The Stronger Tiara

by computerneek

Chapter 9

“GAAAH!” She screams, leaping awake and sitting up suddenly.

Then she sighs, and falls back down on her back. Musta been a nightmare.

Wait a minute. This isn’t my bed!

And sits right back up again, looking around.

There, sitting at that table and cleaning a bunch of oddly-shaped pieces of metal, is a pony she recognizes. Lyra Heartstrings.

Lyra’s looking up at her.

“You’re awake,” the unicorn observes. “Nasty dream?”

She lets out a sigh, somehow sensing that her tiara is on the nightstand to her other side, and turns to retrieve it. She settles it onto her head before she answers. “Nightmare.” She’s not sure she’d count all of it quite like that; in that nightmare, she’d had perfect recall and the ability to guess- accurately- exactly what she could and couldn’t tell somepony. She’d even managed to resolve her issue with the Crusaders- though that was specific to the unicorn, but it would inevitably have cascaded to the other two.

Lyra takes her time before she speaks again, running some kind of brush carefully in and out of a long metal tube of some sort. “What happened?”

She rolls upright, rising to her hooves- and collapsing promptly when one of her hind legs fails to support her weight, collapsing under her like wet linguini. “Ow! Um… I don’t know. You were there. So was Bonbon.” She looks down at her misbehaving leg, flexing the muscles in it- and getting very little response.

Lyra glances up at her between parts, apparently ignoring her problem with her leg. “We were there?” she asks. “What made it a nightmare?”

She shudders. “We… There was a stallion, with dark magic. He was chasing us.”

Lyra puts her brushes down, and starts putting the pieces together. “That wasn’t a dream.”

She blinks. “What?” That simply wasn’t possible; if that wasn’t a dream, then she would know exactly who she could reveal what to. Then she would be able to do math like it was nothing, remember absolutely everything that happened.

Lyra nods, not interrupting her assembly. “His name… His self-given name, that is… Was Darkness Lord.” She puts the last piece into her assembly, tightens something, and picks it up, standing it up on the table.

She gasps. She recognizes it from the dream; it’s Lyra’s… weapon. She’d called it some kind of ‘rifle’ in the dream.

“Put a bullet through his heart,” Lyra states. “Only way to kill a dark magic user for good. Bonbon’s got his body at the Guard house right now, going through the process with them.”

Blink. “Then…?”

“Yeah. You said he was chasing us- do you remember anything after that?”

She shakes her head, pulling herself into a sitting position.

“Ahh. Well… You lead us to the entrance to your Bolo.”

She sucks in a sharp breath; that’s something else from the dream as well. Either it wasn’t a dream… or the dream hasn’t ended.

Lyra nods, placing her weapon in a strange case, and locking it shut. “Yeah. You lead us there. He already knew where it was- he actually beat us to it, by a few seconds. I was able to keep him off the entrance as we approached with a couple hasty shots.” A sigh, and she hangs her head. “Then the battle started.”

“What… happened?” she asks.

“Long story short… the battle lasted almost six hours. All my research on Harmony magic and its effect on bodymelds turned out to be wrong, so I focused mostly on that. I was so focused on it I nearly let him get behind me- only barely saved myself a couple of times. Then of course, there were the times he really did get behind me. You had my back, though- aside from your own ungodly powerful blows, your spiders were waiting just out of sight somewhere. I still don’t know where- but whenever he got behind me, one would always show up and go wholesale on him from behind.

“Then… Towards the end of that battle, you let out a terrible scream, and collapsed. He almost beat us then; your last spider had been smashed almost an hour before.” She closes her eyes, and she spots a tear trickle down the unicorn’s face. “So me and Bonbon went wholesale on him, completely setting aside the matter of your Bolo. Trying to divide our attention clearly wasn’t working, so we took care of him.” Shudder. “It was a lucky shot.

“He nearly had us beat; I was airborne, thrown by one of his blows, weapon in hoof. He had Bonbon on the ground, stunned by the impact, and was rising up to smash down on her with something lethal. So I grasped at straws… or should I say triggers? In any case, I had as good a chance of killing Bonbon as I did of hitting him at all, and an even better one of killing you instead, but it was a lucky shot. The bullet went straight through his heart, and he collapsed, magic shattered. A very… painful, but fast, way to die.

“With him down, Bonbon went straight to you and started checking for vitals- she recovered while he was falling- while I went straight to your Bolo.” She looks at the floor, shedding more tears. “I’m sorry. The bodymeld completed on Harmony magic.”

“What-?” she asks. “Then…”

“Yeah. If you have any more spiders left down in there somewhere, you’ll be able to use them still, but it’ll be hard for your mind to handle. I still have one of the spiders from mine; that’s how I made my rifle. Your super-strength will probably stay, since that’s something you wanted to come back; the rapid healing should stay as well. Oh, and you’ll still be able to control any functions you installed on that tiara of yours. But beyond that and a sense of feeling in the walls of that Bolo down there, I’m afraid all is lost.”

She takes a deep breath. “What about… nan-somethings?”

“Nanites?” The unicorn looks up. “If you happen to know how they’re powered, and where some of them are in your hull out there, you might be able to restore it to function. In theory. In practice, I bet you don’t remember how it works, and thence won’t be able to after all.”

“I… I don’t.”

The unicorn trots around the table, reaching up to put a hoof around her withers. “Welcome to the party,” she states. “You’ve got your tiara, and hopefully it’s not reliant on your Bolo for power; I’ve got my spider. They’re normally reliant on their Bolos, but they can also absorb sunlight on their own- so that’s how I keep mine charged.” Sigh. “All said and done, my spider’s probably no more use than your tiara.”

“Yeah.” She hangs her head, tempted to lean into the older pony and cry.

“Well. I guess we just have to hope that Sweetie doesn’t have the same issue- and is able to restore our Bolos to operability?”

“Sweetie?” she asks. “Sweetie belle? Is she okay? Where is she?”

Shrug. “I don’t know. Last I heard… Oh. Oh no. Last I heard, she was in your medical nanovat.”

She jumps to her hooves, wobbling slightly on her weak hind leg- but at least it’s not as weak any more. “We have to go get her! The air can’t last very long in there!”

“And I don’t remember enough about them to know how they handle power loss,” Lyra states. “Hold on a sec- your leg’s still healing from his slash. Good thing you’ve still got that crazy-fast healing you managed to get out of yours; I never got that. You’ll need to be careful, gentle it a little bit. And I can teleport us to the entrance to your Bolo. Ready?” As she spoke, she removed her rifle from its case once again, and inserted a rectangle object into it.

“Ready,” she states, bracing herself for a teleport.

Lyra pulls back on some lever on the side of her rifle, pushes it back forwards, and nods. “Ready.” Her horn glows.

---

She lets out a gasp as soon as the jump completes, and her hooves strike down on solid metal wall.

“What is it?” Lyra asks immediately, swinging her rifle to point both ways down the passage.

She lights her tiara, a white glow to chase off the darkness. “I felt that,” she states.

“Well of course,” the unicorn blinks. “Kinda hard not to feel it.”

“No,” she states. “I felt that in these walls. I felt the surge of energy the teleport left behind.”

Lyra blinks. “... Huh. My Bolo never felt magic after it completed- I wonder why…? Anyways, Sweetie Belle.”

“This way,” she states, and gallops down the slope. As she goes, she favors her weakened left hind leg; unlike the other one, it’s not offering the strength required for this speed. She’s not going nearly as fast as she could with it, using mostly just the other one for propulsion- and she’s going fast enough the adult galloping with her isn’t quite having trouble keeping up.

She slows smoothly to a stop as she approaches the dirt pile at the bottom, and glances at Lyra. “Any chance you could teleport past this pile, through that little hole? It’s what stopped… him long enough for me to escape when he stole my tiara.”

The unicorn looks at the gap she’d indicated. “Yeah, sure. You want to teleport with, or go the standard way?”

She shudders. “I can go the standard way, thank you.” She crawls through the gap while the unicorn teleports through with her gun. “Sorry, teleporting is just…”

“Unsettling,” Lyra finishes for her. “It still is for me, sometimes. And Bonbon hasn’t gotten over it yet either.”

She chuckles, then continues forwards. “She’ll be just up here.” She selects the passage, and turns to climb it.

As the unicorn turns to follow her, a distant voice sounds back. “Hello? Is that you, Diamond?”

She gallops forwards. “Yes!” she calls back, before she comes to a stop at the edge of the door.

Lyra comes up next to her as Sweetie’s voice comes back from the door again. “What happened? I don’t remember there being such a tilt!” At the same time, Sweetie’s head becomes visible in the dim light reaching the bottom, sticking out of the box thing and looking up at them.

“Um, yeah, about that,” she begins, before Lyra interrupts.

“Sweetie belle!” she calls. “I’ll levitate you up here?”

“Huh? Oh, yes please!” Sweetie calls. “I hate the dark!”

So Lyra levitates her up to the passage.

“Anyways,” Sweetie says, turning to her. “You were saying?”

“Yeah. Um, as night fell, yours panicked, as it was running out of power. So we- that is, me and yours- transferred you here, in mine.”

Sweetie blinks, and tilts her head. “Why use the tiara instead of…?” she asks.

“Because… there was an unforeseen complication,” she answers. “Because of it, mine’s… become useless.”

“Well…” Lyra mutters. “Not entirely unforeseen- but yeah. And, um, how possible would it be for me to get into Sweetie’s Bolo and check on things?”

“Bowhatnow?” Sweetie asks.

“Turns out that’s what they’re called,” she states. “Bolos. And Lyra… Not likely. Getting into hers is a pretty big vertical drop. We were lucky to survive going in the first time.”

“... Oh,” Lyra states simply.

“Yeah, ‘oh’,” she chuckles. “Anyways, let’s get out of here. It’s well into the morning already.”

“Huh?” Sweetie asks. “How long was I gone?”

“An evening,” she answers, as the three head back for the entrance. “Rarity’s probably freaking out, but I mean, you’ve been gone for longer on some of your crusades.”

Sweetie groans. “Yeah, I probably have. Like that time we went to Baltimare to try for our business cutie marks.” Shudder. “All weekend. And I’m glad Princess Celestia found us.” Another shudder. “‘Nuff said.”

“Ouch,” she mutters, as she clambers through the hole first, before reaching back to help Sweetie through while Lyra teleports.

Seconds later, they’re galloping up the passage when Sweetie looks at Lyra. “Oh- and Lyra? What is that thing you’re carrying?”

“Oh, this?” Lyra asks, galloping expertly on three hooves while the last holds the weapon aloft. “A little protection, in case we ran into something.”

“Uhh…”

“Let’s just say it’s a little more potent than magic.”

It seems to take forever before they reach the entrance. “Alright,” Lyra states, before levitating Sweetie out. “You two run home. I’ll teleport- and don’t tell anypony I was involved. It’s all top secret!” She looks meaningfully at her.

“Agreed,” she states.

“Okay,” Sweetie mumbles. “I can do that.”

Then, as the two gallop back to town, Sweetie speaks up again. “Come to think of it, Diamond- about how long do you think it’ll take before I start getting those positive side effects?”

“No clue.”

Wince. “How about what it’ll take to avoid the negative?”

Her ears go flat. “Danger.”

Author's Note:

Sorry about that... offscreening the combat like that. I just couldn't think of any way to make it more exciting.

Comments

[LostArchivist]

Eh fair enough. Offscreen combat isn't fun. There was probably a better way to handle that, but water under the bridge.

Also, Dammit, Twi! She's not normally that irresponsible! Well, except for Smarty Pants... and that one time with the scroll... and Mare Do Well...

[computerneek]

9574975
Uh... This was a little different. This was Twi didn't know what was going to happen, and was trying to be safe. She wasn't aware of the fact that harmony magic made it detectable by dark magic... Or of what it was, and thence that harmony magic would conflict with it either way, to a point. So no, it's not irresponsibility, it's ignorance.