• Published 2nd Jan 2018
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The Maretian - Kris Overstreet



Mark Watney is stranded- the only human on Mars. But he's not alone- five astronauts from a magical kingdom are shipwrecked with him.

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Sol 261

MISSION LOG – SOL 261

The Pathfinder chat is still down. Bandwidth has dwindled down to a truly pathetic 400 bits per second. That’s not bytes, that’s BITS. Put it another way, Pathfinder is transferring one kilobyte every twenty-one seconds. So whatever NASA is sending for download twelve hours each day doesn’t have to be very big to tie up everything for days.

I assume it’s important, though. NASA wouldn’t tie up our main communications system for days on end just to send me a kitten video. (Though to be honest, I could use some kitten vids from the Internet right now, and I’m sure the ponies would just eat them up.)

(That last parenthetical might have triggered a strange mental image. It certainly did in me when I re-read it. However, I am certain that four out of five of the current Hab residents do not see cats as food. Given that, I’m reluctant to mention the existence of millions of crowd-sourced baby cat videos to Fireball. He might think it was sort of like people taking pictures of their lunch or something.)

Anyway, we’re still talking to one another again, and progress has resumed on the Whinnybago. We’re all the way up to IV-D (having skipped over I because it’s duplicate work and because we weren’t in any mood for sorting out nuts and bolts by size or watching paint dry). Rover 1’s pressure vessel is now sitting by the Hab.

Tomorrow I use a bit of wiring harness from it to wire Rover 1’s remaining systems directly into the Hab power grid so we can power its computers back up as quickly as possible and get use of Rover 2 back. (Remember, one of the rovers has to be near the Hab at all times for Pathfinder to talk to, because Pathfinder can’t communicate with the Hab directly.)

The black crystal I pulled from the dirt in front of the cave farm yesterday crumbled to dust overnight. Starlight tells me there wasn’t enough environmental magic for them to feed off of, and by tomorrow even the dust will have evaporated. Of course, she told me this after chewing me out, because… well…

Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python animator guy, made a lot of arty films after the Python years. My favorite remains Baron Munchausen because it has Robin Williams in an uncredited role, but I’ve seen them all, including the one that let Gilliam write his ticket as a director- Time Bandits. And Time Bandits ends with this lump of burnt gunk they call “concentrated evil” somehow going from being in the Supreme Being’s throne room to being in a toaster oven. The main character’s parents poke it and explode, and that’s how the movie ends.

It’s a trippy movie, but if you see Gilliam’s name as director you should take that for granted, be it good trip (Munchausen), bad trip (Brazil), or back and forth (Time Bandits). But I bring it up for a reason: the ugly crystals are, according to Starlight, concentrated evil.

Now, obviously I didn’t explode, though I was wearing a space suit at the time and never directly touched the stuff. But those crystals are a sort of symptom of dark magic, and dark magic is apparently very serious business in ponyland.

Dark magic feeds on evil desires- anger, fear, greed, the usual. It’s a lot cheaper on mana in the short term, which makes it really easy to cast once you learn how. Does familiar it sound, hmm? The thing is, dark magic makes up the difference by devouring the user. Once you get started, it’s really, really difficult to stop, especially since the more you use, the less you want to stop.

And to make things better, dark magic has a mind of its own. It wants to get cast. It wants to take over. It tempts and whispers, Starlight says, so that even the best ponies can be tempted to try to use it for noble ends.

It’s going to be really interesting to see Starlight’s reaction to the third chapter or so of Fellowship of the Ring in a week or so.

Anyway, the crystals. They’re kind of, I dunno, kind of like shock quartz, or possibly trinitite. They’re a by-product of dark magic- or any magic which is soaked in negative emotions. You cast dark magic, and somewhere or other those crystals are likely to show up. Normally, when you see them, it is time to run and fetch a powerful good wizard to get rid of the stuff (and the bad wizard who made it).

Problem: Starlight is the only wizard we have, and by her own admission, she’s not so much a good wizard as an ex-bad wizard on one hell of a work-release program.

(Thought: imagine Voldemort, or better yet Sauron, on probation, helping fix up little old ladies’ homes. ‘Too cold, Mrs. Maitland? Here, let me open up a volcanic vent in your basement! Save hundreds on heater oil! And don’t worry about the mice, my colleague Mr. Riddle will take care of those. Just, well, keep your eyes shut for a bit, because his pet is… shy, yeah, that’s the ticket.’)

Starlight’s embarrassed and uncomfortable for having spouted enough rage-magic to make those crystals appear, and she’s worried that they might twist any magic cast nearby to make more dark magic. They can also dampen positive emotions and amplify negative ones- a trick some really bad pony once used to enslave an entire kingdom once upon a time.

I’m explaining this badly, I know, but I only kind of half understand what Starlight was trying to tell me. Bottom line, she said don’t mess with them again, they’re dangerous.

So of course I was going to get another, because NASA will read this log and want to know why I didn’t do a geology work-up on the stuff. But I didn’t go to the cave today, because Rover 2 had to stay here until Rover 1 is repurposed as the radio shack. And when Cherry and Spitfire got back, they said all the crystals on the hillside had crumbled too.

So sorry, NASA, but I missed my chance to do science to magic plutonium. I’m sure you’re horribly disappointed in me, but I can only plead extenuating circumstances, namely that… that… um…

Dear Mr. Kotter, please excuse Mark from analyzing evil magic rocks. He is allergic. Signed, Epstein’s Mother.

Author's Note:

Today was supposed to be a day of rest. I did a good bit of work regardless. Unfortunately, this wasn't part of that work...

A-Kon is this weekend- my biggest show of the year, and I've taken most of the money from the last few shows to stock up heavy on merch. I just hope the really big order gets where it's supposed to go in time...

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