Wake up Sunset with her magic. 68%
Twilight sat back in the medical bay, surrounded by spent spellcasting ingredients and broken crystal. She’d used more than half the stores of magical supplies on this spell—but just now she didn’t care.
“I still don’t think… it’s reckless to use experimental spells to treat a living patient,” Fluttershy said. “She would probably wake up in her own time.”
“Maybe she would,” Twilight said, shrugging one wing. She was too exhausted to argue, her mane hanging limp and sweat dripping from her face. Medical had far less room than it usually did, with several new cots and life support machines lining the outside. IT was the only way they could have enough room for everypony. “Maybe she never would. I had to do something.”
Fluttershy grunted disapprovingly, but she hadn’t actually stopped Twilight at any point. Once she saw the medical diagrams, even she had to admit they looked real.
“Twilight,” Spike’s voice came in from the radio now, the only place she’d ever hear him from again. “Have you looked at the return signals we got from the probe?”
“No,” she admitted. She rose, turning for the nearest console. “Something interesting?”
Can Spike interpret the probe data? No.
Random Event: Praise of Tactics.
Previously, the following questions were asked: Has Spike found everything Cozy did?
Critical No.
Did Cozy’s well-hidden last emergency stopgap ship destruction plan activate? Critical yes. Destruction of the atmospheric seals and venting all the O2? Yes.
Twilight didn’t hear what Spike said next over the distant rumble from somewhere far away. Glass shattered, metal screamed in protest, and suddenly the wind was rushing past her.
Can Fluttershy seal the airlock in time? Yes.
Fluttershy was on the other end of the room, standing by the door. She jerked to one side, yanking down on a bright red lever above the airlock. It slid abruptly into place, landing with a hiss.
“Hardware failure in engineering!” Starlight Glimmer’s voice shouted. She wasn’t done. “Hull breach detected on deck 1! Hull breach detected on deck 2! Hull breach detected on deck 3! Hull breach detected on—” Twilight whimpered, trying to tune her out. What about the prospector?
She fumbled with the controls, shifting through cameras until she found the feed from docking. The prospector was there—floating slowly away from the Equinox. It moved agonizingly slowly, surrounded by a cloud of rapidly defusing gas and torn bits of docking tube.
At least there was one consolation. There was no obvious damage on the Prospector she could see.
“Celestia that hurts,” Spike said, his voice replacing Starlight’s. Her own faded into the background, repeating the emergency indicators. “Twilight, I… I think something blew up. A lot of somethings. How does it hurt this bad if I’m dead?”
Fluttershy ignored them both, hurrying between her patients. She checked each of them in turn before stopping at the life-support console. “We’re on reserve power again,” she muttered. “But the air is more important. Looks like we’re not connected to life support anymore.”
“No, you’re not,” Spike agreed. “Nowhere is. I’m getting red lines from N2 and O2 reserves. Pressure on every deck is rapidly approaching zero.”
“Cozy Glow,” Twilight whispered. “She somehow… must’ve known we might get her.”
“Wasn’t anything in the computer,” Spike said defensively. “Maybe she had timed bombs. They didn’t go off at quite the same time. Damnit, she knew exactly where to hit us for the most damage.”
It’s okay, Twilight thought, thought of course it wasn’t. We still have the Prospector. We can always pump more air. We can fix this. Cozy hasn’t won.
“How much air do we have in Medical?” Twilight asked, dreading the answer. “How long before we start getting poisoned?”
“Lots of us breathing in here…” Fluttershy whispered, voice grim. “Can you patch us into the scrubbers, Spike? If we can clean the C02, we should have days in here before the O2 drops too far.”
“Maybe,” he answered. “Working on restarting the reactor. No damage there—hull breaches shut it down. But I’m not sure we have any intact life-support… I’ll see what I can find. Still trying to figure out what all these sensors are telling me.”
Twilight watched from across the room as Sunset Shimmer blinked open one eye, then the other. She groaned, her mechanical legs twitching from where they dangled under her. “Great Alicorns before us,” she muttered, her voice cracked and weak. “What did you do to me?”
Twilight made her way over, fighting her own desire to panic. Medical was a large enough space that their air would last—for a while, anyway. She wasn’t going to die in the next five minutes.
“The cryogenics used to preserve you were nearly destroyed,” Fluttershy answered, suddenly beside her bed. Unlike Twilight, she seemed to be keeping her cool perfectly. She already had a clipboard in one wing, and a stethoscope in the other. “Those units give up on your extremities first, then your organs.”
“Fantastic,” Sunset Shimmer’s horn glowed, and she drifted off the seat. She landed on mechanical hooves, standing straight. Looking at her remained uncanny—her body was thin and wizened, her torso seeming much too small to contain all her organs. But she was breathing, and that was something. “Lots of red lights.”
“It hasn’t been great,” Twilight said, her voice exasperated. “You woke up at… the worst time we’ve had so far. My ship just suffered sabotage to every deck. We lost atmosphere, my Prospector is detached and drifting away. Oh, and the rest of my crew are comatose thanks to an alien device we barely understand. Not great all around.”
“You were always quite the captain,” Sunset Shimmer said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s clean up this mess.”
1. Sunset will teleport to the Prospector and fly to the surface to pump reserve atmosphere while Twilight buys time repairing life support.
2. Same plan, reversed roles. I don’t trust a pony who nearly died in cryo to use our only functioning ship.
3. Load everypony into the prospector first, then try to wake them up before any repairs are performed.
(Certainty 235 required)