Sardou
Aurora smiled as the autonomous maintenance drone set the plate of food she had managed to scrounge up upon the table in front of her equine guest, alongside a printout of the ingredients, as related to what she had sampled planetside. She has been lucky that there were enough scraps in there for an actual meal, and enough still to have some survive the slaughter cooking via an autonomous drone had wrought upon her supplies. She was not sure what would piss off the cook more, the horse hair, or the eggs seared into the ceiling.
Aurora paused as she registered a growing look of disgust on her guest’s face. Had she made a mistake or faux pas? Twilight prodded the fried chicken warily, giving Aurora at least some clue as to what had gone wrong. She was thankful it wasn't the Bolludagur Buns. It and the chicken were the only foods she actually had to cook, and she would be damned to Hel Heim before she botched one of the Imperial Staples. Even if they were out of season.
“I apologize Miss Twilight, I can cook it more, or prepare a rawer batch if you desire. I did not know how to prepare it to equine tastes, so I went with the human standard.” The horse’s appearance didn't change, if anything her face continued to sour.
“D-did it suffer much?” Aurora could almost feel her cyber implants skip a couple zeroes and twos as she processed that statement.
“Did what suffer?” Aurora probed gently, hoping to avoid any form of cultural landmine.
“The chicken!” Twilight answered, almost accusatorily. Her hoof rose from the table to point at the cooked poultry as if it was evidence of some greater crime.
“I don't follow, Miss Twilight.” Did chicken actually mean something on this planet? She had simply found the English word for it… but here Twilight was reacting rather to the word with familiarity that seemed to go beyond just ‘it’s a form of bird’ as she had put on the ingredient list. Else she would probably be saying ‘did the bird suffer much.’
The implications of her phrasing were… disquieting, to say the least. She could understand the horse’s knowing what horse meant… but did whomever imported English to this place bring chickens with them? She hadn’t read any reports about the Midgardian slave camps preserving chickens, cows yes, though not in a form that the original speakers of English would recognize.
“I… how did the Chicken on my plate die?” Aurora reviewed the checklist, ensuring that she did not somehow accidentally imply that any living creature had died in the process of making this meal.
“I’m not sure I follow Miss Twilight, but before we continue, what do you think a chicken is, exactly?” Here’s to hoping she could find some answers.
“It’s a small bird, white, with roosters having a red crest, and hens are kept to make eggs!” That was… spot on, if the pictures she had from the Diaspora records department on her harddrive were correct.
“I see. I think there has been some sort of misunderstanding. This isn’t actually a chicken, Miss Twilight. As far as we were aware, they have been extinct for the past 280 years.” Aurora fed information as gently as she could, hoping to leave as much room for Twilight to expand upon as possible, to non-invasively discover the extent of the equine’s actual knowledge. Knowledge of pre-diaspora Midgardian species pointed towards either another example of ludicrous simultaneous evolution, or that more was going on here than some escaped slave’s language catching on with some primitive and prudish remote planet.
“Then... what is it?” Twilight prodded the protein inquiringly. Aurora held back a grunt of frustration at the incredibly uninformative response.
“It’s vat meat, the only thing this meat has ever been in is a tube, a pantry, a fryer, and your plate, in that order.” Twilight sputtered in disbelief, eyes wide as she stared at her plate.
“I… how could you even do that?” She gave the meat a firm stab with a frown, clear distrust on her face.
“The same way the chicken would have. We preserved the genes of the chicken, and reproduced the sequence that produced the musculature and fatty deposits, sometimes the bone, and we created a simulated environment through which that chicken meat could grow. It’s far more efficient than actually feeding, watering, and waiting for a whole chicken to grow to maturity.” Aurora took some small pleasure in Twilight’s open shock, making a positive note on the mare’s growing file as that shock turned towards joy.
“Just imagine the possibilities! This could solve the entire Griffonian Empire’s food crisis! If you could do the same for the Dragon’s gemstones, then they would never need to wage war with the Diamond Dogs!” Aurora made quick note of everything Twilight was mentioning, careful to try and measure her exact tone and expression each time she said what appeared to be a proper noun.
“You know, we do the same for most fruits and vegetables. The fruit that went into your pastry never actually came anywhere near a tree.” Aurora frowned internally as Twilight’s exuberance began to slow down.
“You’re probably better off not mentioning that around Applejack. She owns an apple farm, and is extremely traditional.” Twilight’s curious eyes took another look over the other items on the dish. “It’s been a small while since I had wheat noodles, I’m more used to hay noodles.” Twilight started with the cup of udon, raising up one of the offered spoons in her magic. Aurora had to wonder how Twilight would have reacted to tempura... did the Equestrian opposition to animal consumption extend to fish? There had been a few vegetarian movements pre-diaspora that would still consume fish.
Leaving Twilight to her noodles, Aurora took another crack at the mountain of information she had accumulated. Even as Twilight was drifting into her cargo bay, she had been using her re-shipification to begin accumulating whatever evidence she could find that pointed her towards her crew. Now, with Twilight’s face too full of udon to answer many question, this was the best time to give her full attention to the facts.
There was the fact that many of her internal airlocks had been opened manually, and left open. Her first reaction to that was boarders, but there hadn’t been a single sign of struggle, and there wasn’t any traces on the hull of some form of control of an incapacitating agent. Not to mention the difficulty of coming up with an agent that would knock out the four alien species they had on board. Especially the Gottþorns. There was little that could affect both a human and a treefolk without leaving some form of intense chemical residue, and killing one or the other.
Combine that with the emptied shuttle bay, and similarly empty shuttle fuel tanks, and she was starting to paint a strange picture. There wasn’t nearly enough room in the shuttles to carry all of the fuel the ship had for them. Either it had been transferred to some other place for storage, or the shuttles had been through a week of non-stop flight. Both were possible, but combine that with a nearly empty food hold (unlike Twilight, most aliens couldn’t eat human food), something most aliens wouldn’t bother stealing, and with the far less ransacked seams room (the resale value of an authentic NSR Jomsflot uniform was extremely high right now, with the current military buildup) wouldn’t point towards any sort of theft. The under-ransacked part supplies simply stacked onto the other four points.
She had a couple ideas on what exactly could have happened, but there were a few avenues open to her if she wanted to attain certainty. Unfortunately for her, there was a direct relationship between how much paperwork an option required to how certain it would make her.
For a fleeting moment, she teased the edge of her imagination. She imagined herself slipping on an English Sardaou* hat in the style of the 1920’s, and running through the ship much like the stereotypical hard boiled detective, skipping the paperwork and getting right to the heart of the case. For a moment it was almost as if she was in the heart of Paris, England, in the first noir genre period.
In far less than a moment she squashed that idea. She had a duty, to the Empress, The Heir Apparent, the Republic, and the future of those who would follow her to not slip up, to remain firm in her conviction and be unimpeachable in her actions. She had to be better than human if the Empress’ political maneuvers were to succeed.
But still, a little fantasy never hurt anyone. Her private Investigator name would definitely be Dancer, Aurora didn’t quite fit.
“Sorry-” Aurora’s attention snapped back to the food hall. As Twilight’s voice registered in her system, “but I don’t think this chicken is for me. I’ll eat fish, but even knowing that no chickens were harmed...”
Aurora winced internally as she saw a rising green under Twilight’s coat. Not entirely sure how that worked, but regardless she needed to move fast to keep the mood up. “Do not worry, Miss Twilight. No offense taken. I would suggest you try the bolludagur pastry, I have it on good authority that mine are quite excellent.” Aurora smiled as Twilight downed the pastry messily. It was amusing to see that Princess Cadance’s table manners were not quite contagious.
---
Twilight paused as she approached the third door on the left. She studied the face of the door for any indication of what was in inside. There was a small red plate, contrasting with the soft whites and professional grays of the rest of the door. On that plate was sharp white text. Marked with the same hard straight lines and dots as the other text she had encountered. Aurora had insisted that most of the letters sounded pretty much the same as the Equestrian alphabet, once she had finished the dinner Aurora had made, but Twilight still felt some trepidation as she tried to parse what it said.
“ᛋᚴᚢᛏᛁᛚᛋᚡᛂᚾᛃᛅ ᛅᚢᚱᛟᚱᛅ” Twilight frowned in consternation at the “R,” “S,” and “I” shaped symbols. They stuck out like a sore hoof among the alien text, but even then she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Eyeing the strange markings on the door, she noticed that if the two ‘R’s in the second word were in fact ‘R’s, they were in the perfect places for the word to be ‘Aurora’. In fact, if she flipped the second letter of the second word, and got rid of the two legs on the third, it almost looked like it spelled “ᛅURORᛅ.”
The first word was an utterly unintelligible mess, and making no further progress along that route, Twilight resigned herself to examining the medium the text was made of. Gently she ran a hoof along the text, marveling at how thin the raised text was. It didn’t seem to have anything holding it to the wall. No gap for glue, no nails, no raised lip to hold it, but yet there it was, utterly blemishless.
“Apologies Miss Twilight, acquiring temporary permissions for you to access this room took longer than I thought it would.” Twilight paused as whirring started, followed momentarily by the door sliding open in front of her, disappearing to the left and right.
Twilight entered the room, pausing to admire the change of pace from the soft grays and reds, as new blue walls greeted her eyes. “Make yourself comfortable Miss Twilight, sorry if it’s a bit small. Usually an officer of my rank would share a quarters with a fellow officer, something with a bit more space. However, due to the nature of my service, I was assigned these quarters on my own. I will return once more in a moment.” Twilight’s ears flicked as she tried to squeeze every single bit of info she could out of ‘nature of my service.’
Twilight took another moment to study the room. On one side of the room was a small curtain made of the same opaque plastic as the one in the dining room, where she had disposed of her plate and silverware. It was inside a frame that was about nine hands tall and around twenty-one wide. The frame sat totally flush with the wall. Above and below it were what looked to be drawers. The pull bars were made of a polished metal, but they were mounted too closely for a mouth to bite onto, or a hoof to pull on easily or comfortably.
Across from that was a small couch, it was tall like the rest of the seating so far, with a high back and rests. It was conservatively upholstered and padded, but looked to be made of the same unusually comfortable material that the chair she had used earlier had been padded with. Behind that was a desk, the top of it was decorated with more unfamiliar shapes, cones and small rectangles, some with singular symbols, some with three or four. Firmly attached to it was another chair, similar construction to the couch, but hung aloft with looked like some sort of swivel mount.
On the wall opposite Twilight was mounted one singular length of metal with a ‘t’ shaped cross section, it was intricate, but Twilight’s eyes were inexorably drawn to the two sharpened edges on either side of the long metal shaft. It looked starkly like a sword, but Twilight was unsure how that would work with the form the humans had.
One of the shapes on the desk lit up, appearing in concert was a small figure floating above the desk. It looked almost solid, but some indiscernible property revealed it to simply be a more substantial version of the projections she had seen so far. A quick test with her hoof confirmed Twilight’s suspicions.
“I’m sorry Aurora, but as nice as it is to see you again, I think my patience has earned me at least a hello in person. As… absolutely mind boggling as your projector technology is, it’s no substitute for face to face conversation.” Twilight firmed her stance, trying her best to project an air of authority, as Celestia had been trying to teach her to.
“I’m sorry, miss Twilight, but I’m afraid for us to meet in person would be…” “she paused, “difficult, but all will be explained in time. For now, protocol demands a proper introduction! At least, one is due if you are to sleep in my room for the night.” the image shifted, zooming in on the upper torso of Twilight’s host. “My full address is Skutilsvenja Aurora Joms. But, if you desire, you can just keep calling me Aurora.”
The image of Aurora motioned to what Twilight had previously assumed to be just a random collection of symbols upon what she loosely remembered from a minotaur biology textbook as the ‘right breast’ of the jacket. Before Twilight’s eyes they began to shift, resolving themselves into the words ‘Aurora Joms’. Aurora continued the motion, down to the symbols on the row below, where a similarly random set of symbols resolved themselves into the word ‘Jomsviking.’ “If Equestria was more familiar with the politics of the local sector, I assure you, you would be quite stunned.”
“Aurora, a proper introduction would be in person.” Twilight gave Aurora a stern look. “I literally boiled to get here! The least you could do is have the common courtesy to greet me face to face.” If she was going to be staying the night, she wasn’t going to be doing it without at least meeting her host.
“I… understand. I had hoped I could finish the paperwork overnight, but if you truly desire to meet in person I will attempt to speed things up.” Aurora’s avatar flashed a look of frustration for just a moment before resolving back to the professional look she had before. “It will be at least another hour. In the meantime, is there anything I can answer for you about my country or the ship you are on?”
*A Sardou, a hat commonly associated with private investigators. First popularized near Paris, England.
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I wonder what questions Twilight will bring up when she meets Aurora.
The chicken doesn't even need to be extinct to justify vat-meat on a starship. It might cost more than stocking up on rations, but I'd imagine the boost in morale would more than make up for it.
8094475 Well... you can try asking them in the discord!
8094506 Irregardless, no chickens. They ded.
Blasphemy! You should only eat Bolludagur pastry on Bolludag(Bun Day), hence the name. Unless by some cosmic coincidence it is actually Bun Day in the story, in which case, carry on.
8094615 Considering they don't celebrate Easter... I'm not sure when Bolludagday would be.
8094615 But, the question remains, are you still interested in helping?
8094640 27 of feb(in 2017), and we do celebrate easter here(I can only assume you are talking about Iceland). And yes, I am interested in helping.
P.s. Can't help but point out how silly bolludagday looks to me, basically you're saying "bun day day". Sorry, not trying to nitpick, but it sounds too silly not to mention.
8094653 THEY don't celebrate Easter, "they" as in the NSR, which don't actually speak Icelandic, they speak "Western Imperial" which is basically Icelandic, with Norwegian or Swedish whenever I think they have a word that sounds better. Which will be increasingly more just Icelandic, now that I have someone who speaks Icelandic.
there is a discord group invite if you really do want to help. I can provide some other link if you do not like discord.
That attached history document was quite something. Sounds like someone had an exceptionally good game of Civ 6.
Vat meat. What MRM wishes it could be, even though it basically starts off the same form.
Although I assume Twilight hasnt thought about it yet, I beleive she would be very glad that Pinkie hasnt turned up yet, like out a water spigot. We dont want an AI paradox core dump and reboot event at this time.
I dunno, because she hasnt got the experience, Twilight is currently trying to do a Celestia, the same way Spike tried to do a Twilight, in the episode, Princess Spike?
Ahh, yes.
Good ol' Paris, England!
8095135 The author's note explains all, KNOWS ALL! MWAA HA HA HA!!!
8094820 MRM?
8095329
MRM, Mechanically Recovered Meat, Pink Slime, that which shall not be named. Meat Inna Bun.
8095333 fun.
Could have been worse. she might have been served a small plate of colored crayons- er, I mean food paste sticks. I know I'm dating myself but if you ever saw the crew on the Original Star Trek get food, it was always small colored cubes and sticks that looked like crayons or playdoh.
It's everything the human body needs...
But it looks like runny snot!
Shut up and eat it, Mouse.
That googledoc reads like a Paradox grand campaign AAR. Nice.
Well... let's see where this goes. I do think Twilight is a bit pushy, but she's sort of justified (at least in her mind) given the lack of understanding on her part.
Huh, I thought Twilight had met Aurora in person, like when she was reading Aurora's doors, or eating at the dining area Aurora has inside her. Didn't Twilight see when Aurora reentered the atmosphere, condensing back into a pony shape? Why would Twilight assume Aurora was inside somewhere, and not just very, very big? What, is Aurora going to show Twilight her brain? I usually consider a meeting to be in-person without my companion flipping open their skull, but maybe I'm behind the times.
After her moral quandary with eating chicken meat, I wonder how Twilight'll react when she learns that the Udon she was eating was Aurora, her biological vats also being part of her body.
"Relax, Twilight. Sure you technically ate part of my body, but you're not like a predator at all. More like a tapeworm, really."
8100272 Im.operating on the assumption that Equestrian society hadn't conceived of a lifeform on that scale. She's just been assuming that Aurora was in there somewhere throwing levers. Just like she assumed a digital screen was just an advanced film based projector.
Her conception of sentience doesn't go that much farther than what she kniws, breathing eating pooping life... And in actuality Aurora does two of those so she isn't entirely wrong.
Also, that food doesn't come from aurora. She's basically a dolphin in a tank. The food was grown in orbit on a locally sourced space station agrarium, by loving caring astrobiological engineers.
8100960
Well, additionally, I went back and looked, and Cadance didn't actually summon the EoH until after Aurora had done her giant ship to pone transformation. So literally everypony in the Crystal Empire who watched the giant fireball descend from the sky would know, but Twilight hadn't even got on the train yet, and I think Cadance is
an assholetoo concerned with other matters to mention to Twilight that Aurora is a GIANT EGG BEING FROM SPACE.There's also just the sheer bafflement of scale, like you saw the ship from a distance, but you couldn't comprehend that it was the same as this giant thing you're contained inside. Twilight'd keep thinking a tiny little Aurora would come floating through the corridors of this mysterious giant thing.
8106037 it really doesn't... The real danger is sudden decompression. Which can damage your lungs.
8106037
The lungs are the worst part. Yeah it makes your blood boil, but from what I've seen in my admittedly limited research is that it really isn't a life threatening thing, especially due to the fact that it really just happens to your epidermis. It's not due to temperature, it's just due to pressure, so the minute your body is returned to pressure the blood is returned to a liquid state.
Reports from an astronaut who had his hand exposed to vacuum for an extended period of time say that his hand returned to normal in short order, and no permanent damage was incurred.
is “ᛋᚴᚢᛏᛁᛚᛋᚡᛂᚾᛃᛅ ᛅᚢᚱᛟᚱᛅ”
suppose to be somthing as all I get is blocks
8116375 Yeah, it just doesn't work on mobile phones.
8117341 I'm on my laptop
8117341 Weird... it's standard unicode text.
8120089 If you have any suggestions for the pacing, I'm always open!
8135040 been waiting months on a wait list of an artist to get kantai collection style art of her as a human.
8117953 Sometimes Unicode doesn't display if you don't have the proper font installed. This is more an issue with older operating systems and mobile phones, where their Unicode indices haven't been updated to more recent standards, which include code pages for various languages and fonts to represent them. The copy of Windows Vista on this old laptop I'm currently using doesn't have the relevant language font(s) either, and I also see the code blocks (number 16 on top for the code page, then hexadecimal underneath for the character).
UPDATE!!!!
Please continue with the updates.
Okay, The chapter with Shining Armor disturbed me. Because seriously, all this progressive talk filled me with dread as well as newfound respect for humans. That society didn't torn itself to shreds after a few years. I albo Wonder what are the other powers of Earth that reached Space domination... Plz Tell us.
My theory on How Aurora ended up in Crystal Empire is that she was a relatively old ship repurposed for experimental weapon testing and apparently some bomb doesn't desintegrate matter but sends them somewhere to the pony realm.
Unless Aurora was made into a makeshift rocket to desperately ram another ship but she didn't agree, so they shut Her down with a rescent Memory wipe. She woke up a long Time after she entered uncharted teritory. As for the ponies and their Magic - let's remember that physics change as you Travel in Space. So there must be a place that allows the egzistance of Magic.
As for the actual point in the story, I just hope that ponies manage to reform Her from Her communistic wiewpoint. And Wonder if Luna can enter Aurora's dreams - that ought be good as she propably would scribe off most legitimate info on the princess as religious bullcrap.
When next chapter?
8247384
If you want up to date information about updates and more information about the setting the discord server is the place for that.
Invitation to the server here.
8253098 Already am for a while.
More please!
moARRRRR!
8409956
First of all, that profile pic mixed with that comment is amazing.
Second of all......is this story dead?
8473028
*giggles*
8409956
8260809
8473028
how is that?
What the...how did I miss this chapter until just now?
8473081
XD next day a new chapter...shoulda waited to ask my question XD.
with what looked
Try it, Twilight, we won't tell! You're going to want to be able to stomach non poisonous things anyways as future diplomat...