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// Fourth Day, Afternoon Part I—Factory Investigation 
// Story: Cutie Mark Crusaders Fantasian City-State Historians, YAY!!!!!! 
// by Dragonborne Fox 
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The factory of the Aerie was loud and noisy, and as a result the Crusaders and their chaperone could not be allowed inside without the appropriate gear: vests, hardhats, and special earmuffs that muted much of the incessant noise. That was fine by them, as they needed to retain their hearing for the coming days. The vests were a bit too big for even their smallest sizes, but for the job they worked just as well, after a little bit of emergency stitching from Rarity. The hardhats required padding just to be able to fit on the smaller heads, despite the fact that they had perfectly functioning holes for the earmuffs to go into.

Regardless, they were properly suited up, and ready to begin another bout of information hunting, and that was all that mattered at the time. The secondary adult accompanying them, Rhinoc, was leading them through a series of doors and halls that seemed to stretch on for a while. His horn flashed, his magic swept across their eyes for a split-second, and his voice muttered into the heads of the young ones as the latest opened to reveal the expansive factory before them. "Telepathy is particularly important here, as the noise drowns out most other sounds. Here, we communicate by magic, sights, and hoof and claw signals," Rhinoc said telepathically.

The Crusaders grinned, and Sweetie Belle flashed her horn to let her voice echo into Rhinoc's head, "Like this?"

Rhinoc turned to her and smiled, using a hoof to pat the hardhat on her head with a nod. "You're learning, kid," he replied in kind. He swept his hoof out before the factory, where several conveyor belts were processing everything through chutes and doors at a record pace, glimmering with crystals that sparked as they powered them. Mechanical parts that couldn't be easily identified at first went to various wings of the factory, while others jittered and halted in places to let the workers tinker around with them. Others still featured completed machines, undergoing maintenance checks for various ills and malfunctions to see if they could be restored to working order again.

Various tools went hither and thither, again carried by both soldiers and magitek drones, some of whom had special claws in place of their regular drills to carry the heavier equipment. In addition, there were some ground-based drones using treads instead of rotary blades for their method of transport, using extendable eyes on stands to see their surroundings and extendable claws to bring specific tools to specific workers. A few of them came equipped with soldering equipment, and helped carry out maintenance functions on other stretches of the massive factory.

Above much of the factory were securely-railed catwalks going up and down, where safety crew could oversee the goings-on of below, and beneath the conveyors were sturdy grates that one could walk on and see any maintenance that took place further down from those vantage points. The chaperones and Crusaders were standing on one of the catwalks, looking around to see if there were any signs denoting exits and the like, like they had seen back in Equestria whenever they were out of town.

There were a few such signs present, all lit up with crystals, hanging over doors and catwalks and used to denote what was where. As they were at one entrance out of a probable many, the one they stood on had a sign pointing twice in left and right, as well as the distance needed to get there. One led to a safety station on the left, and further past them was another mess hall, probably for those who had deigned fit to bring their lunches here instead of going to the much larger mess hall up above.

To the right, however, were two curious things: 'computer room,' at roughly five-thousand yards of distance or something equivalent, and seven-thousand-five-hundred yards past that was a 'control room.' The Crusaders looked in both directions, and found the catwalk on both sides was forking deeper into the factory, with yet more signs leading elsewhere into the den of magitek and machinations.

Naturally, with so many available paths to take, and only so many hours in the day to cram the information into their report, they turned to Rhinoc for some sort of explanation. He returned the looks with a warm smile and patted their helmets, doing the same for Katie when she looked at him in somewhat of a pout.

Rhinoc's horn flashed, and he telepathically said, "Since this factory is huge, even for us, I'll take you to the most important parts of its catwalks: the scrap sorting, the construction of the magitek, the implantation of the crystals we use to charge and operate every working bit of magitek, and the control room. How's that sound?" When he was met with smiles and beaming eyes, he grinned and turned left to start leading them upon the catwalk that would take them to the most important parts of the factory.

At the first fork, Rhinoc turned to the right and kept trotting briskly, whistling a jaunty tune he could barely hear through his noise mufflers. He did glance briefly behind his hocks to check and see if everyone was following him, and so far, they were, albeit taking the time to admire the factory's scenery with every second and third glance.

This stretch of catwalk was long, but a sign that read 'scrap sorting' at seven-thousand yards helpfully guided the group straight ahead, and into the path of a few more passing workers. A changeling who also had a purple carapace and a much smaller stub-horn on the snout flashed her horn and asked Rhinoc, "What's with the kiddos?"

Rhinoc replied, "School report. Lance insisted I show them around here, since the nooblet's new here." He indicated the wraithling and added, "Otherwise she'd be lost trying to give them the nickel tour, since I'm pretty sure she might not be able to read." The worker nodded to signal her understanding, trotted over to the trio and wraithling, patted their helmeted heads, and went on her way with a lunchbox strapped to her back that rustled with the muted sound of contained food.

Sweetie Belle flashed her horn to ask Rhinoc, "Are they going to be doing that a lot?" Rhinoc shrugged to answer, and continued on the way to the scrap pile. The trio-plus-wraith traded glances, shrugged at one another, and trotted along to keep pace with him. A few more workers did give them odd looks, but didn't really press their more physically grown changeling escort for answers after he flashed his horn and his aura enveloped their heads for a split second.

As long as they could trust Rhinoc to more or less keep the band of kiddos in line, then who were they to complain? At least it wasn't anything they considered particularly hush-hush either, if their flashing horns and hoof and claw signals meant anything as they traded their pseudo-verbal banter.

Another drone flitted by to scan them, but as with the one in the slime ranch, it gave them the OK to continue onwards. After that, the drones more or less let them be as they continued their march towards the scrap heap. It wasn't long after that when they began seeing the first signs of the pile: stage lights lining the area, shining in the direction they were trotting towards, with little scraps of metal here and there lining the catwalk and everything below it. They had to be careful to avoid puncturing their frogs on the miniscule shrapnel, but thanks to the lights it was an easy feat to perform.

The second sign was the vast melting pots and furnaces, and the immense heat they gave off as they melted scrap and converted the metal bits into a more usable, durable form. There were vents above the furnaces and melting pots, and massive fans studded with crystals that redirected the heat elsewhere to avoid overheating the factory. Ingots were cast, hardening in moments with a new, supple, shiny finish to their bodies that they might have lacked in their previous forms. There were more than a few workers checking them for faults and the like as they did their own march on the conveyor belts to elsewhere, even being sorted by color for good measure. There was more iron and copper than they could count, but the occasional silver and the prized gold did fill their places in the line as well, however miniscule their numbers were.

The last, and grandest sign of the scrap pile was the aforementioned pile itself. A force of workers at least a hundred strong were sorting out the scraps of the lot, some big, some small, and some requiring a team of three or more to lift out. It was as tall as the ceiling of the factory, with catwalks going around its edges and chutes bringing more in with noisy tinkling that did not make any meaningful shift upon the surface of the pile.

"And here is the scrap pile, with every single one of its contents foraged from expeditions around Fantasia's main continent," Rhinoc telepathically said, a hoof sweeping out to gesture to the massive pile. "All you see here is what the cats of old left behind, when Faust and Godcat waged their second war. Anything we find to be enchanted, we hand over to NoLegs for further studying; everything else, we knock the rust off of, convert to ingots, and smelt to make our drones, tanks, and pieces of our airships."

Sweetie's horn glowed once more. "But isn't old metal really weak? Does it fall apart easily?" she telepathically asked.

Rhinoc nodded and replied with another flicker of his horn, "Normally, it would be. But the cats of old had better technology than anything we'd ever heard of; whatever they did must have let the metal remain durable and strong, even now. It tends to fall apart in its current form, but after re-smelting it, it comes out good as new." He gestured to the mountain within their mountain again and added, "And sometimes, we find working chips—little motherboards and daughterboards that tell the machines what to do. We take those to another wing of the factory and reprogram them accordingly."

Sweetie turned to the others and grinned, and began jotting notes down on her notepad. Her friends swiftly followed, and before long all of them had a few notes about the factory in their grasp. Katie's attention wasn't on them, but rather the scrap heap, more specifically the workers attending to it. It was only thanks to the spotlights she could see them at all, and she poked Rhinoc on a hind hock with a hoof to get his attention. When he turned to her, she held up a frog facing her chin, and used her other hoof to make a scrubbing motion across its withered surface.

Rhinoc nodded and flashed his horn once more, "Oh yeah, the scrubbing of the rust. A lot of the time, we use our own homemade vinegar to clean it off, and when that's low, we simply use elbow grease to get the job done. We have special sanders and grinders that help get the more stubborn bits of rust off, and almost always the rust loses its fight." He gestured to the foot of the scrap mountain, and conjured a telescope which he gave to the wraithling. She took it in her hooves, snapped her wings open, and took flight to have a better vantage at which to use the telescope.

It didn't take long for her to spot the sparks of the grinders and the fine dust of the sanders as they got to work knocking the rust off. Some were tinkering with objects that were a muted green in appearance, studded with things too small for even the telescope to pick up on—probably the motherboards and daughterboards that Rhinoc had mentioned and whatever was attached to them. 

Those with vinegar bowls held the metal in the liquid for maybe five minutes, then began using wire brushes to scrub those bits clean as a whistle, all the while wearing hazard masks and hazard gloves on their hooves and claws. The vinegar had an odd color to it before the rust came into the equation to make it brown, an unusual purplish sheen that made it look more like a toxic waste product than anything. This applied to whatever bits of patina that besieged the surfaces of the foraged copper as well, but still the mixture came out more brown than anything in the end.

Again, she turned to Rhinoc as she flew back down and gave the telescope to Sweetie Belle, who took it in her magic for her turn to eye the phenomenon below. Rhinoc saw the look and answered, "We use a bit of an odd fruit for our vinegar, mixed with chitil for the best results. The fruit in question is really good for vinegar: it's only grown in changeling hives, and we call it the sour heart."

"Sour heart?" Sweetie Belle telepathically asked, lowering the telescope for a moment to look at the Major. Rhinoc nodded and conjured a purple, glossy, almost sickly-looking fruit with spikes studding its surface that looked like fangs. It was heart-shaped, and so were the two leaves on its short stem, also a sickly purple in color.

He then conjured a chisel and cracked open the fruit with it, whose surface gave a surprisingly woody thunk for something so glossy. He hit it a few more times with the chisel, breaking it down its middle to open it like a flower, where a vinegary stench wafted from its wounds as it revealed its pink flesh and a massive seed in the center, itself looking like two halves of a broken heart with the cracks sealed shut. Every nose in the vicinity curled at the reek of it, and winced as the seed was ripped out of the flesh with a meaty-sounding tear.

Rhinoc then scraped the flesh out of the husk using the chisel, conjured a cordless, crystal-studded blender, put the flesh and the green substance they used for their cocoons in it, closed the lid and let 'er rip. The flesh and chitil was pulped to a fine paste in seconds, then drained into a conjured bowl through a conjured sieve with a cheesecloth blanketing its top. Once the contents of the blender were emptied, he gave the cheese cloth a firm squeeze into the bowl, and lowered it so the Crusaders could see it.

"As you can see and smell, it's not fit for consumption… most of the time. But if a changeling drains too much hate and despair, and we have no other alternatives around, we give that changeling this fruit. The fruit eats the hatred and despair, but… well, let's just say the changelings who have to eat this stuff end up on the toilet for a little while afterwards," Rhinoc said as the kids got a good look at the sloshing purple liquid, with Katie wincing in sympathy at that last bit of information. They shuddered at the aroma, and relaxed when he made the husk, the seed, the tools, and the liquid vanish into the ether.

Sweetie flashed her horn again. "Can it be eaten by anyone else?"

Rhinoc shook his head with a frown. "It's poisonous otherwise. It's called the 'sapient slayer' when consumed by non-changelings," he replied. A thought seemed to hit him as his eyes widened, and he turned to the wraithling, who wilted with more than one grave nod leaving her noggin. She made a motion gesturing to her stomach, before trying her best to imitate a steam kettle with her split mouth, and then giving up to make a fwoosh motion with her hooves in the rough approximation of an explosion.

He nodded in understanding, and promptly moved to redirect the conversation before the Crusaders could ask their wraith escort how bad sour heart really was when consumed in her personal experience. "Now, we head for the construction zone! This will be quick; I can just teleport us all there," he said telepathically.

Sweetie raised a hoof before he lit his horn to prepare the teleport. She asked, "Is it outside the factory?"

Rhinoc shook his head with a smile. "Nope, but otherwise it would require airlifting the whole lot of you up there, and one of us isn't exactly capable of that," he answered, nodding towards Katie as he telepathically said that. With that, he grasped them all in his magic, and they vanished in a burst of light to reappear in an unfamiliar room, where they stood in a surprisingly blank area with two doors on either side, and a window between them. 

Directly opposite of their standing vantage point, and beyond the window for that matter, was a conveyor belt lined with arms equipped with claws and soldering tools which, for the moment, was shut off. Before that conveyor belt was a control panel, fitted with levers and buttons that might have taken someone with a degree in engineering to successfully operate. A few workers were on standby, equipped with welding masks that they briefly raised as they turned to their fellow soldier with quirked brows.

Rhinoc conjured welding masks, four of them small enough to fit on foals' heads, and wrapped them around the trio-plus-wraith in a way that didn't obstruct their safety gear. When he was done with that, he did the same with another welding mask big enough for his own noggin, then turned to his fellow soldiers and lit his horn to grasp their heads for a brief second. They turned to one another, shrugged, and trotted to the control panel to begin operating it.

In seconds, the conveyor whirred to life, and the workers lifted their hooves to gesture the trio over to get a better look behind the safety of their welding masks. They obliged, and watched as motherboards and daughterboards came first, hoisted by the claws and connected with wires and clippings that wouldn't have looked out of place in an Equestrian film, or the house of one of Ponyville's more eccentric members of society. 

Then, mechanical pieces came in, first in caddies and protective, steel boxes for the motherboards and daughterboards, forming into a roughly round shape. Then came round halves of a body with a round half-disc on the front of those halves and more slots on either side of the body as well as the top and a sliding door on the bottom, and a crimson lens that were joined together around the boards and connected and soldered into place with such precision it was almost a marvel in itself. This was followed by wired joints, heavy and rounded with a singular stick on each that attached to the smaller holes and were soldered in seamlessly.

Then, rotary blades came in, and were attached to the top of the robot, followed lastly by the drills and a few mechanical claws that would extend from the bottom for some unknown purpose. Once seemingly complete, the newest drone had its blades, drills, and joints manually spun by the claws to ensure that it could move. When movement of the joints and sliding door for the bottom claw was ensured, the drone was plopped back on the conveyor, and whisked away beyond their immediate sight.

Rhinoc tapped the three on their shoulders, causing them to look at him. He gestured to the door on the right of the room, and moved to open it for them. They, and their wraith escort, trotted through, down a hall that was still hooked to the conveyor belt, and past another door that lead to another room revealing another row of soldering tools and claws, albeit this time with a dumpster's worth of charged crystals outside the other side of the conveyor belt, secured in what seemed to be a giant silver box of some sort with more of those satellite towers pointing down upon the whole mass.

The claws moved to pick up crystal shards, delicately and with oddly padded tips to their mechanical digits that their next-door neighbors lacked. In addition to that, the Crusaders noticed that the crystal slots seemed to be inside the drones as opposed to the outside, as a suction cup lifted the crimson lens out of its slot to let a crystal of a similar color slot right behind where it would sit, causing it to glow the moment it was implanted. The drills were opened halfway down by more suction cups, revealing more slots inside non-hollow shells for three crystals apiece, going through the length of the weapons in question. Once implanted and closed back up, the drills whirred for a bit before stopping.

The drones themselves had their rotary blades angled to show off a slot on their top, into which another crystal was slotted. The drone whirred the rotary blades, then stopped as its singular lens lit up with power. The drone moved its joints experimentally, up, down, left, right, and swiveling to its backside before returning to their proper positions at the front and ready. Then it scanned the trio from beyond the window before giving them another OK, upon which a chute opened up at the top to let the drone fly out.

The Crusaders then took another look at the conveyor belt, realizing that the box where the crystals were in was where it effectively ended. They grinned and jotted down more notes, with Apple Bloom drawing up diagrams in her notepad of the particular drones that they had seen so far. Rhinoc let them take however many notes they deemed necessary, smiling warmly behind his welding mask even as he took it off. He did the polite thing and waited for them to halt their note-taking before removing their masks as well, and making them all vanish into the ether from which he conjured them.

Katie peeked over their shoulders as they scribbled, and would have truly smiled if she were able. Even though she couldn't read the hastily-scrawled notes too well over the flying hooves and pencils, she had to admit that the illustrations provided in said notepads gave her something of a clue as to what the notes were about. As they wrote, another drone, this one bearing treads and extendable claws, came onto the conveyor to receive its crystals behind its lens, in its joints, and in the axles of its sprockets and idlers. As soon as it whirred to life and gave them another scan, the hatch opened and a massive claw reached in to pick it up by the treads, though gently so it wouldn't disassemble in the liftoff.

It took a few moments of writing out what they heard and saw so far, but the youngsters looked at their second escort with wide and excited smiles that beamed as much as their eyes. Rhinoc smiled back, lit his horn, and teleported them away to yet another new room filled with more workers that looked at them funny as soon as they appeared.

One golden-eyed soldier flashed his horn, and a golden aura washed over Rhinoc's head as the disapprovement began. "You know damn well you're not supposed to be bringing children here," the soldier telepathically hissed.

Rhinoc grinned wryly. His horn flashed in kind, "Sorry, got overruled by Lance himself. Take it up with his crazy ass." He indicated the children-plus-wraith with a hoof and added, "Besides, I'm not giving out our most prized info to them, just how things work around here."

The golden-eyed soldier glowered. His horn flashed again. "That's a crock of bull and you know it. You're just using the madstallion as an excuse to do whatever you want," he telepathically grumbled.

"You're just mad you're not allowed around children, because of your piss-poor performance in that one babysitting gig you had," Rhinoc retorted, his grin widening.

The golden-eyed soldier scowled, an eye and his wings twitching in tandem. "Oh, now you're gonna lord that incident over my head? The one that damn near got me gelded? Real classy, Major, real classy."

Katie's orbs began darting between the two every time their horns flashed. When the Crusaders looked at her, she shrugged without averting her gaze, and continued to watch the nonverbal back and forth for signs of one of the two more experienced soldiers relenting. Eventually, the golden-eyed soldier took an involuntary step back when Rhinoc lifted a hoof as if about to jab it into his fellow soldier's chest. The soldier grumbled telepathically as he turned to fly out of the room through an exit in the back, "Fine! But don't come crying to me if they screw up the situation beyond all repair!"

The trio took the chance to look around the room; behind them was a lift, and there were no doors leading either in or out of the room. Screens filled the walls between the lift and the control panel, which showed off every possible vantage point in the factory, from the smaller mess hall to even a screen showing the control room itself. A window was set just behind the control panel, overlooking the factory in a way not unlike the higher echelons of the Cloudsdale Weather Facility. 

Scootaloo trotted to the window to behold everything in its autonomous glory, her expression as bright as a thousand suns. She wasted no time jotting down the details, occasionally looking to a screen or window to make sure the intel matched up. In seconds, her bestest friends mimicked her motions, and before long all were jotting down information that would make Cheerilee have several heart attacks in quick succession out of pure joy.

It wasn't long after they finished that they began trading notes, each seeing what their friends had written down. Giggling ensued as they envisioned the looks on everypony's faces back home; the feeling that this was going to be the bestest report ever filling them with youthfully abundant levels of euphoria. Sure, it might not top the feeling that would come whenever their  cutie marks decided to finally bless them, but this? It was definitely a close second. Seeing their friends and idol again was just an incidental bonus to it all.

Katie, however, noticed something was up. Her orbs were intently focused on a series of cameras showing connecting catwalks, upon which five very important figures in the military made a mad gallop in what seemed to be random directions, with weapons drawn and military gear already adorning their bodies. It didn't take long for those cameras to have red lights overtake their colors either, flashing intermittently even as alarms began blaring—and with her hearing, not even the noise mufflers could hope to cancel the alarms out. She trotted over to the trio and tapped their shoulders with a hoof, causing them to look at her as she made to remove her own earmuffs.

Curious, the trio obliged, and so did Rhinoc—and that was when they heard it, a low drone and a robotic voice saying, "Warning: hacking attempt in the computer room from beyond the Aerie. Warning: hacking attempt in the computer room from beyond the Aerie. All personnel are advised to take shelter immediately."

"Hacking attempt? What's that mean?" Sweetie Belle asked, a brow furrowed as Katie wordlessly gestured to a camera showing off a room stacked with computer monitors, towers, server caddies and then some, where an entity already began emerging from the masses of monitors through their screens and pooling in the center of the room, its coming heralded by a phenomenon that, in a way, was not unlike the rippling surface of a pond in a rainstorm. 

It… was hard to describe; its appearance seemed to shift from one form to the next, all with limbs appearing out of place one second and then in their proper positions the next, like a game at the arcade was glitching out something fierce. The only constant feature to its mass, aside from the hellish sneer that it wore with every face it cycled through, was an odd distortion around its body—as though it were never meant to exist in the first place, a not-light that dimmed the room it stood in.

Rhinoc paled upon sighting the whatever-it-was, even as his superiors skid to a dead stop in the room it took up residence in. Eye contact was established—and that was all it took for the group to be launched into a frenzy of movement, casting spells, slashing with swords, and firing bullets from a gunblade that didn't seem to damage the entity. "Oh no… it's that damned mobile virus thing again…" he muttered in dismay, racing up to the control panel in a heartbeat to oversee the situation from the window. 

The workers took heed of the emergency lights; everyone halted what they were doing and raced to the nearest safe rooms available to wait out the situation. Even the conveyor belts ceased movement, and the drones promptly shut themselves off and came to rest where they stood and hovered. Seeing this, he turned to the Crusaders and the wraithling. "Listen to me very carefully: that… thing that just besieged the entire factory cannot be fought by foals, or regular soldiers. It is immune to almost everything we have thrown at it in the past. If we wait here, the higher-ups should dispatch it soon."

Yet as he said that, he heard the entity laughing through the audio captured from the camera showing off the fight, even as it stretched across the room to slap three ponies to the ground snout-first, without so much a hint of a bone breaking or blood being spilled. Yet the tell-tale clatter of their weapons stirred something in the Crusaders, who, while wide-eyed and pale-faced with horror, felt something nudging them into action.

They turned to Rhinoc in unison, and said in tandem, "We gotta help them!"

Rhinoc's pupils would have shrank if he were wearing a disguise. As it stood, sweat beaded his brow. "But you have no combat experience! You don't even have your cutie marks yet! What makes you think you can stop that hellspawn?" he asked sincerely.

Sweetie stood firm, stomping a hoof as she made the pencils and notepads vanish into the ether. "I think it's playing for keeps this time! We can't let it take over the Aerie!" she said firmly.

Scootaloo buzzed her wings, her face hardening into a no-nonsense expression one would expect to see on the skull of a drill sergeant instead of a school-aged foal. "Whatever it is, we can't let it get away with… whatever it wants to do!" she agreed.

Apple Bloom nodded. "If'n we get hurt, we only have ourselves ta blame. But if'n we get hurt protecting the Aerie, and that thing goes down, that's all that matters, right?" She added with a hoofstomp of her own, "If'n Matt coulda cast Ragnarok as a kid, then you can be darn sure we can help them take out that whatchamacallit and make sure it stays away from here!"

Rhinoc frowned at the resolute expressions on the fillies' faces, and after being more or less glared down by them, resigned himself to a firm scolding from Lance when all was said and done. "Alright… I trust you. But I'm warning you now: that thing pulls no punches. You shouldn't, either." With that, his horn lit up, and he teleported the group to the computer room, arriving just in time to hear the entity's jeering laughter echo around the battleground.