I: Sugar, We're Going Down.
"One of our planes was miss-ing, two ho-ours o-ver due.
Yes one of our planes was miss-ing, with all its gal-lant crew!
The ra-di-o sets were hum-ming, they wait-ed for a word;
Then a voice broke through the hum-ming, and this is what they heard:"
Mister Rye Wander sighed contentedly as he reclined back in his seat. The padding, treated and yellowed in such a way as to closely resemble manticore leather, gave a pleasing creak as the soft foam inside adapted to accommodate the shape of his back. He found himself once again admiring the plane's interior- the chrome plating, the red carpet leading through the aisles, even the personal reading lights planted above his seat, hard to handle as they were, filled him with a sense of pride and entitlement.
He couldn’t believe some pegasi were actually willing to pass this up, go about flying ‘the way Nature had intended’, as they’d as they’d so insistently chanted throughout the whole terminal. It had irritated him to no end as trying to ignore it just turned it from a droning mantra into an even more irritating mindless animal bleat.
He jokingly bet to one of his liberal and less cynical friends that they’d see at least half of those protesters boarding when they’d return home from the continent. Those would be the sheep, the kind of folk who disliked something simply for the sake of being new, the ‘hangers on’ types, just looking for a new bandwagon to hitch a ride in.
Then you had the old-timers, and like so often with these kinds of protests, they formed the hardened core of the group. From what Wander had seen he’d place good money on them being veterans of some kind or another. They were the type with enough pride and backbone to make up for the rest of the chaff and would sooner collapse shivering from pneumonia rather than admit they’d started a losing battle.
This was real flying, no matter what you heard those hardline featherbrains say about it. They were simply the kind of folk who’d hate something new just for the sake of being new. The kind of folk who just couldn’t handle progress.
Wander reached into his suits breast pocket, the tweed a light shade of brown compared to to the darker mat of his own coat, and slid out a metal case which glinted brightly even in the aesthetic half-glow of the plane.
‘Every generation has its mules’, he thought, picking out one of his last cigarettes (what his more liberal and less tolerable friends jokingly referred to as ‘cancer sticks’.)
‘The bozos that get left behind trying to catch the tail draft.’
He reached his hoof up to his mouth, the roll of white paper tipped lightly on the edge as it neared his slightly parted lips, only to pause then he glanced to his side.
Next to him, his daughter was still wrapped up tight in the grey, scratchy woollen blanket he’d discarded after it caused him too much irritation, but apparently suited the barely grown filly just fine. She was snoring slightly, her nostrils flaring with each breath, one of the few things he found tolerable only if the traveller next to him happened to be a loved one.
Seeing that she was asleep, the stallion felt a slight twinge of guilt mixed with relief. He’d promised Polly he’d quit. In hindsight, he should have prepared better before crossing that particular point of no return. Now he was stuck between the ever present but ever less likely to be satisfied urge of camel Joe’s, and the guilt trips Polly was so inexplicably good at dragging him through.
She’d look at him with those big blue puppy eyes (she could make them tremble slightly, he was sure of it) her face looking at once both stern and pleading. She never said a word throughout, but then again, why should she? That look said it for her; ‘Please, don’t.’
Not a mite more forceful than that...which is what made it sting so goddess-damned sharply.
It wasn’t the cancer that worried her,’ he thought ‘or the lung diseases, no- she didn’t know anything about those things. It was the voice she was worried about.
‘Daddy,’ she’d asked one day, out of nowhere, ‘I’d like it if you didn't smoke so much’
“And why is that, honey? He’d answered, wary that she might have gotten an earful of some raving health nut teacher back at school.
“Your voice, daddy” She had replied “It makes your voice sound all gravelly.”
And she said it so tentatively, so utterly without authority or assertiveness in a tone that plucked at his heartstrings like a musicians hooves on a violin.
She would never abuse it though. She was enough brains in that delicate little head of hers to realize she could-
Well- she could shout, she could scream, she could could break the glass and bend the silver, but as long as she’d use those eyes he’d never have the heart to deny her a thing.
‘But she won’t.’ The stallion thought happily, lodging the cigarette stick between his gums.
You raised her right by that account Wander. She thinks about more important things than dolls and ice cream. She treasures trust.
A shadowy flicker abruptly stole over his face, twisting the corners of his mouth into a grimace.
‘So unlike her dear old mother, isn’t she?”
The grimace deepened, pulling taut the wrinkles at the side of his face (. His mind began to wander back to the last twelve years or so of hell he’d gone through. It began with those male ‘relatives’ (later ‘friends’, then just ‘helpful acquaintances‘) he’d caught snooping around the house when sometimes... no, every time he’d come back from work early. His reaction was what was to be expected from an average, prideful colt in his day and age; he beat the living horsefeathers out of them. Then (kindly, and of course, always in a respectful manner,) showed them the door, where they could limp out with some dignity intact.
The confrontation with his dear beloved was, to put it lightly, unpleasant in the very extreme. Insults were thrown, mostly pulling either his virility or the respectability of his parents heritage into question, with him throwing back some very ungentlecoltly accusations in turn.
When Polly was out to school or, ever more frequently, a friends place, things began to get physical. Not one on one fisticuffs (they were still respectable ponies, after all) Instead, they resorted to throwing furniture. As the guidance councillor would have said, it left our mouths and hooves free to “express our innermost feelings and thoughts of one another”, all with the added bonus of never having to get physically close.
This must have been two, no, three years before they finally settled for a divorce. The night after he had thrown a shoe and hit a frilly flower and fluffy pussycat tea-set on accident.
It had fallen and gone to pieces, and so had she.
It all came gushing out. Once again all the frustration and anger meant for him and him alone.
He’d started to blank out by this time, having spent his emotion in a brief flare of anger on a passionate argument and culminating in the throw, having all the emotion simply flow out of him in a few brief moments, he could only face the consequences with weary resignation.
He had sat himself down (perhaps he would have noticed his wife’s screeching had gained a more frantic, even hysterical tone than usual, but all too soon it blissfully turned back to just that same old animal bleat) and had begun to stare down at the broken crockery, as if the shards of blooming flowers and mewling kittens would still hold some symmetry only he could fathom.
Then a flash of shining metal caught his gaze, and his eyes were suddenly following the progress of a gold band bouncing lazily behind a table leg.
He turned back at to his wife, and she’d stood there panting heavily and her arm outstretched like in some dramatic gesture of offering, and finally she uttered the words he’d been both fearing and hoping for;
“I’m leaving you.” She had choked out, her features briefly softening from a feral snarl as she began to realize what she’d said.
“Do... do you hear me, you leathery old mule?” She had stammered softly. “I’m leaving you. It’s over.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thinking about it now, it was actually pretty funny.
He’d realized early on that their marriage was starting to look very much like a freight train, hurtling along at breakneck speed and pieces starting to fall off the edges. Neither of them would willingly stop it out of some vague notion that it was still the right thing to do, for them, for Polly. So they let it hurtle on, getting pushed forward by it’s own momentum until the inevitable wreck.
Boom. Crash. Fix yourself up. Move on.
And what had eventually brought it all crashing down?
Not the endless fights and arguments, not the year long dry, spell- hay, not even catching her cheating- but a tea set!? That bitch couldn’t find a better note to end our lives together on than the remains of some goddamn cornershop knock off?!
'Lets just cut off that thought -right there-’
Wander suddenly realized his hooves had begun digging so deep into the armrests that the material had begun to tear. He promptly let his arms settle to his sides.
‘You’re on holiday with your daughter for fu-’ Wander breathed deeply
‘... bucks sake. How long have you both been looking forward to this? To see the sights, to live a little?’
A long time. A very very long time indeed, haven’t we? So let’s just...
‘Sit back.’ He did.
‘For one damned time just *relax...‘*** Ditto.
‘And lets agree to not mention *that** particular dragon of the deep until we reach dry land, shall we?’*
“Amen to that.” he mumbled to no-pony in particular.
He procured his lighter, a copper trinket he otherwise used to fiddle with when he was with his own thoughts, and with a flick and a spark managed to bring a tiny flame to life.
He had just begun to inhale his first breath when his little ritual was interrupted.
The cabin door opened. A pony dressed in the pristine white coats of the airline staff and the decorated cap marking him out as the plane's captain stepped out. Wander awkwardly tried to hide the telltale glow of his cigarette, something he’d surely be politely but firmly reproached for.
Instead, the cream-white earth pony ignored him completely as he made a straight line for the lavatories. Wonder still glanced at him, nervous that his little activity was discovered, and in doing so found his nerves acting up for a whole other reason.
He’d only caught a glance, but even that had sent some kind of alarm bells ringing. He’d seen that particular kind of look before: the pilots face had looked pinched, edgy, wide eyed with the kind of worry he remembered seeing in jittery recruits on their first day on the job. A pony with that kind of look needed a warm drink and a kind face telling him he could go back to his job soon as he got a hold of his nerves.
Seeing that in the senior pilot captaining the vessel he was currently on didn’t exactly fill him with confidence either.
Wander leaned back, more tensely this time, and finally took a drag from his cigarette. He kept burning it almost to it’s mid-point. Mouth still slightly agape, his head arched back as he exhaled, watching the plume of smoke as it coiled lazily upwards.
That was better. The sudden pang of fear in his belly was still there, writhing like a ball of slithering vipers, but it felt more subdued now. Controlled, even.
Not long after, he heard the whirl of flushing water as the pilot finished relieving himself. Next came the soft click of the doors lock mechanism being opened, followed closely by the sharp, methodic hoofsteps of a trained uniform.
Wander smartly extended his arm to catch the passing stallion gently on the shoulder.
“Captain?” he asked.
Said captain responded almost instantly - his face never hitching from that same look of polite indifference.
“Yes sir?” he said lightly, “How can I be of assistance?”
Wander couldn’t help but look slightly bemused.
“Is everything all-right up there?” Wander asked slowly. “Nothing I should be worried about?”
The edges of the pilots mouth twitched once. That was the only show of what might have been surprise or dismay before that same visor-like mask of a face slid back on.
“Nothing to worry about, sir.” He answered without missing a beat. “Just a small amount of turbulence-”
“Oh, come on now.” Wander almost chuckled.
The pilot blinked. “Sir?”
“Nothing to worry about? Wander said, cracking a smile. “Son, I’ve seen forced marches that can’t hold a candle to that. You double timed your way back there... and judging by the look on your face, you had cause for some relief, isn’t that right, son?”
The other stallion said nothing. Wander went on.
“Now, either you lost a very unfortunate bet with one of your crew-members, or there was a circumstance present which for some reason or another demanded both you and your co-pilots full attention, And for such a length of time that you couldn't leave to take a leak even when you were fit to burst.”
Still, the captain said nothing.
“So I’ll ask you again, Captain,“ Wander said softly, no longer smiling, “For the sake of my peace of mind, and please, just be honest- is there anything I should be worried about?”
Finally the other stallion seemed to have found the courage to open his mouth, gulped once, and finally spoke.
“There were some unexpected high altitude thunder storms, sir.” He gushed out. “I had to ease her out of from the upper cloud sphere and into the lower air currents, and air currents around this part of the Atlantic are pretty hard to predict, because...“Licking his lips once, he continued, “...because here, the warm tropical currents meet the colder ones from the South, you see, and that sends those air currents twisting and turning in all kinds of wonderful screwed up ways, and by Celestia does it play merry hell with the equipment on this thing.”
He sighed quickly, following up again in a much more upbeat tone, “Well, long story short I’ve had a wonderful night flying a plane against the world’s strongest crosswind while wondering if the first thing to explode would be the engines or my bladder.”
His face smiled briefly, then stiffened with a look of almost horrified realization.
“Ah-!" he swallowed nervously, "excuse me for being so... frank, sir.”
Wander managed to keep a straight face for three entire seconds before he burst out chuckling.
“Excuse you?” he chuckled incredulously “What the hay am I gonna do, complain? You’ve just had me and my daughters lives in your hooves you humble bastard! Why, if I still had my rank I’d commend ya’ for a medal” He laid back, still smirking, “Even if you had soiled your uniform.”
This time, the pilot smiled back. “I wouldn't dream of it sir. Pristine Neigh-jing silk. My father’s.”
“Ah, so he does have some pride in him after all.” Wander leant forward and gestured to his side while he did so. “Say, you wouldn’t mind joining us for some real food back on solid ground would ya? Polly hasn’t had any-pony but this old fossil to talk to since we left home... Of course, only if sitting on your flank all day isn’t too demanding, mind you.” He finished coyly.
“In fact, I’d love to, sir.” Replied the stallion before his smile turned wry. “You might have flown with my father as it might turn out.”
“Hold your tongue son, I’m not that old.”
The captain tipped his hat downward, both as a courteous way to end the conversation and to hide the idiotic grin he’d been infected with.
“Well, sir, it’s been a refreshing little talk,” he said “But I’m afraid I really do have to get back now. Even a plane out of danger still needs a pilot.”
Wander inclined his hoof, the one still holding the cigarette. “Don’t let me stop you then.”
The captain nodded curtly before he turned his back, and briskly disappearing behind the next row of seats and out of sight.
“And so concludes a life and death situation.” The stallion thought idly. ‘Just like that.’
He took in another draw, and this time smoldered the cherry all the way down to the filter. He drew the smoke in, but didn’t inhale, instead letting the smoke roll around his tongue and against the insides of his cheeks, filling his senses with the taste of tobacco and burnt leather. Finally, when the smoke had cooled and lost it’s flavor, he pushed it out through his nuzzle in twin streams of dragon breath, followed by a contented sigh as his whole body sank back into his seat.
The starboard engine exploded just as he began to enjoy the afterglow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wanders whole world shudders as he’s thrown forward. He hadn’t bothered with his seatbelt, meaning his whole body simply kept on going and so landed awkwardly against the cabin wall, Wander leaning against it with the shell shocked limbs of a drunk whose nightly consumption has just caught up with his brain. By the time he scrambles back onto his seat, other ponies have started to join the commotion. Some had still been sleeping peacefully. Had. Now it was more likely that they were clutching their seats in that sudden onset of shock, steadily turning to panic.
He had just clipped his seat belt and was in the process the pulling it tight when the first screams rent through the air.
Wander blocked them out, just as he had the sudden drone of tortured metal that had suddenly enveloped him. What mattered right now is that he had to secure himself.
He turned to his left. Polly, who much more responsibly had fastened her belt good and tight, was still mercifully in that transition of shock to hysteria, her chest inhaling and expelling air in a quick in-out, in-out tempo you could tap your hoof to. If he didn’t stop her soon, she’d start to hyperventilate. Wander reached out.
“Polly?” He asked gently, but loud enough to heard.
He touched her lightly on her shoulder and she turned to him. Her eyes were wide and strained with fear.
“Darling? I need you to listen closely now. Everything's going to be fine.”
He kept his eyes locked on hers. Still, he saw more of the view outside than he’d care for. For one, the outboard motor it looked out on was, quite vigorously, pumping out great plumes of flame and black smoke. Wander kept talking.
“You remember those lil’ leaflets?” he barged on. “The ones that tell you to sit in that funny looking way like- like when I caught Buster rubbing his backside off on the carpet that one time?“
His daughter nodded vigorously. “You..you got all muh’- mad at him. Y-y-you musta’ yelled twenty min-, t-twenty minutes straight...”
“Right, right... you gotta sit like that now, you understand? Lean forward, hug your knees, and tuck your head in, all there is to it. Alright?”
Wander suddenly felt a wave of vertigo, and the world outside angled a couple of degrees closer to the ground than what was considered suicidal.
Polly began to whimper.
“Darling, look at me.”
He pressed down on her shoulder until his hoof drained white. He was hurting her slightly, he knew, but the result was that her big blue eyes once again looked back at him, still with fear, but now at least with some focus, and with that focus came a small measure of the steel he recognized.
“I need you to listen to me. Listen to me very, very carefully.” the stallion muttered, trying as best he could to keep his voice steady over the ever-increasing drone.
“You keep your head down, do what I say, and you’ll be okay. We’re both gonna be okay.”
He paused a moment.
“I promise.”
His daughter nodded again, looking much more in control of herself this time. Just like he’d said, he laid his head down and hugged his knees, though he never took his eyes off of Polly. Haltingly, she mimicked him, although a little more slowly.
The plane was really shaking itself to pieces now. A luggage hold burst open, spilling open suitcases and coloured clothes into the walkway. The damage must have worn away at the planes circuitry, causing the lights flit on and off in a haywire fashion. At some point the oxygen masks had deployed themselves, now leaning uselessly over the crowd of screaming passengers.
All of this still didn’t actually reach Wander. He had to keep focused, to make sure to the best of his ability that nothing would happen to her.
He had promised.
Numbly, the stallion realized his daughter had closed her eyes and had started mumbling. Maybe to Celestia or Luna up above, maybe just to some nameless irrational force that might care for her plight...
This was, after all, as good a time to spread your bets as any.
Wander laid his head down, lowered his ears, and closed his eyes.
“Dear Goddess” he thought, “dear heavens, dear sky, dear something up above please don’t let my daughter die, take anything you want my life my limbs but please oh dear heaven do not take my daughter from me...
The world shuddered. The aluminum wing finally reached its critical failure point and is sheared off like so much paper, being flung from a body no longer stable enough even have a hope of maintaining altitude.
Wander does not know this, he only feels it’s effects, and continues to pray.
‘Anything” he now thought to himself.
‘I’l give up anything, just give us a chance, that’s all I ask for, just a chance-'
Whatever followed was wiped from his mind with the effects of the impact. His limbs are all thrown forward like those of a rag-doll, any thought or consciousness wiped away as every bone in his body seemed to pop loose, his seatbelt crushing into his stomach and stealing away even the chance for a surprised gasp. The last thing he heard was the shatter of glass and one more great moan of tortured metal, both all at once eclipsing the screaming ponies as effectively as to silence them.
Then the world went black.
The Friendly Ghost who Serves as a Host.
Comin' iiiin, on a wing, and a prayer!
Comin' iiiin, on a wing, and a prayer!
Though there's one motor gone, (ooo-ooh)
We can- still carry on! (aaa-aah)
Comin' iiiin, on a wing, and a prayer!
What a show! (oh what a show!) what a fight! (oh what a fight!)
Yes we really hit our target for tonight! (tooo-nite!)
How we sing as we limp through the air,
Look below, there's our field over there (waaaay down there)
With our whole crew in solace, (ooo-ooh)
And our trust- in the Goddess, (aaa-aah)
Comin' iiiin, on a wing, and a prayer!
1943 Hearty Applesung
-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\ooooooo--------------------------------------
Wander snapped awake, and immediately dry-heaved as he fought down a reflexive retch back to his stomach. As he sat there, reeling, sounds came slowly drifting back. A few distraught voices, far fewer than before, veering between fearful sobbing and a rabid sort of gibbering, along with a strange kind of rushing he couldn’t quite place.
He shut them out, tuning the distractions down to a background noise.
Next, he used his elbows to prop up himself up, and winced. Though the seatbelt had thankfully stopped his whole body from being rammed headfirst into the walls of the cockpit, it had also driven itself into his midriff with the force of a kicking mule. The pain blossomed from his bruised ribs as he undid the clasp, drawing out a sharp hiss from the stallion. That little number was going to sting for days, at least, but he was confident it still felt too superficial to be anything broken.
It was then that he noticed how gravity was pushing him into his seat rather than onto it from above, and, supporting himself with his elbows, he found he could simply crouch on his seats back as he would on the ground. A brief glance below him revealed why.
In his hazy state, Wander perceived the whole scene as something slightly surreal. First off, there was the whole drunken perspective, looking from an elevated yet skewered angle, like an eagles eye view of a modernist painting. Then there were the ponies crouching on the seats on all fours, or clinging on with their front as their back legs flailed uselessly through the air, something which looked almost comical-- had they not been dangling over a rapidly rising mass of broiling water.
“We’re tilted’ his groggy mind finally realized. ‘Somehow, the whole thing’s tilted backwards... and we’re stuck at the end like rats in a trap.”
Wander turned himself around, back to his daughter, and realized with a dull sort of surprise that she was unconscious. This fact passed briefly over the surface of his mind but, seeing as she lacked any obvious superficial injuries, for the moment it skipped by, like nothing more than a strange remark.
“Maybe not rats” that same surface thought crazily as he undid the clasp of Pollie’s seatbelt.
“Maybe more like bugs in a glass. Any moment now it’s just gonna flip and the plane’ll go under and the water’ll flow in and we’ll be a-floatin’ like fish in a barrel...”
He reached over Honeydrop, scooping both arms under her still unmoving figure and hoisting her over his shoulder like he would a sack of vegetables.
“Not barrel, a glass. A glass for the crabs and the fishies to gawp through and make a pretty selection... "
The part of his mind which moved his arms, that coldly rational part sill working away behind the rambling meant to keep it all under control, was busily formulating an escape plan. This small, latent minority of his head had been been solemnly busy when the rest’s attention had perhaps been divided by a dreamy look out the window, or a passing glance at the pretty stewardess serving in first class, had noticed and stored a now essential piece of information, a now paramount goal to work towards, and so now, all other input- mostly the piercing screams and sobs of the other passengers on-board flight 301--
“Scuse me waiter?” The ramblings barged on, sounding maniacally jovial, “ A reservation in the cadaver on row two please- we’ll have the eyeball.”
Balancing himself on two back hooves, Wander took a brief glance upwards. He caught sight of a few fearful faces looking down at him (surprising how ponies could still feel enchanted, of all things, at a time like this), illuminated by a soft red glow coming off from the ‘floors’ emergency lighting. Blocking most his view however,was the thin wooden wall separating first from cattle class. Behind it, the busy core of his brain knew, camouflaged within the planes interior paint scheme as if intentionally hidden from anything more than close scrutiny, would be the two emergency exits not currently below sea level, ergo, currently the only feasible ways of getting out alive.
Wander coiled, but did not jump. The seat now serving as his platform gave a sudden hitch downward, and he was forced to readjust his hooves slightly before attempting the lunge. To his surprise, it acted as a small springboard, the mechanism inside reversing as it gave him and Polly a little extra momentum.
He still made the jump by the skin of teeth. That deceptive red glow made everything look closer than it actually was. Both hooves hooked narrowly over the edge, and held. The rest fell downwards, and he bit down sharply as his bruised ribs began to protest once again. He did not give in to the urge flail his legs like he’d seen the other ponies try, instead waiting patiently until the pain in his belly dried up and his limbs felt secure enough to pull the rest of his body and his impromptu cargo up onto the creaking wooden shelf.
Still grimacing from the exertion, Wander gently rolled his daughter off his back and began to half crawl, half-drag himself over to the cabin wall.
The pressure door was just where it was supposed to be. It was damaged, it’s hinges loosened either by the roaring descent or the sudden stop, and the opening revealed a tantalizing sliver of the outside air.
Then the grooves and depressions became clear, and he saw the it as plainly as he had before in the memory of his mind’s eye. With no small measure of relief, the stallion gave a final, belated push as he fell against the hoof shaped grooves that surrounded the doors handling bar.
He tried clockwise. He tried anti-clockwise.
The door moved not an iota.
There was a sigh, a faint grunt of exasperation as the stallion whirled and brought his hind legs in for a kick.
“Of course” He thought morbidly.
“Goddess forbid things would ever get easier.”
He bucked at full force, hitting the unyielding barrier with enough impact to shake his battered body to the core, and collaping as another lance of pain tore through his midriff.
It was expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. For a moment he could only lie there, gasping like a landed fish as red-hot wires ripped through him.
Some-pony, somewhere above him, called out. Two or three more voices joined it, their sounds carrying down to him in a frenzied chorus. A second later there there was a thump, followed by a sudden, harrowing cry drowning out everything else-- for split second Wander caught a glimpse of a figure, flailing limbs, a screaming face-- then it was just the cabin wall at the other side of the plane again, and with another two seconds, the screaming stopped.
Wander cursed loudly, burying his muzzle to the side.
There came the surface thoughts again, eager and frantic, floating up from his consciousness like logs in a muddy lake:
“Whats with the stop? Water doesn't make you stop does it? You float up and scream for a while maybe a quick splutter before you go A-FLOATIN’ in the under the sea, where life is just better, because your a platter UNDER the sea--
-- Oh Luna maybe theres something down there, like maybe theres something really DOWN there, what if it’s got crab-claws, and a beak and too many damn eyes and goes cada-CLICK, and cada-CLACK...”
Then something else tore through that, serene and determined and stone-cold:
“Get up.”
He really wanted to obey that last one. He really did, it just seemed his muscles had turned to jelly and his bones to sawdust, though, with a gargantuan amount of supreme will, he managed to slide his left leg.
The voice returned like an icy blade:
“Get up, you old bastard. You’re fighting for two lives now.”
A few more moments crawled past, a slow eternity. Then, another great mental effort, this one so strained it drew out a cry, and Wander finally managed to once again lift himself onto four legs.
He turned his head, and the sight made him wince. The first kick had damaged it, sure enough, but although it had two brand new-hoof shaped dents, the door was still snugly blocking off his exit. Wander breathed in, and began to mentally prepare himself.
“Right then, on the count of three...”
“A-one...” He pulled his hind-legs in.
“two...” He arched his back.
“And three!”
He bucked, and with a last wrenching squeal of twisted metal, the hatch finally broke free and was flung out into the night. Wander was almost instantly enveloped by a cold drought, the smell of smoke and salt stinging his nostrils.
This time, the resistance had been relatively weak, meaning the jarring and the pain were far less, and even that was partly ignored thanks to the heady euphoria of success. Wander allowed himself a thin smile.
Then, something solid, somewhere, began to groan dangerously, very loudly. The sound knocked the cockiness out of him and took him right back to cold, numb dread.
No time for soft measures. Every fibre of his being was screaming that he was pushing his luck a mile in the red as it was. With a single bound, he leapt over the still blanket wrapped bundle that was his daughter, and with a crude scoop of his head threw her over his back.
A single step, another bound, and he was leaping into the night air, his eyes making out only complete and utter blackness.
Then nothing. Rushing silence, roaring dullness, a coldness all over him, enveloping him, a shapeless grey in front of his eyes.
He was underwater, floundering in the chilly, muffled dark of the sea. Within seconds he had lost his coat, though he could still feel his shirt, filling with water, clinging to his hide, dragging him down.
Instinct brought up a sudden stab of fear, and once again that rational part of him had to hold an iron grip just to keep him from kicking out and spinning further into oblivion. Then he saw movement, an impression of flailing legs, kicking off a heavy woolen shroud. The fear subsided as the rational took this in. She was once again reasonably safe.
There was a sudden noise that pierced the dull throb of the water, a deep twang of metal, like the sound of a plucked guitar string magnified a thousandfold.
It compelled him to turn, to paddle and float himself to face the other way as best he could, and the sight that met him when he did forced out a stream of silvered breath.
He caught a passing glance at the last moments of what was left of flight 301, more than than five hundred tons of aluminum, tempered plastic, equipment, baggage, supplies... and ponies, all fading into the deep as if they had never even existed.
Another minute, he realized, and two more passengers weighing a grand total of around a hundred and fifty pounds would have added to that tally.
He stayed like that for a while longer, watching until the great sky-carriage gradually faded from the edge of his sight, until the breath burning and expiring in his chest became too much to ignore. With sudden, halting movements, Wander kicked his was back to the surface.
-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\ooooooo--------------------------------------
He broke his way through the water with a flailing of limbs and great, greedy gulps of air, beset on all sides by waves which broiled and curled all around him, a surrounding of foamy white, sickly green, depthless blue. He prepared to call out, but as it happened he was saved the trouble.
‘Papa!’ A voice pierced, thin and weak over the roiling waves.
Wander turned towards it, and this time the sight brought him great relief; there was his daughter, barely a stones throw away, clinging to something-- a floating device of one kind or another.
As he paddled closer he saw it was the very hatch he had kicked out a mere minute beforehand. Besides getting stuck at critically dangerous moments, it had the extra use as a kind of life-boat. He could hear the sharp hiss of moving air as a round band of yellow material inflated out of it’s sides, seemingly growing out of nowhere.
Dewdrop was trying her best to scramble up it, her hooves slipping and squeaking as they vied for purchase on the soaking material. Wander discreetly used his shoulder to give her a short boost, letting her clamber over the edge out of sight before grabbing on and hoisting himself onto the seaborne raft.
‘Well,’ he breathed, panting with exhausted relief as thin streams of water still sloughed off him, “At least we’re out of the fire, so to speak....’
Two hooves gripped him, panic-tight, like the arms of a drowning swimmer. Polly pressed her face against him, her tiny frame heaving and shaking as she began to sob.
Seeing her like that made him feel more wretched than anything he’d seen that day, if not his whole life. Yet still, he managed to scrounge up the courage to put his own arms around her and hug her back.
‘It’s okay.’ he said, ‘I mean, it’s not great, but it’s okay--’
‘Where *are** we dad? What happened?” We were just sitting there and then there was this awful noise, and everypony just started screaming and I was so scared and then everything just... just...’*
She trailed off, still sobbing lightly, although now it fell away to the waves as they lapped at the side of the raft.
"It must have been like a dream to her" Wander realized. "Some goddess-awful nightmare pulling her from one bad place to the next."
‘Darling, listen to me,’ he said, holding her tighter, beginning to rock a little.
‘What were into right now... I won’t lie, it’s a damn fine mess is what it is... but were in it together, you and I. And were gonna get through it together. I’ll make sure of it.’
‘But why?’ She whimpered softly, muffled from leaning against him. One word. And one hell of a loaded question.
‘I reckon maybe something got jammed in the engine, or one of the magi-motors shorted out. Maybe we took a wrong turn, and the air currents put us down too hard, maybe...’
He gave a long, shuddering sigh. A sudden, aching tiredness seemed to drain into him.
‘... I could say a lot of maybes darling. Every-pony always does. It’s the nature of things, that’s all I can tell you. Bad things happen, whether you deserve it or not, they just do-happen, have to happen, just because all... all of the unintentionals in the world, sometimes they just stack up against us.’
She pulled away from him, and though her eyes were still puffy and glinting with tears, there was no more crying. Instead they were now focused in a quiet look of contemplation.
‘Unintentionals’ She echoed. Her voice was cold, mechanical. ‘Stuff we can’t help change. Little things, big things, little things that lead to big thing’s, but all stuff we can’t control...’
She glanced up.
‘I don’t like That. I don’t like that in the least. Not one bit.’
Wander nodded. He knelt down, bringing his face to her level. He wished he could have said something off-hoof and swaggering, something to ease the mood, but nothing like that would come to his mind.
‘You don’t have to like it.’ He said at length, feeling desperate, awkward, like he was fumbling in the dark. Where was he supposed to go with this?
‘You don’t trust the cards you’re dealt in your life or your game.’ He said, regretting the words,
(a mural he’d seen on the wall of a speakeasy, for Celestia’s sake),
even as they left his mouth, too quickly to his liking. But then, he saw that he was being payed rapt attention, like some saying of great wisdom was being expected.
That seemed to jog his memory, he didn’t quite know why, and in a flash of inspiration he added: ‘But don’t you dare to fold em either, or you’ll lose em all the same.’
Something in that, miraculously, unbelievably, seemed to reach her. ‘You’re right.’ She said, and then was quiet for a long while.
When she looked up again, her eyes had hardened by some measure, and for only a moment they seemed to flash like gems in the sullen moonlight.
‘I’m sorry I’m afraid’ she said. There was something terrible in her voice, something which wretched at Wanders heart, and he supposed he knew what it was: here was a small part of her childhood, expiring painfully in the middle of the open sea.
‘That was selfish of me.’ She declared.
He reached out a trusting hoof.
‘No need to apologize.’ Wander stated.
‘Were both alive, fine and healthy,that’s what matters, and we are both gonna make it out of this mess just fine-and-dandy, but I’m gonna need you to keep yourself strong, all-right? I know you can be, but you gotta believe it yourself first.’
She nodded again, and this time her face turned to one of steely determination, something which sent his heart soaring with pride.
‘There we go.’ Wander said warmly, almost chuckling, ‘That’s the girl I know.’
Then her eyes suddenly widened, and for a moment he feared that her fledgeling courage had failed her; that she would burst not just into tears but into outright hysterics. Her hoof shoot out, not at him but at something else, something she saw past him.
‘Papa’, she said in soft, almost reverent wonder as he turned to look.
‘There’s a light there papa! There’s something shining!’
Wander, still calm and patient as only a worried father could be in times of such distress, saw nothing but the soot grey pall of the mist and the clammy darkness of the sea. Only the shimmering reflection of the moon gleamed as it bounced and wavered like a silver dollar in some conjurers trick, and for a belated moment he thought that that in her excitement, the brief glimmer must have seemed as something more.
Then it appeared. A thin wispy beacon of light, struggling into existence through the darkness before being swallowed up just as quickly. It showed itself for only a moment, two at most, but the second time already had him surge from his haunches as he cried out with boisterous joy.
‘By the goddess... They’ve found us! They’ve actually found us!’
He waved, the movements becoming almost frantic as his whole body seemed to fill to the brim with some kind of wonderful energy, expelling his aches and pains, wiping away his anxiety, and plastering an idiots grin on his face. He felt suddenly drowsy and energetic and mind-numbingly happy all at once, like he might start to do a jitterbug-waltz on their little life raft.
‘Hey! HEEEEEEY! Were over here!’
It was a loud shout, but though it stung his own ears and ripped at his throat, there was no response, no change in the steady rhythm of the beacon.
He made three more such calls before finally falling silent.
‘Maybe,’ Dewdrop began weakly, ‘Maybe they just need some more time to get ready.’
‘Maybe’ he agreed, his voice a raw croak, ‘Or maybe it’s just the light playing tricks on us.’
Her ears flattened to the side at this worrying prospect, something that Wander seemed to overlook completely as he suddenly turned on her.
‘Anyway, looks like well have to go over there ourselves.’
“Some rescue *this** turns out to be, oh yeah...’’*
He leaned over the side, took a few shallow breaths to steel himself, then hopped over and landed with a sudden splash.
Dewdrop cried out even as he began to kick, asking him in frantic tones what he thought he was doing.
‘I’m p-pushing,’ he replied through clenched teeth, already feeling his extremities going numb as the cold began to pick up where it had left off. ‘How else do you th-think I’m getting us there? Using my horn?’
‘But dad, you’ll freeze like this...‘ She said, looking at him with big, worrisome eyes.
‘I’ll be fine.’ He replied nonchalantly, his voice regaining some of it’s normal volume. ‘Its not so bad, see? I just need to keep moving-- keep the blood flowing, limbs limber, cold doesn’t even bother me.’
This didn't seem to comfort her at all. If anything , her tiny face became even more pinched with worry.
‘Well-- can’t I help?’
Wander didn’t answer immediately, instead facing down as he tried to control his breathing.
‘Just sit tight Drops, keep yourself warm like I told you and tell me when you can see whatever it is that’s giving off all that light.’
That seemed to satisfy her. She nodded curtly and sat facing the way forward with an intense look of concentration.
For the next long while, he couldn’t say exactly how long, the world was just the soft lapping of waves and a view full of sea water, with the only variation being the rhythm of his kicks as they became slower and slower.
The cold was doing a lot more than just bothering him now. At first, he had felt a dull, steady ache at some points, at others, a rawness that felt like strips of flesh were being crudely torn off. Now there was another feeling, or rather, that lack of it, and he knew that as a whole lot more dangerous.
Just when he thought he would for forced to pull himself up to warm his deadened limbs, he heard the shrill voice of his daughter as she called out;
“I see something!” it reported “It’s... it’s some kind of tower!”
‘A tower?’ he thought excitedly, then on the heel of that, ‘The light comes from a tower-- a lighthouse! That means civilization! that means rescue! And that, Wander old buddy, means were saved!’
The thought gave him new-found strength, and he found a measure of feeling come back to him as he kicked off once again, back to the simple sight and sound of the lapping waves. After what felt as only a few moments, his daughter called out once more, this time reporting that she saw some kind of dock they could use as a landing, and now Wander took the chance to finally lift himself on the raft and take a look for himself.
To call the thing a ‘tower’ seemed in his mind both horribly inept and at the same time the only way to possibly name what he was seeing. The thing was massive, beginning as a soaring obelisk of featureless, dumb stone, then becoming oddly graceful as it rose and tapered. One part flashed a gleaming white, like ivory or moon touched granite, while on the other it seemed not just to fall into shadow but to be made of blackest obsidian, and all of it jutted out of a rocky outcrop as if it had just sprouted from the sea itself.
On it’s very top sat the only thing that served as decoration, the source of their guiding light, still giving off it’s steady, rhythmic signal. It was a giant ball of some mysterious glowing green crystal, cusped in the reflective petals of what looked like brass, and so it reminded him strangely of the proud crown atop of a kings chess piece. It was gorgeous, he supposed, but at the same time it seemed so terribly strange.
He felt a slight bump as the raft pushed against the landing, followed quickly by four hoof clicks as Dewdrop pounced onto the smooth rock. Wander pushed himself off of the raft and halfway onto the ledge of stone, seeing his daughter staring upwards, eyes wide with wonder.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured dreamily, ‘who do you think built something like this?’
‘ ...a little help here?’
‘Oh! sorry.’
She immediately galloped over and nicked a hold by the hem of his sleeve, pulling until he gave a slight lurch that brought him well into the ledge. He kept on trotting a little way after that, carrying himself forward a few feet away and beginning to shake the water off as best he could.
‘Brr!-Ah. That’s much better.’
With a last whip of his tail the stallion looked almost dry again. He began to warm into a sharp trot, clicking his hooves against the ground extra hard to shake the color back into his legs.
‘Right then.’ He piped up, ‘Lets see if anyponies home, shall we?’
He gestured with his neck that she should follow, “Not that I think they’d expect anypony this time of night.’
The two of them began to make their way up a wide case of stairs, seemingly hewn from the same rock which made up the island, flanked every dozen steps or so by glass-cased braziers which illuminated themselves in a faint witch-light.
They had just caught sight of a platform of a large balcony-- presumably a lookout point-- when something carried itself to them from up ahead, something playing over the sharp whistle of the wind and which caused their ears to perk. Wander recognized it as the wishful strokes of a violin, quickly accompanied by the plucky, upbeat strings of a contrabass... and finally joined in by Dewdrop, who began to absentmindedly hum along with the tune.
Her trot began to quicken, speeding up the stone steps, when suddenly her father hoof shot out to block her way.
The verse stuck fast and died away in her throat, but the music played on regardless. She looked up questioningly at her father, wondering why he had stopped her so abruptly.
‘Drops,’ he began airily, in a tone hiding the uneasiness his face plainly showed, ‘Could you humor me for a moment and just stay put here, just for a little while?’
‘Why?’ She asked, her eyes turning wide and anxious, ‘Is it dangerous?’
‘It might be.’ he paused a moment before he turned to her, the violin playing out a single, particularly mournful stroke.
“Again with the might be.” Wander muttered internally.
‘Might be nothing more than than a useless gut feeling” he continued, “But I was just thinking that we should take it carefully, you know, seeing as somepony who builds a tower in the middle of nowhere might be a little stingy towards unexpected company.’
He moved off, turning back briefly to address her again and seeing her staring on the stone wrought steps, ‘Just stay right there now, this won’t take a minute.’
With another few seconds he had climbed the stairs up to the balcony and gone out of her sight, and she was alone under the lighthouses shadow, only the wind and the faint music to keep her company. She huddled back against the wall, and it’s meager protection helped her stave of a little of the biting cold.
Softly, timidly, her humming began to rise up again, but her bright and eager imagination had decided to play up again, feeding her fears and her worries.
But because of that very reason, that kind of numbing pre-fear that is both hyper-aware and physically numb to it’s surroundings, it was because of that reason that she did not immediately panic at what was by all accounts an extraordinary experience.
She had been expecting something sudden and horrifying, but not the sudden and strange. The enchanting.
The voice that sang out to her.
-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\ooooooo--------------------------------------
Wander finally saw what was beyond a shadow of a doubt the entrance to their newfound haven. They were impossible to miss, massive twin slabs of thick metal which shined like bronze and whose weight could be testified by the head sized cogs which served in place of their hinges. Like the structure they were part of, they had neither decoration nor any kind of mark, only showing his own reflection and, next to that, a shadowy view of rough stone floor giving way to clean marble, the rest of the inside hidden by complete darkness.
He swallowed once, and then called out,
‘Hullo in there!’
There was no answer, but the music played on.
He galloped closer in nervous steps, feeling his gut tighten. He hadn’t mentioned it to Dewdrop, not wanting to saddle her up with something more to worry about, but he’d felt the tinge of magic since they’d set foot on the island. It was something gentle, like the touch of a spider against bare skin, something you had to think about or you could never even notice.
You couldn’t get a feeling like that from nice, controlled unicorn magic either. Whatever was inside was not only powerful, but also unrestrained, like a seething source of energy that was meant to be felt... and noticed.
“But what the heck right? No time like the present and all that. Hey-ho, lets go.”
He passed the heavy set doors into pitch-black darkness inside. wherever he was, it had an excellent oratory, and the music not only jumped in volume and clarity but suddenly enveloped him completely.
He was still sightless, however, and very wary of calling out in the darkness and stirring up somepony-- or something-- he shouldn’t.
Wander took a few tense steps, trying to home in on the music and getting his eyes used to the darkness.
He froze.
Three figures took shape in the pitch-black gloom. All silent, but all bearing upon him with lengthened weapons above their heads, for what he could only guess to strike him down.
He began to gape, mind racing. He thought desperately of something, anything he could say to placate these attackers.
‘I-’ he managed in a half-croak.
Sudden, violent light flooded his eyesight, a flash of pain which forced his hooves over his head and caused him to cry out. He stood there for one fearful moment, expecting a sudden blow, a burst of magic.
When nothing followed but the sound of his own breathing-- and still so demurely, that little two-piece duet-- he lowered his guard to take a good look, and with no small measure of relief realized that he had nothing to fear from these particular guardians.
He could see now that they were just statues, their features fashioned into the guise of three ponies, elevated on a knee high platform which had made them out to tower over him. They seemed to be plated in gold, or something like it, and as he couldn’t help but feel a vague sense of familiarity at the details that were crafted into it’s form-- when suddenly it hit him.
These were the three founders. The heroes who had led their tribes across the world in what had been the very first expeditions to settle on equestrian soil. He recognized the armored form of commander Hurricane, strong and proud, his countenance lost in the shadows of a crested helm. Next to him stood the elegant figure of Princess Platinum, a jeweled crown adorning her head, her robe forever frozen in a windswept ripple. Finally there was Chancellor Puddinghead, her flamboyant hat and frilly apparel giving her a less solemn radiance than the other two, even though the depictions lacked the personality a mouth or eyes would normally give them.
All three of them held a banner, objects he had earlier mistaken for weapons, and were raising them triumphantly into the air. The Commander’s was an angry red, and was inscribed with the word “STRENGTH”. The other two had similar depictions, the princess holding a banner which was a sultry blue and read “WILL”, while the chancellor’s was a rich green and exclaimed “BRILLIANCE”.
Bellow them, worked into a simple stone plaque set on the pedestal was yet another inscription.
Agerre, Auderre, Auferre.
"something, to dare, something...."
Ad Ambtio et futurum.
"to ambition ... futurum?"
The words rang hollow to him. He supposed they were meant to sound wiser, more thoughtful, as if writing them in a dead language was supposed to add some kind of deeper meaning.
He looked out through the rest of the chamber, and let out an impressed whistle.
‘Now who the hay just plops something like this in the middle of the big blue sea?’
-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\ooooooo--------------------------------------
Shoooooooooo~
The voice called, and Dewdrop heeded. She made her cautious way to the edge of the stair, looking out on the shapeless wall of cold, grey mist.
Below her was the sea, a sickening drop into a trough of stone juts and spires, an erect wall that defied the endless waves. Still, further along, among the swirling eddies of rippling, foaming water, there was something particular that drew her gaze, a smooth circle that was paradoxically flat and calm.
She stared, and even as she looked that impossible smoothness began to change for the stranger-- it started to glow. First a faint witch-light through the murky depths, like a lone june bug in a summer night, then stronger, brighter, until it became impossible to miss.
The glow reached the edge of the water, rising softly above it’s edge in the shape of a small sphere, followed by a sight that struck her numb.
A pale, glistening face.
Dewdrop yelped and reared back from the edge, her hooves kicking the air in a panicked flail that almost sent her tumbling down the stone steps. She regained her balance, if only just, and now leaned against the wall, panting in shock and disbelief.
‘Wait!’ Called the voice from below.
She paused, clinging to the sheer wall.
‘You must heed me, mud-skipper!’ it now pleaded, ‘You are in danger, please, you must listen! You must!’
Something in that voice reached out to her, something about the way it sounded... desperate. But soft and weak. Almost whining. Yet for a second she had glimpsed that face, that horrid face with its pale, pallid flesh and wide, watery eyes, and just the thought froze the skin of her back and shoulders into frigid goosebumps.
And yet... that voice.... could something that sounded like that really be so dangerous?
She swallowed the lump in her throat which obviously disagreed with that logic, and with even more tentative steps than before made her way to the stair wall, placed two hooves on it’s side, and peeked over.
Getting a good look at it now (or, as close as she could with her eyes just barely seeing over the edge,) her earlier fear quickly began to fizzle away to a species of fascination, mingled with simple, foalish curiosity. The face looked back up at her, but made no further move other than bobble timidly in the water. It was much less threatening now: where earlier her shock had made her split second memory of it seem ghostly and strange, now the real sight brought it’s whole into focus, and she found it was much less frightening.
It was eerily similar to a normal unicorn pony, to a fault; his--her... it’s horn was more like a fleshy appendage, hanging rather dejectedly in front of it’s head, and ending in what looked like a dull green pearl.
At he sight of her, somehow, the pony thing stood upright, lifting itself a few more inches above the water and revealing that not only it’s horn, but also it’s forelegs were not those of any unicorn, replaced instead with two lengthy flippers, like seal fins.
‘Oh, thank Poseidon,’ the pony-thing breathed in relief, ‘I had feared you had already fled into the tower.’
He (as she had suddenly come to think of him, for the square jaw and the lack of eyelashes definitely pointed out to a he, even in the case of this strange creature,) received no response from Honeydrop, who was still peeking over the ledge like a frightened animal. Over a dozen thoughts were racing through her head; some of them focused on the pony-things (his?) appearance, some on what the thing could possibly be, a pony that was part of the sea and lived in it’s waters; there wasn’t any description of this thing she recognized, no animal or sentient race that basic schooling had taught her about anyhow.
Then there was that one thought, brooding idly on the corner of her mind, the kind of half-formed feeling that couldn’t be put into words, a premonition she couldn’t yet follow. Only it was something dark-- and it showed, even if she wasn’t at all conscious of it.
‘W--would that,’ she stammered, airily, as if in a daze ‘...would that be a bad thing, then?’
‘I cannot say,’ the pony thing replied, seemingly nowhere near as impressed by her as she was by him, ‘All I know, mud-skipper, is that I’ve seen many of your kind bumble into that place.” He flicked his eyes meaningfully up the staircase, further up the tower, ‘... twelve score, by my count, and I only pass by here on occasion. They come in, and never come out.’
She stared, suddenly wide-eyed. If what this thing was saying were true, then possibly...
‘Is it dangerous?’ She said, her voice sharp and anxious. ‘Some monster? Something big?’ She leaned forward, her face strained, ‘You gotta tell me, mister-’
‘I cannot say!’ he replied angrily. ‘For all I know there is some kind of monster down there, or an endless maze, or some gaping great hole-- and you mud-skippers just insist on throwing yourselves right in the center of it!’
That dark and unlovely feeling at her minds edge was starting to solidify, turn to something worrying. It set the gears in her head a-turning, in that funny childlike way that so often can be as slow to coil as it is suddenly to clamp shut on something-- like the clockwork of an ornate mousetrap.
She found she needed to know... but she could not place why. As it was, what she felt, trumped the tangled scramble of what she currently thought.
Dewdrop blanched a shade closer to white, ‘oh my goodness’ she stammered, ‘oh goodness, oh my goodness...’
‘Whats with that look?’ a second later, the fillies eyes had left him.
She took off, taking the flight of stone steps three at a time and still repeating the same mantra like some kind of ward, a prayer.
‘Oh my goodness, oh no, oh my goodness...’
The pony thing, it’s own eyes wide in surprise and alarm started to move himself, swimming to keep in sight of the running filly.
The voice called ‘What are you doing? Have you listened to a single thing I’ve said?! Stop! Poseidons sake...!’
Then he caught a glimpse of the fillies face, now set with the grim mask of desperation, and in a moment his own face turned from brazen to desperate in itself.
‘STOP!’
She did stop, but not of her own accord.
One of her hooves touched on a slick outcrop of glistening moss, and in a split-second her legs slid from under her and sent her flying, sprawling, against unforgiving stone.
She had the chance to begin a surprised cry, but that was all. There was the slip, a sudden pang of fear and vertigo, and then a dull-thump followed by juddering aftershocks her body slipped and was battered again and again by the passing flights she had just passed over. Only when she finally ground to a halt did her brain catch up to what her body had gone through, and the pain hit home like freight train.
‘Mud-skipper!’ The pony-thing squalled, oblivious to her misfortune; ‘Do *not** enter, you hear me? You should not, can-not, must not enter that place!’*
A strained, syrupy moan escaped her. Her leg felt like it was clutched in rusty talons. She once again felt the sharp pang of fear, the effect of the anticipation of hurt even after the fact had taken place, followed by shame as unwelcome tears began to swell in her eyes. Finally, eclipsing it all, was anxiety. The will to act out what she had set out to do.
‘Please,’ she called out thinly, begging through a clenched throat. ‘Mister sea-pony, you gotta warn him! You gotta warn my papa!’
The pony thing didn’t reply. She didn’t hear it move, nor did it call a back any sign of having heard her. Her heart jumped to her stomach.
It had abandoned her.
‘Please!’ she repeated, her cry now desperate as well as strained. ‘Help me! I can’t... I can’t move!’
Again, there was no reply. She fell back again, resting brokenly against the cold, hard rock. Never had she felt so miserable, and so alone.
‘Please...’
This feeling was worse than the bitter taste of failure, worse than the deep ache of a lost foal. It was the dark premonition that something terrible was about to happen. That such a thing already had happened.
To her, to her father, it didn’t matter. The moment had slipped by, and she had let it past her as meekly as a mewling babe would, and that accusing fact bit her deeper than her battered leg. And in her shame, her despair, her utter loathing of herself, at this horrible emptiness she felt but could not place, feared but could not imagine, she almost collapsed- almost willed the mist and the darkness to swallow her up whole.
Then... then something stirred inside of her. As quickly as her fleeting courage had been drowned in sudden despair, now too did she feel an ember, a defiant spark that floated to her throat even as she surged to her hooves once more.
Her instinct finally overwhelming her, Dewdrop’s shriek tore into the night.
-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\ooooooo--------------------------------------
Wanders ears perked. His whole body tensed like a pulled wire.
‘Drops.’
In a split second he was on the move, his hooves clattering and chipping the marble floor as he skittered across. In a cold gust of air he was outside again, his legs pounding on rock. He turned the corner as he overtook the doorway, too late, and almost smacked right into the chest high walls lining the towers overlook, before a frantic, half-thought jump placed him skittering on it’s edge. For a few heart-stopping moments, he could only move forward, half-running and stumbling along the edge as he threatened to plummet over into the shimmering darkness below.
Then he regained his balance; another jump, far quicker and steadier this time, and he hit the stairs in a four hoofed stomp, only to falter back into a slow trot when he glanced the quivering heap of a filly.
‘Drops.’ he almost sighed in relief. He trotted over and leaned his head to give a supportive nuzzle. She looked up at him with wide eyes.
‘What the hays gotten into you girl?’ He said, his voice hardening a fraction. ‘You got it into your silly little head to give me a heart attack?’
She shook her head quickly. ‘No poppa.’ She murmured.
Then she fell quiet. Wander realized, hearing over the wind cutting across the waves and the sea lapping at the rocks below, that the music had stopped. He pressed on, his hackles rising in flushed annoyance, fueled by a sudden premonition. ‘Then what is it?’ He almost snapped. ‘You were screaming bloody murder to Lunas high heaven, so I think there’s something I should know. What did you see? Come on, spit it out!’
Now she lowered her head, suddenly shy to the point of looking sheepish. ‘I... I felt something, daddy... like... like you were in danger...’
Then suddenly, she began to speed up her talking, looking up earnestly, as if eager to convince. ‘B-but this wasn’t just a feeling either, poppa! It felt really terrible, like there was something really bad about to happen, b-but worse. Much worse, like when you feel yourself fah--falling or something, and you know inside your gonna get hurt, but you try and stop it anyway even though you c-can’t...' She trailed off, the words almost disappearing into a mumble ‘Much worse than that...’
For a moment Wander said nothing, his features softening slightly as he took in the words. Then, he reached up to the bridge of his nose, giving off a tired sigh. ‘All-right.' He said simply. ‘All-right then, listen honey, there’s nothing for you to worry about.’
Dewdrop gulped nervously, looking much more relieved now just that it had all come to nothing.
‘All you felt.’ He continued,’Was the the magic that’s coming off from this tower,’ he paused as the edges if his mouth twitched upwards in the way of a bashful smile. ‘little fillies can get edgy to that kind of stuff, something which in hindsight I should maybe have told you-- that was my mistake-- however...
“You should have known better than to lose your head. I know you know better. Acting on impulse is fitting a lot more of an old fool like me than a young lady like you.”
He was smiling slightly now, letting her know it was all right, but again he saw that she was avoiding his gaze.
‘Drops, tell me what’s eating you.’ He mumbled. 'I told you you should do your best to be strong, I didn’t say anything about having to do it all alone.'
Her eyes flickered up to his, then turned back to the ground. ‘I saw something, too.’
Wander kept smiling. ‘And what, pray tell, did you see?’
She paused, a long moment of silence, then replied, ‘Do you know anything about sea ponies?’
Wanders smile slid from his face like chalk from a blackboard. ‘Sea... ponies?’
‘Yeah.’ She almost chuckled, a knowing sort of humor bubbling under the grave tone of her voice. ‘A sea-pony. It had flippers, and seaweed hair, and this weird little dangly thing on the top of it’s head I think it used as a horn--’
Her tirade was interrupted as Wander suddenly stooped down, raised his hoof to her and, gently, pressed it against her forehead.
‘Darling,’ he began in a conversational tone, ‘These-- ah-- sea-ponies... They didn’t sing to you, did they?’
Dewdrop blinked. ‘I--I thought I heard something, when we came on the island.’ She paused, ‘I thought I was just imagining things, but then you left and it just got louder... and a little after that I saw that... thing.’
With a surprised yelp, she found herself suddenly hurled upwards and staring down as the stone flights slowly passed her by. ‘Pops?’ She asked half dazedly.
‘It’s all-right darling.’ He replied, his head archly aimed forward as he carried her. ‘You gotta realize you’ve gone through more today than a filly has any right to have to go through. A little R and R and you’ll be right as rain.’
‘Poppa...’ she raised her head.
‘Don’t look at the sea honey.’
She immediately complied, quickly dropping her gaze, then continued;
‘Poppa, am I going crazy?’
Wander hesitated, delaying perhaps a split-second ‘Crazy?’ He scoffed, like the very idea was ludicrous. 'Of course your not going crazy, Drops, Celestia knows you shouldn’t say a thing like that.”
"Oh, but can’t that be a possibility?" That black little voice in back of his head piped up.
"She could be bottling up all that emotional trauma, as you’ve known ponies to do."
Rushed, stupid thoughts. Featherbrained slop. She had been exceptionally brave, but she was still just a filly...
"She could be -slowly- burning out under the pressure, as you’ve known ponies to do."
The pressure she was under was staggering, her reaction perfectly understandable...
"Panic is always understandable."
It was the sea, he concluded. Something as intangible and humongous and unfathomable as the sea, or the stars above, or the darkness that shrouded them both seemed always to cut you off from the world, even under normal circumstances, and by Celestia, he knew these were turning out to be anything but.
They finally stepped up to smooth ground, and for the second time Wander stood before those great slabs of metal and it’s gaping, featureless arch.
‘The sea-pony told me we shouldn’t go in here.’ Dewdrop suddenly said out loud, in a horribly lucid tone. ‘We should not, can-not, must not go into that place, that’s what he said.’
‘Well, I have gone inside,’ Wander replied in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘and I’m telling you we should, can and gotta.’ He turned his head so she could see him.
‘Now, are you going take the word of some half-baked water-borne side-dish over that of your own darned father?’
She didn’t reply, but he caught the embarrassed smile before she could turn away to hide it.
A good start, he thought. Comfort her, make light a sombre situation.
All she really needs is some warmth, a place to collect her thoughts, some food if we can find it. Honestly, considering what she’d gone through, she was acting just fine.
Just fine-and-dandy.
-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\ooooooo--------------------------------------
‘Woah.’
Honeydrops head almost reached to her back as she gazed up, her features struck in a sort of dull wonder as she drunk in all the aspects of the chamber.
‘What kind of place is this?’
Wander looked about himself, once again observing the buildings interior, this time taking a real notice in it’s design. Slab upon slab of cold grey granite met him as he gazed around the cylindrical chamber, iron grilled beacons set into the walls tinging everything with a warm yellow glow. Swathes of darkness brooded in between these beacons, or swallowed the walls completely as they vaulted upwards to the invisible roof. The walls themselves didn’t circle around, but rather angled at regular interval as to enclosed them in a many sided polygamous shape, ornate metal girders standing in descending layers at each turn and forming a matted bronze foundation against the monotone of slate.
That was the word. Monotone. Bland. Faceless. Not unappealing to behold, but simply forgettable. Soon enough his eyes slid from the straight, geometric shapes and lines, and unto the centerpiece of the statuettes.
‘Looks to me like some kind of show room.’ He decided. ‘Only one somepony doesn’t want just any John or Jane Doe to be gawping at.’
He set his daughter down on the poly-shaped marble, and her attention was immediately caught by the statues.
‘Who would build this? Out here, in the middle of nowhere?.’ She said after a little while.
Wander shrugged. ‘A rich eccentric, probably. Some lonely art nut crazy and loaded enough to go through with a thing like this.’
Dewdrop trotted over to the display, walking right up to the plate emblazoned on the platforms edge, and slowly placed her hoof on the cool metal.
‘To act, to dare, to take.....’ She mumbled.
Wanders’s ears perked on the top of his head.
‘For to ambition goes... the future.’ She finished, suddenly stepping back, as if deciding the statue deserved a respectful distance.
He sidled next to her, a look of pleasant surprise on his face. How’d you know that?’ He asked mildly.
She glanced at him. ‘Oh, uh...’ Her gaze fell to the ground, her demeanor becoming sheepish. ‘Mister Greylime taught us some old Roaman. For history.’
He raised his brow. ‘So out of pure coincidence, he taught you the couple of words that oh-so-happen to be on this plaque?’
She shrunk together even more, her face becoming colored. ‘I... I asked for a book about it after class.’ She whispered softly.
Wander broke out into smile, then that turned to a hearty chuckle. ‘Darling, I’ve known you your whole life, and you’re still full of surprises.’
He ruffled her mane with with an affectionate hoof. ‘Makes me worried about what kind of boys you might bring home once you stop being such a shrinking violet.’
Her head shot up at him, burning a bright crimson. ‘Dad!’
‘I’m serious!’ He said innocently. ‘I swear, I’m gonna have to chase them away with a baseball bat the way you’re gonna trap ‘em.’
She brought up one of her own hoof’s in a half-hearted attempt to brush him away, her mouth in a tight-lipped struggle not to burst into a grin. She turned away suddenly, but not before he saw her lose it.
‘You’re unbelievable.’ She mumbled, in a belated attempt to sound furious.
‘I know darling, I know. ‘
There was a sudden noise, and the both of them froze to stock-still in an instant. It was the rolling movement of something large and circular. Something that set their ears and eyes searching about the chamber.
With a final metallic chunk, the rolling stopped, instead replaced by the steady rhythmic tic, tic, tic of some immeasurable, invisible machination being moved into place. The noise was coming closer, becoming traceable. Wander realized it was originating from directly in front of them, reverberating from the statuettes. Before he realized, he had slowly moved himself between his daughter and these new, worrying noises that seemed to have no explanation.
The tinny beat continued for a moment longer, the sound now noticeably closer, not coming from the statuettes but rather from the floorspace only a few meters in front of them. A last, noticeably louder click reverberated through the air, drawing both ponies attention as a tiny hatch revealed itself to be embedded in the marble, no bigger than a grapefruit or perhaps a playing ball, and opened suddenly with a grind of stone on stone and the rush of escaping air.
Then something sprung into existence; a long limb of glistening, oiled metal, seeming to lash out at Wander and causing him to raise back a protective hoof. The attack faltered in midair, grinding to a halt inches away from him in the way of a rheumatic stammer. He could see it’s filaments straining down it’s length, see oil-tubes bulging like arteries. Then the thing shuddered once, and retracted back to an upright position.
Dewdrop peeked out from behind him, her flattered ears betraying her pang of instinctive anxiety.
‘What is--?’ She began.
‘Don’t have the slightest.’ Wander cut in under his breath.
The metal limb moved again during their brief exchange, it’s two part body angling to the grating whine of some miniscule bending-joint, seeming now to bow in their direction. Even stranger, the very tip of it, something that looked like a brass ball bearing only just small enough to fit through the opening in the floor, split itself down the middle and opened itself into a dragons eye.
‘Robotics.’ Wanders mind spasmed suddenly. ‘Hundreds of conduct wires and tiny magi-motors that act like muscle. Advanced stuff.’
He opened his mouth to relay his sudden thought, when another surprise developed itself.
The ‘eye’ widened further, revealing a tiny sliver of a dull gem, the colour of moss or the muck-camouflage of a home-guards uniform. With a flickering tick, four tiny, insectoid metal arms, miniatures of the original whole, detached themselves from the things slim neck, and began ticking away at the crysallous mass in their middle with an incessant staccato beat, which slowly gained pace, intensifying into a constant, droning thrum the seemed to lift higher, higher, until...
A spark. A single flash of bright against the dark, like a beam of filtered sunlight in a forest canopy. From the spark blew out a radiance, an image that wavered and shimmered like troubled water in the split second before it contained itself ... and Wanders jaw widened from a hang to a full-blown gape.
Suspended in the air before them was now the pallid apparition of a ghost. Not a ‘ghost’ in the sense that they’d ever imagined one, but still a sight that brought all those old horror-story words to mind. Ghost. Banshee. Spectre. A light that glowed a sickly green in the surrounding blackness, a tainted shine, like it was struggling just to bring itself into existence. It’s body wasn’t a solid, single thing, but a collection of tiny movements; hundreds of miniscule, illegible symbols that themselves were constantly changing and morphing into new forms cascaded in ordered lines around the thing’s body, jumbling and melting together in a sea of meaningless data-babble.
The shape began to change more, to evolve; the main body began to alter first, becoming smooth and elongated. Then the streams of information pushed out from their original shape, the lines of code building and multiplying into aspects Wander quickly began to recognize as a ponies limbs, the gradual creation of one being in perfect timed unison and symmetry of the others. By now the form of a lean torso was also recognizable, writing itself into reality, and soon enough the streams also began to mould a head, a head that missed skin, ears or a snout...
But not eyes. They were made once several arcane lines congealed together to form a whole that was greater than the sum of it’s parts; twin orbs of burning jade, unflinching and merciless in the surrounding gloom.
The whole appearance had taken no more than a few seconds to to take place, all in all, but by this time the two other ponies, both made of flesh and blood, and both becoming very aware of that fact, had begun to tense up for what every instinct inside of them was screaming for: fight, or flight.
Dewdrop was leaning towards the latter, her shackles standing straight on the cuff of her neck, her body stooped low as if to bolt for the doorway: Her reaction was however checked by her father, who now also hung low, teeth-bared, poised to meet a sudden lunge if it came to it.
What the pony-thing did next took them both by surprise.
It placed it’s forearm by it’s middle, swept back the other towards the small of it’s back, and bowed.
‘Greetings to you, Sir.’ It said placidly, inclining it’s head to address Wander.
‘And to you, Madam’ It switched it’s gaze to Dewdrop, nodding again in that strange display of respect.
‘Greetings, esteemed guests, and welcome.’ The voice was mannered. Artificial, but silken, flowing from everywhere.
And it was feminine.
Wander took a few full seconds to compose himself, the stupefied expression on his face still hanging numbly before being hastily rectified along an awkward cough. He abruptly stood himself upright.
‘Ah--greetings.’ He offered weakly, his pose still partly coiled.
He was still looking at it with a measure of suspicion, a measure of anger, but that was quickly beginning to bleed out. With the suddenness of the moment gone, the apparition began to look a whole lot less dangerous. It’s eyes seemed to glow less harshly now, it’s whole appearance turning more demure. He also noticed he would have stood a good head taller than it, had he been standing upright.
‘My assignation is “Abby”. Main function; Informatics. Security clearance; Scarlet.’
There was a short pause after this, during which the lambent apparition seemed to flicker briefly. This might have been it’s own physical way of showing that it was processing, or perhaps purging, new information in place of the metallic ticks and clunks the machinations in the projector arm made. Then she spoke again:
‘My directive is to answer your questions and your queries to the full extent that my programming and limited access to internal data banks would allow. Be advised: Time lapse since last maintenance recorded as three months. On-site data storage may be compromised.’
Another one of those pauses, and once again one of those ripples went through it’s
(her-- Abbie’s,)
form, distorted and straightened as quickly as a shaken sheet.
‘Please withhold questions and queries until contact with an authenticated associate of Providence can be reestablished.’
He felt a tug at the back of his leg, and turned to see Dewdrop still stooping behind him, staring up at the pallid figure.
‘I think this is what the sea-pony was warning us about, Daddy.’ She whispered softly. ‘It might be dangerous.’ Her ears were still folded to the back of her head
Wander didn’t turn to look at her, not immediately. For a while he was silent, staring. The ghost-thing, for it’s part, simply kept floating silently in it’s place, seeming to expect an answer. A sudden, worrying thought came to her. Those burning eyes, that smooth, lilting voice...
What if it could hold ponies in a trance? Was this the danger which they’d been warned about, not the siren song that had surely lured them inside, but the siren sight which would keep them trapped and helpless?
She reached out a gingerly hoof to nudge his side, and he immediately turned his head towards her, his mouth spread into an easy smile.
Dewdrop wasn’t quite relieved. ‘Dad.’ She hissed under her breath. ‘Dad, are you all-right?’
Wander looked at her strangely. ‘Of course I am.’ A short pause as he began to stare ‘...Why are you whispering?’
‘Don’t look at her directly!’
‘Why?’
‘Because she could hypnotize you!’
‘Hypno-’ He mumbled, and surprise tittered a second before understanding. He melted back into that easy smile, chuckling at her, though it was kindly rather than snide.
‘This isn’t a monster, Drops, and she isn’t going to try to hypnotize us. Or hurt us, or eat us either. I very much doubt she could, anyhow, even if she really wanted to.’
He turned his head, now looking the thing dead-on. ‘Isn’t that right, Abbey?’ He asked genially.
‘That is correct.’ She answered in her sing-song monotone. ‘This Avatar is merely a hologram. Direct contact and/or manipulation of physically present objects and equines is therefore impossible.’
Wander took a step to his side, beginning to circle.
‘Look closely at where that things coming from. See that tiny glow at the origin? Like a flare?’ He said this while pointing his hoof at the machine limb.
‘That’s a magical reaction. Those miniature arms are what keeps it going.’ He paused as he leaned in closer, actually placing himself right next to the projection, which, seemingly not reactive to anything but being directly addressed, continued to stare straight ahead.
‘They use low-grade crystals to store information. A powerful unicorn, or just a pegasi or earth pony with the right skills and tools, can project his or her will and create an image, or sometimes a message, and imprint it into the dormant magic stored up inside. Once you activate it, the energy releases itself according to that imprint, energy conducted across a jewel to pass along information. A con-jewel-ter, that’s what they called it. Last I saw they’d gotten a ponies image to do two thing: smile, and wave. So of course, some fellas started saying thing’s (I’ll be honest here, I thought they were howling at the moon,) saying how in a couple of years, they could simulate a live pony, something that walked and talked and looked like the real deal.’
“And her name was Abbie. Why not? Something short, sharp, easy to remember. Hip too, with the whole separate name thing that was going into the craze. Abbey Image, ho-ho ha-ha. Pony or Cybie, whadya care, you don’t know the difference.”
“Goddess, what would they think up next?”
He waved an experimental hoof in front of the radiant little gem, with the effect that it’s ghostly projection not only wavered, but actually disappeared for a few moments, ---before Wander placed his hoof back on the ground and the obstruction was removed. Abby seemed just as impassive to this disturbance as she had been to his proximity to her.
‘Miss Abbey,’ He began again, taking a step to his side.
Now there was a reaction. ‘Yes, sir?’ She said simply, her lithe form turning to face him.
‘This “Providence”... is it a corporation? Did it build this place?’
‘You are misinformed, sir. Providence is not registered as a business administration. It is, however, classified as a project.’
‘Project Providence.’ Wander murmured, then more loudly; ‘A project by whom, Abbey?’
Abbey flickered again, her shape wavering once, first expanding then snapping back into itself, though that unsettling stare of the twin glow lights never left their mark.
‘Results to code word; construction. Registered Businesses by association: one-hundred and seventy-three. Registered individuals by association: Four-hundred-thousand, eight-hundred and eighty-one. Should I list by name?
‘No thank you’ Wander chuckled lightly. ‘Sounds like a lot of trouble for a little peace and quiet.’ Then on the heel of that, still with a smirk; ‘All-right, which of them built you?’
‘Again, my apologies. Security clearance is of magenta level. My access requirements are insufficient.’
He turned to Dewdrop, his eyebrow quizzically raised. ‘Like I said, eccentric. And paranoid, apparently.’ He turned back. ‘A simple “no can do” would have been fine. A lie, even. That would have been more honest.’
‘That is technically impossible. Programming directives extract only certified--’
‘Shut up, please.’ He said, not unkindly. She complied immediately, feeling no sense of shame or anger at the reprimand. That was all-right, because Dewdrop winced in her place. It was the 'please' that should be hurtful. Denial so complete it required an apology. Her father had dismissed the air of small talk with cold, cruel practicality as soon he’d realized there was nothing more he needed to know. She’d seen it happen before.
‘We’ve had an accident, Abby.’ He mentioned, suddenly grave. ‘A plane crash a couple of miles away, I think southbound, but don’t hold me to that. Can you send for somepony?’
‘That is possible, though the communication might be delayed. Is there an urgent need for medical personnel, or only recovery?’
‘Recovery’ He replied, barely missing a beat. The image of the great sky-carriage being swallowed by the depths was still pulsing vividly in his memory. No-pony had come out with them, and no pony would have been able to after that point, he was sure.
A small part of him might have wondered why Abbey had given the other option to begin with. Why had she immediately assumed they would be the only survivors? But that half-formed thought was quickly written off as just a part of the things rigid mannerisms, it was, after all, just a crude, jarring image of a real personality.
‘I’d like to use a radio unit, if there’s one around. A bite to eat would be pretty swell, too.’ His mind flashed briefly back outdoors. He didn’t think either of them needed another scene like that. ‘And I don’t suppose you got some medicine?’ A pill maybe, or some calming herbs would do the trick. Maybe he’d even find a smoke.
The spirit-pony nodded her concession. ‘There are provisions available downstairs. If sir and madam would be kind enough to follow...?’
At her gesture, a soft, thrumming noise started up to their side, and they turned to find the darkness to at the edge of their sight begin to give away as grilled lighting strips were brought into life.
‘I thought you couldn’t manipulate objects, Abbey.’ Wander said absently.
‘I cannot.’ She answered. ‘Broadcasting activation signals, however, is still entirely within the realm of my ability.’ Her tone held something that was suspiciously close to smugness.
The darkness was pulled back further, and now they could clearly see the smooth stone steps, even more brass forming the inlay that disappeared into the floorspace below.
Wander moved off towards the new path, Dewdrop following close behind. When she reached the first step, however, she noticed that the radiance around her had dimmed ever so slightly, and a moment later heard a soft click from behind; she turned, but now there was no longer any sign of their Jane-in-the-box host, nor the strange appendage from which she’d sprung.
She hesitated just a moment longer, then, with a start, rushed to chase the lessening hoof-steps into the gloom below.
-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\ooooooo--------------------------------------
The staircase was long. Surprisingly long, it felt almost surreal... She walked for what must have been several minutes in the dank, narrow tunnel, a shape that bent ever so slightly to her right, meandering out of view. She could smell the sharp tang of seawater, undermined by something clammy and more cloying, perhaps moss. She could imagine how they were descending deeper into the bedrock, circling inwards like a great drill into the earth. It struck her as something supremely foalish thing to do, building such a large tunnel on such a narrow foundation.
At least the architect had thought to add enough lighting. A twin glow of the grilled beacons she’d seen upstairs flanked her on both sides at regular intervals, so she could make her way quite confidently without fear of a misstep.
It came to a point where she began to count the beacons as they passed down. She passed ten, twenty, thirty, she began to get worried. Finally, just when she’d started to go into a half-fearful trot, the way before her ended, the walls rounding off smoothly and ending in a great, overarching doorway framed by those massive ribbed girders. The room it opened into was still wreathed in shadows, a single circular glow-light illuminating cold, wet-looking stone.
And her father, standing off to the side, fiddling with some kind of metal plate on the floor.
‘Dad?’ She asked carefully.
‘Hold on a second, I almost got this...’
A second later, a pressurized hiss emanated from the the metal disc, followed by four metal plugs which pushed out from the side at quarter turns, one after the other. Wander quickly and instinctively pulled back his hoof, and as soon as he did the plate began to spin, pushing up from the ground with each revolution.
‘Well, well well,’ He almost whistled. ‘Quite a selection.’
Housed under the the shelter of the metal plate, still giving off whisps of billowing frost-fog, were tray after tray stuffed comfortably full with luxury foodstuffs. Dewdrop counted green tinted miniature bottles of champagne along rows of white asparagus, pressure-packed in see through plastic. Wander picked out several items.’You should eat something, Drops.’ He said ‘You look like you could use a little pick-me-up.’ She read off labels decorating food cans that somehow managed to look fancy- oeuvres, vermicelli, anti-pasti... caviar?
She was going to ask about these new and exotic sounding words when, with a low grumbling, her belly took it’s urgency over her brain; she realized she wasn’t just hungry, she was ravenous.
Wander pushed over a small pile and nipped the handle on the metal cover on one of the cans, peeling it back to reveal little white pellets. ‘Great.’ She thought bitterly. ‘Even fancy chickens are too grand to lay a decent egg.’
She was, however, not so brash as to voice these complaints, and soon found that though the little pellets were nowhere near filling, they were absolutely delicious, and at the very least they took the bite out of her stomach.
She wolfed down her first helping with what must have been record speed, and almost immediately reached for a second can to open for herself. Wander, meanwhile, was rearing his gaze around, squinting to pierce the pooling shadows.
‘A tower reaching up, a tunnel reaching down.’ He muttered idly. ‘What do you reckon they use all this space for?’
‘This space is used as a ventilation shaft-’
For the second time that day, Dewdrop yelped and jumped back on her hooves. Itty-bitty quail eggs and savory marinade fluid went soaring through the air and landed with a soft splat.
‘-as well as dry docking space for small aquatic dirigibles.’ Abbey finished.
Wander still stood calmly to the side, his pained squint turning to a bemused smile. ‘You know, you don’t speak like ghost, but you certainly scare like one.’
Abbey-- lambent, ethereal, eyes-like-stab-lights Abbey, was now floating in between him and Dewdrop-- what would have been almost slap-bang next to Dewdrop, if she hadn’t jumped the way she had. He could just about see a tiny green inflection and the shape of something extending from the shadows, one of the projectors that he didn’t think would have been there before, even if he’d looked.
Dewdrop, meanwhile, was standing stock-rigid away from them. In her sudden panic the food tin had gone flying, expelling all it’s contents before she’d snatched it back on it’s way down, holding it to her chest like Equestria’s most pathetic shield. She glanced down, seeming to realize this, and abruptly let it fall to the floor, where it touched the ground and started rolling. Two pairs of eyes watched as it sauntered lazily out into the darkness, where it hit with a loud clatter, an echoing reverberation like a spinning plate, and finally, fell silent.
There was an awkward pause in the wake of it’s echo.
‘You did that on purpose.’ Dewdrop suddenly spoke up. Wander quickly sobered at the tone in her voice.
‘Sneaking up like that.’ She continued. ‘You must have thought that was pretty funny, didn’t you?
Abbey inclined her head. ‘Voice print analysis indicate you are in a state of great agitation. Is there something not to your satisfaction?’
‘There is. I think you know really well that there is.’
‘Madam, I offer my sincerest apologies--’
‘No you don’t.’ She said, her voice low, her eyes staring like hard marble. ‘Don’t you pretend to be sorry when you can’t even feel it. Not with that voice.’
‘Drops...’ Wander said softly, walking forward.
‘You can’t even tell what’s wrong. She continued. ‘That’s funny. Because, that is pretty much the same as lying, you know? Despite what you were saying... that whole line about it being, tech-ni-cally im-possible. So tell me, how was that? How was playing a trick? How swell-
‘Dewdrop.’ Wander said firmly, placing a light hoof on her shoulder.
She quickly glanced at him, and her eyes widened a fraction, like she’d all at once she heard the venom in her own words. Dewdrop looked down, ashamed.
‘Sorry.’ She meeped almost inaudibly.
Wander only nodded, wary of the second unstable outburst in so short a time, but relieved at her quick recovery. It was the isolation, he reasoned. With this whole insane situation, they had to get back to the norm. See civilisation. See somepony.
It straightened his mind-track considerably.
‘Abbey,’ He began, ‘You said something about dirigibles- you mean subs, right? Were you telling us this place even has a goddess-darned submarine port?’
‘Yes.’ She replied flatly. ‘Several, as a matter of fact.’
‘It’s right in front of us, isn’t it?’ Wander said wryly. ‘Hidden dramatically in the shadows--’
He raised a hoof to his head.
‘Why am I even bothering with this. Abbey, just give us some light, won’t you?’
‘Certainly.’
She gestured again, her hoof going out with all the trained finesse of a conjurer, and the way ahead was illuminated as more circular glow-lights, framed by smooth, ornate arches, stuttered into life.
The floor of stone ended as a platform, narrowing inwards and turning to an iron mesh, wide enough for two to walk abreast, that branched regularly into twin crosses at each side, a mooring pole marking the end of each outstretch. It suspended over a smooth, still surface, a body of liquid undisturbed in this pony-made grotto.
Only a single one of these docking ports was occupied, however. Half-submerged in the black, brackish water, rising like an inflated bubble on an oil-slick, was the machine Wander recognized from so many news-reels and colorless newspaper shots. A bubbles-sphere. The name it owed to it’s own distinctive silhouette.
Wander laughed, shortly, breathlessly, almost like a cough.
Now it was Dewdrops turn to look up. ‘What’s so funny?’ She asked with genuine curiosity.
‘It’s-- it’s just...’ He sniggered, ‘This whole place... the tower, the tunnel, the whole secret-society shtick, and now this... I swear the guy who thought this up took it straight out of a Trottingham spy novel. A bad one, at that. Next thing you know, we’ll find captain Nemo and his secret underground cave.’
Dewdrop giggled, her voice once again sweet and careless. ‘Or the lost city of Hooflantia!’
‘Right you are! That’s where we’ll help Moby Dick fight the dreaded kraken...’ He said, grinning.
‘And find the goat pirate Back-Sheared, and win the ship he made of gold!’
Wander began to move up the gangway, chuckling. ‘And while were at it, well ride the rainbow, hop on the sun, and ask Celestia to come back down, and then we’ll--why not! Well paint. the. town!’ With a flourish, he struck the iron railing in at the beat with his words.
He came up to one of the docking piers, and when that too broke open to reveal one of those strange projecting stones, allowing Abbey to appear in miniature, he barely felt surprised.
‘Goddess, they put you into everything, didn’t they?’
‘My projector nodes were designed to be as compact as practically possible, but placement is limited only to areas where my physical presence would be deemed necessary.’
‘That’s just fascinating.’ Wander mumbled. ‘Really. But, can you by any chance open this door too, or...?’
There was a soft creak, and the pod door swung open from internal hinges.
‘Thank you.’
He stepped over the black rubber lip of the dirigible, and into what might have been a lush private booth in a speakeasy. His hooves touched down on lush carpet, leading up to seats which were a similar full and blossom red, silver threads forming an inlay that swirled and weaved around the padding. Looking on, he saw that sticking out at both sides of the entrance were small, compact metal boxes, which when inspected, turned out to contain nothing more than tiny bottles full of liquor. He kept on looking.
From what little he knew of submersibles, they were expensive. The costs alone for the creation of the glass, heated by dragons breath while a specialized unicorn team exerted subtle magic to bend it in just the right shape, discouraged anything but corporate purchases. Then there was the extra know-how needed to make all those components and fragile equipment pieces waterproof; the metal casings, signal wires, conduit circuits, battery lights, and, what interested him presently, the radio. That he did know about.
Meant for communication either deep underwater or over hundreds of miles of open sea, he was confident an SOS sent from a thing like that would have to reach somepony.
He was just beginning to wonder what words such an SOS should contain, never having sent one himself, when he heard a soft, surprised scream behind him. His first thought was that Dewdrop had simply panicked at the sight of mini-Abbey, still rattled from her earlier scare. That thought was rudely negated when he heard the pod-doors close shut with a slam and the pneumatic hiss of an air-locked passage.
He turned rather slowly, his mind very firm on the what, but still working out the how and why.
‘Abbey’ he said dully, ‘I don’t think I asked you to close that door.’
‘You did not sir.’ That feckless voice crackled, suddenly present from an overhead intercom. ‘This process is an automated safety precaution.’
Wander did not need to ask for what. The growing, mechanic thrum and the sudden broiling water at the edge of the window sight told him well enough.
‘Then *un-automate it!’* He roared. ‘Send your little signal and turn this thing *off and let me out!’* He was standing right up to the giant window port now, hooves pressed against the glass.
‘My apologies sir, but emergency security protocols overrule my own.’ And then, something that really got to him, something that turned that slow burn of anger into a blazing wave,
‘In your words, it’s a no. Can. Do.’
She said the phrase so haltingly, like a foreigner speaking a strange language, like it she didn’t know exactly what she was saying.
Like she didn’t know how much she mocked.
-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\ooooooo--------------------------------------
Dewdrop did not yelp. She had yelped enough for one night, she thought.
What she did deign to do was to trot over as fast as her foreshortened little limbs could carry her, her hooves clacking loudly on the ornate cross-grill before skidding to a halt in front of the view port.
‘Oh no, oh no , oh no...’ She whimpered.
The great machine seemed to be possessed with a life of it’s own, the machinations at it’s side whipping the water into great, frothing tumult, like a whole school of some gigantic fish had come to feed. She saw how slowly, achingly, it was beginning to submerge below the water line. Wander was at the glass, hitting it with both hooves, but only half-heartedly, as if afraid it might show a crack. His mouth opened and closed in what looked like a heated outburst, but what little sound might have come through was washed out by that constant mechanic thrashing.
‘Stop it, Abbey!’ She pleaded shrilly. ‘Make it stop! Make it go back!’
‘I have already explained the situation to your companion, miss Dewdrop.' Abbey said calmly. ‘Sir has conveyed to me most vividly that he has every intention to return--’
‘Then why is it leaving?’ Her voice was tired, exasperated even, yet it was trembling like crystal on the final note of doom.
‘The disembarkation process is entirely automatic. Neither I nor any present occupant have any means of control over it’s trajectory.
Dewdrop was no longer listening. She’d taken to whirling around the pod machine as far as the dock’s ending would allow, darting nervously from left to right in search of some kind of tether, perhaps a control panel. The final sound of hooves against glass, now loud and desperate, made her once again skid to a sudden halt.
Wander now fell away from the invisible barrier, his powerful frame heaving with exertion.
He was still speaking, gesticulating wildly with his hooves and mouthing certain words as best he could. He was probably trying to impress that she should remain calm, though he wasn’t exactly feeling like a leaf on the summer breeze either.
She tried to keep her eyes on him, even as he slowly disappeared beneath the wildly breaking water, sinking lower and lower to her knees until her jaw actually hit the floor. Then his head was gone, and soon after even the very top of the great bubble-machine slipped down into the murky depths, the water closing over it with nothing more than and the faintest echo of a ripple to show anything had disturbed it at all.
Dewdrop slumped down fully to the deck, her whole demeanor that of utter defeat. Everything was suddenly quiet, except for the new-formed waves lapping softly at the ageless supports of the walkway. Abbey, as always, hovered demurely, acting once again as the silent observer.
After a long while, when the water had returned to it’s motionless, unnatural calm, Dewdrop suddenly rose on her haunches, rending the silence with a sharp intake of breath and a badly hidden sniffle.
‘Now he’s angry.’ She said thickly, simply stating facts. ‘I really hope you were going for that, goddess help you, but now he’s angry.’
‘I never intended--’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
She trotted over to the other end of the walkway and settled herself down, taking on a position of wary vigilance.
‘When is he coming back?’ She asked, only half-expecting a real answer, and only half expecting it to be truthful.
‘Travel time may vary, depending on the underwater sea currents. A return trip could take an average of twenty to thirty nine minutes. Assuming, of course, that all trackage on the sea-floor remains intact.’
Dewdrop looked up. ‘Trackage?’
‘Structures that will help guide the dirigible on a route best suited for sight-seeing.’ Abbey answered.
The filly said nothing, seeming to contemplate this. Sitting alone again, she found her mind was forgetting it’s anger, her emotion was cooling, and slowly she began to find some notions to reason, just as her legs re-found their fatigue. She was also vaguely aware that her throat felt very raw, a combination of all that yelling and the stale, salient air.
When she found her voice again, it felt to her like something very, very small.
‘He might try and hurt you, you know.’
She bit her lip.
‘He gets like that sometimes. It’s like a switch. Sometimes it just turns on and he has to go away for a little while and he gets back and it’ll be fine again--’
Dewdrop swallowed, trying to whet her throat.
‘But now, there isn’t anywhere for him to walk away to. He might want to... no, he might need to make you pay for that, Abbey. For having tricked him.’
There was another one of those bizarre pauses.
‘I don’t think you really tried to trick us, Abbey.’ She said at length. ‘I know I said I did, but, you know...
She smiled, abashed,
‘I suppose I just haven’t been having a very nice day.’
‘That seems most reasonable. Sir had mention you were involved in an accident.’
‘It wasn’t so bad, to be honest. It was just a little bump.’ She grimaced.
‘Course, I did black out and wake up puking seawater and straddling in the middle of the ocean. That was pretty bad, I guess.’
The apparition wavered, seeming to incline it’s head in apparent sympathy.
‘Would you perhaps like a little music, mamzel Dewdrop?’ Abbey asked.
‘I have over seven thousand concerti in my internal library - a sampling of over three hundred sub-genres. The concerti are only the top rated favorites, but I can also offer symphonies, operas, and a nearly endless selection of popular music. You might enjoy some ‘tunnel-snake’ boogie. The ‘tunnel snake’, I am informed, is a dance that is performed on some of the most popular entertainment outlets in Manehattan.’
Dewdrop rolled her eyes. ‘Thank you, but I think I’ll pass.’
‘Then how about some live performance?’ She insisted. ‘I have reel-feeds from Dean-Dartin, Frankle Sinahra, and Tongue Lender, among many others.’
‘That’s okay Abbey. I... She paused again, halting as her calmed mind suddenly threw up a thought that both surprised and intrigued her, ‘...actually, I’d like to ask you to play something.’
‘You need only request it, mamzel.’
Dewdrop fidgeted. ‘Would you... would you like to play a rhyme, Abbey?’
‘Certainly.’ A faint click sounded, ‘The hail in Prance falls only on romance--’
‘Not those rhymes, Abbey.’ Dewdrop said firmly, the strange mechanism in her head, at first tenuous, now clamped down on that stray idea and and held it like a vice.
‘I mean nursery rhymes, like in a fairytale book. Like the ones my momma used to give to me.’
That was the idea. Groundless, random, connected more to some vague sense of happy nostalgia than anything concrete, she’d nevertheless gained the notion that even something like Abbey, something that could never really be termed a pony, something that didn’t even have a mother, at least, not in the same sense she had-- even something like that could be trusted, or at least be believed to be well-meaning, if it just knew something as innocently charming as a foalish nursery rhyme.
‘Could you sing one of those for me, please?’
Again, there was that thought-flicker. Only this time the lambent projection just continued to float, silent as a ghost. The moment stretched on, and Dewdrop began to feel supremely silly. Who in their right minds would record a stupid nursery rhyme as a welcome so obviously meant for gentlemares and gentlecolts? Had really she been so naive?
And then, Abbey spoke. What happened first, as Dewdrop watched, was that a rectangular area low on Abbey’s face, where her mouth might have been, brightened steadily. From green, to pale beige, to orange. A moment later, a bright red line appeared on rectangle, squiggling it’s way across the surface. A moment more, and violet lines began appearing at regular intervals, and before long Dewdrop realized it was supposed to look like the grilled mouth of a home radio set, just far more colorful than one in reality.
When she did finally speak, it was not with her own, flawless, inflection-less voice, but with that of a filly even younger than Dewdrop, bursting forth in the silence of the grotto and full of young zest and zeal;
Iiiiiiin the gar-den we are grow-in’!
Many chan-ges we’ll be kno-win’!
If, you wan-na be ama-zin’,
See, the flow-ers we are rai-sin’!
And then, just like that, it was finished. With one more of those faint clicks, the voice grille faded and the smaller voice-- what Dewdrop had begun to think of as ‘little-Abbey’, was cut off.
‘How was that, mamzel Dewdrop?’ Abbey asked, back to her good old monotone.
‘That’s a nice one.’ She answered brightly, and she meant it. ‘Never heard that one before, but it’s very cheerful. Could you tell me who made that one up?’
‘Certainly. This message was brought to you by Eclair electronics, commissioned by the--
Abbey paused. There was a loud click, then: ‘Security clearance is of magenta level. My access requirements are insufficient.’
‘What is magenta level, Abbey?’
‘To bypass magenta level, you are required to speak a password. You may be asked to spell.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
Just like that, Abbey went silent again. Both of them were still for a while, Dewdrop staring, the data-ghost floating. The moment bled out, second by uncertain second, until there was a click and a small, surprised gasp. Abbey had disappeared back into her little gem-shell.
Dewdrop beleived she understood. Wasn't that the nature of ghosts, surely even pony made ones? Reliably unreliable. Evasive at the best of times.
She began to settle in, again, preparing to wait, again. Feeling, again, those unlovely thoughts that seeped from her mind like yolk from brittle eggshell. Just like outside the tower.
Perhaps, she thought miserably, a sea-pony made for some pretty good conversation after-all.
