Beneath Distant Stars

by PeppyJoe

Archive Eleven

Staring out the window by her bed at the moon low on the horizon, Twilight let out a low sigh. She felt as though far too long had passed since she'd first awoken with a piercing headache, the lingering remnants of which had troubled her sleep ever since. "That's it," she grumbled. "No more tossing and turning."

With a grunt, she sat up and hopped out of bed, turning on the lights and making a minimal effort at resolving her bedhead before heading to the door. Walking on the tips of her hooves, she slowly pushed it open, wincing as it let out a soft creak. The clock in her room had showed an hour well past dawn, leading Twilight to the conclusion it had been left to run without tuning for far too long. Thus, with no sense for what time of night it was, she proceeded to sneak out of her room as quietly as possible. Objectively, it was unlikely she would disturb anypony, since this section of the palace was reserved for the princesses and their rooms doubtless had soundproofing in place, but Twilight preferred not to risk it.

The hall was empty, and Twilight proceeded down it and toward the kitchen no more than twenty paces before coming to a reading nook in the wall. Though she had spent many an hour there in the past, she would have passed it without a second thought this time if not for something catching her eye. Resting on the well-crafted marble table, illuminated by a simple built-in light enchantment, sat a clock displaying the exact same time as the one in her room.

Frozen in place, three thoughts raced through Twilight's mind. The first was how inconvenient it was that she would now need to find a third clock before being able to reset the one in her room. The second concerned how silly that was, and that the odds of both being set to the same wrong time was very unlikely. The third... either somepony had entered her private room to play a bafflingly trivial prank, or something was very wrong.

With an encroaching sense of unease and a markedly faster pace, Twilight resumed her trek down the hall. However, instead of turning to one side for the kitchen, she continued on down a series of empty halls toward the throne room. She passed a number of other clocks along the way displaying the same late-morning hour, getting more nervous with each one.

Finally, she rounded a corner and found herself facing an unusually large crowd of palace guards talking nervously among themselves. Seeing her, they all immediately fell silent and snapped to attention, hastily un-bunching to clear a path for her to the door where they'd stood. When none immediately warned her off, Twilight proceeded through the double-doors and into the main throne room, where a frazzled-looking Princess Luna stood talking to a navy-blue stallion.

"Give this letter to the guard when you exit," she commanded, levitating over a series of scrolls and gesturing with each in turn. "He will bring it to his captain and ensure that you have the appropriate escort. And give this one to the airship captain when you arrive at the docks. This one is for anyone who gets in your way in Yakyakistan. It provides... a clear picture of what I will do if they fail to comply."

"Yes, your highness," the stallion affirmed, bowing and hastily leaving the room.

Now alone in the room, the two princesses regarded each other for a long moment. Twilight with worried insight, and Luna with sympathy and heartache.

"Celestia?" Twilight asked hesitantly.

"Gone." A deep breath. "The ponies from Eris fled in the night. Discord knew, and took it upon himself to alert my sister instead of me. She came to me, briefly, and then left in pursuit. An hour later, I felt the space vessel leave us, and her with it."

Blinking in shock and shaking her head, Twilight took a step back. "Wh- wait, hold... what?! Why would they leave like that? And why would they take Princess Celestia?"

"Discord witnessed an attack on one of our guards stationed in White Tail Woods. That is why my sister went to intervene, and I can only conclude that they chose to abscond with her through some alien skulduggery."

Sitting down hard and closing her eyes, the younger princess fought to hold back confused tears as she said, "I just... None of this makes any sense. Something must have..."

Trailing off and pausing, Twilight took a moment to steady herself, looking back to Luna with a coldness that had not been there before. "How do we get her back?"

"I have already begun to set things in motion, though the path ahead is yet unclear. We do not know precisely where they have gone, but I've spoken with several ponies at the Astronomical Society who believe they can decipher it using the perspective of a map of the stars near us, given to us by the interlopers.

"However, even so, the distance will undoubtedly be beyond anywhere we can teleport. I would ask Discord to simply tell us the location and bring her back if it is within his means, but I have not seen him since Celestia's disappearance."

"You don't think he was taken too?"

"I suspect not... I have felt a change in the essence of our world each time he was turned to stone. Were he absent from Equestria entirely, I suspect we would all know it. Thus, it seems likely he is simply playing the fool, and I would ask you track him down. I believe finding him is the quickest means of resolving this. One of your friends is close with him, yes?"

"Fluttershy... I'll head there immediately."

Turning to leave, Twilight halted as Princess Luna added, "And if you don't find him soon, come back here. I have a contingency plan that would also benefit from your aid."

---

Pressing his head to the floor and trying to peer beneath the large metal door keeping them in the prison barracks, Thatch Roof let out a sigh. "You'd think Celestia would've told somepony to come get us by now."

---

Two weeks later...

The sun had just begun to set over New Pegasopolis as Commander Stern Gaze and his aide approached their destination, a nondescript cloud bank an hour's flight west of the capital. The pair stopped above it, hesitating for a moment, before carefully lowering themselves down and sinking through the surface layer, landing firmly on a denser cloud floor set ten feet beneath.

Now concealed beneath the false surface of the cloud, the Commander walked with practiced ease toward a stairwell leading deeper into the hidden facility. His aide stepped much more delicately, flaring his wings on several occasions seemingly in fear that he would fall through the floor. This was his first visit to RHF-27, a blacksite used to house high-value prisoners and a safehouse for the Commander during emergencies.

The structure's location in the clouds gave it an unparalleled degree of privacy and security, as Eris's magical field was far too weak to support cloudwalking and cloud-based construction under normal circumstances. The architects of RHF-27 circumvented this at great expense. Rows of hydrogen generators flanked the two ponies walking toward the stairwell down this long open space, whirring loudly as they powered a series of dispersion sinks.

These devices, with a considerable power input, were capable of temporarily energizing the weak magical ley-lines that spiderweb across the planet, essentially creating a localized pocket of heightened ambient magical energy. The conversion rate of this reaction was extremely inefficient, but provided enough magic to support cloud construction, allowing for an off-the-grid military site in a place that nearly everypony would think impossible.

Descending the stairway and entering the door beyond, the Commander found himself in a metal corridor with several intersections ahead, and various doors spaced along the walls. To his left, he could see through a window into the guards' lounge area, where several ponies were playing pool and another was eating dinner. Each wore a simple uniform with a short-range stun weapon strapped to their side. The lack of secured guard stations and other bulkier defenses was a conscious decision, made to minimize the facility's profile and risk of detection from the outside. As all prisoners would have magical suppression devices, preventing unicorns from using spells and pegasi from flying, there was no real risk of escape anyway.

With a quick word to his aide, the Commander trotted through a door on his right while the other stallion stepped into the lounge. Finding his way down two more levels of the facility by way this secondary stairwell, Stern Gaze eventually reached the end of the another long metal hallway, this time ending in a well-crafted wooden door. In front of it, a light-grey mare with a short-cut slicked-back reddish-orange mane waited, wearing a black lab-coat. At his approach, she stood up and gave a polite smile.

"Commander Gaze, lovely to see you," she intoned with a crisp formality that suggested otherwise.

"Just Means," he sighed. "Surely we're past this, yes? The Wing's logs are clear enough; this mare governs another civilization, and we will treat her with the dignity of her position."

With that, he took a step toward the door behind the mare, only for her to side-step and block his path. "A mare with the power to move a star," she countered. "Think of what we stand to learn about large-scale stellar engineering, let alone the implications she has for biological research!"

The Commander let out a low sigh, dragging his hoof across his face in frustration. "We will learn much more if we can establish trade relations with her people, and that will be all the more likely if we bring her back happy and alive. Her long-term political value is greater than her immediate scientific value."

"We can do both! If you simply take her away from this facility, she will doubtless fall comatose again. Our world's ambient magical field can't sustain her; a few months of study, and then we bring her back and it will be to her as if nothing-"

"Doctor." Stern Gaze, in credit to his name, stared her down.

"...Yes, Commander," Just Means growled, stepping aside and then walking away in a huff.

With a final shake of his head, the stallion pushed through the door into a well-appointed bedroom intended to house members of the government brought here during emergencies. At the moment, it was serving as temporary quarters for Princess Celestia, who sat by the desk, staring at a tablet computer left there idling as the manufacturer's logo bounced around the screen.

Clearing his throat and drawing Celestia's attention, Stern Gaze pulled from his pocket a hoof-sized green gem covered in arcane sigils and accented with gold and silver mountings at several points. Setting it on the table and tapping it, the gem began to emanate a faint light, and the Commander asked, "Celestia, my name is Stern Gaze. Can you understand me?"

Standing up in surprise, Celestia responded at once, "I can. I am relieved to see you've worked out a translation spell."

"It is a variation of your own," Stern Gaze told her, taking a seat by the door and gesturing for her to do the same. "The sensors aboard our ship registered the base magics you employed to speak Erisian, and coupled with the notes our ponies were keeping about your language, we were able to reverse-engineer the spell and integrate it with a more refined spell of our own."

Despite her circumstances, a flicker of curiosity at this detail crossed her features. "More refined?"

"It is rather beyond me, but my ponies tell me your spell circumvented much of the finer points of translation by simply expending mass amounts of extra magical energy. The spell we're using presently was necessary so that we would not drain our nation of magic for a single conversation.

"That said, this spell does only last so long and there are much more important issues to discuss. I'm sure you have many questions, and I'll be happy to answer them, but there are a lot of ponies waiting for answers from you as well. Let's begin with the events that brought you here without my crew, and then we can move on to the matter of getting you home as soon as we can."

---

Inside a large, opaque purple dome deep in the snow-blanketed north of Yakyakistan, there existed a small pocket of Equestria. Several dozen ponies went about their daily lives and work, moving between the various tents set up in the temperate environment. The dome, though unable to be seen through, did allow sunlight to enter, creating a pleasant warming effect as the brilliant star overhead lurched indelicately across the skyline in fits and starts.

At the center of the dome and the focus of those ponies working therein, rested a giant construct of alien make. This vessel, damaged in its first flight and left behind by the Erisian unicorns when they fled aboard the pegasus ship, had spent the last week undergoing study and careful disassembly. Rows upon rows of tables were set up beneath open-walled tents, shielding the various removed components from direct sunlight.

Several unicorns were in the process of casting divination spells on a set of circuit-encrusted gemstones, enchanted in a way nopony had ever seen before. A number of other ponies were tinkering with various mechanical bits, peering into the insides of a portable generator and examining the alternator mechanism. A large cluster were gathered around the improvised laser cannon they had removed from the roof of a motorized chariot. The latter remained a mystery, but one of the scientists was now demonstrating how to operate the former.

Notably, the objects of greatest interest for most of the ponies here had not yet even been removed from the alien vessel. Several ponies were at work within its confined space, studying the connected spell conduits lacing throughout the ship. Four more were standing on a scaffold built around the outside of the craft, making sketches and discussing animatedly while looking through some exposed paneling at the main body of the ship's jump drive.

Comments

[Aziraphael]

Pressing his head to the floor and trying to peer beneath the large metal door keeping them in the prison barracks, Thatch Roof let out a sigh. "You'd think Celestia would've told somepony to come get us by now."

---

Two weeks later...

They're dead, Jim...

But seriously, though. A guard patrol should have found them within a day. Makes you wonder why those ponies still think the Erisian ponies have left.

[emanwe]

I'm not sure what Discord is playing at by letting things drag on like this so long after his setup fell to shreds, but he's just digging himself a deeper grave at this point.
The time skip also feels excessive. We're just going to gloss over Equestria handling the loss of its chief princess, a perceived act of war by an alien power, or the astronauts being stuck for a week in a Canterlot jail cell with no one noticing?

[Silentwoodfire]

Interesting headcannon, the princesses needing so much magic that without it they are unconscious

As for 'refined' let's instead try 'More efficient to make the most out of VERY VERY little' if I understand their magic deprivation issues correctly.

[Xanderfox]

9418584
I think "refined" is perfectly good, because they had less magic to work with the needed it more precise. Celestia just pumped in extra magic and the spell matrix did the work, we can assume this technique would cause "automatic refinement" of the spell with multiple castings, each time its cast it is more complex but requires less magic.

[gakposter]

9307504
I agree with this statement. They just lost their head monarch and there's no word of this reverberating through equestria. This seems like a quick chapter pumped out to not make it seem like the author's abandoned this story, tbh.

[StarzGecko]

will it come back?

[Lord BLACKHUNTER]

This was a good story.....was....now it's dead no signs of the author since 2018. Now being 2023 I must call it dead.... Let us morn the loss of another good story. congratulations you made Fluttershy cry....