5 Into the Ruins
Chapter Five
Into the Ruins
"You were pretty hard on that changeling, Twilight," Jigsaw said, her voice heavily laden with sarcasm.
We were back at the camp above the canyon. (A known location gave me a reliable teleport target, and though it took quite a bit of energy to cover the distance, I thought it was worth it.) I was heating a third kettle of water to finish off the job of getting the disgusting green goop out of our hair.
"As I said, I gave my word that I wouldn't hurt her," I reminded Jigsaw.
"Oh, I don't know, maybe she would have preferred a few broken limbs to a stern talking-to and being sent home with a note for her mother!" Jigsaw tossed the dirty cloth she had been using to clean herself with quite a bit more force than was necessary. "Still, she really thought you were going to stomp on her for a second there. That's something."
I sighed. I could understand Jigsaw's anger. I could understand it because my own had been on a rather volcanic scale. But I wasn't just anypony anymore. I was a princess of Equestria, and that meant I had to think of the benefit to all ponies, and not just how good it would have been to feel that disgusting parasite's chitin cracking under my hooves.
"Her 'mother' is the queen of the changelings, and the 'note' is a diplomatic communication."
"So you said." Jigsaw didn't look up as she spoke. "An official protest. My, how that must have stung."
I was getting a little bit angry myself at that point. "Look, I know how frightened you must have been, and I understand that you wanted revenge on that thing, but..."
While I was talking, Jigsaw walked around the fire and looked down to where our two bedrolls lay side-by-side. She glanced up at me, but when she saw that I was looking at her, she turned her head, avoiding my gaze. She lifted her blankets, moved them to the other side of the fire, then lay down on them.
Like stepping out of a nice, hot sauna into a cold pool, I went, shockingly, from anger to deep embarrassment. I wasn't even sure exactly why. Talking didn't seem to be doing any good, so I decided to try not talking. I finished cleaning myself, put up a small shield over the camp, wrapped myself in my own bedroll, and pretended to sleep.
= = =
"Twilight!"
I must have fallen asleep at some point, or I wouldn't have been capable of being rudely awakened. "What? What?" I jumped up, scattering my blankets, and looking wildly around for signs of imminent peril.
The sun was fairly well up in the sky, and Jigsaw was shaking a piece of paper in my face. I snapped into action with an immediate assessment of the situation.[1]
----------
[1] I blinked and said, "Huh?"
----------
"This..." Jigsaw kept waving the piece of paper, so I couldn't really see what it was. "This is a copy of the note you sent with the changeling?"
I gave up trying to focus on the paper. "Well, of course I made a copy. It's an official document, after all."
Jigsaw sat down with a thump. She released the paper, and I caught it in my magic before it had a chance to blow away. She lowered her head until her muzzle was nearly touching her chest and mumbled, "I'm sorry."
"What? No... Jigsaw, you have nothing to be sorry about! You're not used to..." I waved a hoof around in a vague gesture. "All this. Monsters, travel... stupid princess stuff. I never used to understand when Celestia did something I thought was illogical, or just plain dumb, in the name of politics. So when I let that monster go, you had to be thinking that I was crazy. And on top of that, sending a note? I can see how you..."
"Oh, stop it, Twilight!" Jigsaw looked up and I could see she was on the verge of tears. "You trusted Celestia, didn't you? Even when you didn't understand. But I didn't trust you. That note was probably one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me! I can't believe I was angry at you for not killing an intelligent creature... even if it was an overgrown tick."
"I... wait... you think the note was sweet?" I looked down at what I had written and couldn't find any sweetness in it:
Unto HRM Queen Chrysalis of the Changeling Swarm, greetings from HSH Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria.
Your Majesty,
Since the late unpleasantness in Canterlot, it has been assumed that yourself and your subjects would be sufficiently wise enough to realize that choosing ponies as a focus of your attentions would be a very bad idea. But, as of tonight, I now have direct and personal evidence that this is not the case.
Thus, if I may be so bold, I wish to explicitly inform Your Majesty that to target any ponies in future would be very unwise, indeed. As the pony who has defeated Nightmare Moon and Discord, among many others, and who has grown stronger by an order of magnitude since we last met, I will take a very personal interest in seeking direct retribution for any further such incidents.
And (you will forgive me if I put too fine a point on the matter), if your subject had injured the pony she attacked tonight in any significant way, I would have ripped open your festering hive, and done such unspeakable things to your Royal person, that all civilized beings would spit on the ground in utter disgust and horror at the mention of my name, for generations to come.
I earnestly hope that this missive will completely clarify the matter, and that there will be cordial relations between our peoples in future.
Yours, Absolutely Sincerely,
Princess Twilight Sparkle
Jigsaw sniffed and wiped a hoof across her eyes. "Yes, it was sweet." Then she gave me a wan smile. "For a given value of 'sweet.'"
Ah, math-related jokes. I guessed she was going to be alright. "Well, I still feel like I should apologize," I told her. "For something."
She nodded. "And I know I need to apologize for being pointlessly angry and jealous about the whole thing."
"Then why don't we just take the exchange of apologies as a given, and get on with our expedition? We're getting a pretty late start as it is."
Her equipment and supplies rose from the ground and began sorting into the various pockets of her saddlebags. "Sounds good to me!"
Wait—jealous?
= = =
We appeared in a small plaza near the edge of the ruins. We had examined it from the opposite rim of the canyon with my spyglass and a detection spell, and it had seemed to be perfectly safe as a point for materialization. It was a bit small, and the tumbled buildings around it gave cover for creatures that I might have missed with my detection spell, but it was the best place to teleport to, given all the variables.
As we emerged from the interstitial void, I guided the corona of dissipating magical energy into a shield spell around us, thereby saving a considerable amount of energy, and giving us near-instant protection.
"That's a neat trick." Jigsaw commented.
"Thank you!" I beamed. "Now, let's take a closer look at these buildings."
"But, shouldn't we head right for the library? We've wasted half the morning as it is."
"Just go charging in, and trust to our reflexes to save us from traps and ambushes?"
"Uhmn..." Jigsaw hesitated. "You do know that there are nowhere near so many traps and such in real ruins, right? A. K. Yearling tends to... exaggerate."
"Of course! But I like being thorough and meticulous." I gave her a slow grin. "Besides, wouldn't you feel silly if we ran into ceiling alligators?"
She couldn't help but smile back, but she waved a hoof at the surrounding half-walls and rubble. "No ceilings," she remarked, dryly.
"Fine." I sighed, and dropped the shield.
Jigsaw held up the map and turned it to match orientation with the ruins. I never understood why ponies do that, by the way. "The library is that way. But it looks like the easiest route will be down that street."
I swept one wing out in that direction. "Lead the way."
I kept a little behind Jigsaw, scanning the ruins with brief bursts of magic. There were a few small creatures scuttling around, but nothing more than that. I had time to admire the intricate carvings on the stones, mostly abstract and decorative, but every once and a while I spotted a fragment of a figurative relief. Once, I saw a full sculpture of a unicorn's head, though the slab it adorned had fallen over and was upside down.
"Twilight," Jigsaw said, after we had been walking for about ten minutes.
"Yes?"
"This place is a lot bigger than I had thought from studying the map. How many ponies do you suppose lived here?"
I did some quick mental calculations. "Well, given the apparent density of the housing we've observed so far, and assuming it's typical of the rest of the city, I would estimate between four and five thousand. Why?"
"Well..." She looked back at me uncertainly. "There are some things about this place that seem odd."
"How so?"
"Professor Sharphoof dates this place to the Early Classical Era, and everything I've seen here supports that. Which means that there would have been a U/A ratio of about one to five."
"Sorry," I told her. "I'm not really an archaeologist, I just own a pith helmet."
"Urban-to-Agrarian ratio," she explained. "That means how many farmers are needed to support one town-dweller. In the ECE, it was about five farmers to every town dweller, so..." She looked at me and raised an eyebrow.
"Roughly twenty-five thousand farm ponies were needed to feed the ponies in this city." It wasn't until after I'd said it out loud that I realized why that was so strange. "And they would have to be..." I waved my hoof at the barren desert beyond the canyon rim. Okay, earth ponies were great at getting stuff to grow in harsh conditions (e.g., Appleoosa), but that was ridiculous!
Jigsaw nodded. "Exactly. Okay, maybe there are some eighty-odd villages out there buried in the sand, but even if this area was a lot wetter, they would still have to cover a really large area to grow enough food. Something should still be visible!"
"That is odd."
"And there's another thing." She swept a hoof at the walls around us. "Have you noticed the carvings?"
"Yes. They seem very skillfully done."
"Unicorns."
"Uhmn... yes?" There was something I'd missed. What a strange feeling!
"They're all unicorns! Every carving that features a pony has a horn."
"Oh! You're right." I shrugged. "That is a little odd, but lots of cities have a predominance of one type of pony, so perhaps..."
"No, no no!" Jigsaw interrupted me, shifting into full lecture-mode. (It was actually quite charming.) "In the ECE they were obsessive about being egalitarian. With the tribes having united within living memory, everypony was trying to out-do each other to show how un-bigoted they were! If they put up a statue of a famous unicorn, there would be a pegasus and an earth pony right next to it. A mural or mosaic that depicted a crowd scene would have exactly the same number of ponies from each tribe. Trust me on this, Twilight: This isn't just odd, it's downright bizarre!"
Then it hit me. Yes, I'm a polymath, an expert in many fields, most particularly magic and magical theory. I also have a working knowledge of an even larger number of disciplines. But that doesn't mean I am familiar with all the endeavors of ponykind, nor do I have an aptitude for a great number of things. And, thanks to a very dear friend of mine, I am painfully aware that among the things I am terrible at, art may be at the top of the list.
= = =
"Oh, no!" Rarity gasped. "Dear, don't clump up the bunting like that! Here, let me..." She took the streamers out of my grasp and began to re-arrange them along the sides of the hall.
I had volunteered to help her decorate the hall in my castle where she was holding a get-together (she called it a soirée) with some of her important clients.
I couldn't see much difference in the arrangement, but it was her party. I turned to the flowers and began setting out the vases on the tables. There was a little, half-suppressed squeak from behind me. I turned to see Rarity biting her lower lip.
She had been very patient with me. She carefully explained to me about the "three-level" effect, and then I got it wrong by putting the candles in ascending order. (Isn't that the most organized way?) But I had to give up and admit defeat when she looked over at the way I had set out the first three vases on the end table (tallest in the center, and the lowest nearer the door) and said, "Oh, dear! No, no... those colors don't complement at all!"
She was so afraid I would be offended, but I just laughed it off and said, "Let's face it, Rarity, I'm aesthetically blind! I'll ask a couple of the palace staff to come down and help out."
= = =
So, even though I'd examined the illustration of the Celestia relief half a hundred times, I'd never noticed—
I yanked the book out of my saddlebags and flipped it open to the right page. Yes, Princess Artistically-Incompetent Twilight had missed the glaringly obvious: All the ponies were unicorns. There were some mules, cows, and even a couple of griffins mixed in, but not a single earth pony or pegasus. I groaned in embarrassment and dropped my forehead to the page, hiding my face.
"Uh... Twilight?" Jigsaw asked hesitantly. "Is everything okay?"
"Yes. No. I..." I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "I suppose it's time I showed this to you. You're going to see it anyway, once we get to the library. It's just that it drives me to the edge of panic whenever I even think about it!"
Jigsaw walked toward me with a look of concern on her face. "Hey, it's okay. Is it those pages in the journal you didn't want me to look at?"
I nodded. "Yes, and I should have shown them to you earlier, I should have trusted you. Agh!" I stomped the ground in frustration, sending up a puff of dust. "I'm such a moron!"
Jigsaw chuckled. "What ever else you may be, Your Highness, you are most certainly not a moron! Besides..." The smile fell from her face, and she hesitated before continuing. "If it's the Tyrant Celestia picture you're worried about, I've already seen it. It's not that big a deal."
"You... you..." I sputtered.
"I went looking for the copy of the note this morning. I couldn't sleep and I just wanted... I don't know, I was just upset." Jigsaw lowered her head and turned a bit away from me. "The note was stuck in the book. At that page." Her head sunk even lower. "I'm sorry I disobeyed you."
I took a deep breath.
I took three deep breaths.
"It's alright, Jigsaw," I told her. "We're partners on this expedition and I should have trusted you from the start. I just didn't want this—" I thumped the book with a hoof. "—to get out. Celestia portrayed as evil? What would ponies think?" I considered her words for a moment. "But you said it's not a big deal. Why is that?"
"The Tyrant Celestia thing?" she asked.
I nodded.
"Well... it isn't that uncommon. I've seen dozens of them... Twilight? Twilight? Oh my goodness, are you alright?!"
= = =
=
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3451755
I'll just say that the title of the next chapter is "Conspiracy Theories" and leave it at that.
No, see, that's how they get you! False sense of security, and then bam! Ceiling alligators!
"A.K Yearling tends to - exagerate. Shouldn't it be exaggerate? srry 4 being nitpicky
NITPICK ALERT
esthetically should be aesthetically
cool chapter! luv it
Bwhahahahaha! A given value of 'sweet' is right.
Don't drop the shield!
It's fairly hilarious to think that there have been plenty of Tyrant Celestia conspiracies that Twilight was completely unaware of. What was that conclusion from earlier in the chapter about general knowledge compared to field specialists?
I wonder how Chrysalis reacted to the letter
I feel like your descriptions of the ruins leave a little to be desired, but that's just me. I've always hated having a less-than-clear mental picture of what a scene looks like. I'll build my own version of it, then something in the story conflicts with that picture, and my mind gets slightly confused and flustered. But, so far, yours aren't quite so vague.
You can say that again, Jigsaw! This little tidbit of magic-theory is a very interesting touch.
Corrections:
Out-of-place quote mark here.
And a misplaced quote mark here.
And she's out like a rock.
Jigsaw used Misplaced Remark.
IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE!
Twilight Sparkle fainted!
I think that Celestia needs to give Twilight a refresher on diplomatic communications. There were a lot more subtler ways to say that, the next pony that gets grabbed by a bug, Equestria puts a megaton-yield megaspell into their hive.
I'm wondering if this is a 'city of the dead' - a ritual site that is not a living city but something only ever occupied during a specific festival (this is not unheard of in RL archaeology). That would explain the lack of infrastructure; the ponies would bring enough supplies for the short time they'd be on site; there wasn't any need for anything else as the site would be near-deserted except for its priesthood and caretakers at other times.
As for the strange racial homogeneity of the carvings? Well, I'm sure not all unicorns wanted to be treated equally with the pegasi and earth ponies. Indeed, I'm sure there were earth ponies and pegasi that felt the same way. So, in the immediate aftermath of the unification, I'm sure there were supremicist groups and isolationist groups that broke away from pony civilisation as a whole and tried to form their own, independent communities. This may have been a more aggressive group, hence its use of the Tyrantlestia imagery and its' apparent fate; it might have attempted an uprising and got itself wiped out by the United Army for its pains.
5265597
I'm more along the lines of thinking that this kingdom was on the verge of attacking Equestria at some point, and Celestia was forced to cow them into submission. Also, the conquered always look at the victors in an unflattering light. Case in point; how the South viewed the North after the Civil War (I'm a big history nut, always have been).
Sounds like an ancient unicorn supremacist state. Just because the majority of people understand racism is stupid doesn't mean they all do.
The diplomatic letter to Chrysalis won this chapter for me. I reread it twice it amused me so much.
I only have one question. Why does twilight have such a bloodlust? It's a bit weird... and scary and possibly ooc if I think about it.
6027238 were is the blood lust
she smaked a dragon round but caused no permanet damage teleported from some bunyips and threatened a parasite i see no blood spilt
I feel kinda bad for Chrysalis. That errant changeling was a just hot-headed, overconfident teenager who thought she could take on a pony and a princess by herself, and now Chrysalis has to deal with the fallout from that idiot. That missive will probably send Chrysalis into a panic, making sure all of her little changelings think before they act.
no space between ? and "
sat
no space after idea
Ah, whew, for a moment I was worried it was another fic where ponies killed changelings indiscriminately.
In my opinion the threat in the letter was a bluff, there's to much they could go wrong with attacking changelings on their home turf that it wouldn't be worth it. It's not even sure if they know where the hive is exactly.
Also, aren't the badlands changeling territory? If so, the two are trespassing and as such the buggies are free to do with them what they want. :B
Cya
Raziel-chan
Somepony just got that face. You know the one I'm talking about.
You know, I really appreciate how intricately crafted all the mythos and such are.
PS:derpicdn.net/img/2013/7/14/373805/full.gif
and that last part reminds me of the look on Twilight's face in this scene:
Oh, trust me, the letter (the details of which were very sweet from Jigsaw's point of view in the 'oh you care so much about me' kind of way) to your mother is quite embarrassing. I love it.
Plus now we get into all the conspiracies amd secret societies amd cults amd fun stuff.
7254641 Lesson Zero - stage 1
Such a wonderful way to end a chapter. Part of me desperately wants to hit next, part of me desperately wants to just enjoy sitting here thinking about what happens next and not knowing leaves me free to imagine :p
And then you roll in epilogue, and reveal the cypher with which you can decode "Misadventures of Twilight" from the actual story tittle.
Uh-oh, Twilight appears to be malfunctioning.
I like that you brought up the desert location. So...they either imported large amounts of food from outside, or the desert was not there. Concerning.
I do wonder how the unicorn-only population will play out later.
Yikes that's kinda scary.
Yikes. I almost wonder if maybe she's a bit too mean, just a touch? Then again I'm a softy myself.
I love this bit. Very Twilight-y, observing the situation and using her magic to figure out the best course of action.
Very flavorful.
*The entire bit about ECE and how ponies lived as told by Jigsaw*
Okay I loved this worldbuilding. It's so well thought out and fits seamlessly into the story. I still remember the answer to this big mystery from having read it already, but gosh it still sets everything up so well!
LOL oh gosh poor Twilight. I could picture her panic unfolding as Jigsaw spoke.
Great establishing chapter for the ruins!
10240776
Twi is mostly indulging in some out-of-date hyperbole, there. Bookish types, y'know.
I have a few friends who are archaeologists and historians... I'm sure I picked up the "vibe" by osmosis!
Jesus Christ this Twilight is as much a psycho as she is a badass.