//------------------------------//
// A Day in the Unknown 
// Story: Magic's Birth: The Sisters' Memories 
// by The Psychopath 
//------------------------------//

Rahllup came out of the workshop after an hour of work. The extra help provided by the group helped speed things up because, as the engineer had said: "This robot is slapped together with incompatible parts connected by some manner of custom, janky converters for everything and it's a miracle it hasn't collapsed in on itself like a black hole. It's a pile of junk made by a genius."

Using Galah's strange brute power, some relatively new metal plates for the flame-faced giant's new chassis was bent and molded into shape, and after a few hours were done -with some help of course- her internal wiring had been rearranged and proper connectors, converters, resistors, and other mechanical contraptions had been stuffed inside of her. All that had been left to do was to properly connect the metal with molecular clamps. The molecules were forced into interlocking with each other, creating a somewhat clean line of connection, if not because of the differing structures causing some bubbling.

"There. Now we just need to see if it wakes up," the engineer said. His anticipation had him speaking in a hushed tone as he backed away from the work table.

The silence was strenuous as Rahllup didn't seem to want to reactivate, if she even could. Then, her face erupted into a geyser of fire, startling the machine that sat up with a jump and panic before regulating the flow herself.

She was looking around in a panic. "What happened?" she shouted. "Where are those weird machines? My data storage was corrupted in some areas."

"I gave you a diagnostic tool for that," the engineer pointed out. "It will work on its own and have little drain on your own resources," he stated smugly.

Rahllup was hugged by her fellow giant and lifted up. "I was worried I had lost you!" Biddy shouted cheerfully.

"Why?" Rahllup asked.

"Your internals were damaged," the engineer explained. He stepped up to the now-standing machine and starting tapping her newly minted chassis with the back of his curled finger. "You were hit pretty hard. In fact, because of the slap-dash way you were made, the impact disconnected a lot of the parts inside you and damaged a lot of others. It was worse than I first thought."

Rahllup's flames dimmed briefly. "How long was I offline?"

"A few hours," Dissonance butted in. "Quite frankly I'm shocked this caretaker managed to repair you in such a short time."

The engineer was visibly perplexed by the 'caretaker' terminology but chose to ignore it for the time being. "It wasn't short," the maker croaked. "It was almost a whole day." He looked at his arms and sighed. "My body hurts." The flamboyant machines shrugged as his disc-teeth spun around and showed a grinning face. "Well, time for that burnt one."

Luna had been holding its hand the whole time they had been working on Rahllup, keeping it close despite it incessantly wanting to escape. Like before, it was being held down, only this time it was by Biddy and Galah. 

"Wow! I feel great! My performance has increased over fifty percent!" Rahllup cheered.

"That's because most of your parts aren't just scavenged scrap metal slapped together," the engineer explained. He watched the stowaway getting dragged to his work table. Everything has already been started up so why not use his workshop? "I also helped in your consumption of black energy. More power for less energy consumed." He coughed and cleared his throat, massaging his throat afterwards. "You'll never get close to the power output of pure blue energy, but you'll be able to run on that amount you brought with you for at least a month or two, and that's including the rations for the triangular one."

"It's Biddydee," the triangular machine corrected. "Or Biddybee."

She was met with intrigue and perplexion. "Why do you have two names?"

The machine tilted left and right. "Because my caretakers could never remember whether my name ended with 'bee' or 'dee', so they just use both now."

"I see." The engineer lowered themselves to the lowest point they could manage to get at eye-level to the stowaway and see any imperfections along their chassis by eye alone. He moved away and walked to one of the many dusty counters nearby and fumbled through the shelves, going through his carefully organized tools and parts. "And this 'Pa' you mentioned, how old is he?"

Biddy took a moment to think. "I don't recall properly since my internal clock wasn't functional at the time, but I reckon he's around eighty, ninety years old?"

The engineer exhaled from his nose. "So he still has quite a bit of life still left in him." He grabbed some pliers and started to pull apart some of the more gnawed through parts of the stowaway's chassis. "I have to admit that I am very eager to meet with your maker--"

"Caretaker," Biddy corrected immediately.

The maker paused and stared at her in annoyance before resuming his work. "Your caretaker, and exchange words of our work with him." He sighed and his shoulders drooped for a short moment. "It would be nice to speak with someone with the same enthusiasm for old machines that I have," he mused. "Maybe in a few years I will be able to meet with him," the engineer continued.

Biddy's systems took a moment to understand what she had just heard. "What...what do you mean?" she asked.

"What I said. Meeting him in a few years," the maker explained. "I want to meet with him as soon as I'm free."

"He's already very old," Biddy said. Her tone was a portent of ill things, and she leaned towards the maker with her optics bright.

The maker stopped his work and looked up at the machine. "You said he's only eighty or ninety. He still has a couple of decades at the least."

He was met with silence at first. "What...how old do you of the blue get?"

The maker looked up pensively, taking in a deep breath and shaking his head. "I'm not a doctor, but I think that we can be at least a hundred and fifty, a hundred and sixty? There's some few who have managed to live until two hundred, but they're outliers," he explained.

If she had lips Biddy would have mimed 'two hundred' silently. "Our caretakers can rarely even live to a hundred, let alone your age," she said quietly. "How is it possible that you're all able to live longer than our caretakers?"

Biddy's question was met with a shrug. "The blue? Our bodies simply being different? There's plenty of factors at play," he said. The maker tapped the charred machine with the back of a plasma cutter. "I only know how you machines work and how each iteration can function better and longer than the last. Don't look to me for guidance on the biological." 



"That disparage between the two is off-putting," Twilight said. The two sisters looked at her. "Those of the black are massive compared to those of the blue. They're significantly stronger and more durable with not much different intellectually from what I could see. In fact, I thought that those of the blue were far smaller and less likely to survive on their own." She looked to Celestia. "Is it because of medical advances?" she asked.

Celestia shook her head. "Medical advances can only go so far, Twilight. The body decays on its own. You can prolong it with the right treatments, but there's not much else that can be done. The differences between those of the black and those of the blue can't be waved away through that alone."

"For whatever reason, the energies they both used affected them differently, at least, that's what I think," Luna surmised. "It's quite difficult to know what changed precisely, but we can at least say it was the energies."

Twilight nodded and looked away as her mind wandered. "I wonder what kind of effects the other energy had on the makers," she thought aloud.

"Whatever knowledge we had of that is long gone," Celestia said. "It's unfortunate, and I absolutely loathe lost knowledge," she growled.

"Well, I could always use a time travel spell to go back there and-ow!" Both princesses had clonked Twilight on the head with their ring hands. "But I would be extra careful! I already have experience with it! Why can't I--Ow! Stop hitting me on the head!"



The engineer seemed to have become dour. His expression returned to the frustration and anger of seeing the sisters back in his junkyard, and there seemed to have been a pit forming within him after hearing such knowledge. To take his mind off of what he just learned, he decided to look outside after taking a small break from working with the damaged wires. He saw the flame-faced giant doing cartwheels. "I think your fellow is enjoying her new chassis and energy flow a bit too much there," he croaked.

"Oh. Well, she's always been the more energetic of us two. To be honest, I only came here to see the wildlife."

"Eeeeh..." The maker threw a piece of metal out and started digging at the wires and cables within. "There's not much of that left here. Most things are maintained artificially. The animals that you do see tend to be small in stature, but boy can they be vicious. Turned into real pests," he laughed. "You're safe since you're a machine, but don't try to bring them towards people, please."

Rahllup was bouncing in place under the watchful eye of the sisters and Galah, throwing dust and dirt in every direction. "This is amazin'!" she shouted. "Ah'm barely spending a fraction of energy of what ah normally would if ah was still using mah older parts!"

"Maybe calm down before you eat up all your reserves," Dissonance chastized. "You can probably siphon off of this caretaker, but that stuff is his, and we don't have the money to pay him."

The flamboyant machine was waved off by Rahllup. "Doesn't matter. By the time we start reaching low energy levels we'll already be going back home."

The sisters looked on silently but felt their internals constrict.

"If you shut off from overexertion of your internal systems then we won't be able to take you back," Galah grumbled.

The whole area began to shake suddenly, making all the metallic piles vibrate aggressively, banging, clinking, and scraping against each other. The setting sun in the distance was slowly being devoured by an incoming flow of clouds with a faint, blue tint.

"Is this another one of your weather phenomenons here in the blue?" Rahllup asked whilst trying to keep herself from falling.

"No," Celestia and Galah said together.

Luna pointed at the sky. "Hey look, it's the blue circles again. I saw them when we were at the black. Hmmm. There's more than before," she mulled over.

The group followed her finger to several massive shapes in the sky, just beyond the field of vision. Tidal waves of blue energy flowed from the clouds, washing over the city and its buildings. The group could almost hear whatever was producing that noise. The noise was higher pitched than any maker could perceive, but only Galah seemed capable of perceiving it at least to a very small extent. A light buzzing.

The engineer stepped outside of his workshop with Rahllup, leaving the now-deactivated stowaway on the table. "I thought I was going to enjoy the brief moment of respite after figuring out how to deactivate that pockmarked thing." He scratched the back of his head and put a hand on his hip. "What in the world is that?"

Everyone turned to face him. "You don't know?" Dissonance asked with shock in his voice.

"Wh-eehgbtbth. You expect me to know everything?!" the maker shouted. He gestured to the sky with an open hand. "I don't know what those things are supposed to be! I think they already asked me about those things a while ago." He placed his hands on his hips and leaned forward, as though that would help him see better. "There's far more than there used to be, and I don't like that emission of blue energy. I don't know of any equipment that can produce that much wake."

The orbs slowly moved away, taking the tremors along with them. The land calmed itself, shaking less and less until it became just a small murmur in the feet, then nothing. There was only silence left behind as the city tried to assess what had just happened.

"Well, that was a marvelous thing to bare witness to," Dissonance said in admiration. "I'm super curious as to what those things are."

"I remember seeing them when we arrived in the black. It was really far away and a lot of lights were pointing at them," Luna said. "I think some tiny things flew after them, but it was very far away, and I possess no zooming function."

Celestia nodded. "I remember that."

"Lights and tiny flying things, hmmm?" the engineer repeated. He looked between each machine and pointed to his damaged wall. "Fix the hole you made or you can't stay here and I'll alert the PABs of your presence here."

Rahllup's flames flared up brightly. "Ya work on us then tell us to leave?"

"You still owe me for everything I did for you," the engineer said. He stepped forward and stared the giant straight into what served as its face. "The least you can do is fix my wall."

It took a few seconds, but Rahllup's flames flickered and she backed away. "Yer right. Ah was lettin' mah heat get to mah systems." She put her arms behind her and twisted her torso around as she looked about. "So, what do I use and what do I do?"

"I'll let my personal construction take care of that," the engineer said smugly.

"But it can't speak."

The engineer chuckled. "Doesn't need to. Meanwhile, I think it's best we don't linger on what just happened. We can't know what they were, so staying stuck on that thought could cause unwanted imagination and panic." He paused for a moment, mentally slapping himself. "Do you feel those kinds of things? This whole 'sapient machine' thing is still new to me."

Rahllup shrugged. "Beats me. Haven't had much ta fear, but ah have had stuff ta worry about."

"Well then...just don't, uh, worry about it?" the engineer spoke with hesitation.

"Okay."