What's Luck Got to Do With It? (Original One-Shot)
When you graduated from the Academy, your first posting told you a lot about what your instructors thought about you. The best and the brightest ended up in Canterlot. Other settlements got ponies that needed more spit and polish. If you were stationed overseas, it meant you’d made enough mistakes your instructors didn’t want to see you ever again.
I don’t know who I’d offended to get posted to the Black Roost, but I must have somehow wronged their family and their honor. They’d only started posting ponies after Princess Cadance had been crowned, probably to get the worst troublemakers in Canterlot and send them north where they couldn’t cause problems.
The Roost was a crown-shaped collection of walls and spires that had been built by the griffons around the time of the founding of Equestria. They’d left and nopony was sure exactly why, though windigos were always implicated in the legends.
To get to the Black Roost you leave Canterlot and go so far north that you see Yaks, then find the big chunk of obsidian and granite the griffons left watching over some of the least scenic glaciers anypony has ever seen.
I saluted the guards watching the front gates, and got about half a good salute between the two of them.
“Shouldn’t the gate be closed?” I asked.
“Doesn’t close,” the one on the left said. I had to clear my throat and point to the silver bar on my uniform before he remembered to finish with a “Ma’am.”
“The mechanism’s rusted over,” yelled a pegasus from above us. He looked down from one of the towers and tossed something into the snow in front of me. “Take a look!”
I picked it up in my magic and flipped the huge gear over to see both sides. It was as wide as two hooves and more rot than metal, flakes falling off even in my gentle grasp.
“They didn’t close this place up properly from the last time they used it,” he said, jumping after the gear he’d thrown and flying down to land in front of me. “You must be the new officer they sprung on us. Sergeant Briar.”
He offered a hoof to shake, and I took it.
“Lieutenant Lucky Strike.” I glanced at his uniform. “Those are First Sergeant’s stripes.”
“Ah, well, haven’t gotten around to fixing my uniform since the last time I got busted down a rank,” he said. “Probably by the time we have the right bits shipped in I’ll be promoted again anyway.”
I winced. “Good for you. I’ve been told to report to Major Ebony. Is he in?”
“He’s always in,” Briar said. “Nearest town is almost a day’s travel away. Speaking of which, come on and I’ll get you a cuppa before you meet him.”
“Your graduation record is interesting,” Major Ebony said, his deep voice echoing and booming, as he looked over the paperwork. “Not quite top of your class, were you?”
“There were some issues,” I admitted, trying not to sweat. The Major kept a fire roaring in the fireplace, turning his office uncomfortably warm. I was amazed the huge black earth pony could stand the heat.
“Discipline problems,” he corrected. “And a surprisingly large number of unlikely events. Nothing that could be directly pinned on you, and some where you were even a victim, but any detail you were assigned to would end up, ah, what’s the official term they liked to use?”
“Inexplicably detained,” I said.
“Ah yes. That’s it! It must be here half a dozen times, but it totally slipped my mind for a moment.” He tossed the papers down among the piles of scrolls on his desk. “I trust there won’t be any inexplicable events here, Miss Strike?”
“No, sir,” I assured him.
“Good. I don’t like unknowns,” he said. “We have enough problems already. Princess Celestia ordered this fortress reopened after sitting idle for centuries. There’s no town close enough for easy resupply, I have serious concerns about the structural integrity of the walls, and they’ve given me only the best soldiers they could find when they scraped the bottom of the barrel.”
“I’m just here to do my duty, sir.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t intend on keeping your hooves clean. I don’t know what they’re teaching at the Academy these days, but here, I expect officers to chip in. You’re not afraid of a little hard work, are you?”
“No, sir!”
“Good. Take Sergeant Briar Patch with you and go through Block C. There are some old storerooms down there and I want an inventory of anything we can use.”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded. “While you’re there, see if you can figure out where the rats are getting in. They’ve been eating more rations than we have. If you can solve our vermin problem, maybe I’ll think about the transfer requests I can already see dancing in your imagination.”
“Oh, you know how it is,” Briar Patch said. “You always give a new officer a tough first assignment to see what they’re made of.”
“I guess I was sort of expecting…” I shrugged, the yellow-green light of my horn making the shadows dance when I moved.
“A posting in Canterlot?” the pegasus guessed. “Trust me, this is much better,” Briar Patch assured me. “Pass me the prybar.”
I levitated it over and helped him jam it between a door and its frame, both warped by the years until it was impossible to open it even if it hadn’t been locked.
“If you were in Canterlot right now, you’d be standing in one place and trying to avoid falling asleep. One mistake and you get chewed out - and that’s even if you’re just enlisted. Officers?” He snorted. “You have the Princess breathing down your neck.”
“Princess Celestia seemed nice when I saw her.”
“Oh, she’s very nice,” Briar Patch agreed, throwing his weight into the prybar and trying to pop the door free. “But she’s still the Princess. It’s a lot of pressure. Give me a hoof with this.”
I nodded and grabbed the end.
“On three. One, two--”
The door cracked, rusted hinges squealing as it opened an inch.
“There we go,” Sergeant Briar smiled. “Just takes a little hard work, and you see real change in the world. You’d never get to do anything interesting in Canterlot. The last time something interesting happened was when Princess Cadance showed up.”
“I remember that,” I said. “I got to shake her hoof.”
“You and a few thousand other ponies,” Briar Patch snorted. “If she wasn’t an alicorn her hoof would have popped off like a loose primary.”
Working together, we got the door open, revealing a room full of moldering fabric concealing misshapen piles of broken boxes and barrels.
“Well, we’ve got something,” Briar sighed. “Come on. If we work together we can get this done before the end of the day.”
“Shine the light over here,” Briar Patch said, waving a hoof.
“What is it?” I asked, abandoning the box of warped crossbow bolts I’d found.
He’d pulled a particularly ragged cloth aside to reveal crates stamped with the seal of the old Griffonian Empire.
“I think we just got lucky, Lieutenant.” He turned and kicked a crate, the old wood splitting. Among the rotting hay, metal gleamed in the light. “Looks like we have a few spare parts. If we go through this pile, we might have enough to fix the gate mechanism and actually button this place up like a proper fortress.”
“That’d make the Major happy,” I said, nodding.
“Nothing makes the Major happy. But he’ll be sure to direct his anger to somepony more deserving.”
Working together, we laid a relatively clean tarp on the floor and Sergeant Briar started sorting gears, nuts, and screws into neat piles.
“Looks like being here away from the elements kept them in good condition,” he muttered. “The air’s actually pretty dry down here.”
“Anything I can help you with?” I asked. I was relieved when he said no, because I had no earthly idea why some gears went in one pile and some went in another pile, and the four stacks of seemingly identical nuts left me entirely mystified.
I started looking through the rest of the storeroom, leaving him to his fun.
Thanks to my extensive Guard training, I didn’t shriek or freak out when a rat ran practically over my hooves. Instead, I threw a force bolt broadly in its direction, broadly here meaning that if I was as lucky as my cutie mark suggested I might have hit the broad side of a barn despite my aim.
The magic bolt hit the wall with a sound like a water balloon splashing on concrete. It should have been barely strong enough to even discourage the rodent that had spooked me. Instead, it left a long, vertical crack in the wall.
“You okay?” Briar asked.
“I just got spooked by a rat,” I assured him.
“Down here? There’s nothing for them to eat. See if you can find where it got in.”
I nodded and started looking, sweeping my light across the floor, looking for the rat. At the base of the crack I’d made, I saw a hole just big enough for a rat to squeeze through.
“I think I got something,” I muttered, stepping closer to get a good look, putting my hoof against the wall to brace myself as I leaned in.
The wall shifted, swinging on a hidden hinge, the crack revealed as the edge of a door.
I cried out in surprise as I fell through into a room no larger than the walk-in closet I’d had in my apartment back in Canterlot.
“Rat again?” Briar asked, mildly.
My head was throbbing. I didn’t think I’d hit my horn, but there was a dull pain not quite in time with my heartbeat. It took me a moment to realize it was a powerful magical field. I lifted a hoof to find a glowing rune on the ground.
“Something else,” I said. “You should come take a look at this.”
A circle of runes wrapped around a nest of woven branches, big enough that I could have curled up in it. It was filled with broken, speckled shards like somepony had dropped a hundred plates.
Or maybe just a few very large eggs.
“I’ll be,” Briar mumbled, looking over my shoulder. “Those were griffon eggs.”
“Think the rats got to them?”
“Maybe,” Briar said, picking a jagged fragment of eggshell out of the mess. “Doesn’t bear thinking about. The griffons must have stashed them here for safekeeping and forgot to bring them along. Well, that or the windigos got them.”
He shifted shells around, revealing something at the bottom of the mess.
“There’s no such thing as winidgos,” I said, rolling my eyes. I pulled something out of the mess, rotating it in my grip to look for cracks. “This one looks okay. How is it still fresh?”
“I think these runes are a stasis spell,” Briar said. “We use something similar in long-term supply caches. Could have held out for a thousand years.”
The runes under us flickered and went out.
“Held out until now, anyway,” Briar corrected.
The feeling of magic around us swelled.
“I think we’ve got a problem,” I said, just before a sheet of shimmering red, like a glowing curtain, cut across the doorway. A voice echoed through the room in a language I didn’t understand, somehow guttural and sing-song at the same time.
Briar frowned and prodded the glowing curtain, swearing and jumping back when it spat sparks at his touch.
“Tartarus!” He spat at it, the spittle evaporating when it hit the magical field. “We’re locked in.”
“What’s that voice saying?” I asked.
“It’s Middle Gryphish,” Briar said, shaking his sore hoof. “I only know a few phrases, but I think it’s something about intruders and a lockdown.”
“Great,” I muttered. “So what do we do?”
Briar shrugged. “Wait for somepony to come looking for us?”
“What if this is going on everywhere?”
“Then it could be a long time,” Sergeant admitted.
“We need to get out of here on our own.”
“Must have something to do with the stasis spell,” Briar Patch decided, kneeling down to look at the runes. “Give me a bit to figure this out. I didn’t exactly go to Celestia’s School for Unicorns on account of having wings instead of a horn, but I picked a few things up in basic.”
“The Major was saying I’d need to get my hooves dirty. How can I help?”
We poked and prodded at the runes, and without a way to tell the time, hours probably passed with us just trying to locate the trigger.
“Good news and bad news,” he said, eventually. “Good news is, seems like this is the trigger. Bad news, looks like the trigger involved anyone who wasn’t a griffon touching the eggs. Not sure if you set it off when you moved it, or if I did when I was going through the shells.”
“Will it un-trigger if we put it back?”
“No. And the core of the enchantment isn’t in the room, so we can’t just brute force it. I think our best bet is going to be making our own way out.”
“How?”
Briar Patch rubbed his chin. “Can’t go through the doorway. Might be able to get through the wall if we make a hole.” He nodded to the doorway and laughed. “Maybe if we ask nicely he’ll work from one side and we’ll work on the other.”
The rat I’d seen was looking in from the other side.
I chuckled until I felt the egg in my saddlebag twitch and move. I pulled it out, worried I’d broken it somehow. In my grip, the cracked, and a tiny beaked face poked out. Wide green eyes stared at me with something between hunger and awe.
“Oh, you’re kidding me.” I muttered.
Briar shook his head. “It’s lucky for her we were here to pick her up before that stasis field failed.”
The griffon hatchling squawked and struggled, trying to get free of the egg. I put it down and helped, peeling the shell away carefully. It spread its wings and squawked again, looking up at me.
“What a cute little thing,” Briar said, smiling. “I think she’s a girl.”
“What do I do now?” I asked.
Briar shrugged. “How should I know? I don’t have any foals.”
It spread its wings more, making soft noises and looking up at me. I tried picking it up, and it squealed in delight, flapping its wings instinctively as it was lifted in my magic.
“She likes that,” Sergeant Briar said with approval. “Probably has flying in her blood.”
I put it down after a minute, and the chick started crawling, awkwardly stumbling on its paws and talons.
“Now we need to rescue an infant on top of saving ourselves,” I said.
“At least we don’t have to worry about rationing since we don’t have anything to ration,” Briar quipped. “Watch out!”
I didn’t notice where the griffon was going until the last minute. The chick had reached the curtain and saw the rat on the other side, and until she started twitching her tail I didn’t see her plan.
“Wait! You’re going to hurt-” the chick lunged for the rat, passing right through the barrier and missing, the rodent scurrying away from the dangerous predator. “-yourself?”
“...It doesn’t stop griffons,” Briar muttered, surprised. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“So as long as I had the chick touching me, I could go through the barriers too,” I said. “Sergeant Briar Patch thinks the shields were designed that way so the griffons could still move prisoners or food around during a lockdown.”
“I see,” Ebony grumbled, glancing at the sleeping infant in my lap.
“We tracked the source of the shields down to another hidden room and disabled the crystal matrix. We tried to do as little damage as possible in case it set something else off or we wanted to repurpose it.”
“So the whole thing was an… inexplicable event,” the Major said. “Dumb luck that ended with everypony in the Roost trapped for hours.”
“Better now than later, sir. Nopony got hurt and if we hadn’t been there to find this little one, we’d all have been trapped for good.”
Major Ebony nodded curtly. “I agree. And Sergeant Briar Patch found more than enough gearing to fix the gate mechanism. All good news.” He got up and started pacing. “Of course now the guards worry they’ll trip some other hidden griffon trap set a millennium ago to catch anypony trying to peel potatoes the wrong way.”
“I doubt they’d set a trap for that.”
“So do I, but Private Violet was at least creative in trying to get out of KP duty.” He paused, leaning heavily on his desk with one hoof the size of my head. “I’ve been thinking about your transfer request.”
I perked up at that, waiting for him to continue.
“I’ve decided not to put them through,” Major Ebony said, smiling as he sat back down at his desk. “Just in case we run into more trouble where we need to throw a griffon at it.”
“But, sir--”
“When you have a chance, I want you to take her into town and get her a checkup. Until we hear back from the griffons about what they want done, it’s your responsibility. You hatched her, you take care of her.”
I sighed and saluted. “Yes, sir.”
The chick woke up and yawned, looking at me and making noises until I put her on my shoulder, digging its talons in and perching there like she belonged.
Author's Note
This was originally written for the Quill and Blade Super Summer Jam contest. Unfortunately, it wasn't one of the finalists - but we learn more from failing than from success.
The Black Roost is loosely based on a setting I used for a Ponyfinder game I briefly ran. I'll probably continue writing short interludes and stories in and around the setting and post them as additional chapters here, so I'm leaving it incomplete for now.
