Chapter XXI: Mekkai, the City in the Sky
As Sunset and Marx exited Cavius’s atmosphere, the latter looked at her a bit strangely. “So, about that thing with the Bonkers…”
Sunset sighed. “Honestly, I was bluffing,” she admitted. “I don’t think I’d have it in me to actually rip someone’s arm off.”
Marx seemed oddly satisfied with her answer. “So what did you do to his arm, then?”
“I just numbed the entire thing so he thought I would rip it off,” Sunset answered. “It’s essentially just like applying a local anesthetic; doctors back home do it all the time to prevent having to put someone under.”
“Makes sense.”
They went silent for a bit, and Sunset winced as her tongue flicked over her missing tooth again. “Think somewhere on Dreamland has good dental implants?” She didn’t intend to have to return to Dreamland, of course, but it was probably a good thing to keep in mind regardless in case getting back to Equestria didn’t work for some reason.
Marx chuckled. “Maybe! I’ve never had to deal with stuff like that!”
Sunset laughed with him. “Yeah, that makes sense.” She narrowed her eyes, considering Cavius’s Fountain’s strange feeling. “Hey, you said that Popstar’s recorded history goes back two thousand years, right?”
“Right about, yeah!”
“Did…did something happen then that wiped out any records beforehand?”
Marx went quiet for a long while. “Probably,” he eventually answered. “Historians don’t really know, given the lack of actual written records. Hell, I think that book you found on Aquarius might be the most significant archeological find in centuries.”
Absentmindedly, Sunset summoned it and flipped through. “Really? I thought you said you didn’t recognize the language.”
“I don’t,” Marx reaffirmed. “But it looks similar to some really, really old untranslatable tablets that archeologists have dug up. This might be the key to translating them!”
“How so?” Sunset asked. The book was certainly no Rosetta Stone; the only language in there was that strange, blocky text. “We don’t have anything in a modern language to compare it to.”
Marx nodded. “Sure, but it has diagrams!” he retorted. “Actually, could you flip back a few pages?”
Sunset did as requested, ending on a diagram that took up both pages. It seemed to be a simplified illustration of Popstar’s system, albeit not to scale. Each planet had a label next to it, but Sunset was sure that wouldn’t be helpful in translation–whatever civilization was here before would have had different names for them. The strange thing, though, was the diagram itself.
Marx looked at it with narrowed eyes. “Well that’s weird.”
Sunset tilted her head. “Care to explain?”
“Well for one thing, Popstar only has three moons,” he started. Next to the star-shaped planet at the far side of the first page were four close circles. “And the diagram doesn’t show its rings, either.”
“Maybe the fourth moon got too close and was torn apart?” Sunset suggested.
Marx performed a surprisingly decent emulation of a shrug for a creature with no arms. “Possibly. But that’s not all,” he continued. “Look, Aquarius and Skyhigh are way larger than they should be. Mekkai’s not even there, and Halfmoon doesn’t have its moon.”
Sunset decided to power through the first two statements–those could just be issues with the scale–and focus on the planets she hadn’t been to yet. “How do you know Mekkai’s not there?” she asked. “What if they just didn’t include Halfmoon in the picture, for some reason?”
Marx shook his head. “Mekkai isn’t a sphere,” he explained, much to Sunset’s shock. “It’s a disc.”
“That…shouldn’t work gravitationally,” Sunset complained. “At all.”
“Neither should Popstar,” Marx countered. “And that’s a lot bigger than Mekkai. The leading hypothesis is that the Fountains keep it stable.”
Sunset frowned. Something had kept the gravity Earth-like on all of these miniature planets, so she supposed that it wasn’t out of the question that it was the Fountains. They were the most intensely magical things she had ever encountered, after all. Besides maybe the Element of Magic itself.
“Is Mekkai…artificial, then?” Sunset proposed. “Maybe this was drawn before it was built, if it is.”
Marx chuckled as they began to close in on their next destination. “Oh, ‘artificial’ doesn’t even begin to cover how strange Mekkai is.”
They got within visual distance of it, and Sunset’s jaw dropped.
The ordeal on Cavius had left the Equestrians entirely shell-shocked, even through most of Sunset and Marx’s conversation. Never before had they really witnessed that level of violence, with the exception of the immortals in the room. Discord, of course, had stumbled across far worse atrocities than mere gladiatorial combat in his years, and was only really shocked by the fact that Sunset managed to pull off that bluff convincingly. Even he had thought she was ready and willing to literally disarm that Bonkers.
Celestia and Luna, on the other hoof, were no strangers to bloodshed, even if Equestria had not been at war in over six centuries. The most recent conflict, outside of the short-lived Changeling invasion earlier that year, had been a small skirmish with the Dragons in CR 379, which Celestia had put an end to personally before any of her little ponies could get significantly hurt.
No, most of those two’s experience with war came from quite a bit earlier. The War of the North had been far more brutal than later history books would make it out to be. Sombra’s coup and the resultant war he waged claimed the lives of over seven hundred thousand ponies, including the entire population of the Crystal Empire–almost four hundred thousand souls had been ripped from time and transplanted to the modern day. That was even after close to a hundred thousand military deaths from the Empire, mostly slaves forced to fight under Sombra’s regime.
It was the first major conflict that Celestia and Luna led Equestria through. Several of Equestria’s northernmost villages were razed to the ground during the war, and the two of them bore witness to many horrible things over those eight long years. The recovery period after Sombra’s defeat had also been equally grueling.
Perhaps, Celestia pondered, her and Luna’s differing opinions on violent solutions stemmed from there. Her sister had always been the more combative of the two, but after the War of the North, she took to protecting the realm with gusto. A few years after the war, Griffonstone, which had been in decline for centuries following King Grover’s death, made a bid for some extra territory against a weakened Equestria.
Unfortunately for them, Luna had been in the area. She almost single-hoofedly sent them packing all the way back to Griffonstone, and for centuries the griffons had called her the Bringer of Darkness. There was even a rumor, for a time, that Luna had sent the Arimaspi to steal the Idol of Boreas, but Celestia personally found that to be a bit unlikely. Her sister had been on the Moon at the time, after all.
Hay, Luna had also practically invented the field of oneiroturgy, another attempt to be her subjects’ sword and shield, even against their own minds. The fact that her contributions to Equestria’s safety often went unseen was one of Celestia’s greatest regrets, a weight that she knew would never be truly lifted.
She had lost her sister for a millennium because of her censoring of the more regrettable parts of leadership, and had lost Sunset for almost a decade from similar foolishness. Nodding to herself, she resolved to not make the same mistake again.
“I must say,” Luna spoke up, interrupting her sister’s thoughts. “This speculation of some…horrible calamity taking place in ages past is most disconcerting.”
“What do you mean?” Rainbow Dash asked. “They said that happened two thousand years ago!”
Both Luna and Discord gave her a very pointed look.
Rainbow chuckled nervously. “Point taken.”
Rarity’s sudden gasp redirected everypony’s attention back to the screen. “My, that city puts Manehattan to shame!”
Mekkai was the single largest artificial structure Sunset had ever seen. It was a disc, like Marx had said, but that failed to put into perspective the sheer scale of it. It was upwards of a thousand kilometers in diameter–though only a few hundred meters wide. The city took up the majority of space, sprawling out from the massive, kilometer-tall skyscrapers in the center and tapering off into more generally urban and eventually suburban the further out it got. A one hundred kilometer thick ring of farmland covered the edge of the disc, and even at their distance, Sunset could make out what looked like giant high-speed rail corridors.
And that was, quite literally, just the half of it. Their angle of approach also allowed them to see the underside of the disc, which seemed just as populated, if not moreso than the top portion. But there were some…differences, Sunset noted. The top half of the disc seemed almost brighter and cleaner, while the bottom even looked grungy. Its main form of lighting looked like it was neon signs, like some sort of cyberpunk dystopia.
For the moment, though, Sunset put her concerns about Mekkai’s social structure aside and focused on the Fountain. “How much do you wanna bet that the Fountain’s right in the middle?”
“Sucker bet,” Marx replied. “Where else would it be?”
“Fair enough,” Sunset conceded, glancing down as the houses began to speed by below them. A few seconds later, they began decelerating and descended, touching down on a walkway only a few kilometers from the planet’s center. Sunset’s landings were definitely getting better with each planet, and this one was no exception–much like on Cavius, they were able to simply step off of the Warp Star before it disintegrated.
The two took a moment to look around at the area. There were a few other pedestrians around, but that wasn’t much of a concern to them. Up this close, the buildings seemed even taller than Sunset had expected. It was like someone had taken New York, Tokyo, and Dubai, merged them all together, and ramped it up to eleven. Everything around them stood upwards of a kilometer tall at the very least, but the air lacked the usual smell of cities. They had landed on a pedestrian walkway above a set of train tracks, one of which sped by below them as Sunset watched. It was definitely entirely electric, and she absentmindedly wondered how a world like this even generated renewable power.
Marx’s gasp from behind her prompted to turn around, and it seemed like that question would wind up answered. Right at the exact center of the disc stood an absolute monolith of a building, stretching so high into the sky they couldn’t see the top of it. Every path they could see led to or from one of its entrances, but the more concerning thing there were the guards in front of every door. Most were Sir Kibbles, but Sunset was able to see a few Blade Knights and Poppy Bros here and there.
The main thing that caught Sunset’s eye, though, was the giant sign above what she assumed was its main entrance. It was in Somnic, of course, which she couldn’t read, but she just so happened to have a translator around. “Hey, Marx?” she asked. “Could you read the sign?”
Marx blinked. “Oh! Of course!” Clearing his throat, he continued. “Vul Manufacturing and Energy, Incorporated. Think it’s the same Vul as the Captain?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Sunset replied. “Vul did say that he came from Mekkai.”
“Hey, maybe his family runs the joint!” Marx grinned. “I wonder if they’ll just let us in!”
Sunset frowned. “Probably not, to be honest. If Meta Knight recruited someone from here and then left, he must have thought that Mekkai’s Fountain is adequately guarded.” She chuckled. “I doubt they’d just let a couple of schmucks in just for saying that they’re gonna stop the Sun and Moon from fighting.”
Marx joined her in chuckling. “Yeah, that seems doubtful.” His expression hardened. “But the Fountain’s definitely in there. So how do we get in?”
Sunset frowned. “Well, I don’t think I can just get us in there with a wallflower spell,” she said. “And they probably have something to deal with invisible invaders, like an IR camera or something.”
“Could we tunnel under, somehow?” Marx suggested.
“That…doesn’t seem very feasible,” Sunset answered. “Neither does a full-frontal assault. Even with whatever power ups the Fountains have been giving me, I don’t think I could do that with my magic alone.”
“I’m sorry what?” Marx asked suddenly. “The Fountains have been what?”
Sunset momentarily cringed at her mistake, but very quickly smoothed her expression. She hadn’t quite meant to let Marx know that. It was going to have to come up eventually, though, so she might as well go for it now. “I think it has to do with the Warp Stars absorbing themselves into my horn,” she elaborated. “Did you really think I would’ve been able to fight Wham Bam Jewel to a standstill without an extra power boost?”
Marx opened his mouth, closed it, and seemed to consider the question for a moment. “Fair enough.” He shook his head. “That’s besides the point, though. Any other ideas?”
Sunset frowned in thought. “Maybe there is a way to access it from below,” she considered. “There has to be some way between the upper and lower halves of the city, right? They wouldn’t force people to travel a thousand kilometers just to move a few hundred meters up or down.”
“That seems like it would check out,” Marx agreed. “You think that there’s one from below up into the building?”
Sunset nodded. “It’d make sense if they have commuters from down there.”
“Would the security down there be more lax, though?” Marx pointed out.
Sunset grinned. “Well, if they have a bunch of people coming and going, what’s one more invisible blip on the records?” Her plan set, she turned around and pointed at a random pedestrian, raising her voice. “Hey, you!”
The Cappy she’d targeted looked up, surprised at her and Marx’s approach. “Me?”
“Yeah, you,” Sunset reiterated. “Is there an easy way down to the other half of the city?”
The Cappy made a face. “Yeah, but why would you want to go there?”
“We have our reasons,” Marx cryptically cut in. “But that’s besides the point. How do we get down there?”
The Cappy shrugged. “I mean, if you want to waste your time you might as well.” He pointed down the walkway. “There’s a Descent Pod a couple blocks that way.”
Sunset nodded politely at him as they passed, making their way towards the area.
The Descent Pod, Sunset decided, was not a pleasant way to travel.
It was exactly as its name implied: a large pod, not dissimilar in size from a human elevator. The travelers, after entering, would be sealed in before the pod launched downward at high speeds.
The unpleasant part came at the halfway point; the pod suddenly flipped upside down with them still inside. The passengers could still very easily tell that it flipped, but the fact that gravity also swapped directions at the same time nearly made Sunset motion sick. Luckily, she was able to recover in the few seconds it took for the pod to reach the bottom surface, but she wasn’t very much looking forward to going through it again.
Especially while maintaining a muruflos on top of it, given that she was going to have to keep them invisible somehow.
For now, though, they could look around on the underside of Mekkai. It was…honestly fairly underwhelming, Sunset thought. Sure, it was far more crowded than the upper city, but with it came the general feeling of big cities that she was used to. People of all species rushed to and fro, seemingly desperate to just get to their destinations under the almost-blinding neon lights on nearly every building.
At the very least, it wasn’t smoggy like cities on Earth had been. Cars seemed nonexistent on Mekkai; if one wanted to travel long distances they had to take a train. That was just about the only nice thing Sunset had to say about it, though. The concrete hellscape of this half of the city was somehow worse than the upper half. The buildings may have been shorter, “only” capping out at just under a kilometer, but the increased pedestrian traffic, narrower walkways, and general grime made it feel incredibly claustrophobic.
It also just felt darker, somehow. The actual light levels were about the same on both sides of the city–the disc faced Popstar edge-on, so lighting really only depended on whether the Sun was visible. It seemed to be winning against the Moon at the moment, as far as Sunset could tell from how it appeared to be day. She couldn’t quite see Popstar itself in the sky through all of the buildings.
Perhaps it was the neon giving off that vibe? They really seemed to like the style down here.
“So uh,” Marx started as they started walking, careful to avoid tripping into someone, “what exactly is your plan, again?”
They rounded a corner, another very large building coming into view. It was in the same relative location to the Vul building on the layer above, and just as Sunset suspected, far more people were coming and going here. Lighting her horn, she answered. “Well, to start off I’ll use muruflos–the wallflower spell,” she explained, applying it. They hadn’t been getting many strange looks to begin with, given the sheer number of intelligent species in the system, but now no one even noticed them.
“Whoa,” Marx grinned, “are we just invisible?”
Sunset shook her head. “Nah. It’s essentially just incredibly subtle psychoturgy to get people to…look the other way, so to speak. Hence why I can keep us able to notice each other.”
“Ah, that makes sense.” Marx turned back towards the building. “So we’re just walking in the front door, then?”
“That’s the plan,” Sunset affirmed, beginning to walk forward.
A few paces later, Marx piped back up. “So, why couldn’t we just walk in up top?”
“A wallflower spell works best in a crowd, and it ain’t gonna do shit against an infrared camera,” Sunset elaborated. “Or any camera, really. And since there was basically no one out on the streets up there, we’d get spotted pretty much instantly.” She frowned. “Actually, that’s really weird. There were like, five pedestrians we saw up there, right?”
Marx nodded. “Yeah, and five thousand down here. You’d think a city like this would have a more even population spread!”
Sunset shook herself out of her thoughts on that as they approached the door. Slipping by right behind someone, she let out a sigh of relief when no alarms went off. They were in.
Now they just had to figure out where to go.
The lobby the front door had opened into was extremely large, the size of some of the bigger ballrooms Sunset had seen back in Canterlot. Multiple hallways exited it from all sides, but what really caught her attention was in the middle of the room: a giant, ornate map of the complex. Carefully, they made their way through the crowd and stared at it.
Fortunately, Sunset’s hunch was right. The two buildings were connected through a Pod terminal in their basements. And the labels were pretty helpful, too!
“Think the giant area labeled ‘Classified’ is where the Fountain is?” Marx asked, reading off of the map of the upper building.
“Oh, definitely,” Sunset agreed. “Looks like the first few levels on both sides are manufacturing, too, but we’ll have to get through the bottom floors, first.” Unfortunately, both of the bottommost floors in either building were dedicated to security, besides the parts containing the Pod terminals.
“Eh, it shouldn’t be too bad, right?” Marx wagered. “We’ve got your fancy magic to get us through!”
As it turned out, Marx was mostly right. Getting down the stairs and onto the floor with the pod terminal was easy enough, as Sunset’s muruflos kept the security guards, mostly Sir Kibbles, from noticing them. Even getting into the Pod terminal itself was fairly easy, since one of the guards they were following entered it and they could slip in right behind them.
The problem came with getting into the Pod itself. Entering with any of the guards was right out, since the Pod flipping around would surely get them noticed. But getting the Pod open would be a different matter; they looked like they took some sort of keycard to unlock and were guarded by a much larger Kibble Blade.
“Hey, Jim!” the security guard Sunset and Marx had been following spoke up, talking to the larger member of his species. Quickly, the two unnoticeable beings rushed to the side of the room to minimize the chance of detection.
“Howdy there, Brent!” the Kibble Blade happily replied. “Going up?”
“Heh, yeah,” Brent answered back, grabbing a keycard from nowhere and scanning it. The doors opened with the sound of decompressing air and he stepped in. “I got assigned up top for this week. See ya around!”
With that, the doors slammed shut and the Pod left for the upper half of the city, while Jim began whistling a jaunty tune, none the wiser of the two creatures watching him. “Think you can crack it?” Marx whispered.
“Probably,” Sunset whispered back. “But the door opening is gonna be suspicious, and if we just fight him he’ll probably call for backup.” She lit her horn and began the subtle process of electrokinesis on the Pod’s card reader. “Can you cause a distraction?”
Marx grinned widely. “Give me five minutes.”
Decisions, decisions, Marx thought as he scurried up the stairs. He needed to cause a commotion big enough to draw the Kibble Blade away from his post, but for that he would need it to happen on the floor above them. There were so many things he could do! Attack a guard, break something, pull the fire alarm…
Hmmm… he considered as he entered the manufacturing floor. He could almost taste the tension in the air, the brewing conflict that only needed a spark to release. Guards were posted at pretty much every exit, and the less said about the workers’ states the better. All-in-all, it was rather dystopian, and not at all the kind of system Marx liked.
Perhaps he should go with attacking a guard. Or, he thought, I could go bigger.
Grateful that Sunset’s wallflower spell was still affecting him, he snuck around to a Knuckle Joe’s workstation. The Joe was scowling as he worked with a metal plate of some sort, and every so often he’d look at the nearest guard with absolute hate in his eyes. It was perfect for Marx’s plan.
Plus, sparking a revolution on Mekkai would make it that much easier to conquer once he was done with Popstar, too.
Gathering up the discarded scrap metal into a ball, he kicked it at a guard. “Vive la révolution!” he shouted as he did, slipping away just as everyone’s attention turned to the Knuckle Joe.
The guard immediately dove for him, apparently assuming that the fighter was the one who threw the ball at them, with the Joe striking back in self-defense. Another guard joined in soon after, while a second disgruntled worker took the opportunity to charge at another. Quietly, Marx slipped out of the room unnoticed as it descended into absolute chaos.
A quick trip down the stairs, and he reentered the Pod terminal as Sunset seemed to have finished up her magic and was waiting on his distraction. “So, what’d you do?” she whispered.
Marx grinned his usual shit-eating grin. “Just wait for it…”
A walkie-talkie at Jim’s side crackled on. “All units on the bottom floors, we have a situation on BF2 that requires immediate attention. I repeat, we have a situation on BF2…”
Jim grumbled at the interruption to his whistling, but left the room regardless. Sunset flared her horn and opened the door immediately, and a few seconds later they were on their way up.
Luckily, the terminal on the other side was unguarded. Whether the company was just that confident in their downstairs security or they were just busy dealing with whatever Marx had done, Sunset was unsure, but she didn’t really care. They were inside the main building undetected, and were thus able to speed their way up two floors to the first basement level of the upper building. The classified section of the map took up an area two floors tall, so it seemed that whoever had built this building had built up the floor above the Fountain.
The unicorn grinned as she exited the stairwell. The room they were in was a straight shot to where they figured the Fountain was, the opposite wall having a giant yellow sign over a door. Sunset still couldn’t read Somnic, much to her continued annoyance, but she figured that it must have been an “Authorized personnel only” sign. Of course, the door itself was guarded, as they suspected.
Unfortunately, the room they found themselves in was very loud and very crowded. It was an assembly line, though Sunset couldn’t really see exactly what they were producing. Because of the crowd, walking right up to the door and getting it open wasn’t really an option, given that that would get them discovered rather quickly. Keeping up the muruflos for this long was starting to get a bit annoying, though, so she wanted to get a solution quickly.
Her eyes flicked around, looking at the walls. It didn’t seem like there was a pullable fire alarm, so she had to go for the next best thing. She looked at the conveyor belt in the room, which was bringing in metal from downstairs. Her horn flared a bit brighter, and a large section of it spontaneously caught fire.
The workers nearest to it screamed and ran as the alarm started blaring and the sprinklers went off. Sunset and Marx quietly stepped aside to avoid getting trampled as everyone else was quick to rush out the door to avoid the flames as well. Soon enough, they were left in an empty room with nothing but a fire being doused by the sprinklers, thick, black smoke beginning to pool on the high ceiling, and the smell of burning rubber.
Sunset let the wallflower spell drop and grinned. “Alright, let’s go grab Fountain number seven.”
They made their way most of the way across the room before Sunset caught a glimpse of something that gave her pause. On one of the workbenches sat a large, golden, and eerily familiar metal claw.
Cristina Vul was not having a good day. She had just gotten out of a meeting discussing their financials, and it wasn’t looking good. Ever since her brother had left for Popstar with one of their Lobsters, the company had been in a bit of a downward spiral. She still hadn’t found someone to fill his former position of head of engineering, and she just didn’t have the knack for personal leadership that he did.
So when there was a fire in one of the manufacturing floors and an active fight spreading throughout the lower building, she felt rather justified in being absolutely pissed as she stormed to the head of security’s office. “Ronald, what the hell is going on down there?”
Ronald, a rather large Cappy, jolted up. “Ah, Cristina! Hello! Where do you mean?”
Cristina pinched the top of her beak. “Cut the shit, Ronald. I know you know what I’m talking about.”
“Well, the fight down in the lower building is still escalating,” Ronald reported. “The brawling has spread up at least two floors.”
“And the fire?” Cristina asked.
“Seems entirely standard,” Ronald replied. “The sprinklers are taking care of it pretty nicely. I feel bad for the couple of newbies that walked in right as it happened, though.”
Cristina blinked. “New hires?”
Ronald shrugged. “Seems like it. Here, look.” He pulled up the camera feed from a few seconds ago.
Cristina squinted at the screen. She had no idea what that unicorn was, and the pink one seemed more like a Noddy in a jester’s hat than anything else. “What’s the current camera look like for that room?”
“The smoke’s obscuring it,” Ronald unhelpfully pointed out while pulling it up.
“And infrared?”
The view switched, and Cristina’s eyes widened. There was the obvious hotspot of the fire, but two other blobs of heat were moving towards the back wall.
The back wall behind which was her company’s Fountain.
Acting quickly, she grabbed Ronald’s communicator off of his desk. “Intruder alert! We have two confirmed unauthorized entries on BF1 directly next to the left stairwell! All nearby units, get there and seize them!” Glaring at Ronald, she continued. “Release the Lobster.”
“You know that that’s going to cause collateral once Security gets there, righ-”
“Just do it,” Cristina ordered. “Keep those two out of the next room at all costs.”
As soon as the phrase “Intruder alert!” blared over the building’s sound system, Sunset started running. Getting caught had not been part of the plan, but they were so close now that retreat was not an option.
Unfortunately, before they actually reached the door, the ceiling opened up and a Heavy Lobster, identical to the one she had faced on the Halberd, fell in front of them. Its lifeless green eyes trained onto her and Marx, and it let out a step forward and opened fire.
Quite literally–it spewed out a flame from its claw, and Sunset and Marx scattered to avoid it. She sent a laser its way, but it just bounced off of it like the previous Lobster she’d faced. This was bad, extraordinarily so, even. They never even defeated the Lobster back on the Halberd! They had essentially gotten it to defeat itself by taking out the floor, and somehow Sunset doubted that the same strategy would work here.
Marx, at least, had immediately scampered off to hide behind something, so she could at least count on the Lobster not attacking him. He was a lot more vulnerable than she was, after all!
The robot followed up on its attack by surging forward in an attempt to ram her. She couldn’t actually get out of the way in time, and was forced to teleport to avoid it. She reappeared behind the metal monstrosity, but was disappointed to find that it had no visible exhaust pipes and thus no real weak point to attack.
The Lobster turned around quickly and was relentless, beginning its next attack before Sunset even had a chance to think about how to counter it. This one was a barrage of tiny missiles, though it was far enough away at this point that she could successfully jump out of the way to dodge. They exploded against the wall instead, creating a small, but visible dent.
That gave Sunset an idea. A few ideas, actually. The last Lobster’s targeting systems had been in its eyes, so before it could properly attack again, she created a smokescreen. That at the very least seemed to confuse it for a moment, but it didn’t last. The robot instead leapt high above her obscuring cloud, landing back down with a thud and opening fire with another set of missiles immediately.
She was too close this time to dodge them, so Sunset was forced to focus on shielding instead. It held against the missiles–although her horn was certainly feeling the strain–but the Lobster seemed ready to rush at her again.
At least until a piece of metal soared through the air and tinged against its head, dividing its attention. “Hey, tin can!” Marx shouted from across the room. “Over here!”
The Lobster turned, but Marx had already left his previous spot and was running around just outside of the robot’s range of vision. Sunset, taking advantage of the small reprieve it was giving her, began formulating a plan.
Regardless of how strange and wacky this world had been, basic thermodynamic principles still seemed to apply. No energy conversion was perfectly efficient, so the Lobster had to have some way to give off waste heat. She glanced at the large claw. Like a flamethrower, perhaps.
“Marx, throw me some of that scrap metal!” She shouted, the Lobster’s attention snapping back to her.
Marx grinned. “You got it!” he shouted back and kicked a piece of metal in her general direction. She snatched it right out of the air with her telekinesis as the Heavy Lobster opened its claw again and attempted to fire its flamethrower.
It found said flamethrower very quickly clogged, however, as semi-molten metal was forced into the gap. Said metal cooled rapidly as well, as Sunset focused as powerful of a cooling charm as she could on it.
Its flamethrower shot, the Lobster retaliated with another series of missiles as smoke covered its eyes. Unable to get out of the smokescreen in time, its shot went wide, impacting the wall again and denting it further.
It charged at her again next, and that forced her to use up more of her mana and teleport again. The Lobster bodily slammed into the wall, and the structure even loudly creaked. Sunset grinned. Even if they weren’t going to be able to get through the door normally, it seemed that taking it down was always an option.
The two quick teleports had left her a little bit drained, but Sunset’s plan seemed to be working. Even as she watched, the Lobster looked like its structural integrity was failing as it began to overheat. Its turn this time was far more sluggish, and its claw was jittery as it raised it to face her and Marx returned to her side.
Perhaps, Sunset figured, its magical protections might begin to fail as well. It attempted to use its claw–whether to launch missiles or attempt to use the inoperable flamethrower she was unsure–but she grabbed the appendage in her telekinesis and slammed it shut.
The metal legitimately deformed, rendering the claw nearly useless. Sunset’s grin grew as the robot attempted to charge them, just about the only attack it had left.
Her horn lit up with the light of the noontime sun, wrapping the entire Lobster in her aura and stopping its charge short. She lifted it into the air with a slight grunt. The magical resistances it had were still making this difficult, but it was really nothing compared to holding up a building.
Unfortunately, time was not on their side. The door slammed open as several security guards burst into the room. “HALT!” one of them shouted.
Sunset, of course, did not halt. Instead, she used the now immobilized Heavy Lobster as a battering ram, slamming it into the wall and tearing a hole straight through to reveal the Fountain. The Lobster hit the ground next to it hard, both of its legs and one of its claws getting sheared off from the impact.
Sunset and Marx moved immediately, before any of the guards could react. They leapt through the hole and sprinted for the Fountain. Much like Cavius’s, Mekkai’s Fountain felt a bit dull, Sunset noted. Unlike that one, though, this Fountain just felt…drained, really. Like power had been consistently drawn from it nearly as fast as it could regenerate.
It still created Mekkai’s Warp Star just fine, though. This one was a coppery orange, and she and Marx hopped on as soon as it was there. Smirking, Sunset gave a mock salute to the charging security guards before they teleported away.
They phased back into reality kilometers above the city, smiles still wide on both of their faces. “So, only one left and then we can summon Nova, right?”
Marx nodded and looked towards where Sunset presumed their destination was. “Yep! There’s only one Fountain left in the system.” His expression softened a bit, as if he was considering something, but he shook it off fairly quickly. “Let’s go get Halfmoon’s.”
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So, Marx decided to start an uprising of the working class to distract everyone else.
There's a Karl Marx joke or seven in here somewhere.
Firstly, I love the contrast between Sunset and Marx needing to carefully plan and prepare to reach the fountain and Kirby just... removing any and all obstacle.
Secondly, Marx appears to be having second thoughts. Makes me wonder why he wants the fountain, and if it's truly as basic as "I wanna rule the world"...
Sunset's grin
Interesting to once again see references to the fact that Sunset spent a lot of time on earth.... Shiver Star is really going to throw her for a loop and that makes me happy.
Wonder what Vul's gonna say when his sister sends him a message about some crazy unicorn and a lunatic purple ball with a jester hat broke into her factory, then caused a riot before forcing their way to the fountain.
11583331
I mean, I couldn't go this far in MWW and not have at least some gags centered on Marx's name!
11583461
Kirby, as wonderful as he is, is very simple-minded in achieving his goals. It certainly pays for him to be as powerful as he is. And Marx's motivations and thoughts will certainly come to light in due time!
Oh, and thank you for pointing out that typo! It should be fixed now.
11583496
Oh, I have plans for Shiver Star. Many plans, in fact. Sunset spent upwards of eight years in Ohio taking advantage of her looking young to learn as much as she could about Earth from local schools, so landing on Shiver Star will certainly be an...experience.
11583681
At this rate, both of the Vuls might have to share a drink over their orange unicorn woes.