DAY THREE
Equestria’s dignified emissary to the distanced and recently estranged provinces in the Frozen North, Prince Blueblood, rolled from one side of his overly cushioned bunk to the other. His head was gripped tight between his hooves, and the graceful blonde locks that adorned it formed sweat-stuck clumps. The mission vehicle’s engine choked and snortled out infernal noises, shaking the entire ViP cabin as if it was a ceremonial bottle of champagne. Again and again, the machine’s death throes pushed deeper and deeper into the Prince’s inner being, and so masked the many moans and gurgles he emitted as the shaking continued.
In the defense of such improper display by Prince Blueblood, this snowplower engine mishap had come into play exactly three days prior. This travesty had been going on for three days by then - only getting worse with each attempt to reignite. The magic-powered chargers that were supposed to keep the vehicle operational in all cases without exception, embedded in the outer hull, were dim - mysteriously gone out the moment the Equestrian mission entered this dreaded patch of land. Ever since having wheeled half the ribcage of a valley, their vehicle had been more or less dead as a doorknob.
By the efforts of a particuarly violent cough, Blueblood was thrown off the bunk and onto the fine, lavishly light brown wooden floor of his cabin. Groaning abstractly, he fumbled with his forelegs in the air, and then gave up, keeling over to the side. His gaze was met with an empty, sealed, pitch black flask.
With an absent whimper, he lifted it into the air with what little magic his ravaged head could muster, unsealed it, and sucked on. Nothing sensible appeared to be able to restart the engine, so the royal stallion had found a way of coping.
“Blueblood… Prince— Prince Blublood, sir, okay, no, don’t—” a female voice from some meters above spoke to him in exasperation. “Oh for crying out loud, you’re going to choke yourself like that.”
Forcefully, the flask was torn off his snout, spilling fragrant bourbon all over him and his suit. Another series of rumbles halted the conversation for a good half a minute, as he was repeatedly hit on the head by other flasks like the one withdrawn - some filled, some not.
“Well, perhaps that would be for the better,” he moaned out as soon as the quakes halted. “A fitting — hic! — end.”
“I beg you, if you plan to commit suicide, you don’t have to tie your alcoholism into that,” the female voice mumbled out, audibly covered somewhat by a hoof. Its owner hopped down from the bunk above Blueblood’s to the floor, swiveling rampantly for the first few seconds after having done so.
The white unicorn mare with her mane done into a thick dark bun, half-piece glasses sliding downards off the sweaty snout, walked up to the tall, big, sterling white, golden-locked stallion sprawled on the ground. She was somewhat groomed and occasionally touched up, if only by herself - and he had the characteristic pinkish flesh hue and eye wander of someone who still thought that a hangover was best fought with what caused it.
As the Prince whimpered in faint defiance, he was put back onto his four hooves. The next second, he found a cushion on the round sofa in the middle of the cabin to sink his face into, kneeling down hard enough to effectively have fallen again. The mare rubbed her forehead vigorously.
“Prince Blueblood. We have to talk about your drinking problem.”
“Hm dhnt hmvh mh dmhrhnknhg phmblm,” the lump of drunken flesh, its mouth and eyes covered by a luxurious cushion, its head covered by a pair of formerly hooficured hooves, responded dispassionately.
Eyes half closed, the mare tugged on the stallion’s collar, struggling to turn him over so that he may face the cabin’s firefly light.
“Come on. Wake up, wake up. Rise and shine,” she insisted, swatting him on the face with her hoof very lightly, a few times.
“I don’t want to,” Blueblood replied with a choked sob, and had his hoof hit as well, when it started to reach for another flask. “I don’t want to, Raven. No, no, no, you can’t make me.”
“Prince Blueblood… sir… Come on, I beg you, get yourself together. You don’t want to come back to Equestria only to have to be treated for alcoholism.”
“No, I do want to go back to Equestria!” the Prince mumbled meekly, raising a hoof in indignance.
“That was not the… Nevermind. Please, sir, you can’t be like that. It’s only been three days,” Raven continued to negotiate with him, sitting down on her hunches in front of the large unicorn. She attempted to look him in the eyes, but they were so close to being shut that it was unseemly.
“Three?” he raised an eyebrow slowly, and a hoof, though that appeared to have just been a twitch. “I… Hic! I thought we’ve been here for… a week.”
“Well, we were going rather fast, the vehicle overperformed itself, an entire day’s worth of terrain in five hours. And then… we’ve only been here for three days!” the mare smiled at having seemingly found something positive in the situation.
“Three days. Stuck in this — hic! — dreadful, corrupted valley. We’re no more than eight miles from the blasted city. And we will never get any further, Raven. We will all — hic! — die here,” Blueblood droned solemnly, weakly wiping away tears from his bloodshot, blurry eyes. “The blizzard never ends. The wights, the dreadful wights, they will slip in through the cracks — hic! — the cracks! And overwhelm us all. None shall find us,” the Prince halted his tongue-tied tirade to burp with the threat of releasing past meals, but restrained his body for the time. “None shall find us but the unfortunate, damned souls who venture this far into the North.”
“Prince Blueblood, sir, we are eight miles away from their city. I’m sure they’ll come looking for us.” Raven shrugged.
“Raven, Raven… I haven’t seen happier northfolk than when we announced our leave. They’ll — hic! — pretend we never existed. Just like they did on all the meetings. Just like everyone always does. Hic!” the stallion pulled up a handkerchief and blew his nose several times in a row. “We don’t exist. We’re all paper, Raven.”
Sighing deeply, the mare examined the scent of the alcohol that the Prince had been consuming ever since the stash had been found. None of the crew confessed as to whose it was, although clearly it was meant to be smuggled to the locals for a hefty price. The Prince diligently withdrew the package of over a hundred inconspicuous flasks, and had had it in these ViP quarters since then. He started drinking roughly one day before their entrance to the Northern capital.
She knew a thing or two about chemistry. What he had been drinking - at first from time to time, and now like water - was more than reason enough for her to only react to the speech with a sigh. The mare was more than glad to do so, feeling a heavy knot postpone its bursting inside her chest.
“I don’t want to stay. I want to — hic! — run away! I… I have been thinking - what if this is an assassination? They knew we would never return. They send us here on this untested, infernal vehicle, and expect us to cross the Frozen North twice over! Open your eyes, this — hic! — this is a conspiracy!” he raised a vigorously limp hoof, while Raven struggled to tear off a chunk of ice from the recently malfunctioning refrigerator unit, and pack it up.
Choosing words carefully, she reassured the Prince:
“It’s okay, sir. Nobody would want you dead,” the mare hushed the crying, drooling, burping, hiccupping unicorn, pressing an ice package against his head.
“No, Raven,” he answered her quietly. “Nobody would.” Blueblood fell silent.
Perhaps, spending the days stuck in the snow via consuming their soon-to-be only sources of bodily heat and caring for the consumer respectively were not the best courses of actions. That said, Blueblood, this being his first political mission entirely of his own and under his control, had precisely no idea how to do much aside from look groomed, smile charmingly, and nod - and Raven, having clear, exact orders on what her task included, could only watch as the technicians in the second wagon tried to revive the engine. Her place was with Blueblood, and Blueblood was, indeed, shortly to turn blue at the rate he was going.
“Can’t it just start… Just start by itself, and we’d have one less problem…” the secretary spoke in a quiet exhale, no less frustrated at the state of things than the Prince. Her eyes passed over a window that showed nothing but bits of snow and complete darkness. Six hours past noon, and it was already dark. Perhaps, for the best. The Frozen North was not exactly invigorating to look at, and that was for Raven, who, in managing many projects, had been all over the continent.
The Prince nearly escaped her grasp and gripped a flask, but before she was able to react, both of them keeled over, moaning. A stark headache came over her, causing the mare to kneel, eyes shut, and a light thump emitted throughout the stallion’s head, the rest of the aching drowned by the many, many drinks. For a long several seconds, breathing was difficult, and Raven stared at the murderously drunk Prince as he looked up at the ceiling and mouthed a short sentence.
“We’re all paper, Raven,” she heard his near emotionless, considerably coherent whisper. He stared intensely at nothing in particular somewhere in the entry door’s general direction.
For a fraction of a moment, it felt as if something tangible, yet untouchable passed through their cabin, swirling slightly, reddish in hue.
“...we’d have one less problem…” the secretary’s unnaturally dull voice brushed against Blueblood’s audial sense, before being drowned away by the thump and the blur.
The very next second, the mare was thrown hard against the refrigerator unit, nearly knocking out the ViP food stored in there. The Prince was launched upwards, yelping quietly, and landing halfways on the sofa, only hitting half of his limbs in the fall. The characteristic hum of the supposedly extremely reliable chargers filled the air.
Previously covered in the thick darkness of the late night, the windows now showed how a heavy volley of flame erupted from the sides of their vehicle, burning away some of the thick snow and ice, illuminating the high walls of the canyon-like valley. She was just about to decide whether to panic or not, but then, the cabin had begun to shake again. Only… differently.
Recovering from the packet of frozen up genuine article vegetarian cotton candy that hit her on the head, Raven only realized what had happened when muffled yells sounded out from the main cabin in the next section of the carrier. It now made sense how the shaking had stopped all of a sudden, a fact the mare blissfully accepted as the norm before then.
“Prince Blueblood, sir, we’re moving!” a thickly coated purple earth pony in a flappy-eared hat, bearing bushy mutton chops on his snout, bursted into their cabin to announce the news. “She’s going! Outta nowhere, up and went off! We’re home free, everyone!” He spun around in so saying, almost chasing his tail, talking both to the partly unconscious, weeping stallion, and to the dozen technicians that shared the journey, albeit located in a much less luxurious quarter. “Take that, you stupid frozen wasteland! Ungh!” For the last shout of victory, he turned to the side, facing the side of the ribcage-like valley wall, and made a vulgar sign towards the ancient formation.
Perhaps too excited to wait for the plainly staring unicorn to respond, the head of the engineering team left and shut the entrance to the ViP cabin. The machine now shook much more consistently, less grappling with its passengers in a fight to the death, more rocking them to sleep all too excitedly. The boney-looking walls now moved sideways, a welcome sight.
It was certainly looking up for their road of no less than one thousand miles to Equestria proper.
“Do you see? There’s never any need to lose hope like that. We’ll be home before long,” the mare assured the other unicorn in the room, still swiveling a bit after the experience. “It’s all… gonna be okay.” Her hoof rushed to cover her mouth as her chest grumbled, perturbed all too much by the odorous smell of the recently alcoholic Prince, the new, constant, more drilling shaking, and the peculiar, worrying residual presence in her horn and head. “Gonna be okay!” she squeaked out in a muffled, final morale reinstater, having secluded herself in the private restroom in the corner of the room.
Prince Blueblood merely scowled, dropping tear after tear on the ground, the bright red flash still alive in his barely seeing eyes. His mind was not exactly a picture of stability - indeed, it was a storming sea of this and that, but regardless, it definitely felt off to him that the news of their progress in not dying horribly... moved him rather little.
The rest of the Frozen North would await, primarily unmapped, rarely recorded in any books, normally ignored by the general populace - which included Blueblood, despite his denial - and cold. They got there in just about a week, and nobody they told so believed them. What fairytale boogie creatures reportedly inhabited the vast frozen area, they only saw faint shadows and suggestions of, plowing through the snow in the pinkish, rainbow-ish, larger than life, parade float-like digntary vehicle.
“Nothing I say — hic! — ever matters,” he stated to himself, exhaling a fume the smell of which would easily knock one of his proper stature out. “I’m…” the stallion raised his head, staring right at the empty observation hole in the metal door of the bright, colorful, apparently unstable snowplower. “I’m a paper prince.”
Something troubling moved in his thoughts as he said so... but it quickly turned out that raising his head in such condition was an abhorrent idea, and he fell back down onto the cushion, moaning loudly in pain, grasping for more bourbon.