Chapter 7: In Which Our Hero's Plan Begins to Bear Fruit
Chapter 7: In Which Our Hero's Plan Begins to Bear Fruit
“Watch your step through here, there's loose rubble on the ground. And keep your helmet on straight – don't want a loose rock to knock your brains out.” I readjust my helmet and take a tentative step over the loose gravel and bits of rubble that cover the floor. There's an acrid stench in the air that burns my throat and seems to close in around me, making the bubbles of light given off by the torches mounted on the walls seem even smaller. My helmet light seems even feebler as it struggles to brush away the gloom in front of me. Dear Celestia, that smell is going to stick to my fur for days, I just know it.
I glance up at the back of Blueblood's head. He seems to be having a grand old time, as he turns and gives me a smile. “Isn't this exciting, Ink? This is the first time I've ever been in a real mine!”
I snort. “If the giggling after the dynamite went off hadn't convinced me, the fact that you actively choose to spend your days in a place like this would be enough to make me doubt your mental stability, Ruby.” The mare at the head of our group laughs, and even Iron and Silver, bringing up the rear behind me, giggle. Our little convoy is trekking through a newly dynamite-excavated tunnel in the Gemcracker mine. Ruby was apparently preparing to blast through into a new cavern when we arrived, and she offered to let us watch the detonation and view the results.
“Hah! You just wait, bookworm! It'll grow on you! Once you get used to digging in a mine, you'll understand.” She throws a grin over her shoulder as she uses her magic to push a pile of rubble out of the way. “My dad used to say that you can take the pony out of the mine, but you can't take the mine out of the pony.”
“I'm not surprised,” I grumble, “given how much dust we're breathing in. Isn't this supposed to be bad for you or something?”
Ruby shakes her head. “Nah, you're thinking of a coal mine. This place is safe, and even if there's a little bad stuff in the air, you're not getting very much. You'll be fine. Besides, it's the most impressive right after the blast. Couldn't wait if you wanted the full show.” She stops at a point where the tunnel widens out and sets her lantern on the ground. “Here we are.” The four of us line up next to her and peer into the darkness. A solid wall of black stands in front of us, seemingly impenetrable even to the combined force of our lights.
“Um... what... is it?” Blueblood asks, hesitantly.
Ruby winks at him. I hear Blueblood's breath catch. “Just wait, lawyer-boy.” She turns back to the cavern and clicks her tongue once, twice, thrice. A minute later, she is answered by an echo, then another, then another, then more. Soon, a whole chorus of clicks reverberate through the chamber. Ruby grins. “Sounds like a big one. Go on, try it.”
Blueblood takes a cautious step forward. “Uh... hello?”
“Uh... hello?” Comes the reply.
“Wow...” Blueblood breathes. He speaks again, more confidently. “Good day to you, sir. A pleasure to meet you.”
“Good day to you, sir. A pleasure to meet you.”
Blueblood smiles. “Charmed, I'm sure. It's always good to meet a gentlestallion of refinement.”
“Charmed, I'm sure. It's always good to-”
“HI ECHO PONY!” Silver's shout drowns out Blueblood's echo and ricochets back to us, seemingly louder than before. “I'M SILVER!” I wince a little at the aural assault. Ruby might not even need dynamite to blast through rock – Silver's lungs can seemingly generate enough force to handle it on their own.
“Aw, Silver! You said I could go first this time! You always go first!” Iron jumps in, his rapid-fire chatter adding to the commotion. Ruby chuckles and pats a slightly depressed-looking Blueblood on the back.
“Hey, don't feel too bad. It was only a matter of time until they jumped in. I'm surprised they let you talk for this long.”
I snicker and elbow Blueblood. “Hey, don't feel too bad. If you really want to talk to a parrot without no original ideas, we could just go back to Canterlot.”
Blueblood laughs a little. “I suppose you're right. The conversation would have been a little one-sided, anyways.” I laugh and clap him on the back.
“Hey, you made a joke! See, this trip's doing good for you already.” By this time, Ruby's managed to get Iron and Silver to calm down, if only a little.
“Okay, you two, get ready for the real show.” She lights her horn up and begins examining the rock walls closely. After a minute, she nods and gestures to a sparkling vein of blue. “Sapphire. Perfect. Okay, get ready for a show.” She narrows her eye in concentration, and the beam of light from her horn abruptly brightens. The gem vein begins to glow with reflected light, and suddenly the entire chamber is bathed in blue light. The light reflected off of the sapphires by Ruby's horn beams into the chamber, reflecting off more and more clusters of gemstones, catching on the dust hanging in the air, until the cavernous expanse before us is glowing blue. I feel my jaw hit the floor. From the silence, I gather that Blueblood is similarly shocked, and even Silver and Iron fall silent. I'm not sure how long we stand there, just gazing at the reflecting arcs of glowing blue light, before it begins to fade and Ruby wipes a bead of sweat from her forehead. “Whew, this is a big one! This'll keep us busy for quite a while.” The five of us turn and file out of the newly-excavated tunnel. As we emerge into the late afternoon sun, Ruby removes her helmet and shakes out her mane. “So how's the work going? You two have been holed up in the town hall for the last four days.”
“Believe me, I know. I think the dust is seeping into my coat.” I sidestep and manage to avoid being bowled over as Silver and Iron go tearing off towards the house. I'm not sure those two actually have a normal walking speed; as far as I can tell, they only have two settings – stationary and maximum speed. “We've been checking and rechecking every record we can get our hooves on, then going through the archives to make sure we didn't miss anything, then re-organizing everything we have to see if it's out of order, and then going through it again.” Ruby winces, as if the idea of office work is physically painful to her.
“Yes, and we're not much closer to finding an answer.” Blueblood frowns. “We might have made more progress if Coal Tunnel didn't drop by at least once a day to 'check on how things are going'.”
Ruby shrugs. “Well, makes sense. I mean, it's important to him, so he'd want to keep an eye on it and help if he could, right?”
“Yes, but...” Blueblood shrugs. “I get the feeling he's mostly just trying to figure out how I'm going to rule ahead of time.”
“And? What did you tell him?”
Blueblood shakes his head. “Nothing definite, but I have the feeling he's not going to like the answer. Yes, I can't really find any evidence that Wild Vine's family bought the land, at least not aside from Vine's word and the fuzzy recollections of half a dozen townsponies that their grandparents might have mentioned it once.” He rolls his eyes. “So pretty much the case is totally wrapped up. I just have to take that back to the Princess, she'll call it good, and Wild Vine gets his land, since nothing holds up better in court than 'my grandpappy told me'.”
Ruby laughs out loud and shoulders Blueblood, causing him to stumble a few steps before catching himself. “Hah! You're a funny pony, Scales. You know, when I first met you, I thought you weren't going to be a whole lot of fun to be around, but just look at you!”
I glance at Blueblood out of the corner of my eye, and I catch just the hint of a blush in his cheeks. Strange.
Blueblood clears his throat. “Thank you. Well, in any case, the evidence is pretty clear that Coal Tunnel's family sold the land off to somepony, and even if it wasn't Wild Vine's family, there's not really any basis for the land defaulting back to his family, regardless of whether or not it was used. At best, I could have the land put up for auction by the mayor and let anypony who wanted to bid on it, but that's the best shot Coal Tunnel really has for getting the land back.”
Ruby shrugs. “Sounds like you've already made your decision then.”
Blueblood nods. “I suppose I have. Still, I'd like to get everything in order before I make a decision, and then I'll probably need to stick around to oversee the auction, so we'll be here for a little while longer.”
Ruby smiles. “Glad to hear it. You two are pretty fun to have around. Iron and Silver seem to have taken a liking to you.” I roll my eyes. I've almost given up on getting work done at the house because it seems like I can't even set quill to paper before one of them pops up at my shoulder. 'Whatcha doin'?” “Will the Princess read that?” “Is the castle as big as it looks in pictures?” As soon as I answer their questions – at least to their satisfaction, which can take a while – they're gone as swiftly as they appeared. They're like miniature tornadoes, gone as fast as they appear.
“And I know Emerald's taken a liking to you too. Hay, you're nearly part of the family now.” Ruby grins, then claps me and Blueblood on the back.
Blueblood smiles. “That's very kind of you to say.”
Ruby elbows him. “Hey, I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true.”
I smirk. “Well, we certainly appreciate Emerald's cooking.” Emerald's proved to be a delicious cook, and just thinking about the dinner waiting for us in the house is making my stomach rumble. Emerald said he was going to make a mountain flower salad.
Ruby snorts. “Just be glad it isn't me cooking. My cooking's decent now, but I was a really bad cook at first. Emerald got sick once, and ever since he insists on cooking almost all the time, even if he's sick. He said that he couldn't tell which was doing a better job of killing him, the disease or my soup. Took him forever to finally admit that I had become an okay cook.”
Blueblood cracks a grin and winks. “Who taught you to cook? A poisoner?”
Ruby shakes her head. “No, my parents taught me, but it never just seemed to sink in properly, and then, well...”
Blueblood's face falls. “I'm sorry for bringing it up. What... happened? If you're okay talking about it, that is?”
Ruby shrugs. “It's not a big deal anymore.” She sighs. “It was... almost 10 years ago now. I was 17. Illness, both of them. Dad first, and then mom a few months later. When we had mom, we could get on alright, but once she got sick... She always said she'd follow Dad anywhere. Guess she was right. It was... really rough at first. I mean, I'm 17, Emerald's just a little younger, and we have these kids to take care of, both of us barely capable of fending for ourselves, much less taking care of Iron and Silver. I'm not ashamed to admit that we didn't think we could do it.
“Our neighbors really stepped in to help us out. They taught us what we needed to know to manage on our own, gave us money and food, even helped us work the mine. They helped us take care of the kids, even took over running the mine once or twice when Emerald and I were just so burned out we could barely move. Without their help, we wouldn't have made it. We've just been trying to pay them back ever since.”
I sniffle a little. “Wow. You must be really close to the other townsponies.”
Ruby smiles. “Yeah. We owe them everything. Now that's enough serious talk – we have dinner to eat!”
I grin. “Yes, ma'am!” We hurry into the house, where Emerald is just beginning to set the table. Ruby manages to wrangle Iron and Silver into washing their hooves. Dinner is a joyous affair, full of laughter, Iron and Silver's tales of school (apparently they had a math test and both walked out convinced that they had aced it but the other failed), polite questions about our work – as well as some good-natured ribbing whenever Blueblood starts geeking out over work, a fresh interrogation by Iron and Silver on the minutiae of life in Canterlot, and general good times. Blueblood and I have a roaring good time. Eating with the Veins feels good. It feels like family.
After dinner, Iron and Silver are shooed off to their rooms to complete their homework. They go, though not without strenuous protest. The four of us retire to the front porch with a bottle of wine and a set of glasses to watch the sunset. I've noticed by this point that wine drinking seems to be a common pastime in Saddlefield, most likely because a town this small has little else to do. Blueblood and I recline in rocking chairs, while Ruby sits on the front steps and Emerald leans against a pillar. The setting sun streams across the field before us, every little pebble casting elongated shadows, some seemingly stretching to the front porch all the way from the horizon. It seems as if we can see all the way to the end of Equestria in the distance.
“I have to say,” I sigh, taking another sip of my wine. “This is rather pretty. I thought this whole place seemed kind of... bleak when I arrived.”
Emerald nods. “It is. But you learn to appreciate it. I think that this view, right here, is why our family decided to build here.”
“Yeah,” Ruby shrugs. “I'd build a house for this. Shame we won't be able to stay here for that much longer.”
I frown. “What do you mean? Is something wrong?”
Ruby glances at Emerald, who shrugs. She turns back to us and jerks her head back towards the mine. “Mine's running out,” she says, as if that was the most natural thing in the world, and not a dire threat to her livelihood.
Blueblood blinks and leans forward. “But what about that big cavern you showed us? There must have been tons of gems in there. You yourself said that it would last you for a while.”
Ruby shrugs. “And it will. But finds like that are getting rarer and rarer. When our family bought this land, we supposedly found one of those several times a year. When I was a kid, it was down to three or four times a year. Now it's one or two a year, three if we're lucky. And we're having to go deeper and deeper to find them, which means more time and more work to get the gems out. There are other, smaller veins, and we mine those when we can, but some of them are too deep or just too small to make it worth the time, effort and materials we'd need to get to them and get them out. Eventually, there just won't be enough gems left to make the mine profitable.”
Blueblood's tone is soft. “Then what will you do?”
“Move.” Ruby glances at Blueblood and raises an eyebrow. “Relax, Scales, it's not that catastrophic. A mine's not like a farm, you know, where you can keep using the same land forever, as long as you take care of it and do that crop spinning thing.”
I snort. “Crop rotation. Replenishes soil nutrients, stops them from getting depleted.”
Ruby waves a hoof at me. “Whatever. Gems, they don't grow back. When a mine starts running out, a family has two options. One is to get more land – dig deeper, buy nearby plots, that sort of thing. Or, if you can't go any deeper, or there isn't any worthwhile land nearby, you move. It's just a reality of the business.”
“So...” Blueblood taps at his wine glass awkwardly. “How much longer do you have?”
Emerald taps his hoof in thought. “Hard to say. At least a few years. Probably not more than seven or ten or so, though, and even that would be really lucky. Even if the mine could be viable then, it might just not be worth it.”
I lean forward. “Could you hire some of those seasonal workers you talked about, get some extra hooves?”
Emerald shrugs. “Yes, but it might not be worth it. We'd bring in some more gems, but if we didn't see an significant increase in productivity, we'd just be breaking even since we'd need to pay and house the workers.”
“So where would you move to?”
Emerald keeps his gaze on the horizon, not turning to meet my eyes. “Don't know. We've looked at a few places. It's a lot of money, though. Hard to come up with the bits.” He harumphs and cracks a smile. “Well, that's enough of that. We came out here to relax, enjoy the beautiful sunset.”
“Yeah...” I sigh and lean back in my chair. “This is nice. I think I could just stay like this for, oh, the next year or so?”
Blueblood smiles. “Yes, but what would the castle do without you? Without your organizational talent, everything might fall to pieces! It'd be anarchy in the streets!”
I snort as Ruby and Emerald snicker at Blueblood's theatrics. “That's a price I'm willing to pay. Though I suppose a personal, heartfelt request from the Princesses could change my mind.”
Emerald shakes his head and turns to head inwards. “And speaking of heartfelt requests, I'm going to take these glasses inside and see if Iron and Silver have actually done their homework.”
I push myself up with a groan. “Here, I'll help you.” I load some of the empty glasses onto a tray and slide it onto my back before pushing the door open. Emerald heads upstairs to Iron and Silver's rooms while I deposit the tray and glasses back in the kitchen and wash them out. Whistling to myself, I turn and head back towards the porch. I can hear Ruby laughing – Blueblood must have said something funny, whether or not he actually meant to. The laughter dies down and I'm about to open the door when Blueblood speaks again.
“Miss Ruby, may I ask you something?” Something in his tone stops me with my hoof on the door. It's got that same tense eagerness as he had when we set out on this trip, his words all twisted up like a spring just waiting to be let go.
I hear Ruby snort. It occurs to me that I'm spying, but it also occurs to me that I don't care. I'm curious now. “Of course. What is it?”
I can hear Blueblood's intake of breath before the words come tumbling out, the spring releasing. “Would you like to have dinner tomorrow?”
There's a pause. “Uh... yes, I usually have dinner. Sometimes I forget 'cause I'm down in the mine, but Emerald usually makes sure I get something to eat.”
“Well, I meant with me. At a restaurant in town – the mayor recommended a place to me, Flip's, he says it's quite nice and very tasty, apparently it's a great deal like the restaurants in Canterlot, though since Legal Speak has apparently never been to Canterlot I'm not really sure how he would judge that, but-”
Ruby cuts Blueblood off mid-stream. “Wait. You mean, like... a date?”
Blueblood coughs and clears his throat. “Ah, erm, yes. Perhaps I should just have opened with that. Miss Ruby, would you like to go on a date with me?”
There's a pause, and I realize I'm holding my breath. I suspect Blueblood is too. “I...” Ruby begins. “Yes, Scales. That sounds very nice. Tomorrow, you said?”
I can imagine Blueblood's sigh of relief. “Yes. If it's quite convenient.”
When Ruby replies, her voice is warm and welcoming. “It is. It's a date, then.”
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I like this chapter. Blueblood is coming out of his self-imposed shell. I hope the date goes well though.
5014093
GYAAHAHAHAHAHAHA-Erm, uh, I mean, yes, I hope so too.
*Wipes tear*
Our little Blueblood is growing up. And don't worry about the delay, no wait is too long.
Are you okay though? What happened, if you don't mind talking about it?
5014465
Oh, it wasn't anything bad. I was on vacation for two weeks, and while I did get a little brainstorming done, it wasn't as much as I would have liked. After that, I went to Gen Con, which was awesome, but I didn't exactly get a lot of work done there either. After that, I had to get ready to move into an apartment a thousand miles from home because I just started graduate school. So yeah, nothing bad, but it was certainly a crazy 4-5 weeks.
Bllueblood x Ruby...finally. I hope this works out. I just hope that Ruby takes the fact that Scales is actually a prince well, without getting too upset.
Whooo!!! HE GOT A DATE!!!!
Also, maybe talk to Pinkie Pie and her family about the gem thing? I think that's what's going on with their farm. I think. I'm not sure even Celestia knows what to make of that place.