• Published 23rd Jun 2017
  • 8,248 Views, 4,585 Comments

The Olden World - Czar_Yoshi



Equestrian culture loves cutie marks. Filly Starlight Glimmer hates them and never wants one. So, she leaves Equestria.

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Definitely Classified

As Live Wire clashed an energized, sparking sword against Egil's mechanically-projected shield, Gerardo watched from the railing above, eyes half-focused and Off Switch standing disinterestedly by his side. The ponies around him seemed to be enjoying themselves sufficiently to stay out of trouble, and that meant it was as good a time as any to get a handle on recent events: namely, his conversation with Shinespark.

It was safer to assume she was on his side than Herman, Selma or anyone in the Stone District, for certain. But the air had been thick with unshared knowledge, and he had a strong suspicion she wasn't willing to help him purely for his own sake. At the very least, it would be for the sake of ideals.

That was the problem with the knowledge-is-power model Shinespark had confirmed, he mused: it made it impossible to tell whether someone was telling the truth so long as they had any cards left to play, and very rare to both see and identify a showing of true colors, let alone find them useful. Sharpie, for instance, he was reasonably sure had nothing left to hide, but was too weighted down in both personal baggage and information he was unable to share with her to be remotely useful as an ally. Shinespark spoke with conviction and seemed to believe in her words, but openly admitted to hiding uncountable things from the griffon. And finally, there were Maple and Starlight, both of whom were solidly on his side yet even more in need of protecting than he was.

With invisible satisfaction, he patted the sword hilt on his belt: at least that was back where it belonged. Aside from unreasonably maneuverable ponies in armor, it had been both perfectly unstoppable and completely nonlethal for the duration of time he had had it. Arambai had warned him, on that night of departure, to always go armed in Ironridge, and at last he had been reunited with the best weapon adventuring could find.

...Ironically, that meant his advantage would be at its greatest should any warfare or fighting break out. He decided not to think about that.

Down below, Egil managed to shove back Live Wire's assault, thrusting the shield-projector forward with his shoulder. Both stallions stopped, lightly panting, the sword growing dull and the shield sparking and fading from existence.

"Well, well!" Egil wiped his brow, then frowned at the shield. "Looks to me like that's all this little old thing can take without a recharge. What say you we break and look at something else?"

Live Wire grinned, leaning on his sword. "I have more than a few ideas..."

Alighting on the floor beside them, Gerardo tucked in his wings and took two steps forward. "Truly impressive, I must say," he commended, pretending he had been fully invested in the sparring match. "That shield certainly seems interesting. How does it work, if I may?"

"It takes one technical term you don't know and applies it to another, creating a third," Off Switch droned, descending the stairs the easy way. "In layponies' terms, science and magic."

Egil belched. "Well, everyone's gotta start somewhere, right? Listen, bud, here's a crash course, the very basics of the basics." He stepped beside Gerardo, slung one foreleg over the griffon's shoulders, and swung the other wide, as if picturing a vista. "Mana is energy. It gets conducted by stuff... rocks, most of the time. Sedimentary stuff like sandstone is a little worse, garden-variety crystals are a little better, diamonds and real gemstones are great. Pony bones are actually the best, but we don't use those for obvious reasons. Most kinds of wood are poor conductors, and then glass, air and metal don't work at all. Gold is a strange case, so let's not cover that. Starting from higher grades of crystal, you can grind the stuff into a powder and it'll work too, so long as you spread it thick enough. Following me?"

Gerardo nodded. Live Wire didn't respond, absorbed in tinkering with a weapon.

"Swell. Now, the more mana you've got in something, the more resistant it is to holding more, and the better grade of conductor that is, the slower that happens. The idea is that if you put something with a lot of mana and something with a little mana together, they even out... so the way you store the stuff is by taking a conductor, touching it to something with a lot of mana, letting it equalize, and then taking it away and surrounding it by air or metal so it doesn't drain. Then, when you want to use it, you touch it to something else... Simple, right?"

"Hmm!" Gerardo beamed. Between his old boat and past technological endeavors, the workings of mana cores and generation of power were hardly news to him, but Egil seemed to enjoy explaining it, so he played along. "That is, in fact, simpler than I thought it would be."

"Then your expectations were too low." Off Switch strode past, scarf ruffling beneath his sunken eyes. Reaching out with his telekinesis, he lifted the dormant shield device, slid open a hatch on one side, and popped out a moderately-sized hexagonal prism. "It's far more complex than whatever you were thinking. What he said is the amount of information children take to change the batteries in their toys."

Live Wire looked up from his tinkering, grin broad. "Says you and your black boxes. Tell Gerardo about the black boxes, then! Those are batteries, too!"

"...No." Off Switch stared back, straight down his muzzle. "That's precisely why you weren't chosen to work on this project. Information is handled on a need-to-know basis and nobody could trust you with delicate secret-keeping."

Gerardo paused, vaguely sure they were on the verge of discussing something not meant to be discussed... and decided not to intervene.

"He's working on the black boxes, Gerardo," Live Wire said, doing his best to force eye contact. "They're replacements for mana cores that supposedly never need to be recharged. It's scientifically impossible, but they already have proof-of-concept prototypes."

Off Switch scowled. "Stop making foolish, erroneous statements in an attempt to make me correct you and talk about the project."

"As a matter of fact..." Gerardo butted in, wings spread to appear bigger. "I'm all for hearing interesting secrets, but perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to raise tensions in a room full of explosives?"

"That sounds mighty good to me!" Egil agreed, pulling a fresh hexagonal cartridge from a shelf and stuffing it into the vacancy Off Switch had left in the shield. He slid the door closed with a clack, and fired it up, a full-strength dome of energy arcing out once more.

"Thank you," Off Switch sighed, moving back to stand next to a wall.

"Killjoys," Live Wire muttered.

A disgruntled silence ensued, and Gerardo quickly decided to break it with a question about the last successful topic of conversation. "When recharging these cores... mana ultimately comes from the ground, does it not?"

Egil nodded. "That's one of two places. You can also charge them straight from a unicorn horn, though that's hard and not as potent unless you're a really buff mage. But it makes sense that since rock is a conductor, you'd go to the ground to find it, right? Turns out all of the ground is infused with it, and the deeper you go, the more there is. It comes from there, too, so we don't have to worry about no finite supplies."

"Interesting," Gerardo remarked, hoping Off Switch wouldn't cut in again. "I take it this is one of those deeper-is-better types of situations?"

"Yes and no." Egil shrugged. "It does become more concentrated as you go down, but ultimately, you reach a threshold where the rock is so suffused, it conducts better than diamond. Nopony wants to actually bury cores and dig them up to recharge, so we stick long conductive pylons deep in the earth, and hook them up to charging stations. But once you pass that threshold, you stop seeing any benefit from going deeper, so... why bother?"

"The city banned it, too," Live Wire added, licking his lips. "Quite some time ago, in fact. It seems like an odd restriction, considering nobody wanted to do it... except maybe me. 'Just because it's a bad idea doesn't mean nobody will try it,' they said. It's as if they prophesied my existence. I'm almost proud to take it personally!"

"Oh?" Gerardo looked up. "Now I'm curious as to their rationale."

"It's because there's nothing wrong with the present system," Off Switch answered. "Practical experience shows that there's no benefit to going deeper, and we aren't wanting for power in the first place. However, if the concentrations continue to increase with depth at the rate they have been, they eventually reach levels where phenomena we can only theorize would occur. There's always the chance someone would try to bore a deep enough hole to find out."

"And how does the rule go again?" Live Wire asked slyly. "If it's never been broken before, best to find out how much it can take?"

"You're missing the point." Off Switch shook his head. "We can't replicate those conditions in a lab. For all we know, rocks explode when under that much pressure and would kill anyone who attempted to descend, or worse, cause an earthquake under all of Ironridge. And what would you do when concentrations were high enough that the air itself became energized?"

"You wanna know the funner reason?" Egil cut in. "Because the world has all sorts of legends that are thousands of years old about monsters and ancient evil and their ilk that aren't around today, yet never about them being outright destroyed. No one knows where they are, and no one knows what the bottom of the world looks like, if it even has one... See what I'm getting at?"

Live Wire hung his head. "Admittedly, that sounds like too much excitement even for me. Still, it does have some appeal..."

"If that excuse works for you, so be it. What matters are the combined dangers and non-necessity of going down that far." Off Switch shifted his scarf and stared up at the exit, clearly pondering whether it would soon be time to leave.

"Hmm..." Gerardo stood, on the fringes of the conversation. "I'm curious, just what kind of depths are we talking about?"

Off Switch eyed him back. "Several stories is sufficient for normal charging. You could bury a stone beneath a second-level basement and see it charged in a day. For maximum efficiency, you need descend about ten. To see anything truly beyond safe prediction, you would have to bore several miles."

"I... see. Most interesting." Gerardo filed the information away for later, noting its primary use as things Ironridge ponies are superstitious about. "Well, I believe I have seen everything you have shown me. Is there more to do here, or shall we make ourselves elsewhere?"

Egil trotted to the stairs, their metal rungs groaning under his weight. "I might be game for heading home for the evening, I think. It's been a fun night of slacking, but Bardal's gonna kill me if I'm still here when he gets done with rounds!"

"I think I've just had a flash of inspiration for a new combo weapon," Live Wire muttered excitedly, carrying several implements toward a far door in his aura. "It'll be night labbing for me, tonight. Here's a hint: it involves a harpoon and an ammunition clip..."

Both doors clicked shut, and Gerardo suddenly found himself alone... with Off Switch. The stallion stared back at him, unblinking.

"...I suppose I ought to get going myself," Gerardo said awkwardly, shifting his weight between talons.

"Do me a favor," Off Switch interrupted before he could leave. "And don't accept any favors from any ponies here."

"Pardon?" Gerardo blinked, trying to parse the contrary requests.

"You disabled several Sosans two nights ago in a skirmish in the Earth District," the stallion said, voice low in the echoey room. "I wasn't there, but I still know it. So do a lot of other ponies. They aren't sure what to think about you, but they think you're strong. Some are afraid of you. Others think you're here to help them. I don't know how strong you really are, but it isn't as much as they're expecting. Everyone here has expectations of you, so try not to get caught up in them."

Gerardo gulped. "I shall keep that in mind. The heads-up is most appreciated."

"Think nothing of it." Off Switch stood for a moment, then slowly climbed the stairs and left the room, turning the lights out as he went. Gerardo was left there, amid glowing indicators and dormant weaponry, suddenly hoping much more fervently that Shinespark would hurry her return.

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