• Published 4th Dec 2013
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Appledashery - Just Essay



Rainbow Dash lives an exciting life and is swiftly becoming the most daring, awesome pegasus in all of Equestria. She would gladly give it all up, though, just to confess her love to Applejack.

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Low Gravity and Expositions

"Follow me," Noir said as he shuffled down a long, dark corridor. He unlocked and opened no less than three cold steel doors along the way, leading into deeper and more shadowy chambers of the building's basement. "And whatever you feel or see, remember not to panic."

"Uhhh... Okay..." Rainbow Dash nodded. She bumped into a wall forth the umpteenth time. "Ouchie! Darn it! How can you see anything down here?"

"Very, very easily," the stallion droned.

"Heh... Forgot who I was talking to. Hey... it's a dead end!"

"Not quite." Noir shut the final door behind them. He approached what looked like a rigid black frame, standing empty at the far end of a slender compartment. He fiddled with a pocket under his cloak, held out a satchel full of silver powder, and blew some of the enchanted sediment forward. The dust flew forward in a gentle spiral, settled inside the empty black frame, and suddenly flashed with dim purple light. In a blink, an indigo mirror loomed before the two ponies, quivering and undulating with otherwordly magic.

"Uhhhh..." Rainbow Dash took a nervous step backwards, her ears folding back. "Erm..."

"Hold your breath." Noir gently took her hoof. "You might feel a slightly dizzying sensation."

"From wh-what—?!"

Noir threw the two of them straight into the mirror.

Rainbow screamed—or at least she tried to. She was sailing down an infinite corridor of violet mirrors, all of them reflecting alternate versions of herself stuck in various degrees of shock and awe. In a blink, the doppelgangers vanished, and she was floating somewhere. After a couple of seconds, she realized she wasn't floating—but rather falling slowly. At last, her hooves struck a solid floor of polished granite tile, with elaborate mosaics of constellations and comets and galactic swirls. "Uhm... how... where...?"

"Welcome to Sanctuary," the night pony said. He lowered his hood and trotted comfortably across an alchemy lab lit by dim, violet torches. Beyond him, metal steps led towards a second platform dotted from railing to railing with thick shelves of ancient tomes. Above and beyond, a domed ceiling revealed twinkling stars and rotating interstellar bodies. "We shall be safe to discuss anything here."

"Uhh... nifty..." Rainbow blinked. "Just why did you bring me here again?"

"Because the topic we must address now requires—"

"No, I mean, this place looks killer secret. Why trust me with it?"

Noir paused halfway across the floor and looked back at her. "Because you seem a simple pony who can be trusted to have a less-than-complex ambition."

Rainbow's eyes narrowed. "You mean to say I'm stupid."

"If it suits you." Noir jumped lightly, and yet his body soared thirty feet, landing softly on the second story above. "Allow me to fetch the Chaotician Chronicles. I feel it will be necessary as a frame of reference."

"For what?"

"There are two possibilities," Noir said. "One. You may very well have unleashed an unfathomable evil into the greedy hands of the Continental Equestrian Black Market. Two. You actually delivered a bunch of meaningless rocks, and some eccentric moguls of the Underworld are about to be severely ripped off."

"Okay, hold the sound stone!" Rainbow Dash frowned and flapped her wings. "What's all this crud about some Black Market? I delivered 99% of those granite shards where they were supposed to go—"

Noir paused in fetching a book, glancing calmly over his shoulder. "I wouldn't do that if I were you—"

It was too late. "Aaaaack!" Rainbow Dash found herself flailing towards the ceiling from a single feather-flap. She spun no less than ten times. "What what what what what what—?!" Thud! She landed against the rooftop, clinging to it with a pained expression. "Unnngh..."

"My apologies," Noir said. "I should have warned you properly."

"Yeesh, what's up with gravity all of the sudden?!"

"There's about one twelfth of it, if that's what you're wondering."

"Whoah!" Rainbow gasped, staring out the domed windows as she slowly drifted down to his platform. Her ruby eyes reflected a pale, barren surface beyond the glass. Above, violet nebulae and swirling galactic bands illuminated the twinkling night sky. "Where in Equestria are we?!"

"Nowhere near it, as a matter of fact," Noir said. "More like several billion light years away."

"Yeah? If you ask me, it looks like the Moon."

"It's a moon. 'New Saros' is what we like to call it. Eons ago, Princess Luna used the Elements of Hamrony opened a portal to this galactic destination at random. My kind have used the transportation spell over the years to seek refuge while Nightmare Moon lived out her imprisonment on the Equestrian satellite."

"Uhhh... neato..." Rainbow landed in an awkward slump besides the stallion, struggling to stand up without pushing herself off at a thousand miles per hour. "Still... 'New Saros'... where have I heard that before?"

"Don't push it," he grunted, flipping through a book.

"And, come to think of it, 'Noir' sounds stupidly, hauntingly familiar for some reason—"

"Here." Noir slid the book over on a table beneath Rainbow's chin. "Do any of these creatures look familiar?"

"Creatures?" Rainbow glanced down at the page, then did a double-take. "Whoah. Yeesh." She winced upon seeing several serpentine dragons with twisted horns and jagged fangs, all stuck in threatening poses and carrying random names slathered beneath them. "These dudes certainly had their rounds with the Ugly Stick!"

"Pay attention," Noir said, his amber eyes narrowing. "This is important. Do any of them strike you as having been seen before?"

"I... uh..." Rainbow flipped through the pages, awkwardly eying the multiple, mutated shapes. "I don't even know what I'm looking at."

"They are the Ancient Chaos Lords," Noir explained. "Tens of thousands of years ago, when the Alicorns discovered this plane amidst the nebulous patches of cosmic chaos—"

"What the heck do you mean 'discovered?'"

Noir went on. "—these monstrous beings defied the harmonic order that the Equestrian founders were attempting to construct. While some of them fled for the outer reaches of space, others decided to stay within this realm, but the very essence of their being conflicted with the tranquility that the alicorns sought to manifest."

"Uh huh..." Rainbow kept flipping. "Sheesh, there are a lot of these dudes."

"Almost as many as there were stars in the sky," Noir said. "But that much chaos couldn't last for long. They warred amongst themselves, whiddling their numbers down to the turbulent few who were present when the world was first colonized by agents of Harmony. This lasting group defied the alicorns at every turn. They identified themselves as Chaoticians, and the war between them and the Alicorns lasted for countless millennia."

"But Celestia's ancestors totally whipped their ugly butts, right?"

"At a great cost. There aren't enough alicorns existing today to spread Harmony from horizon to horizon. Instead, our faithful rulers govern life from the heart of Equestria, maintaining dominance over the Sun and the Moon."

"And you guys—"

"—are sworn to the protection and glorification of the Lunar Princess. Or at least..." Noir sighed. "Most of were."

"What happened?"

"Many of us could not predict the wickedness of Nightmare Moon. When Luna turned evil, the bulk of us sided with her. The Sarosian Guard—as we were called—were once weapons of horrible darkness. After her imprisonment, those of us left behind in Equestria were forced to flee into obscurity. Many formed pocket communities within the seedier parts of the terrestrial plane, living their lives out as mercenaries and bandits for centuries. The few of us fortunate to end up here—on New Saros—held true to our higher calling."

"Lemme guess. The Lunar Code."

"Yes," Noir said, nodding. "And in accordance to what we have sworn, we are not allowed to cause any harm to innocent citizens of our Princess' Kingdom."

"Soooooo..." Rainbow Dash smiled awkwardly. "That's why you totally didn't skewer me with that scimitar of yours."

"I had hoped my message had been clear enough without having to draw blood."

"Seeeeee?" Rainbow grinned and flipped another page. "I knew you were bluffing—Whoah dayum!" she flinched.

"What?" Noir craned his head. "What is it?"

"Uhhhh..." Rainbow Dash stared at a very familiar horn resting atop the skull of an abominable mutant of a creature, its draconian figure segmented to resemble over half-a-dozen animals all in one.

"Is this it?" Noir asked.

"Is what it?"

"Was this the form of the statue you were asked to deliver from Canterlot?"

"I... uh..." Rainbow Dash gulped, fidgeted, then muttered out the side of her muzzle. "Maybe."

Noir's ears folded. "Maybe?" he droned.

"Look, all I got a good look at was a horn."

"A horn? Is that what's in your possession?"

"Back home, yeah."

Noir exhaled, staring nervously at the ancient illustration. "This is troubling..."

"Why?" Rainbow asked. "What if it turns out to be in the shape of this dude?"

"This dude once went by the name of 'Discord the Devourer of Peace' He was one of the last surviving Chaoticians, and an unfathomably dangerous one to boot."

"So?" Rainbow shrugged. "We're just talking about his statue, right?"

"I'm afraid it's more than that," Noir said. "Legend has it that when Discord the Devourer was defeated, his body was turned into stone, then imprisoned somewhere within the Royal Premises." He glanced aside at her. "The Celestial and Lunar Civil War began not long after, and the actual whereabouts of the defeated Chaos Lords were lost to the wages of conflict."

"So you're saying the statue is this guy?"

"It is possible."

"And what if it was actually true?"

"Then that would explain why the Tartarusian Binding Spell failed when all but one of the pieces were brought to the purgatorial pits," Noir explained. "The rest of the pieces were then teleported back to their last place of holding—Canterlot. Only, nopony on guard was expecting them. I have agents in the field who've informed me that these pieces could very well have entered the hands of the Black Market."

"Black Market? What for?"

"There are ponies these days with a dark heart who would love to get ahold of a piece of chaos, as horrible as it sounds."

"Well, they gotta be duds, right?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well..." Rainbow shrugged. "My piece didn't get zapped anywhere! Not like the others, I mean!"

Noir rubbed his fuzzy chin. "Hmmm..."

"What do you suppose that means?"

"I'm not quite sure..."

"And..." Rainbow's eyes squinted. "What if these are the pieces of Discord, after all, and they've been spread throughout the Equestrian Underground cuz of my screw-up?"

"If that is the case..." Noir stared at her gravely. "Then we may have unwittingly begun a series of events that would spell a chaotic world-destroying Equestrian Apocalypse."

"... ... ..." Rainbow's mouth froze in an "O". She fidgeted, glanced at the book, then nervously smiled at Noir. "World-Destroying Equestrian Apocalypse, huh?"

"That's correct."

"What... uhhh... kind of an impact would that sort of thing have on—oh, I dunno—an apple farm?" Rainbow "squee'd" nervously through clenched teeth.

Noir simply blinked at her. "I think our moonwalk is over."

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