Chapter 13
“What dost thou mean orcs and goblins are different things?” Luna asked.
Today was the third session. The others had a day open, and Luna made it perfectly clear she had nothing else going on as she was retired. So, everypony gathered together at lunch, their sheets and dice ready to go, as they talked over sandwiches.
And then Luna asked why the goblins of the second level weren’t of the same tribe as the goblins further in.
Notes were rushed through, and an argument quickly broke out as everypony tried to make it perfectly clear that this wasn’t actually the case, and Caramel returned from the restroom just in time to hear the Lady exclaim that final line.
“Caramel!” she called as she watched him come back into the room. “Dost thou know the meaning behind this trickery?”
The unicorn barista sighed. “It’s the same reason kobolds and goblins are different, but focusing more on the game design element.”
“But they are the same thing!”
“Not according to the game, which is the more important thing, considering that’s what we’re playing.”
Luna sighed. “What has the world come to?”
Caramel smirked. “There, there, you ancient relic, you’ll survive,” he said.
Luna glared at him. “I can still send thee to the moon. I hope thou art aware. Celestia needed the Elements of Harmony, but I can just do that.”
Caramel smiled and hoped she was joking.
When he didn’t see the horizon transform into the cold void of space, his confidence returned a touch, and he continued to smile as Luna glared, a smile growing on her face despite herself.
“If we’re done with threats of imprisonment,” Rolling noted. “We can get started.”
“I suppose,” Luna said. “Threatening imprisonment is so fun, though.”
“That makes me glad you’ve retired,” Rolling said. “Regardless, let’s begin for today.”
---☼---
Shadesong Swifthoof, the pegasus rogue, stared up at the door ahead of them. The door was magical, could not be picked open. To open the door, they’d have to find the key, which could be anywhere in these ancient catacombs. Alternatively, they might be able to use the “Knock” spell, which would allow the door to be opened for the next ten minutes but also make a resounding knock that could be heard for three hundred feet.
“What do you think?” Shadesong asked. “We look for the key and move in silently, or we move in now, but possibly have everything around us know we’re here?”
“Could you open the door once the spell fades?” Luckstep asked. “As far as I know, you’d still have to actually open the door.”
Shadesong shrugged. “I might be able to, but it’d be a bit of a risk. A roll of the die, if you will.”
Hercule and Dreadmane stood guard in the thirty-by-thirty foot room, made of smooth stone. The rough stone of the cave entrance had fallen away to minotaur-cut stone, or, it had the moment they fell through a hole that the kobolds had been digging before falling down into the level below.
The new layer’s discovery sparked some interest back in town, and the Abyssian managed to get the campsite she wanted.
“I don’t like this,” Luckstep said. “Have you found anything, Brightflame?”
The minotaur glanced up from the door. “Well, the lock is definitely made of adamantine. The arcane runes, however, seem to reinforce the tumblers through magical means. If the key has similar arcane runes, I might be able to locate it with another spell, provided it’s within 1000 feet of us, and not being blocked by any sheets of lead.”
“Lead?” Shadesong asked.
“It blocks divination magic. I’m not sure why. Though I do know a unicorn that wrote an entire dissertation on the anti-magical properties of lead, I’m sure I can explain if I find a copy.”
“Oh, trust me, I don’t care that much.”
Brightflame frowned slightly.
“More importantly,” Luckstep said, stepping in before Shadesong could say anything else, “we don’t have the time for that kind of lecture. Maybe once we get back to the forward basecamp.”
Shadesong shrugged and began looking about the room again. Painted frescos lined the walls around them, depicting scenes of minotaur life, including the founding of the labyrinth. None of the work was easily movable, though it would be valuable if he could manage to pry it off the walls carefully enough.
He rubbed his chin as he glanced at it before shaking his head. It probably wasn’t worth it anyway.
“Shadesong,” a female voice called, and he turned to see Dreadmane standing at the door, the others already filing out. “We’re moving.”
The rogue nodded before he shot across the room and took his place at the front of the line, where he began searching for traps. He moved forward carefully until they found a stone door, checking the floor tiles surrounding the door’s threshold ahead of him. He pressed against it carefully, and once he was sure that it wasn’t a pressure plate, he moved on to the next.
Going was slow but safe. So far, the party hadn’t found any traps on the floor unless they were in front of a door or crossed certain statues that flanked the hallways. They hadn’t quite figure out the pattern behind the statues just yet, but it made things clear that the minotaurs chose where to put their traps carefully.
Once the floor in front of the door was clear, Shadesong worked on the lock.
Behind him, Brightflame muttered to the others. “Provided there’s another hallway on the other side of this room, we can probably cut across to another room and find, at least, another set of these runes.”
The lock clicked open, and Shadesong took a breath to study himself before he slowly opened the door just wide enough to poke his head in.
“Celestia’s breath,” he muttered before opening the door wide.
The others went silent as they looked into the next room and gaped at what they saw. Fourteen orcs lay dead in the room. Their bodies were torn apart, limbs scattered, and bright red blood seeping into the cracks of the tiles.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Luckstep said.
Orcs were tough. The five of them could take on orcs so long as they had the numbers but in a three-to-one fight like this? No, walking into a room like this would have only one real option where they all came out alive, and it involved running as fast as possible.
Something tore them all to shreds, and recently.
“What happened here?” Dreadmane asked, stepping into the room.
“Well, I say that something must have torn them apart,” Hercule said.
“Maybe they were ambushed by some other orcs?” Brightflame suggested.
Shadesong shook his head. “All of these are Blacktusk orcs. Even if there was an ambush, the orcs would have killed at least one of their attackers. Whatever did this overwhelmed the orcs so much they never even stood a chance.”
The others were silent for a long second.
“So, what do we do with this information?” Luckstep asked.
“Well, I say,” Hercule began, “I see it as a sign that we need to move more carefully if the enemy has such a powerhouse available to them. It only makes sense that we must do everything in our power to avoid it while also making sure that it cannot possibly follow us back to the camp, or the town, Ajax forbid.”
Dreadmane nodded. “We need to be stronger if we hope to destroy this foe.”
“Not to mention we have no idea what this thing even is,” Brightflame pointed out. “Knowing one’s enemy is half the fight, we’ll be at a heavy disadvantage if we go into the fight blind.”
Shadesong let them argue behind him, but his attention turned back to the battlefield. Even if surprised, the orcs should have done something. Their weapons should have been bloodied against whatever monster attacked, but as he glanced at the crudely fashioned axes and falchions, he saw each and everyone was clean.
The monster that attacked them hadn’t bled.
“I think it’s a construct of some kind,” he said.
The others looked at him. “A construct?” Dreadmane asked.
Shadesong nodded. “None of the orcs’ weapons have blood on them, so either they did so poorly that they didn’t even manage to hit the attacker, or the attacker just doesn’t bleed.”
Dreadmane blinked. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What is a construct?”
---☼---
Rolling looked over at her from over her screen. “Is that Dreadmane asking or Luna asking?”
“Both, I suppose,” the alicorn replied.
“It’s like Frankenhoof’s monster,” Platinum replied.
“That...that offers no context. At all.”
“Oh, right, sorry,” he replied sheepishly. “It used to be required reading in school, so it made for a good point of reference. Uh, it’s a creature that was not born but made. They typically have bodies made from stone, clay, iron, or even flesh, but the force behind them is not life, but magic.”
Luna looked aghast. “What?”
Caramel watched as the others tried to explain a little more before he stepped in with some context. “Frankenhoof was written during a point in time where the unicorn mages in Canterlot were trying very hard to industrialize everything with magic, nearly to the point of ridiculousness. Frankenhoof was a story written about how researching too deep into magic for minimal gain may not be worth it. The book starts with the titular mage tries to make a servant that will complete jobs for him, jobs which weren’t even tedious, like lifting a fork to his mouth to eat and so on. The pony he makes, built out of the bodies of the dead, winds up being stronger than him and far smarter than him, to the point where Frankenhoof runs away from his own creation out of fear. It’s actually an excellent story, a classic by most standards.”
“And this was written to dissuade others from diving too deep into magic?” Luna asked.
Caramel nodded.
“Is that why so many ponies don’t even try to learn all five techniques or forms?”
“Well, maybe? The fact that Transform and Destroy are held under lock and key doesn’t help either,” Caramel said.
“Not to interrupt a history lesson,” Rolling said, “but we are in the middle of a game right now.”
“Of course, my apologies,” Luna said before she slipped back into character.
---☼---
“They sound like vile things,” Dreadmane muttered.
Shadesong shrugged. “They’re strong, but we know what they are, which is a step above anything else.”
Luckstep sighed. “I really don’t like this development.”
“Well, I say there’s not much we can do about it, is there?” Hercule asked.
Shadesong glanced back down on the ground as the rest of the party took a moment to keep talking with each other before he noticed something next to one of the orcish blades.
He leaned down and picked up a single, deep-blue crystal.
---☼---
“So wait,” Sundance asked, “are they crystal golems? Is that what we’re fighting?”
Rolling said nothing as she looked over her screen.
“They could be,” Caramel said. In all his years of playing, he’d learned that Rolling loved to make her own custom monsters to tie a campaign together, and constructs made out of the vaguely magical sapphire crystal that appeared all over the place seemed exactly like something she’d do. Of course, that also seemed a little...tame. A giant stone construct wasn’t terrifying in any way. It was just a giant troll with crystal skin. “I don’t know, though. I feel like it’s probably something worse.”
Rolling glanced over at him but kept her nose below her screen.
Caramel knew that she was smiling anyway.
“Well, if the monsters are made of crystal, then we might still have a chance against them,” Luna said in her ‘Dreadmane’ voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Crystals shear apart when hit from the the right direction. Of course, if they’re magically reinforced, then all we must do is break the magic holding them together.”
“That might be easier said than done,” Platinum said as the shy minotaur. “Magic works strangely around constructs.”
“We might find a weak point, though,” Sundance said as Luckstep. “Right now, we need to find the key.”
“Onward, I say!” Ivory exclaimed.
“So you said that it was across this room?” Platinum asked.
Rolling nodded.
“And there’s no door on the opposite side of the room?”
“There is not,” she confirmed.
“Then we’re probably going to have to go around. North or south, guys?”
“I’ve got a good feeling about going north,” Caramel said, looking at the hoof-drawn map he’d been tracing out. “I feel like going south will just lead us back to the sandpit.”
“North it is!”
They pushed forward into the darkness of the Sapphire Depths, digging deeper into its secrets. All the while watched by Rolling, who didn’t say a word about what was waiting for them.
---☼---
They didn’t get the key.
Caramel stood at his counter at his in-store coffee shop, staring at a lull in the line. With no one to serve jumping at him from the handful of ponies wandering the bookstore, the unicorn took a moment to think about the night before.
The northern passage wound up doubling back on them, moving in the direction opposite of the arcane runes Brightflame located. Once they hit the dead end, they began heading back around into the southern passage. They found the path they needed to follow before they found the source of the arcane runes.
Another locked door.
That was where the session ended for the night, with the party setting up a campsite in that room to get some sleep after spending the whole day wandering around the twisted halls of the labyrinth.
Of course, now he had to wonder where the key was. Where were they hiding it? Why were they hiding it? And while he was at it, why would a Minotaur-carved labyrinth be filled with shrines to Ornithian gods?
There was a secret to the dungeon that made this whole thing make sense, but he couldn’t see it yet. What’s worse, he knew that Rolling loved the fact that he didn’t know.
“I shouldn’t be thinking about this at work,” he thought to himself. “I need to focus on—”
Where was Celestia? He’d been over at Luna’s house three times now, and never once did the elder sister appear. She never came to say hello to Luna’s guests, and he was beginning to wonder if Celestia was even at the house.
That’s the sort of info that would pay a lot of money.
He frowned, thinking that wasn’t really appropriate either. He sighed and got ready to get back to work when magic exploded in front of his counter.
Luna stood there, just off of his counter, and smiled. “Greetings, Caramel!”
“Um...Lady Luna,” he began nearly stumbling over himself again before he managed to collect himself. “What are you doing here?”
“I have come to behold this work of literature thou spoke of the night before. This Frankenhoof. Dost thou know where it is?”
He nodded. “It should be by the classics, over there.”
“Can thou take me there?” she asked.
“Well, I’m not really an employee of the store, I really shouldn’t leave the counter—”
“It won’t be a problem,” Luna insisted.
“My boss is a bit of—”
“And if thy boss so much as thinks about raising a hoof against thee, I will make sure he is haunted by nightmares for the rest of his natural life. It shall be fine.”
Caramel blinked before he came around to the other side of the counter. “Um, right this way.”
He walked deeper into the store, with Luna following close behind as he made his way to the “classics” aisles. “It’s going to be one of these in the very decorative cover.”
“Wonderful, I do love conversation starters.”
“Uh, yeah, right here,” he said before picking up a copy of the book. “Frankenhoof, by Merry Shell.”
“Perfect, I thank thee, Caramel. Now, dost thou have any other recommendations?”
“Um, well... there’s some classical fantasy work. The Shalenera books come to mind,” he muttered, before turning to the bookshelves, “do they still have the Sword of Shalenera?”
Luna waited. Caramel kept searching for any sign of the book before he frowned.
“Um, okay, they have all the later books, but they do have the Knoll Chronicles. That’s more sci-fi, but they’re great books. At least the first three. After that, it gets a little too weird. Um,” he looked up at the bookshelf once more, licking his lips as he tried to come up with something. “Oh, there’s the Fogborn series. They’re newer but great. Anything that stallion writes is gold. Then there’s the Song of Water and Embers series, and—”
“Caramel,” Luna said softly. “Just something to start with, please.”
He blinked.
“Uh, right. Try this,” the unicorn finally said before picking up one of the Wyvernriders of Fern books. “This is more classical fantasy, kind of what we’re playing right now.”
Luna smiled. “I thank thee again, Caramel. I appreciate it greatly.”
He nodded. “Oh, it’s not a problem, now I should probably get back to my counter before my boss finds out.”
“What does thy boss look like, by-the-by?” the once-princess asked.
“Mr. Thistle? Well, he’s a little taller than me, thinner and—”
“Pale purple coat and green eyes?” Luna asked.
Caramel followed her gaze to see Mr. Thistle stomping toward him, teeth grinding together as he walked. “That’s him,” he muttered.
Luna nodded. “Return to thy post,” she said before a smile appeared on her face. She intercepted the furious pony with a gentle flap of her wings and began to speak with him excitedly.
Caramel didn’t take any chances. He rushed back to the coffee shop, where a single customer was waiting for him.
He took the mare’s order and began pouring a drink and had it ready to go by the time Mr. Thistle returned. He glared at Caramel for a long moment before he muttered. “Don’t leave your post.”
“Yes, sir,” Caramel replied.
Caramel caught Luna walking up to the front of the store, and she smiled and winked at him before she slipped into the checkout line.
And despite himself, Caramel smiled.
Stats
Page generated in 0.014 seconds
Total duration
884 users online
1,364,471 hits today, 2,280,440 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.®
So, Caramel and Luna, huh?
...I ship it.
Search too hard for Celestia and you really might get sent to the moon, dude.
Good recommendation.
I recognize all of those series references other than the Knoll Chronicles, I feel may be missing something that should be obvious with that one.
11009428
Well, if you take a knoll and make it more sandy than grassy you,d get a really large hill of sand. If only there was a word for that.
Wyvernriders of Fern one of the best series out there. First time I've seen it referred to on this site.