Level Nine: From Zero to One Hundred REAL Quick
Level Nine: From Zero to One Hundred REAL Quick
The days leading up to an attack were always the most stressful. Not having any specific time and date on hand, the boys were forced to go AHOD as soon as the week started, and would be that way all week. They were hearing stories of strange figures lurching around from students all over the school. Most of which were just local creeps or false sightings, but it was only Tuesday and they’d already fought another golem.
Which was smarter, faster, and more properly constructed than the first iteration. None the more fireproof, though. So it was with this great threat looming over their heads, and the emotional and physical wear of the last few days, that Deep Treble stumbled a moment late into History class and fell into his seat like he’d been shot.
“Nice of you to join us, Mister Treble,” their History teacher, Cranky Doodle, mused. He gave an impatient glare over top of his bifocals, one that Treble ignored with much practice.
“Thanks fer’ noticin’,” Treble remarked, in a slow drawl reminiscent of a certain childhood donkey.
Cranky coughed, and went on with his lesson. “Now, as I was about to say, today we will be discussing a much more local history lesson: one about the city of Canterlot itself. The city was founded...”
For the next several minutes all Treble heard was random words that couldn’t really string themselves together. He was tired, his muscles ached, and his back roared with a dull pain from a particularly ungentlemanly attack from the last golem. He did his best to pay attention, however, as Cranky had a penchant for throwing things at his head if he fell asleep, and a headache would only exacerbate his discomfort.
“...and here we see the factory fire of 1950, an inferno so intense it melted the freshly-laid asphalt on the nearby roads...”
Oh joy, he’s learned how to make massive tragedies and horrible building fires seem boring. Treble let his eyes pan over the map of Canterlot, where Cranky had laid out the major catastrophes of the last century in the dullest way possible. Then the tired little hamster in his head noticed something, and hopped back on the wheel. It took the rest of him a moment to catch up.
“Uh...” he muttered, having caught up with the rest of his brain. His eyes darted back and forth across the map as he connected some invisible dots. There’s the office fire. That house is where the lord went mad and killed his servants, then tore the house to studs to bury the bodies… overkill, much? And that’s where the schoolbus went over the side of the lake twenty years ago and drowned a bunch of kids… fuck. Fuck fuck FUCK. The hamster on the wheel accosted him for his language, before he threw his hand in the air. “Mr. Doodle?!”
The chalk in Cranky’s hand snapped against the board mid-letter as he turned to Treble. “What IS IT, Mister Treble?” he growled.
“Can I get a copy of that map?” DT asked, again ignoring his teacher’s aggravated mood. It was a near-constant, after all.
The teacher gave him a curious look. “Deep, this map is available in basically any city guide, almanac, or other local resource. They literally hand out copies-”
“No, not the boring one, the one you mapped out all this horrible stuff on!” Treble interrupted. Several students turned to stare at him, and a few scooted their seats a few inches away.
“Wha-why would you-no. No, I’m not asking that question again. I still have nightmares. Just… just take it. WHEN CLASS IS OVER, TREBLE,” he added harshly, as DT stood up.
Then he sat back down. “Fine...”
---------------------
“Guys!” Treble yelled across the room, as soon as he’d burst through the steel door. “Guys guys guys guys guys guys!”
It was the afternoon, and they’d all gathered at their hideout. Dust Devil and Rubble Maker looked at him like he was crazy, and had just jumped out of a closet with a knife. Spooks reveled in the fact that he wasn’t the one getting that look this time. Their shaggy friend ran up to the table they’d almost literally just sat down at, and slammed a map down in front of them.
Rubble blinked at it a few times. “Did… did you steal Cranky’s map of horrible accidents?” he asked slowly.
“What? No, he gave it to me. On the grounds that I never ever tell him why I need it,” he elaborated, a statement that was met with less concern than was probably necessary.
Dusty gave it a once-over. “Ok, so besides the fact that our city is a terrible nexus of death and destruction and monsters, what am I looking at?”
Treble sat down, and pulled out a pencil. “Ok, so you know how we’d all… ok, SPOOKS figured out that Sunset’s house was gonna be ground zero for the Golempocalypse?” They all nodded. “Well, I don’t remember the details, cause you talk like, a whole lot all at once, but you’d said something about leylines. And we, the uneducated masses, just nodded and rolled with it. Well, I remembered something you’d said during Winter Break last year, when we thought we were going to have to fight like, Krampus or something? Yeah, thank god we didn’t. Anyway, Cranky was rambling on and on about all this horrible shit that had happened over the last hundred years or so, and I noticed something.”
He drew a circle around the office fire Cranky had lectured on, then drew a curved line from there to a smaller apartment fire where only a couple of people had died, some twenty years later. The line carried on to a car accident where a truck had hit a guard rail and flipped over onto a parked car, igniting both and killing the passengers. “Ok, so that’s one line,” he muttered.
“Um, Treble? Leylines are, well, lines,” Dusty pointed out. “Like straight lines.”
“Shh,” the wannabe rocker barked, his hair draping over his face as he concentrated. “Right, now here’s where that big real estate tycoon flew south for the winter and took his whole house with him, including the walls,” he explained, circling the mass murder and demolition. He traced another curved line. “This is where that serial killer hung himself in public a decade and a half later. Then there was that double murder...” he continued, finishing the curve.
Spooks’s eyes widened, and he took the pencil from Treble. DT saw that Spooks had picked up the pattern, and let him have it. “Ok, so this is the flipped bus from twenty years ago,” Bones pressed on, picking up where Treble left off. “Then there was that water tower that fell apart on top of that apartment complex… and here I think is where that lady drowned her kids in the tub...”
“Jesus,” Dusty groaned. “Are we sure we’re fighting the right monsters? The hell is wrong with this city?”
“You see it, right?” Treble asked, shaking slightly.
Spooks met his friend’s troubled gaze with one of his own. Though, given his penchant for looking dour and scary all the time, it wasn’t that much of a difference. “Yeah, I do,” he said quietly.
Rubble leaned over the map. “And for the less gifted people in the room?”
Treble and Spooks looked up at him, then back down at the map, where Spooks filled in the rest of the curve on each line. They all met at a familiar location.
Rubble winced. “Why do all those leylines lead to the school?”
Bones looked to Treble, giving his friend the chance to explain for once. “Because it’s not leylines. We thought that’s what it was, which is why we said Sunset’s house was the center. She’s just a point on the map, see? Her house is right next to that public suicide. And the building we’re in right now-”
“-is the converted apartment building where the fire happened. I remember that story, they had to turn the whole building into an office complex just to get it back up to code, and it still failed,” Dusty recalled. “But what the hell IS IT?” he added, gesturing at the map.
“It’s a Tragedy Nexus,” Treble explained. Spooks was the only one who looked like he understood the implications, so he elaborated, “Spooks explained this concept last year, with the whole Krampus thing. Where if you do enough bad stuff in one place, or enough horrible shit happens on the same spot-”
“-it creates all kinds of bad juju. Yeah, I remember,” Rubble interjected. “But this is all over the map. How’s that the same thing?”
Spooks took over explaining. “It’s like setting off a chain of controlled explosions in a building, to direct the energy inwards. That’s how you implode a building and make sure it only collapses in on itself. Horrible events create horrible energy, and that energy spreads. That’s why whole houses are haunted instead of just one room when someone dies bloody. In this case, it started off big -the bus, the mass murder, the fire- and smaller and smaller events just carried the energy inwards, like flushing a toilet. It creates a vortex that compresses all that negative energy into one place. I wouldn’t be surprised if these lines were littered with death and tragedy, in some weird chronological order. Add to that all the bullshit that happens at this school, all that magic with malevolent intent, and it’s like a giant pressure cooker. With a very, very thin wall.”
Treble nodded along, and added, “The Beast isn’t coming through at Sunset’s house. That’s just where some of the golems are popping out. It’s using the points on the Tragedy Nexus like a sieve to force it’s way through where all this bad juju has weakened the walls. And it’s gonna drop right in front of the school.”
Rubble’s eyes grew wide “So, if we don’t stop all these golems, who apparently can now appear ALL OVER THE CITY-”
---------
“-then Equestria is doomed?” Princess Twilight asked, very shakily.
It was Late Tuesday night, and the boys had gathered all of the Rainbooms with as much urgency as they could. They’d even told Sunset to ‘summon horse-princess, NOW’ for this conversation. There wasn’t even enough room to seat everyone, even with the boys standing around the map and explaining the situation.
“Yeah,” Spooks explained. “If these things come together and manifest this big bad, it’s gonna have free reign over both dimensions. I mean, it’s literally crashing its way into our world through force of will. Imagine what it could do with an open door like the portal.”
Rainbow waved a hand in a poor attempt to look dismissive. “So why don’t we just, like, close the portal? Keep it locked down here?”
Rubble groaned. “Because even if we only kept it in one dimension, it would still kill everyone here. Not to mention it’s dragging its way into our dimension the long way ‘round because IT WANTS TO. Just closing the door isn’t gonna do jack shit. It’d be like putting up a wall made of tinder in front of someone with a flamethrower. Which, as I’ve been told, would do even more damage than just leaving the door open and letting it walk through.”
Not-Princess Twilight nodded. “Right, like I almost did at the Friendship Games,” she explained.
Applejack just punched her palm. “Well, all’s we gotta do is take down these golems, right? Should be easy ‘nuff.”
As much as Dusty wanted to agree with that sentiment, there was one glaring problem. “Except these things can apparently pop up all over the city. Which means either we spread ourselves thin trying to get ahead of the game-”
“-or we batten down the hatches at CHS and play tower defense,” Sunset groaned. “Even with our superpowers, none of us are exactly experts at the whole ‘fire and explosions’ thing.”
“AHEM,” Pinkie grunted, juggling a can of sprinkles in one hand.
“...MOST of us,” Sunset corrected.
That’s when Rubble surprised them all, and scared most of them, with a big maniacal grin. “That’s where there’s GOOD news!” he cheered.
“...oh god, no,” groaned Rarity, burying her face in her hands. “...I just wanted a normal Fall Formal! A nice dance, maybe meet a cute boy, get lost in the glamour-” THUNK. Her pity party was interrupted by the sound of a very large object being hefted onto the trunk. It was… another trunk.
“...um,” Fluttershy started.
Only to be talked over by Rainbow Dash. “What’s in the box?”
Rubble kept smiling, then kicked it. Hard. It popped open with a suddenness that startled Fluttershy farther into the couch cushions. He reached in, and pulled out what looked like large metal waterguns with extra attachment. “As it turns out, it’s illegal to buy flamethrowers if you’re underage. But there’s surprisingly little legislation about BUILDING them!”
Sunset felt a migraine coming on. “You… built flamethrowers?”
“Pffft, no,” Rubble scoffed. “I’d blow myself up. Uncle JACK built flamethrowers! And phosphorous grenades! I’m pretty sure there’s a few bricks of thermite in one of the other trunks...”
“...one of...” Rarity trailed off.
“The OTHER?” Sunset added in alarm.
“THERMITE?!” Not-Princess Twilight shrieked.
Rubble nodded. “Yeah-huh. See, all those engineering books and chemistry stuff I was reading were all like, ‘Hey, this is illegal without a permit!’ And I was thinking… how do I get a permit? I barely even work construction! Then I remembered I have an Uncle who blows stuff up for a living!”
Treble groaned and rubbed his temples, while Dusty picked up a flamethrower like a child at Christmas. “This is the greatest thing you’ve ever done. I mean it.”
“You DO realize this is all really, really illegal to stockpile all this stuff, right?” Sunset growled, her face all over disapproval.
“Actually, it’s not,” Not Princess groaned.
“...what.”
The bespectacled girl took off her glasses, cleaned them out of habit, and put them back on. “He’s right. The legislation in Canterlot regarding flamethrowers is really, really lax. The only reason it’s illegal to buy one if you’re underage is because all of the companies that sell them list them as weapons, and you have to be eighteen to have a carry permit. So until someone does something inordinately stupid,” she glared at Rubble here, who just beamed with pride, “With one of these, it’s not illegal to own one. And seeing as how we’re fighting a bunch of constructs, and not like, wildlife or people or anything, there aren’t any laws regarding that either. Smaller handheld throwers are used for controlled burns in the surrounding farmlands, and a lot of those farmers have teenage workers. This is what happens when you unionize.”
Applejack nodded. “She’s right, y’know. Granny lets me do the burnin’ of all the dry crop every year to keep it from sparkin’ and causing a bigger, uncontrolled fire.”
“Ok, but… phosphorous grenades!” Sunset barked.
Earth Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, how’d you get that one sorted out?”
Rubble grinned sheepishly. “Well, technically, there’s only one law being broken, and since I’m a minor, it’s technically a misdemeanor. See, the kind of phosphorous grenades my uncle has are flash-bangs. They’re less-lethal weaponry, which he has a permit for.”
Rarity crossed her arms and tapped her foot. “And the law you’re breaking is?”
“Um… illegally modifying a less-lethal weapon? Uncle Jack taught me how to pack flash-bangs, so now they have, well, a little bit more explodey behind them than is legal for a less-lethal option.” Rubble admitted.
Treble hadn’t looked up from the table, trying his best to subside what he was sure was going to be one hell of a migraine. “Exactly how much is ‘a little bit’?
Rubble thought about it. “...five times?”
“Ok, ok, speeding past the somehow only a misdemeanor you just admitted to, I’m pretty sure, no, POSITIVE, that thermite is super illegal,” Sunset protested, stamping a foot.
“...actually,” Earth Twilight started.
“Oh COME ON!”
Ruble grinned. “Yup, you only need a certain number of man-hours and the appropriate safety classes. Plus a legal guardian’s permission. And my mom signed off on all that shit like, forever ago.”
“...why? Why would she do that?” Rarity groaned, more lamenting to herself than actually asking the question.
“Well, I had to promise not to enlist in the military when I graduated,” he explained. A statement that was met with a great deal of silence.
“DUDE. Is that a landmine?!” Dusty asked.
“SUNUVABITCH!” Sunset roared.
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All thats missing.
gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/roflcopter-gif-2.gif
This is a great story.
8439435
Thank you!
Love your story bro keep up the good work.
Sunset, these are not the issues you should concern yourself with. If you all get arrested, that means that not just humanity but civilization survived. I count that as a win.
Also, fun fact: the average chocolate bar has more chemical energy than a stick of dynamite. I look forward to seeing Pinkie demonstrate that.
That said, how long has this cult been at it? This is multiple generations of precisely placed tragedies. They probably won't look too kindly on anyone interfering with the ritual...
I like these kids!
Ah, loopholes!! I love those bastards! Though I would not like to be in the house with that much fire.
The amount of thought you put into the weapons and the girls reaction is enough to bring someone to tears from pure happiness and laughter. you need to do more stuff like this
Ayup, Old Man Henderson, here we come!
NOTHING!!!!!!!!!!
I love this story. I really love this story.
Thermite is incredibly easy to make.
Finely powdered iron rust and aluminum. That's it. A bit tough to ignite at times, though.
8945211
i am concerned about why and how you know this but i'm also too afraid to ask so please dont reply
11062433
Wikipedia, most advanced chemistry texts, some books on industrial welding technology. Thermite is surprisingly simple in concept and has a number of very legitimate uses.
Its not more common in criminal uses for two reasons. One, its an absolute bitch to ignite without some rather tightly controlled chemicals or an obscenely hot flame. Two, people who do try to make it more often end up with a dud mix or the aluminum powder ignites on its own and crispy critters them.