Station Breach
Under normal circumstances, the Operations Spire, a two-kilometre-tall spike of barely-understood thaumic machinery encased in support equipment and maintenance gantries, was a relatively quiet place, despite the high traffic that came with being the functional command-and-control hub of the Exterior.
Today, however, it was a warzone.
Typically, all one could hear when they first entered Operations was a faint, almost imperceptibly oscillating hum that came from the spire itself, interspersed with muffled hoofsteps and quiet chatter. As Celestia entered the chamber, however, the first thing that struck her was the noise: screams of pain and dismay echoed throughout the chamber, punctuated by sharp cracks as offensive spell charges impacted against metal or flesh.
She skidded to a halt, surprised at both the scale of the carnage that had spread in such a short time, and the fact that she was surprised, a sensation almost entirely alien her her considering her previous nigh-omniscience. It took a second for the fact that the Exterior was under attack to sink in, before a bolt of malevolent red energy screeched passed her head, forcing her to take cover behind an upturned metal desk.
She was woefully underprepared for combat. Without some external power source or a Powerstone at her disposal, she would have to rely upon her own natural reserves of magical power and raw ability as an alicorn. While that would be more than enough to best a regular pony one-on-one, she was facing an army. Or, something that seemed like an army.
“Horsefeathers,” she swore under her breath, chaining together a series of one-off general-purpose defensive spells, carefully metering her available power. Since everyone in Operations knew her personally, she could be reasonably assured that anyone who attacked her wasn’t friendly, and tailored the spells accordingly, directing them to reflect any inbound hostile spell, projectile, or beam back to its source.
“This is Alpha!” she yelled, voice echoing over the chaos. “I don’t know who you all are, but this is your last warning to stand down before I personally get involved!”
A bolt of energy slammed into the table she was hiding behind.
“Very well!”
She vaulted the table, propelling herself at the central spire of Operations, wings spread and horn ignited. Almost immediately, five of her prepared defensive spell chains triggered, reflecting three high-energy thaumic beams, a thrown agonize spell, and an explosive cannon shell back to their owners.
The extent of the chaos became even more apparent now that she found herself in the midst of it. For starters, she couldn’t tell her own ponies and the enemy apart, given that everypony in Operations was wearing standard Outsider Operations gear. Groups of what she could only assume were hostiles were grouped together on many levels, systematically advancing on and dispatching isolated ponies who were as much in the dark on who was friend and who was foe as Celestia herself was.
She hesitated in casting an offensive spell, twisting mid-air as she drew closer to the Spire in order to present a smaller target for anyone who might decide to take a potshot at her. As it was, the only way she could determine if somepony was an enemy was if they shot at her first, while they seemed to be able to easily discern who was on their side and who wasn’t.
Another bolt of energy flew at her, and was diverted back at its source in turn, a startled yelp accompanying the bolt’s impact. Two more flew past her, passing barely far enough from her for her wards to ignore them.
She stretched her hooves, latching on to the Spire’s meshwork as she passed, swinging herself up and under a catwalk to provide her with some much-needed cover. It wouldn’t last long, the interlopers would get to a more suitable vantage point to dispatch her, but she didn’t need much time as it was.
To many, the Spire that ran through the core of operations was often mistaken for an ornamental centrepiece, an immaculately-carved spike of eldritch crystal, inlaid with innumerable patterns and fractal fissures that led deep into the spire’s core. Otherworldly polychromatic light flashed through it, bathing the chamber in dancing colors that one never seemed able to tune out. An intricate golden mesh encased the crystal, itself immaculately designed and detailed, further distorting the errant bursts of light.
To Celestia, however, it was a device quite beyond her capability to understand. Countless scholars had spent their entire lives studying it, unable to discern the crystal’s ultimate purpose or limits. As far as Operations was concerned, it was essentially a giant filing cabinet, a faithful assistant capable of storing, organising, and recalling any information stored within it. Beyond that, ponies didn’t really know what it was ultimately capable of, and new functions, trivial though they may have been, were discovered almost every other week.
While the information stored within it was her primary concern, Celestia hoped that somewhere, deep within the crystal’s lattice, lay some capability that could help her.
She reached out, worming her hoof through the meshing to lay it against the icy-cold surface of the Spire.
It was cold. Almost unbearably cold, as though the heat of the universe had been syphoned away and replaced with a dull freezing void. Celestia saw her body stiffen up from the sensation, but didn’t feel it happen, her perception currently situated around five hooflengths behind her head.
She hated this place. Not that it was accurate to call it a ‘place,’ but she hated it nonetheless. Through a mechanism that wasn’t even slightly understood, upon physical contact with the Operations Spire, the user’s conscious awareness was forcibly detached from their body and permitted to roam freely. Her viewpoint drifted upwards, idly examining the innumerable ponies in the room, frozen in time under her scrutiny. An urge to shudder made itself known, stopped short by the fact that it had no body to act upon.
Dismissively, she turned away from Operations, the world shifting around her as she moved through the crystal’s inner world. Quite unlike a giant filing cabinet, data within the Spire was stored natively, ponies depositing memories or innate factual connections within the crystalline lattice for later recall. The sensation of feeling knowledge rapidly connect and detach itself from one’s mind was unnerving, to say the least. It took most ponies years to learn how to act within the Spire, if they ever mastered it at all.
A subjective age later, she stopped, positioned at the exact center of the Spire’s world, innumerable nodules of memory arrayed around her at the periphery of her mind, awaiting connection and analysis by the user.
She hesitated for a moment, a spell sitting in her mind awaiting execution. What she was about to do, cast a spell from within the detached awareness of the Spire, was something that had never been done before, as far as she was aware. Considering that she didn’t currently occupy a physical form capable of casting spells, she was unsure as to what could happen once she tried to cast it. It also didn’t help that she didn’t know if the spell she had prepared, encrypt, was even valid when used on the type of information within the spire.
On the other hand, the only other option she could conceive of to deny the interlopers access to the information was to outright delete it, something that she was reasonably sure was impossible.
She executed the spell.
The affirmative ping of a successful cast popped back to her almost immediately, the array of memory-nodes subtly shifting around her as the lattice visualisation refreshed, an air of perceptual security now pervading each of them.
For a moment, she floated there, pondering how the spell managed to execute at all given her incorporeal form and lack of mana. It was possible that the lattice was somehow drawing from her now-unoccupied body’s reserves, but that was unlikely considering that everything outside of the latticework’s interior world was frozen in place. Mathematically speaking, it was impossible.
And yet, the spell had executed.
Which begged the question, How?
She decided to test the waters, calling up a set of simple spells to test the capability of the realm she inhabited. First of which was a spell that most every young unicorn learned at one point or another, Ignite Fire.
It failed immediately, the negative ping popping back to her almost before she cast the spell. Identical failures met her attempts to cast other basic spells, like Create Air or Sound. It wasn’t until she worked her way into more advanced information-gathering spells that the continual pings of failure gave way to the more amenable success returns.
‘Okay, something simple,’ she thought to herself, readying a simple thaumoinformatics spell. ‘Where am I?’
The Lattice Spire
While unhelpful, the blunt, literal response had been within the realm of her expectations for the spell output. Since the spell’s output was partially based on what information one already had, in order to frame the response in the most understandable, intuitive way. It wasn’t going to give her the Spire’s name for itself, since she didn’t know it. That was assuming the eldritch artifact was even given a name by whomever created it. Questions for another, less imminently perilous situation.
‘Who am I?’
Outsider Celestia Alpha-113, Chief Executor, Exterior Operations
‘What am I?’
Equus Sapiens Majestas
‘Who is attacking the Exterior?’
Outsiders
She paused, confused. Either the spell didn’t properly interpret her meaning, or she didn’t possess the required background knowledge for the spell to give a more detailed answer. The former hypothesis was easy to check.
‘There are a number of ponies aboard the Exterior who have moved to attack me and my subordinates. Who are they?’
Outsiders
She huffed mentally, the memory nodes around her shifting as her viewpoint recoiled with her frustration. Without further information, the line of questioning was pointless, and there were hard limits to the sort of information the spell could retrieve. Asking it for the hostiles’ motivations, for instance, wouldn’t work.
‘How many hostiles are within Operations?’
Three hundred and forty-two
‘How many of my ponies are in Operations?’
One thousand, eight hundred and eleven
‘...How many of those are still alive or conscious?’
Sixty-three
Over fifteen hundred ponies to sixty in a matter of minutes. The prospect was as horrifying as it was infuriating. She has dedicated herself to protecting the Exterior, safeguarding the secrets and the sophonts within it, and now a group of interlopers had intruded on her domain and cut a bloody swath through it.
‘What is Gate Three’s current target?’
Falls-EF
‘Are there any hostiles in or around Gate Three?’
No
She paused, thinking. It stood to reason that Twilight was acting under orders or coercion from someone in Team Fifteen, likely Walleye or Lyra. There was little other reason for her to steal a high-powered thaumonuclear device, something that she would have no knowledge of otherwise.
Ultimately, though, who and why were irrelevant. All that really mattered at this point was preventing Twilight from returning to the Exterior, forcing her to divert to somewhere that she wouldn’t be immediately ambushed upon arrival. Considering her extremely limited travel history in the Interior, the most likely place she would end up was her homeworld.
The next most important thing was finding some way to get a message to her. Contingency plans were rather useless if you couldn’t activate them, of course.
‘How long ago was the last departure from Gate Three?’
Eight minutes and forty-three seconds
‘Where is The Machinist?’
In the Machine Shop
‘I need a teleport solution from my body’s current position to the Machine Shop, and also a solution from the Machine Shop to Gate Three.’
For a long while, nothing happened. The spell eventually returned, depositing two near-incomprehensible spell arrangements into her mind. Long-distance teleportation like that was theoretically impossible within the Exterior, and the fact that the request had returned positive filled her with no small measure of amusement. Academics and researchers had spent years attempting to solve what she had managed to create in an instant. If she managed to get out of this situation alive, the spell arrangement would make for quite the discovery.
She steeled herself, readying her senses for the reattachment to her physical body, and sent one last query into the latticework.
‘Is it possible to detach a section of the Spire for transport, containing specific information for a specific recipient?’
Yes
‘Is it possible for me to do it?’
Yes
‘Show me how.’
Information flooded into her brain. She followed the directions exactly, forming a new bubble of memory, sequestering it away within an apparently isolated, unused area of the latticework that her directions informed her was near the ‘surface’ of the physical Spire crystal, right under her hoof. She took memories from herself, the still-accumulating stream of information and senses from her mind of everything that had happened in the last ten minutes, instructing it to only divulge itself to Twilight Sparkle, the Insider from Slateform.
Finally, she turned towards the bubble.
‘Twilight, I know this is a horrible, unequalled burden to put on you right now, but I need your help. I’ve had a hunch that something like this invasion were coming for a long time, but I could never prove it; there was no evidence, just niggling suspicions. That’s why I needed you. I needed an agent who couldn’t be anticipated, who I could count on to act in my, and the Exterior’s, defense when we really needed it.’
‘It was a manipulation, and I’m sorry for it. I wouldn’t even think of forcing you into this situation if I had any other choice, but here we are. I need you to find out what these interlopers are here for, where they came from, what they want, and if you can, to stop them. For all we know, these ponies could pose a threat to all of existence, not just the little shell that is the Exterior. There are a lot of dangerous things here, Twilight, and they cannot fall into the wrong hooves.’
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A strange alternate place for the mind to visit where time passes weirdly and the text is right-aligned?
Do I detect a fan of Tanako's world?
6168951 If that's the case, I predict everything will get more confusing from here on out until it culminates in a baffling exchange of incomprehensibly potent gambits and counter-gambits that resolves in a moderately happy ending for everyone, for suitable values of "happy".
6168951
Someone else who has read Ra?
6169167
And everything else Sam512 has written.
Some of his work is rather out there, but that's the mixed up fun of Web serials.
Nice idea, using right-aligned text for the different perspective.
"She has dedicated"
Was that meant to be "had"?
Also, the plot does rather seem to be thickening. :)
dangerous things ...
and a magi-atomic weapons are not the most powerful (probably by a long shot ...)
this could be bad
Oh. Not good.
I just sat and read this whole thing and am now surprised to be caught up. Excellent use of two and a half hours
This chapter reinforces the fact that there's a measurable, tangible difference between Insiders and Outsiders, but the mechanism is completely unclear, and all my ideas seem to be wrong, with clear counterexamples in the text.
Idea: An Outsider is born as such, and there's no way to become one.
Idea: An Outsider is a native of a destroyed world.
Both of these seem to be refuted by Mirror Clone Pinkie, if she's honest about coming from the canon world.
Idea: An Outsider is somepony who found the knack for world walking on their own.
Refuted by the Outsider pony who was rescued as a foal from a world before it dropped into The Falls.
Outsiderness isn't caught by time travelling, teleporting, or any other activity the canon mane 6 and Twilight Slate have done.
Outsiderness isn't something that's easily given like performing a ritual or spreading a magical infection, or rather than making a big deal about Twilight Slate being an insider, she'd have been drafted, converted, and accepted.
But at the same time, it's a state that's apparently permanent once attained (or at least can't be removed forcibly from rogues who go crazy. Jury is still out on the possibility of an old or just burned out Outsider retiring to a nice Slateform world where their copy was never born)
Furthermore, this chapter shows it's a trait that more than one faction has somehow acquired for their ranks, meaning that whatever caused Outsiderness in the first place is replicable, and the Outsidening is something that can be performed by all Outsiders to convert more Insiders, (One or a few rogues converting an army makes sense, an army of several hundred rogues seems a little of a stretch) or it's something that Anypony can do.
Yes, this is a question that dozens of people have asked, but not a single pony. It's just that it's been 15 months and we STILL don't know even the basic shape of the primary original mechanic present in this fic, and I for one am being driven a little bit crazy trying to figure it out.
Formant makes near unreadable.
6170913
I'm quite glad you enjoyed it! (And that the entire thing holds up well enough for a complete read-through)
6171692
*gazes pointedly at chapter 20*
Is the format supposed to be this way?
Um... huh. So Outsiders is enough of a thing that there's no information to distinguish hostile from non-hostile, but they can still all be positively identified as Outsider and not Insider. Yet Outsiders are of all different types, with multiple versions like different Insiders from different inside verses. Yet they're not from inside verses... copies? Spontaneous manifestations? Insiders who die wake up as Outsiders? And a giant bomb just obliterated the most violent version of the military capital of Canterlot...
I know it's supposed to be eight dimensional, and I know why, but the ball theory is still the easiest visual representation
past
raised
While unhelpful, the blunt, literal response had been within the realm of her expectations for the spell output, since the spell’s output was partially based on what information one already had, in order to frame the response in the most understandable, intuitive way. [It was a sentence fragment.]
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