The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

The Stakes Are High

"What's up?" Valey's ears perked, the batpony seated on a bench in the space department lobby and watching as Professor Sea Star appeared in response to her summons.

Sea Star fixed her with a look. "You again," She beckoned for Valey to follow. "Come."

Valey's lips twitched in a grin. "Wow, you sound almost like you wanted to see me more than I wanted to see you."

"I have a few questions you might be able to answer, yes." Sea Star nodded, leading the way deeper into the building. "For starters, what was that sword your friend brought to bear yesterday? Where did she get it, and how does it work?"

"Literally couldn't tell you." Valey shrugged. "She's had it since before I knew her. What does it do? Cuts anything that's not alive, paralyzes most ponies without leaving a wound, and does real nasty stuff to batponies. How does it do it? Not a single clue. Why?"

"All of our harmonic readings on the lifestream," Sea Star said, "registered an event exactly at the same time yesterday, despite the tumult that's been clouding them since your arrival. We think it was at the same time that crystal was shattered."

Valey blew on her bangs. "Honestly? If that crystal Starlight broke was made from ether, it's probably more because the crystal got smashed than whatever it was smashed by. You guys are the experts on this material, not us."

"But it defies all of our conventional knowledge," Sea Star replied. "And your expertise, we know very little about."

"We know about applying this stuff to smite bad guys." Valey glanced around her as they stepped into the restricted section. "Think you might be on your own for this, though. But hey, I'm actually here about something completely different that might catch your fancy..."

"And that would be?"

Valey nodded. "I wanna talk about that crystal palace you guys found."

"My ears are open," Sea Star replied, still leading her somewhere.

"You guys said you found it," Valey began, "and you weren't sure what its deal was. If we could get you inside that thing... how big of a deal would it be?"

Sea Star's ears perked. "Now that's quite the proposition. How would you go about doing that?"

"Playing it by ear and figuring it out as we go. So basically like we usually do." Valey shrugged. "I'm not saying we're going to, or that we have a way. I'm asking, hypothetically, how big of a deal would it be?"

Sea Star frowned in thought.

"I'm asking," Valey prodded, "because you got all spooky on the submarine when I let slip we knew about these places."

"You're wondering what we would do..." Sea Star lowered her voice. "Because you're considering whether or not you'd prefer to keep the likes of us out of such an important place, aren't you?"

Valey snorted. "Well, I was trying to be politer about it, but yeah."

Sea Star nodded. "Consider that I might be replying with questions of my own because I'm considering the same thing."

That shut Valey up. Moments later, they arrived at a familiar room, one where Anemone had stuffed the windigo hearts inside a machine and tried to trace their effects. Valey silently mused that they never had gotten around to studying what made her cutie mark tick, but this wasn't the time for that.

"I'm going to try to explain a bit more about how our detectors work," Sea Star began, standing and looking at the machine. "Have you ever dropped a vial of iron filings on a sheet of paper, then moved a magnet around beneath the table?"

Valey nodded. "Hasn't everyone? I mean, no, but I know what happens. It makes patterns and stuff, right?"

Sea Star nodded again. "The magnet exudes an invisible forcefield that the filings align upon. The best analogy I can give for how we measure the lifestream is to think of the lifestream as the magnet, and individual ponies as collections of iron filings. The 'direction' we observe, for lack of a more specific term, corresponds to the direction that the lifestream, far below, is flowing in. Is this easy enough to understand?"

"Loud and clear," Valey replied. "So you get a million pictures of how ponies' iron filings are oriented at any one moment, and you can put them together and sort of see what the bigger flow looks like at that time."

"Ponies don't contain literal filings, but yes. That's the idea." Sea Star pointed at the machine. "The purpose of this device, for instance, is to measure ponies walking in a circle around it, to test whether materials in the middle may be interfering with their readings."

Valey bit her lip. "That's cool. Where are you going with this?"

"There's one crucial point where this analogy breaks down," Sea Star continued. "If you look at the forcefield of a magnet, there are no singularities or points. Everything is smooth and contiguous. If you drew a picture of the forcefield with the field's direction and strength represented by lines, every line that comes out of the magnet would eventually go back in. You could also imagine water flowing in a basin that's being stirred. No matter how the water moves around, none is being added and none is being removed. There are no points where it is either appearing or disappearing."

Valey nodded along. "Speaking of points, I'm kinda looking for one, here..."

Sea Star harrumphed. "Impatient, aren't you? You wouldn't last a minute in a seminar. The lifestream does have points like these. We've only found one for certain, but it's to the south-southwest, centered inside the crystal structure protruding from the seafloor. We strongly suspect there's another somewhere to the northwest, and while we don't have the data to confirm it, you've talked of another across the Aldenfold to the northeast."

Valey kept nodding.

"Stop looking like you're going to fall asleep," Sea Star growled.

"Then tell me what instead of why!" Valey insisted. "I'm never gonna remember the logic and mumbo jumbo, and I don't need it to believe the overall point is true! I've been in these places a million times before, have seen ridiculously crazy stuff and am not some skeptic clown who needs a flawless logical proof to believe something that's a little out there!"

The professor sighed bitterly. "Fine. The overall point is that we don't understand how these points work, but we do understand that they seem to form the backbone of the lifestream and that if anything were to happen to them, it could damage the world as a whole, up to and including making it impossible for new creatures to be born."

Valey blinked. "...Didn't you already tell me this?"

A vein in Sea Star's brow twitched.

"Look, never mind!" Valey sighed heavily. "The point is, we know stuff about these places. We've seen them messed with, and even with pretty heavy levels of messing, they've actually kind of been fine in the end. It's like the world is made out of sturdy stuff. But even if it couldn't take some loons messing around at its roots, we have no intention of screwing with it."

"You're confident enough that you can get inside that you think it's worth having on the table," Sea Star replied. "What do you want to go down there for? I imagine you brought it up for a reason..." She looked away. "Especially since you're wary enough to wonder whether we should be there too."

"You really wanna know? Because it's going to sound crazy." Valey stared at the machine. "There's someone who's been harassing my friend's kid. And they're kind of dead right now, but this someone in particular we happen to know can be brought back by going down there. And we've got some big questions for them."

Sea Star stared as well. "You're right. That does sound crazy. But doesn't all of this?" She turned to look at Valey. "Using the magnet analogy, all of our directions have been moving chaotically since you got here. As if there's too much influence for them to track. For a split second, when that crystal shattered, every one of them pointed the same direction."

"Toward it?" Valey asked.

"No, the same direction. Not towards the same target." Sea Star went back to watching the machine. "Southwest, or northeast. We can't tell which direction the flow moves, only which angle. We believe we sit far from any nexuses normally, so the prevailing currents on this island are not particularly strong and are prone to influence. But the directions we observed during that flash were perfect, down to the micro-degree. So perfect, we could triangulate a source, if it was anywhere within a thousand miles of here. But if there was one, it was further away than that."

She looked up. "My point is, I don't know anything about what magical artifacts you've brought with you from the north. But purely from a standpoint of risk, I think we have more than a right to be cautious."

"...You know what? That's actually pretty fair." Valey shrugged. "I still think it's got at least something to do with the fact that those crystals were... you know... made out of the lifestream. And it was you guys who thought touching it to a windigo heart would be a good idea in the first place."

Sea Star frowned.

"So that brings me back to my question." Valey flicked her tail. "What would you guys do if we went down there and took you along? Because no matter how we do it, I'm pretty sure it's gonna involve us borrowing your ship, and you'd never let us do that without coming along too."

"Observe," Sea Star replied quietly. "We would merely observe."

Valey raised an eyebrow. "You wouldn't build anything? Wouldn't try to extract ether to use as rocket fuel?"

Professor Sea Star sighed. "Princess Celestia bid us work on our space endeavors for the good of the world. If she thought the harm that could potentially befall the world by losing a small amount of ether to the experiments we need to do it outweighed what could happen if we lacked the ability to fly to the moon, then it's our duty to follow through on that desire, not question it. She has a foresight and knowledge of the world granted by her thousands of years of existence that no mortal can hope to match. It would not be in the world's interests to second-guess our princess."

"That doesn't answer my question," Valey replied.

"No," Sea Star answered more firmly. "We have no intentions to set up experiments within this crystal palace."

Valey pursed her lips. "Even though you don't know what's in there? There's nothing you could potentially find that might change your mind?"

"That depends." Sea Star shrugged. "We'd first need to find something that would make us want to badly enough to overcome our present reservations and break our word to you, and then find some way to get back inside without your assistance, or whatever plan you have for entering. And I think the odds of that are very low indeed."

Valey frowned. "Sounds like both of us are spooked enough by the possibility of the other doing something to this place that we really ought to take a hint."

"What have you seen?" Sea Star asked. "Something has the idea of exploiting these palaces strongly in your head."

"Aside from your lab?" Valey tapped the floor. "Both of the ones I've been in have had someone screwing with them before. In one, some yaks were trying a sketchy experiment that nearly got the whole city up above frozen over. And someone else had turned another into a mana power generator for an entire continent."

"This one is likely pristine," Sea Star replied.

"Yeah. And I'd sorta like to keep it that way."

Sea Star sighed and got to her hooves. "Well, I doubt this conversation is going anywhere further. If you want to borrow the Arc Manta to visit this palace, it will be a weeklong trip one way. I will endorse the mission and personally accompany you to operate the ship. You'll need to choose at minimum one other pony from my department you trust who can operate the vessel while I sleep, and I'll ask that you work with Anemone to identify as many possible sources of harmonic confusion your friends are carrying as you can before we set out. It isn't critical that the ship's instruments be working, but it would greatly help in navigation."

Valey blinked. "Wait, so that's a yes, just like that?"

"With a lot of warnings attached." Sea Star looked away. "I shouldn't need to tell you to prepare for a two-week sojourn in the Arc Manta. You know how cramped it will be. If you have any unfinished business that shouldn't wait for that long while we're gone, see to it now. We'll need at least a day to prepare the ship, so come see me when you're almost ready. I'll see you around."

Valey watched as she left. "Huh..." She shrugged. That was a hurdle she hadn't expected to clear quite as quickly as she did... Of course, whether or not she fully trusted the Kinmari scientists was another matter, but at least Sea Star seemed to care. And worst case, she could beat them up in the palace if they tried anything.

Getting up as well, she trotted off, looking for Maple and Starlight to tell them the news. And if investigating harmonic disturbances so that the ship's navigation worked correctly was a priority, maybe she would find some other ponies, too...

Comments

[Amilition]

It feels like yesterday I checked on this story, and it had 30 chapters. When I checked it today, I was blown away at the amount of chapters now.

[Phoenix Kitten]

A second point of no return?
Oh boy, are we about to head to the final dungeon?

[Oberth Effect]

Can't wait to see what the tree has to say about what happened in that lab.

I think the other experiments we have seen might be relatively harmless because they worked on the harmonic flame, with the tree potentially insulating whatever was being done from the lifestream itself. Starlight's sword affected crystallized ether directly, so there's the potential for more significant effects.