//------------------------------//
// Chapter 1 part  2 
// Story: Hooves of Iron 
// by Shock34 
//------------------------------//

        “Where are you Spike? I can't see anything in this darkness.”
        The pain in the toy maker's ribs was turning into a dull throb that sent spider webs of pain up his side. He caught his breath for a couple of seconds before moving again.
        “I'm going to find the li-AHHH!”
        Fresh adrenaline shot through his body as the toy maker made another dive at the sound. He landed on the floor in front of the bench and was rewarded a second later when the heavy mass fell on top of him.
        He let out an “oof!” as the wind was knocked out of him. Why did I have to use so much metal? he thought. I'll be lucky if she doesn't break my spine.
        “Spike, I think I landed on something soft. Hold on while I use a light spell.”
        “Just use the light I installed on your horn,” the toy maker muttered.
        “Whhaaa!” The toy maker could feel Twilight get up on her legs and circle around defensively.
        “Who's there! Come out where I can see you!”
        Great, she's taking her first steps and they just so happen to be on my back.
        “You are on me, and I would greatly appreciate it if you would get off my back.”  
        “Oh,” she said as the realization hit her and she jumped off. “Sorry about that, but where is Spike? Where are my friends? And who are you?”
        The toy maker ignored the pain continuing to pulse down his sides and back and stood up. He blindly reached for the oak chair, found it, and sat down in it a second later.
        A bright light blinded his electronic eyes, not so much different from a search light. They whined as they attempted to adjust to the gloom.
        “Or I should say what are you?”
        The toy maker's mouth went dry for a second as he tried to form words that would answer the questions that this filly had. In the months that he planned the project, he had always pictured what would happen when the filly awoke. The questions that it would ask, the bewilderment it would have, and the sense of loss it would feel. But the idea of being interrogated by his own creation never crossed his mind. Such is life I suppose.
        “I am a human and my name is Stephen.” The toy maker thought about adding “and I built you,” but thought better of it. This filly can only take so many mental bombshells at a time. All the better to space them out.
        “A human? What's a human? I've read all the books in the Canterlot Archives and I've never heard of such a being. Are there more humans around? Are they big like you or are they small? Why haven't we seen any books on humans in Equestria?”
        The light moved off his face and towards his metallic limb “And what is this? Is this a natural part of you?” the light moved towards his other, natural arm. “Comparing this arm to the other, it would seem that this arm is natural extension while the other is an artificial construction but that's....”
        The light flashed again in his face, “How is this possible? Did you suffer some kind of accident? Did it hurt? Do humans feel pain? And where are my friends?”
        Well, at least her powers of deduction are intact. Let's see about how she will continue to hold up.
        “One question at a time and in order.” The toy master readied himself, tailoring the next couple of words to leave the softest impact.
        “A human is a member of a race of intelligent ape and the reason why you haven't heard about us is that we don't live in Equestria. We live on a planet called Earth.”
        He paused to let her digest the statement.
        “So if you don't live in Equestria, then that means you are aliens and therefore have abducted me! I demand to be taken back home!”
        The toy maker sighed “That is simply not possible.”
        “Why not!?” she asked in an accusatory tone.
        “Power Restored!” a mechanical voice interrupted.
        The amber florescent lights activated and slowly revealed the source of the voice that was hiding in the darkness. The purple foal that was previously sleeping on his desk was now standing in the center of his work room, its eyes taking their gaze off him to scan the room. As she busied herself, the toy maker turned his gaze toward the photos of his daughter. He frowned as they weren't in their expected place and turned his eyes down towards the floor.
        There, among the shattered glass, lay the pictures of his beloved. Tenderly, he picked them up with his metallic hand and placed them back on the shelf. The images of his love cracked and shredded, making a mockery of the current situation.
        This is not going well, he thought and felt a blade of anger well up within him only to be cooled into nothingness as his emotional stabilizer implant activated. He could not allow himself to get angry, not now. Even so, he thought it was time he dropped one of the bombshells that he was carrying and let the pieces fall where they may.
        “You can't return because the place you remember never truly existed” The toy maker said bluntly. “It only existed in the minds of creative people and children. The same as your friends. You were the same until a few minutes ago.”
        Twilight's eyes returned instantly to his and he recognized the emotions projected on her holographic face. Fear, anxiety, the feeling of having the rug of reality pulled out from under you, grasping at anything to stand your ground only to find out that it too was being swept away. The toy maker felt his innards take a knife of solid ice of remorse. The emotional stabilizer did not turn on. He needed to feel this. He needed to feel human.
        Twilight gave a light nervous laugh. “Oh, I get it. This is some trick that some pony is playing on me.” She took her eyes off the toy maker and scanned the room again “Okay, the fun is over, you can stop joking with me” she trotted off towards the living room. The toy maker got up and followed her. He toyed with the idea of taking one of his smoke pipes while watching the pony, but thought against it.
        He leaned against the doorway, his metal limb crossed with his natural one as he watched the purple pony turn over his furniture, throw his books off the shelves after looking through them, and pick up items to look under them before leaving them on the floor. He observed the look of keen determination in her eyes and sense of purpose. I wonder if she is going to find any bugs that Lauren leaves in here occasionally, he thought as the little filly continued to tear apart his home.
        She didn't find any bugs (the toy maker didn't know to credit Lauren's ability to hide bugs or the Twilight's determination) and he watched in amusement as the pony tried to open the compartment under his bed. She turned toward him after a while
        “Are you going to help me open this?” Her voice was bordering outright frustration.
        The toy maker shrugged his shoulders and the pony gave an explosive sigh. She gave up and continued to tear the living room apart before moving on. The toy maker watched as she moved into the library, working her ways up the shelves as she flipped each book open and slammed it shut. The toy maker also caught slight grumblings about someone called spike not being here to help her.
        This continued on for a while until at last, sitting in a pile of toss furniture and discarded items, did Twilight stop, a look of sheer exhaustion upon her face.
        “Find what you were looking for?” The toy maker finally asked.
        The exhausted pony moved looked at him with her eyes; she was too tired to move her head.
        “No, no thanks to you,” she muttered.
        “Well, if that's the case, I'm sure you'll have no problem picking this mess up,” the toy maker said with a bemused smile.
        The pony let explosive sigh, causing a few papers to fly up and the toy maker gave a light laugh.  He then moved towards the exhausted filly and sat down.
        “What were you looking for?” he asked.
        “My friends,” she replied, her voice edging close to tears.
        The toy maker's eyes softened as much as they could. “What makes you think that anything in here would give you any idea where to find them?”
        “I don't know. I thought this was all was just a trick that some pony put on to teach me a lesson. Something to show that this isn't really happening” moisture started to build up in her eyes.
        The toy maker struggled to find the correct words to say. “Twilight, I'm sorry,” was all that he could manage.
        Her previous energy returned to instantly. She turned to him, fear gone now replace with anger. “You took me away from them! You brought me here!”
        Good thing I didn't install lasers in that horn of hers yet.
         Before the toy maker could respond, she got up and ran out the door.
        “Twilight! Wait!” he said with his hand, outstretched as if to beckon her back to him.
        He heard the exterior door slide back into place and his heart sank.
        “I never should have done this.. I never should...”
        A feeling of loss hit him again and even with the emotional stabilizer activated it could only blunt most of the blow. The overall feeling left him with emptiness and apathy. He broke his promise. He failed.
        He sat there for a while, ignoring the alarms Twilight set off as she raced down the hall until he at last got up and went to the security console. He reset the alarms and stared briefly at the exterior door.
        Time to see if she is still around. If not... He couldn't finish the thought; it pained him too much.
        The toy maker grabbed several series of clothing from the coat rack before approaching the door. He then turned to the feline hiding under the coach.
        “Gepetto, keep a good eye and watch the place will ya?”
        The feline let out a hiss of disapproval at the destruction around it.
        “That's good, keep that attitude. Keeps them on their toes.” With that, he ran out the door.
        He ran down the red carpet hallway, dodging maids, other owners, and the occasional dog. He eventually reached the end of the hallway that ended in an open air sky way. Before him lay the city itself, clothed in golden light and metal. The toy maker heard subtle sobbing and he turned to see Twilight, leaning against the railing, tear drops trailing from her eyes before vanishing outside the range of the emitters. He slowly walked over to her and leaned against the railing. Long minutes passed before any of them spoke.
        “I'm not in Equestria anymore, am I?”
        The toy maker put down the extra layers of clothes next to him and turned his gaze towards the golden vestige of the city that dominated the scene. The distant buildings lifted up like massive pillars to support the overhead canopy. Nearby buildings were nearly stacked on top of each other, like a madman's jigsaw puzzle. Lights the color of emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and topaz littered and flashed in and out of existence on the floor as the machinery that supported them came and went. At the top lay the canopy itself. Covering the sky like a blanket, it reflected the golden light back at the buildings, giving them look as if a miner had discovered some treasure in a cave.
        “No, you are not,” the toy maker said simply.
        Twilight looked longingly at the city, her eyes mirroring her mind.
        “Twilight, I never did answer why I brought you here.”
        She turned towards him, still teary eyed. “No, you didn't”.
        The toy maker let out a sigh of his own and rubbed his hands together, flesh with metal.
        “I created you to keep a promise. Years ago, my daughter died, but before she did, she made me swear to make her favorite character come to life and wish her goodbye. That character was you”.
        “So what? I was just character in a girl's mind, just a plaything?” More sorrow than anger this time.
        “No.” The toy maker fought his own rush of emotion. “You are more than just a plaything. You gave my daughter something to hold on to during her final hours; someone she could relate to. You gave her hope.”
        The toy maker's eyes whirled again as he called up a local internet access point and pulled up Twilight's wiki. He started to skim through it.
        “Why do you think that Celestia asked you to write all those messages?”
        Twilight wiped her eyes clean “To show the value of friendship.”
        “Yes and what did you learn from all those letters?”
        “That friendship transcends boundaries. It is the thing that holds us up when we feel down. It's the thing that glues us together when we feel like falling apart. It makes people do strange things, crazy things even, but it always works out in the end.”
        She again turned towards the city. “But all that didn't really happen did it?”
        The toy maker continued to read through her file, his green glass pupils dancing as he read.  
        “I'm not in a position to say whether you were really there or not,” he said. “However, I can see the effect of the love that my daughter had for you. She loved how you talked, the way you walked, the funny look on your face when something you planned went awry. She loved you when you were still just an idea and it gave her a few more days of hope. A few more days of life. That's already more than I could ask of you right now. You gave her life, I just returned the favor.”
        With a thought, the toy maker closed the file. “Do you think you can stay here for a little while? This world has a lot to explore, tons to discover.”
        A brief smile came across Twilight's lips and her ears perked up “Discover?”
        The toy maker let out a smile, “Oh yes. The universe is a puzzle box, its secrets waiting for the right person to unveil them, To seek them out and build off them.”
        He turned toward the pony, “Are you ready to be that person?”
        Twilight turned towards him, her sadness fading like fog in the morning sky. “I think so.”
        The toy maker looked at her with a quizzical look “ Are you sure? Our discoveries take a bit more effort than the ones in Equestria.”
        The sadness that was on Twilight's face was now one replaced with eagerness and curiosity “You can be rest assured that I am the right pony for the job.”
        “Great” The toy maker said. “But I think we've had enough fun for tonight. What do you say we head back inside and clean up the mess?”
        “Sure, I'll be right there.” The toy maker let out a sigh of relief. That could have gone much worse. At least we didn't have a repeat of Lesson Zero, he thought.
        “But what about my friends? I just can't forget about them!”
        The toy maker turned to her “Don't worry, you'll see them soon enough.”
        He gathered the pile of excess clothes that he dropped and used them to pick up the pony.
        Lift with your knees! Lift with your knees! He thought as he strained to bare the weight of the metallic unicorn. With a series of maneuvers, he wrapped the pony in a blanket.
        “Any reason why you are doing this?” said the voice in the muffled covers.
        “Yes” Whispered the toy maker. “The last thing we need to have is people asking why I have a miniature holographic pony in my home. Those people start to talk to other people who then get certain ideas which I don't like to discuss.”
        “Is this world that dangerous?”
        The toy maker tried his best to shrug.
        “Depends on who's after you and what they want.”
        The toy maker felt a light shake come through the layers.
        “Do you think that they will be after me?”
        The toy maker repositioned so that most of the weight was on his metallic limb. He then used the natural limb to pat the unicorn’s head.
        “They'll have to get through me first, and I can be dangerous when I need to be.”
        A slight laugh came from the pile “Oh, I'm sure you are.”
        The toy maker joined in. “You have no idea.”
        The toy maker put the pony down as he entered the door. Like a butterfly from a chrysalis, she erupted and quickly removed the shirt that was still attached to her head.
        They both examined the carnage of earlier and Twilight turned to him sheepishly
        “Sorry about wrecking your home. I was just...”
        “Confused? Desperate? Alone?”
         Confusion ran across her face, “Yeah, how did you know?.”
         The toy maker leaned over to pick up a book and put it on the shelf as he juggled a few other things. “I’ve had to deal with a lot of death in my time and those are the emotions that are the first to come up.”
        Twilight cocked her head in a curious pose. “How can you deal with so much hurt and still be up and going?”
        “One day at a time, one day at a time.”
        A hissing broke the conversation as they both looked up to see the white cat perched it's self upon one of the upper shelves. Its green eyes were lasers of hatred focused on Twilight.
        “You might want to consider making friends with that cat,” the toy maker observed. “Otherwise we are both going to be in trouble.”
        Twilight gave a gentle wave of her front hoof and smiled nervously at the feline.
        Gepetto simply hissed and continued to stare at the pony intruder.
        “You mentioned that you wanted to know about how I got my augments?”
        Twilight's eyes turned away from the cat and lit up, previously held curiosity returning.
        “Yes, how do you manage to retain feeling in such a contraption? Everything that I know about science tells me that this isn't possible, but yet it is!”  
        “Well,” the toy maker started. “It takes a long physical process. One does not simply cut off an arm and attach a new one overnight.” He paused for a second. “Well, a healthy person that is.”
        A puzzled look came over Twilight's face “How long?”
        “Oh usually three to four months of disconnecting nerve tissue from the joint that you want to remove and at the same time boosting your immune system to fight off infection when they actually cut. From there, it's another three months of bed rest as the body recovers from the shock of having a limb removed and another one put in its place.”
        Twilight gave a face of awe. “Humans can do that? Most other animals wouldn't be able to deal with such trauma.”  
        The toy maker glanced at a statue of a mechanical clock on a pedestal in the corner of the room.  “Normally, you would be right, but due to our advances in technology and science, we are able to go beyond the limits that nature has placed on us and are at the verge of becoming something more.” He looked glanced over at Twilight. “Are you just going to stand there all night?”
        Twilight shook her head as she snapped out of her daydream. “Oh right, sorry,” The toy maker watched as a purple glow came across a book and lifted it back into its place.
        Ah, the nanobots are working. It's about time they did something useful for a change.
        “Anyways,” the toy maker continued, “This puts has put a lot of people on edge and has thrown our society into a crucible of sorts.”
        “Why would it do that?” Twilight replied as she put tablet back on an office desk.
        “Because it scares a lot of people. It takes their view of the world and turns it inside out. Much like what happened to you, but to a lesser extent,” the toy maker stated, his words becoming hard like granite. “They do not understand what is happening in the world and, therefore, fear it.” He drew a deep breath for the next statement.
        “Fear is the mind killer. It makes friends become enemies, and enemies become friends. It makes the most illogical thoughts seem like the right ones and obscures the truth that we dare not face. It has caused nations to revolt and others to bare the burdens of a harsh regime, lest they replaced by more savage one. It turns brother against brother and the most sane mind to insanity.”
        A moment of silence passed within the room during which neither of them spoke. The only sound was the slight shuffling noise of things being put back in their places. It was the toy maker that broke the spell.
        “But then again, there is always hope. The thing that drives people to do impossible things, to dream for a better life, the thing that gets a person out of bed after everything they know falls apart. The hope to rebuild. Sometimes that is all we need.”
                He turned towards the pony, rubbing his tired glass eyes. “It's getting late and we both need to rest. Do you have any more questions in the meantime?”   
        Twilight looked around the room and pointed at a tablet.
        “What is this? What is it a writing machine? A weapon? A portal to the unknown?”
        “All of the above and more. It's a computer.”
        Twilight looked at it and tapped the screen inquisitively.
        “It's not really doing anything.”
        “Well, that's because...” the toy maker looked at the screen. The background had a blue color to it and on it was listed some technical details. The words “fatal error, press any key to reboot” were displayed at the bottom of the screen.
        “...it's not working correctly,” The toy maker sighed. “I'll have to get this fixed and show you in the morning.”
        Twilight looked around, “Where I am supposed to sleep?”
        The toy maker thought for a minute “I have a spare bed in the library, I'm sure you’ll find yourself quite at home there”.
        Twilight trotted off without any complaint and soon had discovered the sofa in the library. She jumped up and spread herself on it. A purple aura covered a blanket lying in the floor and it soon covered her. Before she closed her eyes, she looked around. A massive holographic globe dominated the center of the library and several desks displaying various books surrounded it. The Republic, The Art of War, Principia Mathematica, and various other titles lay upon them. Twilight let out a slight smile. It wasn't home, but it was close enough.
        The toy maker took off his shirt, and fiddled with one of the sockets that bolted the metal to his flesh. He winced as he turned it and outstretched his metal arm. There was a low audible crack and the pain that he was feeling went away. He sat on the edge of his bed. “Well, that could have gone worse,” he admitted out loud. A slight meow answered him somewhere in the room.
        “She's asleep, Gepetto. You can come out now.”
        The cat bolted from its hiding place and jumped onto the bed. A low purring emitted from it.
        “Yeah, Yeah, I know. You two don't get along, but you're going to have to deal with it. She's here to stay and she's bringing a few of her friends in the next couple of months, so you’re going to have to get used to that fact, cat.”
        The cat continued to purr and dove in and around his metallic limb, demanding to be petted.
        “Fine, have it your way,” the toy maker said as he reached up and stroked the back of the feline.
        He moved himself to a more comfortable position on his bed and picked up the book that he left on the stand next to it with his natural hand.
        “Funny how few people bother to read these any more,” he muttered. He turned to see the title.
        Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? Asked the title.
        The toy maker gave a grin.
        “We are fixing to find out,” he said as he turned the page.