Archives of the Friendquisition

by Inquisipony Stallius

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

“You should not have come here, Inquisipony,” Sniffles said with smile. “This is a sacred, secret meeting place, and I’m afraid you aren’t allowed.”

The vile pony was taller than the last time Caballus saw him, a full head taller than Roughshod in fact, by virtue of his outfit. Except for his head, Sniffles was encased in bulky, olive green power armor. Hissing slime oozed from every joint, corroding metal that was forged to resist the weathering of millennia. Tubes running from the backpack gently pulsed as they pumped something best left unknown between its plates. Even if it hadn’t been decorated with the putrid iconography of the damned, especially the tissue box cutie mark painted on the flank, it was unmistakably the ancient, pockmarked suit of a Traitor Marine.

The others staggered backward. Caballus alone managed to hide his shock, but made no such effort to hide his disgust. “This is the sovereign soil of Equestria, heretic. You’re the one who’s not welcome.”

Sniffles’ roaring laughter echoed in the chamber, raspy and hoarse. Eventually it ended in a coughing fit that was somehow no less jovial. “My little Inquisipony, I never said you weren’t welcome!” He paused to rein in his dripping nose with a wet snort. “I only ask that you resign your offensive occupation and renounce your False Princess before you try to join our humble ranks. Our recruitment policy is quite clear about that.”

“Join you? I’ve heard enough.” Caballus drew a pie. It was dense, baked with fresh pumpkin. He would need the extra stopping power.

“Boss,” Roughshod whispered nervously, “You sure we can take him? I mean, he may be ugly heretic scum, but… but for Celestia’s sake! He’s a Goddess-damned Pony Marine!”

“We outnumber him,” Caballus replied, “and he’s not even armed. Just stay sharp and we’ll be fine.”

“Outnumbered?” The Marine laughed again. “Oh dear, what a notion. Since you’ve stumbled upon our church, perhaps it’s time to meet the congregation.” He stamped his hind leg once on the stone floor, causing a loud metallic clang to reverberate throughout the stone chamber.

The tone faded, and was answered by a new sound. The sound of shuffling hoofsteps. A diminutive, robed figure appeared from the entrance directly behind Sniffles, descending the staircase that led up to somewhere else in town. It cowered behind the armored giant, until the Marine bowed his ear down to it.

“I’ve gathered them, lord, just as you asked,” whispered the Admanestratum clerk from before. At the sight of Caballus, she gave a frightened peep and scurried back behind Sniffles.

“Come then, my children,” Sniffles called out in a jolly, nasal bellow that boomed in the stone hollow. “Come meet our new friends!”

The sound of shuffling returned, but much louder this time. First one set of hooves, then another, and another. In moments, dozens of ponies began filing out of each of the entrances. Except for the space given to the Inquisipony’s team, the whole room was soon packed with ponies standing shoulder to shoulder. Caballus recognized faces in the growing crowd: the old bartender, bandits from the gang fight, a respectable-looking couple he had seen on the street, and many others; ponies from all walks of life. It looked like the whole town had answered Sniffles’ summons, and they were all staring accusingly at the four of them.

“Hairtrigger?” Caballus calmly inquired, “I’m not familiar with how things are typically done out here at sector’s edge, but is it normal for the entire population of a settlement like Applemattox to be at the beck and call of a renegade Marine?”

“Er… Not typically, no,” the Arbitrotter said. “I reckon this one slipped through the cracks.”

“Ya think?” scoffed Roughshod.

Sniffles smirked at the Inquisipony. “The haughty powers of ‘mighty’ Equestria don’t reach here, friend. They won’t. They can’t.” He nudged the clerk forward again, stroking the unfortunate pony affectionately. “These ponies were loyal Equestrians once. They prayed to a False Princess who doesn’t listen or care, and tithed to a bureaucracy too bloated and corrupt to protect them from the horrors that lurked beyond the edges of the known world. They cried out for help, and in our infinite beneficence, we answered.”

Even though she was beginning to pale and tremble from her proximity to Sniffles’ gut-wrenching stench, the clerk smiled contentedly at the attention she was receiving, like an adoring puppy. At least until her eyes rolled into her head, she vomited, and collapsed in a convulsing heap.

Sniffles grinned. “See how grateful they are? Without our help, they would be helpless, easy prey to the monsters that steal ponies in the night. But now they live free of fear and oppression. All they had to do was see Equestria for the lie that it is, embrace the truth, and be liberated.”

“Liberation!” the gathered crowd cheered in unison.

Caballus sneered at them. “I’d wager my rosette that this abomination and his ilk are the very ones responsible for those disappearances,” he announced. All he got in return were their blank stares.

“No it weren’t! It were the Grabbers!” came a decidedly uneducated-sounding voice from somewhere in the back. There were several murmurs of agreement.

“Yeah, the Deep-Grabbers were taking ponies, but then the Children came and they stopped!” an old farm-mare yelled. “They’ve done more for us than Equestria ever did!” Several more cheers supported her.

The Inquisipony raised his eyebrow and glanced back to Hairtrigger. “What are they talking about?”

“Why these ignorant, backward…” the pegasus said with disbelief. “The Deep-Grabbers are an old legend told by the settlers. They’re bogeys, spooks said to live underground out in the Rocklands, lurking and such. But there ain’t no such thing,” he said aiming his comments at the herd of townsfolk. “It’s just a story! Just something you tell your misbehavin’ foals; that the Grabbers will snatch them up if they don’t listen. Nopony in their right minds actually believes it!”

Caballus held up a hoof. “Don’t waste your breath on them. Everypony here is clearly too tainted by the traitor’s lies to listen to reason. Words won’t change any of their minds now. The only way to save them is with purifying flame. A flame I will be pleased to deliver.”

“An impressive claim, Inquisipony,” Sniffles wheezed. “Only I wonder; how then do you intend to make your daring escape, cut off and surrounded on all sides as you are?”

“Been a mite curious on that score myself,” Hairtrigger muttered.

“Don’t worry,” said Roughshod, “Cab always has a plan to get out of fixes like this.” The brown stallion turned to Caballus expectantly. “Right?”

Caballus shrugged. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“Ha! This is Equestria’s best and brightest, sent to foil our glorious plans?” the Marine mocked. “You four couldn’t foil your way out of a hole in the ground. Which is convenient, because that’s where we throw the unbelievers around here.”

His voice lost its friendliness for a moment, becoming cold. “Then you’ll pay for hurting my poor baby worms, Inquisipony.”

The ponies surrounding the team slowly closed in, forcing them up against the wall, step by step.

“Can you get us out of here, Mystic?” Caballus asked, trying to keep the concern out of his voice as the space between them and the heretical mob disappeared.

“You mean… as in teleporting?” she said anxiously. “I… I’m not very good at using that spell on ponies. And it gets exponentially more dangerous with each passenger you try to-”

“As long as the odds are better than certain death,” Roughshod said impatiently, “I’d say it’s better than staying here.”

“Alright…” Mystic said, closing her eyes. Magical power began to gather around the unicorn. A chill filled the rest of the room as her spell drew even the heat from the air into itself. Some in the heretical herd hesitated as their breath fogged in the air right in front of their muzzles. Aim for the surface, she told herself. I just have to get us to the surface.

“Don’t let them escape, my Children!” Sniffles shouted with delight, like a coach chiding a team of foals playing some field game. “We wouldn’t want them to miss all the fun!”

The tainted ponies all roared and charged at once. Caballus dropped one screaming heretic with a pie, and struck down another before the masses were upon him. Hairtrigger brought down three with quick shots from his Peacekeeper, and tried to get clear of the heretics by flying above them, but somepony grabbed a hold of his leg and he was dragged down. Roughshod reared up and slammed the first attacker in reach down into the ground, then kicked a second back into the oncoming tide, bowling many over. But he too was quickly overwhelmed by their sheer numbers.

Finally, the mob reached Mystic, who was still trying to finish their magical escape. One bandit lunged forward and tackled her, slamming her into the wall. Her head collided with the stone and her eyes snapped open. With her concentration broken, Mystic’s teleportation spell began to destabilize. The ball of energy swirled violently around the tip of Mystic’s horn for a moment, before it imploded to a single speck of light.

The unicorn stared at the speck, blinking, oblivious to the violence all around her. A split second later, it burst in a blinding nova.

---

Mystic awoke with a start. She would have yelped had a hoof not immediately covered her mouth.

“Hush, little lady,” said Hairtrigger’s voice in the pitch darkness, “you’re fine.”

“What happened?” she whispered, cautiously standing up. The floor still felt like stone, but it was uneven, not the smooth floor of the heretical shrine. The air had an iron taste to it. “Where are we? Where are the others?”

“Not sure,” he replied, “but I reckon that little trick of yours worked after all. Seems your aim was a mite off, though. Can’t tell which direction it sent us, but probably no more than a few dozen meters or so, right? Lucky for us, those heathens seem to have dug their little chapel near this here cave. If your spell scooped up the others, I’m sure they’re around here somewhere too.”

Mystic’s head throbbed from the effort, but she lit her horn to look around. The pegasus’s face appeared in the gloom, the soft light reflecting back off his augmetic lens. He was covered in soot, singed black by the teleportation’s side effects.

“Are you okay?” the unicorn asked.

“Fine, thanks to you,” he said. “Compared to the fix we were in, getting out of this cave should be easy.” Hairtrigger reached into a pocket on his armor and produced a luminator. Reciting a quick prayer to awaken the machine spirits and fireflies within, the Arbitrotter was rewarded with a beam of light revealing the cave tunnel before him. With the luminator affixed to his duster, he led the way forward.

The pair walked the narrow cave tunnel for several minutes in silence, following its twists and turns until it began to widen. Before they even realized it, they had walked right into a much larger cavern, one filled with a forest of stalactites and stalagmites. In every direction, stone spikes jutted from the floor like the trunks of trees, and others hung down from the impenetrable darkness high above. With every loudly echoing hoofstep, it was becoming even more apparent that it was a massive space.

Mystic tried to brighten her horn, to see if there were any clue that might lead to an exit, but it seemed the harder she tried, the harder the darkness fought to keep its secrets. It was as if the light itself was afraid to stray too far, lest it too became lost in the cave forever. “So…” she said, “which way should we go?”

“Beats me,” the Arbitrotter replied with a shrug. “Being trapped underground ain’t nowhere in the Arboates training manual. Wouldn’t suppose there’s some sort of spell you could just whip up to figure it out the right direction, is there?”

“I’m afraid not.” The unicorn thought for a moment, rubbing her chin. “But I think if we keep close to the wall, we’ll either come to another tunnel or at least we’ll know when we’re going around in circles.”

The pegasus mulled the plan over. “That’s actually darn clever,” he said, keeping the cave wall on his left as he set off into the dark. “Let’s go.”

After another couple minutes of walking went by without conversation, Hairtrigger spoke. “Say, you seem like an awful smart little filly. Did you go to some sort of fancy school or something?”

At first, Mystic said nothing, responding only with stony-faced silence. “I read a lot of books,” she finally said.

“Ah… right, sorry. They told me you were all hush-hush about things like that.”

Just then, the pair approached a massive stone column that lay across their path, one that was too long to simply walk around without straying away from the wall. Hairtrigger almost simply flew over it before he remembered that Mystic didn’t share the ability. With a polite gesture, he offered her a lift, which she accepted.

“It’s just that I got to wondering,” he continued as he picked her up in his hooves, “being the sharp, talented thing you are, maybe Caballus plucked you out of some sort of fancy school for pretty, gifted unicorns.” His mouth curled in a debonair grin.

Mystic wasn’t entirely sure what to say to that. She was unaccustomed to being flattered. Thankfully, the dim lighting helped obscure the blush on her face. “Well, I promise you, he didn’t.”

Hairtrigger gently set the unicorn down on the other side of the column, where they resumed their trek. “You just seem kind of young to be doing Friendquisitional work, is all.”

“I guess… it’s all I have,” was Mystic’s blunt response. The thought was a somber but familiar one, and she pushed it aside. “Besides,” she said, perking up a little, “I’m not much younger than you are.”

“No ma’am,” Hairtrigger chuckled, “I reckon you’re not. So, it’s books then, huh? Never been much for ‘em myself. Only one I ever really read is the Lex, and let me tell you something, little missy: it is dry. What sort of books are you keen on?”

“Whatever Caballus has on hand. There’s not much space on the ship for them, but he keeps a rotating library for the both of us while we travel. Mostly grimoires and spell-books for me to study, but others too: books on Equestrian history, sector culture and politics, classical literature. He often reads with me, especially theological texts for our regular devotionals. A couple times Fyzzix has even loaned me one of his sacred Technical Tomes. They’re almost impossible to understand for anypony who’s not a Meq-Priest, but the diagrams are still rather…”

Mystic paused when she noticed that Hairtrigger had fallen behind a few paces. “What is it?”

Hairtrigger had stopped to glare irritably into the darkness. “Daggum interference again. Can’t even see as good as my real eye anymore.” He tapped the side of the metal casing jutting from his eye socket, to no effect.

“What do you think is wrong with it?”

“No way to know,” the pegaus shrugged. “I try to look out into the dark, but I’m still seeing these big, fuzzy… shadows everywhere.”

A knot of unease filled Mystic’s stomach. She wasn’t sure what caused it in that particular moment; maybe the gravity of being lost in the cave had finally caught up with her. Maybe it was her worries about what had happened to Caballus and Roughshod. Hairtrigger talking about all the “shadows” around them certainly wasn’t helping. But whatever the reason, Mystic was all of a sudden very anxious about something. She began to trot a little faster. “Could we pick up the pace a little? I’d like to-“

“Get down!” Hairtrigger shouted.

Comments

[Doomande]

Nice that we have our first pony in powerarmour, that it is a filthy Nurgle scum is a minor detail. And a nice touch with the cutie mark

I know that this is a nitpick, but should it not be hoof in "Whatever Caballus has on hand"