Spike's Doom and/or Destiny

by terrycloth

Airship Antics

Moondancer awoke feeling much better than she expected. There was no full-body ache from the Giant Floating Crystal’s resurrection curse, and the constant low-level itch from the Battle Saddle she usually slept in was gone as well. She was lying on a bare wooden floor, but a soft, warm, scaly dragon was cradled between her hooves. She absently stroked a hoof down his side, and he shifted a bit in response.

She looked up and saw the bars of the jail cell, and everything made a little more sense.

She shook Spike awake, and got to her hooves. While he was blinking and looking around, she kicked Bon Bon in the shoulder. Derpy stirred as well, opening both eyes and blinking – whoever had stripped them had been thorough, and even her eyepatch was missing.

Well, not missing. All their equipment was spread out on a table not ten feet from the bars of their cell.

“That’s convenient,” she said, lighting her horn to try to fetch her saddlebags. The spell didn’t make it past the bars. “Okay, slightly less convenient.”

“They’re following the rules,” Spike said. “They fought us in small groups, and then threw us in prison with no one watching us so that we could escape, and all our stuff has to be right there or else we wouldn’t be able to fight out way out of the castle.”

“Airship,” Bon Bon corrected.

“Well, yeah,” Spike said. The noise from the engines wasn’t as loud inside the ship as it had been outside of it, but it was still unmistakable. “Metaphorical castle.”

“Castle in the sky!” Derpy said, grinning. “So when do we bust out of here?”

“You do not,” said a growly voice from out of view, and then a large dragon walked in from the next room – large enough that he had to duck to move around inside the ship. He was wearing a fancy three-cornered hat and an embroidered uniform coat, and was quite obviously some sort of officer. “Welcome, ex-heroes of destiny,” he said, holding up one of his claws to admire the four colorful rings arranged on his fingers. “I’m afraid the cage you’re in is quite escape-proof.”

“Magic-proof, at least,” Moondancer said cautiously.

“The bars are also fire-proof, unbendable, and the lock is quite impossible to pick, at least for people of your… tech level.” His face twitched. “I may believe in following the rules, but I’m not a fool.”

“Why aren’t we dead?” Derpy asked. “I’m pretty sure we were about to be dead.”

The dragon smiled. “I had you resurrected, of course.”

“But how?” Derpy tilted her head. “Did you join our party while we were all out? The spell only works on party members.”

“You were linked to the rings,” the dragon said. “That was enough for the Flying Spaghetti Monster to bring you back, according to my pirates. You may be linked to them still, I suppose… but I assure you, these rings are mine now, and will remain mine until I deliver them to my master, along with the four of you. A matched set, you might say.”

“So why did you kill us in the first place, if you were just going to take us prisoner?” Moondancer asked, rubbing at her chest, where she could still almost feel the spear stabbing her. AGAIN. She hated being stabbed. “We were trying to surrender.”

“I was under orders,” the dragon replied. “The general was quite explicit – the four of you were to die.” He chuckled. “I’m sure she’d be mortified at what I did afterwards – even if true death isn’t an option, there are ‘safer’ ways to transport your souls.” He scowled. “But I’m tired of her meddling. Her disruptive ideas. Her ‘common sense’.” He almost spat the words. “You are my prisoners, and I will transport you in the traditional fashion. You will not escape. I will present you to my master and he will be forced to admit that the old ways work! Perhaps then he’ll reign in her depravity.”

“You really don’t like her,” Spike said.

“She’s been in this world for but a few months, and already she’s wormed her way into a place at my master’s side, as one of his high commanders! It’s obscene. I don’t know what witchcraft –”

“Is she sleeping with him?” Derpy asked.

The dragon stared at her. “What?”

Derpy nodded sagely, although her eyes unfocused and somewhat ruined the effect. “It really sounds like she’s sleeping with him. Have you tried seducing him yourself?”

Spike covered his muzzle to stifle a laugh.

“I’m – what? No! My master would not lower himself to…” He raised the claw with the rings to his forehead, and pressed the fingers against his scales. “Enough. I’ve told you my plans and my reasons, so now I must retire to manage my minions from my cabin upstairs. If you need anything, scream at the top of your lungs, in vain, because these doors are thick enough to muffle any sounds you make so that they’ll never be heard over the engines.” He smirked, saluted them, and slammed the door behind himself as he left.

“Alright,” Bon Bon said. “Let’s take a look at this lock.”

===

The lock was, in fact, impossible to pick with mechanical picks. “It’s not really a lock so much as a giant magnet,” Bon Bon said after examining it for a while. “I’m not sure how they open it, but the mechanism isn’t here.”

“So that’s all it takes to make a lock unpickable?” Spike asked. “Magnets?”

“Giant magnets,” Bon Bon said. “Normal magnets you can just wedge something between them, or use magnets of your own. The one they’re using here is way too strong and I don’t see a mechanism for prying it off to let us out. It’s easy to make a lock unpickable if it can’t be opened at all.”

“They probably just turn the magnet off,” Moondancer said. “It’s a simple spell, from what I remember of it, but I don’t actually know it by heart.” She shrugged. “The cage is warded anyway.” They had, of course, already verified the dragon’s other claims.

“So we need to wedge it open?” Derpy asked, “I can make a wedge!” She kicked at the floor a few times, until one of the boards splintered and bent. She pried it up with her teeth, only for the forehoof she was bracing against to suddenly crack right through the floor. “Ahh! I’m stuck!”

“Here, let me help,” Spike said, grabbing hold of her sides.

“Nooo, if you pull me up there’ll be so many splinters!” Derpy said, shaking her head and flapping her wings to drive Spike off.

“What… what the ever-fluffing buck…” Bon Bon said, staring.

Derpy, waved her free hoof. “I don’t know what went wrong!”

“No, I think what she means is –” Moondancer started, then grabbed Spike’s tail in her magic and dragged him back. “Spike, stop that. What she means is that the floor is made of wood. Breakable wood. Is it even fireproof?”

Spike froze, and looked down at it. “Stand back, and let me check.”

Derpy quickly and expertly pulled her hoof up out of the hole, and pressed it against Spike’s muzzle. “No. I’ve got this.” She grinned, and started bouncing up and down on all four hooves, singing along as her hooves clopped against the floor with each syllable. “Mer-ry-had-a-lit-tle-lamb-*smack*-lit-tle-lamb-*crunch*-lit—”

There was a thump from the deck below, as Derpy vanished into a pony-sized hole in the floor.

“What are you doing here?”

Derpy’s voice replied, “I don’t know, where am I?”

“Get out of here! There’s no prisoners allowed in the engine room!”

“Oh no,” Spike said.

“Ooooh, is this the engine?” Derpy asked.

“What?” Moondancer asked, looking at Spike. “What’s wrong?”

Derpy answered for him, in a way, “What does this button do?”

“Yeah, this isn’t good,” Bon Bon said.

There was a loud whistling noise, and Derpy squealed in alarm, then with the sound of crunching metal the whistling cut off.

“We’d better get down there,” Spike said, jumping into the hole.

Aside from Derpy, the room was deserted – whatever she’d already done to the engine had convinced the engineers to run for their lives. Bon Bon and Moondancer dropped down behind him as he tried to figure out what she was doing now.

“Are… are you just hitting random buttons?” Spike asked.

“All the lights keep flashing red!” Derpy whined, spinning a large wheel until it came right off its axle and clanged to the ground next to her, making three more red lights start flashing. “I don’t know what happened? It was leaking steam so I kicked the pipe…”

Moondancer’s eyes focused on a crushed pipe, which had a now-silent pressure relief valve just above the crushed section. “No time,” she said, grabbing Derpy in her magic and dragging her bodily across the floor towards the others. She squished them as close to her as she could, before shouting, “Big Bee’s Bubble!”

Then everything exploded in steam. The bubble, with the heroes inside it, bounced to the far corner of the room, where it wedged into the corner behind a flipped table that they hadn’t even seen in the room. But weeks of constant use had strengthened the spell, and it held. When the steam cleared, they found themselves hidden in the corner, underneath a hole where the ceiling had collapsed, dropping the table with all their equipment, which was now laid out in convenient piles around them. The room was lit now by the orange glow of an open fire, which was not really any friendlier than the previous flashing red warning lights.

Moondancer dropped the bubble, and they started scrambling into their armor.

“Good job, Derpy,” Bon Bon said. “But now we need to get off the ship.”

“We need to get the rings back first,” Spike said, while he frantically worked to braid Moondancer’s armor back into her tail and mane. “The captain has them, right?”

“A ship like this probably has more than one engine,” Moondancer said, levitating the pieces of Spike’s armor into place and fastening the straps. “But if it catches fire…”

“We’re fireproof?” Derpy pointed out, wriggling into her armor.

“This is your, uh, helmsman speaking,” came a tinny voice from a box lying on the floor next to the blasted-open door out of the engine room. “We appear to have lost power to the starboard engine, so we’re losing altitude pretty fast. There’s no need to panic – we should be good for a water landing in roughly fifteen minutes.”

“Aaand it’s a timed mission,” Spike said, scowling. “I hate timed missions.”

There was a lurch, and a sudden silence, except for the crackling of the flame and the distant sound of wind.

“Okaaaay… still no need to panic. Engineering is telling me the port engine can’t support the weight of the ship on its own, so we’re going to autorotate and splash down a little harder than expected. Everyone brace for impact in… ten minutes.”

Spike gave a muffled “Oof!” as Moondancer’s magic slammed all the rest of the pieces of his armor onto him at once. The intricate braiding around her legs and tail was replaced with a simple spiral, that she tied off at the end. Bon Bon and Derpy were already in their own armor, of course.

“Time to go,” she said, taking a step with a somewhat stiff gait.

Spike twisted his helmet around so that he could see out the faceplate, and stumbled over to the door to check the hallway. “Coast is clear.”

“Go go go!” Bon Bon said, and they all rushed out of the engine room and started casting about to try to get their bearings.

“I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” said the helmsman’s voice again, this time from a speaker set near the ceiling as they ran down the hall and around a corner, searching for a stairwell. “The good news is, we just broke through the cloud cover and the jagged mountain peaks of the New World are looking awfully pretty right now – if you look off the starboard side, you can see a rainbow!” There was a pause, during which the ship lurched again. “The bad news is, we’re a little off course and instead of a safe splashdown in the Sea of Ice, we’re heading right for New Mech City, and when we hit we’ll be going fast enough to kill a bunch of civilians. Sooo I’ll be arming the self destruct now, to destroy the ship at a safe altitude. Five minutes to detonation.” There was a pause. “Panic is now authorized. Go crazy, folks.”

===

The heroes spent the next few minutes dodging enemies, as they searched for the captain and the stolen rings. Literally dodging them, for the most part, as the enemies were panicking, as instructed, and tended to run screaming in straight lines unless somepony got in their way, which was enough of a distraction for them to recognize the escaped prisoners.

And then they’d have to fight them, and nopony had time for that.

The only real obstacles to their progress were the flagrantly displayed piles of golz and other treasure in the various rooms they passed, tempting them to stop and collect them (“I’ll catch up,” said Bon Bon more than once) and the slow destruction of the ship itself, as the fire and damage spread and was only exacerbated by the self-destruct working its way towards final detonation. At one point they would have had to backtrack to find spare parts to repair a broken console spraying fire across the only passage towards the stern of the ship if they hadn’t all been immune to fire.

There was another way to go – towards the bow – but that led through the open deck which was literally packed with soldiers, and no one was about to second-guess Moondancer’s decision to block the door with every crate in reach of her magic.

But they were immune to fire, and the captain’s quarters were in the stern, so they managed to find him with nearly two minutes left on the clock.

“I should have known it would come to this,” the dragon scowled, standing up from his throne-like reclining chair to face them. “But don’t think you’ve won! Even if you –”

“Dark Eidous!” shouted Moondancer, summoning lightning to strike him. Derpy followed up with a shot from her cannon, which had no other target than the looming captain.

“Sorry,” Spike said, running up and whacking him with his shield to get his attention. “We really don’t have time for a monologue.”

“NO!” thundered the captain, smacking Spike to the side. His massive claw closed around the smaller dragon’s throat, and he lifted him into the air to scream at him face to face. “If I have to face the heroes in combat, I will get my monologue! You will not deny me this!”

Spike opened his muzzle, and blew a jet of fire in his captor’s face. This didn’t hurt him much, since he was a dragon as well, but it distracted him long enough for Moondancer and Derpy to get off a few more shots, although Moondancer was using magic missiles since the lightning might have hit Spike too.

“You are gnats!” roared the dragon. “Insignificant gnats! Fools, charlatans, false heroes!”

“Got the rings,” Bon Bon said, reappearing behind Moondancer. “Are we going to finish this fight?”

“I don’t see how we could retreat with him holding Spike like that,” she said, sending another teacup from the captain’s cupboard smashing into his arm at barely-subsonic speeds.

“Are you okay, Spike?” Derpy asked, carefully sighting her cannon to aim at the captain’s head, only for the kick to ruin her aim, again, and send the cannonball careening off the side wall and the ceiling to smack him in the shoulder. “Do you need a muffin?”

“I’m fine,” Spike said, wiggling helplessly in the dragon’s grasp. His arms were pinned, and his fire breath was useless, but in turn the dragon’s attacks weren’t doing much to him through his armor. “Just holding his attention, like I always do! Heh heh.”

The dragon ignored them all, in favor of continuing to rant at his captive audience. “How can you be heroes when you support the rule of the Immortal Emperor? That fiend in pony shape who crushes the spirit and creativity of all the world’s people? Only my master sees through his lies!”

“That’s great,” Spike said, “But uh, we kind of want to go home? So we need to complete our quest. Which means we need to start our quest. Which means getting the rings. Which we did! Twice now. So if you’ll just put me down, we’ll go find an escape pod or something and be out of your spines.”

“I think not,” the captain said. “In seconds, the ship will be destroyed, and all of us along with it – and my master will control our resurrection. All I need to do is hold on for a few more –” His eyes went wide, and he coughed. His grip on Spike momentarily tightened, then went slack, as he collapsed back into his chair, blood bubbling through his lips as he clutched at his throat. “No…. escape…” he burbled, then his eyes glazed over and he was still.

Bon Bon wiped off her fruit knife on her armor. “Alright. Escape pod, now.”

“Ten seconds to detonation!” came the cheerful voice of the helmsman. “Eight. Seven. Six...”

“There’s no escape pod!” Spike said, looking around the cluttered room. If there was such a pod, it was too well hidden for them to find in five seconds.

“Window, now!” Moondancer shouted, snatching up Spike and using him as a battering ram as she leapt over the captain’s desk and smashed through the glass panes. Derpy was right behind her, carrying Bon Bon.

There was a city below them… but it was a long way down.

And then the ship exploded, and the sound alone knocked Derpy out of the air, and Spike out of Moondancer’s grip. Fire washed over them, followed by a rain of finger-sized debris, but none of them were conscious to notice.

Comments

[ledezma25]

“How can you be heroes when you support the rule of the Immortal Emperor? That fiend in pony shape who crushes the spirit and creativity of all the world’s people? Only my master sees through his lies!”

is this gonna be one those ‘it turns out the true bad guys were using you all along’ type deals?

[terrycloth]

9369911
So far they haven't gotten the emperor to even notice they exist yet, so...

[howard035]

I respect this traditionalist, and I'm glad he got his villainous monologue.