Thanks to the power requirement of the various pre-landing track shifts and the power surges I used to ensure my port forward outboard track system- the one with the necklace-bearer under it- didn’t move during landing, I have virtually no power left. I estimate I can maintain awareness for 4.31 hours; motion, or any attempt at combat, is simply out of the question. My solar plating, unfortunately, is rather severely damaged; as such, I am not producing enough live solar power to maintain even my awareness indefinitely. I direct one of my surviving optical heads upwards, to locate… Looks like a lunar body, producing this light. I estimate the light intensity reflecting from it- and finally estimate normal solar intensity, current solar position, and solar period.
It would seem I should be experiencing sunrise in about 1.04 hours; I should be able to produce enough power for full system awareness, plus additional, at any time of day. I estimate the solar period to be approximately twenty-four hours, plus or minus 1.37 hours.
I redirect the optical head to watch the ‘taurs respond to my appearance. They seem to be in a bit of a panic- and it makes sense, I DID land on the leading elements of their army. Interesting- the languages they are speaking, Minish and Centaurian, are among the few I acquired in their entirety.
Wait one… It seems my planning was imperfect; I have lost much of the information I downloaded, including all data on magic matrices, to the jump. This happened when I left 80% of my backup data locations, including all three damaged Survival Centers, behind. Unfortunately, I failed to duplicate this new data out of these zones in time, and have lost it. At least I still have backups of all other data.
More than one stallion had screamed when the sky had torn open to leave this metal leviathan floating in the air. Fewer than a dozen had not screamed when it then landed on top of their goal- and crushed an Element Bearer to death.
Even Princess Celestia, leading this party on the rescue following the Bearer’s discovery some five minutes ago, cries out in fear as it lands. She quickly catches herself, though, reminding herself of Discord’s mission. I hope you find something truly powerful, she prays. Kindness just lost its bearer.
“Fall back!” she orders. The party she’d been able to take isn’t nearly large enough to realistically fight against the army that had been chasing the Element of Kindness- but had the mountain not fallen out of the sky, her party would have been able to slow down the attackers enough to allow Fluttershy’s escape. She lets out a sigh, before guiding her army into a hidden position. She’d spent far too much of her remaining energy teleporting this party here when the messenger came in- and will have to spend some time recuperating before she can jump even just herself back to Canterlot. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know of any fort close enough to their position- so her best option is to jump the entire army back to Canterlot… which means a few days’ recuperation in the field.
The hostile army, after a short period of panic, is placated by the second-in-command- who had, by a stroke of luck, been in between the enormous crushing sections- marching victoriously out from under it. After a few shouted orders, Centaurs and Minotaurs alike are flowing through the gaps as they search for any sign of their prey.
Signs they find. They find her, inside one of the enormous crushing sections, where a hole had prevented her from being instantly crushed.
Her wing is a different story. The stone that had followed her through the hole had smashed her wing against the strange metal- presumably crushing it, and most certainly trapping her in place.
“Ah-HAH!” The second-in-command announces; the commander had been among the crushed.
Fluttershy ignores him, crying into her hooves.
Even though the sun started to rise shortly after they found her, I was powerless to stop them from doing as they pleased. Fortunately, she has not been killed; presumably, they assume she will be unable to escape and starve to death.
As much as I may have been unable to stop them from abusing her, I was able to convince my own nanorepair systems to stage themselves inside her form- and, in some cases, to perform immediate repairs.
By the time they eventually leave, I have spent much of my reserves- and some of the new production- in replacing her skeleton with duralloy. I had no choice; it was either that, or I allow her to die from lack of nutrients. Or temporarily remove one of her limbs- but with no assurance she’d be back for me to rebuild it later, that wasn’t really an option.
So I have replaced her skeleton with duralloy, disintegrating her bones into the necessary nutrients. Her new skeleton should weigh about as much as her old one- and is equipped with its own nanorepair suite, to allow healing. It won’t be as fast as natural bones might heal, but it’s better than nothing- and these bones should tolerate hundreds or even thousands of times the forces her natural bones would. I have purposely not assembled the fragmented parts before the ‘Taurs left. Now that they’re out of the way, I reassemble what bones I can. This reduces her pain, straightening her disfigured legs. I set a pack of nanites on rebuilding her hooves out of duralloy; the ‘Taurs destroyed them. I color them to match her original hooves; I wish for these modifications to be completely undetectable to her and, preferably, to everypony else as well.
She has been a crying heap since before the ‘Taurs finished. Now, as her legs and free wing straighten and mend, her attention seems to have been drawn. Her tears have not stopped- but she is staring at her left wing, even holding it aloft, as I straighten and fuse the limb’s new duralloy skeleton.
Finally, I feed power into the track system. Just enough to release her trapped wing. As I begin to straighten and fuse her right wing’s alloy skeleton, she looks alarmedly at the bogie wheel she’s been pinned against- and shifts to her hooves. She grits her teeth against the pain as she pulls her damaged wing out of the gap and takes a step away from it. I wait until she is far enough I can be certain her tail won’t get caught again before I release the power, allowing the bogie wheel to crush against the stone once again. She lets out a yelp, collapsing to the ground, as I do so.
Close to half an hour passes, and I have completed her repairs. I have outfitted her new skeleton with a small chemical power plant, to run off her metabolism; this should have no appreciable effect on her appetite. I have also outfitted it with a small medical suite, to continue the repairs I was not able to perform. It will take some rather significant time to perform this task, though, relying upon her metabolism, rather than resource scavenging, to produce the necessary materials. During this time, she has not risen. I return my dedicated repair nanites to my own hull shortly before she rises slowly to her hooves and begins stumbling, slowly, forwards- in the direction she had been going before.
She rises slowly to her hooves. She doesn’t know why the great big metal thing had moved- but when it had, she had taken the opportunity to pull herself free. When it shifted back, she had collapsed- right on top of her strangely healed left wing. It hurt- but interestingly enough, it withstood the force that should have broken it. She had let herself lay, feeling as the crushed bones in her right wing somehow stitched themselves back together. Now, she’s grown hungry- and nothing feels broken. She checks, spreading both wings for a visual inspection. Many of her feathers have been damaged or outright destroyed, and her fur ranges from matted to bloodstained, but all of her bones seem to be arrow-straight. As a matter of fact, as she reviews the state of her wings, she will need to find the time for a good preening sometime- and likely won’t be able to fly until they grow back.
She looks past her wing, to her flank, for only a moment. It’s not like those feathers are going to matter, in the end- she won’t be able to fly for another few months anyways, and it’ll take mere weeks for the feathers to grow back.
She focuses on the rock in front of her, raising one shaking hoof to poke it. She’s pretty sure she’s lucky she wasn’t killed by the… thing that landed on her. Had it not landed on her, rather landing just behind her, she would have gotten away. She could have flown away, even. And when she found a fort, authenticating her entry would have been as simple as flying over the walls. None of their enemies can fly, after all.
But it had fallen on her. Thank Celestia she had survived- but honestly, in her current state, she’s not much better than if she hadn’t. The Minotaurs had gotten their turn first. Physical abuse, she could handle. She’d lost several teeth during that- and they had made sure to break as many bones as they could without killing her. They had yanked all four of her hooves from under her- and broken them in as many ways as possible. In the end, her hooves resembled fleshy stumps. She’d normally be walking on the hyper-sensitive frog of her hoof for years after that kind of abuse- at least, assuming she couldn’t find somepony with a prosthetic. Since she’s one of the Elements of Harmony, she’d only have to find them and inform them of her problem and they would help her.
Not that she likes taking advantage of her status like that. She hasn’t in the past- and doesn’t plan to now.
Then the Centaurs had gotten their turn. The Minotaurs had been all about the physical attacks- but their four-legged allies were more magical. None of them could steal a pony’s magic outright, like the defeated Tirek did, but they had come up with something worse. She thinks it’s worse, at least; even the Elements of Harmony can’t repair the damage, only time can- and speaking of the Elements, they’d taken hers. They’d come up with some new spell. Twilight had described it to her once- and she had listened. According to Twilight, their new spell drains the lifeforce out of a pony. Fortunately for ponies, this irreplaceable ‘lifeforce’ regenerates itself- over a few months. As long as it’s not all drawn out, where the pony would die… But Twilight had hypothesized that, should they kill a pony with that spell, the caster would also die. Cold comfort.
Then, her magic- every part of it- is reliant upon her lifeforce to function. Her cutie mark has disappeared; she won’t be able to use her Cutie Mark Talent for close to six months, the time it’ll take for her to fully recover. She won’t be able to fly for three. Her magical hoofgrip- or, as some unicorns call it, ‘tactile telekinesis’- won’t function for close to two months. Her physical strength is just about zero- but, so long as she can find food and water, that should already be recovering. It’ll take a full month before she’s back to her normal strength, though.
Not that she enjoys using her physical strength, as a proponent of the gentle approach. But at least she’ll have it… someday.
She sets the curiously regrown hoof down on the stone once again, as her first step forwards. Right now, she only barely has the strength to walk. If she doesn’t find food soon, she’ll die.
That’s an unfortunate consequence of the lifeforce draining thing: If unfed, the drained pony can die in a matter of hours.
She takes another step forwards. All four of her hooves are miraculously healed, just like her wings… and just about every other bone they’d broken. No, every other bone- she’s checking with her tongue, and even her teeth are back! That should… vastly simplify the eating process.
She continues forwards.
Eventually, she stumbles her way out of the… She looks back up at it. She’d call it a mountain, but this looks far too much like something Twilight would just love to look at. She’s also too close to see any higher features than these massive wheels… and the strange slabs strung underneath the lower set and overtop the higher set. The strange slabs that had landed over her, leaving her alive by a gaping hole that happened to be over her head when it appeared.
She scans the ground in front of her. There’s a couple shrubs here in this frozen wasteland- and, if she pushes the snow aside, there’s also grass.
She eats her fill before looking up at Celestia’s sun, in about the middle of the sky. It’s cold out here- but she can handle the cold, to a degree. If it means helping her friends, she can handle anything.
If she recalls correctly, she’s not far from the nearest fort. She’d been galloping towards it- or, at least, towards where Fort Flurry should be standing. She ambles slowly in that direction, making tracks in the snow. The sooner she can reach that fort, the sooner she can alert Ponykind to the absence of her Element. She wishes she knew where it went- not only would that make it easier to recover, but Twilight had worked a communications spell on them. Limited range, sure, but far enough she would be able to reach any of her friends in the fort from here.
She turns to look back towards the thing that had landed on her. She’s traveled a long distance- a good half kilometer or so, she thinks- but the thing is gigantic. So big, she decides, that the term ‘mountain’ describes it anyways, no matter how much Twilight would like to look at it.
Though, she considers, it might be more accurate to call it a ‘cratered mountain’. It’s enormous, it’s made of metal. It’s also covered in holes.
She turns back towards the fort and ambles on. The sooner she reaches the fort, the sooner her friends will know she’s safe.