Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced

by Cordial Nova

VII. HH-704/IES 4129: "Building a Home from the Wreckage of Your Starship"

The wreck of the Istry Lochran
On the verge of the Everfree Forest

The discussion could be heard approaching long before those having it were in sight.

"...you really can't do that? I thought you used a similar technique to get here?"

"Yes, but I needed two stargates each the size of a small moon to do it. And they use wormholes, and you can't have been using wormholes because the drift equations get rapidly chaotic in bent space-time. Even a short distance jump on the planet's surface would have turned us both to quark fog. Give me the short explanation of yours?"

"Okay! So, the matter doesn't move at all. You define your departure and arrival volumes as fivespheres in sixspace encompassing the pieces of threespace you want to move, and then you can exchange them along the free axis at minimal energy cost, swapping the threespace volumes. The matter comes along with it. But there's more to it -"

The millimetrically raised eyebrow of one of the Royal Guards keeping gawkers away from the wreck was, had an onlooker been versed in the body language of these imperturbable gentlestallions who happened to have been stationed in Canterlot during a certain mentorship, a shared acknowledgement that this was a Twilight Sparkle full-flow explanation, of the kind that routinely caused headaches for anypony listening other than Princess Celestia (1) herself, and a speculative wager that that would be true for her current visitor, as well.

1. And while they were much less of a problem for her than for most ponies, the contents of the bottle of migraine pills in the lower left-hand drawer of the Glorious Solar Desk had dwindled somewhat more frequently on those days on which Twilight was feeling particularly creative.

"- and that compensates for the difference in energy density!"

"Wouldn't that let you travel in time just as easily as in space?"

"Oh, no, you have to use a completely different spell for that, because the universe is expanding and so the swapped fivespheres wouldn't fit."

"Argh." The Royal Guards watched as the unicorn in question and the alien came into view along the rough path leading back to Ponyville, the latter pressing her hands to her temples, and such a well-versed onlooker would have noted the tiny eye-flick on the part of the first guard's partner that acknowledged bits to be exchanged later. "I think we may have to come back to this later, somewhere we can have mathematics and paper. Probably lots of paper."

Then Cordelia looked up and caught her first clear sight of the wreck since the crash, her face falling as she stopped in her tracks. "Oh. Oh, bugger. Istry..."

The wreck of the Istry Lochran was a pitiful sight. The drenching the weather teams had given it to put out the deuterium fire had turned the ground to mud, and the great mass of the ship had subsided further. The forward section had leveled out, its weight driving the lower halves of the spoked wheels into the soft ground, which caved in again on top of them. The aft section had fractured again, the heavy, unsupported reactors of the torch drive sinking into the ground, canting the charred midsection steeply up into the sky, mirrored by the twisted wreckage of the magnetic nozzles on the far side. Metal stalactites dribbled from fractured pipes near the roots of the radiator wings, with matching stalagmites beneath them.

"I'm sorry." Twilight's ears drooped. "I'm sure Princess Luna didn't mean to -- I mean, this isn't how we'd want to --"

Cordelia closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath, then exhaled, once, twice, and ended with an explosive exhale, coupled with a aching half-chuckle. "The average first contact with a worldbound (2) society involves being segregated from the public in some government facility, lots of interviews with people who've had their sense of humor surgically removed, and a laboratory or two - with suspicion, concealed information, and tedious politics thrown in for spice. A bad one involves lynch mobs and dissections. You made me breakfast, answered my questions, gave me some lovely new clothes, and are throwing me a welcome party tonight with what sounds like most of the town in attendance. I have not taken a poor impression of your hospitality, I assure you."

2. A pre-spaceflight society. Of course, the whole banished-to-the-moon issue will complicate that just a bit, once Cordelia hears about it.

Twilight's ears twitched, but didn't rise. "Even with your sky-ship destroyed, and you stranded here? You're not angry?"

"Well, I can't tell you that I'm happy about losing my starship like this, but I also believe that it was unintentional. Unless you're running a well hidden space program of your own, it wouldn't be obvious that Istry wasn't built to stand up to gravity, so Princess Luna could easily have missed it." She shrugged. "Getting angry over something that might just be a contact misunderstanding only makes it more likely that we're both going to lose out in the long run. And starships can be rebuilt much more easily than relationships."

"Really," she continued after a moment, "I'm not - oof!"

Cordelia staggered slightly as Twilight reared up on her hind hooves, hugging the eldrae with her forelegs, her horn about level with her neck. Cordelia returned the hug a little stiffly (3), brushing aside Twilight's mane to wrap her arms around her withers.

3. Although, in fairness to her, she was trying to figure out how to say "hugged by an adorable purple unicorn" on an Exoplanetary Biological Contact Report without the home office assuming that she'd found the planet of Really Good Drugs.

"I need to talk to the guards. I'll be right back!"

Cordelia smiled as Twilight headed over toward the ship, ears once more upright and bounce restored to her step. Then, while she exchanged a few words with the guards, Cordelia contemplated the wreckage. The spokes linking the gravity wheels were near-vertical, which was enough to give her an idea of the interior layout, even with the core hull's starboard list. She was sketching out the best route through the ship in her head when Twilight returned.

"Ready?"

"Ready. It would have been easiest to go in and out through the small craft bay - with some of the bigger items I want to salvage - but it ended up on the bottom, and now that it's sunk into the ground, that'll be a lot of digging. So," Cordelia continued, leading Twilight over to the starship, "let's try the main airlock."

Between the gravity wheels, an unblemished stretch of hull stretched in front of and above them, emblazoned with the roundel of the Empire, twelve-pointed golden star on indigo, to the left of a circular, windowed depression in the smooth grey surface leaning down towards them. Paired rows of symbols, larger above and smaller below, hexagons and part-hexagons - larger and smaller shimmered to its right in more inlaid gold, which Twilight examined with interest.

"CSS Istry Lochran," Cordelia said quietly. "Registered at Almea, Lorhalia Yards, hull number 1129".

"1129? But that," Twilight pointed with her horn, "looks like a three-digit number?" Her eyes brightened. "Different radix?"

Cordelia frowned. "This is why I actually need to learn the language soon. This translator is convenient, but it glosses over too many nuances. By digits, in our numbers, that's seven-ten-one. Seven dodecen (4), ten dodectave, and one. And in yours?"

"Two-one-five-one, or two octiad, one octcen, five octave and one. So you use duodecimal?"

"And you use octal."

4. A brief note on the vocabulary I'm using for Eldraeic and Equestrian numbers can be found here: https://eldraeverse.com/2016/09/18/all-my-base-are-belong-to-you/ .

Of course, this does imply that the rise of Nightmare Moon happened two octennia ago, and in this AU timeline in which everything doesn't happen at once, the Sombran Coup and the disappearance of the Crystal Empire approximately three octennia ago. The defeat of Discord and the end of the Discordant Era happened very roughly four octennia ago, although it's hard to tell precisely because of his playing around with time - which persisted for some time after his petrifaction, and involved a lot of hitting individual out-of-sync pieces of Equus with the Elements of Harmony.

They grinned at each other. Then Cordelia began reaching out with her psychokinesis, dragging rocks over from the nearby forest to form a crude ramp to the airlock door. A few moments later, Twilight joined her, her magic gathering more rocks, while binding and smoothing them into a solid structure, blue photon-discharge glow and lavender field entwining and working together.

The ramp built, they stood before the door. Cordelia poked at a small panel beside it, and a loud clunk from within suggested some mechanism uncoupling. The door itself rolled slightly to the right, with a brief hiss of inrushing air through the crack - wide enough to let Cordelia wedge a hand in the crack and roll it the rest of the way back into its recess. Stepping in, she held out a hand to Twilight.

"Welcome aboard!"

Twilight looked around, curiously. The airlock chamber itself was mostly rubberized metal on all sides other than the door behind them and the matching door in front of them, each painted with red-and-yellow warning stripes; lit only by curious glowing globes of pale liquid set into the room's four vertices.

Cordelia, meanwhile, had pulled a panel off the wall beneath the darkened controls that did break the bareness of the room, and was fiddling about with the contents.

"What's that?"

"We're going to want to get some fresh air in there with the life support not running. But usually, these two doors should never be open at the same time -"

"So you don't let all the air out?"

"So we don't let all the air out. And so to make 'em open, I've got to bypass all the interlocks designed to stop that from happening. (5)" Another clunk sounded from within the wall. "Got it!"

5. Specifically, she's making the emergency circuit lie and claim that there's a fire on board, which is one of those rare circumstances in space for which dumping your atmosphere into vacuum can be the right answer.

With that door rolled aside, too, the two of them moved on to a corridor, stretching off left and right. Plush indigo deep-pile carpeting covered floor, walls, and ceiling, save for a few signs inset here and there, illuminated by the ghost-pale light of more of the glowing globes. "The quick tour is," Cordelia began, "technical stuff's all in the aft ring. Engineering space up top, small craft at the bottom, lab and workshop in the middle. To our right, the for'ard ring. My cabin below - we should probably go there first - galley and 'fresher above, storage and the computers in the middle, which is where we'll find the -"

"Library!" Twilight broke in, but was looking at a niche in the opposite bulkhead, a rack of a few dozen spiral-bound booklets held carefully in place by individual snaps. "Bookshelf? I thought you had -"

"I do. But that's not it. These are just a few checklists and such-like that need to be accessible in emergencies, and printed on paper in case the power fails." Cordelia ran her finger along the spines, then pulled out a volume from the right-hand end of the shelf. "And here's the Least Useful Book."

Twilight fought a brief internal battle over which part of that sentence to pursue as they moved off, then picked the one that was less strange, but more offensive to her sensibilities.

"Least useful book?"

"Service in-joke, sorry. There's a group of retired scouts writing what they call 'hypothetical handbooks' - advice on situations that haven't come up yet, diplomacy with extinct species, what to do if you find yourself in the distant past, what to do if you meet someone from the distant future, martial arts with arbitrary numbers of limbs, that sort of thing. Or in this case, number 704, Building a Home from the Wreckage of Your Starship (6), which should never, ever be needed 'cause there's no way to land one of these in any shape to be salvaged. Well, until today. Now I get to put it into practice."

6. The paired volume, How to Construct a Habitat From the Wreckage of Your Starship, isn't part of the hypothetical handbook series, because that's much more likely to happen.

"You have somewhere to stay," Twilight pointed out.

"And I appreciate it very much, Twilight Sparkle, please do not mistake me. But I cannot think you'll want me sleeping in your spare bed forever - and apart from building a shelter, it tells me what useful equipment I ought to salvage and what I can do with it. I think you'll find some of that quite fascinating," Cordelia grinned, "judging by what I saw of that list of yours. And -"

She stopped, abruptly, as the floor and ceiling of the corridor gave way to open shafts leading up and down, lined with the same plush carpet, now striped in a pattern of interlocked blue-and-yellow arrows.

"Hm. This could be a problem, though."

Twilight leaned over, and looked down. "There's no ladder?"

"Never needed one. Istry's spin was slow enough that you could fall down slowly and jump right back to the axis, given a little practice. Wouldn't like to try that now, though." She thought for a moment. "Those rocks - how do you feel about a quick game of you-levitate-me, I-levitate-you?"

Author's Note:

This chapter has taken me so ridiculously long to write and so forth that I decided to split it in two. Next part later.

Comments

[Booster Spice]

I love how teh description in a magical fantasy land for teleportatin, makes far more sense than superstring theory. Given I thought I had the math somewhere, and an approximate analysis gave teleportation, time shift, and D jumping as coherent base function, just with extra energy and complexity for the dimentional harmonics needed etc. Of course Twilight actually knows the functions, I can only guess.

Then again, Twilight might own a Library, but Pinkie can use L-Space. Poor Twilight.

We will leave Pinkie popping out of the ring binding for later. Like when its time to announce its time for The Party.

The base thing. That was absolutely brilliant, how to make the joke valid. And the ponies use binary on three non standing legs to get the Octent? that and Octave musical ties in greatly. I was considering Quen and Vel, but those are variations on the base ten anyway so starting from elsewhere I wouldnt expect it.

I totally forgot about th In Case Of fire, Open Window, but then wouldnt it be one of those glass covered panels with the interlock lever behind it? With appropiate protection? Also, where Is the best place to put the paperwork relative to the rapidly decompressing on fire airlock in the dark so you can find them?

The trouble with hypothetical scenarios, is that in being million to one occurances, they happen 9 times out of ten.

On the tenth time, you end up in Equestria.

[Mitch H]

7616873 I think it might be a reference to Numberography, wherein it was established that the most natural numbers were those that could be counted upon the hooves of yourself and those of a friend.

[Cordial Nova]

7616924

I've never actually read Numberography, so thanks for the pointer!

My initial inspiration (although not the in-verse reason, because it would hardly fit) were the 8-hour clocks seen in early episodes of the show; after that made me think about natural number bases for the ponies, I started out with the notion of counting on hooves, in quaternary, or in the case of pegasi, on hooves and wings in senary. But both of those, especially the former, are inconvenient number systems to use for large quantities, so I then developed the notion of a more advanced counting system using joints, similar to counting on the fingers in many Asian countries, in which one gets an octal count from forelegs only: pastern and cannon, knee and forearm, which took over from traditional tribal counting during the time of Old Equestria (post-windigos, pre-Discord).

Unicorn mathematicians, of course, were using abaci all along, but then, unicorn mathematicians are still mathematicians and as such disdain all integers other than 0, 1, and infinity.

7616873

I totally forgot about th In Case Of fire, Open Window, but then wouldnt it be one of those glass covered panels with the interlock lever behind it? With appropiate protection?

The designers want it to be controllable centrally so you don't have to get (potentially past the fire) to the airlock to use it. The way it's supposed to work is that if the emergency circuit reports a fire, the interlock automatically cuts out and lets you send a remote command to blow the lock (which you can't normally do).

And under normal circumstances, they aren't too worried about people pulling the panel and doing a rewire, because if the ship wasn't shut down right now, doing what Cordelia did would have set off about half-a-dozen separate alarms before she got the interlock unlocked - emergency panel used, suspected fire, circuit tamper, interlock disable, damage control master alarm, and so forth. It's supposed to be (relatively) easy to do, 'cause if you need to do it, you probably need to do it very badly. It's just difficult to do it quietly.

[Booster Spice]

7617042

which makes me wonder, given during Red Alert on a battleship, everyone is suited up, is it better to have atmospher or not on the ship, as in nothing to burn, but do shockwaves propagate more through efficintly through structure if theres not an atmosphere to damp the shock, but also carry it etc?

[emanwe]

7617042

And under normal circumstances, they aren't too worried about people pulling the panel and doing a rewire, because if the ship wasn't shut down right now, doing what Cordelia did would have set off about half-a-dozen separate alarms before she got the interlock unlocked - emergency panel used, suspected fire, circuit tamper, interlock disable, damage control master alarm, and so forth. It's supposed to be (relatively) easy to do, 'cause if you need to do it, you probably need to do it very badly. It's just difficult to do it quietly.

As always, I love the amount of thought you put into these mostly-unseen-to-the-audience details.

[Cordial Nova]

7618139

They've just not been in the story yet. (Although both will be appearing in later chapters.)

[Cross Lament]

the planet of Really Good Drugs.

That's one way to describe Equestria, I suppose...

Still loving all of the technical detail that goes into this story.

[Cordial Nova]

7617083

Actually, the Imperial Navy works in a shirt-sleeve environment - no full suits and standard atmosphere.

When I back-enveloped this, my numbers suggested that if you get absurdly lucky and a munition just glances off gently enough to hole the compartment, then decompression will generally be slow enough that you've got plenty of time to leave the compartment and/or don (the rest of) your suit; whereas if you're struck fully by a munition moving at space-intercept velocities, the energies involved are such that it won't matter whether The Charred And Splattered Red Paste Formerly Known As You was suited up or not, and all the air's gone anyway for fire purposes.

And the magnitude of the numbers also suggests, at least to me, that whatever damping or transmitting effects the air might have are going to end up lost in the rounding, where high-energy penetrating strikes are concerned.

[Xepher]

Looking forward to more. As has been said, I love the details you put into this.

[steelthunder]

7720342
Id rather not imagine anything like felicia day... But alright.

[Lakeguy]

7718126 I was asking why they're not listed in the Dramatis Personae.

[Cordial Nova]

7723353

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear: I'm adding characters to the Dramatis Personae as I write the chapters they're mentioned/encountered in, so until they show up in the story, they won't be listed there.

[Lakeguy]

7723368
7723368 Ok, got it.

[Cordial Nova]

7720386

I consulted my imagination again tonight, and this time it suggested a [tall, pointy-eared, red-haired] Beth Riesgraf, instead, as more fitting. But honestly, I'm not all that visual a writer. Feel free to imagine as you like within the few parameters I nail down - neither of us will mind!

[steelthunder]

7725735 any ETA on updates? I love your story, and I am very interested in your original universe. I've always wanted to make my own but im not that great of a writer, I struggle with forcing myself to write things down, and i get anxiety over being too similar to other works of fiction.

[Cordial Nova]

7726571

That would be... now.

(Sorry for the long delay, and glad you're enjoying the story/universe. Sometimes the words flow, and sometimes it's like trying to drag a truck along with your teeth, and this last month and a half, for me, has been very much the latter. Darn temperamental writer-brain. )

[MAD-3R]

1. And while they were much less of a problem for her than for most ponies, the contents of the bottle of migraine pills in the lower left-hand drawer of the Glorious Solar Desk had dwindled somewhat more frequently on those days on which Twilight was feeling particularly creative.

Would there happen to have been a fifth of scotch in that drawer as well for when Twilight had a true master stroke of genius?

[Cordial Nova]

8509287

The scotch is there for when Twi had an idea that she could take straight from concept to horn.

(They still haven't found the inside of the summer breakfast parlor.)

[Bugsydor]

Although, in fairness to her, she was trying to figure out how to say "hugged by an adorable purple unicorn" on an Exoplanetary Biological Contact Report without the home office assuming that she'd found the planet of Really Good Drugs.

Adorable and hilarious.

And hey! It's good to see a fellow purveyor of octal in horse words. Oh dear I confused a lot of people with it.