Pathfinder Ponies

by terrycloth

Back on a Different Track

The storm broke by the time the party was ready to leave Crossroads once more. The roads were still muddy, which slowed their progress, and they didn’t make it to the inn by nightfall. Since they’d still have time to reach Black River Mine after a second day’s travel, they decided to make camp in the wilderness instead of pushing on to the inn – there were still a few Gloomwings left, who might be haunting that area after dark, and running into them unprepared had been a costly mistake, last time.

Since she’d spent all day napping in Applejack’s hat, Rainbow Dash was volunteered to stand watch all night. In the middle of the night, she spotted a lone leucrotta sneaking up on the camp, and while it didn’t seem to recognize her as a threat, it did recognize her as a potential alarm system, and began its hypnotizing chant.

Rainbow Dash easily shook off the magic, but decided to play along, holding her wings out in front of her and hopping across the grass towards the leucrotta like some sort of zombie. The leucrotta wasn’t fooled… but her act was so bad that it just stood there staring in morbid fascination, and didn’t react in time when she got close enough to attack.

The first peck to the face stunned it, leaving it vulnerable to a series of high-speed claw attacks from all angles, as the tiny songbird danced around it, inflicting surprisingly nasty wounds. But it recovered eventually and fought back, snapping at the fluttering menace and catching her between its teeth, only to have those teeth broken as Rainbow Dash burst back out into the open air.

Soon, it was howling in pain and begging for mercy, which was not forthcoming. Another angry chirp and a bone-cracking squelch later, and its howls abruptly ended. Looking up from her kill, Rainbow Dash spotted Twilight, Pinkie Pie, and Fluttershy watching the fight from the edge of the light from their campfire.

“Chirp!”

“You looked like you had it handled,” Pinkie Pie said, with a shrug. “Besides, if we helped you fight we’d get all worked up and we’d be too tired to memorize spells in the morning.”

Rainbow Dash seemed to consider this, then gave a shrug-like flick of her wings, and headed back for the camp.

“Although I don’t know what’s up with Twilight,” Pinkie Pie said, glancing at the purple unicorn standing there staring off into the night, still not reacting to the battle. “I mean, yeah, she doesn’t have her armor on, but she probably could have killed it in one blow.”

Twilight closed her eyes, and let out a shuddering sob, tears running down her cheeks.

“Oh… kay? I’m sorry? I didn’t mean to insult you?” Pinkie Pie said, backpedalling into the air at Twilight’s reaction. “I’m sure you had a really good reason for not helping Rainbow Dash?”

“I don’t have any reasons,” Twilight said, dropping to her knees in the grass. “Not anymore. Everything was so clear, and now, I just don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” Fluttershy asked, approached her with concern.

“I don’t know anything,” Twilight said. “I was taught things, and I figured things out, and I believe things, and I thought that was the same thing as knowing them, but now all I know is that knowing is so much more than that.” She looked up at the night sky. “I need to get the spell re-cast.”

Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy stared at her.

“The loyalty spell,” she said. “For once in my life, I knew that what I was doing was right, instead of having to pretend. For once I wasn’t just lying to myself and trying to get other ponies to believe me.”

“But it was all fake,” Pinkie Pie said, scrunching up her face. “It was just the magic tricking you.”

“Are you saying the Empire doesn’t deserve to exist?” Twilight asked. “Are you saying it’s an evil abomination and should be overthrown? Are you a traitor?”

Fluttershy squeaked and fluttered back, out of the line of fire.

Pinkie Pie just giggled. ”Yes, yes, and no. I mean, sure, the emperor is kind of crazy and locked himself away in his castle for hundreds of years and nopony even knows what kind of undead he is, and the orcs that run everything are all bloodthirsty and corrupt, and the goblins are jerks who like to enslave ponies, and the gnolls are all obsessed with fighting and territory, and the ponies are miserable because everything else picks on them, and the only recourse is to ask for an Adventurer to pass judgment and hope that they take your side which is completely random because half of them are totally evil.

“But that doesn’t make me a traitor. I’m on the Empire’s side.” Pinkie grinned after giving her speech, and then suddenly gasped. “I know what you should do, Twilight! Kill yourself!”

Twilight scowled. “How would that help? It’s not like I would stay dead.”

Pinkie Pie giggled. “But when you came back as an undead Rarity could mind-control you and you wouldn’t have to think. If you came back as a mindless undead, you double wouldn’t have to think!”

“Um… Rarity’s pets don’t exactly have the longest lifespan,” Fluttershy said.

“True,” Pinkie admitted, “but even if you weren’t her pet, being undead means you don’t feel any fear or pain.”

“I’m not afraid,” Twilight snapped. “Or in pain. My problem is doubt.”

“Then become my minion,” Pinkie Pie said. “Trust me completely, and when I show them all, you can stand by my side when I say ‘I told you so’!”

“I can’t trust you completely just because I decided to,” Twilight said. “Doubt isn’t something you can turn on and off like a switch. Not without magic.”

“I think…” Fluttershy started, then cringed back as if expecting to be shouted down. When it was obvious that Pinkie Pie and Twilight were waiting for her to finish, she continued. “Maybe you’re feeling doubt because you’re trying to do the right thing by thinking about what’s right and what’s wrong. Maybe instead you should just do what makes you happy.”

“Doing what’s right makes me happy,” Twilight said. “Knowing what’s right makes me happy.”

“Killing makes you happy,” Fluttershy said. “I’ve seen the way you smile standing over the shattered bodies of your enemies. So… next time you have to decide who’s right and who’s wrong, just kill whoever’s most annoying. Or if both sides are annoying, kill everypony.”

Twilight rested her forehead against her hoof. “Fluttershy… if I killed everypony who annoyed me, I would have killed Rainbow Dash a long time ago.”

“And I’m sure she would have deserved it,” Fluttershy replied firmly.

“But you like Rainbow Dash,” Twilight said. “You worry about her all the time. You used up a scroll that you bought with your own gold to save her.”

“Oh, I don’t have any problem with Rainbow Dash, but this is about you, Twilight.”

“Fluttershy,” Twilight growled.

“Oh! Am I annoying you?” Fluttershy squeaked, fluttering back a bit. “If you’re going to try to kill me, I’ll fight back, sorry. But don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll win!”

“I’m not going to kill you,” Twilight said, standing up. “I’m not going to kill any of you. We’re a team. That’s how we’re strong. Even if we annoy each other, we fight together, and that’s how we’re strong enough to take down any monster that’s thrown in our path.”

“Yessss,” Pinkie Pie hissed, then cackled and rubbed her hooves together. “We will walk the path of destruction together, and the fools who stand in our way will be destroyed!”

Lightning flashed behind Pinkie Pie, on the far eastern horizon, but the thunder was well delayed, and faint. The storm had long since moved on.

In the morning, they continued on towards Black River Mine. They reached the inn by lunchtime, and found it much the same as they’d left it. The same young gem pony was still the only inhabitant, and she still insisted on keeping the inn open despite the lack of other travelers.

When asked, she didn’t know whether or not the remaining Gloomwings were still swarming every night – she’d never seen them, and with the shutters all tightly closed she couldn’t hear them.

“What in the name of all that’s unholy are we going to do about those Gloomwings?” Applejack asked. “Sure as salt we can’t fight a lich with our eyes closed.”

“I have an idea, actually,” Pinkie Pie said. “I got a really really really good look at their wings while I was staring at their wings like a zombie last time we ran into them, and I noticed something really important.”

“Oh?” Rarity asked. “Do tell.”

“Their wings,” Pinkie Pie said, leaning over the table and continuing in a loud whisper, “are purple.”

The other adventurers stared back at her, until Applejack finally said, “I don’t get it.”

“If we couldn’t see purple, we couldn’t see their wings,” Pinkie Pie said. “And then we wouldn’t be confused.”

“So you have a potion that can make us not see purple?” Twilight asked.

“I was thinking I might be able to mix up some green glass,” Pinkie Pie said. “It’ll make purple look black, and then the patterns will be black on black, and we won’t see them.”

Twilight nodded pensively. “If you can make the glass, I can probably set it into a pair of goggles for each of us. If it works, we’ll be able to essentially ignore them.”

“And the lich?” Rarity asked. “Not only is a lich a powerful spellcaster, but his hooves paralyze, like a ghoul.”

“I know the anti-paralysis spell now,” Fluttershy said.

“If we need to use it, then it means he’s been reduced to attacking in melee, which is good news for us. We need to keep the initiative,” Twilight explained. “Interrupt his spells, blind him with glitterdust, flank him so he can’t just step back to cast safely. We need to force him to fight defensively and then terminate him with extreme prejudice. That’s our only hope to take him out without losing anypony else, and we can’t afford to lose anypony else. At least not until the gem ponies pay up.”

“They still owe us for the bandits, don’t they?” Rarity remarked.

“You mean the bandits who escaped?” Applejack asked.

“We turned them over, so they owe us the bounty,” Twilight said firmly. “If my priorities had been straight, I would have made them pay up before we left.” She took a deep breath. “It would have been an awkward conversation, but we almost lost Pinkie Pie because we didn’t have that money.”

“Oh, it’s okay, Twilight,” Pinkie Pie said. “Even if I got eaten by the worms, I probably would have come back as a shadow or something.”

After lunch, the party headed out onto the salt flats. They were almost in sight of the Black River Mine – just coming up on the burned wreckage of the old caravan – when the wind started picking up. Particles of salt lifted from the ground and in seconds, the salt storm that had menaced them on the trip down was back, stinging acid salt driving into their skin and eyes.

“Not this again!” Rarity complained, pulling her cloak tighter over herself, uselessly.

“Pinkie Pie, can you do anything about this storm?” Twilight asked, shouting over the wind.

“I can try?” Pinkie replied, looking around for a cloud. She flew up into the air, and quickly emerged into the open. This was no natural wind storm – it was a tightly demarcated 30’ cylinder, following along with the party as they gravely trudged onwards.

Realizing that they were under attack, she ducked behind the storm to hide, and tried to get a look at who might be causing it, but there was no sign of anypony – nothing marred the dull white of the salt flats aside from the storm, and the ruined caravan a few hundred feet away.

At any rate, a self-contained cloud was easy enough for her to move. She set her hooves against it and pushed it to the side, off of the party. “This isn’t natural!” she yelled down to them as they emerged from the receding edge of the stinging, howling wind. “Someone’s casting a spell!”

The party looked around, and Rainbow Dash suddenly chirped angrily, and dashed forwards towards the caravan.

“She must have spotted something,” Twilight said. “Everypony, charge!”

Applejack was the fastest, her great cat heritage enabling her to run like the wind across the open terrain, quickly catching up with Rainbow Dash despite the songbird’s head start. The others fell a bit behind, and were able to see a new storm swirl into being around the two in the lead, while the other storm fought against Pinkie Pie’s control, and broke free of her grip to swoop down behind them, although it wasn’t fast enough to catch up. Pinkie charged at the chasing storm and tried to kick it into nonexistence, but it stubbornly continued to exist.

“Spread out!” Twilight ordered, as she saw the storm chasing them. The party tried to follow her orders, Fluttershy and Rarity breaking left and right. The storm around the lead pair followed Rainbow Dash as she tried to swing around to the side, while the storm behind dissolved and reformed around Fluttershy and Macintosh, who refused to part from each others’ side.

That left Applejack free to make a sliding dash for the caravan, only to backpedal in panic as she nearly ran right into their assailants. “Mummies!” she shouted – or tried to shout, but the dry air around the two withered undead ponies seemed to suck the moisture right out of her body, turning her cry into a tortured croak.

Setting her dagger in her teeth, Applejack leaped at the nearest mummy, but its leathery hide turned her blade easily, and it retaliated with a heavy hoof, breaking a few of her ribs as its aura of dryness continued to suck the life from her. She ducked under a blow from the other mummy, which would surely have done her in had it connected.

However, the distraction she provided meant that the salt storms dissolved, and seeing what was going on, Fluttershy began summoning some elementals to help the fight, while the others continued to try closing the distance. Dash swooped down behind the mummies, preparing to attack, while Rarity and Pinkie Pie slowed to a stop to either side, preparing to use their own abilities.

Seeing the rest of the party finally arriving to assist, Applejack wasted no time turning tail and running back towards Fluttershy. “You girls can take it from here,” she said, her voice dry and raspy.

The mummies ignored Rainbow Dash, not recognizing the bird as a threat, and split up to advance on Pinkie and Rarity, slamming their hooves into them painfully, and in Pinkie’s case draining her moisture with their aura. Rarity, as a fellow undead, was not affected, or at least not harmed. Rainbow Dash was not amused, and flew after the one menacing Pinkie Pie, pecking it in the back of its leg – but the mummy’s flesh was too tough and leathery for her to break any bones.

Pinkie, for her part, flew up out of reach – and out of the dehydrating aura – and dropped a bomb on the mummy’s head. Not only did it burn easily as the alchemical fire splashed over it, but its hooves slipped out from under it as Pinkie’s bomb left a greasy patch of oil on the ground beneath it.

Fluttershy finished summoning her elementals, getting a pair of them this time and sending them to help Pinkie and Rarity, then fluttered over to ease Applejack’s pain with some healing magic. Applejack smiled. “Thanks, sugarcube, but I think I’m going to sit the rest of this one out.”

Rarity pointed to the flaming mummy as the elemental approached her and her opponent, and rattled off a short sentence in Auran. She then retreated from the battle slowly, the mummy which had tried to attack her following behind like a loyal puppy, entirely under her spell.

Then Twilight finally finished her charge, her hammer slamming into the flaming mummy and sending black salt flying everywhere as its hide ruptured in a dozen different places from the sheer force of the blow. It staggered to its hooves and took a last, weak swing, hitting nothing, before Rainbow Dash and the elementals finished it off.

The fight was over.

Rarity sighed as she looked at her new thrall. “I’m afraid I can’t keep him,” she said. “He’s strong, but he can’t turn off his aura, and there are still far too many living creatures around for a constant moisture-draining effect to be socially acceptable.”

“Do you need me to put him out of his misery?” Twilight asked, as Pinkie Pie mixed up some healing potions, and Fluttershy gave the most badly injured a few simple healing spells. Without their wands to top everypony off, most of the party was going to let the minor burns from the salt storm wait for one of Black River Mine’s medics to cure with a healing pulse.

“No, I’ll take care of this myself,” Rarity said, scratching at the salt, and then digging into it in a shower of loose salt and dust. “It’s unusual for a ghoul to be putting bodies into a grave, but he should be happy enough packed in salt, and unable to further interfere with travelers along this route.”

It took seconds for her to dig a pair of graves, as the party looked on, amazed. “Can all ghouls dig that fast?” Pinkie Pie asked.

“Many of us can, yes,” Rarity replied, crawling from the second hole. Twilight lifted the remains of the destroyed mummy, and dropped them inside. It took several tries, and a final pass to scrape in the loose salt, since the mummy had come to pieces as it died.

“That’s so cool!” Pinkie Pie said, grinning as she flew up into the air, looking towards Black River. “If we let the bandits kill all the miners, I bet they’d have no trouble making quota!”

Deep Bore was not impressed with Pinkie Pie’s suggestion, once they finally arrived at the mine. He was equally unimpressed by Twilight’s interpretation of the bandit bounty.

“Let’s go doon tae th’ jail and take a peep at our pris’ners, nae? Or go oot tae th’ wall and count bandit heads?”

“Do you want us to finish clearing out your mine, or don’t you?” Twilight replied. “If you’re going to cheat us on this, why should we trust you to pay up for your other contracts?”

“Ach, we’ll pay for that one, lass. The mine’s been quiet as a grave since ye last were ‘ere. One of the boys took a peep and spotted the lich’s tunnel all walled up with stone – ye may not have fought him off, but he dinnae want any part of ye!”

“Be that as it may, we can’t just let you cheat us on the matter of the bandits,” Rarity said. “Quite apart from our reputation, we have expenses that need to be paid.”

“Then go take care of ‘em! We cannae pay ye for a service that still needs doin’!”

“You offered a bounty per bandit,” Rarity replied, “Not a commission to end the bandit threat. We defeated fourteen bandits, but only brought back proof of the deaths of three, as well as nine prisoners. Therefore, you owe us for twelve. That you couldn’t hold on to the ones we remitted into your custody is none of our concern!”

“The way I figure it,” Applejack said, lounging on a nearby rooftop and cleaning her claws with her tongue, “Either you pay us what you owe us, or we see how much more efficient the mine would be with undead workers. A pack o’ ghouls probably wouldn’t pay us any mind if we took our pay right out of the till.”

Deep Bore’s ears flattened against his head, and he sputtered at the threats – but there was no denying that if they wished to, the party could easily make good on them. “We dinnae keep the money here!” he spat, finally. “It’s all in th’ bank, off in Rally, waitin’ for the bandits to be cleared out so we can buy supplies and nae watch them burn tae ash under bandit arrows!”

He paused, and smiled, the afternoon sun glinting dangerously off his coat. “But iffen ye think the bandit threat be put down for th’ moment, surely ye won’t mind travellin’ with th’ caravan that carries the coal to Rally? When it arrives safe, our kin in th’ city can pay ye, ye thieving magpies.”

Twilight looked at Applejack and Rarity, then motioned them over to huddle and discuss the deal. “So they want us to guard their caravan… how dangerous of a mission is this?”

“Aside from the bandits out on the flats, not very,” Applejack said. “The pass is guarded by half an army of orcs. It’s as safe as walking down Main Street in Bright Valley.”

“So, perfectly safe, as long as we’re on official business,” Twilight said. Applejack nodded.

“And if we do run into bandits, it will only be an opportunity for us to run up our earnings,” Rarity mused. “Although the danger of fire arrows destroying the coal is a bit worrying.”

Twilight nodded slowly, then turned to Deep Bore. “We’ll do it, on one condition. You need to give us more of those fire extinguishers, to protect the coal.”

Deep Bore frowned, but nodded. “On loan,” he noted. “We’ll be keepin’ count, and expecting them back!”

“Of course you will,” Twilight replied. “I wouldn’t expect any less.”

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

So, Twilight's finally back in her right mind... and she doesn't like it. Life's just easier when magic makes your decisions for you. After such a long time spent under mind control, having free will back likely would feel like a heavy burden. Still, at least now she can finally focus on what's truly important in life: getting paid.

Also, I had to laugh at Dash's epic fail of a Bluff check.

Looking forward to more, especially since there's no way guarding the caravan is going to be easy.