World Ten - Legitimate Kingdom
Princess Xlestia hated not knowing things.
It was an easy enough thing to avoid, most of the time: she ran all the universities, had guard outposts all over Equestria, and had a sister who monitored the dreams of everyone in the country. She could even, on rare occasion, catch a glimpse of important future events in the occasional vision.
So, having made the risky and perilous journey from her dimension to this one – bringing her entire kingdom with her, no less – she was rather put out to find that the humans had advanced a tech level since she had last checked up on them.
This may have helped explain why she was currently crouched down on a cloud over one of the humans’ mobile military bases. The cloud was mixed with the same Invisipaint that she had then covered herself in, so as long as she didn’t make any noise, the humans would have no way of knowing she was here.
A groundshackingly loud rumbling caused her ears to swivel back. It’s moving back this way again… Xlestia noted.
She’d ‘landed’ Equestria far closer to existing landmass than she’d been intending, so instead of an ocean ‘moat’ to help preserve her boarders, she’d ended up sharing a border with one of the existing human continents.
The Barrier made protecting her borders a moot point, of course, but their current position meant that the humans were free to park whatever forces they liked just outside.
Which was exactly what the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion had done, and why Xlestia was now staring up at a 50 meter tall, 200,000 tonne spherical murder machine.
The Barrier had been designed to laugh off a nuclear strike against it. To her secret annoyance, so had the ‘Object’ (no really, that’s what the humans called them) that now patrolled the land bridge between Equestria and ‘Africa’. Not only that, but it had been equipped with weapons designed to blow away other such nuke-proof Objects as itself. She was still reasonably sure that her Barrier could tank any human weapon, but now she wasn’t certain.
“What’s got the princess so agitated?” One of the soldiers just below her asked.
Xlestia’s heart leapt up into her throat. Had the humans found her so easily?! But then she remembered that the 37th referred to the girl piloting their Object as ‘the princess’, even though she wasn’t actually royalty. It was surprisingly Equestrian of them to refer to the most powerful girl they knew by that title.
“Is that a trick question?” Another soldier responded with another question.
Xlestia looked down through her invisible cloud. Almost directly below her were a pair of soldiers – one with brown hair, one with blond. They were wearing the same light blue uniforms as all the other soldiers in the base, and appeared to be cleaning plant matter out of the treads of the giant wheels that their mobile base travelled on. Considering those wheels were taller than they were, they were almost certainly going to be at it for a while. If the 37th was run anything like her Royal Guard, this was almost certainly a punishment for misbehaving soldiers.
“Let me put this in a way that even an idiot commoner like you can understand.” The second soldier continued. “We’re watching history in the making here, Quenser. But nobody here knows yet if it’s going to be the boring kind of history about treaties and negotiations and the invention of noodles, or the ‘fun’ kind of history where puny soldiers like us get crushed underfoot.”
“Dammit Heivia, why’d you have to bring up noodles? Now I’m hungry.”
“You weren’t listening to me at all, were you?!” Heivia dropped the brush he had been using to clean, and gabbed Quenser by his collar. “It’s your stupid fault we’re stuck doing this, so the absolute least you could do is listen to me when I’m talking to you!”
“Look, just because I was fantasising about a jumbo bowl of curry noodles with bits of chicken on top –”
“Why did you add all that extra detail?! Now I’m hungry!”
“– doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention.” Quenser finished.
Xlestia had been about to open her wings and command the winds to carry her to a different part of the base, but an unexpectedly serious note in Quenser’s voice made her decide to stay just a little longer.
“Basically, when it comes down to it, everyone’s worried about war, right?”
Heivia shoved his partner away with a huff and leaned against the wheel he was supposed to be cleaning. “Everyone except you, apparently. Look, the Legitimate Kingdom might be happy to negotiate with Equestria because we’re both run by aristocracy, but the other world powers won’t be so nice. The Capitalist Corporations won’t be able to stand someone other than them controlling the kind of gem deposits Equestria’s been showing off, and frankly I’m surprised the Faith Organisation hasn’t already declared a crusade against something so obviously outside any of their religious texts.”
“Aren’t pegasi from Greek Mythology?”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure they only had the one.”
Quenser paused in his own cleaning. “And the Information Alliance?”
“Dude, like I know what the government that literally bases itself around keeping secrets is going to do.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Hearing that the humans thought that war with her ponies was only a matter of time made Xlestia’s eyes narrow.
“Equestria doesn’t really stand a chance though.” Quenser shrugged.
Xlestia’s fur bristled.
“And tell me, oh wise all-knowing oracle, just how you came to that conclusion?” Heivia asked sarcastically.
“They don’t have Objects.”
Xlestia looked up from the two bickering soldiers back to the giant sphere of metal she had been studying before she had noticed Quenser and Heivia. As had already been mentioned, it was 50 meters (164 feet) tall, so it easily towered over the mobile base dedicated to its maintenance. Out from the main spherical body protruded 7 main cannons that reminded Xlestia of the legs of a crab the way they aimed around the body from their anchor point in the back. It was covered in hundreds of much smaller secondary cannons like the spines of a porcupine.
Xlestia had seen a demonstration of its power yesterday, when the base commander (a surprisingly young woman named Major Froleytia) had tried to get her open discussions about a mutual defence pact. The Object (this particular one was apparently named the ‘Baby Magnum’) had fired enormous beams of energy from its main cannons that had melted the majority of a small mountain. The Baby Magnum, Froleytia had explained, was an outdated First Generation model, and that anyone who came after Equestria with hostile intent would use Objects of the far more dangerous Second Generation.
But Xlestia (while secretly surprised at the magnitude of the destruction) wasn’t worried at all, because –
“No, they ‘just’ have an indestructible force-field instead.” Heivia said, voice still dripping with sarcasm.
Xlestia blinked at the human finishing her thoughts for her, but nodded in agreement, even though neither human knew she was there.
“Yeah, and that’s why they’ll lose.” Quenser said, picking up his brush and returning to the work they were supposed to be doing.
“Hey hey hey!” Heivia ran after Quenser. “Don’t say such unintuitive things and then leave without explaining anything!”
“Well, it’s true that Equestria has a perfect defence, but that’s all they have.” Quenser explained, gritting his teeth as he tried to pull loose a twig that had gotten firmly lodged between two treads of the giant tyres. “An army of ponies versus even one Object isn’t a battle; it’s a slaughter.”
“Not saying I disagree with you, having been on the wrong end of those monsters way too many times, but don’t they have those super-powerful ponies that claim they can even move the sun and the moon?”
“Unless they’re flat-out immortal, I seriously doubt they can take even one hit from an Object’s main weapon, and that reduces things down to rocket tag. And I doubt their princesses have ever gone through training like a Pilot Elite’s, so their reflexes are almost certainly slower.”
Xlestia, who was not ‘flat-out immortal’, began to suspect that this conversation was far more important than she’d initially thought.
“Okay, sure, so if they didn’t have that Barrier thing they’d lose. But that’s like saying we could totally go to Alpha Centuri if only it wasn’t four light-years away – it doesn’t actually make the problem any easier to solve.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“If one side had an understandable defence, but the other side by far has the superior army, then really there’s only one direction the status quo can change towards. By hiding behind their magic shield and laughing at their enemy for not being able to get to them, they’ve ceded initiative and left themselves wide open to when someone bypasses their ‘perfect’ defence.”
Xlestia felt a surge of indignity swell up inside her. ‘When’ they bypassed her Barrier?! The most advance spell she had ever wrought, overcome by people who didn’t even know the first thing about real magic?!
Once again, Heivia seemed to agree with her. “Oh yeah, genius? Lets hear some ideas on how exactly someone could cheat a pair of glass slippers out of their Fairy Godmother. The Electronic Simulation Division already verified that that Barrier thing is a sphere – your can’t just go around it. It even permeates through the earth, so digging a tunnel underground doesn’t get around it.”
“Did they they check to see if a laser goes through it?”
“What do you think was the first thing they tried, moron? Even though it’s transparent, lasers get blocked. Apparently, it works like those sunglasses that get darker when exposed to UV light.”
Wait. Xlestia eyes narrowed. When had they tried that? Had they tried to negotiate because they thought they couldn’t invade, or had they tried to figure out how to invade when she had refused to negotiate?
“I guess that makes sense.” Quenser conceded. “I mean, for their claim of ‘nuke-proof’ to stand up, it’d have to block harmful radiation, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, and if it can block dangerous EM waves some of the time, why not make it do that all of the time?”
The simmering heat of fury that Xlestia was feeling hearing the two discuss how best to kill all her charges was disrupted for a moment by a cold shudder that passed through her body. She hadn’t actually built the Barrier to do that – the fact that it blocked ‘lasers’ (whatever those were) was just a happy coincidence. If that hadn’t been the case, would she currently be fighting a war right now?
Heivia continued. “They ran though the entirety of the Baby Magnum’s armament. Lasers get absorbed, plasma gets cooled back into gas and then dispersed, and railgun and coilgun shells dissolve into what we’re pretty sure is flower pollen.”
Quenser up his index finger. “Weather goes though it. You could do something like build up a massive lightning charge with an ionising laser in a cloud you know will pass over your target.”
Quenser held up two fingers. “Ponies themselves can go through it, so once you had a sample of pony DNA you could grow yourself shells made of pony bone.”
Quenser held up three fingers. “And hey, if the Barrier turns solid materials into other solid materials, then just find one that turns into a rock or something and drop a heavy chunk of it from orbit.”
Quenser made to continue, but Heivia interrupted him. “I get it, I get it! There’s no limit to the human capacity for evil!”
He pointed a finger at Quenser. “However! Even if we could fire a weapon inside, that’s no guarantee that we could bring the Barrier down.”
“What, you actually believe them when they say that its a natural occurrence?”
“Oh, not a chance.”
Xlestia’s mouth fell open. They… hadn’t believed her?
“That thing’s way too convenient to be natural. It’s like a fat guy scarfing down bacon and claiming that he’s not cheating on his diet, it just rained food from the sky so he took it as a sign to eat.”
“Pretty much.” Quenser agreed. “Not to mention the fact that you can see from the satellite footage that it’s centred on their capital. That Barrier is about as natural as the giant erasers we have for rations around here.”
Xlestia’s blood ran cold. They knew.
“So what makes you think blowing things up is going to stop the Barrier? For all we know, it could be self-sustaining. Screw the second law of thermodynamics, it’s literally magic.”
“Because their princess isn’t an idiot, that’s how. Nobody sane would make something that big and dangerous without making it’s default behaviour ‘off’. It’s like how nuclear reactors automatically shut down if nobody is at the controls, or how more effort was put into making sure that nuclear bombs didn’t go off than was put into making sure that they did. When the potential for disaster is this high, you need your construct to become safe if you aren’t able to maintain it.”
Xlestia, who had been taking very quiet, shallow breaths, suddenly found herself taking deep gulps of air as her chest tightened. It… it was true, the Barrier would disappear if something were to happen to her, but that was because she was the one fuelling it with magic, not because she’d built any special safety feature into it. What sort of disaster could have befallen Equestria if the Barrier had malfunctioned, and she hadn’t been able to stop it?
“That’s why I think the higher-ups want a defence pact with Equestria.” Quenser shrugged. “Not because we think they can help defend us, but so that we can keep them alive while they figure out the secret to magic.”
“Princess?” Token Minion asked hesitantly. Xlestia was sopping wet from having washed off the Invisipaint, but it was her sombre expression that really gave Token pause. “Are you okay?”
Xlestia was quiet for a moment. Then she said, quietly: “We’re leaving.”
Token Minion looked up at her monarch, more that a little shocked at hearing such a defeated tone. “Um, leaving this area, or…?”
“This world.” Xlestia said, slightly testy. Token Minion immediately held her tongue, not at all wanting to add to Xlestia’s stress (despite the desperate urge to ask Wait, so you did bring us here on purpose after all?!).
“The humans of this world…” Xlestia muttered to the herself, trotting towards the secret workshop where she kept her notes on the spell that had brought them here originally. “…are far too ‘creative’.” She spat the last word like a curse.
When the alarm went up in the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion that the continent whose entrance they were guarding had suddenly vanished, all Major Froleytia could do is stare out the window in her quarters at the ocean view that hadn’t been there yesterday.
“Yeah.” She muttered. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t stay in this ****hole of a world one second longer either.”
World Ten – In which friendship is not rewarded and disharmony is not punished.
“You know, if you include those crossovers our author keeps including us in, this isn’t even the first time we’ve had to deal with magic?”
Stats
Page generated in 0.033 seconds
Total duration
1,034 users online
365,725 hits today, 2,004,447 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
This is probably one of my more obscure crosses, so hopefully you'll bear with me.
Invisipaint is from "Princess Celestia and the Summer of Royal Waves".
i Like it
8771249
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it.
How about Godzilla Planet of Monsters?
It dawns on me that the chapter naming scheme makes it all sound like a series of Mario Levels.
“Sorry Princess!” Token Minion said. “You’re humans are in another world!”
The fact that anything warhammer 40k related isnt on this list is shocking
8771400
Actually it's a short bit in Suggestions 1. Basically Celestia takes over a human planet, and no one notices because it's just one fairly out of the way planet.
8771427
And then it gets eaten by 'nids.
8771650
I've got an idea for a JoJo chapter rattling around in my head, but I'd like to finish Part 7 before writing it, and I've only recently finished Part 3.
Why could not she expand the Barrier like she did in the other worlds?
I mean, sure if you have an impenetrable defense and they have a bigger offense than at best you have a stalemate and it is only a question of time before something break it.
But if your impenetrable defense is also your irresistible offense...
Hmm. Conversion Bureau vs the world of Girl Genius? "Any sufficiently analyzed magic..."
8771698
The Barrier expands at a walking pace - i.e. humanity has decades to find a solution to it. In the world of Heavy Object, where the major world industry is weapons development, that's way more time then they need.
I didn't go into it a whole lot, but the weapons tech in Heavy Object goes crazily outside the box - they've had an Object that you couldn't destroy because it contained the main server for an international bank, an Object that that exploited the 3-body problem to divert incoming shells, a 'Zombie' Object that would fake its own defeat so that you could never be sure that you'd really destroyed it, and an Object that contained it's own orbital launch system to get around an international ban on space-based weaponry. If there's a loophole in the Barrier - and I suggested a couple here - they will find them.
8771759
I'm afraid I haven't read Girl Genius (it doesn't sound like my kinda thing), but from the dozen or so times people have suggested it, it sounds like it would boil down to "my plot-based powers are greater than your plot-based powers"!
I remember that anime, but it's been a while since I saw it. Good stuff.
8771679
.
The two of you now have me considering what would happen if Xlestia invaded the "If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device" universe
Context for this relating to Jojo: here (language is nsfw)
It would probably devolve to another "my plot armour is superior to your plot armour" scenario, since the TTS-verse's Ultramarines succeed by fiat at any task they're given, no matter how ludicrous ("sneak undetected into another chapter and steal their artifacts while singing loudly and driving an enormous tank" currently tops the list).
8773257
TTSD is a fun setting, but the only joke I have for a cross is the following:
Awesome to see this updated, and it's great to see Xlestia's plans blow up in her face.
I'm gonna be honest here, I have no idea what the setting for world ten is from.
You know what would be an interesting world? Any Dungeons and Dragons setting. The presence of gods, universally accessible magic, and other species in vast numbers is a pretty perfect example of this stuff.
8790166
The text "world ten" is a link to the Wikipedia page of the cross source - in this case, the light novel series turned anime called Heavy Object.
8791777
Thank you.
You should do the world of supreme commander and/or supcom forged alliance.
50m is nothing compared to the 200m ACU
Lol at how the exposition is happening right outside the barrier and stuff!
Typo:
exiting landmass > existing landmass
At least two examples of boarders instead of borders.
10752424
I could only find one, but thanks for spotting that anyway.