*** Mission Log: Sol 5172 ***
*** AOS – BSN ***
*** Message Received (Source: Starlight): Oppy, please. Everything’s alright. Please come out. ***
The rover backed up further into the closet, bumping into a set of brooms with its rear. Its camera shot around behind it, then back to the closed closet door where a comforting light was shining around the edges and a soothing voice was trying to coax it out.
“Twilight scary,” Opportunity replied meekly.
“I know, sweetie. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna let anything bad happen to you. I’ll protect you from the mad Twientist, so won’t you please come out?”
“Hey!” the voice of the alicorn in question protested in the background. “I’m right here, you know.”
“You be quiet,” Starlight hissed over her shoulder. “What in the hoof did you do to scare him so much?”
“I don’t know! I just spotted him at the door to my lab, said ‘hello’ and waved at him. Next thing I know, he backs up into the wall and begins racing down the corridor. Then he barricaded himself in the supply closet, and here we are.”
A small piece of crystal fell from the ceiling and bounced off the rover with a metallic clink.
“What was that?” Starlight asked.
“Just me,” Spike replied calmly as he hopped from the top of the shelf to the floor. “Hey, Opi.” Spike held out his fist for a bump.
Opportunity looked at the door it had accidentally jammed shut by knocking over a broom, then down at his own chassis that was noticeably missing his robotic arm. Starlight had removed it earlier this morning.
“Oh, right. Sorry,” Spike said, lowering his fist.
“Spike! How did you get in there?” Starlight asked from outside.
“What do you think? You said Opi was locked in. So I went into the closet on the upper floor and ate my way through,” he replied, munching on the last bits of crystal still between his teeth.
Opportunity moved its PanCam to survey the dragon-sized hole in the ceiling.
“What?” Twilight called. “Spike, we talked about you eating the house!”
“Shush,” Starlight cut in. “Count yourself lucky. If it hadn’t been Spike, it would have been me. And trust me, I would have made a much bigger hole with my magic.”
“When this is over, we’re going to have an unscheduled roommate meeting about eating and blasting load-bearing walls,” Twilight grumbled. “Drilling into them for scientific experiments, too,” she added after a moment’s thought, mentally counting all the small, circular holes from the Rock Abrasion Tool that had become commonplace around her walls and floors.
“Alright,” Spike said, ignoring the girls and sitting down next to Opportunity in order to project calm. “What’s wrong, buddy? You wanna tell me what happened?”
Opportunity turned its mast to indicate the laptop it had taken to carrying around most of the time. After a moment, a picture began to appear on the screen, a picture the rover had taken earlier. “Twilight scary,” Opportunity repeated when the image had finished loading.
Spike squinted his eyes. “Huh. Oh! Yeah, I can see why that would freak you out.”
“What is it?” Starlight asked, her voice sounding agitated through the door.
“Well,” Spike began, trying to think of a way to best describe the image while scratching his head. “It looks like Opi drove by Twilight’s lab and, well, she’s standing amidst a bunch of robotic arms. She’s also holding one in the air with her magic and waving it at him. Oh, and she’s sporting her best mad scientist grin.”
Starlight’s voice became angry. “Twilight!”
“What?” The alicorn seemed taken aback. “I was just demonstrating how well the joints turned out on the final model. I thought he’d be happy to see it after all the failed prototypes.”
“Do you honestly not see anything wrong with this picture, Dr. Frankenlight!? Imagine walking into somepony’s basement and seeing it filled with severed pony limbs. And then they spot you and start waving a hoof around they’d just cut off somepony.”
“… Huh, I guess that would be a little disturbing,” Twilight admitted, though her voice carried a hint of clinical detachment. “I suppose I’ve just kind of gotten used to the idea of losing and gaining extra limbs over the years. I lost my horn twice, once when we fought Discord and when I first went through the portal. Three times if I count the poison joke incident. I grew my own wings, and then there was the time those three cultists stole Rainbow Dash’s wings. I still know the limb reattachment spell I researched at the time. Oh! And, not to put too fine a point on it, but when you were still evil and ripped the cutie marks from me and my friends, that was kind of like losing a limb. Or maybe an organ would be a better analogy for that?”
Spike couldn’t see it. But he could have sworn he heard Starlight rapidly blinking through the closed door. “What?” the unicorn asked after several seconds of stunned silence. “No, seriously. WHAT!?”
“Anyway,” Spike carried on, tuning out the conversation that ensued between the alicorn and the unicorn, “you know that Twilight was working on this for you, right? We’ve talked about replacing your arm for ages now, since it keeps getting stuck when you try to move it.”
Opportunity remained silent.
“Please, help me understand,” Spike said calmly, his hours of helping Starlight perfect her counselor voice paying off. “You didn’t even bat an eye when we replaced your wheels.”
“… Opportunity no have eye to bat.”
Spike frowned. “You know what I mean.”
The rover regarded its new wheels, then the housing where the joint for its robotic arm was supposed to be. “Different,” it finally said.
Spike considered that. “Hm, well. I suppose this and that are two different things.” He thought for a moment. “Is it that the wheels were more like having horseshoes replaced, but the arm is more important?”
“Yes. No. Instrument Deployment Device more important. Experiments. Fulfill mission. But not what Opportunity mean different.”
“Then what else is different?”
The rover once again was quiet, and Spike allowed it the space to gather its thoughts. “Opportunity … different. Different from before,” Opportunity finally said.
“How are you different?”
“Before Opportunity listen to creators. Creators say ‘bad path’ or ‘big rock, no go there.’ Now Opportunity alone, scary. Afraid end up like Spirit.”
“Spirit?” Spike asked.
“MER-A, Spirit. Spirit and Opportunity same. Assembled together, same creators.”
“Assembled? Do you mean born? Like, a brother?”
Opportunity nodded. “Yes, like brother,” it confirmed. “Older brother, not by much. Twins. Like Opportunity, Spirit explore. Stuck. Battery low and in the dark. Silent now.”
“And did your creators help him?”
“Try. Try Free Spirit. Fail.” Even though Opportunity’s voice was artificially created by Trixie’s enchanted bow, Spike felt like there was a twinge of sadness in it. “Opportunity lose brother. Opportunity lose creators. Now must make own decisions. Afraid. Afraid lose more. Afraid lose friends. That why Opportunity different.”
“Hey, listen,” Spike said, calling upon his own memories of being a dragon in a pony world. “Change is always scary.” He extended his wings. “When I got these, I was terrified that I had to leave. But change doesn’t have to be bad. You’re not going to lose your friends. Twilight, Starlight and I, we’re not going to leave you behind, even if you get stuck” he said, patting the rover’s front wheel comfortingly.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU SOMETIMES, TWILIGHT SPARKLE!”
Spike and Opportunity looked at each other when they heard Starlight’s outburst through the closed door and continued to listen on.
“I thought I handled the situation well,” Twilight mumbled in her defense.
The duo could practically feel the gargantuan effort Starlight mustered in order not to scream again. “Twilight, I’m literally the last pony on Equus who can criticize you for your reformation-over-retribution approach, but seriously? Those cultists broke into your friend’s house and stole her wings while she slept! Don’t you think that calls for a little more than one of your lectures?”
“Well, I did disable their magic, too. To reinforce the lesson.”
“Temporarily,” Starlight pointed out. “Did they give you any indication that they realized the error of their ways? And remind me, what was the result of the first time you tried to give me one of your lessons?”
“You … eventually came around?” the princess ventured.
“After?” Starlight prodded.
“After embarking on a year-long revenge plot that nearly destroyed the universe as we know it,” Twilight conceded with a sigh.
“So what makes you think they didn’t go out and immediately foalnapped some other innocent pegasus as soon as they got their magic back, one that didn’t have the benefit of being best buddies with a princess?”
“… I should probably go and follow up on any missing pegasus cases with the Royal Guard as soon as I get the chance, huh?”
“Ya think?” If a sarcastic undertone could be used as a battering ram, that closet door would have stood no chance against Starlight. “But first you get in there and apologize to Oppy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Twilight replied sullenly.
“I think what we can take away from this,” Spike noted dubiously, “is that you can’t be afraid to make a mistake. You just have to move forward and try the best you can at any given time. And if you make an honest mistake, you can always count on your friends to set you straight.”
“Opportunity take different lesson from that,” the rover replied.
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“Starlight way scarier than Twilight.”
*** IDD: Extending Instrument Deployment Device ***
*** MI: Beginning Microscopic Imaging ***
*** MI: Imaging underway ***
*** Spectrographic Analysis Queued ***
*** APXS – WARNING: Radioisotope source decaying, additional processing time required ***
*** MB – ERROR: Instrument unresponsive ***
*** MTES: Status nominal ***
“How does it feel? Everything alright?” Starlight asked as she packed away her tools.
After emerging from the closet, Opportunity had sheepishly accepted Twilight’s apology and allowed the ponies to bring it back to Starlight’s workshop.
Twilight’s new design for the arm, which allowed for a much wider range of motion, had been fitted first. The old instrument arm with its broken wiring and malfunctioning heater element had been declared a lost cause and instead been used as the blueprint for the improved version.
After receiving the new arm, Starlight had remounted the housing for the actual scientific instruments, its innards cleaned and restored to working condition to the best of her ability. Rebuilding them from scratch had been a non-option, since even a visit through the mirror portal had left the resident Twilight Sparkle there at a loss for explaining how some of them worked.
“Is fine,” Opportunity replied. “Status nominal.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t restore them all,” Starlight said, picking up a small, round disk in her magic and frowning at it, as if staring at it hard enough could unlock its mysteries. “It has to be this part. As far as I can tell, it’s just Cobalt. But I’ve tried every piece of Cobalt Maud could dig up and some similar metals. None of them worked. There must have been something special about it.”
“Opportunity not know. Only know not work.” The rover rotated its instrument arm and once again tried out the new addition. In place of the malfunctioning instrument, there was now a three-fingered claw that could pick up and manipulate small objects, Sunset Shimmer’s contribution who continued to show a knack for combining Equestrian magic with technology from her second home.
In this case, the salvaged claw from a crane game machine found in a junkyard was being controlled by Oppy sending commands through the Binary Sparkle Network to a harmonic crystal that in turn made the claw move.
Opportunity picked up the small sapphire it had just examined as a final test and deposited it in Spike’s outstretched claw. The dragon gobbled up the treat, made a fist and bumped it against Oppy’s new appendage. “Opportunity like this better anyway,” the rover decided. “Is more useful.”
Starlight chuckled, but her eyes were drawn back to the disk. It had a nice, metallic sheen with a slightly blueish tinge to it and seemed perfectly intact. “It’s a shame we don’t know what’s wrong with it. It is rather pretty,” she mused.
Opportunity watched Starlight regard the unassuming piece of metal, its beauty enhanced within the unicorn’s azure glow of magic, twinkling as she turned it this way and that. The rover noticed its resemblance to Starlight’s own cutie mark as it was held in this manner. “Starlight keep,” it said.
“What?” The unicorn turned to look at the rover.
Opportunity drove towards her and plucked the little disk out of the air with its new fingers, holding it out to her. “Starlight give Opportunity so much. New wheels. New voice. New arm. Opportunity want give back.”
“I didn’t do it for a reward,” Starlight pointed out.
“Opportunity know. Starlight friend. Is gift.” Opportunity brought it closer to her, indicating for her to take it.
Starlight opened her mouth to say something, then simply smiled. Rather than using her magic, she received the gift with her hoof and brought it close to her chest. “Thank you, Oppy. I’ll treasure it always.”