My Little Pony Heart of Friendship: Tales of the Outbound

The land steeply sloped downwards, leading to a smaller pit of lava where in the center, some thin but numerous steel bars were holding up a flat-bottomed boulder. Inside, sticking out of the lava was the torso of Miss June. At the sight of this, Rarity’s eyes went wide, then she collapsed to the ground, crying into her crossed hooves. “WE’RE TOO LATE! SHE’S ALREADY BEEN BURNT IN HALF!”

However, the very much alive top half of Miss June raised a hand. “Actually, I’m okay.”

Rarity’s heavy sobs abruptly stopped, and she gazed from behind her hooves with makeup-streaming eyes. Applejack trotted forward with her mouth wide open and an eye wincing. She coughed, trying to regain her composure, then gestured to Miss June from out of the corner of her squinting eyes. “Uh… I beg your pardon, but HOW IN CELESTIA’S NAME ARE YOU OKAY?”

Miss June could only make a dismissive hand waving. “I’m a glass elemental, a fire tribesfolk. Non-elemental fire can’t hurt me, just like how lava can’t hurt dragons.”

Percival scratched the back of his head, his eye holes miming a raised eyebrow expression. “If you’re not in danger from the lava, why did Percival’s search spell say you were in fatal peril?”

Miss June sweeped her gaze to the lava beneath her waist. “Well… It hasn’t stopped rising yet. And I can still drown.”

Gyre stepped forward this time. “Huh… Maybe if you can tell us how you got trapped here, it might give us a clue on how you can get out.”

The pragmatic and logistical-minded Miss June kept her priorities in mind, and disregarded any scruples about this newcomer. “About a day or two ago we all got lodged in some mountains after the storm blew us away. When we went up onto the deck, we weighed down the ship enough to abruptly tilt it forward and Mister Joe, Miss Jane and I fell off. I don’t know how, but I wound up here and decided to explore and see if I could find a means to signal for help.”

She swept an arm in an arc above herself. “This whole place was some kind of dome. When I got to the center, I felt a pressure plate give way and some steel spears shot up and corralled me. Then the dome collapsed with the capstone coming down and impaling on the spears’ points before the whole thing rose up on a telescoping pillar. I was fine for a while and survived by making some glass jugs to catch rainwater for a few days. But then I felt the ground quake and some streams of lava burst out from the walls of the surrounding pit and started slowly filling it. Next thing I knew, it rose up above my hips and then you all found me.”

Percival’s eyeholes cocked an eye, then he extended a hand to Miss June and her prison. “That… doesn’t really give us anything to work with.”

Gyre, however, beamed and rubbed her hands at this development. “It’s for the best! I had a plan worked out already, and I was a little worried I’d have to change it. Everybody and everypony, get into position!”

With a few gentle and not-so-gentle nudges, Gyre managed to get Applejack and Rarity turned around standing parallel a distance facing away from the cage. Then she raised a foot and summoned a new configuration for her energy spurs: These ones were purple, they looked a bit like in-line skates with four wheels, but on closer inspection, they were more spool-like with thin flanges extending from a narrow drum core on each. With a few elaborate swings of her foot, she let fly two wheels trailing thin strings of purple magic that looped around the mares’ torsos before doing the same to two of the steel bars on Miss June’s prison.

With a big grin, Gyre hopped, manifesting the other set on her other foot and landed on the wires one foot each, somehow not encumbering the anchoring ponies. After a few embarrassing moments of haphazard gestures, Percival finally got the point and shrunk down just smaller than a human torso before stretching to hang onto Gyre’s back, still not causing any strain to their pair of living moors. With an odd humming sound, the docked duo rolled down the strings to stop in front of Miss June’s prison for Percival to stretch out his arms to grip, changing them to a much less heat-resistant tin that melted in the heat of the lava to provide a way out for Miss June.

Bending down to take her hands in her grip, Gyre pulled Miss June out of her prison and managed to pull her across the deep, inescapable pit of lava towards the safety of the pit’s edge. However, about halfway across, Miss June abruptly made a face. “Wait, hold on! I think I felt something brush up against my leg!”

At that, Percival rolled his eyeholes. “It’s got to be over two-thousand degrees in that stuff! What could possibly-” But Percival’s thought was interrupted as something huge and long erupted from the lava beneath them, dispelling Gyre’s emanations and flinging her and Miss June on the ground behind Applejack and Rarity.

The mares quickly helped the girls up and they got a chance to behold their new crisis. It was a caterpillar or centipede-like insect covered in solid black plates with softer tissue between glowing red hot. At the front of its body was a pair of glowing segmented eyes and a pair of extended, scissor-like mandibles it snapped at them as it coiled above the lava.

Taking a break from gaping at this development, Applejack swung her head back and forth for a moment. “Wait… Where’s Percival?”

Gyre’s eyes went wide. “I guess since he was smaller and lighter, he got flung farther.” She then started slowly turning around, keeping her eyes on the creature. “These things might be quick, but they can barely move from the points they emerge from, we should be safe if we can get out of striking distance!” The group slowly started backing away from the caterpillar, seeming to not rouse its reflexes. Unfortunately, in their path emerged two more creatures right from the sides of the mountains their path ran between, lava pooling on the ground from the holes they made. Gyre frowned and held a finger to her chin. “Unless… They’re part of a pack. In that case, they’ll burn their way through the ground in a surprisingly tactical manner to outflank prey.”

Rarity quickly erected an open-topped wall of ethereal crystal to divert the lava. Gyre manifested her weapon while Miss June flexed a clawed-fingered hand as a red-hot ball of molten glass appeared in it despite her anxious look.

Meanwhile, Percival groaned as he slowly regained consciousness. He stretched and scratched around, trying to get his bearings and push himself up. He managed to get on one foot as his vision cleared. He could see that he was indoors, and from the architecture he was in one of the same kinds of places as in this zone, except this one in particular seemed tailored for personal use rather than be one of the public spaces he found on his way through the zone. Too small to be a real living space, but from the presence of an anvil and sets of tongs, hammers, and a dark, sooty fireplace, this was some kind of forge or workshop.

He suddenly felt a stream of debris fall on his head from above. He turned his head around a full one hundred-eighty degrees on his neck to take a look directly above him and saw the hole he made in the roof falling in. However, he abruptly felt the room shake and a couple more blocks from the ceiling fell down one after the other. Then, all at once the whole place started coming down on top of him. He barely had time to sweep his arm up to shield himself, let alone the time to will it into an effective barrier.

All he could hear was the storm of falling debris and terrain, yet strangely, he felt nothing. A few seconds later, it all stopped. He opened his eye holes and saw a strange sight: The rubble seemed to have been warded away, diverted from a small circle surrounding himself, leaving only a layer of detritus. Sensitized by his previous moment of terror, he’d just now realized that this whole time, he’d been tightly gripping something in his free hand. He brought it to his face and saw that he was holding a red crystal that glowed with a warm orange core inside. He turned his head and found that right where his hand would have been strewn out when he’d fallen in was a chipped, overturned pot whose contents on the floor were the same kind of crystal.

Percival relaxed his grip on this curio and suddenly whatever force was shielding him fell, along with a cloud of dust. Waving it all off while paradoxically coughing, he managed to stand up and make his way out of the collapsed hill back into the open, where he could hear a distant ruckus past some familiar-looking mountains. He dashed towards it when he’d seen a jet of lava erupt from below, carrying his unexpected boon with him.

Back in the literal heat of it, Gyre and Miss June had taken opposite positions to better ward off the nonstop attack of the lava bugs’ attack as best as they could. Gyre had taken the rear, splitting her wheel in two and adding spikes sticking outward from the edge and spokes while holding it with both hands, generating enough force and friction to deflect the two bugs’ strikes with powerful spins timed to them. Miss June tried her best to be more proactive with her bug, lashing at it with a thin, sharp stream of semisolid glass extending from what she said was an evocation locus, slightly grateful over the situation not drawing attention to her favoritism for this small but highly efficient bit of magic as her weapon, which tends to be a big tell for elemental’s lack of aptitude in combat.

However, Miss June’s dread appeared to suddenly be made manifest as she made one awkward lash that the bug was able to weave around and make a rapid strike at her. Applejack sprang into action and gave the bug a hard bucking kick in the face to repel it before it could close its shear-like mandibles around Miss June, but she let out a muffled cry as she dragged her back hooves against the ground to relieve the painful burning from the bug’s intensely heated body. Rarity could hardly spare anything but her sympathies as she was putting everything she had into maintaining the barrier to keep out the certain doom of the lava from the holes the bugs bored upon their arrival.

The cavalry seemed to arrive with a loud trumpeting sound that carried. Enough to catch the bugs’ attention, halting their attacks. The group looked over to see Percival having extended a large horn from his free hand somehow being sounded pressed against his mouthless, mask-like face. They could see something glowing in his other hand, but couldn’t make it out.

Apparently satisfied with what he’d done so far, he retracted his horn back into a normal hand and slid down the slope right into the lava… Or so they’d thought, but on making contact, the lava was somehow parted in a wide circle around him. He paused halfway to Rarity’s barrier, then attempted to taunt the bugs into attacking him by stomping and shouting.

The bugs shuddered and arched their bodies at this new, more interesting prey. All three of them struck at once while Percival never raised any kind of guard, but when none of them (besides Gyre) heard any blood curdling sounds while looking away, their eyes went wide. The bugs seemed to be repelled, striking fruitlessly as some kind of unseen barrier denied their offensive.

Once the bugs’ fury had seemed to reach its blinding peak, Percival’s eyeholes narrowed and he tensed his arm, his free hand morphing into a steel ball studded with morningstar spikes. With a shout, he flailed around his improvised hammer on an elastically whipping arm, striking each of the bugs directly in the head with their own momentum slamming into the heavy blows as his attacks seemed unaffected by whatever phenomenon was shielding him.

The impacts carried each of the bugs’ long bodies a fair distance away as they hit the ground, stunned and twitching. Percival hurried over to the side of the barrier. Once he was sure the lava was pushed clear of his side of it, he gestured at the inhabitants. “Come on! Who knows how long they’ll stay down!”

Hesitating for the briefest of moments, Rarity gave her horn a twitch and a hole opened up next to Percival. Applejack didn’t hesitate and cantered out first, and the force protecting Percival from harm seemed to allow a proven helper like her into its fold. She turned back and gestured, swinging her head. “Come on, y’all! We got what we came here for, and we’re not comin’ back!”

Everyone poured out of their instant but thankfully solid fortification, falling as Rarity was the last one out. With the crystal raised in an upwardly-extending hand, the group slowly but carefully maneuvered across the lava-covered ground, making sure they stayed in formation under the protective sphere of influence.

***

Percival yelped in Sloop’s voice and pulled his finger back from the fire, waving it around. “I guess the magic faded when the glow did after all.”

Miss June entered this new finding into her archival construct. “We’d better keep it anyway. It might be a key comparative part of an experiment if we plan on selling it to researchers.”

Sloop groaned, spending a minute swishing around the coconut juice he gulped before swallowing. “Priorities, Miss June! I know business calls for ruthless pragmatism, but I’ve always been a dreamer who thought that compassion can win if it has fangs. Though, I really feel that we should focus on everyone’s safety before we try to figure out how to get rich from this opportunity!”

Floating the shard to her face after having Percival pass it to her, Rarity also floated a rudimentary jeweler's lens she had Miss June make for her. “But my word, even without the magic, I can safely say I’ve never seen anything quite like these crystals before! The things I could MAKE with gems like this…!”

Applejack gave Rarity a somewhat contemptful look, then held up her pineapple to take a bite. “I’m in agreement with Sloop! We can think about what we’ll do when we get off this crazier-than-a-color-blind-toucan island after we find the kids!” She forlornly gazed up at the mountains in the distance. “I’m glad we’ve finally got some idea as to where they might be, but I’d like to know why we’re not makin’ plans to head right to ‘em!”

At that, Crazy Joe briefly gave Applejack a look of his own, then after stuffing a berry into his mask through an air hole waxed in his usual untranslatable grunting gibberish that Gyre cleared her throat upon hearing it in its entirety. “He says that we need to weigh the facts against the priorities. We know where the kids are and we have good reason to believe they’re safe where they are. But we only think we have an idea as to where his sister may be and have no clue as to what’s stalking her right now. Jane might be able to handle just about any normal situation, but this island has proven that it’s full of almost nothing but abnormal situations!”

Applejack didn’t like it, but the fact was that Crazy Joe was making a lot of good points, so she knew the most honest thing to do was just to not say anything. When they were done eating and talking, they all went to bed for the night.

The following morning, Gyre led them to another point on the lakeside that she said was the entrance to one of the only zones they had yet to visit, so odds were that it’s where Crazy Jane may be found. Once she led them to a cape cliff overlooking the water near the falls, she told them that they had to wait for a while as “This particular entrance to this particular zone is a bit odd, and only opens up at certain times every day.” Explaining why she insisted on bringing a picnic lunch.

At about high noon, they’d paused packing away their hand-made supplies into their personally woven basket when Gyre suddenly started going towards the cliff’s edge. The group approached behind their guide and followed her gaze down into the sparkling, reflective water below. However, the water abruptly darkened as the surface suddenly became disturbed and tumultuous. Then, a large pinhole appeared as if a drain had suddenly been opened up at the lake’s bottom, steadily growing in size and volume until a full-blown whirlpool formed directly beneath them, the vortex in the center gaping into the unknown.

Rarity’s eyes went wide, and she flinched, cantering backwards with clenched teeth. “Tell me you don’t want us to-” But she shivered at how eagerly Gyre smiled and nodded at her, and felt faint at the sight of Gyre putting her hands together and extending them in a diving motion.

Applejack trotted up next to Rarity with a sympathetic expression and pursed lips. “This time, I’m in total agreement!”

Sloop prepared himself to give a really good speech to ease their concerns, but he wasn’t prepared for Crazy Joe to push past both of them and move to stand next to Gyre at the cliff’s edge. He took a deep breath that produced an eerie moaning through his mask’s breathing holes. Then, he hopped off the edge to everyone and everypony’s shock, plummeting in a butt-bomb position as his body started trailing sparks as he fell, finally disappearing in a bright flash right at the dark hole in the center of the swirl.

Before any of them could catch their breath, Gyre followed along in a more orthodox dive, even adding a couple flips for good measure that sent the sparks in all directions like a human firework. She straightened out right as she disappeared, letting off a pillar-like flash just like the tail of a rocket.

The rest of the group shifted their gaze to Sloop, who raised his hands. “I might be a water tribesfolk, but this is a new one for me, too.”

Battle-form Percival approached Sloop, then opened his hand. Sloop’s tense expression softened as he took his friend’s hand, then the transformation elemental extended his other hand to Applejack, who gazed at it before raising a leg and placing her hoof into his grip. Sloop turned to Miss June and extended his hand to her. Despite the familiarity, she hesitated. Rarity circled around to the other side and looked deeply into the glass elemental’s eyes for a moment, then smiled and raised her own leg, that she slowly moved to grip, then turned to her benefactor to return his previously-denied gesture.

Sloop, as the centermost link in their chain, led the lot of them right to the edge of the cliff. He gave both halves of their formation a look, then closed his eyes to take a deep breath. Finally, they all dashed forward and leaped off. As they fell, they let loose a wide trail of sparks like the tail of a majestic peacock, disappearing into nowhere all together at once before hitting the water.