Antidote
Eventually, Twilight finishes articulating her jaw wordlessly up and down. “What was that?” She finally asks.
The brown mare looks at her with a politely inquisitive expression, saying something she can’t understand- maybe a question? Rainbow was right, though- Fluttershy might understand, but she doesn’t stand a chance.
She hangs her head. “You probably don’t understand a thing I’m saying, do you?”
Another polite expression, showing some confusion, along with some worry.
Worry? Twilight immediately sets about calming that worry… or getting distracted in the process. Within seconds, she’s managed to forget all about the mystery pony as she examines and pokes at everything in the room- all weird stuff she hasn’t a clue what is. She even manages to forget that her magic won’t work.
Wait! Was that a magic surge she just felt, ever so momentary?
She watches calmly as the native recovers. The native had experienced gate shear. Rift gates are incredibly stable- yet incredibly dangerous at the same time. Anything living that passes through will invariably be segregated from its soul. Her auxiliary form is immune to this effect, simply by being an auxiliary form- it doesn’t have a soul in the first place. The good news is that the effect takes time to manifest- and is fully curable, up until the affected entity dies, often between thirty seconds and a minute after the event. It so happens she’s never experienced it before, but everyone that has described it as a burning pain in their chest. Of course, the antidote is reportedly as painful as it is fragrant, until it does its job- after which it’s just as painless as it is flavorless.
The purple native stares at her for several minutes, jaw opening and closing somewhat erratically as she attempts to make sense of the situation. This she finds amusing- she’s probably trying to decide exactly what just happened, and possibly wondering why she didn’t consume any antidote herself.
Finally, some words are spoken. She doesn’t understand them at all- and a fleet-fingered glance at the control panel indicates her computer doesn’t either.
“Did you want to go back home?” she asks.
More words neither she nor her computer understand, accompanied by a hung head- presumably related to an acknowledgement of the language barrier. She begins to worry- this native is probably going to panic soon, once she realizes where they are.
Only, she watches as a flash of worry crosses the purple face- replaced almost instantly by curiosity as it casts around the room. So, she’s gotten a curious native. Might be helpful. Then again, now that she’s distracted, she’s far less likely to notice sensor scans- and orders one done. She’d noticed before that some native creatures seemed to manipulate rift energy in some manner or another- that giant scorpion so long ago had been a prime example. So, while the native in her transporter room examines the (locked) control panel, her ship’s rift sensors perform a high-fidelity scan. Perhaps, if she can read their weird links to rift space, she can tune her rift shield to avoid interfering with them?
While the scan runs, she reviews the footage of her arrival back aboard ship. Her computers had faithfully analyzed it for all important details, presenting them to her in bulleted form, almost immediately upon passing through- but now, watching the video, she notices something her computer had missed. The look of fear, of terror, on the native’s face before they passed through the gate.
Like the native understood the dangers of the gate, and didn’t know she was using an auxiliary form.
Then and there, she decides not to make a general allowance for their weird links within her ship’s defensive fields; there’s a reason they exist, and it’s not to be turned off. However… She runs the footage taken from the investigative party’s departure from the edge of the shield. There had been a bright flash, a surge of rift energy- and they had disappeared. Rift sensors had not shown any penetration into rift space- and had not recognized the signature.
If she assumes that was some sort of short-range remote teleportation ability, much like her ship has (though it’s instantly lethal to everything living, including auxiliary forms)... She can tune the shields to allow that, specifically on the transporter pads. They can already be tuned to allow other ships to send in components in those specific spots with the touch of a button- so that shouldn’t be hard. She’ll just have to find out if this purple native has this ability- and if so, convince her to use it… Preferably on something inanimate, like…
Oh, that’s easy. Like the styrofoam cup she drank the antidote from. The tuning of the shield for another ship’s (or station’s) transporters can have adverse effects on the first jump- usually resulting in the complete destruction of whatever was transported. As such, there are-
Right! There are procedures- during the tuning, standard procedure is to transport the water in a pitcher in one ship to a bucket in the other! So happens she has almost eighty such pitchers floating around- and dozens of buckets… And, with that H2O tap extended, effectively limitless water. The main benefit of water is its utter harmlessness if it is destroyed- or more accurately, torn into thousands of unmoving fragments, usually spread over a 15% greater volume than intended, but on the intended position. The worst that had ever happened in recorded history was that the waterproof surface of the transporter pad got wet.
So, her fingers fly, punching orders into the computer. If this native is capable of that, and she can tune it properly, she could give the native an escape route! What’s more, if she pulls it off right, the native will know she can escape! … Though only from the pad. Minor detail.
A few more strokes on the control panel later, the Rift Engine spins up a touch, feeding the additional Rift energy into the transporters- which power on to transport in the required materials, leaving them on the pad.
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Is this a crossover?
8790167
No, this is not. This starship- and its captain- are original.
As a further aside, both of you need avatars. :D
8790316
'both of you'... You mean spaceship & pilot, or...?
8790618
I meant you and the person you replied to. :D
Default profile images, and all that. I usually choose some sort of awesome-looking dragon artwork.
8791225
Ahh.... Whatever. XD maybe someday. I don't generally bother with that kind of thing.
8803588
IMO, it would make more sense narratively to show the power of the weapon by describing its effects (eg. "can blow up a star"), than providing an explicit value that's so catastrophically "out of range" as to be nonsensical and is guaranteed to grab the attention of irritating pedants like myself.
8804997
Good point. To that end...
The four Starcracker missiles are each genocidal weapons. When fired, they instantly decimate space for a range of a couple lightyears around, eliminating everything, both in N-space and in rift space. Planets, stars, singularities. Everything. No, even our heroine's ship can't protect itself against just the fringes of that blast.
Those spinal Thunderer cannons... pack that same amount of damage into a single target with a single shot. Nevermind the thing is capable of speeds of around 600 rounds/min, across all six weapons. Predictably, nothing in the known universe can tolerate its fury. Not even a singularity. Speaking of which, if she uses all six in tandem, they form a singularity cannon! ... Short-lived singularities, but still...
Yes, I know, it's a Mary Sue ship. I knew that long before I started this story.
8805153
Eeesh, reminds me of the ridiculous stuff the ships in the Culture setting get upto. That's kinda Gridfire on steroids!