Prologue
The cyan pegasus mare leaned against the bar, sipping her fifth cider. Her ears flicked toward the sound of the city’s hourly bell, chiming the second hour of the afternoon. With a twitch of her head she flipped her unkempt rainbow-coloured mane out of her eyes, and glanced at the bar’s hourglass. The barstallion, a unicorn with a blue coat and brown mane, walked over to it. Reaching up with a forehoof, he flipped it over, allowing the sand grains within to fall into the empty bulb. Sighing, the mare drained her mug in a single pull before tapping the bar and glancing at the barstallion. He raised an eyebrow at the collection of empty mugs in front of the pegasus, shaking his head before collecting them. She rolled her eyes and slumped onto her barstool.
“Was one of those for me?” asked a cheerful voice with a refined, almost posh accent.
“Tavi. Finally,” responded the pegasus. “You know how I hate waiting.”
A grey-coated, dark grey-maned earth pony mare slid onto the stool next to the pegasus then waved to the barstallion that she wanted a drink. “What’s wrong with waiting? All good things come to she who waits.”
The mare rolled her eyes. “Octavia, I’ve been waiting for two hours,” she said through gritted teeth. “I am not a patient mare.” She glared at the barstallion when he gave a mug of cider to her seatmate. “Did you at least find what you were looking for?”
“Have I ever let you down, Rainbow?” asked Octavia. Rainbow opened her mouth to respond, but Octavia quickly added, “And your birthday doesn’t count. That wasn’t my fault.”
Rainbow looked askance at her. She seemed about to reply, but apparently thought better of it. The two got up from the bar and made their way to a booth along the wall, away from prying eyes and eavesdropping ears.
“Well?” asked Rainbow, her ears forward, eyes alert. “Had your contact heard anything?”
“Yep. The twins are being sent out somewhere near Mount Argent,” said Octavia. “On the down-low, it would seem. It took my contact a while to find somepony who knew anything.”
“Mount Argent?” said Rainbow, “I wouldn’t have thought Duke Shining Armor wanted anything to do with Svengallop, not after that whole incident with the orphanage.”
“Hence the hush-hush, presumably,” said Octavia. “The bad news is that they're not taking one of the Duke’s airships out there, and they’ll be leaving on the third hour.”
“Great,” replied Rainbow with a roll of her eyes. “That leaves us with less than an hour to check out about four dozen private and mercenary ships.”
“And the good news,” said Octavia, as though Rainbow had not spoken, “is that I already know which ship they’ll be taking.”
Rainbow rolled her eyes again, getting sick of the motion. “Well, why didn't you say so? What are we still doing here?”
“Well, I’m having a cider. I don’t know about you.”
Rainbow snorted out a breath, glaring at Octavia. Octavia’s eyes widened in mock terror, before she finished her mug and made her way back to the bar, fishing out her coin bag as she went. After a brief discussion with the barstallion, she glanced back at Rainbow and raised an eyebrow. Rainbow merely smirked, pointed a wing at the hourglass, and left the tavern. Octavia waved a dismissive hoof at her and left a small pile of coins on the counter before following her out.
She found Rainbow leaning on the wall outside the tavern, looking towards the skyport. She was holding a wing before her face, the primary feathers spread, and Octavia could see the magnification effect Rainbow’s wind fury had induced between the flight feathers. “You’re looking for Soaring Scavenger. She’s a highly modified light-freight hauler, berthed at bay six on the northern pier, about halfway along.”
Rainbow shifted her gaze to the northern pier of the skyport, muttering to herself as she counted out berths, before her eyes widened in shock. “Highly modified, no kidding. I can see at least eight gunports from here, and I barely even need Tank’s help for those!”
“I’ve been meaning to ask, why do you call your wind fury Tank of all things?” asked Octavia.
“Because he takes the form of a tortoise,” replied Rainbow. “Why do you call your wood fury Evans? And your earth fury Kazumi?”
“It’s kind of… complicated,” said Octavia.
Rainbow raised an eyebrow at her. When it was clear that Octavia had nothing more to say on the matter, she asked, “So what do we know about the Scavenger?”
“She’s captained by Black Strap,” replied Octavia. “A brute of an earth pony who leads the crew in acts of piracy, though they’ve been known to hire out as mercenaries on occasion.”
“Like today.”
“Like today, exactly.”
Rainbow folded her wing and dismissed her fury, the ghostly form of a tortoise briefly visible as the crafting dissolved, and the pair of ponies began to make their way towards the skyport. “So, what’s the plan?”
“This is your mission, Auditor Dash,” Octavia replied. “What would you suggest?”
Rainbow took a moment to consider her options before replying. “I’m thinking we should get to the base of the pier,” she began. “You have Kazumi keep other earth furies from sensing us, while I have Tank keep pony eyes from seeing us. When the coast is clear, you use Evans to open up a hole in the hull, and we sneak aboard and get any papers and stuff the twins have. Then we sneak off and report back to the High Lady. In and out in ten seconds flat.”
"I like it. Simple. Easy to remember.”
“So I have your approval, Auditor Melody?”
“Absolutely,” Octavia Melody replied. “Not bad for your first outing.”
“Let’s hold off on the celebrations, Tavi,” said Rainbow. She ignored her companion’s pout and continued. “We didn’t come all the way to Jewelport just to make a plan. We still need to actually get the proof that Svengallop is up to something nasty.”
The pair made their way to Jewelport Skyport, and snuck into the shadows at the base of the northern pier. The pier was designed to also serve as a warehouse for any cargo on- or off-loaded by visiting airships, which berthed at bays at roof level. Since most airships were at least three decks deep, and most airship captains preferred to not smash their keels into the ground every time they pulled into port, the pier-roof was five floors above the ground. The upshot of these design considerations was that there were few ponies about at ground level, and the pair of Auditors had little difficulty avoiding notice as they made their way toward bay six and the underside of Soaring Scavenger.
Rainbow flicked out her wings and made a minor effort of will, instructing Tank to blur the air around Octavia and herself, rendering them all but invisible to prying eyes. Octavia, meanwhile, tapped the ground with a forehoof, communing with her earth fury. She waited a moment for Kazumi to respond, then nodded to Rainbow. Rainbow murmured to Tank, willing him to bring her the sounds from the deck of the airship suspended above them. She was about to gesture to Octavia when she felt a tremor pass underhoof.
Rainbow whirled to look at her partner, her eyes wide and ears drooping, alarmed at the earthcrafted probe. Octavia was already turning this way and that, looking for the earth crafter who had found them through his concealment crafting.
Without warning, the earth itself leapt up and tried to grab hold of the operatives. Octavia was flung upward and knocked her head on the keel of Soaring Scavenger, but Rainbow had the reflexes of a flyer. She dodged the grab and called Tank to her wings, the tortoise form of the wind fury flickering into sight as Rainbow dispelled the invisibility veil in favour of raw speed.
Rainbow knew she could escape, she held every speed record on the Equine Academy books. Speed did her little good, however, when somepony up on the deck thought particularly quickly and threw a cloud of salt crystals over her. Tank’s form disintegrated, the fury’s essence scattered by contact with the salt. The agony of it was enough to make Rainbow to scream in pain even before she crashed to the ground.
The last thing she saw before passing out from the agony was a pale yellow unicorn mare approaching, her eyes narrow with malice.
Rainbow awoke in a tub of water, with more water showering over her face. She spat some of it out from her mouth, noting the salty taste. She shook her head to clear the water, only for yet more to fall. Rainbow tried to clamber out of the tub, but some unseen force held her hooves and wings in place. She willed Tank to come to her, but felt nothing from the fury.
“Don’t bother trying to get out, windcrafter,” said a mare’s voice. “That’s saltwater you’re in. Your wind fury may as well not exist. And I won’t let you out until I’m told.”
Rainbow turned to the source of the voice, barely able to make out a yellow shape through the water streaming over her face. “Let me go!” she demanded.
The mare laughed at that. “You don’t get to tell me when to let you out!”
“Wait,” said Rainbow. “Was that you I saw before, just after the salt? You’re with the twins, aren't you? And is this shower your watercraft? Would you cut it out?”
“She most certainly is with us,” came a stallion’s voice.
“And she will not stop the shower,” came a second stallion’s voice, almost identical to the first. “After all, we don’t want you escaping now, do we Flim?”
“Certainly not, Flam. Keep that water going, Moondancer my mare,” replied the first stallion.
Rainbow looked around at the newcomers, tilting her head forward to try to keep the saltwater out of her eyes. The new arrivals were a pair of pale yellow unicorn stallions bearing red manes and tails with white highlights. They wore white undershirts and blue striped vests, and each was armed with a spear. They were almost identical but for the moustache one grew. “The twins themselves, Flim and Flam. Or is it Flam and Flim? I never could be bothered enough to care which of you is which.”
“Before you say something you might regret later on,” began one brother.
“Perhaps you should hear our offer,” continued the other.
Octavia walked into the room, completely unbound. “You should listen to them, Rainbow. Not that you have much of a choice.”
Rainbow frowned in confusion. “Octavia? What’s going on?”
“We’re giving you the chance to join us,” replied Octavia. “The chance to serve Duke Svengallop, to prove your loyalty to him before he takes the throne.”
“Tavi,” Rainbow said, averting her eyes and lowering her ears. “You traitor. How could you betray the High Mare like this?”
Octavia moved to look Rainbow directly in the eye. “I’m doing this to save Ponera from Granny Smith.”
“You think you’re saving Ponera from our own High Mare?” said Rainbow, incredulous. “What in the name of Tartarus are you talking about?”
“Look at what she has us doing, Rainbow Dash!” cried Octavia. “We’re here spying on the dukes, when we should be looking out for the safety of the ponies of Ponera!”
“If the Duke Svengallop wasn’t trying to overthrow the High Mare, maybe we wouldn’t have to be spying on him!”
“If Granny was a capable High Mare,” began Octavia, “then Svengallop’s plans would never have been able to get as far along as they have. Ever since Clean Leaf died she’s been obsessed with political intrigue at the expense of the well-being of the ponies of Ponera. The fact that there has been so much political infighting for the past few years is proof that she’s past her prime and it’s time for her to step down. And everypony knows Blueblood is a fool, we can’t let him take the throne. If she won’t step aside of her own accord, then for the good of the citizens of Ponera somepony needs to help her down from the throne so that a stronger leader can take her place.”
“You’re a traitor, Octavia,” whispered Rainbow, turning away from her former friend. “Get out.”
“You’ll come to see things our way, Rainbow,” said Octavia. “All you need is time. Come on you three. Let’s leave her to her thoughts.”
Octavia led Flim, Flam, and Moondancer from the room, and the room itself shuddered for a moment. Rainbow watched the four traitors to her nation turn right, moving down the hallway and out of sight.
The shudder had stopped, but Rainbow still felt a sense of motion, of turning and then acceleration. “I must be on the airship, then.” She looked at the source of the water still showering down on her head. It was coming from a blob somehow floating above her head, continually replenished by a tendril linking it to the water in the tub. “I guess that Moondancer mare knows her watercrafting. I’ll never get through to Tank through all this saltwater.”
The water continued to cycle despite Moondancer’s absence. Rainbow sighed, and lay her head on the edge of the tub. The water blob followed her, ensuring her head was salted enough to block her access to her wind fury at all times. Rainbow arched a brow at the blob. She could only respect the skill of the crafting, even if she was annoyed by the persistence of the rain.
The water continued to shower over Rainbow’s head, but now that her head was over the side of the tub, some of that water began to drip over the outside. When Rainbow spotted the growing puddle, she began to feel hope again. All she had to do was wait until enough water had rained out of the tub for her body to be exposed to the air.
Rainbow tried to contain her hope and excitement. Watercrafters could sense emotion in those nearby, and wrapped as she was by Moondancer’s water fury Rainbow had no doubt that the mare could could feel her emotions. However, once the water level had lowered enough that Rainbow could once again feel Tank, her hope surged - only to be replaced with fear when she heard Moondancer’s warning cry from above.
Rainbow pulled on Tank, willing him to push his way between herself and the water. She felt agony through her bond with the fury when his essence came into contact with her salt-soaked coat, but she forced her way through it. Air surrounded her, and Rainbow felt the grip of the water fury slacken. She drew Tank to her wings and flapped as hard as she could, throwing her fury at the tub, sending the water flying out of the tub in a massive spray that soaked everything in the room. At the sudden dispersal of the tubload of water and its attendant fury, Moondancer screamed in pain loudly enough for Rainbow to clearly hear, even through the shock of the salty spray dispersing her own fury.
“Well, that scream came from above, so the stairs must be this way,” Rainbow muttered to herself as she bolted through the doorway and turned to the right, the direction her captors had gone. Her choice of direction was rewarded with the sight of stairs leading up to the deck, and Rainbow poured on the speed and galloped up the stairs to the quarterdeck of the airship.
Not wanting to stop and chat, she leaped over the gunwales and called the salt-weakened Tank back to her wings. Rainbow tried to keep her speed up, but the fury was barely strong enough to even keep her in the air. She angled this way and that, dodging blasts of flame from Soaring Scavenger’s firecrafters. As she descended from the airship, Rainbow had Tank divert some of his efforts into another veil of invisibility before any windcrafters could get themselves airborne. Not yet accustomed to Tank’s salt-weakened state, she nearly fell from the sky when her fury almost collapsed, too weak to split into a second, completely different crafting.
Thinking quickly, Rainbow cancelled the veil, instead turning to fly under the airship. She calmed herself and ensured there was nopony looking her way, before willing Tank to launch her up, over the rim of Soaring Scavenger’s envelope.Now on soaring straight up on a ballistic trajectory, she had Tank focus his efforts exclusively on invisibility just in time to avoid notice on her way past the deck of the airship. Reaching the apex of her flight, Rainbow spotted a point in the rigging at the aft end of the envelope that should be able to hold her weight without distorting any of the rigging too obtrusively, and angled her wings to aim for it.
Setting down under her veil, Rainbow willed Tank to extend the tiniest sound channel she could manage to the deck. “I hope their windcrafters aren’t as good as me,” she muttered as she strained her ears to hear the words her wind fury relayed to her.
“Sorry, sir,” panted a voice Rainbow did not recognise. “We lost her.”
“Her wind crafting is too good.” This voice Rainbow recognised as Octavia. “She’s too fast for anypony not ready for her. Even with her fury weakened by the salt, once she was airborne there was nothing any of us could do.”
The next voice was cold, cruel, and unyielding. “And just how was our pretty little prisoner allowed to get airborne in the first place, hmm?”
“Whatever she did must have disrupted Moondancer’s fury very quickly,” replied one of the twins.
“Look at her, she’s still unconscious,” finished his brother.
“Well,” said the cold voice, “now what? She’s off to warn everypony what you’re up to.”
“No, she’s not,” Octavia replied. “She doesn’t even know our destination - she thinks we’re going to Mount Argent. And if she did know where we were going, there’s no way she can beat us to Cliffside - even she can’t keep up the speed for over two hundred miles. Besides, even if Rainbow knew to watersend a warning through to the Eyrie, Coloratura doesn’t have the resources to track us down. Have somepony take a message to Duke Svengallop warning him that Dash escaped, let him worry about her. As for us, Captain Black Strap, take us east until we’re out of sight of Jewelport, just in case she’s watching us. Then set a course for Cliffside Eyrie.”
Satisfied that nopony would be expecting her to be aboard the airship, Rainbow dismissed the sound channel and willed the envelope’s lifting windfuries to ignore her. She smirked to herself while she secured herself to the rigging and settled in for a long flight.
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Fair warning, I've read Codex Alera several times, so my comments are going to be laced with nitpicks about fidelity to the source material.
That said,
Superb prologue. You actually had me wondering how close you'd be following the Codex Alera, and I heartily approve of the role you've cast Rainbow Dash in. Nopony could be a better Amara, at least in terms of skill. And I can see why Granny Smith would be a logical... High Mare.
Octavia as Fidelias is going to be... odd in my mind simply due to her name.
My biggest issue here, however, is, so far as I understand furycraft, water doesn't counter air, so water would be useless for containing a windcrafter. You half-bury them and sprinkle dirt and salt on them. Granted, being on the airship makes the burying part impossible, but sticking Dash in a barrel of salt would've been more believable than the water tub.
This has the makings of a great adaptation. I'm going to keep reading and try to keep my ranting to a minimum in future comments. The water thing just made me
a lot. Sorry.
8316315
Yeah, Rainbow as Amara was kind of obvious, wasn't it? As for Octavia as Fidelius... come to think of it, I can't quite remember why I picked her. My first idea was Cheese Sandwich just for the shear WTF value, but I just couldn't get the characterisation right. Having Octavia in the role made it a bit easier.
I can certainly see where you're coming from with the countercrafting trap, but I think it's just that I interpreted Amara's imprisonment a little differently - she was out of direct contact with the air, and so couldn't windcraft. I've simply recreated that concept with water instead of earth. In hindsight, I probably should have made it salt water. Maybe I'll fix that at some point.
As for nitpicking, I don't mind as long as it's thought out and civil.
8316315
Alrighty, there we go. I've salted the water, and tweaked Rainbow's escape to account for the effects of salt on Tank.