//------------------------------// // Chapter One // Story: Station Thirteen // by Jarvy Jared //------------------------------// Cypress Flash had been sitting at his desk when, without so much of a word of greeting, Peppy Pusher dropped two tall stacks of papers in front of him and said, “Take these and follow me.” Logistics was a quiet place already, so when she had made the order, her voice bounced off of the circular walls. Both the order and the sudden dropping-off made Cypress jump up, startled. The stacks had displaced Cypress’s collection of funky-looking metal coils and springs, and it took a few seconds for him to recover them all.  “Can I, uh, get any more info?” he asked. But Peppy was already walking away. Cypress sighed; that tracked with her. Ever since his first day working at Station Thirteen, which had happened about a month ago, she’d carried an attitude of “Do as I say, and question me later.” He felt that her name was one of irony, for nothing about her seemed peppy.  He lit his horn, lifted the stacks, and, with a sigh to himself, followed after her. He had to speed up to cover the distance between them, nearly tripping on a couple of thick wires snaking across the floor to a series of computer monitors and electronic record-keeping equipment. Peppy’s shadow bounced steadily under the soft gaze cast by the fluorescent ceiling lights, while his looked like a mix of a kirin and some warped clay sculpture. “Are you going to tell me what this is about?” he asked once he’d caught up.  “It’s better to show than to speak,” she replied.  Soon they’d left the Logistics department and were heading through a short corridor unfamiliar to Cypress. At the end, there was a single, red-sheeted door whose window orifice betrayed a thick darkness. They stopped short of the door, and Peppy turned around to face him.  “There’s a conference I have to attend, to discuss a recent development in supply transportation. Princess Twilight Sparkle personally requested that I come.” Cypress doubted that there was anything personal about it—in all likelihood, she’d received an invitation marked with the royal seal, and that was the extent of her connection to her Highness. “When are you leaving?” “Later today. The conference is expected to be a long one, followed most likely by several meetings with interested parties. So I will be off-site for a number of days.” “Today?!” Cypress nearly lost a hold of all the papers. “But, the department—I can’t run it by myself—” “Calm down.” Peppy stuck him with an intense, yet paradoxically calming, glare. “You shouldn’t have to. Remember all that work you did during training? That was in anticipation of this event. You’ve already met the quota for work for the next three months, give or take a few extraneous assignments here and there. So you should be fine.” “Right…” He sensed Peppy’s glare becoming colder, and he cleared his throat. “Well, then, what’s all this? Paper? I thought you told me that we’ve been working solely with digital work?” “We have. But that’s a recent development compared to how old this observatory is. That,” she said, nodding to the papers, “are all the old inventory reports from back when this place was first built. And in there”—she turned and pointed her horn towards the door—“contains all of the old supplies we used back then.” “Why do we have them still around?” She sighed irritably. “Look, I don’t have time to give you the whole history lesson. All you need to know is that we’ve been gradually transitioning out of the old tech into the new—hence why you’re seeing a lot more computers and high-tech stuff here than you would in most other places. But we’re still relying on some outdated technology that, if they fail, requires replacement. That storeroom contains items that’ll be useful in case that happens. So we keep it around, just in case.” She turned and pointed a hoof at the piles of paper. “Still, we’re learning that paper can be destroyed or ruined, so what you’ll be doing while I’m away is digitizing all of these inventory reports. You’ll also be checking to see that their contents match what we have back there.” Cypress lowered the piles onto the corridor’s floor. “Two piles? That doesn’t seem that bad.” “There are a dozen or so more boxes of them back in my office. I’ll bring them to you before I leave.” She sauntered past him while that information rendered him thunderstruck. Then, she stopped. “One more thing. Be careful in there.” “Why? Afraid I’ll get a papercut?” he said without thinking. She glared at him, and he wilted, embarrassed. “I mean that it’s very dusty in there. Practically filled to the brim. When I checked it two days ago, I nearly had an asthma attack on account of all that. Nopony’s been in there to clean in ages, so if you breathe—breathe carefully.” Cypress spent the rest of the day putting the task aside, in favor of other responsibilities, and Peppy seemed to delight in watching him go through a slew of excuses, all to put the assignment off for even a minute longer. When she was gone and when he no longer had an audience to which to generate an excuse for himself, he let out a long sigh, grabbed what boxes he could, and entered the storeroom, wondering if perhaps he should look for a gas mask or air filtration device.   Yet, he quickly found that perhaps Peppy’s words were a bit of an exaggeration. The storeroom, though small and lit dimly by a single copper bulb, was alarmingly clean—cleaner than his own quarters, though that, he knew, was not much of a bar. Across the dozens of shelves that held boxes of supplies and which were labeled with curiously loopy hoofwriting, he could not find one speck of dust. He scanned the ceiling to see if some sort of ventilation system was in place, but nothing of that sort appeared to line either the top of the room nor the sides; indeed, he could not find pipes, conduits, or other such connections. The storeroom appeared severed from the rest of Logistics.  “She’s just messing with me,” he muttered to himself. Though he could not imagine why she’d do so over a matter as simple as dust. He looked at the boxes as though hoping they would answer him, but within those four cramped walls, no sound escaped. It was as though it was not just a separate area from the Logistics department, but from Station Thirteen as a whole. He sighed, then bowed his head to the task at hoof. He worked the rest of the night, then returned the next day, already dreading continuing. Boredom began as a light infection before it manifested across the whole of his body, making his arms and legs tingle. His neck stiffened from having to bob his head up and down as he went through the aisles, checking inventory against log, then logging the log into the digital database. His eyelids drooped with each item examined, and more than once, he was tempted to set the whole room on fire, if only to expedite both it and his end.  Distracted by such tedium, he almost missed the first discrepancy. “Fourteen?” he said, frowning. Beneath him was a box of circuitry. The inventory report told him that fourteen packages of circuitry had been ordered, but only eleven were in the box. He turned the page to see if they had been used to replace something, but that side was blank—Peppy hadn’t signed off on a replacement request. He flipped through the old report twice just to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, and he wasn’t. He checked another report against one of the boxes next to that one. Lightbulbs, the kind that you’d see in old factories before Princess Twilight had implemented the use of eco-friendly ones. This one was fine; twelve packages remained, but two had been used to replace the bulbs in one of the janitor closets. He frowned, shuffling the papers in his hooves. Was this perhaps just an error in the documents? Or a possible lapse on Peppy’s part? He supposed it wasn’t entirely an impossible scenario, yet couldn’t imagine his supervisor making such a mistake.   “It’s just a small discrepancy,” he mumbled to no one in particular. He was looking at that box again. “It shouldn’t matter. Right? Yeah, it’s nothing big…” Another few moments passed before he grunted. “By the Silence, I hate this.” And there was more reason for him to hate this. Within the next hour, he’d discovered a total of four boxes on the middle row with similar discrepancies between what their reports indicated and what was actually in them, and he could find no official markings or signatures to explain them away. What’s more, when he tallied them up, he found that the number of items missing was strangely miniscule. One might have missed them entirely had one not been looking for them in the first place.  Cypress looked at the boxes with bewildered eyes. He hadn’t even gotten through the room’s first two rows. Packages of circuitry, wires, fiber optics, silicon chips—all were missing, yet the amount missing remained criminally small, almost negligible.  “Of all the times Peppy has to be away,” he groaned.  “Of all the times she’s away,” Cypress groaned. He knew what he had to do next—figure out where these supplies had gone before his supervisor came back and canned him. But the thought annoyed him. It’d be one thing if many were missing, but to have so few—surely it wouldn’t matter, would it? Cypress rose. He groaned as his back cracked—he’d been sitting for hours in this room prior to the discovery. The digital clock, displayed via a  wristband around his right hoof, showed the time as just after one. The distant pangs of hunger echoed somewhere inside him. “Fine,” he grumbled. “Eat first, decide what to do next after.”