Chapter 1

The race for Mount Everhoof had begun well before Cirrus’s survey team had returned from the frozen wasteland known as Yakyakistan.

The real race began one fateful afternoon in May, at approximately fifteen minutes before two. Before then, I was nothing more than a tinkerer who lived on the outskirts of Canterlot. Not the nice ones high up on the mountain, but the real rundown parts at the base of the Canterhorn.

I had set up shop in the area only a few moons before. It wasn’t ideal real estate; quite a bit of the plaster on the walls was peeling off and half the lighting didn’t work; but for the price, it was something I could afford on a tinkerer’s budget. Plus, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t fix up on my own.

For those first few months, business was slow. Every once in a while, I’d get someone coming in with a busted drainpipe or a burnt out socket, but nothing particularly interesting. Most of my time was spent either fiddling with wind-up toys or tearing up the walls to fix faulty wiring. Mostly the former.

I happened to actually be doing something fix up the shop the afternoon that my life changed. Not that I had much choice; after one too many showers, the piping in my bathroom decided to give. With a dry mane and a slowly flooding basement, I headed out to my workshop to grab my toolbox and a few pieces of copper pipe that had been sitting around collecting dust.

I had just gotten the water shut-off when I heard the doorbell ring. ‘Really? Why couldn’t this wait until later?,’ I muttered to myself as I grabbed a dishtowel and wiped down my sopping wet coat. Water still dripping off of my cold wet haunches, I stumbled my way up the basement stairs.

Standing in the corner of my workshop was a tall, handsome stallion with a coat the color of the setting sun. He obviously had some years on him; there were faint traces of grey in his burnt orange mane. There was an air of authority to him; but yet, at the same time, he seemed not to have a care in the world. None of this mattered to me at the time; all I wanted was to know what he could possibly want that could be more important than me unflooding my basement.

“Ahem,” I grunted, “Can I help you, sir?”

He jumped at the sound of my voice, dropping the wind-up mouse he had been playing with. Clamoring to pick it up, he said, “S-sorry about that! My deepest apologies. I didn’t see you there.” He glanced up and down at me. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

I raised my eyebrow and sighed. “No, not at all. Just trying to keep my basement from flooding; nothing important.” He hesitantly approached me as I made another futile attempt to dry off my coat.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I just need to get my sextant repaired, but I suppose it can wait…” He hastily pulled the strap on his saddlebag, sending pieces of bronze on the floor in front of me. If this was the sextant he was talking about, it was definitely going to need more than just a simple repair. With another heavy sigh, I gathered the pieces and brought them over to my workbench.

“Well, I’m not sure if I can repair it, but I’ll see what I can do. Come back in an hour and If it’s repairable, I should have it done by then.” I shooed him out the door without much protest. Alone in my workshop, I grabbed my soldering iron, fastened my goggles to my head, and set to work.

Despite it being in a few million pieces, the craftsmanship of the device was astounding. Along with the usual degree lines on it, the body of the device was intricately carved with fantastic imagery; a coiling dragon, the ferocious cerberus, and- no, it couldn’t be. Nopony of that stature would have any reason to be in the slums of Canterlot.

For it’s condition, I made surprisingly quick work of it. Other than a loose screw, the only real damage was to the mirrors; easy enough a fix. I opened a small compartment on my workbench and pulled out a basket full of mirrors; pulled out a mirror that most closely matched the broken one, and flipped down the magnifiers on my goggles.

Now that the sextant was together, I finally could get a good look at all the carvings on the body. As I soldered the mirror into place, the carving that had caught my eye earlier became quite apparent on the outside of the telescope. It wasn’t a well known emblem, but the crest with a mountain in the background and a compass rose in the foreground was something that my grandfather had told me about when I was a colt.

My observations were interrupted by the door opening behind me. I hurriedly set the device down on the counter and turned around to see the stallion from earlier returning. Unlike earlier, however, he looked over his shoulder and quickly slammed the door behind him. He hurried over to the counter and asked, “Well, how much do I owe you? I don’t care if it’s fixed or not, but make it quick.”

In his panic, his saddlebag had come undone, spilling a pile of maps and other assorted documents onto the floor. Trying my hardest to ignore it, I fumbled around the workbench and grabbed the workbench. “Umm… twe-thirty bits! Yes, thirty bits exactly.”

He dug his muzzle into his saddlebag and threw a bag of coins at me without hesitation. “Hopefully that’ll be enough to cover it,” he panted as he gathered up his papers and haphazardly threw them back into his saddlebag. “Now, if you’d excuse me, I’d better be going. Do you happen to have a back entrance I could leave through?”

“No,” I spurted as I levitated the sextant into the other side of his bag. “But why would you need to leave out the back anyway? I know this is a little shadier than the rest of the city, but it isn’t that scary.”

“I-it’s nothing,” he insisted, nervously scanning the room. “Could I just use your bathroom quickly? I’ll be out in a few minutes. No need to worry about me hiding in there for hours. Just a quick, ahem, what’s it called…”

“Just stop it already!” I slammed my hoof on the table, spilling the bag of bits all over the counter. “There’s obviously something going on here, and I demand to know what it is.”

He wiped his brow and gave a nervous laugh. “Very well, but I’d prefer to discuss this somewhere a little less… exposed. Perhaps you have a dark corner in your basement we use?”

“Flooded.” I thought about the layout of my home, considering where we could quietly discuss without being interrupted. The basement was flooded, attic was infested by bats, first floor, was easily accessible to anyone off the streets, but my study on the second floor…

“Follow me.” I floated the latch on the door closed and swept the bits on the counter into the drawer. Scanning the room for anything else out of place, I grabbed my lockbox and ushered the stranger upstairs before locking the stairwell door behind me.

We rounded the corner and headed past the stacks of unopened boxes from the move. Even if my workshop was a fully stocked if untidy mess, the rest of the house appeared as if no one had been living in it. I unlocked a door at the end of the hall and ushered him into my study.

At least it was supposed to be a study. In reality, other than an antique globe in the corner and a worn-out desk next to the window, the room could have been any other room in my house. I flipped the light switch and pounded the wall until the lights flickered on. The stranger glanced around the room, breathed a sigh of relief, and dumped his papers onto the desk.
Upon closer examination, the place names on the map made little sense to me. ‘Yakyakistan’ was scrawled in the corner of one of the maps, but other than that, the only thing I could make out was that wherever this ‘Yakyakistan’ was, it was a ridiculously mountainous land. I pushed the maps around on the desk, revealing a letter with the same emblem I had seen on the compass.

“Now, that we’re out of the way, I probably should introduce myself.” He dug a business card out of saddlebag and floated it in front of me. “My name is August Ember, representative of the Canterlot Branch of-”

“The Celestial Society of Adventurers.” I paused a second to take it all in. All the stories my grandfather had told me of high society intrigue and fantastical foreign adventures, could they be true? I couldn’t believe it.

He nodded solemnly. “So I see you’ve heard the stories.” He pulled another object out of his bag, this time a tiny pin with a compass rose on it. “Since you’ve been kind enough to shelter me for now, I’ll give you this. It’ll let any other members of the society know that you’re trustworthy. It’s the least I can do to repay this small kindness… what’s your name?”

“Needlenose.”

He let out an indignant snort. “My apologies. That’s just a very unfortunate name. Fitting, but unfortunate.”

I took the pin and attached it to the strap on my goggles. “It’s actually quite fitting right there,” he said. “Reminds me of the way that one of our former members wore his on his aviator goggles. He was a kooky old fellow, but he passed away a few years ago. What was his name again? I think it was Booker, or maybe Ba-”

His ramblings were cut off by a loud clattering downstairs. Not clattering like when the generator knocks something over in the shop, but more like the sound of shattering glass, which was strange because the only glass in my shop was the windows… Beads of sweat rolling down my neck, I put a nervous ear to the ground and listened.

August quickly followed suit. “Please don’t let it be them,” he whispered to me. Trying my best not to panic, I paid close attention to the sounds downstairs. Whoever was down there, they were certainly making a mess of the place: Every few seconds I heard something or other smash against the floor.

A cold, dry voice spoke up from below. “We know you’re in here, August! Just hand over the findings and nopony gets hurt.” Whoever spoke let out a chuckle fitting their voice. “Probably.”

“It’s them.” August quickly stood up and galloped to the desk, throwing its contents into his saddlebag. “I don’t have a lot of time to explain, but I’m pretty sure you get the gist of what this guy wants with me. I’ll do my best to explain later, but for now, we need to focus on getting to the society headquarters. You have any way of getting to the roof?”

I jolted up and burst through the study door. “At the rate they’re going, we have maybe five minutes before they discover us up here. The door is steel reinforced, but if they’re determined, and they sound like they are, I doubt that’ll stop them. Remind me, what exactly is your plan once we get to the roof?” I pushed some boxes out of the way and yanked down the attic stairs.

“Well, given the proximity of the adjacent house, if we could find something that would support our weight and was approximately ten feet long, we should be able to-”

“Less talking, more escaping!” carefully dodging the piles of guano and assorted bits of glass on the floor, we made our across the attic to the roof access door. I didn’t even stop to open the door, knocking the loose metal door off of its hinges.

Downstairs, I could hear them pounding away at the door. In front of us was a gap between my house and the neighbors, his roof about four feet above mine and definitely too far to jump across. The alley below us was a good 20-25 feet below us and littered with assorted construction materials which would not make for a soft landing. There was no doubt in my mind: we were cornered.

“Got any ideas? We certainly could use one about now.” I looked back over my shoulder to see August grabbing some empty flower planters. I had planned on using to grow some zinnias if I ever got my patio fixed up.

He brushed past me and placed them at the edge of the roof directly in front of the doorway, weighing them down with a couple a bricks lying around the rooftop. He then grabbed the door in his teeth and started to drag it across the ground.

“Well, are you going to help me, or are you just going to sit there and gawk while the enemy is breaking down the door?” I ran over to him and helped him pull it into place on top of the planters, creating a completely useless ramp pointing towards my neighbors house. He then ran back through the doorway, gesturing for me to follow him.

We had our backs to the wall when he grabbed me by the shoulders, looked right down into my soul and whispered, “Trust me.” He lined himself up with the doorway, crouched down, and took a deep breath. “Three… two… one… go.” He broke into a full on gallop, running through the door and up the ramp, flying across the gap and landing safely on my neighbor’s roof.

“Don’t hesitate! Just run as fast as you can and you’ll make it!” He screamed. Down below, I heard the sound of a blow torch cutting through steel. I had no idea where the blowtorch had come from, but it didn’t matter. They were coming for us and my life probably depended on me making it to my neighbor’s roof. I took and deep breath and counted to three.

One… Two… Three.

I made a mad dash for the doorway as the stairwell door gave way below me. This was no time for hesitation. The footsteps drew nearer to the attic, but I didn’t stop to think as I galloped onto the ramp and made a leap of faith for the roof.

Apparently whatever forces of nature that had helped August were not nearly as fortunate to me. The ramp had given way under my weight, sending me careening toward the wall in front of me. I barely managed to grab the awning, and was now dangling twenty feet off the ground with a mass of plywood and copper pipe below me.

August rushed to my aid and grabbed my hooves, struggling to pull me up to his level. I knew I should’ve taken my uncle’s advice to stop binge eating carrot cupcakes. I leaned back and tried to swing my back legs up over the awning.

One of my legs got over as eight or ten hooded ponies with horns ready to fire stormed onto the roof. Shocked, I let go of August leaving me dangling by a single leg. A determined if nervous facade came to his face as he grabbed my leg and somehow managed to pull me up to the rooftop.

The masked ponies opened fire, sending shingles and plywood chips flying in the air as we crossed the peak. A stray bullet lodged itself in my rear end, sending a wave of pain through my body and sending tumbling toward the edge of the roof. August tried to grab me, but his hooves were too late as I was sent careening toward the street.

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