• Published 21st Jun 2012
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Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me - DataPacRat



Not every human in equestria gets turned into a pony.

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Upsetting the Apple Cart

I hadn't needed to stretch out the conversation with Safe Guard so long just to trade ideas - I was also catching my breath.

I'd been operating on bluff and improvisation - but that wasn't going to take me very much further, if I didn't at least figure out exactly what I was trying to do here, let alone come up with an actual plan. So - goals. My usual overall goal system remained in place: reduce the odds of the future extinction of all sapience, by various skipped steps, by keeping myself alive for the next thousand years or so, by keeping myself alive for the next week, by avoiding capture by Safe Guard; including applying the various rules-of-thumb I'd figured out so far, such as avoiding excessive force. What plans might accomplish that? I thought back to my fourfold, Meade based model.

Convince him of my innocence? I'd tried to let him give me the opportunity to do so - but he hadn't been interested. Plan desirability: high, but requires further sub-steps.

Run away? I could drop right back to the ground - but Safe had the Mikoyan, and governmental backing, and unicorn magic; he'd probably pick me up again quite soon. Plan desirability: low. Alternately, I could try to drop him off, and take off in the Mikoyan. He'd be somewhat inconvenienced by having to walk fifty miles back to Oasis, while I could fly away. Plan desirability: medium.

Beat down on Safe until he was physically incapable of capturing me? Even ignoring the fact that he'd taught me everything I knew about hoof-to-hoof combat, but far from everything he knew, while it might solve the short-term problem, it introduced certain long-term ones, such as reducing the chance of getting him to ever think I was a good-guy. Plan desirability: low.

Confuse the heck out of Safe until he couldn't figure out how to capture me? Now there was an interesting option, which accomplished my goals, and stayed within my ethical rules-of-thumb. Plan desirability: high.

Operation Mindscrew it was, then. And the name itself actually gave me an idea.

I glanced at my boots, thoughtfully. If I could replicate their effect magically, then perhaps I could improve that idea even further. Now, what was a decent Latinate term for 'glue'... 'glutinous'? 'Viscous'? 'Adhesive'? 'Coefficient of friction maximus'? I grabbed a couple of random objects from my pockets, plus a charged gem, and muttered a quick set of experiments, until I found that 'adhere' seemed to be the magic word, and did even better when I fiddled with the suffix to get 'adherere'. Maybe I should do more of my experimenting while under life-threatening pressure - it certainly seemed to provide plenty of motivation... nah, that was just silly.

Armed with my newly-figured spell, plus all the surviving contents of my pockets, I slipped into the Mikoyan's interior...


There were only so many places where Safe and Micro could hold Captain Red and the crew, and have a chance of keeping me from rescuing them; even fewer if Red had managed to hire some new crewponies before being captured. My first guess seemed most likely, as an unfamiliar earth-pony in Guard uniform was seated in front of the crew-cabin's door. I concentrated, whispered my glue-spell once with a moderate push of will, and then again with a much stronger one... and then trotted boldly into the hall.

The guard immediately saw me, widened his eyes, and started to shout - but only got out, "Mm! M? M. Mmm m mm m mm!" He started wiggling - but his hooves and heinie were firmly attached to the wood floor. "You don't have any allergies, do you?" I inquired solicitously. "Or a cold? Anything that blocks your nasal passages?" He glared at me, then shook his head. "That's fine, then - I won't have to put you to sleep to make sure you can keep breathing. You'll be able to open your mouth soon enough, but you'll be staying put for some time longer. Trust me - it's for your own good. If you'll excuse me, I need to get into the room you're guarding." He rolled his eyes, and kept tensing his forelegs, trying to pull free.

I just slipped around him, cautiously opening the door - and, yep, there was Red, Blanche, Star, and Amethyst, all lying on the floor and trussed up like calves in a rodeo, and the pups in a basket. "Hi, everyone," I commented. "Sorry, but I'm not here to set you free just yet." I ignored their incredulous looks, and went about lifting each one of them into a hammock. "There you go, all nice and comfy. Feel free to let Safe know that you've got no idea why I came here or what I'm doing."

I exited back to the hall, and closed the door. I examined the guard. "If I free your mouth, will you promise, on your honor, not to shout until I make it around the corner? If you don't, I'm quite willing to let the spell run its course." He blinked a few times, then, hesitated, and nodded once. I reached inside a pocket to touch a gem, and muttered a quick "Nullus magicae", concentrating on his mouth and very much not on the larger gluing.

He opened his mouth with a gasp, and then opened and closed it a few times. In a normal conversational tone, he asked, "What in the name of Celestia do you think you're doing?

I grinned. "I'm on a bit of a timetable - but when we're all done, I'd love to hear what you guessed, and when." I turned and trotted away - and, when I reached the end of the hall and turned, I heard him start shouting behind me, letting everypony know where I'd just been.

I hurried to make sure I wasn't there anymore by the time anypony else arrived.


I didn't remember what this smallish, maintenance crawlway was officially called; as soon as I saw it, I instantly dubbed it a Jefferies tube. I was up against the side of the hull, with the port side-propeller just on the other side of the enchanted wooden wall, it and its mate slowly pushing air downward to keep the Mikoyan in a steady hover. A number of pipes came up from the stern and terminated here; some were speaking-tubes; some of them carried the fluidized crushed gems which powered it, while others connected to the mechanisms which rotated it. It was these latter ones I was fiddling with - I was disabling one set, and using the piping therefrom to run a bypass through another set. All it would take was opening one valve, and things would be irreversibly set in motion.

But there was a certain danger in that - so I knocked out a section of speaking-tube, and called out into the opening heading to the bridge, "Safe, you there?"

"... I am." There was a susurrus in the background - I guessed they were talking about which tube my voice was coming from. That was fine - I wasn't in the spot this tube ended at.

"I am about to do something a little drastic. In roughly two minutes, there won't be a single pony alive on any of the top decks. I strongly advise that if you have any ponies outside, you order them back in immediately."

"You just want the deck cleared for your own nefarious purposes."

"'Nefarious'? Really? Well, at least tell me how many you're leaving up there - if I hurry, I can probably save one. I doubt I can save two."

"... There'll be just one."

"Crap. I'd better hurry then." I hit the valve, and gem-fluid started running through it... and as I wriggled my way out of the Jefferies tube, and started galloping, the port propeller slowly started turning...


By the time I made it up onto the deck, the Mikoyan was listing ten degrees to port - and it wasn't going to stop. The port prop had rotated all the way to its stops, and was now pushing air upward instead of down, with only the ship's enchanted buoyancy, and the starboard propeller, keeping it in the sky.

I came up from the stairs amidships; in front of the bridge's main door, Safe Guard himself was standing on deck, his shining armor a little askew as he struggled to keep his hooves on the smooth deck's ever-increasing slope.

I yelled at him, "Get back inside, you idiot!"

"No!", he shouted back.

"You'll fall!", I returned.

"Put the ship back flat!"

"I can't! Not in time!"

"You're bluffing!"

"At least grab a rail!" I started galloping for an equipment locker. "I'll get some rope to tie you off!"

The ship's hull, not specifically designed for this absolutely crazy maneuver, creaked and groaned. Almost all of the cargo was secured against dangerous maneuvering - the key word being 'almost'. I heard a few crashes from belowdecks.

The tilt became too much for Safe's hooves, and he started scrabbling as he slid across the deck. I took a breath to shout another glue-spell - but he bumped into the railing, and grabbed hold of it. So I went back to my rope-collecting, trusting in my seemingly non-magical boots to keep me firmly anchored.

In a few minutes, I was wrapping rope around Safe and the rails, and trying not to invoke the Centipede's Dilemma as I used my hooves to tie some simple knots.

"You're completely insane," Safe stated, as the Mikoyan's deck made it all the way to vertical - and kept tipping.

"So they say," I commented, tying further knots, making sure to keep as many of my booted hoofs pressed firmly against the deck as possible.

"What are you possibly trying to accomplish with this... stunt?"

"For one - to keep you from just flying us off toward Canterlot." I leaned casually against the rail while it was still at least partly below me, and tried to ignore the blood rushing to my head - and the various cursing noises coming from inside the bridge.

"By keeping this ship from being able to fly anywhere ever again?"

"Hm? Oh - no, there's a fairly simple fix to temporarily stabilize things, which will let a more permanent fix be made."

"Do tell."

"Not just yet, I think. Would you be willing to agree that this is a relatively harmless form of resistance against your efforts? That I could easily have caused all sorts of casualties by arranging for you and whoever you brought with you to meet me on deck, without warning you?"

"What's your point?"

"I'd also like to point out that I've had access to the sources of a number of magics unfamiliar to you - the forbidden texts, my own researches, the Great Battlefield whose dangers no living soul but myself has likely seen in thousands of years. If I was really some sort of murderous danger to ponykind - I could have done a lot worse than just turn the ship topsy-turvy." We were now fully upside-down, emphasizing the point. "You and your guards are alive purely because I chose to exercise mercy."

"Again - what's your point?"

"This conversation will go a lot faster if I'm able to get you to accept one point: I had you beaten before you ever got here. Or, if you prefer - I have you in checkmate. Are you willing to accept that, or do I have to show off some more?"

"Fine - I'm in checkmate, and your prisoner. What do you plan on doing with me?"

I grinned at him. "Simple, really - I plan on surrendering to you."


"... What," he stated.

"Conditionally, of course. You seemed quite insistent in refusing to hear anything I had to say earlier," I commented, watching the ground overhead gradually give way to sky. "So I needed to arrange matters to where we'd be able to have an actual conversation, with you actually willing to consider my words."

"And you decided to do... this?!"

"Hey, nopony got hurt," there was some further cursing from the bridge, so I amended that to, "seriously, and it worked, didn't it?"

"And you can fix it, so we don't have to walk home?"

"Easily. The next time we're upside-down, just tell your pilot to rotate the starboard engine to match the port - that'll put us in a steady hover again, just upside-down." I considered the various crashy noises from the bridge. "On second thought, maybe I should go do that myself - I'm not sure anypony but a pegasus can get to the controls at the right time."

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