The work in the furnace room was tough just because of how hot it was. The sweltering heat made her sweat rivers until she had no more sweat to give anymore. The Wrenchers working in here were much the same way, they probably needed to drink a ton of water after a day’s work in here. Rainbow Dash watched as Nut pressed up and down on some kind of pedal-powered pump that fed a line directly into a furnace and fanned the flames inside. The mare was huffing and puffing with exhaustion after doing this for a solid half hour to keep the furnace burning as strong as possible.
“Take a break and I’ll cover you,” Rainbow Dash offered.
“I don’t need a break. Find something of your own to do,” Nut glared at her.
Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. Did they all have to be allergic to even the smallest offers of help? “Okay fine, what’s something I can do in here?”
“Sit in the corner and don’t bother us?” Nut suggested.
Rainbow Dash had to admit—in a less serious situation or back home she would’ve been the type to gladly sit out and let others do the busy work while she napped. But she didn’t like the idea of that here. Not when the work was like this and the ponies doing it led such miserable lives. It would’ve made her feel way too bad if she just watched them or something. These weren’t friends leading happy lives like Applejack, who Rainbow Dash would’ve had no problem messing with like that, they were ponies who needed her to give her all here too.
“Sorry, but no, I’m going to do the same work you Wrenchers have to,” Rainbow Dash told her.
Nut frowned and glanced at her with her creased face. “You’re not proving your sincerity anymore, you’re just being stubborn.”
“Then maybe I can out-stubborn you into agreeing with me. That would work too,” Rainbow Dash shrugged.
“Hrn,” Nut grunted and kept pumping away.
Dash checked to see what the others were doing to see if there were any opportunities for her to insert herself. Some of the Wrenchers had a ladder with a toolbox by it leading up to the top of one of the furnaces, it looked like a clamp holding down one of the pipes on the ceiling had come loose and needed to be screwed securely back on. And probably thanks to the existence of the Thunderbirds there weren’t any pegasi in this group of Wrenchers to make a job like that easy.
Rainbow Dash grinned and flew over to them. “Hey! Mind if I help you out with this?”
The three Wrenchers turned to her with annoyed and mean looking faces. One of them grabbed a socket wrench out of the toolbox and roughly hoofed it over to Rainbow Dash before all three of them left to go work on a different furnace.
A sarcastic “Be our guest” was the only verbal response she got from any of them.
“Be that way too then,” Rainbow Dash shook her head and flew up to the ceiling.
It was an easy enough fix. The screw was still there it had just come loose, would’ve been nice if she had an extra hoof to hold the clamp down while she ratcheted the screw back into its hole but she made do. And made sure her wings didn’t accidentally touch the nearby furnace. After a few rotations the pipe was back to being tightly held on and in no danger of shaking or falling. Rainbow Dash almost reflexively wiped the sweat from her brow before realizing her folly and instead just flew down to dump the wrench back into the toolbox. She didn’t know what to do with it and the ladder so she carried them both back one at a time to the closest corner of the furnace room.
She was thinking about what else she could do when the doors leading to the rest of the work area opened up and some ponies came in with a cart carrying several buckets of something and one larger barrel. Rainbow Dash watched in curiosity as they came to one of the furnaces and carefully opened up the grill, licks of flame wisping out of it, and started tossing black rocks from the barrels into it. Coal? They were feeding the furnace with that?
Rainbow Dash floated over and watched as they went to a number of different furnaces, maybe ones that were a little weaker than they should be, and tossed coal into the raging fires to make them burn more. They did that until all but one of the barrels were empty, but the last barrel was different. It was totally closed on top except for a single cap near the side. That barrel they carted to the side of the furnace room opposite of the doors and went to a pipe on the wall that had a similar cap on it. One of the ponies unscrewed the cap from the wall while the other took the one off the barrel and then they both hefted the barrel up and began dumping its contents into the pipe.
Gasoline. Rainbow Dash saw the yellow liquid pouring out by the gallons. Maybe it was used to start the fires in the first place or was fuel for some kind of machinery that worked with the furnaces. Rainbow Dash didn’t know. But there must have been a good fifty gallons of it that they emptied from that barrel into the wall. Afterwards they screwed the two caps back on and took their now empty barrel and buckets away on the cart. Those two probably weren’t even Wrenchers, were they?
Rainbow Dash spent the rest of the work day doing whatever odd jobs and minor work she could find in the furnace room. By the end of it she would’ve been fine with living an igloo for the rest of her life.
“Geez… this heat is something else,” she shook her head as she finished unplugging a blocked valve with a wire brush.
“You’ve only been in here for one day. Try doing it for as long as we have,” Nut dismissively said to her.
Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “I could handle it. You don’t need to badmouth me at every turn.”
“Hrn,” Nut grunted again.
“Day’s almost over by now. I’m following you back to wherever it is you and your group of Wrencher’s hang out,” Dash told her.
“Fine, waste your time,” Nut shrugged.
“Gladly,” Dash grinned, fully determined to not allow the Wrencher leader to get any sort of satisfaction.
Finally it was indeed time for the work day to end and Rainbow Dash followed the Wrenchers as they left the furnace room, taking the ramp down into the tight maintenance tunnels. Rainbow Dash really wished she could fly some more and stretch her wings but quarters were just too cramped in here. She and Nut instead brought up the rear of the party as they headed “home”. With just two turns they were already in a section of these claustrophobic tunnels that were completely foreign to Rainbow Dash, going in a different direction from where Frayed Wire and the others had been earlier today.
“So where do you guys stay down here if you’re avoiding Frayed Wire and his Wrenchers?” Rainbow Dash asked Nut as they both ducked under a low-hanging pipe.
“Waste management,” was her response.
“Great,” Dash grimaced. Didn’t sound like a very appealing place to go.
It took an extra bit of traveling (and thanks to the twists and turns Rainbow Dash had no idea where they actually were) but they eventually made it to the waste management section of the city. Or at least the under/maintenance area of it. They stepped over a threshold painted with a double yellow and green line and a sign above it with a big “WM” on it.
The smell of trash and burning trash was obvious.
Once stepping over that they walked across a platform that their hooves echoed off of—must’ve been hollow under it. Rainbow Dash and Nut were still picking up the rear and letting the other Wrenchers go ahead. The moment the last of the other Wrenchers stepped off the platform a buzzer rang out and the metal platform dropped down, swinging open like a trapdoor with Rainbow Dash and Nut still on it, dropping them into wherever was directly below that room.
“Wagh!” Nut yelped in surprise.
“Again?” Dash frowned.
Both of them quickly landed on top of something misshapen and lumpy—trash. They had fallen onto a big pile of trash. Some of it uncomfortably hard and painful like bits of rock and scrap metal or twisted and broken rebar. The door above them swung back shut so none of the other Wrenchers could see and get to them quickly but it looked like there were stairs leading from somewhere else above to get down here on the far side of the room.
But there was something else going on, the trash was moving.
Rainbow Dash stood up and looked around. They were actually on top of a huge filled up dumpster that was moving on a conveyor belt. The dumpster itself bolted to the moving belt so it looked like it could never be detached and there were a few others in front of and behind the dumpster they were on.
And they were all going straight towards a vat of molten metal. It looked like the conveyor belt flipped over and started going under the floor, likely the dumpster would throw all the trash it carried when that happened into the orange pool of fire and metal and then go back around.
“We’re on the trash line for burnable trash, it all gets melted down and eventually piped to the smelter,” Nut said as she stood up and rubbed her head. “Come on, let’s jump off.”
“Right,” Rainbow Dash said and fluttered her wings to quickly get off the trash heap.
Before she could though she saw something out of the corner of her eye, two pieces of scrap metal levitating off the heap, held in a black aura of magic. In an instant they both zoomed towards Rainbow Dash and Nut.
“Look out!” Rainbow Dash yelled and ducked, the scrap metal flying right above her head.
Nut was a little too slow to react, looking back just in time for the metal to hit her in the head and knock her down, unconscious. Rainbow Dash reached over to grab her when she felt something else land on the trash heap with them and turned around to see a brown unicorn stallion coming at her with a lit horn. From the black magic of his horn he conjured up a magical sword and swung it right at Rainbow Dash’s face.
“Whoa!” She backstepped to avoid it, the edge of the blade taking off a few stray strands of mane.
The unicorn didn’t let up though, he kept rushing at her with the black sword trying to stab and slice her, and with the uneven surface of the trash she kept stumbling and couldn’t get the time for her wings to unfold. Not to mention she couldn’t leave Nut there to be burnt up. Which was another issue—them having about thirty seconds before this dumpster threw everything inside it into the fires.
Rainbow Dash grabbed an iron rod on top of the trash and threw it at the unicorn but his magic sword effortlessly cut it in two. He then brought it forward in a wide sweep aiming to take her head off but Dash ducked underneath it. Getting a little creative she discreetly tore out some of her feathers and dodged to the side of the dumpster away from Nut when he tried to stab her next. She was at the edge of the dumpster and close to falling off, the unicorn advanced on her with a smirk and prepared to either force her off or finish her off all together.
That’s when Rainbow Dash threw the bunch of feathers she had collected in her hoof up at him. He was fast again, expecting it to be something like that iron rod, and his sword sliced through the air and cut one of the feathers. But the cloud of feathers and not something like a rock confused him and momentarily obscured his vision, enough for the very fast Rainbow Dash to close the gap between them. With a swift punch to the jaw he was discombobulated and his magic failed, yanking him by the mane she them twisted him around and threw him off the dumpster right before it was about to reach the end of the conveyor belt. Then she took a sharp breath and darted at full speed across the dumpster, grabbing Nut and jetting off of it at the last second.
She and Nut tumbled to the ground and slid across the metal floor right beside the opening for the dumpster to throw all the trash into the molten inferno. Dash watched for a second and then looked down to make sure Nut was okay, finally dragging a hoof across her brow and sighing in relief.
“Close...” the pegasus whispered.
“Leader!”
“Nut!”
Rainbow Dash looked up at the voices and saw some of the other Wrenchers coming down the stairs that led into this trash room. Seemed like she didn’t have anything to worry about anymore. Frowning though, she looked over at the other side of the conveyor belt for any sign of that unicorn. She saw him yank open a vent with his magic and head inside, not before flashing one last nasty look at her, and then he was gone.
“What happened?!” The first Wrencher who got to them demanded as they came to a screeching halt in front of Dash and Nut.
“We were attacked, but I think Nut’s okay. Just got hit in the head a little,” Rainbow Dash said and gently nudged the Wrencher leader. “Hey? Anybody home?”
“Stay back!” That same Wrencher said and pushed Rainbow Dash away from Nut, all of them gathering around the gray unicorn and trying to rouse her back to consciousness.
Rainbow Dash just shrugged and sat down. “Alright.”
It didn’t take long for Nut to wake up but she would probably have a decently sized bruise where she had been hit. The unicorn managed to stand back up on her own power and shoo the others out of her personal space. Blinking a few times her eyes found Rainbow Dash and she frowned. “I saw… something coming at my head but it’s all fuzzy.”
“We were attacked by a unicorn. I think he must’ve hit a switch or something that dropped us onto that conveyor belt and then he tried to get us dumped out in there,” Rainbow Dash said with a nod of her head towards the molten pool.
“Frayed Wire?” Nut instantly suspected. “Was this all just a ploy to get my guard down and-”
“I’m gonna stop you right there,” Rainbow Dash held up her hoof and ignored the glares the Wrenchers threw at her. “I don’t exactly trust or have anything nice to say about Frayed Wire myself but I don’t think he was the one who did this. It doesn’t really make any sense, and he definitely didn’t want me dead just like that either.”
“So then who was it that tried to kill us?” Nut asked, honestly perplexed.
“The Black Hoofs,” Rainbow Dash said.
That declaration surprised Nut and her Wrenchers, all of them sharing looks of confusion with each other before Nut looked back to Rainbow Dash and raised an eyebrow. “How do you figure? And why?”
“A guess—or a hunch really. This morning I was attacked by three pegasi that didn’t have Thunderbirds tattoos, and this unicorn who attacked us didn’t wear a jumpsuit either so he wasn’t a normal worker. And the other gangs don’t want me dead, they want to use me. The Black Hoofs I’m not sure about,” Rainbow shrugged.
“But then why me too?” Nut asked.
“Uhh, chance? Or maybe you were even a big target for them too. The ponies I’m staying with now told me that the Black Hoofs exist to keep you gangs in line so you don’t do anything against Resin or Crush.”
Nut narrowed her eyes and looked at her followers. “And if I suddenly died under mysterious circumstances my followers would assume it was Frayed Wire the same as I did. And it would be all out war between our two factions.”
“Meaning the Wrenchers would never be a problem for the Black Hoofs or anybody else,” Rainbow Dash finished. “I’m pretty sure I was the main target but, well, two birds with one stone? I guess those Black Hoofs have heard about me and don’t like what I’m saying or might be doing.”
The ponies all stood there, contemplating things for a short minute.
Nut finally raised a hoof to her head where she was hit and winced. “I need something cold on this...”
“Er, sorry I couldn’t like push you out of the way or anything,” Dash said.
“It’s fine,” Nut said and then regarded Rainbow Dash silently for a moment before sighing. “You really saved my life, didn’t you?”
“Maybe a little bit,” Dash grinned.
“Even after everything...” Nut muttered. She started walking away towards the stairs that would take them back up and out of here. “I’ll speak to Frayed Wire. Peacefully. No guarantees on what will happen but I owe you that much.” She looked back at Rainbow Dash with a guilty frown. “Thanks for saving me.”