Coarse Diamonds

by Darkonshadows

-92-

“Why did I think this was a good idea?” Rarity mumbled out loud to herself, trying to get the Puffle to go where she wanted was a bit hard. She could still see the container she left the unconscious body in, the guy wouldn’t stay down forever… oh and her ride was digging into snow again. The Puffle was possibly eating some of the snow to stay hydrated. “What are you looking for?”

Slowly getting off of the Puffle and trying not to wince at putting pressure on her right leg that was shot through, Rarity looked up at the tunnel above and then down to the mound of snow that was now missing one large wolf robot. She was in a wide cavernous space with a tunnel on the far side of the snow and looking to the left she saw something that looked like a garage entrance, the décor of the facility was Spartan at best and it could be better. They had obviously moved the large robot wolf she had destroyed while she was out cold to the world.

Behind Rarity were the several boxes and crates of supplies she had hidden amongst and the smaller entrance to this facility whatever it was. It made her wonder how nobody found her; it wouldn’t have been that hard to just look in the container. Of course the entrance hadn’t been guarded until after she blacked out in the container, so the humans had to assume she was already in the base and posted a single door guard there.

There was a loud gasp of surprise and Rarity almost went for her material pistol that was one round lighter, she turned to the Puffle to see it was kicking both rear hooves at the air. Slowly the pink puffball pulled out of the snow with a root in its mouth and then it sat down. She started to eat the disgusting looking thing she had dug up that was leaking an eerie orange sludge.

It was only out of mild interest that Rarity watched it consume the root entirely, after which it or she started to eat the snow. It was kind of hard to think of it as being female. So it could find food and stay hydrated, but it was too dumb for anything other than its own survival. It was interesting to watch at least, it made her wonder how the species procreated considering the fur is thick enough to stop material rounds or machine gun bullets, some of which hit the Puffle in the face where its fur had to be the thinnest.

“How do I make you go where I want you to go?” Obviously Rarity was not riding the Puffle back to the tunnel she fell from after dealing with the alpha sized robot. Riding into the tunnel at the level she was at now was also out as she didn’t think she’d survive a drone swarm right now, the Puffle would undoubtedly survive it somehow. It was becoming clear to her that these creatures were so simple minded that… that thinking of that gave her a good idea. She whistled sharply and lit her horn to cast a very basic spell from the traditional three that all unicorns knew, she had seen it earlier and it only occurred to her now that the Puffle had been staring while she mended her parka. “Hey there, look at this, do you like this?”

Magic missile, levitation and light were the three spells all unicorns knew. Rarity wasn’t particularly good at magic missile since she didn’t have the power to pour on any really damaging force from her horn and her levitation was advanced in so far as she was good at having fine control over many small objects that didn’t weigh much. You could give her a box of needles and she could probably get them moving at sixty or seventy miles an hour going a circle around her. As such Rarity’s levitation spell might have been short range and only capable of handling so much weight of a single particular object, but she could get quite lethal with it. All it would take is giving the objects momentum and then releasing her hold of them at the right moment. A pistol used less magic to levitate and shoot though and that’s why she trained with them as a weapon of choice, she only need to grip the pistol in three places with her magic, handle, barrel and trigger. What she was currently doing was using the highly modular light spell.

A light spell was the easiest spell for any unicorn to achieve, for it was very hard to get wrong in any way, shape or form. Light can be given form in a multitude of ways, speaking of light her helmet’s lights weren’t on and she really didn’t need them to be as this place was quite well lit. There were lights above the garage and door entrances pointing outwards. Her light spell was more specific than that.

A light spell could just be the unicorn’s horn lighting up, shooting out a cone of light, a cylindrical beam of light, creating an orb of light at the tip of the horn, creating a ball of light that moved where the unicorn needed it and more. The light could be magically shaped to go in any direction; it could be as strong as sunlight or even be a black light if you were a detective pony. The more complicated the light the more energy it used up, the light spell was quite a versatile spell.

Magic missile taught power, levitation taught control and the light spell taught imagination. Rarity had a lot of control, very little power and her imagination, when she used it, was limitless.

Rarity made sure to concentrate on what she was doing and the Puffle eating the snow stopped when it saw a tiny pink dot in the snow. It sat there for a moment with a bit of snow melting in its open mouth and then it pounced on the spot of light. Moving the dot towards her, Rarity watched as the Puffle followed it clearly fascinated. Once the Puffle was close enough she stopped channeling her magic and carefully climbed onto its suddenly idle back, once again becoming a rather ignored bit of weight.

“Let’s try this again shall we?” Rarity lit her horn and the Puffle looked at the little bit of light excitedly and started to follow it straight towards the door leading into the facility. Once they reached the door Rarity stopped using her magic and the Puffle paused making a confused noise.

Rarity’s assumption that they thought she must have gotten into the facility proper was quickly shot down, that is unless they thought she was capable of entering the password for the door. There was a key pad right next to the door and above it was an idle display screen. The Puffle didn’t seem to be ready to wander off as it kept looking around for the small bit of light Rarity created.

Now looking at the keypad, Rarity slowly thought of an idea. She used the light spell again, but modified it to light one specific thing hoping that at least one person had used the keypad without gloves on. It wasn’t exactly placing a black light on the keypad, but it was close enough as she could see five keys had been used specifically. One, two, three, five and seven were the numbers she had to work with, she had no idea what order to press them in. She also only had one real chance at this; a wrong entry could have someone coming to investigate why there was a wrong entry.

Rarity scrutinized the fingerprints and the side of the door the keypad was. The keypad was on left side of the door. She considered the way an arm would raise and how it would touch the keys on the door, the person was right handed judging by the way the prints were settled. The Puffle was quickly losing interest and Rarity lit her horn once more to keep it in place trying to catch the speck of pink light on the floor excitedly.

“Let’s see, right handed, the human only used one finger when pressing the keys. The angle of approach shows me an idea of how a human would raise their hand to press the first key and the last one. The keys are pressed… I think the first key is two and the last one is five.” Rarity figured this out because the first key was pressed at an angle and the last key had to have been pressed more vertically. So she only had three numbers to figure out. “Why does a number ending in five and beginning with two seem quite familiar? It’s on the tip of my tongue why.”

She studied the keys more closely and thought about the order the keys could be pressed in and her eye for detail eventually made it click for her. She just couldn’t believe it would be that number, because the negative of that number meant...

“Well now, I think I see a theme going on here. Absolute zero in Celsius is minus two, seven, three, decimal point, one and finally… five.” She used her magic to hit each key and waited, what happened next was a bar of light above the door turning green and it slid up and out of the way. “Well Rarity, you are simply genius!”

As Rarity preened at getting the door to open, what was not simply genius was that the Puffle decided to run through the door way to explore a new place with her still straddling it. Beyond the door was a small corridor with two doors, one leading to the garage next door and the one at the end of a reception area like place. The Puffle had slowed down when it saw a humming human vending machine and stopped to stare at it.

Rarity kept her eye on the reception area ahead of them and the fact that it had fortifications and a camera; they were thankfully out of range of the camera so far. Things could only get dicier from here on in, especially if she had to keep the random pink fluffy creature under her from doing something absolutely stupid. That had been a chore so far, trying to stealthily travel through the building would be much harder. This facility required investigating and she was certain the others were doing better than she was, but the Puffle wasn’t exactly a quiet creature to be riding on in this situation as it kept making loud gasping noises at every single new thing it saw.

There was a table and chairs sitting before the armored checkpoint room that could be used as cover during a siege. The décor was once again rather bland and Spartan, blue, white and silver seemed to be the colors of the day, along with that tilted cube symbol and no name for the organization that made this place to speak of. It was rather bland and tasteless really. Some of the walls looked a bit damaged, but on the whole she’d say there had never been a firefight here and this facility had been here for the most part of a year.

Concentrating, Rarity recreated the speck of light and led the Puffle towards the door to the garage near the entrance. The Puffle followed it excitedly and Rarity knew she had long since figured out the best method of controlling her ride, it wasn’t even an effort or magically exhausting.

She moved the Puffle to the side of the door and opened it with her magic and leaned to her left to look through it while making sure to stay careful. There were several vehicles in there, mostly vans or covered truck vehicles and she could see a few humans talking with one another. She quickly shut the door; she really didn’t want to attract any attention to herself.

Destroying the camera or trying to break through the checkpoint station would mean doing the same thing as entering the motor pool beyond the nearby door; thankfully they were too distracted to notice the door opening and closing. What was she going to do now? Wait… light spell! She was getting all kinds of inspirations, but it would be a bit more magic intensive to create light that can bend all other sources of light around her.

“I wonder why no unicorn has thought of this before, I mean sure there are illusions that do the same thing, but they have no effect on technology. Plus there are spells that alter the body so that it can become clear, but this…” Rarity lit her horn and wrapped a light that bent light around her right hoof and watched as it disappeared entirely. It wasn’t very intensive, but it was a bit draining. “It makes me wonder how dumb unicorns really are if we haven’t figured out a thousand uses for this one spell by now. I’ve always admired stars and other shiny things… I just never considered what light was really capable of before this. The big difference here is that there are so many costlier spells made to do this one specific thing and I can do it with a simple light spell and some ingenuity.”

Rarity expanded the field around her and the Puffle’s body and felt a slightly larger drain on her magic, but it wasn’t bad. It would be worse if she wasn’t at rest on the Puffle, now the real problem came into play… how was she going to steer the Puffle if she had to concentrate her effort on the light spell? With a little bit of sweating, which Rarity obviously didn’t like doing, she managed to create the pink dot of light that attracted the Puffle’s attention by moving a slow circle.

In terms of magic, this was nothing. In the terms of concentration… it was a constant mental effort on her part to cast the same spell twice while the first one was still going. This was on top of the pain from her broken leg and her thigh wound being quite vocal about her current condition, her pain receptors were still firing on all cylinders at least. Now wasn’t a good time to experiment, because this was giving her a bit of a headache and it would be harder to pull off this new form of the light spell while more injured than she currently was. The Puffle started running after the dot which Rarity wasn’t moving at all, it stayed at a set distance ahead of the Puffle all the same.

Rarity quickly dropped the second light spell as soon as they were under the camera; the first was easier to hold on to and the camera didn’t set off any alarms so it worked. It was good news that she learned how to make herself invisible at a fraction of the cost, where even the most studious unicorn would be doing such a spell the hard and overly complicated way with all kinds of convoluted math and equations.

This use of the light spell likely did nothing for Rarity’s smell, body heat, the sounds she made or if she were to walk in soft substances like snow or mud; she’d be rather easy to spot. Then there were motion detectors that could be keyed to specific sizes, like say the size of an Equus Pony. As such there were many drawbacks to that particular use of the light spell; in this instance the camera couldn’t see her as it thankfully didn’t have a heat or motion sensor. Maybe it would have picked up the noise, but without something visible to go off of, the camera wouldn’t set off an alarm. There was also such thing as a magic sensor as well, so the spell wouldn’t even prevent that from detecting her either.

It would have been nice to have at least known this use of the light spell when she met Mind Field and it could be quite useful in many other situations. Against a changeling this kind of thing was all but useless given they can detect emotions and the direction said emotions came from. It was rather situational and Rarity understood that completely, aside from knowing her limitations it made her feel a little like Vera.

She looked up at the camera and waited while dropping the light spell keeping her and the Puffle invisible. She had to save on her magic, because she used that to wield her pistol and couldn’t use all of it up on constantly holding up the stealth field. She timed the creation of the pink dot and moved the Puffle over to the checkpoint and peered into the window from the Puffle’s back.

Rarity saw the switch that opened the door and hit it with her magic causing the door next to her to open and then she swiftly made the Puffle move out of sight of the camera before it was too late. The camera swung back and saw nothing out of the ordinary at the checkpoint, before continuing back to the reception areas table and chairs.

-

They were parked outside the facility in one of the many large cavernous snow fields, on the ceiling looking at one of the sections of the large underground facility.

“This place looks really big.” Idly commented Greta who was working on something with her data pad, she and Ember were on the ceiling again after having been stuck at the very butt end while Gilda had piloted the elongated monstrous machine up the wall to their current position. “The firewalls are too tough, I can’t hack into anything and I can’t really do much without them noticing where we are. I’d be painting a target on all our backsides if I tried anything more than what I already am just probing their systems.”

“Then you got nothing at all then, well that’s no surprise. Humans got their technology to where it is now by hacking, creating viruses, building firewalls and being complete and utter assholes to each other. It’s how they evolve, they take the worst and best of themselves and build on that. Even the most tragic things in their history solved problems; it just takes them a while to get around to the fact that the problem is already solved. Like how they stuck their heads in the sand about cancer for more than a hundred years before someone found out that there was a cure for it, that it was quite readily available and it could even be cheaply mass produced. Humans are kind of assholes and greedy like that, especially those corporations that made all that money off something that they had already solved. Only a fraction of that money that was earned was spent on only alleviating the symptoms and making more money for the filthy rich, said people who bought out the media and practically owned the world at that point. One can imagine the riots that were caused when it was found out that the cure had been actively delayed by a worldwide pharmaceutical company conspiracy for monetary reasons… half the planet devolved into anarchy in under five minutes.” They were also a self destructive race that evolved and changed in many ways both great and terrible, which made them kind of like Griffons and Gilda could respect that. What she couldn’t respect was not actually putting any effort into something once you were paid to do it, griffons did things for money and they did what they were paid for when they gave a price even if they were greedy. Rarity made it hard to be greedy and her altruistic tendencies were rubbing off on the people around her. “So our chances of getting into their system are all but impossible without some kind of backdoor, these guys seem like the kind of professionals. They don’t even leave a name on any of their symbols anywhere. From what I have seen so far, whoever they are they are not advertising themselves very well and that’s dangerous.”

“So do I go in and try to find the others for a quick extraction?” Ember was already getting her EVA suit on and up to her neck, her wings were compressed against her back and she slowly patted her special rifle. All she had to do was put on her helmet and drop out of the Centaur-pede.

“No, wait a moment Ember; I think I might actually have something!” Greta started sending the sudden influx of data to Gilda. “Are you getting this Gilda?”

“Interesting, a map of the facility and all the surrounding tunnels…” It might have mildly impressed Gilda that Greta managed to do this when she said it was practically impossible seconds ago. “How exactly did you get this Greta?”

“I just got back into contact range with my Deus Ex Machina. It looks like my little Viral is still operational, let’s see… I can piggy back their communications using Viral’s tail as a back door. You’d think they would fix that kind of oversight, it’s given me some light access to their systems.” Next to Greta was a very attentive Ember. “I now know where Rarity, Applejack and Saffron are. Marking their current locations, they’re moving so I have to update every minute or so. They’re alive, but I don’t know what their condition is. They all seem to be moving well enough, Applejack and Saffron are causing all sorts of alarms to be raised. They seem to be proving hard to catch thanks to Ar-Mare-Do-Well being good at escaping situations.”

“What about Rover?” It might be selfish of Ember, but she wanted to leave with her entire hoard alive. Every single member of Rarity’s crew mattered to her, they belonged to her and nobody was going to hurt them or take them from her without a response from an aggravated dragon.

“He’s currently right next to Viral and I can see him. I’m putting it up on the screen now.” The screen Greta had previously used to remote control Viral appeared and they could see things from Viral’s view, Viral was currently focused on Rover and beyond him was a group of five guards. It seemed as if security in the upper levels of the facility were heightened thanks to Applejack and Saffron going on a merry rampage to find a place to go where it’s safe. Hallways of security camera’s, enemy MAT drones and humans were in their way and they were somehow successfully bypassing most of it. Probably Saffron’s doing if Greta knew anything about the armor she helped design. “I’ll get in touch with him; thanks to Viral acting as a mobile back door. I just need her to plug directly into a computer to get into some really sensitive data. Such as what is really going on here.”

“Any chance I can meet up with any of them in a timely manner?” Ember wanted to be with at least one scrap of her hoard out in the field and Rarity would be her choice to go after, she was Ember’s centerpiece and she needed her dragon. Psychologically speaking, Ember wanted to preserve and protect her most precious gem first and foremost.

“I can get you either to Rover or Applejack and Saffron, the humans don’t know about Rover’s presence for the time being and I need you to be quiet for a moment so I can stop him from taking a plan of action if he even has one. As for Rarity… she’s further down than us as you can see on this map.” Pushing a single button on her data pad, a map popped up showing Ember where they were in relation to everyone and everything. Personally they knew where their friends were, but talking to them would lead someone to finding their communications line which wasn’t exactly secure at the moment. “The eight towers above, where the blizzards started from, we destroyed the southernmost tower here. We accidentally fell into this tunnel here and I don’t know how everyone got to where they are now, but Rarity is the furthest down from us. She’ll have to use an elevator or at least climb a shaft to meet up with any of us here, here and here. Problem is we can’t actively use our communications or else they’ll discover us immediately, unless they happen to be around Viral who can mask our communications to our friends. So…”

“Operation: Totally Asinine Reason to Dubiously Incite Suffrage?” One could almost hear the upturn of a beak turning into a smirk, at least Gilda was enjoying all this crazy stuff they were getting into and she didn’t have to lift a claw. She already did her awesome stuff, but when the time came she would do some more and until then she could kick back and relax. “Just get Viral to a computer to screw over the system for more information and open communications, we find our people and get them out if needed, find out what our objectives are when it comes to dealing with this facility and from there… the most likely outcome will be glorious if we aren’t stopped in time.”

The facility was at least eighty stories tall and there was one large room that took up thirty stories of space off to the side inside the facility that read as captured product. Greta, Ember and Gilda were sitting above the halfway marker outside one of the sides of the facility which was not a perfectly rectangular or square building. In fact the building was designed and built a bit lopsidedly, but with the surrounding soil and rock for a support structure that didn’t matter much. Rarity was three fourths of the way down deep into the facility, barely two floors up from the Centaur-pede was Rover and lastly Applejack and Saffron were near the top of the facility where there was a lot of heightened security and more of a commotion going on. They even had a read out of the tunnel networks that showed them as almost being a fraction of a mile or so below the surface of the planet. This place looked a bit convoluted to get around and it was large, it must have taken quite some time to build and even get this stuff by the Ponies that started settling on this planet a long while ago.

The underground facility was located dead center in the eye of the blizzards and the seven remaining towers. The humans were definitely connected to the problems plaguing the Ponies that had settled on this planet and happened to be doing a good job of damaging the climate while doing so. Once they had all the information of what was going on, then they’d have a pretty decisive course of action as Gilda stated.

-

“Rover, drop whatever you’re doing and pay attention.” Hearing the sound of Greta’s voice caused Rover to jump slightly, but instead of being fearful he turned to the robotic fox with a smile.

“Rover is thinking you are having good news?” Rover backed away from the corner and was carefully watching his surroundings; he had his ears listening for the sign of any incoming drones. They had a very annoying pitch to them as they flew around and he was thankful that his friends were okay. Well as far as he knew, it was certain that Greta was okay at least. “What do you need Rover to do?”

“About that, we don’t have entirely good news, but at least we know everyone is alive at the moment. We just can’t communicate with any of them; you however are safe because Viral found you.” There was a large amount of positivity in Greta’s voice and the fox looked to be smiling as if mirroring the griffon’s mood. “I can probably bypass or disable security by getting Viral close enough to them, but to really do some interesting things Viral needs to reach a working computer intact. The humans are going to be the real problem as they’re currently in the way of that.”

“What am I to be doing, there are one too many of them for me alone.” Rover wasn’t dumb, he had been getting smarter and learning a lot as of late while under fire. He was more curious as to why they were wearing parkas over their EVA suits, but he guessed it was some kind of precaution or added protection. He wasn’t one to question the Boss Lady on the ridiculousness of it.

“That’s just it, you’re not alone Rover. I’m going to be with you in spirit, but if you could do us a very small favor and dig down right about here at a fifteen degree angle… then you’ll have all the help you’ll need.” The robotic fox with Greta’s voice coming from it moved over and pointed to a specific spot with its paw, why let the Diamond Dog forget he had a very unique talent in this situation. He wasn’t exactly constrained by the myriad of tunnels and could reach them in no time. “She’s blue, scaly and itching for a fight from the looks of it. Viral will wait here until you get back.”

Rover had always thought of dragons as the scariest things in Equestria, as for now though? He wasn’t entirely sure who to be rightfully scared of. For one he was no longer on planet Equus and two his life of being a simple minded Diamond Dog was over with, he had been too deeply changed by the most dangerous individuals imaginable and one of them was his beloved Boss Lady. Oh and he was also friends with a dragon, so yeah he was now part of the scariest group of people you could imagine, well at least in Rover’s mind. You’d almost never think they were a bunch of merchants, crafters and entertainers with the way they got things done.

Rover dug down in the way the robot;s paw pointed and slowed down when he neared a thin spot in the ice and snow, with a few more swings of his suit covered paws he came out right above an upside down Centaur-pede. Standing on the belly waiting for him was Ember in her EVA suit carrying three weapons, a rocket launcher, an energy pistol and her whip upgraded Trailblazer rifle. She leapt up and Rover helped to pull her up and into the hole he had dug, he started to dig his way back up to Viral and the Centaur-pede started to move away to let the snow fall out of the hole.

“Just point me at these road blocks Rover!” A confident Ember followed Rover right back to the turn in the icy tunnel where Viral awaited them. “They won’t be around for much longer.”

Author's Note:

This will get less and less interesting as it goes on... but that's because I'm the one that has to write all this. I'm pretty sure I'm at my halfway point for a million word fic, but it's my concern that this won't be too terribly interesting going forward.

Rest assured that the combine total of every fan fiction I've ever wrote would actually add up to a million words. I really want to make this fan fiction a million words itself. I can't do worse than 'Twilight' with it's sparkling vampires right?

Developments are still going on in space even when I'm not focusing on them and Rarity is busy here. I've always figured that there are multiple ways to do a magic spell, Rarity just found one of the unique ways to use a light creating spell. Doesn't mean she's unstoppable, it just means she needs to pick and choose when she uses it for the ultimate surprise factor.

Magic Missile doesn't have much versatility and it's a blunt instrument that just says use more power to do more damage. You can maybe make it heat seeking or fire off a shotgun blast of missiles.

Levitation is the bread and butter all unicorns learn for the excessive usefulness of it, such as manipulating things on the other side of glass without needing to physically touch something. It's the most common used spell among unicorns and is quite frankly the most common way they get a grasp on controlling their magic.

The thing is though they have a limitation as they are the anchor point for the spell, meaning that lifting themselves requires an exponentially massive amount of magic. Other spells would be better utilized for flight than levitating themselves, like an anti-gravity spell.

Now the light spell, a spell that generates light. It seems so simple and yet it has so many incredible uses depending on how inventive you could get with it. Imagine visual illusions that have an effect on machinery, instead of illusions that just affect the mind of only biological targets. The invisibility Rarity uses. The normal use of shedding light on a situation. You can get the ability to see things that aren't there with specific spectrum of light. There is the possibility of making light that only the user can visibly see, you can see in the dark when your opponent can't. Creating blinding flashes. Using light to play with cat like entities. Creating a targeting line for a magic missile to travel along. The most magic intensive use I can think of for the light spell would be what Radiance of the Power Ponies does, which is the use of hard light constructs.

Comments

[Razzy]

Griffons are much, much cuter and fluffier, though.

Good that changelings are peaceful now, then.

Some of the terrorists are about to have a very bad day.

I'm just going to imagine that Chryssie is reenacting Alien back in the orbit, with the attackers playing the Nostromo crew, but without Ripley.

... Gilda is going to blow it all up, isn't she? While laughing maniacally.

'seemed to be the color of the day' - colors

'but on whole' - but on the whole

'In concerns of magic' - In terms of

'In the concerns of concentration… it was' - In terms of concentration... It was '

'assholes to themselves' - to each other

'The eight towers above, were where the blizzards started from' - remove where

'there was on large room that took' - one large room

'This place was looked a bit convoluted to get' - was looking or looked

'robots paw' - robot's paw

'Centaur-pede start to move away to let the snow fall out of the hole' - started