Mahlwurfs and Mallets
(♫)
“That’s the third one this week!” Twilight Sparkle snapped at nopony in particular. “Do we know what exactly was taken?” She looked out over the big storage yard behind the Station, and kneaded the spot between her eyes with the frog of her left hoof. The fact that she’d been called out here at the utterly unreasonable hour of eight in the morning wasn’t the only reason for her current crushing headache, but it certainly did not help.
She turned back to her companions, all clustered behind her at the complex’s front gate. They’d installed chain-link fencing not long after renovating the Station, for all the good it had ended up doing.
Vortex, one of Princess Luna’s Night Guards, had been patrolling the area the night before and had been the one to notice something was amiss. He had called in Captain Marigold. Marigold, in turn, had notified Spike and Twilight herself. Applejack, Rarity, and Rainbow Dash hadn’t been formally involved in any of it, but had caught wind anyway and made themselves available to lend a hoof if needed.
“All right. All right.” Twilight forced herself to focus on the matter in front of her, instead of the pebbles currently jammed inside her skull. “Spike?”
The small dragon fanned quickly through a sheaf of typed inventory forms he’d extracted from his omnipresent leather messenger bag. “You know that big silver monstrance we pulled out of Froggy Bottom Bog last month? That was the only thing.”
“Damn them,” Vortex muttered, kicking at a loose stone with surprising force. It sailed a good twenty meters and landed somewhere in the strip of tall grass that separated the Station from the back quarter of Sweet Apple Acres.
Rainbow Dash dropped out of her usual low hover to sit beside him, and shot him a quizzical look.
“That monstrance was salvaged from the great Lunar temple in Everfree City, just before our rebellion began in earnest,” the Shadowbolt explained, “T’was smuggled with great effort out to Hardfrog Valley, and then lost when our encampment was flooded. Luna… we were all overjoyed when thine diggers found it intact, after so many centuries.” He shook his head, expression unreadable behind his tinted yellow flight goggles, “Ponies better than I gave their lives to see that it was safe; thine own comrades spent countless hours to restore it to its former glory… and, the night before t’was to be returned to us, it is gone. No doubt destined to collect dust in some Canterlot noblemare’s secret trophy-room.”
“If even,” Spike muttered, “Nopony’s been able to track down any of the other artifacts circulating in the usual black- and gray-markets, either.”
“So thou… truly hast not even a guess of what these blackguards want with Our Luna’s heraldry?” Vortex asked, ears pivoting sideways in confusion.
“Maybe they’re just meltin’ it down,” Applejack suggested, “that is an awful lotta silver…”
“Or, worst case scenario,” added Twilight, “we’re dealing with some kind of hardline anti-Lunar outfit that’s actively destroying artifacts as a goal in and of itself- like those ‘Discordic Panic’ types back in the 1080s.”
“We don’t know that!” Rainbow Dash snapped.
“Girls, girls, calm down,” interjected Rarity, “that monstrance was mostly fine filigree. It’s not very dense. If somepony wanted to steal a few pounds of silver, there are larger and much less noticeable ways to get it- a few serving trays from one of those bigger Canterlot estates, for instance, would probably have the same raw silver content if not more.” She knelt down on her haunches to look Vortex in the eyes- or, at least, the goggles. “If I were you, I’d stop worrying about what’ll happen in the future, and finding the ponies who did this, now.”
“Umm. Right.” Twilight left Rarity and the Shadowbolt to settle their affairs in peace, and made her way carefully over to the only train car in the yard that wasn’t sealed shut. Instead, the big panel door on one side had been slid open, the stamped tin tie-band across it was neatly cut, and the orderly grid of close-packed crates inside held a suspiciously square hole in the center. None of the other crates had been remotely disturbed, and the door had only been opened the distance required to get at the one that was removed. That suggested whoever was responsible had known exactly what they were after ahead of time.
She grabbed the door itself in her telekinesis, experimentally sliding it back and forth against its track. It made an audible rattle if she moved it at a rate greater than about two centimeters a second, but was relatively quiet below that speed. Given that it had been open about a meter and a half when she’d arrived, that meant the thieves had spent at least a minute and a quarter simply moving it. Or they had some method of magically suppressing sound that was also not clearly visible- but for safety reasons, muffler candles and similar items were legally required to include an illumination spell demarcating their area of effect, before they were permitted to be sold on the civilian market.
Next, she focused on the locking mechanism, muttering the cantrip to her favorite mage-sight spell and painting the world around her in false-color auras. The password enchantment on the lock appeared to still be functional -she’d have it taken off the train car and sent to her lab for a proper dissection later on- and displayed the appropriate six-digit numerical code. Those codes weren’t a closely-kept secret- enough ponies needed to load, unload, and maintain the trains that knowledge of them was in fact fairly widespread- but they were also changed daily and only then written down.
“Vortex?” She called out, “can you tell me again what happened last night?”
There was a very faint whisper of displaced air as the Shadowbolt took wing and then glided over to her location. Applejack and Rainbow Dash both followed behind on hoof. “Aye, though there is little to tell,” he said, “I circled the yard most of the night and saw nothing. I passed this car on my rounds as usual, perhaps just after three-thirty as the clocks now reckon it, and it was closed and locked. Then perhaps five minutes later I passed by again, and ‘twas as you see it now.”
“And the tracking gem?” Twilight asked, already leafing through the papers in her saddlebags for Vortex’s patrol route.
“We found it a couple yards from the train,” said Applejack.
“Just like a ruttin’ magic act…” Rainbow Dash muttered.
With the proper document finally floating in her telekinesis, Twilight studied the path Vortex had taken. The car that had been broken into had been out of his sight for perhaps all of four minutes at any given time. More interestingly, a note on the margin informed her that he’d chosen to keep the entire watch as a cloud of immaterial vapor, courtesy of the strange Lunar magic Twilight and her team were still struggling to get a handle on. Having seen the phenomenon first-hoof several times, Twilight knew that at night it rendered him effectively invisible. The fact that the thieves had still known exactly when he’d be away from this specific train car suggested an extremely high degree of planning, and very detailed foreknowledge.
“I just don’t get how this can continue to happen to us over and over again,” Spike snapped as he loped over to Twilight’s position, alongside Rarity and Captain Marigold. “Aren’t these Guardsponies of yours supposed to be the best of the best?”
“Outside the EUP Platoons, yeah,” Marigold shot back, “But we’re soldiers, not police, and Vortex and his Night Guard buddies aren’t even officially soldiers yet. We don't have the authority to start knocking on ponies' doors and holding an investigation outside of our own little patch of borrowed land. And even if we did, we're so short-hoofed we can't afford to pull anypony in from the other patrols. Searching the town would mean pulling troops out from guarding Froggy Bottom Bog, and then they'll just hit one of those camps again.”
“Couldn't we ask the Watch for help?” Spike offered. “This is technically still town property that’s being invaded; Ponyville can’t just abandon their obligation to keep it in order after they agreed to let us stay here.”
“I'll put in another request, but Amethyst Star said they can barely cover their own patrols.” The Captain scuffed an armor-shod hoof against the gravel in frustration. “It’s all just one big never-ending game of Mahlwurfs-and-Mallets.”
“If… I may offer a suggestion, darling,” Rarity spoke up, “What if we made the Lunar artifacts less profitable to steal? Right now, this… outfit is the only one offering any up, but if we sold a few ourselves, or even just put them on public display… maybe their demand would dry up? Crime is a business like any other, after all.”
“Yeah, why do we gotta keep all this business so darn quiet, anyways?” Applejack cut in, “Ah mean, Ah’m all for keepin’ them reporters outta Ponyville, but… maybe they wouldn’t try so hard to get in here if’n a few of us went someplace else and talked to ‘em?”
Twilight shook her head. “I’ll mention your suggestions to Celestia and Shining Armor in my next report, but I personally don’t think either is a good idea. For one thing, we aren’t the ones who decide what happens to Lunar artifacts at all- they belong to Luna and the other Lunar survivors, and those ponies have been pretty unanimous in what they want done. They fought pretty hard to keep up their gear during the Rebellions, and now they want to make sure all of it ends up back in Fillydelphia Harbor with them. We -umm, the Academy- are really incredibly lucky to have been given the chance to study these artifacts at all.”
Sitting down across from her, Vortex nodded.
She looked out over the yard, briefly expecting that the missing crate to appear, magically overlooked, safe and sound on the loading dock. It failed to materialize. “Some of this stuff is also really dangerous in ways we didn’t immediately recognize. Think about the pillars we found in the Bog. We spent weeks passing over them and thinking they were completely inanimate, but they have extremely powerful magical defenses. What if we’d decided they were safe to exhibit to the public, and then one decided to start spawning those ghost construct things in the middle of a crowded museum? A lot of ponies could get seriously hurt! We just… we still know so little about any of this, even less than we thought when we started working on the problem, and I’d rather give out no information at all than give out information that turned out later to be completely wrong. Ponies could get into serious trouble following our bad advice, and creeps like that ‘Lunar Equestrian Studies Society’ or whatever they’re calling themselves now would eat it up with a spoon.”
“So much of what we’ve uncovered is also… well, it’s kind of personal to Luna and her Guards,” the scholar continued, “The press would have a field day with things like… like what happened to General Silver Shade, or the condition of some of those Lunar soldiers we saw as ghosts, and that’s really not any of their business.” She shook her head. “Right now, I… guess there isn’t a lot more we can do here except clean up.”
She looked over to Marigold, who made a small “over here” gesture with her right forehoof.
Confused, Twilight followed the Captain over to a section of gravel between two other train cars, out of sight of the rest of the group. “Listen,” the Guardsmare muttered, “right now, we need to start thinking about somepony inside our operation being connected to this. Now, the Academy staff and my Guards all went through pretty serious background checks just to get here, but these Ponyville mares… well, that Apple farm takes a lot of bits to run, and somepony who can walk off with our gear could just as easily make sure the Defense Ministry ‘loses’ a few of Rainbow Dash’s old files…”
Twilight’s eyes narrowed, and her ears snapped forward. She wanted to ask just how Marigold could possibly have known that, but then realized doing so would only confirm what were, most likely, just suspicions on the Captain’s part. After a moment of open-mouthed stammering, she settled on “What’s all this about Rainbow Dash having files?”
“Listen, Doc, I’ve seen Dash out in the field, and I read your report about everything she did to help take down Nightmare Moon. The only reason she hasn’t made Master Sergeant by now is either she never actually wanted a career in the military -which I doubt- or somepony higher up than you or me blackballed her file.”
“If, that’s the case, and I’m not saying one way or the other…” Twilight scuffed half-heartedly at the gravel with one hoof. “… then that’s her business and not yours, understood?”
Marigold’s expression shifted in an unreadable sort of half-state for a few seconds, before finally settling on professionally blank. “Yessir.”
Twilight looked back over her shoulder at Applejack, Dash, and Vortex, before turning back to Marigold. “And since you read my report on Rainbow Dash, you know there's not a chance in Tartarus she'd do this to us.” She stepped past the Captain and back out into the main section of the Yard, waving at her assistant. “OK. Right. And, Spike? We’ll need another box of gold wire for the locks, I want to switch them all out with a different design.”
“Already ordered.”
“And we’ll want to-”
“Shuffle the work shifts for the volunteer yard workers? I’m halfway through drawing up another schedule. I’ll also go around this evening and change the lock codes to new ones after the trains are loaded, myself.”
“And what about the-”
“Had one of the Guards go pick up your new thaumoscope yesterday.”
She gave him a quick pat on the shoulder. “Thanks, Spike. Oh, and do you know where Sergeant Leafspring’s gotten off to?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t seen her since… like, six o’clock last night, actually.”
“She didn’t report for duty this morning, either,” Marigold added, “Of course, it’s Leafspring, so she might just be sleeping it off in a ditch somewhere. She doesn’t have any part in yard security, so I’m not too worried.”
“She came ‘round the farmhouse a little after eight last night,” Applejack interjected, “she’s been chattin’ up Big Mac an awful lot lately, not that Ah really mind or nothin’. Ah sold ‘er a basket of apple fritters to share with you other grunts, she set off again ‘round ten, and that’s the last any of us ever saw ‘er…”
“Well, she’s also the only other pony in town who’s qualified to program the thaumograph’s discrimination matrix, so I guess I’m going to have to go ahead and spend the rest of the morning doing that myself,” Twilight muttered, already heading for the gate.
It was probably going to be another long day.
(♫)
Spike awoke, as he usually did, at approximately eight-thirty the next morning. He tidied his basket, scrubbed himself clean in the Golden Oaks’ tiny shower, and picked up the Times of Canterlot from the front step. He skimmed over the daily report from the Station that Derpy always carried over along with it, and after confirming that no urgent crises were in development, left both the report and the Times on Twilight’s desk. Then he considered breakfast at Sugarcube Corner before settling on homemade pancakes, careful to separate out the batter he’d mixed with glass beads and natron from Twilight’s unadulterated portion. His guardian managed to hospitalize herself frequently enough under her own power already, without his contributing.
It was only when he sat down at the Golden Oaks’ main table with his plate in front of him and the day’s inventories and budgets beside it, that he noticed the silence. Normally, by this time of morning, Twilight would’ve been awake and moving around up in the loft. Today, he heard nothing. She’d still been away on some sort of investigation in the Everfree Forest when he’d come back from supervising the Station late last evening; and he hadn’t even thought to look over and see if she’d returned when he’d awoken.
“Twilight?” he called.
There was no response.
He climbed back upstairs, cursing himself for volunteering to reset the combination locks in the Station so late last evening, and stopped short when he found the loft empty. Not only was Twilight absent now, but her bedsheets were still in order, something she never bothered to fix until after she’d eaten. She hadn’t returned at any point in the night. That was uncommon, and usually rendered her more or less unable to function for the following day.
Now somewhat concerned, he loped down from the loft and continued into Twilight’s lab in the formerly secret room in the basement. He’d expected to find her either still resolutely chewing on some arcane problem or slumped over asleep in her chair, but the lab was dark and empty.
“Twilight!” he called again, louder this time.
Once again, there was no response.
He walked into Sugarcube Corner to find Rainbow Dash the only other customer. “… we staked out the scene,” the pegasus growled, “had Vortex on the perimeter, ready to move in as soon as the tracking gem so much as wiggled. And then… nothing. Not even one dirty hoofprint!”
“Ooof, sorry. Those Night Guard types really should’ve let you train ‘em into proper mall ninjas!” Pinkie Pie replied from behind the counter.
“Heh. Yeah.” Rainbow Dash nodded, and then her eyes narrowed and her ears flipped backwards. “Hey, wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”
Spike coughed softly. “Um, hi, have… any of you seen Twilight today?”
Rainbow flicked out her wing in a negatory gesture. “Nope! Not since yesterday morning, actually. Why?”
“She didn't come back to the library last night.”
“Heh, maybe she's shacking up with the Guards at the Station again?” Rainbow Dash snickered.
Spike ignored her. "What about Rarity?" he asked.
The pegasus cocked her head, confused. “Why would Rarity be at the Station?”
“I meant have you seen Rarity?”
“Oh, she was here earlier, grabbed her coffee to go, said something about magical silk?” Pinkie Pie answered.
“Okay. Thanks.”
He made his way to Carousel Boutique and found it unlocked, with the front showroom completely empty.
“Rarity?” he called out.
“In the back, Spike. Feel free to join me.”
Somewhat cautiously, Spike slipped through the curtains surrounding the workshop, into an environment of general disarray. A bored-looking Sweetie Belle paused from rolling a loose spool back and forth on the floor with her hoof -generating an appalling tangle of unrolled thread in the process- to look up at him, and then returned to what she was doing. Rarity herself sat hunched over a sewing machine, nearly smothered in stacks of some sort of fine golden silk. It did, admittedly, look quite impressive.
He cleared his throat, and when Rarity barely twitched an ear in his direction went ahead and asked, “Have you seen Twilight around lately?”
“I’m afraid not, darling,” the tailor said without looking up from her work. “But I’ve been more or less shut up in here ever since yesterday afternoon. I… might’ve taken on an order a bit larger than I’d initially figured, you see.”
Spike nodded, then remembered that Rarity wasn’t looking anywhere near him. “I… yeah,” he finally said, “I know how you feel. Twilight hasn’t shown herself since we visited the railyard yesterday, and I’ve probably got a dozen different forms on my desk by now that all need her approval.”
Rarity paused, briefly, and tilted her head sideways. “Where all have you looked?"
"Just Sugarcube Corner, and here."
“You know, darling, there’s no such thing as a twenty-four hour waiting period before the Watch can declare a pony missing. Suspicion of foul play is more than enough.”
He shifted from one leg to the other, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. “Rarity, it’s, umm, a little early for that, don’t you think?”
“Sorry, sugarcube, ain’t seen ‘er since last mornin’,” Applejack looked up from the irrigation ditch she was digging to answer. She waved the shovel she was holding in the crook of her foreleg over to the red stallion unrolling a wad of canvas liner beside her. “Big Mac, you seen anything?”
“Nope.”
“Last Ah saw, Twilight was on ‘er way up to the Station for somethin’. She looked in an awful hurry, so Ah didn’t stop ‘er to ask. That woulda’ been ‘bout… two-ish?”
Big Mac just stared off into the distance for a while, work seemingly forgotten. Then at long last, he said. “’M worried ‘bout Leafspring, too. Ain’t like her to just disappear like this.”
Spike tried his best to produce a reassuring expression, which was difficult when one’s muzzle was pointed and filled with tiny, needle-like teeth. “I’ll… umm… see what I can do."
Captain Marigold peered at him over her little desk in the corner of the officers’ barracks. Her usually crisp white uniform tunic was ever-so-slightly wrinkled, and her intensely yellow coat was doing a poor job of hiding the bags underneath her eyes. “She had the Lapwing out running some kind of search or recon over the Everfree, from about oh-nine-thirty to fourteen-hundred. After that, she came back here and asked if she could have Sergeant Chamomile assigned to her for the day. They grabbed some supplies, mostly survival gear and some instruments from Daycaller’s office, and that’s the last I saw of either of them.”
“Did she file her flight plan like she was supposed to?” Spike asked.
“Yeah. She also dumped a bunch of notes here that I’m not really sure what to do with.” Marigold waved a hoof at one of the several imposing stacks of paper that filled most of her desk’s surface. “I thought of running ‘em over to Verse or Daycaller, but everypony from the Academy’s tied up pretty good as is.”
“Maybe I could take a look at them?”
“I don’t see why not.” The Captain slid the entire stack across her desk, “Just… do it someplace other than here. I’ve got a meeting with the aircrew in five minutes to figure out who might be able to fill in for Leafspring, and now there’s whole infantry squad I’ve gotta get in shape without my First Sergeant.”
(♫)
Spike sat in a folding chair in the corner of Doctor Daycaller’s combination office-lab, watching as the Academy mage fiddled with a collection of brass instruments and chalk markings that surrounded a small crucible of molten tin. Applejack and Rainbow Dash had both decided to join him after about his first hour of waiting, and currently occupied two other chairs on the other side of the mage’s desk. Spike was surprised at how grateful he was for their presence.
The crucible hissed and bubbled as Daycaller muttered a long string of incantations, then grabbed a pair of long metal tongs in his jaws. He picked up the packet of hairs Spike had extracted from the brush in Twilight’s bathroom, and held it under the gas flame that heated the crucible until it was completely consumed. Then he tipped the crucible itself into a much larger cast-iron cauldron full of cold water. Spike watched the molten metal hiss and crackle, solidifying almost instantly into a long, snake-like shape that didn’t quite seem to fit into the three ordinary dimensions. Daycaller fished it out and set it on a wad of paper towels on his desk, then spent a solid minute leafing through a thick leather-bound book and occasionally turning the metal piece to one side or the other.
“Anything?” Spike asked, feeling suddenly impatient.
Daycaller looked at the book one last time, and then shook his head. “Nothing. As far as positional divination goes, taglocked molybdenomancy is about as reliable and… and difficult to frustrate as one can really get, but… it looks as though the metal is just cooling randomly. There should be recognizable planes and bubbles, and I’m not seeing anything like that.”
Rainbow Dash cocked her head and squinted at him for a few seconds, and then asked “So, is there anything else you can do?”
“Well…” Daycaller plucked the metal off the paper towels and carried it over to the compact alchemical workbench on the other side of the room. He dropped it in a small ceramic bowl of fuming orange liquid, into which he added the contents of a few dark glass bottles whose labels Spike didn’t even bother trying to understand. The resulting inky, faintly smoking mixture was poured back into the cauldron, and after that Daycaller adjusted a few instruments, scuffed out some of the runes surrounding them, and chalked in new ones.
The surface of the cauldron gradually stilled and blackened, resembling more and more a hole into some dark, voluminous space than the surface of any liquid at all. Then all at once, the figure of a small purple unicorn snapped into view inside of it.
Applejack whistled appreciatively, then sucked in her breath as the image in the cauldron looked upwards, spun around, and began to gallop in place. After a few seconds, the Twilight-image seemed to cry out and lose her footing, hanging in space for an agonizing moment before tilting at a strange angle with her hooves scrabbling at some unseen surface.
Rainbow Dash’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. This looks like what she did when Nightmare Moon was shooting at us on that big stone platform! That was, like, three months ago. See, look, next she’s gonna grab onto a ledge, and then she’s gonna yell at me not to try and get her…”
True to Rainbow’s word, the unicorn image ceased its frantic scrabbling and then called out something inaudible.
Applejack shook her head. “Everfree?”
Daycaller nodded. “Everfree. We should… really be lucky we’re able to get any kind of a lock at all.”
“Can you… adjust any of this?” Spike asked, “I’d really kind of like to be able to see where Twilight’s located right now.”
“The spell is already supposed to be synchronized with the current time,” Daycaller tapped a particular array of instruments, “if I tried to refocus it into the future to compensate, these two lenses here would have to be inside one another. Maybe if I had a few weeks I might be able to redesign the focusing element, but there’s no telling what it would show or how reliable it would be.” He shrugged, and twisted a valve at the base of the cauldron. The liquid began to drain away, and the image inside became more and more transparent until it had faded away completely. “I wish there was more I could do, but divination into the Everfree… I’m frankly amazed this worked even as well as it did.”
Dash and Applejack both accompanied Spike back to the Golden Oaks. His feelings on the two looking over his shoulder as he attempted to decipher Twilight’s notes could best be described as mixed. On one hoof, their very presence was distracting- Twilight knew when to leave him alone. On the other, however, he still welcomed the company. The library simply wasn’t meant to be this silent at three in the afternoon, without a skinny purple unicorn leafing through texts and muttering to herself in the office.
Much of the material they’d brought back from the Station consisted of copied articles and lists of citations dealing with alchemy, liminology, and esoteric types of matter. Many were from foreign researchers, Abyssinian and Minotaur mostly; some were dated a hundred years or more in the past. All of them were quite dense even by Twilight Sparkle’s standards, and well beyond Spike’s own knowledge. However, he vaguely recalled some of the documents as having come in via firelink not long after Twilight’s trip to Fillydelphia Harbor three days previously. He wasn’t quite sure what that meant.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to be pawing through her stuff like this?” Rainbow Dash asked.
Spike leafed through a selection of what appeared to be thaumospectral response equations written in Twilight’s small, blocky script. The first few were recognizable as having been copied from the references he’d already seen, and then Twilight had begun making alterations; to what end he couldn’t determine. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said aloud, “I’d be seeing this sooner or later either way, just to organize and file it. Usually, I’d be the one transcribing these kind of articles, even. And it’s not like there’s anything personal in them- not like the… literature she keeps stashed in the nightstand where she thinks I don’t know about it.”
“Okay, yeah, forget I even asked.”
Finally, he chanced upon a document that was just about comprehensible- a table of coordinates and corresponding thaumograph response numbers. He unrolled a map of the Everfree Forest, one of several copies currently scattered throughout the Golden Oaks, and began marking down the locations. For the most part they formed an even grid over the whole of the forest, but the later entries were all clustered around the location of a particular Lunar Cairn. The Academy archeological teams had designated it 77E- it was one of several that had been found open and empty, although none of the Lunars whose names were listed inside had been recovered alive in Ponyville.
He turned back to Rainbow Dash and Applejack. “I… think we should go and get some of the Guards’ gear. And try and find Fluttershy, too.”
(♫)
It was raining in the Everfree, off and on in dense little torrents, and the air was unaccountably chilly. Despite herself, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Captain Vortex having made it into the forest at four in the afternoon, Fluttershy could see that the sun was most definitely canted towards the west. She recalled that Ponyville’s last scheduled shower had been last week, around ten in the morning, and the clouds above were still tinged dawn-red. In a strange sort of way, that almost made sense. As far as she was concerned, it was just another incentive to keep her head down and her wings clamped tightly to her sides in her borrowed Guard armor.
In addition to their armor and clairaudio-enabled helmets, each of them carried a comprehensive booklet of maps and a tracking gem. The gems were linked to a set of compass-like devices with an enchanted needle pointing to each, as well as to true North and to a magical beacon set up at the main camp on Castle Rock. Finally, Spike had insisted that they all pack a set of magical flares coded to their respective cutie marks, in case they needed to split up. White flares would be sent up every five minutes to establish that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Blue meant to fall back to wherever they had split off from at a careful pace. Green indicated something interesting but not urgent had been found, yellow that prompt assistance was required, and red “Don’t bother coming to save me. Just run.”
If she hadn’t already known the path Twilight and Sergeant Chamomile had taken, Fluttershy doubted she could’ve followed them. Sometimes, their tracks were fresh and clear; sometimes the entire path was nothing but rain-slick mud; and sometimes the path was perfectly undisturbed, but no traces were to be found at all. Still, follow she did, more or less, with the others all trailing along behind her.
For the most part, barring the occasional strange interruptions, two pairs of hoofprints closely followed the geodesic curve Spike’s notes described as the most “direct” path to Cairn 77E. Then, perhaps a hundred yards away from the site, they stopped and did not resume.
Fluttershy held up her left wing in the agreed-upon signal to stop, her heavy pack saddle sliding into the back of her neck. “I’ve been going on for about twenty yards now, and the tracks aren’t picking up again,” the little pegasus explained.
Rainbow Dash scratched the underside of her muzzle with an armored hoof. “Wait, didn’t Twilight and that guard have gems, too? Why didn’t we just ask for a compass for them?”
“Spike tried that, castin’ the spell himself, back at the Library and it didn’t work,” Applejack said, “Remember?”
“Yeah, but, are we sure the gems even work out here? Because nothing really works out here, ”the weathermare asked.
"We could track the gem you ate, right? Back when we were goin’ up against Nightmare Moon?"
"I ate it, I don't know how it works! I'm not a... gastro...gem...ologist? I'm not an egghead."
For the first time since they had set out, Captain Vortex spoke up. "Ah... so that was how you found us so easily."
Applejack cocked her head. “You didn’t know that?”
“Nay! We thought you had tracked us by skill alone!”
“Cool!” Rainbow Dash paused, then looked back at Fluttershy. “So, umm… what do we do?”
“I say we advance to the Cairn, then spiral outwards, until somepony returns to where the tracks are visible,” Vortex suggested.
Fluttershy nodded, slightly. Her friends followed suit.
Their hike up to the Cairn was uneventful, and accomplished much more quickly without the need to keep following often difficult-to-spot traces. It was, just as Spike had told them he’d left it, undamaged and completely empty. The crate of supplies the first survey team had stashed inside for ponies who might later come this way in trouble was unopened, and the ledger atop it where visitors were supposed to record their arrival and departure times still showed only a single entry- one month ago.
Fluttershy looked around, and saw the others were all occupied sketching out a search pattern on one of their maps. She quietly picked up the provided quill in her teeth and signed their names on the form along with the date.
After a few more minutes of discussion, they began to file out of the Cairn. Vortex split off from the group and stepped over to her location. “Fluttershy, I would ask thee to remain here. Should any of us become lost, it would be best if there was a pony with a tracking gem to guide our return.”
Quickly, she nodded. “Okay.” It was drizzling outside again, and she wasn’t overly fond of getting wet. That, and the uneasy feeling of unwelcoming that pervaded the whole of the Everfree seemed a little bit more bearable inside the Cairns and the Academy’s camps.
For a few minutes she was left alone in the structure. Applejack’s voice echoed over the spell in her helmet, “Nothin’ yet,” and then a little later “Rainbow? Vortex? Shit, spell must be toast.” Then, a little while after that, she heard the same phrase again, weak and distant like a long-delayed echo. “Nothin’-yet-Rainbow-Vortex-shit-spell-nothing-yet-toast-Rainbow-Vortex-yet-nothin’-spell-Rainbow-yet-Rainbow-Vortex-yet-yet-yet…” The sound twisted around itself and faded to an inaudible whisper, and then eventually nothing at all. Towards the end, Fluttershy could even fancy hearing words the farmer hadn’t originally spoken, although she would’ve been be hard-pressed to explain what they might’ve been- or even to confirm they were in Ponish at all.
After that, they switched to using the magical flares. Fluttershy watched from the entrance as lights arched into the air every five minutes, a triangle for Vortex, three spheres for Applejack and a jagged line for Rainbow Dash, all of them colored everything’s-alright white. After four rounds of this, she stepped outside and realized she could see another flare off in the distance, this one Lunar purple. It launched, fizzled out, and then launched again in an endless loop. Strange.
Then another flare went up, this one with Applejack’s cutie mark colored found-something green.
Fluttershy stepped out of the cairn, stretched her wings, kicked off and glided through the woods towards the flare. Then she braked, thought to herself, and turned to follow Applejack’s compass needle. Then she stopped again, remembered that the ‘direct’ path could in fact take much longer to traverse, headed back to the Cairn to check the map, and set about retracing the same spiral search pattern the farmer had originally followed.
She caught sight of Applejack after perhaps ten minutes of jumping-and-gliding-and-jumping-again, standing in the middle of a small round clearing surrounded by thick, gnarled gray trees. Scattered around her were what appeared to be gray-coated, blue-armored bodies.
Fluttershy swallowed hard and trotted closer. All of the bodies were indeed clad in dark blue astral steel armor, and all of them were horribly desiccated and emaciated- Lunar revenants. Indeed, the term ‘bodies’ was itself somewhat inapt, as more than a few had been torn to bits by something large and strong and sharp, to a degree that made getting even an accurate count of them difficult. As she walked among them, noting the dented armor and scattered weapons and torn-up soil, Fluttershy supposed there had been between twenty and thirty of them originally. Anypony who gave a number more precise than that would simply be guessing. The whole area smelled very faintly of rotting vegetation, but then again so did a lot of places in the Everfree.
She turned back at the sound of rustling foliage, and watched Rainbow Dash and Vortex glide into the clearing as well. Dash just stared, open-mouthed for a moment, while under his goggles Vortex’s expression shifted from surprise to concern to confusion. “Was… was this place how you first found it?” He asked Applejack.
She nodded. “Didn’t touch a thing.”
“I… think this was a timberwolf attack,” Fluttershy suggested, “they hunt in packs, and wouldn’t immediately be able to distinguish between living ponies and those revenants.” Timberwolves fed so rarely, and were otherwise so territorial, that whether they would’ve found the revenants edible or not was more or less a moot point.
Vortex just nodded.
(♫)
“Hey, up there!” Rainbow Dash called, flicking a wing at one of the gnarled gray trees on the border of the clearing. Fluttershy and her friends drew closer, and in the dim light the pegasus was finally able to detect equine forms slumped in the lower branches of the canopy.
She kicked off the ground again and drifted closer. All three of the bodies were Lunars clad in dark blue armor, their ashen coats even grayer than usual, their eyes sunken in and dried shut, very much dead. A pegasus mare with a beak-tipped helmet still had one leathery wing pressed against a long gash that ran from her shoulder up her neck; given the depth and lack of appropriate tourniquet, blood loss had probably claimed her. Two stallions, another pegasus and an earth pony, were huddled up against each other in an odd position, heads tucked down and their legs curled up against their barrels- they were in poor enough condition by now that it was difficult for Fluttershy to tell, but if she were to guess both had simply frozen to death in the middle of summer.
From the ground below her, Captain Vortex uttered a string of curses so vicious and archaic that Fluttershy had never heard them outside of her record collection.
Rainbow Dash gave a low whistle. “Hey, uhh, you doin’ okay?”
He stood stock-still for a little while, then swallowed hard and nodded.
“They’re… pretty far along in… well, in decomposing,” Fluttershy finally muttered, unsure of what else to say. “I think they’ve been out here ever since the Summer Sun Celebration.” Of course, this being the Everfree, she would’ve also believed their having decayed right down to skeletons after being seen alive three hours previously, or having been casualties of the original Rebellion a thousand years ago.
“Then why has nopony found them, before us?” Vortex demanded.
“Ah dun’ think they were properly here before,” explained Applejack, “or maybe ‘here’ wasn’t here before, either. This parta’ the forest’s tangled itself up worse’n a crockpot fulla’ garter snakes.”
“Yeah, I think I was picking up my own tracking gem a little ways back,” added Rainbow Dash. “I found my own hoofprints, too. Either mine, or yours or Vortex’s. What’d Pinkie always say? ‘Time is bent and space is flexible’ or something?”
“Ah bet Twilight’d know…”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence before Vortex spoke up again. “This, at least, explains why their Cairn was found empty. I fear their fellows in the others may have met the same fate…”
Fluttershy let herself drift back down to ground level, briefly examining the discarded Lunar equipment scattered at the base of the tree- a broken potion bottle, a small buckler shield, a rune-inscribed stone, and two smashed canteens. “Do you think this might’ve been what Twilight was looking for?”
Nopony answered. After a few seconds, Rainbow Dash shot a quick look over at Vortex and then ducked her head. “Girls? Do you think this is… our fault? All the Lunar zombies keeled over as soon as we fried Nightmare Moon, and if they were fighting timberwolves at the time…”
Fluttershy stepped back through the patch of torn-apart underbrush that made up more or less the center of the ‘battlefield’. The Timberwolves might’ve hauled off a few intact corpses, but everything she could see was effectively shredded. “I don’t think we need to worry about that,” she said out loud, “all of these… bodies?… were torn apart, they didn’t just collapse.”
“So, why didn’t the guys in the tree just fly away?” Rainbow asked.
For the first time since she’d arrived in the clearing, Fluttershy looked directly upward at the dense forest canopy. The longer she stared, the deeper it seemed to become. Light was coming down from somewhere, but it was anypony’s guess as to where. “They couldn’t.”
“We should… prob’ly get outta here, sugarcube,” Applejack suggested. “This place is… well, it’s givin’ me the screamin’ willies. And,” she looked back at the tree, where Vortex had quietly picked up the dropped runestone and was currently in the process of slipping it into his pack, “the Station an’ Fillydelphia Yards’re both gonna wanna know ‘bout these bodies sooner, rather ‘n later.”
(♫)
“… and… I think that’s about it,” Fluttershy explained to the others gathered around the scuffed oak conference table in Ponyville’s town hall- Spike, Derpy Hooves, Amethyst Star, Captain Marigold and Doctor Daycaller. Vortex had already boarded the six o’clock train to Fillydelphia Harbor, to inform Princess Luna of the discovery of her wayward troops.
The small purple dragon leafed through another stack of charts. “Those Lunars you found were pretty much dead center in the area Twilight was scanning. Umm, so to speak.” Nopony laughed. “The focus depth of her last few scans was a couple of meters lower, though. She started scanning underground and never made it up to treetop level; in fact she stopped right at the ground.” He scratched absentmindedly under one greenish fin. “I wonder if there was anything special they were carrying? I’d actually like to take the Lapwing out for another look at the forest.”
“That’s, uh, actually going to be a little bit complicated,” Daycaller spoke up. “Captain Marigold had me take a look at the thaumospectral system, and it’s… set into a configuration that… well, makes it basically unusable. I’m not… actually sure how to undo some of the changes.”
“I was mostly wanting to just search visually and maybe use the sound system to try to signal anypony,” Spike amended, “if Twilight just sends up a flare, we might be able to follow it back down to her.”
Marigold’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’re already dealing with potentially aggravated timberwolf activity here; I don’t think we should be flying around making loud noises over the forest. Especially while our airship mechanic’s decided to go AWOL on us.”
“What about a wider search with infantry? Fliers and ground teams?” the dragon suggested.
“What sort of divinations would they be using? Would we have time to train them?” Daycaller asked, leaving Fluttershy wondering quietly to herself at what point it had been decided that eyes and ears alone would not have been sufficient.
Marigold rapped her hoof against the table. “Negative on that one. We’re short-hoofed enough as is, I just don’t have the troops to pull away from patrols.”
“Then I’ll revise the patrol schedule so some are free,” Spike shot back.
“Not without Twilight to sign off on it you won’t,” Daycaller muttered.
Very, very briefly, Fluttershy considered saying something to the Academy pony in return, but it seemed the entire group had already more or less forgotten her.
“I wish I could send some of the weather team to help you,” said Derpy Hooves, her laborious pronunciation even slower than usual, “but we’re working double shifts on watch anyway. My ponies need to spend some time with their families, you have to understand…”
Spike looked over at Amethyst Star. “What about the Watch? This… this can’t be the first time somepony’s gotten lost in the Everfree around here, can it?”
“Spike, my officers were the first ones Doctor Sparkle booked up with additional patrols near the Station.”
Marigold leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and shook her head. “I really wish there was something I could do for you, Spike, but… the project’s got other problems in front of it right now, and there’s not a lot of chips left on the table. We’ll just have to wait and see, and hope for the best.”
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Well, glad to see the third story in this series already up and running. Again, the exchanges, characterizations and future story set-up are all quite well done. Definite understand why the Lunars would be so annoyed by the thefts (not that Twilight and her friends were taking them any better) as well as the possible reasons for the thefts. And, of course, I can also understand why Twilight might be annoyed by the Lunar guard accusing her friends of the theft. Still appreciated Spike taking the initiative to investigate himself after Twilight turned up missing. And, even with Twilight taking the time to get the right gear and back-up, I STILL have a very bad feeling about what could have happened to them. Still appreciated the explanation as to the Timberwolves.
All and all, I am definitely looking forward to more of this, even if I am currently in "Hoping for the best and fearing the worst" mode (which is most likely your intention).
Very nice to see this. Was just experiencing post-story depression. And this perfect heist - as well as a lot of the events in the last story - seems to depend upon someone - or some thing - being undetectable. Well, the last story did showcase that there's such magic around...
A murder of timbercrows is a terrifying thought
There have been clues placed in the previous two stories about an inside 'source' for things like photos etc. Looking to see if that plays out like I think it will.
Although somecreature or creatures with the ability to see Vortex in non-corporeal state is kinda scary.
So Celestia’s personal student and national hero disappears in Eldritch Murder Forest and that’s too low a priority to call for backup from other regions?
11245743
Yeah, that might just be my single biggest screwup in an EC story- especially since it's completely unnecessary for there to be any shortage of backup at all. Twilight disappeared in the Everfree Forest. They could send in the whole entire Equestrian Army and still have no chance of finding her!
Why hasn't Dash asked for an indepenet review over what happened in flight camp? She knows she's innocent and she wouldn't want to cheat the system and just go "I'm friends with Twilight make those files disapear" but "I'm friends with Twilight, please have another look and a full investigation over what happened"" is complelty fair. Is it wrong that she would only have that oppurtinuty because of her friendship? Yes, but thats not her fault, thats the fault of limited time. She was wronged and trying to get a fair chance to clear her name is not only what she deserves, she has the power to do it.
11318654
I won't go into detail because I haven't come up with all the details yet, but remember that point when Season 2 rolls around.
I love your Everfree Forest, even during Season 1 the forest became far less scary then it was first introduced. In Season 1 the reason for that is the Main Six have becoming heros and no longer regular ponies, and so a dangerous forest is a lot less scary now they have faced Nightmare Moon. Later season the Everfree becomes a joke and something the average pony can walk into, but even in Season 1 the fact that the forest changes from strange, horrible and impossible to simply a dangerous place is dispionting. It makes sense but something is still lost.
EC keeps the Everfree the same as it was when first introduced, impossible and terrifying, and being a hero of the realm doesn't change that.
11245822
I am going to interpret this as the ponies trying to not admit to themselves or Spike that its hopeless, while also making decisions acknoldging the hoplessness. A possible human/pony reaction.
11318666
Sounds good! Can't wait
11318670
I do plan to make the Forest a little more tractable over time- if you consider the fact that nopony had ever gotten to the Castle of the Two Sisters in the intervening millennium, it has already lost most of its teeth thanks to the Lunars' beacons and Twilight's higher-dimensional math. But that's going to be a gradual, years-long process and nopony's going to be building summer homes in there for quite a while.
I agree the Forest was seriously underused in the canon show as a source of undefinable weirdness, though. And guess what- I like writing undefinable weirdness.