Vagaries of Fate
Aurora rose from her dry dock, her legs raising her hull away from the soft protective padding that separated her ventral surface from the hard wooden supports that comprised most of the dock. It was a crude thing, and it left her wondering HOW such a barren country could afford wood. Aurora faced the door as one of the horse’s walked down the hall towards her. She already knew it was Twilight. Aurora could sense the air around the door flickering in and out of reality in a measured controlled fashion that she had quickly come to identify as a pattern unique to Twilight. Her mind lazily stretched itself as her legs stretched out. She had finally begun to get used to giving herself a couple hundred orders and accepting them.
It was a tad silly, but she kind of felt like an AT-RS* as she dismounted the bed, carefully monitoring her movements to manage the violent terrain. Just to further the illusion she maneuvered over the table in the middle of the room on her way to the door. It was right about then that Twilight knocked.
It was kind of fun, her hooves clopping along the crystal furnishing as she approached the door. As she dismounted the raised work-surface she glanced back, careful to ensure her rear legs didn’t foul the dismount. Her External Processing Unit sped up as it worked in concert with her wetware to quickly plot out possible courses the conversation could take. Other core processors were dedicated to her stance, body language, and expressions. All of this as she cantered at an even and appropriate pace towards the door. Raising up her fore left actuator, Aurora opened the door, quickly studying the underside of the purple horse’s upturned hoof as she maintained a friendly and polite smile.
“Greetings Twilight, I presume you’ve recieved my list?” She didn’t need to presume. Aurora picked up quite easily on the infrared sheen of the ink she had written the request in. The horse hadn’t cleaned them since she had handled the letter.
“I-I’m sorry Aurora, but we haven’t decided to fulfill your request. We want to know more about who and what you are and what you need these materials for. For all we know you’re just making another weapon to do to us what you did to Sombra. Other than that one time Cadance saw you up in the sky, we have no confirmation of who or what you are.” Aurora could feel her cargo bay doors grit against each other tightly as she moved quickly to close off unusable responses and refocus her social software in this new direction.
“So I am suspect then?” Aurora sensed trepidation in Twilight, beyond what the diplomatically chosen words would normally convey. She wasn’t sure what had caused them to suspect her so, but it was evident she would have to repair the early trust the horse’s had shown her if she was to continue operating with their support.
“I don’t know if this is possible, but we need more evidence of who and what you claim to be. It would be a gesture of goodwill if nothing else. You are a ship right? Why not let one of us onboard?” Damn it to Hel. She had hoped her goodwill with the horses would last longer. She hadn’t been banking on it, but this was a definite wrench in her plans. This was a bad sign, especially if she needed to bank on the goodwill she got if, and it was a big if, if she provided what Twilight was asking.
She cursed herself for getting this comfortable. Her comfort had let her get complacent. Aurora reminded herself that her crew was somewhere on this Aesir and Vanir forsaken world. She had to find them. It was self evident that her slow pace wouldn’t work as well with these horses as she had hoped. She needed to speed up her plans, if for no other reason than to maximize whatever goodwill she acquired now and in the future.
Aurora recalculated her priorities, shifting her paradigm away from the long term planning to the short term actualization. It was fortunate that she had gotten this from Twilight. Of the horses she had met so far, it seemed to her that Twilight was the best place to start repairing goodwill.
Aurora raised a hoof, and asked for a small moment of Twilight’s time, the words themselves were unimportant, and she simply set that report aside as she threw her mental processes behind the task of reevaluating her analysis of what and why Twilight brought back this sort of response.
What Twilight asked was, complicated. Aurora was on the tail end of the initial paperwork for her takeover of the now unmanned ship positions vital to operations, and was not looking forward to the new slurry of forms that would be required to avoid treason charges for bringing onboard a newly discovered, and poorly researched, alien life form.
Relationship with the horses in the context of her newly set directives. How much time would it take to do the forms versus the time saved by the probes? How many tertiary benefits would providing this information to the horses provide? How many complications? What would she do if the horses took some form of religious offense to some material or another in her hull? Could she just ignore them and set out?
Ignoring the horses was not likely. While in her current form she still outpowered most of them, there were quite a number, and if there were more like Cadance then trying to go through them would be a slog. It would be shrewd to invest some time towards minimizing interference if nothing else. Intense moral qualms aside, the situation wasn’t so desperate nor untenable to resort to forcing the horse’s to provide the material assistance she needed.
That left some measure of cooperation. Was this too much? How would she even get Twilight into orbit in the first place? Decontaminating whatever sections of the ship Twilight touched would be relatively quick unless the horse’s had a more extreme internal biologies that she somehow missed any external signs of.
She would...she would do it. Now was a time for decisiveness. Her crew awaited her, and the vagaries of fate were quick and hard on those who lacked forward momentum. No telling when everything would go south, especially her relationship with these damn horses. That left the how. The how was by far the most interesting part of this equation.
“Am I right in understanding that Equestrians breath a mixture of air consisting of at least twenty percent oxygen, oxygen being a unit of matter comprising of 8 positively charged particles, 8 negatively charged particles, and normally coming in bonded pairs?” It was a shame that the English linguistic revival fell out of the vogue of the English scientific circles before the discovery of particle mechanics. That would have made this conversation far easier, that is if the near match between it and the horse’s language continued.
“I think we do,” Twilight seemed to perk up at Aurora’s words. “We do have an element called oxygen, and it sounds exactly the same as the element you described, except we call those subatomic particles electrons and protons. Oxygen makes up roughly 20.8% of our atmosphere, so that matches as well.” Twilight paused, knitting her eyebrows in confusion. “Although, that wasn’t on the list you gave me. How is this relevant to anything?” Aurora marked down the new vocabulary away for now.
“What’s the highest any Equestrian has ever been? Do you have a star-program, a space program?” Twilight’s confused look was not a great sign. “What is your medical expertise?”
“I couldn’t tell you about the highest a pony’s been, I’ve never studied weather before.” Twilight answered hesitantly. “That would be a question for a pegasus. As for a star-program, we have started mapping out the constellations, and I have enough medical knowledge to treat minor cuts and scrapes. But what does that have to do with anything?”
Damn it all, it looked like she would need a tertiary source of knowledge. If the doctor was any sign, these Equestrians were rather lacking in the field of medicine, but it might be possible for her to infer from whatever basic knowledge the horses what precautions she would need if she was to carry Twilight into orbit, or if push came to shove how long Twilight could survive a vacuum.
“Do you have any textbooks I could borrow. How and why I explain myself further rather rides on a few things that are hard to explain” Twilight’s face lit up with excitement, turning towards the hall.
“Actually yes, we do.” Twilight trotted excitedly out into the hall. “The Crystal Empire has a very well stocked library. It’s not exactly the most up to date, but I think they’ve imported a medical textbook or two. I’ve been meaning to check it out, they’ve got plenty of ancient tomes that I’m sure I won’t be able to find anywhere else. Unfortunately, every time I’ve been in the empire, I’ve been here on business and haven’t had the chance to.”
Aurora followed the lavender horse out, shaking her head in amusement, but pausing in the entryway as she saw the horse trotting down the hall. There was definitely a juxtaposition here between the caution of Twilight’s response to her material request, and her sudden eagerness to teach Aurora more about the horses. Something was definitely up with that.
Twilight twitched nervously, the minute movement stiffly and claustrophobically hampered by the thick layers of padding she had wrapped around every inch of her. Her mouth nervously fumbled around the mouthguard the words of warning the ship had provided sending chills down her spine. Luna had been against it, but deep down Twilight knew she had been provided an offer she could never turn down. To be the first pony in space! To reach out and touch the unknown with her hooves and wings in a way no other pony had before!
The tiny little buzzer rang in her ear, announcing to her and the padding protecting her ear that the countdown would begin shortly. Twilight let out a small flare of magic, making sure her magic hadn’t shut down in the interval between now and the tests she had done learning to teleport with all of this on her. It had been Luna that had taught her that, basing the lessons on similar methods of teleporting with armor.
Twilight panicked as she felt the air squeezed out of her lungs by a pressure that dug into her stomach. Taking a second or two to realize she was just being lifted up onto the balcony, just as had been planned. She winced as she was set back down, the not inconsiderable weight of the protective padding she was wearing weighing down uncomfortably on her hooves, despite Rarity’s best efforts to distribute the mass as evenly as possible.
“Are you ready Twilight?” Twilight winced she heard the voice of Aurora, forced to remember just how Aurora had produced the communication device. Glad that at the very least the small bit of metal had come out dry. She tried her best to nod, it was impossible for her to speak. She quickly went down the list of instructions Aurora had given her, testing the magical breakpoints of the suit she was wearing, taking a deep breathe in and exhaling. and preparing herself mentally to intentionally let go of her breathe when the vacuum of space attempted to wrench it from her lungs.
Aurora’s promise to catch her nervously rang in her ear. Luna’s promise to teleport Twilight back to Equis if she was in that vacuum even a fraction of a second longer than planned was small bit of solace.
“3” It was right about now that Twilight was questioning her decision to do this. Her enthusiastic words of agreement ringing in her ears as her eyes studied the airtight foam that covered her face.
“2” I mean, that list of materials hadn’t been such a long thing. Surely they should have been willing to provide it to a guest like Aurora, trust or no.
“1” She could feel the spell begin to wrap around her, space beginning to bend just as planned. She hadn’t understood at the start when Aurora had instructed to pre-cast the spell, after Aurora’s last second health warning it was a far more reasonable request. Not that Twilight wasn’t cursing herself as she fumbled to try and cancel the spell, panic and bile rising in her guts.
“Lift off.” Twilight blinked in confusion, unable to turn and give Aurora an odd look at the strangeness of her words as the spell snapped into action. Twilight’s unprepared guts churned as she fell out of, and rebounded back into reality high into the atmosphere, just as planned. Panic continued to rise, as she could feel heat begin to seep out of her impromptu protection, the bitter cold of the lower Arcanosphere attempting to tear into her suit. A deeper panic rose within, a fear of the cold, of the bitter bitter cold. Tales of frostbite and hypothermia ringing in her ears as she fought to keep in mind Aurora’s promise that space would be far less of a drain on her body heat.
“Vector acquired. FTL’ing now.” Twilight shouted in panic, even though she knew that no sound would reach Aurora through the suit and the low density of the atmosphere between them. She struggled to hold back the instinct to magically tear the suit off here and now, to trust her wings to carry her back to wonderful, safe, beautiful, rock solid ground below.
The next sensation that traveled up and down her spine was an acutely foreign one. Her years of teleportation had prepared her for her own spell, even if her gut hadn’t taken too kindly to it, but this felt acutely alien. With a teleportation she felt a pinching and an expanding, much like one felt when tightening and relaxing a muscle. This was nothing like that. She wasn’t contracting and expanding, she was falling, simply falling, deeper into magic than she had ever imagined one could teleport and come back from. Aurora had promised her that FTL wasn’t magic, yet here she was surrounded by it, almost intoxicated by the sensation of it.
And then it was gone, not gone as in reality had returned, but rather that they had gone past it. Beyond magic. Magic’s wonderful embrace was torn from Twilight, simply the faint glow of her few enchantments on her protection seeming to be carried through. Just as that vast emptiness of the magic barren new world was about to claw at her, something wrapped around her. It wasn’t magic, but rather it was somehow the structure and control of magic made solid. It was such a palpable thing that it commanded both magic and matter, pushing aside the foreign world and letting the embrace of magic fall into the void that created.
And again, another world, even more strange and alien than the last, but this time Aurora’s shielding held. An aegis that Twilight praised in thought.
And then another world, and another, and another. This continued for a period of time that was beyond any she could have predicted, in that somehow she knew it took no time at all.
And as that realization struck her, she was in Equis again, the rest of the journey, the return back through the second world, back through that realm of pure magic, and the arrival into what she assumed was orbit over equestria compressing into an instant in her mind. She could feel it below, the majesty of Equis, the glow of its magic fueled by the founts of the Sun and Moon.
What didn’t compress was the feeling of air slowly draining from her padding, speeding, accelerating away from her. Already her lungs were struggling to hold onto the air within them, fighting not to be starved of the nourishing oxygen.
“Let go of your air Twilight. I do not wish to have to attempt surgery, my medical training only goes so far.” Twilight struggled to obey the command, trying to let go of the vapor of life that her body screamed it needed even as she forced her mouth to remain open, her lungs to let go. Already her world was beginning to gray as the vacuum of space filled her chest, pulling, tugging at every inch of her. The reverse pressure causing her skin and capillaries to expand painfully.
It was too much, too much to think, to feel, her horn attempted to light the way home, to teleport, to return to the safety of the atmosphere below. The panicked unthought attempt to cast magic beginning to remove the protective layers that surrounded her against her will in that moment, though exactly as she and Aurora had planned before.
“Ten.” Black clung to her consciousness. Ten seconds had already passed. The counting in her earpiece just now registering to her frightened senses as the vibration carried through by direct contact. Aurora had warned her that she just had fifteen seconds, to wait until exactly fifteen seconds to set off the enchantment that would remove her padding. Fifteen till she passed out. She worked towards that, her instinctive attempts to teleport having started the process already, but not set off the chain reaction.
“Twelve.” She was running out of time, her brain struggling to fight through the inky black of asphyxiation. She let go of any sort of precision in her casting, simply charging up her horn for a flare powerful enough to set off any magic nearby.
“Fourteen.” With her mind finally slipping away from her, Twilight let go of the magic, far more than she had intended. The pulse almost felt like enough to shock her back into awareness, but… but
Stats
Page generated in 0.025 seconds
Total duration
780 users online
1,175,199 hits today, 2,280,440 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.®
What a tease.
7943258 it's literally my longest chapter for this story, ever. I need to leave something for next time!
what was that list again? if i remember, it was almost nothing hard to get at all, right?
Given the total impossibility of training, preparation or prior experience, its about the best anyone could expect of things?
How long for Twilight to recover to the point where she can agree on a cargo bay orbital teleport point, relative to ground, and vice versa?
Shes going to need the next chapter alone just to recover.
7943314 actually that'd be chapter 3 :P
Anyway. Hyped for the next one!
7943709 Chapter 3 wasn't that long a couple hours ago, I decided to combine some of my chapters.
Well I wonder what Twilight is going to do when she wakes up.
7943625 ... huh? this comment needs more context.
Could we get a little description of just WTF happened between going to the library and launching into space? Because I'm a little lost as to just how long Twi gets to stay in vacuum, how exactly Aurora is going to bring her on board, and just what spells are being used in the process. Awesome story thus far!
7943314
Still a tease.
7943765 ...
Well...
...
Now I feel stupid that I didn't notice that...
Gaahh
And I remember it, even... *throws mic away* —UGH—
*picks up mic again*
Well, at least the rest of my comment is sound and true.
So... What's at AT-RS? I'm assuming it means something like "All Terrain Recon Ship".
7944956 something like that.
7943854 Well, if I'm reading it right:
Once Twilight has been there once, 'there' in this context being Spaceship Sized Aurora's cargo bay, she might be able to take it in enough or set a spell or similar which would allow her to teleport from the surface of the planet to the cargobay, bypassing having to be in vacuum entirely.
Personally, I would agree that if this is possible, it would be the eminently sensible course of action. Aurora might have some objections though to the idea that Twilight might be able to enter and leave her without prior permission. Or perhaps the idea of teleportation vs FTL would cause the ship disquiet, the idea of a pony FTLing inside her. These are interesting questions.
7945398 Well you did asterisk it, as if you were going to explain it later/post script, then...didn't.
7947632 It's something in Icelandic. it translates to All Terrain Scout Transpot. It's a bipedal walker/halftrack (it can do one or the other) open topped light tank destroyer with a recoilless cannon. Kinda a cross between a star wars at-st and an anti tank jeep.
7947629
7943625
I really appreciate your feedback. I honestly hadn't thought of that, I might use that in some capacity in the near future.
Now that's how you end with a character going unconscious or dying. None of this "and then the darkness claimed me/and then I died" stuff. If the point of view is the character, then at that point the character isn't (shouldn't be) aware enough to note that for us. At least that's my opinion.
So, I very much like!
7954708 how'd ya like the build up?
wow.... really liking this story.
And then uh... she drifted into Aurora's open hatch, and the ship pressurized the inside so that Twilight could take off her suit and breathe again.
New world? What? Is Aurora dragging Twilight through space?
Wait, how did her shielding fail the first time? Why is she dragging Twilight through space? Weren't they just going to inspect Aurora's quarters up in orbit, to verify that she is in fact a ship? That seems like a more sensible first step than wrapping a pony up in padding and dragging them around behind you on a trip around the galaxy faster than the speed of light!
WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO FOR TWILIGHT TO SIT AROUND IN THE VACUUM OF SPACE
hmm Space isn't actually cold. It's an INCREDIBLY good insulator as it is a vacuum, The biggest issue on space suit is not keeping warm but keeping cool enough. Yes on the long term you will cool down, but the timescale is more on the DAYS than seconds... [Apollo 13 had issues with the temperature dropping as they needed to switch off the heaters and the ship was radiating heat away.]
The promise of answers.... It's too much, let's goooooo!! !