It had taken me a whole day to recover from pinkie's shenanigans, but i was pulling through. The housewarming gifts if gotten from a few of the guests at the party consisted mostly of decor stuff like a painting of a forest or a mexican-style blanket that resembled some of the ones I decided to use as impromptu seat covers in years past. The only exeption to the decor or household stuff was a few assorted books on magic engineering (why these specific books is a mystery), and a taser-ish device that had ironically written on it "human deterrent", It rubbed me tha wrong way a bit to see the companies of this world producing specifically anti human devices, but it would be ironic and mildly amusing to zap the crap out of a pony with this thing. After i set upmthe new decor stuff and put the blanket over the worn out truck seat, I began my day officially. I had something to eat and began the process of searching for, and narrowing down leads, the creepy conversation nagged at my brain ever since I had read it, and after tracing it back to the server I found it stored in, and started up a search algorithm that would check all of the connections the original users could have used to access the server tower, the algorithm would take several hours to make it's search, and including the proxies and various security programs, it would take even longer, so I let the program run on most of the processors and left a couple open for other things and left it to work its magic.
While the kraken as i'd begun to call it did it's job, I decided to look into the books I'd recieved. Ths first of the three was explaining equestrian electronics and how to make runes, there were several runic languages and each seemed to have a different purpose. The second book had the basics of programming crystals and various other things pertaining to the programming or reprogramming of magic, and the final one was a book of projects and modification ideas. I already knew what to do with these...
I decided that I should probably stop by cloudsdale and drop in on our little resistance group before changing my search to canterlot and the higher up officials, from what Id gleaned, Twilight was only a pawn being used to some end higher up the ladder, mostly based on her almost immediate compliance to her teacher (gotten from electronic copies of letters) and her temperment towards newcomers,
*****
Edge of Cloudsdale housing district.
I landed the truck in front of the house and gave a solid knock on the door.
"Who Is It?" I heard aurora yell from across the flat.
"It's Rusty!"
"Come on in!" I turned the knob and walked into the somewhat familliar little house and entered the basement where I saw the 4 familliar faces I knew, accompanied by a couple strangers sitting around the basement table, one was a white pegasus with tiny wings that looked like he was on steroids, the other was a brown earth pony wearing a cloudwalking gem.
"Hello......who are these guys?" I waited for a couple secomds before I was introduced.
"Rusty, these are our newest resistance members, buff biceps, and Doctor T. Hooves,"
"Nice to meet you both.... I will get to know you a little better later, but first, I have some things to discuss.
****
For security reasons, we sent the newcomers upstairs before i began to discuss my findings.
"I am changing my search direction, the short of it is, that although I will still be keeping the 6 under close watch, I will be focusing on getting information from the higher up government officials, and possibly the other princesses.
"Thanks for the update.... Buuuuut...is there anything you have found out in ponyville? Aurora asked with a bit of a pointed look
"Twilight, although she lit the fuse to war, she is most likeley being manipulated by someone else, her letters are mostly just saying yes to orders, or notifying someone of the order's completion, and her personality seems like the type to lean towards friendship and the opportunity for scientific research, both would be comprimised by starting a war, so I can reasonably assume that she is a pawn, just a good hunch, but it seems sound."
"Seems logical... Although, how do you plan on getting at magically encoded or locked stuff without being able to use magic, the nobles are notorious for over the top security."
"Either I find a tool to use magic, make one, use runes, or figure out how to break the laws of biology, point is, Im not leaving yet and I will make sure to find a way to do so before I start making trips,"
"Ok, just don't get caught, we wouldn't want to loose our best marksmare" gwen gave me a wink and a little smile before I responded.
"Ill be back....hopefully with all of the parts I had when I left,"
"You better, or else were screwed.....no pressure," copper gave me a sarcastic look before she looked to cirrus and nodded.
"I think we've discussed everything at the moment, other than bad leads and dead ends, Ive found nothing on my searches of public websites, or the deep net sectors that Ive searched, so I think we can adjourn, oh... And Rusty, whooves and biceps are under your complete command in ponyville, we should have more members soon, we've started asking some other small militias from fillydelphia, and a few very pissed off zebras to join our cause, so Ill keep you up to date on that, as well as who to avoid, now.... If everyone agrees, lets get back out there." everyone got up and went off to continue their work, I went home and began packing up for a trip to canterlot.