Chapter XVIII: Skyhigh, the Center of the Storm
Sunset was breathing heavily as she and Marx fled Aquarius. That had been far too close for comfort, and she wasn’t even the one that had been in direct danger. Once they were a considerable distance away from the planet, she decided to check up on that. “You good, Marx?”
Marx blinked. “Hm? Yeah, I’m fine. You could've teleported me if it came to that, right?”
“Probably?” Sunset wagered, unsure. “I’m not sure you’d want to bet your life on it, though.”
Marx took a moment to absorb that. “Eh, I’m sure I’d’ve been fine either way–don’t worry about it too much.” Changing the subject, he continued. “Hey, did anything interesting happen while I was looking for you?”
Sunset frowned and, flaring her horn, retrieved the book. In the light of the Warp Star and outside of the murky depths of Aquarius, she was able to actually get a good look at its cover for the first time. Disappointingly, it wasn’t anything that pointed towards its contents. The book–fittingly for what Sunset assumed was likely a journal of some kind–had no distinct cover. Instead, it was bound in nondescript leather, which Sunset shook a bit to get any leftover water off.
“I found this thing,” she said. “It was in a long-term stasis charm, but uh…” She opened it. “I don’t recognize this language.”
Marx narrowed his eyes and frowned a bit. “I don’t either. It’s definitely not Somnic, that’s for sure. You found it down in that underwater city?”
“Yeah,” Sunset affirmed. “Any ideas on that?”
“Nada,” Marx said. “But we can figure out the archeological significance of that later; we have a Nova to summon first.”
Sunset stored the book again and looked ahead, where they were approaching a new object. Strangely, it looked less like a planet and more like a miniature nebula. It did have a distinct central core, which looked to be about ten or so kilometers in diameter if Sunset was eyeballing it right, but its atmosphere seemed to extend several hundred kilometers outward. The Warp Star started warming up a bit–signaling their reentry–well before she initially expected it to.
“So, what’s this place?” Sunset asked.
“Skyhigh,” Marx answered. “As far as I know, the whole thing’s made of clouds, but only the ones at the center are thick enough to stand on.”
Sunset did some mental math. “So we’ve only got what, sixty square kilometers or so to scan for the Fountain?”
“A lot less, actually,” Marx said. He nodded towards the swirling mass of clouds making up the core, which they were rapidly approaching. It actually reminded Sunset of Venus a little bit, just much smaller and with clouds made of water instead of sulfuric acid. “Those clouds are non-magical, so we’ll be able to pass right through them. The actual walkable surface is only a couple hundred meters across.”
Sunset stopped the Warp Star just above the swirling wisps. This close, it was obvious that they’d be able to pass through. There was a distinct interface between the cloudy region and the open air, but the clouds were barely more than mist. “So, it’s five kilometers down through this onto soft, fluffy clouds?”
“As far as I know,” Marx said.
Sunset grinned. “Good enough for me. Geronimo!”
With that, she plummeted the Warp Star directly into the clouds. Immediately, the temperature dropped considerably. The magic of the Warp Star did protect them from the worst of it, though it left Sunset slightly puzzled. Even accounting for the clouds above them blocking more and more natural light as they descended, the thermodynamics of that shouldn’t have worked out. But whatever magic was holding a large–albeit not quite planet-sized–ball of gas together seemed to make it work anyway.
It allowed for a beautiful sight, at least. This high up, Sunset was able to watch ice crystals form in real time as water froze onto small bits of dust. It was honestly a bit mesmerizing, but she tore her gaze from the phenomenon to focus on getting them close to the center.
They were still quite a ways up when Sunset’s horn started picking up pinpricks of energy from the Fountain. She grinned. If all went well here, this might be the easiest Fountain yet!
Soon enough, the magically-reinforced cloud surface was in sight, though it was beneath a rather thick layer of mist. It was spherical, and the entire thing couldn’t have been more than one hundred meters in radius. The Warp Star disintegrated upon landing, as expected, throwing Sunset and Marx onto the soft surface. The pair tumbled a bit, but were undamaged.
As Sunset pushed herself to her hooves, she considered the magic she was sensing. Skyhigh’s Fountain wasn’t nearly as calming or serene as Popstar’s and Aquarius’s, but it didn’t give off the same wild vibes as Floria’s, either. The best way Sunset could think to describe it was ordered chaos; like the swing of a double pendulum, Skyhigh’s magic felt confined but chaotic all the same.
Marx glanced at her expression as he hopped to his feet. “Feeling for the Fountain?” he asked.
Sunset waved a hoof. “Eh, sort of. I can get a general idea of its direction, but if we want something more exact…” She lit her horn.
The spell she was casting, arcanum revelare, was a rather esoteric piece of magic. It was originally developed as a medical spell to determine the magical field strength within a pony’s body, as to discover potential blockages to mana flow and correct them. In the modern day, that usage had been supplanted by potions and enchanted crystals that achieved the same effect, however.
Outside of a medical context, just about its only use was triangulating the position of a magic source, which was what Sunset was aiming to accomplish. Even there, it was usually beaten out by more efficient, specialized detection spells, and with arcanum revelare’s rather large mana draw and excessive casting time, nopony had ever bothered to devise a more efficient version of it. Unfortunately, Sunset had no specialized spell for the Fountains, so she was forced to use the general-purpose one.
Efficiency, at least, wasn’t exactly a concern for Sunset. This close to a Fountain, she was essentially swimming in ambient mana, so her only limit for spellcasting was how quickly her own body could take it in. They weren’t exactly strapped for time, either, so she didn’t mind the spell’s rather long windup. A novice caster might take ninety seconds to cast arcanum revelare, and the average CSGU graduate could probably do it in sixty. Most experienced wizards didn’t bother to remember the spell, but those that did could usually cast it in twenty seconds. Celestia usually took around ten, and Sunset had seen Twilight cast it in seven seconds to analyze a maxim tomato. Sunset herself was expecting to take twenty-five, maybe thirty seconds, given that she hadn’t tried it in years.
She pulled it off in five.
As the visualization took place–the magical field lines shining an aquamarine in the visible spectrum, the same as her magic–she blinked in surprise. That should not have been that easy. The sheer amount of ambient magic might have sped it up, sure, but she knew that she didn’t have nearly enough internal mana stores to cast such a complex spell that quickly.
Sunset’s face contorted a bit as she considered that, but Marx seemed more interested in the glowing strands of magic than her expression. “What’re these?” he asked.
“Magical field lines,” Sunset explained, taking the opportunity to expand the range of the spell to better estimate their target. Triangulating the Fountain’s exact position might’ve been a bit overkill, but she wanted to make sure of something before they wasted a few minutes scouring the surface for it.
“So do they point towards the Fountain, or…?”
Sunset sighed as she looked around. The field lines all pointed straight out of the cloudy surface at right angles, flowing radially outward into space. “Yeah,” she answered. “But this means that it’s below us.”
Marx looked down at the clouds. “So we just bust through and fall onto it, then?”
Sunset flared her horn before spewing forth from it a great pillar of flame. The fire spilled onto the floor, raising a cloud of steam above it as the water boiled away. It shone a brilliant orange, lasting a full ten seconds until Sunset was confident that that was enough to bust through to the Fountain. She grinned as the flames receded and revealed a perfectly circular hole in the clouds.
It then immediately filled itself back in, fueled by the Fountain’s magic.
Sunset growled. Okay, apparently this required a bit more finesse. She could manage that. She lit her horn again and, this time, focused on heating up the clouds in a ring a few meters in diameter. The clouds within the ring itself boiled away in an instant, and Sunset diverted the resultant steam away with her magic as new clouds formed to replace the old. Her and Marx took the opportunity to hop over the superheated gas, landing on the cut-out circle of clouds.
Oddly, Sunset noted as they jumped, this was a far greater draw on her magic than she had been expecting. She mentally brushed it off, though; the clouds seemed magic resistant, after all.
Their landing spot, unprepared to bear the weight of two beings, was forced downward, finally granting the pair access to the interior of the sphere. As their makeshift elevator descended, it quickly became apparent that Skyhigh’s interior was, while still gaseous, far denser than the outside. Where the surface only held mist, the clouds got denser and denser as they dropped, becoming an outright fog rather quickly.
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem that they could just drop right to the fountain. Their ride drifted downward some ten meters or so, but before long they had landed on yet another layer of clouds. The fog was so thick now that Sunset could barely see two meters in front of her, though thankfully both her and Marx were bright enough colors that they’d be able to see each other just fine. Both of them, though, frowned down at the clouds they were now standing on.
These, too, were different to the layer above. Notably, they were far darker and denser, as if the floor was made of rainclouds. Which, Sunset figured, it might be. They had no idea what was below them, after all.
“Think we can break through this one, too?” Marx asked.
Sunset flared her horn and prepared a spell. It was supposed to do the same thing as above–heat up a ring of cloud enough that it boiled away, and let them ride the center down.
When she executed the spell, though, nothing happened. It didn’t even backfire or blow up in her face like she might’ve expected from a failed cast. The clouds around them stayed just as unblemished, and the fog didn’t even heat up.
Well, there was one thing that Sunset could tell happened. She still felt her mana deplete just the same as if she had successfully cast the spell, but it was accompanied by a tugging sensation at the base of her horn.
She furrowed her brow. It had been a while since her time in CSGU, but she had a feeling she knew what that feeling was supposed to signify. Magic used against somepony didn’t always have a tell for the receiver, especially if the caster was trying for subtlety, but schools like blood magic–bioturgy if you insisted on pedantry–always incited certain physical reactions in the subject. But as for a tugging sensation…
Sunset’s eyes widened.
Mind magic.
She almost mentally cursed herself for letting herself get rusty enough that a foreign entity could enter her mind like that. Psychoturgy was a delicate enough subschool of magic that mental intrusions could usually be turned around at the door with only a modicum of effort, but she had dawdled so long on remembering the tells that whatever was attacking her had already entered her mind. Instead of wasting precious seconds berating herself, she recalled what she had read on combating psychoturgy when it was already in action.
Letting one’s mind go blank seems like the solution at first glance, but attempting such a feat is effectively impossible. It’s kind of like telling someone to not think of pink elephants and then actually expecting them to not think about pink elephants. Once a victim knows that somepony is in their head, it is basically impossible to think about anything else–even if the victim is trained in meditation, some animalistic part of their brain will always be active and responding to the threat.
Instead, licensed psychoturgists generally recommend to play into the intrusion. A mental attacker is usually looking for something specific in a victim’s memories, and once they’re in, all the victim can do is try to redirect whatever memory is being brought up, and potentially trick the attacker into believing that they have what they want.
This, though, didn’t seem to be in the cards for Sunset. She was experiencing these flashes of memory right along with whatever was attacking her, and they seemed effectively random. Snippets of conversations she’d had with Celestia, poking fun at her brother and that friend of his, her mother reading her a bedtime story when she was a filly, ordering a donut, and other random, entirely usual points of her life before she fled to Earth.
She was still trying to puzzle out what, exactly, this mental probe was trying to learn when it spoke directly into her mind.
In Ponish.
To ye who venture the clouds and enter
And seek what lies in the maelstrom’s center
To further pass below these floors
Ye must complete the trials four
The first of rain, of nature’s tears
Ye must find your way to persevere
The second of wind, of nature’s might
Ye must dispel the central blight
The third of lightning, of nature’s wrath
Ye must locate the downward path
But further below the clouds transform
Beware, traveler, the Eye of the Storm
Its message delivered, the foreign entity in Sunset’s mind retreated, leaving her brain once again entirely her own, if quite a bit more confused. Based on Marx’s expression, it had happened to him too and left him similarly bewildered.
A rumble of thunder distracted both of them before they could discuss it, though. Before their very eyes, some of the cloudy floor off to the side sank, forming a staircase downward and allowing them to hear the pitter-patter of rain.
Marx blinked. “Did uh…your life just flash before your eyes as well?”
Sunset nodded. “And I assume you heard an ominous voice warning us too?”
Marx snorted. “Yeah, it sounded like it was trying way too hard to rhyme.”
Sunset chuckled a bit as she and Marx made for the stairs. “The mind magic itself is still pretty concerning, so we’ll have to watch out for that,” she commented. “That can do a lot of damage if you’re not careful, but in this case…” she rolled her eyes. “Who the hell even tries to make ‘eye of the storm’ sound ominous anymore?”
Unbeknownst to either of them, as it was still obscured by the thick fog, the cloud above them blinked.
“Y’all saw that, right?”
Everypony else was a bit too shocked about the cloud blinking to answer Applejack’s question, though Rainbow was the first to break from her stupor. “Yeah. Clouds are not supposed to have eyeballs.”
“Agreed, darlings,” Rarity said with a bit of a shiver.
“Good ta know Ah ain’t just seein’ things, then,” Applejack responded.
The scratching of a pencil on paper diverted everypony’s attention to Discord before they could further that conversation. “Are you taking notes?” Rarity asked incredulously.
“Of course!” Discord exclaimed. “Clouds with eyes! I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that!
Rainbow let out a low sound that actually sounded a bit like a legitimate growl. “Discord, I swear, if you mess with my clouds again…”
“I’m getting real sick of rain,” Sunset muttered.
The cloudy staircase down to the next level had deposited them in the middle of a thunderstorm. At the very least it wasn’t windy, but the raindrops were still rather cold. Sunset had a warming charm up to counter it, just like she had done on Floria, as she frowned at their surroundings. The clouds on this layer were just as indistinguishable from each other as the ones above, blending together into one big gray mass of water.
“So, any idea what that voice meant by ‘finding our way’?” Marx asked.
Sunset scoffed. “Please, if that was any more vague it’d have been incomprehensible. I think we’ve just gotta wing it.”
“So…split up and look for a way down?” Marx suggested.
Sunset shrugged. “Might as well.” The sphere they were standing on wasn’t very large, after all–this layer had to be a bit over a hundred meters across, at maximum. They would probably be able to hear each other shout from across the entire thing.
The two wandered off, each searching for something to indicate a way down. As Sunset had mentioned, the puzzle that the mental magic had imparted was unhelpfully vague. That–the tendency for magic puzzles to be stupidly vague–was one of the few things she actively preferred about Earth compared to Equus. All of Earth’s major mysteries that she knew about fell into three camps: proven to be undecidable, historical mysteries with solutions lost to time, and mysteries that were actively being worked on. There were no wishy-washy millenia-old prophecies, no cryptic old wizards wanting to sound smarter than they actually were, and no vague messages where the exact wording made everything make sense only after it had all gone down.
Sunset slowed her pace a bit as she thought. Hold on, exact wording! She frowned. Well, that doesn’t really help me. “Ye must find your way to persevere” doesn’t really tell me anything. We already have to find our way, and I’ve definitely been persevering! I mean seriously, I’m not sure how this day could get any w-
She cut off her train of thought, both because she didn’t want to jinx herself, and because her hoof splashed down in a puddle that she hadn’t seen before. Curiously, she peered down at it. The water was nearly perfectly clear, blending into the, well, cloudy-gray color of the clouds beneath it. The ripples on the surface from the raindrops, though, were completely visible. Humming to herself in thought, she poked at the material the puddle was sitting on.
Instead of the soft and slightly squishy material of the rest of the magical clouds, this felt more akin to cloudcrete, the building material pegasi used to keep cities like Cloudsdale and Las Pegasus stable. She supposed it made sense–the water’d just get absorbed back into or disperse regular clouds, but cloudcrete could maintain a limited amount of liquid water on its surface.
Sunset’s frown deepened as she looked closer at the water, a raindrop dripping off of her nose and splashing down. Carefully, she looked at the ripples as they spread outward, highlighting the water’s true shape. This wasn’t just a puddle, it was a thin line of water extending in either direction, and Sunset couldn’t quite see where it ended.
“Hey, Marx!” she shouted. “I think I found something!”
Marx bounded over the horizon a few seconds later, skidding to a stop right next to Sunset. He blinked and looked down at what she’d found. “A puddle?”
Sunset waved a hoof in a so-so motion. “Sort of. I want to check if it wraps around the whole thing. Could you stay here to act as a landmark?”
Marx nodded. “Okay!” he affirmed.
Sunset smiled. “Thanks.”
It didn’t take her long to circle the entire sphere of clouds at a light canter, and she was back at Marx’s position in a bit over half a minute. A bit around the circle, though, she had encountered an oddity, which was apparent on her face when she returned.
“Found something?” Marx asked.
Sunset nodded, gesturing for him to follow. The two made their way down the line a bit before Sunset stopped, pointing down at the line of water.
Branching off from the main, circular path was a jagged zig-zag of perpendicular line segments. It was difficult to see in the weather, but clearly the lines of water had multiple branches.
“You think that this has to do with ‘finding our way?’” Marx asked.
“Possibly,” Sunset considered. “It can’t hurt to follow it.”
And follow it they did. The zig-zag led them to another line, latitudinally parallel to the last. It also circled the entire surface, and just under halfway around this, too, had a zig-zagging pattern leading to an even tighter circle. The pair continued exploring the odd pattern, encountering tighter and tighter concentric circles, each with varying symbols between them. At the very center of the pattern was a five-pointed star of water, no deeper than the rest of the intricate cloudcrete in the floor, but far more prominent.
Marx looked at it curiously. “So uh, any ideas?”
Sunset narrowed her eyes. Lighting her horn, she summoned an illusion. Streaks of aquamarine light floated in the air, shimmering brightly enough to shine through the thick rain. The magic traced out a distinct pattern: a five-pointed star in the middle, surrounded by five circles. The innermost circle was bare, while the second tightest had a strange, pointed pattern jutting out from it. From the third circle a helix-like spiral arose, and the outermost three circles all had that staircase-shaped zig-zag connecting them.
The orange unicorn grinned. “It’s a map.”
Marx squinted a bit and tilted his head (or at least as much as a sphere with feet could do so). “I can sorta see it. But the map’s a circle,” he pointed out, “and we’re on a sphere.”
Sunset shrugged. “Sure, but a circle is just the cross section of a sphere! And you only need three points to define a plane.” She pointed to the center of the map. “In our case, the Fountain,” she pointed to the first staircase pattern, “the entrance, and…”
Her horn shone brighter as she cast a dispellment charm. She winced a bit–there was a bit more magical feedback than she had been expecting. Dispelling a charm usually took an amount of magic proportional to what had gone into it in the first place, and apparently whoever had constructed the faux-cloudcrete had wanted it to stay. Still, it accomplished the desired effect, and the star-shaped puddle quickly bored through the now entirely-regular cloud.
Sunset grinned again as she finished her speech. “...the exi-”
She was cut off, though, as the water exploded back out of the hole accompanied by screaming winds, splashing both her and Marx across the face. The rain coming close to them, caught up in the air currents, turned nearly horizontal and pelted against them.
The two glanced at each other and, through some silent agreement, pushed forward against the wind and down a level.
Sunset’s mane whipped around her as she and Marx descended the staircase to the next level. The wind screamed in her ears, getting ever-louder the closer they got to the cloudy floor. Honestly, she was rather surprised that they hadn’t been forced off of the staircase by this point–it had no railings.
The source of the extreme winds was obvious: just over the horizon (which for a sphere of this size was under ten meters away), stretching from the ceiling above them to where Sunset presumed was the floor, was a massive funnel cloud. Hailstones whirled around in the air, flung about every which way by the storm.
As the two reached the bottom of the stairs, Sunset yelped a bit and ducked to avoid a golf ball-sized hailstone that had been launched in their direction. Still, she couldn’t help but chuckle a bit. “I was right!” she shouted.
Marx raised an eyebrow at her. “About it being a map?”
Sunset grinned. “Yep!” She held her hoof out and pointed at the tornado. “And I betcha that’s that ‘central blight’ we’re supposed to dispel.”
Marx blinked. “Not to be a stick in the mud but,” he gestured as much as a being without arms could, “how?”
Sunset’s triumphant grin fell from her face. “Well, tornadoes form because of a temperature imbalance, right?” she spitballed. “So I guess I could heat up the air above it to equalize that?”
“That’s definitely not a normal tornado, though,” Marx countered. “The legends about Nova are at least two thousand years old, and I’m pretty sure tornadoes don’t usually last for millenia.”
Sunset sighed, not that she figured Marx could even hear it over the wind. “Fair enough.” She winced as another hailstone whizzed over their heads. “We might want to get rid of it quickly, though; I think that one was bigger than the last.”
“Can’t you do something magicky?” Marx asked.
Sunset rolled her eyes. “Oh sure, get the magical unicorn from another dimension to do everything,” she griped.
Marx raised his eyebrow further, which frankly was rather impressive at this point. “So you’re saying you can’t dispel it?”
Sunset grumbled a bit and lit her horn and they began moving towards the cyclone. “I mean I can, but I’m no good at atmoturgy,” she explained. “It and hydroturgy were always my weakest schools of magic back in school.”
“And I take it that you’re best at fire magic?” Marx asked.
“Pyroturgy, yeah” Sunset elaborated. “Really I’m great at thermoturgy in general, phototurgy, too.” She raised her voice as the winds picked up even more and erected a shield, deflecting another hailstone. “But atmoturgy requires directly influencing a gas, which I never really saw the point in practicing if I could just set something else on fire or freeze the gas for better control of it.”
“Could you do that for the tornado, then?” Marx suggested. “Freeze it?”
Sunset shook her head. “Performing cryoturgy on this scale just isn’t in the cards for me, even with the power boost the Fountains’ve been giving me.”
“So what are you doing, then?” Marx inquired, pointedly looking at her lit horn.
“A general-purpose dispellment charm, like what I used to take out the cloudcrete in the rain,” Sunset explained. “Actual atmoturgists would be able to do it easier, but the best I can do is brute force it and rely on the Fountain’s power to stave off mana burn.”
“So…how long will that take?” Marx asked as another, even larger hailstone impacted the shield.
Sunset sharply inhaled as she felt a stab of pain from her horn, but immediately the wind began dying down. “Not long. We’re thirty meters from the Fountain, tops, so it’s been feeding into my mana almost as fast as I can deplete it.” The hail, at this point, had stopped flying every which way as the wind-speeds dropped from tornadic to simply hurricane-force.
The funnel cloud’s collapse was rather quick. The twenty-meter tall vortex destabilized mere moments after the spells keeping it up did. Without the magic constantly supplying angular momentum and no temperature disparity, the air very quickly bled off its rotational energy and the cloud dispersed, revealing a hole in the floor.
The hailstones, no longer supported by the wind, clattered to the floor as a cacophonous roar of thunder rumbled up from the new hole. Sunset trotted over and looked down through it. “Well,” she said, rather appreciative of not having to shout for once, “looks like we’ll have to jump.”
The floor below–about ten meters down–was a far darker color than the one they were currently standing on. That itself wasn’t the issue. She’d made larger jumps before, like the one onto the Halberd’s deck, but the actual state of the lower floor was concerning. Lightning visibly streaked across it, dancing within the cloud itself.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Marx asked, having joined her in looking through the hole.
Sunset cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t think we have any other options.” Lighting her horn, she cast a cushioning charm and prepared another Faraneigh cage. “This is gonna be a strain on my magic though, even this close to the Fountain. We’ll have to get through it quick.”
Marx frowned. “Will the map help?”
Sunset summoned the illusory circles again. “Assuming that the spiral was the tornado and it all falls on the same plane,” she pointed at the lightning-like pattern attached to the second circle, “the exit should be pretty close.” She glanced back at Marx. “Ready?”
At Marx’s nod, Sunset levitated him onto her back, cast the Faraneigh cage she’d been preparing, and jumped.
Sunset had been expecting it to be bad, for lightning to be jumping from floor to ceiling and ceiling to floor, for her magic to be constantly strained, and for the thunder to be loud enough to nearly deafen them. She had prepared accordingly, keeping their conducting shield around them and focusing as much power as she could just on keeping them alive so she didn’t waste any. She had thought that was adequate.
Apparently not.
The moment they landed Sunset had to severely adjust her strategy. Her noise-dampening shield saved them from deafness and the Faraneigh cage was enough to stop them from getting fried alive by the current, but the air itself was charged enough to cause problems. It was straining her magic something fierce, but she needed some sort of stopgap, and fast–breathing in ionized oxygen would make for a very quick (and very painful) death. She didn’t have the time nor the knowledge of Marx’s anatomy to use bioturgy as a solution, so she restored to making a crude thaumoelectrochemical alteration to her Faraneigh cage–the cage itself would use the spare electrons running through it to undo the ionization in the air passing through it.
Of course, doing that took work. Even being closer to the Fountain, whatever cloud layers were below them seemed to be blocking most of its restorative effects, so Sunset estimated that she’d only be able to keep it up for a few minutes at most. They needed to move.
She took only a second to orient herself before she began sprinting towards where the lightning symbol corresponded to. Some small part of her vaguely registered Marx’s shout of surprise at her sudden action, but the rest of her was far too concerned with pure survival to bother caring about the specifics.
On this small of a sphere, the horizon was only about six meters away by Sunset’s reckoning, and they reached the approximate location of their goal in only a few seconds. Sunset stopped short as they reached it, panting a bit, but otherwise quite glad to have averted disaster.
Unfortunately, the only thing there was a long copper rod. In another situation, it might’ve been inconspicuous. Like a wire manufacturing plant. That would be just about the only situation though, given that the thing was a cylinder over three meters long and a solid five centimeters in radius. At least, that was around what Sunset was estimating–the constant electrical connection between it and the ceiling was obscuring most of it from view with the glow.
Dully, the rational part of Sunset’s mind began catching up with the rest of her panic-riddled brain. Clearly the rod had to have some kind of use, given that it was there. What that purpose was, though, was a bit tough to think of through the ringing in her ears. Ringing that she was finally beginning to register as Marx’s voice.
“Sun-shim!” he shouted. Based on the exasperation in his voice it was far from the first time he’d called her name in the past few seconds. Her ears perking up in recognition seemed to be enough to let him know that she was listening, though. “You good?”
Sunset took a deep breath and winced as she felt the phantom pressure on her horn flare up. “Yeah, but not for long,” she answered. “We’ve got about ten minutes.”
She couldn’t see his face, but she could still tell he was disconcerted by that. “I take it that we die after those ten minutes expire?”
“If we can’t figure this out, yeah,” Sunset bluntly replied. “Any ideas?”
“Well, the voice up top said something about a downward path, right?” Marx wagered. “Maybe it has something to do with the electricity?”
Sunset stared at the copper for a bit before a grin crossed her face. “Marx, you’re a genius.”
“I am?”
“Something has to be forcing a voltage difference between the clouds here, or else there wouldn’t be current!” Sunset realized. Sparing what magic she could, she grasped the metal in her telekinesis. She had to avert her eyes from it as she did, since the electricity jumping between the ceiling and it (and it and the floor) was far too bright to look at.
Idly, part of her noted that the copper had to have a permanent cooling charm on it; the energy output of the current probably would have vaporized it by now otherwise. That, though, was besides the point at the moment. “Air’s a dielectric, so most of the current is gonna discharge through this.” Carefully, she maneuvered the copper to the side, far enough away that it wouldn’t burn them to death. “So we just need to find wherever that emf source is short out the circuit!”
“Huh?” Marx asked.
Sunset sighed. “We need to connect the floor to the ceiling with the copper. That’ll short the circuit and buy us some time.”
Marx hummed in thought. “Seems a bit short for that. You’d need three of ‘em to actually reach the ceiling.”
“That’s why I think the puzzle mentioned a ‘downward path,’” Sunset said. Glancing around, she began trotting in the direction that the floor-to-ceiling lightning was fiercest. “I think it means the point at which electric potential is the lowest, since that’s where electrons flow from!” Her speech paused for a moment. “Well, at least in direct current. If it’s alternating the actual direction of the current will flip every so often, but there’s still an electric field and thus a ‘downward path.’”
“You uh, know a lot about electricity, huh?” Marx noted after a few moments of walking.
“Just the basics, really,” Sunset admitted. “I only really took the science classes that helped out with the magic I wanted to learn. So I have surface level knowledge of anatomy, chemistry, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, solid state physics, that sort of stuff.”
“That just sounds like a physics degree,” Marx deadpanned.
Sunset blushed a bit. “I mean, wizardry is a field of physics, and those tend to be inherently interdisciplinary with each other.” She thought for a moment. “Granted, Celestia had me take classes in a lot of the social sciences as well; I think she wanted me in some sort of government position once I graduated.”
“Sounds like she wanted to waste all that knowledge in that head of yours,” Marx added.
Sunset snorted, but she caught sight of something before she could reply. Grinning, she rushed forward to make sure it was what she thought. Spiking from the floor and ceiling were a stalagmite and stalactite of cloud, electricity constantly arcing between them. Next to it was an opaque column of what Sunset could only assume was pure magic, handling all of the mechanics of keeping this insane circuit going.
“Here goes nothing,” she said. Carefully, she inserted the copper rod between the two cloud structures, praying that her hunch was right.
It was.
Nearly instantly, the dull roar of thunder that had constantly permeated the air around them, even through the shield, ceased. The copper itself was positively glowing–even with its miniscule resistance, the cooling charm had to work overtime to bleed off the excess heat the current generated. But the insertion of a far better conductor than air proved fruitful, as it had localized the current and the excess charges in the rest of the cloud equalized.
Cautiously, Sunset let the Faraneigh cage drop as she felt the strain on her magic decrease dramatically. When they weren’t instantly fried, she let out a relieved sigh. “It worked!”
“So what now?” Marx asked.
Sunset frowned. “I’m…not sure. All the other ways down revealed themselves after solving the puzzle, though, so I bet this one is close by!”
She was proven right very quickly as the floor beneath them suddenly vanished.
Sunset only had around a second to process what had happened before they hit the cloudy level below them, but that was enough to cast another cushioning charm and save them from a potentially nasty fall. Even with what Sunset assumed was next to no mass below them (unless whoever had left the Fountains made Skyhigh out of neutronium or something) they were still experiencing Earth-like gravity, and a ten-meter fall, even onto cloud, would still cause some damage.
Sunset groaned a bit as she picked herself up. That cushioning charm had been hastily cast and the fall had still hurt. Marx had fallen only a small ways away from her, and seemed to be in similar condition. Glancing around, she tried to puzzle out what seemed to be their final challenge before the Fountain.
The sphere they were on now had to be twenty meters across at absolute maximum. The horizon curved away far too quickly for it to be any larger. In stark contrast to the layer above, this one was composed entirely of the kind of fluffy, white clouds one only ever sees in fiction. Even the ceiling above them had lost its dark coloration.
Unfortunately, that had been replaced by a single, rather terrifying element.
“Hey Marx,” Sunset broached, “do the clouds in this universe usually have eyes?”
Indeed, embedded in the ceiling was a single, massive eye. Sunset watched on as the entire ceiling began to shake, the surface pooling in on itself to become a similar shape to a child’s interpretation of a cloud with an eye in the middle. What was once the copper rod they had used had been broken up and rearranged, becoming several copper spikes sticking out of the being.
“What’s Kracko doing here?” Marx asked in a perplexed tone.
“Kracko?” Sunset asked. Vaguely, she recalled that Dedede had sent one of the Star Rod’s fragments to a ‘Kracko.’ This was that being?
“A cloud-based creature that likes to hang around Popstar sometimes,” Marx explained. “No one knows where it comes from or why it does what it does, and it doesn’t seem to be very talkative.”
There was a rumbling noise, very similar to that of thunder, and Sunset felt her ears involuntarily flatten against her head. “Think this is that Eye of the Storm, then?”
Marx stepped back a bit. “So it would seem.”
With the crackling of electricity, the tips of Kracko’s spikes began to spark. Sunset’s eyes widened in realization with just barely enough time to save herself, as she threw up a shield just in time to stop the full force of the previous floor’s lightning bearing down on her.
She screamed as her horn flared ever brighter and she felt like her head was splitting open from the strain. She heard something pop, and everything went black.
Marx frowned at Sunset’s limp body as it flopped to the floor. She was still breathing, thankfully–he still needed her to activate the Fountains, and he wasn’t very keen on getting stuck on Skyhigh. Still, this was far from ideal. Sunset was his muscle until he could get his nonexistent hands on Nova’s power, but it seemed like he would have to take care of this himself.
“Well that was a bit rude,” he called up to Kracko. “It’s generally considered impolite to introduce yourself with attempted murder!”
He wasn’t entirely sure if Kracko had nerves that he could get on, but annoying his enemies into defeating themselves was his specialty. Anything to help his chances against this.
Marx grinned and spread his wings, the magical, metallic structures flaring outward. It had been far too long since he’d had a chance to actually fight something himself.
With a powerful downward flap, Marx launched himself into the air, hovering roughly equal to Kracko. The cloud responded with a lightning barrage, forcing Marx to duck and weave to avoid being struck as he approached. Fortunately, even with him rarely using his wings, he was just as agile as ever.
His wings were an interesting case. They weren’t natural–his species, as far as he knew, were incapable of flight. No, he had obtained them a few years back during his quest for ultimate power. Halfway around Popstar and inspired by a quarrel he’d gotten into with a mouse, he’d designed the wings himself. It had taken him weeks using all of what he knew about magic, but with the Fountain’s healing he fully integrated them into his body.
Kracko was close now, and the spot Marx was targeting–its eye–was ripe for a high-speed kick. Unfortunately, Kracko saw it coming and drifted upward a bit, and Marx ineffectually kicked its cloudy body instead. The sound of more electricity charging up on top of it forced him to retreat.
He rocketed back down towards the ground, but apparently Kracko wanted a closer shot. The cloud followed him relentlessly, scraping up a few stray bits of cloud off the floor in the process as Marx circled the sphere. Shifting his strategy a bit, Marx pulled up, circling above Kracko and baiting it to fire.
The bolt of lightning was half a meter wide and blew a hole in the ceiling far above them, though that hole was closing abnormally slowly. Marx only spared a moment to look up at it, but it was enough for an idea to form.
He quickly flew back around the sphere to where Sunset’s unconscious body was laying. Gathering up the loose bits of cloud Kracko had released from the floor, he formed himself a ball to bounce on and grinned up at the approaching cloud. “You call that lightning?” he taunted. “I’ve seen worse shocks from a doorknob!”
Not his best quip, he’d admit, but it was enough to enrage Kracko. And that was all he needed.
This lightning bolt was wider than the last and certainly more powerful, which was all the better in Marx’s eyes. He dodged it, nimbly rolling away, and as soon as it impacted the cloudy floor the entire thing seemed to just go poof. The vast majority of the innermost sphere of Skyhigh had been vaporized.
That finally revealed their prize: the planet’s Fountain of Dreams. It sat on a small, irregularly shaped rock, lazily spinning about some axis. Marx, his wings still spread wide, rocketed over to Sunset’s falling body and chucked her directly into the Fountain’s waters.
He landed on the rim shortly thereafter, retracting his wings just in time for Sunset, who was back to full consciousness, to breach the surface and inhale. “Wha-” she started.
“No time to explain,” Marx cut her off, happy to note the aquamarine sparks jumping from the water to her horn. “Can you blast it?”
Her eyes, which were beginning to glow the same color as her magic, flicked to Kracko, who was still above them and still charging up another lightning blast. Naught but a moment later, it released it.
This one, however, was met halfway by one of Sunset’s own magical lasers, halting it midair and pushing it back. She seemed completely serene, her mane even beginning to flow as she channeled the Fountain’s power into her beam. Time seemed to slow as Marx watched the two blasts of pure power connect, and after what felt like an eternity, Sunset’s won out. The aquamarine blast completely overtook Kracko, blasting away most of its cloud and leaving it a floating eyeball with a few cloudy remnants spiraling around it.
It took the smart route and promptly retreated, phasing back into the upper ceiling.
Sunset panted as her mane and eyes returned to normal and the glow of her horn subsided. Still, she grinned and practically leapt up to the Star Rod, summoning their next Warp Star.
Where Popstar’s was yellow, Floria’s green, and Aquarius’s blue, Skyhigh’s Warp Star was a cloudy white, fitting for its planet of origin. Still giddily smiling, Sunset hopped on. “Ready to go?”
Marx grinned back. “Of course.”
A few moments after smashing through the three cloud layers left, they were back in space.
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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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I love what you made of Skyhigh. Hotbeat being Sunset's element, she should have less problem.
They're just going to be so used to it that when we get to Void (if we get to Void), they won't even react to the god destroyer of worlds...
Huzzah, it has returned! It’s always interesting to see the snippets of the Equestrian’s reactions. Good luck with the uni finals.
Oh man Sunset and Marx better watch out after this Kracko can hold one heck of a grudge... though does mean cloud boi has one less defeat too Kirby to be bitter about though.
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Thank you! I was debating how different I should make each world in MWW from the original game, but in SS and SSU they honestly all felt a bit samey, just with different color palettes. My goal is to make sure each planet has its own distinct identity.
Also, while Sunset may like fire, she isn't quite immune to it. And lava is very hot.
11564822
Power scaling in Kirby gets very intense very quickly once we hit the modern games, so worry not; Void will still be a threat once we eventually get to It.
11564918
Thanks! I know that the Equestrians' reactions are a bit few and far between currently, but that's mostly because, besides Celestia, Sunburst, and Starlight, none of them really know Sunset. (Also, I might've bit off a bit more than I could chew with having thirteen characters reacting to it, which is part of why I benched the Crusaders pretty early on, along with the ethical reasons, of course.)
11564980
True, but imagine the enragement Kracko could feel upon seeing both Kirby and Sunset fighting him, now that both of them have had a go at fighting (and winning against) him.
Yeah, Princess. but then she was bad at handling teenagers and you were being a teenager and everything blew up