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// 25% 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
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"Then what are we doing in the meantime?" asked the stallion. "Just lounging around here, existing?" 
"Sounds good to me," said the mare. 
The stallion gave a single, loud and forced chuckle. "She'll expect reports at some point. She may not want to get rid of us at a hair's drop, but if we're not working and she notices that then it's not much different from telling her we don't want to work anymore."
"What are we supposed to work on, anyway?" asked the mare, looking at him. "We don't have any new material to process, and won't until overmorrow at least." 
"That doesn't mean we can't be working," replied the stallion. "You know how it is. Coming up with ways to smooth out the process or improve the results, testing things on what we do have. We've been through this cycle already."
"That was when we were doing experiments doomed to fail, on prisoners. I don't enjoy this, but killing ponies who'd be killed off anyway is one thing. Turning soldiers into those things is another, and we both know it. I don't want my life's legacy to be the thing that'll end up slaughtering who knows who who knows where." The mare stared at the other unicorn. "Besides, I don't like working with the samples," she added, looking down again. "I think I've gotten sick of the smell of rotting meat."
"If you cared about the moral integrity of your actions you should have walked out the borders of this country as soon as you realised what it's done, or died trying. It's a little late to not look like a coward now," the stallion said, but in a caring tone. "Sometimes I think there's something wrong with us."
"Only sometimes?" The mare sarcastically quirked an eyebrow. 
"Not like that." The stallion fetched a bit of food from the table, without really looking at it. "The ponies out there, going about their lives, do you think they care? Do you think they would care, even if they knew? They weren't taught to think like that. They weren't taught to care. As far as they're concerned this is right, all of it."
"Can you blame them?" asked the mare. "You said it. They don't know better. Can you even say someone is morally wrong if they've only ever heard one version of the story, if they've only ever known one meaning of right and wrong? If they've never been taught, shown, told anything different? If they haven't had a chance to decide, can you blame them for a choice someone else made for them?"
"You're asking for yourself, aren't you?"
The mare hesitated for a moment, and looked down again. "Do you ever wonder if you're wrong about what you think is right?" 
"Every cycle since the one I realised I'd been wrong all the ones before it," the stallion replied. 
"Then how do you do what's right, if you don't even know what right is?" 
"You do what you think is right," the stallion said after a moment of thinking. "Until you hit a wall. Until you find out you might have been wrong. And if that happens, you try to be better afterwards. You don't expect a test to go perfectly the first time, there wouldn't be a point to testing otherwise."
"Isn't that what the ponies out there are doing?" asked the mare. "They think they're right, and they do something we think is wrong. Would it not be right to stop them, from our point of view, and only then try to change their minds? Would it not be right, from both our point of view and theirs, to try to make our good and evil theirs, then get rid of those who disagree?"
The stallion was silent for a while, and in the end just sighed. "The good news is you'd be dead before you got through the first minute of telling a pony on the streets about how Nightmare Moon is evil, so you don't need to worry about dealing with that. I think it all comes down to whether or not good and evil exist beyond us, or if they aren't merely concepts in our minds. Our own good isn't worth more than theirs if both are so limited."
"What is good anyway, right?" the mare said, looking at the floor.
"Not the food here," said the stallion, trying to lighten the mood. He looked around the room for a moment, then sighed again. "I'll look for something we can work on. There's got to be some paperwork to sort out or other thing to research while we wait."