//------------------------------// // -94- // Story: Coarse Diamonds // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// Rarity felt like something was horribly wrong; the laboratory section was quite empty until she and Fluffy came across a body on the floor. Looking at it, it didn’t look like the guy died because of ranged weaponry. Instead looking at his neck, Rarity would think the guy was asphyxiated. What could have been strong enough to strangle a human and why didn’t it eat him? She could guess that the laboratory might have experiments or captured beings, but if it was anything volatile then it would have disposed of the body. It was the only one she had seen so far, as she got closer to the large room Greta wanted her to investigate. “Rarity, this is Greta, aside from my aching concussion we’re all doing mostly okay. I and Gilda have learned a lot about this place, but one of the things I don’t have is what’s in that large room down there. Ember is already in the area and should meet up with you soon to investigate. That or you’ll find her.” At least Greta sounded the same as always, which made Rarity glad for her safety and it sounded like everyone else was doing okay. “Rover, Applejack and Mare-Do-Well will meet up with you later. Make judgment calls on whatever you find. Damn, they noticed my intrusion! I need to pull out from the system before they can discover the Centaur-pede’s location. It looks like someone is actively watching for my intrusions now, so expect sporadic contact windows unless we can take over the command center of this place. I’m pulling the connection now, sorry we couldn’t talk Rarity.” “Well that was rather informative.” Using her magic Rarity had Fluffy turn the corner of the short pathway they were in to see several more dead bodies and sitting next to one of them was a brown Puffle that suddenly looked towards them. It was concerning Rarity that another Puffle was here next to several dead humans just looking at them in a strange manner. “Please don’t tell me…” Rarity had expected that humans were experimenting on the Puffles to make them more dangerous, at least humans had a tendency to make things more dangerous. The Puffle came up them and studied Fluffy for a moment and then slowly slid its tongue out of its mouth. It then blew a quick raspberry and Fluffy did the same back and then they started blowing raspberries in unison repeatedly. It almost sounded like they are communicating with each other with blank looks on their faces. The brown Puffle eventually stopped and gasped, then started smiling happily as Fluffy did the exact same thing. Rarity spent three minutes of watching their interactions from her perch on Fluffy’s back, said actions included licking one another once, running a tight circle, blowing a raspberry and jumping in place several times. It would have been adorable had Rarity not suspected Brownie of killing those humans. That’s when another Puffle wandered into the hallways, this one was orange and it ran up to them and then the slow tongue extending and the raspberry blowing started all over again. When they got around to gasping at each other in amazement, Rarity just had to comment on it. “I’m apparently looking for intelligent help in the worst place possible.” They were all rather cute, but Rarity didn’t think she could stand another Puffle style meet and greet. They were all so like minded it was uncanny that they weren’t all one creature with the same brain, which would give them all about two brain cells collectively. The two other Puffles looked at Rarity and they blew a raspberry, then went on ignoring her and playfully started to romp around one another with Rarity along for the ride down the direction they were headed towards initially. That was when Rarity saw a struggling human with a Puffle hugging him, its hooves were tightly wrapped around his neck in a loving embrace and he was flailing until his movements stopped. The red Puffle stopped hugging him and looked entirely confused about why the human stopped moving. “Note to self, never let Fluffy or any of her… family… friends… I don’t know what they are, but I know for certain that I don’t want them to hug me.” It had looked so innocent when it suffocated that human to death and that was really disturbing to Rarity, why hadn’t any of the Puffles tried to hug her to death yet? Maybe she was safe as long as she stayed on Fluffy. While she was thinking the Puffles went through another playful looking meet and greet which had Rarity shivering as she had a hunch that things were going to get far worse the more Puffles there were. Creating the dot of light, Rarity ran into an immediate problem when all the Puffles slammed their heads together trying to get at it, they all made the same adorable squeaks as they ended up on their butts rubbing at their head before returning to being all dumb smiles. “Well this is going to be very inconveniencing.” She’d have to use more magic to distract the other Puffles to keep them from running into each other. She sighed and at least thought of one of the positives of being in a laboratory. There had to be at least one medical kit around here somewhere. - Ember looked left and right tracking her rifle along the corridor, she had seen several eviscerated bodies and other bodies looked to have been just asphyxiated. She’s seen enough laboratories to know there’s been some kind of security breach, the question now was how many things got out and how dangerous was everything that escape. A shift behind her made Ember spin around and point her gun directly in the face of a yellow Puffle that simple blew a raspberry at the threatening posture Ember represented, it then proceeded to lick the second barrel of her gun and its nose became scrunched up. It gagged then moved on with its life as it didn’t like the taste. Ember knew Puffles were dangerous and continued to eye it warily. It didn’t seem all too curious about her as it only gave her a friendly smile and continued to explore its surroundings. A disturbing thought just crossed Ember’s mind. How in the world did a Puffle get down here and inside this facility? Well she now had an idea as to what had escaped containment, but why were humans capturing Puffles? There was the sudden sound of something slamming to the ground and Ember looked up from her thoughts to see a large six legged lizard creature that had short sharp hooks where its feet should be. It was trying to stab the Puffle. The key word here was trying, because it was failing to injure the Puffle at all. The lizard was a forest green color, with intermittent red stripes along its body leading to a short and rather stubby tail. A lizard creature with a short tail was a little odd, but the scales on its body were thicker around the rear and tail so attacking it from behind must have been pretty hard to do if you were a predatory creature. The Puffle giggled at being knocked over and grabbed one of the hook bladed legs that tried to penetrate its obscenely thick fur and cuddled against it. The creature started screeching in pain and tried to shake the Puffle off of its leg. The lizard tried to bite the Puffle with its sharp predatory teeth, which also failed when it only ended up with a mouthful of fur. From Ember’s perspective this was kind of sad to watch, concerning the predator was on the losing side of things and quite badly at that. The Puffle eventually fell off the leg with a squeak and the lizard growled angrily, its leg looked like it was broken considering how limply it hung. The Puffle didn’t seem to notice and latched itself onto the predator that it thought needed a hug. It did so by latching onto its face and snuggling it. The lizard spent the next two minutes trying to shake the Puffle off of its face and slashed its own body up with its hook blades. What was the reason for the lizards panicked assault on trying to get the rather affectionate Puffle off of itself? It couldn’t breathe with its mouth clamped shut by the Puffle’s hooves and all the fur stuck in its nostrils. It took only three minutes, but it slowed down and the Puffle looked confused about the fact that it stopped moving and blew a raspberry. Getting no response the Puffle let go as it obviously thought the lizard creature was sleeping and had enjoyed its cuddle time; Puffles didn’t exactly understand anger or aggression and thought it needed to be met with love and happiness. It didn’t even understand the blood slowly leaking out of the body on the floor and just wandered away to find other things to smile and gasp at. “Okay, that was absolutely horrifying to watch.” At least Ember knew what was eviscerating the humans and she even knew what was asphyxiating them as well. It was entirely playful and innocent throughout that entire interaction and didn’t seem to understand what it was doing to that poor monster. If Changelings were told about these creatures, they’d have to be warned first about their little habit of snuggling things to death. It was on the whole a really creepy thing to witness, it made her wonder why it left her alone and snuggled the lizard monster. Was that how they responded to aggression or anger? Did they even know how to feel sad? They certainly understood confusion well enough, which was one of their three states of mind aside from excitement or happiness. When Ember was just was closing in on the large room and she heard a scream in the distance, it didn’t sound like Rarity so it was of no issue to her. She stopped at three way intersection and looked around the left turn and saw another lizard thing ripping out pieces of a dead human’s lungs and devouring them. She fired three or so rounds into its head dropping it, she didn’t want it to attack her from behind as she turned right and went that way. The white of this place was beginning to get unnerving; she eventually stopped outside the door to the large room and saw the words cold storage written above the door. Ember put her back to the door and waited for Rarity to arrive. Greta had said that Rarity was being directed here and Ember didn’t want to leave until she knew for certain her centerpiece was safe. - “Greta how are things going, is everyone doing alright?” All this reading was boring, but Gilda knew it was important to the situation they were in. Contracts required more careful attention, what she was doing right now was skimming the data and stopping it when something caught her eagle eyes. “I’ve learned a few interesting things, if you’ve got the time to listen.” “It is going as well as can be expected. I’m trying to get a bead on the command center, but the map of the facility isn’t helping all that much in that endeavor.” Not many areas of the map were actually labeled coherently, but Greta was happy that you could kind of get an idea of where things were like the elevators or the stairs. Anything else was left up to chance as this facility had a lot of places to go and none of them were exactly friendly to intruders at the moment. “Our people with Viral are currently laying low for the moment; all those small walkers these humans have running around are really dangerous and hard to avoid. So what have you found out so far Gilda?” “Well the drones are definitely military and they aren’t here illegally, they are being used by UEG employees and that’s kind of a red flag.” Red flag nothing, all this was an open invitation to say the governments of Earth had planned this facility and it sounded like a political nightmare for the Humans since they can’t report the drones as being stolen. They were literally shipped to this planet and somebody had to have greased a few wheels or so to get them to this facility. “In fact there are a lot more things than that pointing to UEG being responsible for building this facility; I think we’ve busted our way into a government conspiracy here and it’s a really bad one.” UEG or United Earth Governments was the organization of all of humanity’s efforts put together into a solitary entity with each government controlling their own small portion of the Earth which was the Human home world. Every government on earth had a say in how Earth and or Humans presented themselves in a galactic manner. This facility stunk quite badly of underhanded dealings; some people in the UEG had this place built and it wasn’t by coincidence that the planet started to slowly freeze over despite being labeled an ever green world. Ever green planets were temperate year round and had a single mostly fixed climate all around, unless they fell out of alignment with their solar body and this planet hadn’t done that. This facility had screwed up the climate and it was on the orders of the UEG. It seemed rather familiar and Gilda tried to think of where she’s heard of something like this before. “Can you go into more detail?” It made Greta a little uneasy, the UEG was behind this? Wouldn’t that be a horrible scandal or nightmare for them if it ever came to light? Then again the people in this facility had all those defenses in place that prevented anyone from discovering this facility or even reaching it safely, which was what Rarity and the rest of them had done by accident while defeating a massive army of automated robots. In all likelihood nobody would have found out about the facility at all or any other facility like it. “Did you find anything as to their goal here?” “I can do you one better, I know exactly what they are doing here!” Gilda had remembered seeing news of something like this happening to planets belonging to other alien races; said planets were sold off to Humans. Large amount of aliens went missing and only a few turned up found and rescued from slavery rings or the people they were sold to by said slavers. Now that she was considering it, it all made sense as to what was happening. “The Humans are trying to expand their territory and they are doing it by stealing systems from other races. I’m surprised that no one has figured it out yet, it’s a rather unique concept really.” “How unique, and why do I get the feeling that I need a tin foil hat right about now?” It was a little hard for Greta to pay attention to what Rover was discussing with Applejack and Saffron, when Gilda was talking and attracting her attention like a siren. “Okay the machines they were using to cause the blizzards are probably of human in design. As for the defenses for the climate manipulators, I think they purchase a lot of outsourced robots to use. They probably don’t want humans to be connected to sudden changes in climate on whatever planet they’re trying to steal. When they planet gets enough coverage in the worst climate imaginable for said residents, they con the major present race out of ownership of the planet.” The minute Gilda said the words con, it sort of clicked for Greta and it was bad news that needed to be spread like a wild fire. “To give you an idea of what I’m thinking of, what’s the worst ideal climate for a Macropussian?” “Give me a second to think, they like warm temperate climates that are a bit dry with at least some water. A planet like Desserzon would be a good place to meet one. They don’t like excessively wet or stormy climates like a Parascine would enjoy.” The implications were beginning to build up to a staggering crescendo and Greta had a look of horror on her face. “Let me guess, the planet of Maldri Two?” Maldri Two was owned by the Macropussians; it was and used to be owned by them. It now belonged to the Humans after an unexplained disastrous change to the climate that started causing rain all over the planet in set waves. The planet was especially good in resources; however a lot of unexplained disappearances of their people and the destruction of multiple settlements thought to be caused by the weather made it uninhabitable by Macropussians. Once the Humans took over the planet, the climate started to slowly get better for them and the rains had almost immediately ceased being so frequent. “If you consider it, there’s also what happened to Hagolad Seven, Piroquen One and Infidado Four… all of them had strange climate problems before the Humans started making deals for each planet. After they got them, the climate problems became less of an issue after exactly a year. The planet’s climate becomes completely habitable for Humans.” Now they were doing the same thing to Applin Five and it disgusted Gilda, the Humans behind this galactic scale crime were absolute bastards and they were government level bastards no less. “That would be the projected estimates of how long it would take the humans to fix the climate to exactly their needs.” This meant the governments of Earth obviously knew all about this and even condoned or endorsed the thefts of said planets for Human gain. Ponies couldn’t handle prolonged winter very well and it explained the burned down buildings now. When the Ponies refused to flee the worsening conditions and a Pegasus squad or two get called in to fix the climate conditions… it led to the Humans attacking Gravenstein to prevent the discovery of their operations. They left behind those automated robots, to catch anyone they may have missed or as a bit of misdirection that Humans weren’t responsible for the damage to the town. The robots could be traced to the wrong people and the race that helped build them would take the fall for what the Humans were doing. “So they’re trying to steal the Applon System from the races of Equus. The people of Equus don’t have many planets and we can’t afford to lose what we do have, not to mention it’ll give the Humans a foothold to get into the Pony held systems.” For once Greta was rather furious, especially that this was happening to the people of Equus. “Well they are not getting this planet if we can help it, they are not getting away with this again and I’m sure Rarity would agree. This will be a reason for all races affected by this to go to war with the Humans. Unless the Humans can prove that they weren’t behind this and can refute the massive amounts of evidence we’re currently building up here. Heck we’re sitting in the middle of one of their secret operations right now and we’ve been recording all this information since we dropped on the planet!” “Calm down Greta, we’ll get them. I’ve noticed they have a pattern; at least they are hitting planets that aren’t the home worlds of various alien species. They are specifically hitting planets that don’t have a strong presence of military and are being freshly settled.” Gilda continued to read over some information and she just saw something of interest, but she’d mention it in a bit after she was done with their current topic at claw. “Hitting a home world would have been too suspicious, but hitting the fringes of other aliens territories? I believe they think its fair game no matter who they’re hitting. They’ve certainly gotten away with it so far up to this point. We’re the largest wrench they’ve ever had to deal with when it comes to their system stealing plans.” “You sound like you’ve got something else Gilda, what is it? Wait, please hold that thought.” Greta was still controlling Viral, but now she felt more vindictive about all these Humans having built a base on this world to wreck it and then make it their own. “Guys, we’ve found out what’s going on here and none of you are going to like it.” Greta proceeded to dump the information to Applejack, Rover and Saffron; there was a notable change in Saffron’s posture when it came up that the Humans were stealing planets. Mare-Do-Well heard an injustice and now she was angry. She wasn’t the only one as Applejack had kin that went missing and now she didn’t feel so sorry for shooting those Humans. Sure she’d feel awful if she killed them, but if they died from something else after she shot them then that wasn’t her fault. “Right, continue, I’m finished filling in our upper level group. We’ll have to fill in Rarity and Ember when we get a chance.” Greta wasn’t able to smile at the moment, not until this facility was taken out. They were still in the same spot they previously were, on the ceiling near the midsection of the facility and humans were running around below them on the snowy floor of the cavernous area. Nobody had spotted the Centaur-pede so far. Thankfully this cavern hadn’t collapsed; it was the tunnels that were really messed up. “I found this organizations name; it’s called Tempest Technologies.” Gilda started and the name was quite familiar for Greta as it would be to anyone else who heard it, the tilted cube logo wasn’t anywhere near the organization when it was operating publically. “It’s Kind of obvious what they specialize in.” - Ember perked up when she heard the sound of hooves coming towards her, but there were too many hooves to be Rarity. She watched the corner to the left from the door she sat herself in front of and saw Rarity come around the corner. She was riding a Puffle and there were several Puffles following her, apparently she was leading this pack of Puffles with four separate dots of light on the floor. “Oh thank goodness it’s you Rarity, are you okay?” Getting up, Ember approached the mare. She saw Rarity’s front left leg and she could see splotches of breach gel poking out from underneath her parka around her right thigh. Upon closer inspection Ember could see that the parka had been patched in an unnatural manner, Rarity has been hurt and quite badly by the way her leg was in a makeshift sling. “Nothing a little medical help couldn’t fix, I’ve been having problems finding a medical kit. I broke a leg and another one got shot clean through. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by telling you which ones as you can obviously see, I’m a mess.” Sighing audibly Rarity felt awful and was in quite a bit of pain. “I’m not up for much walking and I’m running quite frightfully low on magic. Also I’ve seen horrible things, you were right Puffles are dangerous. What I could really use right now are some pain killers. I must look to be in a most dreadful state and I’m sorry you had to see some of me like this. I’ve been doing quite horridly. It hasn’t all been bad at least; I’ve certainly learned a new trick or two that will be helpful if we can get out of here.” Ember wanted to sweep Rarity up into a hug, give her a sponge bath, then brush and comb her mane out until it sparkled like her personality and then tell her she was still beautiful no matter how she looked. To Ember, her centerpiece could wear a garbage bag and she would still be the most precious and attractive thing in her hoard. Now was not the time to make her centerpiece feel better, now was a time to see what was in the large room she’d been waiting in front of. “So I’m guessing you saw the Puffles kill someone.” Ember had contemplated how they were going to get through the door she had been waiting at. “Yes and I found it horribly disturbing. They are so adorable and innocent, but it seems like they don’t know their own strength when it comes to cuddling someone to death.” It made Rarity shiver to think about it, Puffles never showed an ounce of fear, anger or even anything that would be considered a negative emotion. They seemed so happy and simple minded that it was hard to think that they could murder someone by accident. Rarity still didn’t know what was eviscerating people, but it hadn’t been the fluff balls. “Speaking of disturbing things, have you by any chance seen some torn up Humans darling?” “Those can’t be blamed on the Puffles, there are these six legged stubby tailed lizard things with hooks at the ends of their legs. I’ve killed one of them personally.” After a quiet moment Ember, sighed and decided to tell Rarity about it. “A Puffle snuggled one to death, it looked like a vicious killing machine. At least until it attacked the Puffle I saw and the Puffle walked away with only a little bit of fur lost from the whole altercation.” “Can we change the subject? I really don’t want to think about Puffles at the moment, I’ve had to ride one to get here and I’m tired of dealing with their idiocy. Also I may have used them to attack a human or two on the way here and I’m not proud of myself for it.” This was concerning the fact that she had to cast a light spell every few seconds to keep Fluffy from wandering away from the door and at least one other dot for each Puffle present. It was really quite taxing for Rarity to deal with all these childish creatures; she really didn’t want her horn to have a magical blow out. “Since I am quite tired of having to deal with them, could you please be a dear and carry me?” “Sure thing Rarity, now I just got to be careful about this.” Ember put away her rifle and carefully lifted Rarity into her arms trying not to hurt her Pony. She held the fragile and most beautiful piece of her hoard against her chest and winced at the pain that produced. At least that walker hadn’t broken her ribs, but they had been put through a lot of stress and she could feel the bruising. She turned to the door and Rarity finally released the light spell. They waited as all the Puffles started to lose interest in the area and wander off, all except for Fluffy who stood there idly and blew a raspberry. “Now let’s see what’s in cold storage... I have a good hunch at what we’ll find.” “She’s not going to go away is she?” Whined Rarity, she was very tired of having to deal with Puffles. Sure they were cute at first, only now she was quite sure that she understood what Ember meant when she said they were dangerous. At least they were unintentionally dangerous by doing something out of what looked to be completely instinct. Shaking her head, Rarity leaned her head into Ember’s right shoulder and relaxed while directing her attention to the door; she cast another light spell that revealed several smudged finger prints. “This shouldn’t be too hard to figure out, though this is going to be much hard than when I previously did this.” Ember could see the fingerprints on the keypad and scrutinized them, but nothing came to mind as to the order that one would press them. Fluffy, for some reason just sat there staring at what the two other figures were. Not many people would know it, but she was the smartest Puffle alive. That wasn’t actually saying much as she was only slightly better than any other fluff ball like her. She sat down and stared at the two considering them, they didn’t need hugs like the others did. All those other guys really needed hugs until they fell asleep and she couldn’t help because she was too busy paying attention to the enticing light. “So why do you think the Puffles snuggle the humans hard enough to kill them?” It might sound odd to ask that question, but Rarity wasn’t about to back down from broaching the subject as she and Ember scrutinized the keypad. “At a guess, I think they have some sort of ability to sense anger, aggression, danger or darkness in others. Their defense mechanism to defeat such things is with love, cuddles and happiness in a very ironically deadly manner.” It was kind of sad that innocent creatures were so blissful in their ignorance, but Ember couldn’t blame them. If they knew what they were doing they probably wouldn’t do it as much anymore or at all, they also wouldn’t be as happy as they perpetually seemed. “I don’t think they even realize that they are killing people. At least I’m quite certain their innocence is not an act.” Fluffy moved in front of the two as they were busy looking at one another. She just stared at keypad and saw the small markings on it. She stood up on her hind legs and after reaching out to it with a hoof, she started to playfully paw at it. It seemed important to the two things… so maybe playing with it would help them figure things out! She smiled and started to slap randomly at the keypad, that’s when the two noticed what she was doing. She saw the enticing thing round thing, but ignored it and kept poking at the thing and then something happened. She looked to her left and the wall was gone, how do walls just suddenly disappear like that? “Did that Puffle just seriously open the door?” Ember asked in flat disbelief as the Fluffy gasped and moved into the room looking around at all the new things. She quickly followed and her eyes looked on in horror at what she was seeing “I do, in fact, believe Fluffy just did that.” Even Rarity was too shocked by what Fluffy did to notice the change in her surroundings; the odds of the Puffle figuring out the code were astronomical as much as having the dumb luck to punch in the right code in the first place without fingers. It took a moment to pick up on the fact that Ember was shocked about something else. “What is it Ember, what are you… oh.” It was a massive room filled with thousands of bodies that were frozen solid and crammed into this large place; they now knew what was in cold storage and where all those captured people went. Only there were more than either Rarity or Ember thought there would be, not all of them were Ponies either. A good number of them were Humans, thus further complicating the issue as to what was going on. An upset sounding squeal made the two turn to Fluffy, she now had her tongue stuck to a block of ice with a Pony inside.