Kobolds From Space 2: Kobold of Shadows

“So,” Wave said, “what did you do wrong this time?”

“I tried to appeal to authority I didn’t have, and they demanded proof I hadn’t forged ahead of time,” I replied.

“Exactly. It’s a lot easier to appear unimportant because of things like that. Go unnoticed. Make friends who won’t question when you do something slightly weird. Completely ignore everything I say because I’m not actually trained in this.” Wave grinned back at me.

“This part *is* the appeal to authority module,” I mentioned. “Being the only kobold amidst a bunch of diamond dogs makes all the module harder though. Everyone knows I’m supposed to have a dragon escort.”

“Pancakes like you a lot,” Wave replied. “Make him your accomplice.”

“Does he?” I asked. “He doesn’t show it.”

“Well, he’s a dragon,” Wave said, as if that explained everything.

Fighting was more fun, even though I wasn’t very good at it either. I could sometimes get a hit in against Honor, but Steel and Fire were essentially impenetrable, even with my using Speed of Darkness to try to approach them from unexpected angles – they seemed to be expect them anyway, somehow.

“You telegraph all your moves,” Steel explained. “Which is perfectly normal for beginners, so don’t feel too bad.”

“You spin around during Speed of Darkness and I sometimes mess up the counter,” Honor complained. “Keep doing that.”

Diamond dog magic continued with the unaspected magic module, since Serval and Astral didn’t have crystals of their own yet. Each spell was a complicated process of envisioning and directing the magical flow, which thankfully didn’t require meditation after the first couple spells since I was still terrible at it. P erro tried to teach me to dig through rock but it didn’t take. Instead we learned a couple more of the minor spells – mending to repair small objects, and a minor levitation spell. Adding the darkness aspect didn’t make anything really useful out of them, although I was able to repair things wrong in dangerous ways, making them sharp and twisted. Trying to add darkness to levitation just led to me picking up things with tentacles.

Making the darkness powers themselves more powerful was just a slow process of waiting for the crystal to grow. The Darkness trapped inside it was as frustrated as I was by the lack of progress, but there was nothing either of us could do without letting it out which I was not about to try, if it was even possible. I suspected that it was not. I certainly hoped that it was not.

And so it went, until eventually Fire pulled me aside.

“I have a job for you,” he said. “It’ll be really dangerous, so don’t accept if you don’t think you’re ready.”

“What is it?” I asked

“We need intel on the ponies and I really can’t afford to risk myself, especially since they know me and hate me for blowing up their airship,” Fire said. “So I’ll send you on a scouting mission. If you can sneak around and get a sense of their numbers and disposition, that’s fine, but if you get captured, defect . I don’t think you have to lie any more than I do that you want the shadow diamond dogs to go away.”

“Defect?” I asked. “Like… for real, or…”

“Whichever you think is safest,” Fire said. “I don’t want to lose you, but this is what you’ve been training for.”

“We’ll need to hide the crystal better,” I said, clutching at the amulet dangling off my chest. “Otherwise they’ll just take it and probably destroy it.”

“What happens if they do?” Fire asked.

“I think the shadow goes free,” I said, mouth all frowny and jaggy across my faceplate. “If I can hide it and not use it where they can see, that’ll give me an emergency escape at least.”

So we went to Star and Fairy and got a special rig where the chestplate had a space for the amulet to hide. “They might just take your rig if they catch you, though,” Star said. “We can’t protect against that.”

“They’re not as anti-technology as the Shadow Dogs,” I said. “I don’t know why Harmony is keeping them primitive but if they take it I can probably ask for it back once they search me.”

“Well, they won’t find the amulet with a physical search,” Star said. “Not without sawing the rig in half. I don’t know what other abilities they have, though. From what I’ve heard unicorns basically have no limit for their magic.”

“The limit’s the same as for anyone else,” Fire said. “How much they trained. I haven’t been too impressed with the unicorns I’ve seen so far.”

Being on the surface was weird. Sure, I’d been in forests and plains before in VR, but real life was supposed to be tunnels and chambers, not trees and plants everywhere. Trees and plants and ponies.

There were so many ponies! I slipped from tree to tree and tried to count but it was hopeless. There were some with spears (spears!) and armor that were obvious combatants. Detect Magic pinged on their spears, so they were at least enchanted, but it also apparently pinged on their magic sense since one of the unicorns looked directly at the tree I was hiding behind when I used it. I crept away carefully, and managed to get out of sight before he came over to investigate, but I overheard him telling the others that he thought someone was snooping around.

“Probably just one of the civvies,” the other unicorn said. “Diamond dogs don’t have magic, except for that nasty shadow stuff. Never heard of one casting normal spells.”

After that narrow escape I tried to make sense of the camp. Most of it was pitched tents, but there were a few more permanent buildings made of presumably locally sourced wood – there was certainly enough of it on the island. There were three airships overhead, and absolutely zero chance of fitting all the ponies onto them. They gave every sense that they were here to stay.

As dawn started to break, I spotted a fourth airship flying in from the distance. It was shaped vaguely like the pony airships but was clad in metal, with a jarringly out of place sun symbol painted onto its dull gray side. I made my way over to the skyport, to see what was so special about it.

Apparently, it was a special delivery of VIPs . Half a dozen armored bat ponies stood to either side of the ramp, as a trio of unicorns made their way down it.

“It’s so hot, and the sun isn’t even up yet! The Great and Powerful Trixie demands a cold drink if she’s to work in these conditions,” said the blue unicorn wearing an elaborate cape and pointy wizard hat.

“Then it’s a good thing you’re only here as my plus-one,” said a pink unicorn with purple and cyan hair. “I was the one they requested, and who is the Great and Powerful Starlight Glimmer to refuse?”

Trixie glowered at her. “Don’t steal my bit, okay? Not in front of the kids.”

The third unicorn was maroon, monstrously large with a broken horn that looked … really painful, actually , although it didn’t seem to bother her. “I’ll make you a smoothie once we’re settled in,” she said. “But first I have to get a briefing from the commander.”

“That will do,” Trixie said, waving a hoof dismissively at the broken-horned unicorn, before turning back to Starlight. “Why did they request your presence all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, anyway?” Trixie asked.

“I knew you were sleeping through the explanation,” Starlight Glimmer said with a sigh. “Creatures with powers resembling the Pony of Shadows have been sighted here, and I was the first to master a detection spell . Aside from Luna, of course, but she has other duties.” She lifted her head, and a purple light shone brightly from the tip of her horn, sweeping over the bat ponies. “Clear.” It swept over Trixie and the maroon monster. “Clear.” It swept over the woods where I was hiding, and she pointed her horn directly at me and pulsed more magic through it. “Um… that’s an odd reading. Definitely shadow tinged –”

The giant unicorn’s broken horn crackled with electricity, and then the tree I was hiding behind exploded, leaving me exposed.

“Don’t kill me!” I squeaked, holding my hands up to show I wasn’t armed.

They took my rig off first thing, and of course the detection spell showed that the rig was what had the shadow magic.

“I’m going to need that back,” I mumbled through my inexpressive face. “It’s humiliating to be naked in front of people.”

“I don’t know if we can do that,” Starlight Glimmer said. “It’s infected by shadow.”

“It’s *containing* the shadow,” I corrected. “We lured it out of me and into a trap in the rig, but if you break it it might get free, like the Shadow Dogs after you gave them that stupid amulet.”

“Amulet?” the giant unicorn asked. “I really need to attend that briefing.”

“I used to be the only one infected with darkness, but there was an amulet stinking with harmony. It drove the darkness mad and it used enough power to destroy the harmonic bit, but not the trap. Now the darkness is in the paws of the worst Diamond Dogs and it’s all your fault.” I sulked.

“So what were you doing snooping around out here?” Trixie asked. “Are you a spy?”

“I wanted to know what ponies were like. The other kobolds and diamond dogs allied with the Shadow Dogs who were trying to kill us just a day before, because they’re more scared of you, and that never sat right with me ,” I said. “So I snuck out and wow there are way too many ponies here. I can kind of see how that could be scary.”

“Harmony stinks?” Starlight Glimmer asked.

“Um… to the Shadow, yeah,” I said. “They’re implacable enemies. A slaver virus to oppose a hive mind.”

“Harmony isn’t a hive mind –“ Trixie started.

“It totally is,” I said. “Or at least everyone underground is convinced that it is. It has a light touch, that’s all, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.”

Starlight looked thoughtful. “Tempest, go to the briefing. I think I can keep a single unarmed kobold under control.”

The maroon unicorn nodded. “I’ll be back shortly, hopefully with an explanation for how the commander let this get so out of hoof.”

They let me have my rig back, but not before clipping a magical disabling tool to it which blocked the radio transmissions I’d been using to keep Fire and company up to date during my straightforward spying run. Starlight apparently improvised it on the spot.

“We know your tricks,” she said. “This’ll keep you isolated until we know we can trust you.”

Of course, she couldn’t or didn’t disable the nano-dot alternate rig, but as long as I was wearing my actual faceplate it was inside the disabling field and didn’t work either. Or at least, it didn’t connect to the network. Otherwise both rigs worked fine.

“Thanks,” I said, my rig displaying my worry for all to see. “What happens now?”

“That’s up to Tempest,” Starlight said. “She’ll probably throw you in a cage or something.”

“You don’t have to torture me,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know about the Shadow Dogs for free.”

“I didn’t say anything about torture,” Starlight objected.

“I’ve been in a cage before,” I replied. “It was *torture*.”

“You should let me lock down your emotions before Harmony gets you,” the darkness said once Starlight looked distracted.

I shook my head, since Starlight was still in the room and not distracted enough to not notice me talking to nothing.

“One day I’ll have all my power back, and then you’ll pay for this,” it said. “Unless Harmony gets you first.”

Tempest did want to throw me in a cage, but they didn’t have a cage, and Starlight managed to talk her down to a relaxing beach trip with fizzy drinks that Tempest could make.

“You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” she said.

“That’s not actually true. Flies love vinegar ,” Tempest retorted. “Besides, we don’t want flies, we want spies.”

“Definitely catch more spies with honey,” I offered.

So, the three of us (Trixie came with, while Tempest had other duties) sat sipping amazingly tasty sodas, and I told them everything I knew about the Shadow Dogs – how as a child, they’d beaten me within an inch of my life . How I still had flashbacks if people held me down. How the kobolds mostly huddled in their lair out of fear of them, only moving around with a dragon escort. How they smashed the technology we were trying to give to the diamond dogs. How -- *somehow* -- this had led to the Alpha agreeing to make a truce with them against the ponies even though if they somehow managed to drive the ponies off, he had to know that we were so next on their list of victims. Again.

“So that’s why I don’t want them to win,” I finished. “I want them all gone. I’ll do whatever I can to make that happen, except hurt my friends. A lot of diamond dogs and kobolds and dragons down there are my friends.”

“We have sleep spells,” Starlight said. “We can take your friends down without hurting them.”

“I think Luna really wants some of us dead,” I replied. “She thinks we’re going to breed out of control and take over the world.”

“Are you?”

“The world has a lot of empty space,” I said, “and once we reach a critical mass we can start just building in space, which has all the space we could ever need. I haven’t ever seen a fully developed system in person, but the pictures were amazing. We don’t need the planet. Not the whole planet at least.”

I paused. “The ponies could be part of that. That’s our promise to the diamond dogs, at least the reasonable ones – we won’t leave them behind if they want to join us.”

“So you could get us their technology?” asked the Great and Powerful Trixie. “I’m something of a gadgeteer if I do say so myself, although I usually do fireworks and magic tricks.”

“We’d need to start with a basic fabricator,” I said. “Those aren’t small. I’m not sure I could sneak out with one… not to mention that you’d have to trust me to sneak in and that seems like it would be pretty stupid if you have any doubt.”

“Yeah, we’ll put that on the back burner for now,” Starlight said. “First we need to defeat the Shadow.”

“Fire,” I said. “Especially dragon fire. If you let me unclip this I could talk to Pancakes –”

“No,” Starlight said. “Clip stays on.”

“You have a dragon named Pancackes?” Trixie giggled.

“He’s a friend. I think I could convince him if I could talk to him.”

“No,” Starlight repeated. “You’re not getting word back to your friends that easily.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so. Still, fire.”