A small assembly of friends gathered at the top of a massive sand dune in the middle of a nameless desert. Fourteen ponies and a lone hippogriff. All they were missing was a wolf . . . be he wouldn't be coming, not here, not today, even though he was ultimately the reason why all them were here.
All of them stood gazing down the unimaginable structure rising from the desert sands several miles ahead. It was massive, gargantuan. Its width might've even exceeded a mile in and of itself, and even though its height was nothing next to its other two dimensions, it was more than obvious this thing would tower over them were they standing right in front of it. It was a building, a library, supposedly, an enormous structure of obsidian standing there alone in a massive valley formed by the surrounding dunes.
The Doc had been right . . . even just looking at it from this far away made you feel a deep sense of unease. It was as if this whole thing just . . . wasn't right.
"Whoah," Ink Rose was the first to finally break the silence, "is that it?" She asked.
"Well let's see," Finn fiddled a hoof around in his satchel until he produced a drawing. It was one familiar to those who knew Doctor Wolf more personally, a drawing someone had made listening to his description of the library. Finn held it out in front of him just below the actual structure's place in his vision as his eyes went from drawing to building to drawing to building. "Yup!" He concluded in the same perpetually cheerful voice he always had. "That's definitely the place."
"Am I the only one getting creeped out just looking at this thing?" Silver Quill couldn't avoid asking.
"Nahh," Firebrand replied, "I'm pretty sure that's a universal feeling right now." He paused for a moment before turning his head to the group's two snipers. "Fox! Voice! Whatta'ya see?"
Both ponies raised up their scopes and started scanning the front face of the structure. They saw exactly what the doc had been able to remember and describe, along with a few new specifics.
"Looks one main staircase," Golden Fox reported, "plenty of pillars . . . and lit torches."
"No doors mate." Voice said, still not breaking his fake Aussie accent. "No windows by the looks of it either."
"It's just like the doc said." Ink remarked.
"Can you guys see any of the writing?" Key Frame asked, remembered that detail from the story.
"Yeah, there's plenty of it." Fox confirmed. "Looks like we've got English, Equestrian, either Chinese or Japanese, uhhh I think Greek and what look's like . . . Russian I think."
"Huh," AnY rubbed a hoof to his chin, "so it sounds like more different alphabets as opposed to different languages."
"Yeah," Key Frame agreed, "that's what the doc thought too."
"So, what does it say?" Lightning Bliss asked. "Er, the English, at least, I mean."
"Control." Both Fox and Voice answered at the same time.
"Why do I have an odd feeling that's what it says in every one of them?" Ink spoke the rhetorical question, voicing what they were all thinking.
Silence fell over all of them again. They all stood there on the peak of the dune, gazing out at something that shouldn't be there. All of them were entranced, in a way, at least for while, frozen there wondering. But the silence didn't last forever.
It was K.P. who broke the silence, of course. "Ugh! I hate creepy things. Can't we just blow it up already?" She complained to the rest of them.
"Um, I'm not sure that's really what we came here for." Sweetie Bloom remarked at the comment, only to be immediately contradicted by Firebrand.
"Oh no," their self-appointed leader corrected her, "that's exactly what we're here for."
An understandable assortment of "What" and "Wait what" came at his ears from almost everypony around him, all except for the few others who knew of the actual intentions of their "mission".
"Ok," Thespio began, "forgive me for maybe not understanding whatever the "bigger picture" is supposed to be here, but just HOW, exactly, were you planning on blowing that entire thing up?"
"Uhhh, I have to agree with the worst actor on this," AnY said, "blowing stuff up is what I normally do, and I'm just not seeing any way something like THAT is coming down even with everything me and Sweetie Bloom have put together."
"Yeah," Sweetie agreed, "I'm sorry Firebrand but AnY's right. I don't think it's happening."
"Relax! Ok? We have a plan." Firebrand finally spoke up.
"We?" Fox asked. "Who's we?"
"The privileged few." Silver Quill suddenly said with a minor smile. "Of which I am finally one."
"Oookkk, what are you guys up to?" Key Frame's suspicion quickly rose.
"We're gonna . . . test something." Firebrand offered next to no explanation.
"Why do I not like the sound of that?" Fox asked.
It was Thespio who answered, and who provided what was probably the best answer that could have been given. "Probably because anything secret that Firebrand does is usually really dangerous and anything Silver's involved in always goes over horrifically."
"Sooo, what's this plan of yours?" AnY asked the red unicorn.
"Finn." Firebrand passed the job of explaining everything off to the blue engineer, who had just finished setting up the magical Skype Box.
"Well you see," Finn began telling the entire group, "most of us who know about the library pretty much agreed that something about seemed inherently evil, and that it'd probably be in everypony's best interest if the threat of it trapping anypony else ever again were removed. Permanently I mean. But when me, Silver and Firebrand were talking the other day, we concluded that the building's unnatural nature might make conventional means of destruction a little underwhelming."
Everyone just stared, while Firebrand wore an excited smile and Silver still just looked satisfied to be included.
Finn went on. "So a few weeks ago, I made an video advertising myself as a helping-hoof pony whose perfect for random odd jobs. One of the comments I got was from somepony who wanted help moving some nuclear warheads."
The stares continued, and almost all of the eyes widened.
"They may not really be that big, but those are heavy! So I helped him load em up into his ICBMs. He said they were for emergency occasions, like Twilight and Flash Sentry becoming cannon or something else just as horrific. But, apart from just paying me, he also said if I ever came across something truly horrifying, I could send him a message on Skype and he'd launch one just for me, as a thankyou favor for helping him out. So that's what we're gonna do right now!" Finn finished just as the Skype screen came up.
"W-w-w-wait! We're going to NUKE this place?" AnY was the first to break free enough from shock to vocalize the blatantly obvious concern. "I thought we were coming out here to investigate this place?"
"We are," Firebrand confirmed, "we're investigating it by nuking it."
"Are you insane!?" Key Frame shouted.
"YUP!" Firebrand's face was all but beaming with a childish thrill.
He was almost immediately followed by Silver Quill adding on, "Honestly, who isn't. Have you even seen this little group of ours?"
"Dude!" Fox broke out of his shock next. "What the **YAY**! This isn't cool! Did you drag all of us out here just to get killed?"
"Relaaax, roarin orange," Silver had to say through some sort of horrible pun, "we already worked all of this out. It's perfectly safe! Finn's guy knows what he's doing."
"Annnd sent!" Finn announced, snapping everyone's head in his direction for a second before they all turned back to glare at Firebrand.
"Ok I'm just as mad at Firebrand as everyone, if not more," Ink Rose stopped the angry questioning before it could resume, "but am I really the only one who think's we should focus on getting just a LITTLE bit further away from here?"
"Um, I second that." Thespio agreed, followed then by everyone else within the proceeding three seconds.
"Finn!" Firebrand called out. "Ask him what the safety range is."
A pause followed the request before a notification appeared on the blue pony's Skype screen and he gave the answer he'd received. "He says it's standard 500 kiloton warhead, so as long we wear protective suits we should be fine to watch the show from about ten miles out."
"Do we even have protective ANYTHING?" Voice asked, breaking out of his fake accent for once.
"I suppose we could always just hold Silver Quill in front of us and use him as a shield." Eliyora suggested. Whether or not her suggestion was serious didn't really matter to hippogriff implicated in it.
Silver's head-feathers fell, and slipped into one of his existential contemplation moments. "Am I nothing else to you people?" He asked, though the focus of the conversation turned serious again before he received any answer.
"No need for that everybody," Finn spoke up again, "you know I come prepared to meet my team's needs whatever they may be!" He paused to pull out the bag of assorted useful items he'd used during the brief few hours he'd been the blue team man-servant. "I still keep this on me just in case. Fourteen radiation-shielding suits coming right up!" And with that he began to shake the bag, and just as he'd promised, out came full-body white suits with filtration masks attached.
". . . yeah I've already learned not to ask questions at this point." Golden Fox said, practically speaking for the whole group.
"Already everybody, suit up and let's head on out and watch the light show from a safe distance!" Finn all but cheered them forward in their action, like he usually did.
"Concern for personal safety aside, I can't wait to watch all the pretty lights." Eliyora said with something of a calm eagerness, drawing more than a few looks from the others around her.
Firebrand felt the need to correct her before putting on his own suit. "Ah, it's just one light," he told her, "but it is BEAUTIFUL!" And now he found himself receiving many of the same stares she had.
Everyone was fully suited within the next few minutes. They all now appeared the same: all quadrupeds sealed within loose-fitting reflective white sheets, and air filtration masks donned on their faces. In fact, apart from size, the only way to distinguish any one member from another was the presence or lack of a horn, since wings were kept folded inside the protective suits and no faces could be seen in detail through the light-dimming visors that guarded their eyes.
"Alright, let's move out." Firebrand ordered. "We'll go for that dune and guage our distance from the target once we get there."
Groans and mutterings escaped the mouths of nearly everyone as they all headed out, distancing themselves from ground zero of what was coming.
"Finn!" Firebrand called for the blue pony's attention. "Tell your friend it's go time."
A salute came from the now-covered pony, followed by hooves typing out a Skype message. A momentary silence came afterward, during which Finn picked up his messenger and he and Firebrand joined the others in quickly moving farther out. Some thirty seconds later Finn heard the simple sound of a new message and looked down to read: 10 MILES / 15 MINUTES
~~~
Far, far away, out in the boundless expanse of the open ocean waters, a black shadow lurked beneath the surface of the waves. It grew slowly, gradually, and only for a moment, almost to the point of appearing clear enough to discern. And then something happened, swift and sudden. A pulse shot across the ocean surface, and through the water came an eerie orange glow. The little circle of light beneath the waves grew larger and larger, and brighter and brighter, until finally the waves shattered around the point of its emergence. Billows of a beautiful orange steam sprang from the water, and amidst it all a long, gleaming rocket shot up and out, flames racing and roaring from behind, hurtling it ever upwards.
On, on and up it went, until its path began to curve, and it obeyed the pre-ordained arc it had been given. And at its height, at the absolute peak of the arc the body of the rocket shot away, leaving nothing a little capsule racing forward along the trajectory. On top of the rocket had been capsule, and inside of the capsule was a heavy metal cone.
~~~
"Alright, I think this should be good." Firebrand said as the group ascended the top of another massive sand dune.
As luck or fate would have it, the dune they'd chosen was in fact taller than the one they'd stood on at the edge of the valley where the library laid. They had more than a clear line of sight to it, though now at double the distance it didn't appear quite as massive as they knew it to be.
"How much longer do we have to wait?" K.P. asked, growing just the mildest bit impatient.
"Finn?" Firebrand addressed their newly-designated time keeper.
"Uhhh, should only be about ninety seconds." Finn determined. "We should be able to see it coming in any moment now."
"Um, guys, are we absolutely sure we're a safe distance away from this?" Thespio spoke aloud the doubts that many of them still had.
"Don't you worry about it Thespio!" Finn was naturally the one to assure everyone. "We've got a back up plan!" The moment his words were done, Finn brought out his engineer wrench and began waving up and down in front of himself. Within a few seconds, a TF2 teleporter had been produced. "I set up the other end before we left," he told them all once the machine was up and ready, "if anything goes wrong, we just hop right in and come out safe and sound back at the set."
"Ahm, why couldn't we have just teleported out here instead of walking all this way?" AnY asked, though he did catch himself afterward, remembering how the teleporter system actually worked. "Oh, eh, right, nevermind."
"Uh, guys . . ." Key Frame's voice drew everyone's attention. It was the tone rather than the words, and it was a tone that one couldn't really describe with words either. ". . . I think we have incoming."
Somehow everyone's eyes were all lured to the same spot in the sky. Though none of them really saw where any of the others were looking, they still were all looking up the same patch of blue within a second of each other. And there it was: the tiniest, most minuscule little dot situated against the blue and hurtling downwards in an angle. It was coming.
"Everyone!" Firebrand yelled. "Make sure your goggles are on and your suits sealed!"
Everyone fitted the goggles that they were already wearing, and they all checked their suits. Everything was sealed, and everyone was ready.
And there it came, closer and closer to the ground. Every few seconds a glint would flicker off of it, as the plummeting metal cone caught the desert sunlight. It came racing down, shooting for the roof of the library like some great arrowhead until the building was only a few hundred feet directly below. And then . . .
. . . and then even behind eye-shielding goggles, everyone's vision was flooded by a blinding radiance.
Atomshine.
Several seconds passed before anything became clear. After nearly a count of ten the light retreated from the edges of their vision, receding into the center, revealing the ongoing nuclear cataclysm that had produced it all.
The fireball flickered as it rose, climbing, climbing and curling down and inward on itself. They could see the blast wave in the form of the wall of sand it had sent out in all directions, blowing outward at several hundred miles per hour. But amidst everything . . . there wasn't a sound.
"Why's it so quiet?" Ink was the only one to ask.
"Because sound isn't instantaneous," Silver said, in the same hushed kind of voice, "in fact it usually takes about six or seven seconds for it to travel a mile. So we're probably not gonna hear anything for at least another forty or thirty seconds."
The fireball kept rising, the vacuum underneath it now pulling up blackened sand and dust. The mushroom was forming, but only once the ascending fire had died would it become a cloud. The wave of sand still blasted across the desert towards them, though it was visibly slowing down. Only after a full minute had passed did their ears all finally receive what they'd been anticipating. By all means, it was loud, but it wasn't deafening, not at the distance that were from its origin.
Now, just over a minute after the cataclysm began, then fire was dying, caving into black, pluming clouds. What had been the rising fireball now formed the bulb at the top of the miles-high stem. The mushroom cloud had come to its incarnation.
But all their time couldn't be given to observing the aftermath of annihilation. They had a purpose for coming here, and the few among them who'd originally known were waiting carefully for lower-most layer of smoldering cloud to clear. They only needed just enough, just enough for them to get a glimpse. Because something in their guts told them that there were only going to be two possible outcomes to this.
Another minute of waiting and watching brought what was left of the blast wave to them. After covering this much distance it was now nothing more than a decent forty mile-per-hour gust, along with the sand it kicked up. It left the group's vision temporarily obscured, reducing the world around them to nothing bet a tan and yellow grainy haze. A few did instinctively hold a hoof up over their eyes at first, at least until they realized that their masks and goggles already guarded their faces completely.
All of the sudden a bought of obviously-forced coughing caught everyone's attention. The source, as it turned out, was Silver Quill.
"Uhh, Silver, what are you doing that for?" Ink Rose asked.
"Yeah, we have masks." Firebrand added. "There's no way you're actually choking on the sand."
"By no means," the coughing abruptly ceased to allow the hippogriff's voice to emerge, "but this scene just felt empty without it."
Only the masks held back the looks Silver new he was getting. But even in their absence, he still took great joy in receiving them all.
Eventually the dust and sand did settle down, and their line of sight to the library, or rather the base of the mushroom cloud became clear again. The peak of the cloud had risen higher; it had to be a dozen miles up by now. But it was the base they were concerned with . . . or at least that three of them in particular were concerned with. It was beginning to clear, and it was only a matter of moments before they would see . . .
Just then, a brief rushing sound came from nearby. Sparkles were tossed threw the air for a few seconds, surrounding a flash of pink, from which two ponies emerged. It was the two who'd been missing for the entire event, one Scottish earth pony, and one black and red pegasus.
"Oh! And well would you look at that! That stupid alicorn even managed to make us late to whatever this was." Maddie complained the instant they emerged, pointing with a hoof up at the mushroom cloud.
"Oh come on! Seriously?" Toon Kritic whined upon seeing what was before them all. "We missed out on a Nuke!?"
"Eh," Firebrand shrugged, "snooze ya lose."
"It's not our fault!" Maddie vented the cause of their tardiness. "Mary Sue refused to teleport us with her stupid alicorn magic while you guys still moving. She wouldn't do anything until you all stood still and . . . um, what are those suits?"
"Yeeaahh, should we be wearing those?" Toon asked as well.
"Oh no, don't worry." Finn promised them, removing his own suit and goggles in demonstration. "The blast has already gone by so the thermal pulse is already over. All you really need is a facemask now." He ended fishing out two additional air filtration masks from his satchel and tossing them over.
The two newcomers donned their masks and joined the others in staring out at the towering aftermath of the atomic process that had taken place only minutes ago. Most of them stared for the sake of it, but Firebrand, Finn and Silver focused their eyes at the base of the cloud as it continued to clear.
Just a few more minutes . . .
. . . just a little bit longer . . .
And then it finally lifted, the smoldering cloudbase faded away . . . but a dark color still occupied that portion of their vision. The black of the mushroom cloud was fading, but the sand of the desert wasn't what took its place, nor was it even the colored glass nuclear fire was known to produce from desert sands, it was . . . obsidian.
Every pair of eyes lifted wide open, and cold shock replaced the blood in everyone's veins.
It was still there!
And not just part of it, ALL of it! There was nothing different, no change whatsoever! It was unphased, unharmed . . . like it hadn't even been touched.
The library was still there. And no one . . . no one stared at what they were seeing without a deep, creeping sensation of unnaturality.
This place was wrong.
One voice spoke out: Thespio's, in a voice meant to match a role from an older film, where a similar situation had happened. And he matched it perfectly, in fact his tone was even more convincing . . . perhaps because this was actually real.
"Negative . . ." he said, voice shaking and carrying the darkness they all felt icing their veins, "Target Remains. Repeat . . . TARGET, REMAINS."
Author's Note
Yeah, safe to say I've become a big fan of the Bronalysis crew over on YouTube as of late.
As I said in the description, this came to me after making a joking comment on one of Finn's videos and then subsequently watching Doctor Wolf's origin story reading.
The idea here mainly being that Firebrand, Finn and Silver Quill suspected that "The Library" might be some kind of "Elder Thing", and so they decided to test such a theory . . . by means of Firebrand's biased choosing.
YouTube channels of everyone involved:
Firebrand ~ Josh Scorcher
Silver Quill ~ MLP-Silver-Quill
Finn ~ finnthepony
Ink Rose ~ Ink Rose
Thespio ~ DaWillstanator
Golden Fox ~ GoldenFox
KeyFrame ~ Keyframe Productions
Maddie ~ Mad Munchkin
Toon ~ ToonKritic Y2K
Voice ~ VoiceofReason
KP ~ ILoveKimPossibleALot
Blissy ~ LightningBliss
Eliyora ~ Eliyora
SweetieBloom ~ Sweetie Bloom
Doctor Wolf ~ DRWolf001
