Chapter 10
“Oh, and, um, Lyra?”
“Yes?”
“I’m still sorry about the generator, but-!”
“Don’t be. I told you, that thing is my fault.”
“Uhh… But there was something else that came up, I’m a little curious about. I heard you traveled a lot, a long time ago?”
The unicorn chuckles. “So, did you hear it from Vinyl, Applejack, Fluttershy, Nurse Redheart, or Derpy Hooves?”
She blinks. “Uhh… Pinkie, actually.”
Nod. “Predictably. Then Vinyl confirmed it earlier today, right?”
Slow nod.
She chuckles. “Now I have to ask, did she mention it on her own or did you have to pry it out of her?”
“Uhh, what?”
“No really, did she volunteer it or did you have to dig for it?”
“I… I guess it was a cross of both. She was gushing about your security spellwork, and I asked if she knew where you learned how… Then she mentioned it. Speaking of which, where did you learn how?”
Smile, and a headshake. “Designed ‘em myself, actually. As a matter of fact, Vinyl is wrong- I still travel a lot.”
Blink. “Wait. It was Pinkie that said you did.”
Nod. “Yes, she did. But did she ever say I didn’t travel anymore?”
“Uh, yes?”
Shake, and she reaches to open the cupboard under the sink. “No. She said that-”
A pink head pops out of the cupboard that a pony shouldn’t fit in. “Back in the day, Lyra traveled a super duper lot!” The head disappears again as Lyra closes the cabinet.
“So yes.”
“Then…”
“Well, she wouldn’t be lying…” Lyra reaches for a different cabinet, pulling it open to let a pink head stick out of it.
“Unless I said it didn’t apply anymore!”
Then the pink head disappears again, and the cabinet lands shut.
“What…?”
Lyra chuckles, completing the dinner salads she’s been working on, and levitating them over to the dining table. “Yes, she knows the truth.”
Bonbon’s jaw drops. “Then… How did you know…?”
“That Vinyl knew about it? I didn’t. I just knew…” She pauses, smiling, and her horn glows for a second before a thaumic scroll lands on the table between them. “I just knew that. Go ahead, take a peek.” She stuffs her face into her salad with an odd squeaking noise.
Bonbon slowly reaches for the scroll, surveying her own salad, and finally touches it. Instantly, she knows it’s… an unlabeled record, dated almost eight full years ago. She blinks up at Lyra, raises an eyebrow, and opens herself to the record, reviewing its contents.
“... Oh.”
“Oh hey, Bonbon! … Uh, did something happen?”
Bonbon looks the unicorn in the eye. “Four three nine five.”
Vinyl’s eyes go wide and she takes a step back. “Uh, is seven six two nine better?”
Bonbon lets out a sigh. “Whew. I was wondering… Three one oh eight. I’ve got something for you.”
The DJ’s eyes go even wider, and she backs back into her house. “Roger that. Um, my study will be best.”
Octavia rounds the corner at that moment. “Wha-? Something happen?”
Vinyl doesn’t move anything except her mouth. “Work.”
Octavia nods firmly. “I’ll have breakfast waiting.” She trots off to the kitchen.
Then the unicorn leads Bonbon into the back of the house and through a solid wooden door. A solid wooden door that emits a low, metallic clunk as it lands shut, shortly followed by the small sounds of metallic deadbolts sliding into place.
“Otherwise known as the panic room,” Vinyl states, still wide-eyed. “Uh…”
Bonbon fluidly removes the thaumic scroll from her mane, and offers it to the unicorn. “You’re going to want to see this,” she states. “She revealed it to me just this morning.”
Vinyl takes the scroll in her magic, floating it over to her hoof. “Thaumic recording, eight years ago, no label… She? That Lyra?”
Nod.
Vinyl looks down at the scroll, and triggers the tangible playback function on the recording. Most thaumic recordings don’t have that, instead being viewable by unrolling the scroll and watching it like a window… Or, more accurately, a moving picture; tilting it or moving side-to-side never changes the field of view.
It seems Lyra redesigned the thaumic scroll- or, more likely, revealed a new design found someplace else. She can move around wherever she wants, look wherever she wants, scroll forwards or backwards through the record at will… Sure, there’s the simple limitation where she can’t actually see anything that wasn’t recorded, but so?
Then, it’s eight years old. And the capture of this kind of recording suggests a very different kind of spell than the one normally used to capture thaumic recordings; this simply can’t be made with the normal spell.
But she’s getting ahead of herself, examining the spellwork. She rewinds the record back to the beginning and starts actually watching the record.
She recognizes the house and property; it’s Lyra’s property. A momentary glance through the house shows that the interior was not recorded. Funny how she can make that glance all at once.
She spots herself walk onto the property. A younger version of herself, mumbling about something… She listens closely, and picks out the words being spoken.
“Ooh, this is so exciting! My first mission! I’ll have to try out all my tools! … er, the ones I can, I suppose. I can’t try things like breaching charges on anything I don’t really want to destroy. Um… Oh, I missed the first step already! Check for security spells… Uh, nothing. Good.”
She watches the younger version of herself, fresh out of training and hardly a week into the establishment of her chosen cover as a DJ. This would have been before she met Octavia- and before she almost got discovered a few times.
Yet the mere presence of this recording informs her she was discovered on her very first mission- just nopony told her about it. Though, given how Bonbon had seemed relieved when she’d confirmed her Agency status, this recording isn’t enough to pin down exactly who she’s associated with- even for another Agent.
She watches her younger self, after coming up dry on her search for security enchantments, move on to step two: Scan for scrying or recording spells… and come up dry.
She sighs. If only she had known, back then, that musicians always use security; she would have realized something was off and aborted right there. After all, at that point, Lyra had been a lyrist for a dozen years already- and, if she remembers correctly, is actually out of town, probably to play somewhere, at the time of the recording. She shudders; roughly two weeks after her first mission, her mixing tables were stolen from her while she was away. A month after that, the same happened again- but she’d managed to track him down and reacquire the stolen tables, thanks to the low-end security spellwork she’d set up in the intervening time.
When Vinyl finishes reviewing the recording, her eyes go as wide as dinner plates.
“... Oh.”
Bonbon nods. “My reaction exactly.”
“So, uh…” Vinyl glances at the panic room door, horn flaring briefly. The rest of the recording had been exactly what she expected. “I’m Field Agent White Noise… My mission, this last… few years at least, has been to investigate Lyra. Um…”
Bonbon blinks. “... Oh. Field Agent Sweetie Drops- and my first mission, as of yesterday, is the same.”
“First mission? Oh, you lucky. Does she know about you?”
“I… I don’t think so, but she did catch my first Contact Agent.”
“She did? Shoot! How bad was it?”
“His name was Malevolent Darkness,” she states. “Back in Training, we liked calling him ‘Molester’ behind his back.”
Shudder. “Wow. He still there, or no?”
She shakes her head. “After Lyra turned him into a birdbath and sent him to the Guards, they replaced him with a first-timer- who hasn’t been caught, but I get the idea Lyra knew she was there.”
“She did?”
Nod. “Made her a salad before she left.”
“... Wow. Um… Okay. Maybe we could cooperate?”
Nod. “Probably the only way we’re going to get to the bottom of this. I’m thinking I’ll try to find out if she’s caught any other Agents snooping around her property- and if they’re still around, find out what they know.”
Blink. “You act like you already know there’s more.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Your mission has been ongoing for the last few years, you said- but that wasn’t eight years, was it?”
Blink. “True… My mission has been ongoing for the last four years or so, yet it’s exactly identical to my first mission.”
“And my mission is identical as well. So, across a timespan of eight years, Command hasn’t been satisfied with what they’ve been able to find out about her. I would be surprised if we were the only Agents they’ve sent.”
“Wow. Um… Did you find out where she learned...?”
Nod- then she freezes. “I did… She designed them herself. When I mentioned the question, she immediately asked who told me she’d been traveling… and you were the first of the five names she mentioned.”
Blink. “So, she knows about at least five Agents.”
Nod. “That’s what I’m thinking- but she didn’t give me the impression of knowing who they’re aligned with.”
“Wow. So, who was it that told you? Pinkie?”
Nod. “What’s more, it seems she’s in on it.”
Blink. “What?”
“When she first told you about it, what did she say?”
“She said she used to travel a lot…?”
“No, the specific wording.”
She thinks for a second. “Mm, I don’t remember.”
Sigh- and she imitates Pinkie’s voice. “Back in the day, Lyra traveled a super duper lot!” She clears her throat, resetting to her normal tone.
Vinyl nods. “Sounds about right, yes. How is that important?”
“Well… Lyra never stopped traveling a lot.”
“What!? But I see her every day!”
“Good question! As it turns out, though, Pinkie is in on it. She explicitly didn’t say anything about now- and last week, when I asked when she’d stopped, the answer was a ‘Donno’ variant.” Sigh. “Either that or multiple very specific times, a few days apart- which turned out to be times that Lyra had stopped by.”
Blink. “She’s good, then. Telling a deceptive truth… She had me fooled.”
“I’d wager to guess you’re not the only one.”
Nod. “What was that list again?”
“List? Oh, um… You were first, then Applejack, Rainbow, Nurse Redheart, and Derpy Hooves.”
Stats
Page generated in 0.03 seconds
Total duration
1,003 users online
164,955 hits today, 2,561,572 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Wow. She's good. I would also not be surprised if that scroll had a tracker... :D
I do wonder what's the part with the agent's affiliations; are they segmented, or are there different agencies/controllers?
9270650
Yep, she's good. I haven't posted the next chapter yet 'cause I'm not entirely satisfied with it.
9270655
I was unsure of that. It does make sense.
Darn it, I think the stories are confusing me. Did she move one under her house, or is the distant one the same one that hid her from Tirek?
9270665
Uh... You might want to reread. The whole story.
In short, she was hidden from Tirek by being hundreds of miles away, in the Bolo, with layer after layer of magic. Magic she used to teleport the Bolo to her "experimentation zone" fifty miles from Ponyville- where she has the 55KW geothermal, where her real self is right now. Then she grabbed a little geothermal to bring home, installed it, and dashed out to greet Bonbon on virtually zero magic.
9270672
Ah, right. I did say the similarity was confusing me. For that matter, there's only a single paragraph at the start of Two and some minor context clues in chapter one that tell us that she didn't just TP it under her house but couldn't immediately dig out, which is what I had thought had happened.
9270700
True. Float around long enough and I just ordered another story published...
9270700
Oh- and don't forget the whole traveling a lot, the train ride, a couple chapters ago she took a train out and entered the place...
Er... either it's when she said Rainbow instead of Fluttershy at the end or I missed it and you made a mistake with that switch because I got real confused for a second and went back up to double check.