Pandora - 749,559.83 A.H.
13th of Faust, 1st year of Harmony
Gallium Mall PD, Tavros Station - Fenx System, Noctae Sector
Since the invention of the migraine there have been five migraines which were rated the most excruciating, the most agonizing. Pan’s left them all behind.
The poor pony could think of nothing other than the throbbing pain behind his eyes, which was quite literally blinding. The actual pain itself blotted out the details in his vision, reducing the world to blinding white and chilling black. Even his hearing was not spared from the migraine’s wrath.
The world around Pan was reduced to a mere dull humm, as if everyone were speaking at the end of a long narrow tube, while other sounds came as if from several blocks away on a cold winter’s night while some asshole hummed loudly and off key two inches away from his ear.
Pan couldn’t think. He couldn’t feel. He couldn’t sense. All he could do was lay there and accept the reality which had been forced upon him.
An unknowable amount of time later, his pain changed. The throbbing agony faded away, seeming to pool into narrow strips along his head, with a single large knot right at the back of his head above his neck. As the pain changed, the world returned. Slowly, and with agonizing consequences.
Light was too bright. Soft things too soft, hard things too hard. Smells were too vivid and sounds too varied and numerous to fully understand.
Pan lay in what he thought was a bed, hoping the strangeness would fade away and the world would return to normal. It didn’t.
What felt like hours passed with his senses in overdrive. Pan’s efforts to tune things out and focus proved futile. The way things were wouldn’t be going away.
It was up to Pan to deal with them.
His desperate mind clawed at the overwhelming amount of information he was seeing, hearing, and feeling. Slowly, a hoofull at a time, sense returned to the world. Pan was able to tell he was on a bed in what looked like a more traditional hospital. Something you would see in Equestria.
His heart leapt in his chest, for a frenzied second the thought that he had fallen into a coma and never left filled his shaken mind. To Pan’s surprise, he found that idea comforting.
He’d never left, he’d been attacked in a park, dropped into a coma, and lived out his personal fantasy in his mind while recovering.
It would have been wonderful. The world would have never lost its color, happiness wouldn’t have become fleeting. The judgmental barbs thrown his way wouldn’t have bitten as deep or clung to him for so long.
Then Pan sorted out his ears, and the sound of alien voices became clear. Pan sighed, expecting the hope to fade away as it always did. The joy remained. The room remained bright, the air remained crisp.
Pan’s ears drooped back as he tried to comprehend what sorcery was responsible for the world suddenly not sucking.
Then it hit him. It was his sorcery. It was back. He could feel it.
Pan’s magic had never totally left him, but without his horn it had withered, faded, and shrank to the barest trickle. That dry well had been filled anew, and power once again coursed through his veins. Power which demanded to be used.
Pan sat up. The motion attracted the attention of a tall, slender, gray-skinned alien Pan wasn’t familiar with. He genuinely couldn’t tell if they were a male, or a female, or something else. All he knew is she had on a black uniform with a little red medical symbol embroidered on each of her four sleeves.
“Hi!” Pan greeted, waving a hoof.
The alien looked up from their bank of eight holo screens and waved back with one of its slender arms. “Hello. Your Captain has just finished confirming her identity and should be by to collect you in a few moments. Please remain in your bed.”
Pan frowned. The aliens expression had been very curt, their words had been blunt. He wasn’t certain how to respond. “Okay… Is something wrong?”
The alien sighed and gave Pan a glare. “I’ve autopsied six Peacekeepers this afternoon. I do not consent to socializing with you, nor anyone else.”
Pan raised an eyebrow. “Uh, okay? Sorry…”
The alien remained silent, forcing Pan to sit in bed and wait for Penny to arrive. During the first five minutes Pan reflected on everything that had happened and how he got where he was. Everything fell into place quite easily, though he didn’t remember too much after the salesman said they had to get a doctor to do the implant after he failed the second time.
The more interesting thing on Pan’s mind was trying out his magic. While he could feel it running through him, he remembered how he had been able to feel it for a few days after the attack. Feeling your magic and being able to use it were two different things.
Pan looked towards the unknown alien nurse, doctor, or whatever they were. It wasn’t right to just start testing things without letting them know what was going on. “Hey, um, I’m going to make sure my magic is working right. Just, you know, FYI.”
The alien didn't reply.
Pan shrugged and focused his thoughts inwards. He had never trained as a mage, but all unicorns were expected to learn a few common spells. Everypony knew how to use telekinesis at range, create light, and warm themselves. Those effects could hardly be called spells, they were instinctual. Foals could do them.
Pan drew upon his reserves, and focused on making himself warm. He felt the temperature jump immediately. The cool room became uncomfortably hot in an instant. Pan smiled, and released the spell. The room returned to normal.
Tracking his eyes around the small hospice, Pan took note of a small cup and reached for it with his magic. A pale green glow enveloped the cup, but rather than the bubbly aura Pan was used too, the magical glow was almost flush with the object, as if the cup itself were glowing.
Pan frowned. “That’s odd…”
He pulled the cup to him and turned it, examining the small mug in detail. It appeared to be mundane. No runes, no enchantments, and yet his magic gripped it with an aura that suggested a level of arcane refinement known only to the elite of elite wizards.
It’s gotta be made from something weird… Pan decided as he put the cup back and picked up a pen with his magic.
The pen also seemed to glow from within.
Pan blinked, set the pen down and turned towards the alien. “Excuse me, this is important and medical related.”
The alien sighed and looked over at Pan, its dark eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Did you do anything with the psi-amp I had implanted?”
“Yes. It was garbage. Defective unit. Called the company, had a replacement authorized, built it in the fabricator, replaced the one in your head. It’s working as well as a low grade civilian amp should.”
The alien turned its attention back to its paperwork. Pan tapped his hooves together. “Yeah, um, about that… I really shouldn’t have an aura as tight as the object I’m lifting. That’s way more control than I’ve ever had and—”
The alien growled under its breath. “That. Is. What. Amps. Do. Leave me alone, please!”
Pan stood up, slipping off the bed and landing on his hind legs with an audible thunk. He walked towards the desk, anger beginning to build in his chest. “Excuse me, but you don’t understand. Twilight, motherbucking, Sparkle doesn't have an aura this tight, and she’s basically the most powerful unicorn known to ponykind. Buck, I saw Princess Celestia cast a spell and her aura was a bit less tight.
“I’m a normal unicorn. A young, normal unicorn. I do not have literally thousands of years of experience as a wizard to be this precise and refined with my spellcasting. What exactly is responsible for—”
The alien growled, spun to face Pan, its tail lashing behind it, and flashed three sets of fangs Pan’s way. “Look here, you primitive whelp! I don’t have the time or energy to play tour guide for you! I performed autopsies on all of my friends today. I will answer this question, and then you will be silent or I will eat you, got it?!”
Pan narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, you’re a jerk. I get it.”
The alien’s left eye twitched. “You have a computer on your brain stem doing magic for you. Of course it’s better than your brain at complex calculations. It’s a computer. I’m done talking to someone too stupid to know what a psi-amp is before putting one in their body. Good day!”
The alien sat back down and resumed typing, managing to make the quiet sounds of fingers tapping on keys into something angry and distressed.
Pan sighed, rolled his eyes and pushed the rude alien out of mind. It was time to see if he could do something he’d always wanted to do, but had never been able to perform.
Transformation magic.
Given his interest in fictional anatomy, Pan had tried to learn enough transformation to experiment on himself. He’d been able to memorize the spells themselves, but actually casting them had proven too difficult. As he focused on one of the spells he knew, Pan remembered his father's half hour long ranting spiel about responsibility. The last time Pan had tried using this spell, he’d accidentally cursed himself and needed immediate medical attention to stop slowly transforming into gelatin.
Pan bit his lip. Maybe I shouldn’t try that one… Let’s go with something simpler first.
Pan reached for his magic as he recalled another spell. He felt the metaphysical pool within his mind bubble slightly as he drew upon it, taking as much power as he dared try and use in one spell.
The magic built up in his horn, burning slightly, as if he were standing too close to a fire. Pan gulped nervously, closed his eyes and let the spell go. The energy built up in the base of his horn lanced forwards, seeking the organic mana-channels which would normally carry them out of Pan’s body and into the world where they could do their job. Those channels had been removed entirely.
The mana flowed instead into hundreds of tiny synthetic channels which had been wrapped around Pan’s head. They guided the energy to the implant at the back of Pan’s head, and the psi-amp went to work.
Much like the remains of Pan’s horn, the amp had also received direct instructions from Pan’s conscious mind. It knew what to do. It took the energy it had been given, organized its modulations, corrected minor errors in pulse rates, and sent excess power back into Pan’s system so it wouldn’t be wasted.
True, the amp had never been made with sorcery this complex in mind. Equestrian magic was a thousand years more developed and understood than even the most bleeding edge of Galactic arcane development. Equestrian machinery, on the other hoof, was much the opposite and lagged far, far behind.
The overbuilt amp channeled the refined spell back to Pan’s horn through a second set of wires, and the spell was cast.
Pan looked down at his forelegs as he felt the spell release a second after he had wanted to cast it. The delay had worried him, but as the magic washed over his body and turned his dull, slightly bristly rust-colored fur into silky-soft, extra warm rust-colored fur, his heart leapt in his chest.
Pan smiled and pumped a hoof in victory. “WOOO! Permanent conditioner is go!”
Before the alien nurse could express annoyance at Pan’s jubilation, the clinic’s door hissed open, and six tons of compressed alloy in the form of a T-34 burst into the room.
“Pan! You're okay!” Penny exclaimed as she dropped into a squat to pick up and hug the little pony to pieces.
The alien decided to just keep typing.
Pan smiled and nuzzled Penny’s cheek as affectionately as he could while worrying about his ribs being crushed. “Yeah! I feel great actually. Maybe a lack of mana was making me cranky?”
Penny let go of Pan and leaned forwards to put her head as close to his eye level as she could. “You mean even with that butchery the amp is working?”
Pan shook his head and pointed to the alien. “No, he, um, she? They gave me a different one.”
Penny stood up, turned around and offered the nurse a grateful smile. “Thank you for taking care of Moy paren', medsestra.”
The alien smiled nervously. “I uh, I don’t have the Chernin translation protocols. Sorry.”
Penny sighed and turned back to Pan then paused. Her lips pursed as she looked at his shinier fur. “Did… Did you have a bath?”
Pan shook his head, making his mane shimmer and ripple as it drifted through the air. “No! With the amp I can cast spells I couldn’t before. Remember how I said I gave my online persona shiny fur because I wanted it in real life but the conditioner is just too expensive and annoying to apply?”
Penny nodded. “Da.”
“Well, I learned a spell for it. But I could never cast it because transformation magic is really complicated. But I noticed my telekinesis was super refined when I tried to use it, so I thought I would try making my fur just naturally soft and shiny with a transformation spell and boom! It worked.”
Pan grinned ear to ear for a moment. Penny smiled softly. “Well, I know there’s other things you want to try. Be careful when you do, okay?”
Pan nodded twice. “I will!”
Penny pulled Pan to her with a second, more gentle hug. “Good! I uh… I can’t handle you getting hurt, Pan. I’ve never snapped like that before.”
Pan frowned. “Snapped like what? When?”
Penny frowned and stood up, keeping hold of Pan so he remained at her chest level. “Well… When you collapsed after getting that amp, I stormed the store and threw the owner through a glass wall, then arrested him.”
Pan blinked. “You did that because I got hurt?”
Penny nodded, then shook her head. “Not quite, comrade. I did it because someone had hurt you. True, we haven’t been face to face for long, but you’re important to me. Very important… Blin, I don’t think you’d understand.”
Pan reached out with a hoof and gently stroked Penny’s cheek. “Hey, try me.”
Penny bit her lip, adjusted her glasses and took a short breath. “I can’t trust most people, Pan. A lot of people know me because of my show. I’ve tried having friends on my ship before, but… Most turn out ot be fans, the bad kind. They would steal my things to sell on auction sites, that kind of thing.
“Others couldn’t handle me being me. I am more, uh, perky, and a little more lusty when on camera. It helps bring in views, you know?”
Pan smirked. “I know you are. You’ve told me before. I still want to see you be more ‘lusty’.”
Penny giggled. “Ey, well, if you’re up to it after everything today, sure. When we get back to my cabin.”
Pan blinked in surprise. “R— really? That’s all it takes to get to have, uh, fun?”
Penny rolled her eyes. “Da. That’s not what I wanted you to take from this. You’re important to me, Pan, because you’re the only friend I’ve had for years. You listened when I had to complain, and you cared about me.”
Pan nodded twice. “Well yeah. You did the same for me. Why wouldn’t I treat you right too?”
“Ey, a lot of people use you, Pan. It’s almost normal. You didn’t. You were a real friend when I needed a real friend… And your little furry butt is cute, so you get to be Moy paren', Pan.”
Pan blushed and kissed Penny on her visor where her nose would be. “I have no idea what that means but it sounds like a good thing.”
Penny pursed her lips and blushed. “R— Rainbow said your word for it is, uh… Special somepony.”
Pan smiled and buried his nose in Penny’s neck. “I love you too. For like, the same reason. You helped keep me sane during what I can tell now was the worst part of my life.”
Penny gently pet the back of Pan’s head with her armored hand. “Awww… Come on, we’re clear to go. I’ll call Blue and have her meet us at the Dawn. Send her some cab fare so she can get her own shuttle. We can have a nice walk home together.”
Pan smiled. “That sounds wonderful, hon.”
Penny turned and carried Pan out into the hall, where she reached up and set him on her left pauldron. “Or you could ride up there and be extra cute!”
Pan snickered as he moved his hooves in search of proper hoof holds to cling to the colossal armored plate. “How long have you wanted to put me up here?”
“Since a year ago when you told me you were a meter tall pony.”
Pan’s rear hooves found purchase after a quick search, which let him comfortably cling to Penny’s pauldron with a view of the top of her head. He couldn’t help but realise how much like a pony she looked when all you could see was a silky pink ‘mane’.
You know… After seeing a whole lot of aliens today, I still only think she’s pretty. Maybe fantasy isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be?
Pan frowned, not quite comfortable with that thought. He wasn’t ready to abandon the fantasy of sexy alien lovers. Especially not since he had one.
Desperate to shift his line of thinking, Pan leaned towards Penny and whispered. “By the way, when we do get back, I’ve got toys. Y— you know. So after you’ve had yours I can take care of my other ones and you can just relax and cuddle like mares like to do.”
Penny stopped walking mid footfall. Her head slowly turned until she could see Pan from the corner of her eye. “Did— Did you just tell me your males can do more than one round?”
Pan nodded, a frown pulling at the corners of his muzzle. “Uh, yeah. Girls get a big one, guys get lots of small ones… That’s just how it is.”
Penny cleared her throat. “Hang on, please!”
Pan yelped as Penny took off down the hallway at a jog. Her T-34 hit the ground with enough force to make the floor shake. Several officers dove under their desks, worried the station had destabilized. Pan clung to Penny’s shoulder for dear life.
“Eeep! Why are we running?!”
Penny’s cheeks burned pink as she turned the corner to the stations’ entrance, already using her neural interface to call for a shuttle. “You see, comrade, in every other species I know, it’s the other way around!”
Pan frowned more, not understanding what Penny meant. For exactly half a second. “Ohhhh!” He gripped the pauldron as tight as he could. “Can you run?”
Penny smirked to help hide her blush. The mild curiosity of how Pan would feel in bed had been eating at her for a while, but now that she knew stallions had more than one round to fire, well... “Da, I run!”
The two took off down the hall, Penny’s suit screaming the entire way as its servos kicked into overdrive. Before Pan knew it, they were out on the street, racing towards the nearest shuttle landing pad at eighty-eight clicks.
Rainbow Dash - 13th of Faust, 1st year of Harmony
749,559.83 A.H.
Dawn of Destiny, Tavros Station - Fenx System, Noctae Sector
Dash didn’t realise it, but for the entire shuttle ride back to the Dawn, she hadn’t looked out the window once. She was sitting inside of a flying metal box which propelled itself through an airless void with beams of electromagnetic force, as she traveled from the core of an artificial moon where millions made their home to a starship where she now worked as a cook, and not once had she looked out the window.
Instead, she kept her eyes on Jo while they held a conversation she might have had in Berry Punch’s pub. Not once did the cyan pegasus realise the sheer absurdity of having what amounted to a friendly discussion over tea while shooting down a depressurized steel tunnel ten thousand kilometers above the closest island in the infinite cosmic sea.
Not once did she come to an understanding of exactly how small and insignificant a single pony was given the sheer vastness of space. Because despite the immense scale of everything around her, in spite of the fact that she was but a microscopic spec above a slightly les microscopic spec. All because of one simple fact.
Rainbow had gotten on a ship, sailed for a few days, landed at a port, gone ashore, and met a wonderful mare who was Celestia damned hilarious. The immense vastness of space was no match for the infinite cunning of mortal minds. In Rainbow’s mind, Equestria was only a few days away, or in other words, about as far as Griffonia. Distance was perspective.
“That’s about it,” Jo finished, leaning back against the shuttle’s seat as she finished her life story.
Rainbow triple blinks. “But, but that was like, three weeks of stuff tops!”
“Yeah, I’ve been awake for three weeks. The previous two years weren't really me.”
Rainbow’s ears drooped. “I uh… I can’t date someone that young.”
Jo snorted and rolled her eyes. “Oh come on, Dash! I’m not organic. I never was a child. That’s not how we work.”
Rainbow fluttered her wings. “Well, I guess? But it’s still weird!”
Jo snorted. “How am I weird?”
Rainbow stroked her chin in thought as she tried to come up with the right words. “Well, I mean, you’re a collection of parts and stuff that someone put together, then made software for, that identifies as an adult female just like, right when you came online. It’s kinda weird.”
Jo shrugged, her servos humming quietly as she gestured. “You know what’s weirder?”
Rainbow raised an eyebrow, not sure what could be weirder than someone just making an adult mind and a body to go with it. “What?”
“Your origin.” Jo said as she stuck her tongue out at Rainbow.
Rainbow rolled her eyes and laughed. “Okay, yeah, sure. I’m a tiny flying pony and that’s weird to you, the robot who lives in a world where there are actual tentacle monsters that try to sell me life insurance while I’m walking through a mall.”
Jo leaned forward and steepled her fingers. “I’m actually serious, Rainbow. You are way more weird.”
Rainbow frowned, blinked, and tilted her head. “How? I’m natural.”
Jo nodded slowly. “Exactly.”
Rainbow’s frown deepened as she struggled to understand the point. “I don’t… get it.”
Jo spent a few microseconds working out exactly what she wanted to say. Once her speech was finished being written by her subroutines, she spat it out as eloquently as she could.
“Rainbow, I began as an idea in the mind of an intelligent creator. Perhaps you did too, but perhaps not. What we can say for certain is that I exist because an already existing intelligence desired my existence, and created me using already existing knowledge of the universe and its physical laws. We both know this is not a religious statement, I can prove I was created, you met my creator. Perhaps you too have a creator, if so I would dearly love to meet them.
“Let us stick to what we know of organic intelligence’s origins. What we can prove. You exist because many millions of years ago while a lump of stone in the vacuum of space was being struck by sunlight, basic chemical reactions produced self-replicating molecules, which over many generations eventually developed into more complex forms, thus beginning an ongoing cycle of incredibly slow iterative improvement, allowing basic chemicals to join together into basic organic machines, not at the hand of any intelligent creator, but through simple physics.
“Over yet more time, those little machines began to work together, creating more and more complicated creatures, until eventually, intelligence emerged from the interactions of simple organic units, became self aware for reasons it itself cannot fully understand, and declared itself a person.”
Rainbow pursed her lips and held up a hoof only to let it drop. “Um, well… Yeah? I guess evolution is kind of weird when you think about it. But it’s still natural.”
Jo nodded. “Yes, it is. But we’re not talking about unnatural. Heck, I’m natural. Ants make mounds. Birds make nests. Beavers make dams. People make tools and machines. I am no less natural than a beehive, or a spider’s web. I am only more complicated.”
Rainbow fluffed her wings. “Huh… Well, yeah! I mean, that makes sense. If I put myself in your horseshoes, I mean.”
Jo leaned back in her seat. “I’m not done, though. I can prove that your existence, specifically, is way weirder than mine.”
Rainbow snorted and rolled her eyes. “What, because my ancestors evolved from magical animals?”
Jo shook her head. “Nope. Because you’re an organic lifeform.”
Rainbow raised an eyebrow again. “Alright, if you can prove I’m weirder than you, you get to ask me one question, no holds barred, and I have to answer. If you can’t, I get to do the same for you.”
Jo chuckled and shook her head. Her CPU warmed in anticipation as she readied her capture card to record Rainbow’s face. “Deal! You ready?”
“Bring it on!”
Jo took a deep breath to try and mimic a bombastic person’s warm up to delivering an epic bomb. “You exist because two other things like you decided to smash their cells together. You started out as a little lump of carbon with a sprinkling of other elements. Then, that little lump split into two, then they became four, and so on, until today.
“You are a collection of trillions of little organic nanites which took decades to reach a state they deem to be functional as a collective, yet you identify as an individual. But you’re not. You are an emergent intelligence governing a highly sophisticated hive formed from specialized castes which is incapable of understanding this simple truth about yourself despite having full control of the collective behaviors of your constituent nanites, or ‘cells’ as you call them.”
Rainbow stared blankly at Jo for several long moments. “Uhhh…”
“Furthermore,” Jo added. “You do recognise your cells as yourself, despite not understanding they are each individual things working together to make you. You’re a hive mind that doesn't understand it’s a hive mind. Whereas I am some clever maths being computed on electrons meant to emulate just such a hive mind, woke up one day and understand I am math being computed on electrons.”
Rainbow grinned sheepishly and looked into jo’s eyes with a rather distressed laugh. “Uh… Can we go back to talking about each other's fillyhoods?”
Jo frowned. “Sure, sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. You did ask for that.”
Rainbow nodded. “Right… Um, I guess you win that one. So uh, ask away!”
Jo paused for a moment, a rare action for an android to take. Normally she could decide what to do next before an organic could even fire a single synapse. But this was different.
She had miscalculated, and now the cute mare was upset. Clearly her data regarding Rainbow was inadequate. The problem facing Jo was that her next question would be seen as payment for losing a bet, and therefore she couldn't hold onto it for later use. Organics did not work under such logical arrangements. She had to ask now, but make sure the question would further her understanding of Rainbow’s nature and preferences, while not upsetting her further.
“Um…” Jo said to buy time.
Rainbow blinked. “Did you just um? We’ve been talking for hours and I swear that’s your first one.”
Jo’s cheeks glowed pink as the LEDs behind them lit up. “I’m afraid I don’t know what’s best to ask.”
Rainbow decided to jump fully onboard with the new topic to avoid the existential crisis Jo had planted in her mind a second ago. She smirked and opened her wings, leaning towards Jo in a gesture any pony would recognise as ‘oh, the pegasus is into me’.
“Most mares I’ve had to answer like that use it to get something sexual out of me.”
Jo blinked. “I see. In that case… Why are you willing to sleep with me?”
Rainbow smiled. “Because I like you! I think we could work out, and I’m pretty wound up.”
Jo shook her head. “No, why are you okay with fucking the android? Most people aren't.”
Rainbow shrugged. “I don’t know? I mean, you’re a person. You move. You have sexy bits, you flirted with me…”
Jo’s blush brightened, the awkwardness she had placed on Rainbow shifted back to her as the somewhat dense mare just didn’t get it. “Maybe you haven’t realised that, you know, my parts are silicone.”
Rainbow rolled her eyes then shook her head. “Come on, Jo! I told you what I did as a teenager to get off before I had a coltfriend. Why would that be a problem?”
Jo accessed her memory files and triple checked them. “Actually, you didn’t. What did you do?”
Rainbow snickered. “I bought a pocket pussy on sale from a sex shop and scissored with it. I like sex toys. They are fun. It doesn't matter that you’re not, as you would say, a squishy ball of wet carbon.”
Jo raised a hand in objection. “No, I would have said slippery meatbag… Wait a minute. You said you are bisexual, correct?”
Rainbow nodded. “Yep!”
“You enjoy penetration then?”
“Duh! Even lesbians do.”
Jo’s circuits raced for several long moments as she tried to work out why in the world she’d chosen a toy ment for males. “But, you don’t have the anatomy required for proper use of an onahole. Why wouldn’t you have gotten something made for females?”
Rainbow smirked as she could almost feel the confusion oozing from the mechanical mare. “It was cheaper.”
Jo facepalmed. “Oh my god… It’s so simple but so obscure!”
Rainbow snickered and slid across the seat to wrap a foreleg around Jo’s waist in a light hug. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get it one day! It took me a while too.”
Jo sighed and hugged Rainbow back, her hydraulics pulling the mare in just a bit more tightly than Rainbow had expected. “Thanks, Dash.”
The Shuttle’s AI chirped to get it’s passenger's attention. “Attention, passengers. We are arriving at the Dawn of Destiny.”
Jo rolled her eyes. “Penny named her ship just for that, didn’t she?”
Rainbow nodded and smiled. “Probably.”
Rainbow’s ears perked as she remembered her first time seeing the Dawn. It had hung in space like a guardian angel, one which had been too late to save her. Now was the perfect time to appreciate the ship while not being in danger.
Rainbow let go of Jo and walked across the shuttle to stand on the opsite seat and look out the window. Jo joined her her a second later as the Dawn came into view.
The old tanker was docked between all kinds of other ships, which served to really highlight the vessel's age. The Dawn’s hul was basically a triangle, elongated into a teardrop shape with the end blunted by the transparisteel cockpit bubble. Four massive cylindrical tanks were lashed to the sides by thick strap-like bands of steel, some of which had windows in them, providing view ports to habitable interior sections, as well as structural integrity.
The Dawn had a single large dorsal turret, with one big gun which was either a laser with a jury rigged cooling system, or a terrifyingly homemade coilgun. The turret’s housing was nearly centered on the ship’s dorsal section, and framed neatly by the folded Surf Drive field projectors which lay back along the hull, though still protrude slightly from the ship.
The Dawn wasn’t painted, but her hull had been blued, except for where her name was etched into the hull plates along each side on the top of the ship.
Every ship docked near her was sleek, had an organic shaped hull with curves and tapered surfaces, no visible drive masts, weapons, and proper paint jobs. The Dawn stuck out like the ancient ship she was.
Rainbow smiled as she looked over the ship. The old ship had saved her life, which made the obvious pile of junk into something truly special. “Cool, isn't it?”
Jo winced, her servos wined as she empathised with the ancient ship’s clear and obvious pain. “Is… Is that a five hundred year old Chernin Kamaz-class fuel ship?”
Rainbow shrugged. “I don’t know? Probably. Penny never told me… Oh! It does have antimatter tanks.”
Jo put her hand against the shuttle window. “I’m so sorry, girl… Ohhh, I can feel those landing strut hydraulics from here! You don’t have a mechanics, do you?”
Rainbow’s ears drooped. “Wait, do you have like, machine empathy?”
“In a way…” Jo pulled her eyes away from the poor ship. “As a security android I am programed to analyze vehicles, weapons, and people and search for weak points. That ship is ancient, and clearly Chernin owned because I can see the jury rigging from here.”
“Is it that obvious? Wiat, how do you know they owned it because they rigged stuff?”
“It’s the Chernin way of life. Their ships are their homes, and out in space forever. Most of them, like seriously, ninety percent of Chernin, live in space, on a ship, helping with their endless quest to find their ancestors, or their ancestors’ homeworld. Which means they are raised to think about how to make stuff work without spare parts. Or refurbishing.”
Rainbow pursed her lips. “Ohhh… So they have their own style of quick and dirty fixes?”
Jo nodded. “Mhm… Your captain is forbidden from fixing me, okay?”
Rainbow snickered. “No problem. Heck, teach me how and I’ll do it. Maybe it will be fun?”
Jo rolled her eyes. “Oh, baby. Yeah, you re-enamel that servo coil. You re-enamel the coil good.”
Rainbow bit her lip, snorted, then burst out laughing. The shuttle swung around and lined up with the Dawn’s docking port before she finally managed to catch her breath and look up at Jo from the floor. “Not that kind of fun!”
“Good, because that’s not my fetish,” Jo snickered.
Jo reached down to help Rainbow up. Rainbow took her hand with a hoof and pulled herself onto her hind legs to stand upright for a moment, and smacked the top of her head into the bottom of Jo’s breasts. “Ow.”
Jo took a step back. “Whoops! Sorry. Are you okay?”
Rainbow nodded and dropped to all fours. “Yeah. Reflexive ow. Those are surprisingly soft for being full of engine coolant.”
Jo smirked, her servos humming as she bent down to look Rainbow in the eyes. “If you think they are soft now, well…”
Rainbow’s cheeks flushed as she flicked her tail back and forth eagerly. “So uh… You know why I’m fine sleeping with you, but I have no idea why you’re fine sleeping with me.”
Jo laughed until her cooling fans had to switch on. “Yes you do! How can you not?”
The Shuttle’s hatch hissed as it opened, revealing the Dawn’s cargo bay. “We have arrived.” The AI announced.
Rainbow turned and walked through the hatch, giving Jo another view of her perfect little toned butt. The android snapped a quick hologram of Dash, then followed her into the Dawn. “Thanks for the ride.”
The Shuttle chirped. “You are welcome, miss.”
Dash turned around and as soon as Jo was inside she pressed the button Penny had showed her earlier and closed the hatch so the suttle could leave. As the hatch slid shut with a woosh, Rainbow looked up at Jo again. “Come on, I let you know!”
Jo stuck her tongue out at Rainbow. “Noooo, you only told me why you're okay with me being an android.”
Rainbow blinked. In truth, she did find Jo to be a little sexy for her body, but almost all of her attraction was to the android’s personality. “Oh! Uh… Well, I recently learned that I like boobs.”
Jo’s circuits glowed for a moment. “Thank you! These may be a bit big for my tastes in terms of daily drivers, but I do like my girls.”
Rainbow blushed and scratched at the back of her head. “Uh, but, well… Mostly I think it’s hot that you’re almost as good a flier as I am.”
Jo nodded twice and stooped down to give Rainbow a kiss on her nose. “I’m glad that’s why. So, still want to know why I think you’re cute?”
Rainbow nodded. “Um, yeah!”
Jo activated her holographic projector and displayed the hologram she’d taken of Rainbow from behind. The projection was displayed at life size, but Jo had edited the coloring to make it appear as if Dash was under a heavenly spotlight. “You have the cutest little butt!”
Rainbow blinked and then shot Jo an angry look. “What, that’s it?! I like you because you’re cool and we are both racers, and you just like my butt!?”
Jo smirked and gently booped Rainbow’s nose. “Nooo, you asked why I want to sleep with you, you silly little pony. I like you because, well, that’s complicated. Let’s just say that any woman who hitchhiked her way into space to kick alien ass because a military force more powerful than her entire planet combined kidnapped her friends is a huge turn on for me. Especially when she thinks she has a chance and can fly faster than the speed of sound!”
Rainbow smiled, her heart soared for a moment. It’s not every day a mare’s told she’s sexy because she was a badflank. Then the rest of Jo’s statement reached her ears and the wind went out of Rainbow’s sails.
Rainbow hung her head, her wings slid down slightly to cover her sides. “What am I doing?”
Jo frowned, doing her best to compute why her complement had backfired. “What did I do wrong?”
Rainbow turned around and took a few steps away from Jo. “Nothing… I— I just…” Rainbow reached up to wipe her eyes clean before she started to cry.
The android’s security software analised her emotion, and then understood what she did. “Oh… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought them up.”
Rainbow’s ears drooped back. “I— No… it’s just, I’m on a date. My friends are captured and I am on a date! It’s not fair, and I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be looking for them.”
“What if you found them? What would you do, play it by ear?”
Rainbow shrugged her wings. “I don’t know? Probably… I have to try!”
Jo nodded twice then walked over to sit down on the floor next to Rainbow. “You don’t. You could let them go and accept the loss. You could let the cops handle it. But you chose to do something about it. That is why I have feelings for you other than lust, Dash. That loyalty of yours? It’s sexy.”
Rainbow sat down and covered her eyes. “I shouldn’t be doing this… I mean, thank you, but… I should be out there.”
Jo hesitated for a few microseconds then reached out to wrap her arm around Rainbow. Despite her distress, the mare scooted into the hug. “You’re not wasting your time here, Rainbow.”
“Yes, I am…”
“You're not. Look at you, you’re an emotional mess right now,” Jo said as soothingly as she could. “You’re determined, you're loyal, but you’re scared too. You want to do this alone, but you can’t, can you?”
Rainbow didn’t say a word for several long moments. Her fears of inadequacy burned and bubbled under her skin. Her lips trembled, unable to say anything. Jo knew exactly what the little pegasus was feeling. Her analysis software’s feedback made her want to cry, so she switched off her sadness subroutines. Rainbow needed her.
“I—” Rainbow said after a moment. “I— I’m not… I’m not a hero like them… I was lucky. I told you the story but… I’m just a weather pony who’s into flying. I used to suck. I sucked really bad. I trained super hard to be as good of a flier as I am now. Anypony could be like me if they tried hard enough and never gave up. But my friends? They are all special because of who they are.
“Twilight? She’s an actual genius and is so powerful as a wizard that a lot of ponies think she’s actually a young Alicorn and that she’ll grow wings one day. You know, like how dragons do. Fluttershy? She’s got an actual super power and can talk to animals, even make them do things they really wouldn't do naturally.
“Pinkie Pie? She’s probably some kind of minor chaos godspawn. The legends say that when Discord Ruled Equestria he liked to fool around with mares. Maybe he’s got a bloodline. It would explain how Pinkie once ran, RAN, on her HOOVES, as fast as I can fly.
“Applejack? She’s got the whole classic hero thing going for her. Farm girl, strong, too stubborn to give up, absurdly powerful with her Earth Pony magic. Rarity? Rarity is really, really cunning and started a successful business when she was just sixteen, and still does all the work for it herself even though she has a thousand clients as of last month. I know because she had a party to celebrate it.
“But me? I’m just fast and good with the weather. Yeah, I’m loyal… But I’m not super powered. I’m not the exact kind of pony all the old heros are in legends, and I’m not cunning enough to pull off any plan I put my mind too. I’m a weather pony who is very fast. I’ve got a trade school diploma, a cheap house, and four Wonderbolt applications with rejection stamps...
“I’m not the kind of pony that should be a part of a heroic team…”
Jo tightened her hug around Dash’s shoulder. “What are your classic heros like?”
Rainbow sniffled. “Like Applejack. They all grow up on farms, so they know how to work hard. They are always tough, and determined… Which yeah, that matches me… But they are also alway extra powerful by birth. Like AJ. I know she likes to do things traditionally, but I’ve seen her touch an apple tree that hadn’t grown fruit yet and make it grow apples so fast that I saw it happen. I've seen her strip blight from a whole orchard at once. She’s absurdly powerful for an Earth Pony, she does in hours what they normally do in weeks.”
Jo accessed a few files and readied them up for her projectors, just in case. “Okay. So, I have something to share with you that might help you. But we need to go a little bit off topic. You need to know about what I adopted as my culture.”
Rainbow slowly looked over to Jo, then nodded. “O— Okay?”
Jo turned slightly to bring the uncovered portion of her left arm into Rainbow’s view and pointed to it with her other hand. “See this? Saria designed my body to be humanoid. When I awoke and wished to look organic, that influenced me. My creator wanted me to be human-like, so I chose to accept that and extend it to its logical conclusion. I chose to look like a human.
“A surprising number of people think the peach tint to my skin is how Chernin identify androids they make to look like them, but it’s not. This is how the First Race looked.”
Rainbow sniffled. “Wait, really? That’s it? Chernin with a darker skin tone?”
Jo’s processor took a few moments to process her way through the irritation at yet another person who didn’t know just how close the Chernin looked to the most important species in Galactic history. “Yes… There’s a theory about that which I will share with you later. Suffice to say, I have absorbed as much information on the First Race as I could, and I count myself as a human-android. Their culture is my culture, as my creator’s wishes have led me to believe.”
Jo turned on her projector and showed Dash an image of the milky way galaxy, one taken from outside of its confines. The colossal structure was fully visible in all its glory. Blue-white arms spiraling around a bright yellow core.
“This image is the first thing a species sees when they connect to ODIN. The network Humans built and we all use to communicate across the whole galaxy.”
The projection morphed, green words appeared, superimposed over the milky way. Dash’s ears shot up in alarm as she was able to read them.
“Woah! How did, I don’t have a reading module on my translator!”
Jo blinked, her CPU spinking. “Wait, you can read that?”
Rainbow nodded “Yeah! Well, no. Those are Equish letters. It looks like super old Ancient Equestrian. I’m sure Twilight could read that, but I just sort of recognise it from school.”
Jo thought for several long microseconds and decided to start compiling a theory. “Interesting! Well, it reads ‘Welcome, friend. We made this for you and your siblings. Enjoy our gift to you.’”
Rainbow nodded slowly. “Okay… But what does this have to do with me, and with heroes?”
Jo gently squeezed Rainbow’s shoulders again. “I promise I am going somewhere with this. But I need to show you what humans have done first, okay?”
Rainbow nodded. “Okay.”
Jo changed her projection, showing Rainbow a picture of a truly massive structure. It spanned more star systems than Rainbow could count, and was describable as a system of shells built around thousands of stars, joined by bridges of light, and of such an immense size that the structure orbited the Milky Way itself.
“This is the Maw II power station. It’s inactive now, save for a few small automated portions. A few people have gotten to explore it. Humans built it to power their civilization. It used to be a little galaxy, one of the satellites that orbited the Milky Way. Now, it’s one huge powerplant, with an energy output no one can fathom.”
Rainbow stared blankly at the projection for several long seconds, her wings flaring open. “Ponyfeathers! Nopony could build something that big!”
Jo changed her projection again. The new image showed a colossal spherical starship. One so big it dwarfed planets and stars alike. It’s sheer bulk was causing havoc with the orbits of the planets in the system it had just warped into. The image was freeze framed, with the massive ship having just fired an energy weapon with a beam wider than a planet. The shot was atomizing a fleet of ships which Rainbow immediately recognised as being identical in design to the Nova Wing ship which had taken her friends.
Rainbow also understood that the dark object being ejected from the starship like a spent shell casing was a black hole.
Rainbow’s ears drooped. “I— Is that a ship, that’s using… a…”
“Supernova for its main gun? Yep.”
Rainbow wasn’t sure how to process this information. But her inner 8 year old was. I wonder if Celestia could do that?
“That is the SYS Admin. He’s nice. He’s a human-built AI who as far as anyone can tell goes around maintaining old human technology. This is from the battle that turned Nova Wing from a confederation into a pirate fleet. They decided to blow up one of the ODIN network nodes. The Admin didn’t like that.”
Jo changed the projection again. This time it showed a star system. Or rather, a black hole system.
The system was clearly artificial, as the black hole accretion disk had been altered to shine like a sun, and three hundred Equuis sized planets orbited around it. Each of them were in stable orbits, and were life bearing worlds. Each of the green paradise shared a single huge atmosphere artificially contained around the black hole itself.
“This is Terra II,” Jo announced. “It’s at the center of the Milky Way. So far no one has dared explore it, just in case humans are still around and live there. But can you see it? Three hundred gaia worlds, each one kept in orbit with artificial gravity engines. All sharing one atmosphere so you can just fly back and forth between them all with crude technology like solar powered airplanes. You could easily have a quintillion people living in luxury in there even after the heat death of the universe, thanks to a warp bubble around the whole thing.”
Rainbow blinked. “What?”
“It’s a stable, independent, patch of spacetime. The black hole’s energy can’t escape. We can only see it through a camera feed on the ODIN network. There’s big space-gates to let ships in… it’s a shelter. One meant to last literally forever. That black hole is a supermassive one, and since its energy can't leave that pocket, well, it will always be present in some form, so you know. Infinite sustainability. Your species could live forever in there.”
Rainbow’s jaw dropped as she realized the sheer enormity of what Jo was saying. “Humans just, built that?!”
Jo nodded. “They did. They left making of videos for all of these things on ODIN… Our scientists still can't understand well, anything, but they showed the construction. The vido’s host is super friendly too. They wanted us to understand that they made the Galaxy the way it is today for, well, for us. It’s all a gift, you see?”
Rainbow stood up and looked at the projection reverently. “So… they were gods.”
“No!” Jo said firmly. “They were not gods, they were mortals like us. Mortals with a two hundred and fifty million year head start. They did all of this with hard work, genius, and determination.”
Rainbow shook her head and pointed to the projection of Tera II. “They made a way to tell entropy to buck off! Mortals can’t do that!”
Jo shrugged. “Fine. Then they were mortals who made themselves into gods. Because we know they were flesh and blood, just like you.”
Rainbow’s tail swished as she had a sudden idea. “So… You mentioned that their death-ship three thousand—”
“The SYS Admin is a repair tug, actually,” Jo corrected.
Rainbow shivered. “Their ‘Oh dear Luna, what do we sacrifice to make space-god not kill us all’ is still around, and according to you, nice. So long as you don’t blow up his internet connection. Right?”
Jo knew where Rainbow was going with this. “He won't help you kill them. Governments have begged, pleaded, bribed, he only fixes old human things that broke.”
Rainbow’s ears drooped along with her head. “Oh…”
Jo reach out and gently tipped Rainbow’s chin up to look into her eyes. “Hey, hon. Now that you know what humans can do, want to know what their idea of a hero was?”
Rainbow sighed and looked away. “Something else I can’t live up too?”
Jo let go of Rainbow and stood up. “The archetypal human was anybody.”
Rainbow rolled her eyes. “What, like, they didn’t have one? Makes sense, they were all basically gods.”
“No, not at all,” Jo took a few steps away from Rainbow to give herself some space. “Their archetypal hero was much like yours. A person of a common origin who had grit and determination. But that’s it. No inborn powers. Nothing special about them. Not at first.”
Rainbow rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
“I’m telling you the truth. They called them the everyman, a symbolic idea that a great person could come from anywhere and be anyone. It’s a statement that heroes are not born, they are made, and they make themselves. Hell, Rainbow, you’ve even completed the warm up for how their legends were formatted.”
Rainbow’s head whipped around to face Jo. “Wait, really? How?”
Jo smiled. “You were in your normal life, doing normal things. Then a bad thing happened that shook your world up. You didn’t head into action immediately, but tried to get a higher power to take care of it. That didn’t work, so you took matters into your own hands— Uh, hooves, and set out to right what went wrong with nothing but your wits and your individual talents. All that’s left is for you to find a mentor, experience personal change through hardship along your journey, then put things right before going home.”
Rainbow smiled for a moment. “Huh… Well, that's cool. I guess. But… I still shouldn’t be out picking up mares when my friends are… Are having Luna knows what happen to them!”
Jo’s CPU switched modes, unlocking her full function set. She looked down at Rainbow and smirked. “Oh yes you should be picking up mares.”
Rainbow shook her head. “No, I shouldn’t be!”
“Dash, you know nothing of this galaxy. You are up here with a serious need for emotional support, and lessons in badassery. Sure, you got a xenohunter, but why learn from just one master? Sure, you have a friend, but he’s taken and let’s face it, you need a real lover both for the sake of having someone to confide in and support you, and also to keep your brain from demanding you rut everything.
“It could take years to find your friends, Dash. Space is huge. You need someone to love you and help you through this.”
Rainbow flicked her wings. “Okay, sure, maybe… But I feel like you’re saying that just to get laid.”
Jo shook her head. “No, I’m saying that because I like you, want to fuck you, have an irrational hatred of Nova Wing pirates for reasons beyond my understanding, and…”
Jo extended her left arm. The synth skin along her arm split along four seams and folded back to open up her forearm. Her hand split and retracted inwards as other plates slide out, altering the limb’s structure until her arm reshaped into a large bore plasma cannon. “I’ve got a motherfucking gun for a hand!”
Jo activated several more systems, allowing hardlight armor plates to form around her, assembling a dark-blue and purple set of power armor entirely from force fields around her frame. The armor did nothing to enhance her performance of course, it merely looked cool and protected her chassis from harm. It was light, sleek, and feminine in appearance, but also hard, industrial, and screamed ‘battle armor’.
Rainbow’s wings flared. “Woah! Cool!”
“I’m not a normal girl, Dash. I am a security robot who happens to be a woman. I am programed in every form of combat my creator could legally and illegally access. I would love to teach you how to shoot. I would love to teach you how to crawl into a ship’s maintenance hatch and render it inoperable before slowly taking the crew out one by one.
“I would love to slam through a pirate’s hull with you in a boarding torpedo, kick open the hatch, and then storm the bridge, plasma flying and energy blades crackling, in one glorious charge to rescue your friends while we play Bonnie Tyler’s song Holding Out For a Hero so loud every pirate without a hardsuit goes deaf, then escape the ship, girls in tow, just as it explodes! Why? Because you are a hero in the middle of their legend and god damnit! I think I’d make a good side-kick! I’d like to make something of myself too, Dash, and you have one hell of a good cause to fight for.”
Jo deactivated her hardlight armor and switched harm arm back to its hand mode. She knelt down and held her arms wide to offer Dash a hug. “And I would also like to be with you in the meantime. Hold you, care for you, and be here for you. Because if you break, if you crack under stress, shame, or guilt, they win.”
Rainbow’s brow furrowed as she thought about Jo’s statement. “Yeah… Yeah they do win if I’m like this, don’t they?”
Jo nodded and continued to hold her arms appart to offer Rainbow a hug. “They do. If your spirit breaks, they win without firing a shot. In short, you need me, and I want to be with you. It’s win win. So what do you say we go to your cabin and break in that omni-furniture’s bed mode?”
Rainbow bit her lip, flicked her tail, then trotted forward into Jo’s arms. The android wrapped her in a tight, loving hug, which Rainbow returned. “I— I think, that I would like that… But I’m not really in the mood for sex anymore.”
Jo nodded and kissed Rainbow on the cheek. “That’s perfectly fine. I can show you my built-in strap-on some other time. How about instead you show me how your hooves work for holding things so I can show you how to fight with a plasma knife?”
Rainbow tilted her head to the left. “Plasma… knife?”
“Yeah!” Jo opened her left thigh storage compartment with a soft click, and reached into take out one of her two plasma knives.
The weapon took the form of a small D shaped piece of metal. She slipped the loop onto her hand like a set of brass knuckles, then pressed a small switch with her thumb. With a loud snap and hiss a glowing orange hard-light blade materialized on the ring, making it into a knife.
“Sharper than any alloy, excellent for close quarters combat, and as I know thanks to finding some of their kit in a police auction, able to pierce Nova Wing’s standard armored jackets.”
Rainbow looked at the blade, her eyes widening as her inner eight year old squealed in delight hard enough to make Rainbow herself squeal in delight. “Oh-my-gosh-oh-my-gosh-oh-my-gosh! You have a lightsaber!”
Jo shook her head. “Nah, I can’t afford the luxury brand. Sorry—”
Rainbow shook her head and let go og Jo to gently take the knife from her, holding it by the ring. Jo let Rainbow take it, but remained close, ready to swoop in with superhuman speed and snatch the weapon away if she were about to hurt herself.
Rainbow gave the blade an experimental flick, only for her grin to widen as it hummed through the air. “Yesss! Coolest thing ever! And… you could teach me to use these?”
Jo nodded. “Of course! It’s a part of basic hand-to-hand combat for Pari special forces. I’m specialized in their CQC techniques.”
Rainbow’s wings fluttered excitedly. Perhaps a bit too excitedly. Then again, the android said she would give Rainbow her single most favorite fantasy weapon ever. Which meant there was only one thing Rainbow really needed to know.
“Do they come in rainbow?”
“The blade is a forcefield, the color is a hologram so you don't cut yourself. It can be anything you want.”
Rainbow had a sudden fantasy of boarding a space pirate ship armed with a Rainbow colored lightsaber while getting heavy fire support from her busty marefriend’s rotary plasma-cannon. Her sexdrive came right back.
Rainbow’s cheeks flushed. She bit her lip. Okay… I think that being in space is doing weird things to my fetishes… But you know what? I think I’m okay with this.
Rainbow pressed the knife’s switch with her nose and shut off the blade. She handed it back to Jo and gently rubbed up against her left leg as she would rub up against another pony’s side to start flirting. “Sooo, uh… About me not being in the mood…”
Jo’s hydraulics hummed in surprise as her eyes widened. “No way! You are not also into weapons!”
Rainbow shook her head. “N— no… But I think I am into sexy badflanks with lightsabers.” Rainbow smiled at Jo and took a few steps towards the Dawn’s elevator. “So um… yeah! Let’s go to my room for those knife fighting lessons.”
Jo frowned. “But this cargo bay would be ideal. It’s got more room for—”
Rainbow gave her a deadpan stare.
“— Oh! OHHHH!” Jo put her weapon back in her storage compartment and closed it. “I get it. But are you sure your back onboard? If not, just say so and we can stop any time.”
Rainbow nodded. “I am. Your cool little toy snapped me out of that funk. Besides, you're right. If I break, they win. So let's go have fun, and if it’s even a little bit nice you’ll be my official badflank marefriend. Deal?”
Jo smiled. “Deal!”
Rainbow lay on her bed, panting heavily. She honestly couldn’t feel the omni-bed beneath her. The nanomaterial supported her perfectly, just like a cloud bed. However, even if it had been as hard as a rock, Rainbow was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to feel it through her afterglow.
“Holy buck…” Rainbow moaned happily. For the tenth time.
Jo giggled and snuggled up even tighter against her back. She’d been Rainbow’s big spoon since their fun had ended ten minutes ago. “Awww! You’re still loopy. Come on hon, it’s been ten minutes. It’s time for round seventeen!”
Rainbow laughed and shook her head. “I told you… Mares, normally… get one… for ponies! I’m I’m done…”
“I know,” Jo whispered playfully. “You only really had three. I’ve been saying a higher number each time and you’re so out of it you’ve been believing me every time.”
Rainbow snickered and scooted closer to Jo, leaning into her warm synth-skin. “How the buck… are you… this good?”
“I downloaded about eight yottabytes of techniques, including motion capture data… This was actually my first time using any of it. Is your butt okay? I forgot to ask if you’ve used it before.”
Rainbow snorted. “I can’t feel anything other than awesome. I’ve let stallions use it before. It’s okay. I’m great! You made that as nice as… Buck it, you know how I reacted. Heh…” Rainbow shook her head. “As for this being your first time, yeah, right! The hay it was.”
Jo blushed and nuzzled into Rainbow’s mane. “Well, first time outside of VR and my own simulations.”
Rainbow gently pushed her plot against jo’s lap as affectionately as she could manage while being half numb and half tingly. “I guess that’s a huge perk to dating an android!”
Jo’s circuits tingled happily as Rainbow affectionately ground against her. “Huh. yeah! It is. I never thought to mention that as a marketing blurb!”
Rainbow laughed and shook her head. “I’m glad you didn’t. Somepony else would have snapped you up as their marefriend and personal trainer.”
Jo’s eyes lit up excitedly. “Soooo… Are we a thing?”
Rainbow turned her head enough to kiss Jo on the cheek. “Yes, we are so a thing! But we’re getting you a proper pony-shaped toy for your built-in.”
Jo snickered. “It’s a hardlight hologram, hon. I can make it into anything you want. I could even alter it ‘on the fly’.”
Rainbow’s eyes sparkled. “Awesome! Uh, I mean, um... as soon as I can move again I wanna learn how to use a lightsaber.”
Jo smiled and hugged Rainbow to her as she used a foot to draw Rainbow’s blankets over them. “Sure! Here, lets cuddle while you catch your breath.”
Rainbow sighed happily as the ultra-thick blanket she had taken from Canterlot slid over her, trapping her and Jo’s warmth under its nice thick, heavy soft mass. I really, really hope I didn’t use up all of my luck for the year finding her.
Rainbow’s mind flashed back to her earlier fantasy of storming a pirate ship with an energy blade. Eh, if I did, I’m pretty sure she can teach me how to make my own luck!