Agents of F.R.I.E.N.D.

by PeppyJoe

11. Lavoisier

Two weeks later...
Knight stared over the bow of the freighter, watching for the distant landmass she desperately hoped would soon appear.

It didn't.

~ ~ ~

Travel thus far had been largely uneventful. The first few days had been occupied with reaching the earth-pony settlement that New Growth had constantly assured them was "Just ahead! Just ahead!" When they finally did arrive, they had no trouble orienting themselves according to their guide to Lavoisier, but did uncover a small communication error.

Soarin trotted several paces ahead of the group, eager to enter the ruined city. He had been able to see it on the horizon for quite a while now, and though much of it had clearly begun to crumble from unknown hundreds of years of erosion, and much else of it was buried beneath dirt, he was excited to have a change of scenery--thus far, they had been traveling almost singularly through cracked, barren fields and forests of dead trees.

Reaching the first structure recognizable as a house and glancing inside, Soarin skidded to a stop and called out, "Hey! You need to see this!"

Minuette galloped up to him, while New Growth paused to say something to the few griffins and ponies accompanying the outsiders before rushing to join them himself. Minuette took one glance in the house and saw what had startled Soarin; the body of a teal earth-pony mare, limp on the floor but looking very much alive. She turned to New Growth and demanded, "Did one your scouts die out here? That body can't be more than a few days old! You said this place was safe!"

The yellow stallion frowned at her, glancing confusedly at the mare in the house, before shaking his head. "No scouts died here. This is Dead Zone, yes? That," he gestured toward the mare, "is Dead."

Minuette scowled back at him. "You're telling me that that pony was an original inhabitant of this town?" New Growth nodded. "Her body would have long since decayed. There'd be nothing but a skeleton left, if even that."

New Growth shook his head again, frustrated. "You don't understand. Dead Zone is... static. Nothing changes here but terrain. Trees stay the same, ponies stay the same. Ponies in Dead Zone do not rot."

Sure enough, their travel through the town had revealed hundreds of dead ponies who looked like they'd frozen in time and collapsed. Now over a week later, the five ponies and four griffins had nearly reached the fabled unicorn city. New Growth had suggested they set up camp at the foot of a chain of mountains that was evidently concealing Lavoisier from view. The group would need to climb it in order to continue, but it was nearly nightfall and scaling a mountain is best done with plenty of light.

The camp consisted of four tents; one for Minuette and Soarin, one for the accompanying ponies from Home Mountain, and two for the griffins. Soarin had offered to help with guard duty, which he later concluded was an odd thing altogether given that there was supposed to be nothing alive in the area, but the other ponies and griffins had refused his assistance. It was after that refusal that he returned to his designated tent and found Minuette trying to adjust her mat to be more comfortable.

"Hey," he said.

She glanced up and nodded in greeting. "Hey."

The pegasus flopped down onto his mat and sighed, watching contemplatively as his friend worked. After a minute he asked, "What do you think we'll find tomorrow?"

"Answers," she said immediately. "Nothing's made sense since that explosion, and if there's nothing in this city that offers some insight, I don't know what we'll do."

Soarin nodded, not knowing what else to say. He adjusted his position a bit and laid his head down to get some sleep.

~ ~ ~

Fancy Pants was positively beaming as he guided the Courser into its mooring at Crown Roc. He had always held a special regard for foreign cultures, and few were more foreign than that of Griffindor. From his position at the controls, he could see a sprawling market district filled with stalls, airdocks, warehouses, and the deafening cacophony of birds hawking their wares at unashamedly overpriced rates. Below deck, Time Turner prepared some materials and wondered how exactly they were going to find the captain in this mess of a city.

~ ~ ~

New Growth woke Soarin and Minuette at the break of dawn, and they had broken camp within fifteen minutes. After that, it was just a matter of several relatively uneventful hours of climbing before the group had rounded the first mountain and saw several stone towers and a wall rising over the next. "Do, ah..." Soarin tilted his head, staring at it. "Do you see a way in?" No one did, so they concluded that it would probably be necessary to walk the length of the wall until they found something.

Six hours and a lunch-break later, the group had rounded the second corner of the massive walls and located the main entrance. As they approached, they saw several armored unicorn guards in a dead-but-not-decayed state similar to the earth-ponies from the smaller settlement. Minuette glanced back at New Growth and said, "Still think the unicorns killed those ponies on purpose?"

"Perhaps not," he conceded.

Together, the ponies and griffins advanced through the desolate city. Relative to the previous settlement, Lavoisier appeared to be in remarkably good condition. Parts of it had clearly collapsed under the sheer stress of wind or snow over so many years, but the vast majority had held up to the elements. As they walked through the city, passing corpse after corpse and building after building, they independently but all at once realized that nopony had the slightest clue what to do next. After that concern was raised, and following a brief discussion, Soarin surprised everyone by coming up with a plan.

"Everywhere we've been in so far has been chock full of magical stuff that I'm sure your people would love to salvage, New Growth, and you said your people can spare your help on the farms for a few months until harvest. I say you all start spreading out and seeing what you can find that you might want, but if you come across anything strange, just leave it alone and get Minuette." He paused, glancing around. "These unicorns are definitely the fancy show-off sorts, so I imagine that their most important buildings are going to be the most impressive looking."

Minuette nodded in agreement. "Yes, on all counts. We'll meet over there, by that fountain, by sundown. Now, let's see... That tower in particular is taller than the rest; we should start there." New Growth translated the basic plan and the rest of the group began to wander off and explore. Minuette and Soarin stuck together, heading for the southernmost tower.

As they approached, Minuette looked up at the engraving over the gates, which simply read "Magic." The gate was closed, and flanked by a dead guard on either side, but she had no trouble gaining entry.

The room beyond the gate was devoid of any furniture or decorations, and the only thing of note was a staircase leading upwards. Soarin unconsciously twitched his wings, looking up the long empty space in the center of the tower.

The two of them climbed about twenty flights of stairs, marked by small flat stops with narrow windows overlooking the exterior, before reaching any actual rooms. The first few appeared to be unused, but above those were a few storerooms full of carefully-packaged bottles of potions and unrecognizable artifacts of presumable arcane significance. It was not until they reached the twenty-seventh floor that they found anything worthwhile.

Pushing open the heavy-set mahogany door and looking around, Minuette faltered as she realized just what she was looking at. She stood at the edge of a circular room, lined on the east wall with glass paneling overlooking the horizon. In a circle around the center of the room sat sixteen unicorns of varying age and gender, but unified by the red robes marked with stylized suns that they wore. In the center of the room itself sat a clear, spherical gem that Minuette had assumed she would never see again.

Soarin finally caught up, breathing heavily as he climbed the last of the stairs to reach Minuette. He saw her stiff posture and followed her gaze. "Is that...?"

"Yeah. I don't know how, or... It doesn't make any sense, but these are the Solar Magi and that is absolutely the Celestial Stone."

"I mean, it could just be a replica or something. It's not necessarily-"

"This is Lavoisier, the capital of the pre-Equestrian unicorns! This is their mage tower!"

They both fell silent, staring at the surreal scene before them. Hesitantly, Minuette advanced toward the gem and reached out with a hoof. As it made contact, she jerked back, feeling the surge of energy. Glancing back at Soarin, she gave an affirming nod. "This is definitely it." When he offered no response, she continued, musing aloud. "Okay. What do we know? We had the real Celestial Stone in the middle of the ocean, and it absorbed an absurd amount of magical energy. We know that the Stone operates by generating new energy from what is put into it. We know that the Stone turned the inputted energy into a much larger output, causing the explosion you witnessed..."

She trailed off, thinking, and Soarin added, "And we know that the Stone is now sitting in a dust-filled room of dead ponies hundreds of miles away from where it fell into the ocean."

"See, this brings me back to the idea of time travel, since I can't fathom any other way the Stone could be here, but there's far too much evidence to the contrary--not the least of which is the fact that the entire population of this city didn't inexplicably drop dead thousands of years ago."

Soarin scratched at the stone floor with a hoof. "Do you think we could have caused that? Do you think we did go back in time, but somehow that caused everypony to die off?"

Minuette shook her head. "According to New Growth, the dying-off happened centuries ago--maybe more. I don't see how we could be responsible. Although..." She began to grin slightly. "I haven't been able to cast any sort of analyzing spells since we got here since my magic wasn't working, but I can draw straight from the Stone now." With that, she put a hoof to the gem, focused on a basic illumination spell, and her horn lit up as she successfully cast it. "Alright, now we're in business."

Continuing to use the Celestial Stone to draw energy, Minuette began casting a series of spells. The first was one of her favorites to learn as a child, albeit one that she had always considered useless. It was a timekeeping spell that worked by analyzing the magical radiation output of a distant star. It was accurate to an incredible degree, and using it, she confirmed that they had not traveled back in time.

Next, the unicorn used a spectroscopic analysis to confirm that the Celestial Stone was indeed what it appeared, and not just a very strange and conveniently charged replica. Then she used a variation on her magical forensic pulse to see if there were any obvious indications of what had killed the ponies in the room, and immediately froze. The spell revealed that apart from a faint signature coming from Soarin and herself, and a small amount radiating out from the Stone, the room was entirely devoid of magical energy. She explained as much to her companion, but he just frowned in confusion.

"Why would there be magic? These ponies are dead, and the Stone has been inactive."

"You don't get it. Everything has some sort of magical trace. It's faint, especially for inanimate stuff, but it's still there. Our whole world is saturated in it. But... This place has nothing. It's like it's been completely drained."

"Could that have killed these ponies?"

"Absolutely, and I'll bet that that's exactly what happened. And it wouldn't have just killed the ponies, either. It killed the trees and the grass, and it would have even killed the bacteria that would have otherwise helped these ponies decompose..."

Soarin muttered something under his breath before asking, "What the hay could have done something like this?"

"I can't imagine. It would've..." Minuette paused, her speech slowing as her eyes widened slightly. "It would've had to have been... a very, very powerful... magical artifact." Her gaze shifted away from the stallion and toward the orb in the center of the room.

In a hushed voice, she asked, "Are you familiar with the principle of the conservation of energy?" Soarin shook his head. "It's a scientific law that says that energy cannot truly be created or destroyed, but only changed in form. It also allows for the possibility of changing matter into energy, and vice versa. Some ponies have tried to add onto it, speculating about how it could be subverted using time travel or speculating about inter-dimensional travel, but that's never been a serious consideration." She continued staring at the Celestial Stone. "That central principle has proven true time and again, but I don't think anypony could figure out... Just what the buck is that thing doing?"

Soarin remained silent.

"We're standing in the room where the Solar Magi first took control of the sun, using the Celestial Stone to draw vast amounts of magical energy. Only... The room we're actually standing in was drained of magic, and the majority of this whole accursed continent was drained along with it." Minuette took a deep breath, looking nauseous. "What if this is another world, somehow, and this is a different Celestial Stone altogether? What if, when the unicorns of our world used it to cast spells, they were actually siphoning magic from this world through this version of the Stone?"

"That can't be-"

Minuette sat down hard on the cobbled floor. "We killed them all."

Author's Note:

[insert dramatic sound here] This chapter was a bit heavier in wordcount than previous ones have been, but I just couldn't justify splitting it. I suppose it was also a bit heavy in the Marty McFly sense of the word. ...And I suppose that referring to Marty McFly in this context is, itself, a double-meaning. Aren't we having fun today!

Sorry for the two-day deviation from the ideal schedule, by the way. Complete lack of internet is to blame, but I have no regrets! This chapter is brought to you from sunny St. John island.

Also, for what it's worth, this chapter was originally going to be titled "Ancient Mysteries," but that reminded me of a line in "What Does The Fox Say" and ruined the whole thing for me.

Comments

[MrAskAPirate]

I like it; better than time travel!