The Beginning of Adventure!
The Adventures of Dewey Decimal and Steven
By The Pirate Prince
It was nearing two o'clock in the morning and the head librarian of the Canterlot library was sitting at his desk. He was partaking in time consuming and extensive research into the properties of an ancient tome. Mainly he was seeing how comfortable it was when being used as a pillow. Snoring quietly, Dewey Decimal sat in his dimly lit office, the embers in the fireplace casting an orange glow into the room. Outside, the assistant librarian was whistling a Hearth's Warming Eve carol out of season while returning books to their shelves.
A green light filled the office and a rolled up scroll appeared above the desk. It fell, collided with the librarian's head and rolled into the middle of the room. Dewy Decimal's head jerked up, a small line of drool connecting his mouth to the priceless antique. Wiping the cover, he looked around his office for the cause of his awakening. He heard the whistling and eyed the door before noticing the true cause of his unwelcome return to consciousness. He levitated the scroll towards him, unfurled and read it.
He then re-read it because the light was rather poor.
He then re-re-read it because the light was rather poor and he had just woken up.
"STEVEN!" Dewey yelled. He heard the sound of books falling to the ground and it reassured him that Steven had indeed heard him. A moment later and the spiky maned pegasus stood in the open doorway.
"What's your problem? You scared me half to death! I'm the one who'll have to pick them all up again!"
"It's your own fault. You know you shouldn't carry so many books at once." Dewey motioned with his eyes at the painting of a grumpy looking pony on the wall. Long ago some stuffy head librarian decided that it was unsafe for ponies to carry a stack of more than five books at a time and so had made it the number one rule of the library. This rule had proudly been ignored by everypony who had ever worked there since but nopony had ever bothered to change it. It was satisfying calling ponies out when they dropped a big pile of books.
"Have a look at this." Dewey gave him the letter and began putting logs onto the dying fire. He stopped mid levitation “Wait a minute, isn't tonight your evening off?”
“Well, I didn't really have anything better to do," he answered without looking up. Dewey decided not press any further.
To the Head Librarian of the Canterlot Library
I am currently interested in ancient theories into the application of permanent teleportaion spells and request your assistance. I believe I have discovered a way to correct the problems that occurred when attempting the spell in the past and require access to your books for further research. Please find attached the list of books I wish to study. I am arriving at Canterlot tomorrow morning, please have them ready for me.
Yours faithfully,
Twilight Sparkle
P.S.
Really sorry. Twilight told me to send it this afternoon but I forgot. Was at a "going away for a little while party." Sorry.
Spike
Steven turned the letter over.
"It'll take us hours to get all these together," Steven complained. "I was just about ready to go home." While he had been reading Dewey had left the office and had started picking up the books off the floor.
"Don't you know who Twilight Sparkle is? She's Princess Celestia's personal protégé. If she wants something, she gets it." As far as he was concerned, she was someone with power, and that was trouble. The previous head librarian had often talked about Twilight Sparkle's study sessions.
'That Miss Sparkle, she'd read books faster than you can put them of the shelves. Before she moved to the country, she practically lived here.'
He placed the stack of books on a nearby desk and looked around the library. Similar piles of books littered the room rather than being placed neatly on shelves and the pair's impressive collection of board games was spread out over the central table. He wiped the table with his hoof; dust clung to every surface in the room. Since becoming head librarian 8 months ago, the main library rarely had any visitors; if anyone wanted a book, they'd just ask one of them to find it. "You get the books together, I'll tidy up. If she isn't happy, we could be out of a job."
"You don't really think that, do you?"
"Please, this was pretty much her home. If she thinks we're not good enough, the princess thinks we're not good enough.” He started sorting the nearby piles by subject. “You said it yourself, it's not like you've got anything better to do."
It took nearly four hours before Dewey was satisfied with the library; exhausted, they returned to the office. Dewey sat at his desk, his head on his hooves; Steven slept on his back, laying on the carpet by the fireplace. The letter was in the corner of the office, screwed up in to a ball. Dewey had thrown it at Steve when he tried checking the list for the third time.
"Hello? Anypony home?" The prodigy's call echoed from through the open door of the office. Dewey shook himself awake and checked the clock on the wall, 9:20. He woke Steven with a light kick before rushing to greet the unwanted visitor on the lower floor.
"Yes, hello ma'am. I'm Dewey Decimal, head librarian. The books you requested are upstairs," Dewey recited with forced enthusiasm.
"Pleased to meet you. I'm Twilight Sparkle and this is Spike." She motioned her head to the baby dragon on her back. "It's been a long time since we've been here. Back before Mister Hardback retired."
"Yes, father was very proud when I was chosen to replace him." Dewey could still remember the look on his father's face when he learned he'd inherited the family librarian cutie mark. He'd been so proud, so happy his son was destined to follow in his hoofsteps.
As they made their way up the stairs to the second floor, Steven walked to the center of the room "This is Steven, my assistant. Steve, this is Twilight Sparkle." The pony stifled a yawn and bowed.
"What an.. unusual name." Twilght commented.
"My parents were ambassadors to the Griffons. They named me after one of their friends," Steven explained without really thinking, ponies always commented on his name when they first met him. Dewey noticed Twilight glance at Steven's cutie mark, or rather, his lack of cutie mark.
"Steven's been my best friend since school," he blurted out, trying to keep focus away from his friends flank. "Anyway, the books you wanted are here on the desk." Spike was savvy enough to leap from Twilight's back before she galloped to the desk. "You can go bed now if you want, Steve. I think can deal with this for now." He sidled up to the academic pony, "Do you need anything else?"
"No, I'm fine, thanks." She replied, her eyes not leaving the pages of the first book. She grabbed some of her notes and began comparing them to the books. Spike moved forward and relived Twilight of her saddlebag. He had already moved it to the side of the room and was busy unpacking when the head librarian stealthily walked up behind him.
"So you're the one that caused me and Steve to stay up half the night, huh?" Spike dropped a couple rolls of parchment and tried stammering out an apology. Dewey watched him stone faced for a few moments before breaking into a smile. "Relax, it's fine, I'm over it.” He bent down and lowered his voice “So, what's your job while she's busy with her muzzle in a book?" nodding to Twilight. Spike chuckled nervously.
"Not much, really. Not until we're ready to start experimenting, then I'll be there to write it all down." He showed him the notebook that he'd be writing in. It was covered in tables and figures with a little doodle of a pony with a curly mane in the margin.
"Huh." Dewey looked up at the stack of books. "That might take a while.” The two of them watched the unicorn reading for a few seconds. “You like board games?"
Dewey and Spike stayed in the office playing board games for a few hours while Twilight sat and studied. Eventually Dewey got tired of losing to an amateur and started making conversation. "So what's this all about then?" Dewey asked while moving his black checkers piece.
"Twilight thinks she can make some ancient, long distance teleport spell. It's gonna be like, a big ball that when you touch it, it teleports you really far.” Spike moved his white piece to take two of Dewey's and reached the other end of the board. “You'll be able to get from Canterlot all the way to Manehatten instantly. Only, every time anypony tried to do it, the other end would never end up right." Spike shuddered at the thought of ponies teleporting into the floor. "Twilight thinks she'd figured out a way to do it properly, she's checking to see anypony tried it before."
Dewey Decimal had stopped listening to the baby dragon. After all, in the next room, history was being made. How often did librarians take part in history? Librarians weren't the kind of ponies that made history. They weren't even the ponies who recorded history. They maintained it so other ponies could read it and make more history. Dewey was so distracted by his thoughts he hardly noticed that he won the next three games.
By the time Dewey had left and returned from getting lunch, Steven was back and was listening to Twilight's explanation on the modified spell.
"-guaranteed to be a safe exit. Unfortunately, the concentration needed to do that will cause the accuracy of the spell to be reduced. Once a safe, permanent link is established, I try to modify the position of the exit portal from the other side. Now I just have to find the information I need.." Steven nodded in less the complete comprehension and backed away to his friend.
"You were wrong, she doesn't think we're doing a bad job at all, she's actually really nice."
"Yeah, well why don't just go ask her out already?" Dewey enjoyed his expected flustered reaction, Steven was easy to mess with when it came to mares. Unexpectedly, Steven stole the bag of sandwiches in retaliation. Their short scuffle was ended prematurely when Twilight shushed them without looking up from her research. They returned to the office; Steven was blushing and Dewey was failing to suppress his giggles at them being told off. There they found Spike lying on the floor playing with the chess set.
"Your majesty, the knights are dead and the castles are overrun! What will we do? Get the footmen and tell them to protect the two pointy ones."
Another couple more hours of boardgames and Twilight had finally found everything she needed to begin her experiments. The four of them gathered around the main room, Dewey was chewing some candy he'd saved from lunch.
"I'm going to go ahead and begin casting the spell. If everything goes right, it should make a gateway to my home in Ponyville." Spike was ready, quill and parchment in hand.
Twilight closed her eyes and concentrated on creating the portal. The first try yielded no observable results except a bead of sweat on Twilight's forehead. On the second attempt, a pinprick of light appeared in the air for a few seconds before the planes of the universe sprang back into their natural shape.
Finally on the third time, the pinprick expanded into a meter wide sphere. While the edge was an obvious orange, as Steven looked deeper into the center, the colors was harder to identify, blueish, yellowy red and greenish purple. While Dewey was fighting the urge to throw something through it, Steven crept a little closer to portal.
"Stop!" Twilight's voice froze him in his place. "Don't touch it! Even if we were sure we knew where it went, which we don't, that portal would collapses transporting that much mass." Steven eyes widened and he backed away.
"Would it collapse with me inside?" he asked, cutting off Dewey's fat joke before he began. The two of them started thinking of what it would be like trapped in the space between portals; whatever that meant. They decided with certainty that was something that they didn't want to experience.
"No, the safety rules I concentrated on when I made it should hold until you made it all the way through, but it'll cause the portal to close and it'll be long walk back," Twilight explained while searching through her saddlebag. Dewey swallowed his mouthful of sugar coated sugar.
"So how are you supposed to know it went to the right place?" the head librarian asked. "You gonna go catch a train home?" He had stopped looking for something to throw and was staring into the depths of the multicolored orb.
"No, I'll use this." She levitated a small cube of stone from her saddlebag. "Unfortunately, the safety rules I had to concentrate on meant I couldn't think too hard about the teleport's exit. It might not even be in Ponyville at all." She took a deep breath and began casting another spell, this time on the rock. When she'd finished, it floated in front of her without her horn keeping it up; she bashed it away with her hoof. Keeping at eye level, it flew across the room, then stopped in mid air and sped back the way it came, stopping in front its enchantress.
"Unfortunately, I can't send anything with a very complicated spell on it without the portal collapsing. Since I know this thing's top speed, it'll be able to tell me how far away and in what direction the exit portal is." She batted the cube about a couple more times before marching to the portal. "If it's close enough to ponyville, I'll go home and use a different spell to find it. Then I'll move the exit to where it should be manually. Ready Spike?" Spike saluted and pulled an 15 minute hourglass out of the saddle bag. She threw the rock into the glowing sphere, there was a flash of green light, and the rock was gone.
In the beginning it was fun, they chatted and played board games by portal light. Twilight explained to Dewey some of the more complicated details of the spell and he understood the theories much better than either Steven or Spike had. But eventually Twilight was far too concerned to take part in any amusing distraction. She was continually looking around, as if she could spot the tiny object on the night-time horizon. "It should have been back by now, whatever direction it's in." Eventually Dewey convinced her to go to sleep, that he, Steven and Spike would watch for the stone and keep record of hourglass' turns.
"Miss Twilight?" Steven lightly shook the pony that was sleeping in front of the unlit office fireplace. "Miss Twilight, please wake up. The cube's arrived." Her eyes sprung open.
"Thank Celestia. I was scared the spell had been stripped by the teleport." She grabbed the cube from the air and cuddled it.
"Um, there's something else." Twilight looked at the scroll he'd placed in front of her. Not only were there the expected tally marks, but somepony had made some calculations. "Dewey thought he'd try saving you the trouble. Only.." Half asleep, Twilight took a few seconds longer than she would usually have done to figure out what was wrong.
"There must be a mistake." She whispered to herself. She checked and double checked the calculations, but they were correct. The distance calculated was more that the distance from Ponyville to Canterlot. It was more than the width of Equestria. It was even further than the distance between the Griffon Peaks and the Minortaur Caverns. That little cube had travelled further in one night than any pony had ever explored. It was so far off the map it had left the cartography section and was in amongst the cookery books.
"Maybe there was a problem, like it appeared inside a house and had to wait for someone to open the door,” she muttered to herself. “Which way did it come from?" Steven pointed. "At least it came from the right direction." She stood up, the cube happy to orbit its master once again. "Well, I might as well try it again before I try creating a new portal. It's not like I'm on a time limit." She left the office, threw the stone back into the glowing sphere, turned the hourglass over and rushed out of the library.
Spike had woken up from the commotion, so Steven decided to try bringing him up to speed.
"Where's the other guy" the dragon asked after listening to the explanation and glancing round the library.
Steven wasn't sure where Dewey had gone. As soon as he had figured out how far away the portal was, he'd left the library, leaving Steven to figure out what the workings meant by himself. He reappeared several hours later, after Twilight and Spike had finally gotten back to sleep. He had his saddle bag on and he was levitating a number of shopping bags. He tried creeping into one of the storage rooms without being noticed. Steven walked up behind him while he was fiddling with the door.
"Where have you been? What have you got there?" he asked, careful not to wake the ponies asleep in the other room.
"Nothing!" Dewey spun round, levitating the bags into the room and shutting the door.
"Oh really?" Steven feigned for the door then reached into the saddlebag, pulling out an assortment of items. "What's all this?" Binoculars, a compass, a water canteen. It was as if..
"Get in here!" Dewey pulled open the door and pushed Steven inside, nearly making him trip over the bags.
"What are you doing!?" Steven yelled, already having a hunch on what the answer was.
"Ssshh. Not so loud!" Dewey hissed. He face looked extremely nervous and there was an obvious look of guilt in his eyes. "Look I was.. I was going to.."
"You were going to go through the teleport!" Steven grabbed him but Dewey couldn't meet his gaze. "What the hell were you thinking?!"
Steven already knew what he was thinking.
"You already know what I was thinking!" Dewey replied, knocking his friend hooves from his shoulders. They'd been friends nearly all their lives and whenever Dewey had done something "eccentric," Steven knew there was only one cause.
"Seriously?! I thought you'd gotten over this?! You're going to throw your job, your life away, just because you don't want to be a librarian?!" As much as they complimented each other with their personalities, what had originally drawn them together was cutie marks. Dewey had been the first in the class to get his, so Steven had thought of him as some kind of expert. Together, they spent their childhood searching for Steven's special talent.
"Get over it?! How am I supposed to get over it?! This thing is my life, my destiny! I'm one of the smartest ponies of my generation, I could have been a scientist or a magician or an artist, but instead I'm only ever going to librarian, someone who looks after books. Not writing them, not reading them, just looking after them for other ponies to use."
Steven sighed, he'd heard it all before. While the claim about his own intelligence did have some merit, it was hard for Steven to be sympathetic. You could only hear a pony talk about his wasted potential so many times.
Dewey motioned towards the bags on the floor. "I'd thought you'd might come with me. We might be able to-"
"NO!" Steven exclaimed in uncharacteristic anger, "I've come to terms with myself, I'm at peace. Don't think you can manipulate me like when we were kids!" The reason Dewey had kept trying to help Steven all throughout their childhood was because he'd secretly hoped that, maybe, he'd find himself a replacement talent. He'd almost become obsessed, he couldn't stand the idea it was beyond his control, that he would become something he didn't want to be.
"I- I never- Look, you're my best friend, I never.." Steven sighed, his outburst had passed and was already starting to feel guilty.
"And I'm your best friend. That's why I'm not going to let you throw your life away." Steven pushed him aside, picked up the shopping bags with his mouth and exited the closet. Before he could take two steps from the door, Twilight walked through the office door, rubbing her left eye with her hoof.
"What's going on out here? What are you doing in the closet? What's with all the bags?"
'You're so close to freedom! So close to adventure! You can't let them close the portal! You'll be trapped here forever! You'll never escape! You'll never be happy!' Dewey's mind screamed at him.
Steven was about to answer, to try to explain away the bags of survival equipment, when Dewey slammed into him. Through Steven's light pegasus frame, his unicorn levitation and sheer force of will, Dewey pushed the the two of them into the spherical teleport spell. A flash, much brighter than before, flooded the room. A high pitched note echoed through the library, the sphere turned white, and the teleport spell simultaneously exploded and shrank back into a pinprick of light.
Twilight Sparkle stared, open mouthed at the white dot before in winked out of existence. She sat down on her rear, her mind working in overdrive trying accept what her eyes had just seen. Behind her, through the open window, the stone cube flew into the library. It happily floated in front of its mistress, unaware how little she cared about it now.
While the teleportation was instantaneous from an outside perspective, from within the trip took several seconds. Dewey's eyes saw an impossible tunnel of color, shape and thought. He opened his mouth and his lungs were filled with an airless nothing; not a vacuum, but a harmless, fluid, anti-reality substance. His mind flashed with foreign ideas and magics that vanished as quickly as they appeared, leaving him with fuzzy memories and strange tinglings in his horn.
Steven just swore.
The pinprick of white light glowed brighter and brighter until it exploded into a flash of blinding green light. The two ponies fell into a heap of limbs and shopping bags.
"WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM!?" Steven's wings pushed himself into the air, he turned and shouted at his companion. "WHAT.. WHAT WHERE YOU THINKING!? EXPLAIN! NOW!" He swooped down and grabbed Dewey's shoulders, shaking him violently.
But Dewey's mind was still filled with memories of the teleportation spell, he sat on his rump, with a grin on his face that didn't improve Steven's mood in the slightest.
"Did you see that? That was awesome!"
Steven pushed him onto his back and flew back into the air. Higher and higher he few until he landed on the closest cloud. He looked over the edges, frantically searching for any sign of home. When he couldn't recognize anything on the landscape, his frustration boiled over and he let out a scream that was heard all across the grassy plains where they had landed.
"I should just fly off and leave him here." Once he had said what he was thinking out loud his anger evaporated. Of course he couldn't just leave him, he's was his best friend. Back when they were kids, Steven had continually been made fun of for being a blank flank. Ponies used to say it was because his mother had had an affair and he was half-griffon, Dewey had been the only one who had ever defended him.
He landed next to Dewey, who had awoken from his daze and had begun sorting through the bags. "What now?” he snapped.
"I bought you a new saddlebag, I'll empty these bags into it.” Dewey answered without looking up. “I wasn't able to fill the canteens before we left so while I do that you should go find a source of water. We can set up camp there." Steven's evaporated anger partially condensed, but it was getting late and any more shouting might hurt his throat. However, he did permit himself a little growl and flew back into the air.
He didn't have to fly very high before he spotted what he'd been looking for, a river that he had briefly caught a glimpse of when he had first looked over the landscape. "This way." Steven slipped on his saddle bag and took off towards their destination, leaving Dewey to walk in the direction he'd gone.
Steven was able to put up his tent and start a fire by the time Dewey reached him. The firem made with wood from the trees dotting the riverbank, guided Dewey to the exact spot in the late evening darkness. When he had finally stepped into the firelight, Steven had unwrapped an hay-bar he'd found in his bag.
"You know that stuff will keep for ages. We should just eat the grass here and save that for if we need it."
Steven contemplated this sound advice.
"Please just shut up!" he retorted. Steven finished the remaining half of the bar in a single bite and shut the tent flap. Dewey silently set up his tent and ate a few mouthfuls of grass before going to sleep, leaving the fire to die down by itself.
As Dewey began to drift into unconsciousness, the dying embers caught the eye something on a nearby hill. It watched the campfire for a few moments before laughing to itself and ran off into the night.
"Dewey! Dewey, there's something out there!" Steven had his head through the flap of Dewey's tent and was repeating what he had whispered before, loud enough to wake the unicorn. The things outside the tent heard him and laughed at the fear in his voice.
Dewey reached into his bag, pulled out a flare and gave it to Steven. He flew above the tents and twisted the top, a spark set the flare alight. Yellow eyes and teeth sparkled in the light as Dewey levitated the largest rock he could find. "What do you want?!" Steven asked.
"Meat!" The answer was met with a chorus of laughter as their leader stepped into the boundary of illumination. Drool fell from its mouth onto its metal chest plate, the armor so rusted it was impossible to remove. Its fur was covered in scars from weapons, bites and claws. It held an axe stained with dried blood in its right paw, which it raised above its head.
Simultaneously the two ponies threw what they were holding at the creature. The flare went over its head, lighting up the rest of the pack. The rock was more accurate, causing the creature to duck to avoid getting hit.
"Dewey!" Steven swooped down and picked the pony by his hooves and pulled him into the air. The pack took this as the signal to attack. They moved as one, jumping with claws, teeth and weapons, climbing on each other to get a higher launch.
Dewey defended himself by kicking and pushing with his magic while Steven pulled him onto the branches of the tree they had made camp under. "Are those damn Diamond Dogs?" Steven asked, trying to get a good look at the creatures beneath them.
"Not Diamond Dogs, definitely not Diamond Dogs." Dewey replied in shallow breaths, desperately trying not to get a good look at the creatures beneath them.
At their leader's growl, the pack stopped their attempts to climb up after them and stepped back from the tree. The pack leader walked under their branch, its tongue hanging out of its hyena mouth.
"Meeeeat? Come down. We want to be friends." This was met with laughter from the pack. "Come down and we promise to kill you before we eat you." This was met with even more laughter, even the boss chuckled at the joke.
"W-why should we?" Dewey asked, clinging to the tree branch as tight as he could.
"You stay, you stave. Naaasty." More laughter. "You stave, you waste away, we get less meat. Better you come down." Again, more laughter.
"You.. you can't make us. We'll eat the leaves and he can fly away and get me food and drink." Dewey yelled down at the gnoll. The gang's laughter was interrupted by a sharp growl by their boss.
It paused before replying "Flying meat can go and we leave him alone. For now." The others didn't like the sound of that, but a low growl and a vicious look silenced any objections.
"Look, you can't get us and we can stay up here forever, so why don't you just go hunt something else?" Steven spoke up.
The pack leader walked out of the circle of gnolls and stared at the dying flare. "Yes, we'll go hunt something else."
"What!" The largest gnoll, armed with a mace and wearing a breast plate much too large for him, stepped to the leader of the pack. He growled, towering over the battle scared veteran. The leader of the pack lowered his axe and laughed in the face of the challenger.
"You stay, and you and you." He pointed to three of the youngest hunters. "You stay while we go hunt. We take meat things, so if they escape, they have to find us to get them back." The three youngsters, barely older than cubs, giggled at being singled out for a job. The big brute took a moment to understand the plan, then he chuckled, bent down and licked his leader behind a torn left ear.
They pulled the tents from the ground and carried their spoils away into the night. The four remaining gnolls sat in the grass and waited for something to happen.
"Good thing they didn't try cutting down the tree." Dewey whispered to Steven.
Steven carried Dewey to a larger tree before flying up to sleep on a bed of clouds. The junior gnolls play fought as the eldest slept. Dewey, however, couldn't sleep, he was busy trying to think of a way to escape. He tried using his magic lift the mace, but was to heavy and too far away. Even if he could, what was he going to do, drop it on its sleeping hyena head? He'd never killed anything before and he didn't want to start now.
"I didn't think it would be like this. I thought it would be fun. Sorry Steve, sorry. I'm sorry." He sat, propped against the tree trunk, the first tears he had shed for a decade rolling down his cheeks.
Steven tried shielding his eyes from the morning sun before he remembered what was happening. He dashed to the tree to see Dewey sleeping, propped between the branches.
"Morning meat." On the ground, the elder hunter's smile showed his impressive set of teeth. His back leaning on the tree trunk, next to him was the remains of half an animal carcass that the pack must have brought him in the night. The poor dead creature, it reminded Steven of the times spent living in the Griffin Kingdom. Nearly every summer him and his parents were guests of the noble house of Steven Razortalon.
"We're not meat, we're ponies." The gnoll's laughter at this comeback woke Dewey with a start, Steven landed on the branch to help hold him steady.
“Steven, Steven I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't.. I didn't think.." He wasn't crying any more, but Steven could tell he had been.
"No, no you didn't," Steven interrupted, hoping that being confrontational would snap Dewey out of his melancholy.
"You should just leave me." Steven could barely hear him over the laughing gnoll beneath them.
"Don't start that now. You got us into this situation, you get us out of it. Use some magic or something." Steven was worried now, Dewey was never one for self pity.
"I can't, I can't fight. I can't do anything, I'm just a librarian." Below them, the young hunters had awoken and had joined in with the mocking of their prey.
"HA HA HA HA HA HEE HEE HE HE HE HE HE AHA HA HA HA"
Steven was cold, hungry, he had barely slept and his only friend was acting less than useless. He just couldn't stand it any longer. He flew high into the air and then shot down like an arrow at the predators. The senior gnoll's eyes were closed and his ears were full of laughter, so he didn't notice the pony until his hooves had collided with his face. His head was knocked back, smashing into the tree trunk he'd been leaning on, knocking him out cold. Steven landed, spun and kicked him again in the face with his hind legs. He then turned to the trio of young, confused gnolls; they'd never seen prey fight back.
"RUN MEAT!"
They did.
Steven and Dewey had flown across the river and had climbed over a number of hills before they decided to discuss what to do next.
"We're not really do this, are we?" Dewey asked. Steven finished swallowing his grass breakfast before replying.
"We have to, we're not going to get very far without our stuff. It was your plan to begin with." While trying to think of a way to escape the tree, Dewey had thought of several plans. In the best one, Steven used his pegasus talent of weather manipulation to scare the hyenas away.
Steven flew high and spotted the gnoll camp, a trio of wrecked caravans they must have ambushed and moved in to. The plan was for Steven to fly out of their reach with the storm cloud and scare the gnolls away, shocking a couple maybe. Then the two of them would find their saddle bags and put as much distance between them and the savage hunters as possible. "It's not like they've seen a pegasus before, they'll be scared to death of somepony shooting lightning at them. It's strange here, the weather doesn't seem to need anypony's help." Steven's thoughts on foreign weather patterns was interrupted by Dewey.
"I don't think we should. What if one of them come back and tries to kill us?" The usual confidence he had in his ideas hadn't fully recovered yet.
"Then we kill him." Steven answered, as it was most normal thing in the world. Dewey stared open mouthed.
"What!? How can you just say that? Killing is wrong!" Steven stood up and let loose some of his pent up frustration.
"Don't you get it?! We're not in Canterlot anymore, we're not in Equestria! The rest of the world's not like that! You've never been out of Equestria, I have. I've been to the Griffon Peaks and the Minotaur Caverns, people fight and animals kill each other. And if we ever want to get back home, if we want to survive, we need stop being scared." He paused a couple of seconds, deliberating whether or not to continue. "You wanted an adventure, now here we are."
It took several hours for Steven to find enough clouds to squeeze together to make a storm cloud. Shooting out accurate and non-lethal lightning bolts was a very tricky and stopping it from raining away was a constant struggle. Steven doubted he'd be able to shoot off more than a dozen before it ran out of static electricity.
Despite Dewey's concern the plan worked. The gnolls were relaxing after feasting on a couple of water buffalo when Steven attacked. Their ears ringing from thunder and their behinds painfully zapped, the ferocious predators fled, many of them dropping their weapons and running on all fours. Half of them didn't even realize they were being attacked by a pony. Dewey crept into the camp, levitating an axe and shield dropped by the young gnolls who fled the tree, and started searching the caravans while his partner kept watch high above him.
“I found them!" He shouted up to the pegasus. Steven dived down and followed him into the structure. "Help me get it all together."
Steven entered to see the saddlebags' contents scattered around the alpha gnoll's caravan. It took them much longer than they'd hoped to find everything. Luckily, the gnoll leader had forbidden any of the others from touching the bags, so none of the items were broken. However, the tents had been ripped by the journey, so the two of them felt it wasn't worth bringing them.
When they exited the caravan, the first thing Steven noticed was that the storm cloud had started raining. With Steven no longer there maintain it, the cloud did what came naturally to its kind.
The first thing Dewey noticed however, was the Gnoll leader charging towards them, axe raised and mouth wide open.
"Look out." He pushed Steven back into the caravan and raised his shield above him to protect him from the blow. The attack knocked the piece of metal and wood from his telekinetic grip and it spun away from him.
The leader turned his head and shouted, "ATTACK!" but the pack kept away. They were afraid of their leader, but they were even more afraid of the painful shocks and the deafening booms.
Dewey took this chance and swung his axe at his attacker. The gnoll jumped back, grabbed the handle and wrenched it from the unicorns grasp. Meanwhile, Steven realized what was going on and shot into the air, racing to grab hold of his leaking weapon.
Throwing the weapon to the side, the gnoll raised its own axe. Dewey grabbed onto it with his magic and tried to push it away, causing it to embed itself into the ground to his left.
Steven reached the cloud and patted the bottom, stopping the rain from falling. He could tell it had lost a lot of water, there couldn't be many more shocks left in it. Even if he did shock the pack leader, he doubted it do anything but make it even angrier. He grabbed the cloud's sides and pulled it down, turning to face the ground in time to see the gnoll smack Dewey across the horn with its left paw. He forced himself to fall as fast as his wings would allow. When he saw the creature raise the axe, he squeezed the cloud as as hard as he could.
"DIE MEAT!" The gnoll snarled between gritted teeth before opening its jaw wide, ready to continue its eternal laughter.
The lightning struck the raised axe, jumped the gap between the weapon and the gnoll's simple steel helmet and made a path through her semi-humanoid body into the ground. Intense pain coursed through her, a violent gargling sound emanated from her throat, her eyes rolled up into her skull and she collapsed to the floor, dead. The other gnolls ran, what little courage they had regained destroyed by seeing their pack leader smoking on the floor.
Steven landed next to the fallen unicorn and pulled him to his hooves, the cloud had popped in his hooves and had soaked the corpse. Dewey Decimal and Steven took a moment to look over the creature's body, the fleeing hunters and the ruined caravans before putting on their saddlebags and leaving the camp.
"You called for me?"
"Yes, come closer. Did you hear that, a few minutes ago."
"It was just thunder, nothing to be worried about chief. The sky isn't ready to fall quite yet."
"Look." He pointed out the window, "I don't see any big storm clouds, do you?"
"N.. no, chief."
"Send a group out to take a look, but be sure that they're careful. It's been months, but that gnoll gang might not have moved on yet."
Bowing, the warrior closed the door behind him. The chief turned and looked out the window again. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the setting sun.
"A pegasus?"
