19 - To Chase the Light
Applejack lowered herself to her haunches and looked over her wards. "Alright, how's everypony feeling?"
Sweetie raised a hoof. "I'm OK. How do we get out of here?"
Apple Bloom pointed up at the water-spewing tunnel they emerged from. "Not back that way. Ah almost drowned, but ah'm feeling better now, thanks Sweetie."
Scootaloo was busy shaking her wings free of water. "Ready!"
Sunflower rubbed behind his head. "It was my fault for not spotting that trap. I won't do that again."
Apple Bloom tilted her head. "I didn't spot it neither, ya know?"
Sunflower frowned. "But it's my job. You're an alchemist. I should be spotting these things before we get hurt."
Applejack reached out, putting a hoof on Sunflower's chest. "Nopony here is blaming you, Sunflower."
Sunflower puffed up despite the water. "I'm blaming me! I have to get better, and I will. I'll pull my weight." He took a moment to shake himself free of much of the water, then start to look around the dim room. "Where are we?"
Applejack rose to her hooves and had a look around. The room was about twenty feet tall, with a clear spider motif, if the webbing design across the walls were any hint. The webs seemed to dance with how Sweetie's light bounced off the pool of water on the side of the room close to the spouting pipe. The ground closer to the pool was slickened with water. The floor had a large pattern of some kind of castle. She could see a single door of stone on the far side and pointed to it. "Go check that out, careful like."
Apple Bloom and Sunflower approached carefully, and soon the door was pushed open. Despite the age and humidity, it slid open silently, revealing a hallway that went off to the left and right. Bloom peeked left while Sunflower took right, both squinting into the gloom. The others came up behind them and they quickly decided to stick to the right. The hallway came quickly to a metal door. It was locked, but nothing Sunflower couldn't handle deftly with his tools.
Pushing open the door revealed a well-lit and spacious chamber. There was a deep red carpet running down the middle, leading to a lifted dais with a great cushion. On the cushion sat a curious creature. It was like a greatly overgrown purrsian, with the body of a cat and wings on its back, but it also had the face and upper torso of a humanoid female at its front. She clearly saw them, and was watching them.
She spoke in a soft tone, a smirk playing over her features. "Look at these curious little morsels. You're furrier than the usual interlopers. How long has it been?" She rose up to her paws. "Were you looking for treasure? Or did you learn of me and hoped for answers?"
Sweetie shook her head quickly. "No ma'am, nice to meet you! I'm Sweetie Belle, this is Applejack, Apple Bloom, and Sunflower. We're lost. Sorry if we shouldn't be here. We didn't mean any harm."
"What an adorable little thing you are." The creature looked over Sweetie Belle. "Are you ensorceled animals?"
Applejack shook her head. "Not as far as ah'm aware, ma'am. We're not looking for no trouble now, ya hear?"
She huffed softly. "I am going to assume you are. My orders don't include pest control, so I don't have to attack you." She prowled forward with all the grace her feline ancestry implied. "It has been quite some time, I believe. What year is it?"
Sunflower raised a paw, "IC 291"
She shook her head. "I don't recognize that. IC? That just means more time has passed than I would have liked." She gestured with a paw for them to come closer. "Come in. I already said I won't bite."
The group advanced into the room nervously, their disposition not helped when the door slammed shut behind them with the soft click of the lock re-engaging. "Oh don't look like that, little things. I would hear of the world. Tell me what lies above my head."
Apple Bloom put a hoof to her chin. "Well, there's this huge city called 'Murrage' up there, filled with ponies like that." She pointed at Sunflower.
"That is clearly a cat, not a pony."
Sunflower made a dismissive wave of a paw. "They do that. They call everyone a pony. It's kind of cute when you get used to it."
Scootaloo asked while leaning forward curiously. "Who put you here? You said you were following orders?"
She made a disgruntled noise as she returned to her cushion. "Damned dark elves bound me to guard this room long ago. They used to come by once in a while, but that stopped. It's impossible to determine the time here, so don't ask how long ago that was. I was to guard against intruders, grave robbers, and despoilers of all sorts, but they were speaking of other gangly hairless things like themselves. If you were human..."
Applejack swallowed her fear. "Well... we ain't. We're ponies, and Sunflower's a 'purrsian'?" Sunflower nodded agreement. "We, uh, so... do ya like it here?"
"Hate it." She stretched out her paws, revealing long and deadly looking claws that retracted at the end of the motion. "You don't look like you would be skilled enough to fix that."
Sweetie Belle smiled brightly. "We could try if you tell us what we'd have to do?"
She considered Sweetie Belle, her eyes wandering up over the others. "I see no harm in trying, but if you kill yourself, I accept no responsibility." She shrugged softly. "This is your choice."
Apple Bloom turned to the others. "It's the right thing ta do. 'Sides, she may help us get outta here!"
Applejack faced the woman. "Well, ta start, is this here a physical problem, or a magic one? What are we talking about here?"
She pointed up to the wall behind the party and they all spun to see an intricate pattern in jewels embedded in the wall made to look like a staring eye. "So long as that watches me, I cannot leave. Simple as that. I feel they constructed it to spite me. It's so... dull. There's no grace or subtlety to it, no puzzle, just denial."
Sunflower tilted his head at it. "That looks pretty simple. Why not pry the jewels out?"
She huffed. "I can't touch it. I've tried throwing things at it, they bounce off. I gave up after a time."
Scootaloo spread her wings wide. "Come on, Sunflower, let's have a look." They took off together and circled roughly around the jewels, inspecting them. The center had a huge onyx-like crystal, surrounded by dozens of other gems to create the colors and impression of the eye. It was locked in a perpetual scowl. Scootaloo reached out to touch one and got a nasty shock for it. She squeaked and veered away, coming down for a landing.
Sunflower frowned thoughtfully before coming down soon after. "I think we need a stick, a nice long stick."
Applejack flipped up the lid on her saddlebag and peeked inside. "Huh, they weren't kidding when they said it was made well. Everything's nice and dry in here." She found her rope and pulled it out. "Will this do?"
Sunflower took hold of the rope. "Not exactly a stick..." He took off with it anyway, the rope dangling along underneath him as he approached the baleful eye. He tied the rope into a lasso, then tossed it at the eye. Missed. With a soft grunt he reeled it in and tried again. After three more increasingly frustrated tries, the rope snagged around the largest gem and pulled tight when he yanked on it. "Now we're talking!" He quickly flew down and offered up the rope. "Pull!"
The sphinx didn't need any further prodding. She leaped forward and grabbed the rope, giving it a mighty pull between her paws. The rope went taut, then began to strain as it became a contest of pure brute strength. Applejack grabbed the rope in her teeth, yanking in assistance. The gem began to spark and fizz, a powerful bolt of energy striking the rope and starting a small fire on it. Sunflower waved his paws. "Pull harder, before the rope burns through!"
Applejack and the sphinx redoubled their efforts before the rope broke with a resounding snap, sending the two into a pile on the ground. The sphinx howled out her displeasure. "So close! Damn you, drow, you curse me from your graves."
Scootaloo pointed. "It wasn't for nothing, it's halfway out already!" The gem did seem to be partially dangling free, clearly dislodged a few precious inches.
Applejack looked at her rope, the fire already spread uncomfortably far along it. "Well we ain't using that again..." She stomped out the fire and reclaimed her much shorter rope. "Any other ideas?"
Sweetie shook her head. "Maybe we should look for that stick?" She smiled at the sphinx. "We'll be back, promise!"
The sphinx settled on her cushion, facing the door. "Take your time. That is one thing I have in unfortunate abundance."
Applejack pointed at the door they came in through. "Don't suppose ya could open that?"
She shook her head. Sunflower advanced with his tools and had it back open shortly enough. The Sphinx twitched faintly, grabbing at her cushion with clawed paws. "Don't remind me too much that you may resemble raiders."
They soon departed the company of the sphinx, the door closing on its own as they trekked down the hallway past the water room. The hallway turned right, then opened into a round chamber with the hallway continuing at the other end. Applejack frowned at it. "Don't trust it."
There were grates running along the outside of the circular room, and smooth stone in the center. Apple Bloom and Sunflower peered cautiously from the entrance, no one daring to wander in. Sunflower pointed. "Look." With his pointing Apple Bloom could see a faint circle in the stone in the center. "A pressure plate."
Sweetie tilted her head one way and then the other. "Can you turn it off?"
Scootaloo spread her wings and soared over the pad without prompting, landing on the far side safely. "Ta da!"
Apple Bloom rolled her eyes. "The rest of us don't got wings!"
Sunflower advanced. "I do." He didn't fly though, he simply went along the outside, staying on the grating. He soon reached Scootaloo's side. One-by-one, the others skirted around the plate in the center.
Sweetie peeked back at it as they advanced. "I wonder what it did?"
Scootaloo chuckled. "Nothing good. Maybe boiling hot lava would rain down or something."
Applejack huffed softly. "Ah reckon ah don't rightly want ta know."
They reached the end of the hallway where finely crafted wooden double doors stood, defying age and looking as new as if they were carved just the day before.
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this sounds like a Clive Cussler kind of trap. or is it.??
good chapter and I love the cliffhanger.
Harts Fire
5908612
Dirk Pitt meets Daring Do? that would be one heck of a tail.
What stats does the Sphinx have, well, if they do manage to get it out alive that is. That gem eye of restraint looks particularly nasty, especially being drow.
And what lies behind door number two, Bob?
Well, we have a better idea of what the dark purrsian is after now. A Drow temple? The bad sister of Calistria?
Apple Bloom pointed at the "water-spewing" tunnel.
I think that she was "putting" a hoof on Sunflower's chest.
The room has a spider "motif."
There was a lifted "dais" on a great cushion.
There are two spaces between "spread" and "her."
Perhaps surprisingly, "double doors" doesn't have a hyphen.
5908659 All fixed! Thank you for being a part of the adventuring team.
5908714 I have mixed-but-mostly-positive feelings about the current chapter. What I'm enjoying most about this fic is the interplay between Sunflower and the girls, and there was very little of that here. However, I simply can't hold that against the story here, because I'm aware that it would have been awkward, if not downright inappropriate, for the characters to prioritize relationship drama over finding a way out of their current predicament. Indeed, if they had started going on about how they felt about each other, I'd have been among those who'd have pointed out how it probably wasn't the time or the place to do so.
As it was, I felt that what we got was probably the right amount of interplay between them, that being some ruminating in their downtime moments. Sunflower was, to me, being a bit too hard on himself. Apple Bloom was right in that she was also checking for traps, but more salient than that is the simple fact that no one is going to succeed at a particular task all of the time; human error (or purrsian error, or pony error) is inescapable. At the same time, I'm sympathetic to his recrimination; Sunflower clearly has high standards for himself, and he's upset by any instance of not living up to them. What's less clear at this point is what those standards are - is he upset because he didn't fulfill his role in the party adequately, or is he upset because he doesn't feel like a leader/alpha male? Because if it's the former, then it's a small failure, and is probably easily gotten over, whereas if it's the latter then he's probably taking this like a big sign that says "you are nowhere near being the sort of purrsian you want to be."
I would make a note that Apple Bloom's pointing out to Sunflower that she also didn't find the trap could be an instance of her trying to get closer to him, but in this particular instance I think that's a case of me seeing what I want to see. Apple Bloom isn't the sort to evade responsibility, and she'd almost certainly have pointed out her own culpability in not finding a trap regardless of who was blaming themselves. So there's no real relationship drama there.
My brow furrowed a bit when I read about the area having a spider motif. On the one hoof, that is a convenient shorthand for indicating the handwork of drow. But on the other hoof, the spider theme is religious in nature; it's the theology of Lolth made manifest in drow culture, and it seems a bit odd to have a D&D-specific, rather than Pathfinder, goddess be referenced, even so indirectly. Does (or perhaps "did," since the drow seem to be long-gone) Lolth have a presence on Everglow? That's...rather awkward to contemplate, if only because that could never happen at the meta-level, due to legal reasons.
Far more notable, however, was the notation of the year that this story takes place in. I admit, that caught me by surprise; I'd have thought that Sunflower would have used a purrsian calendar to confound readers who wanted to peg exactly when this story (and its predecessor) happened, but now we can do exactly that! Now that we know this is happening in IC 291, we can firmly say, for example, that Iliana hasn't died yet, despite the rumors of her illness near the end of the last story, etc. We also know that the Pony Empire is four years away from the beginning of the end when its founder and empress finally does pass away.
More immediately, the group has come across a not-immediately-hostile gynosphinx. When the conversation turned to them freeing her, I confess that I had flashbacks to the sphinx character Enid (who was much more of a girl-next-door character) from Paul Kidd's Greyhawk trilogy of novels. While I doubt that this (so far nameless) sphinx will remain with the group for nearly that long, it'll be interesting to see what happens if she remains with the party for an extended period of time. She's almost certainly a font of ancient knowledge (simply by her very nature), but she's also wildly out-of-touch with anything even remotely current, to the point of not recognizing that Everglow is now firmly in the grip of sentient four-legged races. Most likely she'll be a temporary ally until she has the opportunity to go her own way.
I'm a little surprised that she couldn't get out of her predicament, though. She has dispel magic and remove curse at a not-inconsiderable caster level, and that compulsion she's under is clearly magical. It's not totally unbelievable that she couldn't have defeated it with magic, of course, but then we come to the physical component. Her saying she can't touch it must be in reference to some sort of compulsion, because the "bug-zapper" feature that it has doesn't seem like enough of a safeguard to keep an unwilling prisoner in there for so long...not when it can be that severely damaged with a rope and some tugging. As it was, I'm a little surprised the group didn't just smash the loosened gemstone with a weapon and take the small hits that went with doing so. The task really seemed like it was mostly completed when they decided to take such a roundabout way of finishing it off.
In the meantime, the dungeoneering continues!
I wonder what class daring doo would be?
5908751 Prodding it with their metal weapons would have resulted in very nasty shocks, hence why Sunflower wanted the greatest of all puzzle solving tools, a stick. The sphinx is severely restricted in her approaches to it, mentally compelled from fixing this seemingly obvious problem. That is what she said though, that it seemed like such an obvious thing and it infuriated her for being so blunt and yet stopping her cold.
Huh. A sphinx. One that's been trapped here for quite a long time. I wonder what she's been eating. It's a good thing she's only following the letter of her commands, or I might have found out...
In any case, it's pretty clear who built this structure. Let's just hope there aren't any drow still lingering around the area.
It's amazing! The ink is still wet on this typo:
Taut, unless they're educating it.
5908763
Archaeologist, perhaps?
5908806 Fixed! Your eagle eyes spot what others may miss, hmm...
Me: "Ah, f@#k!"
Technically, she did drown (non-fatally) although I wouldn't expect her to know the difference.
grave robbers
Here's where the fey sub-type is really worth the racial points
What has the sphinx been eating all this time?
5908751
There is more to life than shipping
She better not, she's CR8; they're having enough trouble with APL as it is.
5910470
Something I acknowledged in my very next sentence:
5910606 And then talked about shipping for several paragraphs.
5910613 For a single subsequent paragraph; the one after that was how I didn't think that Apple Bloom's exchange with Sunflower had anything to do with shipping, and the four after that had nothing to do with shipping at all.
But of course, that's beside the point; there's nothing wrong with being interested in shipping, nor saying what you'd like to see out of a given work in that regard. Better to give your opinion on someone's writing, after all, than give your opinion on someone else's opinion.
5910641 Or in this case, my opinion of your opinion of my opinion of your opinion of someone else's writing.
5910654 Technically true, though that comes to the same conclusion.
5910663 I was agreeing with you. Given how rare that is, I don't blame you for not recognizing it.
5910670 I did recognize it, hence why I said that was "true" (albeit technically).
5910678 *Sigh* If we can have an argument even when we both assert that we agree, we should go into politics.
5910692 Yeah, but I chalk that up to the idea that we probably don't agree about what it is we're agreeing about.
5910463 Fixed!