The Escapades of Lord Corn Wall

by Megatron

The Fall

Fall, it was a season that always brought with it great change. Trees shed their leaves, days grow short as nights grow long, and warmth bleeds away only to be replaced by cold. However, this year more would change in Equestria than the weather. This year it would be proven that nothing was eternal.

Lady Gold Iris, a Pegasus noble whose family had come to power through banking, had consistently been sending shipments of unknown materials via train into the mountains of northern Equestria each day for three weeks now and Lord Corn Wall was rightfully suspicious. Gold Iris had clearly put a fortune into whatever this project was and ruining it beyond recovery would force her into an early retirement. Of course, there was no way of knowing what exactly this was and the only was to figure out was to go there. Corn Wall, Fire Star, and Zap Watt would sneak aboard one of these trains and stop the banker noble once and for all.

Normal ponies would have tried to board the train by disguising themselves as workers or henchman in order to safely get onboard with minimal effort. Corn Wall, Fire Star, and Zap Watt were not normal ponies. They instead rode in a balloon being flown at high speed by two disgruntled peguasi and then jumped down onto the top of the train with parachutes. As awesome as this sounds it is extremely dangerous and it’s amazing that the trio didn’t fall off the top of the train cars into the valley that the train was near, being served a gruesome end by razor sharp rocks. Nobility just seem to have that inexplicable luck. As it were the three invaders were completely unharmed and simply found a way inside the train car.

“Vhat do you zhink is inside all of zhese boxes my lord?” Asked a curious Zap Watt.
“Let’s find out shall we,” responded Corn Wall. Fire Star lifted up one of the lids to reveal that inside the unmarked containers, rested tons of steel parts of various shapes and sizes ready for assembly. Everypony then looked to the center of the car where a box marked with the words “Extremely fragile, break and die!” in bright read ink stood. Corn Wall slowly opened it and saw that in contained several large gemstones that had a soft scarlet glow.
“What in the hay could these be for?” Fire Star wondered aloud.

Before anypony could even guess however, the train came to an abrupt stop. Out side of the window, the group saw that they were no longer in the Equestrian countryside, but were now within the very heart of a great northern mountain. There were so many torches lit throughout the complex that nopony even noticed that they had entered the mountain and the train car had enough insulation that they wouldn’t be able to feel the cold northern air until they exited. Outside, a great commotion of engineers and scientists all dressed in heavy, white lab coats with scarves and goggles covering most of their faces. The guards stood guard with thick darkly colored trench coats, large steel helmets, and bib scarves rendering them mostly identical. A horde of these goggle welding ponies had entered the train and, in a rather lucky coincidence, three entered the car who were all the same sizes as Corn Wall, Zap Watt, and Fire Star.

Without a thought, Fire Star knocked out the poor engineers and ripped off their clothing. And, again, luckily for the group nopony heard or saw it. Lord Corn Wall abandoned his top hat (not a loss considering he owned an obscene number of replacements) and Fire Stars peaked cap had a removed wire stiffener (this means that it could be curled up into a ball and still form back into shape when needed but also caused it to have a crushed appearance) so nopony objected to putting on these out fits. It seemed that luck was going out of its way to help Corn Wall on his quest.

The trio exited the car with their new disguises on, carrying out the boxes, and followed the stream of ponies until they saw what this whole operation had been about. In front of them stood a huge metal shaft that was surrounded by walk ways and seemed to stretch down for miles and was aimed up at the sky. In the center of this shaft, floated a huge red crystal surrounded on all sides by smaller ones the size of the ones in the center crate. And starring directly at the shaft was Gold Iris herself, clothed in the same dark trench coat as the guards but without the helmet or bib scarf. This contrasted sharply with her bold yellow coat and bright red mane.

Zap Watt looked at the others and declared, “I vill go and see vhat vill destroy zhis machine, you try to be careful around here.”
“Will do!” shouted Fire Star.
Gold Iris heard this however and shouted, “What are you two doing over there?”
“Nothing, we were just about to get back to work milady,” Corn Wall answered.
Gold Iris paused and then ordered, “Guards, Seize them!” In the blink of any eye guards seemed to appear from nowhere, grab the two, and drag them towards Lady Gold Iris. She took off their goggles and scarves and then let out an evil cackle.
“Corn Wall you old fool, you do realize that no engineer, strike that, no pony in the entire world speaks with your archaic inflections,” she taunted. “You never should have come here, this device is far above your antiquitated mind. See a Unicorn simply has to channel magic into that main crystal and energy shoots up to the moon where it will be reflected down to the target of my choosing.”
“How in the hay does that even work?” asked a genuinely perplexed Fire Star.
“Magic!” all the engineers in earshot responded in unison before returning to work.
Gold Iris chuckled, “yes, magic, magic that I will soon use to destroy your manor and everything you own before I refocus to decimate the other nobles!”

Zap Watt had been staring at the center crystal for a solid five minutes now and could see no obvious weakness or vulnerabilities to exploit. All he knew was that it was powered by magic and the smaller crystals at least were fragile. When presented with an unknown like this huge crystal, Zap fell back on his base strategy, shoot it with an electrical current and see what happens. It was specifically due to occasions such as this that the scientist had created the Pocket Zeus 120. It was small enough to fit in your pocket (as the name makes painfully obvious) but can still fire a bolt of electricity that is far beyond lethal levels. He fired the bolt at the crystal with disturbing glee as, much to everypony else’s horror, the crystal shook and rumbled, clearly going critical.

All differences, duties and hatreds were thrown aside as everypony rushed for the nearest exit. Lord Corn Wall and Fire Star ran towards Zap Watt who had found a hidden exit towards the top of the mountain. The three of them jumped towards the Pegasus driven balloon that had followed the train all the way to the mountains and flew away in time to safely see the resulting explosion before speeding away back to Canterlot.

When the noble awoke the next morning, he spent hours looking out at the year’s first snowfall, reflecting on what had just happened. For the first time in history, a noble had actually managed to defeat another noble in their eternal competition. For the first time in his entire life, Corn Wall had managed to achieve his goal of crushing an enemy noble and becoming a step closer to achieving the same dominance as his ancestor, the great Corn Lord. The noble felt a sense of triumph and pride that he had never felt before. This feeling was shattered when he read the mornings newspaper. According to the paper, Lady Steel Heart had also managed to drive another noble into retirement. Two nobles had been eliminated and Corn Wall knew at that very instant that all the others would fall like dominos shortly. After that, there would only be Steel Heart and himself left. One would have to emerge victorious over the other by utterly crushing them eventually. He would have to use all his cunning to ensure that he was the winner. It’s going to be a long, cold, harsh winter.

Author's Note:

A big setup to the finale, I wanted this chapter to give off the feeling that the situation was getting truly desperate and that the world was coming to an end (because for the nobles, the life they've always known is completely destroyed after this).

The super weapon is a giant Death Star basically, I originally wanted it to be a world destroying weapon, but I realized that if that were the case, then Celestia and Luna would certainly get involved, stop everything immediately with their godlike powers, and it would totally ruin all the tension, so I made it something that threatened Lord Corn Wall without involving anyone else.

-Lost_One, 8/7/19