//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 // Story: Borderlands 2: Starlight DLC Pack // by the-pieman //------------------------------// A large, rather rotund man sits down next to a child’s bed, makeshift and lit by a fire set outside the window. He sighs, looking down at the child, who still isn’t asleep after four games and a dozen sets of Downloadable Content worth of story time. “Up for more eh? Don’t you get tired of these stories? Well fine, I already told one, I’ll tell a new one... with some very different sorts of Vault Hunters. At least, they think they’re Vault Hunters. We start, actually, at the beginning of one of my other stories; you remember how I told you of the time Handsome Jack took over the entire planet of Pandora? Well, while six crazy Vault Hunters were just getting their feet under them, someone else I gave the great honor of calling my friend was on another world entirely, and had just found a very interesting object...” ----- (/\) ----- Anthony lounged in the main room of the Golden Oaks library, not sure of what to do, now that he was back from Wunderland. He just wasn’t sure how to take in what he’d seen. He’s roused from his musings by a small, but still loud ‘boom!’ from outside town. Curiosity, if nothing else, draws his attention. “Again!? Don’t I get a break?” Anthony sighs as he gets up, setting his book down. “It wasn’t me this time!” Pinkie yells, popping out from behind one of the couch cushions and looking a touch panicked. “Or me, I have an alibi!” Dash yells from a cloud just outside the window. Anthony sighs. “Your ‘alibi’ is that you were sleeping.” “Yep, and it’s as sturdy as a tectorantula!” Dash says, smiling wide at her infallible logic. Rolling his eyes, the human stands and makes for the door, figuring he might as well head off the issue before it becomes too bad, and Pinkie follows him, if only so he doesn’t find out she was a second away from glitter-bombing him moments ago. Anthony just runs along, heading towards the explosion noise, realising how counter-productive it usually is. “So what do you think it is this time?” Rainbow Dash, flapping along, still lazily laying on her cloud, shrugs. “Idunno. Doesn’t sound loud enough for a monster, and there’s no screaming or fires. And Twilight was headed in that direction, but there’s no snakes in that field, so I don’t think it’s her.” “Oh, oh oh! Maybe it’s aliens!” Pinkie suggests, smiling at her... amazing detective skills. Anthony stops in his tracks mid-jog and looks at Pinkie. “Why would aliens come to Terra of all places?” The mare shrugs, still pronking along, “Well, you asked what we thought it was, and I guessed aliens.” Anthony concedes the point. “Ooh, are we taking bets? ‘Cuz I totally bet that Pinkie’s right.” Rainbow Dash says, grinning. Of course, she can see that there’s a crater and something in it in the field they’re heading towards, so she has a bit of an unfair advantage. “We are not taking bets.” Twilight says as they approach the crater, having heard RD’s comment. “We’re going to study it. And don’t be silly, aliens don’t exist.” Pinkie, pronking ahead of the others, hops straight down into the crater and slides to the bottom, the almost spherically-shaped hole warm but not hot under her hooves. Looking over the object and ignoring Twilight’s calls of unsurety and Anthony’s calls of distress, neither of the two more scientifically-minded beings wanting to go near the grey, glowing stone. Thin, glowing lines of purple light cover the almost conical stone, the rest of it looking much like concrete or granite in appearance, though not quite like either. As Pinkie inspects it, a violet aura wraps around it, and Pinkie too, as Twilight gingerly lifts the both of them. “Pinkie, weren’t you listening to anything I said?” “Well, kinda, but I was mostly looking at this! It doesn’t look like any rock I know, and my sister is Maud about rocks!” She waits for giggles, before remembering that nobody in the group has met her sister yet. Antony looks at it. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s really familiar...” He takes it from Twilight’s grasp and looks at it in the light. “Okay, I definitely know this thing, but I can’t get a name... like a memory I haven’t recalled for years.” “Is it something from Earth?” Twilight asks. “You have been away from home for quite a while.” “No, no, it’s...” he sighs and hands it back to Twilight, facepalming. “It’s alien.” “How do you know it’s not just ancient?” Twilight asks. “In fact, it seems to be magical. I think... There’s an energy input node, I can feel it... right... here...” she looks at the flat end of the cone, and looking at it, it looks a bit like an electrical socket. Anthony feels a lightbulb go off in his head at the same time Twilight does, and they both attempt to power it with their own forms of energy at the same time, magic and cosmic energy suddenly flowing through circuits that were made to handle both. Like an eye opening, the ‘socket’ of the device suddenly turns to a bright, luminescent purple, and a beam of light shoots from it to just behind Anthony, forming a disc of purple and black energy right between him, Pinkie, and Rainbow Dash, pulling them into the portal, which promptly vanishes, taking a chunk of the turf below them with it. The gray and purple artifact falls from the numb grip of Twilight, who stands there, shocked and confused. Only one thought goes through her mind: ‘Did I just vaporize my friends?!’