Explosions, Expositions, It's all Gravy
Bellesmith's ears twitched. She tilted her head up, panting.
"Do... d-do you hear that?"
Elma shivered, clinging to her. The exhausted changeling stammered, "Hear what?"
"It... it almost sounds like... like..." Belle's chestnut eyes narrowed. "...screaming."
"Mother... I mean..." Elma winced. "She sent them away. The brood..."
"No, it's not changelings," Belle said. She stood up and trotted towards the battered hole in the rusted side of the collapsed dirigible. "It's... almost animalistic. Primal. I... I don't understand..."
"Belle?" Elma squinted towards where the mare stood, her green eyes squinting. "What are you doing?"
"Something's not right here," Belle murmured. "This place is older than you, me, and just about anything we've stumbled upon." She turned and looked over at Elma. "What if it was hidden here for a reason?" Out from the hole, a decayed pegasus head entered, shrieking loudly.
"Belle!" Elma shouted, her shell flickering stripes for a blink.
"Gaaaie!" Belle fell, scooting backwards from her flank.
The undead pony rammed and rammed and rammed its battered shoulders into the frame of the hole, struggling and scuffling to get in. As it spat and snorted, copious streams of purple goo fell to the floor of the airship's hollow chassis.
Belle grimaced at the pooling ooze, trying not to vomit. The metal frame of the vessel shook, and the hull cracked in four different places, allowing the zombified creature to squeeze through.
With a birdlike yelp, the thing pounced on Belle. Its bone wings spread wide, scraping the edges of the ship's interior and producing sparks.
Belle rolled aside, panting for breath. She fumbled her way across the interior on her belly while the pegasus loomed above. Wincing, she flung a hoof forward and swooped up Eagle Eye's shield. The mare spun around and swung the thing blindly, successfully smacking the skull of the monster.
Crack!
The thing's jaw snapped clean off. Nevertheless, it icily pivoted its cranium back down at the horn-less unicorn. A stream of lavender slime trickled out of the gaping hull in its maw. With a gurgling sound, it lunged at Belle again.
"Hnnnngh!" Belle planted the shield flatly against the ends of her lower hooves and reverse somersaulted.
Clannnng! She uppercutted the beast, knocking it towards the dilapidated cockpit of the vessel. There, it crashed and rattled about, drowning in loose junk and danging manaconduits.
Before the shield could completely rattle to a stop, Belle grabbed it and used its weight to stand. She watched—breathless—as the wings of beast protruded in and out of its buried struggle. She heard more shrieks, and she looked straight out the cracked hole in the airship. Her twitching vision caught sight of various winged figures streaking across the gray clouds. Then, Bellesmith heard an eerie hiss. Like steam. She looked down.
A puddle of the pegasus' purple drool was spreading right before Belle's eyes. Bubbles formed, only to produce lids that fluttered open. Bright eyes rotated around, eventually locking on Belle's figure with one collective stare. Almost immediately, a low thumping picked up, like a drumbeat summoned out of the void. Then, with slow and frightening grace, the slime-slick skull of a pony emerged from the paper-thin pocket of ooze.
Belle hobbled backwards, her eyes glossy with terror. She nevertheless bit her lip, dashed over to Elma's side, and threw both the changeling and Eagle's shield over her flank. "We have to go."
"Go?!" Elma gazed sickly at the floor giving birth to a lurching abomination with featherless wings. "Go wh-where?! These... these creatures..."
"We can't give up!" Belle panted and stammered, galloping briskly out of the manaship and into the gray rain. "We must keep moving!"
"But..." Elma shivered as she gazed through the thick precipitation at multiple waves of shrieking beasts. "But th-there are so m-many—"
"We must!"
"Pilate, you're good with words!" Rainbow huffed and puffed as she rocketed the two of them through the rain. "Not to mention super alive. Both of which are totally awesome! So... in two sentences or less... do ya think you can explain to me what in the hay Roarke is doing here and why she set you up to be friggin' robo-zebra?!"
"Beneath us!" Pilate shouted, his helm rattling as he dangled in the pegasus' grasp. "About five of them! Try and fly to your right!"
"Pilate, dudeguy, I think I know what I'm doing—" Five separate shrieks sounded off from below. "Crapazoid!" Rainbow's voice cracked as she suddenly jerked left, flinging both of them away from the intercepting pegasi. "Luna on a unicycle! You weren't kidding!"
"Two more! Up top! High!"
Rainbow flung her eyes up, squinting through the rain. In a flash of lightning, she saw two pairs of skeletonous wings. Just as drops of purple slime fell towards them, she spiraled about, backflipped, and dove straight down, hurling their combined weight towards the top of the domed structure.
"All seven of them are still on our tail!" Pilate stammered. "And there's a group at your nine o'clock! Coming in fast!"
"Friggin' flank buckets!" Rainbow Dash griped and performed the necessary twirl and dodge motions before ultimately flying a wild loop around the broad circumference of the building. "How do you even see all of this?!"
"It's the Oracular Array!"
"The Oracle Aria?!"
"No! Oracular Array! Combination of Searonese and Naga technology!"
"Naga?!"
"Lounge! It was built by the Lounge, okay?!" Pilate winced, almost slipping from Rainbow's grip on the last turn. Rainbow tossed him and picked him up again in one motion so she could hold onto him better. "Nnnnngh... Roarke... sh-she snuck aboard Razzar's ship weeks ago! She's been passing herself off as one of the Lounge ever since!"
"No friggin' way..." Rainbow Dash weaved in and out of the pillars, trying to throw the monsters off her tail. "What in Celestia's name for?"
"Presumably to f-find out who the Lounge were..." Pilate shivered as he held tight to the Lounge staff in his hooves. "And pr-provide us safe passage through the Wastes!"
"After all I said and did to her..." Rainbow Dash's rainsoaked ears drooped. She heard the shrieks of the pursuers, snapping out of her momentary daze. Frowning once more, she barreled hard to the side, flew daredevilishly through a throng of zombie pegasi, then dove deep into the clouds lingering beneath the structure. For a brief moment, she and the zebra were alone with the mists and thunder. She nevertheless continued her high-velocity flight. "So why'd she hook you up with all of that gizmospunk?!"
"This crystal on my back?!" Pilate shouted above the howling winds. "It's sk-skystone! But a very specific kind! Material you can only find along the north edge of the world—not too far from here!"
"Yeah?! Your point?!"
"More like Roarke's point!" Pilate shouted. "She tasked me with getting this to the center control room of Stratopolis!"
"What in the buck for?!"
"She says that Razzar tortured enough changelings to gather information about this place! Someway or another, the shapeshifting hoard know about a control room in the very heart of the central structure. You place a piece of skystone like this on the center dais, and Stratopolis immediately flies toward the corresponding cardinal direction!"
"And just what will flying this towards the skystone fields accomplish?!"
"Rainbow Dash..." Pilate gnashed his teeth against the rain. "It's not about flying this place. It's about crashing it!"
Rainbow Dash blinked, then gulped as she coasted the two of them through the clouds. "Yeah. Yeah, okay. I can get behind that."
"But our friends—"
"—will have to find their way off the platforms," Rainbow said with a nod. "Hopefully Props, Josho, and the others will get their flanks to the Tarkington. They've got what they need. As for the Noble Jury—"
"She's safe!" Pilate exclaimed while errant shrieks picked up in the distance. "She's still flying through the windy reaches of Stratopolis!"
"What?!" Rainbow glanced down at him. "When?! How?!"
"Rainbow, trust me! I saw it... I-I mean I felt it!" He winced. "Sensed it! Nnngh... it's... an awful lot to take in and then try to explain..."
"Heh, you and me both, brother."
The shrieks intensified. Rainbow Dash glanced back and saw several dark figures bursting out of the upper clouds and soaring after them.
"Did Roarke friggin' anticipate them?!" Rainbow barked.
"Yes and no! I don't think she had any idea they would have come from the heart of Stratopolis or else she wouldn't have tasked me with delivering the skystone!"
"I dunno. I mean, this is Roarke who we're talking about."
"Rainbow Dash, what do we do?!"
"You're the clever zebra. You tell me."
"Rainbow," he growled.
"Alright. Fine. You take your time and think. I'm gonna... uhm... screw with gravity some more." Holding her breath, she flapped her wings hard and shot straight up. Pilate stifled a yelp as he felt his body flinging with her movement. The two rocketed upward, piercing the dark mists while winds blew at them from randomly switching angles. All the while, the pegasi pursued, undaunted, fueled by the panic in their prey's flight.
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Well, they got a living radar and SPAH checker out of it. Not too bad of a trade for getting stuck in Startopolis.
Really hope Ebon's gonna be okay.
I really wonder how they are going to pull this one off. That place is going to be a nightmare to get back into.
We need fire. Lots and lots fire. Hopefully the city will explode upon crashing, otherwise you really haven't solved the problem.
Pilate can finally see better than everyone else yay.
won't crashing just break the temple and allow the smooze to get free?
just throwing ideas out..
Yellow Skystone is increadibly energy dense, and partiularly unstable. If the city follows the control piece, then you could possibly be looking at taking one extremely unstable lump of highly reactivve material, and slamming it at high speed into an entire mountain full of the stuff, on the very edge of a mind boggling large machine.
I think Everyone would feel That event.
So, when this city goes rocketing to the north, what's the delay? Are we going to have all the ponies shoot north and get stuck there where it's even colder?
4385928 That depends on where you crash it.
If you send Stratopolis down inside a volcano or deep into the ice, it just may stop it.
Dang...didn't realize Pilate's new eyewear was that good.
They need to put the bastard on cruise control, due north, and right over the edge of the world. Any other direction would take too long, and I doubt the ground below them would appreciate a Smooze Bomb. The only down side is, it might rear it's ugly head again if/when the story crosses over to the Dark Side of the world, and the changeling queens would be reunited.
4386043
Pilate is now OP!
I'm still sort of doubtful that this place will be destroyed. There's too much lore and history surrounding it.
Though I think the edge of the world is destructive enough to destroy this place and the smooze.
4386205 For you to say something like that colonel...
I bet the Jurists could really use the help of the Necromancer right now.
...hmmm...I wonder if Sweetie Belle could use Fonic Hymns.
The Oracle Aria sounds like a good name for a rock band.
Wonder how Razzar intends to sneak/shoot his way through rooms filled to the brim with Smooze when even with his relatively large group he had difficulties simply getting away. Guess he'll have to just wing it. Without wings. Or radar. Jetpacks are nice though. Wish I had one.
I see what you did there
4386037 I was thinking they could drive it straight down, into the Frozen Sea. If the Smooze freezes, bully for them. If not, though... it'll absorb the ice wyrms and eventually proceed to threaten all adjacent continents
Imagine all the time you could save by sending the thing east.
Also, skinny-dipping in Smooze is bad, m'kay?
Hypothesis and affirmation have never been as closely together.
So many op bad guys...
How the hell do you stop the doomslime?
The slime isn't creating the zombies. The slime creates a portal on whatever surface it covers, allowing them to pass through.
Yes, yes, yes, I can maintain my belief in the law of conservation of mass, oh yes...
4392696 Well, the slime could just be super dense, and the zombies could be made out of lighter lattices of ooze. Thus conservation of mass. Also, if that doesn't work for you, a wizard did it.
Pilate is now OP.
-Spirit
Well, Pilate now has the ability to tell changelings apart from regular ponies and I forsee this being very helpful in the future....also Rainbow needs to find that friggin sword before they crash that bitch.
4385928
I've been thinking this the entire time.
Why is Rainbow surprised? Josho already told her the Jury was still flying.
Anyway, back to defying gravity!
"There's too many of them!!"
"Fall back, fall back!!!"
KA-BOOM
"Pegasus down!!"
"Medic!! We need a medic here!!"
"Watch your six!!"
"WHERE ARE OUR REINFORCEMENTS!!!!!!?????"
Anyone tried singing to the slime yet?
Oh god, I forgot about Belle and Elma. I guess the changelings have totally retreated now that the undeadies are out and about.
4387230 Insert "This Day Aria" lyrics modified to talk about Java here.
Those undead ponies are the reason I always hated to Horde in Halo, and the Zombie Virus in Resident Evil.
Holy fraking hell. At least things are exciting,
I think that Roarke helped the only way she knew how for two reasons. One, she was in that spot Rainbow is now, and Rainbow stuck with her, even though she didn't want Rainbow to. Two, she still cares, even if Rainbow does not, which we know is not true.
06/04/2017 00:12 UTC
Looks like Pilate and Belle learned a few things from Rainbow in the School of Kicking Major Flank.
Man, it's gonna go completely FUBAR now that the Smooze is fully on the loose.