Part 5 (Oliver) - Chapter 2
“You’ve been calling every hour?” Alex frowned at Oliver, not seeming the least bit reassured.
“Every thirty minutes, while we were out. Haven’t heard from Adrian or Sky in hours now.”
Moriah pushed her half-eaten lunch away on the table, glaring at it. Nevermind all the effort Oliver had spent preparing it, just as he spent on every meal he prepared. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t make a banquet out of vegetarian MREs! “We should go back right now. There’s nothing else for us to learn here.”
Joseph looked nervous, perhaps even more so to be directly contradicting Moriah. But he wasn’t so timid that he could be so easily cowed. “Even if nobody in Alexandria is connected to the fire, we might run into the ones who are eventually. If you give me enough time to crack the runes they’re using, we might be able to look up a defense in the books.”
Oliver watched this exchange without comment, observing the way Alex took charge; that even after becoming sixteen, they still considered her an authority. He did too, though her recent “death” had apparently only reinforced her authority in their minds.
After a few seconds of consideration, Alex looked back to him. “The fact they dropped out of contact right as they went on their spying mission can’t mean anything good. Even normally reasonable and kind ponies might have got angry about the spying. Either way, our friends need us.” She turned to Joseph. “Do you already have pictures of all the runes you found?”
“There weren’t very many. Looked like they’d been deliberately destroyed. But I found a few excerpts, like this one:”
Kar-kar-t-nt-kar-w-bb-tul-bn-bbqm-vmy-min-w-kar-t-vq-p-kar-qhp-mak-g-mes-min-fx-hk-min-n-wbr-vri-nt-mak-b-min-lq-p-kar-qhp-mak-g-vri-cxz-vri-m-kum-tul-jhv-nd-min-hz-m-tul-tul-kb-mes
“Pretty sure they’re using some form of monoalphabetic substitution. There are some patterns in the letters that suggest a key of twelve letters or less. It isn’t Odium Forgives, I already tried that. I can’t quite pin down what those short letter-groups are, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with vowels and I know I’m close. Just-”
Alex cut him off. “But you have pictures of all of it, right? So you could keep working on the way?”
He nodded, and looked like he wanted to speak. Moriah very gently put a hoof in his mouth, and Alex smiled approvingly. “Good. It will still take hours to fly back. You can keep working on the way; let us know if you come up with anything.”
Alex looked between Oliver and Moriah. “Is that okay with you two?”
He shrugged in response. “Nothing I can do for someone who’s been burned to death but pray. I’d prefer we get the chance to bury them, but we could always come back. It’s not as if we’re the ones paying for gas.”
They were agreed. Oliver had little to do with the return procedures, except in insisting that they were all secure before they actually took off. There would be no repeats of the day before, particularly with those who lacked the ability to regenerate broken necks and broken skulls. But despite their fears, there was no fire-dragon attack, wasn’t even any turbulence. Once they’d reached their cruising altitude and supersonic speed, Oliver reluctantly acknowledged that they were probably safe to leave their seats.
“We need a plan.” Alex was already in the seat next to him. With Moriah as the pilot and Joseph engrossed in his codes, he was the only one she had to test her ideas. “Have you ever planned a rescue mission? Maybe we could just use one of your old ones.”
He shook his head, smiling a little. “Never. I help people make diet and exercise plans, but I don’t think that’s the same.”
“No.” She was silent for several moments, fiddling with the large metal bracelet she wore. There was a screen there, and after a few minutes or so of tinkering, it filled with an aerial image. He thought it was the plane’s cameras or something, until he saw that the ground wasn’t moving, and that he recognized it.
“HPI satellite?”
She nodded. “Damn scary how close they can look, isn’t it? They got this picture three minutes ago. I think the message said they’ll send us another one the next time one of their satellites pass, in… another twenty-three minutes. This is all the intel we have. See anything interesting?”
Oliver had to lean close to her to look, which was much easier now that he had removed his bulky restraints. He couldn’t help but feel that she had intended him to have to from the beginning. So he leaned and he looked, taking in as much as he could from the tiny screen. He noticed what she had been indicating in seconds. “That’s Adrian!”
His distinctive coloration had been somewhat washed-out by the satellite image, though Oliver was still sure it was Adrian he was looking at. “The resolution on this… must be half a meter at the largest.” He shivered. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like he’s with several of the new ponies. I think those… might be Carol’s wings there, with that color. Wish this was video, so we could see if he was restrained.”
Alex looked troubled. “There are stationary satellites that can give us a steady picture, but they can’t spare the cameras for us right now. Couldn’t get anypony to tell me what it was about though.”
“And they’re the ones with the spy satellites.” He frowned at the image a moment. “They’re heading straight for the library.” He steadied himself, trying to make himself as calm as possible for the suggestion he would make next. “Could it be a problem with their equipment instead of the ponies around them? It is possible their phones or ours stopped working for unrelated reasons.”
“Yeah.” Alex nodded, then rose. “I’ll ask Joseph to check once we land. I think he said something about not being able to get reception when we’re moving this fast.” She hopped down onto the floor. “I’m going to discuss landing sites with our pilot.”
Their pregnant pilot. Who hadn’t said a word about it to anypony, so far as he could tell.
He had thought about telling Joseph about his suspicions more than once over the last few days, since he figured it out. Technically, since they were just suspicions and Moriah had never come to him for medical advice, he had no responsibility to keep it secret.
More practically, he didn’t want to face the fallout something like that would cause. Still, he might be able to walk the middle ground somehow. “Could you let her know that if the treatment for nausea I gave her isn’t working, she can come talk to me and I’ll give her something stronger?”
Alex raised an eyebrow. “Sure, but I hope she’ll wait until we land first. Autopilot or no autopilot. We’d already have died once without her.” She gestured at the wall. “Maybe you can help Joseph with the code. Or maybe you want to try calling using the HPI communicator. I think there are instructions for how to contact civilian satellite net-”
He interrupted her. “Joseph and I can figure it out.” By that of course, he meant mostly Joseph. Assuming the unicorn could be persuaded to leave a code half-broken for a few minutes.
Oliver moved over to Joseph’s seat. The unicorn had made a few adjustments since they had been able to move around, propping himself sideways on blankets and pillows stolen from both of their bunks. With most of the seat beside him detached, he’d created a comfortable space in which to sit facing sideways and work on the laptop, his horn glowing whenever he needed to manipulate the mouse or press a few keys.
He watched carefully for several minutes, waiting for a break in Joseph’s concentration. Only when the unicorn looked up did he speak. “Hey Joe; can I borrow you for a few minutes?”
The unicorn gazed back with a glare that could’ve curdled milk. “Is it more important than breaking this code?”
Oliver very nearly failed to stop himself from saying that no amount of codebreaking hours were actually worth anything to them until the point when he actually broke the code. He was thinking it, but stopped himself from actually getting the words out. Somehow, he doubted they would be very convincing. Instead he said: “It’s just as important and it won’t take very long. I’m afraid that we might just have some kind of equipment failure on our hands. We have no way of knowing if Cloudy Skies and Adrian Wong both lost access to their phones for some reason, but we can at least eliminate the possibility that it was ours by using the one the HPI built into this plane. Alex said there was a communications station, and that you could help me make a call on the civilian network. You think you could set that up for me?”
Joseph looked very much like he was going to say no. He didn’t actually say anything though, just looked Oliver up and down, before snapping his laptop lid closed and rising to his hooves. “We’ll use the computer back here. It’s closer than the one in the bedroom.”
Ten minutes later, and they were online. Joseph had left him to his work as soon as he verified the phone was working using technical wizardry that impressed Oliver almost as much as the magic he did with his horn.
That left Oliver in an extremely uncomfortable position. Really though, it was a situation he found himself in more and more as the apocalypse wore on: being social. Before the end of things, he could’ve counted his friends on one hand. Before, he had never been in a serious relationship for more than a few months before it ended in ice rather than fire.
Oliver did not like being around people. Even when the world ended, the very idea of making a phone call, even to ponies he knew, filled him with dread. Merely getting up the courage to get out of bed in the morning, when he knew some large portion of the day was going to be spent around other ponies, it took genuine restraint not to hide and just let the world happen around him.
The last six months had done something unexpected, though. After all that time around the same people, Oliver was finally beginning to learn what it was like to have friends again. He could not abandon them now, not when his failure to act might cause bloodshed. Moriah was already on the warpath, and Joseph would be too if he thought Sky might be in danger. The best thing he could possibly do was learn that they had been wrong about everything, particularly their belief that they had working phones.
So he forced the headset designed for a human head onto his own, twisting it sideways so at least one of the earpieces actually rested in his ear, and the microphone pointed askew in front of his eyes. Then, with a single, deep breath, he dialed Adrian. The phone rang, rang and rang with the strange delay only satellite phones possessed. Though maybe it might be more true now to say that all phones had it, since satellite phones were all that survived.
On this network, most phones would ring ten times before a call would be transferred to voicemail, which equalled a disconnection. Those servers had long since gone offline, so instead of transferring to a working switch station, calls just went dead.
The phone stopped ringing on the ninth this time. As it did, Oliver could hear the sound of loud conversation in the background, though it was impossible to make out what they might be saying. He reminded himself that he was hearing the world several full seconds into the past, then started speaking.
“Adrian, are you alright?” he asked. “This is Oliver. We haven’t heard from you or Cloudy Skies since noon. We just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
There was a long, muffled silence, as though someone had just covered the receiver with their hand. Not that anyone had any of those left these days. “Adrian can’t talk now,” said a voice, not Adrian's. It belonged to one of the newcomers, actually. He was dreadful with names, so he couldn’t remember which. Male, but not so deep as Abrams. “I am Night Speaker; there is important business to discuss.”
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I was really hoping all that talk of nightmares was just Sky being metaphorical, but when the bad guy has a name like "Night Speaker", I'm doubting that more and more.
They're heading back to town? Excellent.
The newcomers have Adrian (possibly restrained) and are heading for the library? Hello hostage crisis. I wonder if they could pull the same Hummingbird shield trick to disable all everyone in the library, or if that would be too fatal for Adrian or damaging to the Equestrian books.
Hey, looks like Oliver was a bit broken, too. That makes...all of them? I wonder if the real story is that everyone is in their own way.
41.media.tumblr.com/9b1b76ebb5c62720f78e47a39cfbec75/tumblr_nt7v8d3R2L1rsmidfo1_540.png
Serious Oliver is very serious.
So, Night Speaker? I'm guessing Nightmare cultists who took the opportunity to escape from Equestria with their spirit of doooooooooom and their evil ways. Be on the lookout for alicorn fillies!
Cipher translation:
all-that-think-they-see-will-be-blinded.-all-that-know-they-are-blinded-will-be-given-truer-sight.
Are Night Speaker and Shadow Speaker two separate individuals or not, I wonder? Maybe they have a bit of a theme going...
Dun dun dun!
Nice to see them bonding instead of bickering. Having something else to fight against will do that.
Uh-oh. I saw that coming from a mile away... but still. Sucks to be Adrian.
Amazing (or sad) how well I can relate to that...
Well, that's not at all good. Still, we may be able to get some insight from the destroyers' perspective. And the big honking anti-magic field generator speeding towards Alexandria will probably prove useful. Still, it seems like it's going to take a miracle for this to end with the library intact...
Well, that's ominous.
6327920 Well I gather that you wanted to explain how smell worked, and that it was the first time Oliver saw Alex naked... But the lack of detail in the scene is what leaves room for interpretation. To me the way Oliver described the smell made it seemed that it was more pronounced. And since he is a doctor, the hesitance he shows at the beginning seems to point out that something more than just catching Alex with no clothes is happening.
I may be mean for thinking this but I sincerely hope there's a mounted cannon on the bird. Yes, I know the Antimagic field generator could work just as well, but some people just really need to be blown up.
6328787
I added a detailed explanation for cracking the ciphers, as well as the translation of the first two messages to the Ponies After People group forum (the message on the dragon doesn't seem to be solved by the same method). You can find it at the bottom of the thread here. I don't take full credit for it, as Celefin was also involved in the solution.
Going back over the picture of the dragon, I think I might have taken the letters down wrong originally (it's kind of hard to tell which direction is up for each rune, and tilting the runes a little turns it into a different rune). Reading from a different angle, it could be "jduamzpzozu".
Put through the cipher, it gives.. still not a word, but something that has enough of the appearance of a word that it could be a name instead, and even a dragonish kind of name, at that. Since Joe is looking for a lead to a defence against the dragon, a name might be all he needs to find what he's looking for. So, it's a longshot, but maybe the name he needs is "Vamgalmrung". Alternatively, the first letter could be "w", which gives "I am Galmrung"
Or possibly not, but if anyone else wants to try translating, the runes on the dragon can be translated to the starting ciphertext with this cipher, and you can follow the rules for cracking the cipher from the link on my post below.
Alright, here comes the 'diplomatic meetings' to discuss an 'negotiation' so that they can 'cooperate' to a goal that 'both of them agree on'
...
Sarcasm, sarcasm everywhere.
Meanwhile, being a doctor seems to give you heightened senses in everything medical, or maybe it's a pony thing, eh.
I don't think these guys are terribly good at hostage-taking. You have a prisoner, you let his phone ring nine times, then you accept the call in a place where your co-conspirators are chatting with each other? Have none of these ponies watched a Liam Neeson film?!
6329101
This rung a bell somehow, and a quick Google search brings up Glaurung. Coincidence? Probably!
6329558
Yes, I'd like to think I'm pretty lazy.
6327920 I thought that Alex was re-aged when in Equestria. Now I'm no longer confused. Thanks!
6329444
Possibly coincidence, or it might be that Tolkien naming conventions are the reason I thought it sounded dragonish enough to even mention it in the first place!
6329444 Heh Oliver's next line "I have a particular set of skills, skills that make me a nightmare to ponies like you"
Oh shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6327984
Is that a reference to past sins??? Awesome!!!!! Although, I literally just started chapter one of that story so please don't spoil it for me.
I'm going to shoot in the dark - Night Speaker isn't the Big Bad; I doubt that individual would want to step out of the shadows too soon. Night Speaker is either an Ascended Mook or a Dragon of some kind.
The Twelve Letter Cipher That Joe Needed Could Be CELESTIA LUNA Or The Other Way Around. Twelve Letters Two Important Equestrian Figures