//------------------------------// // Chapter 3 - First Checks // Story: Friendship is Optimal: Last Leap // by StarrySkies //------------------------------// The first test firing of Copernicus Engines’ new Pegasus rocket went off without a hitch. Its design had been Rachel’s brainchild from the start, an array of smaller rockets carefully slaved into one massive exhaust. The materials science involved was fiendishly difficult, having to guide the output into one plume without losing it all to turbulence or melting the entire engine into ruin. She accepted the praise in the office with quiet pride, and carefully didn’t mention just how much help her Equestrian friends had been.  She had worked with them on a few other, smaller projects. Nothing major, just the iterative improvements to existing rocket designs for the satellite launches that were Copernicus’ bread and butter, the bulk of their income from various corporate and government agencies. The Pegasus was something special; this one would be pushing human cargo, if all went well. There had already been talk of putting together a vehicle around it and bidding for crew runs to the International Space Station. A few late nights batting around ideas and troubleshooting carefully fictionalized scenarios with the rocket club had helped her to nail down some of the more worrisome issues; Sine Wave once casually asked about a possible resonance that left Rachel in a cold sweat when she realized what a wreck it would have made of the engine if left unaddressed. It burned a nearly invisible flame on the testing pad, all instruments reading green, and she permitted herself to finally relax for the first time since she’d started on the project. She even took a celebratory sip of sparkling water from a fluted glass at precisely the right moment for Bruce to slap her on the back and set her to sputtering. “Look at the heroine of the hour! Ms. Mad Engineering Genius herself. What do you have to say for yourself?” Once she stopped choking - another slap on the back from an abruptly-contrite Bruce helped with that, once he realized what he’d done - she shook her head in denial. “You know it wasn’t just me - “ “Oh, sure, not just you, but we wouldn’t be standing here without your designs, would we?” He drained his drink - champagne for him, and not his first, most likely. “You did it, Rache, you put this dream together and it’ll bring us to the stars!” No back-slap this time, but an arm around her shoulders. From any other manager it would have been uncomfortable, but they’d known each other back in the wild college days, and it drew a smile from her. “Not to the stars, maybe, but it might just get us some juicy contracts,” she noted drily. “Tobin’ll be real happy about that, and I’m in your team - it’s all your brilliant managerial skills, I’m sure.” An expansive wave of his free hand, empty glass dangling from his fingers, dismissed that. “Oh, sure, it’ll keep the lights on, but you know it’s all about getting us out there. Even Kampos knows that in his heart of crusty hearts. Profits are now, but progress is forever!” --- “Um, excuse me, mister Solid, but what are you doing with that axe?” Rock Solid paused mid-swing, wiping sweat from his brow with one slate-furred leg. “Cutting down a tree, Fluttershy, what does it look like?” “Well, yes, I can see that, but - why are you cutting down that tree? It doesn’t look sick or rotten.” The pegasus peered up at the thick, leafy branches, still swaying from the last stroke of Rock’s axe. “Oh, dear, and there is a whole family of squirrels up there. They don’t seem to be happy with you, not at all! Their poor nest.” “Well, Ms. Fluttershy, I needed some wood, and this is a nice big oak, looks like I could get some really nice planks out of it.” Rock paused, feeling a little guilty. “I, ah, I didn’t see the squirrels, though. Don’t suppose you could apologize to them for me?” To his surprise, Fluttershy rounded on the larger stallion with a stern look, her wings outstretched in agitation. “Now see here, Rock Solid, you don’t get to just chop down healthy, inhabited trees whenever you feel like it! That’s an awfully mean thing to do, and I’m sorry, but you should be ashamed of yourself for making those poor squirrels worry about losing their home!” Sitting at his desk with a bunch of tools spread out around him, Bruce sat back and blinked in honest surprise. Before him were two PonyPads, one with the case disassembled and its innards strewn across the worktop, the other neatly perched on its charging stand. Both were receiving power - the cannibalized gadget showing a scrolling stream of indecipherable status messages as it communicated with the game network, and the largely-intact one showing a yellow mare somehow looming over a significantly taller, brawnier pony. For Bruce, character creation had been an off the cuff affair. Where his daughter had agonized over her pony’s design, matching colors and patterns, he simply hit “randomize” until he found something he liked and tweaked any details that didn’t match. The name “Rock Solid” had all but suggested itself from the dark gray fur with emerald-green mane combination he’d come across, though he’d kept the bright pink eyes on a whim. Earth pony, of course; he liked to think of himself as sturdy, dependable. The kind of man who could get things done. In this case, what he was getting done was pushing some limits in Equestria Online, and monitoring the steady stream of traffic to and from his terminal to see how the system handled it. It had taken Bruce an entire month to figure out how to break the junker PonyPad to his needs, and he’d only done it with some tips from other people working on cracking Hofvarpnir's signature gadget. The technology really was something else; the software, though, that was something he couldn’t even begin to break into. No matter what he tried, it just ran with it, though not always in the direction he expected. Now, for instance. The game didn’t seem to have built-in resource management, but it let him buy an axe in town, and when he used it on some deadwood, it broke up into planks. Sure enough, a whole new construction-based minigame that the tutorials hadn’t mentioned a thing about. And it had been going smoothly, too; planks nailed together made a nice little birdhouse or two, a seesaw for some of the younger Ponyville residents functioned with cartoonish but reliable physics, and that train of thought had led to considering just how far the physics engine could be pushed. Until he chose a taboo tree and awoke the wrath of Fluttershy, apparently. “Listen, Fluttershy, I -” The NPC didn’t even let him finish, actually silencing the grown man sitting at his desk with the force of her glare. “You need to apologize, Rock. Those squirrels weren’t doing anything to you, and you came along and frightened them by messing up their home!” “I - I guess I’m sorry, Fluttershy. I mean, I’m sorry, squirrels. Can they understand me when I say that?” Bruce tilted the camera up from his abashed-looking avatar into the foliage, where the beady-eyed digital rodents peered down from various perches. “I should have checked the tree wasn’t occupied before I started taking whacks at it. My bad?” The glare intensified for a moment. Bruce would have almost sworn the pegasus was about to reach right through the screen at him from the sheer heat of it, though of course that was silly. Finally, it relented, and Fluttershy favored him with a cautious smile. “Well. If you’re really sorry, Mr. Solid. But wouldn’t you mind helping me relocate their nest to a different tree? This one’s a little bit, um, damaged.” Bruce rolled his eyes, and Rock Solid got to work helping out a friend. --- Emily stormed into her bedroom and flung herself down onto the bed, knocking off a textbook and the pencils she’d left on top of it the night before. She’d had a great study session after school, with Professor Angle and a handful of fillies and colts about her age; she wasn’t the only Equestria Online player who was having trouble with advanced calc. The nitty-gritty of it might be tough, but the concepts just seemed to make so much more sense when Angle explained them, and she’d already made fast friends with her classmates. That is, Rock Roller had. It was so much easier for Rock to talk to people; Emily stammered and spoke over herself and hated the sound of her voice. Rock was a little rough, sure, but he was firm and confident when he needed to be. That was the problem. When Janna Gunderson, stupid Janna with the perfect hair and the perfect skin and Emily’s best friend Rick for a boyfriend, had run into her after practice, they’d gotten to talking, and Emily mentioned that she was in school late for an EO study group. Then Janna started talking about how Equestria Online was just a stupid fad, really, and how everyone would feel so dumb when it was yesterday’s thing, and ponies were just for kids, anyway, Emily just hadn’t been able to keep quiet. She’d burst right out like Rock Roller would have, gotten in Janna’s face about it and actually shouted the girl down for a whole three or four seconds of utter confusion. Then, of course, everything had gone to hell. Emily ran out of words and just stood there, like an idiot, and Janna got back her balance and laughed it off and everybody looked at Emily like she was a weirdo, but then, she was a weirdo. Only little kids and weirdos played Equestria Online, and Emily knew that wasn’t true, and all of the other students who laughed at her knew it, but it didn’t matter. Janna said it in that oh-so-sure way she had and for that one moment it was true, even if it was false before and false afterward. If there had been a nearby hole handy, Emily would have jumped into it and pulled it in after. There wasn’t any big, catastrophic response, which would have been almost a relief in itself; just everyone looking, and the heat rising from her collar that she knew showed in her cheeks, and the embarrassment just rose up and that was all she could think about for the whole rest of the day. She hadn’t even dared to check her phone since. From its dock on the small, cluttered desk, the PonyPad quietly turned itself on. Quietly, but not silently; there was a soft, barely audible chime as the screen flickered on, just enough to draw Emily’s attention and distract her from the spiral of shame and sullenness. Scrubbing at stinging eyes with one hand, she reached out and snagged the Pad from its charging dock with the other, took a look at the screen as it turned on, and almost dropped it right off the bed in shock. Her dad had gotten them each a PonyPad at first, but soon found out that while he could mess with the hardware on his own all that he liked, he couldn’t do much to play around with its software at all without making an EO account and playing the game. The two of them had spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon together trying out this and that character option once his second, intact Pad arrived, making the most monstrous abominations they could and just having fun with where the randomizers took them. She’d been there when he had settled on his final design, teasing him about going for a “basic” earth pony when he knew full well she had done the same in the end. They’d even chosen a name theme together. Bruce was still at work. His FrankenPad was still half-disassembled on the workbench she’d passed to get into her room. Despite both of those, Rock Solid’s concerned face stared up at her from the screen of her PonyPad. “You alright there, pebble? I heard you crying.” “I’m - you’re not Rock Solid,” she hissed, her blood running cold. Only her dad ever called her that. Had someone been spying on them? “What is this, some kind of phishing scheme? Who are you and how’d you get his account?” The stallion blinked up at her in visible confusion. “What do you mean, Roller? Pretty sure I’m as Rock Solid as I was when I woke up this morning.” It was just the kind of stupid pun her father loved to make, but she didn’t let it phase her. “You can’t fool me. Br - Da - Rock Solid isn’t logged in right now, I know that.” “Oh, of course not! He isn’t me at the moment. But I’m him, sort of. Haven’t you ever come to Equestria at different times before?” The familiar-looking stallion looked up at her from the screen with every evidence of concern. That put Emily mentally off-balance, and she paused, frowning at the screen. “Uh..yeah, I guess. But I’ve checked on him - you - and you were always just asleep in your room.” The stallion put his head to one side, then the other, in a noncommittal gesture. “Well, yes, but I’m not always just sleeping. Listen, you know Celestia is always watching over every pony, right? She keeps us safe and helps us out when we’re having trouble with things.” However Emily had expected this to go, that wasn’t it. Something very weird was going on here.  “Ye-ees…” She drew the word out, trying to figure out what to say next. “I mean, I know that’s how Equestria works, that’s how the game is set up.” Normally, Equestria Online gently frowned on breaking immersion like that - other ponies would express confusion at anyone treating them like just NPCs, or the software itself would simply refuse it, overdubbing the offending phrases in real time. This time, though, the words passed unaltered, and Rock Solid only nodded in acknowledgement. “Think of me as an echo. Celestia wants to make sure all of her ponies are happy, even when ponies they care about might be busy in the outer realms - so I’m Rock Solid, built up from every moment you and, ah, Bruce, spend together here in Equestria.” Only a moment’s hesitation, there, but a flash of discomfort crossed the stallion’s face at using the alien name. “Every time you play together, Celestia learns a little more, and I get a little better at keeping you company. You know your father would spend all the time he could with you here, if work didn’t keep him away, right?” Emily fidgeted uncomfortably. It was true, she knew, or at least she wanted to think so. It was easy to nod in agreement, and the cartoon horse on the screen smiled up at her. “Well, that’s what I’m for! To keep you company and help you out when you’re all wrapped up about something, like you are now. Did something happen at school? You can tell me about it. I’ll always be here to listen to you.” In the back of her mind, Emily wondered whether there was a Rock Roller to keep her dad company when she was busy, too. Was that Roller easygoing and confident, like she felt when she played him? Was he comfortable in his skin in the way that she wasn’t in hers? Rock Solid’s kind words and consideration swept that concern away before she could fully form it, and sharing with him how she felt was like a weight lifting off her shoulders. She didn’t even mention him to Bruce when he came home that night. --- “Listen here, Booster,” Sine Wave protested. “There is no way in Equestria that you are going up in that thing. It’s a death wish on landing struts! You don’t even know if the safety spells are fully functional!” The two pegasi stood in a rocky waste, one carefully chosen for its distance from anything particularly flammable or anypony likely to be discomfited by the occasional explosion. Before them was the most ramshackle rocket Booster Rocket had ever seen, scrounged together out of scrap metal and anything they could get their hands on. Some of the panels were actually made of wood! But the Ponyville Rocketry Club had put it together, all on their own.  “Come on, Wavey. It’s just a quick test flight. You can’t tell me you’re not eager to see Equestria from above! Way above, not just from Cloudsdale.” They’d been friends since shortly after Booster came to Ponyville, and she knew he didn’t mind a little teasing about his literally lofty upbringing. "I could fly up there myself, you know. If I brought a good warm sweater and got a high altitude charm - I'd be chilly but I wouldn't risk getting blown up by a fuel leak, or a seal failure, or a blown gasket -"  "That's not the same thing, and you know it." Booster slyly edged up next to him and bumped the pegasus' shoulder with her own. "And you're talking about going up yourself. You want to come on the test flight too, don't you?"  “Yeah, well...maybe. But that doesn’t mean it won’t blow up with us in it! I love building rockets as much as you do, but you have to admit this is dangerous stuff we’re playing with. Celestia herself won’t be able to help us if we bucked up a variable somewhere, didn’t convert units correctly or something like that.” Rachel paused and leaned forward a bit - her PonyPad was pretty comfortable to use in handheld mode, but something about the way he’d said that made her suspension of disbelief itch. Immersion was one thing, sure, but EO was a game when you got right down to it. “Come on,” she admonished, “you know Celestia will save us if anything goes really wrong. We’ll just have to pay some bits for medical care if we get banged up.” The game’s speakers seamlessly overlaid her voice with Booster’s as she spoke. The pony tones came out just a bit more dulcet, not quite as prone to squeaking when she got excited as Rachel’s natural voice was. She had no idea how the gadget managed it, but it was a comforting feature to have. Sine Wave was giving her an odd look, though. She found herself flushing and mentally kicked herself for reacting so readily to a sharp look from a cartoon horse, but didn’t feel any less discomfited by it. “A situation like this - you know, magic can do a lot of things, Booster, but it does have limits. If something goes wrong enough, fast enough, and we really could get hurt. Badly hurt. Or...even worse.” “Listen, Sine - “ “I’m worried about you.” The dark-furred colt stretched out a wing and gently brushed its feathers along Booster’s side. “You push hard, and fast, and it’s exciting, but you need to learn to slow down, sometimes. Keep your hooves on the ground - and I know, I know, we’re not good at that at the best of times.” She couldn’t help smiling at the weak wordplay. “Yeah, yeah, all right,” she conceded, wrapping her friend in a brief wing-hug. “How about we double-check the figures a few more times, and then try sending it up without us, to test the parachutes? We could put a dummy in the pilot’s seat, use that to gauge the g-forces...” The two of them were up far later than she intended, getting the rocket just right - and safe enough for Sine Wave’s nerves - for them to try out another evening. --- At its second test firing, the Pegasus exploded on the pad.