s still a great treasure!”
Tootsie and Truffle’s eyes lit up at the sight of the chest, especially once Sweetie demonstrated how heavy it was. “Say…” Tootsie said. “Can we play?”
Sweetie considered. “I dunno…” she said. “’Cause, right now, it’s five against five against five. I don’t know if it’s fair if we get seven ponies on our crew.”
“Well, you already have seven, don’t you?” Truffle reasoned, pointing to the wooden figureheads of the Diamond Tiara.
“They don’t count,” Sweetie said, then paused a moment. “No offense.”
“None taken,” one of the figureheads assured her.
“And you’ve already split up into three,” Tootsie pointed out. “That’s not really fair either, is it? And besides, we’re going to Sugarcube Corner anyway, like I said.”
Sweetie considered a moment more, before shrugging. “Sure!” she decided. The two abandoned their yacht, and came aboard the Diamond Tiara, which got underway again. She looked at the two. “But I’m gonna be the acting-captain, then, of the cruise.”
Both of the other two ponies saluted smartly at that. “Aye aye, Captain Sweetie Belle!”
Sweetie smiled brightly as Sea began flowing by beneath Diamond Tiara’s keel again. Hmm…she thought. Captain Sweetie Belle…I like the sound of that!