Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 27 Escape Plan A

Escape Plan A

Naudia gave a shrieking squeak, popped up into the air, and kicked Doctor Willow square in the chest.

Doctor Willow, for his part, flew straight out of the building through a couple walls.

He might have even crashed the next building over on the first floor like a ragdoll. But Naudia wasn’t paying attention to that, she was in full on blind panic mode, sending off the signal to Twilight and tearing at the bars on the window. If she’d have thought about it it would have been much easier for her to just rip them out of the wall, instead she broke the iron bars with her little rat paws, and scrambled through the window to shoot off at a dead run towards where Twilight was going to be.

She knew that wouldn’t have killed Doctor Willow.

Nothing that horrible, nothing that wrong, could have died for good just being kicked through a couple walls. Who knows maybe it did kill him, but it wouldn’t put him down for good, he would be up after that.

It was like Naudia could feel him behind her as she raced through town, knocking over lamp-posts and kicking off of buildings so hard she left a dent in them. The feeling of that thing was physically making her shake, it was actually hard to concentrate on bringing the rest of her back with her main body to gather up.

“I need to calm down, CALM, down.” Naudia said to herself. “It’s probably going to take a bit before Twilight can get here.”

Naudia sat there panting, feeling the cold sweat drip off her back.

She could still remember his eyes, bright green, but there were hints of that off brown creeping in through the veins. His cutie mark, a bundle of willow bark, was fading away. Almost everything else about him was perfect, from his facial features to his teal fur, not so much as a hair out of place. Naudia had felt emotions from him as well, strong ones, deep ones that seemed to claw their way out of an abyss to reach out to her, daring her to just take one bite, and all her problems would be over.

She couldn’t go and find Twilight now, she had to calm down. CALM DOWN.

The way he talked, the way he existed.

It did not help her mental state to have seen inside that thing.

She was grooming herself with her little rat arms, trying to stop herself from shaking.

By the time Naudia managed to collect herself she could already hear Twilight’s distraction at work, even halfway across town. She could already see some of the outer guards making a run for that side of town.

She gathered herself up, it turns out she had bolted and spread out all over town in a panic. It wouldn’t help if she linked up with Twilight when her left hoof was still hiding in town as a rat somewhere. The was one advantage though, she spotted the town ponies sneaking away away from the commotion towards the now emptied parts of town.

As a changeling again she stopped thinking so much like a rat, and stopped feeling like she should groom her hair to calm down. Which warranted further investigation, but not now. She didn’t feel any less chilled or shaken than before the transformation though.

While she was trying to calm down still she was hit in the head by a board with a nail in it. It actually took her a good long second to realize what had happened because it didn’t hurt at all. It was a weird thing to feel the point of the nail on her zoetic shield in a way her brain told her “this should hurt” but it didn’t, at all, not even so much as a scratch, the nail instead was bent flat.

Naudia stared down at the shattered board, part of which had broken in half over her horn and then looked up. She looked up in time to catch a spray of broken boards, shingles, and glass before they fell back below the roofline off in the distance.

Twilight was doing some serious work over there, which was great, it would give the ponies more time to escape. But this didn’t look like the sort of thing that would be easy to pull back from once Doctor Willow gets back up from what was happening. Naudia knew they weren’t ready to fight him yet, she could feel that in her bones. She could only pray that they had something for Twilight and Naudia to practice with before things came to a head here.

Naudia finally managed to get herself under control, and managed to dodge another piece of flying lumber, a broken window frame this time. She had to go warn Twilight about what was happening.

Naudia cloaked herself and began a careful approach to the commotion, it seemed that all the guards had moved over there automatically. An indication that they might be smarter than expected, possibly even pony level intelligent.

She was abruptly cut off from that train of thought when she arrived at the scene where Twilight was fighting.

It was disgusting in a way that Naudia had never personally experienced before.

Twilight’s zoetic shield blood was all over the place, that was a watery blue, that was difficult to actually see as blood. However there was a worrying amount of it around.

But the other stuff was… off, strange, it wasn’t blood, it was alive, it crawled. The pools of that offputting drab vomit brown viscous liquid creeped around of it’s own volition back towards the pieces of the fake guards.

The fake guards which had broken like a low quality glassmaker’s experiment. Their eyes whirling in their heads, teeth gnashing, and hooves scrambling with rage, even as they lay shattered on the ground like the hollow shells they were.

And at the center of all of this, in the middle of a destroyed house was Twilight in her full lichenthrope form. It had sounded a bit funny before, hah ha, lichenthrope made of wolf lichen, but here it didn’t look so funny. Twilight bristled with the greenish hair-ish lichen and emanated a raw fury even as she stomped a fake guard’s head flat, as it tried to flop around and bite at her. Clouds of spores fell off her like a cloak, and the guards that had stopped moving showed the most evidence of the lichen infestation.

Naudia’s eyes were torn between these two images, the horrible shattered guards, and her mare-friend having probably caught up to her in combat prowess. It was a strange mix of a new type of deep disgust, and a burning changeling pride in Twilight, who despite everything seemed to be doing pretty well.

Only “pretty well” though, she was clearly running out of steam here, Naudia sprang into action.

Naudia could use her summoned in bacteria to heal a target, and with all this battlefield debris from Twilight’s spells she would be able to get her back to tip top shape really quickly, hopefully before another set of guards could come in.

As Naudia was doing this though Twilight called her on the bug-phone-thing that as Naudia understood it was sorta like that tablet thing, but not as good at operating with hooves. It took her a couple seconds to actually answer the bug phone.

“Naudia? Where are you at?”

“What?”

Naudia took her head away from the bug-phone thing and waved at the lichen werewolf shouting:

“Hey, Twilight, over here, I’m right here!”

“Twilight” didn’t respond, didn’t even acknowledge her.

“Wait, Naudia, are you still in town?”

-------------------

Naudia marched up to Twilight who had been waiting for her in the forest far outside of town.

“What was that?!”

Twilight looked confused.

“I sent my lichenthrope pelt in there as a distraction?”

“You could have told me you were going to do that!” Naudia tried not to shout.

“But it was a perfect distraction, completely without risk.”

“But if I don’t know about it, then it looks like you’re in SERIOUS trouble. What would have happened if things had gotten worse than that, what if I ran into your pelt right as Doctor Willow got to it, I would have thought you died.”

Twilight cringed back at Naudia’s admonishment.

“I’m sorry.” She said in a small voice. “Gwynn told me about this when they heard we were doing a distraction, and I just didn’t think about it, it sounded so perfect in my head.”

“I’m sorry Twilight, it’s just that in an operation like this communication is key. Fighting against something like Doctor Willow isn’t going to be a walk in the park. I… I don’t want to lose you and if… if I thought that monster had…” Naudia was too choked up to continue.

Twilight wrapped Naudia in a hug until Naudia stopped crying.

“Does it really feel that hopeless to fight against him?” Twilight finally asked.

“I can’t describe the terror I felt on meeting him, I could feel it, he was standing over me, above me, like a cliff made of hollowed out chitin, I couldn’t take it, I kicked him through the wall of the building and ran in a blind panic for I don’t know how long.” Naudia barely paused, her eyes frantic, pupils small as she remembered the experience.

“I’m certain the First Administration has something that could help us stand up to him.” Twilight said rubbing Naudia’s back.

Naudia looked up at Twilight.

“You don’t think… this is a suicide mission, do you Twilight?”

It took Twilight a second to answer that.

“I never thought about it that way Dia, it’s just something that needs to be done.”

Twilight stroked Naudia’s hair to calm her down and organized her thoughts on this.

“When I looked into the Ryladite, that crystal in the First Administrator’s left eye, I saw, er, understood things. There was a war with a civilization of nerteln, a long time ago whose scars have never fully healed. The yunguaq call it the Second Annihilation War. I think you have an understanding of how strong a yunguaq is at this point Naudia.”

Naudia nodded at Twilight.

“This Second Annihilation War was so much worse than the first, the yunguaq had time to build up again, expand again, there were so many stars. And then three in four to three in five of everybody who was alive, died in that war against the nerteln. I cannot express to you how large that number is, it doesn’t fit into the pony mind or any conventional amount of things that any pony has ever dealt with. Stars torn asunder, galaxies left barren and dead where once every single star had as many yunguaq as there are insects on Equestria.”

None of this sounded real to Naudia, but she realized the numbers would line up with what they’d seen of the Chattler Anomaly, that great mystery of why the stars all shined in the same shade of infrared.

“I’ve never thought about this mission too much beyond getting it done because the consequences are too massive to think about. However I don’t think that the First Administrator would directly send us on a suicide mission after spending the last year converting me, in place, into this werewolf slime yunguaq.” Twilight wobbled one of her legs around for emphasis.

Naudia looked around awkwardly.

“I don’t know if that makes me feel better or not Twilight.”

“I feel confident that what we are doing is not hopeless, Doctor Willow doesn’t know about yunguaq magic, he’s starting from scratch. We aren’t fighting some kind of monster made before the universe was created, we’re fighting somebody finding their own way that has gone too far.”

“All right Twilight, I don’t know if I can trust the First Administrator on this, but I trust you.”

They left for where the ponies would be gathering, but they were careful to watch and make sure none of Doctor Willow’s monsters were following them there.

-------------------

When they did get to the meeting place that Naudia had set up they found it empty.

“They couldn’t have missed it could they?” Twilight asked.

“How? It’s the part of the creek with the rotted wooden bridge, there can’t be that many rotted bridges around here.”

There could have been ponies here, but it was hard to tell where they went as it was just a smooth rock beach, not counting if they had been pegasus, or if earth ponies had just forced their way through the creek.

“Or if one of the unicorns knew a rain boots spell.” Twilight said.

“How likely do you think that would be?” Asked Naudia.

“It is in the fourth grade book of unicorn spells.”

“So probably then?”

“I have no idea, I remember the spell… but I don’t know how many ponies would still know it from fourth grade.”

“I still know most of the stuff I learned in fourth grade.” Naudia said.

“The rain boots spell was in the back of the book, in the spell dictionary.”

“Oh, well I’ve never tried to read through a dictionary though.” Naudia said. “I did read the supplemental files for ‘Stable Supreme’ though.”

“Wasn’t that the power p-”

Just then Gwynn Hall stepped out of the bushes, muttering to herself.

“Damn GPS, can never judge distances right on it, looked like it was just over there- Oh, Twilight, Naudia! There you are, we need you back at the camp, things have gotten worse.”

“WORSE!?” Twilight exclaimed. “Were the ponies in town captured?”

“What no, we sent somebody to fetch them and send them on their way to the werewolf village.”

“Who?”

“Somebody trustworthy.”

-------------------

Earlier:

Meadow Dispatch, the defacto leader of the survivors of Knicknik was staring at a strange sight. It was a lizard creature standing upright and trying to communicate with her.

The lizard seemed to have a permanent mild smile on it’s face, a long chubby tail, soft looking paw-pads, and a flowery look about it. As in it’s scales looked like wild rose flower petals, It’s back legs were oddly long and had flaps as if they were supposed to be wings feathered again with flower petals. On it’s back was a kind of sail colored the same as it’s petal scales and entirely opaque, the kind of sail that Meadow had seen on some ancient creature in a museum.

The strangest thing of all was how it was trying to… communicate with them. The dragon had created in the air what looked like a crayon drawing of a field with a couple lines of trees, rows and rows of cabbages. There was a prominent werewolf waving at them and werewolves walking around inside in the distance. It was obviously supposed to be the werewolf village.

Below the crayon looking picture that had been created out of thin air, was a series of pictographs, rather like road signs or bathroom signs. The best Calva, Pete, and Meadow could work out was that this strange creature wanted them to go to the werewolf village.

“I guess we can trust it?” Meadow said looking at the awkward cartoonish creature’s mild smile. She was speaking half to it and half to Calva and Pete.

The creature squeaked, like one of those dog toys, and then set off at once to lead the way with a waddling enthusiasm.

-------------------

Twilight decided not to press the matter with Gwynn.

“I wish you would have left a sign or something to tell us that.”

“We didn’t want to leave any signs for Doctor Willow to follow.”

“Then why didn’t you call us on these, bug, phone, things?” Twilight asked.

Both Gwynn and Naudia failed to meet Twilight’s eye.

“I forgot about those.” Gwynn mumbled.

Gwynn perked up almost immediately.

“In in the interests of speed I came here so we could fly back on the back of Frankie!”

Naudia and Twilight looked at Gwynn blankly.

“Don’t tell me you already forgot flying on Frankie? You know, big flat rat?”

“OH!” Twilight and Naudia said in unison remembering the large flying rodent they rode on like a magic carpet when Gwynn had first met them.

Twilight and Naudia looked around expecting Frankie to abruptly show up.

They stood there waiting awkwardly for a long while, trying to make small talk and dance around the obvious fact that Gwynn was using this to cover up the fact she forgot Naudia and Twilight had portable phones. They did not bring up that it might actually have been faster to run back to camp at some point.

Finally after that agony of waiting, Frankie showed up oscillating above the tree line, and settling down to float above the creek in front of Gwynn. Again Frankie acted like an excited pet dog in front of Gwynn, the rat looked like somebody had seen a flying squirrel and a magic carpet and decided that the two should be combined, as a rat. It had a large head with a strange neck, it’s tail had fins on it, and it was still huge. The creature felt larger than Twilight had remembered, like Naudia and Twilight could have laid down on it’s wide flat back and stretched both of their hooves all the way out without bumping into one another.

“He looks bigger than I remember him.” Twilight said.

“Yeah, a good deal bigger.”

“Well he had to fit into the cargohold of that ship, we didn’t want him to be too cramped down there. He’s actually operating on the same slime tech both of you are, so he just left most of himself home for that run.”

Twilight and Naudia stared at Gwynn for a second before deciding that it wasn’t worth bothering about.

They got on Frankie and flew off to the First Administration’s camp.

-------------------

Back in the village, standing amongst the wrecked houses.

Doctor Willow was levitating a lump of lichen.

“What an interesting spell.”

Author's Note:

Okay sorry that took so long, I've been working on stuff behind the scenes to release a second story on a different website. See these two blog posts for an explanation as to what is going on. Once this story finishes up I'm going to start posting on a different website.

https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/985519/so-i-finally-found-where-im-going-to-post-the-next-storywhich-is-still-a-ways-off

https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/986081/the-exogenous-god-has-been-released