Mare Do Well: Rebirth

by MagnetBolt

The Shoulders of Giants, Part 1

“Honestly I don’t know why I was looking forward to this,” Lyra said, and she stared at the drink in her hooves. It was beautiful, streaks of orange and black making it look like somepony had juiced a tiger and topped it with whipped cream.

“What does it taste like?” Loopy asked with morbid curiosity.

“You know those chocolate oranges you sometimes get around Hearth’s Warming?” Lyra asked. “You know, the big solid ones that can separate into slices and it’s sort of like, orange-flavored chocolate?”

Loopy nodded.

“That’s what I was hoping it would taste like,” Lyra said. “But actually it just tastes like somepony mixed some orange juice into cold coffee.”

“I keep warning you about drinks like that,” Bon-Bon said. “Seasaddle is supposed to be the coffee cafe capital of Equestria, but you just want to go to Novo’s. We’ve got a Novo’s back home in Ponyville!”

Lyra whined plaintively like a toddler without her bottle. “But in Ponyville, we don’t have all the new drinks yet! We’re always months behind!”

“Imagine waiting months for a drink and it ends up tasting like that,” Loopy said, motioning to Lyra’s elaborate and disgusting coffee. The changeling grabbed a donut and nibbled on it. “I’m not going out to get you something else. The rain is just pouring down tonight.”

“We had almost a week of dry nights,” Bon-Bon said. “The weather wants to make up for it, I guess.”

“At least it’s dry down here!” Lyra said. “You’d think the subway would flood in a storm like this.”

“Keep talking like that and you’re going to jinx it,” Loopy said. “It’s a spacious, rent-free place in the middle of Seasaddle, and I am not going to let you mess that up by thinking about it too hard.”

“Come to think of it, we need to come up with a cool name for this place,” Lyra said. “Like… the Marecave!”

“First, that sounds like a double entendre,” Bon-Bon said. “Second, I already filled out the paperwork and this is officially the Park Row Provisional SMILE Office.”

“That doesn’t even make an acronym!” Lyra groaned.

“I’m all in favor of it sounding professional,” Loopy said. “Sorry, Lyra.”

Bon-Bon nodded and opened the paper, flipping through. “We have to at least try to be professional. The local PD still doesn’t like us all that much.”

“Maybe we can solve some of their outstanding cases,” Loopy suggested.

“That’d just make them more upset,” Bon-Bon muttered. “The reason I have the paper is so we can try and find something new.”

“Oh, how about this?” Lyra pointed to an article.

“An article about horoscopes?” Bon-Bon asked.

“No, it’s about the Horoscope supercomputer,” Lyra said. “It’s supposed to use totally new technology. Instead of just running numbers, it uses divination spells to predict answers.”

“I bet that wouldn’t work well in school,” Loopy said. “Not that I ever went, but I bet most teachers don’t want to hear you’re guessing and predicting the answer to math problems instead of just adding the numbers.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Lyra said. “Calling it a guess is like… like saying buckball is a game of chance. There are statistics, and skill, and rules, and--”

“--And most prophecy is useless,” Loopy noted. “Or at least so vague you can apply it to anything. Like, look at this. The article says the Horoscope predicted a flood two days ago, and early this morning a bunch of pipes broke and a low-lying part of the city got flooded out.”

“That sounds like a successful prediction to me,” Lyra said.

“Except everypony knew there’d be flooding,” Loopy said. “I’ve lived here a while. Every time there are heavy rains, something floods.”

“It’s odd, though,” Bon-Bon said. “The computer predicted the place and time. It’s still a little vague, but it’s not like most of these doomsday predictions you get from prophets.”

“Maybe they got lucky,” Loopy shrugged. “Like I said, that part of the city has streets below sea level. If anything was going to flood, it would be there.”

“It’s made other predictions,” Lyra said.

“Winning lottery numbers?” Loopy asked.

Bon-Bon snorted. “That’s what I’d ask it for. But it looks like it just predicts bad things. The paper mentions it predicting some kind of towering inferno near the heart of the city.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Loopy said. “Does it say where?”

“Why?” Lyra asked. “Worried that it’s going to come true?”

Loopy rolled her eyes. “I just want to know how many bits I should bet you that it won’t come true.”

“How about if it comes true you owe me a coffee?” Lyra asked.

“Deal,” Loopy said. “After all, what are the odds of a real fire in this kind of weather?”

---

“I can’t believe this,” Mare Do Well grumbled. Even with the waterproof coating on her hat and cape, she still felt soaked through to the bone. The storm was driving the rain sideways, and it was practically like a hurricane that had somehow found its way to exactly the wrong side of Equestria.

Mare Do Well was standing across the street from a tower block, the shorter buildings around it only reaching halfway up the skyscraper and making it stand out like a monolith planted in the neighborhood. Smoke poured out of it in big, dirty clouds, flames licking between the metal panels covering the building like a suit of thin, aluminum armor.

“According to the radio chatter, there are still ponies trapped on the upper floors,” Bon-Bon said. “There are barely any pegasus ponies in the city and the fire is cutting off rescue efforts.”

“You’d think there would be a market for weather control here,” Loopy said. She braced herself and flew towards the building. As soon as she got close, the thermals from the flames caught her buzzing wings. Loopy only barely made it to the building without hurting herself, hooves hitting the cladding and sticking. Luckily, she’d hit a section that wasn’t on fire, but even here the metal was uncomfortably hot.

Lyra audibly shrugged. “Hard to sell them on it when they can’t have cloud houses or fly without a license because of height restrictions.”

“How close are you to the top?” Bon-Bon asked.

“Between the storm and the fire, this isn’t as easy as it looks,” Mare Do Well said. She started moving, practically running up the side of the building. The surface was just matte enough to give the changeling decent grip, at least until she stumbled onto a panel as hot as a griddle and almost fell.

Mare Do Well jumped onto a different panel, trying to figure out which floor she was on.

“Can you get anything from fire and rescue?” she asked. “Number of ponies? Floor?”

“Three names on the checklist that aren’t accounted for,” Bon-Bon said. “Top floor! There was only elevator access and that got cut off when the fire started!”

“Only elevator access?” Mare Do Well asked. “Whose idea was that?”

She got to the top and looked down. Fire had already made its way to the roof on one side of the building. Mare Do Well kicked in a window and swung herself inside.

“Is anypony here?” she shouted. “I’m here to rescue you!”

“Oh thank Celestia,” an older mare gasped. She ran out of the darkness, her bowl-cut mane grey with ash and the air fouled with smoke but still tolerable. “I didn’t think anypony was coming!”

“Fire and Rescue said there were three ponies here,” Mare Do Well said. “Are the others okay?”

She heard a moan from the next room and ran in, finding the floor half-collapsed and a pony trapped among the floorboards, barely hanging on, fallen furniture complicating things by pinning her under a steel beam.

“How did this happen?” Mare Do Well asked, trying to help the younger mare free.

“Something exploded on the floor below here,” she coughed. “I can’t- I can’t move--”

“It’s okay, I’ve got you,” Mare Do Well said. “You’re going to be fine.”

“You need to get me out of here first!” the older mare shouted. “I can barely breathe!”

Mare Do Well glared at her. “Ma’am--”

“She’s only the help! I’m ordering you to rescue me first!”

“Right,” Mare Do Well said, standing up. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

---

“...so I knocked her out and saved the maid,” Loopy finished. “The third ‘pony’ was her bucking cat, but I got that monster out of the penthouse too. Ow!”

“Cat scratches get infected really easily,” Lyra said. “They have to be cleaned out.”

“A lot of ponies got hurt in that fire, but thankfully nopony was killed,” Bon-Bon said. “It was a near thing.”

“I can’t believe the place went up like that during a storm,” Loopy said. “Don’t they use water to put out fires?”

“The cladding on the tower failed inspection three times,” Bon-Bon said. “I talked with the fire chief about it. Apparently, it’s a known issue - the insulation on the backside of the panels is basically shredded paper, wax, and cotton.”

“That sounds like tinder,” Loopy said.

“Yeah, and the outer layer of aluminum kept it dry and out of the rain.” Bon-Bon sat back. “We really need another pony down here. Coordinating with the authorities and doing all the research is getting to me.”

“Hey, I’m trying to help--” Lyra said.

“You’re doing more than enough keeping up with all the tech stuff,” Bon-Bon assured her, nuzzling her cute, smart wife. “I can’t get my head around it.”

“So when the fire started, it just followed the whole outside of the building,” Loopy said.

“A real towering inferno…” Lyra muttered. “Just like the prediction Horoscope made! And it was on Heart street! The Heart of the city!”

“It is a little strange,” Bon-Bon admitted.

“If it really can predict disasters before they happen, it could save lives,” Lyra said. “What if ponies had taken it seriously with the fire? Nopony died, but ponies lost everything they owned, and some of them are going to need weeks in the hospital.”

“Maybe you should reach out to them and try to get a look at how they do it,” Loopy suggested.

“Good idea,” Lyra agreed. She finished wrapping Loopy’s cuts up. “I’m gonna go grab a soda from the corner store. You want one?”

“Sounds good,” Loopy said.

Bon-Bon watched Lyra go, waiting until she left to say anything.

“I know she gets excited about new technology, but I’m still not sure about this computer,” Bon-Bon said. “My instincts tell me there’s something off.”

“Good instincts to listen to,” Loopy agreed. “Somepony told me a long time ago, trust, but verify. Right now that thing’s a black box.”

“If Lyra can talk to the scientists involved, maybe--”

“Girls!” Lyra shouted, running inside, her mane drenched. “There’s trouble!”

Loopy grabbed her hat. “What’s going on?”

“I didn’t even get to the store. The paper put out a late edition just for this!”

Lyra held up a newspaper.

“Horoscope Supercomputer predicts massive roadway collapse,” Loopy read.

“According to this, the Horoscope says there’s going to be a disaster ‘at the road at the place of clovers’,” Lyra said. “You might think it’s just been lucky, but--”

“I’ll get a map of the city and try to find Clover Road or Lucky Lane or whatever else it might mean,” Bon-Bon said, running for the rolled-up maps.

“You get in touch with the Horoscope team,” Loopy said, pointing to Lyra. “See if they can be any more specific.”

“Got it!” Lyra saluted.

“I’m going to get out there,” Loopy said, pulling on her costume. “I’ll follow the elevated roads and see if I spot anything.”

---

“This has to be the spot,” Bon-Bon said. “If you look at it from above, the elevated roads and tracks look like a four-leaf clover.”

“It’s still standing, so we must have gotten here early,” Mare Do Well said. “Can you get the Seasaddle PD to close the roads?”

“They’re already on it. If we’re wrong, we’re going to owe them a lot of favors,” Bon-Bon said. “There are still ponies on the roads. You need to clear everypony out and direct them towards the barricades to the north and south.”

“Okay. Let’s hope I don’t look too stupid doing this,” Mare Do Well said. She jumped down into traffic, right in front of a group of ponies. “I’m going to need everypony to clear the area! This is an emergency!”

Ponies halted where they were, whispering to each other.

“An emergency doesn’t mean you stay where you are!” Mare Do Well yelled. “You need to move!”

The road under her hooves started vibrating subtly. Ponies around her started looking down.

“MOVE!” Mare Do Well screamed. “Go, go, go!”

The ponies started stampeding, and Mare Do Well did her best to direct them in the right directions, hopping from one roadway to the next, pointing the way to safety. The whole time, the shaking was getting worse. It was already rattling like a train was rushing past.

Mare Do Well hopped down a few levels, checking to make sure there weren’t any ponies. Finally, she dropped to the ground, ushering the last few ponies off the road and to the barricades the Seasaddle PD had set up at a safe distance.

“Everypony just stay calm!” the officer there said. “Everything is going to be fine! This is a safe place, you’re out of the danger zone!”

Mare Do Well breathed a sigh of relief for a few seconds, catching her breath. “The quake is getting worse, but it seems like everypony is out of danger,” she said. “How bad is it in the rest of the city?”

“There’s no shaking anywhere else,” Bon-Bon said. “I don’t think this is a normal earthquake.”

“Well, what else could it be?” Mare Do Well asked. She didn’t have time to get an answer, because a wave of panic hit her like a slap. She turned to look.

“What do you mean you don’t have her?” a mare shouted.

“I thought you grabbed her!” a stallion yelled.

Mare Do Well stepped between the yelling ponies, holding up a hoof.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“My baby is still up there!” the mare yelled. “This idiot husband of mine--”

“You can argue later! Where up there?” Mare Do Well looked up.

“T-the blue cart,” the stallion said. Before he could continue, Mare Do Well took off, running for it. The rumbling was getting worse and worse, like she was standing on a tuning fork that was getting tapped over and over again, the resonance getting stronger every time. The interweaving levels of concrete were waving in ways that stone wasn’t supposed to.

She jumped up to the next level and spotted the blue cart, abandoned at the edge of a roadway. Even over the rumbling, she could hear a confused and terrified filly crying for her parents.

The concrete under her hooves cracked, and the rumbling road started tilting. Mare Do Well ran for the cart, grabbing the crying filly out of the back. She couldn’t have been more than two or three years old.

Dust filled the air, and a shadow fell over her. Mare Do Well looked up to see the upper roadway starting to come down. She bolted, the bundle tucked against her body.

“Shhh!” Mare Do Well said, doing her best not to sound scary. She buzzed into the air, picking a path through the tumbling debris even as the roadway dropped out under her. The storm must have had a soft spot for foals, because the winds died down.

Mare Do Well burst out of the cloud of concrete dust, half-blind, and ducked around a falling support column. Chunks of concrete the size of her hoof fell around her, and she twisted to shield the filly. One chunk hit her wing right near the tip, and Mare Do Well felt something break. She bit her lip and spiraled toward the ground like a maple leaf, her one good wing struggling to arrest her fall.

She landed hard, rolling and ignoring the pain in her wing, coming to a rest on the asphalt just as the last of the collapsing roadway settled into place, only a few steps ahead of the rubble. She was on her back, with the filly held tight against her chest.

“You okay?” Mare Do Well asked.

The filly looked up at her and burbled happily. Loopy had never been a mother, but being able to read emotions meant she was pretty good at telling what foals wanted. She raised an eyebrow.

“No, we’re definitely not going on the fun ride again,” she said.

---

“You must have saved dozens of ponies,” Bon-Bon said. “The current theory is some kind of ground liquefaction caused by the heavy storm. Like the foundations just turned to quicksand.”

The area had been closed off by the Seasaddle PD. Even now, they were going over the debris to check for anypony that might have been missed, but all indications were that they’d all gotten out in time. Loopy had volunteered to help out, just in case her emotional senses would do something, but it looked like there wasn’t anypony to rescue.

“Not to mention the photo op!” Lyra added. “Mare Do Well standing tall and giving a filly back to her mother after plucking her from the jaws of death! It’s pretty heroic if I do say so myself.”

“What else was I going to do, keep her?” Loopy snorted.

“How’s the wing?” Lyra asked, nodding to Loopy’s side.

“It’s… I’ll talk to a specialist next week,” Loopy said, dismissively. “Don’t give me that look. I survived in this city just fine without the government for a long time. I’ve got ponies for things.”

“You mean you’ve got ponies you feed on,” Bon-Bon corrected.

“I meant friends,” Loopy corrected. “But sure, if you want to be gross about it…”

She kicked a chunk of concrete out of the way, then frowned.

“What’s wrong?” Bon-Bon asked.

“You’d better not have just broken your hoof,” Lyra warned. “I am not going to try and splint an exoskeleton.”

“No, it’s…” Loopy grunted. “Help me with this. I think it’s one of the support columns.”

She’d spotted something in a revealed hollow. With Bon-Bon and Lyra’s help, they moved a few more fallen bits of decking and rebar to reveal it.

“What is that?” Bon-Bon asked.

Lyra tried to pull it free. “It’s attached to the column,” she muttered. “Hold on-- got it!” She yanked, and it came free. It was about as long as her foreleg, and shaped like something between an enclosed piston and a barbell.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bon-Bon said.

“Neither have I,” Loopy agreed. “Think it’s a coincidence that we found a strange machine near the collapsed road, attached to a failed support column?”

“I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Comments

[Reese]

Yeah, I was already suspecting that the computer's "predictions" were more "here's the disaster we plan to cause next"... I suppose there could still be a twist there, but it doesn't look good for those being genuine prophecies.