My Little Pony Heart of Friendship: Tales of the Outbound

From behind the big rock, Gyre mournfully gazed at the hut she’d tenderly built and humbly lived in for so long atop its hill. Sloop found his determined gaze was occupied by the really large form of Crazy Joe standing in the middle of the open plateau whose terrain was seared black and pitted with craters by its own occupant. What was putting Sloop off was the way Crazy Joe was standing. He couldn’t find the words, but he could just tell there was something off about his acquaintance presently.

Sloop rematerialized one of his arrowguns and aimed it pointing at Crazy Joe’s head. When Gyre took notice, she gave Sloop a shocked expression and was about to say something, but when she looked into Sloop’s eyes when he turned to her, she remained silent and turned to look at his target.

Sloop, willing a great speed into his stun-set bullet, squeezed his handle just right and let it fly, near-immediately hitting Crazy Joe in the temple. He was sent stumbling, but he quickly righted his footing. Crazy Joe turned his masked face in the direction of this attack and extended an upturned hand for a bright red energy bomb to appear. Sloop and Gyre split up, running as the lobbed spell blasted their cover to pieces.

Sloop strafed, firing off five more shots: Three straight-on, two curving to his side. However, Crazy Joe barely reacted as he seemed to absorb the attacks with his own body. He retaliated by swinging his spiked wrecking ball in three horizontal arcs, Sloop evading each with a simple backstep. Crazy Joe finished up this onslaught by quickly lobbing an energy mass to Sloop, who evaded the short blast radius with a jump to the side.

At that development, Sloop got curious. He made another charge to Crazy Joe but this time didn’t attack. Crazy Joe retaliated the same exact way as before: Three horizontal wrecking ball swings, one quickly lobbed energy bomb. Sloop evaded as previously.

Sloop dematerialized his depleted arrowgun and swung his free arm in an upward arc, creating a flat, bright red arrow on the ground before him. Running into it, he was sent rocketing forward at an enhanced pace. Crazy Joe couldn’t do anything as Sloop passed him, but Sloop took this opportunity to get a really good look at his acquaitence’s face. Sloop suddenly got a shocked look that he carried to an equal distance he started at on the other side of the plateau.

Sloop turned around, pointing his arrowgun in a faint hope that it would deter an attack, but unsure considering what he could glean from Crazy Joe’s present state. What he saw was that Crazy Joe’s eyes were glowing with a pale, yellowish light with an unresponsive expression. What’s more, there was a mass of crystal sticking out of the side of his head, tan brown with a darker shade of the same color within, the whole thing glowing with magic.

Sloop turned to look at Gyre as she rolled in, coming to a stop next to her brother. Sloop pointed at his impromptu companion. “I think I figured out what’s wrong. Looks like he’s under some kind of mind control effect. It’s gotta be powerful to enslave someone like him, but it seems that all it has left is to force him to follow a simple, reactive attack pattern. I think it’s caused by some crystals attached to his head.”

Gyre’s eyes went wide at that. “Crystals?” She looked away for a moment, putting a curled finger to her chin. “Now that you mention it, I’ve always found all kinds of crystals that gave me weird vibes in the right places to look on this island. I’ve never tried to use them, but I guess this is proof some of them can go as far as to control your mind.” Sloop understood, unphased by this confession. Someone like Gyre wouldn’t need any more magic than they have to thrive just about anywhere, so she wouldn’t take a risk going looking for magic she didn’t fully understand.

Their attention immediately snapped back to Crazy Joe at the sound of a bloodcurdling roar. His body spasmed and twitched, flexing in several odd angles for a moment. Then he started whirling around his wrecking ball, flinging around it to slam into the ground while also flinging exploding energy masses haphazardly in all directions.

Sloop’s eagle eye zeroed in on what he knew to look at, and he saw that the light in the crystal on Crazy Joe’s head had grown dimmer while in this state. Once his sudden rage had left him winded, the crystal mass on his head brightened up again, and he assumed his previous neutral posture from before. Sloop snapped his fingers and pointed. “So THAT’S why Crazy Joe was acting crazier than normal around you! He’s fighting whatever’s controlling him! So he’s gotta be still in there!”

“So, do you think we should capture him?”

“Hm… I don’t think we should be so direct about it. If he has an episode trying to regain control while we’re trying to bind him, he could seriously hurt himself and us while we’re in a pretty awkward position. We’ve got to take him down first! He’s tough, he can recover from anything we hit him with, and I’ve got a plan to hit him good and hard enough to free him!”

Sloop quickly tried to get his idea across. Gyre’s expression betrayed absolutely nothing, but he knew she could follow through on whatever he needed.

Gyre re-materialized her weapon. Then with a surprising ease, she lifted it over her head as it made a slight but noticeable transformation. The wheel split in half, becoming two thinner wheels separated by a short axle extending horizontally from the hub of the now two sets of spokes. Then, it started making a noise that quickly became a roar as the upper part started spinning. Now hanging from the handles, Gyre took to the air using what could only be a very intuitive kind of magic that she could only ever say “Felt right enough”.

When Gyre was in position about five or four and a half stories up, she extended a foot and summoned a new solid green energy wheel. The four spokes lengthening to the size of her foot as they took a structure fanning wider as they met the wheel rim. Which itself grew broad enough to serve as an effective shield covering her whole body from whatever angle she pointed it at, which was presently straight down.

At the same time: Sloop materialized his arrowguns and combined them, this time in their composite bow form. He knocked an arrow and chanted to send his rune arrays down the shaft to the arrowhead, this time in another configuration. The eight red runes formed a cross shape extending directly from the arrowhead while the eight blue ones filled up the gap between the red ones to make a circle, all together looking like a crosshair.

Sloop raised his bow, aiming at his sister’s barrier and let the arrow fly, taking with it the blue part of the array to mark Gyre’s shield after the bullet disappeared on contact. Next he nocked another one of his bullets with the remaining half of the array moving to affix to it from the riser as it extended to become the arrowhead. He aimed right at Crazy Joe and let it fly. After a brief pause for the arrow to vanish and the array to fully attach, Crazy Joe himself vanished and instantly reappeared with the center of the half of the array at the same spot the other half sticking to Gyre’s shield high above was. Both halves of the arrays vanishing upon their predetermined function being fulfilled, Crazy Joe dropped. Falling one, two, three, four stories, then Wham! Right on the ground. Whatever controlled him was insufficient to force him to ignore this hit.

Sloop took his chance to race over to one of the people he was responsible for as captain of the whole voyage. He bent down, taking a close look at the crystals extending forward in a point emerging above his closed eyes. He took a second to check and found that Crazy Joe was still breathing, frighteningly easily considering the fall the bomb elemental had. But regardless, Sloop rematerialized one of his arrowguns and swung it down to the crystal, one half breaking off with one hit with the handle and the rest coming loose with another.

Following protocol (taught to him by Boros Noxus), Sloop gave Crazy Joe’s face a good smack to coax him awake, yelping at the pain of hitting the metal mask over his mouth and nose, which now that he noticed was on nice and tight despite all the punishment he sustained and must have undoubtedly received on his way to this very location. Nonetheless, Crazy Joe let out a moan and began to stir. He sat up and opened his eyes, which rolled around pointing in different directions for a moment before the bomb elemental whacked himself upside the head with a fist (a tip given to him by Boros Noxus). With a final shake, he looked around with a confused expression, then flinched a bit when he saw Sloop so close.

Sloop awkwardly coughed into his fist. “Look, I know you might be really confused right now on account of still getting over an ol’ brain bleaching, but you’ve gotta tell me how you wound up here! And if you can, tell me where the others are!”

Crazy Joe paused for a moment, eyes trailing off in concentration as he rubbed the lower part of his mask. He turned back to Sloop and began a very elaborate series of his typical yet completely inscrutable grunts and mumblings, adding color with a few gestures with his free hand and moving his head while changing his expression to match whatever he may have been trying to describe. Sloop wasn’t the only one who thought that Crazy Joe did this because he thought it made him seem cool, but once a human like him commits to such a thing, there isn’t much anyone can do about it.

“He says that it was a few hours into the storm before they all realized that there was nobody at the helm. His sister tried to take the wheel herself, but even if she knew how to operate the controls, she couldn’t see where to steer. Then, everything started spinning and they felt like they were being thrown somewhere through the air. After a while, they came to a crashing halt and everything was quiet. When they thought they were safe, he, his sister, and someone named June went up on deck to investigate. The boat looked like it was caught in a crevice between some rocks, but all they could see was a bunch of fog and a ton of stars shining above in the night sky. Then, they must have upset something delicate by all going to the bow at once because the three of them were sent tumbling as it abruptly tilted downward. All he can remember from there is everything going dark as he fell into a big hole in the ground. He’s got no clue how long it's been, how he got here, or why he’s so sore.”

Both Sloop and Crazy Joe were stuck dumb as Gyre slowly descended to the ground while perfectly interpreting the story, Crazy Joe somehow even more shocked than Sloop at the latter. Dematerializing her weapon upon touching down, she stood silently for a few awkward moments.

Sloop jabbered for a moment, then cleared his throat holding his hand out to her. “Uh… Crazy Joe, I’d like you to meet my long-lost older sister, Gyre Masters. As far as any of us could tell, she’s just been up here on the surface for the last… Ten years… On this very island… That all of us somehow… Wound up on…”

Doubletaking between Sloop and Gyre a few times, Crazy Joe gave Sloop what he could swear was a look of sympathy and laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. Sloop awkwardly averted his gaze and patted Crazy Joe’s hand a few times before lifting it off. “Yeah… Well… Gyre here is our only hope of surviving, finding everyone, and getting off of this screwy island! So we’ve got to follow her lead back to the others and the base camp we set up!”

At that, Crazy Joe nodded and made an affirmative-sounding grunt. Gyre and Sloop helped the really big warrior up, then Gyre stepped back and took a look upward holding her palm to the sun, giving it careful looks with squinting eyes as she extended and closed her fingers. Even Crazy Joe seemed weirded out by this display, but Sloop patted him on the arm, giving him an assured expression and holding a thumbs up. They both took off as Gyre suddenly dashed away, climbing up the slope to her hut.

***

“...and then Gyre let us take a generous share of supplies from her stores like food and containers for water we filled up at that crazy hilly zone, which is really fresh, surprisingly. Afterward, with Crazy Joe here doing most of the heavy lifting, we rigged up a complex structure combining all of our magics and rocketed everything through the entry point back where we left all of you!”

The story left all the listeners utterly aghast. Even Rarity couldn’t tell how inelegantly wide her mouth was with a fire-crisped root on a stick floating halfway to it, her focus trying to digest and unravel everything she’d just heard. After a brief silence, Applejack looked into the even darker shade of the foliage growing away from the beach, then forlornly gazed up at the starry night sky. “At least we have reason t’ believe Apple Bloom and the other young-uns are alright where they are. They should have enough water and victuals to last ‘em a month since we’re not there to have any.”

Percival nodded, pressing another berry to his mask-like face to have it bewilderingly absorbed into the mask-like shell. “Glad to hear some optimism based on fact. Even I can’t let myself be carried by a blind faith that all will be well.”

Finally regaining her senses, Rarity took a small bite from her toasted root and dabbed at her mouth with a clean palm leaf. “Hopefully, we won’t have to stay on this island for that long, dear. I’m thankful Naster Sloop here had such a fine boat built that could remain in-tact after so much punishment! If we can find it, we should be able to sail back home!”

Gesturing with a pointed finger from a half-eaten bun she made from crushed up acorns she took from the arboreal trees, Gyre gulped down her last bite from it. “Still, the real trouble would be finding them! At the speed the boat was flying, they could have popped into any random zone on this island! I can’t quite say with confidence that I’ve even begun to unravel the great mystery of this place!”

Sloop finished off a banana and added it to the pile of scraps they made to the side of their fire pit. “And it definitely doesn’t help that all the spatial anomalies creating the zones are messing with the abilities from my compass element! Wish I’d spent more time trying to learn more elaborate navigation and locating spells! The thing about the more primal and intuitive kind of elemental magic is that it’s hard to work with things that already have integral magic properties of their own, especially if it doesn’t fall into the exact domain of the element you have! It's why Kris doesn't like to use the Omega Weapon, his fighting style is all about primal and intuitive magic!”

Sloop fell quiet for a moment, holding his normally high head quite low. Crazy Joe, after slipping another strip of cooked seaweed into the air holes of his mask, laid a hand on his compatriat’s back. After mumbling a sincere sounding string of his usual nonsense, the group turned back to Gyre. “He said not to worry about that kind of thing! The life you chose to live means that billion to one flukes like this are going to happen nine times out of ten! But all they are is just an opportunity to overcome and get harder, faster, better, and stronger the only way facing confrontation can do!”

Sloop looked up at his cousin-in-arms. “That definitely sounds like something Master Noxus would say!”

Nearly an hour later, they decided to head to bed. Dousing the fire with some scoops of nearby sand after packing all their supplies and materials away, they made for the shelter, going on both sides of the privacy curtain Rarity and Percival wove from thinned wooden dowels. The next morning, after being coaxed awake by a still-on-farm-time Applejack, they spent a couple hours eating breakfast and the like, took care of some chores and tasks with Crazy Joe being surprisingly industrious and persistent with hand crafting some supplies. Then, they made their way up the sheer slope and took a different route through the grassy hills led by Gyre.

They came to some of the rocky foothills near the mountains. Passing these, they came to an expanse of natural hot springs, a long stretch of mostly even rocky land dotted by large pools of water that perfectly reflected the blue sky above. Each one letting off puffs of steam that drifted on the gentle breeze over the narrow, winding paths between each pool.

Rarity floated out what looked like a clam from a hoof-woven bag and opened it to reveal a reflective surface of polished mother of pearl. She quickly poked and prodded at her face, then moved to use her hoof to inspect her mane. “While I admit a good steam would do wonders for the havoc the all salty sea air and stress is wreaking on my features, I feel we should prioritize finding the other castaways and the boat!”

Gyre turned her head and gave Rarity a smile despite the issue she raised, pointing out towards the sheer slope of the distant mountain wall. “If Crazy Joe found some way to the lake and hills zone, there’s a good chance the other two who fell off the boat tumbled into zones all across the island! There are entrances here and there you can pop through if you’re going fast enough, but the one up ahead is the best way to one of the more… quirky zones! And the part you wind up in is the safest in that one in particular.”

Applejack tilted her head to her twin Percival as they poked her with a hoof to get her attention, spending an extended period transformed as such to recuperate from the strain from his battle form. “You better mind the fact that when Gyre uses the word ‘quirky’, you can bet your tail it’s definitely lethal and treacherous-like.”

Sloop peered ahead, noticing something carved into the rockface. A large archway with a pair of grooved columns and a floral pattern design on the side of the stone above stretching to connect them. He also noticed that on the ground level of the uncarved rock within, there were clusters of cracks across multiple depressions in the wall about as tall as Gyre. He gave his sister a cocky smirk and gestured at it with his thumb. “Did you have a little bit of trouble before you figured this one out, Sis?”

Gyre unexpectedly let out a loud laugh. But then crouched and made a more daring look that reminded all present of her brother. “Yeah…! It happens!” With a leap, she conjured her cyan energy spurs and accelerated downward, rolling from the crest of the foothill the group was standing on.

Transfixed, the group watched the wheel elemental as she deftly maneuvered throughout the narrow, winding, and scarce paths in the land. Not losing speed as she jumped from one level in the springs from the next, she began trailing sparkles like she did by the lake as she made a direct beeline to the archway. When a few among them turned away while peeking or covered their faces with eyes exposed, expecting her to slam into the wall of solid rock, she disappeared with another flash, two streaks of light leading to that point disappearing into a sparkling mist in the breeze.

Eyes wide and shining with a sudden onset of reverence, Crazy Joe walked over and picked up both Applejack and Rarity in his arms. Ignoring the protests from both, he leaped down into the expanse, then he abruptly furrowed his brow and crouched. His feet then started glowing, which was enough to quiet and still the strong-willed mares. Once the light receded and concentrated around the bottoms of his feet, Crazy Joe took off like a hundred-ton rocket-powered train.

Sloop and Percival marveled at the sight of the trails of rocket fire blasting from the bomb elemental’s heels each time he raised one of his rapidly moving feet. Unlike Gyre, Crazy Joe picked up more and more speed as he went further and further, eventually reaching a pace where he could cut through the pools without losing speed, leaving behind a length of wet land before the water rushed back into place.

At the same point as Gyre did, Crazy Joe started trailing sparks along with the ponies in his arms, their cheeks, manes, and eyelids flapping in the wind before they practically exploded right before hitting the wall in the arch, their flash several times as big as the already large human.

Looking at one-another for a moment, Sloop and earth pony-form Percival seemed to have come to a silent agreement. Percival narrowed his brow and jumped down first, then Sloop leaped and landed on his friend’s back. Rearing back and kicking the air for a moment, Percival took off. Along the path they tread, Sloop laid out bright red arrows with a bicycling series of flicks from his glowing hands, Percival gaining more speed as they hit each one with their hooves while keeping to the narrow path like a well-maintained monorail from back in Core Metro.

At the key point, they began trailing sparks too. Right when Percival was expecting a facefull of mountain, the both of them disappeared with a bright flash. The white light expanded before their eyes right before they tumbled into the nowhere zone between the island’s spatial anomalies