The next day, the desert reminded them of its ill intent. As they waited out the heat of the day, Apple Bloom cocked an ear. "Do y'all hear somethin'?"
The rest went silent a moment before Sweetie began bobbing her head and getting up onto her hooves. Sunflower sprang up to his paws and was across the wagon in an instant, making nary a sound. With a lightly trembling paw, he pulled open the door a crack and peeked outside. Just as quickly, he closed it. "Fire!"
Applejack tilted her head. "Fire? It's sand. Sand don't... burn."
Willow spoke a short spell and vanished from sight. "It does when they are elementals. Prepare yourselves."
Scootaloo snorted softly as she drew out her rapier. "Doubt the fire's going to bother them much."
The wagon lurched at her complaint with the sound of something striking the side powerfully. Applejack was the first out to greet their foes. There were two human-sized waves of fire, one directly beside the wagon. She crashed into the one beside the wagon, battering it with her hooves. It was just as hot as it looked, and she yanked one hoof away with some fire clinging to the fur of her ankle. She shook it out quickly with a snort.
Sweetie began to sing a song of rain from the safety of the wagon as Scootaloo flew free and joined Applejack. Her rapier jabbed into its flaming hide, drawing a crackling roar from the beast. Apple Bloom guzzled down a potion as Sunflower joined the battle. The elemental was little more than a sheet of flame. It had no front or back and no weak point that Sunflower could detect. Bludgeoning it to submission would have to be done the old fashioned way.
The flames hedged in by the party lashed out, catching Scootaloo across the snout. Besides the painful thump, which knocked her head back, the flame spread over her with supernatural speed, igniting her in an instant. She squealed in terror and withdrew from the scuffle, taking off in a run across the sand.
Apple Bloom called after Scootaloo. "Stop, drop, an' roll!" She emerged from the wagon and approached the second elemental as she swigged another potion, preparing herself to keep the creature at bay. The fire did not keep her waiting. It rushed at her and she nimbly dodged aside with enhanced physique. "Gonna have ta try harder than that!"
Applejack spun about and brought up her powerful apple buckers. The flames could not handle a twin strike, but set Applejack aflame in spite of it. It was almost as if the fire left the elemental and surrounded Applejack instead. "Ah shoot!"
Willow appeared at the top of the wagon as her spell dug out the sand out from under the remaining elemental, sending it tumbling into the hole. Apple Bloom scooted back away from the flowing sand around the hole. "Woah, cool."
Scootaloo dropped into the sand, burying herself in the hot gritty granules until the flames around her were put out. Applejack followed the example, rolling about on the ground. The heat of the sand was little compared to the licking flames she could get rid of.
Willow called down to them. "The creature is inconvenienced, not dead. Be ready to finish it off." As Applejack and Scootaloo struggled to pick themselves out of the sand, Sunflower rushed to join Apple Bloom by the pit. By the time the pit began to fill to the top with sand, they had all arrayed at the ready. The flame had lost its will to battle them, fleeing the moment it could get over the side of the pit and taking off into the scorching sands. "That also works..." Willow swung down into the wagon, and the others soon joined her.
Sweetie Belle's soft songs banished much of the pain of the fire, and Apple Bloom's potions took care of the rest. Applejack set the vial down carefully. "That coulda gone much worse. Good job, everypony."
Willow snorted softly. "You really should stop doing that."
Applejack tilted her head. "Do what?"
Sunflower flashed a bright smile. "That pony thing. We're not ponies."
Scootaloo rubbed behind her head. "Oh yeah... Sorry, just the way we talked back home."
Applejack nodded in quick agreement. "Didn't mean nothin' by it. Yer plenty fine cats."
They settled in and began sleeping in shifts until the heat faded away. When Willow moved to retake her driving position, she stopped at the door. She tore down a small slip of paper stuck to it with a dagger. Sweetie Belle tilted her head at it. "What's that?"
Willow frowned. "They found us."
Apple Bloom approached curiously. "What's it say?"
Willow surrendered the note to Apple Bloom. "They want us to give up one of our number, or they'll take everyone and everything by force. Thank the Sun King for small favors, they've given us warning."
Applejack frowned. "But why would they bother ta do that? Ah reckon they got another angle."
Scootaloo clopped her hooves lightly. "Maybe they want us to give up somepony, and then they'll attack anyway and we'll have one less pony around."
Apple Bloom blinked. "That's devious... Well I'm not giving up any of you! We can take them on if we have to."
Sweetie Belle puffed out her cheeks. "As Rarity would say, they sound like a bunch of uncultured hooligans, and I will have nothing to do with them." She turned up her nose with a small hmph.
Sunflower bobbed his head in agreement. "I won't let them take any of you."
Willow softly patted Sunflower on the head. "You're a brave little alpha cat, but you're not the largest one here. Trust in these skilled ponies to do some of their own protecting. It's time to get moving. Be ready in case of trouble." She was soon gone, and the wagon began to move, undoubtedly guided forward by her.
Their progress was shorter than they would have liked. After pushing forward for several hours, Willow thumped the top of the wagon. "Wind's picking up, and I see sand building. We may be in for a storm." There were no rocks or trees to hide in, just larger dunes. Willow joined them in the wagon and began bolting shut the small windows. "A sandstorm is no light matter. There's nothing for it but to wait until it passes."
Sweetie pointed towards the front. "What about the camels?"
Willow's expression soured. "There's very little I can do for them. They will either survive, or not. If not, we have new issues more pressing than the idle gestures of bandits. At the very least, they will be hindered by this storm as much as we are. If they planned to attack now, those plans are dashed."
Scootaloo crossed her forelegs. "Well this sucks. I bet if Rainbow was here, she'd just stop the wind."
Apple Bloom looked at Scootaloo curiously. "Are ya startin' ta learn weather magic now that yer flyin'?"
Scootaloo shrugged. "Sort of. I figured out how to kick a cloud away, but I'm learning on my own." She shrank a little. "Wish Rainbow Dash was here."
Applejack snorted softly. "Can't disagree. She'd be right useful 'round these parts, 'long with the rest of the girls. Ah bet Twilight could magic us out of this predicament if she were here."
Scootaloo moved over to Applejack and pointed at her saddlebag. "Let me see her book. Maybe we could use the spell ourselves. We're wizards too you know."
Applejack nodded. "Ya got a mighty fine point there." She pulled out the book and put it on the ground. "See if ya can't find some spell that'd help."
Scootaloo flopped to her haunches and began flipping through the dense tome of magical lore as the howling of the sandy wind outside increased in pitch and intensity as the storm came rolling over their wagon. Small bits of dust blew in through the cracks, leaving wild eddies of sand across the floor. Willow stood up and quenched the lamp before replacing it with magical light. "A lamp in a closed place is a poor idea."
Applejack made it her duty to sweep the dust out with her magic, keeping the ground clear so long as she occasionally made a sweeping motion to send the dust off to wherever that spell send dirt and stains. It was quiet, save for the ever-present howl of the wind and the soft creaks of the wheels as the wagon rocked back and forth under the assault.
Scootaloo pointed at a spell. "We could summon up new horses if the camels don't make it."
Sweetie pouted at the idea. "Poor camels. What'd they do to deserve this?"
Willow shook her head. "There is a good chance they will weather through this. This is their home. They are more used to these storms than we could ever be."
Sunflower perked an ear. "How come we aren't used to this, Mom? Aren't we from the desert?"
Willow nodded. "Haven't you listened to your Grandmother? She has told the tale plenty of times. Once we were creatures of the air." She gestured with a paw at Sunflower's wings. "That is where we got those. We would go wherever the wind carried us."
Sunflower smiled. "That sounds nice. Why don't we fly much anymore?"
Apple Bloom raised a hoof suddenly. "Cause y'all like big cities and comfy cushions and stuff?"
"Basically, yes." Willow drew out a slender stick of a pipe and began packing it with some herbs. "We are more comfortable now, but less free. There is always a price to be had in all things, my son, and you would do well to learn that."
Sunflower's eyes darting to the fillies, then back at his mom, looking thoughtful a moment. "How do you know if the price is worth it?"
Willow ignited the end of her pipe with a match, lighting the herbs inside briefly before she gave a lazy puff. The smoke was sweet, rather than the acrid tang the others had expected. "That is something you learn over a lifetime of trials. What you would pay for is not what I would sacrifice for, but you will learn, I have no doubt."
Apple Bloom raised an ear towards Applejack. "Is that something ah should be learnin'?"
Applejack considered a moment. "Reckon it is. Ah made a lot of decisions, and none of them are free. Ya gotta give time, or bits, sometimes more ta get what ya want. Sweat, blood, effort. Nothing's entirely free. Even time is somethin' ya only get so much of, so... yes, ya do gotta learn what's worth paying fer and what's not."
Sweetie tilted her head. "Wow, I never thought of it like that..."
Scootaloo grinned. "Well hanging out with the Crusaders is worth the price every day!" This was a sentiment the other Crusaders could easily agree with, culminating in a group meeting of hooves and paw. With a renewed sense of camaraderie, they huddled together and waited for the raging winds to abate.
day, the
quickly, he
there
old-fashioned
Stop, drop, an' roll!
another
I believe it's day time.
pain
job, everypony
somepony, and
Well, Ah'm
givin'
y'all
hooligans, and
patted
You pack a pipe or roll a cigarette, you don't pack a cigar, AFAIK
of
winds
SURRENDER DOROTHY
Willow is just rolling up the typos and smoking them away.
5943719 All fixed! Though she meant 'they', not 'there', as in 'They, those guys out there, are elementals.'
5943796 Ah, my mistake, but you can see how I got confused.
To be, or not to be.
The pipe of Hamlet.
If you can get that corrupted quote, and understand its reasoning here, you are old.
A desert does seem to be a natural entry point for fire elementals. Of course, to them, it's practically the tundra.
(As for whether sand can burn, I'm sure Apple Bloom has something to say on that matter...)
Those bandits don't know what they're dealing with... unless they watched the party defend themselves from the elementals. We'll see how that goes.
Immolate does not mean burn, it means kill (usually but not always by fire)
Someone wasn't watching very carefully
So a lantern is a bad idea, but smoking is fine?
Ouch, fire elementals suck. No weak spots, burn natural weapons like hooves, immune to Scoot's fire damage on her rapier. Not surprising too, Everglow is a fey world, close to the Inner Planes.
I bet Applejack and Willow are going to have a very interesting conversation about prides, sooner or later.
5944297 Fixed, though I don't think the consumption rate of O2 for a single pipe matches up against an oil burning lantern.
5944371 I think either would be fine in a leaky canvas-covered wagon, as long as nobody gets immolated.
5944404 I would hope they aren't sacrificing themselves with optional fire.
5944411 You can never be too careful.
fire , wind , sand and life lessons interesting chapter.
wisdom is every ware if you look for it.
Harts Fire
Sweetie began bobbing her head and getting up "onto" her hooves.
Applejack would say "sand don't burn."
Change that first comma into a period.
There are two spaces between "Apple" and "Bloom."
5944721 Fixes applies with a vengeance.
5944736 This chapter excellently balanced adventuring with downtime, and even some bonding among the party members. Oddly, Willow's parable about how everything costs something, while not untrue, sounded tinged with melancholy to me. Was she echoing her mother's mourning for how the purrsians have lost much of their morals in their race for creature comforts? Or was it something more personal? Either way, the tit-for-tat philosophy was a stark contrast to the generally optimistic tones that the ponies usually take, and served to remind me that Willow still hasn't truly opened up to them.
I agree with FanOfMostEverything that the fire elementals were an appropriate, albeit unexpected, desert encounter. The fight against them was pretty straightforward, but I liked that the second elemental fled when it realized the odds were against it. It's nice to see monsters acting like they have a sense of self-preservation, instead of throwing themselves into combat when there's no real chance of victory. Leaving aside issues of "maybe they'll have a part to play later" (since that doesn't seem to be relevant here), it's a nice nod to verisimilitude.
The note that the bandits left was odd. If they'd gotten the drop on the wagon, why not attack when they had the advantage of surprise? Why give them an ultimatum, especially one with no obvious show of force to back it up? Applejack is right in that there's another angle to be had there - especially since this seems to confirm that they're slavers, since they're demanding that an individual be surrendered. My guess is that these slavers don't currently have the manpower (catpower?) to currently conduct a raid, and are trying to bluff their way into getting even more. With the sandstorm currently blinding them, and obliterating any tracks, I'd be amazed if they were able to even try to make good on their threat.
5944967 I actually did read their monster entry. They are very much not known for their bravery. They love tormenting weaker foes. 1 vs 6? Nope! Run away! Being set on fire was very unfun for Applejack and Scootaloo though. Where are the pikes when you need them? Gosh...
I also enjoyed the personal time they managed to have inbetween the hazards. The desert is reminding everyone that it is not a passive thread, as well it shouldn't be!
It's one of those funny things. A desert is a good place to find a fire weapon, and also the place where it can be most useless at times. Scootaloo was so sad. Fortunately she got over it pretty quick. That filly thrives on victory!
Is it me, or does it seem like people leave about as many Old Typos, as there tends to be New Typos that pop up!
*Shakes fist* DAMN YOU TYPO DEMONS!! Even in defeat you still mock our beloved writer!
5944989
That's because, from Third Edition on, there's been a wrought iron wall - made of tigers - between the setting/narrative parts of the game and the mechanical parts; something we can see between the first half of your second sentence and the second half, respectively, in the quoted passage above.
5946855 I have no idea what you mean. This has been true since my vague memories of final fantasy 1, far before D&D 3rd edition.
5946932 Final Fantasy 1 is an apples-to-oranges comparison; a video game (especially such an early one) has technical limitations that it has trouble working around. An RPG, by contrast, is far less limited - the closest equivalent would be page count, and given the treadmill of supplements, magazine articles, etc. that's not really the same sort of limitation.
But that only makes it all the more egregious how bad recent editions of D&D have been in this regard. But I suspect that, at this point, what I'm talking about isn't clear, so let me start again.
The issue of "deserts being places where you're most likely to find fire-based weapons/magic is narratively intuitive, but mechanically backward, since fire-based powers are easily resisted by fire-based monsters" is an issue of trying to marry the narrative/setting concern (that deserts are "fitting" places to find fire-based magic/weapons) to a mechanical concern (e.g. why would you develop magic/weapons that will be ineffective against the most common kind of monsters in your local area?).
The problem is one of trying to justify the narrative within the context of the game world, and then having the mechanics be representative of that. Why is it narratively-intuitive to find fire-based magic and weapons within a desert setting? Why doesn't every wizard - keenly aware that desert monsters will resist heat and cold, but be highly vulnerable to ice-based magic and weapons - study ice magic? Taking that example to its logical conclusion, why doesn't it become obvious (within the context of the game world) that if you want to find an ice wizard, you should go to a desert (and to find a fire wizard, you should go to an arctic tundra)?
Based on a purely "game rules create the logic of the world, rather than the other way around" stance, that should be what happens. But that seems narratively counter-intuitive, to find ice wizard all living in deserts, whereas fire wizards are all found in arctic wastelands. It flies in the face of what we expect, but the rules - which otherwise don't bother to address setting issues - make it the optimal choice. That means that if we want to make a game world that meets our expectations, instead of subverting them, we have to go back and have the rules address setting issues from the outset - the rules must serve the setting, rather than vice versa.
This is largely where Third Edition failed to deliver, though I do believe that it wasn't intentional. Rather, the game's drive to be a universal "toolkit" - while always present - had reached heights that previous editions hadn't come close to. The credo became "options, not restrictions," and setting constraints were restrictions by their very nature, which meant that they had to go. I'm of the opinion that the designers (perhaps naively) thought that DMs and their local groups would add back in these restrictions to help flavor their local campaign worlds, but in practice (at least that I've seen) that's not what happened. Instead, everyone treated the rules as a "canon" that had to be slavishly obeyed, and setting and narrative concerns were largely sacrificed on the altar of "preserving game balance."
Thus, issues of "why would my desert mage study fire spells? He's going to be surrounded by fire monsters that will be immune to them!" became an idea to be championed, instead of a problem to be fixed. It became an odd notion to be ignored, rather than an issue of verisimilitude that could be addressed.
The game ceased to even make an attempt to try and answer the question, because magic and magic items were described totally in terms of game mechanics - any issue of how magic worked from an in-character standpoint was left for everyone to decide for themselves - only for most people not to even bother. So creative answers like "the fire spirits that populate the desert hate cold-based magic, and so repeated use of it brings down their wrath on would-be cryomancers," or "deserts are 'near' the Plane of Fire, which causes cold-based magic to lose its effectiveness within their borders," or even "the only wizards available are fire mages; they know that the powers of the desert [see the previous reasons regarding fire spirits and the Plane of Fire] favor their form of magic, and that is the only knowledge they have to bestow."
You could play up those reasons, and then create game rules to support them - e.g. "wizards that use more than 5 levels of spells with the [cold] descriptor in a day suffer a +25% chance of a random encounter, due to the fire spirits directing fire monsters towards the ice wizard," or "within the desert, all spells with the [cold] descriptor are minimized (the opposite of a Maximized metamagic effect)" or even "if you want to roll up a wizard with ice spells, you need to roll a 10% or less on a d100," respective to each of the reasons above. The rules are made to justify the setting, rather than the setting needing to justify itself to the rules.
It shouldn't be awkward that a desert is where you're going to find fire magic that has a hard time injuring the local monsters; it should be obvious that both the magic and the local monsters are adapted to using the same ambient energy source, that being fire/heat; the rules should reflect that, rather than subverting it. But the "Rules As Written" don't do that - there's a wrought iron wall made of tigers between the fluff and the crunch.
5947015 That sounds lovely, and a bunch of stuff I wouldn't have time for in my game to be honest. For a specific desert 'campaign' if I wanted to get into it that deep? Why not. But this is quite enough debate on an off-hand comment. I can't say I personally bemoan the pagecount required to make up magical bylaws for every terrain type.
5947032 Oh, it's absolutely a lot of work, but that's true for anything worthwhile. Heck, your own characters all but said so in this very chapter:
My issue isn't that the rules can't really deliver in this regard, and it's not even that they don't really try...it's how they didn't do much of anything to stop the wide-spread fetishization of "game balance" that led to the rules being seen as something that must not be modified, rather than as something to be tweaked and tinkered with to create a rich setting.
But I've probably gone on enough of a "kids these days" rant.
5947061 5943796
oh no, i need an adult. your conversation is too long to read, anyways i really like thebonding in this chapter and what, the thieves probably can't make good on their threat and all. would such if thy lived in a hide out in the dune next to them tho, tobad that sword was usless. also i feal asthou thy should have found a water item, like maby an invenent goblet or a rain spell because water items are the most likey to be found in decerts since veryone needs it
5947061 you like my pic?
7058760 Again, it makes sense that everyone would want something like that. What's harder to justify is why they're not more common, insofar as they're compared to other magic in the local area.
7058762 You mean your avatar here? I'm not sure what it is; some sort of dragon, I think?
Think you mean Belle.
10701056
Ancient typo slain.