• Published 26th Oct 2013
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Fallout: Equestria - Weight and Measure - Facsimile



Though his last job was a miserable failure, Rule Book the 'discount' mercenary may have found his ticket to a bright future; a mysterious robot with an insatiable curiosity and a penchant for working out the trouble Rule Book gets them in.

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Chapter 1 - Last Request

It was a miracle that the lights in the room were still working after so long without use. Most of them, in any case. The cool glow of florescence was a welcome change from the glimmering of a single flashlight, and the pegasus who stood at the door remained there for a long moment to enjoy the change of atmosphere. Outside, the wind was still whistling against the broken remains of the building's main floor, but underneath the reinforced concrete there was not only refuge from the elements but a strange sort of peace brought about by the thick walls and soft hum of the lights.

Sadly it didn't seem to last for long. The lights had only been on for a few seconds before a sharp FSSST sounded from the opposite side of the room, and with a brief flicker the room again went dark. There was the faint sound of an electrical pop from across the room as something burned out after so many years of neglect, and that was that.

Rule Book took the time to push his black mane out of his eyes, and then a bit more time to shove the stubborn locks back and over an ear when they proved more difficult to get rid of. He'd dealt with worse places than this, but normally when he did it was under better circumstances and on his own terms, and normally he had prepared a bit more in the way of lighting than the strapped-on light that sat just above his brow, making it all the more difficult to straighten his mane. Still, it could have been much worse than a straightforwards basement-diving among the crumbled and soggy remains of an abandoned commercial district.

As Book looked about and got his bearings he began ticking off all of the extra hazards and inconveniences that he now had to contend with besides the failed lighting. The stairs he had clambered down from a closet in the lobby had led to a hallway and then a keycode-locked door that had long since stopped being secure, bolts rusted completely to bits and a firm yank away from opening. Now, just ahead and down a few extra steps of concrete, was a room that was filled with all manner of boxes and crates and unidentifiable things that were disfigured by time. It wasn't a very large room as far as rooms in general went, maybe even a bit low-ceilinged, but as far as basement storage rooms went it was a pretty fair size larger than average. Though much of everything he saw was physically intact, which was also a miracle in any city that had been touched by the War, it was also in poor condition; crates made of treated lumber were still starting to waste away with age and moisture, boxes made of metal were clearly starting to rust almost through, and at the far side of the room a section of wall had given way and the earth and stone behind were crushing sections of the storeroom.

It was strangely quiet. Rule Book was used to dank caves, and while this basement was as cold and wet as any cavern it had an eerie stillness and artificial quality that made him shudder on the steps. The grey pegasus drew his coat closer about him at more than just the chill, wincing as the long cloth brushed against the fresh bandages on his left flank, and started forwards down the steps... to stop abruptly, angling his head as his light reflected oddly off of something. A surface that was not concrete was in front of the steps, reflecting his lamp's glow like a mirror, black and out of place. Gingerly and with a frown, Book extended a hoof and touched the surface of the strange black sheet.

His frown deepened to a scowl as he watched ripples roll outwards from the spot, spreading outwards across the surface of the water that covered the floor of the basement. "Just my luck," he said, barely even a whisper. He drew back from the water and watched the ripples spread with his lamp, trying to gauge where it ended and a proper floor began. The ripples met the walls and crates and bounced without ever meeting a patch of dry concrete.

Flooded. Of course the basement was flooded. He'd run out of miracles tonight and now bad luck was catching up to him and starting to make this job even worse than it had to be. He swore inwardly and wished that he'd bought some sensor equipment. He'd like to know if the water was tainted and just how royally bucked he was at this point, but he'd get no such information from what little he had on him now. As far as he had been told the city above had been destroyed by means of conventional warfare rather than the brutal and instant erasure that was a megaspell, so he had doubts about if the water was tainted. Either way he had an unfinished job to do and he wouldn’t let water stop him.

He promised himself that he would find a doctor to check him over as soon as this was seen through. After all, he still had that nasty bullet-hole in his left flank’s thick muscle to contend with, and while he kept saying to himself that he could tough the pain out like a colt, he knew it would need more than some pressure from clean bandages and a hooful of pain pills. He definitely couldn’t waste time worrying about a tiny bit of tainted water. At least, he hoped it was a tiny bit. Would that he’d not exhausted his wing muscles in getting here in such a hurry...

Mustering up his courage he started to step forwards, his forehoof sliding into the surface of the black water without much sound… and shortly after making contact with the concrete of the next step down. The water was icy cold and impossible to see through; who knew what it could be full of? Rule Book made the decision there with only one foot in that he wouldn’t stay long enough to find out any more about it. He continued forwards, hoping that there wouldn’t be any more steps in front of him, but his other forehoof found another step just beyond the first. Almost a foot of depth and he had no idea if he could stand or have to swim! For all he know it could be a whole flight of steps to the actual floor below, and at that point he’d have to just give up entirely. There was no way he was swimming in stagnant water with a wound in his butt.

He took another step, limping a little forwards and extending his hoof along the next section of concrete below the water, and found that this time it didn’t end in another drop. His scowl threatened to curl up into a hopeful smile at this; at least it was only a foot deep. That would be fine. Encouraged, Rule Book started to ease his way forwards again and make his way into the water, feeling carefully in front of him to avoid tripping.

The sound of his breathing and the soft sound of water parting around his legs were the only two noises in the basement, no matter how he strained to hear anything else. At the very least his luck with having escaped the clutches of the city’s ‘inhabitants’ - if he could call the bandits that had attacked earlier such - was holding up. For all he knew they’d given up and were picking the corpse of his original charge clean right now; it was a small victory to know that they’d find nothing valuable, being as he’d been entrusted with The Case a short time before he fled.

The pegasus didn’t feel much sympathy for the ghoul who’d lost whatever passed for life in the city above. Sure, Rule Book thought, the unicorn colt had been his charge to escort to the very basement he now found himself in, but the mutterings and distant stares that were almost all he got in terms of conversation hadn’t instilled any feelings of affection for the guy in Book’s heart. He also didn’t feel much affection for ghouls in the first place, especially ones that dated back to the days before the War; they’d lived plenty of life tacked onto whatever original span they were meant to live, and not many of them stepped past the ‘angry old geezer’ attitude for him to take a liking. Even if they had far more knowledge and experience than he did, and usually had advice worth listening to.

Keystroke had been the name of the specimen who’d met a bullet-induced fate a half-hour earlier; an engineer of some skill who from all he could piece together had once worked in the building that was ruined above Book’s head. What little conversation had passed between them since leaving New Pegas and making their way into the San Palomino desert had been dominated by very long blurbs of near to meaningless information strangled out by Keystroke’s ravaged throat, among which were a few bits and pieces about what exactly his job was meant to accomplish.

The black-painted, metallic case that sat neatly in the pack on Rule Book’s back was the prized possession of the ghoul who’d hired him as an escort, but it had been passed over without almost any hesitation when things became rough and the ponies circling them in the streets began to call out taunts. Keystroke had apparently entertained no hopes of survival against so many, and maybe he had been regretting only hiring one pony to bring him to his destination, but in the short sentences that had passed between them while under fire he made it clear that the whole point was The Case, and The Basement.

Rule Book had failed to defend the old creature as he had promised he would, and he felt guilty about that. Maybe that guilt was why he took on the colt’s final task, or maybe is was a need for a sense of closure. Whatever The Case was, it was important, as was the storage room the pegasus waded through; his job wasn’t done until he found out how the two matched up.

At the far end of the room, with bare wall on his left and crumbling walls on his right, Rule Book found a set of shelves set against the wall that were somewhat intact, though unfortunately empty. Other than the wade through dark water and the boxes and canisters that filled the room, there seemed to be nothing useful or meaningful or even suspicious. What had been the point of coming here? Assuming it was the right building, which he was sure it was because the directions had been very specific, was this even the right area of the basement? Maybe the building had a floor even further down, now entirely filled with opaque, icy water?

Book shuddered at the thought.

Even so, he couldn’t simply give up without having done everything possible to see this job through to the end, and he had barely even begun his search. Met with the useless wall the pegasus started to look about for anything that would give a clue as to his final destination in this dank hole. To his right, towards the collapsed portions of the room, he could see a set of metal frames set into the wall and metal-shod cables that ran along the wall from them, to either side and both upwards and downwards; a switch-box or fuse-box. Rule Book didn’t want to toy with electrical equipment while up to his knees in conductive liquid, but it was a start. His headlamp followed the lines of cable that ran upwards, where the brackets that had held it to the concrete had been knocked free of their anchors, letting the cable hang down into the water a bit before going back upwards to the lights.

“Well, there’s the lighting question answered,” he muttered to himself. “Must’ve shorted and blown a fuse.” It was a reasonable assumption, especially with the faint smell of something burnt in the still air. He counted it as yet another miracle that the water hadn’t been electrified and killed him on contact, or something equally career-ending. When the fuse had been blown it had cut the connection to this particular cable, leaving the water relatively safe to enter. The other cables, assuming they hadn’t shorted, were likely fine, and the one extending upwards to the edge of the ceiling and then towards the damaged section of the basement was a possible lead. It was probably damaged as well, but it still went somewhere, and it could potentially answer the question of what he was doing in this hole.

Rule Book proceeded even more carefully than before, stretching each hoof out in front of him in the water and testing the flooring before taking the full step. The wall had been damaged somehow, likely weakened by time, and had given way to let dank earth shove through and spill broken concrete across the floor, providing a handy tripping hazard that Book wasn’t eager to exploit. Even with the damage to the wall, the cable remained out of the water and stretched to both the remains of the basement’s corner and then took another right along the wall and into somewhere that Book couldn’t see with the crates obstructing his view.

The concrete chunks that had fallen out of place had done some damage to some containers here and there in this section of the basement, and as he waded past Book couldn’t help but peek at what they’d spilled. Many of the things weren’t identifiable in the water, but where stored objects had spilled onto dry rubble it was a bit clearer that they were small boxes of cardboard, barely holding together. And yet more, where these boxes had been damaged it seemed that they contained mechanical parts of unknown purpose, many of them identical.

From what Rule Book pieced together listening to the ghoul who’d sent him here and from what he could see spilled out of containers he made the guess that this building had been the home of a company devoted to either the production or distribution of machine parts, and very complicated ones at that. As the structure had the makings of something more corporate than industrial, he had a feeling it wasn’t a manufacturing site; maybe a company office or a development and design center for a larger company. If so it made sense that scavengers wouldn’t have messed with anything here; machine parts weren’t useful to nomadic types, just settlements.

As Rule Book neared the corner and a point at which he could turn and continue following the cable, he slid himself further towards the right and hugged close to the containers just before the turn, trying to stay out of the way of the majority of the rubble. As he turned the corner his headlamp followed the cable along the wall to what looked to be a subsection of the basement divided by a partly-collapsed barrier, and then downwards to a wall outlet set rather high up in the wall, a grey box jutting out and with something plugged in still. Book followed the cord with his headlamp to where it ended at what looked to be an old electric screwdriver, next to which was--

The pegasus pulled himself back with a jolt, pressing himself against the cold metal of the container next to him, clenching down his jaw and making a determined effort to not cry out. A severed head. A bucking head on the table! The sight of it was fresh in his mind and he recalled the distinctive shape of a pony’s head, not merely a skull, laying sideways on the table next to the drill. He raced to come up with some explanation but could find nothing other than the assumption that somepony had been beheaded and their freshly-taken cranium set on the table. But who? And by whom? And for what?

Most importantly, where was the killer?

Rule Book steeled himself, taking a glance behind him where he had come, expecting all sorts of things… but seeing nothing. As far as he could tell he remained alone in the flooded basement. He turned and prepared himself mentally for carrying on, leaning out around the corner and letting his light shine across the table and the grisly display…

… he was quiet for several long seconds as he realized what he was seeing. His light clearly showed what looked to be a pony’s severed head save that there was no blood nor flesh. It was certainly a head, but it didn’t quite look right, and as Book rounded the corner and closed the several feet of distance to stand beside the table he saw why.

It was a robot. Or more accurately, a robot’s head. The metal where it would have connected to a body was jointed and bare but the rest of the head was covered in interlocking plates of white plastic. The eyes were wide open, showing intricate and minutely-sized parts behind the glass in imitation of a pony’s eye, complete with a pupil and an iris. It all looked very realistic, if a bit dirty and grimy; clearly it wasn’t anything made postwar. And it most definitely wasn’t a Robronco model he recognized.

Finally Rule Book had an answer as to what was in all of these crates and storage barrels, or at least a fair deal of them; robot parts. It was few fair trots ahead of where he had been before in this mystery, though it was by no means a complete picture. Somehow a storeroom of robot parts and machinery connected to The Case in some way.

The pegasus shrugged his pack off and gripped it with his teeth, tossing it up onto the table next to the head. All this time he hadn’t seen the inside of The Case, but now was a good a time as any to see what he was dealing with, and hopefully piece together some more of the puzzle. The plain metallic container had a set of hinged latches on the front which were easy enough to open, and eventually he prodded it apart and took stock of what was inside.

It wasn’t very interesting, but it was most definitely illuminating; he was no engineer but he’d seen enough machines dismantled by gunfire to recognize critical robot components when he saw them and here, set inside of aging foam inserts, was what was essentially a processing module. Not a Robronco model, but very similar in design. It had all the appearances of being either a knockoff part or other replica, but the ghoul who’d carried it had treated it as though it meant the world to him. It likely did.

Rule Book could make the connections fairly quickly: here he was in a storeroom full of robot parts, with a mission to carry a robot processing unit of special significance and…. do something with it. It was plain what it was he had to do; he had to find whatever robot this core would fit into and activate it, and hope that the program stored in the unit would shed further light on the entire matter. As for what robot it went to…

Rule Book turned and looked about at the crates and containers around him, wondering how many he’d have to look through before he found something he could use. He doubted he’d find a complete robot anywhere, but then again all he’d need to test his theory would be a torso or a he--... he turned around slowly and peered down at the robot head on the table. Could it really be that easy? The pegasus reached out with a hoof to nudge the robotic head and roll it a little, looking it over and after a while locating the panel on the back of the cranium that was easily popped open with the bit of the nearby driver, as the screws were already taken out and nowhere to be found. Sure enough, the panel revealed a bay for a processing component, inside of which was the silvery case of another core. Some deft prodding with the driver let Book slip the little box out of its socket.

“Guess it’s about as easy as that, huh?” he asked nopony at all, holding the two cores side by side. Maybe the old ghoul had been here before and was working on something before this entire ordeal; the new core was an exact duplicate in terms of shape, though significantly less grimy. It didn’t take long for the colt to fit the processor into the space where the old one had resided, snugging it into place and placing the panel back where it belonged, little plastic pins securing it with soft clicks. “Now I just need to find some way to power the damn thing…”

It was likely, to Rule Book, that somewhere in this room there might be at least the torso of the robot that this head was designed to fit on, and if he was very lucky he might even find some power cells to fit it with. Once that was accomplished maybe he could get some answers straight from the pony’s mouth, and in this case quite literally. He waded his way a bit back from where he had come, peeking about in the mess of crushed and half-crushed crates to try and get an idea of what was stored where. The majority of items that had been spilled appeared entirely made of metal, and from the shapes he made the guess that these were parts from another robot model entirely. A crate that had been tumped onto its side with the lid knocked off revealed what looked like the head of a robotic ant; definitely not a pony model.

The parts he thought he would be looking for would likely be stored in a special container of some kind, he reasoned, being as the piece that lay on the table behind him looked a great deal more expensive and complex than the average robot. Something not likely made of wood, and something not likely stored at the bottom of a stack. Something new, and secure, and possibly… dark grey and stored ten feet away from him at the top of a stack of crates near the corner of the basement. It was the best option; a rectangular container that looked somewhat out of place among all of the storage boxes, with a series of numbers on the side that he couldn’t make sense of with the peeling of the grey paint. Next to this was yet another, and then another, all identical… and all being crushed by the weight of the collapsed concrete above.

Rule Book slid his wings out from under his coat, fanning his feathers; he was a bit stiff, but he decided that the out-of-place containers would be worth a check. Flapping his wings, the pegasus pulled himself airborne with a slosh of water and made his way in the air towards the containers he had spotted. From the look of things it seemed as though they were intact, metal shells that were doing an admirable job of holding up the weight of a collapsed roof. Enough that he could reach out with his hooves and tug at the sideways-facing lid without it budging at all.

A good wiggling and a sharp yank later and the lid of the bent container popped off like that of a tin can. Peering in with his headlamp revealed the most promising result he could have hoped for, and at the same time the most disappointing. What was inside the container was crushed and mangled beyond all hope of usefulness, but the appearance alone was worth a grin; gleaming silver metal and bits of white plastic, much like that of the head that rested on the table below. It was likely parts for the same robot model, and if so that meant one of the three containers had to have something useful to him. At the very least something to help him understand what kind of robot he was dealing with in the first place; the containers looked rather military, but a replica of a pony hardly seemed a very military design choice. He’d find out soon enough.

The container at the far end of the stack was the least harmed by the weight of the roof, and was easily a foot in height and two wide. The same measure of tugging and wrenching brought the top of this one off as well, and inside was a delightful find; an assembled body. He dropped the lid and didn’t mind the splash it made in the water below, reaching in with both hooves to feel of the material inside; cool metal and smooth plastic, just as he had hoped. Miracles upon miracles. He grasped at it and started to pull it forwards… but it seemed the weight of the roof wasn’t giving him much room. He didn’t want to pull too hard and risk causing the ceiling to collapse on him, but at the same time he didn’t want to just give up. He gripped the robotic body a bit more firmly and tugged in short little yanks, trying to bring it loose and slide it out.

HRRRRRNNNNNN… went the ceiling. The concrete inches above Rule Book’s head suddenly shifted and he stopped flapping, desperately trying to duck out of the way as chunks of rock started to break loose. He dropped quickly and flared his wings out again to glide out from under the spot, feeling grit and bits of gravel raining down on him. At any moment he expected the entire roof to come rushing down and smash him into the water-covered floor, smooshing him like a fly between a window and a rolled magazine.

And then all at once it stopped.

Rule Book alighted on the edge of the sturdy table at the end of the little corridor of boxes, assessing the situation; the ceiling had shifted and given way a little further, taking more boxes with it but ultimately being stopped short of falling down. Had it gone any further it could have either blocked the way out entirely or worse, crushed him. But even better was the ultimate result of seeing, laying splayed across the new rubble that jutted from the water’s surface, the body of the robot he had been trying to get to.

The pegasus flapped over to the rubble and settled down in the water next to the machine, casting a cautious glance upwards before turning his attention to the robot. It was most definitely not something he’d seen before, a machine built in the shape of an earth-pony to great detail, though perhaps a bit smaller than even his own body. It was, sadly, more than a bit worse for wear with the way it had been crushed in the box, cracking some of the plastic plates that covered the entirety of the body save for the places where joints allowed for movement. Beneath the plates he could see complicated moving parts that he assumed would allow it a great range of motion, which he supposed for an anatomic replica of a pony was the entire point. While it had taken a beating and portions of it looked mangled, it was intact and most importantly… was missing a head.

Rule Book reached out and tucked his forehooves under the robot, the cold plastic smooth to the touch. It felt almost too light to be complete, and as he hefted it he wondered if it was just a husk of metal and hollowed out on the inside, because it weighed only about as much as a pony of equal size; though this was a fair deal of weight it was still a far cry from the weight of a robot. The metal was likely aluminum, and the plastic plates rather than metal probably shaved plenty of weight from the machine. In either case he could lift it up and onto his back, keeping it out of the water and hauling it towards the table.

Setting the body down across the sturdy metal surface, he looked over what he had to work with using his headlamp. From all appearances everything was where it should be, as though the robot had been stored away in assembled form, save for the head… which was likely the one laying here on the table. It looked expensive, and assuming he could get it out of here he briefly wondered what kind of haul in caps it could bring in at New Pegas, or even the Hub. It was worth a shot. But more important were the answers to several burning questions.

He slid down the plastic shutters that made up the ‘eyelids’ of the robot before he started; no sense in being creeped out by the dead stare while he had to concentrate. Putting the head on the robot’s neck segments was an easy enough task; the neck was made up of a series of motors that looked as though it could give a wide range of turning much like the vertebrae of a pony’s spine, and connecting the head to this was a simple matter of setting it properly and then securing the four bolts that held the end of the neck to the base of the robotic skull. Then the somewhat painstaking process of making the cabling connections to the skull. Then came the even more painstaking process of realizing that he had put it on backwards and having to undo everything he had just done and do it over the right way.

Sploosh!

Rule Book was getting towards the point where he was searching for some kind of control mechanism to see if what he had done had worked at all when he heard the very distinct sound of something splashing heavily into the water. He bolted upright and turned around, peering at the rubble with his headlamp… but the sound hadn’t come from there. It had sounded like something at the very far side of the dark, flooded basement. Something large.

The pegasus swallowed and held his breath, listening at the now unbroken silence for any sign of further movement in the room. Barely perceptible when he strained his ears and perked them towards where he thought he had heard the sound, he heard a tiny noise like ripples being formed in the water’s surface. Not the treading of hooves wading through liquid as he expected, but rather a sound much like that of a fish swimming just below the surface of a shallow pool. A big fish.

He couldn’t bring himself to move, could barely bring himself to breathe. His mind was frantic. There’s something in here with me! he thought, casting his lamp’s light across the water’s surface in front of him and searching for any sign of movement. But the surface was still. Even so, he heard the sound of movement on the far side of the room… and he could feel his heart pressing up into his throat as he swore he could hear it drawing closer.

It was then that I woke up and opened my eyes for the first time.

FALLOUT: Equestria

Weight and Measure

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