Moon Diary: Black Box

Unfortunately I can feel it moving so we must be quick, as much as is possible without losing coherence. We should be quick, it’s vitally important that I am as fast as possible but I fear I won’t be. Life is too precious to me, and the story is not short enough for me to be quick. Besides that, my control over this new magic is very limited. Hooves are worthless for typing on computers built for human hands. I so miss hands, though I’m better off than some of the others were in that regard. Loyalty and Honesty had a rough time of things when we first became this, and assumed these equine shapes.

I would wonder about how you will be reading this— for a variety of reasons I can’t be the one to disseminate these words. (If you’re curious, it’s automated. My friend set it up.) But where exactly it goes after I hit that send button? I have no idea. I suppose it will go off to those bizarre realms of the internet where conspirasists whisper about government cover-ups of the ruins of the Equestrian civilization. Sites like that run by that idiot who caused all this to happen. If he hadn’t died so horribly I would be angry at him.

It doesn’t help that I’m new to being a unicorn. Magic comes so slow to you when you haven’t grown up with it. How did those Equestrians teach it to young foals, so long ago? Even now, at the foot of the gates of Death, I am so curious.

This room is so cold. Even the mind of the Goddess of the Moon likes the cold of space, so it remakes reality to serve itself. I hate her. A long time ago, I used to pity her. When being an… Equestrian was a new sensation, I felt pity because I could imagine her, Luna, all alone on the surface of the moon. Lying there, sleeping, alone, cold, perhaps somewhere down in that thing that resembles a mind but isn’t, she could see or know or feel for us. I suspect that Ponies are just kinder than humans in that way. I soon got over those pony instincts and went straight back to fearing. It was a far more appropriate response, I assure you.

What you’re about to read is… jumbled. That’s how I can describe it without thinking about the events I’ll be describing occasionally skirting around or condensing. Thinking about those fifteen days is hard, and it is not something I wish to do— even I could do so, safely, I’m not sure I would. You’ve probably never heard this before so it may mean nothing to you but honestly I don’t care because these are my last words and I’m going to say them: Quisque suos patimur Manes. It’s totally true, you Latin-speaking hack.

I suppose I should at least try to prepare you. Would you be able to believe that book can survive for millennia? For more than that. One particular book did. We’ll get to how we found that later. It’s been disseminated by myself, through proxies, and altered slightly in the process, edited for clarity, but it’s still very real. The first we found in the ruins of old Canterlot, deep underground. The others… I don’t have a name for that place, where were given them. It is a terrible place. It is a terrible, terrible place, where it is dark and cold and you can’t see your hands (I had hands then!) and you can’t feel them so it’s as if you’ve lost your body somewhere.

If you’re curious about the title, it’s all I could think of to call these collected documents of our investigation of the Dunwich the horrible thing that it contained. The black box is real and is sitting on my desk beside me, blending in with the dark room. It’s cold, just like the air, and it’s full of paper in terribly fat folders. I’m not sure when I thought about documenting it all outside of keeping some basic records as part of our regular protocols, but the box was definitely around by day twelve, and I do remember it earlier…

I’m rambling. Forgive me, but in the back of my mind a frightened child is reminding me that this… Corruption come down from the dark between the stars let the other people finish their tasks before they died horribly. It’s not sentient, not yet, nor will it be, but it acts almost as if it is. As if waiting is a choice it makes. As if watching is something it does because it plans. That frightened little voice in my head wants me to ramble on and on and on and stay alive, but we both know it won’t work like that. (Though should I not say, we three?) So I’ll be a little more direct:

In the black box are documents: short narratives filling in events authored by myself, printed-out emails, memorandums, transcripts of conversations and videos, and records of texts and emails. I feel like freaking Bram Stoker here, writing my scary story in letters between boring English people (I’m not sure, but sometimes I think without the ship Dunwich, we would’ve all been unbearably boring. Dying makes you so exciting.) I’ll tell much of this story directly, but I fear that without some sort of documents I’ll not be believed. If you still doubt, the ship itself, the good ship Dunwich, was in the news. Only we called it that. I’ve included it below, the article it was mentioned in.
Huh. My hoof has black veins. That sucks. You know what? You suck, Dunwich.

I think it is also a reminder. The Goddess lets us live longer than she has to because these shadows are slightly less blindly hungry than she is. But curiosity is limited, especially for bloodthirsty flying unicorn ghosts. So let’s kick this shindig.

-Magic

~~~~~~~

Day 1

SUBJ: The Dunwich?
To: Jen Phillips
From: Ryan Cazadore

Really? The Dunwich? You named the ship the Dunwich?

I mean, I like horror as much as the next guy, Jen, but you had to give it that name? Couldn’t even come up with something scary. I had to look that up, you know, because it sounded so familiar and I couldn’t place it.

Anyhow. I just finished the file. It’s sick, ya know? I’m gonna have damn nightmares after that. I hate you sometimes. But I’m glad that at least I’ll have a chance to do something about it.

Two weeks, then? What’s our plan, then? Why not just blow the damn ship up, save us all a ton of trouble, hoofing it (See what I did there? Because they’re Equestrian ruins?) to ruins and talking to eggheads about how they don’t know nothing about anything?

PS: These pony things give me the weirds man.

RE: The Dunwich?
To: Ryan Cazadore
From: Jen Phillips
Yes, the Dunwich. Honestly, Ryan, it’s not such a bad name.

I do love H.P., and yes, perhaps it was silly of me to name the thing that’s going to kill us after something from one of his stories, but perhaps the end of the world is the time wherein it is most apropos to be silly.

Read the file again, then, stupid. You will recall that despite having seen it’s horrifying effects, we have no idea how any of this works. What happens if we just send a cruiser to kill it or a plane to bomb it and that doesn’t kill Her? Imagine it, a thousand little rusty shards of that Japanese fishing vessel, spread along the ocean floor, each a foothold of a terrible Goddess of Death and Blood? Even you, moron, know how terrible that would be for life as we know it.

Fun supposition: What if we bomb it and she just feeds of that energy and the corrupted Presence can harvest enough to restore her?

Look, we need to assemble a team. I’ll see you tomorrow and hand you three dossiers. You get to pick two to be your best traveling friends forever for the next 15 days. (Two weeks is close enough, I suppose. At least you looked at it.)

PS: They were an advanced, sophisticated society and I value their intellectual achievements higher than I value yours. Besides, things that give you “the weirds” must not be that bad.

~~~~~

(From the Files:) Taken from the Associate Press
“Coast Guard monitoring Japanese tsunami drifter as it nears the Alaskan coast”

A derelict Japanese ship dislodged by last year’s massive tsunami is drifting toward Alaska, the Coast Guard said.
The shrimping vessel was floating slowly northwest in the Gulf of Alaska about 200 miles west of the nearest point of land — Forrester Island outside the Dixon Entrance, a maritime transportation corridor separating U.S. and Canada jurisdictions. The ship is heading in the direction of the south-east Alaska town of Sitka 202 miles to the north, traveling at about one mile per hour, Coast Guard spokesman David Mosley said.
“Our main concern is maritime traffic,” he said. “We’re trying to minimize any safety concerns, alerting vessels. We don’t want any vessels to run into it.”
A Coast Guard C-130 was heading to the ship to pinpoint the exact location and check if a data buoy was successfully dropped on it earlier.
The vessel has been adrift since it was launched by the tsunami caused by the magnitude-9.0 earthquake that struck Japan last year. About 5 million tons of debris were swept into the ocean by the tsunami.
The ship, named Ryou-Un Maru, is believed to be 150 feet to 200 feet long, according to Mosley, and has been identified as coming from Hokkaido, Japan.
Beside marine traffic hazards, another concern is the ship’s impact on the maritime environment after floating at sea more than a year. What’s on board is unknown. Also unknown is whether the ship is carrying fuel.
Officials are studying various options on how to deal with the ship, including scuttling it at sea or towing it to land.

~~~~~~

I will make the comment that at this time we knew nothing, relatively, about the nature of the monstrosity. The horror that was to come was not yet complete. We went over the file again on the second day, and a team was selected. Unfortunately I have no file to include, so I’ll have to type this fast. We decided that Harold Merwin was a good enough addition, a good level headed agent, honest and dependable. We could use his work ethic. Roger Isles was our other choice, bringing the team to four. Roger was always a little too frivolous for my tastes, but Ryan was quick to start defending him.

God I miss you, Ryan.

Team assembled, we went over the file again and brainstormed. The facts we had, at that time, run thusly:
• A malignant remnant of the Equestrian civilization was alive in some sense on our moon.
• That entity, known in our files as The Goddess, has invaded our world via a recorded tape, via mechanics of reality we do not understand. Everyone who watches the tape dies, eventually, and gruesomely. One of the victims is unaccounted for, and his ship is afloat in the Pacific.
• The ship in question is emitting the same sort of Thuamaturgic Radiation that some of the Equestrian ruins recently uncovered do, except much more concentrated. Dark purplish black aura surrounds ship.

I introduced this document to further provide context to our new team members.

Report 02-Timeline difficulties, part 1a (Jen Phillips)
Victims: [NAMES DELETED], Notes: Astronauts. Encountered the Goddess on the lunar surface, died one by one. The recording they left behind has been until now the main mode of invasion for the Goddess.
[NAMES DELETED] Notes: The late Secretary and the General were hard to explain to the public. Dealing with the press and keeping them from the evidence was both hard and damaging to our relationships.
[NAMES DELETED] Notes: We suspect that this is patient zero, the man who first watched the video. Died shortly after alerting his superiors to the final few hours of tape sent by the now deceased moon walkers.
[NAMES DELETED] Notes: Civilian, suspected hacker. Left alone because he was deemed annoying but harmless by our experts. Ran paranoid site based around recently discovered Equestrian ruins. Died shortly after promising subscribers video and information regarding the “Mare in the Moon” legend. Found torn to shreds in his home with the Lunar Tape on his computer’s hard drive, still playing.
[NAMES DELETED]
[NAMES DELETED] Captain and part-owner of the Ryou- Un Maru, shrimping boat. Connections through an internet friendship with [NAMES DELETED]. It is highly likely that he saw the tape when [NAMES DELETED] stole it for featuring on his site. Attempts to find him were cut short by a recent tsunami and further investigation has not found him. Officially listed as missing, presumed dead.
[NAMES DELETED] Notes: Hacker’s landlady. Found him, died later, multiple bite marks, torso torn open and crushed by blunt force and seemingly by teeth.

Notes: The problem is determining the line of infection. We know that the astronauts who woke the Goddess up were first, and we can guess that it was sort of like this overall: Astronauts, [NAMES DELETED], [ALL NAMES REDACTED]. But this is conjecture, even if reasonably well-thought out conjecture.

I have an excerpt of this first meeting:

ROGER : So we’re fairly sure that whatever it was that killed them is on that boat. Somehow. Sort of.

JEN: Yes. The entity on the tape matches the Equestrian description of some semi-mythological figure called “Nightmare Moon” who was at some point defeated. Research goes slowly, as the Thaumturgic Radiation that’s kept their histories in somewhat decent condition has also made it hard to study or remove books.

ROGER: Can’t we just, I don’t know, blow it up? Problem solved.

JEN: [sighs]

RYAN: I said the exact same thing. But there is a good reason. Sort of.

JEN: Sort of? How do I even begin? Remember the “we don’t have a clue how it moves” part of this whole situation? It’s murdered people high and low through a damn video! What if, in destroying that ship, we just help it spread? What if the ship is trapping it and when we break the seal it’s free? That’s not likely, but neither is a paranoid Anon hacker being turned into a bloody pulp by watching a video of a moon unicorn with wings and black eyes. Or what if bombs just help it grow, like the energy just feeds it?

ROGER: Point.

JEN: We have time, anyhow. We’ll be leaving in the morning for the ruins down in Brazil. Here are your boarding passes.

[A moment of rustling paper and then silence.]

HAROLD: Excuse me, but I can’t help but notice that I’m flying an entirely different airline than any of you.

RYAN: Yeah. Let me see that ticket, Rog… yeah. Different times.

JEN: I was going to get to that. The intelligence community is tense. The NSA and the CIA are at each other’s throats, again, and even in BlackSect, we’ve experienced some consternation as regards recent events.
So, at least for the moment, this mission is beyond our usual protocols. There is no order on paper anywhere even giving me authorization to know anything about the Dunwich. This mission and this team don’t exist in any official records. Beyond that, all of you have just received an extended leave, except for you, Ryan, who are now fired.

RYAN: What the he—

JEN: It is temporary. Unless, of course, you fail horrendously, in which case it shall be permanent because of the resulting death and chaos.

RYAN: … Damn you.

JEN: I didn’t do it. BlackSec is not in good graces with anyone at the moment, and hasn’t been for some time. We’re being watched, and all our agents tracked. You already had a vacation with your young son a few months back, so there was none for you to burn.

Things went downhill after that. Ryan was angry— justifiably so, yes, but perhaps a little too vehemently so. In any case, we went our separate ways, back home. In order to make this as believable as possible, we all left earlier than we usually did, making sure to make a show of saying goodbye at different times and listing different locations as our destination. We told no lies, for in fact all of our tickets did go to different places. We simply knew that waiting in those other locations would be planes to take us back to our original intent.

I must admit that I was excited to see the old Equestrian ruins. As part of BlackSec, I’d been privy to every scrap of information uncovered by sources Brazilian or American. I devoured it all eagerly, giddy at the thought of such knowledge. It still excites me even now, sitting in this cold room, with black veins crawling along this hoof of mine. I regret that I was only to be granted the privilege of walking those halls in a dire time when I had precious little leisure to just study and learn.

It was, in fact, my eagerness to learn as much as I could about that ancient beyond-mythic time that convinced my superiors at BlackSec to give the case of the Dunwich to me. It was that insatiable thirst that led me to the terrible and haunting passages of Equestrian that told of the terrible and threatening specter of the semi-mythological Nightmare Moon. It was the only passage we had recovered intact that any could make heads or tails of, and that only because the pictograms were accompanied by an actual illustration. At home, I sat on my couch and stared at that ancient page of vellum, preserved forever in my photocopies. Once it had left the warm and protective bosom of the thaumaturgically-charged Great Library, it had quickly faded and eventually dissolved. The page itself was gone long before those pictures came to me.

I wonder why I even bother using that word, thaumaturgic. It’s all magic. Magic and spells and legends and whispers in the dark, all around and in this terrible little tale of ours. We referred to it as radiation so that we could feel as if we knew something about it. We knew nothing of it, as humans. The last of the Archmages of Equestria, in his last act as a pony, had laid such a powerful magic on that ruin that it kept not only the books but the building itself more or less intact for tens of thousands of years. Hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe Millions, even.

We headed out in the morning, all at different time, all in different directions. Ryan, I knew, was taking his assignment hard. His instructions had been perhaps the most burdensome and the most unbearable. I left first, and he left last, his son in tow and a forged invitation to visit his parents in Canada in his pocket. His distress, over being fired, over having his son accompany him to keep the ruse strong, was quite real. The NSA hacks following him (they thought they shadowed our man unseen, idiots.) were quite convinced that nothing was afoot. They said so over connections they thought were secure.

Harold arrived shortly after I did. The man was good company, and the two of us set off for the ruins as soon as we could, not even bothering to collect our bags. They would be delivered by BlackSec without us having to find them.

The ruins were everything I had ever hoped and everything I had ever feared. What Gods walked these halls, lived in these strange cyclopean structures?

What terrible darkness could end such beings? The Dunwich perhaps, with the passenger it carried. The whole way there, through the jungle, I couldn’t shake the image of that terrible rusty boat shrouded in a mist that lived and hated and was always hungry for flesh and violence. The pilots who’d done the flyover to get pictures had reported that it whispered and chattered nonsense syllables. Sometimes it howled. The mist seemed to posses only those fragments of a mind it had deemed useful, and thrown those softer worthless parts like sanity and reason away. If thought was a line it was a snarl, a tangled mess of intention and blind driving intent. The wrongness of it was not a thing of chills down the spine. It was a think of crawling. The urge to scream would assail me every time I saw that picture and the overworking imagination I have always been cursed with would bring up from the shadowy nothing those voices. It was an awful trip.

But the Ruins of Canterlot were worth it.

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