//------------------------------// // Chapter 3 - Seek And Destroy // Story: Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny // by MagnetBolt //------------------------------// Prison. Part of me had sort of expected to end up there at one point or another, but I had been totally wrong about what it was actually like. I guess as a filly I’d sort of gotten this vague idea it would just be a big grey building filled with tiny cells, and you get locked up all day like you’re in time out. A few details got added on over the years -- about how prison is full of dangerous ponies who will eat you alive. Sometimes literally, if they were really bad little ponies. I hadn’t imagined how bad it could really be. All the sadistic guards and homicidal prisoners in the world in my little mental image couldn’t prepare me for walking through a rain of ash in sweltering heat. After the interview and paperwork, Emerald had released me to the other guards, and they’d gotten a few kicks in, but they were smart enough to only put the boots to me lightly so they wouldn’t have to carry me anywhere. Instead, a guard marched me into a passage dug into the volcanic rock and through recently-installed metal gates, ushering me along with gentle taps from a shock baton to encourage me to keep up the pace. “So does everypony get this kind of nice treatment?” I asked. “No talking, prisoner NP3228,” my personal attendant said. “If I want you to say something I’ll tell you to say it!” I rolled my eyes and trudged along. Thankfully, if there was one thing I wasn’t it was claustrophobic. A lot of pegasus ponies couldn’t handle being in small spaces for long, especially when they were poorly lit with arc lamps strung along the wall at irregular intervals. Eventually we reached a few gates in a row, something like an airlock to keep prisoners in, I guessed. “Get inside,” my guard ordered. I walked in between the gates, then after a moment the far gate opened with an electric buzz. I could take a hint, and walked the rest of the way on my own. Just beyond the double-gate was a cavern big enough that claustrophobia wasn’t much of a concern. It was a rough cube, obviously carved out by hoof. An upper level had all the doors, and I had to walk down some rough stairs to get to the bottom floor where the cells lined the walls, each of them a metal box with bars welded to one side. “Looks like they finally finished asking you about your secret drink recipes, huh?” a voice to my left said, one I could place instantly. After all, I’d been stuck in a skywagon with her. “Welcome to the rock.” “The rock?” I asked Quattro Formaggio. She shrugged. “For most pegasus ponies, it’s the first time they’ve seen this much solid ground. You don’t look all that impressed, though. I’m guessing it’s not your first time?” she smiled. “I’ve been to a lot of places that had solid ground. Most of them were nicer than this.” I glared around the room, trying to look less bruised and beaten than I was. There were maybe two dozen ponies here. I expected them to look more criminal. The mix of stallions and mares were thin, mostly in rags, and just looked tired, hungry, and scared. “Yeah, the Smokestack’s not exactly a luxury resort,” Quattro agreed. “Ever been in prison before?” “No, have you?” I asked. “Not one like this. Apparently we get to have fun digging in the rock, and if we don’t meet quotas, we don’t get to eat.” “Digging for what?” “Technology, scrap, apparently there’s still a lot buried here,” Quattro said. I nodded, remembering the glimpse I’d had of the facility. Like ruined steel buildings, bigger than anything I’d ever seen before. They were obviously pre-war, though I couldn’t imagine why anypony would build anything on top of an active volcano -- I’d only just learned they even existed, and as far as I could tell they were the worst places in the world. The crowd was staring at us while we talked. They were whispering among themselves, stealing glances at me, and generally making me worried. “What are they all yammering about?” “They’re taking bets on how long we’ll last,” Quattro said. “Highest bet I’ve heard is a week.” “A week?” “Apparently most ponies only rate half that,” she added. She chuckled and offered me a wide grin. “You should be impressed we’re getting that whole week.” “Thanks,” I mumbled. I was getting off on the wrong hoof. A week? These ponies must have been more dangerous than they looked if they took apart new arrivals that quickly. I had to do something to make myself look less like prey. I took a deep breath to puff myself up a little, regretted it immediately because of the rotten-egg sulfur smell in the air, and walked over to the biggest pony I could see. I knew all about what went on in prison, or thought I did, and so the first thing I did was tap him on the shoulder, wait for him to turn around, and slug him right in the face. I wasn’t in great shape, so there was a good chance I was about to get my snout pushed in, but I had to let them know I was crazy enough to fight the toughest pony in the place. He immediately collapsed, holding his face and crying. “Why did you do that?” he sobbed between tears. “It really hurt!” “Uh.” I hadn’t exactly expected that reaction. “Really, Cham?” Quattro asked. “Don’t you know that the only way to survive in prison is to make friends? Punching ponies isn’t the best way to do that.” “I just thought… you’re supposed to fight the meanest, toughest pony on your first day!” I protested. “It’s the normal prison thing!” The mare adjusted her sunglasses and smirked at me.“Chamomile, you’re the meanest, toughest pony in here,” she noted. I huffed. “No I'm not! I'm delicate and innocent and...” “Tell that to the stallion you laid out.” “I--” I groaned and offered a hoof to the stallion. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have hit you like that.” He sniffled, but accepted my help. The other ponies in the common room kept grumbling. At least I’d done one thing right -- nopony was going to mess with me. I just wasn’t going to make any friends, either. I’d done okay without friends for most of my life, I could deal with it until I got out of prison. Probably. Assuming none of them had a shiv and was going to stab me in the back the second I wasn’t paying attention. A buzzer went off, and I stopped being the center of all attention. The gate slid open, and guards walked in, looking at us. I almost thought they were here because I was in trouble for starting a fight, but their gaze passed over me without really taking notice. “We’ve got a missing prisoner in the mine,” the lead guard said. “One pony is missing from the shift headcount. We need a search party.” One of the ponies in the crowd shoved me while I wasn’t expecting it. I stepped forward against my will, glaring back and trying to figure out which one of them had decided I needed to volunteer. “Thank you for your service, NP3228. That’s one,” the guard said. “I want one more. You can volunteer and earn some points towards your quota, or you can be volunteered. Your choice.” Quattro sighed and raised a hoof. “I’ll go.” The armored guard nodded. “Good. At least some of you still have some spirit. Come with me.” “He disappeared down there,” the guard said, pointing. “If you find him, try to bring him back, dead or alive.” I looked down the tunnel. There were lights strung along it mostly at random, just wedged into the volcanic rock. It curved out of view a few dozen paces down. I tried shining the light the guard had given us down that way, but there was no sign of the missing prisoner. “Is there a map of the tunnels?” Quattro asked. “Not this one. It’s a new branch,” the guard said. “I’ll be keeping watch here. If you aren’t back in a few hours, we’ll assume you’re dead too.” “Do a lot of ponies die in the tunnels?” I asked, checking the roof for cracks. “It’s your first day, right?” the armored guard asked, shaking his head. “No wonder you volunteered so fast. Okay, look, because I want you to come back so I don’t need to file more paperwork, here’s the run-down on what you might see.” I turned to him, deciding to actually pay attention to this. “First, this is a volcano,” he said. “There could be poison gas. You’re the canaries in these mines, so just watch each other. Second, lava. You see glowing, molten rock, you can figure out what to do. Third, and this is pretty rare, you might find live cables.” “In the mine?” Quattro asked. “Some of the buried equipment still works and has power. I’ve got no idea how that works, but it does. You swing a steel shovel into a live power line, and you have a bad day, you get me?” I nodded. I’d had a lot of shocks from batons, so I was absolutely sure I didn’t want to have more of that kind of bad day. “But the worst thing, and I mean the worst thing, is the nanometal,” the guard said. He looked around for a moment and pointed. “You see that shit right there?” He was pointing to what looked like silver frost or lichen growing from a crack in the rock. When I reached for it, he slapped my hoof away. “Don’t bucking touch it!” he snapped. “If you get a splinter, it’ll start growing in you. We’ve got enough prisoners like that already. There’s no cure, and it feels like needles growing inside your skin.” The guard swallowed. “Best thing for them at that point is a plasma bolt to the head, put them out of their misery, but the boss wants them kept alive to study the nanometal. So don’t get scratched by it, you understand?” “Got it,” I said. “Fate worse than death.” He nodded, looking unhappy about it even through his armor. “Now get going. You find him, I’ll make sure your quotas are cleared for tomorrow. Like a little vacation day, but you don’t have anywhere nice to go.” I nodded instead of saying anything stupid and led the way, keeping my wings tucked tightly to my body and watching my step as I moved, very aware now that I was a large pony in a fairly tight tunnel and there was something that’d kill me if I touched it. Quattro followed in relative silence for a while, and we took the next turn, the floor starting to level out. “Look at this,” Quattro pointed to the wall where some of the rock had been broken away, revealing steel plating. “What do you think?” “It’s an archaeological dig,” I said. “Really?” Quattro asked. I nodded. “It reminds me of places Dad used to take me. They must be trying to find artifacts in the ruins. I don’t know how much would still be working after being buried in lava, though.” Quattro chuckled. “The walls held up, so they must have built them pretty strong.” “Yeah,” I agreed, checking the next corner. There were a few branching paths, but most of them were just short, exploratory tunnels, shallow enough I could see to the end. They’d probably been dug just to make sure the main path was going the right way. “You look like you know what you’re doing.” I turned to glance at her. “I’m not a total idiot. Dad made me do stuff like this all the time.” I paused for half a second. “That must be why they wanted him in the first place. Some kind of archaeology thing. Maybe they want him to manage the dig. These tunnels are almost random. They probably missed a lot just because they're not organized.” “It’s not that old,” Quattro said. “It’s more like grave robbing.” “Like you’d know,” I huffed. “Why are you even here?” “Oh, you know. The usual.” She picked up a shovel somepony had left in the tunnel and offered it to me. I took it and waited for the rest of her answer. “I’m one of those awful anarchist rebels you always hear about. I was going recruiting and got picked up like a big idiot. Shucks! Bad luck on my part.” I narrowed my eyes. She smiled. “You… wanted to get caught?” I guessed, reading between the lines. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t even good at reading in the first place and this was stretching my abilities to the limit. “Maybe a little bit,” Quattro admitted. “For a volcano you can see from miles and miles away this place is actually hard to find, and even harder to get into. The one thing you never think about in the Enclave is how much empty space there is between settlements. Just endless clouds and blue sky with nothing to break it up. Easy to hide something in all that nothing, even something like this.” “And I thought I was the dumb one,” I snorted. “You found the place, now what are you gonna do with it?” “Good question,” Quattro said. “I think I’m going to look around a bit, make some friends, chat up some of the ponies that have been here for a while. What about you? Got dinner plans for later tonight?” “When they finish whatever it is they want with my Dad, they’ll probably let me go too,” I said. I was only about half sure of that. I might have made a few mistakes with assaulting guards and committing actual crimes where a lot of ponies could see them. “I hope so,” Quattro said, sounding worried and serious. She put a hoof on my shoulder. “For your sake, I really hope so. You seem like a decent pony, and nopony belongs in a place like this, especially not decent ponies.” “Thanks,” I said lamely. “You seem okay too, for a Dashite.” “Hey, I never said I was a Dashite. I’ve still got my cutie mark. I think it’s brave of them to do what they do, but it’s just so…” she shrugged. “It’s a ritual, a statement. To them, it’s the biggest event of their lives, giving everything up and going down to the surface. To the Enclave it’s just a strongly-worded letter they toss in the trash without even reading all the way to the end.” “And you’re different?” “If we get out of this mess alive, I’ll show you,” Quattro said. “Like I said, I was doing some recruiting. Maybe you’ll get to see what I was recruiting ponies for.” I shook my head and pressed on. I didn’t really care about whatever she was talking about. I just wanted to find the missing prisoner and get out of there before anything else happened. I didn’t want to spook Quattro, but the tunnel didn’t seem all that stable. I heard something rattling around, like pebbles falling onto rock. I was about to stop and say we should turn back, but then some common sense got through my thick skull. “Did you hear that?” I asked. Quattro paused and tilted her head, listening, then nodded. “Think it’s our lost miner?” “It’s either that or the ceiling is coming down,” I said. “Stay about ten paces back from me. If you feel anything vibrate or the air pressure changes, run for it.” “You know, I’m really appreciating having an expert with me,” Quattro said, patting me on the shoulder. “I’ll be ten paces behind you.” I gave her a short nod and crept forward. The tunnel was claustrophobic here. It was obvious it was still being roughed out, with that kind of uneven, exploratory feeling to it, just wide enough for a pony to get in and work on it. I had to carefully squeeze through the tightest parts -- none of it was tight enough that I was worried I’d get stuck, but if I had to leave, I was going to have to back up since there was no room to turn around. “How’s it look?” Quattro asked. I winced at the sound. I wasn’t really worried that a loud noise would somehow shake the rock enough to make anything break, but somepony had already gone missing and I was starting to get worried. I held the light up to check ahead, hoping I’d see the end of the tunnel. I thought I saw something, and switched my light off. Just like I’d thought, there was something shining ahead. “There’s light that way,” I said. “Lantern, or a way out?” Quattro asked. “We’ve been going down, so it can’t lead outside,” I said. “It might be the missing miner.” I turned my light back on so I could watch where I was putting my hooves and crept forward. The passage opened up a little, and it was clear he’d been working more here. There was a discarded pick, the steel walls were mostly clear of rock, and most importantly, there was what he’d found. I heard Quattro stop behind me. “Found something?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said, looking at the open steel door, and the clear corridor beyond it. “You could say that.” The light I’d seen had been coming from around the edge of the door. There were still long, flickering lights working on the other side, despite how many decades had passed since they’d been installed. Quattro stepped up beside me, totally ignoring the warning I’d given her about staying back. I couldn’t blame her. “Look at this…” she whispered, trotting up to the door and touching it. “This is a pressure door. It must have been closed when all this happened and kept the lava out.” “He must have gone inside,” I said. “Is it safe?” Quattro asked. “You’re the tunnel expert.” I used the shovel Quattro had given me and pushed the door open. I felt some strange resistance and a rock the size of my head swung down on a rope made of torn up prison uniforms twisted and woven together, swinging right through where we’d have been standing. “That could have broken a few bones,” Quattro said. “How’d you know it was there?” I shrugged. I hadn’t, but I didn’t want to admit that. Quattro tilted her head and nodded, letting me play it off as being cool. “It’s definitely something a miner set up. I don’t think he wants to be found, Chamomile.” “Well he’s gonna whether he likes it or not!” I tore the booby trap down and trotted inside. It was much nicer on the other side. The air was cooler, the floor was flat, and it was a real hallway instead of a spidery tunnel through black rock. “Hold on,” Quattro said. “Look at this.” She was looking up at the wall. I followed her gaze to where it bulged out, black rock just barely visible. The edges of the steel were thick with the bright, frosty nanometal, like a fungus growing from the other side. “I guess the lava almost made it through,” I said. “I think the nanometal is holding this wall together,” Quattro said. “It’s like using softer cloud to weld sheets of cumulonimbulated cloud in place.” “It’s held up for a couple centuries, so it should be okay as long as we don’t-- what are you doing?” Quattro rapped her hoof against the wall panels, then started digging at the join between two of them. “Give me a hoof with this,” she said. “You should be able to get under the edge with that shovel.” I looked at the tool, looked at her, looked at the wall that probably had molten rock on the other side, and took a long moment to think carefully about my next step here. “And why do we want to do that?” “Because I just realized that the door we saw, and these panels, they’re practically identical to how cloudships are built!” Quattro said. “The red border on this panel means there should be emergency supplies behind it!” “Or lava,” I reminded her. “If there’s lava, I’ll buy you a drink,” she promised. I sighed and jammed the shovel in at the corner, then pushed, trying to pry the panel free. It didn’t take much once it started moving. The outlined section popped off, and Quattro guided it to the ground. “First-aid kit,” she said with approval, grabbing the sealed box. She looked it over, brushed off some dust, and opened it. “Looks like the healing potions are still good. You want one? You got worked over pretty good by the guards.” “I’m fine,” I said, not feeling bad enough to risk drinking something almost two hundred years old that we found inside a wall. I was also half-sure she just wanted me to drink one first so she could see if the others had turned to poison or something. She shrugged and tore some of the wiring out of the wall, pausing once she’d ripped out a length of it to look at the ends. “Weird…” she muttered, and I had to agree. It wasn’t proper copper wiring at all, but a rope of some kind of clear, glassy stuff. Quattro quickly fashioned it into a sling for the first-aid kit, wearing it like a shoulder bag. “So is this some kind of cloudship?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Maybe. It could have crashed here during the war. It’s not exactly the same as the ones I’ve been on, and it would have to be impossibly large. Practically the size of a small city.” “I’ve never heard of anything like that.” “Neither have I, but it’d explain why the Enclave is so interested in digging this place out of the rock,” Quattro said. “Let’s try and find that prisoner. If this part of the ship, or whatever it is, is undamaged, they might have found something we can use.” I nodded and we carefully walked through the corridor. The flickering lights and near-silence gave the place a weird aura. It was creepy, and I found myself trying to step silently. And failing, because I’m not good at being quiet, but my instincts still told me to at least try and be quiet. “Hey, is somepony there?” somepony called out. “Help!” “Sounds like we found our missing comrade,” Quattro whispered. I followed the sound through another one of those bulky pressure doors, walking inside and looking around. There were metal tubes, each of them big enough for a pony, lined up in long rows, like some kind of warehouse. “Hello?” I called out. “Over here!” I followed the sound around the corner and to one of the tubes. A pony waved frantically at me from a small window set into the tube. He looked exhausted and filthy, covered in soot and sweat. “I hid in here and I can’t get it back open!” he said. “Get me out of here fast before it comes back!” “Before what comes back?” I looked around for a way to open the tube. “And what is this thing?” “Looks like all of these used to have ponies in them,” Quattro said. She tapped on the window of another tube, and I glanced over. A skeleton was trapped inside, the skull pressed against the glass. “Why?” I asked. “Maybe it was some kind of emergency shelter?” Quattro guessed. “I don’t think they worked.” “Figure it out later!” the pony in the tube snapped. “That thing is gonna be patrolling through here any second!” “I heard you the first time,” I said, wedging the blade of my shovel into the seam between the tube’s front and back, which I assumed was some kind of door. I grunted and pushed, and the shovel snapped right in half. “What’s that sound?” the prisoner asked. “I just broke the shovel,” I sighed. “Hold on, I can find a crowbar or something--” “Not that! There was-- watch out!” I looked the way he was pointing. A massive shape, even bigger than me, turned the corner. It had four wheeled legs around a central body, like some kind of massive steel spider. It pointed a long-barreled, blade-tipped weapon at me, and I could tell it was some kind of instantly deadly energy weapon, something that would turn me into a pile of goo with one shot, and it had the drop on me and a perfectly clear shot. I winced. There was a hiss, a clicking sound, and I didn’t die. I opened one eye to look. The robot was still menacing me with the weapon, but now that I was looking more closely at it, I could see it was crooked and sparks were coming from broken, trailing wires. “Looks like it’s pretty banged up already,” Quattro said. It twisted around with a jerking, uneven motion and produced a series of short launch tubes pointed right at us. “Stay in there, you’re safer than if you were out here!” I shouted, bolting away. I didn’t stay to watch, but I heard the deep thump of something deadly being launched at me and the blast of heat and shrapnel when it exploded a few paces behind me. I cursed -- metal splinters were the worst, and they were in my back where I’d have trouble pulling them out. Quattro beat me to the end of the aisle, ducking to one side of the row of tanks. I went the other way, taking cover there where the machine couldn’t see us. “Any ideas?” she asked. “One,” I said. “It’s a bad idea though.” “Better than having no ideas,” she said. “Can you keep it busy for a few seconds?” I asked. Quattro adjusted her sunglasses, and I still don’t know why she was wearing them inside, in bad lighting, at night. Or why the guards had let her keep them. She ducked back into the aisle and started flitting from one side to the other, and she had to be going three times faster than any normal pegasus. The machine was clearly struggling to keep up and aim at her. I ran down the next row, keeping low. I had to get around to the robot’s back side. I peeked around the end, and saw it facing the other way, still trying to track Quattro. It was time to put my brilliant plan into action. I jumped on the robot, grabbing the broken weapon and pulling. “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s breaking stuff!” I shouted. The whole weapon mount tore free, and I held the bent plasma caster like a harpoon. The robot turned to me, and I saw the launcher start to take aim. I gave it one of those primal screams and jammed the harpoon right into the barrel of the rocket launcher. A huge amount of smoke burst out of the tubes, and the next thing I knew, I was flying through the air. Briefly. Then I hit a wall. Briefly. Then I was out into the corridor on the other side of the wall. “Ow,” I groaned, from where I’d landed. “I think you got it,” Quattro said. She trotted up to me and offered me a hoof up. I winced when she grabbed my fetlock, and she caught my expression, looking at my leg. “It’s just a cut,” I said. It was bad enough to need stitches, but it wasn’t my first time needing stitches. She looked back at the wall I’d gone through. I could see the nanometal from here. I could practically read her mind. “It’s just a normal cut,” I said again. “I’m fine.” “Fine, but tell me if you feel anything weird,” Quattro said, giving me a healing potion. I chugged it down and felt most of the bruises and cuts from my trip through the wall heal over. The ancient healing potion had an oddly sweet taste to it, without the acrid medicinal taste I was used to from modern healing potions. “Let’s go rescue the guy we came here to rescue,” I said. The pod door was a little dented, but that only made it easier to open. I grabbed a hunk of the robot’s wreckage, a bent piece of the hull, and used it to break the seal. The door hissed open, and the miner stumbled out. “You two ponies are crazy,” he said. “Do you have any idea what that thing was?” I shrugged. “Some kind of security robot. Now let’s get out of here.” “Not yet,” the miner said. “I found it!” “Found what?” I asked. “I found what they’ve been digging for!” the miner smirked and held up a slightly tarnished golden card. “And I’ve got the key to it right here. Once we give them what they’ve been looking for, they’ll let us all go!” “Or they’ll line us up against the wall and shoot us,” Quattro countered. She grabbed for the golden card, and the miner pulled it back before she could get her hooves on it. “You’ll see,” the miner said. “Maybe they’ll line you up, but when I show them what I found, they’ll reward me! I’ll be free, rich, and you’ll still be in prison!” He bolted. I took a step, about to go after him, and saw Quattro just watching him go. She held out a hoof to stop me. “Let him get a head start,” she said. “What?” I frowned. “Is this some kind of weird thing where you want to make it more of a challenge to hunt him down?” Quattro gave me a look. “Chamomile, where do you think he’s going?” “...Towards the treasure he found?” “And where do we want to go?” “...Towards the treasure he found?” “So what should we do?” “Follow him towards the treasure?” “I knew you’d get there eventually,” Quattro said. She patted me carefully on the back, probably worried she’d open up a stab wound. “Now come on!” She went after him, much slower than I’d seen her while she was keeping the robot from tracking her movement. The stallion ran down the corridor, and we went after him, but sort of in a slow, stealthy way. The miner finally stopped in front of a huge door, twice the size of the others. There were alcoves to both sides, and one still held the broken-down remains of one of those four-legged robots like I’d killed a minute ago. “He must have tripped the security here and it chased him into that tube room,” Quattro whispered. “Should we…?” I asked. Quattro nodded. I walked up behind the stallion. He’d pulled out the golden card and was about to swipe it through a slot. “Hey,” I said, startling him. Somehow, he hadn’t noticed us following him. His hoof jerked, and the card hit a button instead of going into the slot. A red light started flashing. “Oh buck,” he whispered. “What’s that mean?” I asked. A panel opened on the ceiling, and a garbled voice played, so distorted I couldn’t make out any words. The stallion dropped the card as a turret appeared through the open panel, the weapon focusing on him. He scrambled for it, but just before he could grab it a green plasma bolt slammed into him, and he just sort of fell apart, melting into green goo before he even had time to scream. The garbled voice started speaking again. “Use the card!” Quattro shouted. I was already scrambling for it, jamming it into the slot. The blinking red light stopped, then turned green. The turret paused and retracted, the garbled voice saying something in a friendlier tone before going silent. The door hissed, steam releasing from hydraulics that hadn’t moved in centuries. I stepped back, and it rolled open, sliding into the wall. “You think that’s what they’re after?” I asked, looking inside. I wasn’t even sure what we were looking at. Encased in a sphere of glowing red magic the size of a house was what looked like a swirling tornado of silvery metal, like a swarm of angry insects combined with a storm. There was a primal force to it, like looking into the heart of a massive flame, only barely held back by that shield of magic around it. Quattro nudged me and pointed. Down at the base of the sphere, an armored unicorn stood, totally unmoving, their horn glowing with that same crimson aura. The armor was unlike anything I'd seen before. It was made of coin-sized hexagons of blue and silver metal linked to each other like building blocks, making flat sheets and blocks forming the plates of the armor. I couldn't see an inch of skin of the pony underneath, if there even was one. Maybe it was just a pony-shaped machine. “I think this means trouble,” she said.