Mare Crisium

Perhaps the greatest irony of Luna's life was that she so often missed the night she so cherished. To blame it on her ponies would be both unfair, and completely accurate. In order to serve their needs and listen to their grievances, she needed to be awake during the day. In order to watch over their dreams, she needed to be asleep at night. So it was that the Princess of the Night found herself something of a crepuscular creature rather than a nocturnal one.

This night, however, would find the sad upshot of her hypocrisy. As she slept when other ponies did, so she would find herself at the mercy of the same shadows they feared. Under the pale moonlight,  down halls bleached of color, her shadow stole towards her slumbering form. It dodged beyond the sight of her guards, weaving around their vision as though their eyes were the brightest searchlights.

With nary a sound, it darted though the doors, passing enchantments that should have barred such a thing. Inside the night princesses' chamber, it stalked over the velvet carpet, casually kicking a moon marked pillow from its path. For a moment, it paused at the foot of its victim's bed, head swiveling to take stock of the soft blue curtains, the star studded ceiling.

A faint light danced around the shape of a horn, lurid green mixed with bloody red. Perhaps in some circles, the mixture might have been comically festive. For princess Luna, it provided only a subtle disturbance to her sleep. “Hnnnng?” She rolled over, and blearily blinked the sleep from her eyes.

The conflicting colors swirled brighter, and had it been any other pony at the foot of her bed, Luna might have defended herself in time. Unfortunately, the pony it happened to be, was herself. “Lovely moon tonight, don't you think?” As Luna's brain tripped over her own visage, it managed to snatch on to two other facts as the coruscating light engulfed her. The first was a red gemmed, black winged amulet around 'her' neck, and the second was a pair of green, slitted eyes, of which she'd heard, but never seen.

Then, with an anticlimactic fffzzzt, the true princess of the night was gone, replaced by a wicked grin upon her counterpart. A grin that abruptly disappeared as the door opened, and one of the guards poked her head in. “Princess?”

The imposter yawned, her magic already concealing the jewelry about her neck, and her expression disguising her glee. She blinked blearily at the guard, and waved her off with a hoof. “My apologizes. I thought there was a bug in my bed.”

When the guard nodded and shut the door, she grinned. Of course she thought there was a bug in her bed. As a matter of fact...

...she knew there was.

Luna fell with a soft whump. The whump only described her impact however, as there was no sound to accompany her landing. For an instant, she felt the desperate urge to breath, her hooves and wings beginning to flail about in the fine talcum dust around her. As she raised a delicately cascading cloud around herself, Luna found herself gripped with a sudden realization: She was quite alright. Sure enough, this close to her namesake, the lunar magic flowed as freely as an ocean. She could well have been cut in two, and would have shrugged off the blow. Best of all, she retained her body, unlike last time, and her magic along with it.

Her initial panic fading, it rapidly refreshed as the last few moments played through her mind. Struggling to her hooves, and nearly flipping herself into the air (or lack thereof) in the process, she started channeling a teleport. The magic came as easily to her as... well not breathing at the moment, but as easily as breathing normally would. She gathered forth a greater sum, and greater, and greater, until it felt as though she held the whole of Canterlot upon her horn. With a thrust of will, she released her spell as a teleport, and hurled herself back home, to warn Celestia and undo her usurper.

Or so she'd planned.

She popped into existence in freezing cold, and what could only be described as sucking agony. Her eyes froze instantly, and only her alicorn physique kept her body from succumbing to vacuum. Before her, Equestria loomed larger, but still painfully out of reach. At her back, she could feel the moon shining upon her, its weakened magic the only thing sustaining her as she floated trapped between worlds. She tried to scream, but no air was left to her lungs. Flailing in empty space, she grudgingly grabbed hold of her moon, and slowly let it pull her back to its surface.

'I should have known better' she reflected through her mostly blinded eyes. The moon made an excellent prison because of its distance from Equestria. No pony could reach it without nearly divine assistance, not even herself or her sister. The moment she'd been sent here unprepared, it was over. Until the elements, her sister, or perhaps even Discord noticed her absence, she was a castaway. As her final, dismal act, she cast one spell with what moonlight drifted to her. She sent it rushing to Equestria, a trigger for those fail-safes she left should something happen to her. Likely the usurper would intercept most of them, but all it would take was one in the right hooves, and help would be on the way.

Until then, she reflected as the moon passed into view, she could do naught but wait. She was about to become melancholic when something strange struck her. The moon was getting larger. A lot larger. A lot faster. With sudden alarm, she realized that there was no atmosphere slowing her decent, and that her free-fall towards her new home was rapidly becoming a crash landing. She grasped rapidly at the lunar magic, trying to push off it, but such was the nature of their bond that she only accelerated her approach.

'oh horseapples' she reflected in those last seconds.

Luna landed with a whump for the second time that day. Assuming whump could adequately describe the thirty foot impact plume she made. In total silence, dust and boulder alike began to drift back down, leaving Luna to pick herself out of her crater amid a snowstorm of debris. She attempted to sigh, the gesture having no effect without air, and flexed her legs experimentally. Anywhere else, and she'd likely be a mess of sprains, if not fractures. Here, however, she felt only a minor strain on her limbs, already fading. In fact, as the ice melted from her eyes, she reflected that she actually felt better after the crash than before.

At least, she did until she saw the figure.

“Guys. I think... OH GOD IT'S LOOKING AT ME.” Vask had never been on board with the idea. Never. He'd been happy back on Terra, or as close as any of them could come anymore. How he'd wound up on this merry band of interstellar pirates was anyone's guess. It was certainly a mystery to him, almost as large as how he was currently being stared at by a naked pony on the moon. Even with his regrets, he had to keep his priorities in order.

And right now his priority was running.

“I need evac, I need evac STAT!” He practically screamed into the radio feed. To be entirely fair, he couldn't technically scream, lacking a throat, or any of those frail fleshy bits his companions seemed so fond of, but attempting to push his transmitter past safety tolerances basically amounted to the same thing. Especially when he 'lost his voice' as the circuits proceeded to fuse.

'well that was dumb' he was able to reflect in a moment of clarity.

That moment rapidly fled as his cameras detected the pony proceeding to bound after him. Again terrified by the inexplicable creature behind him, Vask picked up the pace, his hydraulic limbs gouging through the lunar dust. Most days, he was glad to have legs instead of wheels or tracks. Made traveling easier and a bit cleaner. Today, he wished he'd sprung for solid fuel rockets.

He made another bound, trying to shift his weight to throw himself forward faster. As a reward for his impetuousness, he managed to send himself into a front flip, the top of his armored carapace bouncing off a crater's edge and sending him higher than he'd have liked. And slower, he realized, as the pony closed on his botched jump. Rapidly approaching panic, he tried firing one of his leg grapples into the ground, desperate to escape his sluggish arc. It whapped into the soft dust, only to pop back out as he tried to retract it. Cameras sweeping around, pony almost beside him, he fired another at a more exposed jag of rock. As soon as it impacted, he yanked desperately, the sudden acceleration just barely pulling him out of the Pony's reach.

'that was too clo-' his thoughts stopped dead as he saw a soft glow envelop the pony, and she started to maneuver after him. 'oh come on!'

He couldn't keep this up. He was just too clumsy out here in low G. He had to find a way to end this chase, preferably without antagonizing the mysterious impossibility that chased him. Quickly, he flashed through the maps stored on his processors, and checked for nearby landmarks. Against all luck, he was next to Quarry Beta.

He might just have a chance.

Luna continued to follow the strange... device? She wasn't entirely sure. Though she could see steel and cables similar to those of airships and trains, the four legged machine acted more like an animal in the way it fled from her. In fact, the resemblance to the ponies of her first nightmare night was slightly... distressing. It was for this reason that she didn't simply grab it in her magic, lest she give the poor thing a heart attack... assuming it had one.

In fact, the creature/machine reminded her of a daddy long legs, a roughly lens shaped body attached to four equidistant legs. At least in appearance anyway. Its behavior recalled ponies and other mammals, the way it leaped and bounded through the air. She thought she'd finally caught it when it botched one of its jumps, only for it to cast out a cable into the ground, then yank it back. The action puzzled her for a moment, until its second shot connected, and pulled it away from her.

She was uncertain whether to admire its ingenuity, or roll her eyes at its tenacity. Truly it reminded her of her silly ponies.

As she followed at a sedate distance, she noticed an odd shape on the horizon. It looked like a crater at first glance, but as she approached, she realized the shape was wrong. The pit was square, its edges sharp and sloping. With a shock, she realized it was a quarry, and it was to this place that the machine was headed. As she watched, it bounded out into open space, then tossed a few small fragments of... something into the pit it sailed over, followed by one of its grapple-cables. As it zipped out of sight, a number of dusty clouds erupted around it, and too late Luna realized it was going to lose her.

As she rushed over the pit, however, the dust obscured her view completely. She hurried down into the cloud, but it was too thick to see anything. Flicking a light spell from her horn, she proceeded to search the quarry. Several times, she thought she'd found the machine, only to realize she'd stumbled across something completely different. The pit was filled with massive metal constructs, the devices mystifying her momentarily, until she thought about the purpose of the quarry. It was then that she realized she was among a number of digging machines, and felt a sense of awe overcome her. Each of them was as tall as three ponies at least, and could probably do the work of twenty judging by the tools mounted to them.

Just what manner of business was occurring on her moon?