//------------------------------// // 14: Point of No, Return // Story: Space Captain Pinkie Pie // by terrycloth //------------------------------// Twilight Sparkle gasped loudly as she surfaced from the warm, aromatic pool. Her hooves hooked over the edge, but instead of the wooden slats she expected, it was the same odd, smooth substance that the moon ponies used for their furniture. There was a splash and a giggle behind her, and she blinked her eyes open and looked back to see Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash having a splash fight. The room was dimly lit – there were plenty of lamps, but boxes made out of some sort of paper were stacked almost to the ceiling, leaving the pool in the middle in shadow. A narrow pathway through the boxes led to a doorway, beyond which was a sadly familiar corridor. “I don’t understand,” Twilight said. “We’re back on the Here to Help?” “It worked, you’re awake!” Pinkie Pie said, lunging through the water and wrapping Twilight up in her hooves. “And not stony at all! So was it the same as last time? Were you all cold and lonely and couldn’t see a word I was saying?” Twilight Sparkle frowned. “Was I asleep?” “You were a statue,” Rainbow Dash said. “Remember? From the poison joke that you were sure was perfectly safe?” Rainbow’s words sparked memories. They were not good memories. Being immersed in warm water, and Pinkie Pie’s embrace, helped keep them from bringing more than a momentary wince, at least. “Well, that’s kind of a relief, actually,” Twilight said. “I guess I must have been hallucinating the descent, and the audience with Celestia, and… everything else. In case you’re wondering, it didn’t go well.” “You were banished and imprisoned?” Rainbow Dash asked, smirking. “Worse,” Twilight said. “The moon ponies were turned to stone, and all their technology – well, what was left of it after I screwed up getting us down from the moon – was set on fire and buried. We got off scott free.” “Sounds like it’s a good thing we met you instead of Celestia,” said a brown and white unicorn, walking in from the hallway. “It worked? She’s completely de-stoned?” “I think so,” Twilight said. She climbed out of the bath and balanced precariously on the small patch of floor left between the water and the boxes, looking herself over. “I don’t see any stone, do you?” Pinkie Pie lifted up Twilight’s tail and checked underneath. “Nope!” she said, giggling as she dodged a hoof to the face. “Then I guess it’s my turn,” said the unicorn, but hesitated as her first hoof was about to touch the surface. After a second, she sat down at the edge of the shallow pool and stared into the murky water instead. “You don’t have to change back, Tess,” Pinkie Pie said, helping Twilight back into the water. “I’m sure Twilight would be happy to teach you magic! She even knows some time spells.” “I cast one time spell once,” Twilight said. “It’s not like I memorized a spell you can only use once.” She looked at Tess. “Can you actually cast spells? I wouldn’t expect poison joke to be able to grant magical ability, but it is chaos magic so I couldn’t say for sure. Heart’s Desire was able to give Applebloom a wide variety of talents during the Cutie Pox incident.” “It lights up, but nothing seems to happen,” Tess said. “That’s consistent with a unicorn just learning to use their horn, actually,” Twilight responded. “Would you mind remaining a unicorn for a while longer? It’d be a fascinating experiment to see what kind of magic, if any, you’d be able to use.” Tess stared at the water, and shuddered. She stood up and took a step back. “It’s not going to become permanent if I leave it on, is it?” she asked. “Nooo, no no no!” Twilight said. “Probably not. I’m sure we would have heard about it if poison joke was permanent. If nothing else we can get more of the cure once we get back down to Ponyville.“ “We’re good on cure,” Rainbow said. “Ditzy and Derpy didn’t trust the poison joke either, and squirreled away like a dozen doses.” “Then I guess I’m okay with putting off having my body torn apart cell by cell and reassembled,” Tess said, scampering back farther from the pool. “Anything in the name of science, or whatever passes for science to magical purple unicorns.” Twilight frowned, then forced her face back into a friendly expression. “You’re right, this really can’t be a proper experiment without the ability to reproduce your situation on demand. Still, I think it’ll be an interesting longitudinal study, as well as a sorely needed data point about the effects and limitations of poison joke.” “And a sorely needed FUN point for the grumpiest moon pony,” Pinkie Pie added. “Fun. Right.” Tess didn’t look convinced. “So… what was this I heard about Celestia turning us to stone?” she asked. “The princess wouldn’t do that,” Rainbow Dash said. “You guys are cool. She only stones bad guys.” “She hasn’t stoned any pony in more than a thousand years!” Twilight added. “And it’s been thousands of seconds since she had us turn someone to stone for her,” Pinkie Pie added, a bit less helpfully. “And what would you do, if she asked you to imprison us?” Chance asked, lounging against the door frame. Tess whirled and slammed her posterior into a stack of boxes, which wobbled a bit but didn’t quite topple. “Hi, Tess. You’re looking a bit less bipedal than I expected. Cold hooves?” “Yeah,” Tess said. “The idea freaks me out more than staying the wrong shape at this point.” “Aww,” Pinkie Pie said, pouting. “You’re not gonna use the excuse Twilight gave you?” “It wouldn’t fool him, and he’d enjoy it too much if I tried,” Tess said. “Do I need to get the knockout gas?” Chance asked. Tess laughed. “Ask me again in a week? If it hasn’t worn off on its own.” “I thought you’d be frantic to get your implants back,” Chance said. “I know I’d be crawling out of my skin if I suddenly had to rely on my brains for math and memory. Not to mention hormone regulation. You’re always riding my tail about it, and now you’re walking around without any controls at all?” “And somehow, I’m still not even remotely attracted to you,” Tess said. “Twilight, do you think we could get started on the magic lessons? I want to do something that’s not anywhere near that… bath.” “Um…” Twilight said, “actually… the water is nice and warm, and I just spent a few hours or possibly months as a statue,” Twilight said, sinking lower into the water. “I don’t suppose you ever spied on a book of kindergarten-level unicorn magic? You could practice some of the exercises.” “You know,” Rainbow Dash said, splashing lightly at the not-quite-transparent water, “between the herbs and spices and a couple days’ worth of pony juice we built up flying up here, it’s not really water anymore. It’s more like Zecora’s special pony stew.” She fluttered up out of the aromatic pool, and shivered her wings to shed most of the water on them. Pinkie Pie started humming her ‘evil enchantress’ song. “Don’t care,” Twilight said, letting her eyes close. “It’s warm and it smells good.” “I think I’m going to go check on Derpy,” Rainbow said. “If Tess and Chance are both here and she’s not, then I figure we’ve got fifteen minutes tops before something explodes.” She swooped past Tess and Chance, and headed down the hallway calling Derpy’s name. “Rainbow!” Tess called, running after her, “I left her hooked up to the virtual reality rig – she’ll be fine!” Chance let the door slide closed behind him as he headed over to the bath, giving it a sniff. “That does smell nice,” he said. “Mind if I join you girls?” “Not at all!” Twilight said. Pinkie Pie giggled. “The more the hairier!” Chance stripped out of his jumpsuit, and slid into the water with a sigh. “Oh, I’ve missed this,” he said. “We should have cleared out the boxes years ago, but you know how it is. It takes an emergency to get you to actually get off your butt and do something.” “What’s in all the boxes?” Pinkie Pie asked. “Just some random cargo,” Chance said. “Salvage. Scrap. Junk.” He pointed to a random box. “That one has fifty seven yards of thermal piping. We stripped it out of an abandoned sulfur mine.” “Ew,” Twilight said, opening her eyes and looking at the box suspiciously. “Why would you mine sulfur?” “I did say it was abandoned,” Chance said, with a chuckle. He ducked under the water, and swam across the pool, bursting up out of the water between Twilight and Pinkie Pie and pulling them into a giggly, squirmy group hug. “Oh, it’s so nice to have friends here!” he said, “We are friends, right?” “Of course!” Pinkie said, giving him a nuzzle. “I’d like to be friends,” Twilight said, relaxing in the water next to the moon pony so that he could brush her mane with his claws again. “But I barely know you.” Chance nodded as he stroked the ponies flanking him. “Well, I hope we can get to know each other. It’s weird – I feel like I already know you from reading all the stories about you from our, uh, language files, but that’s just some image of you I’ve built up in my head. I’d like to get to know the real you.” “This isn’t going to turn into some creepy moon pony technological horror story, is it?” Twilight asked. “You’re not going to implant monitoring devices in my brain?” “What I meant was, you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you want,” Chance said. “That’s all. Consider myself, this ship, and everything on it completely at your disposal.” “Yay! Cakes for everypony!” Pinkie Pie said, splashing water up in the air. “Everything on the ship?” Twilight asked, her eyes lighting up. Chance nodded, lifting her chin to meet her gaze with his own. “Everything,” he whispered. “Do you have a library?” Twilight asked, rubbing her hooves together. Chance laughed, and nodded. “Oooh, I can’t wait! All the secrets of the moon ponies!” Pinkie Pie glommed onto Chance’s back, and nuzzled his cheek from behind. “You’re the best moon pony ever, Chance!” she said. “If the princess tells us to turn you to stone, we’ll totally argue with her for at least five minutes!” “And if she banishes you from Equestria, we’ll write you letters once a week,” Twilight said. Pinkie Pie grinned. “And if she locks you up in prison, we’ll take really good care of your ship until you’ve served your time!” Chance smirked. “And what if she gobbles me up?” “Then I’d probably suffer a total mental breakdown,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Because that would just be weird,” Pinkie Pie added. “I mean, you’re almost as big as her. How would she gobble you up?” === “We had a library,” Chance said, staring at the screen in the conference room. “Didn’t the wall used to have a lot more… stuff?” Twilight asked. The screen was nearly blank, with only the magic mirror showing the crash site – with reams of gibberish scrolling up the side where Chance and Tess’ radio communication used to be – and the slightly undulating background pattern showing that it was still working. Tess and Derpy were already in the room, Tess poking at the screen to no effect while Derpy sat on the table, every part of her drooping as much as a pegasus could. “I’m sorry!” Derpy said, miserably turning her head just enough to see Twilight and Chance. “I don’t know what went wrong!” “I don’t know how she managed to completely wreck the system from inside a virtual reality sandbox, but -- ponyfeathers!” Tess said, staring at the screen. “I can’t get it to respond at all.” “My direct interface is telling me that the system still exists, but every command I try just reports an error,” Chance said. “Should we try to restart?” Tess scowled. “I don’t know. That’s the first thing I’d try if we were running on the main system, but this was just something I threw together out of the pieces that still worked after everything was trashed. At the very least we’d have to shut down all the core systems – put the reactor on autonomous mode…“ Tess’ horn suddenly lit up. “I have a really bad feeling about this,” she said, eyes rolling up to try to see the glow as she felt it tingle. “It’s not all broken,” Derpy said, reaching towards the one remaining window. “This one’s still working.” She touched the crash site mirror, and the image froze with a loud ‘Ping!’. After a few seconds it disappeared. Tess turned to Derpy in alarm. “Stop! Don’t touch anything!” she said. Derpy, startled, fell off the table and faceplanted into the screen. All the lights went out, and the constant rumbling and hissing that every pony on board had learned to tune out suddenly made itself notable by its absence – all was silent, except for the rustling of Derpy’s wings as she meandered around, trying to find somewhere to land that didn’t involve crashing into other ponies. “Oh, buck me,” Tess said quietly. Twilight cast a floating light so that they could at least see each other. “What just happened?” she asked. “Tess. Reactor. Now,” Chance said, turning and running out of the room. “Buck buck buck buck,” Tess said over and over as she followed the moon pony out of the room and down the hall, adding, “Don’t touch anything else!” as she left. Derpy hovered in the middle of the room, glancing nervously at the walls and ceiling and the table beneath her. She wobbled back and forth as she tried too hard not to accidentally touch them. “Touching the table is probably okay,” Twilight said. Derpy landed heavily on the table. Two of the legs snapped off, sending her tumbling into Twilight and getting them both stuck in the doorway, which tried to close on them. Twilight’s magic forced the door back into its recessed slot, and dragged Derpy out into the hallway. “Okay, that one was my fault,” she said, as they collapsed on the floor. === Later, every pony met in the kitchen. Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash were hiding inside a massive cake fort they’d built on the table before the power outage, Derpy was underneath the table, trussed up with tape like a turkey so that she couldn’t touch anything, and the other three were sitting in the uncomfortable chairs. “The good news is, we’re not going to die,” Chance said. “Right away,” Tess added. “We have air, and water, and – well, cake,” Chance continued, ignoring her. “In an emergency we can eat the food packets raw.” “The bad news is that we couldn’t restart the reactor,” Tess said, “so once our energy storage cells run out this ship turns into a tomb.” “On the good side, the reactor isn’t damaged,” Chance said. “We might be able to get it running again.” “We tried everything,” Tess said, “and drained half our storage cells in the process. We couldn’t make a large enough ‘spark’ to get the fusion reaction going.” “Do you want me to try?” Twilight offered. “No!” Tess said, looking horrified. Chance shook his head. “Only as a last resort. I was actually remembering something you said, Twilight, about getting the ship down to the surface?” “Right,” Twilight said. “In my dream, while I was stone, I thought I knew how to get the ship down safely, but it didn’t work. I did manage to teleport every pony off before the crash, at least.” Chance smiled. “Why don’t you explain the idea that didn’t work, and we’ll see if we can fix it?” “Of course!” Twilight said. ”First, we slide the ship off the moon. The moon’s much too small to have its own gravity, so the ship is only stable resting here because you landed on the very top of the moon. We wouldn’t have to move it far before gravity would take over.” “Move it how?” Rainbow Dash asked. “I hope you don’t think Derpy and I can lift it – this thing’s huge.” “Well, um, it’s a ship, right? It has engines or something? Maybe a balloon to deploy?” Twilight suggested. “In the dream it was really a rocket-ship and we just turned on the rocket for a few seconds.” “We have rockets,” Tess said. “I could probably get them to fire even without main power, assuming Derpy didn’t delete the controls.” Derpy struggled to apologize from under the table, but her gag held. “The moon’s full of mountain ranges, though. You know what would be really neat? If we had some sort of big screen on the wall there, where we could bring up a map of the moon and plot a course,” Tess said, glowering at the gray pegasus. “I’ve got a map on my implants,” Chance said, closing his eyes. “South. If we head south there’s no major barriers.” Tess nodded. “Of course, once we slid off the edge, we’d be tumbling end over end like a flipped coin, and every pony inside the ship would be smashed against the walls over and over until we broke our necks.” “Maybe we could spin it like a Frisbee?” Pinkie Pie suggested. “Or use a ramp,” Rainbow Dash said. “If we built a giant ramp at the edge of the moon, we could launch off sideways and keep the ship upright. And if we aimed slightly wrong so that we hit the edge of the ramp, we could even fly off sideways, spinning.” As every pony stared at her, she crouched down behind the cake battlements. “What? I use ramps all the time for my tricks. Normally I’m trying to stop them from sending me spinning when I go off the edge, but – I’m not an egghead!” She sulked a bit as Pinkie Pie patted her head. “The ‘build a giant ramp’ step doesn’t seem especially plausible,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Maybe if I could get out onto the surface I could use my magic…” “Well…” Chance said, “we do have the mining coherent light projectors – wow, that’s awkward. Mining rays?” Chance listened to what he’d just said and nodded. “Mining rays.” He walked over to the refrigerator and opened it. “They’re fully charged, so we might be able to carve a ramp, especially if we aimed for an existing mountain range and just smoothed it out a bit. There’s one to the east, but we’d have to carve a tunnel through some hills.” “Those are mining rays?” Rainbow Dash asked, looking at the scary black devices stacked inside the fridge. “Of course. What did you think they were?” Tess asked, defensively. “Ray guns?” Pinkie Pie suggested. “Pew pew?” “Don’t be silly,” Chance said. “It’d be highly illegal for a civilian ship like ours to have lethal weapons on board.” “And the little mouth-held ones that look exactly like ray-guns?” Rainbow Dash asked. Pinkie Pie giggled. “They’re for making ITTY BITTY mines!” “Or welding,” Chance said. “Why are they in the fridge?” Twilight asked. Tess shrugged. “We need to keep them close to the crew quarters, in case we need to do some… emergency mining.” “And the fridge has extra heavy insulation to keep them from being damaged by cosmic radiation or inspectors scanning for concentrated energy storage,” Chance added, with a smirk. “Uh huh,” Rainbow Dash said. “Anyway, we’ve got at least three ponies that can go outside. Tess, if you change back we’ll have four –“ “We’ve only got three mining co – mining rays, unless you want to go back into the temple and see if you can find Wolf’s,” Tess said. “Do we really want Derpy to have a mining ray?” Twilight asked. “I’m guessing that it isn’t safe to point at ponies or ships.” Derpy whimpered. “Fine,” Tess said. “I’ll change back.” She shuddered. “Chance? I think I’ll need that knockout gas.” “Hold up,” Chance said. “So far, we’ve got the ship off the moon, spinning and upright, but falling to the planet below at terminal velocity. What’s the next step?” Twilight nodded. “I cast the cloudwalking spell on the ship, and we aim for a really thick cloud. In my dream we aimed for a normal cloud, and the ship burst right through it and crashed. So, thick cloud is important.” “A thunderstorm,” Rainbow Dash said. “We stack those up ridiculously high.” “And when the spell wears off?” Tess asked. “The spell lasts for days,” Twilight said. “I’m sure we’ll be able to gather together enough pegasi to bring the ship down safely before then. Or if not, I can keep recasting it until we figure something out. It’s a pretty easy spell and yes,” she added, “it’s actually meant to be cast on building-sized objects.” “Yeah, most of the heavy equipment in the weather factory is permanently enchanted with it,” Rainbow Dash said. “Still, Twilight, you’d better make sure you can actually cast the thing before we send the ship careening to its doom.” “I’ll practice while you’re working on the ramp,” Twilight responded. “So how do we find a thunderstorm?” Pinkie Pie asked. “Oh! We could send Derpy and Dashie down to make a thunderstorm?” “It’s usually a twenty-mare job,” Rainbow Dash said. “We could send Derpy and Dashie down to set up a weather party!” Pinkie Pie said gleefully. “Yeah, I could rally the weather squad, that could work,” Rainbow said. “Lots of paperwork afterwards, but that’s why I have Raindrops.” “Then I think we have a plan,” Chance said. “Only one more thing to worry about – the princesses.” “If we’re sending Rainbow ahead, she can tell them we’re coming,” Pinkie Pie said. “We can invite them to the weather party! Then it’s sure to go off without a hitch.” “And if they say ‘no, don’t drop a giant metal Frisbee on our heads’?” Tess asked. “Then we probably get in a lot of trouble, because it’s going to be too late to abort,” Twilight said. “The pegasi can fly down to the planet easily enough, but flying back up would take days – we can’t really send messages back and forth, especially with your windows all broken. I’m guessing no more spying on Equestria until you get that fixed.” “We could interface with the probes directly,” Tess said. “It’s not safe to get that close to the edge, though, and it’s a long walk.” “The moon is tiny, I could fly to the edge and back in ten seconds flat,” Rainbow Dash said. “Except that you won’t be here,” Twilight noted. Rainbow blinked. “Oh, right.” “So, what?” Chance asked. “We just go ahead, with no signal, assuming Rainbow Dash will get the clouds ready for us?” “Plan B, I fire the retro-rockets and try to soften the crash,” Tess said. “They’re not meant for a planetary landing, but if there were any clouds and it slowed us down a little, maybe something would be salvageable.” “And I’ll teleport us to the surface, so there’s no risk of any pony being hurt, as long as we aim for an uninhabited area, like the mountains west of Canterlot,” Twilight added. “We’re risking the ship, but I should be able to keep every pony alive.” “You’re not risking anything,” Rainbow Dash said. “I never leave my friends hanging.”