My Little Engineer

by Soren Mercer


Shake and Bake

“I still think this is a bad idea…” Twilight complained as soon as she had appeared from the medical tent that Pinkie was still holed up in. She was stable and going to live, but whatever the demon had one to her made it so she’d likely never walk with that hoof again. Even after all that, Pinkie was still as cheerful and as bubbly as ever, going on that it was her fault for getting attacked like that in the first place.

Celestia and Luna were both in the process of setting up a table to eat at and hopefully try meeting the suited creature again, under better terms like dinner. Sunset had helped to try and construct a human palatable menu of vegetables in addition to the regular items on menu for the ponies so spirits were high, all things considered.

Setting out with the table in magical grasp and the dishes hidden away in magic, Celestia and Luna both set out towards the ship with the eyes of their subjects on them at all times; if they weren’t on the ship, anyways.

~~~

“I’d say that went well.” Luna smiled wide as she and her sister returned from the meeting with the table and the remains of the dishes floating behind the pair. “I didn’t think it’d apologize for hurting Pinkie… Strange way of going about it though…”

“Still an interesting way to mount the language barrier, though. Haven’t played charades in a millennia.” Celestia smirked back with nods and stepped into the tent with her sister, joining Twilight and friends.

“So? I see it went well.” Sunset announced as she welcomed the newcomers to the tent. The six smallest ponies were all around their own table working on dinner of their own when they all looked up to greet the princesses.

“It did, yes. It even apologized for injuring Pinkie Pie.” Celestia remarked, dropping the jaws of Twilight and Dash; Dash’s mouth having been working on chewing on a salad of flowers and vegetables.

“Why do you think it poked at the food?” Luna wondered aloud as the remains were handed off to Dash to finish up.

“I suppose the first time was to separate out what it could potentially eat, notably everything but the hay, flowers and whatnot… I think it may have been testing the others, seeing if they were the same as the one it’s used too.” Celestia remarked as she settled down on her stomach at the table, her neck making it easy to still remain at head level with the other seated ponies.

“Explains why it shook its head and turned it away. Perhaps something about our food is incompatible with his diet…” Luna surmised as she draped herself over her sister’s back, resting her head on the table with her neck up against Celestia’s.

“How did you manage to talk with him in the first place? I can’t imagine it was easy to understand each other.” Fluttershy asked casually given the friends around her, even the princesses no longer fazed her any more.

“We played Charades, actually.” Luna chuckled at the memory again and rolled off her sister, landing on her back to look up at the ponies upside down. “Well, he did, we just watched.”

“Charades, really?” Applejack was having a bit of trouble holding back a burst of laughter, something Dash couldn’t do and fortunately had an empty mouth when she burst into a fit of giggling, rolling onto her side. “Calm down, sugarcube!” she requested, staring at Dash though was having a bit of difficulty stifling her own giggling. Both Rarity and Fluttershy were both hiding their own giggling behind their hooves while Sunset and Twilight were both calmly eating.

“Princesses,” A guard poked his nose into the tent, righting Luna to her hooves and forcing Dash to collect herself. “The suit seems to be back at repairing his craft.”

“Thank you for the update. If he shows signs of trying to reach us, then let us know.” Celestia smiled warmly and bid the guard leave. “How’s Pinkie Pie doing?”

“She’s in recovery but the doctors won’t be able to repair the nerve damage. She’ll likely never walk on that hoof again, the limb itself is dead.” Twilight reported with a sombering sigh. This information was what was keeping Sunset and herself calm while the others all laughed away, however this revelation quickly settled in over everypony else and silence overtook everypony present.

A few minutes of silent eating, another guard appeared at the curtains, this time pushing through completely to salute. “Your highnesses, I have to report that the creature has approached the area you had set up the table at and appears to be waiting for you.”

“Thank you, you may go.” Celestia sighed and got to her hooves with Luna and Twilight joining her. “Shall we?”

“Can we watch? I wanna see him playing charades.” Dash requested with a cheeky grin and made to stand, as did everyone else.

“I don’t see why not, just stay back please.” Celestia nodded back and lead the convoy from the tent. As soon as the smallest of ponies who weren’t royalty were all out, Celestia lead her sister and Twilight further, approaching the suit who was stood stock still at the original meeting point.

“What do you think he wants?” Twilight wondered as the figure casually waved a hand in goodwill. “Think we can establish a better form of communication than charades?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure that you’ll figure something out soon enough…” Celestia sighed back and stopped a few meters away from the lone figure. Bowing her head quickly, she stood back upright once the other two had done so. The figure bowed back before pointing to Celestia again then repeating the motion of firing that weapon. Luna summoned up the same image again, making the figure jump slightly at the sight a second time before nodding. The figure then pointed to his arm before moving his hands as though he was cranking a wrench then swinging a hammer.

The princesses all looked at him in confusion before celestia summoned up an image of the tools they thought he was asking for but he shook his head in reply. Pointing back at the image of Pinkie, the figure tried again by bringing his closed fists together.

“Connect something?” Twilight mumbled before an idea struck her. “Oh!” she exclaimed before manipulating the image to place a red plus sign over Pinkie’s image. When the figure tilted his head, Twilight began trying every known medical symbol she knew over the image before the figure seemed to light up at the Caduceus cross used for medicine. “ I think he wants to help fix Pinkie!”

“How?” Luna remarked and removed all the images between the group. “We’ve already got the best medical ponies to help her.”

“But he’s not from here, he could have something that fixes nerve damage!” Twilight remarked eagerly. She quickly fired up her horn and summoned an image of Pinkie sedated and with her hoof in a cast, then applied the cross to the image before changing the image to Pinkie at full health.

The figure watched and nodded a few times before motioning for the ponies to follow him before pointing at the image again and repeating the motion.

“Suppose he wants us to bring Pinkie to his ship so he can help her?” Luna offered before giving a sigh. “He did apologize for hurting her and we’re pretty certain he didn’t intend to harm her in the first place. I think we should try trusting him.”

“I agree. Let’s go get Pinkie and see what she says first.” Celestia agreed before holding a hoof up to the suit to tell him to wait. He nodded and flung his arms wide before allowing himself to fall onto his backpack to rest. With a shrug of the eyebrows, Luna lead the trio back to the tent and to Pinkie Pie once the rest of the mane six had joined up.

“So? What do you think he wants?” Rarity demanded as they entered into the sterile environment of Pinkie’s tent.

“I think he wants to help fix Pinkie’s leg.” Twilight remarked and stepped up to Pinkie’s sleeping form. “Hey, pinkie, wake up!” she demanded, giving Pinkie a sharp shake to stir the pony.

“Oh come on, I just got to sleep…” Pinkie mumbled with her good hoof while her dead hoof remained tied to her body. “What?”

“The suit wants to help fix you. We think he might be able to repair nerve damage somehow…” Celestia explained simply as everyone stood a ways away from Twilight and Pinkie. “It’s entirely up to you if you want to let the thing that hurt you help you.”

“Sure, why not? I don’t think he meant to hurt me, so why not give him a chance to fix things?” Pinkie replied through whatever effects of sedation she was still under from her operation. “I am going to need some help, though.”

“Of course, i’ve got you.” Luna remarked and surrounded her in the warm embrace of her magic. Lifting the pony off the bed, the entire group followed the princess out of the tent and back to the figure lying on the dirt.

The figure noticed the arrival of the group and with help from whatever form of propulsion he had, righted himself to standing without issue. Eyeing the entire group over, he pointed out the mane 7 except for Pinkie and Twilight before holding a hand up to stop their progression.

“Don’t worry girls, i’ll be fine!” Pinkie waved at her friends as she was carried towards the back of the ship with her royal escort. The rest of the girls merely dropped their backends where they were and took their seats to patiently wait.

The figure lifted off from the ground, the flames of his pack lifting his entire body into the air while the alicorns all took wing and followed the figure up into the recently sealed ship. The large back wall of the ship began to rise, no longer with the alarms and flashing lights, until the expansive inner working of the ship’s hangar bay was revealed and allowed for entrance. The figure landed on the steel surface of the ship and deactivated his pack to walk inside, motioning for the ponies to follow after him.

“This is so exciting! Look at all this technology!” Twilight gawked at the things around her, making estimations of what everything was and noted the boxes with the name Deadtech Industries on the side, still clueless what it meant. “This is amazing!”

“Indeed, it is quite remarkable!” Luna agreed as the figure approached a few large buttons on the wall and hit one. The doors behind everybody began to descend again, sealing everypony in. “I never even considered the thought that he may be trying to kidnap us…”

“I’m sure we’ll be fine. Besides, we can all teleport out anyways.” Celestia remarked as the sounds of whirring machines began to fill the space while the suit approached a large box with rounded edges and an open face before stepping inside. A door closed around him, sealing him in for a few minutes while the taste of the air began to change for the ponies.

“Hey, do you taste that?” Twilight noted as she flapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Something about the air isn’t right.”

“It seems like something is removing an element from the air.” Celestia replied and began applying magical wards to her and her friends. “We’ll be fine. I assume that the reason why the suit is doing this is because whatever’s being removed is dangerous to his physiology.”

“Would explain why he’s always come out in a suit as opposed to the flesh we saw in the capsule.” Twilight agreed as the door opened on the large box and the man, now sans any suit but sporting skin tight clothing of a white t-shirt and shorts and his exo-frame, stepped out from the box and stretched. Motioning to the ponies, he lead everybody to a section of the wall that looked stranger than the rest and hit a button on a control panel, opening the section of wall and stepped in.

He stepped back out and held a finger up before pointing at Twilight and wiggling the finger to come forward. Hesitantly, Twilight obeyed and followed the male human into the wall before stopping with him. He pressed another button and the door closed again, trapping the pony in with the man until the opposite wall opened up, letting Twilight into the bowels of the ship for the first time. Both stepped out and Twilight immediately began to scour every inch of her surroundings to try and imagine what that particular thing did.

The man closed the door again, switching which side was open and gestured for Luna to bring Pinkie and herself in to begin the transfer again. Repeating the task with Celestia and soon the man lead everypony up a flight of stairs and around an enormous box with semi-rounded edges, aiming for a room marked with a vaguely similar medical symbol and the process of moving one pony through at a time began again.

Eventually all four ponies were through and stood in the tiny space of the medical center looking out through the glass at the remaining ponies nearby, noting how bored they all looked at the moment. A cough turned the attention of the ponies back to the man who was busy operating one of two strange upright machines set into the same wall as the door.

The man pointed at Pinkie before wiggling his finger again and holding his arms out.

“Does he actually think he can carry Pinkie?” Twilight smirked as Luna obliged and let Pinkie float towards the outstretched arms.

“Hey, I’m not that heavy!” Pinkie complained through partially lidded eyes. “I’ll have you know I have an extraordinary metabolism!”

“I don’t doubt that, but look at him! He’s so tiny!” Twilight remarked, thrusting a hoof out towards the man. “The fact that he has to wear all that metal tells me he’s barely strong enough to keep himself from collapsing!”

“Then why does he seem to have no problem carrying her?” Luna smirked as the man took Pinkie under her forelegs and held her up like a child in his hands. Twilight’s jaw dropped at the show as Pinkie was placed against a flat portion of the machine. Letting go of the pony, the man stepped back as the machine’s artificial gravity held Pinkie upright and in place while her mane and tail laid flat against it; as though she were simply laying down. Operating a panel nearby, the plate that Pinkie was laid out on spun on hinges and turned Pinkie so that her body was enclosed into the machine.

“Pinkie!” Twilight screamed and approached the machine as it whirred up to do whatever dastardly deeds it was programmed to do. “Let her out of there!” she demanded, beating on the metal frame of the man’s leg and ended up bending the knee joint out of place.

“Twilight! Relax, I don’t think anything bad is happening to Pinkie; from what I can tell, she’s fine in there!” Celestia requested as she draped a hoof over her younger’s shoulders. Luna set to magically fixing the damaged joint, straightening it out though it still refused to move without catching on itself.

“Hey, this kind of tickles!” Pinkie announced from within, her voice muffled by whatever made up the machine. She let out a short burst of giggling while the sound of a power saw notioned to the fact that the cast was being taken off. “Ooh, shiny!”

“She is certainly a strange one, isn’t she?” Twilight sighed in resignation and sat back while the man took a seat at his desk to wait. A few minutes of dry silence interspersed by the rather unnerving sounds coming from the machine Pinkie was in was finally broken when the man stood with a sigh and approached the door. All three alicorns watched him get up and step into the airlock curiously but remained silently seated where they were.

The man poked his head back out, a look of consideration on his face before pointing at Celestia and wiggling a finger to come. Celestia shrugged and stood to join the man in the airlock as requested. The quick change in doors meant that Celestia could follow the man out back into the hall and down the longer enclosed hallways towards the front of the ship; Celestia resorting to ducking in order to fit into the hallways to do so.

Judging by the casualness of how the man was walking, there wasn’t anything in specific he needed to show or do with Celestia, it seemed he was just showing Celestia the rest of the ship. Stepping through the framework of another airlock system, Celestia followed the man past the five remaining closed cryo-pods before stopping to take a look at each of them. Detecting he was no longer being followed, the man turned to look at Celestia who, through the act of vague charades, inquired if more like him were in the other pods. Shaking his head, the man hit the master-control on the nearby wall to open all the other pods, revealing them empty save for whatever special provisionary foods he’d collected and kept frozen for whatever special event he’d come across.

Shrugged her eyebrows along with her shoulders, Celestia continued after the man and up the stairs into the mostly destroyed bridge before getting an eyeful of the holographic mapping table in the center of the room. It was currently, and permanently, frozen on a map of the last system that the ship had been through; it’s name was still illegible to Celestia as she gently waved a hoof through the images and shook her mane out in utter, but pleased, disbelief.

The tour of the bridge was quickly cut short as the entire vessel began to shake and tremble, Celestia taking to the air with a look of frustration rather than terror before the trembling calmed and the princess landed.

Despite the fact that she couldn’t understand the voice, Celestia perked her ears when a female voice announced, “Warning, quakes detected. Must monitor. Warning, monitoring equipment destroyed, please rebuild.”

The man, having been slightly shaken off his feet stared at Celestia with a look of worry before moving to a terminal along the sides of the room to begin tapping his fingers over holographic buttons with more letters Celestia couldn't recognize but estimated was some kind of alphabet. If they had specific letters, perhaps Twilight could set up a comparable lettering system for translation?

The man leapt up from the desk and waved Celestia to follow again, though with greater urgency as both creatures returned to the med-center.

“Princess, what happened? Was that just the ship or was it the planet again?” Twilight demanded as she met her ex-mentor at the doors.

“I believe it was another earthquake, the man looked rather troubled by it before bringing me back here from the front of the craft.” Celestia explained, dropping the jaws of both twilight and Luna. “Oh, yes. I was being shown the rest of the ship.”

“No fair! I wanna see too!” Twilight complained with a firm stamp of the hoof while the man worked on the machine Pinkie was still in. Shaking his head, the man sat back down behind his desk but given that he was no longer giving tours meant that it wasn’t going to be much longer that Pinkie would be in the thing.

A few minutes later and a sharp buzzing noise alerted everybody in the room to the machine having completed it’s job. The man stood and approached the machine as the panel holding Pinkie spun back around, revealing the pony with all legs hanging and sans cast.

“Hiya everypony!” Pinkie grinned and waved both hooves, showing off the perfectly working limbs. “Guess what, i’m not crippled!”

“That’s amazing! The best surgeons we have couldn’t repair that nerve damage and that machine did it in a matter of minutes!” Luna gawked as the man lifted Pinkie off the plate to set her down. As soon as her rear hooves hit the ground, Pinkie launched herself up at the man and wrapped both hooves around his neck in a hug, surprising the man.

“Thanks so much! And don’t worry, I forgive you for injuring me in the first place!” she announced before letting herself fall and hit the ground on all four. “So? What’s goin’ on?”

“Well, I think the man is a bit nervous about the latest quake we had…” Celestia remarked as the man tapped away at his desk in irritation. “I think we may also have a method of communicating with him. I saw one of his devices at the head of the ship and it looked like it had the entirety of his alphabet on it.”

“If we can create a comparison chart, then maybe we can write to each other!” Twilight’s face beamed at the chance to bridge the language barrier through her. “I’ll get started on it!”

All four ponies approached the airlock before Luna got the man’s attention to help them through. The man looked up before nodding understanding and remotely operating the door where he was. The four ponies all stepped back into the body of the ship and while Twilight wanted nothing more to explore the ship, she was more focussed on establishing a method of communication and aimed for the open airlock door everypony had already come through.

With the man remotely operating the door, the ponies found themselves back in the hangar while it depressurized so that the hangar could fill with the local air-supply and breathing wards could be deactivated.

“Come on everypony, we’ve got work to do!” Twilight announced as the ponies leapt off the edge of the ramp with wings spread and Pinkie hitching a ride from Twilight.