Chapter 41: Syd and Marte Krofft This Isn't
At the Inn of the Prancing Pony
Chapter 41: Syd and Marté Krofft This Isn’t
Three thousand kilometers east-northeast of Los Angeles lay the Mammoth-Flint Ridge Cave System in Kentucky, the largest known cave system on planet Earth, and Mary Jo’s inspiration for the Lost Caverns of Soap Candy. Currently visiting the caves were the local equivalent of royalty, the person who connected the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves and put Kentucky on the spelunker’s map, Patricia Crowther. With her was her family.
“You know,” said husband John Crowther, “when you said we were going on a vacation, I was thinking something more like Disney World.” He looked very disappointed in his bright yellow caving outfit and helmet.
“Ah, the rides at Disney World are all the same,” said elder daughter Sandy. She was wearing a bright yellow caving outfit and helmet.
“Yeah, maybe Mom will make another game out of this trip, and we’ll get to be in it!” exclaimed younger daughter Laura. She was wearing a bright yellow caving outfit and helmet.
“I write one little game on the side a decade ago, and nobody lets you forget it,” grumbled Patricia. Although to be fair, the “one little game” was Colossal Cave Adventure, which single-handedly launched the entire genre of adventure gaming in 1976. Also, she was wearing a bright yellow caving outfit and helmet, but I bet you could already guess that.
Patricia was short, shorter than anybody else in her family of four, but she didn’t mind, because that was how she was able to crawl through passages nobody else could and become world famous in the small community of cave explorers. “Look, I just have to find Mr. Evers again. He gets lost practically every other week, and since we were staying the night in the area—”
“On the way to Walt Disney World...” said John with a pout.
“Yes, and we are going to get there, dear,” Patricia said, reaching up to pat her husband on the cheek. “I’m sure he got stuck in Purgatory again and the gals missed him. A quick little river trip, and we can get back on the road by noon.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes, dear.”
“We wanna go with you!” chorused the two sisters, dimpling their cheeks with their enthusiastic grins.
“Well, I dunno...” Patricia said, playing into a well-known ritual with her daughters.
“Please?”
“All right. You can go. But only to Purgatory. If he’s not there then I’ll leave you with the gals while I keep searching.”
The sisters looked at each other for a moment. “OK,” said Sandy.
The family were making their way through the underground river complex of Mammoth Caves, dragging their rubber boat through the dangerous passages that connected them. If not for the fact that they had practically spent their lives in these caves, they never would have been allowed to go. Through the rivers Styx and Lethe, over the Great Walk and into the Echo River they travelled, with all their illumination provided by their helmets and handheld lanterns. Down here, the temperature was chilly, but comfortable, and there was no sign of the passage of time.
Finally they reached the first of two holes in the rock, where the passage known as Purgatory broke through its parallel path to become accessible from the Echo.
“Mister Evers?” cried Patricia, holding up her lantern. “Mister Evers, are you there?”
The call was answered, but not by a voice. Instead the whole world started staking violently.
“An earthquake!” exclaimed Laura, stating the obvious.
“Hold tight to the boat!” Patricia ordered the others. “I’ll steer us to the center of the river.” It may not have been the soundest decision under the circumstances, but at least it was a solid response to the sudden crisis.
# # #
After only a few moments, the quake subsided.
“Is everyone alright?” Patricia asked, lifting the lantern she had been cradling through the tremors.
“N...nothing damaged but my nerves, I guess,” said John.
“I’m fine!” said Laura with excitement. She didn’t quite go so far as to say “Let’s do that again!”, but she was thinking it.
“I’m OK,” said Sandy.
Patricia checked the others to look for injuries they might not be aware of, then checked herself. And then...“This...is odd.”
The rubber raft was sitting on dry ground.
“Where did the river go?” asked Sandy.
“Maybe the earthquake opened this big hole, and all the water drained out!” exclaimed Laura.
“Wouldn’t have had time,” Patricia said calmly.
Sandy consulted the piece of laminated parchment in her care and compared it to the shape of the cave they were now in. “This looks all different,” she said. “Also, the ceiling’s glowing.”
Patricia looked up. “An excellent observation,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that. Everybody link arms, and then turn off your lanterns.”
The others obeyed without question.
“Neat!” Laura exclaimed a few seconds later after their eyes had adapted. “It’s bright enough to see!”
“What’s going on?” John asked quietly. “I don’t remember blacking out or anything. So how did we end up in a new part of the caves. This is new, right?”
“Well, it looks a bit like Flint Dome,” said Patricia. “But the scale’s all wrong, and the electric lights are missing. Not to mention the fact that you’d have to go back to the historic entrance to get to Flint Dome from Purgatory.”
Laura looked around her excitedly. “Do you know what this means?” she asked. She quickly continued without waiting for an answer: “That was a magic earthquake, and we fell through to another dimension!”
“Well, that’s a bit of a stretch,” remarked Sandy. “We appear to be—”
“In the Land of the Lost!” exclaimed John, just as excited as his younger daughter. “I bet we’ll turn a corner and meet dinosaurs! And cavemen! And—”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Patricia exclaimed. “There’s no way we’re in that stupid show.”
“Aww...” said John. “I liked Land of the Lost.”
“Mom’s right,” said Laura. “Because we’re in Equestria instead.”
“That’s silly,” said Sandy. “If that happened, we would have turned into ponies, like in the show.”
“Maybe not!” Laura countered. “Or maybe it’s a delayed reaction!”
“Halloo!” cried a voice.
Patricia pivoted around with her lantern, facing a passageway leading out of the cave. “Who’s there?” she replied. The voice didn’t seem to belong to any cave explorer or national park service member she was aware of.
“We appear to have gotten lost during an innocent exploration of some caves,” said the voice, growing closer. “That I absolutely had permission to collect fares for.” A figure emerged into the light, followed by the small group that he had been illegally acting as a tour guide for.
“You have got to be kidding me!” Patricia exclaimed.
“See, what did I tell you!” cried Laura. “It’s a pony!”
“Lucky guess,” grumbled Sandy.
“Aw, no Pakuni,” said John.
“I assure you, we are not common pack animals,” Water Cooler said with a smile. “Although I could do with a drink. I assume this means you do not know the way back to the Everfree Caverns cave entrance?”
Patricia crawled out of the raft and walked over to get a better look at this taking quadruped. He looked well-fed, with a bulbous red nose, a somewhat old-fashioned shirt front, and a straw boater hat. Another thing she noticed was the fact that this creature was one of the few individuals she had met as short as she was. “Am I in Oz?” she laughed.
“No gold-plated roads here, I’m afraid,” Water Cooler replied with a smirk, “although we do have our fair share of both wizards and charlatans.” The group of ponies he had been leading huddled at the far end of the cave from the humans.
“You seem to know a fair amount about our kind,” said Patricia.
“Perhaps...perhaps,” drawled Water Cooler. “And you appear remarkably calm for somebody meeting a Technicolor equine for the first time.”
“Oh, I’ve had conversations with all sorts of things while exploring caverns on my lonesome. So who might you be?”
The earth pony somehow managed to wedge the edge of a hoof into a breast pocket to slide out a piece of waxed cardboard. “May I present my card?” He then availed himself of the opportunity of a drink while she read it.
Patricia read the card aloud: “Water Cooler. Father, Husband, Counselor, Jackanapes, Bartender—”
“And tour guide.”
“Novelties and notions,” said Patricia, finishing the card. “What kind of—oh no you don’t! I’ve seen My Little Chickadee a dozen times, you little impostor, and I am no Mae West! You won’t get me saying her lines.”
“You wound me to the quick!” Water Cooler said, holding his hat to his chest. “I was planning no such thing! I just...do my best work in pairs. Why, in a prior life as the Abbot, I and my partner had the floors rolling nightly with my antics.”
“I didn’t think abbots were especially funny,” said Patricia.
“To be honest, it was the Castellan who got most of the laughs.”
“The Abbot and the Castellan.” Patricia groaned. “I hate puns!”
Water Cooler reached over to tap her sympathetically on her shoulder. “Then somebody upstairs must really hate you to send you to this place.” He looked past the woman to see the two girls behind her. “Are these your two darling children?” he asked. “And is that a pickle jar I see in yonder raft that they are guarding? We ponies have a bit of a weakness for old N-A-C-L.”
“W.C., these are Sandy and Laura, my daughters. And this is my husband, John. And I must say, you’re being far too nice to children, given your persona’s reputation. What was it you said? ‘Any man who hates babies and dogs can’t be all bad?’”
“That, dear woman, is a vile slander. I love children. I can remember when, with my own unsteady legs, I toddled from room to room.”
“When was that, last night?” Patricia snarked. “Oh, I hope you’ll excuse me, I just recognized the line.”
“So, you don’t want to play Mae West, but have no problem playing that puppet Charlie McCarthy?”
Patricia laughed. “What can I say, I have a wooden head!” She knocked on it for emphasis. “So, assuming this isn’t all a mad dream, what say we team our resources to find our way out of wherever it is we’ve wound up?”
“An excellent proposition!” exclaimed Water Cooler.
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Err, what? Joke chapter or more shenanigans?
5403622 I concur, what the buck is going on now? Flashback? AU? Prophecy?
"A prior life"? He's a PC? Then he's the least PC PC I've ever P-seen!
In any case, this is bad. This is very, very bad. Not the writing, that I greatly enjoyed. No, I mean the interdimensional bleed-through. That could potentially have some truly catastrophic consequences for both worlds.
In any case, looking forward to more.
And now she's lost in a maze of twisty little interdimensional passages, all alike?
There were enough hints that the cave also existed in the human world, so it wasn't entirely surprising that someone might slip through from this side. It's going to be very interesting if they meet Hope Springs and company though. MJ's reaction to humans appearing is likely to be pretty great!
Water Cooler's knowledge is pretty surprising though. An odd question occurs to me: it looks like if a player's adventurer dies, the pony seems to live on in the players's head (in some cases, at least). Would anything similar happen to a player who died with an active adventurer? It presumably was the goal of the first adventurer guy, who probably ascended as a god in Equestria, and may or may not have done it by dying, but would it also apply to anyone playing the game?
That first adventurer guy might also be able to return through the interdimensional cave system with all his god-powers intact! I wonder if that was even his plan all along?
Well, I'm not qiite sure where all the dread came from, as I quite enjoyed Water Cooler's return. I'm looking forward to WC and company meeting up with Hope if they're in the same cavern system. Even if they don't meet, though, this interdimensional bleed has some interesting implications…
I feel like if I did get the references it would make more sense... and that things are just going to get razier and crazier...
Such confusion. The cave systems being connected is no problem, although I am curious why Patricia is the Colossal Cave programmer here, given that if that was the case her husband should be the famous caver
Hells yeah I got most of those references!
Things are heating up in the Colossal Cave Adventure. I wonder if MJ will just describe the humans as any other exotic creature or just outright say what they are.
Mammoth cave, eh? Went there on vacation with the family a couple decades back. Can't remember too much about it, other than some underground river boat trip with a meal of some sort down in the cave.
Water Cooler! Hell yeah, I was hoping he'd show back up.
I love it.
I thought I wanted more WC, but with his breaking character I'm less sure. I do wonder though, in his next life will he be a Tramp, or take a trip to Mare-occo.
5417894 Only Quest Relevant NPCs, your average merchant, guard, villager, civilian, etc. will have at most an ECL adjustment due to their race.
...Ah well, the archive binge had to end sometime. I await the breakdowns when Hope inevitably encounters our inter-dimensional spelunkers. Hopefully Celestia doesn't use the gamers' horror for a "take that", or a "why weren't you this serious before".