Return to Sender

by Starscribe

Chapter 15

Felicity wasn’t sure how long it took for her to return to her senses. Starvation was a strange thing, particularly when she had to fight the instinct to end it with her magic at every moment. But as awful as the hunger had been, it would pass. When she ran out of magic… what then?

The trouble was, Felicity didn’t feel better. She lay in a corner of the escape pod, tossing and turning with the grass in her stomach. With a full belly, she should’ve felt fine. Instead her stomach began to ache, like little knives stabbing through her guts as it dragged through her.

I’ve been poisoned, she thought, when she was awake enough to think anything at all. So much for Harmony being a god. At least we’ll die together.

She woke on the floor of the evacuation pod, breathing a heady mix of engine grease and sulfur riding a strange, low wind. She struggled forward, dragging herself to her feet. A thin line of dried blood dripped from her lips. “Why does it hurt so much, oh god…”

“I made a minor miscalculation,” Harmony said. She couldn’t even tell if it was verbal or not. The damage to her body had helped wake her, but that didn’t mean she felt better. She’d just traded confusion for pain. “Based on the elemental composition of the plants on the surface, it appeared they would be safe for you to eat.”

Past tense. “They weren’t.” She crouched, and more blood dribbled between her lips. “What did I eat, exactly?”

She stumbled out towards the doorway, which she’d left open when she emerged to sate her hunger. Even now she could barely remember how much she’d eaten, or what it had tasted like. Not good, but she’d been so hungry that she didn’t care.

“The chirality of sugar and amino acids present in the food you ate is reversed. This means all the nutrition present on this planet is inaccessible to you. This might have not had such severe side effects, but there are more pressing concerns. The biosolvent on this world is not water, but ammonia. Even the small amount you ingested before you could be stopped has caused serious damage to your intestines and liver.”

She stumbled back towards the instrument panel, lifting one of them in her hoof and gesturing angrily at the readout. At least the pod’s systems had kept working, despite the strange environment. “This reading is… way in the red,” she choked, coughing out another mouthful of slime.

“You have a citizen’s body, Felicity. What you’re looking at is atmospheric pressure—that value is what allows ammonia to remain liquid at this temperature. That was never going to present a danger to you. However… based on the levels of trauma you have experienced, I believe your internal organs will begin to fail within the next three hours. The process will be slow, but will continue to your death without immediate treatment.”

“Or...” She slumped onto her haunches, staring down at the floor. “You could heal me, right now. Alicorns can bring people back from the dead.”

“With an infinite energy reserve, yes. But rather than rushing to such a solution, you should consider the long-term. Step outside, and start walking about thirty degrees to the left of the sun. Argue with me as soon as you are moving.”

If she had the energy to scream, she probably would have. But with knives apparently running the length of her body, tearing bloody holes in her guts, Felicity didn’t feel like doing much of anything. She wanted to curl up and quietly die. Maybe one day, many years from now, someone would find her corpse and revive her. Stranger things had happened.

Do not submit, said her ghost. I’m better than giving up. Get moving.

She groaned, struggling her way out the opening. She turned in the indicated direction. It took her down a slope into a forest of sorts, though the trees were strange to her.

They resembled bamboo, except their bark was slightly transparent, and she could see something faintly yellowish pulsing around inside, along with little specks swimming up and down. Fish?

“I hope you realize how insane you’re sounding to me,” she croaked as soon as she was moving. The slope helped, though moving too much or too fast reminded her of how broken she was. “Save magic, but for what? So your module can keep running after I die? Have you decided I’m expendable?”

“You are not expendable. Magic arises in the unique interaction between higher-dimensional Elysian fields and living things. When you die, I will too.”

Of course she had no way of knowing if Harmony was telling the truth. It would be an easy lie, since she’d be dead before it was possible to verify. “Okay then, so why are you telling me to do a death march, instead of curing me?”

She slowed a little in her steps, as she saw motion in the treetops above. Like the fluffy spores of dandelion weeds, floating from branch to branch. Except they were as big as her head, and flapped visibly to stay airborne. Something here is going to try and eat me. I don’t even have a handgun anymore.

“Curing the damage to your body will expend a significant plurality of our remaining magical energy. It would still be a necessary expenditure, except for the planet we have found ourselves on.

“The Forerunner scout probe was satisfied with this place for reasons that should be self-evident. There are templates suited to these conditions in its records. If you were cured, you will only start to starve again. You can eat nothing here. If you walk too near any body of liquid, the vapors may blind or suffocate you. We can heal this damage, but never again.”

“So…” Her addled mind struggled to figure out what the program was saying. It would’ve been easy for her normally, she was sure of that. But now she just couldn’t make sense of it. “We’re looking for a hospital. We’ll beg for help?”

“No,” Harmony answered. It never sounded frustrated with her, or upset. But for all she knew, the program was outraged with her stupidity. “The greater body of myself would know the requisite spells to alter your body to exist in this environment. Without a link to Harmony, I do not. But there is a place we can find out.

“Before you die, we must reach something living, preferably something at least as intelligent as you. You will become an individual of the native species, and deprivation will no longer be a concern.”

“They can’t like that,” she muttered, a little of her old strategic self resurfacing. “The ones in orbit were specifically adapted to fighting Evoker civilizations, right? They’ll hate magic.”

“Or not know it exists,” Harmony countered. “Concentrate on motion, Felicity. There is a settlement nearby, I sense their minds. We could teleport that distance, but such a spell will be detected if there is any presence of anti-Evoker countermeasures on this planet. Not to mention it might drain enough magic that altering your body is no longer possible.”

She walked. Each step came only with great difficulty, and she imagined she could feel her body dying. All that from a single meal of grass? Or maybe it was the weeks of starvation first?

I haven’t had a real meal since waking up from cryo. I would be dead several times over if I was a regular pony.

She could only hope that Escape Gear hadn’t ended up down here, or she’d be dead for sure.

More than once Harmony had to warn her away from dangers of the alien jungle—oversized vines covered in spikes, which extruded sharper and sharper the closer she got. Along with patches of ground covered in wax, meant to make her slip closer and closer to an open maw like a pitcher plant.

“If it makes you feel better, your body has currently been subjected to at last four lethal toxins I can identify,” Harmony said, apparently cheerful. “But because of structural differences, none of them can interact with your body chemistry. With a respirator and external food supply, this might be a safe place to take refuge from the civilization on this world. Unfortunately, we have neither.

Guess we’ll just have to hope they’re friendlier than the ones out in space. “Do you think you’ll be able to translate for me when we get there?” she asked. “I’m no Princess Lucky.”

Harmony didn’t answer—and even in her injured state, she saw why. Just through the trees was a great gap in the forest and every other growing thing, which had been cut back and burned to blacken the ground for at least a hundred meters. Feelers crept slowly across, though they hadn’t made it far, and from the damage they were probably cut back often.

Just past them was a crater of deep blue… water? It didn’t smell like it was going to poison her, anyway. It was so deep that she couldn’t see very far. But what she could see suggested a skyscraper, stretching down so far that the light grew dim.

It rose out of the water ahead of her, though nowhere more than two stories, with floating decks of foamy rock strung together with polycarbonate and stainless steel. It looked mostly industrial up here—massive collection fans slowly twisted, and another steadily belched out a thick cloud of white-yellow smoke, a little further off.

Between the little islands, which might’ve been the tops of skyscrapers if seen from another angle, aliens walked. If only her crew was still with her, she could’ve told them why none of their space photography had seen aliens on the surface.

They were almost entirely transparent, such that she thought she was looking at water splashed up on the decks at first. But even at a distance, their motion was impossible to mistake for anything other than deliberate action.

Her eyes could barely focus on what she was looking at, and what she did see was a mess of contradictions and confusion. One moment saw an individual lope down the ramp on four legs like a pony, and the next another gripped an oversized valve with four limbs like a Varch’nai, twisting a little with each turn.

They were about the size of ponies, which would’ve made them seem small to any humans, with varying numbers of limbs that sometimes seemed humanoid and other times seemed more like a cat or some other long, flexible animal.

Through their transparent, mostly liquid bodies, she saw their… bones? Or maybe sinue, since it was flexible and stretched when they moved.

“What the hell am I looking at?” she whispered, crouching lower in the trees. There was no telling if they had seen her from this far out—would her difference in biochemistry make her invisible? It probably didn’t work that way if she could see all the living things around her.

“The product of deliberate engineering abandoned to natural selection,” Harmony answered. “That would match with the hostile, plant-based biosphere you found on the route here. These beings maybe have arisen from the tools used by some advanced cultures to seed the construction of plant-sized structures by way of motive photosynthesis.”

Harmony kept talking, but she wasn’t listening anymore. It was getting so hard to think, and the world was going gray. Felicity had come a long way now, but this was the end. Her breathing came shallow, and something burned in the back of her lungs. It was just one physical stress too much.

She wobbled on her hooves, then tumbled forward onto the treacherous slope downward. She barely even felt the pain as she rolled off the edge, then off a cliff at least ten meters above the liquid.

She wasn’t even conscious when she hit the water.

Comments

[Gavier]

a planet abandoned halfay trought terraforming? This is getting more and more interesting by the chapter

[Mister Morden]

Ammonia based life world? Yeah, that is pretty crap for a even a Citizen to land in.

Have to see what happens next!

[Hari Seldon]

Magic arises in the unique interaction between higher-dimensional Elysian fields and living things.

BAHAHAHA! As someone who learns Physics for a hobby that physics pun about "fields" and "Elysium" from Greek mythology was GOOD!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(physics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium

I also like that Magic is literally The Living Force from Star Wars.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Living_Force

[KMCA]

If she's lucky it's actually water as a waste product or repellant for the forest.

[minibox]

Nothing really says alien like an alternative biosphere. Guess we'll have to see if communication is even remotely possible.

“The chirality of sugar and amino acids present in the food you ate is reversed. This means all the nutrition present on this planet is inaccessible to you. This might have not had such severe side effects, but there are more pressing concerns. The biosolvent on this world is not water, but ammonia. Even the small amount you ingested before you could be stopped has caused serious damage to your intestines and liver.”

Harmony should have detected these incompatibilities immediately. Don't know how reliable Harmony is in her data collection anymore.

“Before you die, we must reach something living, preferably something at least as intelligent as you. You will become an individual of the native species, and deprivation will no longer be a concern.”

Something different, but still pony.

“The product of deliberate engineering abandoned to natural selection,” Harmony answered. “That would match with the hostile, plant-based biosphere you found on the route here. These beings maybe have arisen from the tools used by some advanced cultures to seed the construction of plant-sized structures by way of motive photosynthesis.”

No doubt the alien ship is more connected to the creators than the civilization. Who these creators are is just another question for Felicity to find the answer to. Their anti-evoker technology does makes me wonder whether the Red Tide may actually been human in origin though.

[FanOfMostEverything]

I have to agree with 11189936; A+ pun with those Elysian fields.

Now there’s just the matter of fitting in with the locals. And eventually, theoretically getting off the planet. It’s really starting to feel like Harmony’s butting its head against long-abandoned, automated defenses.

[Luminous Lead]

“The product of deliberate engineering abandoned to natural selection,” Harmony answered. “That would match with the hostile, plant-based biosphere you found on the route here. These beings maybe have arisen from the tools used by some advanced cultures to seed the construction of plant-sized structures by way of motive photosynthesis.”

Sounds like Shoggoths to me. Tekeli-li!

[Cross Lament]

11189983
Ammonia is not a subtle substance to anything remotely us-like. The moment the pod door was open it should've been in there and beating her about the senses with a bat.

[Malandy]

The Forerunners have been out there for a long time. Are these water-beings Forerunner origin?
----
Typo:

sinue > sinew