Relax and heal 73%
A week went by on the surface of Proximus B. At first Twilight did her best to keep up with every member of the crew, since they spent most of their time arranging the fields and planting all the seeds they’d brought. It was nowhere near to the entire stockpile, but it would keep them fed for months if the crop came in. Not to mention enough Geneseed to wake the rest of the crew.
The alien soil had a strange smell to it, like every scoop had been ground with nuts and ash. But the soil-safety tests kept coming back positive. Even more, nopony came down with mysterious illnesses.
Of course, that didn’t change anything about the illnesses they already had.
“I’m positive,” Fluttershy declared, on the evening of the third day. “You’re showing pneumonia-like symptoms, Applejack. You’ve been working too hard.”
“I don’t got…” she started coughing, and a mouthful of greenish slime came up into the cloth Fluttershy held in front of her face. “A choice. Pinkie only knows how’ta grow rocks. That ain’t what we need right now.”
“You did a great job getting everything in the ground,” Fluttershy said. “Now you’re going to have to count on your friends for a bit. It’s an order—mandatory bedrest, sixteen hours a day.” She glanced over her shoulder at Twilight, who had just emerged from outside, with mud caked up her hooves almost all the way to her knees. It was dirty, smelly work. But Proximus B’s soil wasn’t unpleasant, exactly. “Her health could be in very serious risk if she keeps going like this captain. If she doesn’t listen, I recommend she goes into the ice until we can return to the Equinox.”
Not a casual recommendation. Putting a sick pony in cryo involved the risk of further complications, and meant another six months before they could be frozen again. “Noted. I agree, Fluttershy. You have my permission. If she forces us.”
“I won’t,” Applejack hung her head. “But… I want one walk…” she coughed again, and they waited patiently for her to finish. This time she reached down, taking a puff from a plastic inhaler, and her breath cleared much faster. “One walk to the fields each morning. To tell you all what to do. Give me that, and I’ll… stay in bed the rest of the time.”
“You can have one trip to the field,” Fluttershy corrected. “You can use a wheelchair. That somepony else will push.”
Applejack grumbled, but she didn’t have the leverage to argue. And besides, she was sick. The right pressure, and she was soon spending most of her time asleep, waking only when her breathing got too hard or her fever too hot.
Please Celestia, don’t let me get that. I don’t want to be in bed for weeks.
Beyond the farm, Twilight gave no assignments, only the restriction to go nowhere near the building and no more than a kilometer from the Prospector at any time. That didn’t mean they didn’t find interesting things to do.
Fluttershy built a little animal hutch and enclosure, entirely from sticks and rope, and set it up near the field. For all the time she spent gathering insects that she could dissect and study, she treated the more complex life with her usual care.
They weren’t rabbits, exactly, not like any she’d ever seen before. If anything, she felt a little sorry for them—their proportions looked like something painful, with swollen bellies and three sets of limbs instead of two. It spoke to the lack of predators in the tiny patch of life that they could survive, with as slow as they moved.
But most interesting to Twilight was Pinkie’s discovery, made after the first green shoots of their crop had started to rise from the tilled soil. She called over the radio, late into the afternoon. “Twilight! Hey, Twilight!”
Twilight had been reading then—one of the many books sent to the Equinox before contact with Equus was broken. She gently returned the portal screen to its holster on the wall, careful not to damage the delicate ribbon cable on the back. “Yes?”
“There’s something here, Twilight. Something that… I don’t really understand.”
“Dangerous?” Twilight was already rising, heading for the door. She snuck past Applejack’s bunk, but there was little chance of rousing the prospector over her own snores. The airlock wasn’t serving as an airlock much anymore, and where the hooks had once held biohazard suits they now held tools. Twilight grabbed her own belt off the hook, and settled it onto place. The radio went into its designated place, even as she selected an earpiece from a plastic box, then waited patiently for the pneumatic door to hiss open.
“No,” Pinkie replied, her tone certain. “Not to us.”
“Where are you?”
Twilight followed Pinkie’s directions, and soon enough she was approaching the place her Geologist had been spending most of her time. Here was a fairly orderly excavation into rocky soil, complete with lines of twine marking the place Pinkie had been digging, and a stolen utility stepladder to get down the four or so feet into the dirt.
There was a large pile of refuse on the soil—mostly bits of semiprecious stones Pinkie had found, nothing that interesting.
“What is it?” Twilight asked, leaning down over the edge. There was barely enough space for two ponies at the bottom. Pinkie was there, hunched over a bit of metal.
“Look.”
Twilight climbed down after her, squeezing in alongside Pinkie and bending down. There was shadow at the bottom of the hole, but Pinkie’s headlamp was enough.
The length of metal was bent and twisted, with a melted section on one side and a jagged, broken bolt protruding. Pinkie had exposed a rectangle of metal, where text was printed in block Ponish letters.
RES Solstice
Gantry Section 109-A4-Blue
Arduus ad Solem
1. Begin a full-scale excavation with every healthy pony’s resources. There’s no ship by that name. This can’t be here, this can’t be here, this can’t be here…
2. Bury it, never speak of it again. This can’t be here, this can’t be here, this can’t be here, this can’t be here…
3. Explore the structure. We shouldn’t be struggling for scraps when a source of information is so close.
(Confidence 200 Required)
YOLO!! Option 4.
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I'm drunk.
I vote Excavate.
If we hadn't just had 2 moral boost votes I would have had no choice but option 2.... Shame really, that one sounds hilarious to write..........
Option 2 it is.
Option Three. If nothing more is found there, THEN go Option One. Option Two is RIGHT OUT, Explorers, not cowards...
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I love how both options had "This can't be here" written on them! Really, I would go with options 1 or 3... But I have a hard time deciding and most people will vote for those anyway so...
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YOLO! OPTION 4! We made it this far let's risk it all on a silly gamble!
They took way more than 40 years, didn't them?
Alternatively, Equus itself is a colony, and they just found an ancient exploration ship from original pony worlds. Although the sun reference in the Moto raises doubts about it. Maybe FTL?
Either way a mystery. Curious on the development. Also, no way in hell I'm trusting Twiggles with magical checks, she failed all of them yet.
I’d say they excavate. The crew seems awefully shy towards mysteries like this is “this shouldn’t be here” is the fearful mantra it is.
Option 4 (which can be seen in the poll link) isn't written in the chapter's list of options.
I voted for excavate. There might be recoverable archives or tools inside. (Also as the time of this comment no one has voted to bury it.)
So, time travel shenaningan's maybe? This is..... interesting.
All this has happened before, it will happen again.
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Or in 40 years they now have FTL and just found the last expedition.
Excavate. Uncovering this could give them new insights on whats going on, and is (probably) less risky than exploring the building. Also, it may tell them that there's something out there that may be... detrimental to their health, and so they need to GTFO.
Excavate. Get as much information as you can. Safely. I see you, option 4, and I don't agree with you
Option 1. They need to find out what was redacted from their history now
I'm voting for the mysterious, unmentioned 4th option that appears on the poll but not the end of the chapter.
We've been playing it very safe. What's wrong with picking one option marked (Dangerous) every now and then.
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Not necessarily. They HAVE been gone 80+ years. In that time equestria could easily have developed their FTL warp drives significantly, thus creating a ship FAR faster than the equinox by factors of 10 to possibly 100+. A ship like that send after the equinox stopped recieving or sending transmissions or sent later to rondevu with them not only could have caught up to them but even surrpased them and beaten them to the planet. It may even have been what initially damaged the ship in the first place
nr. 1 seems stupid, because we don't really have the resources or logistical flexibility to just drop everything and dig up an entire ship.
nr. 2 is also stupid, because we are here to explore, and we are not weak of mind.
nr. 3 seems prudent.
The uncounted option seems like it would be the best, though it's a gamble, with potentially catastrophic results...
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WHAT WAS, WILL BE. WHAT WILL BE, WAS.
I think a small scale excavation is appropriate, but you haven't given an option for Pinkie to keep doing what she's doing.
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They've been gone 40 years. 80 was the round trip; the minimum time to be away from home.
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If they had just found the crashed ship, sure, but this thing is buried in the ground deep enough, and with so few signs of impact, it implies it's been there for a decent chunk of time.
GRAVITY IS DESIRE
TIME IS SIGHT
Option 1 or Option 4? Choices, choices...
Option 1. If someone else was here before us, we need to know
I'm going to guess there isn't a full ship down there, its likely a crashed wreckage or a section that was torn off before crashing on the planet, either way we need answers here
There's a fourth option on the poll using dark magic, gonna have to say noooo to that.
2 is right out, that's just foolishness. I say excavate.
Edit: Sooo tempted by option 4,but nah.
I'm going to have to go with ., If dash was up I'd say 3, but without a fighter to pad the rolls, I find that to risky.
People think the hidden option sounds good? Wonder what that...
Seriously? Have you lost your minds people?! Option 4 is a bad idea regardless of circumstances!
Aaaand immediately, the naming parallel is apparent. Equinox, Solstice: that's no coincidence, I'm sure.
1 would advance the story the safest and the slowest. Next would be 3, and then 4. 2 would be shooting the narrative in the foot (hoof?).
We're gonna be here a while anyways waiting for plants to grow. Might as well see everything the is to see. Let's start with our backyard and work outward from there.
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*stares in Starlight's direction*
Well, Option 3 up above is explore the structure, I'm assuming the building, but option three in the straw poll is excavate and see what else is buried. I'm taking straw poll 3 as the true 3 and going with that one. The mere fact it's in ponish is crazy high suspicious, what's really going on? But be careful. As for option 4, have we established that Equestrian magic works the same, or at all, in the rest of the universe? Twi might want to experiment a bit before going full dark magic...
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Aw jeez like in Season four of Battlestar Galactica where they finally find Earth and it was nuked to hell.
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The issue with that is that the top of this ship chunk was completely buried a solid four feet into the ground. I don't know a lot about archaeology, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen in a century or so.
Sounds a lot like what happened in Elite Dangerous background lore, a bunch of non-FTL Generation Ships, basically like the Equinox, were launched ~750 years before the events of the game. As technology advanced and FTL travel became commonplace, humanity traveled beyond the distance the Generation Ships were able to cover before they were able to actually reach their destinations. Forty years pass, develop better long distance travel, and the poor slow little Equinox gets left behind. Assuming this is the case, for all we know there could be a growing interstellar frontier already.
40 doesn't seem like much compared to E:D's 750 though.
They don't need to unearth the whole thing, just find an access port to break into.
Maybe Node can scan it?
I feel like, with the way its worded, the "this cant be here ..." choices will end in pain. Why? It sounds quite panicked.
While yes, it is named the 'solstice' and to top it off, it was stated the princesses went missing (I think it did anyways, I've got too many stories I'm reading rn). I think the best option would be to explore, rather than excavating the whole thing (causing a lot of ground noise that may attract the giant world water, which I've dubbed Alduin)...
Who knows though...
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Doesn't even need to be FTL, just sufficiently faster than the Equinox.
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Any ship that can move between star systems in 40 years is already going at FTL speeds. The average galactic distance between stars is a fair bit more than 40 light years in distance. For example the next closest star to us after our sun is 80 ish light years. So the equanox was already moving at FTL speeds so any significant speed increases will also be FTL
Ah, the classic "We invented FTL while you went the slow route" twist. Assuming that's what happened.
In any case, this seems like a great warmup for exploring the local structure. Time to see what's been going on while the crew was sleeping.
Also, I choose to call the hexapodal pseudolagomorphs "dodo bunnies."
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Spike definitely attests to them taking forty years. Or at least experiencing forty years.
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He took naps, as dragons do. Who knows, maybe one or more of those naps lasted longer than he expected. Some centuries so.
Then again the computer would have to face a different date too, so who knows? I think the "Equus is a colony" is the most valid explanation. If the ponies had reached FTL during travel it's likely they'd have rescued the cryo travelers, they knew where they were, after all. Unless greater powers intervined.
You never know what you'll discover when you give your crew freedom to do whatever you want. I find it amusing that Pinkie decided to just dig a hole. I did that in Minecraft once, just spent a week digging a giant 50x50 hole. Most relaxing thing I've ever done in a video game.
I'm amused by Twilight's reaction to what was found. Silly Twi, science is all about tearing away the comfortable feeling of thinking you understand the world. Burying things that go against your beliefs is for religious fanatics, politicians, and people that spend their days starting flame wars on social media.
Excavate!
There needs to be an option 5: ask node how to build a data link between itself and its origin. Even leaving aside their unwanted stowaway, there are a number of things that just haven't made sense in this system: The strange explosion as they were decelerating. The odd ship that blew up for no reason. The weird worm thing that tried to eat them. Whoever built node and the first ship they met lives here and should be able to tell them WTF is going on. Getting this info to explain all these seemingly random events would be very helpful in avoiding future disasters.
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Well, she is a geologist...
EDIT: Would love to hear her thoughts on how this hunk of apparently Equestrian metal ended up 1) buried and 2) on the Signalers' planet.
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True.
I'm guessing that the fact that it's in their language isn't a coincidence. Let's see… RES… Royal Equestrian Something?
Anyway, that would imply that, as FanOfMostEverything suggested, Equestria might have invented FTL technology while the Mane 6 were sleeping.
… talk about existential crisis.
Silly Twilight, such a truth always comes out one way or another.
Anyway, I'm not risking dark magic when there are other options. (Option 4 is in the poll but not in the chapter for some reason.)
That leaves 1 and 3. 1 would take up time and effort, so… 3 I go!
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Well, 2 is easy.
They already sent the Mane 6 and Spike, why not send another ship to the mystery Signal planet?
As for 1, no idea.
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Dude, Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years away from us, not 80. The average distance from one star system to the nearest other star system in the Milky Way is 5 light years.
4 light years in 40 years means traveling at 10% the speed of light, not faster than light.