On the Fine Art of Giving Yourself Advice

by McPoodle

Chapter 26: On the Road to Nowhere (H. Celestia, Raven)

H. Celestia—Rockville. 3:45 p.m. on Day Three.

Celestia’s search party found Rarity’s search party encamped in Rockville. They were sitting in the main square, and most of them were on the verge of tears.

“We crossed that whole rocky plateau. Back and forth, and back and forth!” Snap Shutter explained. “It was a full day before we realized that we were being pulled in circles. It was like the Everfree, all over again!”

“We figure there’s some sort of mineral under the rocks that messes with a pony’s sense of direction something fierce!” Lofty said. “We’re trying to hire out a local expert to guide us. A geologist, hopefully.”

“It could be a strange mineral,” Raven said, having materialized just out of Celestia’s sight. “Or it could be Harmony’s spell, designed to ensure that Rarity got her cutie mark uninterrupted. One of the Pies who live here could guide us, but I’ve got a better idea.”

“And what is that?” Celestia said, turning her head.

But Raven was nowhere to be found.

---

Raven—The basement of Canterlot Castle.

Princess Celestia waited patiently to be recharged. She was mostly obscured from view by the seven chargers that surrounded her.

Everyone who had crossed through the mirror were waiting down here to see how this story would end.

Pinkie Pie had been slumped down on the ground like a sleeping dog. She jumped up when she heard the sounds of hooves descending the stairs into the basement. Hooves that hadn’t bothered to go through the basement door first.

Turning the corner was Raven. “Pinkie, I need your assistance,” she said. “Maud, you can come if you want to.”

“I thought you left with Celestia,” Rainbow Dash said.

“I’m coordinating,” Raven answered-but-not-really. “She’s communicating with me.”

“Raven, are you there?” said the voice of Principal Celestia. It was coming from the wrist computer that Princess Celestia had taken into Equestria without thinking. She had left it on the table to keep the chargers from hurting it.

Maud walked over to the device and pressed the flashing button. “She is,” she reported.

Raven strode over, gave Maud a look, and then reached out and pressed a button. “I am,” she said.

“That one,” Maud said, pointing to the correct button.

With a sigh, Raven repeated herself after pressing the right button.

There was a pause on the other end of the line as Celestia realized she didn’t actually have anything useful to say to Raven. “Alright, do whatever,” she said finally. “I trust you.” You could almost hear the unspoken postscript of “Like I have a choice.”

“Come along,” Raven said to Pinkie, walking towards the exit of the room. “Are you coming?” she asked Maud.

“No,” Maud said as Raven passed her. “But feel free to call if you need anything.”

Raven froze in mid-step. ‘Was that a smirk I just heard?’ she asked herself incredulously. Then with a shake of her head she continued.

In the far corner of the other chamber of the basement, Raven turned to face Pinkie Pie. “Alright, we are going to shadow walk to Rockville,” she whispered. “It’s one of the lesser Pie powers, so I think you will be able to do it. If not I can drag you, but trust me when I say we both don’t want that to happen.”

“Wait, really?” Pinkie whispered incredulously. “Folding the Planes is a lesser power? That doesn’t make any sense, even for me!”

Raven smiled mysteriously. “Now what do you think that tells you about the true nature of this universe?” she asked. As Pinkie watched, she moved her hoof, pointing in an impossible location, and the shadow she pointed at was now in both the basement and the late Rockville afternoon. With a step, Raven was gone, and the shadow was back to normal.

Pinkie’s wide eyes went even wider. “That is so much easier than our way of doing that!” she whispered to herself. A flick of a wrist, a single step, and Pinkie too was gone.

---

H. Celestia.

“Hi, I’m Pinkie!” Pinkie introduced herself. “I live around here, and she knows all about weird geological magic!”

“Who?” Bluey asked, in response to Pinkie using “she”.

Pinkie was meanwhile off in a corner having a conference with herself. “Yes, you,” she whispered. “Geology is completely out of my skill set. ... Yeah, well that shows you how well Maud and Grey get along with each other, doesn’t it? ... I never said I was going to force you out. Just give me the smart things to say, and I’ll say them. Deal? ... Good.” She turned back to Bluey, who could hear a great deal of that conversation. “I mean me! So, when are we going?”

Bluey turned to Celestia. “Can’t we get some other geo-magic expert? One who is, you know, sane?!” He looked back to see that Pinkie was suddenly in his face.

“Hey, Bluey-louie, you’ve got a little bit of smutz in your mane.” She licked her hoof and extended it towards him. “Let me get that out for you...”

“Gah!” Bluey exclaimed, falling back against the wall of the carriage.

Celestia meanwhile was looking in absolute shock at Pinkie, having finally realized that this pony was somehow the counterpart to her own student Pinkamena Pie. (She had been a bit preoccupied by her transformation and the impending job of impersonating a head of state to notice her in the basement.) “Pinkie, can you please behave yourself?” she asked.

Pinkie nodded her head rapidly, her curls going in every direction for half a second before spontaneously regathering into her signature style. “Oh right! Find the pony in peril first, joke around later. I get that!”

Bluey looked warningly at Celestia.

“I trust you will not disappoint me,” Celestia said.

“What did you want me for again?” Pinkie asked, earning a facehoof from Bluey.

“We need you to lead us through some magical anomalies so that Snap Shutter here can follow the trail,” Celestia said patiently.

Pinkie chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment while her eyes looked off into the distance. “Yeah,” she said quietly. And then with a single bound she was standing on Snap’s broad back. “You do your job, and I’ll cancel out your distractions.” The voice seemed different somehow to Celestia, something closer to her sad-sack student.

# # #

“Canceling distractions” turned out to consist of Pinkie’s hooves acting as literal blinders on Snap Shot’s eyes. Pinkamena then channeled her earth pony magic through them, allowing Snap to see the true way forward. The Canterlot ponies followed the pair with some confusion, because in their eyes they were constantly back-tracking and even walking through rocks, but as long as they stepped exactly as Snap stepped, they were able to follow. The Ponyville ponies of course were quite familiar with this kind of magic. And Raven decided that she didn’t want that magic to affect her, so it didn’t.

Nevertheless, it took an hour to reach the broken geode—following tracks across a dry expanse of rocks that are occasionally shifted by the wind is not easy.

Pinkie gasped as she reached out to touch the giant half-boulder. “This cutie markening was big!” she exclaimed. “Nearly as big as mine. Of course, Rainbow’s was the biggest, followed by Twilight’s.”

Rarity’s parents walked up on either side of the geode, looking out at the far vista beyond it. “Do you have any idea what kind of mark she got?” Hondo Flanks asked Pinkie.

“No offense, Missy, but our Rarity was not known for her affection for rocks and dirt,” Cookie Crumbles added.

Pinkie spent a moment pondering what she could or should get away with. Finally she said, “I don’t know! We’ll just have to ask her when we meet her.”

# # #

Another hour later they had left the rocky area behind, and had entered the desert. It was sunset. At a cue from Raven, Celestia climbed up onto a rock where her head was precisely between the sun and the others, and performed the ritual she had been taught as, in Canterlot, the Princess lowered the sun below the horizon. This made it nearly impossible to tell that the Principal’s horn wasn’t glowing bright enough for what she appeared to be doing.

Pinkie removed her hooves from either side of Snap’s head, looked around, and then hopped down to the ground. “Well, that’s the end of that particular magic area,” she reported. “You should be able to continue searching without my help. Do you mind if I tag along? I’d really like to know how Rarity’s story ends.”

Hmph. I used that phrase first.

(What? If she can talk to me, I have every right to talk to her first.)

(Wait, I can? Neat!)

“Oh, I’m sure you can still be of service to us, Pinkie,” Celestia said with a smile. Turning to the pegasi, she started issuing orders. “Carry Pinkie with you back to Rockville, and come back here with her and the chariots we left behind. She will keep you from getting lost—I expect that the magical effect reaches quite high into the atmosphere, and we don’t need to waste time trying to find the top of it.”

The pegasi saluted, swooped up Pinkie with a “whoop!”, and flew off...in entirely the wrong direction. There was a shout and a pointed hoof from Pinkie, and the pegasi banked over to fly...in an entirely different wrong direction. At least, that’s what it looked like.

Most of the group waited there. Snap Shot and a few others continued to follow the trail, equipped with glow-bug lanterns that they had brought with them. Tracking was a slow process, so it made more sense to let Snap Shot get well ahead of the main group, and then they could use the chariots to catch up later. The lead group was equipped with a simply ridiculous number of magical flares, for use if they needed to call for help.

Celestia as always was granted the space due her by her position, allowing her to do any number of suspicious activities without attracting suspicion. For example: “Now would be a good time to set up a contingency plan,” Celestia said to the nopony behind her and to her right.

“What did you have in mind?” Raven asked from that exact spot.

“Well if this was Earth, I’d say GPS coordinates to relay to the Princess, so she could at least have a general area to start looking for us if worst comes to worst.”

“‘G.P.S.’?” asked Raven.

“Longitude and latitude. That’s assuming you have some way of knowing exactly where you are. Do you have the ability to rattle those off?”

“...No,” Raven admitted. “Like the Princess, I can go nearly anywhere I’ve been to before, so it’s not an ability I’ve missed.”

“Do you think Princess Celestia has a spell for this?”

“Probably.”

“And I can’t admit ignorance. So...” Celestia turned to face Trixie, who was some distance away. “Trixie, do you have an invention for knowing your latitude and longitude?” She asked this, knowing in advance that the answer would be...

“No.”

“Wait, I have something,” Bluey said, walking up to the Princess. From his saddlebags he removed an object that outwardly looked identical to a pocket watch. However when the stem was depressed to open it, the inside had a series of mechanical counters rather than a standard clock face. The digits spelled out the exact longitude and latitude.

Bluey gave the device to Celestia, and she looked it over. The cover was enamel, but whatever design it may have once had was covered up by a paper sticker on which was depicted Bluey’s cutie mark of a compass dial. The inside back cover was hollow, but had little hooks that appeared to have once held in place a second enamel disk.

“I found it discarded on the street one day,” Bluey explained to Celestia. “I had my math tutor take it apart to understand it, then put it back together and fix the fault that was keeping it from working. It was originally a mass-produced souvenir promoting some smarmy blue unicorn with a top hat. The inside had a cracked painting of a glass lake in the middle of the desert that eventually fell out, but not before I memorized the set of coordinates painted at the bottom: 37 degrees, 0 minutes, 37 seconds North—”

“117 degrees, 27 minutes, 1 second West,” Trixie said, finishing Bluey’s coordinates. “The pony on the front was Jack Pot, my...um, father.” She was clearly uncomfortable admitting her relationship with him. “It was the trick he pulled right before the Everfree disappearance, where he appeared to bring the very sun down to the earth, to melt the desert sand into a sea of glass. Unfortunately for him the location was very remote, and he couldn’t get any major newspapers to cover the event. So he had a bunch of ‘locators’ created so that ponies could go out there themselves and see the lake. Of course nopony wanted to go out to the middle of nowhere to see the spot where a trick had already happened. I have one of those in fact, for the very good portrait on the front. It had been so long since I opened the thing that I forgot what it did!” Trixie looked over at Bluey, who clearly wasn’t finished with his story. “Oh, but go on...”

“No, it was good to learn the origin of the trinket,” said Bluey, trying to be polite. “My tutor told me that the mechanism that the modern-day toy was using originated with the griffon navigator of the legendary Rockhoof’s circumnavigation voyage. Now of course nopony can be sure that Rockhoof or his navigator ever existed, but it does show the extreme age of the invention. The clockwork was probably created by griffons, but the magic to know the coordinates appears to be earth pony in origin. Anyway, I got my cutie mark saving myself from a rather nasty situation with that particular device. I got a more official device later, one with floating numeral displays that is even supposed to work on other planets in whatever far future era when ponies travel to them, but I still keep the old toy with me, for the memories.” He looked at the actual coordinates displayed on the device. “You know, according to this, the volcanic lake once advertised in the cover is not that far from here. I wonder if we’ll have time to visit it on the way home?”

“Trixie, you say you have one of these devices?” Celestia asked.

“At home,” Trixie replied.

---

The Basement.

“Hello, is anyone there?” Trixie’s voice emerged from the wrist computer on the table. Most of the ponies and one griffon normally in the room were still out eating dinner, and Princess Celestia had not come back yet from lowering the sun and raising the moon.

All that was left were human Twilight Sparkle and her pony family, who had had their dinner delivered down here so they could introduce each other without being overheard by the wrong ponies.

Twilight Velvet got up and pressed the flashing button. “Yes, Trixie?” she asked.

She was answered by silence.

Twilight Sparkle got up and looked at the computer. “You have to let go of the button,” she told her stepmother. “You hold the button down while you talk, and release it to listen.”

“Oh,” said Twilight Velvet. “And you probably heard all of that,” she said to Trixie through the device. “Sorry.” And then she released the button.

“It’s OK. I need for you to get a watch thingee from my room with a blue unicorn’s face on the front of it and bring it back to the basement,” Trixie told Twilight Velvet. “It doesn’t have to go anywhere after that. Oh, and while you’re at it, could you tell my mother that I sort of went on a big mission with Celestia and forgot to tell her? Because...I did.”

“Will do, Trixie,” Twilight’s mother said with a smile. “I’m overdue for a talk with her as it is.”

As she was leaving the room, Trixie added, “Oh! And could somepony write some coordinates down? We haven’t found Rarity yet, but we’re close, and we want some way that the Princess can rescue us just in case things go screwy.”

Twilight Sparkle tried in vain to pick up the ballpoint pen, and then moved aside for Night Light with a slight pout.

“I’ll write it down,” Night said, holding the pen with his magic.

“OK, 37 degrees, 2 minutes...”

---

Tracking through the desert was very much a stop and go process. Snap Shot would reach a withered plant or piece of debris and would then study it very carefully under the illumination of his lantern, picking up every piece of information that he could. Then he would look around at the neighboring landmarks and think carefully, occasionally consulting the object before him once again. Finally he would dash over to the next object, quickly confirm that he was indeed a few strides closer to Rarity, and the process would repeat.

There was only one main stopping point, and that was the big pipe sticking out of the ground. The surveying team absolutely refused to go any further until the main group caught up to explain what in Tartarus that was doing there.

Celestia started to examine the structure, but paused on noticing that her advisor was absolutely frozen in position. “Raven?” she asked in concern.

“That shadow shouldn’t be there,” she said, pointing under the pipe.

And indeed, there was a shadow under the pipe. A daylight shadow, a few hours after sunset.

Celestia read the desperate expression on Raven’s face. It was one she had seen often in students she had counseled. “Raven needs to perform a top secret technique,” she informed the others, before leading them out of sight. As they were walking away, she caught Raven out of the corner of her eye poking the shadow with a hoof. She heard a delighted gasp.

And then after they had turned out of sight, it was replaced with a wail of utter despair.

Principal Celestia looked around her, into the faces of the worried ponies looking back at her. None of these ponies could comfort the ultra-private Raven. Only Princess Celestia, and she was far away. The Principal nerved herself to stay there for a few moments, to allow Raven the privacy for whatever she was now grieving over. And then with a signal to the others to stay put, she walked back around the corner, making sure to make a lot of sound while doing so.

“Who was it?” she asked quietly when standing behind Raven.

“Mustang Sally,” Raven replied, her voice dangerously calm. “The youngest of my twenty-three daughters. She should have been Raven, like all of us, but she broke away from me a dozen years ago, permanently severing her connection to the collective mind. I always knew, but...” She pointed at the spot where the daylight shadow once was. “I have her memories now. I know what happened after she left me, her new name...and how she met her end.” She looked southward, her eyes glinting red with rage. “There is an utterly evil being there, in the town that undoubtedly claimed Human Rarity as well. I will find and save that poor child. And then I will destroy the one who took my life.” She began walking towards Nowhere, not bothering to see if anyone was following her.

Now Reader, you may be protesting at this point that Raven had promised to Princess Celestia that she had “let go” of her grief over the lost Mustangia Raven.

She had lied.

# # #

“It was the general spending bill of thirty-one years ago,” Raven explained, walking at a relentless pace towards Nowhere, not really caring if anybody heard her voice or not. Celestia assumed that she must be employing the data organizing skills the Princess had frequently bragged about to unbury and correlate once-meaningless information gathered over a lifetime. “An obscure provision appropriated 10,000 bits to a water pipeline for the buffalo that would extend from the western coast all the way to the Ghastly Gorge. The idea was that the water would convert the desert into a series of oases. We were only supposed to be paying for the Equestrian portion, but the bloated figure was in fact used to pay for the whole of it.

“The pipeline was successfully laid—we’ve been walking over parts of it for hours now—and the desalination and pumping artifacts at the South Luna Ocean terminus were activated, but then the Crash of ’63 happened, and the company went out of business so fast that nothing was shut down. None of the owners of the various pieces of Far West Real Estate ever bothered to do anything about the pipeline, so it still runs to this day. If you attached a handle to that faucet we saw and turned it, you could turn this whole valley into a lake in a week.”

---

Despite their rapid pace, it was quite late in the night before the party converged at the sign welcoming them to the town with the strange name of “Nowhere”. The population figure on the sign had been crossed off and replaced by smaller numbers so many times that it was no longer possible to know for sure what the exact number was now, other than the fact that it was definitely below 100, and perhaps closer to 10.

“There’s something very unusual about this ground,” Pinkamena remarked, looking down. “It feels...wrong.”

“I know,” Raven said. “You get used to it.” She continued onward.

“Are we in any sort of danger?” Celestia asked, stopping.

When Pinkamena saw that Raven was not responding, she dug her hooves into the packed sand. “There is a very unusual mineral deposit here.”

“...Pinkamena?” Celestia asked in amazement.

“Did you hear me?” Pinkamena asked flatly.

“Yes, I did P—”

“—Pinkie,” Pinkamena said quickly.

“...Pinkie. Um...we in danger?”

Pinkamena closed her eyes, digging her hooves deeper into the sand. “...No,” she said finally. “At least...not from the soil.” She blinked, and suddenly her hair was back to its previous fluffiness. But her expression was still somber. “Did you see her eyes?” she asked quietly.

Celestia nodded, bringing her head close for a private conversation. “They turned red after she absorbed that...shadow.” The others backed up a bit to give the two their privacy.

“She’s allowed herself to become possessed,” Pinkie said simply.

Principal Celestia did not question this statement for an instant. For one thing, she was aware of Equestrian magic. And for another, she was well aware of the Pie family’s reputation for knowing ancient secrets that no one else did. “Can we do anything?”

Pinkie shook her head. “For now, Raven and Mustang Sally want the same thing, so it would be as hard as separating...well, it would be impossible. If she starts arguing with herself, we might have a chance.”

“Thank you, Pinkie.” Celestia raised her head to address all of the other ponies who were now looking at her. “And thank all of you for your efforts in getting us this far. It appears that this mysterious town is the current location of Rarity and as you might have heard from Raven, it is a place with unknown dangers, and where we may be unable to distinguish friend from foe. Those of you unaccustomed to fighting should stay here, on the other side of that sign. The rest of us are going straight into the town, as quickly and as silently as we can manage. Unless anypony has a better plan?”

In her heart, Celestia knew that Raven would have had a better plan, but Raven was no longer in the mood for plans.

“Uh, should we send our coordinates to Canterlot and tell them what we’re about to do first?” Trixie asked.

Celestia internally facehooved. “Yes, that would be a good first step,” she said quietly.

Comments

[McPoodle]

The notes for this chapter are too short to post by themselves, but the first one provides the YouTube link to the music video that the title must have brought to the minds of those readers of a certain age.