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The Conversion Bureau: Setting Things Right

by kildeez

Chapter 26: Chapter XXVI: Back In Canterlot...

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1030 HOURS
UNDISCLOSED ROOM IN LOWER COMMONS
CANTERLOT CASTLE, CANTERLOT, EQUESTRIA
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As far as training sessions went, Shining Armor had gone through better. Of course, usually training involved strengthening some part of himself: mind, body, or magic. This was something else entirely. He grunted, eyes closing with the strain in his horn.

“Focus, Captain,” Luna cautioned, standing over him. “Focus is the key here, not effort. Remember: you won’t have your magic on the other side. This spell will need to be maintained by your ambient magic, and you must focus to draw upon it.”

Nodding, Shining’s face relaxed, his effort drawing back. His mind emptied itself. Surprisingly enough, this part of the training was coming along easily. The meditation, imagining himself as merely an antenna for the power around him, turning himself into his own magic generator, was turning out to be one of the easier parts of this training. Maybe it was all those fantasy novels he’d read in high school. Losing himself in some other world was kind of like this, only instead of swords and dragons and certain pink princesses in grave danger; there was just himself and a great, blank slate.

And then Luna reared up behind him and screamed her lungs out, the sort of terrified scream that might open a cheap slasher movie. Gasping, Shining’s eyes bolted open and he fell on his back. The spell dissipated in an instant.

“Princess, what…” he started.

Luna merely sighed at him. “Focus, Shining, under any circumstances. Do you believe your captors will stay nice and quiet for you while you maintain the spell? Do you think your capture will be smooth and calming?”

Shining opened his mouth, then closed it. He bowed his head, shame obvious on his face. “I’m sorry, Princess.”

“’Tis alright, Captain. So long as we can move forward,” Luna strutted in front of the former guard, her features calm, her muzzle turned up in a little smile that warmed Shining’s heart. For a second, some traitorous part of his mind imagined darting across the room and sweeping Luna up in his legs, finally discovering if that saucy little smile she liked to use tasted as good as it looked. Only a second though, and the image disappeared as soon as the rest of him, the happily married part of him, was able to react.

He closed his eyes, breathed, and once again ran the standard marriage-saving protocols. Cadence, nibbling at her lip, eyes half-lidded with that needy little smile. Yeah, there we go.

“Ready for another try?” Luna asked, watching him curiously. “We won’t go so easily on you this time around.”

He snorted and lowered his head, ears folding forward. “Bring it on.”

That little smile reappeared, and Luna shook her head. “Focus, Shining, not effort.”

“Er…right, sorry Princess, I…”

As usually happens when one is getting too comfortable with the way things are, a curveball hit in the shape of a panicking guard galloping through the doors, slamming into the room as if there was nothing at all in the doorframe. Princess and prince were both caught off guard, staring at the newcomer in stunned silence.

“The…anomaly…” the guard gasped, not even bothering with basic etiquette, though he did manage a weak salute, holding a shaking hoof to his forehead. “Your highnesses…it’s…expanding!” He finally managed to gasp.

There were a few moments of processing as both royals slowly wrapped their minds around the sheer magnitude of what was just said. Then both leapt to their hooves in a wild state.

“Reinforce the guard!” Luna cried as Shining rocketed out of the room, galloping past the guard and out the door at top speed. “Get our mages moving, and make sure everypony is clear!”

The last, choked-out words Shining heard before he zoomed around a corner and out of earshot were: “We’ve already lost Refugee Camp Alpha…” and then he double-timed it. He didn’t even know he could run faster until the moment those gut-wrenching words graced his ears. He had to see. Even if he could do nothing, he had to see.

He rushed past saluting soldiers and a rising tide of panicking civilians. His teeth clenched as he ran, begging not to be too late, not again, not so soon after his last failure.

He reached the castle walls, shouldering past a few other guards to glare down at that cursed field. His stomach sank into his horseshoes. There was no denying it: the weird cloud of fog was unmistakably bigger. The dilapidated fence which had served as a border for the ponies gathering around it was now gone, completely enveloped. So too was the very refugee center he’d woken up in.

Dear Celestia above, had that only been a few days ago? Was it really less than a week ago when he’d woken up next to Cadence, had a perfectly normal day watching the recruits drill, filled out some paperwork, and received an urgent message to make all haste to Canterlot? On that day, Celestia was in her palace, Twilight was just a letter-send away, and Spike didn’t need to cuddle up with somepony in the palace to keep from crying through the night. Had that all been such a short time ago?

Shaking his head, he glared at the nearest pegasus. The pegasus turned to him, jaw still hanging agape, then his pupils narrowed and he immediately sank in a bow.

“Captain!” He gasped. “I’m sorry, I…”

“I need a ride. Now.” Shining Armor stated, not bothering to correct the younger soldier that he was the former captain. With a nod, the pegasus took to the air and swooped overhead, hooves extended. Shining didn’t even need him to slow down, as he joined hooves and allowed himself to be carried to the ground far below, wishing all the way he had his sister’s talent for teleportation spells.

Panting, the pegasus dropped him off with an unceremonious thud. Shining barely even noticed the jarring landing, taking to his hooves and galloping towards the ring of soldiers gathered at the cloud’s perimeter, some restraining their comrades from charging headlong into the cloud, the rest just standing there with their heads craned back and their jaws gaping.

For a second, Shining was one of the gapers. The moment he got close to it, the new size of the cloud struck him, drawing his eyes up and up as its shadow fell over him. His jaw fell open and his ears folded back as his gallop slowed to a trot, then stopped completely just outside the ring of guards closed in around the new border. It blotted out the sun with its size, stretching up as far as the Crystal Empire’s stadium reached. His heart beat in his throat, and he swallowed. Finally, he snapped himself out of his trance and turned to the nearest guard.

“You there! Private!” He pointed. The guard’s gaze slowly drifted down to him, his spear held loosely in his hooves, then with a gasp he stood ramrod straight and saluted. Rolling his eyes, Shining gave his hoof a little roll. “At ease.”

“Sir!” The stallion lowered his hoof, thrusting his chest out.

“Why wasn’t the hospital evacuated!?” Shining Armor sneered.

“I…sir, there was hardly time for any sort of evacuation,” the guardspony whispered, visibly shrinking. “It was all so damned fast, the stallions around you were either outside or close enough to the perimeter to feel their way out when it happened. The cloud was just…there.”

Snorting, Shining moved on to the next stallion in the circle. “Is that true!?” He barked.

“Wha…oh!” The stallion’s glazed-over look dissipated. “Sir, I…”

“Is that true!?” Shining Armor spat, not even waiting for the obligatory salute and command to relax. “Is it true the cloud expanded in a very brief amount of time?”

“I…it did, sir. I was standing guard at the camp’s perimeter when all of a sudden, I was surrounded by the cloud. I took a few steps back out of surprise, and I was here, sir.”

Shining Armor cursed. At the very least, his stallions weren’t cowards, but holding the witnesses to the princesses’ kidnapping so close to the damned thing had been an obvious mistake. Sure, having everything they needed to hide in one place had seemed convenient, but now…

He closed his eyes and grit his teeth as the sight of a bloody hoof poking out from under a blanket rose up from his mind, despite his best efforts to hold it back. When he opened his eyes again, he made note that most of the stallions around him had taken several steps away. His teeth clenched until he was sure they had cracked.

“How many ponies are still in there?” He growled.

“A-at least thirty counting th-the civilian medical staff and detainees, s-sir,” the guard before him gulped, trembling on his hooves. “W-we don’t have a count yet for the guards currently MIA, so…”

Snorting in frustration, Shining turned his piercing glare on the wall of fog swirling in front of him, much to the relief of the stallions that had been the subject of said glare until that moment. Then he began to stride forward.

“Sir!” The pegasus which had dropped him off gasped, clenching at his shoulder. “What’re you doing!?”

“Getting our ponies out of there before those monsters take them too,” Shining spat as he shrugged the hoof off his shoulder. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“S-sir, wait,” another stallion in golden armor reached for him. “We should wait for…”

“For what!? For it to be too late!? For those things to send us the disembodied limbs of our ponies!?” Shining screamed. The stallion shrank back, but most notably, he didn’t get out of Shining Armor’s path.

“Get out of my way,” Shining snarled.

“N-no, sir, I can’t do that,” the stallion whimpered, still shaking but standing strong. He reached for his spear and began to pick it up. Shining Armor batted it to the ground as if he’d just caught a foal with its hoof in the cookie jar.

“I don’t need to stand here and debate orders with a bunch of cowardly little colts!” Shining hollered. “Now, get out of my way, or I will…”

Captain Armor!

Even in his current state, the Royal Canterlot Voice was more than enough to make Shining Armor cringe like a colt hearing his name screamed by his mother. Still maintaining a strong façade, Shining Armor turned to glare eye-to-eye with the lunar princess, only now growing conscious of how freakin’ tall she was compared to him.

“Captain Armor,” she spoke, enunciating every syllable with every drop of icy coldness she could muster, all while returning Shining’s glare with equal, if not greater, force. “What doth thee bethink thou art doing?”

Oh Celestia, ye olde Equish, he thought, suppressing a shiver. This was the Lunar Princess’s way of making sure you knew you were officially one snide remark away from knowing what a full buck to the face from a goddess felt like. Still, he met her gaze, though not with the force he had begun with.

“Saving the ponies I am pledged to protect, your highness,” he replied nonchalantly.

“And how would getting yourself captured accomplish this?” She asked, reverting to her modern tongue, though the fury in those massive, blue pools suggested he was far from out of the woods just yet.

“I was not…”

“You were about to charge full on into enemy territory with no plan, by yourself, with little to no hope of rescue should something go wrong and no idea of what you might face,” Luna shook her head. “Has your time in the Crystal Empire caused you to completely forget all of your military training?”

Hearing his actions put in such frank terms, Shining’s façade crumbled. He backed away, though he still glared. “Princess, I…”

“I understand your concern, Captain,” Luna closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, that warm, soft look she’d held for that instant in the palace was right back. “Probably more than you know. But stumbling headfirst into any situation with no knowledge of what waits will rarely, if ever, help anypony.”

“I…” he bowed his head, ears folding down. The scolded colt had finally realized his mistake. “I’m sorry, Princess, my behavior has been absolutely awful, and completely unbecoming for a stallion of my status.”

Luna nodded, the ice and cold retreating instantly from her gaze. “Thank you, Captain. Apology accepted.”

An awkward silence fell over the group, the other stallions and mares in guards’ armor unable or unwilling to break it. Then Shining Armor lifted his head, his voice gentle, but still booming over them all with authority. “Everypony maintain positions around the cloud! I want a cordon of at least a quarter mile around the entire anomaly in case it expands! Pegasi patrol the skies; keep an eye on the ground for anypony that manages to sneak through the outer defenses! Unicorns lay down some alarm spells, make sure that if anything more complicated than an earthworm enters our cordon from the outside, we all know about it! Earth ponies maintain the outer cordon, I want regular patrols on the perimeter with randomized, scattered incursions into the area immediately surrounding the anomaly, in case somepony breaks out and requires assistance or somepony sneaks through the outer defenses, but under no circumstances is anypony to enter the anomaly itself! I don’t care if you hear your own mother calling for you from inside, there is no reason whatsoever that I should hear about anypony getting close to that thing!”

There were a few more hoofbeats without motion, then the crowd around the royals burst into activity, ponies rushing off in their own, segregated groups to carry out their own tasks, squad leaders already barking orders to the ponies under them. Soon, only Luna and Shining Armor remained. Just as they wanted.

Shining Armor sighed and turned towards the great cloud billowing before them. “What about them, though?” He whispered.

Luna sighed and offered a comforting wing across his withers, and miraculously he found he didn’t need to run the marriage-saving protocol through his head. Then again, he was a bit distracted by the billowing grey smoke which had just devoured another innocent group of ponies.

“’Tis not our place to say where they will be tomorrow, Captain,” Luna said gently. “We can only hope and pray for mercy on behalf of whatever beasts have taken them.”

Shining Armor didn’t speak or bring up how ridiculous the idea of mercy from one of those faceless, black-clad things was to him. Instead, he continued staring at the cloud for an extra few minutes. Once or twice, he attempted to levitate a rock from the ground at his hooves, only to be met with failure. Just like last time. Eventually, he got up and trotted towards the beginnings of the barricade his ponies were constructing around him. Luna followed suit soon after, and all that was left in the little clearing were a few trodden blades of grass where a group of ponies had been just minutes before.

And the gap between worlds widened.

Author's Notes:

This will be something a bit far from the current plot (heheh), but I figured we needed to catch up on what's going down by Canterlot around now

Next Chapter: Chapter XXVII: Thompson Estimated time remaining: 6 Hours, 50 Minutes
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