It was very well into the evening by the time I slipped into the museum in mind. There was a fee at the entrance, which Virmare had conveniently forgot to mention, but it wasn’t hard to pass that by. Just a bit of some bending of the light was enough to appear inconspicuous to the toll-takers up front. Once I was inside, I found a spot behind a statue display to undo that light-bending and appear perfectly normal and disguised again. I stepped out and did a little bit of scouting.
By that, of course, I meant that I looked around the exhibits. I was already there and it would be a while longer until the sun was down, so I might as well enjoy it.
There was a mild crowd being brought through the place while I explored. I caught a few glances from the group, but it wasn’t anything suspicious or questioning. Probably just some tour of the place going on.
I gave a small nod to the crowd as I slunk by them. It was the only-barely-genuine sort that absolute strangers gave to one another, accompanied by a weak smile or a tightening of the lips. They bought it, as much as one could buy it, and kept staring over the painting in front of their faces.
From there I just kept moving along through the place, most of the purveyors heading towards the entrance, maybe unconsciously. I was doing just the opposite. It made me stick out, of course, so the solution was simple; I waited until the guests were out of sight, out near the front, and before the guards had trickled out to look around the halls, I threw on the stronger version of the light bending spell I had used before. It made me feel a little woozy with both the magic it took and the effect it had, but when a guard, decked out in fanciful blue cloth and matching hat, came marching through the hall, he stuck to the center of his route and didn’t notice me moving about at all.
That was one part of the job done. I stopped myself from sighing in relief, resigning to simple, slow breaths instead, and headed further into the museum. The next step would be to find that stupid book the crazy unicorn needed, failing finding her first. Based on the very, very obvious fact that this building wasn’t housing any history exhibits beyond the artistic sort, this was going to be the fanciful eye-candy art type. If we – er, if I – was lucky, then maybe the book would be considered too ugly to be put up as a display. If that was the case, it would probably be in some back room among the dusty pieces of ancient art needing some reassembly.
Yeah, I could picture it now: a bunch of shelves, mostly empty, in a corridor deprived of guards. What a nice and easy job it would be.
After some half-hearted trolling of the halls, I caught sight of some double-doors off on the right side. On a tiny golden plaque next to it read “EMPLOYEES ONLY” in that odd mixture of off-putting capital letters mixed with flowing font.
That could be it. It could be the store room equivalent, or the guard break area. After seeing a couple of said patrols pass, though, I considered it a pretty safe bet that this would be the spot I wanted to get to. Once again, taking time and caution, I waited until both of my sides were clear of guards and noise before I gently grasped the handle on one of the doors and pulled it open, only barely.
I slipped in while the door was swinging back, catching it and letting it click closed. Only after it had shut did I look forward to check out the new environment.
I was, at best, over half right. This area must have been somewhere near the back of the museum, and was devoid of any traffic, be it guard or guest. The floor was covered with dust, as were the shelves – and the shelves went way, way, way up. Most were as empty as the floor, though a few held ceramics or covered paintings and assorted works of art. Between the shelves wasn’t much room, unlike what I had imagined.
That little difference would have been fine, of course, if not for the section at the back that was cluttered full of tons and tons of tomes.
Well past the sparse shelves of art were entire shelves of books, parallel to the other, stacked from the bottom to the top. There wasn’t a single empty space or any separators, either. Whoever had set these up had clearly intended for them to use up every inch of area they could, even though there was very clearly some open areas in this storage.
I felt confident enough in my assertion that I was alone to mumble some unpleasantries about the idiot responsible for stacking things back here. If they wanted to have a library, then they could have just moved it into the castle and saved themselves their “precious” space here.
“Why does an art museum have this many books, anyway?” I spat, before there was a loud sound I could only describe as something like a particularly airy sneeze.
I jumped forward and nearly knocked into a mostly empty shelf, only barely stopping myself with a push of my wings. I was still invisible, but that didn’t last long before I put all that gathered energy into a spell for flooding someone with air – ideally, something like the opposite of having the wind knocked out of them.
But I didn’t get to use it. The source of the noise was also responsible for completely sapping that power I had gathered, leaving me drained. I fell face-first onto the dusty floor and coughed, followed by more coughing and gagging thanks to said dust. I looked up, feeling thoroughly beaten and humiliated.
Of course it had to be Virmare. She looked down at me momentarily, just to be sure I wasn’t dead, probably, and then looked at the books right ahead. “Oh. Great. I thought you would have found it by now and I could just get on my way, but at least we should be pretty close,” she said, calm enough to be clearly taunting me.
I wiped at my mouth and nostrils to clear out yet more of the dust before I worked on standing up. “How did –“ I started, but she just shushed me as she began checking out the collection.
“Earlier today I grabbed one of your hairs – which wasn’t really a hair, of course, but I didn’t really think that one through before I did it.” Oh, now she admits to doing anything wrong in the slightest. “But it didn’t matter. It was still a piece of your magical work, therefore your essence, so I could track you down with it.” And even then she hadn’t really messed up. “When you started heading to the museum, I made my way here, too, and waited just outside. As soon as I could pick up you talking, I figured it was safe to teleport in on you.”
I stepped next to her and looked over her shoulder, clearly aggravating her. “Why don’t you start on the other shelf? …and why does an art museum have this many books, anyway?”
I rolled my eyes and did as she asked. Old, raggedy brown tomes where was I started, but there wasn’t exactly a lack of them. Plus, it was an ordeal to tug them out of the tight confines that were the accompanying books.
The first I managed to pull free was something written by one “Hoofdini,” which wasn’t the first genie in Equestria, I was surprised to find. Instead, he was some sort of magic performer. Rather than put it right away, I looked into it. Pages were loaded with flashy spells and his best recollection on how he had done them, for what, and even how the crowds tended to receive them. It was something between a diary and a spellbook.
I set it aside, saving the hassle of potentially finding it again, and dug into some more. They were all related, at least somewhat. Every single one was all about magic, whether it was spells themselves, or a history of the stuff, or suggested reagents, focuses, and their replacements.
“They must be planning some sort of showing of the art of magic,” I concluded, stating it aloud just in case Virmare hadn’t realized the same thing. Maybe I could get that much over her. “Spellweaving, showy magics, it’s all here.”
She scoffed. “Where I come from, magic isn’t some innate thing. I can’t imagine that you would have made it into an art form before us.”
I looked behind me and right at her, lifting a brow. “Unicorn aren’t born with magical ability where you’re from?”
Her arm seized up before shoving aside a bulky bunch of books. “No. They’re not. I speak from experience.”
Based on the tension that stuck around in her muscles, I guessed that must have been the case. That explained… some things, at least. I certainly wasn’t about to push her on the subject of magic if she believed it to be her hard work and nothing to do with nature.
Even so, I’d never heard of a unicorn born without the ability to do magic – or a changeling. Perhaps she was the exception, which made the topic even more of an obvious hazard to tread on.
I carefully let the subject drop and went back to sorting through the lines of books.
It took much longer than I would have expected, but it’s not like I had ever gone spell book hunting before; not that specifically, anyway. Apparently brown was the color of choice for magic practitioners. I found one that matched a little more closely, with scorch marks near the front. I brought it out and near to Virmare, but she had done the same. She opened her book, looked on the inside cover, and her face lit up. She immediately shut it and kept it suspended in her magic. It wasn’t any normal lift spell – it looked like it was could take a beating from a dragon and still hold out. She valued that thing.
I shrugged and started moving back to the shelf I was at. “If you’ve got it, I guess we don’t need this one,” I said, and opened it up before putting it back.
Unfortunately, it exploded in my face.
The book had a real doozy of a warding spell to protect it ready to go, and it must not have been opened in quite some time with how much force it had stored. It blasted me back into the shelf with all the force of a cannon, crushing my chest under the power it put out. Books, wood, and dust went flying while the shelf took its sweet time to swing and knock against the floor. There was a fairly nasty squelch that sounded too familiar to me from my time fighting and escaping changelings a few months back, and there was only a few brief seconds of numbness in my shoulders, hips, and chest before they lit up with searing, pressing pain.
It really HURT. I ended up sprawled out on top of splintered wood and burnt paper, coughing yet again. This time, though, each cough was like my lungs got to contract and expand atop a bed of burning spikes, and made my whole body seize up around my center.
Oh, yeah, and then I remembered I had senses beyond pain and sight. Everything smelled dusty, burnt, and awful; I could most definitely taste something ichory and burning stuck in my mouth; and my ears were painfully ringing.
There was something else, too, but it wasn’t coming in right away. I waited in pain for to adjust, only to pick up the noise of yelling and general alarm. And a literal siren of an alarm, too.
“…me? Can you HEAR ME?”
And OW was that loud, too. I raised the less pained arm to my head, very softly trying to cover where the sounds came in. “Yes, I can hear you pretty well, thanks,” I grumbled, trying to look away from the ceiling that was holding my attention. Virmare was standing before me, appearing less smarmy and more… concerned, oddly enough. Panicked, maybe.
Ah. Right. Things slowly started to piece together in my shaken head. That enormous explosion was loud enough to warn the entirety of the guards and maybe even anyone outside the museum, too.
“We’ve got to go.” Obviously, but my head was still all swimmy, and I just said the first thing that came to mind. I moved to stand up, feeling plenty ready to leave the sorry state I was in, but the pain that shot through the whole of my being and then some put any desires to move all the way out of my head and halfway across the planet. Anything I did simply made it hurt more.
“The only part of you that isn’t burned is your whole backside,” Virmare commented, which I’m sure came from the fact that she was panicked like I was, and not that she wanted to see me flipped over like a cooked vegetable and finished grilling on the other side. Either way, she approached me and – to my surprise – lifted me up in her magic in the same sort of spell that she’d had on her book.
“You’re… real heavy,” she complained. Not too long after, her magic flickered and nearly died out, making her gasp, huff, and take a deep breath to maintain that level of power.
“You don’t have to hold me in that same sort of bubble,” I told her. In response, she glared at me and started to let the concentration slip on it, degrading the spell. I could start to feel the pain in my back intensify, and I bit my lip to prevent some sort of unmanly whine escape. She put the same level of power back into the spell, and the pain lightened back to the level of intolerable it was at prior. “Fine,” I gasped, and put all my focus into carrying the book instead.
She was hesitant to let go at first. It was pretty easy to tell, considering her aura wouldn’t leave her tome for a good few seconds. She did, though, and with her effort all in one place, and my lackluster power backing up that which she had held before, she brought us back out through the only door available.
“You’d think they’d have a fire exit,” I managed between panting. Virmare didn’t laugh. “Can’t you… teleport us out, or something?”
“I can’t teleport on something without an exact idea of where I’m going. I’m in a city I don’t know, in a building I don’t know, carrying some crazy idiot I only barely know.” Guards were flocking to the store room now, cones of bright light projected in front of them. I got the feeling they weren’t just for seeing in the dark, either, based on the particles that bounced off of the surfaces the light touched. “Plus, I’m not teleporting anywhere when I’m already focused on carrying something YOUR size. And I’m not the one holding my book.”
I had to concede that that was fair. She looked to the right, the left, and then the right again, huffing in exasperation. She just decided to head down where was closest, guards be damned.
It wasn’t the best idea. A cone of light caught her on the shoulder, and she froze up - not even her whole body; just the left foreleg, which sent her to the ground, and, by effect, me too. While I couldn’t imagine how that stunning magic must have felt, I also couldn’t imagine it hurt more than having my already aching body subjected to more impacts. I completely forgot about holding that book in the meantime when I was much more concerned with holding myself together.
I was able to roll my neck enough to look away from an ornate pillar and over to Virmare instead. She took the fall rather gracefully, all things considered. She was already back up on her hooves and spent just a second to blast the guard responsible for our fall with a cone of flame. It didn’t incinerate him, thankfully, but it did make him drop the cone and focus on blocking off that fire. She spun back to the book and I, looking the both of us over.
I could see her look between the tome and me a couple of times. The deliberation and consideration she was doing terrified me for much too long. We were here for her book, not for me. She could easily grab it and run off without the dead weight I had become.
But she didn’t. She grabbed me up in her magic again, pulled me around the corner with her, and ran at breakneck speeds towards the entrance.
In the oddest way, we were lucky that the way I had come in was the longer path around. Most of the guards were moving to fill up the shortest space between the entrance and the store room. Our run had fewer blockages than it could have otherwise had, and Virmare was quick to blast any more watchponies before they caught us. Each one ended up subdued under a blast of flame, and she kept moving while they recovered.
Along the way, she may have destroyed some priceless artwork with stray embers. I couldn’t hold that against her. I ignored anything alight and did my best to not pass out from the pain and the growing smoke while she carried me.
The toll gates were filled full of guards, once we had finally reached them. They stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking our exit.
Virmare grunted and slowed herself as she rounded another corner, catching sight of them. “I don’t suppose you have any energy at all? I just spent most of it getting us here, and…”
“Sure,” I managed, forcing myself to keep my eyes open. With any luck, I’d pass out after I used up all my magic and I could get some rest in. “Just get me a little closer.”
The nightwatch didn’t want that to happen. They yelled about staying in place while a few of them came forth to restrain her and stop her magic, but they didn’t dare move, holding barriers up to block the possible fire they saw trailing behind her. Still, she inched closer, the guards holding their ground and looking very uncertain and worried about it.
“Cover our ears and eyes,” I whispered, and squinted as I focused.
It started as a tiny sparkle behind the guards and their barriers and slowly grew to the size of a melon. As soon as the magic covering from Virmare went up, the melon popped with a bang that was still loud and painful, making both her and I wince while the guard yelled and curled up to try and block their senses off after the fact from the best flashbang I’d ever been able to create.
My rescuer (bleh, it felt bad to call her that) didn’t waste any time carrying two of us out while fatigue settled in over my pain. My bed was going to be holding me in its warm, loving embrace for a good few days very soon, if I made it out.
Our chances didn’t look too bad, now. There didn’t look to be any guards outside, and the ones we hadn’t incapacitated were funneling out over the blinded blockade up front. Virmare just ran, far, far, and farther, down dark streets.
“You got the book, didn’t you?” she asked, looking up and to the left to me, still very suspended in magic.
“Of course I did.” I presented the tome to her through my waning magic. She slowed to a halt, and I dropped it onto her back.
She looked like she might collapse then and there in relief. “Good.” She turned back to me again and frowned. “I didn’t pick you over it for any reason other than the fact that I could easily come back for the book, and not for you. So don’t think that for a second.”
I probably laughed or smiled or something, but I wasn’t anywhere near lucid enough to process it. Instead I readily fell asleep.
