264 - Shopping Trip
“Take everything in here,” ordered Lex. “Don’t leave a single coin behind.”
The ponies behind him responded with a chorus of affirmative statements, immediately moving around him and heading into the vault. Even so, they looked nervous…though whether it was because of their surroundings or because of his being in shadow-form – hovering in the air as nothing but a mass of darkness with a pair of glowing green-and-purple eyes – was unclear. But the important thing is that they’re here at all, he knew.
When he’d instructed Sonata to ask for volunteers to go into Vanhoover with him, he’d expected very little in the way of results. After all, it was common knowledge among the camp ponies that the last group he’d sent into the city had died there. Plus, the food was already starting to be unloaded and passed out. As such, his surprise had been complete when several dozen ponies, more than fifty in all, had stepped forward, offering their services. It had almost been enough to make him wonder if Sonata had enchanted them, but she’d had a much simpler explanation: “they’re going because I told them that you’d be going with them.”
Her hypothesis had left him feeling awkward, not sure if she was teasing him or being genuine. But at least he’d been able to keep his discomfort from showing, having changed into a shadow as soon as they’d set out. Given that simply going from one train car to the next while he’d checked their contents had left his muscles sore and aching, there was simply no other way for him to make the trek through the city than turning incorporeal.
Fortunately, the volunteers hadn’t been too off-put by his bodiless form, and they’d set off. Lex had them enter the city in a formation similar to when he’d left it a few days ago: with himself at the head of the group and Severance bringing up the rear. He’d almost left the scythe behind, but had reluctantly decided that there was more chance of something going wrong in the city than with the train. Even then, Lex had put caution first and foremost, telling the volunteers to remain close together and stay silent unless it was to bring something to his attention. The Night Mare might have said that all of the city’s ghouls had been in the attack on the camp, but Lex wasn’t willing to trust everypony’s life to her word.
Instead, he’d focused on logistics. He’d questioned several members of the group about the layout of the city, outlining the locations he wanted to head for. By the time they’d reached the city proper, he’d had a general layout of their intended route.
Despite the fact that the bank was closer, Lex had left it for last. With the weight of the coinage they’d need and no transportation immediately available, going there first would have been a waste of time. Instead, he’d directed them to a local hardware store, grabbing what few transportation devices – wagons, wheelbarrows, shopping carts, and even hoof trucks – they could find along the way. Fortunately, the store had plenty of shovels left; digging, unsurprisingly, hadn’t been a high priority for the ponies that hadn’t been able to leave. Several ponies had wanted to grab other supplies as well, and Lex had allowed it; there’d be a need for more work in the future, and the fewer trips they needed to make the better.
The next stop, a nearby hospital, had been a much more tense affair. Unlike the hardware store, the hospital was spread out across several buildings, all of which were divided into numerous small rooms that made it very easy for someone to hide in. Lex’s solution had been to split their group into two, leaving half of them behind to stand guard over what they’d already acquired with Severance to guard them while he led the other half in a quick sweep of the place, targeting any salvageable supplies. Miraculously, they’d managed to find several caches of the drugs that House Call had outlined for him, not to mention numerous hospital beds that – thanks to their wheels – alleviated all of their transportation problems.
The sun had been nearing the horizon by the time they’d made it to the bank, and although there’d been no surprises so far – the worst that had happened had been a false alarm during their passage through the hospital when one of the volunteers had caught sight of an anatomy dummy through a doorway and screamed – Lex still had no desire to keep everypony in the city after dark. Instead, he’d had the group take the same formation that they’d used for the hospital, with half of the volunteers and Severance remaining in the lobby of the bank with what they’d already salvaged and keep watch while the others went with him to look at the vault. Fortunately, that hadn’t been a problem, since Severance had told him ahead of time about the room right above it with the hole in the floor…
“And another one,” grunted a pegasus stallion as he flew back up with a bag of bits, passing it off to a waiting earth mare before wiping his forehead. “These things aren’t heavy, but there’re a lot of them.”
“Just be glad someone cut the floor open,” replied the earth mare as she tossed the bag on her back. “I wouldn’t want to go traipsing around in the basement to get there.” The coins in the bag clinked slightly as she shuddered at the thought.
“Yeah, it’s pretty weird someone’d want to rob this place in the middle of a disaster, but we got lucky-”
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” interrupted Lex, causing both ponies to freeze in mid-motion. “This was done by the last group of ponies that came here…that I sent here.”
The pegasus stallion blanched. “Ah…I didn’t mean to-, we just heard that they didn’t come back. I didn’t know this was them…”
Lex didn’t respond, silently staring at the hole in the floor, and the two ponies glanced at each other. Licking her lips, the earth mare spoke up. “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” she ventured tentatively. “They volunteered, right? Just like us. I’m sure they knew the risks.”
“They didn’t know the risks,” replied Lex bitterly, not bothering to look at her. Of course they hadn’t known the risks; he hadn’t known the risks, having overlooked numerous clues as to Xiriel’s presence until it was too late to save those five. And I can’t take the chance that will happen again if we waste too much time here, he berated himself silently, already regretting his having let his recriminations slow things down. “Get back to work,” he ordered gruffly. The earth mare looked like she wanted to protest, but her partner stopped her, shaking his head silently before flying back down into the hole. The mare wavered for a moment, then left, heading back toward the front of the building to drop the bag of bits off with the others.
Lex was grateful that she hadn’t tried to make further conversation. They needed to hurry up and get out of here, and not just because of the late light. He was running low on the dark magic that kept him in this form.
Checking the train cars had taken up more energy than he’d thought it would. While it was easy enough to use his circlet to look into the magical spectrum for each car – unlike the small reservoir of magical power that it housed, its ability to let him see thaumaturgic energy could be invoked without limit – checking each car’s foodstuffs for poison was considerably more difficult. For that, he’d needed to dip into his dark magic, using its power to enhance his senses to such a degree that he could detect even a trace scent of foreign substances. By itself, that was a comparatively minor use of his power, one that didn’t require much energy to invoke. The problem was that heightening a sense that much could only be sustained for a few seconds, and there were quite a few cars on that train. The end result was that he’d needed to utilize that power again and again, each time expending dark magic to do it.
Even then, he’d had plenty left over when they’d headed into the city. But that had been a few hours ago, and while the dark magic expenditure for remaining in shadow form wasn’t great, it wasn’t inconsiderable either. Now, several hours after they’d come here, he could feel that he was running low. An hour left, he decided silently. Maybe less. But they were almost done here. The ponies cleaning out the vault were working quickly, and at their current pace they should be able to just make it back to the camp before he had to change back. Then he’d be able to settle accounts with Coal Hopper, and move on to the next issue at hoof.
He waited impatiently as the ponies continued working, and it took only a short time before the pegasus stallion from earlier gave Lex a nod. “That’s the last of it.”
Lex gave a perfunctory glance at the interior of the vault, taking in the empty shelves, and was about to tell the other pony to rejoin the others when something caught his eye. “Take the ledger as well.”
The other stallion blinked. “Huh? Oh. You mean that book by the door?”
“Obviously.” Only the fact that he didn’t have teeth at the moment prevented Lex from gritting them, but he let go of his irritation a moment later. That book was doubtlessly a record of how much money was here and who it belonged to, which would be useful later. Although he hadn’t formally founded his own state yet, there was no reason not to keep track of the ponies whose money he’d needed to appropriate. Presuming that they were still alive, they’d likely need that money back to start rebuilding what they’d lost in the disaster. Of course, that would require that he find an alternate source of revenue in the meantime, which was why he’d wanted to send somepony to Las Pegasus, which Thermal Draft had volunteered to do…
Stopping himself before he could be overcome with regret again, Lex waited for the pegasus stallion to return with the ledger. “Now, we-”
“S-Sir!”
Lex turned around as another pony, a unicorn stallion this time, came bounding down the hall. “We’ve got trouble!”
Resisting the urge to swear, Lex rounded on the messenger. “What’s happened?!”
Out of breath, the unicorn pointed back the way he’d come. “We saw movement! Outside!”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “Go rejoin the others in the lobby, now!” He didn’t wait for them to comply, immediately turning and heading in that direction by the most direct possible route, passing through several walls before emerging in the lobby of the bank, where the other volunteers were huddling around the items they’d scavenged, looking nervous. Turning his eyes to the front of the bank, Lex immediately peered out the broken windows, but only the trash-filled streets of Vanhoover – the shadows stretching and the buildings painted orange by the light of the setting sun – were visible, with no movement that he could see. Lex continued to peer outside for several seconds, but found himself hoping that maybe this was another false alarm, the result of nervousness and-
Then he saw something moving at the mouth of an alley several blocks down the street.
As he watched, several vaguely equinoid shapes emerged from the side-street and scurried closer to the bank, avoiding the fading sunlight and ducking behind cover wherever possible. This time Lex did curse softly, wishing that he had enough dark magic left to enhance his vision to make absolutely sure. But that was a minor problem; it was easy enough to guess what he was looking at.
There are still ghouls in the city.
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Begin the shredding.
Could be infected ponies that died after the ghoul army attacked...
Or they might just be starving desperate ponies.
Looks like Sonata's speech before the battle for Vanhoover several chapters back seem to be working wonders for Lex if their sympathies is anything to go by. And the result of the battle certainly proved that the camp ponies truly trust him and his ability to protect them, which is something that is possibly being put to the test soon.
9107222
Still, I agree with terrycloth's assessment.
Given the potential number of hiding places in the city, there could have been other survivors that managed to hold out long enough to witness the ghouls suddenly leaving the city en masse. Then seeing the large group of ponies being led into the city by a smoke creature and a floating scythe might have raised a few flags for them, hence why they're keeping their distance.
So a little warning might be in order before Lex sends Severance in. Bad news if Lex chopped up an innocent pony by mistake.
Though there is also the possibility of the survivors being hurt by the ghouls and subsequently turning into ghouls some time after the attack on the camp. If this is the case, this would explain why they're sticking to the shadows and not openly attacking like the ghoul horde did. If it weren't for the fact that Cloudbank and her group was gobbled down to nothing, I might have thought they'd come back as ghouls themselves, haunting Lex further on his mistake.
Thats the problem with taking out all your savings in one big lump, you never know if theres a family nearby who want to help relieve you of the problem of carrying it all.
Might wanna be sure of that, before you accidentally have grumpy scythe kill some ragged looking survivors.
9107138 Quite possibly...
9107222 I suspect we'll find out very soon.
9107268 Lex does seem to finally have earned everypony's trust, respect, and perhaps even admiration. I suppose it helps that they actually saw him give it everything he had to try and protect them from the ghouls. Though, to be fair, there were plenty of other indicators about the sort of person he is, from his handing out food and medicine (and delivering them from Block Party) to his heartbreaking rant at Severance after he found out that Cloudbank and the others were killed (since it was fairly obvious that he was castigating himself, rather than the scythe).
As for the issue of new ghouls being created, remember: that only happens when someone is infected with ghoul fever (via a bite, as far as we know) and dies from it. Simply being killed by ghouls in a fight doesn't do it.
Of course, these ponies might not be ghouls at all...
9107489 Yeah, but in the current state of the city it's not like the coinage is good for very much.
9107580 Hopefully Lex will check before he goes in for the kill.
No idea. I saw it online. I bet it was inspired by "Flatlander."
Interesting. That's similar to what Paizo did with the First World. I have noticed that the "Fey Realm" and the "Shadow Realm" seems to be commonly shown as the two planes closest to the material in recent cosmologies.
The Shadow Plane is often used to represent "failed possibilities" I believe.
Ah, Bruce Cordell. Possibly the greatest adventure writer ever.
Rules or records? Because if it's still records, that might be more like a backup hard drive for reality.
Yeah, they haven't been that kind to her. But she did hack an Element of Harmony, that's pretty tough!
That's true, they're more like changlings then. But that also means they never experienced magic over-use, just negative emotion energy over-use.
It really does.
Me neither. Were I to guess, I would guess that Sombra can enthrall some ponies directly without any devices, just with his magic, only for a limited period of time and a maximum number of subjects. So as soon as he bumped off Amore, he hit the guardsmen with his spells (there probably aren't that many of them), and metalworkers. Then he had his enthralled workers immediately start producing helmets until they dropped, while he just enchanted the finished objects.
It probably is a bit like Futurama and the Brain Slugs.
Hermes: [monotonous] I got you an official Bender hat. [He takes a brain slug out of his jacket and hands it to Fry.]
Fry: Wow! Thanks, Hermes! [He raises it to his head.] I-- Hey! Cut that out!
Hermes: [After Bender knocks the slug off Hermes head.] Thank God I'm free of that nightmare!
Bender: Sorry, buddy. Here you go! [Bender replaces the brain slug.]
Hermes: [monotonous] Thank you. It was cold down there on the floor.
Hermes: [monotonous] On to new business. Today's mission is for all of you to go to the Brain Slug Planet.
Zoidberg: What do we do there?
Hermes: [monotonous] Just walk around not wearing a helmet.
Nice to see Lex is "shadowing" the new volunteers.
Man, Lex would be really good at Fallout. This guys know how to salvage!
My wager is that at the time Night Mare made that statement, a few ghouls were either wandering outside city limits and returned, or a few ponies with ghoul fever had not yet died and arisen. Or they're actually ghasts!
some how i am going to say no.
i am thinking survivors or looters.
9108192
True enough, if these are actually other survivors, Lex would undoubtedly take them back to the camp to be fed and treated though that would require stretching the severely limited pool of resources at his disposal. So unless new developments occur back at camp, the 'modest' portions of food he's rationed will need to be divided further to help their fellow ponies.
Of course, if the majority of the ponies are anything like the ones featured during the food queues, that shouldn't be too much of an issue. At least that's what I hope.
9108552
There are some important differences; the First World was actually created by the gods and served as a template for the Material Plane. By contrast, the ether gaps in the Deep Ethereal don't represent anything that was made. Rather, they're closer to representations of what might have been, but wasn't.
Forgive my snort of derision. The idea of a specifically fey realm is one that mainstream D&D can trace back to Chaotic Good Outer Planes of Arborea (i.e. Olympus) and Ysgard, though more the former than the latter. The problem is that D&D only weakly defined the place of fey/fairies/sidhe in its original cosmology, something that I think was caused by its orderly divisions and classifications of monsters (even before Third Edition, when keyword-typing took hold hard in the game rules). The result was that the Seelie and Unseelie Courts only received (comparatively) belated definitions as a racial-political pantheon of deities, and sat awkwardly alongside creatures such as elves (and elven deities), who were fey-like but not actually fey, and fairy-like Chaotic Good outsiders, such as the (original) eladrin...said eladrin being one of the first casualties of this when they started mucking with things in Fourth Edition.
Despite that, however, the "Plane of Faerie" actually debuted as a proper plane in Third Edition's Manual of the Planes, but it was in the "possible other planes" section of the book, rather than being integrated into the cosmology proper, putting it alongside other unofficial planes such as the Plane of Mirrors. Of course, when we saw a subtle references to the Plane of Mirrors in official products (I think during the few occasions when nerra popped up), so maybe it wasn't quite so official after all.
But eventually, they reshuffled the cosmology and decided that they wanted "light" and "dark" versions of the mortal world for easy planar adventuring, and used the "Feywild" for the former and the "Shadowfell" (changing the Plane of Shadow's name into something that sounded rather eye-rolling) for the latter.
I'm not sure if you're referring to Golarion's cosmology, but in D&D lore the Plane of Shadow is typically a rather gloomy "reflection" of the Material Plane, rather than representing any unactualized aspects of Creation. (Why D&D lore selected it to be the one plane that crossed other cosmologies, I'll never know. Personally, I'd have assigned that to the Far Realm, making it so that if you wanted to journey from one cosmology to another, you'd have needed to go through that incredibly inhospitable, and un-mappable, place.)
I loved how many connections he weaved between stuff in late Second Edition.
As the Immortal's Handbook structured it, they were basically the structure for "how" things functioned; presumably they included not just the game books per se but also what the GM had written down about the campaign, etc.
Is it? There's no real way to say for sure, if for no other reason because it's hard to see just how Sunset could have acquired that knowledge in the first place. Remember, Twilight said in the series premiere that the knowledge of the sixth Element of Harmony (i.e. magic), had been lost. Moreover, there was no way for Sunset to know it was a crown, etc. Really, that entire movie was sketchy insofar as the details went.
They've never seemed to suffer from any sort of "over-use," as they were never shown to suffer from any sort of deleterious effects that we saw. Rather, they simply ended up regaining their full power, before being defeated.
Other than referencing the comics, that's as good an answer as any, I suppose. Honestly though, his army should have had some pegasi in it, since the Equestrian army did and that's a substantial military advantage. The fact that he didn't despite having conquered half of Equestria (according to what Twilight saw when she looked at the map), throws a monkey wrench into things (e.g. suggesting that he could only enslave crystal ponies, since there are very few crystal pegasi that we've seen).
9108893 See the next chapter for the answer!
So Cereal didn't have control over all of them.
9221620 In point of fact, it didn't have direct control over any of them, per se. It simply created the initial ghouls and let them run wild. It was simply able to predict how they'd react, since Xiriel was incredibly intelligent on its own (and, it's vaguely implied, had done things like this before).