//------------------------------//
// Orientation 
// Story: Takeover 
// by ScootaEu 
//------------------------------//

To celebrate their new lives as colonists Scoots and Jade drank late into the night, with Jade disappearing with some equally inebriated mare. Scoots decided it was late enough.
"Musicians, go figure," he said to himself before swiping his bracelet over the bartenders tip jar and heading out.
The jar was only symbolic as physical currency hadn't been used in almost a century. You could have your bank install a chip into anything you wanted and it could become your credit card, Scoots had chosen his bracelet as it had already doubled as a microcomputer. All he had to do was separate the clips holding it to his wrist and plug it into a monitor or available data port, it was no more than a gimmick really but one of the few things he rarely left home without.  
Heading out of the bar and into the street the music was cut off as the doors slid shut behind him. The bar was located in down town Manehatten, not the nicest of areas and also probably home to some of the oldest part. Decaying buildings flanking the more modern but still outdated SmartRoads. They were apparently smart because they could block access to troubled areas for non-essential vehicle crews and ponies, with barriers rising out of the ground as well as wire fences. Newer ones could deploy water and sound cannons. These had been instrumental in quelling and containing food riots a few years ago, after an intense drought caused a countrywide famine as well as general social unrest with many blaming Griffons and other minorities for the droughts. The more he thought about it, leaving was not so bad an idea after all.  




Two weeks later the two ponies were riding the equatorial space elevator. They'd said their goodbyes to family members and packed only their 'essential' belongings. Scoots carried his duffel bag containing some clothes, a few family photos and a few thumb drives containing all the software and data he might need. Jade had not packed so lightly.
"You realise it costs almost 60'000 bits per kilogram to transport all your junk," Scoots said whilst eyeing the two suitcases and guitar case at Jades hooves.  
"But I need all this stuff."
"Like what? They're going to give you clothes to wear and pretty much everything else."
"Company issue only comes in that one size fits nopony. I only really wear clothes when I perform and I need to look my best for the ladies." They began walking towards customs, ready to check their bags in.
"I swear, you must think of nothing else. Anyway, if you're always trying to look your best why do you have that mouldy old Stetson?" Scoots pointed at the Stetson on the back of Jades neck.  
"You have no taste Scoots, this thing is vintage not to mention a family heirloom. My Grandpony gave this to my father and him to me."  
"It looks stupid."
"YOU look stupid!"
"Wow, put me in my place." Scoots loved goading Jade. His fits of rage reminded him of a child that hadn't gotten its way.
"Identification and bags please." The clerk pony interrupted the two.  
Scoots lifted both his and Jades bags onto the belt next to the clerk with his magic.  
"Show off." Jade sneered, putting his ID card on the desk.
"Sorry for being better than you," replied Scoots, letting his tongue slip out hoping to further annoy his companion.




After a minor argument between the clerk and Jade over how he was 500% over the weight limit they were sitting down in the lobby of the elevator. The room was half waiting room, half viewing port with much of the room being made of windows. Although pretty, Scoots wondered about the strength of the structure to withstand attack or an accident with all this glass.  
"I wonder how these things work." Jade had his face pressed up against the glass looking down at the shrinking ground below them.
"They work by the combined magical will power of everyone on board. If anyone begins to question how this thing works we'll plummet out of the sky."
"I don't like it when you take advantage of my trusting nature." Jade looked back at Scoots who was trying his best to not laugh at how pathetically cute Jade could be some times.  
"If I explain to you how it works you won't understand much of what I'm saying, zone out and then keep bugging me for the rest of the ride. So as a compromise I'm going to say magic and you're going to believe me." Scoots checked his bracelet for the time; it was 8:15 pm. If he remembered the itinerary correctly, they had 5 minutes before the orientation began. Sweet Apple Acres really wasted no time with recruits; it must have been the need for a quick turnaround in qualified colonists Scoots wondered.  
"Jade, you coming to the orientation?"
"Nah man, I wanna look at space stuff," he replied, his face still stuck to the glass.
"When you inevitably get bored of space stuff head over to storage room 6."
"Okie Dokie Loki."  




On his way to room 6 Scoots took a second to admire the build of the elevator. The whole cart was modular, built around the engine block and rooms could be swapped out for more or less storage. The whole lobby was probably removed for pure freight runs. Outside the lobby and passenger areas the room was no longer carpeted and walls and floors took on a very industrial feel, one which Scoots would need to get used to as he'd be spending the next 5 years, minimum, in modularly built complexes. The sound of his hooves on the steel grates was loud no matter how he trod, the empty ringing of metal amplified by the empty space below the walkways.  
Turning into Storage Room 6 he saw that there were no chairs and a few dozen recruits were all standing in a semicircle around a mare with a red coat and blonde mane wearing a suit, marking her out as a corporate type.  
"For those of you just arriving, my name is Royal Gala and I'll be managing this training program."
Scoots couldn't put his finger on it but he swore that he had seen this pony somewhere before. His question was answered by one of the other recruits.
"Aren't you the youngest member of the Apple family?"
That's it! She was Royal Gala, the youngest of the Apple family, founders of Sweet Apple Acres. What was she doing here teaching a bunch of colonists the fine art of not killing yourself whilst working on a colony complex?
"Yep that's me. Now that's enough questions for now, I'll be starting the presentation in a moment so get ready to have the fun sucked out of the room as I give you all a quick history lesson regarding Sweet Apple Acres, it's past, present and future goals and achievements."
A hoof shot into Scoots side making him yelp in surprise. Jade had returned from looking at space stuff.
"Space is boring Scoots, it's just the same thing over and over"
"Well it is mostly empty, mostly. You're just in time for the history lesson anyway. Pay attention and maybe you'll learn something for once."  
"Comments like that hurt my soul."    
"Stallion up, foal." 




Royal Gala tapped the projector on the table in front of her to life. A black and white photo of a mare with her mane in a bun was now taking up the majority of the wall.
"This is Granny Smith. Much of what Sweet Apple Acres is today is owed to this pony. She was one of the founding members of Ponyville, setting up a farm to feed the locals. It's this basic urge to colonise new places that has led the Apple family and Sweet Apple Acres to where it is today."
The next slide (coloured) showed a family of 4 ponies in front of a red barn. They were a filly with a bow in her hair, a quite frankly massive colt, a mare that wore a Stetson and the same mare from the previous slide with a green coat and grey mane but a few years on; a fair few years.
"The barn you see before you is that of Sweet Apple Acres; the farm, not the company, but that comes later. From left to right there's Apple Bloom, Applejack, Big Macintosh and Granny Smith. Applejack and Big Mac ran the farm efficiently for decades before they began to grow too old to carry this on by which time Apple Bloom had grown up and earned her cutie mark in construction. Using her talents she designed and constructed machines to aid her older siblings in farm work. This was the start of the mechanisation of farming in Equestria. This meant that more food could be produced with less work and at less cost. It also meant that heavy industry and machines would start to become commonplace in day to day pony life as their usefulness was realised.”
A map of Equestria covered the wall, with the names of cities and towns connected by dashed white lines.
"After two decades Sweet Apple Acres had grown as both a farm and a technology firm and had farms around almost every major town. Most food in Equestria originated on our farms and was transported and distributed by the early Ponyville Express Company, the same that constructed and runs the elevator we are on now. Now all this extra food about meant that population exploded, as well as technological innovation."
The map was replaced by a picture of picture of Equestria from orbit. The map started off predominantly green but grey areas slowly began to grow out of nowhere like a fungus.
"Arable farm land on Equestria is most definitely finite and the amount of arable land was shrinking as a result of global climate change brought about by the rapid proliferation of the Sweet Apple Acres and competitor technologies. However, population was still growing and food was becoming harder to produce in the quantities it was needed. This pushed the directors of the time to push experimental ideas to keep producing more and more food, from vertical farming to genetic modification. The idea they eventually settled upon was that of orbital farms."
The slide began to populate itself with small silver structures in orbit around Equestria as well as a thin black line protruding from the equator.
“Using earth pony breakthroughs in material science and unicorn magic we were able to spin a carbon-fibre cable many hundreds of kilometres long and 100x times stronger than steel. The cable was spooled down from orbit by an experimental extrasolar pegasus craft, RES Prometheus. It was treated as a technological showcase by many companies involved but SAA and PE put their all into it and as a result we were soon colonising low orbit and the moon. Ironically, many wanted to turn the moon into a huge prison complex as homage to folklore but it was seen as far too valuable in mineral wealth to leave for colonisation. It has more recently been turned into a forge world of sorts where its low gravity allows many unique components to be built, many of which are used in our Atmosphere Processors and Self-Deploying Orbital Elevators.  It is also home to a few government facilities that aren't open to the public.”
The image of Equestria began to zoom out to solar system level then further to a galactic scale.
“After decades of launching deep space probes and developing technologies to allow ponies to travel to and survive the rigours of space we began getting back useful data. We found that there were 3 solar systems within 2 light years of our solar system, of which one showed promise with multiple large moons around a gas giant that dwarfs our own Jupiter. After this discovery a race was on to get to this system first. The Griffins tried this earliest on but with disastrous results leading to the loss of a colony ship and almost 1'000 lives. This put a halt to almost all space travel but not for SAA and PE. By this time the two companies were working together to be the first to colonise a new world outside of the solar system. They realised that there was more to it than actually just landing on the planet; these colonies had to be self-sustaining and as such they began building and designing their first generation of colony ships.”
A massive ship began fading into view. It was placed against the Canterlot mountain range as a size comparison coming up to almost half its height. Along the centre ran a massive crane with a huge spool of carbon-fibre cabling in the centre. The engines were rather diminutive but as the ship would never have to make atmospheric entry or exit it wasn't necessary to have large engines. On either side of the crane many pods could be seen, along with two large domes on either side of the centre filled with what looked like an orchard.
“The 'Smith' was the first ship of the Explorer-Class. It was an entire bare bones colony built around a ship. The colonists would stay in stasis whilst the ship was in transit and upon arrival would begin deploying key parts of the colony, such as the orbital elevator and farming modules to provide food to the colony whilst solar arrays in orbit provided initial energy for the deployment. After the farms were set up the colonists would be woken up and the ship, now part of the elevator, would descend to the surface and this would form the heart of the colony. When everything was ship shape more vessels would arrive, expanding the colony. The newer generation of Explorer-II's engines can be re-purposed to function as atmosphere processing plants, reducing waste and beginning terraforming a planet as soon as possible. The only other difference between them and Explorer-I's is that they are crewed solely by androids during the space flight and initial set up of the colony to ensure everything goes according to plan.”
An animation of a barren planet began to play. A ship arrives in orbit and begins deploying its space elevator and deploying the solar panel array. Next modules are ferried down to the surface and a colony begins to take shape. A time lapse begins showing ships arriving and disappearing with the colony growing larger and more complex and all the while the planet becomes greener and greener before turning into a picturesque world.
“That is ultimately the goal of all our missions and colony ships, to expand ponykind’s influence on the cosmos. After you have all been trained you will be part of the third generation of colonies being set up just outside of explored space. Probes have returned with exciting data showing worlds perfect for colonisation, but of course the next step is getting there with our ships, easier said than done. The Old-Fashioned is the sister ship of the Tardy-Student and neither are flight worthy yet. Their engine components are on separate continents still, but this gives us plenty of time to teach you what you need to become a member of the Apple family: Dedication, hard work and loyalty. Also how to use heavy machinery without killing yourself and all those around you.”
Royal Gala left the room looking physically exhausted while those in the crowd still paying attention chuckled at that last remark, including Scoots. Jade however had fallen asleep 5 minutes into the talk. Scoots wasn't surprised in the slightest that Jade had fallen asleep, but more that he'd been able to do it standing up. That takes dedication. With the room beginning to clear out with everypony heading to their specialist training Scoots felt he should do the same but he'd best do his duty as a friend and wake Jade first. 
“Excuse me sir, I'm an impressionable young mare an-” Scoots put on his best feminine equine accent and prodded Jade with his horn.
“Yes, yes, how may I… Oh, you know that's not fair. What if there is some impressionable youn- I mean some mare that's lost and looking for help that only a stallion like myself could provide?” He said, puffing out his chest.
“Wow, you're a real cassoneighva. We have to get going for specialist training. Where do you need to go?” Scoots began checking his timetable for directions.
“Oh, the entertainers only have to do basic lessons and safety awareness,” Jade replied, baring his teeth in a forced toothy grin.
“Lucky git. I suppose you make up for it by performing every night for our amusement for 6 days of every week for 5 years? Hey, it doesn't actually sound that bad when you put it like that!” The deep red pony froze whilst Scoots hit Jade on the back and headed to his first of many seminars for the next 3 months.