Better Than I Ever Dared to Dream
Bashing herself shoulder first into a well patinaed door represented the penultimate stage of a long and difficult journey for Daring Do. She’d hopped a freight train cross country, stowed away on a ship someone like her should have never been allowed near to cross the ocean, hopped another train, not freight this time, to cross a good solid half of another country, conned some people into thinking she was part of their tour group to catch a bus, and finally walked for a day and a half to get there.
Though, in the interest of full disclosure, the walking should have only taken half a day. Her navigation skills could, perhaps, use a little work. Still, she was here.
There was something wonderful about that.
She’d done all of those things not knowing if it was all just chasing after a delusion or even, heaven forfend, an undomesticated goose. The door, though, was proof. It was real, as her shoulder could attest.
She wan’t entirely sure why it was still standing, but it was real. No one else had found this place, she’d checked, and now she was hers to claim. She’d have to figure out how, of course, but the biggest hurdle had been cleared: she’d found it.
Besides, right now --with the penultimate stage having been completed-- it was time to move on to the ultimate stage: surveying the find.
⁂ Twenty Years Later ⁂
"My favorite part is jus't bein' home for the holidays with all my family," Applejack said as she and Sunset walked into Canterlot High School. "Ain't that the best?"
"I wouldn't know," Sunset said. "I haven't been home for the holidays in a long time."
"Oh . . . right," Applejack said. "Do they have the same holidays back, uh . . . where you come from?"
"They're definitely not the same," Sunset said, "but many of the traditions --fur trees, candles, getting together, giving gifts, and frightening rich jerks into moral behavior via the careful application of temporal ghosts, for example-- are the same in spite of the differences. That said, you'd probably be better off asking Twilight; even before I came here I wasn't close to much of anyone, so I didn't exactly participate all that much."
⁂
Natural light barely made it to the door, it did little to show her the room beyond, but she was Daring Do, future world famous archeologist, and she was prepared for anything. To wit, she’d brought a flashlight.
The moment she turned it on, well maybe not the moment itself, but definitely before the first moment of the aftermath had passed, she gasped. It wasn’t a large gasp or anything, not particularly long or loud, but for however short a time, what she saw took her took her breath away. Literally.
The first thing she saw was an armillary sphere. While those had been around forever, the oldest surviving one from this part of the world was in the ballpark of five hundred years old. If she was right about this site, this was easily three times that old. It was the find of a lifetime, and she’d made it at the age of seventeen.
Of course, the fact that the site was as not-destroyed as it was, which was significantly more not-destroyed than she’d expected, might suggest that the site had been disturbed rather more recently than she hoped. Still, it was an impressive find.
The room itself was nothing special, just a rectangle with the side she’d come in being one of the short sides. She hadn’t expected any impressive displays of architecture, so she wasn’t disappointed. What was in the room, though? Nothing else she saw equaled the armillary sphere, but all of it was solid gold, figuratively speaking. The wall opposite the door had two alcoves, each with an intact marble statue. The paint had, fortunately, not survived. (Better to have a ‘stone and refined’ look than the ‘freakishly realistic mannequin’ look that the artist had intended.)
There was a κλεψύδρα on one side of the room, and in Daring’s completely non-authoritative opinion, the only reason it wasn’t working was that the water was all gone; a water clock can’t work without water, after all.
On the opposite side of the room was a . . . something. She wasn’t sure what, actually. It merited a close look.
In the back of Daring’s mind alarm bells stared to ring, or maybe they’d been ringing all along, and they merely grew significantly louder. On the one hand, yes, an astrolabe would be totally within bounds for the time period she expected. On the other hand, why would someone make one with a tympan the size of an sixteen inch pizza pan? It was too big for anyone to reasonably use as an astrolabe, and therefore made no sense. Nice bronze work, though.
Roaman rooms were notoriously sparse, and the rest of the room lived down to that standard, but around the astrolabe there was . . . junk. And junk was good.
The astrolabe was set into the top of a square pedestal that could, potentially, be an extremely weird altar, and said potential altar had stuff on it. The only door save the one she came in through was a wood one set into the wall next to the maybe-altar, there were two deadbolts holding it shut, but through a damaged section she could see that the door didn’t actually go anywhere. It was protecting, and she used the term loosely, what looked to be some extremely shallow shelving.
She reached through and pushed on the back panel of the shelving. No give. Maybe the door to nowhere was a more realistic version of those fake doors Roamans were known to paint on on walls? Then the shelving, and the locking up thereof, could be a way to make it marginally less useless . ? .
Daring wasn’t exactly convincing herself, but she didn’t actually need an explanation for the useless door. She shrugged and turned her attention back to the could-be-an-altar, with an eye toward the the non-astrolabe things on it.
There were some wax tablets, In Ancient Roam, those were the equivalent of notebooks, with the slight problem that the “books” had all of two pages each. On the flipside: infinitely reusable. They put the “forever” of the armillary sphere to shame. Oldest surviving wax tablet? Thirty four hundred years old, or thereabouts. Roaman civilization? Twenty seven hundred years and change.
There was an awesome inkwell. A gimbal inside made it so that however you turned it, the ink would never come out. Unless, you know, you got downright violent in your motions. There was something else that she wasn’t quite--
It was a codex.
Everything else, warning bells included, was forgotten in the face of finding an actual text. She grabbed it and opened it, all the while ignoring the part of her said both that what she was doing was extremely stupid and that the results she was getting were completely wrong.
This was not how you handled ancient documents, and the fact that it wasn’t having positively catastrophic results . . . it felt like it was only centuries old. Five or six hundred years maybe. Everything she’d done was based on the belief that this place had been sealed away for more like seventeen or eighteen hundred years.
The details made things worse. Those centuries-old books had been cared for and maintained. The whole point was that this place was supposed to have been abandoned.
She didn’t care.; she just wanted to read.
As expected and hoped, it was in Latin. Saying that Daring’s Latin was rusty was being incredibly charitable; it had never that good in the first place. That said, with appropriate aids, she could manage. Her backpack contained everything she owned in the world including, critically, Cantle’s Latin English Dictionary.
She unslung her pack and let it fall to the floor. A few moments later she was ready to attempt translation, and she knew just where to start.
It wasn’t the beginning. Even without understanding the text, Daring had already figured out what the codex was: it was a log book. Maybe a diary, maybe something more formal, but very definitely a regularly updated chronicle. While, “Why did they start this?” was an interesting question, “Why did they stop?” was even more important.
Living in a space changed that space, so nothing she found would really reflect how it had been at the beginning. How and why it was abandoned, though, that would have had a profound effect on just about anything. So much so, in fact, that knowing would improve any interpretation immeasurably.
She didn’t actually translate the last log first.
She hadn’t really noticed the leather strip acting as a bookmark, but because it was there she got a good look at the bookmarked page as she flipped to the last entry. What she did notice was that the bookmarked page was significantly more legible than most, or possibly all, of the entries that followed.
You couldn’t translate what you couldn’t read, so Daring considered putting, “Why the entries stopped?” on hold while she investigated “Why is there a bookmark for that entry?” She considered it, but decided to stick with plan A. It was when struggling through the beginning of the final entry yielded
IRE·CHARTAS·SEPARATA·FUNE·LEGE·IBI
that she changed her mind.
It said, “Go to the pages having been separated by cord; read in that place,” or, to put it less formally, “I used a bookmark for a reason, you dolt.” So she went to that page, and she read those words. It was a gods damned slog.
It started off with a creepy destiny angle:
NE·CASU·HUC·PERVENISTI·TUA·DUCTA·ES·FATO·IPSO
Daring loved lowercase letters. This was something that had long been true, but that love had never before been nearly so intense as it became while she read the codex. In fact, she now thought that lowercase letters might very well be the best invention in the history of ever.
Glory to the minuscule letters, because when one only had majuscule letters the situation might best be described thusly: Fuck.
Credit should also be rendered to the space, interpunct, or literally any other word separator. In this case the interpunct. In all cases, those were strong contenders for the greatest invention ever.
While utilization of the lowercase without word separation, e.g.:
NecasuhucpervenistiTuaductaesfatoipso
might not hurt as much to look at as capital letters without end, the truth was that what you really wanted was use of the lower case and word separation, because when you looked at:
Ne casu huc pervenisti. Tua ducta es fato ipso.
you could figure out it meant:
You have not come here by chance. You have been led by fate.
without any great suffering.
You might have to look up a word or six --though not really because there were only four (five if you separated the “per” from the “venisti”)-- but you’d get there without any of the discomfort caused by being assaulted by massive blocks of uppercase letters.
The message, though, was simultaneously what one expected and vaguely unsettling. Especially since it somehow knew that Daring was female. It very much did not say, “Tuus ductus…” after all. Still, that was obviously happenstance, not the work of fate.
Factus sum casu, fatus non artifex huic est.
Daring found herself repeating variations on that as she first read, then skimmed, through the next section. The codex seeming to know details the author couldn’t know was happenstance. Daring’s presence was the result of long, hard work. Fate was not involved.
Fate was definitely not involved.
Fate didn’t exist.
It was the section after that that finally made Daring fed up enough to stop.
⁂ Twenty Years Later ⁂
"So, is this what you do at slumber parties?" Sunset asked "Just . . . hang out?
"Pretty much," Applejack said. "Eat, gossip, watch movies, tell scary stories--"
Pinkie Pie's hand shot up, which didn't accomplish all that much, but she soon said, "Don't forget the pillow fights," from her position lying on her back on the floor.
Before anyone could respond, Rainbow Dash led Fluttershy passed them. She explained, "Fluttershy needs to lie down for a while," as they walked to their sleeping bags.
If there had been any doubt as to the veracity of Rainbow's statement, and there really hadn't been, it would have been laid to rest when Fluttershy said, "Use your limit break, Mr. Fuzzles." It wasn't the words themselves, mind you. It was the way Fluttershy had said them, which left one with the impression that she was in a daze that was pulling out all the stops, and possibly recruiting allies, in its efforts to level up into a fugue.
Pizza came, Fluttershy returned to an normal state of cognition, and nails were painted. Sunset decided that she had to say how she was feeling, lest she be overwhelmed by keeping it in. "Thank you, girls. I haven't done anything like this in so long . . ." simple words, but she hoped her tone of voice, and perhaps her body language, would tell them what a formal linguistic framework never could. "It's good to have friends," she finished.
Rainbow Dash was suddenly next to her, that girl could move so fast, and said, "Hey, I feel the same! " which wasn't actually a sentence, given that "same" in this context wasn't a substantive. The meaning was clear enough, though. "I don't know what I'd be like without you all."
In another context it might have hurt, given that Sunset was the reason Rainbow Dash had spent so long without the other four, but Rainbow was right there --her elbows making dents in the mattress as she propped up her head on her hands-- looking straight at Sunset. If Rainbow had ended the sentence at "you", Sunset would never have guessed she stopped short, because there was absolutely no doubt that Rainbow was talking about Sunset.
Not just Sunset, of course. Rainbow had said, "you all," and she'd meant it, but Sunset knew that she was a part of that "you". She wasn't just being included because they thought they were supposed to; she wasn't just an obligation or a charity project. She was one of them.
Applejack let herself collapse across the foot of the bed, then looked toward Sunset and Rainbow and said, "Same here," in a way that meant so much more than those two words had any right to mean.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
⁂
For mystical magical reasons, that were supposedly totally non religious --so not being beholden to a given god, or indeed not believing in them, was, again: supposedly, not an exemption-- it was very important that one do a little ritual soon after disturbing the site. The ritual, while simple enough to do, made no sense.
That wasn’t what caused Daring to stop.
What made her stop was that whoever wrote the codex had the gall to forecast doom and gloom and then blame it on her.
She was the one who had to go through a veritable mountain of Latin grammar…
The final sentence she translated started on a passive paraphrastic with “this thing” as the subject. That’s was a demonstrative pronoun, a fifth declension noun --fifth, because first and second clearly weren’t irregular enough, third wasn't different enough, and fourth wasn’t obscure enough-- the gerundive, the fact that a gerundive could be combined with “to be” to mark utter necessity, and a dative of agent. All of that in the first clause, and it didn’t even get her to the sentence's midpoint.
After that beginning, the time by which she had to do the thing was indicated via an anticipatory subjunctive governing a clause of latest possible boundary. Because every reader was sure to know all about clauses of latest possible boundary.
Next came a negative result clause, which was annoying and subjunctive in and of itself, that involved a way to say “countless people” so absurdly extremely roundabout that it could have given Daring a headache on its own. After that came an ablative of means which was joined at the hip to a dative of possession because using the genitive for possession was apparently passe or something.
And to cap it all off? An accusative of respect. An accusative of respect was what an author used when they wanted the person reading to start a lifelong vendetta against grammar. It just . . . existed. It would sit there in a way that didn’t seem to connect to any other part of the sentence by any laws of grammar or reason. Someone hearing that might think, “Oh, like an ablative absolute,” but they would be completely wrong. With an ablative absolute you knew it didn’t connect. It didn’t throw your for a loop because its very existence gave you the tools needed to understand it.
No one looks at an accusative and thinks, “Hey, I’ll bet that there’s no damned explanation for why this is an accusative or what it might go with.”
And after that, after all of that, it said, basically, “You need to do the thing by the time lest countless people suffer greatly; said-suffering would be your fault.”
Why would it be her fault? Why not the person who made it so, supposedly, entering the room set off a countdown to catastrophe? Because that was the gist of the whole doom and gloom angle.
When undisturbed the room was in a kind of stasis, waiting for someone to find it, or rather be guided to it by fate, but as soon as someone entered the stasis ended, and if you didn’t do the thing by the time terrible things would happen, and on your own head be it.
“Hi, welcome here. It’s great that fate guided you here --it was all fate, you do not deserve and credit-- and you’re going to do important things, but first:”
Pause for effect.
“Your very presence here is a threat to reality itself and a ton of people are going to suffer unless you disturb this site on a level that will make smashing through door and prodding the book look like nothing. All of that suffering is on you. Enjoy.”
Which . . . to Tartarus may that be damned. None of that was on Daring.
And, as noted, the ritual made no sense. It was simple, oh was it ever simple, but it didn’t track.
One needed to chronologically align things by setting the astrolabe to the current date. Astrolabes were in no way intended to be used to tell the date. Also, the Astrolabe was locked in place and needed to be unlocked by three keys each dedicated to a facet of the big Roaman tripartite goddess' constituent trio. Because . . . bwah?
And how was that not religious?
Once the astrolabe was set, you placed the specially set aside most precious things, which oddly, happened to be gems fitted into metal casings , at specific spots on the astrolabe.
The keys and gems were on the shelves behind the random door to nowhere. Setting an astrolabe to a date was actually very simple.
One of the more basic functions of an astrolabe was that one could use it ot tell the time. If one knew the date and had a rough idea of the latitude, they could plug in the angle of the sun to get the time. The process was reversible. If one had a rough idea of the latitude and knew the time, they could use the angle of the sun to get the date.
The only hard part was the latitude. If you had an astrolabe intended for use at 45 degrees and you wanted to use it at 23 degrees or seventy two degrees . . . well, the stuff you’re using for the time? Not on the tmypan. This cannot be corrected for via your normal means.
That being said, this astrolabe was stuck in a room. It’s latitude was known and, presumably, properly calibrated for. If that was fixed, setting the astrolabe to the time, which was provided as the latest possible boundary, and the angle of the sun was a very clear, if utterly roundabout, way to input the date.
⁂ Twenty Years Later ⁂
"Ok, who's ready for Ġ͢ͅȞ̨̝̭̱̦̈́̃͡Ǫ̵̧͚̖̔̋ͫ͟͝S̵̸̛̎̆̆ͥ͆͐̅͆͡҉̭̥̩̘̯̗͜T̴͕̘̗̱̖̪̰̎̒̋̂ͬ̂ ̶̷̨̋͌̿ͤ҉̴̛͏̵̴̘̩͖͇͚͠S̃͐͑͂̒ͭ͟͏̢̯̼͕̠͜T̨̹͙̯̠ͦ̆̂̆ͬͯ̒ͭ̆́̊͘Ǫ̸̢̗͙̯̻̥̪̩̖̟̲̫ͯͭ̀̿̚͝R̵̡͎̻̳̜̜̫̩̼͉͕͔͒̉ͥ̇̇̋ͯ̑Ī̶̴̸̢ͯ̀̚͝͏͔͖̻͓̜̜̤Ȩ̒҉̧̺̫̰͈̕͢͡S̡͎͑͘͢͜?" Pinke near shouted, having somehow managed to appear out of nowhere in a brown cloak and holding a lit candle. Freshly melted wax dripped down the side and collected onto the, apparently copper, candle plate. Pinkie Pie, seeing absolutely nothing strange about any part of this, continued, "I've got some creepy tales lined up."
Rarity looked aghast, because if any member of their group of friends were going to look aghast, it would obviously be Rarity. Sunset took that as her cue to change the narrative. "You know, Pinkie," she said, "if you want to hear weird stories about beings in another world, I've still got the journal I used to contact Twilight."
Pinkie Pie seemed to genuinely consider it. Rainbow Dash said, "Oh yeah, does that thing still work?"
"It's a book, darling," Sunset said doing her best Rarity impression, "what do you mean, 'does that still work?'"
Rainbow snorfled.
Ignoring the glare Rarity was now giving her, Sunset said, "Yes, it still works. I use it all the time."
"That really is something," Fluttershy said, "it's like texting another world."
"It was the only way to text back home," Sunset said. Then she realized she should amend that. "Well, apparently Twilight and Princess Celestia stay in touch via dragonfire," she said, "but I'm pretty sure Spike is the first baby dragon living with ponies in at least six hundred years, possibly much longer, so for the rest of us, enchanted books are the only option."
Most of her friends were staring at Sunset, rapt. Sunset wasn't sure if they their interest was in Equestria, Twilight, or Spike, though. Rarity was the only one who hadn't gone into "Listen and Stare" mode. She said, "Yes, well be sure to tell Twilight everything, but right now, let's focus on the ones who are here."
"You mean.?." Pinkie Pie asked.
Rarity rolled her eyes then said, "Yes, darling," to Pinkie.
Sunset barely managed to cover her ears before Pinkie shouted, "PARTY TIME!" in what was, very definitely, not an inside voice.
⁂
So what was being asked of Daring was simple. Open the door, use the keys, set the rule and rete of the big giant (downright odd) astrolabe. Place a couple of gems. Do it all before the prescribed time.
What was the prescribed time? Meridies.
Midday. “Noon” if you wanted to be all Modern Englishy about it.
This was where research came in handy. In Roam, day and night weren’t divided into 24 equal partitions with the number of hours in each depending on season and latitude. No. In the Roaman reckoning there were twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night. Exactly twelve hours: no more, no less. That meant that hours of the day were longer in the summer, while hours of the night were longer in the winter.
The variable length of an hour was considered to be a feature, not a bug. When the daylight lasts longer you can get more stuff done, as is widely known by all diurnal species. Given that, and the unmissable corollary that when there’s less daylight you can’t do as much, all civilized societies recognize that it would be monstrously unjust to expect, or indeed force, people do as much work on a winter’s day as they would on a summer’s day. If only there were some way of measuring things that happened to be longer in the summer and shorter in the winter.
All of this, and so much more, meant that Meridies/midday/noon was emphatically not 12:00. Noon was, assuming Daring was both remembering and calculating things correctly, 11:37:22 or thereabouts.
By an extraordinary coincidence, that very definitely was not fate, it was almost, but not quite, 11:35 on the nose, which meant that the prediction of catastrophe, the blame for which was being unjustly put on her, would fail to occur in a couple of minutes.
She’d just walk out of here, figure out how to claim the site, become famous and rich, and 11:37:22 would pass without her even noticing it.
Ne casu huc pervenisti.
She would definitely not dwell on the little coincidences that might, to an untrained eye, give credence to the idea that there was magic and/or fate at work, thus making the prediction of catastrophe somewhat credible.
You are not here by chance.
Yeah, she’d worked her ass off to get here, which involved a fair amount of lying, cheating, and stealing. There was no chance about it. Just lots of hard damned work.
You have been led by fate.
There was no such thing. She didn’t believe in magic or fate or destiny, and she was going to follow the plan: walk out of here, figure out a way to claim the find, and announce the discovery to the world with said discovery intact.
She wasn’t going to fuck with an eighteen hundred year old door, or an eighteen hundred year old astronomical instrument. The book was one thing, but the damage she’d do by trying to follow the instructions was on an entirely different level.
...lest countless people suffer greatly...
She was leaving. Nothing would happen
All of that suffering is on you.
No, it was not. Moreover, it hadn’t even said that. That was her paraphrasing it.
All .... on you.
It wasn’t even a serious paraphrase. It was a glib one. And it totally wasn’t on her.
She checked her watch. How, had it only been forty seconds?
You were guided by fate.
There were countless things that broke her way, sure, but that wasn’t fate. Sometimes luck favored you, sometimes it kept you down. That’s what made it luck. If it always acted in a predictable manner, it wouldn’t be luck anymore. Just some non-random law of the universe.
What were the odds that all of those--
“You know what? Mayhap it was happenstance,” Daring said to the empty room. It was, quite possibly, the first time she’d ever uttered the word ‘mayhap’. “Because that’s the alternative. Either I got here by my own efforts, or I got here by chance. Those are the only real possibilities.”
You were guided by fate.
“Fata non veram est!” Daring shouted at no one. “Fate isn-- damn it. Fata non vera e-- wait, fate is masculine, which is stupid because because the fates are . . Tartarus. Fatus non est. It isn’t. It just isn’t.”
“Nothing is going to happen,” she said, “and you know what superpower I want most? The ability to get thoughts out of my head. Intrusive damned thoughts that have no place in the mind of a future archaeologist, and I shouldn’t be thinking about it, and I shouldn’t be giving it credence, and I shouldn’t be playing this stuipid game.”
You did not come here by chance. You were guided by fate. You must do this thing, lest countless people suffer greatly.
She looked at her watch. 11:37:01
The deadbolts were rusted shut, and Daring’s attempt to unbolt them only served to rip them off the door. The effect was the same either way, though. The keys and gem were there as advertised.
Three keys slammed home with far more force than one should ever use when handling ancient artifacts, and Daring turned them in the prescribed order. She even said a little tribute to each goddess as she turned their key, which worked out to, “For grain, for freedom, and for wine,” given the goddesses in question. At that point she grabbed on to the rete and twisted. It didn’t particularly want to twist, but she wasn’t giving it any options. Once that was in place it took two yanks to make the rule turn free. Once it did, setting it took barely any time or effort. Then it was the stupid gems. Plonk, plonk, plonk.
It took a moment before she looked at her watch, and even then it was only 11:37:18. She could have gone more slowly and done less damage.
Oh, gods, Daring thought, damage.
The door was dead. The keys were probably severely damaged, the metal of the astrolabe . . . the thin metal of the astrolabe was warped: bent, twisted, and possibly even torn in one place. She hadn’t expected to to be durable, yet it had somehow underperformed her expectations.
Even if she’d thought to check how thick it was in advance, though, the force she’s put on it would have done damage regardless.
One of the gems was coming loose from its casing, but that hardly seemed to matter when compared to astrolabe.
Great job, Daring. You’ve just desecrated an ancient site because of superstition that you don’t even believe in.
Though that did raise the question of whether one could desecrate a place that was, supposedly, never sacred to begin with.
Daring sighed. She treated it with a lack of respect and damaged what had been a pristine find. On the other hand, she literally did what she’d been asked to do. She shook her head. She should have known better.
Tartarus, she did know better. She knew it was stupid while she was doing it. She had known it was stupid before she did it, too. She's done it anyway.
⁂ Twenty Years Later ⁂
Pinkie Pie was singing on Rarity's bed while Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash stood on the floor on either side providing backup vocals. All of them were using hair brushes as microphones.
Applejack and Rarity were watching from their seats at a small table Rarity had set up, and Sunset was standing and filming the performance. It was the song they'd used to get everyone to vote for Twilight and unseat her as tyrant of the Fall Formal, which was not exactly something liked to dwell on, but they were having so much fun it was infectious.
Sunset hadn't put any effort into being subtle, so she was surprised when Rarity asked, "You're recording them?" but being surprised didn't make it a difficult question.
"Yeah," Sunset said, "I want to capture the memories.
A few seconds later Pinkie reached the climax and shouted, "Stage Dive!"
Everyone else took that as a signal to dive out of the way. Rainbow Dash even said, "Eep!" as she did.
Pinkie Pie demolished a closet door with her landing, The way she said, "I guess that works better when there's a stage," Made everyone laugh, and utterly diffused the ambient "she could have seriously injured herself" tension.
Fluttershy said, "I think this is the sixth door you've broken by dancing," to Pinkie. She obviously hadn't been keeping count.
Sunset had. She said, "Nope, twelfth," as she helped Pinkie to her feet.
Pinkie was the first one to notice what the closet had actually contained. "What are all these clothes, Rarity?" she asked.
Rarity explained, at some length, that it was her closet of shame, where all of her worst mistakes waited to be donated.
Pinkie Pie wasn't having that. "What are you talking about?" she asked, somehow already in one of the outifts. "This stuff is great! It's the perfect material for making outrageous selfies!" Pinkie pulled Rarity into a one armed hug. Rarity looked like she might die of embarrassment.
Sunset noted, "These are pretty funky clothes, Rarity," and being calm about it seemed to do a little to put Rarity somewhat more at ease.
Rainbow Dash said, "Yeah, check me out." Sure enough, Rainbow was the second one to be dressed up, beaten to the punch only by Pinkie and her freaky Pinkie Powers.
"Well . . ." Rarity said, "feel free to try them on, I suppose."
A new phase of the slumber party began, and Rarity herself joined in before too long.
⁂
She might as well find out what it said to do next; while technically possible, it was difficult to believe she could screw up any more than she already had. She looked back at the book, then sighed again. She’d get some air first.
That was the plan, but when she turned around, Daring discovered a problem with that plan. One that made her shout, “No!” to the empty room then sprint to the side she’d come in via..
The doorway was gone.
It wasn’t some kind of cave in. However horrible, that, at least, would have made some kind of sense. No, her only exit had simply ceased to exist. In its place was a flat section of wall that was distinguished from the other flat sections of wall only by the fact that it couldn’t possibly exist. She’d walked through that space to get where she was now, and she couldn’t walk through solid objects, so there could not be a wall there.
There was a wall there.
She patted, she scraped, she pounded, but the result was more of the same. In fact, not only was there a wall there, but with the masonry as it was, and as unbroken as it was, it seemed absurd to think there had ever been anything but a wall there.
Saying, “No, no, no,” did not, in fact, help.
Maybe she’d gotten confused. Maybe this was the wrong wall. Mind you, she’d walked in a straight line, parallel to the side walls, to get from the entrance to the vicinity of the astrolabe, and taken a single ninety turn toward the wall followed by a few steps to actually reach it, neither part of which left a great deal of room for confusion. Also, the rectangular layout of the room, when combined with the alcoves on the far side of the room, meant that none of the other walls were shaped like the wall she’d come in through.
So it wasn’t so much, ‘Maybe the reason I can’t find the way out is that I got turned around,’ as it was, ‘Maybe I took leave of my senses, lost the ability to gauge things like straight lines, parallel motion, or basic shapes, and got turned around, with the result that the exit isn’t where I expected it to be.’ Daring told herself that that was probably it, not because she believed it, but because it was better than the alternative.
Clearly the solution was to take a closer look at the other walls.
Two hours later, when that had thoroughly failed, she smashed the wooden shelving that had had held the keys and gems and had originally been hidden behind the door to nowhere. The hope, of course, was that there was an exit hidden concealed behind it. There wasn’t.
At that point she went back at the original wall and the impossible lack of opening it contained. On the basis of ‘Maybe if I can’t see it, it won’t exist,’ Daring closed her eyes and tried to reach through the wall. It was still a wall when she couldn’t see it, and therefore going through it proved impossible.
If it truly were some kind of perception thing, she reasoned that it would probably apply equally well to the memory of her seeing the, hopefully illusionary, wall. That suggested that the solution was to disorient herself so that she didn’t realize she was where in relation to the still, theoretically, extant doorway.
As fun as it would be to close her eyes, spin around until she could barely stand, and then, her sense of balance likely compromised, stumble around the room groping at the walls in hopes of finding an exit she couldn’t see, Daring decided not to attempt that solution. She was generally pretty good when it came not vomiting, but in this room, especially with the utter lack of ventilation, she didn’t want to risk it.
She returned to the ‘must be the wrong wall’ hypothesis. A quick look at the other three walls showed a notable lack of exit adorning each one. She checked them again anyway.
It wasn’t that she didn’t consider checking the codex for mention of entrances that disappeared when you wanted to use them as exits, or even disappearing points of ingress/egress in general.
She had very much considered consulting it, and she had quickly rejected that idea entirely. The last time she read that book she ended up desecrating the find of a lifetime and then getting trapped in a logically impossible room. Consulting the book was not on the agenda.
That left checking the walls for concealed exits and/or weak points she could convert into exits. She also mixed in jumping up and down on every spot of floor in hopes of finding a heretofore unsuspected super secret exit tunnel, which she was pretty sure didn’t exist.
After testing the floor and going through an third round of wall checking, Daring looked back at the book again. She reached the same conclusion as every other time she’d thought of it: Not happening. Consulting the book was a not something she was going to do.
Insulting the book, on the other hand . . .
“It’s one thing to use a door for a closet,” Daring said, “but using it for some shelves?” she pointed at what was now the only door in the room, kaput as it might happen to be, “That makes no sense. Using a full sized, downright heavy wood door for that pointless task? Categorically stupid.
“In the unlikely event that someone did, somehow, think that was a good idea, they wouldn’t double deadbolt it closed, especially not when all of this is inside their super secret, protected by fate, hidey-hole.”
Daring took a breath and a step toward the book. Then she continued, “Furthermore, while I haven’t actually checked, I’m pretty sure that the wood of the door would never last this long anyway, and neither would the paper of a book, on top of that Roamans would would have used pearls, not gems, for their super special superlatively precious trinkets given that they prized them more than gods damned diamonds, the metal astrolabe was invented well after this place was supposedly sealed, codexes didn’t replace scrolls until the fourth century, and velum codices didn’t exist until the third century!
“You’re not some lost document of secret wisdom from second century Ancient Roam; you’re just a stupid hoax. You’re. Not. Real. And if you’re not real then magic isn’t real, so there’s no way the doorway could disappear, and I can’t be stuck here, so let me go!”
For a moment after she finished speaking she simply stood there, then she realized what she’d just done.
Daring Do, future world famous archaeologist, was shouting a spurious argument at an inanimate object in an attempt to . . . what? What even was her endgame? Make it magically return the missing doorway by telling it magic didn’t exist?
Daring looked at her watch. 5:23. It felt like longer.
She told herself this wasn’t happening. She told herself this couldn’t be happening. Magic wasn’t real, a door way of that size could never be bricked up in the time she’d been looking away from it, and certainly not silently, and definitely not in a way that left no indication that the new bricks and old bricks had been laid at different times. There was no way. This wasn’t real.
She didn’t believe it.
She wanted to believe it, because it if it weren’t true . . .
In the last five and three quarter hours, everything Daring thought she knew had been disproven, and every belief she’d held had been utterly demolished . . . by two by one point two meter section of brick wall.
She’d checked every inch of the walls around her; it was all real. Every inch had the same composition and construction as the inch to it’s left and the inch to it’s right. All brick, all connected, all very, very solid. The only variation was in the form of the alcoves, of which she now counted the not-closet as one, and she’d given each of those extra attention. There was no fake section of wall for her exit to hide behind. All four corners of the room joined two nigh identical, and identically real, walls. There was no facade concealing an entire wall, not that anyone would have been able to set one up without her noticing regardless.
There was just Daring Do, the person who had been reduced to yelling at a book. There was just Daring Do, trapped with no hope of escape or rescue.
Daring backed up; she hit the wall hard --probably should have seen that coming-- then she surrendered to impossibility, inevitability, and gravity. She just let herself slide down it.
“Please just let me go,” she said.
Daring Do, future world famous archaeologist, hugged her knees and started to cry.
⁂ Twenty Years Later ⁂
Sunset collapsed to her knees. Tears had been flowing freely for a while now, and she didn't even try to stop them.
Pinkie Pie and Rarity were glaring at her. Fluttershy, also crying, wouldn't even look at her. Rainbow Dash only looked disappointed, rather than angry, but that could just be because her focus wasn't on Sunset, she was occupied with comforting Fluttershy. Applejack was the one to speak.
"This is it, Sunset," she said. "You're not going to take advantage of us any more."
Sunset could barely see them now, there were too many tears in her eyes.
"I'm sorry," Applejack said, but she didn't sound sorry to Sunset, "but you did this to us. Tell whatever secrets you want." They all walled by her, just blobs of color.
A moment later, Sunset heard Applejack say, "But we don't have to listen," from behind her.
Sunset dropped her head into her hands. She kept on crying.
Author's Note
This is what happens when you find yourself at a crossroads, and you realize you can choose between writing half a dozen short (barely more than a thousand word) entries into the May Paring contest, or you can spend two days looking at astrolabes on the internet (opening an ungodly number of tabs in the process.)
⁂
First thing is that, if Daring refusing to check the codex to find a way out seems irrational, and possibly stupid, to you . . . well that's because she's being stupid and irrational. That's not the same as saying she's entirely to blame for her decisions here. Which i'll get into some next chapter.
⁂
As mentioned here or there, this is the stupid Daring Do Sunset Shimmer time travel story. The non-stupid, non-time travel story can be found here. With the exception of the first two or three paragraphs, that one was written long before this idea ever popped into my head.
Calling a wild goose chase chasing an undomesticated goose, was actually here first, though. (Note which paragraph of the other story it appears in.) If I ever do more Daring Do stories, I think I'm gonna have Daring/Yearling always use that for "wild goose chase".
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This kind of story begins with the characters having all of the hope and happiness ground out of them. I hope I've done that competently.
Much of the Sunset and friends stuff has its roots straight in the Holiday Special comic. For the most part I didn't add or change so much as expand.
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On Latin . . . originally I was actually composing the sentence I have Daring go off on. It occurred to me with just over one that people probably don't care whether or not they actually read:
HAEC·VOBIS·RES·FACIENDA·EST
and so on.
Also, HAEC ... RES isn't particularly difficult Latin, but if one is pissed off and wants to make it sound like impressive, they might describe it as the demonstrative pronoun and a fifth declension noun, with commentary as to the place of the Fifth declension in the context of Latin Language.
Its sort of like when Dr. McCoy bluffed his way into the room where Chekov was being held by saying is patient had . . . cramps. If you use technical terms, and the people listening don't know what they mean (or simply aren't paying attention to that meaning), something mundane can sound impressive.
⁂
For grain, for freedom, and for wine
If you want to do magic you'd be better off looking to the ﴾Hecate, Persephone, Selene﴿ gestalt triple goddess of Ancient Greece. That said I was going for a mix of the mundane (like the gimble inkwell and the waterclock) and the "Wait, what‽ . . . really?" (like a door with no good reason for existing, or an allegedly Roman Source thinking that gems were the biggest deal in precious trinkets.)
From Britannica:
On the advice of the Sibylline Books, a cult of Ceres, Liber, and Libera was introduced into Rome (according to tradition, in 496 BC) to check a famine. The temple, built on the Aventine Hill in 493 BC, became a centre of plebeian religious and political activities and also became known for the splendour of its works of art.
Based on this and, near as I can tell, nothing else. Some people on the internet consider Ceres, the grain goddess, Libera, freedom, and Liber, a wine goddess, as a tripartite goddess of Rome.
This view is rare and unsupported enough (again: near as I can tell) that the whole thing should fall firmly on the "Wait, what‽" side of things.
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On Daring's rant . . . I had to revise that so fucking many times after discovering that codices are older than I thought. Like many inventions, they just sat around doing very little for quite some time before becoming all that popular.
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If you take a look at the word count here . . . I am completely serious about the possibility of doing a half a dozen minimum length stories instead of this. That said, this was already started at that point (it was why I was researching astrolabes.)
