The Warlock

Mzark was a deep city. Not by Human standards, it was practically on the surface. But bu Equestrian standards, it was the deepest they had ever seen. And for the ponies and my self, it was the deepest we had ever been before. The lift took a while to get us to the city itself, but we got there eventually.

We walked off the lift, and Blackreach, which I learned on the way down was the unicorn’s name, rounded us up in a circle.

“Alright, the Princess had given us two tasks for this city. Objective number one: Find and retrieve an experimental human weapon hidden somewhere in the city. We don’t know how long this will take, so Brick” She gestured to the only male pony in the group, the bodyguard “is carrying a months supply of food, water, and general supplies for us to use. Objective two: Princess Celestia was vague on this on, but she told us to make frequent stops so, and I quote “Gareth can collect his pay.” I don’t know what that means, but Gareth does. Now, lets start at the back of the city and work our way forward.”

///

The way back was mostly uneventful. It only took an hour for us to reach the rear most portion of the city. Luckily, the rear most was also where the military of the city was stationed. Combing through the base did not yield much in the way of loot, only a few more cells of my multitool, but it was a start.

We stopped after an hour of combing through the barracks to have some breakfast. We ran into a problem when brick took out one of the food bars for me to eat.

“What’s in this?” I grumbled while chewing around the thick, stringy mess in my mouth. I somehow managed to choke the glob down, but my mouth and throat felt violated.

“Oats, honey, hay, and some lavender and salt for taste. Standard military rations.” Brick said after swallowing his bite.

“Well shit. This is gonna be a problem.” The others flinched at the profanity, but I did not care.

“What’s wrong, Gareth” Twilight asked, concerned.

I passed the mostly whole bar off to her. “I can’t digest hay. These bars are completely inedible to me.”

The others paused for a moment, before it hit them. “We don’t have any other food. We have to abort the mission.” Blackreach groaned out. It had taken her days to put this expedition together, and now they had to abort because of some guy who couldn’t digest the most basic staple of the Equestrian diet. It was incredibly rare for someone to not be able to eat hay, but not unheard of. “Go ahead and gather what you can, Gareth. We will come back her later when we have something you can eat.”

I wandered off, feeling bad. It had obviously taken a lot of effort on her part to make this happen, and I had made it all for not. I wandered the base, just looking through lockers, desks, drawers, and various rooms for anything of use.

I found thirty more cells for my multitool, a hundred mid-power rounds for my rifle, and some odd capsules and vials in one of those wall mounted first aid kits. They were the only things in there. There were only three varieties; red, blue, and green. I found an ingredients and instruction label for each. Each kind of pill was the size of an aspirin, and the vials looked to only hold a couple of milliliters. The red pills and vials were general healing potions, the blue restored magical reserves, and the green was a general pick-me-up and stamina restoration. The pills were for time release and the vials were for immediate use. Worrying about expiration dates, I searched all over the box until I read the phrase, “Produced: 5/1/253M7 Timelocked: 6/1/253M7”. I had an idea what that meant, but wanted confirmation.

I wandered back to the others and approached Blackreach. “Hey, what does “Timelock” mean? I found some meds with that on the box. Do y- Whoa!” I pulled the box of magic boosting pills out to show her when Twilight practically tackled the box from my hand.

“You found TIMELOCKED pills?! This is amazing! Timelocking was one of the only good things the humans ever created! It is the perfect preservation technique. We have no clue on how to do it because we have no examples other than what is in books, but this might just be what we need to recreate it! Please tell me that you found more?!” I swear I heard a rubber band snapping. She had gone from lamenting the cancellation of the mission, to excited and frizzy haired, asking for my pills. Like an adorable Lewis.

“Sure thing.” I pulled the dozen boxes and the hand full of vials I had found in one of the first aid kit and handed them over.

Like I had stuck my finger in an electric socket, I sat up straighter. “We might not have to cancel the mission after all!”

This got Blackreach’s attention. “What do you mean? We don’t have anything for you to eat.”

I got a smug grin as I began spinning another web of bullshit. “Elves and Humans are evolutionary cousins. Different enough for the curse not to effect us, but similar enough that we shared a number of biological necessities. Including diets. That is the reason I am here in the first place, I can use human technology while you can’t. If we find some Timelocked rations, we won’t have to cancel the expedition after all!” It was a sound plan, but we actually had to find them in order for it to work.

This got everyone fired up again, and we began searching more vigorously. We eventually found a door with the words “Rations” printed onto them. Covering the door nobs was a sheet of metal, with a keyhole. Carved into this was a circle, and inside the circle was another two circles, with even more circles, lines, and dots all around it.

“Hey guys! I found it! But the door is locked with some kind of metal thing!” I called out. We were kind of spread out looking for this, but they came quickly enough.

Twilight hit it with an unlocking spell, only for the beam of light to bounce off of the surface of the lock. Frustrated, she tried again, and a third time. After that, she turned to us and said, “I can’t pick it. The lock is solid Alum. The only magic that will work on it is runic.”

“So you can’t use runic magic to open it? And what the fuck is Alum?” I asked dumbly.

She sighed. “I am a sorceress, not an enchantress. If we want in there, we have to find the key.” Not answering my second question. I would figure it out later.

///

We had been searching for an hour or so for the damn key. Twilight and Blackreach were searching the barracks and offices, while Brick, Shutter (the other pony), and I were searching the other rooms. The mess was devoid of everything other than the smell of food rotted away long ago. The CO’s office had an ancient bottle of mead, which I pocketed, and some more cells, but nothing other than that. The doctor’s office and clinic were another matter.

The cabinets full of meds were Timelocked. None of it was safe for ponies, but it could be useful for me. More vials of varying size, more pills, and some painkillers. They were small though, so they weighed less than ten pounds. Along with it was some general doctor stuff, like rubbing alcohol, bandages, plaster, and some other stuff. I took the bandages and alcohol and left the rest.

Inside the doctor’s desk were a few things. There was a pistol variant on the plasma rifle, and ammo for it. There was a white multitool (I had only seen the black ones before, so maybe this was for doctors on the battlefield?) and cells to go with it. There were four or five bottles of that ancient mead, and a flask with the same stuff. And there were a set of keys.

“Hey! I think I found them. Check it out.” I called to the others in the next room. I took the keys from the drawer when I heard a light clink sound from under them. Inside was a single vial of grey liquid. “What the...” I mumbled to myself.

The vial was about the size of the others, but there was writing on the side of it on a tiny label. “Booster. Do not expose to magic.”

“Huh. Cool.” My ring wasn’t going off, so it must not be evil (ring was a generous term. Ponies did not have rings, they had something that locks around the fetlock. It made me look like a gypsy). But I couldn’t put it in the bag, so I slipped it into one of the inner pockets of my robes.

“You found it? Well lets go test it out!” Brick called to me.

///

The ring had three keys on it, one of which was to the doctor’s office, though that was redundant now. I had kicked the door in. The second one opened the Rations door lock. It fell off with a light clunk. It was not big, only the size of an tablet, so I pocketed it, wanting to see what it did.

Opening the doors proved one of the misconceptions ponies had about humans wrong. They did not eat ponies. Humans here were apparently pescatarians. The rations all were 24 hour rations, and were the size of three Hersey bars stacked on top of each other. Because they kind of were. The only indication of what they were was the ingratiates list. One algae bar, one chocolate bar, and one fish pemmican bar. All of them had the same produced/timelocked stamp on them, so they were still viable. And the ring didn’t go off, so they were safe.

Blackreach was nervous. “What do they say?”

“Timelocked. The expedition can continue!” The rest cheered.

I spent the next hour packing all of them into my bag. There were only a few hundred in there, and they weighed almost nothing. I snacked on one of the “Salmon, Officer, Type III” rations. The timelock was really good though. The pemmican was still soft.

///

We explored the rest of the base for the rest of the day. Turns out that the third key was to the armory. I was fully stocked on cells, plasma rounds, some kind of thick batteries with handles, and for some reason arrows. The armory could use a restocking, but nobody was going to. I picked up some new rifles, including a sniper version, an LMG variant, and a massive plasma cannon that used the batteries with handles. There was a lot of money in the office, either they had to pay for their own ammo, or the quartermaster was doing some laundering.

The money was odd. They looked and felt like credit cards. Thick plastic with the various denominations printed on either side. The different denominations were different colors too. Ones were green, fives blue, tens red, twenties purple, fifties orange, hundreds yellow, five hundreds white, and thousands silver. Because there was nobody to spend it on, or anybody who would buy it, the money was completely worthless.

I still took it though.

The officers all had some kind of mead in their offices. They must have loved the stuff. Everyone knew that mead did not go bad, so there was not a “timelock” stamp on the bottles. This meant that the mead had been sitting there for over a thousand years undisturbed. A bottle sitting in my dad’s pantry for ten was worth hundreds, and tasted like it was worth thousands. What would these be like? I didn’t bother opening one, I had the flask. It was full, and a little rubbing alcohol around the mouth sterilized it.

I was about to put it to my mouth when I stopped. I had a mission to complete, and that was to take all of this city’s cool shit. Being drunk would not help that. With a sigh, I put the flask into the bag, and instead looked to the box of green pills, more specifically, one of the warnings.

“Do not use to replace sleep for more than three months.”

If anybody had seen me at that moment, they would have been wary of the gleam in my eye.

“The looting has been doubled.”

///

What followed was a solid month and a half of looting. Twilight had to leave early for some reason, so it was just the four of us down here. They learned to help me in looting every house of its valuables to keep us moving.

///

One and a half months later..

///

It was very quickly apparent that the bag I had was more than a normal bag of holding. It became apparent after the first military base. A normal bag of holding could usually hold 250 pounds, but this one just kept on going and going. I did reach a point where I could not fit any more in the bag, so I wound up dumping most of the weapons in one of the open manholes. The meds, ammo, jewelry, and mead stayed though. I still wound up dumping most of the money though, only keeping the highest denominations for display.

We had finally reached the end of the city. Every house had been looted, and every building was drained of ammo, jewelry, booze, and meds. We had come across a few more military bases along the way, and they were better stocked than the first one. The rations wound up being the only food I would keep from the entire city’s worth of food. They were only a few ounces, and they were timelocked.

The rest of the team was fed up with me, but were not complaining too much about the time it was taking, they were being paid by the day. The team was relived when it was discovered that this was the last building in the city, so the weapon must be in this one, and fuming that this was the last building in the city, so the weapon must be in this one.

The building was actually a door built into the wall of the cavern. Set into the door was one of those finger locks that I had to unlock by shoving each finger into a hole, grasp, and turn.

The door swung open with little noise. Inside was what looked like an office building with multiple floors. We looted the floor, and continued down, and looted again. This pattern repeated itself until we reached another finger locked door. Behind this one was the real prize.

It was a vast open room. Roughly a hundred feet in diameter, and with a pool of water in the middle. I looked down into the pool and was greeted with tubes a hundred feed down emitting a neon blue. Fantastic, a reactor.

Suspended over the pool with heavy duty cables was a single room. There was a walkway leading into this room on the other side of the main room. We walked to the ramp.

“Okay, guys. That pool is a nuclear reactor. Do not fall into it. I will grab the weapon and things and be right back.” Not waiting for a response, I walked gingerly up the ramp, and into the room.

It was only the size of an apartment kitchenette, and had two tables in it. One held the weapon. It was a backpack fed monster. The rifle was about the size of a Barrett, and the backpack looked to be at least a hundred pounds. The shells were too disproportionate to be true. They looked like someone had taken a 20mm shell, removed the round, and adjusted it to take a .30 caliber round.

The backpack was a giant box with a hopper on the bottom that fed the bullets into the chain. Inside the backpack was fifteen rounds, five in the chain, and some idiot decided to leave one in the gun’s chamber.

The gun, backpack, and chain all folded up, or disassembled to fit into the bag. The bullets just sipped in.

The second table had a simple terminal with a stack of computer chip looking things laying next to it. It was an unusual interface, but I came across the file that had the information on the rifle in it. Through some trial and error, I discovered the chips were data storage, and copied it over to one of them.

I was just about to exit out of the program when I had an idea. I selected every file on the computer, copied it over to a new chip, pocketed it, and hit the delete key. Now nobody could access it.

I exited the room, looked to the exhaustion group of ponies, and said “Let’s go home.”

For the first time in weeks, they looked like they didn’t hate me.

///

We parted ways almost immediately after exiting the cave. The others were unsure weather to be mad at me for keeping them underground in a human city for a month and a half, or to be happy that I netted them \ a month and a half’s wroth of pay from collecting my own.

I would have gone straight to the library, had it not been floating upside down in the sky. In fact, the entire town was floating, or on fire, or alive. The roads were slick and slippery, and everything smelled of chocolate mild.

From the moment I walked into the town, I felt as if I was being watched. And it was eerily quiet, other than the heavy metal played on the kazoo echoing throughout the entire town. I could almost feel the clouds of rice sized rubber duckies encompassing me.

Oh, shit they were! I was being held in place with a cloud of the miniature bath toys. Struggling only made them quack harder.

“Oooh! A new player to the game! Welcome, little human!” Wait, I knew that voice. There was only one being that I knew of that was strong enough to cause this big of a mess.

“Q?”