• Published 29th Apr 2014
  • 1,663 Views, 150 Comments

Pathfinder Ponies - terrycloth



Twilight Sparkle. Rainbow Dash. Fluttershy. Applejack. Pinkie Pie. Rarity. Sure, these names mean nothing to you now, but once these fledgling warriors join the Pathfinder Guild and become Adventurers, their destiny awaits!

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City of Smoke

The party of adventurers ran into no further trouble escorting the caravan to Rally. The coal was taken off their hooves at the Black River Company’s headquarters, and while they expected to have to argue for their payment, it was handed over without question, including the extra bounties for the bandits they’d fought during the escort mission. They did have to give back the extinguisher rods before they could get paid, of course.

After that, they got directions to the Pathfinder Guild in order to collect on the other mission, for chasing away the drakes. The Guild turned out to be one of the blocky keeps, which made it easy for them to keep heading in the right direction most of the way there. While they were still three blocks from their destination, however, a drift of smoke seemed to seep out of the alleyways and shroud the streets in gloom – and as they watched, everyone scurried into the nearest building or other shelter.

“Come on!” hissed a voice from a building with an ambiguous sign – it might have been a café, or possibly a store selling musical instruments. “You need to get inside!”

“Well, I don’t think muggers would have been able to stage all this, so we might as well do what they say,” Twilight said. The others followed her in.

The store (which turned out to sell both food and musical instruments) was packed with dozens of random people off the street – mostly orcs, but maybe one in three was some other race, and the races of fey were not uncommon. Some of them looked nervous, but most of them just looked bored.

“So, what’s going on out there?” Rainbow Dash asked, trying to peek through one of the store’s windows. It had been boarded over for years, however, and she didn’t have much luck.

“Some idiot opened another portal,” said a grey and pink pegasus hovering near the ceiling to give herself a bit more breathing room. “If you stayed out there, you’d be up to your neck in mephits.”

“We can handle mephits,” Twilight replied. “Is there a bounty?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? The army’ll handle it though, we just have to wait until they give the all-clear.”

“I bet that’ll come quicker if we’re out there helping,” Rainbow Dash said. “Come on, who’s with me?”

“Rainbow, the army doesn’t usually like being ‘helped’ by civilians,” Twilight replied.

“Since when are we ‘civilians’?” Rainbow asked.

Twilight shook her head. “They’ve been training together as a unit, and have specific tactics and formations that they’ll be using. We’d just be in the way. Besides, you saw how the orcish soldiers fought at the fort – they’re not going to be stopped by a few lousy mephits.”

After an interminable wait – it must have been ten or fifteen minutes – a booming voice rang through the walls. “All extradimensional invaders have been purged from this sector. Citizens may go about their business. Praise the Emperor.”

“What, is he a god now?” Applejack asked, as they were pushed back out onto the street by the impatient crowd behind them. There was no sign of fighting, or destruction – perhaps it had happened in another part of the ‘sector’.

“Maybe he’s trying to become a god,” Pinkie Pie suggested. “I heard that if you get enough ponies to worship you, POOF!” She gestured with her hooves and spun around in midair.

“I think you also have to die,” Rarity replied. “Preferably in full view of your worshippers. I suppose if one was going to stage their own public death, this would be a good time to do it. The chances of coming back in some form are rather high.”

“I’m pretty sure the Emperor could afford a Raise Dead spell,” Twilight said. “It’s probably just some weird turn of phrase his underlings decided they liked.”

It wasn’t clear why a guild of adventurers – even one that had been absorbed as part of the Empire’s government – would need such a large building, but the Pathfinder Guild in Rally was huge. It occupied a full city block, and had four stories above ground, and who knew how many below. For all that, the windows were more like arrow slits, and the heavily reinforced front door led into a small lobby and waiting room. A bored-looking orcish clerk sat behind the counter, writing on something that was kept out of sight of anyone entering.

Twilight approached the desk. “Hello there. We’d like to –“

“Please take a number,” the clerk said, pointing to a small stack of thick paper cards in a bin near the side of the desk.

Twilight looked around. “But there’s no one else here.” The clerk continued to stare at her impassively, so she took one – it had the number ten on it – waved it around a little, and then went to sit with the rest of the party.

The clerk scribbled away at the form she’d been working on for another few minutes, before looking up. “Number seven?”

Twilight looked at the card again, then back at the clerk.

“Number seven?” the clerk repeated. “Last call for number seven.” When no one responded, she flipped over something on her side of the counter. “Number sixteen?”

“Oh come on!” Rainbow Dash said, leaping to her feet just as a shadowy figure seemed to materialize in front of the desk, handing over a small card. The griffon blinked, then sat back down. “What?”

The party couldn’t make out what the shadowy figure discussed with the clerk, or determine any logic to the order that the next dozen numbers were called in after its business was finished. Perhaps one number in three had someone respond – and it was pretty clear that not all of them were teleporting in under their own power. Eventually, their number was called.

“We’re here to collect a bounty,” Twilight said, returning to the counter. “We handled the drake job, in the pass.”

The clerk nodded, and turned to search through a filing cabinet, until she found a folder, which she flipped through for a few seconds before finding what seemed to be the relevant sheet. She lit a small candle, and set it on the counter next to her. “So, you killed the drakes that were harassing travelers?”

Twilight felt a flicker of something poking at her mind, but managed to shake it off. “Um… yes?”

The clerk frowned as the candle flickered. “Please don’t resist the candle, ma’am. Now, repeat again, did you kill the drakes that were harassing travelers in the eastern pass?”

Twilight took a deep breath, and let the candle’s magic affect her. “Not exactly,” she said, finding it impossible to lie, even for the sake of simplifying matters. “The drakes were an illusion created by a changeling hive that was hired by a kobold alchemist to harass travelers in the pass. We destroyed their camp and killed everyone there, which should resolve the situation.”

The clerk frowned, and ticked off a few things on the sheet in front of her, then looked it up and down a few times. “Okay. That qualifies.” She opened a drawer and took out another form, filling it in and handing it to Twilight. “Take this to the sales department, they’ll handle your payment. If you have any equipment recovered on your mission, you can turn it in there for standard guild rates.”

“Um…” Twilight said. “Where is –“

The clerk pointed to a door on the right side of the waiting room. “Just follow the signs, ma’am.”

The sales department turned out to be a similar small, empty room, although when they arrived a sales-orc was already waiting to greet them. He handed over a bag of coins in return for the paper from the front desk, and helped them sort through the treasure they’d recovered from the bandits and the changelings.

“We pay a set price for magical and masterwork items, as good as you’ll find anywhere else, and full value for gems, artwork, and coin,” said the orc in an expensive suit.

“Is there anyone who doesn’t give full value for coin?” Applejack asked, perking an ear.


“You’ve obviously never tried to deal with goblins,” the sales-orc said with a smile. “We also sell a wide variety of magical items. We charge list price as long as we have them in stock or can get them through the blink dog couriers. Large exotic items may incur an additional charge. We also have enchanters on hand to upgrade any items that have sentimental value, and we offer full value trade-ins for many items, if you want to upgrade your equipment and get back on the job as quickly as possible.”

“So if I wanted to trade in this freezing glaive for a freezing lucerne hammer –“ Twilight asked.

“Ah, no. Exotic polearms aren’t on the trade-in list.”

“It’s not exotic,” Twilight said with a frown. “It’s martial.”

The orc smiled and spread his hands apologetically. “The only pole-arms on the standard list are lances and longspears. Everything else is classified as exotic. We do still pay the standard sell-back rate for oddball items, of course, and if you want to pay to upgrade one of them, it’s not any harder for our enchanters.

“And as always,” he said. “If you think you can get a better deal elsewhere, Rally does have other merchants. I assure you that our prices are competitive for all legal items. After all, we’re not here to make money – we’re here to make you --” he pointed at the party “—the most effective Adventurers you can be, within the limits of your budget.”

“Right,” Twilight said. “Why don’t we sell everything we’re not using, split up the cash, and then meet back at the city gate in… three days?” She looked at the orc questioningly. “To upgrade the magic on my hammer?”

He examined it closely, then handed it back and nodded. “We do swift enchanting for no additional charge.”

“You mean split up?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Is that really a good idea?”

“I’m not saying that we need to all go our separate ways, but Rarity and Pinkie Pie are probably going to be spending all their time in a library somewhere, scribbling in their spellbooks,” Twilight said. “I don’t think the rest of us are going to want to wait around and watch. This is the capitol city of the Empire, it should be reasonably safe.”

“We can at least all stay at the same inn, and meet for dinner,” Rarity said.

“There’s an unofficial inn for Guild members staying in town, if you’re interested,” the sales-orc said. “It’s just down the block. I can give you directions. It’s got an up-to-date posting list, if you’re looking for more work.”

Rarity smiled. “That would be lovely.”

After selling the Colonel’s magic items, and the equipment taken from the bandits, and combining it with the payout from their recent missions, the party ended up with about ten thousand gold pieces to spend, each, with a bit left over to cover a room at an inn, meals, and other incidental expenses. Twilight spent all of her share before even leaving the room. Rainbow Dash and Applejack spent some time checking out the other merchants in town, to see if the sales-orc’s claims were on the mark, but eventually ended up back at the guild to spend their money as well.

Rarity told the others that she was interested in certain… exotic materials, and vanished off on her own for several days, only reappearing at the inn, at night, to talk to the others and reassure them that she was still alive, and in fact making wonderful progress on her project.

Twilight, Fluttershy, and Macintosh, on a trip around town to see if they could find any sort of entertainment, ended up caught in another smoke incursion, and weren’t able to find anywhere indoors to hide. They managed to stay out of the way of the actual fighting, but were able to watch the battle between the orcish troops and the invaders from the plane of smoke. The mephits, as it turned out, were not the only form of elemental creature coming through the portals – there were also what looked like nagas whose snake tail was made out of dense smoke, who fought the orcs hand-to-hand much like Rainbow Dash. As Twilight had predicted, the Empire troops – a force of earth pony infantry, with a few clerics and wizards in support, in this case – made short work of the enemies, although several of their number were injured in the process.

Applejack and Rainbow Dash tried to gain access to the Military District, but were turned back at the gate by the guards, who refused to believe Applejack’s line about being summoned by the general without any sort of supporting paperwork, and were thwarted from flying over the wall by fierce enchanted winds.

On the last night, after Twilight had finally retrieved her now slightly-more-magical hammer, the party checked the job board to see if there was any paying work that might be more urgent than investigating the kobold lair. The only thing that stood out was an offer to be ‘on call’ to fight off minor planar incursions in the capitol. The wages being offered were almost insultingly low, however.

“Maybe we should have checked the board before we spent three days bumming around town,” Applejack said, frowning at the listing.

“There’s only one reason I can think of that anypony would take that offer,” Rarity said. “If we assisted the military with these… ‘planar incursions’, we might be in a better position to find out just why the capitol is suffering from planar incursions at all. We’ve seen these portal-opening books before, back in Crossroads, but all that came through were a small number of mephits. Nothing like what we’re seeing here.”

“And if it has anything to do with what’s going on in the military district, we might be able to take a closer look at it, like Wind Seed suggested,” Twilight said. “Still… I’m more worried about the kobolds. The military seems to have the situation in Rally under control. I’m worried that the situation outside of the capitol is getting less and less under control with every passing day.”

Applejack shrugged, and returned to the table. “I don’t care much what we get up to next. It may not be a paying job, but there’s always a profit in a good ol’ fashioned dungeon crawl.”

In the morning, Rarity ran off to put the finishing touches on her ‘project’, and the others waited for her outside the gate. After a short time, they saw her emerge, accompanied by four large two-pony wagons, their contents covered by tarps. With the help of her porters, she removed the cover from the first wagon, revealing a large skeleton of some sort of wingless dragon. She placed two large onyx gems in its eyes, then unfurled a scroll and read the words inscribed upon it, in the spidery language of magic. Purple slime oozed out of nowhere to coat the bones, and the gems in the now-animated skeleton’s eyes vanished, replaced by faint blue lights. The skeletal dragon stood up in the wagon, then bowed its head towards the necromancer, in submission.

“The revenge of Sparky?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Oh, these are much better than Sparky,” Rarity replied, with a fangy grin. “For one thing, they fly without wings, meaning their skeletal form doesn’t leave them grounded.” She turned to the skeleton, and motioned for it to rise, and it shot up into the air with surprising speed. “For another… I have four of them. Uncover the next, will you dearies?”

As the porters uncovered the next wagon, Twilight frowned at the hovering skeleton that had already been animated. “What sort of creature are they? I’ve never seen a dragon like this.”

“Well, of course you haven’t,” Rarity explained, as she placed the next set of gems. “They’re native to the Jade Empire, on the far side of the world. When I heard that there was a relatively intact specimen available here, I knew that I had to have it! Imagine my surprise when the procurer told me he could get his hooves on another three.”

“How much did you end up spending on this?” Twilight asked.

“Well…” Rarity said, looking a little embarrassed. “Not more than ten thousand gold, I can assure you that much, and most of that was for the scrolls.” She paused. “Well, half of it was for the scrolls.”

“She spent almost everything,” Pinkie Pie stage-whispered. “I had to chip in to help her pay for the ink to copy the spells I bought for us.”

“Sugarcube…” Applejack said. “You know you’re just going to lose ‘em in a day or two at the most, just like every other undead you’ve ever had. What in Kara’s name made you think that spending all your money on a bunch of hyped up dragon bones was a good idea?”

“I will not lose these,” Rarity hissed, turning to glare at the rest of the party. “And if I do… then any griffon or unicorn that is in any way responsible had better hope that they can hide from my vengeance, because it will be swift and terrible!” She stomped at the ground.

“And if they go crazy, and try to eat us?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Then I suggest you let them,” Rarity replied. “Now, let me get back to work. I’m sure we’d all like to get on the road as soon as possible.”