Chapter 14
“Look,” Sunny said. “If you want to stay, fine, but you were the one arguing about how you need to get home so bad.”
“And you were the one that wanted to dive nose-first into the jungle,” Marble argued. “I thought you would have loved to stay!”
“If you’d been listening carefully, you would realize that I want to explore. One ruin that’s been picked clean by another band of idiots isn’t why I’m here.”
“The tower isn’t ‘picked clean’ as you so nicely put it,” Marble shot back. “Two rooms have been hit, but there’s still a wealth of information in here.”
“So you want to catalog it all now?” Sunny asked. “You can’t wait until you get back to the university so you can share the location and get a good team here? You’re in a survival situation. What you find here isn’t important if you don’t survive to deliver it.”
“Finding this tower again is going to be nearly impossible, and you know it. We have no real landmarks to navigate by, we have a poor sense of distance, and at best, we have a general direction. This discovery is nearly a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence, and I need to document as much information as I can while I have it.”
“Our food supplies here aren’t infinite. We can’t afford to stay here when our food stores dwindle quickly. That’s the problem with foraging. We might be able to get away with it for today, maybe even tomorrow, but I have to travel further and further out to get any kind of food.”
“It doesn’t look like you’ve had any trouble yet,” he growled.
“Because I have a spell that makes it easy to find food. I can’t make it appear! I still need to go looking for it, and if it doesn’t exist, then I can’t find it! Our best bet is to keep moving so that we keep refreshing our store of food.”
“You have rations in your bag.”
“Those are for emergencies! They’re not meant to be used all in one go because you decided to take a vacation.”
“If the food is there for us to eat when there’s nothing around, then using it once we run out is exactly what it’s for!”
“It’s for not starving when we’re on the move, not wasting time sitting on our flanks!”
“We can afford the time!”
“Thinking like that is how you spend your entire paycheck on useless stuff.”
“Knowledge isn’t useless,” Marble snarled.
“It is if we die,” Sunny argued.
“Who knows what we could find!”
“Not food, that’s for certain,” she said as she moved toward the door.
“If that’s all you’re going to worry about, then it’s no wonder you have half-baked theories on—”
Whatever words he said were cut off by the resounding crack of stone against stone as Sunny slammed the door.
That idiot was going to get them both killed. Sitting here in the middle of nowhere for who knows how long so he could make some sketches instead of actually moving.
“You’re just upset you have to babysit him longer,” her inner Celestia said.
No, duh.
This trip was for her. It wasn’t for anypony else. It was her chance to be selfish so that she could enjoy some danger and not worry about whatever responsibilities she did or did not have. “Even if I happen to enjoy them, Missy.”
Her inner Celestia sipped at some tea.
Now she wanted some Oolong.
“Admit it, though,” the mental alicorn said, “it was nice to get into an argument that you weren’t going to win by default.”
Not the point.
Sunny wandered down the stairs, stomping angrily as she made her way down to the antechamber entry of the Windtower. She needed to try and find some breakfast for the pair before the idiot decided to break into her emergency rations right away.
What had gotten into him? They searched the tower the night before. They slept and readied themselves for the new day. Sunny woke up and decided she’d start by taking down her hammock when Marble made his argument.
Everything immediately spiraled out of hoof.
She still hadn’t managed to get her hammock down.
Her Perceive Body spell thumped through her and into the surrounding space, highlighting to her eyes alone the roots, fruits, and nuts she could bring back to the camp. She sighed as she spotted a mango hanging in the air.
She reached up, using her magic, and plucked the ripened fruit from the branch and brought it down. She checked it for any signs of insects before slipping it into her bag and moving on to the next flare of magic that marked something to eat.
Sunny managed to collect a couple of bananas and a wild yam, as well as one more taro root to eat before she turned to look for more water. She cast her Perceive Matter spell, tuned for water and began searching for a pool that wasn’t too stagnant.
“You know what the real problem is?” Inner Celestia asked.
“I don’t remember asking your opinion on it,” Sunny muttered to herself.
“The problem is that you enjoyed your job too much.”
Sunny rolled her eyes.
“You loved being the mother of the nation, and you absolutely adored giving every part of you away, and now that you have to actually hoard those pieces for yourself, you have no idea what to do.”
“Ah, yes, thank you. You have completely revealed the truth to me, and I can put this whole trip behind me. You’re better than therapy, did you know that?”
“Look, it’s not my fault that we’ve lived so long that I can almost recognize the patterns in our brain without bias.”
“Or really? No bias at all?”
“I said almost,” Inner Celestia grumbled. “The point is, we’ve seen this often enough in other ponies that it’s elementary to recognize. Sky above, we’ve seen Twilight do this exact same thing.”
“I’m very aware of what starving baker syndrome is, thank you.”
“The point,” Inner Celestia said pointedly, “is that you love to take care of ponies. So much so that you have problems doing anything else. We’re still trying to take care of ponies, even now! We’re doing whatever we can to help this pony get back to Equestria before you actually get to go off and adventure. You loved being the Princess so much that you just can’t allow yourself to do anything else.”
“I am doing something else! I’m running off into the jungle to go on one of the most ill-advised camping trips on the planet.”
“And you need to be a Princess first and make sure that Marble’s safe before you actually enjoy yourself.”
“You know, I don’t remember asking for your opinion on this at all.”
Her Inner Celestia smiled knowingly.
Sky above, it was annoying dealing with the ex-Princess when you weren’t her.
Sunny collected the water in a bubble over her head and began to make her way back to the tower. She moved carefully through the underbrush to the tower’s antechamber and climbed back up the steps of the stairs to their camp. Once there, she dropped the water into her pot to boil. Luckily, Marble wasn’t present, no doubt exploring some corner of the tower to get some information out of the carvings in the stone.
Meanwhile, she cooked.
“I’ve been demoted from Princess to explorer, to the maid,” she grumbled to herself.
Inner Celestia pointed out that the first demotion was her own idea.
Sunny didn’t respond.
She kept working quietly and purified the water in her pot before pouring it into the various canteens they had. Once she did that, she pulled out the utility knife she brought with her and began to cut up the mango, yam, and taro.
Once she had them in large slices, she began to roast them over the fire, blackening the fruit and vegetables until they would crunch when she bit into them. With everything roasted and cooked, she slipped all of the food onto a pair of banana leaves she plucked.
Once they were both served, she sighed and began to eat, piece by piece.
“You do have to admit he knows what he’s doing, though,” Inner Celestia remarked.
“What now?” Sunny muttered.
“He really knows his way around the tower.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Right now, you have someone who is uniquely trained to work with traps and ruins. If anypony could figure out what the Windtowers used to do, it’d be that pony.”
“How wonderful,” Sunny replied in a deadpan.
“You can’t tell me you’re not curious. We’ve been wondering about what on earth was going on in there for millennia. They wouldn’t tell us, they wouldn’t tell Luna, and now we might have a chance to figure out what’s going on. Just imagine what we could find out.”
“Fascinating, I’m sure,” Sunny replied flatly. Even though she knew full well that she did want to know what happened in these old towers. Right now, she wanted to be mad, and not even Inner Celestia was going to take that away from her.
---☼---
“...then it’s no wonder you have half-baked theories on ancient civilizations you know nothing about!”
Marble watched Sunny storm out of the room before she slammed the door shut with a clack of stone-on-stone.
That mare...oh, that mare…
Marble growled to himself before he leaped out of the window of the wind tower and took to the air.
Who did she think she was? Telling him that his job, his life calling, was worthless? Both he and Vanilla dedicated their lives to this, and then comes Sunny talking about how they couldn’t risk it.
How dare she?
He came up to the top of the tower and landed into what he started calling “the observation room.” He had no idea what purpose the room with the broken machine and the bookshelves actually served, but naming rooms offered him some point of reference to work with.
He landed and took a long look around the room, sighing to himself at the destruction that somepony wrought thousands of years of history.
Marble shook his head before picking up one of the books and carefully turned one of the bark pages with the gentle touch of his feathers. Most of the pages were burnt beyond recognition, but a few of them still had their works carefully painted onto the wood. He slipped the half-destroyed book into the bag Sunny weaved for him. The pegasus once again wished that he had a journal or something to draw some of his findings, but anything he might have was back on the ship, no doubt on the bottom of the ocean.
He picked up another book, which bore an image of the tower, surrounded by a series of oval glyphs that the entirety of the Lusitanpec written language.
It might be another critical piece to help decipher the language, but that was work beyond his abilities. He slipped the book into his bag as well before his thoughts turned to Sunny.
Her concerns were...valid. As much as the pegasus hated to say it. Worrying about food was a perfectly reasonable thing to worry about, considering they were in a survival situation. What’s more, she was currently the survival expert here, and it’s, well, unfair not to listen to her.
Still, the wealth of knowledge here couldn’t just be thrown away. Someone needed to record this for the sake of all academia. If Vanilla found out that he left here without writing something about it, she’d roast him over a spit.
Of course, if he didn’t make it back home, she wouldn’t be happy either.
Marble sighed.
Okay, Sunny had a good point. They needed to keep moving, despite what they found here.
Fine, he’d talk with her and try and work something out, so they weren’t going to starve.
He picked up another book and began searching through it for something that he could salvage. He skimmed through another and then the fifth book before he set one aside just as his stomach growled. Sighing, he turned back to face the door and stairs that led back down to their campsite.
A sweet scent wafted up from the stairs, and he could tell that Sunny came back with breakfast. Marble felt his mouth water at the smell emanating from their campfire, and his stomach knotted on itself.
He needed to eat.
He began walking back down the stairs and soon came up to the door they camped behind. He pressed it open to see Sunny staring out the window as she bit into blackened slices of fruit. On one of the benches, not far from her, sat a large leaf with even more pieces of fire-roasted food, waiting for him.
Sunny didn’t turn to face as he entered, though her ears flickered his way and signaled that she heard him come in.
He walked over to the bench where his food waited and took a bite out of some roasted mango, and the juice dribbled down his chin. He wiped his mouth with a hoof before he swallowed and turned to her.
“If we only stay one day, can we make that work?”
She glanced at him before she sighed and nodded. “I can probably get one more day’s worth of food, yes.”
“I can sort through the books upstairs, and I might be able to find what I’m looking for, but if I can’t find anything else over today, then I’ll consider the information not worth it.”
“It’s not that the info isn’t worth it,” Sunny replied after a long second. “It’s just that food, shelter, and our lives are more important. Though I suppose a break wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway, it’d give me the chance to get some new equipment for us.”
“Some new equipment?” Marble asked. “What? You mean to tell me that you’re going off to the hardware store just around the corner or something?”
Sunny smirked. “These ponies didn’t have hardware stores, and they did just fine. I can get us some stuff to work with. It won’t be the nicest bags and baskets in the world, but they’ll get us through the jungle a little better.”
“And you just happen to know how to make a bunch of baskets and bags?” Marble asked.
“You’d be surprised how much I know,” Sunny said with a smile, “and how little that means I actually understand.”
Marble blinked before he ate a slice of the yam. A part of him wanted to make another snappy remark about the totem, but his brain decided against it. Honestly, it was as good a guess as any other, and Sunny had an impressive source of knowledge of plants, foods, and survival, she might be wrong, but there was no need to dangle it over her head forever.
Besides, they were playing nice right now.
“Okay, so I’ll look through the books, and you make us some extra equipment. Does that sound right?”
Sunny nodded. “I might need to borrow that knife I got you.”
“The artifact? Of indeterminant age and questionable magic?”
“Oh, it’s definitely magic,” Sunny said, “I’d bet my life on it.”
“Still, it’s an artifact!” Marble said. “It’s older than Equestria itself! What if you break it?”
“It’s magic. It’ll be fine. The chances of a magical item breaking as slim to none. That’s half of the reason ancient items were enchanted to begin with. It makes them so much harder to break. That knife is as strong now as it had ever been. That’s the point.”
Marble sighed. “Fine. But if I find out you broke this knife, I’m going to be very angry with you.”
Sunny rolled her eyes. “Sure, got it.”
Marble narrowed his eyes but didn’t respond before he handed over the fang dagger.
Sunny took it and finished her food before she stood up and tossed her banana leaf out the window. “Alright, enjoy your little search. I’m off to go start making some supplies. Hopefully, we’ll have you ready to explore the jungle by the time we leave.”
“I’m so glad this amuses you.”
“I’m just happy we came to a compromise,” Sunny said, smirking.
“Why do I have a hard time believing you, then?”
She shrugged and continued to smirk before she slipped out of the room through the non-trapped door. Sunny disappeared into the wilderness a moment later to find who knows what she needed to make her’ supplies.’
Marble watched her go with a frown before he began moving back up to the book at the top of the tower. He had more important things to do right now than worry about whatever ridiculous plan Sunny was coming up with.
---☼---
Ebony Dusk stood in front of the Temple of the Coatl.
The singular feathers had wreaked so much havoc, but she had to save the last one she had to make her dream come true.
She turned to her mandrill servant. “Zalxayl,” she called.
“Yes, Lady Dusk?”
“I need to get into this temple.”
“Yes, Lady Dusk. Unfortunately, I must beg your patience. It seems the key to the temple door isn’t quite complete.”
Again. Another delay before she could claim her proper place in the world. Why is it that something always stood in her way? Why couldn’t anything ever—
She inhaled deeply before exhaling.
“I...I can wait. I’ve waited years for this moment. What are a few more days?”
“Weeks, I’m afraid, Lady Dusk,” the mandrill explained.
Dusk inhaled a sharp breath before she released that one as well. “I can wait,” she muttered darkly.
“Your patience inspires us all.”
“Don’t patronize me, Zalxayl,” the one-winged pegasus snarled.
“Of course, Lady Dusk.”
She stared up at the doors. The last obstacle between her and her destiny. If it weren’t for the fact that destroying them would cause the whole temple to collapse, she’d be in there already.
She snorted.
She could wait a few more weeks.
A few more agonizing weeks.
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Actually, the question is "What do you plan on doing if I walk out of here?" If he answers "You would leave me here to die?" then the response would be ", NO, you would, as you decided to stay when I leave."
Aww, binge over. Ran out of ‘next’ buttons
Make the best of the situation and take the opportunity to find out, Sunny.