Airship Mauled

by Darkonshadows

Chapter Sixty Six, How Low Did She Get?: Welcome to Chineigh.

-Airship Mauled, Jade-

“Look I can do math, eight plus eight is sixteen. Twenty four plus twenty three is forty seven. Simple math isn’t that hard…” See I can admit my faults. “Though I probably shouldn’t have been attempting or teaching math while clinically insane.”

I probably taught my tree my completely questionable math skills with pretend hand puppets and that might not have been the best thing I’ve ever done.

Hey, it got me out of limbo at least.

“There, there, it’s okay Jade, we understand and love you.” Really Fizzle, that’s how you’re going to treat me? The pats on the back were at least rather reassuring, even if they were highly condescending. “Now never try to teach math while completely insane or even while you are functionally sane again. If you can do that, then I’m sure everything will be fine.”

She was treating me like a little child, but at least I could understand where she was coming from. I did make most of the people in the room scream in horror after all.

“Look at it this way, we at least learned that our wife Paprika might have a fear of hoof puppets.” Arizona watched as her fluffy wife ducked under the table whimpering. “Don’t know where she got it from though.”

“It’s okay Paprika, there are no hoof puppets here.” Velvet looked busy trying to coax Paprika out from under the table. “Besides, you know we’d protect you!”

“Meep…” Paprika poked head up from under the table slightly.

“Look, as scary as the prospect of the chica kitty doing math, with the explanations provided in these fairly nice pamphlets that were hoofed out…” Glancing at Lingo, I saw the pamphlet in his hoof and read the title on it.

“Hey, why does that say beginners guide?! Are you guys seriously implying that you made more than one pamphlet about me for this? When did you even start passing them out to begin with and why don’t I have one!” I let out indignantly before I felt something start scratching me behind the ears, thus calming me down immediately. “A little lower… oh that’s the spot…”

“Good Jade, just relax, don’t petty kitty everyone in this room into oblivion… we actually wouldn’t survive that.” You might Fizzy, especially if you kept rubbing my ears like this with your hoof. She looked at everyone. “Never give her time to plan a petty kitty scheme, defuse immediately if angry unless the target isn’t you.”

“I can agree with that!” Flamberge shouted from next to Sweetcakes with an icepack on his head.

“Can we get back to how she got out of there?” Queried Drip as he snuggled against Macaroni with Lingo.

“I was getting to that and it involves the fifth year. The plane of a rather questionable existence being set on fire by my ‘admittedly’ consistent math skills was a good thing…” I glanced around at everyone. There were quite a few disbelieving looks. “Seriously, it was actually a good thing that most of the place caught on fire and turned some of the sand to glass or else I wouldn’t be here telling everyone about this! So at the very least giving my math skills some credit for getting me out of there.”

They were all still blankly staring at me, I sighed and started back into things.

-Limbo, early into approximately the fifth year, Jade-

“Wait a minute, you can talk?!” Seriously guys, you don’t need to face hoof so loudly. It might disrupt the flow of my story.

“Of course I can mommy.” The tree answered in a friendly tone and it glowed slightly with each spoken word. “Mommy is silly.”

“Huh, okay then.” It took a while for me to finally get my mind fully together after figuring that out, but once I did I made a brilliant plan on how to get out. It would involve setting a localized portion of the dimension on fire again, but there were unfortunate side effects of my exit strategy. “Say… could we do a bit of math together?”

-Break-

“Okay, show of hooves or whatever else you have, who would trust Jade with a child?” Fizzle raised her own hoof, as did everyone in the room.

“Aw… you guys!” Jade was awed and touched at the trust they showed in her with being able to take care of a child.

“Now show of limbs, who would trust Jade with math even if she was working in conjunction with someone else?” Everyone immediately lower their limbs with Fizzle’s words and were all looking at everything else in the room.

Nobody could quite meet Jade’s slightly miffed eyes, not a single limb was up in the air.

“Fizzy, my resentment and urge to petty kitty this whole room is rising…” Jade said slowly as her eyes twitched violently, because even Fluttershy and Pom were looking elsewhere. Those two were the nicest people in the room and even they didn’t throw her a pity vote.

Fizzle just started to pet Jade again, she grumbled and eventually started purring. This made Fizzle smile calmly as she stroked the beige furred Abyssinian’s green hair.

-End Break-

Getting back to the story, also you guys are quite mean, it was into the fifth year that Icky slowly drew me back into a form of relative sanity.

I say ‘relative’, because it took me a while and a lot of tender love and care to get me back to completely functional for society as I am now after I left the place.

Now as to how I escaped the place, do I need to clarify that my plan didn’t involve me personally using math all too much or at all?

Why does everyone sound so relieved to hear that?!

In any case, I thought back to the fact that limbo had large chunks of glass all over the place due to my “MATH” lessons. Why does it sound like I’m saying that with air quotes?

It made me consider how an hourglass teeming with dark magic got me into this mess, I didn’t have any dark magic on me. So I figured, in my mildly decent mental state, that a regular hourglass might get me out of this.

So I improvised a method to create hourglasses out of nothing but the purple sand, my insanity driven savant sand sculpturing skills aided in this endeavor greatly. It also required Icky Dress to do my form of complicated math with magic in a localized area.

I just have to ask, was it really a series minor apocalypses if no one is around to be hit with or harmed by it? In any case Icky created enough magical fire, being more capable of using magic than I was as a very magical tree, to quickly heat some very uniquely made sand sculptures.

-Break-

“Couldn’t you have used a salamander scale to make an hourglass and have gotten out sooner?” Kuril received a shaking head from her daughter.

“Wouldn’t have worked, I’d be down a salamander scale and the cast only gives you one defined wall of flames over a given area that likely wouldn’t have melted the sand evenly or the effect wouldn’t have stopped when I needed it to. That would have made a solid block of useless glass.” Jade answered with flat looked even as she smiled at the hooves wrapping her in a hug. “I’m not an expert in glass blowing, but I had an idea as to how difficult it would have been to do it correctly with such an unwieldly cast like that. I’d only have one shot at making an effective hourglass. If I had failed, I’d be out of a salamander scale that I might have needed later for its magical alchemy sustain effect. Icky was actually capable of doing it without me relying on a one-time thing to hopefully achieve a successful result.”

“How many tries until you were successful?” Fizzle place her chin on Jade’s head.

“It took a good fifty or so tries directing Icky to flash melt the sand as quick as she could so. Before you ask, I couldn’t use my infinite campfire ability without the sun being present.” Jade had been fairly correct in the idea that there was no way could have done it on the first try with the one salamander scale she had on her. “Thank goodness for Icky being able to create localized fire, since it was about the fifty third attempt that we succeeded. We only produced two barely viable hourglasses out of the one hundred and seventeen near identical sand sculptures I made that were hit with an explosively powerful blast of flame that time, there was a lot of heat and liquefied molten glass. Fifty three attempts with more than a hundred sand sculptures each… I actually counted to make sure we had at least one hundred chances at success each time.”

-End Break-

After at least seven months of nearly non-stop trying, with very little sleep, I held the fruits of our labor.

I was in awe, as I reverently carried the two fragile looking hourglasses that I and Icky Dress had forged together. The hourglasses were made from simple sculptures of two spheres connected together, one solid and the other hollow. As you can imagine there were plenty of problems making one of the conjoined spheres hollow, but we had eventually managed it.

I didn’t know if this was going to work or not, but I still had to try. I gathered my supplies and a few souvenirs from my first math lesson with Icky Dress.

“Icky… if this doesn’t work… I won’t know what to do with myself.” The wobbly massive of glass with sand in it held in my left hand could only be vaguely called an hourglass, it was spilling sand into the empty portion like it was supposed to. The other one was more accurate shape and I put that in my pack and was going to use it next if this one didn’t pan out.

It likely didn’t matter if the object could do an exact hour accurately, I was hoping it only had to count as being an hourglass in name or spirit to work.

“Do it mom, show me the world beyond this place where you decided to plant me.” Hearing Icky’s encouragement, I held up the hourglass. “Even if… I might not live for very long beyond this realm if things go badly.”

“I’ll try to get your roots into some soil Icky.” My fur was a mess, my claws were jagged and my hair was a long sordid amount of tangles, I looked like anyone’s description of what a stereotypical hermit might look like.

I held the hourglass aloft and closed my eyes to begin the cast.

The fragile wobbly mess of melted sediment actually responded, I opened my eyes and threw the magic at the ground in front of me.

A vortex open in the world before my eyes, I cried fat tears.

I was getting out of there.

This vortex however did not look like the one that I had made with the dark magic hourglass, it also did not absorb any of the surrounding sands. What it did do was rapidly grow to suck in and swallow both Icky and Me.

That’s when we were separated.

-???, Jade-

A crack split the air in this place, this announced my arrival to somewhere else and I slammed into a sand dune among the blistering heat. Given the sand wasn’t purple and I could feel the sun, I was no longer stuck and hopefully there was civilization nearby.

I started walking and looking around for any signs of other being, but I stopped a few feet from where I fell.

“Icky? ICKY? ICKY DRESS!” It didn’t take me long to realize that Icky was no longer with me or anywhere near where I was. I was in another desert, but the sun felt nice on my fur after so long in a twilight realm of nothingness. “Where… no… not again… please… no… no, no, no, NO!”

I fell forward in the blistering heat onto my hands and started to cry. It was fortunate that I had attracted attention to myself, and also highly unfortunate that first signs of life I met out there among the sunlit sands was hostile.

A shadow fell over me and I looked up, my eyes shadowed in the cloak vaguely saw a Jackal standing over me with a steely gaze and eyes glowing like Quetzalcoatl while he was corrupted.

They were like tall muscular Diamond Dogs and… oh, you saw some in Cow-ro on the way here? Huh, I guess they stayed being much nicer since ancient times.

So back to the story, I was swiftly beset upon by Jackals in the times of Ancient Anugypt.

I didn’t defend myself and was swiftly knocked out by a blow to the head, thankfully they wanted to take me alive. Not so thankfully, they were going to torture me and try to get information out of me that I didn’t have.

Let me tell you, Anugyptian prisons back then don’t have good prisoner services. After five years in limbo, I considered it a slight step up in my situation as they gave me barely enough water to not die of dehydration after dragging me bodily through the desert.

I would soon actually be dragged into the war between Baast with the Anugyptian Felines and King Anubis, the god of death and nightmare tainted leader of the Anugyptian Jackals.

-Break for lunch, Airship Mauled, Baast-

“This would be a time after 'future' Discord visited us, he had to leave quickly after we helped him and we soon had heard rumors that they had captured some of my subjects. My contingent and I were on our way to rescue them and that’s where we first met the sun priestess Jaded La Perm.” Never had I met a mortal so driven to survive, after plenty of time with Quiet Voice to help get her mind centered back to what it once was. Jade has been through much, she was quite happy now. “She wasn’t exactly in her right mind at the time, but she definitely didn’t need our help to escape and was already in the midst of a jail break by the time we got to her holding cell.”

“Yeah, future Discord had to leave quickly to not screw up the time stream, I absolutely told him to not mess history up where it involves me or mine.” Jade was now being comforted by Maries and Fizzle was sitting off to the side.

“You met Discord?” Fluttershy looked fairly curious, she was much braver than Quiet Voice.

“Yeah, I met him far later, but for a time he was going by the moniker Chaos, the blue winged Anugyptian Feline with a demented amount of humor. Anugyptian Felines also went by the term ‘flail-tail’ a lot, they actually wore it with pride even when the jackals wouldn’t call them anything else.” After Jade finished speaking, I watched as my son flicked his split tail about as Kuril sat a plate of seasoned fish before him.

“Then Nefer is our favorite flail-tail!” Jacky rubbed Nefer’s head and he mewled a bit angrily.

Even if he pretended to hate the affection, Nefer had a smile on his face the entire time.

My Nefer always finds his way, like Jaded finally found hers.

Author's Note:

(New magical alchemy ingredient!)

Next: City of the moon.

Comments

[Herald of Opera]

Wow, using the cut-to-bizarre-reality-warp on purpose as a repeatable thing? She really had gone so crazy she came out the other side...

[Booster Spice]

Using an hourglass as a Dreinstein-Rosencatz time and dimention bridge cast?

But where did Icky get to?

Hopefully she had a better time than Rincewinds Kangaroo.

[jimerjam]

What do you wanna bet that icky dress is sent into the past and becomes the tree of harmony?

[Herald of Opera]

10084781
Hard pass on that one; she was stated to have slurred the name, from there you get Yggdrasil, and from there you get the tree becoming the multiverse because that's what Yggdrasil is.