Chapter One: Rocks in the Road
The lights were nearly blinding. If not for the enchanted contacts Nilliana wore, she’d have been seeing stars for an hour.
But this wasn’t her first rodeo.
Honestly, a rodeo would be more entertaining. The gryphoness thought, managing to suppress a chuckle as she walked down the model runway, making a simple, clean-cut turn. Even if it was itchy beyond all measure, the teal and cream arrangement around her neck stood out starkly against her white and grey colorations. The black and red streaks on her face and wrist only made the arrangements pop more, one of many reasons she apparently was “perfect” for such things.
Last one for the night.
It was a race between the gryphoness reaching the curtains and ripping off the itchy, flowery thing around her neck. Thankfully, for her paycheck’s sake, the former won. Even so, her dark green eyes narrowed as she neared the curtains. It was a battle, to say the least.
At last safe behind the obnoxiously lavender curtains, the gryphoness blew out a tired breath. Her manager, Garti, tossed her a bag of coins.
“Thanks, Nilli,” the brown gryphon said with a laugh. “I know the designers appreciate you not shredding this one.”
“Hey, that was once, okay, twice,” Nilliana retorted as she carefully unclasped the teal and cream-colored arrangement from around her neck and shoulders. “And it was their fault for leaving pins in the wrong places. I warned them!”
“Yeah, fair enough. I think that’s it for the next two weeks, but then there are three shows back-to-back. Usual pay plus overtime. I’ll send you a schedule when we’re a week out. They’re still nailing down the specifics. That sound good?”
Setting the shawl arrangement down on a table littered with the other items, Nilli nodded.
“I’ll be there. Take care, Garti.”
“Same, Nilli.”
The backstage area opened directly to a small park behind the downtown venue. The gryphoness ruffled her feathers and took a few deep breaths of the air. It wasn’t exactly fresh in the middle of the concrete jungle, but it was better than the stuffy interior of that runway area.
Sometimes it was a bit of a thrill, being able to show off. But at the end of the day, it was for the paycheck more than anything. To quote Gardi a year or two ago, “You’ve got a body type that is in demand, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. You can model scaled-up Kirin wear, slimmed-down Hippogriff garb, and Gryphon fashion all in one. And designers will pay handsomely for that.”
Considering the pay for a single event was more than Nilli made in three months running her magic shop, it was an obvious choice. Besides, the various designers (and her manager,) abided by her refusal to do anything too risqué.
Which ironically, was a thing even though races didn’t normally wear clothes.
I’m there to show off some fashion, not be eye candy. Even if that is a side effect, a big one.
Hence moving. Maybe this will be the last time.
She wrapped herself up in a teleportation spell, reappearing in her shop. The wooden and stone building was located on the edge of the city, but adjacent to a transportation hub which was starting to increase her customer base after a mere few months.
Of course, considering the shop was able to move cities at a whim also helped with that. The current location was new. It had been an easy matter to send her shop to the bought property. She had moved around before.
Having her home on the opposite end of the medium-sized property was an added bonus. All she had to do was walk a few minutes to open the shop. Unlike other cities, there was actually space to breathe in this area.
Flopping down onto a massive bean bag, Nilli let out a groan. Conjuring a small cube, she tossed the arcane item up into the air and caught it. The blue, magical creation reflected off of the few similarly-colored feathers across the gryphoness’s face. She always liked her blue feathers, even if they were just spattered here and there across her midsection and top half.
When you had to stare at yourself in a mirror when getting done up for events, you learned to appreciate things about yourself. Or drown yourself in the voices forcing you to learn the opposite.
She let the magical item fade, curling up on the beanbag with a frustrated huff.
Things felt different.
Emperor Tanzil was…off. It wasn’t just the fact he was interested in the pony princess. If Nilliana was being honest, the poor guy needed some sanity in his life. And Twilight at least had a sane, if not slightly neurotic head on her shoulders.
No, this was deeper.
There was a tension whenever she spoke with her once-mentor. When he had approved her transfer to Tall Pines a few months ago, it had been with a fair bit of caution. Yes, it was for research, and he had also understood the deeper reasons. But there was something else.
She got up, examining a military trunk in the corner of the wooden living room. It had been a non-negotiable gift from the Emperor a few months ago, along with a series of high-stress combat courses. Popping open the hinges, the gryphoness examined the large pistol with a sigh. A new rifle also lay in the foam in the case, multiple magazines already loaded with explosive rounds and packed side to side, lining the edges of the military container.
What are you expecting, Tanzil?
With a wave of her claws, the pistol was returned and the container latched. Powerful magic spread through her home, the gryphoness double-checking the various defensive spells coating every atom of the building. Even something nearly immune to magic would have trouble getting into the house.
Nilli shuddered, shaking her head. Her home and shop had defensive measures rivaling the royal gryphon castle.
So why do I feel like there are eyes burrowing into the back of my skull?
The home should feel cozy, with magic candles casting a comforting glow across the table, chairs, kitchen, and living room. And yet the gryphoness’s chest was tight with anxiety.
Another sleepless night, I guess.
She curled up on the beanbag again, levitating a few pillows to nest in. Insomnia was ever-present in her life. Sure, spells and drugs worked, but the gryphoness didn’t like waking up in a cold sweat from the nightmares.
Sleeplessness, or night terrors. Sometimes, she had to just get some shuteye, like tonight. With the world on a razor’s edge, she’d think herself into a tizzy. Everyone was just waiting for a threat that was out there. Waiting, but still going about their business.
A simple sleeping spell settled over the gryphoness, a final thought drifting through her mind.
I need a project. Maybe I’ll get started on that research this week.
Of course, that meant tracking down a certain chaos unicorn.
Arcane trotted through the air, the light-violet unicorn all smiles as the city sprawled out beneath him.
All of this is mine. But it won’t just be me, not forever.
Entropy was nearly complete. Plumbed with water, sewage, electricity, everything a city-state needed to provide for its inhabitants. Nobody was here yet, of course. But it was almost done. The infrastructure had triplicate of backups and could house tens of thousands without breaking a sweat!
For all intents and purposes, it was livable. Automated golems patrolled the streets and kept up with maintenance in the absence of citizens; they even grew and cooked food! All of it went into the warehouses and deep cellars of course.
Sure, magic could have made it so nothing ever broke. He could have made plumbing that was unbreakable, devices that never ran out of power, or plants that grew without being tended to, but then it didn’t feel lived in. Natural. It was an ironic statement for a city in the Chaos dimension. Entropy itself sailed through the stars, an arc of normality amidst a never-ending dimension of wonders. Plumbing would need fixing, electric outlets would need wiring, and tables would need serving. Keeping things grounded in a semblance of normality just felt right, especially when the inhabitants would be those who didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Yet he now found another purpose to the city.
Nobody had said anything, but the stallion had heard whispers. Something had gotten out of the Silos. Something bad. He had even tried to locate it, but the “thing” being from Limbo was resistant to chaos magic even trying to find it.
Discord was even unsettled, and his dimensional shields around portals had been strengthened significantly. Arcane had quickly learned to do the same.
The stone walkway and platform for the portal sites in his city had been refurbished. Pony-shaped Golems now waited to receive guests, and chaos-powered decontamination equipment surrounded the entry points. Automated turrets ringed the platform and edges of the city; a point defense system that would fry anything that got too close.
Arcane wasn’t sure if anything could survive in the chaos realm. But belt-fed autocannons with various payloads were a good enough insurance policy as any. The portal locations were similarly covered by their fields of fire. If anything bad managed to come through, it wouldn’t leave the entry platform in any form other than a fleshy paste.
He wanted to be wrong. But the anxiety of the world was getting to him. Even when living in his house down the street from Astral and Sassi, the stallion could feel something horrifically wrong with the realm. There was something out there that nullified his magic, something that shouldn’t exist in this plane. And it was waiting.
If my nightmares come true, I want a fallback point. Entropy is a safe haven, but it can also be a fortress against nightmares.
And Arcane had plenty of horrific dreams to go around.
He prepared all the same. Astral and Sassi were going to far greater lengths than; after all, the unicorn had installed and tested the majority of their equipment.
All of which was likely breaking every arms-control law in the book, even if the two Thestrals had permits. But they knew what dangers were in the Silos.
To that end, Arcane decided to take a brief trip. He conjured a portal, popping out near the observatory in Tall Pines. The structure had been completely rebuilt, an ornate wall surrounding it, and the distant house of his friends. The wall also cut off the observatory from the other part of the property, leaving the majority of empty fields around Astral and Sassi’s house for privacy.
Astral had said to test the systems whenever he wanted; Arcane appreciated that. It gave him purpose, something to do. The refurbishment of the telescope and observatory had been child’s play for the unicorn to accomplish. Rebuilding Sass and Astral’s house had been likewise simple, as had the structural reinforcements.
It was the only way they could be completely sure there weren’t listening devices in the walls, after all. It wasn’t such a paranoid thought considering the creatures vying to develop a RASP procedure of their own.
Yet now, all of the unicorn’s spare time was spent trying to figure out the answer to a very simple, yet infinitely complex question.
What do I want to do with my life?
At present, helping others was high on the list. That was why the unicorn had offered his magical services to Astral and Sassi. Well, and being part of their weird RASP family of course. All of the highly illegal, or at least dangerous, countermeasures within their property had a singular purpose.
They were to keep every creature inside the walls safe.
Even after everything Astral and Sassi had been through, they looked outwards. Of course, their home was their castle. But Arcane wasn’t a fool. There were things here and there that made him realize these two Thestrals saw a coming storm and weren’t about to abandon creatures to it. It was nice to know Arcane’s anxieties weren’t just in his head. Everyone was on edge.
The unicorn examined one of a few dozen pillars along the tall wall near the gated entrance. There was a small visitors center, the stone entry path leading to the observatory for tours and the like. Visibly, the simple yet elegant marble column was indistinguishable from the dozens within view. A simple, polished orb of stone adorned the top of the circular pillar.
Arcane grinned, blowing a dark blue mane out of his black and kaleidoscope-colored eyes as he looked closer at the item. In terms of creations, he was quite proud of this one. Astral and Sassi had given him goals, parameters, and overall specifications. And Arcane had gone to work. It was funny; one might think performing orderly tasks like creating a house or electronic devices went against chaos magic.
But what was more chaotic? Chaos being chaotic, or chaos being normal. The latter was far less expected. That was how Arcane saw it, at least. And so far, he had been right. You simply had to utilize the magic in a non-conventional way.
The pillar itself was armored to withstand everything short of an airship’s cannon blast, along with the walls. Inside housed within the orb, a reinforced minigun was cradled within an armored frame. Of a similar model to Sassi’s that she had carried through the Silo, the turret was tied into an entire automated system enveloping the property. Each pillar was fed by a self-replicating system of repair parts, ammunition, and targeting information with a dozen backup spells.
A similar defensive system was set around Astral and Sassi’s house, but the observatory was, as far as Arcane could tell, a fallback point.
While the unicorn didn’t know the first thing about electrician work, chaos magic did. He thought of something, and it was created, perfectly wired, and set up. It had all been tested, of course, a bubble having been erected around the facility each time. What began as a crude sketch and an idea for each segment of the device had come together in a beautiful array of technology and chaos magic.
Arcane wasn’t about to tell his friends, but the measures they had put in were a bit terrifying even to him. There were turrets, magical repulsion fields on the walls, bubble-shielding systems, and quite a few bunker-like structures underneath the observatory. It exceeded the security of almost every military base the unicorn knew of, only rivaled by the militant island of the Last Light Organization.
To Arcane’s knowledge, nobody knew about it, and he wasn’t about to tell a soul.
Besides, they had let him paint faces on all of the claymores. So Arcane was just as guilty in this case.
He’d have thought them crazy, if not for knowing full well what they were facing. If he was unable to flee to his own dimension, Arcane would have done the same thing. In fact, his own home down the street was hardened in a similar manner after the Thestral’s.
They could all feel it, and they were preparing as best they could. Sassi and Astral trusted him to keep them safe with these systems in an emergency, and Arcane wasn’t about to let them down.
They were his friends, after all.
It took only an hour or two, Arcane testing all of the turret systems, stocked tripwires, cameras, armored doors, and a dozen other rather interesting countermeasures. As expected, they performed flawlessly. Any bugs had been worked out a hundred tests ago. The automation was flawless and had multiple safety features to prevent any unfortunate accidents. In the end, a living creature had to give certain orders which prevented any deadly automated. That had been, of course, a priority. Astral and Sassi had been given their fill of homicidal AI’s.
With that done, that meant he could have the evening free.
Teleporting back to his house, the unicorn sat down on a rather ugly plaid, but plush, sofa. Free time should have been a freeing thought. Yet without a daily job (for now,) it meant…nothing. Yet “nothing” somehow meant everything.
Having nothing to do used to be such a horrible thing. It just meant I sat in my cell.
Even now, Arcane fought the looming urge to stay busy, anything to prevent the boredom from creeping in. It had taken some long talks with Fluttershy, but he was adjusting. Doing nothing was okay. There wasn’t any pain coming after doing nothing.
It was okay to think, to just be.
But that didn’t mean Arcane didn’t try to stay busy. He tried to help creatures every day. Even if it was something simple. In fact, the unicorn had created a crude system in his city to track various instances of need, which made it easy. A truly random selection of the most serious cases of creatures seeking help.
He couldn’t fix the world, but Arcane could try to patch what he could. Maybe in the future, he could do more. He would do more.
But first, I need to fix myself.
And that’s okay.
A rumbling in his stomach indicated Arcane’s destination would likely be somewhere out for dinner. It was something of a regular occurrence now. Sure, he could just conjure food, but it didn’t taste or feel the same. Eating a fresh-cooked meal out and among creatures was, he found, a low-stress way of acclimating back to what real life was.
Maybe I can also visit Mally.
The reunion with his mother months ago had been a relief, but slightly awkward. He was a different pony from before but his mom loved him all the same. She immediately had picked up on his nervousness and simply smiled.
“I’m just so happy you’re free from that place. I’m always here to talk,” she had said. “May I make a selfish request?”
“Of course.”
“Can you visit next month?” The gryphoness had been struggling not to cry, and Arcane had wrapped her up in a hug, even though he was still getting used to the whole “positive physical touch” aspect of life.
“I promise to try and talk every week and visit every month. At least for the near future while I’m figuring stuff out.”
He had, thus far, held up that promise. His mother thankfully understood boundaries, but Arcane appreciated someone checking in on him. Someone he could trust.
That list is few and far between these days.
Wrapping a simple blurring spell around his frame, Arcane teleported to downtown in Tall Pines. The spell wasn’t anything fancy, just something to hide his fangs and eyes. Pitch-black pupils surrounded with a scintillating, kaleidoscope of colors generally drew attention. Besides, enough creatures knew about him from his stint of helping publicly to be recognized.
Unfortunately, they knew him far more as the unicorn who could use Chaos Magic.
It had only taken him a week to realize how essential the concealment spell was. Even with Astral and Sassi vouching for him, Arcane saw the same reactions as he did in his youth. Fear, distrust, hostility. A few kind smiles, but when creatures actively moved out of the way to avoid you…it hurt.
Not much had changed since he was young.
It was a simple equation for many. Arcane used chaos magic. Discord used chaos magic. Discord was random. Chaos magic was random and often harmful. Therefore, Arcane was a ticking time bomb, extremely publicized good deeds or not. He wasn’t to be trusted, because chaos magic couldn’t be trusted. A swath of heroics couldn’t undo generations of mistrusting chaos magic. And even if all of that was to be ignored, Arcane certainly looked odd with his multicolored eyes.
To Discord’s credit, the Draconequus had shown genuine remorse when realizing the negative association wielding Chaos brought. But that was no matter. Maybe in time, creatures wouldn’t fear him, and realize he wasn’t Discord. Arcane had seen glimmers of that. He had ventured out without the spell a few times, and far more creatures smiled at him. A few even waved.
He didn’t really know how to respond to that.
For now, Arcane didn’t mind a simple hiding spell. It was disheartening knowing that creatures didn’t trust him, but at the same time, he felt so unbelievably awkward when there was a wave or a smile.
He just wasn’t ready to deal with it 24/7, not like Astral or Sassi could.
He meandered the street, looking down at the signs in the distance. There was a 24-hour bar and diner that was highly recommended, so that was the unicorn’s destination for the night. Maybe he’d stay and have a drink. Non-alcoholic of course. Some of the worst parts of Arcane’s life had been when the Guards had been drunk and decided to beat him senseless with their batons. He’d never touch the stuff as long as he lived, nor associate with that sort of crowd.
But perhaps, just some hot cider and listening to normal conversation would do him some good. It felt nice to be in society again. Even just sitting at a table in the diner and nibbling on appetizers all night felt freeing. Seeing usual patrons come and go, families have dinner, and then the night life kicking into gear before then settling down before morning. He kept his eye out for any magical creature with green eyes; a perhaps futile attempt to locate whoever saw him in the Silos those many years ago.
If nothing else, Arcane wanted to at least say thank you.
It gave him a reason to learn who each creature was who entered. It took effort to do so without magic, to pay attention to mannerisms out of the corner of his eye. Things that were difficult felt nice to accomplish after trial and error.
Even if that meant learning how to be a normal pony, sitting at a table, and ordering a meal. It had taken him a few tries to not stammer and squirm when placing a request. Eventually, he wanted to ask the recipe for a few of the dishes. The unicorn had started cooking in his own kitchen, and was slowly beginning to make a routine out of it.
A smile twitched onto the pony’s face at that. Just being able to experience the flow of normality around him felt good, a counterbalance to his chaos magic. But in the end…
It feels nice to live again.
Aaaaand we're off with some familiar faces!
Slower upload schedule for now. Hope you all enjoy!
As always, feedback is appreciated.
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and now we wait for it to all go downhill
Based on what you say later, this should be "teal".
11721871
Thank you!
DOH
11721851
I'd never do THAT....
The calm before the storm... but *boy*, do I enjoy this setup! <3 Lock and load!
11722471
..... click-clack,,, Hell, It's about damn time.