Roughly a Light Minute
“As discussed in previous chapters, species of Tatzledia, whilst superficially resembling leeches or worms, are related neither to the Hirudinean or Oligochaete annelids and, in fact, occupy an entirely different phylum, of which they are the only extant members. Nine species have so far been identified, two of which appear to have become recently extinct, as they are only attested to and not found in the wild. There are three subspecies. Ranging in length from three to eleven metres, depending on age and diet, tatzledia spp can weigh up to two thousand kilograms, though the average is between five hundred and eight hundred. Of course, it is their highly unusual and perhaps unique method of reproduction that is of most interest to modern science, but I will cover this later on.” - 'Glaucus' (almost certainly a pseudonym), Modernis Mundus Bestialis, BN 42, from a translation by Funny Money et.al.
Fluttershy's hysterical screaming soon became a slightly different, but excited, shriek, as she realised that the roc did not mean to eat her. Certainly, it still maintained a firm but blunt grip on her with its rowing-boat sized talons as they ascended at a frightening pace into the engulfing blue sky, but had it been intending a quick snack, it would already all be over. She'd seen these terror birds handle their prey, and they took no joy or time in dispatching them. Fluttershy liked to think that this was because they were an order above the average ravenous fanged predator with a spark of smarts, but knew deep down that it was because the longer a prey animal, especially one with horns or similar means of self-defense, was allowed to stay alive, the more time it had to cause damage in aid of its escape. With the sheer weight of prey needed to sustain such a phenomenal aviform, rocs could afford little downtime.
The alkali flats were studded with roc hideaways like angular flattened tulips, and generally strewn with boulders. To the east, the desert occupied the horizon and, since that was the direction the roc was headed, it was the only way she could see. Yellows and ochres flashed past below, almost sulphurous in the sunlight. Flickers of mica and sparkling salts in the regolith gave it all a shimmering mein. As the roc beat its tremendous wings and they accelerated, gaining height all the while, there would occasionally be a bright flash as the light reflected off a particularly shiny rock or sparse, transient pool.
After about twenty minutes, though Fluttershy was pretty unsure on that measure considering the levels of adrenaline coursing about her system, the roc began to sink downwards. Then, four great pillars emerged out of the heat haze. Arranged in a loose square, they failed to draw her attention as much as the Black Dog did. With each of his heads pointed in a compass direction and great shaggy black back facing the north, he seemed some sentinel statue, a gargoyle to ward off foes. His collar, an immense circlet of dull slate metal studded with square diamonds, girdled his tripodial neck. Eyes like the shallows of a stormy ocean filled with bioluminescent plankton gazed and gazed, ever vigilant.
The roc made one loose orbit of the four pillars that marked out the gate to Tartarus, shedding altitude all the while, then curved back on its course to overfly a surprisingly flat strip of yellow dirt which, by dint of its square shape, had to be artificial. They were moving slowly now, low enough that Fluttershy could see the emerald shoots of hardy desert plants nosing up out of the sand. Just for a moment, she swore that the roc glanced down at her, then its talons sprang open, depositing her onto the makeshift runway.
She landed with a sound like a tree trunk being felled onto dense leaf litter, impacting rump first. The roc, it seemed, had imparted a slight spin to her. The world was a swirling maelstrom of confusing views, and the sky she could see was fogged with clouds of dust. She soon came to a halt, and lay on her back, staring into the blue. As a pegasus, she knew that uncontrolled landings could easily result in fractured leg bones, so it was best to roll into one that was too fast and couldn't be corrected. Had it been an accident, a twist of fate, or had the roc known that as well?
Clambering to her hooves, she looked around for the bird which had brought her here. Its low pass to the ground had left a trail of drifting dust along its course, so was easy to track up to where it was now curving up and away, needing only the occasional flap of its gigantic wings to propel it. That scimitar beak was now obvious, and easily twice as long as her own body. The big sapphire eyes were studying her, waiting. Now, she saw the second bird. It had obviously been following along some distance behind. It must have been very high up, for it seemed like a single, vaguely avian shape drifting slowly along, up in the hazy blueness of the deep sky. Shrill calls came next, along with their basso subvocalizations, just one part of the complex and impenetrable roc language. They boomed across the landscape, resonating inside her skull and in the pit of her stomach.
That's certain, then, Fluttershy thought. They're as intelligent as I am.
She glanced around, expecting to see the chimera somewhere, but frowned as things came together in her head. Animals are animals; they can be excused. But these rocs can understand our language, they're smart, thinking beings. How can they allow it? Where are their ethics?
That muscle tensed in her neck again, just before Discord whispered; ethics are for ponies!
Whilst this might have made anyone else jump, Fluttershy merely trotted forward toward the Gate and refused to give him the satisfaction. She'd spent a long few weeks in fear of this ability, the fact that he could read minds. However, she'd soon realised that he could only easily read surface thoughts, her internal monologue. Even then, it would not always be fantastically accurate; his precision scaled with the force of the emotion that she was feeling at that moment. Whilst this had lead to some rather embarrassing incidents, when Discord had intruded on her more personal moments deep in the forest, she'd developed better mental finesse since then. Whether or not these apparent limitations to his power were genuine, or merely a disguise, a sort of feint, she didn't know. That estimation tended to change depending on how much of a bastard he was being.
Fear came over her then, because the towering pillars of the Gate were looming large. The ground underhoof was changing from its rough, random sprawl of windblown dunes to the flatness that predominated the area immediately around the pillars. She had been here a few times before, mostly to check in on Cerberus. Despite the Black Dog being three or four times the size of her cottage, and nominally charged with the defense of the realm above from the realm below, his personality was really rather doggy. He enjoyed small, squeaky objects being thrown for him, scratches behind the ear, and the occasional bit of something meaty purchased from gryphon butchers.
How this reflected his ability to detect and guard against threats that were possibly powerful enough to rival even the Princesses was beyond her, but she supposed that his attitude would change as soon as he actually spotted something worthy of his fierceness. It would be like it was with any other guard dog. Fluffy, snuggly and, in the right light, downright adorable, with those he liked, and a ravening monster who would dive in for the kill without a moment's thought against those he didn't.
“What are the rocs for, Discord?” she said, quickening her pace toward the imposing figure of the Dog between the pillars.
“Fun,” he said, using his words this time, appearing to her left in one of his favored mythic forms; a box-kite parody of a dragon picked out in red, green and orange ribbons, drifting as if tethered in a gentle breeze. “Though, mayhap, for more pragmatic reasons.”
“If this is a wind up, I'll set him on you,” she said, peering up at Cerberus' heads. “I wonder if you'd come out of it smiling so widely.”
“Mr Woofy over there would barely leave a scratch on me.”
All of a sudden, there was a low rumbling roar, as if of mountains collapsing in the distance. One of Cerberus' heads shifted. Flights of small brown desert finches bloomed out of the various hiding spots in his fur, alarm calls going up and a great mellifluous tweeting echoing between the pillars. Green threads of dry aloe creepers fell in a rain below them, along with dust and sand, dislodged as a pair of those oceanic eyes panned round to inspect them, pupils contracting sharply down to fierce points as if someone had shot up a flare over that sea. His squat, canine features were rounded and rough, as if he had seen an unceasing span of ages come and go. A single snaggletooth, alone the size of a pony, jutted out from his lower jaw and pressed against his big black lips.
She was about to jump up and greet him with a full body snuggle, but then in the shadows cast by his own body there was a tremendous movement, far too fast for such a large entity. His immense right paw shot out and slammed down on Discord with a whip crack sound. She was sure she heard crunching and a sound like someone unclogging a particularly blocked up toilet. From beneath the claws and pad of the chthonic limb, four mismatched appendages jutted out at strange angles. The draconic tail spasmed. Cerberus licked his lips, quite slowly, exposing a further array of enamel that was positively selachian.
“Good boy!” Fluttershy cooed, stroking Cerberus' huge and wrinkled nose, which elicited a softening of those wicked eyes.
“Why?”
Cerberus' voice didn't emerge from his mouth, but seemed to spill out of thin air, spawned of the naked vacuum itself. The tone of it was deep, as expected, but with a merry, idle tone behind it, like a grandsire might put on when dealing with a precocious foal whom he must educate about the birds and the bees. It was always concise, too. There was rarely a word wasted or out of place. His features followed the expressions and emotions of his speech. Currently, one massive furry eyebrow like a shag carpet remnant was ever so slightly raised, and he seemed to indicate the trapped and wriggling form of Discord with a tilt of the head.
“He says that Princess Twilight is trapped in Tartarus,” Fluttershy said, granting him the same courtesy of verbal efficiency. “If that's true, we need you to let her out, or let us in.”
“Hmm...” the Dog said, dragging that sound out into a long rumble like echoing thunder.
“He could probably explain it himself if you let him up,” Fluttershy said. “He didn't really tell me very much.”
Cerberus nodded his agreement and raised his paw, swiftly returning it to its normal position. Discord had been rammed deeply into the dirt, slap bang in the centre of a paw-shaped impression. The chimera was laying it on thick. That, or Cerberus really had some power over him. It seemed as though Discord had been flattened along his trunk, goatish head squished and squashed into an odd shape that, as soon as the pressure was off, popped back to the way it had been.
“Ow,” he said, sitting up straight, rubbing his temple, at which point his eyes fell out with an obscene plopping noise and rolled in opposite directions. “Was that really necessary?”
“You are not allowed here,” Cerberus said, fixing him with a gaze that spoke of the litany of casual violence its owner could perform.
“I'm on a mission of mercy!” Discord protested, holding up his paw and talon. “Tell him, Fluttershy.”
“I did, but I think he needs a little more information.”
“We've not got the time!”
There was a brief silence, in which Fluttershy said nothing, and the Black Dog merely continued to gaze, as if daring the chimera to do something brash. The moment passed, then Discord sighed and telescoped his arms out left and right, fetched up his eyes and reinserted them as if they were made of glass. They wobbled around in their sockets like gyroscopes, then he blinked a few times and they went back to their old selves, mismatched, googly and lurid, liver failure yellow.
“I only know a little more than I've already told you,” he said, standing up and brushing invisible sand from his feathers, scales and fur. “Twilight, for reasons unknown and by methods arcane has gotten herself trapped in Tartarus. We have to open the way for her. The Gate doesn't open from the inside.”
“What if it is a trick?” Cerberus said, though whom he was addressing was unclear.
“I wouldn't joke about something like this.”
“He's been better recently, less of a pain in the rump,” Fluttershy admitted. “Reformed, and on our payroll.”
“So I have heard,” he said, nodding. “Many evil things live beyond the Gate. Many woes, from many places.”
“We'll be careful,” Discord said, conjuring a ball of sputtering, oily fire above his paw. “Don't forget, I am no pushover.”
The Black Dog grinned, his lips pulling back ghoulishly to expose a seemingly endless parade of flat, sharp and serrated teeth that were strikingly white, their sharpest edges shimmering and distorting the air. Fluttershy couldn't quite see where exactly those edges were. He flexed his big shoulder muscles and lifted the same paw he'd used to pin Discord experimentally.
“W-With exceptions,” the chimera clarified, looking away and dispelling the flame.
“The Gate can be opened from the inside,” Cerberus said, lending another of his grating, shuddering growls to the emphasis. “I am both here and there.”
*
“'Tatzledia procreator terribilis’. Yeah, they have the name pretty much right. Sarge told me it means ‘terrible breeder’. We were out on patrol, half way along the Tepp trail, on the northern edge of the desert, when we found it. Nice Wings was on point above, and he just started screaming and hollering like it was the end of the world. ‘Course, me and Lemon Laugh all gallop over to where he ended up landing just as fast as we can. I ain’t never seen anything like it. There was a family caravan, maybe thirty or forty diamond dogs plus carts. Something happened to ‘em in the night. Bandits maybe. Tatzlwurms don’t usually have the stones or the inclination to attack thinkin’ folk unless they’re injured and can’t resist. Anyway, there were five or six of the big ones… they were just eating. I think I could have stomached that. You see plenty out on the trails and, well, we’re all animals. Some folks reckon there’s a difference, but we all look the same when something’s got its teeth in us. Nah, what did it for me was the two that weren’t having dinner. They had those special feelers out, the ones with the little things that look like brushes. Almost careful, like, they’d taken off all the clothes the two diamond dog matriarchs were wearing, and… well, they were doing that other thing the wurms are known for.
Then Nice Wings gets real mad. Starts going at ‘em with his crossbow and his dropstones. Laugh and me open up with just the magic. Halfway through Wings runs out of dropstones and he can’t get his wits together to reload the bow, so he lands and starts going at them with the stronghooves on his back legs. Wurms don’t move that fast, but they sure are wily bastards. We killed the two breeders right quick, but by the time we were done with that, the others had escaped into their burrows. Nice Wings was gonna dig them out, but we managed to calm him down before he got himself into trouble.
It was at that point we realised that most of the diamond dogs were still alive…” - excerpt from the debriefing of Lance-Corporal Sand Dancer, 602nd Royal Guards Brigade, AN 944
*
Twilight grumbled and marked time whilst Starswirl filled in his end of the deal. The big lump of fur that was his body wriggled and writhed in its unsettling way, and he hummed and hawed as a quill, liberated from her own panniers, danced across the Nectars scroll. Occasionally it swung away and dipped into a pot of ink. Whatever he was writing, it was long winded and complicated, and his horn occasionally produced the odd sound of satin sheets rubbing together that she recognised as an ink erasing spell.
In the interim, she was fussing about Whom. The mare had taken to trembling and generally looking completely pathetic. Twilight wished that she'd had the presence of mind to bring medical supplies with her, but acquiring a mortal sidekick who might actually require such things at some point had never been on the agenda. Her ribs seemed badly broken. They were visibly deformed beneath that pink fur, marred with the blotches of growing bruises. The substance that Starswirl had administered, once Whom had explained to her that episode, was yet still working its magic on her, but they both knew it wouldn't last. She needed to get Whom to a non-magical doctor, the sooner, the better.
“What you have to understand,” Starswirl suddenly said, as his chaise lounge shuffled around to focus on her. “Is that Tartarus is a very big place. I assume you're aware of the arbitrary nature of demesne dimensions, yes?”
“Have you finished writing there? Can I see?”
“Are you aware of--”
“Yes!”
“Well, good.” Starswirl rolled up the scroll and secreted it on his mighty person. “Then you will recall that part in my seminal work, Demesne Arcana Modernis, where I mentioned cosmological distances?”
“Get to the point.”
“Tartarus is immense. Even in all my subjective time here, I have never really managed to discover where it ends, or if it actually has such a thing.”
“I'm pretty sure I saw a wall around here somewhere. That implies boundaries.”
“It's a step.”
“Excuse me?”
“I've taken to calling it Basin nine hundred and forty, but that is an arbitrary designation. The wall you saw is one edge of that basin. It is eleven hundred kilometres from the base to the top of the basin, which is itself fourteen thousand kilometres on its long sides, and eight thousand on the short ones.” Starswirl seemed to puff himself up, rising slightly. He evidently enjoyed this sort of didactic tone in a way that put Twilight to shame. “I have so far charted over two thousand such basins. That's why it took me so long to turn up here after I detected your ingress. Light may travel at a pretty speed, but I do not.”
Twilight's head reeled as she glanced around into the sucking darkness beyond the pall of soft light, trying to factor such a gigantic scale into the general scheme of things. She felt her throat turn into a tiny desert, and it was as though someone had tipped a bathtub full of ice down her spine.
“Where's the ceiling, then?” she said.
“Oh, I gave up trying to find that a few centuries ago. Magic soundings taken in a vertical direction always return the same results as I got when I used to try them on the night's sky. I don't think it really has one.”
“What about the Osscept?”
“Where's that?”
“The big place full of bones.”
“Oh, the Vault of Bones. It's a similar sort of endless space. I identified bones from over ninety-five percent of Equestrian species that actually have them, but those samples make up only about thirty percent of the total mass.”
“No, I mean, how is it connected into this place?”
“It's another cell in the greater structure of this demesne, ditto Elysium, and that place with all the fire.”
“I don't think I've seen that one.”
“They're not linked by linear space. I think they are quite strongly acausal and atemporal too, in relation to the other cells.”
“I called them layers.”
“You say tomato...” Starswirl shrugged. “In any case, be glad you didn't stay too long in any one spot. You say a thousand years have passed in Equestria, but it has been rather a lot longer for me. Subjective time has meant a span eight times that.”
“You've been down here for eight thousand years?” Twilight raised an incredulous eyebrow.
“Approximately.”
“I think we've meandered away from the point you were trying to make,” she said, filing that factoid away for later investigation.
“You may have wormholed your way in here like a particularly randy specimen of tatzledia--”
Twilight winced at the reference, instinctual parts of her brain rebelling and telling her to flee.
“--but that is certainly not a route you can take out, as I'm sure you have already tried.”
“My teleportation doesn't seem to work here, yes.”
“A device somewhere hereabouts disrupts the generation of stable wormholes. It's ten kilometres tall and, so far, I have not managed to destroy it, by means mundane or magical. I suppose at one point it would also have prevented you turning up here at all, but time has not been kind to it. ”
“So how do you get around?”
“The atmosphere only settles down into the basins.” He glanced upwards, as if looking at something huge in the black. “Even then, it's in a thick layer about a hundred kilometres deep. Once you're above that, you can slip around in the vacuum at alarmingly high velocities, unimpeded by the atmosphere. Doesn't take long to get where you want.”
“Oh!” Whom suddenly piped up. “I've read about that. I love science fiction. The magazines I used to get had stories in them every month.”
“It is no fiction, my dear!”
“You were making a point...” Twilight grumbled. “Does it lead to you giving me back my scroll?”
“Long ago, I discovered the intended exit from Tartarus. It is within a dome shaped structure on the high ground between the basins. But I cannot get through the Gate. I am an intended captive of this demesne and, whilst parts of it may have decayed, those wards hold true.”
“So you need me to have a look? Break you out of here?” Twilight sat down on her haunches and licked her lips, anticipating a challenge.
“Yes. Then I will fill my end of the deal and give you back your list, when once again I taste Equestrian air and feel the sun upon my skin.”
“What makes you think I'll be any better than you? You've had eight thousand years, so you say, to pick that lock.”
“You are a Princess! You're of the same authority as she that put me here. More importantly, you aren't intended captives. The demesne keeps good track of its prisoners.”
“Right. Well, alright. I suppose that we've no choice. We need to get out of here in any case.”
Twilight briefly considered just taking the list, now that Starswirl had apparently already amended those missing parts to it. The ancient mage represented a major imponderable, however, and she dismissed the idea almost as soon as it appeared.
“You shan't without me, unless you wish your scroll to stay entombed as well.”
“Oh, don't worry. We've a lot to talk about. A great many things.” Twilight couldn't help but smile as she imagined all of the wonderful, exciting topics the two of them could rap about, what light he could shed on the past, present and future, and of the physical properties of the world and this weird place. “I don't intend to leave any part of you behind. Where is this exit then? Lets get to it. We've no time to waste.”
“That direction,” Starswirl said, indicating with his head to Twilight's rear. “Up, out of the basin of course, for about...” He trailed off, humming to himself, then said, quite simply: “A light-minute.”
*
Equestria, named such by its equine inhabitants and named other, secret things by the other races with whom they shared space, hung in the star-speckled firmament like a gaudy bauble, hiding one half of its face in shadow. It kept a steady corkscrew path around the harsh white point of a star that cared little for the fragments of gas and metal that loyally followed it, beating out an unceasing pattern through epochs of geological time, quenchable only by the most dramatic of cosmological events.
They had become now, instantiated into mere six and seven dimensional fractals spraying and sliding about in the quantum foam like energetic pinballs. One, final, barrier yet prevented them decaying and degenerating further, to sketch three dimensional objects into being on the surface of that little blue and green marble, and so begin the Party. This happening was scheduled to be something truly grand, and so warranted the capitalisation. If the fractals that were the Greater Gods, Dionysus and Indra and all their high-order fellows, were to rampage in the style they had been promised, a certain drink had to be made, a final key in the lock.
They could feel themselves getting stupider as they spiralled down toward Equestria. The secrets of the cosmos, and the Cosmos Beyond, elude them as if those memes of deep understanding were wily newborn rats, and they the decrepit cats at the ends of their lives. Ideas of their bodies, suitably horsed up by dint of the universal context, swirled and eddied, desperately waiting to become odd red equiforms and other syncretisms. Each of the fractal-gods were, truthfully, only a tiny part of the fullness of the Gods they represented, but it was more than enough. They would return and become one again, and memories, such as they were, merged with the immensities that spawned them.
Thoughts like pair-production and annihilation in the foam flashed and flared soundlessly, and the fractals began coalescing in the background in coordinates that corresponded to the three dimensional location of the Moon's permanent night side. Photons encountered them then, a constant wash that described a solar system, an uncaring star and a planet full of mad horses, cattish birds and birdish cats, insectile equines that couldn't decide on a look, and upright dogs that wandered the desert and worshiped rocks, all watched over by mares of loving grace. These last creatures the fractals were most familiar with, for they came from the same stock.
The rest of them they remembered faintly from the last time they were here, but they were all products of random evolution, hotch-potch combinations of atoms, molecules and electricity. Some of them were the products of the products of evolution, more than the currently extant fraction that were untampered with in fact, but this distinction was of little importance to the fractals. No, it was the hybrids they were interested in, those mares of loving grace. Once, a very long time ago, they'd been flesh things digging about in dust. Then, the Universe, which cared far more than the stars that made up the majority of its visible mass, had decided to get itself involved, and that, as far as the Gods were concerned, was were everything had gone pear-shaped.
The first hybrid, made from a fragment of the divine which the Universe had let inside, then bound into a cattish bird on the top of a mountain when his suffering became too great, turned out to embody all the things that its syncretic race cared about. It used its immense powers, at least locally, to forge a new three-species race, turning many cattish birds into birdish cats, and even making some horsish, cattish birds, which irritated everyone no end. Then, it turned the tables in a long-standing war of attrition and completed its subjugation of the equines, for use as food, amongst other things.
With the Universe predicting catastrophic biosphere collapse within a mega annum, and unable to go back on its choice, it let in something else to balance out the equation. This was an unbounded thing, not mixed with any sapient biology. Responding to the desperate cries of those mad horses, fearing their extinction, the second fragment of the divine rose and instantiated as their defender.
Disaster was only averted because the two fragments were basically evenly matched. As it was, part of the gryphic megacontinent fell into the sea, millions on both sides perished, and several vital oceanic and littoral biospheres were utterly obliterated. The Universe was more than a little bit miffed about this, and decided to wait and see what happened next. The pony survivors, and there really weren't many, escaped across the sea that they would later on call the Dauphine, and the gryphons retreated into the mountains, talons clasped around a certain crown which held the last scraps of their pet God.
The first defender of the equine faith was cursed roundly by those he'd thought he served, and subsequently descended into a century-spanning hissy fit. Meanwhile, the cut-throat processes of regnal ascension in the gryphic realms ensured that someone new, someone at least as sociopathic as the last guy, was soon wearing the crown. Though the Divine intelligence was burned out, it still retained a lot of its power, and whoever wore the crown was a conduit for this. Despite being on the receiving end of enough gamma radiation to boil off part of an ocean and raise global temperatures by several degrees, gryphic affairs rose quickly under the unified leadership a semi-divine ruler at the top of things offered.
This set the stage for a local biological catastrophe within five hundred years, a blink of the eye in the Universe's timescale, so once more it strove to act to rebalance things. These Divines it had let inside itself were embedded in its foam like ticks, and it would have caused more damage to remove them than it ended up causing to control and balance them. Having island-hopped, flown and slogged their way across the ocean, the dregs of the pony species had set up shop on the uninhabited second megacontinent, and begun to strive inland. To protect them, the universe allowed in divine fragments again and, selecting certain mares who became important later on, bound those fragments into the meat. To protect itself, these fragments were arranged in balance with each other, complementing and requiring the other to succeed.
Naturally, within five years these individuals were in charge of the entire pony show. The Universe, content that it was good, sat back once more to monitor events.
Indra, represented as his fractal, gazed at the moon and at the little planet. Within the fractal, the shape of his scarlet pony form danced cartwheels around the imagined shape of Dionysus, who drifted simultaneously inside his own fractal and inside that of his fellow's. Their current topology allowed them this kind of thing.
“You know, when we're down there you won't be able to occupy more than one location at the same time,” Dionysius said. “It's very much frowned upon for massy three dimensional objects, as we will soon become. You're welcome to try, but you may cease existing.”
“Stop being a spoilsport,” Indra said. “How soon until the Party starts?”
“You'll be pleased to know that we'll be down there in the blink of an—”
*
“--I don't think this is a good idea, Twilight!” Whom whinnied, trotting a slow, wincing dance of panic and worry on the stone. “What if you sneeze and the magic stops working?”
“That rarely ever happens,” Twilight said, sizing the mare up through squinted eyes as she measured the required force field diameter. “Besides, you seemed perfectly content the last time we were in vacuum together.”
“But back there I didn't have any choice, it just happened,” Whom said.
“You think you have much in the way of alternative options?” Twilight said, adjusting the straps of her panniers. “We need to get out of Tartarus, and so we need to get to the Gate. You might have read some science-fiction, but do you have any idea how immense a distance a light-minute really is, especially on a pony scale?
“No...”
“To use the normal system of measurement, it's nearly eighteen million kilometres. Light travels so fast that, in one second, it could do eight or nine laps all the way around the globe. We are talking about a distance sixty times that.”
“Fine, alright, I get it!”
“I'm sorry Whom, but this is the only way.”
Without waiting for a reply, Twilight gathered and applied her magic, generating fine layers of force and placing them carefully over the top of one another. She wove them like expensive muslin around the pink moon mare, creating a series of membranes like a sort of dress or suit. They came right up to her neck, mating with another nesting doll of interlocking fields that went over her head. She looked as though she had been preserved in clear amber. For now, Twilight was exchanging atmospheric gas through diffuse sections in the head piece, but that was about to change.
Ever since the brief flight through space, ideas had been dribbling around in Twilight's mind like marbles. The life support system she'd thrown together from the contents of her panniers had been a stroke of genius, but she had been looking for ways to improve on it. Now able to use magic with impunity, unconstrained by heat concerns, she got stuck in. Warm flares rolled over her skin and her horn began to glow cherry red as she increased power to the whole procedure. She was only barely aware of Starswirl watching her intently from behind a shroud of hair.
First, she boiled down the functions she wanted to perform to their most simple, basic operations. Then, building from the ground up, she translated those functions into reality, forcefields providing the meat and bones of machines Whom would require on the trip. She could make these force fields any shape she liked, as long as they conformed to basic geometric rules, and she could alter the properties of those psuedomaterial surfaces in various ways. They could contain gases and liquids, apply various pressure levels to them, become diffuse and porous, and more besides.
So, spherical chambers could be slowly filled with atmospheric gas via vacuum pumps, processes along the insides of those containers removing heat until it became liquid, allowing more to be stored. Water could be condensed, dispensed, collected again and purified by heat and condensation. Twilight held in her mind an image of ground level Ponyville the whole time she was working, striving to emulate every condition found there inside the heart of this strange device she was building, all to keep Whom alive on their long trip.
Tartarus' stone floor was beginning to turn molten with waste heat by the time she was done. The amber entombment has grown many opaque, copper-coloured protrusions of force fields like cancerous lumps. It was also now far bigger, almost the size of a small house, flat and wide and shaped a bit like a saucer, and levitated ten metres off the ground as Twilight drifted around it under gentle, half-physical and half-magical impulses, making final adjustments. Power gradients, heat gradients, thaumic batteries tied to the underlying structure of space and other things besides all had to be balanced, so that it would maintain itself with only the occasional top up from her own magical sources.
“It's a bit like a triskelion, then,” Starswirl said, from the ground, interrupting her reverie.
“What?” she said, after a moment trying to process the words; long applications of magic tended to leave her a bit disconnected from reality.
“This thing. Lots of self-reinforcing force fields and tricksy magic,” he said, sending his chaise lounge on an orbital inspection tour. “Looks good, but I wouldn't want to be inside it if you hit a magic dead zone. The thing would just come apart.”
“Yes, it would,” Twilight said, flatly, then moved on, fluttering down to rest on top of the giant thaumic device she had constructed. “I assume you have something like this in order to get around?”
“Nowhere near as complex. It's just a standard one inch frictionless shell.”
“Ah, of course.”
“Tartarus wouldn't want its prisoners to be able to commit suicide, so here I cannot die,” Starswirl explained anyway. “It's really just for the atmospheric bits. The shell, I mean. I don't like to get my mane messy.”
Twilight nodded and dug her front hooves down into the weird pseudo surface of the device. Below, she could just about see Whom's immotile form through warped layers like panes of hard boiled sweets and frosted glass, in which dribbled and oozed fluids in various states like fabulous crystal slugs. The surface reacted to the pressure, admitting her up to the fetlocks and then solidifying like tar. She did the same with her back legs, though these she submerged up to her flanks. There was a strange coolness around her most sensitive parts, and she realised in an instant that she was sitting on the cavity containing several thousand litres of liquid oxygen.
With a purple flash and a keening like catgut thread on piano wire, Twilight fired up her telekinesis and pushed gently up on the bottom of the big device, which wobbled and lifted further from the ground. She caught sight of Starswirl on her right, ascending with her, matching her course.
“Lead the way,” said Twilight.
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Cerberus 'speaks'? Interesting.
Man, gods and godlike figures are complicated.
Also, Tatzlwurms are creepy and disturbing.
Ooooo, Equestrian deity backstory, ho!
Twilight is putting together a magical spaceship for Whom to ride in, this time with the benefit of pre-planning? Awesome. Space travel is a bit of an iterative process, if she keeps this up I expect great things assuming Equestria makes it out of this in enough of one piece that it can serve as a home base for a nascent space program.
How does this story not have a dark tag? Srsly.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, overall. On the one hand, rape and murder run rampant, the story meanders, the grammar is gratuitous, and it plays mix-and-match mythology.
On the other hand, it's fairly well written and moderately intriguing. The characters are well done, and the worldbuilding has interesting aspects... although I don't think I'm as interested as the author is.
I guess I'll track this for a while, and see.
I am curious, though. NoeCarrier, was this inspired by the story of the Mead of Suttungr? You're definitely using Norse mythology, and I've liked that tale for years now.
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Yeah, the unfocused and meandering plot is something I've been trying to amend with recent chapters. I'll be the first to admit that, were this a standard novel, maybe as much as half of it would have been cut. I've indulged myself left, right and centre. There is a whole section that takes place in an art gallery so I was able to describe all the statues and landscapes. I often forget I have a story to tell at all, and not just a world in which it takes place. Do you think that the speed of the plot has increased over the last ten thousand words or so, or am I not doing enough?
There is a mongrel mix of different mythologies at play in the thematics, which matches up nicely with the fact that it is an 'All Gods' party, at least, so I would like to think. As for Suttungr's mead, not directly. The Nectars owe far more to the Greek drink of the Gods, as in 'Nectar of the Gods'. There are many things that the Nectars do when you drink them, but turning you into a learned man or a skald is not one of them.
They are also very much immortals only, as they have certain qualities usually found in metallic hydrogen. No possibility of any pesky do-gooder Gods stealing them and giving them to oiks. All those anecdotes Twilight found in her library before setting out on this mad adventure were largely spurious.
5512999 Well, you seem to have three main narrative threads; Twilight, Luna, and Emboss. I would say that Twilight's thread took an uptick when they left the moon (I remember thinking 'They're finally leaving!') Luna's seemed to pick up when she went for Mythragg. Double Emboss., though... doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Maybe if/when he meets the king of the griffons? The sum total of things he's accomplished so far is 'leave home and get on a boat'.
I don't know if that's useful feedback, but that's how I see it.
Oddly enough, I think 'nectar of the gods' was also mead; hence the 'nectar' part. I believe wine, (and Dionysius) came along later. I'm not much of a mythologian, though, so that could be dead wrong; and I do catch your meaning either way. I guess giving Berry Punch a sip isn't an option. Metallic hydrogen is tricky stuff.
I guess the thing about mix-and-match mythology that bugs me is that any single mythology seems like it should have more than enough material, but so often people just skim the top ten-percent of each, and end up with a not-very-cohesive whole. It does seem to work here somewhat, perhaps because of your theme, but so often it just feels... insipid. I remember one anime that threw in so many things, any sort of symbolism was lost; it just turned into word salad. Or perhaps it was beyond me. :P
Anyway, I do want you to know I've enjoyed your story so far; if it feels like I'm critical, it is because I do care enough to comment. You're a cut above the rest around here, and I mean my complaints in the best way possible.
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Don't worry; I greatly appreciate meaningful criticism and feedback. Without it, you can't tell how those who read what you write are finding it, and you'll never improve as a writer. Thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful and cogent comment.
The Emboss plotline was a bit of a metastatic budding of events. He was only ever really intended as a joke, which was about willies. Most of them are -- have you noticed? I liked him, so I kept writing him. It was quite the same with Whom, who appeared as satire on the MLP toys and just grew on me. A brilliant idiot, comic relief and portable plot device, as well as mortal foil. She's like a literary demolitions charge.
Emboss has turned into an attempt at portraying the 'everypony'. Unlike most of the other characters, he has no superpowers, and he and his wife are really just standard unicorns. His reason for being is a quest to calm his ethics. If I could go back, I would write his foals better. I can't remember what I called them, and they don't appear in the text at all except as passing reference.
His role in the plot moving forward will be to let Hywell know what's going on with regards to the looming existential crisis, but also to secure the aid of Dunya's people's friends, whose identity I may have hinted at. They've made a trip of about 1,200 miles at this point, and taken in an appreciable fraction of the inhabited world. It has dragged on a bit. I cut short the intended sections in Port Pronto to speed this process up. Hopefully, things should move more quickly. I've also been trying to avoid the usual extraneous pitfalls that I tend to fall into, with the aid of my fearless and untiring editor.
In short: stay tuned. You aren't the first to point out the fact that I have dawdled, and I've taken this message to heart as best as I can.
5521040 I won't say i disliked Emboss' scenes; rather, they bored me, which may be a harsher criticism. I'll look forward to his meeting Hywell, who's been interesting so far. I don't mind a story that meanders somewhat, and I sometimes wish I could grasp that sort of feeling myself; I often feel I rush too much, jumping and dashing through scenes that would work better at a more sedate pace.
If I may be so bold as to presume to offer a little more advice... Sir Truffles writes excellent blogs for those looking to be better writers; one of his latest was on Exploration, Progression and Pacing, and I think it outlines some useful ways of thinking about how stories flow.
Whom really has worked quite well so far, and mostly manages to be a likeable character. She's nearly asphyxiated, burned up on re-entry, and... something with changelings, yet manages to keep a positive outlook. I look forward to her meeting with Luna, which should be interesting on several levels since Twilight and Starswirl are likely to be accessory. ("You're flying what? Making the Nectars causes what? Celestia's where?")
Yes, I have noticed that most of the jokes here are fairly phallic. I would say the underlying 'feel' of this story is 'debauched'. Some of them even made me laugh, despite inheriting a rather dry sense of humor from my dad. Looking back over the scene with Olisbos, I couldn't tell whether Twilight took him along or not... but have you ever heard the joke about the voodoo dildo?
I'll just add here that I'm honestly not sure whether you intend the brewing of the nectars to fail or succeed, and I do appreciate that ambiguity. It's often much to easy to tell the direction of a story from simply skimming a little.