Dumping Ground
“Wake up!”
The shout came like a slap to the face, abruptly forcing Twilight’s brain back into a conscious, if disoriented state. Her eyes struggled to focus, pain radiating across her muzzle in a manner that led her to believe she may actually have been slapped in the face, and not simply yelled at. The gray-encircled-by-yellow blob that dominated her vision, only one pony that could be, did nothing to dissuade her theory.
“Ow,” Twilight moaned, flailing somewhat as she turned and regained her footing. “Why’d you hit me?”
“I didn’t.”
“You’re a bad liar,” she shot back, shakily getting to her hooves, wrinkling her muzzle in annoyance as an unidentified liquid dripped from her nose.
“Your nose is bleeding.”
“I am?” Twilight poked her tongue out, only to recoil at the overwhelmingly metallic taste. “Why’d you hit me?”
“No, really,” Walleye asserted, voice tinged with worry. “I didn’t hit you.”
“Why do you even care? It’s not like hitting me is out of character for you.”
“Celestia above… I didn’t hit you!” Walleye growled, exasperated. “There’s blood all over the floor. You probably fell on your face or something.”
“Why would I fall on my face?”
“...Do you even remember what just happened?”
“I… something... about Pinkie Pie?” Twilight wondered aloud, tapping her hoof to her chin in contemplation.
“I think you might have a concussion.”
“From you hitting me, probably.”
“No. We were fighting a Sparkle, you managed to pin her down after she killed Rainboom, and then your magic went all… Sombra.”
“Rainboom’s dead?” Twilight exclaimed, whipping her head around to stare at Walleye as her vision finally cleared. “How?”
“Rogue Sparkle threw her into a Void rift. Not the best way to go, but considering our fate, I’m kinda wishing I’d gone out that way.”
“Don’t say that,” Twilight snapped, looking around. “Alive is better than… dead…”
Her words died in her throat as she fully took in the world the found herself in. The entire landscape was littered with debris, fragments of buildings, vehicles, and what she could only assume were bones jutted out of the landscape, and each other, in a manner that seemed as though they had been teleported into the positions they now occupied. Stone met brick and brick met bone at odd, unnatural angles, forming vast, seamless, and chaotic spires that reached far into the air.
The sky itself was the most unnerving feature. It was black, but unlike the unnatural darkness of rifts into the void, or the star-speckled dark of the night sky, this was a black that seemed to blur into the foreground. As her view darted around, visual echoes of the terrain she had been previously looking at flickered in Twilight’s view, as though her brain didn’t quite know how to interpret what it was seeing and opted simply to repeat what had previously been occupying that area in her field of view.
As she watched, a black fissure formed intersecting one of the debris spires, lingering in place for a moment before fading and leaving a shard of stone in its place, jutting at right angles out of what appeared at first glance to be a gigantic rib bone.
“Where are we?” she breathed, utterly awestruck by the vista.
“I don’t know.”
“What did I do?”
“I have no idea,” Walleye replied, genuine fear in her voice. “And this is coming from me. I’ve seen some bucked stuff in my time, but what you did… was something else entirely.”
“So, neither of us know what I did or where we are.”
“We could be in Tartarus…”
“No, Tartarus is an actual place. Each world has its own Tartarus, I’m pretty sure. If I wasn’t inside it right now, I’d swear this place didn’t, couldn’t, exist.”
“Tartarus is real?”
“...Seriously?”
“What?”
“You’re a special ops pony working for an inter-dimensional secret society, you just, for lack of a better description, fell out of space-time, and you’re surprised that Tartarus exists?”
“Okay, enough of that.”
“What, embarrassed?”
“Twilight, this is not the time,” Walleye hissed, irritation wound into her voice. “You’re more than welcome to ridicule me later about my knowledge, or lack thereof, of the finer points of Interior… Wait, no, you don’t get to ridicule me, that’s not how it works. I give the orders, you follow them. And right now, I’m ordering you: get us out of here.”
An unnatural, otherworldly shriek echoed over them, punctuated by a chain of unsettling organic cracks, as though to reinforce Walleye’s order. Twilight’s ears reflexively flattened against her skull, the fur on the back of her neck prickling up as a wave of dust was kicked up by the shock of the sound passing over them.
“What was that?” Twilight whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“It sounded like… metal. Tearing. Like paper.”
“I don’t know, alright?” Walleye growled, fear seeping into her own voice as she instinctively backed away from the direction the sound came from. “I don’t know! I don’t know what it was, I don’t know where we are, Rainboom is dead, I don’t know where Lyra and Pinkie are, so you need to get us out of here before whatever made that noise comes after us!”
“You don’t know where they are?”
“Of course not! I thought I was here alone until I found you!”
Twilight looked around. Shards of fractured Exterior metal poked out from the ground around her, partially superimposed into the rock like most of the landscape she had seen. Dozens of other objects from the Exterior room she had just been in were scattered around her in an area a few hundred hooflengths wide. Off in the distance, she spotted another shard of Exterior, jutting vertically downwards from an overhang.
A twinge of fear shot through her as she realised that the spot she had been lying, distinguishable by the puddle of rapidly-drying blood, was only barely in open space. She had avoided reappearing inside solid rock by mere fractions of a hooflength.
“They… might not have survived.”
“How do you figure?”
“Look,” Twilight said, pointing at the blood. “That’s where you found me, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, stuff that arrives here doesn’t fall from the sky,” she said, gesturing at the unnatural heavens. “It seems like it just… pops into existence wherever it pleases. If that piece of wall had arrived two or three hooflengths lower, you would have found me sticking out of the ground.”
“Couldn’t I have just dug you out?”
“Not buried, Walleye, superimposed,” Twilight explained. “Like two images projected atop each other. Their very molecules are intertwined. And that’s if I was only a little bit lower. What if I had emerged completely inside the rock? You wouldn’t have even known I was here!”
“...Oh,” Walleye replied, after the mental image had properly sunk in. “So…”
“Yeah.”
“So Pinkie and Lyra are dead, too?”
“No… Maybe? I don’t know.”
“That’s helpful, rookie.”
“Look, I don’t know, alright? Where did you turn up?”
“About a thousand hooflengths up,” Walleye replied, pointing in the direction of an area comparatively devoid of complex terrain. “Half a klick that way.”
“What, by yourself? No walls or anything?”
“Just me and my wings.”
“Right, well… You probably tumbled through the Void differently to the walls around you. Weren’t you in the air at the time? Maybe being in contact alters the components of your eight-vector enough to…”
“You’re speaking words, but I’m pretty sure they’re not the same language as mine.”
“Well, think of it like turbulence, only instead of it being in a three-dimensional world like…”
“Irrelevant. Get us out of here.”
“...The one we… Sorry?”
“Whatever you’re magi-babbling on about is irrelevant to the task at hand, which is getting us out of here.”
“I thought we’d agreed that we needed to find Lyra and Pinkie?”
“No, That’s what you want. Meanwhile, I am ordering you to teleport us off this world.”
“And leave them behind?”
“We’re no good to them if whatever else is here gets to us first! Teleport us! NOW!”
“I’m not going to…”
“CAST THE CELESTIA-DAMNED SPELL, INSIDER!”
Twilight took a step back, surprised.
“So much for respect...”
Walleye just glared at her, wings twitching in annoyance as she tapped her hoof impatiently on the ground, waiting.
“Fine,” Twilight acquiesced, igniting her horn and pulling Lunatic’s spell to the forefront of her mind, feeding it her homeworld as a target before allowing it to discharge.
>Cynosure Acquisition Failure
Twilight tilted her head in confusion as the spell pinged back, the message entirely unfamiliar.
“Well?” Walleye demanded.
“It… didn’t work.”
“Or you didn’t try.”
“No, really. It failed,” Twilight insisted, re-casting the spell with the same parameters.
>Cynosure Acquisition Failure
“Failed how?”
“I’m not sure. I… think it might not be able to find a way to where I told it to send us.”
“Send us somewhere else, then.”
With a huff, she re-ignited her horn, pulling the spell up again and allowing it to discharge without a target input.
>Void Intrusion Failure
“Oh, come on!”
“Waiting, rookie.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong. It won’t cast at all.”
“Stop with the excuses!”
“It’s not an excuse!” Twilight pleaded. “The spell just will. Not. Cast. First It’s saying it can’t find a reference point, when I gave it a target, and now it’s failing saying it can’t intrude into the Void.”
“And that means?”
“Well… From what I know about how the Ruins and the Falls work, it not being able to find a reference point isn’t that strange if we were still in the Ruins, since that’s kind of their defining feature. You need to go through connected worlds in order to get anywhere. Direct-transport is possible in the Falls and elsewhere because everything’s connected, if that makes sense.”
“It doesn’t, get to the point.”
“Oh, well… The thing is, even in a Ruins world, the spell would still partially work. It would be able to detach us from a world, but it wouldn’t be able to send us anywhere else except drop us back on the world we came from, or MAYBE jump to a world that’s directly connected to it. Maybe. I’d need to test it.”
“More point-getting-to, less magi-babble.”
“We’re not in the Falls, OR the Ruins, OR the larger Interior, OR the Void. We’re… somewhere else again.”
“And we can’t escape?”
“More or less.”
“Great.”
They both fell silent, Walleye standing in contemplation while Twilight took the time to reexamine the world she was now in. Random, turbulent airflow ripped at her mane and fur, shifting and inverting with a frequency unseen even in tropical cyclones. Dust whipped around her feet, borne aloft by the wind, yet strangely not rising far above her hooves, creating the illusion that the demarcation between ground and air itself had blurred.
The most unnerving thing, however, was the sounds, or more specifically their absence. Beyond the white noise created by the wind barreling past her, and the unearthly screech that had drawn their fear moments earlier, the world was eerily silent. Twilight’s ears flicked around, trying to localise phantom sounds in the random auditory stream, each false noise only serving to heighten her unease as her brain attempted to pattern-match nothingness.
Cracking stone. Flowing water. Skittering insects. A pleading cry. Each cued Twilight to twitch her ears in what she thought was the source of the noise, it stopped. She hunched down slightly, vertigo beginning to exert itself from the repeated failed localisations.
“Did you hear that?” Walleye asked, suddenly alert.
“Hear what, exactly?” Twilight whispered.
“That sound,” she replied, pulling her rifle up and peering through the scope, scanning. “It sounded like somepony shouting.”
“It’s your brain playing tricks on you, there’s nothing…” Twilight trailed off as she heard a cry, quiet, but distinct. “...there…”
“There!” Walleye shouted, pointing at the floor of a ravine far below them. Two points of color, one pink, the other aqua, were moving rapidly along the ravine floor towards them. They were shouting, though what they were shouting was still indistinct.
“Is that…”
“Lyra and Pinkie. They’re booking it. What in the…”
Walleye was abruptly cut off as a massive cluster of material came loose from the side of a spire at the far end of the ravine, showering rock and debris as it fell sideways and slammed into the ground. Seconds later, the sound of the event caught up to the visual, a horrid, otherworldly metallic screech, the same as what had startled them both not moments before.
As they watched, horrified, the pile of debris began moving, pulling itself under its own power, standing.
The shouts of the two ponies in the ravine became suddenly clear as a single, urgent, terrified word reached them.
“RUN!”
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7067406
7067435
You sir have burned through this story from what appears to be start to finish in all of two hours. I tip my hat to thee.
With regards to your queries-
There was a bit of discussion about this when the chapter initially went up. It's a combination of the latter, being so thoroughly fish-out-of-water'd that her normal 'this doesn't seem right, maybe I should stop and think for a moment' was short-circuited, and not discovering the real implications of what she was doing until the last possible moment.
Now sure I follow. Are you asking why Lyra is defending Walleye, or why I didn't kill off Walleye? There are answers for both (The latter is a quicker explanation, obviously), but I just want to be sure I address exactly what you're asking.
Well, things just keep getting more and more interesting...
Which is bad for our Twilight Pov though!
i await the next chapter
Poor Twilight. Stranded in inter-dimensional null space and losing "friends" by the minute. Why didn't she just let Walleye kill the other Sparkle and at least try to get Rainboom back?
"less magi-babble" ?
7067785
The mechanics of 'Outsiderism' are explored in chapter 20 and 21. The comments haven't been answered because there's an explanation in-story.
7068139
Twilight's trying to avoid killing, justified or not, after being manipulated into nuking a city. As for Rainboom, there's nothing any of the present ponies could do to save her.
7068624
Cheers, I've fixed that up.
7067755
Make that three or so. I had to take a break in the middle to make dinner.
I can understand the reasoning, it just seems like the circumstances don't quite bear that out. Twilight had just been returned to her world, spent a good twelve hours there (at least an overnight stay) and then voluntarily returned to the exterior. She could, at that point, effectively leave whenever she wanted to and it was probably the point at which she should have felt least stressed. Add to this the fact that Walleye had been nothing short of hostile to outright violent at her, it just made no real sense for her to not only go along with this, but to keep going along with it after was made clear to her just what kind of destructive power the outsiders have at their disposal.
In all honesty, at that point, it made her look uncharacteristically gullible, weak-willed and like someone just had to be handed the idiot ball to keep the story going. No offense.
The former. Frankly, I'm asking myself why any of them even went along with the plan. This was a straight-up rogue action, which the outsiders clearly frown upon. She didn't even try to hide the fact that she was planning to indiscriminately butcher possibly millions of civilians out of nothing but pure quasi-racist rage at one of their own getting injured. Not even killed, injured. Even the whole Freudian "they killed my little girl" excuse doesn't apply anymore, because she just killed tens of thousands of theirs just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Seriously, that's supervillainy-grade disproportionate response. She's viciously psychopathic in a way that should've had someone put a bullet through her head long ago. It frankly makes all the other outsiders look monstrous and completely unsympathetic just by association. No even halfway decent person would have stood for that.
I like the rest of the story, honestly. The entire thing is very well-realized, the worldbuilding is fun and on the whole it really comes together very well. Those two things just kind of poison it for me. Not because they happened, but because nobody seems to react appropriately to them.
7071019
No offense taken. I'm certainly not one to shy away from legitimate criticism.
Personally, though, I tend to be somewhat forgiving about 'idiot balls' in general provided that circumstances support them, because left be honest, everyone can have moments of extreme stupidity from time to time that are painfully easy to spot if you step back and look at the situation from an external viewpoint. Such moments are all the more common the more stress, anxiety, and uncertainty one is under.
Twilight, in this situation, has had her entire understanding of how the world works shoved sideways and kicked a few times for good measure. A good night's sleep doesn't fix that.
Ideally, the first thing she really should have done is nope out of the whole situation and go to the princess, but she wasn't in any condition to make well-thought-out, rational decisions, and made one that was, in hindsight (Twilight even calls herself out on her own stupidity in chapter 14/15), extremely ill-advised - She decided to be stubborn and try and prove Walleye wrong about her.
In retrospect, I could have conveyed the tumultuous state of Twilight's mind a little better, but that entire sequence of events (having been taken advantage of in her vulnerable state to murder a version of herself alongside a whole city) was necessary to set up Twilight's motivation in the second half of the story.
To make a long explanation short - Rainboom went along with it because Walleye if her CO (and even without that, she agrees with the plan anyway), Lyra went along with it because, given her history, it's far from the worst thing she's seen, and Pinkie isn't so much 'going along with it' as 'not thinking the situation through' because she's actually a mirror clone from 'Too Many Pinkie Pies' and thus somewhat vulnerable to moments of irrationality (She also didn't witness the events on EF first-hand, and was suffering the aftereffects of a concussion in later chapters, both of which are going to snub the visceral horror one would normally get upon learning what happened).
The only other character in play is Twilight (who acts suitably horrified once she comes to her senses). There hasn't been anyone else in the story yet who knows what happened at EF.
As for why she hasn't been the recipient of an unfortunate 'accident' as a result of her violent attitude - Her behaviour (or at least, her outlook towards Insiders), while not exactly common among Outsiders, isn't surprising or unheard of. Basically every Outsider who originally hails from a Falls or a Ruins world (Like Walleye, Rainboom, and Lyra) is more violent and amoral because that's what being on those worlds do. Couple that with the general 'us vs. them' attitude towards Insiders that being on the Exterior brings, and you get Walleye's outlook.
She's part of a front-line team because she was selected by Solaris (the male Celestia-variant who immediately called for Twilight to be offed in Chapter 2), who is also from a Falls world and thus a bit of a 'General Ripper' type. The only reason something like this hasn't happened before is because pink-Celestia has enough foresight to pre-empt Solaris' bad ideas and thus put Walleye in a role that didn't require prolonged or detailed contact with Insiders (Recon and Surveillance vs. Trade or Diplomacy).
7070745
No offense intended, but Twilight seems to be able to do all kinds of things, so finding and retrieving her shouldn't have been that hard in theory at least. Also, Twilight wouldn't be killing anyone herself and the party in question is a single pony who has already killed one of their group. That's not her doing anything and it's definitely not nuking a bunch of ponies who might be innocent.
Oh. So Twilight managed to punch through the Void. I don't mean forceful Interdimensional travel, I mean she literally punched through the void. Like it was paper. She made a hole in the void. Behind worlds there's the void. What's behind the void? FUCK KNOWS!
7071252
I suppose so. My problem with it is that I could have seen her let herself be manipulated into something like this at some point before that, but not right when she should have been really at her most stable frame of mind ever since the story began. It's not what she does that's the problem, it's that it feels forced.
Makes sense enough, although I have to wonder why they ever put a team like that together in the first place, then. A group of that sort of people in one place is a disaster waiting to happen - and it did.
In all honesty, it makes me care a lot less about what happened to all the other outsiders. It's a good thing sometimes to have somewhat morally ambiguous protagonists, but in this case, it's starting to look like we're just following two different groups of villains along - or, rather, one group of villains. We haven't actually seen the other outsiders do much of anything yet, except attack the main exterior. Considering the sheer, holocaust-grade monstrosity characters like Walleye seem willing to perpetrate at the drop of a hat, it's hard to imagine the new management being actually any worse. I can't quite figure out why Twilight hasn't just told them all to shove it and fix their own problems yet.
I do hope there will be a reckoning for that at some point. A lot of stories that have scenes like this end up making the mistake of falling into protagonist-centered morality, where the only thing that ends up mattering is who did it, not what they did.
I'm sensing some variant of Langoliers here. "Run" indeed.
It awakens.
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
You say Rainboom is dead?
Show me a body and I'll agree with you, not before.