Hens' Teeth
(♫)
It had been a warm, still night, but as Fluttershy worked her way deeper into the Everfree the weather began to change. The air grew cool, then outright chilly, and the leaves around her rustled periodically in response to a stiff, howling wind. The moon remained high, though- higher than it had any right to be at this time of year and this time of night, in fact, and it still very much appeared to be sporting the Mare-In-The-Moon pattern on its surface.
Fluttershy refused to let that bother her.
She had to give her young charges credit where it was due. Although their trail weaved and diverted and circled back every so often, for the most part they kept to the path Twilight Sparkle had charted a week ago on their presumably borrowed map. She considered it fortunate that their tracks diverged even as much as they did- she wasn’t sure if she’d’ve been able to gain any ground on the fillies if they’d been taking as direct a route as she was.
Far off in the forest, she thought she heard raised voices, and then something hissed.
For one confused, irrational moment Fluttershy wondered if she’d properly secured the lid on her vivarium, before dismissing the concern as ridiculous. Carl wouldn’t follow her all the way into the Everfree, and there were plenty of other creatures that lived in the forest and could hiss. She kept moving.
Then, after perhaps half an hour of walking, the path she was following bent off into a section of thick brush and did not come back to the main trail.
She pulled up short and looked around. Twilight Sparkle’s own tracks had well and truly been erased by now, but she remembered they had stopped for good at just about this exact same spot.
Carefully, one wing poised above the pocket in her saddlebag where her knife was located, Fluttershy ducked down and wormed her way through the thicket. For perhaps the first six or eight feet, leaves and branches pressed so tightly around her that she could barely see anything at all, but then abruptly the brush fell away. In its place was a broad, flat clearing, stretching out well beyond what she could discern in the dim light, dotted with massive tree trunks that spread out to create a uniform, leafy ceiling perhaps a dozen yards or more above.
She squirmed back through the clump of underbrush and found herself back on the narrow trail running to the Cairn.
Next, she circled around behind the patch and made a few experimental ducks into different sections of it. It remained nothing but a small clump of thorny bushes a little under two yards across at its longest axis.
Far off in the distance, something hissed again.
Twilight had mentioned structures like this developing in the Everfree. “Bubbles,” she’d called them, pinched-off sections of space that contained an arbitrarily large volume connected to the outside world by only the thinnest of bridges. Being essentially ‘new’ space that had not existed when the Everfree Forest was Everfree City, there was generally little of archaeological interest inside of them, and so the Canterlot expedition had assigned them a low priority. Fluttershy and her search party must’ve walked past the entrance to this one a dozen times or more during the course of their investigations, and had never once stepped into exactly the right spot from exactly the right direction to reach it- and if Fluttershy hadn’t been following the three fillies’ tracks, she likely wouldn’t have been able to find it now either. That made her wonder how her charges in turn had managed to enter… unless, of course, they too had witnessed something else either enter or leave.
Something hissed once more, fading into a low cackle, this time clearly audible from the direction of the bubble’s entrance.
Fluttershy squirmed her way through the thicket again, and trotted towards what she hoped was the center of the glade, or at least someplace more central than the entrance. For all she knew, the bubble could be the size of Cloudsdale, and of nearly any shape.
“Scootaloo? Apple Bloom? Sweetie Belle?” she called out.
This time, after a few seconds, she heard Scootaloo call in return, ever so faintly. “Fuh- Fluttershy?!”
She galloped towards the sound as quickly as she dared, keeping one eye on her compass and the other on the path ahead. The needle was now pointing back towards the entrance, instead of north; Fluttershy wondered if that was because the entrance was the only remaining section of normal space- and therefore astral polarity- it could detect. “Scootaloo? Sweetie Belle? Apple Bloom?”
In another patch of low brush up ahead, something shuffled. Fluttershy pulled up short, and then relaxed as three small equine figures slipped out into plain view.
“Fluttershy?” Sweetie Belle asked, eyes wide. In the dim light it was hard to tell, but the pegasus thought she was trembling slightly.
“Scootaloo got us l-lost out here for ages!” called Apple Bloom.
“I did not!” Scootaloo countered.
Sweetie Belle looked back to Fluttershy and then ducked downward, ears pulled back against her head. “Are… are we in trouble?”
“No, no, of course not,” Fluttershy soothed, then she paused and cocked her head. “Can you tell me how you found this part of the forest?”
“Well, we thought we saw one a’ your chickens go into the woods…” Applebloom began.
“… and we saw you had one of those cool maps like all the Guards have…” continued Scootaloo.
“I hope you aren’t mad that we borrowed it.” Interjected Sweetie Belle. Fluttershy chose to ignore the fact that the fillies had deliberately waited until she had reason to leave her study before attempting said ‘borrowing’, in the interests of moving their conversation along without any more petty recriminations.
“And we thought we saw your chicken go into those bushes…” Apple Bloom went on.
“… but we were looking all over and it’s not here.” Scootaloo finished. “So… uhh… can we… maybe can we just go home now?”
Fluttershy was about to answer when she heard that strange hissing, cackling call once again.
“In a minute, all right? Can… can everypony stick close to me?” She kept one wing over her saddlebag, and made her way towards where she thought the noise had come from.
Little by little, a pair of equine figures became visible in the hazy distance, uniformly colored and utterly immobile. At first, Fluttershy wondered if they were statues, even though the bubble up until this point had contained not a trace of artificial construction. Then the moon hit them at just the right angle through the foliage above to illuminate them fully, and she realized she recognized them. Sergeant Chamomile stood frozen in place in his andesite-gray armor, his mouth open and one hoof extended to point at empty air. Twilight Sparkle was crouched perhaps three yards away, fine stone saddlebags no doubt filled with fine stone instruments and a useless stone tracking gem, her forelegs spread out to brace herself, one eye open and her horn pointed down as though charging a nonexistent spell.
Behind Fluttershy, the three fillies gasped and staggered backward almost as a single entity.
“Twilight?” Sweetie Belle yelped.
“What happened to ‘em?” demanded Apple Bloom.
“She’s been turned to stone,” Fluttershy answered, careful to keep her voice soothing and level. “She’ll be okay, we just need to-”
There was another cackle, followed by a low, syncopated growling. It was much closer this time, almost right beside them.
“Girls?” Fluttershy asked, no longer bothering with pleasantness and focusing solely on packing her voice with as much calm, level authority as she could manage. “Stay behind me.”
She stretched out both of her wings, broad-sides-forward, in what she hoped was a sufficiently protective gesture.
A vague shape perhaps two feet tall sprang from one shadowy clump of bush to another.
“What… what is that?” Scootaloo whispered.
“It’s called a cockatrice. Don’t look directly at it…” The shape darted across the clearing again, faster and closer this time, and Fluttershy caught the definite impression of a long, snake-like lower body.
She felt a small hoof tap at the top of her right wing. “Wait…” she commanded, without looking back, “It can only petrify things up close. It’s trying to close the distance.”
The shape leaped into the open again, this time revealing ever-so-briefly a white, bird-like head before disappearing once more.
“So shouldn’t we be… runnin’ away?” Applebloom stammered.
“Wait.”
(♫)
There was a loud scream, almost like an alarm siren, as the cockatrice sprang out of the shadows and landed directly in front of them. Fluttershy recognized it almost instantly- its lower body was scaly and green in color, a cross between a particularly fat snake and a lizard with two long legs and a pair of membranous wings, transitioning midway up into a head that resembled a chicken’s only on a cursory examination. It had white feathers, and a rooster’s red wattle and comb, but the skull underneath was clearly more serpentine in construction than avian. Its eyes faced forward like a snake’s, big and round and almost luminously red in the dim light, and its half-open beak revealed a pair of folded-back fangs.
It fixed its gaze on Fluttershy. She no longer had the slightest doubt that its eyes were well and truly luminescent, a dim red light that seemed to seep out from somewhere deep inside its skull.
Almost immediately she felt a horrible twisting, pulling sensation surge up her back, leaving numbness in its wake- the feeling of flesh and bone hardening into solid rock. She refused to let it distract her her, as she forced the portion of her brain that usually formed words to instead confine itself to the concepts animals could understand.
“|stop this|” she commanded, as though she were talking to any other chicken.
The cockatrice hopped backwards and then peered at her, confused. The feverish red brilliance pouring out of its eye sockets flickered and dimmed, and the surge of numbness in Fluttershy’s spine slowed to a crawl. “|loud| |colorful| |hate you| |intruder| |scary| |hate|…” it hissed, like any other chicken.
“|stop this|” she commanded again, heedless of the numbness now having thoroughly overtaken her hind legs.
“|no| |hate you| |big| |colorful| |scary| |brought the roosters| |scary| |roosters| |hate you| |big| |intruder| |roosters| |scary|…” The light in its eyes pulsed again, and stone twisted its way through the rear half of Fluttershy’s barrel. Quickly, before the numbness could reach her wings, she unbuckled the pocket on her saddlebags that held her signal mirror. If it couldn’t be reasoned with, it would be dealt with.
“|craven| |pathetic| |little creature|,” she growled.
“|hate| |hate| |too close| |too big| |defend den| |loud| |too big| |colors| |hate| |roosters| |hate|…”
“|just another bully|.” The noise she produced was somewhere between an avian cackle and a staccato hiss. She had no idea if the concepts she was vocalizing were even making it through to the creature in front of her. She didn’t particularly care.
She reached for her signal mirror- and realized she couldn’t feel either of her wings anymore.
The twisting, wrenching, crawling sensation pushed up into her chest, and suddenly Fluttershy found herself fighting simply to breathe. "|big| |bright| |loud|. |ponies| |in den|. |bright light|. |attack|. |bright light| |loud noises| |too big|. |scary|” the cockatrice hissed, all at once.
Fluttershy closed her eyes, and then opened them again. The cockatrice still stood its ground before her, twitching nervously, seemingly unsure whether to keep pressing the attack- to keep defending itself- or to just run away. “|no threat| |to you|. |no threat| |to den|. |not| |scary|.” she chirped.
The light behind its eyes flickered. The creeping numbness halted, but Fluttershy was already beginning to feel faint and light-headed. The torsion of the heavy stone pulling against her skin burned in her barrel, and for the first time she wondered just how long she could continue to function with half of her internal organs effectively removed.
“|bright light| |too big| |hate| |roosters| |noises| |colorful| |too big| |den in danger| |hate| |roosters| |hate| |scary| |scary| |scary| |scary| |scary|…”
She pulled in a shallow breath, as deep as she could manage with her diaphragm frozen-not that it mattered when she couldn’t feel her pulse, either. It might’ve been from the lack of air, but for a split second Fluttershy thought she was staring down at a spindly yellow filly, scared out of her mind, who desperately wanted everypony to just stop looking at her. “|let me go|: |no more scary|. |let me go|: |roosters gone|. |let me go|: |ponies gone|. |let me go|: |den safe|. |you||safe|.”
The cockatrice tilted its head like a confused dog. It hopped from one foot to the other for a few seconds… and then the light behind its eyes cut out completely, and Fluttershy was able to feel her hind legs again. She gasped and staggered, briefly, her entire body tingling with freshly-restored circulation, but she didn’t dare take her gaze away from the cockatrice.
It just sat there, in the middle of the clearing, utterly transfixed by her. Now that it was standing still and out in the open, it wasn’t even particularly impressive- just an ugly, mismatched bird-like thing with a fat ungainly body and an almost comically chicken-like head.
She thought about the panic and days of constant, low-level dread she’d just endured, and the chaos that had swept through the entire town because of this silly little creature, and reached once again for her signal mirror.
Then she thought of how she’d felt when ponies had intruded on her own little sod-roofed bubble, and how silly Spike and Marigold and Filthy Rich had all looked, lashing out at the nearest thing that bothered them without once stopping to actually sit down and consider whether they were actually going after the right problem. Then she looked back at the petrified forms of Twilight and Chamomile, and pondered their logical significance in light of the other disappearances.
She slipped the mirror back into her pack, and asked “|pony| |intruders| |where|.”
The cockatrice looked over at Twilight and Chamomile. “|pony| |intruders| |here|. |pony| |intruders| |bog|. |pony| |intruders| |scary| |mist|. |pony| |intruders| |bog| |plains|.”
Fluttershy nodded, and motioned for the fillies still crowded behind her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, to follow along. “|show me.|”
(♫)
Spike sat at his desk in the Golden Oaks Library, now utterly empty save for an inkwell, a single quill, and the Royal Academy letterhead upon which all official reports were supposed to be sent.
He had no idea what to say.
“Dear Princess Celestia, we regret to inform you that…”? That sounded ridiculous. “Dear Princess Celestia, I’m afraid I’ve managed to misplace the head of the Ponyville Expedition, who also happens to be your personal protege…”? He wondered if he should send a report at all, and not just schedule an appointment, take the train to Canterlot, and break the news face-to-face. He wondered, not for the first time, if he’d be reprimanded for jumping to conclusions too early, or if there was some other lower-level official channel he was expected to have consulted first. Then he wondered if he’d be reprimanded for taking as long as he had, and not notifying Celestia as soon as Twilight had gone missing. He wondered whether it was appropriate in a letter like this to mention the difficulties he’d been having with the Project staff, Captain Marigold in particular. What would Celestia do if he told her? Would he only be getting himself in deeper trouble? Would he be getting Marigold in trouble? Did he want Marigold to be in trouble?
Apart from “Dear Princess Celestia” in the upper-left-hand corner, the paper remained blank.
He jumped, slightly, when he heard somepony open the door. Then he relaxed, and turned back to his paper. It was about the right time of night for Rarity to drop by and deliver her usual bag of gems, after all. Knowing Rarity, she’d probably leave it right by the previous day’s bag, which he hadn’t touched. Beyond that, she was unlikely to bother him- the tailor was very good at picking up on when he did or didn’t want to talk. Discretion was a rare quality in ponies these days, and he’d grown to appreciate it a great deal over the last week.
Then he heard Twilight’s voice call out from the main room. “Spike?!”
He pivoted around in his chair, letter instantly forgotten. A scrawny purple unicorn was standing in the middle of the main room, looking somewhat disheveled but very much alive.
“Twilight!” He dashed forward, leaped, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders.
“Hey, Spike. It’s good to see you again,” Twilight muttered, smiling ruefully. “It has been. A. Day.”
He didn’t let go, and fought to keep his voice from breaking as the nictitating membranes over his eyes slid half-closed of their own accord. “Twilight, it’s… it’s been almost a week.”
The unicorn gave his forehead a brief nuzzle, and then squeezed him even tighter. She screwed her eyes shut and shook her head. “You can’t be serious.”
Now that the initial shock of her arrival had worn off, Spike looked over at Twilight again with fresh eyes. She didn’t seem any thinner than the last time he’d seen her, or dehydrated, or sleep-deprived or for that matter even particularly dirty, although… “What happened to your tail?”
“Oh.” The scholar twisted her neck around to look behind her, then laughed nervously. “The end must’ve broken off. That happens sometimes with petrification, when they’re stone the individual hairs are pretty brittle, so…”
Spike held up his hands in confusion. “Wait, wait wait wait wait. Petrifi- what now?”
Twilight laughed again, and sat down at the main table. “Look, it’s a long and kind of stupid story, and obviously I have a lot to catch up on, too. But can we maybe settle it after I get the chance to shower? And get something to eat, too. I skipped lunch yester- well, a week ago, I guess, and my mouth still kind of tastes like rainwater…”
It had wound up taking them most of the night for Fluttershy and Chamomile simply to get to all of the other ponies the cockatrice had petrified, especially after Twilight Sparkle had insisted on heading straight back to Ponyville with the fillies- and taking her mental library of incredibly useful translocation and scanning spells with her. Then, once the cockatrice had shown them a quartet of petrified Lunars in another section of the glade, they’d decided they would need to free Vortex first and then return, lest the reanimated soldiers take issue with being rescued by ‘Solar loyalists’.
Even finding the Shadowbolt had then proven more difficult than expected- he’d been petrified midway through the process of converting himself into his vaporous form, and thus transmuted into a mixture of gravel and fine dust that sank into the marshy soil effectively without any trace. If they hadn’t brought the cockatrice along with them and convinced it to ‘explain’ what had happened, Fluttershy doubted anypony would ever have been able to identify his remains. Even then it had been a nearly hour-long process of communion, translation, and guesswork. After that came a sizable argument between herself and Chamomile about whether it was even safe to depetrify Vortex in his dissociated state.
Eventually, however, he was restored without any outwardly observable ill effects, and led back into the grove to meet with his comrades. Two of them proved to be revenants, and collapsed immediately upon being released. The others were confused and disoriented after nearly three months in stone, but they accompanied Vortex to the train station without incident. All three Lunars subsequently set off on the six o’clock direct line to Fillydelphia Harbor, bound for whatever treatment they might require for any lingering petrification sickness and a long-overdue reunion with their beloved Princess Luna.
After that, they sought out Sergeant Leafspring in a shallow ditch near the northern border of Sweet Apple Acres.
Then, all that was left for Fluttershy to do was sit quietly in the corner of the Station officers’ barracks as unobtrusively as possible, and watch Chamomile make his report to Captain Marigold. You could tell a lot about ponies, if you just sat quietly and watched.
“… so, they’re back with their families now,” the Sergeant was currently explaining, “but I’m not really sure who to talk to or what, really, to do, long-term, sir. Is this the kind of thing that the Guard follows up on, or the Watch, or… or Foal Protective Services or somepony? I mean, if Fluttershy here hadn’t shown up, those fillies might be statues right now. Sir.”
Marigold just shook her head. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Sergeant. Kids are more resilient than a lot of us might think, and they’ve all got families- or, well, guardians, at least, from what Rainbow Dash told me about the orange one- to talk with ‘em and help them work through anything that might be troubling them. They don’t need some busybody in a uniform looking over their shoulders. If anything, we should probably just talk to Councilpony Cheerilee about doing another school visit. Maybe it’d be a good idea to remind ponies that just because we go into the Everfree pretty routinely now, doesn’t mean it’s safe or easy for civilians- especially kids. And also that it’s not okay to throw things at us.” She laughed, surprisingly bitterly, and then continued, “So… what’d you eventually do with the cockatrice? The Academy types might actually want something like that as a specimen.”
“Actually…” Fluttershy swallowed hard and stepped forward, “I decided to let it go.”
“Let it go?” Marigold’s eyes widened, and she leaned forward in her chair. “That was a dangerous animal you had out there!”
“It’s not going to come back, or attack anypony else,” Fluttershy explained, “We took it deeper into the forest and let it loose in another bubble that was plenty big enough for it to set out its territory.” She reached out one hoof and tapped the relevant section on the map Marigold had unrolled across her desk.
“And, so, what,” the Captain demanded, “we just… declare that bubble off-limits? Forever?”
“Were you ever planning to send anypony into it again anyway?” asked Fluttershy.
“Well, no, but…”
“You can still go inside if you need to, as long as you’re cautious,” the pegasus continued, “but I don’t think anypony’s going to need to worry about that cockatrice for a long time. Really, I think all it wanted was just to be left alone. Now it is.”
Marigold reached up and kneaded at the bridge of her muzzle with one hoof. “I’m just going to put in my report that the two of you lost sight of it while you were trying to lead it back here for examination, and that bubble is where you think it ended up, okay?”
Sergeant Chamomile quietly nodded, and then turned back to Marigold.
Taking the unspoken cue to leave, Fluttershy stepped out of the barracks and trotted down the hall, out through the big double doors in the lobby.
She set off back towards the edge of town, and her own little bubble of a sod-roofed cottage, intent on catching up on her chores and much-needed sleep.
(♫)
Seated beside Spike at the library’s central table, Twilight set about telekinetically policing up their used plates and silverware. “… and, I guess that’s about it.”
The dragon set aside his nearly empty mug of tea-and-saltpeter blend. “Let that serve as a lesson to you, I guess. Always bring along at least two Royal Guards when investigating strange noises in a bush in an extradimensional forest. One isn’t always enough.”
“Spike, get me my good parchment, I need to notify Her Grace the Exarch immediatelyabout this groundbreaking new insight into the equine condition!” Twilight laughed, but then her expression became serious. “So, what all did we lose?”
“Mostly the artifacts I told you about, and critical but not irreplaceable supplies, but it looks like we’ve also come up short on weapons and some analytical reagents listed as controlled substances. It’s a mess, and I don’t think we’ll even know how far we’ve really been set back for a good long while.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame we never did catch the ponies responsible for all this.”
“I don’t think they’ll be coming back again if that’s what you’re worried about,” Spike countered, “They put on a pretty terrible showing without their cameramare to spy for them.”
“I don’t think she’s the only problem, though,” Twilight explained. “Based on what you dug up for me, Shutterfly didn’t sound like a stupid pony. She wouldn’t head directly away from Ponyville because she thought her chances were better climbing Maranduin and checking herself into a hospital in Canterlot. I think she was trying to meet back up with an accomplice. That cockatrice might’ve been responsible for the ‘attacks’ on AJ and Fluttershy, and it was probably what ended up killing the photographer, or at least she died trying to avoid it, but all the rest… I’m pretty sure somepony doesn’t want us to succeed out here.”
“That’s a bit of a leap,” Spike countered, “Maybe they were just after the artifacts and expensive equipment? They didn’t have anything against us, we were just a lucrative target.”
“Maybe. But Rarity made a good point back at the freight yard yester- a week ago, whatever. There’s easier places to rob than a fortified Royal Academy dig if you’re just after expensive artifacts. With all the resources these ponies were pouring into this, I’m not sure they’d even break even unless they had some kind of really dedicated buyer already lined up. I think they’re after something bigger,” She fished through the collection of papers Spike had unpacked, and extracted Shutterfly’s autopsy photos. “In fact, I’ve seen this mare before, in Canterlot and Fillydelphia just as things were starting to go south with the Cabinet Ministers. She divebombed me and kept trying to get me to do some kind of interview with Blitzfeed, it was… very strange. And then, everypony in the Governorate office just happens to have some reason not to get involved when the Guards and I went missing? That’s a pretty big coincidence, and arranging it isn’t something that’d make an ordinary smuggling ring any money.” She set the photos aside, “Listen, Spike. This is the second time I’ve been in serious trouble and not able to contact you. If it’s all right with you I’d like to add myself as a target to your firelink.”
The young dragon nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. We might want to include somepony who’s always in Ponyville, too, maybe Marigold or a member of the Council, in case we’re both left out in the wilderness again. I’d also like it if some of the mages could take a look at Shutterfly’s body- Luna's necromancers, especially.”
Necromantically prying memories out of a corpse was a fiddly and difficult science. Not only did impressions of sensory information quickly start to degrade after death, but bringing them back also meant bringing back traces of the pony’s personality- and the impetus to lie. However, Luna and her fellows had performed seemingly impossible feats of magic more than enough times already.
“But, before we set that up,” Spike continued, “I’m wondering… I don’t think you ever got around to telling me what you were doing out in that part of the Everfree to start with. Daycaller’s still trying to straighten out everything you did to the Lapwing, and there’s this pile of journals you left out that I haven’t been able to make any sense of.”
Twilight nodded, and poured herself another cup of strong tea. “I was going to talk about that once we’d unpacked again and you’d had a chance to get a decent night’s sleep, but since you asked… Spike? Get my notes…”
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If you do it right the yes it is.
It only looks sappy because of all the bozos who do it wrong.
All I can say is excellent job on the final chapter of this story. Definitely appreciate the exchanges, characterizations, (mostly) mental action and general wrap-up in all the right places. Well, the Crusaders DID accidentally help Fluttershy find Twilight and Chamomile and I also appreciated the increased detail in Fluttershy's dialogue with the cockatrice. Yeah, I can understand why Twilight would want to get the Crusaders back to Ponyville, but it IS too bad she didn't leave the locator spells before she left. At least most of the cockatrice's victims have been safely recovered, even if it took quite a while. I could also understand Spike trying to struggle with what to tell Celestia before he saw Twilight arriving. And, at least Twilight is up to speed on the goings on that occurred in the week since she disappeared. The acknowledgement of bringing more than one guard with them for back-up in the future was great too, as was the stuff about increasing the number of emergency contacts in case of something like this happening again. The stuff about the thefts will remain a mystery for now (unfortunately), though I have a hunch we'll get some more leads throughout the season. Twilight also has some good reasoning about thinking the thefts were more than simple greed as was as considering the additional stuff about Shutterfly.
REALLY looking forward to more of this series.
Aww, no 2E FtS/StF surgery?
I love how you made the Stare an extension of druid magic, real clever.
10893427
Yeah, sadly, while the Admiral and I are tabletop veterans, it's a bit more difficult than that: what's the first thing that happens around an injury? Inflammation. Which means all the petrified pieces wouldn't actually fit back together, unless sanded down. Which opens another can of worms: what if you sand off too much? Just how much volume in this chunk is inflamed tissue, and what's actually supposed to be there? What if severed nerve endings retracted, and don't fit together? (Biologist, sorry, this is what I think about for a living).
While this is zooming way off into future ECs, healing magic in this version is Equestria is... strange. It's a fairly easy procedure to stimulate tissue growth and regeneration- at least, when there isn't active magical effects that'd hamper such magic, see Twilight's leg injury- but that then asks the question, what exactly needs to be fixed? Overshooting the injured area would at best produce neoplasms which would then need to be removed, and at worst could produce outright tumors. Instead, diagnostics is the cutting edge field, attempting to divine down to the micrometer which tissues need to be regenerated, and no more. While it's a standard field in modern times, 1000ish years ago diagnostics was very much an art, rather than a science. And one particular unicorn's inherent, instinctive understanding had the potential to propel her into princesshood. But, again, that's for much, much later.
10907445
I wanted to call them "woodpeckers", but Serketry said absolutely not.
Lovely stuff. It’s hard to pull off a mystery where the audience already knows the answer. Creating a second mystery where we don’t is a great way to sustain the tension, to say nothing of watching the whole operation slowly collapse without Twilight or any help from higher up the bureaucracy. Poor Spike.
Also, given Twilight’s original reason for heading out into the Everfree, this raises some very interesting questions about Zecora in this setting…
Continuing to love this series. On to the next installment!
11013923
It's not Zecora she is looking for. This time.
Another enjoyable story in the Extended Cut universe.
It was nice that the overarching mystery is noted - I did think that there was suspiciously little help from Canterlot - missing project managers connected deeply with a returned Princess (and deeply connected to the Princess that's been around for a long, long time), along with missing guardsponies and a dead pony with a large amount of fraudulent identification would normally get a significant response.
You can has review!
11245743
That, and both Spike and Marigold going through the proper channels got them stonewalled, and by the time they realized they were screwed, Spike had that mental breakdown about reporting directly to Celestia- which he was about to do just as Twilight arrived.
Basically, from a narrative perspective, Twilight was missing just long enough for Fluttershy to have her moment; if Fluts failed, Spike would've contacted Celestia and Shining Armor directly, and, yeah, the entire Royal Guard would've combed the forest, and might've eventually found the cockatrice den. The question then is, would Twilight's statue still be salvageable by the time they found her?
11308093
An oddball ghost happened across your fic and read it. Have a review!
11318722
Thanks!
11318889
Grunt is a Vietnam-era term for low-ranking infantry. The guys who did the grunt work, fighting at the front, patrolling hostile villages, getting shot at, etc. Simple as that.
11319324
Is it self-coined? It seems to be very insulting
11319528
If you mean, did the Admiral and I make up that term, no. If you mean, do soldiers and marines use the term to refer to themselves, yes.
11319614
The second one is what I meant. I'm glad
This was a good story but the biggest problem is one that has been pointed out by several others before. Namely Twilight's disappearance not being so important as to get a reaction from Canterlot.