*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*...Octavia...*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*
My body felt a bit uneasy when I pushed off of Vinyl, wobbling back and forth oddly similar to how she had been doing prior, before finally steadying out and looking over to the four figures crowded near the door. I must've looked unamused to them, because they all - save for the silvery one - changed their gaze to a more irritated one. Though the shift was small, it was noticeable, but I took no offense to their looks, because I certainly felt unamused.
My eyes wandered lazily over to the form of the grey, ashy mare who had been standing beside Shakes and Sweeps. Her name finally came to me -- General Flint, or more so just "Flint" if I recalled correctly.
She silently crept over to the crowd, situating herself right beside Stone. Her gaze was a bit different than theirs though, a bit more interested - as well as objective.
The first to break the silence, I hadn't noticed, was the mammoth of a pony she was standing beside of, Stone.
"Something's different 'bout her this time round." He mumbled under his breath, his eyes hardening as he looked at me with a bit more effort and judgement. His voice made it clear that he wanted what he was saying to be between just him and the others crowded near the door, but it came all too easily into my ears for me to ignore.
We finally made eye contact and his eyes narrowed even further before finally coming to a rest as he seemed to reach his conclusion.
"Got somethin' in those eyes that I never seen 'fore." He continued. "Least not in her anyways." He huffed, eyes wandering to Vinyl.
"She took out Whitey all by herself. Didn't look like Whitey was holding back much either..." Flint added, getting a glance out of the corner of Stone's eye, but nothing more.
I suppose Vinyl had had an impact on him as well? She seemed to do that with most people she met, even if she didn't mean to.
But on that note, I have to disagree with Flint. Even in the most painful blow Vinyl had dealt to me - the one where she shoved her hooves into my ribs - felt restrained in some way. It most definitely hurt, but for some reason there was the faint impression that it could have been much worse.
I'd also considered what Vinyl's mother had said about Vinyl's diet affecting her strength; and that this may be the one time that I say starvation did something good.
"I don't suppose you're here to try and take her away from me, are you?" I asked genuinely, though it ended up coming off as a bit rhetorical.
In hindsight, the question was just downright stupid. I mean, what other reason be here for? To throw me a party? Though, I suppose asking wasn't going to do anything inherently harmful.
"I suppose you plan on takin' her?" Stone asked, craggy brow raised.
"Yes. I do." I responded.
Stone let out a big sigh, his eyes closing before he stiffened up and craned his neck to both sides, a sickening crack coming out with each whip. Under the sounds that I never thought could come from someone's necks unless it was breaking, I heard the subtle mumbles of his deep and rich voice. Something about having swore to himself that he wouldn't wake up today for something silly.
Flint started looking a bit worried when Stone started stretching out his body before taking up what loosely resembled an offensive posture. Truth be told, he didn't really move much from before he had "gotten ready", but Maple and the stallion with a lab coat on seemed to get the same unspoken message and took a few steps back.
The only one who didn't move was the Silver one, who remained motionless and stone faced as she seemed to stare past me.
"As a forewarning, I'll say this twice to ya, Miss Melody. I'll never hit a mare." A low grumble said, coming from the hunched form of Stone. He seemed to understand that I could hear him, even it was a mumble, from this far away.
His shaggy black mane came down just over the tips of his eyes and left them shaded black, making his bristled coat and hulking form all the more menacing than it already was. His muscles strained hard, bulging out and becoming as chiseled as, well, stone.
'I wonder if his name being a pun was intended? Or perhaps he got his name from his muscles? But then how long has he been this muscular for?' I thought to myself.
My thoughts were instantly interrupted by the sound of something crunching, and looking up showed me a rather impressive sight of what had caused said crunching sounds.
Stone had moved slightly, but the cracks running from under his hooves were the more noticeable sight. He bent his front hooves slightly before pushing himself up onto his hind legs, his weight causing him to teeter at the peak of his height - leaving him roughly three times taller than I was standing - before he came back down.
He built speed fast, crashing into the ground with enough force to cause even more cracks to spread across the ground, the fear of the ground breaking apart becoming an actual concern.
Well, it was an actual concern because it had actually happened.
His hooves had hit the ground hard enough to finish the job the first set of cracks had started, chiseling out a chunk of the floor that was in the shape of an arrowhead; only much, much larger. As if it were on hinges, it sort of swiveled up from the ground and served as a huge shield that managed to hide even Stone's huge form behind it, if that served as any sort of comparison.
I was both impressed and confused by the feat; impressed by the fact he had done it so easily, but confused at why exactly he did do it in the first place. I tried to link it to his statement about not hitting mares, but couldn't really relate the two.
Until the wall of stone he had erected began to move.
Quickly.
Towards me.
I was almost hit by the moving wall, stunned by the fact it had began to move at me like a train at full speed, but reflexes eventually took over and sent me rolling to the side, quickly regaining my balance this time in a more prepared stance.
I glanced up to see Stone's hind hooves still in the air from where he must've kicked the chunk of stone at me.
I was too absorbed in admiring the feat, that I almost failed notice the fact that everything was slowly turning a light orange hue. Not only that, but the fact that things were beginning to get very hot.
Fortunately, I tripped over my own hooves and ended up sprawled back on the ground as the heat began approaching and becoming unbearable to the point where I felt my mane actually begin to singe.
Then it stopped.
I opened my eyes, padding around my body to find that I was still alive - hot to the touch, but alive.
When things began to look clear again, I noticed things were already moving slowly. Though it was blurry, there was an oddly orange light coming from the place where what must've been a fireball had come from that drew my attention.
It eventually came through, and I noticed it was Flint who had shot the fire ball.
'Then again, who else would have shot something like that.' I thought to myself, watching her as her head began to sink down towards the ground.
I raised an eyebrow when it got low enough to the point where her horn touched the ground.
I heard the shouts of Shakes suddenly, causing me to turn to her to see her with a look of panic on her face as she struggled to start moving towards me. I could only tilt my head at her, partly because I didn't know why she was so worried, and the other part was because her words came out distortedly slow.
Though I managed to make out one of the words she was saying.
"Below."
A bubbling sound caught my attention, and I looked down to see the ground beneath me turning molten as I finally made the connection between what Flint was doing.
I stepped backwards, watching a geyser of fire and liquid rock shoot up from the ground that made an actually quaint compliment with the white background of the room around it. It reminded me a bit of the modern art paintings you might see, starkly contrasting colors - that being said I always thought they were a bit of an excuse for big money for little effort.
Then again, there never was a hoof reaching through the modern art at those galleries mother would drag me to.
'Hoof?' I thought.
A hoof flowed through the molten rock as if it were mere water, the lava parting around it like it was a rock in a river as it kept stretching through and closing in with what I had to assume was my neck.
Then I saw who the hoof was attached to.
Stone's face was both a dark and calm angry, yet somehow didn't seem angered in the least. A better word would be determination, but that seemed to be an understatement. His mouth was dipped down at the ends in a small frown, his hair still covering up his eyes so that you couldn't quite see them.
Despite being fully capable of moving, I found that I simply couldn't.
"I told you, Miss Melody, I won't hit a mare." He groveled lowly, his torso finally beginning to make its way through the miniature volcano below him.
"But consider this the end of your warning, lest ya' get hurt next time." He said forebodingly.
Perhaps what he meant was the he'd give mare's two warning before actually attempting? It was honestly frustratingly vague.
His hoof was closing the distance between it and my neck when an arrow flew into view suddenly.
Despite being sharpened to the point of being a makeshift surgeon's scalpel, the arrow bent and harmlessly bounced off of Stone's hoof and into the fire behind it where it immediately disintegrated. Though it may not've pierced Stone's skin, it did have enough force behind it to knock his hoof off to the side past my face.
I took advantage of that, and quickly scooted my way back from the, now dwindling, geyser of flame.
I looked off to the side to see Shakes giving me a little salute, accompanied with a sheepish looking smile and a blush now that she realized that I realized it was her.
'What an odd reaction.' I thought, cocking a mental brow at her.
A smile crept across my face as I realized just how lucky I was to have friends such as these. Although Shakes went through that whole "knock me unconscious and steal my mare" phase, she seemed to be out of it now.
I couldn't forget how I met them either, that one fateful night at the bar where I almost fell victim to Bigs' thirst until Vinyl just happened by to take out the trash and scare him off. Not to mention the rocky and vast road that simply knowing and interacting with Vinyl has taken me down.
I'd considered myself a fair and level headed person, until I put myself near Vinyl by comparison and found that I was still a bit snobbish on some issues. But she also gave the impression that that was okay.
A hoof lightly slapping my face brought me back to the matter at hoof.
"Stop doing that." A voice said.
I looked to see that Shakes had somehow made her way over to me and was now staring at me with both her hooves pressing my cheeks together like that you might imagine a grandma would.
"W-What?" I said, voice distorted by how she was squishing my face.
"Doing that thing were just kind of stop moving for a few seconds. Your eyes get all foggy. It's weird." She said, letting go of my cheeks and turning back to Stone just as the geyser below him let out a pitiful last bubble before being completely worn.
The sound of someone collapsing behind him became known.
He stood tall and dark, hardly a scratch around his underbelly and torso where he had reach through the fire after me.
"Well, I guess he's a little tough." Shakes complained, loading another arrow.
A shift of air came from behind me, causing me to turn and my eyes to widen.
The silver mare had somehow made her way around me and Shakes without making herself visible or even heard to either me or Shakes, which seemed impossible in theory, yet there she was.
She was looming over Vinyl, who was still curled up on the ground from where I had straddled her, with a look eerily devoid of emotion. and eyes that could almost be considered wide, but not quite. In fact, I think the fact she didn't have any kind of emotion on her face made her intents even more fearful.
I immediately started moving towards her, my pace more of a brisk trot than a flat out run, but when I got within a couple meters from her, she turned halfway towards me with her eyes now half lidded. They still lacked emotion, but seemed more piercing now.
I felt myself freeze at that gaze.
The white of the room seemed to fade into blackness as we locked gazes, the only color being her as she looked back into me. I was filled with more messages than I could process into a single statement, though I could definitely say most of them were warnings.
We must've stood there for seconds on end, but it felt like hours. I wasn't sure if it were my own eyes slowing things down that made this staring contest seem so long, or if was just the effect of her eyes.
Only when something else began to emerge from the make believe shadows did she move.
A limp hanging white head with a hoof raised.
It seemed like Vinyl to do something such as this, to get up and loom behind her before hitting her, but something about this didn't seem right. And it soon became evident why, as Vinyl was still laying down on the ground.
The hoof swung down fiercely, which made it surprising that the silver mare managed to dodge it.
On her way back from the dodge, she sprung her hooves out and quickly grabbed hold of Vinyl by the torso and began to lift her up.
I felt myself tense up and began to move towards Vinyl and the silver mare just as the white figure opened their eyes. They were blue enough to cool the room by a few degrees just by letting them be seen.
She lit a familiar red horn that let out a swell of magic in the shape of a red ball above her head before she swept her hoof up into the magic, reaching in and literally pulling some of the magic out and throwing it as if it were a liquid towards the silver mare.
I had always figured magic to be an untouchable thing.
Apparently I was wrong.
As the mare, who I assumed was one of the generals, moved out of the way of the liquid magic, I took it as an opportunity to close the distance between us; hoof prepped to head towards her lower back - the only thing facing me since she had backstepped - in an attempt to make her let go of Vinyl.
I, no we, had gotten this far. To lose now would be an impossibility.
She never turned around, and just as my hoof closed the gap to her back, her own hoof shot around and pushed mine out of the way. It ended up sending me into Vinyl, which I guess achieved the same results as trying to punch the silver mare and freeing Vinyl.
Fumbling for a second, I managed to straighten up and lock eyes with Vinyl, finding that they had an almost glazed look to them. She seemed so docile for some reason, it was almost worrying. She wasn't even being feral like before - which I would prefer to this version that just let herself almost get captured without any resistance.
She was just letting this all happen as if she were powerless to stop or influence the outcome. Why won't she fight back? Even if she couldn't, just small resistance could help out.
Why was she being so like me now that I was doing something? Was dead weight a prerequisite I hadn't heard about?
"Vinyl?" I found myself shouting, not actually having planned to do so.
The only response I got was the glowing of the runes from the ring on her horn and the same empty stare from her.
It seemed as if that "something else" in the back of my conscious was trying to take over again. Telling me to make Vinyl help, to force her to do something. I had managed to partially get ahold of myself after stumbling up from the debris earlier, but this urge was coming back with a vengeance.
This frustration of denying these inescapable voices turned into a motion of anger, and it apparently had reflected itself in the form of my hoof cracking the ground as it landed. After my hoof hit came an odd case of heavy panting, not because I was tired in the slightest, but for some other reason. I felt sweat beginning to bead up as I continued to pant, heat welling up inside of me as well.
I considered that I might've gotten sick or something, but it seemed unlikely.
I managed to turn enough to see the silver mare effortlessly dodge bolt of both metal and magic from Shakes and Sweeps, seeming to know where they were going to hit before they were even shot.
I had seen plenty of things of the supernatural, such as a mammoth of a stallion walking through liquid flame as if it were a mere hot shower, but something about this was different.
Her eyes didn't even seem to be looking at the bolts when they flew at her, and when she did look at them it was only to confirm they had missed her.
Shakes had said each of the generals filled a niche that the other one lacked, but I was failing to see what this one's weakness was. Stone's was a mix of his conviction and speed, Flint's was her pride, the doctor one - who I assumed was the other general - must have been his weakness physically.
But this Silver mare was both capable physically - from her ability to pick up and navigate Vinyl's body so easily - and mentally from how she was able to predict movement.
What could her weakness be?
A hoof firmly stomping snapped me from thought.
I turned around to see Vinyl's mother standing again. She didn't seem to have fully recovered, but the snarl on her face was more than enough to tell me that that wasn't a concern to her right now.
I looked to see the Silver mare joining beside Stone in staring at us, her face back to being flat and void of emotion. She was obviously going to be an issue if we wanted to get out of here, but as far as I was concerned, we had Vinyl and that was all that mattered.
We also, at least I thought, seemed to have some hope that Vinyl would stop acting so docile and start fighting back.
I could always blame myself for that, she only stopped fighting back after I pinned her and flipped the tables on her in terms of who was on top.
Still, this wasn't the time for that.
"What happened to Whitey?" Flint asked nervously, prancing up and straining her neck around Stone and towards Vinyl.
"She seems to be in either shock, or just chooses not to fight back. As for which is the answer, I've no clue." The lab coated stallion chimed, stepping forwards and finally completing the line of Generals.
A flurry of hooves entered through the door behind them, what looked like dozens of hunters flooding into the room, parting to go around the generals, before settling in front of them.
"Shit, I almost forgot that these guys had an army." Shakes cursed from beside me.
I noticed that the first line of these hunters were all unicorns with their horns lit and apparently charging.
"Miss Scratch?" I asked, getting up and off of Vinyl and standing with her. "I'm not magically inclined, but I do believe I can feel something from over there."
"Yes dear, that would be the massive magical bomb they're preparing to use." She said, almost casually.
"The what?!" Both me and the sisters screeched.
"Yes, I do suppose there was a better way I could've conveyed that, but there isn't much we can do as of now other than brace." She said, staring dimly at the line of unicorns.
"Teleporting is always an option, but I fear I couldn't get us all out of here. And from the looks of your sister, she couldn't either." She said, making note of how rough a shape that Sweeps was in.
I scrunched my nose and thought hard, coming to no other options either. Teleporting only a few of us would split us for that old saying of "divide and conquer", so I guess the only option really was to brace for it.
The low whining, sounding oddly like a long note from a double bass, made itself known while a wavering ball of no particular color began to expand from in front of the line of unicorns. The ball was massive, spanning maybe fifty feet high and an equal distance in length; just the look of it practically screamed unstable and destructive.
"Look at it this way though." Vinyl's mother chimed in.
"With the power behind it, there isn't a way to avoid hurting themselves in the progress." She said, turning to me with a suspicious smile.
"We've just got to survive it, and they'll probably defeat themselves. Save for those four from prior, they'll most likely live through it." She said, giggling at a time like this.
I didn't have time to turn when the low note from the ball stopped and a sudden force hit me.
It reminded me of going to the beach with mother and father, playing in the ocean until a large wave would hit you like a force you'd never felt before. Sweeping you to the bottom of the seafloor and leaving you powerless to stop it, only this time there was no water to slow movement, and I was sent hurdling towards a solid stone wall instead of sand.
*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*
When my eyes opened up again, the entire room we had been in was now filled with what looked to be dirt mixed with dust. Not only that, but through this grit I could make out the faint outlines of massive chunks of rubble that had been torn from all parts of the room. Chunks of rock had been ripped from the ground, walls and even ceiling.
The moving of rubble caught my attention, and I turned just in time to see Shakes pop out of a small cluster of rocks and gasp for air before coughing harshly.
"Shakes?" I asked.
She looked at me.
"Octavia?" She said, still coughing before getting up from the rubble and stumbling her way over to me.
I was fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to not be lodged inside of any sort debris and only be slung into the wall at breakneck speed. There was a new hole in the wall directly beside where I was situated, though I assumed it was associated with the explosion. This one was the only one to actually go through the entire wall and form a hole, where as all the other were just deeps scars into them.
"Where's Vinyl?" Shakes asked, getting a bit worried by not seeing her immediately.
I looked around and began to get worried myself. Being how docile she is now, her getting captured again was going to be easier than ever.
And I was not going to let that happen.
"I...believe she went through that hole right there." An intellectual voice chimed in between coughs from somewhere right beside Shakes.
Me and Shakes both looked to see the lab coated stallion emerging from rubble of his own, his previously, pristine, white lab coat now marked with dirt and scratches.
"Were there guards that way?" Shakes asked, surprisingly at ease with the stallion.
"No, no, just a few chemicals."
Shakes, in a surprising change of mood, gripped the stallion by the shoulders.
"Chemicals? What chemicals?!" She seemed to freak out at the word for some reason.
"Shakes." I started, trying to stop her from being so rough to this, up to this point, compliant stallion.
"Again, nothing much. Some Strychnine, a pesticide we use, some peroxide." He said, listing off a number of what must've been chemicals.
"The most notable one-" He finally said.
"-would be the magically separated, pure ethanol to cleanse some of the nastier wounds we encounter."
Shakes looked like she had seen a ghost.
"Is that a poison?" I asked, assuming that was why Shakes was worried.
"No no no, it's simply ethanol without all of the nasty stuff that's normally inside of it and concentrated to an even higher degree so that it is guaranteed to kill most bacteria in wounds. They told me it was over-kill, but I told them that I was the general." He said, trying his best to explain it to me.
Shakes suddenly dropped the alleged general, sending him falling to the floor before he quickly got back up.
"She's gonna drink it." Shakes said, barely a whisper.
"What?" I asked, not quite able to hear her from where I was.
Shakes head turned slowly, a look of pure fear in her wide eyes - one of them even twitching.
"She's gonna drink it." She said slowly.
"You can't be serious. Not even vampires can handle magically enhanced ethanol in high doses. It's the vampiric equivalent of hoof sanitizer. On steroids." The lab coated general said, scoffing at the idea.
"You don't know her liver." Shakes mumbled, ignoring the stallions comment, and beginning to stumble over to the wall I was at, using it as support as she leaned on it as if she had gone weak in the legs.
"Sweet Celestia. She's gonna get drunk."