//------------------------------// // -91- // Story: Coarse Diamonds // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// “We lost them, how could we have possibly lost a several ton machine rampaging through the tunnels?” The human shook his head and put two fingers to his helmet. “I’m calling this in. I can’t believe we lost something that large in the tunnels somewhere!” “Where could it have possibly gone, the thing was so big that we couldn’t have possibly missed it if it were coming this way.” The second person stated looking around with his light sweeping the tunnel ahead and behind them. “If anything the drones would have a heck of a time losing it, if they hadn’t been destroyed. If we don’t know where it is, then the drones certainly don’t either.” It would take several more minute of them searching the tunnel they were in, but they eventually decided to drive back to base. After five minutes of driving they continued on down a different tunnel by taking a right turn at a three way junction. “So that’s the way we need to go. All the blood is beginning to rush to my head, please tell me you got the gravity generator up and running correctly Greta.” Gilda was only slightly upside down, had anybody bother to look to the roof of the tunnel at the junction they would have seen the large machine hanging flush with the ceiling with all eight limbs. “Excuse me Gilda, but you are the one resting on your back here, while I’m the one stuck on the ceiling fixing things!” Greta called back tersely. They had obviously survived sliding through the tunnels, but not without injury. Greta had a bad concussion and a small head wound, but it wasn’t bad enough that she wasn’t doing her job after getting her head bandaged. “My concussion certainly isn’t exactly making me do my job any faster you know.” “Isn’t it a bit weird that you designed this thing to crawl along walls and ceilings, but didn’t take into account the passengers you might be carrying?” Ember was with the two engineers, she had caught up with the griffons beating off gaggles of drones that were damaging the Centaur-pede. She was horribly worried about the state of the others when she learned that they got separated by falling into the network of tunnels. While Ember really wanted to get into the thick of it and start troubleshooting their problems, in quite a literal fashion by emphasizing the shooting their troubles part, doing so now would expose Gilda and Greta to danger. That was not something Ember wanted to do. “What do you need now Greta?” “Well excuse us for living! Crawler mode is a bit of a thing and we haven’t exactly tested out all the bugs in the design.” Gilda was, as Greta had pointed out, in fact lying on her back facing the ceiling of the tunnel they were in. “I can assure you that testing the submarine mode will be a lot more harrowing if we have to do it on the spot with the sort of damage we’ve taken thus far. Anymore of this and we might not even be able to lift off for space to break that record.” While in crawler mode Centaur-pede’s torso shifted to an extreme forward position and used the two arms as legs. It made the entire machine look more like an insect, but a spider definitely wouldn’t be anyone’s first guess. “If we can even survive getting to a point where we would even need to test the submarine mode in our current state, then I’m sure there will be nothing to worry about because we will have all the time in the world. You know since we’ll be dead when the pressure collapses the entire structure inwards, but at least I’ll be buried next to the love of my life in a giant metal coffin as a lump of skewered flesh.” While Greta could pride herself on her and Gilda’s work, she was a bit iffy on vehicles that traveled underwater and wasn’t sure if the Centaur-pede could actually handle that kind of pressure. They were primarily specialized in space traveling vehicles, so other vehicles necessitated a bit more stress testing. “Now if only she would get off her ass and help me back here or at least do something useful. Speaking of useful, will you pass me that screwdriver Ember?  I have to get this panel back in place.” “I don’t plan on dying until five more years down the line Greta, besides I am doing something important. I’m listening to what’s going on around us, until you can fix some of the internal damage. At least the limb swap function worked perfectly and the fresh limbs are all functioning nominally.” Hopefully nobody looked up in this section of the tunnel and noticed something entirely off about the curvature of the ceiling, even Gilda knew that it was impossible for them to go unnoticed forever. “Speaking of, good news, at least Applejack, Saffron and Rarity are safely inside their base and are apparently alive. At least for the time being, considering there are shoot to kill orders currently going on for all of us. That’s the bad news, aside from the fact that we really don’t know what’s going on down here. Thus far our friends' current statuses are unknown at best and we don’t know where Rover possibly got off to. Hopefully they’ll keep their heads down and Ember can find them quickly enough to extract them. They’re probably learning a lot more than we are at any rate.” “What about Viral, I’ve only had her for such a short amount of time and I already miss the way she wagged her tail.” Greta was being way too sentimental about a robot for Gilda’s taste. “I didn’t even get a chance to finish her. To think I spent so much time remodeling her from scrapped wolf robots.” “Greta, I’m sure your pet robot has been blasted apart by the drones by now. If not, who knows what it could be doing with the modifications you made to it. Why do you always insist on making your own pets?” There was a story behind it and Gilda wasn’t about to elaborate. “You mean to tell me that Viral isn’t the first thing that she has built?” That had Ember curious, what else had Greta built aside from a robot fox that could launch robot wolf controlling viruses. “Not by a long shot and it’s rather telling that the other pets she’s made aren’t around anymore. She loses them for a various number of reasons, which is mostly the the lunacy of my best friend trying to keep a pet. There was this one time that it almost went total grey goo scenario when she built a bunch of these self replicating kittens.” It almost sounded like Gilda was horrified about the cats, despite the fact that it sounded cute. She heard Ember chuckling lightly and decided to put a stop to it. “It’s not funny; it’s actually quite horrifying for a number of reasons.” “Hey, I gave the repli-cats a really firm limit as to how many there could actively be at any given time! I’m not dumb enough to let them have the ability to reproduce without setting very firm limitations. I also made it clearly impossible for them to use any form of loophole in their programming on the subject alone.” It was concerning that Greta may have started a robot kitten uprising, in fact they were all on the SNUGGLES space station as security drones now. “Unfortunately they no longer belong to me and are unionized as SNUGGLES members. They are far more effective at unionizing than even the Caccerans are and can break red tape faster than people can make it, I’m kind of oddly proud of them really. They are currently in charge of the SNUGGLES organization’s security, by mostly keeping the case workers safe from their more dangerous customers. At least they are still adorable and I can visit them any time I want, with Tree Hugger always following us around it’s not hard to run into them every now and then.” “Was it really that bad?” It almost sounded that bad to Ember and she was asking Gilda in the upper torso for clarification. The dragon hardly thought of Greta as being threatening when she was so friendly, much less that she could cause a devastating mechanical grey goo scenario on such an adorable concept as kittens are. “Yes, do not trust Greta with making robots. They are usually in the vein of cute or disturbing for varying reasons and they usually have some destructive defensive capability thrown in for good measure. The kittens were probably the most notable example of why Greta would never make a killing in the robotic pet world… unless killing is something you wanted them to do specifically.” Stopping to consider her words, Gilda shrugged and continued onwards without caring about Greta’s feelings in the slightest. “It’s actually kind of Greta’s hobby, one that thankfully never gets too far. We can trust her with fixing the average MAT or CAT drones, but building her own pets? Yeah, run for the hills, because Greta is a real piece of work when it comes to making pets for herself.” “Hey, those kittens are friendly and well adjusted members of society! Even knowing they can kill just about anything in five seconds…” Well at least Greta wanted to believe they weren’t evil in an adorable manner, but joining SNUGGLES to get out from under her claws wasn’t the most ridiculous thing to ever happen to Greta’s so called ‘pets’. The mechanical kittens didn’t seem to hate Greta or anything, they just didn’t want to be her pets and she was fine with that. They still like to be cuddled and held, which is all Greta could really ask for at this point as far as that situation was concerned. “Yes, we’re all certainly thankful for not having little robotic kittens as our overlords Greta. It’s a wonder that Opal never bothers to ask me just exactly why it is that I gave her the nickname ‘Kitten’. If she wants Greta to build her a body, all she really needs to do is ask. Greta’s an old pro at making dangerous mechanical felines... one could even say she enjoys pussies way too much.” The sarcastic tone Gilda spoke in made Greta very quiet, it had to be the double entendre that had shut Greta’s beak. The poor girl had to be blushing up a storm and Gilda didn’t care one iota at being the cause of such a reaction. “Anyway, we might need to move soon, because we can’t stay here forever and sooner or later someone is bound to look up. The electronic countermeasures that we’re using do not physically prevent someone from seeing us up here. So I’m going to move us nearer to the human base. While I do that, do you want to hear the mechanical pet fish story? That one was one of Greta’s crowning achievements for most ridiculous destruction of a robotic pet, bar none.” “So you gave Opal the affectionate nickname ‘Kitten’ because of… that’s… actually kind of funny.” At least Ember was only mildly amused and there was a giggle or two as she continued to watch Greta work. Ember was too worried about the rest of her hoard to really loosen up and enjoy the conversation. “I’m curious enough to ask, what exactly happened with the mechanical fish?” “It’s hard to believe even if I do tell you, but Greta can confirm it happened and it gets really bizarre. I’m actually taking into consideration that one of her creations might be a time and space traveling entity when I say that.” There was nothing more embarrassing that Gilda could talk about than what happened to Greta’s mechanical fish. “It started on a day that Greta forgot to feed the fish…” Right now Ember would stick to helping Gilda and Greta; they weren’t exactly the best fighters even if they were carrying the most weapons at the moment. If something went wrong, they’d definitely need her and as such she had to keep a clear head. Ember could not go off looking for Rarity and abandon these two, no matter how much it pains her that the centerpiece of her hoard was missing in action. Her scales itched like no tomorrow at the fact that her hoard was in danger and she couldn’t do a single thing to help them right this instant, it was especially bad when she could tell that her centerpiece needed her. - “Yeah, this is certainly worthy of a conspiracy theory nut going on about it.” Trying to piece this puzzle together was difficult for Saffron. The robotic animals were especially strange as it didn’t seem like something humans would do, but here was an entire base full of armed humans. They were responsible for the blizzards damaging the planet, that much could not be denied, but what was the entire point to all of this?  That was what she was really working on. “Any idea’s Applejack… also are you okay?” “It’ll take more than a few bumps, cuts and bruises to put me down, don’t you worry none about me. The only real problem I had was how cold it was until we got into this facility proper.” They were currently taking cover in a storage room behind a bunch of boxes somewhere and Applejack was quite concerned about all the activity going on around this human base. “I don’t rightly have an idea as to what is going on any more than you do. Heck, all this is beyond a simple farmer like me. We’re way in over our heads and I don’t know how we rightfully got as far in as we did.” “Don’t sell yourself short, my day job was not exactly being a vigilante and none of this stuff is exactly my specific special talent.” As she talked Saffron was scanning Applejack and checking her status, minor injuries a split lip and a slightly lowered body temperature. Applejack was still healthy; she hadn’t been hit like Saffron had been a few times, then again Applejack wasn’t wearing a shielded and armored suit made for maneuverability and combat with an EVA suit underneath that. No, all Applejack had was a parka, a rifle and her hat. “I’m also wearing something that wasn’t exactly meant to be stealthy, but I’m managing to make it work at least.” “What is your day job?” It had bothered Applejack that she got stuck with the masked mare; one who hid her identity like this was unnerving to her sensibilities. “I was a chef for a family oriented restaurant, but that restaurant got burned down in the Canterlot kerfuffle with the Hands of Midas. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you will sooner or later. At least nobody I cared about got seriously hurt, but a lot of ponies lost their lives in that fight. I can’t really save everyone; I can only save those who are nearby to the best of my ability.” Sitting down Saffron tried to relax; working with Spitfire and Daring had been interesting. She’d do it all over again if she had to, but she knew she couldn’t be everywhere at once. With that in mind, she did the best she could to help ponies through that crisis and to think she had been so busy chasing dangerous underworld criminals when something much bigger was going on. She kind of missed the signs that those things were being built. “After that mess, I ended up joining Rarity’s crew and I don’t regret that choice for an instant. It’s certainly been an interesting experience; Rarity is the kind of mare I can get behind because she’ll help anyone who needs it. She is truly noble and that puts her in the thick of things because she can’t very well turn a blind eye to friends, family or people in trouble. It almost got her killed several times too, but I can admire a mare that would keep throwing herself into dangerous situations for the sake of others. I do it often enough myself for the sake of strangers.” “All that is great and all, I can also maybe understand needing to protect your identity because you don’t want anyone going after your family.” Really, Applejack could see why heroes wore masks or tried to keep their identities a secret. If she were a vigilante she wouldn’t want criminals hunting her family down because of her actions and doing the right thing. “What I want to know is what made you become a vigilante in the first place?” “I wanted to be a detective growing up; having a cutie mark for cooking didn’t help anyone take me seriously enough. I made my bed and I will sleep in it soundly.” Saffron looked around the metallic container for any sign of anyone coming; thankfully nobody had found them yet or entered this storage room. Everyone in this facility was obviously on high alert. “I might have broken a few laws, but I did it for the right reasons.” “Could that really be a good enough reason to break the law… aside from what we’re doing right now being important to saving my farm.” They were currently breaking and entering on a shadowy organizations operation, Applejack really couldn’t make too much of a complaint about law breaking at the moment when they were technically trespassing on private property that shouldn’t even exist to be trespassed upon. She idly started checking her material rifle for any damage from the frantic ride through the icy tunnels. “Sometimes, it takes extraordinary individuals to deal with problems others might turn a blind eye too or even more extraordinary situations. Rarity seems to have a knack for finding extraordinary situations.” Taking in the farmer’s actions, Saffron decided to check the status of her suit and all of what she had. All weapons were working, pinpoint puller and whip were working, the glide wings were undamaged and the only thing she could see actively see as being wrong with the suit was the fact that her shields were down to twenty three percent.  “In fact, I prefer to be called something of a highly concerned citizen. If I hadn’t arrived on time, then Rarity would have been raped by a stallion that specializes in it. He rapes both the mind and the body with his magic; he was a bit difficult to put down and quite dangerous because of his ability with illusions. Look at it this way; I’m not doing this stuff for a profit and it can be at the cost of my personal health with little to show for it. Sometimes the people I rescue can be quite ungrateful despite everything I’m risking.” “Well I’m not ungrateful, but I think it’s really for the best that I don’t know who you are.” Slinging her rifle over her back Applejack turned to Saffron or as she knew her Mare-Do-Well. “Well Mare-Do-Well, what do we do now? We can’t stay in one place forever and these humans are going to find us eventually.” “We need to look around some more and get a better scope of the kind of operations going on around here and again, I’m not exactly wearing the most subtle thing in the world.” Understatement of the century, but Saffron was pretty sure that Applejack got the gist of what she was saying. “I’m going to record whatever we can find and it’ll be evidence enough of what’s going on, all I have to do is get out of this place alive with said evidence and give it to the one person who’d know what to do with it. Oh and we need to find my friends while we’re at it... if they’re even alive. They’re all survivors so I can at least be positive that they are doing particularly well.” - Rarity woke because of something causing her to be in absolute pain and she tried to sit up. It felt like a sharp ice pick being shoved into her brain, she wasn’t doing very well and she tried not to scream out loud as she quickly remembered why she was like this in the first place. Rarity’s right hind leg took a shot through it, her front left leg was broken and her body was battered. She was currently armed with only a material pistol, but she had plenty of magic… said magic was quite limited as she didn’t know very many useful spells in this situation. She was still in the box she had blacked out in, the door to the container was still open and there was something else in the box with her. It was bright pink and fluffy as all get out, it poked at Rarity’s broken leg sending a rather large signal of agony up her spine into her head. Rarity had to pull her leg away and she struggled to push the overly curious Puffle off of her. It was the same one that had somehow miraculously made it past all the security patrols, the ones that were out to kill any intruder on sight no less without a scratch on it. The Puffle just stared blankly at Rarity and its tongue slowly slid out of its mouth, it then blew a quick raspberry. Not that Rarity understood this creature or it’s mannerisms in the slightest, even if it was cute. Being cute certainly wasn’t helpful in this situation, also it was kind of annoying that this thing had been through so much and it didn’t look horrible injured in the slightest. “Okay Rarity, remember how you got into this situation.” Her right hind leg was of suspect usefulness, but at least her breach gel had sealed that wound and it was mostly just flesh damage. She could limp, but her front left leg needed to be in a rudimentary sling.  She would have bled out by now if the breach gel hadn’t closed off her external injury. “I’m horribly injured and happen to be in a really dangerous place. The only thing that could help me now is my magic, my impeccable aim and what is termed as the absolute dumbest creature on the planet… well I’ve worked with less before. I believe danger and intrigue is currently in style, but I’m not exactly going to be able to move swiftly by myself… but…” The Puffle blinked as Rarity gave her a look, well Rover said it was female. She still seemed more like an ‘it’ to Rarity. Rarity narrowed her eyes at it and started to carefully pull off her parka while the dumb thing watched her. There wasn’t any time for being lazy, she had to do something and sitting around here waiting to be discovered wasn’t going to do her any good. Now what part of the parka would she be okay with desecrating? Maybe she didn’t need to desecrate it too badly, but instead she could repair it with magic as long as the pain didn’t distract her. Having pulled off the parka she used one of the few spells that she spent a lot of time mastering, it was a fabric repairing spell and it would fix the holes in the park with what material she had, provided she hadn’t lost too much of it. The Puffle watched the magic glow transfixed and started smile as she watched Rarity work on the parka. Sliding her broken leg carefully back into the sleeve, she used another spell to stiffen the cloth into position to make an improvised sling and she didn’t have to destroy much of her parka to do it. She still decided to rip off the bottom section of the parka; she used the resulting several strips of cloth to hold her leg against her chest. She smiled at her handiwork. “There that should do it. Knowing how to dress a wound is something that all professional fashion designers should be capable of. At least I think I’ve done a good job of it. I just have to avoid…” Rarity let out a frustrated sound of pain as the Puffle poked her broken leg. “Would you stop that, it hurts!” The Puffle backed off in complete confusion, not understanding Rarity’s emotions in any shape or form and instead it just gave her a bright smile. Being cute and possibly indestructible might be the two biggest defense mechanisms that a Puffle had; their best defense would always indisputably be their lethal stupidity and penchant for leading others into disastrous situations. “What was that, who’s there!” It sounded like Rarity might have alerted someone to her position with her yell. “Oh bother…” Rarity grumbled and shifted herself carefully onto her back. She levitated out her material pistol and used her left hind leg to kick the dumb creature out of the box in the hopes that it distracted the guy long enough for Rarity to get the drop on him. “Oh god, it’s a Puffle!” The human or Rarity assumed it was a human, seemed particularly horrified by the sight of a Puffle. Said creature just looked up at him innocently as soon as it was kicked out of the box. It didn’t seem to care that Rarity had kicked it or even put it in danger, it just sat there staring at what Rarity assumed was a human. The Puffle tilted its head and blew a raspberry and that was all it took for the chatter of a machine gun to be unleashed upon her pink fluffy hide. Rarity was witness to the most absurd thing ever from her position as the Puffle went rolling backwards under the stream of fire and when it stopped the guy holding the machine gun rushed toward the uninjured pink fluff ball with a knife. Rarity could understand why the human decided to go for using a combat knife on the Puffle; all the bullets fell to the floor after hitting its ridiculously thick fur. Even Rarity thought that stabbing it in the face would probably be the best option to injure it at this point, especially if material rounds were hopelessly ineffective at piercing through its insurmountable wall of fur. Rarity kind of felt bad for shooting someone in the back, she looked over the uniform with her eye for detail and noticed a good spot to aim for. She fired a single high speed rock through the guy’s thigh, his legs went out from under him and he fell down in front of the box Rarity was in. She quickly tore off his helmet with her magic and then slammed her material pistol into his skull before slowly trying to pull in his unconscious form. That was a bit more difficult considering her injuries The Puffle looked at the guy going to sleep and the mare that had been sleeping in here, so it must have been quite comfortable. She decided to help and started to push the guy into the box to help the funny legged creature that made loud noises when you poked the funny leg too much. She wanted to help the two leg walker sleep too! Sometimes moving things started sleeping for a really long time, but that was okay because they always got funny smells after a while and became full of interesting little wiggling things that made the long time sleeper slowly disappear as if by magic. She always knew to never sleep that long or get those really funny smells, she thought she was a rather smart Puffle. On some level, Rarity was a bit horrified that she had used something as childlike and innocent as the Puffle was. She used it as a decoy out of self preservation, but was more surprised that it was probably the best call considering that the Puffle came out of the situation without a single scratch and a happy idiotic smile on its face. Rarity idly considered the fact that energy weapons or fire would likely have more of an effect against the pink puffball. Why was it exactly helping her pulled the guy into the box? Did the dumb thing actually like her? Well that would be somewhat good for Rarity; she could really use a friend right now. Now how does one go about taming a wild animal? Rarity wished she knew because she planned to ride it around, she wasn’t going to be walking very far in her state. The Puffle turned to her as soon as the guy was in the box and it blew a raspberry. Rarity slowly climbed on top of it and it didn’t fight her at all. Now how did she get the Puffle to go where she wanted her to go? The Puffle just idled there for a minute and looked around in confusion, then it started giggling happily as it started running in random directions. It only took seconds for Rarity to realize that riding the Puffle was an absolutely terrible idea. What had she exactly been thinking when she decided to do this? At least her ride didn’t seem to have any problem with her weight. - Rover popped up near an entrance to the facility. While he couldn’t dig through solid metal, the tunnels were mostly made of ice, snow and dirt. He spied on the humans around the corner and then heard something coming up behind him; he quickly spun around and brought his energy rifle around only to hold his fire. Viral yipped happily at seeing him and wagged her tail, even if Rover was aiming a gun in her face. “Rover is glad to see friend’s machine is doing well, stay with me.” Rover pointed around the corner and Viral moved over to peak around the corner with him at the guards watching the entrance. He didn’t know where the others were, but he had a pretty good guess they were already inside the facility considering all the tunnels led here. He found Viral to be really quite lifelike, but not anything like Opal. Opal had always smelled weird to Rover, but he just figured everyone ignored the odd smell Opal gave off.  Maybe they just couldn’t smell it; Rover didn’t know or care much at the moment for mysteries. He had to find the Boss Lady or at least one of his companions. Greta had programmed Viral to follow the commands of her friends, with varying levels of authority. Rover admittedly was at the lower end of said authority, but he could still tell Viral what to do.