Chapter 1: Blake
Blake Hodges knew a desperate situation when he saw one.
It wasn't like leading a group of clandestine, urban explorers had ever been an entirely safe way to spend his time. If anything, the danger was part of the appeal of the hobby. Only an urban explorer could venture down where law enforcement, dangerous gases and structural collapse, were only the beginning of the danger.
But going somewhere that others hadn't seen for decades, maybe even centuries was a thrill that could be matched by little else. Unfortunately, that adrenaline came with a price. The danger had to be real.
It wasn't just that they expected the trip to last only a few hours and brought nothing in the way of food or water. It wasn't just that their map of the Paris catacombs had proved itself inaccurate after only a few minutes away from the public tunnels. It was a combination of all of these, and the knowledge that they hadn't seen the sun for hours. Long enough that they had begun to feel the weight of dehydration, slowing their steps and thoughts.
Blake recognized the danger as soon as it began. As soon as he realized they were in trouble, he refocused the expedition on the only thing that really mattered now: escape.
This was no military expedition, not even a guerrilla corporate filming team. The others trudging along behind him were only his friends, and exploring was only a hobby. Nevertheless, when he ordered the cameras be put away and that Kaelynn abandon her heavy duffel of dive equipment, they obeyed.
“I think we're going down,” Ryan said from just behind, amid the rustling of several layers of paper. Ryan had brought his own maps. Unfortunately they'd proven no more useful than the ones that Blake purchased. Even worse, they disagreed, and may have been the source of their getting lost in the first place.
But Blake wouldn't say that now, as much as he wanted to. Placing blame was for when they all got out of this alive.
“We should have made a left back there,” Ryan finally said, not sounding terribly confident. “I think I saw sunlight.”
“No, I'm pretty sure that was just another service light,” Jordan replied. “If we're lucky, it might've been a connection to the sewers, but probably not. Could be abandoned subway tunnels.”
The two of them looked to Kaelynn to moderate the dispute, as she often did. As the only woman in their party, Kaelynn was easily Blake’s equal for strength and endurance. Through a sweaty tank top smeared with grime were muscles lean from physical labor.
Kaelynn only grunted in response, ignoring both of them. She'd barely said a word since Blake forced her to abandon her gear.
“We will find a way out of this,” Blake declared, perhaps the 10th or 11th time now. Even he was growing weary of saying it. But without the positive reinforcement, his friends might give up. The Paris catacombs were not a place to be navigated by the unwary.
With the increasing weight of exhaustion pressing in on them, the macabre shadows seemed to come alive out of the corner of their headlamps. Numberless skulls and bones arranged into strange shapes that twisted and writhed as the light of their passing group faded. The Paris government's reluctance to make exploring the catacombs accessible to the public was no mere bureaucratic overreach.
The number of urban explorers who had ventured down here and never been seen again numbered in the triple digits at this point. After surviving so many dangerous and exotic places, Blake couldn’t imagine the shame of dying only a hundred meters below the streets of a busy city.
As the shadows parted up ahead, they saw a strange lump on the uneven stone, one that had not merely fallen from its alcove. The clothing was dated, perhaps eighties, flannel, faded and stained by decay. A pair of empty eye sockets stared up as they approached. An old Casio watch caught the reflection of their headlamps from one bony wrist.
“We’re going to fucking die down here,” Ryan muttered, tugging on the straps of his backpack. He stepped wide around the corpse rather than merely over it as the others did. “This'll be us. Two, maybe three days.”
“No, it should be longer than that,” Jordan replied. “Blake's got a LifeStraw, doesn't he? If we swallow our pride about muddy puddles and sewage, we should last at least a week.”
Ryan spun, striking Jordan on the shoulder with an angry fist. The strike would have done little to a man of Jordan's height, but either by poor footing or symptom of dehydration, Jordan reeled to the side. His hand caught the wall for stability, tearing down a stack of carefully arranged bones. There was nothing but friction to keep them in place.
The entire wall collapsed, filling the hall with the clattering echo of tumbling remains. It seemed to grow louder and louder rather than fading, as though numberless dead were jumping from their alcoves to rise to the disturbance.
Even Blake stiffened at the sound, one hand twitching reflexively to the knife at his belt. But if anything lurked this deep, it wouldn't be some mere city thug. Exploring the liminal spaces gave Blake a hardy respect for the unknown. There were things man just wasn’t meant to know.
At least the cavern hadn't caved in. By the time the sound faded, a section of wall in the narrow passage perhaps eight feet across had collapsed. Strangely, there was not mere rough stone behind it, but a gaping opening into a narrower tunnel beyond.
Even stranger, light shone from that tunnel, faintly blue and shimmering, like the sun did when passing through deep water.
“Wait, Ryan,” Kaelynn called.
He did, turning to face them.
Blake approached the opening now drawing the knife. It wasn't as though he expected a previously hidden passage to be more dangerous than the one they were already in, but having the sturdy plastic grip between his fingers made him feel a little braver.
“That can't be a way out,” Kaelynn said. “It was covered.”
“It can't be the way we came in,” Jordan corrected. “That doesn't mean it won't eventually lead to the surface. There's light there. That means either functioning electronics or maybe a section of sewer. I think I hear water.”
He was right. Blake could make out the sound, though at first his mind rejected it. The splashing of water against a bank, like a small pond. Or more likely, a long forgotten eddy of sewage. Yet the smell was not rotten as it had been when they passed through sections of Paris sewer.
He trusted his nose more than his eyes down here. “Mark the wall,” Blake ordered, then began forward into the passage.
He heard the sound of chalk striking against stone. He didn't have to look behind him to see Jordan was the one listening, writing a number into a square on the wall. Those numbers were the hours they'd spent down here, and had already prevented more than one loop through the tunnels.
Blake reached down to his wrist, pressing the timer function on his watch. It beeped cheerfully in reply. “We'll keep going for half an hour, but I don't think we'll need to. That light is close.”
It was, though the brief walk did little to reassure him that they were finding their way out. Rather than numberless burial alcoves, the walls here quickly transitioned to smooth, even stone carved in regular blocks. The shape of bas-reliefs along the wall formed the suggestions of pillars at an even placement about 20 meters apart. Stone molding soon joined them on the bottom and top of the passage.
“I wonder if this went to the palace,” Jordan said. “This is fancier than anything we've seen for hours.”
“Might not mean much if it did,” Ryan said glumly. “All of that would have been sealed by now. They don't want anyone else wandering down here. I think we should have listened this time.”
“We should have been more prepared,” Kaelynn said. “Should’ve gone back when the map was bad, maybe. Doesn’t mean we give up and let them hide all this from us.”
Light reflected off the stone of the floor and ceiling, which was speckled with a strange florescent mineral. It couldn’t be the usual limestone that had built Paris far above. Soon enough, they reached the source of the light, and the entire group was thrown into stunned silence.
It did not look at all like a sewer, but rather an ancient Roman bathhouse hundreds of miles from where any Roman mason had ever worked. The chamber was about a hundred feet square, with stone tables and chairs along the side. The style might have been Renaissance, or perhaps something even older. The color had faded from the fine tile mosaic leading down into the water. Yet Blake could make out suggestions of galloping horses and celestial patterns along the sides of the bath. Stranger still, strange enough that Kaelynn drew her GoPro and began filming again, was that the light did not come from above. There was no ancient skylight, or even a window in the wall where clean water flowed into this ancient bath.
Rather the light came from below the water. The bath itself was perhaps five feet deep at its furthest point, with water that was clear and fresh. Blake’s throat burned at the thought of soon quenching his thirst, and filling every water bottle that he owned. If anything, the water smelled like a flowing river or stream. It had to be safe.
There was an opening on the wall, easily large enough for a person to fit through, and sunlight shone through it as though it opened directly onto a Paris street.
“That's impossible,” Ryan declared. “We must be hundreds of feet down. I know the ground was sloping all the way here. We can't be this close to the surface.” However impossible Ryan's maps suggested, Blake knew sunlight when he saw it. They had found their salvation at last.
“No reason to rush this,” he said, fiddling around in the survival pack on the small of his back. Unlike the others, Blake only brought the bare essentials, but this LifeStraw had saved him more than once. He bent down beside the water, sniffing it more closely just in case. There was no stench of sewage, the only smells were fresh and clean. He began to drink.
It was like tasting heaven. He drank until his thirst was sated, then kept going until it made him sick. Finally he offered the straw to Kaelynn. While she quenched her thirst, he removed the empty bladder from his survival pack and filled it. Then he unfurled the collapsible water bottle and did the same.
Blake stood up to his waist in the water, feeling hope return at last. “We made it,” he said. “I don't care what’s out there. If we've got hundreds of feet to climb, we'll climb it. We have the gear.” The others nodded their agreement.
“And you told me to abandon my dive gear,” Kaelynn said, annoyance in her voice. “If this goes to the surface, I'm going back for it.”
Blake reached down in a flare of anger, grasping her wrist with one hand. “The hell you are Kaelynn. I'll pay for new stuff myself. I am not losing a friend over some plastic and silicone.”
Kaelynn snatched her arm free with surprising strength, but didn't argue.
They didn't rush to get out. Karlynn walked the camera slowly around the room, capturing every aspect of what they'd found here. Ryan packed away his maps and papers in a waterproof box to which they added cell phones and other vulnerable electronics. There was no sense losing equipment if they didn't have to.
“Kaelynn, you're the strongest swimmer,” Blake said, as soon as all bottles were filled, and all thirst was quenched. “How do we get through there safely?”
Kaelynn walked to the opening, wading through the water. The water was perfectly clear to their eyes, without even a layer of moss growing there to obscure biting pests. She bent down, submerging her head underwater for a moment. She rose seconds later, shaking out her long blonde hair.
“Looks like maybe a hundred feet. So long as you can hold your breath for a minute you should be good. I can walk you guys through a breathing exercise. I'll be in front, everyone should hold hands. We're more likely to lose someone in a hundred feet of water than in miles of tunnel.”
Blake deferred to her expertise, going along with the hyperventilation exercise. Then came the plunge.
The sound of strange winds in the catacombs finally faded, replaced by the gentle splashing of water against the bath walls. Kaelynn swam first, with Ryan just behind. Blake brought up the rear, taking one of Jordan's wrists.
The swim wasn't that long. It would have been uneventful, except for the sudden current.
There had clearly been no river here. There was no possibility that water could remain in the bath with such a current present. Yet the water around him began to roar, ripping his hand free of Jordan in a single terrible moment.
He kicked and fought against the current, but in vain. His eyes burned with sudden pressure as the water drew him up into the light.
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Small gripe, but the Romans built loads of things in Paris, back when it was still called Lutetia.
That is one hell of a start.
Can't wait for more.
You wanted to explore strange and forgotten places long unseen by man? Sure thing. Good luck getting back.
Looking forward to seeing where they end up, and what follows.
Excited to see this story go!~
Hmmm. Based on that wall, they may have stumbled across into the mines of Paris. We don't know how old this worldgate is, but given the construction around it, someone knew it was here and it's been here for a while. The catacombs were built in 1810, so it's unlikely that the knowledge of a worldgate and this construction would completely disappear in less than 200 years.
If it is the mines, that gives us a date of no earlier than 1300. This does fit the Renaissance time period that Blake initially suspected for the style.
Alright, a new story! And another great start! Will track at the moment, but if it gets good next chapter (as all Starscribe stories are wont to do), it'll hop over into my Faves shelf.
Ooooh! This is looking very promising! I’ll be sure to keep up with it and can’t wait for it to hit the featured page later today!
EDIT: looks like my prediction was a little late, while I was reading it hit the featured page!
haven't read a word yet, and I have just one question...
how many of the group are males transformed to females?
This is gonna be interesting...
(locked, loaded and saved. ready for next!)
And so a new adventure begins. Let's get the show on the road.
Well this looks interesting! Good start so far! Definitely gonna be keeping an eye on this one!
10655987
Zero, which is also the number of transformations that have occurred so far.
That's great! I'm going to share the link with my friends
In addition, I see "before the magic becomes permanent."
Forgive me for reading 《Fine Print》 through a Google translation.There were a lot of details I couldn't read.
So, stay here for a long time. Will they become ponies forever?
And so it begins....
Who wants to take bets on which one goes native first?
10656246
Well in Fine Print, it's not that the magic is permanent, but that the worldgate in it will close permanently after a year, what side that protagonist choose to be on when it does close will be his permanent home....
Here however.... well.... it's yet another Equestria Interpretation
Interesting... Looking forward to seeing how this story plays out!
10656246
We don't know all the rules for worldgates yet. Given that they share the same magic system, I'm going to put the rules as I suspect them from Fine Print, as well as source chapters for these rules as I've seen them, in this spoiler down here, just in case people here haven't read Fine Print yet. Also, for people who haven't read that yet, go read it, it's great.
Fine Print Spoilers!!
Rule 1: Any human that goes through a worldgate will transform into some form of pony (Most chapters) or pony-adjacent creature (Chapters 47, 53)
Rule 2: When a pony goes through a worldgate to Earth, they transform into a human (Chapter 46)
Rule 3: Anything that is being worn or carried will convert into something that their new form can use (Chapters 2, 6, 47)
Rule 4: Currency, food, and skills do not convert (Chapters 2, 6, 20, 25, 51)
Keep in mind, there are almost certainly MORE rules, but we haven't seen enough to guarantee any.
10655987
After the gate? Looking at the artwork (female-ish eyelashes?), at least one?
10656373
Rules one and two are likely the same. A sapient will gain the form of an equivalent sapient race crossing universes. It's just that Equestria has a lot more sapient races. Kalvary Kreme donuts might or might not be an indication of something involving food. I wonder if the dollar was backed by the equivalent material (likely gold or silver) a bit is, would that allow for a conversion? I've never seen Tracy bring out a bit.
10656455
Yea, I had them separate because of something that was said early on that caught my eye.
(More Fine Print discussion)
On this side, you're human. Over there... humans aren't really a thing anymore. (Chapter 2)
So it is or at least was the case that a human's local equivalent in magic smol horse world was a human.
It could be that they're the same rule, but that line does kinda keep them separated in my mind for that reason. As for Kalvary Kreme donuts, we've seen that the pictures don't 100% line up with the prose so that could have been a stylistic choice by the artist. Arby's didn't convert to a different food (Chapter 20), the produce they bought (Chapter 50) didn't warrant comment, donuts didn't warrant comment, so I'm going with 'Food doesn't become other food, regardless of if edible by pone' as a rule.
10656491
Fine Print spoilers:
Janet's transformation certainly proves equivalency between multiple species and a sample size of five (Tracy, Janet, three friends) doesn't discount the possibility that humanity is simply one of many equivalent species in the pool and that none of them were lucky enough to roll it. It would technically be a 1 in x chance to hit human where x is the number of sapient species on the planet. Of course to actually roll human would be silly plot wise and at best turn the story into the usual HiE fare or at worst create a (either terrible or hilarious) situation where a person turns into another person.
I also suspected artistic choice with the donuts then again Aquarium of the Bay is a real place. Could be a slight inconsistency with brand names or maybe it really is hinting at something. Details might be clues. Maybe. But yeah, the brand might change but the food doesn't. Would love to see an Arby's bag go through now.
10656335
I get the idea. Thank you for your explanation.
(Anti - revealed plot complete)
I'm a little confused, though,
because Tracy has seen his own bat wings in the human world,(and maybe fangs? I can't remember exactly.)
I set it up in my story like this, because the human body does not have magic, so when a human is affected by magic, the body that has absorbed the magic cannot expel it, that is to say, it is an irreversible action.
10656373
Thank you for your collation, this information is very helpful for me to understand the whole story (as well as for my own design of HIE story).
I'm sure there will be more rules for the transition through the portal, look forward to later updates.
10656590
You may want to spoiler tag that 2nd paragraph as it occurs very late into the story. It's still not clear if he was seeing those wings because of magic or because of phantom limb syndrome and his brain filling in details. In another case of pictures not reflecting prose, he later specifies that when he looks straight at the mirror, the wings aren't there, which supports the phantom limb theory.
If by miles, you mean feet, since the Thermes de Cluny is right there in central Paris.
10656623
What you said is very reasonable. I think I should reread 《fine print》 from the beginning to the end with the help of a translation software.
(Forgive me for not being able to pass CET-4. The exam is a bit difficult for me.)
i.imgur.com/MOks9Qt.jpg
10656335
True, the worldgate in Fine Print closes permanently, but there is still the possibility for them to open a new one, even if it's unlikely that it conects the same two places.
10655987
I think we learn about that in the next chapter. My hope is of at least one, since they are always fun to read, especially their reaction when they learn about their new gender.
fluorescent*
Anyone remember Surviving Sand Island? This premise is giving me similar vibes.
And I am 120% here for it! Onward, to adventure!
10657200
I came here to say the same thing.
Of all the words in the English language, the one that is least likely to be correct in everyday writing is florescent. No one ever uses the word, so it's always a misspelling of fluorescent.
10660108
Maud Pie would probably be very impressed if you gave her florescent rocks, though.
Oh, neat!
It's a pool of heavy water and they're seeing the Cherenkov Radiation from the reactor!!
This should result in a few mutations before it's all over....
Seriously, does no one ever read DC or Marvel anymore?
this reminds me of a magazine article about the most dangerous hobby of all...underwater cave exploration.
and I mean COMPLETELY underwater.
This is an interesting start and I don't doubt that those catacombs are dangerous.
That's a heck of a hook! Looking forward to reading the rest of this.
I honestly find this passage kind of confusing, for a few reasons.
If they're beneath Paris, then they're at most a few hundred feet from where where Roman masons worked. Paris began its history as a Roman city well within Roman lands.
Roman and Renaissance building styles are pretty distinct, so I'm not sure how something can look like an ancient Roman bathhouse but also have a Renaissance style.
And more of a nitpick, but the Renaissance isn't really all that old insofar as European history goes, so something being "even older" than the Renaissance doesn't carry all that much weight -- especially when it's already been compared to Roman ruins.
Just a bit of a Public Service Announcement for anyone coming upon this story--peak only if you're interested in something that might be a spoiler for an event that happens in a much later chapter:
FOLKS, DON'T FORGET TO READ STARSCRIBES PREVIOUS STORIES--ESPECIALLY THIS ONE!
IT'S A PREQUEL TO THIS STORY!!!
Would you believe I only recently found that this is a sequel/side-quel to Fine Print?
Meanwhile, I am confused by this description:
So, light below the water, that's like the portal on the island from Spring Breakdown. But a different opening on the wall, with sunlight ... why do they need to go underwater?
A surprisingly competent inquiry. Good to know these characters take safety and survival seriously.