Luna's eyes brightened to quadrice their normal illumination. "I thought you were recovering from your overheating," she said.
"I still am," Galah said as a faint haze emerged from his body. The weight of what he had just said slowly started to dawn on him. "Oh wait..." His body whistled and a large amount of heat blew out at once.
"You morons!" The female caretaker bellowed. "You're destroying our house!"
"But we didn't-" was all Biddy managed to get out before she was somehow lifted up in the air by the enraged female.
"No! You and that furnace-face are going outside and staying there!" She kicked the backdoor open and threw the machine out. Biddy landed with a very loud and heavy 'thump'.
Rahllup was quick to scamper to her feet and jump outside, dragging Galah with her. The enraged female snapped around, glaring at the sisters and Dissonance, fists clenched and chest heaving up and down in anger. However, she didn't have time to say anything when she noticed Luna and Celestia already clearing away the mess and analyzing the walls.
"What are you doing?" the female said in confused anger. It suddenly appeared to be misdirected.
"Observing the composition of the wall," Celestia said. "I want to see if there's a way to properly repair this or replace it without needing to destroy what's left."
The woman stuttered, trying to formulate the right words to respond. Dissonance watched intently, writing down everything he was seeing in his memory storage.
"You better keep a close eye on that one," Pa said. "That prototype isn't functioning properly." He became tense, leaning against a hand grasping at his chin. "You might have to...destroy him in the future if he continues with that chaotic, unpredictable behavior."
"...Destroy?" Luna repeated quietly. Her voice became more distorted and muffled as though far away, like the voices from an old radio. Her arms began to quiver.
Pa nodded. "Yes. Who knows what kind of threat he'll become in the future, whether intentional or not?" He looked towards the hole in the wall and crossed his arms. "This was just a wall. Easily replaceable since the house hadn't collapsed, but what if it did?" He grumbled in annoyance. "We would likely have either died or been severely injured. He's clearly just meant as a t--"
"No!" Luna shouted as loudly as her volume permitted. Her arms were raised and her ring hands were clenched. "You won't take him from us! I won't allow it!"
The caretakers stared at her, eyes wide and bodies leaned away. The female's sour demeanor had turned to one of sheer disbelief. Even Celestia was staring at her sister, her 'eyes' brighter than usual. Luna's own lights were flickering erratically and the propulsion at her 'feet' seemed to be howling when they were near-silent before.
"You need to calm your energy output, machine of the blue," Pa said with repressed fear in his voice.
Celestia grabbed her sister by the arms and held her back.
"She's experiencing fear and anger," the female realized. "Even Rahllup and Biddydee never demonstrated such a volatile reaction."
Pa sucked in air and forced himself up, stomping before the enraged machine fighting and struggling to break free of her sister's grip. He jabbed Luna's chest with a finger. "Are you going to take responsibility for his absentmindedness and inability to process vast quantities of information potentially killing your...'sibling' here?" he asked her sternly. "Or what some would consider to be my children?"
"Then I'll rebuild him!" Luna blurted in response.
Pa grunted and massaged the ridge of his nose. "No. He's a prototype. A test-bed prototype. There are no spare parts. There is no replacing broken ones." He looked at Luna straight into her 'eyes'. "When he goes, he has to go. There's no way to recover him, and there is no way to transfer his flawed and unfortunately limited programming to a new platform!"
The blue machine's voice emitted a loud, distorted screech, and her hovering thrusters howled louder and louder. Celestia was about to lose her grip when Dissonance jumped in. With the strength of the two combined, Luna was gradually pulled back.
"He has a point, Luna," Dissonance started. It didn't escape Celestia's sight that his teeth depicted a face strained in effort at an angle with tears running from its eyes. A bit on the nose, she found. "I noticed it with that delelele. He's very absent-minded. Whether it's you or himself, he'll be destroyed soon enough. You saw what he just did."
"No!" Luna cried out. Her systems were starting to glitch, and her joints and limbs started to twitch randomly.
The female stomped forward, using her enormous frame and bizarre strength to add to the other two's. Luna was being forced down by giant hands on her shoulders. "What are you so afraid of?!" she asked sternly through the noises.
Luna's body quickly calmed, and the intensity of her eyes' light faded. She stared into the caretaker's and gave pause, trillions of calculations and simulations rushing through her systems every microsecond.
"I...don't know...Loss? Being alone?" she answered weakly.
The caretaker hummed in response. "Sounds you developed a concept of familial love." She looked to Celestia. "Would explain why you two are so tied together."
"Wait, so Galah was like a literal family member of yours?" Twilight asked.
Luna wobbled her hands in the air, straining a long, uncertain note from her vocalizers before conceding. "Yes, I suppose. He literally preceded our models."
Twilight gave pause as she thought the concept through. "So, had he been fully stable like you two, is it entirely possible that he could have become an alicorn like you two?"
Celestia's 'eyes' lit up. "Now there's an idea. I suppose that, yes, that would have been a very possible outcome since we became alicorns."
"I also wonder how things would have turned out had we never come to be as we are now, or the world hadn't...changed," Luna lamented. "But, the past is the past. What's done is done and we can't change it."
Celestia's body lit up brightly. "Not unless we use a time traveling spell," she giggled.
Luna floated up to her sister and bapped her several times on the head. "No! No! Bad Celestia! We talked about this! No time traveling! You did enough the last few times."
The white machine laughed as she flinched from her sister's strikes, leaving Twilight perplexed. "They time-traveled?" Twilight thought to herself. "What exactly is it that they did?"
The day of traveling had finally come. Luna was closely watched by her 'sister' along the days as the two both explored and helped out with the farm on occasion when needed. Galah helped as well and was even more closely watched than Luna, and this time by everyone. Because of their weak frame and personality, Dissonance was charged with watching the prototype, something that was apparently enjoyable to them because they noted down every moment Galah would just 'phase out', as the flamboyant machine called it.
A big truck with an open back had rolled up to the farm, its driver talking with the two caretakers and Pa. He was a heavy-set caretaker, another anomaly that the three machines of the blue had hardly seen any sign of. Most of their makers had a constant body-ratio, but these makers of the black were far more varied. What did it mean?
"Figured we'd need some fuel if'n we're ta come with ya," Rahllup said. Her voice broke the sisters out of their pensive trance. The giant machine and Biddy were both carrying large tanks on their backs, each easily the size of the sisters. "Should have enough fer about a month, ah think." The flames serving as her 'face' flickered unevenly. "Yeah. Ration it up and we should have enough fer the time we're over there with ya."
Biddy and Rahllup hugged the two caretakers, and the flame-faced giant lifted up Pa. They lamented not being able to hug the children since they were in school, but not everything ever went to plan.
"Ya done with all these 'goodbyes' and such?" the heavy-set caretaker asked. He checked a glowing band on his wrist and started tapping his feet impatiently. "Don't have time for that."
"Ah, calm down," the female caretaker berated. "You're getting there anyways. I know for a fact that you're at least three hours early."
The heavy-set caretaker huffed multiple times while trying to come up with a response. In the end he just shrugged and pouted. "Just get in the truck," he ordered the machines.
"Oh, I'm going on an adventure," Dissonance cheered as they hopped and skipped towards the back of the truck. "To the land of the Blue, no less." They had trouble standing in place, their body shaking from excitement. That their 'teeth' showed a head trembling with a massive, toothy smile didn't make things anymore discreet than they couldn't be. The caretaker stared at the two floating machines pass him and float onto the truck, leaving him awestruck. "What the..." he forced out in a wheeze.
"Yeah. Those two are from the blue. They're why we asked you to send this group there for the time being," the male caretaker said.
Pa came forward and punched the heavy-set male in the hip, prompting a loud yelp of pain and flinch. "You take care of 'em now. Don't want to learn that Rahllup and Biddydee were destroyed!" He leaned to the side and glared at the sisters. "That means you two," he added whilst pointing to either of them.
"No need to worry," Luna said. "We'll take good care of them." Her left 'eye' flittered in its illumination for a few seconds. "Don't we know someone who works with machinery?"
Celestia took a moment to dig into her hard drive and nodded. "We do!" she proclaimed enthusiastically. She jumped into the air with her arms outstretched and her body tilted at an angle. "We know exactly where to go..." The white machine paused. "We'll know exactly where to go when we finally reach a service station."
The two's voices glitched, making it sound like they were laughing. As always, Galah was oblivious and ignored them, but the other three machines and the caretakers visibly looked horrified and tried their best to keep their distance.
"What's happening to them," the male whispered to Pa.
"Uhhh...I think they've gained some form of sapience that the other two haven't." He readjusted himself but still felt uneasy hearing the strange, boosted laughter. "They're incredibly advanced, so them evolving to such a point wouldn't be too farfetched."
The female narrowed her eyes and frowned. "I, uh, don't think their systems are adapted to that yet."
The heavy-set caretaker stared at them then let his forehead fall onto his open hand. "I'm too old and fat for this," he groaned. "Okay, I'm going," he announced to the family.
With a final goodbye, the group departed on the back of the truck. Everyone waved goodbye, and so the trip started. The trip to return home. Luna never thought that seeing the skypiercer would begin such an adventure for her, but she wasn't complaining. She felt something within her growing, developing, separate from her body, her systems. A glitch or a stray wire. The blue machine would need to get to a service station as fast as possible once they returned home.
The landscape hardly changed as they moved along and watched the truck belch out angry black smoke into the air. The smoke was eagerly inhaled by trees twisted and leering over the roads like parasites on a body. Celestia catalogued them, but even she was unnerved by these things. It was almost as though they were watching and following them.
The port announced itself by loud horns blaring and cranes hard at work lifting heavy containers. Several gigantic robots of the black were hard at work where the cranes could not go. They seemed compact at first, looking blocky but still standing at the height of four makers standing atop each other, but their height increased drastically when they extended their torsos, revealing multiple interlocking metal beams hidden behind a flexible glass-like material. Four large arms extended out from the sides of the robots. They had been folded into empty spaces in their backs, making storage and movement easier. Their 'hands' were large clamps that took a hold of two large containers or four at the same time, all the weight kept in balance thanks to their six legs scuttling along with heavy thuds. They had no real heads. Luna could see several bright red orbs all along its upper torso beyond the glass. Vehicles ran by left and right along the port, warehouses were being filled, ships were being offloaded. None of the machines had never seen so much activity, and it was going on for several dozen kilometers along the coastline.
"The ship is there," the heavy-set caretaker announced.
He pointed to a fairly old model of vessel, stretched very far and high. Its body was triangular and painted in bright oranges with a logo Luna's 'eyes' couldn't make heads or tails of. It was blurred somehow, but the makers seemed to have no issues seeing it. She couldn't see above the walls thanks to all the containers.
"I'm taking you there into the cargo hold. Everything has been arranged, so don't worry about a thing," the caretaker reassured.
Everyone but the sisters moved onto an elevator that took them to the deck of the vessel. After much talking with the crew, everything had been resolved, and the machines would soon depart for the blue. Luna and Celestia stared at the water from the tip of the ship as it was slowly tugged out of its mooring. As the vessel was engulfed by more and more of it, the two felt disdain towards the material.
"What is that?" Luna asked.
"It's water," Celestia said. "Too much water."
"It's blue, like our energy."
"Not the right kind of blue."
Their voices grew more and more vitriolic as time went on. It was a good thing they could fly.
"Unbeknownst to us, we were being followed," Luna said.
Twilight faced her. "Followed by whom? Pa?"
Celestia 'snorted. "No. Somepony you know very well." She pointed to a paused image Luna was projecting to show a blurry figure hidden behind a pile of containers. Only its head and part of its hand clamped to the sides was visible.
"How do I know them?" Twilight asked. "I thought everypony but you vanished."
Luna heaved a sigh. "Oh, you know them alright," she said tiredly.
"Hey, you two," a familiar voice called out. It was Rahllup.
"Yes?" Celestia answered.
"Can you float up and check on the farm? I'm nervous. I just need to know they're okay," she requested nervously.
"Certainly," Celestia said. She put a hand on Luna's shoulder and floated up.
They had been traveling on the sea for a few days already, but with the heights they could reach, they would at least attempt to reach the zenith angle of the horizon.
"There!" Luna announced.
They didn't have the best long-range vision, but it sufficed to see the familiar setting. Something was wrong, though. They could see one of those gigantic, cubic machines stomping towards it while a group of tiny caretakers enveloped the land. The sisters remained in their position for an hour, ignoring Rahllup's calls to them. The gigantic machine''s body shifted, but it was too far away to see what exactly it was doing. They still recognized its horridly bright lights looking down at the makers. The house was damaged, and smoke began to rise from various areas of the farm. Horrified, the two lowered slowly back to the surface of the boat where a nervous Rahllup waited.
"So?" She grabbed the two from the air and pulled them close, revealing the violently flaring and crackling flames in her head. "So?!"
There was a long pause. "They're fine," Luna lied. "We just needed time to process everything. We are very far, after all."
The flames relaxed as Rahllup heaved a false sigh. "Oh. Fantastic. Thanks a lot," she said in relief. "Ah'm gonna shut down for a while. Decompile everything." She walked away and waved the two goodbye a few moments later. "Thanks again."
The two were left staring at her backside. They were trapped with the secret of what they knew, and eventually they would return, and she and Biddy would know. They would know what happened to their family. They would be alone.