3 - Cold, Buckingcold
Sherbert - 19th of Megan, 29 EoH
Deck 13, USS Phoenix - Phoenix
We returned to the Phoenix with a sickening jolt. Well, I did. I don't know what it was about Uncle Sky’s teleporters but after I had touched the void they always made me a bit queasy.
Not sick queasy, just… They didn’t feel right.
As we arrived, a changeling guard looked up from his magazine, noted the three of us, and then turned back to his reading. Lyra lived here, Captain Vinyl was here twice a week for Princess Luna’s game night, and I was Sky’s niece. He knew us, the alarms hadn’t dinged their little ‘these people are transformed’ warning, he’d done his job.
Lyra was the first to move off of the silver and brass teleport pad.
“You girls get the equipment, I’ll meet you at Sky’s lab. It’s pretty late but he’ll probably still be working on something,” she called as she ran out of the room.
The changeling guard hummed as she ran off and looked up. “Are you girls needing equipment for something?” He asked curiously.
Vinyl turned around and nodded. “Yes, is there a problem?”
The guard nodded. “Mhm,” he answered with a frown. “The Chief’s scheduled to depart for Ponyville in twenty minutes. You won't make it to the Engineering deck in time. Scale of one to ten, one being Luna broke her stove, ten being The Dark God was reborn, how badly do you need equipment?”
Vi bit her lip thoughtfully for a long second then shrugged. “Maybe an eight?”
The guard tossed his magazine aside, not caring as it slid off his console and landed on the floor.
“Stay on the pad,” he instructed as he began tapping a rapid series of commands. “Standby for a transport. Transporter room to Engineering.”
I groaned. Aw, man! Not another teleport. Come on!
“Engineering here,” a pony’s voice replied. “Something wrong with the transporters?”
I turned to look at the console in concentration. I’d heard that voice before… Who was that?
“Negative,” the guard said. “Captain Scratch of Luna’s Knights requires mission equipment for a significantly dangerous operation. Standby to receive transport.”
“Will do,” the pony replied.
That’s a mare. Who do I know who sounds like that and is-
Oh! CC. General Mechanic. Nice mare, hangs out with Lyra. Uncle Sky likes the way she does electronic circuits.
The teleporter hummed, and with the odd jerk-snap feeling Vinyl and I were spat out into the Engineering bay. My ears immediately lay back as I was bombarded with the sounds of a hundred different tools at work. Ugh, why do engineers insist on prototyping via hoof? Use the stupid printers…
“Ugh, really? Port them directly in front of me?” CC grumbled directly into my corneas.
I took a few steps back from the poor mare, doing my best to focus on her right eye instead of the patch when I spoke to her.
“Sorry,” I said with a blush. “I guess he didn’t-”
“Think about accidently transporting you inside me, and failed to use the minimum safe distance protocols. Like an asshole,” the slate gray mare griped while turning around to wave across the lab at Uncle Sky as he walked down the stairway from the observation pod which overlooked the engineering floor. “HEY! CHIEF!”
Despite the noise of the ‘shop’, Sky paused, turned towards us with a curious expression on his face, noticed Vinyl and I standing next to his crew pony and waved back, quickly trotting down the rest of the stairs and moving over to us across the floor.
As Sky approached, he flicked a small screwdriver off a workbench with a wingtip and gripped it between his teeth as he walked, passing it to a hoof as he stopped a few steps away from us.
“Okay, hand them over,” he said with a casual smirk.
“Hand what over?” Vinyl asked for me.
“Your comms,” Sky answered with a jovial wink. “All three of you had your comms break at the same time and couldn’t call me to say ‘Hey, we’re over here. Mere’. So you had CC yell. Heh heh.”
I rolled my eyes as Sky tossed the screwdriver back onto the workbench with a casual flick of his foreleg. “So, whatcha girls need?" He asked more seriously. “I’ll get my crew on it before I head out. I’ve gotta go. The Pink needs to be ponked.”
I blushed a bright red. “Ummmmm!” I said, unsure of how to reply to that.
“That’s Pinkie speak for a back massage,” Sky said with a snicker.
“Why didn’t you just say that?” Vinyl asked, one eyebrow raised up enough to tent over her glasses’ rims.
“Because then I wouldn’t have made my niece turn pink! And today was a good day. I’m happy. I like to have fun when I’m happy, don’t you?” Sky rhetorically asked, turning to look at Vinyl this time. “No really though, what do you need? I want to go home.”
Vi nodded. “Sorry, this came right out of left field,” she said as seriously as she could. “We need three of your environment suits adapted for as cold of weather as possible, preferably to operate in space-cold temperatures. We need one fitted for me, one for Sherbert, and the last for Lyra.
“They should be armored for light combat, and contain stealth systems equivalent to-”
Sky shook his head rapidly and held up a hoof. “Whoa whoa whoa, hold it!” He said with a sharp frown. “What’s up? This sounds like a thing I’m going to get dragged in to. What do you need all this for?"
Vi paused for a moment, searching for the right words to use. I was only barely starting to get a good ‘read’ on the Captain. She took her position as a Knight Captain very seriously… Which clashed with how laid back she was about everything else in her life.
“We’re on a mission to locate and search Mage Medowbrook’s tower for a classified proper noun, Uncle,” I said for Vinyl, doing my best to sound and look professional.
Vinyl nodded quickly. “Right. The one under the ice near Buckingcold, just in case she had more than one,” she added.
Sky’s face went pale. His wings lifted up, getting into a quick-launch positions while his ears lay flat against his head in terror.
“N-never again,” he mumbled half to himself.
Wait… He’d BEEN there!? Oh! Yes, that’s right!
Uncle Sky and Pinkie Pie had gone there during the Tartarian invasion to retrieve Pinkie’s Element’s reagent. He never, ever talked about that. Pinkie didn’t either.
That didn’t bode well.
“Um, are you okay, sir?” CC asked, walking over to get a better look at her boss. “Do you need some water? Anything?”
Sky shook his head. “No! No water. Guh… Why did you have to offer water?” He grumbled before taking a deep breath and shaking himself out of his funk.
Literally.
Shake, shake, shake, normal happy look restored. It was a total Pinkie thing to do. I guess she’d rubbed off on him a bit after all the years they had-
EW! Brain, why did you phrase it like that then picture it in that way!? They are blood relatives!!!
“Hokay!” Sky sighed, closing his eyes for a moment before raising his watch up to use it. “So! Dealing with Lovecraftian shit ey? Luckily for you, I just finished drawing up plans for some armored space-suits for digging out the starport ruins on the moon. Sai, pull up the Dead Space designs. Send them to CC’s workstation."
"On it,” the AI assistant applied chipperly.
Vinyl tipped her head forward to look Sky in the eyes without her glasses being in the way. “What’s Lovecraft? You’ve clearly been to where I’m going. What should I know?” She asked with a concerned quaver in her voice.
No. Not just concerned, empathetic. She understood that whatever had happened to Uncle Sky had been actually traumatic, and she knew exactly what that felt like.
Suddenly it clicked.
The twitchy way Vinyl had been all day, the haunted look she’d had in her eyes when she’d walked into Dad’s clinic. The way she’d spaced out when we’d teleported to her old home, and just stared at the forest all spooked for a full minute.
Vinyl had gone to dad to get help with flashbacks. Dad wasn’t a psychologist, but he was an MD, meaning he could diagnose-
“Lovecraft is a really old, dead, author. Wrote about a lot of really scary monsters from beyond-space time itself. Cosmic Horror. Not really my genera. But nothing else I’ve ever heard of comes close to describing Buckingcold’s mines,” Sky said with a shiver. “Oh, um, CC. Make them some suits, will you? Use the arctic variant I designed. And a few weapons. You’ll really regret going in there unarmed. So don’t.”
Vinyl nodded. “Yeah. Our informant said it’s dangerous, that's why we're here for suits and not at an Outpost Alpha buying commercial artic gear,” she said with a smirk. “We’ll be fine. We’ve gone into dangerous places before. Oh, um… That far north is definitely not within the teleport grid.
“Would you mind giving us a lift up-”
“NO!” Sky snapped, ears falling back fearfully.
Vi and I stepped back under the sheer force of his refusal.
“Umm,” I said, frowning worriedly. “You don’t have to go incid-”
"NOPE! NEVER GOING BACK! YOU CAN'T MAKE ME! ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ME?! WELL NOPE, NOT GONNA HAPPEN!" Sky exploded, fearfully lashing his tail.
Vinyl held up both her forehooves. “Woah! Take it easy! You don’t have to go. I just meant ‘Can we borrow a shuttle?’ this mission needs to stay small. It was almost impossible for two ponies to get inside. We can’t take the whole team, so we won't have a portal.”
“Oh!” Sky said, letting out a deep breath of relief, his ears standing back up. “Yeah. Yeah you can borrow a shuttle. Hey, CC, you can fly, right?”
The blue gray and darker blue gray mare nodded. “Yeah, I can. I don’t mind taking them up either. Especially not if that counts as my shift for today,” she said hopefully.
“Sure does. Whip them up some suits, get some weapons done up too. Soon as it’s all done fly them up there. Monitor their vitals. The SECOND you see any sign of injury, beam everyone right the buck out, directly into the shuttle, and fly right back here. Got it?”
CC nodded and snapped a salute. “Got it!” She said as she turned to Vinyl and I. “Come on girls, let’s get you loaded up. I guess Lyra’s grabbing her own equipment? Do you know if she’ll be wearing her cyber costume? I’ll need to know if I should print hers for a human or a pony.”
“Pony,” Vi answered instantly. “She hasn’t worn that on a mission since the time she got impaled in it. Doesn't like making Sky fix it.”
CC nodded. “Makes sense. That thing’s systems are NUTS! Okay, hold still so I can get some shape scans of you two. Let’s get the fit prefect.”
One of these days, I would have to learn what happened down there that made my uncle so afraid. I had a very bad feeling that today was going to be that day.
Lyra Heartstrings - 19th of Megan, 17 EoH
Buckingcold - Crystal Empire
I had no idea CC had been trained as a pilot. I mean, it made sense. She was an engineer, and she helped design and maintain the shuttles. But I never really thought you’d need to know how to fly them to know how to fix them.
She felt differently. ‘If you don't know what the pilot means when they say it’s flying a bit slippery, you can’t really fix it.’
A good point. One which I was trying to apply to the other thing on my mind.
“We’re nearly there,” CC called from the cockpit. “We should be landing in three minutes. Soon as I find a solid patch of ice to set down on.”
“Solid patch?” Vinyl asked with a worried frown. “Is the ice sheet messed up?”
“Look like it, yeah,” she said with an unworried laugh. “It’s ice covering a network of tunnels. As snow builds up and weight shifts you’ll get tunnel collapses and unstable bits. We’ll be okay, just need to spot a good place to land.”
“And that will take three minutes?” I asked curiously.
“Mhm, probably shorter. It’s just a ballpark estimate. You girls should get those helmets on. I’m reading forty three below outside,” CC warned.
Ah yes. The suits.
I looked down at my rather bulky padded cloth jumpsuit. It had some armor plating on it, but not as much as you would expect for a combat suit. But then again, it apparently wasn’t a combat suit, just a spacesuit. And not even a hardsuit, hence the bulk.
“What is the armor for again? Aren't these just designed for cleaning up some lunar ruins?” I asked as I reached up with a hoof to tap the ‘helmet deploy’ button.
Please don’t clip off my ears…
The helmet clamshelled shut around my head, my vision going black until the helmet’s sensors blinked on. And revealed a design flaw. The helmet’s sensors were worse than my enhanced vision. Great.
Well, at least the suit looked cool. And my ears were fine. Whew!
Nothing against Sky. His designs were great. But he didn’t build this one. CC did. And well, she was good, but not Sky. I was super worried she’d gotten my size wrong.
“Trying to land here,” CC called back, a bit annoyed.
Sherbert deployed her own helmet, its segmented plates unfolding from the chest and back plates, then closing around her head securely. I winced, worried about ear pinching. But nothing happened.
What ever happened to, you know, helmets you just put on? Only thing about these suits I hated. Looked good, were warm, bulk didn’t impair you too much. Why the helmet?
Sure, it was a signature thing, and after moving to Phoenix I learned that Sky really only designs something’s internals and takes the cosmetic look out of random movies and games in the Phoenix's entertainment packages. But still… Ear pinching. Maybe even snipping. Not okay!
“Well, getting the Lunar Spaceport up and running has been a Shipwide goal for two decades now,” Sherbert answered. “And since there has been working security systems on the Phoenix's decks that resulted in a few people being hurt while clearing out new decks, you put armor on the space suits in the places most likely to get hit.”
“Why not just go full armor though?” I asked with a frown as I checked my saddlebags.
“Fuel,” CC called from the cockpit. “More mass, more fuel. Till we get that starport running, sending things up there is expensive. And no, you can’t just portal or teleport large amounts of stuff up there for less energy cost.”
“You could send a few squads of armored people up to clear hazards first, then send engineers,” Vinyl pointed out.
“Yeah, and we are. But they could miss something. And even if they don’t, one suit puncture and you have a dead pony. So you know, armor the bits most likely to get scraped, poked, or cut when you accidentally brush against something. Hold on, we’re about to touchdown,” CC said.
A half second later the shuttle stopped with a sharp jolt, listing a few inches to the left side.
“Whoops! Guess that snow wasn’t as firm as I thought,” CC said nervously. “Ummm, oh. No. We’re fine. Nice and stable. Just a crusty top layer. Okay, everyone ready to go?”
“Let me finish checking my bags,” I said as I resumed inspecting my saddlebags.
“You do that, I’m closing the cabin door so I don’t freeze,” CC said, reaching back with one hoof to pull the cabin door shut. Sealing it immediately afterwards.
Can’t say I blamed her. Minus forty three is too cold. We needed some pegasi over here to get rid of the cold.
Heck, that time we’d traveled to the Wendigo kingdom, it had been warmer than this. And they were a species that survives by eating heat.
I shook my head and went back to checking my supplies. I didn’t exactly have a mission bag packed specifically for this. I hadn’t expected to actually go to Mage Medowbrook’s tower for at least another year. I’d had everything in boxes. I was pretty sure I’d gotten everything I’d needed.
This ritual spell was the only lead I had. I’d expected to find something like this decades ago, but no.
The first thing in my saddlebag was a scrapbook. My copy of the Veiled Grimoire, the reason it had taken me so long to make any progress. Most books on Dream Magic talked about its history. Some talked about spells and rituals, but they were all about channeling raw energy from the Dream Realm.
The Veiled Grimoire was the only book I was told had information on how to manipulate Dream Creatures which survived the purges… In part. It had survived in bits. A page here, a fragment there.
I’d spent three decades traveling from place to place, dungeon delving, and trading with collectors to assemble the volume in my bag. Those little tiny bits of progress were the only thing that had kept me going for so long. The only real progress I had made towards ending this curse.
My copy wasn’t complete. I had perhaps sixty eight percent of the full book. Assuming I wasn’t missing any more sections in their entirety. But it did have the entirety of the instructions on how to make an Aether Crystal.
“Let’s see: Coral snake eyes, donkey hair, powdered snakeskin, redwood bark, dried briar fox heart, crystalized black mamba venom, powdered nitrate, uranium dust. Yep. I’ve got all the alchemical stuff,” I said to myself as I dug through my bag. “There’s the crystals, wait, where's the- Oh! There we go. Yep, I have everything. Let’s roll.”
Sherbert shook her head slowly. “I’ll never get how Alchemy works,” she mumbled.
“It’s not hard,” I said as VI hit the button to lower the cargo ramp, the cabin immediately filling full of icy air and flurries of snow, even though the ramp was only open by a centimeter. “Oh joy! A blizzard.”
Damnit! How the hell were we supposed to find out way in this mess?
It seemed like Vi shared my concerns. She hit the button to close the ramp, tapped the side of her helmet to turn on the radio, and asked. “Hey, CC, where are we parked in relation to the entrance I showed you on the map?”
“About a hundred yards north by north east,” she answered. “Need navigation assistance?”
“Yep! It’s just a solid white wall of snow outside,” she sighed.
“Wait, like, I landed in a snowdrift?”
“No, it’s snowing so hard that all I can see is white,” Vi corrected.
“Ah. No problem,” CC said, the sound of a few switches flipping in the cockpit crackling over the radio. “Ooookay! Open the hatch.”
I stepped forward, getting close to Vi, basically putting my face in her plot. “Sherbert, this looks stupid, but do it. Visibility out there-”
“Yeah, I saw,” Sherbert said with a shudder. “I don’t want to get lost either.”
The hatch creaked open once more, the horrible wall of cold came flooding back in. This time I could see ice forming on the cargo bay’s walls as the moisture in the air flash froze and stuck to the bare metal.
How… How does anyone LIVE in the Crystal Empire? There's more settlements than the Pleasure City! What insane fool would-
“Okay, Vi, turn left a bit more. Your suit’s compass should have a barring of twenty two degrees. Head that way and keep moving straight,” CC instructed.
We started to walk out, single file, close as we could be. Almost immediately the white snow camouflage pattern on our suits bit us in the flanks. Even with my nose just a few decimeters from Vi’s plot I could only barely see the outline. Of her plot. Not her whole body, just her plot.
“What kind of murder snow is this?” Vinyl grumbled as she trudged onwards.
I understood what she meant the second my hooves touched the snow. It was like glass. The freshly fallen snow felt like walking on glass.
“Luna… No wonder Uncle Sky's still freaked out about this place. We’re not even in the mines yet,” Sherbert mumbled.
“Let’s keep going. At least the interior of the caves wont have this snow,” I said optimistically.
What? Somepony had to be.
We kept walking single file for what felt like half an hour. What with the slick snow, heavy snowfall, and gusts of wind which literally blew us off course three different times… Why the hay was there a village near here!?
I don't care if it had been built to house mages and scientists for some sort of long term study. No one should be living here! The world clearly wanted people to stay the buck away. Why else would the world literally be plunged into a white void of death?
It was so bad that by the time we could see more than just a leg’s length ahead, we were inside the ice cave. We’d wandered inside a freaking CAVE without noticing it.
I turned around to look back the way we had came. “Woah! You can’t even tell how far into this cave we even are,” I said with a worried frown.
“The wind must be blowing into the cave,” Sherbert said with a shrug.
“It can’t be. Because there’s no wind in here,” Vi pointed out, gesturing around us to the way the faint dusting of snow on the floor was just well, sitting still.
In fact, the wind seemed to stop in a clearly defined straight line about three meters behind us.
I shivered slightly. “It’s like that one dead zone place you came up with for that one Nightmare Night game a few years back,” I commented.
Vinyl nodded once. “Yeah, almost exactly. Just with ice instead of rock,” she mused before taking an ice axe out of her saddle bag with her magic and carving an arrow into the right hoof wall. “So let’s do that thing you guys didn’t do.”
“I marked the maze walls!” I protested angrily, glaring at her behind my visor.
“Yeah. With chalk. Which is a thing you can easily erase,” Vi pointed out before turning and beginning to walk deeper into the cave.
We followed her, moving ever deeper and deeper down into the ice sheet. Vinyl was right to carve marks to show us the way out. The further we went, the more I could see some alien creature following behind us, scraping painted markings off the walls to lead us to our doom.
The cave started out okay, but… It didn’t stay like that. After just a few minutes of walking it became a ratsnest. A proper labyrinth. No natural cave would form like this, with nine to twenty six different passages per junction. Corridors that ran just straight enough to seem like a logical place to go, but at once clearly couldn’t have formed like that naturally.
Something had built this place. And a little voice in the back of my mind kept whispering to me. Insisting that whatever had dug these caves was still here. Watching. Waiting. Salivating.
“I am so glad you have that map, Vi,” I said quietly as Vinyl made a sharp left hoof turn.
We had been heading right towards a tunnel which looked very much like ‘the right way to go’. The way VI had turned looked like it would loopback on where we had come from.
But I could see the map over Vi’s shoulder. The road ahead had a warning written on it: ‘Ice Worm summoning trap, 10 meters in.’
“Yeah, without this we would be screwed,” Vi said with a way too playful giggle given the nightmarish creepy evil place we were in at the moment. “Oh shit, I just jinxed it. Watch, some... I don’t know, wall yeti, will just reach out of the ice and snatch away the ma-”
I reared up and shifted my stance so I could walk comfortably on my rear hooves, drew the compression rifle CC had printed for me, and dialed it’s power setting right up to eleven.
“The buck it will!” I snapped. “Not if it knows what’s good for it!”
She said at max this thing would disintegrate almost anything pony sized you pointed at it. Yeah I’d have two shots before the power cell ran dry, but I had extras in my bags!
Sherbert winced. “Uh… Paranoid much?” She asked. “The suits hooves are padded, we're moving silently. They are EVA suits, so nothing with thermal vision will see us. We have a map, and so far there’s been one long safe route to get to the tower.
“I’m not a wizard myself, but it seems to me like you’d make a safe path to your house. We’re just walking down a dead wizard’s driveway, and the Captain has the route clearly marked. It’s fine!”
“It’s always fine before it’s suddenly terrible,” Vinyl said supportively. “Also, Sherbert, everypony here works better if we act like family. Call me Vinyl, not Captain.”
“Oh, uh, okay,” Sherbert said with an awkward shuffle of her hooves. “Sorry.”
“Sooo, I’m the only one who swears we’re being watched? Hunted even?” I asked nervously, turning to look behind myself.
Vi turned around, gently putting a hoof on my shoulder. “Hey. Keep your cool.”
I sighed. Vi was right. If I panicked I wouldn’t react properly when we were ambushed. “Thanks… How can you feel so at home here? It’s just… Unnatural. I swear the cave walls sometimes pulse. Like they are breathing,” I admitted with a shudder.
Sherbert tilted her head. “Uh, I’m not seeing that. It’s just a kinda twisty-turny ice cave,” she said.
VI nodded in agreement. Her helmet lights flickering as if dying. “Yeah. I kinda like it actually. Feels cozy.”
“Um, your helmet lights are dying,” I pointed out. Just for safety's sake.
“Are they?” Vi asked.
“Yeah, the lamps just flickered,” I answered.
“No they didn’t,” Sherbert objected.
“Yeah, I didn’t see that either,” Vi agreed. “Do you need to take five, Ly?”
I frowned and looked around. How could they be comfortable here!? I-
I was seeing things. They were fine, I was seeing things.
“Yeah. I… I guess I do,” I said with a frown, reholstering my weapon and sitting down. “Sorry. I- I don’t know what’s gotten into me. But this whole time everything’s seemed, well, unnatural.”
Vi and Sherbert shared a look. “Mmm, too bad it’s minus sixty three down here,” Vi sighed. “I’d do a medical check-up.”
“The suits have medical sensors,” Sherbert said helpfully.
“Yeah, which are calibrated for ponies, and changelings,” I pointed out with a grin. “What are Vinyl and I?”
“Ponies?” Sherbert said heastently.
“Vampires,” we corrected.
“There’s biological differences,” Vi said casually. “For example, we’ve got TONS of a particular symbiotic microbe living in us. Take that out, and we’ll die almost immediately. Because that’s the physical manifestation of the vampiric ‘curse’.
“We also have different healthy vital signs. Our heart rates are slower, brain activity is different… If Sky had built these for us, I’d trust the medical sensors to be properly calibrated. But he didn’t. He got an underling to do it.”
I narrowed my eyes in indignation. “Hey! CC’s a great friend of mine!” I protested.
“So why have you never invited her over for game night?” Vi countered.
“Because our group is already big enough to where it kinda slows the game down a bit. Add another player and it would take FOREVER to do one combat round. I invite her to movie night sometimes. You have friends outside our little clique too,” I said defensively.
All of that was true. Not every friend of yours would or should be a part of every group of friends you-
“Actually I don’t,” Vinyl countered. “The ponies I mention from time to time are all online friends, or fans I talk to on occasion. We don't ever hang out in person. Heck, I don't even know where they live.”
I winced and stood back up, giving Vinyl a hug. “I’m sorry. That has to be rough,” I said as I let go.
“A bit. But it’s not that bad. We do stuff a lot, and once Classical music is back out of fashion Octy will be home a lot like she used to be. I can put up with a few years of lots of lonely afternoons. It’s not a big deal,” Vi dismissed with a hoof wave. “So, feeling better? We’re not too far from the tower according to this.”
Vinyl waved the map at me. Not rudely, just to draw my attention to it. As I looked at it, she put a dot on the map with a light spell to mark our position. Squinting at the very fine hoofwriting, I tracked the route ahead and then blinked in surprise.
“Really? That’s what, fifty meters to the edge of the central cavern?” I asked with a hopeful smile.
Vi nodded. “Mhm. Then it’s just this ‘guardian’ thing to deal with and we can get into the tower,” she said comfortingly. “To quote Sherbert: I’m not a wizard myself, but it seems to me like you’d make a safe path to your house. I honestly can see why dad had a hard time coming down here in the first place, there are so many death traps on this map that well, it’s scary.
“But we have a clearly marked path, and that includes a very specific route across the central chamber’s floor. I don't think we’ll have to fight any guardian if we stick to it. All the hard work has been done for us.”
Sherbert nodded in agreement. “Yeah! If we were scouting this on our own I’d feel just like you. But we have the map, and I know you feel like we're being chased but I haven't heard or seen anything. I may be a bit of a derp sometimes, but I’m still a shinobi. I know how to spot a tail.”
I nodded twice. “Yeah, I know. It’s just… This pace feels so unnatural! Let’s get going,” I said with a nervous laugh.
Vi shook her head. “You’re weird, Ly. But that’s why I like you. It’s just an ice cave. Let’s get into the tower. There’s no notes about it… That’s where your worry will come in handy.”
She turned, checked the map twice, and then took the right hoof fork which lay ahead. Exactly where the map said we should go to avoid a deadly pitfall trap.
Yeah! We had this on lock. We could do it.
I followed along after her, and sure enough, after just a few more seconds we finally left the creepy caverns and walked right into a huge chamber cut out of the ice sheet.
The bubble-like chamber looked like all of Ponyville could fit inside of it. It was kilometers across, and at least one kilometer high. Maybe a bit more. Aside from the chamber’s immense size, it was also completely terrifying!
The chamber was unnaturally smooth. No icicles, no stalagmites. Flat floor, perfectly carved office stairs leading down from the cave system to the floor. Complete with hoof rails also carved out of the dark blue ice.
In the center of the cavern, partially obscured by eerie shadows which seemed to ooze and slide over everything, was a massive tower. I’d never seen anything like it.
The tower was made from Bismuth. Just. Pure. Bismuth.
Rainbow colored crystal from base to the needlepoint of a top which I swore only had a pony’s head worth of space between it, and the top of the ice bubble. The tower’s shape was just as insane as the choice of material. It looked like a very tall, pointed cone, with a very thin base. Except instead of being a circular based pyramid, the tower was composed of overlapping cylinders.
Three big cylinders made the bottom layer, intersecting somewhat, but still distinctly cylinders. Then more clusters of three cylinders, only of a slightly smaller size were stacked on those, but offset a bit so the bottom edge of the next set of cylinders slightly hung over the edge of the base layer. And that pattern just continued going up and up and up.
The tower was a spiral of clustered cylinders, right until just one single spiky bit formed the very tip top. It looked sort of like a staircase. Only a kilometer tall and made by the most assholeish of art deco focused architects.
Everything was brightly lit by big beams of sunlight shining down through the ice. Despite the swirling shadows. Despite the fact we had only been in the caves for two hours, and had landed at night. It wasn’t mage light, or electric lighting. It was proper, real, sunlight. You could see and feel the difference. The light was white, pure, and warm. Physically warm. I could FEEL the light.
Through my suit. I could feel the sunlight. Through the two and a half centimeters, of SPACESUIT!
“What the buck is this?!” I squeaked, taking a few steps back into the cavern to exit the light, my heart pounding and away in my chest like a jackhammer.
“Ooooohhhkay,” Vi said slowly. “Sherbert? Can you restrain her if she panics? There are too many death traps back the way we came.”
“If I panic!?” I snapped, pointing at the bright rays of light. “Why are YOU not panicking!? You can feel the sunlight, through your suit! SUNLIGHT FELT THROUGH SUIT!”
“What light?” VI and Sherbert asked together.
“The bright white sunlight lighting up everything in the cavern! You’re STANDING IN IT! How can you not notice it?!” I demanded, sweeping my forelegs around the cavern. “It’s everywhere!”
“Uh, no. It’s just as dark in here as it was in the caves,” Vinyl objected.
“No it’s not,” Sherbert disagreed, shaking her head. “There’s some light in here, but it’s not bright like sunlight.”
I stared incredulously at them for several long seconds. “I- but, what do you-”
Then it clicked.
Vinyl felt at home here. Sherbert was a bit nervous. I was freaking out.
Sherbert saw some dim glow. I saw very bright light. Vinyl saw nothing.
I had none of the strange magic I’d discovered in me. Sherbert had a bit of it speckling her aura. Vinyl was basically made of the stuff.
The wards around this tower took into account that magic’s signature as part of their operation!
I facehooved. “Oh wow! I’m a HUGE idiot,” I moaned. “It’s wards. It’s a big mind affecting ward.”
“Explain,” Vinyl said in her ‘commandery’ voice.
“I need to confirm it first,” I said, closing my eyes and concentrating on my magic, quickly casting the detection spell I’d made earlier this evening. I opened my eyes, and looked around. I could still see all of the shadows, and the light, and the bubble itself… But now I could see dark splotches of the strange magic sliding and oozing all over everything. Moving in a way which suggested it was organized into a spell of some kind, but not in any system I recognised.
Based on how the magic moved, the dome’s perfection was an illusion. There were bumps, and cracks, and small icicles hanging from the ceiling. The ‘flat’ floor had lots of pits and holes, and seemingly bottemless voids, with very few safe paths going all the way to the large island around the base of the tower.
Interestingly, the tower itself was completely clean, and truly appeared as it seemed to at first.
I nodded triumphantly. While still afraid, I wasn’t panicked anymore. I understood it was all a lie. And I should have from the get go. The ward must also affect your judgment.
“The magic type I discovered is completely saturating this place,” I informed. “It’s arranged in a spell of some kind, and if I watch the auras, I can see that the chamber ahead isn’t how I see it visually.
“Sherbert you have a little of that magic in you, and you see some of the illusion, but not all of it. Likewise you were only a bit creeped out by the caves. Vinyl, you’re basically all… Whatever this stuff is, and you’re entirely unaffected.
“It’s just like any other aura detecting ward, only keyed to this strange stuff instead of an individual’s aura. Hence, I get the full effect. Sherbert gets a glitchy version as the ward can’t decide what she is, and Vi… Well it seems to just be welcoming you with a red carpet. You said it feels cozy.”
Vi hummed and then nodded once. “Okay, that would make sense. After all, if this magic is what Dad said it should be-”
“What did your dad say it was?” Sherbert interrupted with a worried twinge to her voice. “Because um… I’ve been seeing the, um, stuff the whole time we’ve been in here. But you know, I Pinkie Promised.”
I closed my eyes and groaned. “That promise of yours is REALLY biting us in the plot.”
“Agreed!” Vinyl said irritably. “I’m not upset you made it, Sherbert. But since we can see the stuff, or at least Lyra can, why doesn't that count as ‘we already know what it is?’”
“Because you don’t know what it is!” Sherbert countered. “You can see something but not know anything about it other than ‘This is a thing. It’s over there. It looks like itself’.”
Vi took a long, deep, super frustrated breath for me. I decided to spare her the rage-rant.
“Discord. Doesn't. Think. Like. That.” I stated flatly. “We can see. It. We’re interacting with it. We have the need to know. We’re aware of this stuff. What. Is. It!?”
Vi nodded in agreement. “Yeah! I know that the source of this stuff is most likely an extremely powerful magical entity that can rival Discord himself. Does THAT count as knowing what it is?!”
Sherbert shuffled her hooves worriedly against the ice. “I- I don’t know! Have you ever seen Discord pissed off? Genuinely mad? Projecting killing intent? I have. He teleported in front of me, looking like he was going to vaporize a continent, staring right into my eyes, when he thought I was a thing that um… That makes the stuff you’re seeing.
“I’m NOT risking this. At all. Ever. So unless you actually know WHAT this stuff is, by name, I’m not opening my mouth. If Pinkie can tell when a Pinkie Promise is broken, Discord can too!”
I growled in frustration. “Ugh! I- That’s understandable. But we’re all surrounded by the stuff, and it’s clearly a risk to us. If you see any threat, TELL US!” I demanded, stomping a hoof hard enough to crack the ice.
Sherbert nodded, stepping back slightly. “I- I will. I’m sorry. But- But I’m not going to-”
“We understand,” Vinyl signed.
I turned to Vinyl and gave her a weary look. “So… A magical entity trapped here, huh?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. I figure this is a private enough spot to talk about it,” Vinyl said as she looked around. “According to my dad, some sort of eldritch sounding creature is imprisoned inside the tower. It’s able to do things like, say, grant Sombra the insane amounts of power he had compared to any other litch in all of history. And also bring me to life when nothing else could.”
I blinked once. “Wait, we’re heading to the source of Sombra’s power?”
“Mhm. And that same source is what lets me be alive. By uh… By having used parts of a similar entity to give me life,” VI mumbled awkwardly. “So um, it’s kinda sort of my brother. Because it made a soul for me out of its dead sister. Yeah.”
The three of us were silent for a long long time.
“Uh… That, that should count,” Sherbert decided nervously. “The thing imprisoned here is called a Voidborn. They live outside of our universe. There’s little ones that are like extra dangerous monsters, and big ones that uh… Well, Discord said they literally eat entire universes. Just, as food.”
I squeaked fearfully instead of cursing in terror like I wanted to.
Sherbert waved her hooves urgently. “No no no no! We’re fine. We have to be fine. I mean, a mortal mage’s power can keep this thing imprisoned, so it has to be a little itty bitty one. But it still has magic which is based on raw potential. So it can do almost anything it wants, including impossible things that violate physics, even magical physics.”
Vi coughed. “Well, obviously. It forged me a soul… Are they true monsters? Or are they like us? Because dad said he had a conversation with it.”
“Discord seems to think they are all evil,” Sherbert admitted, looking down at the floor.
“Can’t be,” I objected. “This one did something nice.”
“Yeah, well, Dad was supposed to sort of let it free so he could live with me. It apparently sees me as it’s sister and-” VI paused, then laughed. “Oh wow. No. This one CAN’T be evil. It has a sense of family.”
“Diamond dogs do too. But they will still kill and eat you and then never feel bad about it,” I reminded.
“Oh,” Vi said, the wind visibly falling out of her sails. “Good point. It may have not killed dad for breaking their deal because of me being in the line of fire.”
“Soo, now that we know what’s here, I vote we go get Luna, and have her get Twilight to go over this place and make sure that prison’s bars are nice and stable and will last for the rest of eternity,” I said firmly.
Sherbert nodded. “Yeah. And also tell Discord about it.”
“Only if we know he won't blow up the whole Crystal Empire to kill it,” I countered with a wince.
If she wasn’t exaggerating how he’d reacted to detecting the void’s magic in her...
“No. We’re going inside,” Vinyl said adamantly.
“The hay we are!” I protested, turning around to leave.
“We are going to verify this entity as hostile or peaceful before we do a single thing, Lyra!” Vi insisted. “Do you not remember history class in college? Mage Medowbrook wasn’t exactly a good pony. Yeah, we remember her mostly for her contributions to magic, but she was still a pretty amoral wizard.
“Remember that time we went to Hound? How their diamond dogs are, you know, tall, thin, healthy looking. Usually pretty smart? Know how ours are dumb lumbering beasts with no real single uniform body shape?”
I blinked once as the faint dregs of history came rushing back to me. “Oh! Oh shit, you’re right. Mage Meadowbrook devolved Equestria’s Diamond Dogs to make conquering them easier for the pre-Celestia Equestrian army and to make it harder for them to butcher pony villages established in or near their territory,” I said with a sharp frown.
It’s not like me to forget lore, that’s sort of my thing. I’m the party’s bard, in game and out. The wards must have shaken me up more than I realized.
“Ex-bucking-actly,” Vi said witha sharp nod. “She may have given us the standardized spell system. Basic medical magic, and basic crystal energy storage, but she also did a lot of things we would call monstrous now, even if our ancestors didn’t.
“We’re going inside. If it’s evil, we go with Sherbert's plan. If it’s nice… We’ll work something out. But we are going in. Because trapping a cosmic entity to use as a massive battery is totally something she would have done.”
“This is a REALLY bad idea,” Sherbert objected. “Discord was very very clear about how they are.”
VI nodded. “Yeah. But we’re going to double check. Because everypony keeps forgetting that Discord and his kind are not omniscient. He can be wrong. I’m not going to permanently imprison or kill someone who isn’t evil just because someone else thinks all of their kind is evil.”
Sherbert paused as if to object to that, but then sighed and hung her head. “Okay. That’s a fair point. It’s not very nice to judge a whole group like that. We’ll go check… But I do want to point out that all timberwolves are dangerous and will eat you. All Tatzlwyrms are dangerous and will eat you. Griffons from the Griffon Kingdoms have no problems eating you if you can’t physically fight them off. There are some groups that really are universally a certain way.”
Vi started to walk down the ice stairs towards the tower. “Follow me exactly. There are bottomless pits, wards, and… Landmines? Huh, Okay.”
I began to walk after her once more, pausing only to look at Sherbert and say. “Yeah, we call those groups monsters. But Vinyl and I are reminders that some monsters are just damaged people, and can be fixed. There’s always exceptions. So we look first, shoot second.”
Sherbert sighed. “I know but… I trust the word of a literal god with, you know, litteral universes worth of experience.”
“He’s still failable!” Vi called back loudly.
I nodded in agreement and jogged to catch up to Vi. I wasn't about to go off the path.
And what a path it was. With my detection spell running, I could see the safe walking path in terms of what wasn’t a pit of death. But what I couldn’t see was the places where hidden spells were planted. Those were marked on the map, and Vi had us move around them.
We never had to jump or anything, but taking the time to move along the dropped spaghetti noodle shaped path, and avoid the minefield was… Aggravatingly slow. By the time we reached the safety of the central island, my suit’s clock indicated three hours had passed.
Three hours. To travel a straight line distance of maybe four kilometers.
I sighed and looked back the way we had come. “Man… Too bad we’re not pegasi,” I grumbled. “That would have taken like, two minutes.”
Sherbert paused, and facehooved, her hoof making a loud metallic ringing sound as it met her helmet. “Oh for pete's sake! I could have shape changed and flown us across one by one!” She snapped.
“Well… We’ll do that on the way back,” Vi said with a laugh. “That’s my fault too. I forgot that we have a new asset on our tea-”
The ground beneath our hooves shook. Vi and Sherbert snapped to attention, clearly feeling it too. It wasn’t the illusions at play.
The ground around the tower cracked, splitting open and withdrawing away from the island the tower sat in. Forming a hundred meter wide gap in the blink of an eye. A massive, hurricane-like, wall of wind screamed to life, enveloping the tower in what may as well have been a solid wall.
And above the deafening noise of the wind, coundless whispering voices could be heard chanting, “Yog-Sothoth… Yog-Sothoth…”
Before anypony could even scream, the ground around the tower cracked appart as purple, fleshy, root like tendrils burst forth from the ground, flowing together to form large blisters of sickly flesh from which thousands of bulbous eyes erupted like pimples. The abomination formed a wall around the tower, from which tentacles the size of large trees oozed and slithered, each one tipped in at least one fanged maw.
Then we screamed. We screamed so hard that the only part of my mind not completely terrified was the little blip that was happy the suit I was wearing had waste collection.
The thing spoke in a voice like a grumpy old stallion in the pre-coffee minutes of his day.
“I am The Lurker at the Threshold, The Key and the Gate, The Beyond One, Opener of the Way, The All-in-One, and The One-in-All,” it said. “You trespass upon ground that is forever mine, given by mortal and immortal minds. You seek treasures forbidden to you, treasures forever held here under bargains struck in good faith.
“Know that my speaking to you is only so you may grasp the insignificance of your beings before I awaken- Oh.”
“O-o-o-oh?” Vinyl stammered reflexively, cowering in terror.
“Sorry,” the abomination said, than audibly yawned. “I didn’t recognise you, The Light. Sorry. Really sleepy. I’d just drifted off from when those two vampires woke me up a few decades ago before your mortal friend there decided to ring that stupid bell.
“The Darkness is upstairs… As he always is. Go inside. I’m going back to bed.”
The winds died down. The land cracked back into position. The flesh-wall of terror dissolved into a few wispy strands of void, which drifted off into a small cabin near the base of the tower. Inside which I could see a single bed, a desk, a comfy chair, and a bookshelf filled with what had to be volumes of forbidden lore neverment for the eyes of living beings.
“Um, Y-y-y-y-you won't kill us, right?” I squeaked, still quite terrified.
“So long as you do not awaken me again,” the thing that should not be grumbled in it’s old man voice. “Ah, but I must be certain before I leave you to your own task. The Light, I trust you remember what the Chaos God and I agreed? You may not take any of the Mage’s final inventions, nor writings, from the tower. If you do, I will annihilate you.”
“W-wait, Discord knows you’re here?” Sherbert and Vinyl asked together.
“Of course. Did you forget our bargain? I required a place to nap where another Voidborn wouldn’t find me. He wanted the mage and her work safely contained, and could not do it through his own power.
“Occasionally destroying foolish mortals and lesser Voidborn as a guardian and a jailor is a small price to pay for a good nap in the safety of a hidden universe. A treasure which you are presently denying me. I advise you go inside, and take care of your business,” the thing growled. “You do have business here, do you not? If you woke me without cause I will eat you all.”
“We do! We’re visiting my brother!” Vi said with a terrified laugh as she ran behind Sherbert and I, grabbing our shoulders with her forehooves and began to pull us towards the tower door.
We didn’t need anything more than her first light tug to bolt headlong for the tower’s doors using the quietest terrified-panic-run ever.
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INTERESTING so Discord knows at least some of it
this left a smile on my face
Once again, they should have talked to Discord.
Apparently, he's not even going to kill these voidborn.
8452045 I'm not counting on that after all Discord might know everything the Voidborn has done.
Murder murder murder snow!
(I see wut u did thar)
Oh yeah, they have access to Lovecraft. Discord should just have pointed at it and told Sherbet it's required reading
Funny how Sherb and Vinyl find the cave normal/cozy. Surely makes all the terror others had seem trivial, if not downright childish. Not their fault that not everyone is a voidtouched, after all.
Grumpy old man jailor/doorman is hilarious. His sleepy declaration of titles oozed "I'm to bucking tired to do this right now, gtbo and let me sleep!". And still managed to be marginally less funny than Lyra's mind being glad for waste collection
On that note, playing Call of Cthulhu for them now is either going to be pants shitting terrifying or just"meh, been there, done that, got the lousy seven armed t-shirt".
Hm. Veryyyy interesting. I wonder if Dissy knows not all voidborn are bad?
8452108
You're right, I guess...
But I bet you there are a lot of these "voidborn". We haven't seen the outside of universes yet, so we can't be sure how many there are. It seems the smaller ones are numerous and can easily enter dimensions.
Noted the guardian says he only just started to drift off after those vampires decades ago. Vi comments that she is almost 80 that alone illustrates the difference in scale between mortals and the voidborn
8452169 Well keep in mind ponies in Equestria have been punching holes through to other dimensions for a while now.. How many of them where worried about any after effects or what effects their failures might of caused. You can guarantee for every success there was multiple failures even for mages like Starswirl and Clover. How many other mages tried it sure they were just as good if not better than Starswirl
Bond. James Bond. That is all.
In case anyone is wondering, it's this one: Arctic Security Suit
blog-imgs-43.fc2.com/h/a/h/hahahajoka/2011_0224_235352-P2241134_convert_20110225155441.jpg
8452085
I'd say obviously Discord knows that not all Voidborn are bad, considering he has at least one being used to guard Meadowbrook's knowledge. Its unclear if he knows about The Darkness or not, but I'd say he probably does if he has a deal struck with Lurker.
Seeing as how Lurker only seems to want to do nothing but sleep, I'd say its a pretty good wager that Discord is aware that some Voidborn just want to be left alone.
Then there is the apparent fact that supposedly Darkness' sister was/is known as The Light... which suggests further that Voidborn simply come in different flavours other than evil, just like every other living creature in the world.
Why do I get the feeling the citizens of Phoenix are rather jaded or at least unconcerned when it comes to dangers?
Because you're a horny mare with a dirty mind
I want to know more about this, and like everything going on at Phoenix, Phoenix side story sometime?
8452589 Really? your suits don't come with HUDs? beacons? waypoints? the ability to outline friendly?
Are we talking one of these?
discuss.fleetworkshop.org/uploads/db1714/original/2X/2/2bad3763534a3636a97cd225b24501dd2189fd9b.jpg
You know I have never herd vampirism explained this way, I rather like this idea.
unitednuclear.com/images/bismuthcrystal.jpg
I always wondered what this stuff was called, I've seen it used to make swords and knives before, they look really cool!
Ya so would I at the idea of something eating the universe as a snack.
Magical or tech?
Wait you could? I thought you didn't have the ability to use pegasus magic, you can't use unicorn magic last I knew.
AGAIN! Again with the eyes!!!
Did he mistake Vi as somepony else because he is so sleepy? Or is Vi some hero she's not even aware of being yet?
8455632
Of course they do. But think about this? Who's perspectives are you following in this chapter?
8455997
Lyra, I'm assuming they also don't come with instructions to counter her derp
You know, I really feel like they should have gotten Sky's personal help on the equipment for this mission, instead of just one of his assistants.
Eldritch dude just wants to sleep, leave him alone guys.
8459915 "I just want a nice 30 quintillion year nap. Why is this so hard!?"
Pretty sure you meant "our" in this case.
8461211
Don't have much to comment on here, but I did find the ending rather amusing.