//------------------------------// // Chapter 26: The Third Book of Revelations // Story: Fallout: Equestria. We're no Heroes // by otherunicorn //------------------------------// Chapter 26: The Third Book of Revelations "Well, I gotta admit that is out of this world." The next morning saw me back down on the secret level of Stable Lab Four, sitting in the remains of the pod the Ministry of Awesome’s representative had once occupied. The original access to the secret level was via elevator, the same elevator that moved between the upper levels. The elevator control panel had given no hints to the extent of its travel, displaying only buttons for the upper floors. Knowledge was required to magically activate buttons for the lower level, literally hidden behind the metalwork. The elevator (of course, no longer working) let ponies out into a main gathering area which was serviced by a cafeteria and toilets. Desks were set up against some walls to allow study or discussion. A library of technical manuals and research notes also opened off this area. From there a corridor led down to the machine room to which our access shaft connected. Along this corridor were also various other plant and storage rooms, the reactor, air purification, bio sample storage (still locked) and so on. There was no food processor or generator such as the yeast extract system with which Stable Four was equipped. Those trapped down here would have been limited to what there was in the cafeteria store room, and when that ran out, the paper of the books in the library had become a substitute, a poor food source ultimately supplemented with pony meat. There was also a largish double door that was locked. Apparently the great secret of Stable Lab Four rested beyond that. Any details that had been written in research notes and stored outside of the secure section had been somewhat chewed, if not eaten outright. Down here, the pod pony had lived for many years, out of sight of the occupants of Stable Lab Four. His pod was built into a small room to one side of the machine room we had broken into. A disguised door with machinery placed in front of it had hidden it from view, allowing him to safely sleep in his pod for most of two centuries until one of the stable's unicorns had figured out what was going on, and found a way to trigger the door. Now his pod had become a disadvantage. He could not run or hide himself, short of releasing himself from the pod, and that would have left him very vulnerable anyway; his years of physical inactivity would have led to significant loss of muscle tone. Instead, he had tried to negotiate his position with the stable hierarchy, and when that failed, he had implemented the spoilsport policy, detonating the living quarters of the stable in order to wipe out any who may have opposed him. Two things had gone wrong. First, he found he was unable to re close the door to his room, leaving his pod vulnerable to the few ponies trapped down there with him. Second, one of them had been a cyborg, capable of surviving anything he was able to throw at them in an attempt to preserve himself. The smashed turrets attested to that. The marks in the smashed bubble of his pod indicated Sea Mist had pounded it with her hooves until they broke or cut their way through. Starmetal blades, Red Tape had explained: damn hard and damn sharp, and I should know because the so-called duralloy hoof blades I had were the same stuff. Having read the logs of his last few days, I was able to see some of the horror he had initiated play out as Sea Mist went mad, hunger driving her to eat those who had already fallen, then with her inhibitions against eating pony meat gone, going on to killing the others that were with her. Reading his logs reminded me of something else though, and searching through them failed to locate anything relevant. What was it that my mother had said? "I named you after someone I read about in some very old log files." Red Tape also commented on knowing the reason behind our odd names when we arrived here. "Find anything useful in there, Anne?" Red Tape asked as I climbed out of the pod. "Just the control for the door locks," I answered. "The password wasn't that hard to crack." "So now we can see the great secrets," Demi stated. "You will also see the source of your name, Anne," Red Tape stated as he lead our party towards the doors. Even Duct Tape and Lana were down here with us, Lana riding on Saffron's substantial back. "I couldn't see anything about them in the pod pony's logs," I commented. "The names didn’t come from his logs," Red Tape stated. "The logs the names came from were mine," Lee said. "After all, my name was Teresa before it was changed to Lee, and Anne is my virtual companion." "Your what?" we chorused. "I had a virtual world, sort of like your memory orbs, except that I could interact with it. Anne lived in there," Lee explained. "You told me Anne was a hewman," I objected. "She was a human, just a virtual one. She was a recreation of one of my ancestors, back when she was young and pretty." I shook my head, letting the thread of the conversation drop. Some of Lee's concepts were a bit... odd. Red Tape hit the button that opened the double doors, and they slid into the wall recesses, revealing yet another corridor with a row of closed doors to either side. "Research labs," Red Tape explained, indicating the closed doors. "We'll come back to these later. Come this way," he said heading towards the doors at the far end. "How big is this place?" I asked. "Big enough, though not as big as the stable above. You will be surprised to know this part of the stable actually started out as a mine. Indications were there was a lot of metal ore in the area, and with the war effort needing all the metal it could get, digging this close to society was forgivable, but what the miners found was outside their expectations. Celestia had the discovery covered up, and the miner's memories extracted while she decided what to do about it. Eventually the war pushed it to the back of her mind. When Luna found out about it, she approached the Ministry of Awesome to deal with it. As Rainbow Dash was known to say, her ministry didn't deal with anything that wasn't awesome, and this was about as awesome as it was going to get." Red Tape explained as we arrived at the doors. He tapped a couple of buttons and we heard the locking bolts slide back. Another button opened the doors. We passed through the doors, into a poorly lit room that looked like it had taken blast damage. The straight walls of the stable gave way to older twisted ones as if two structures of different ages had been joined. Cables exited their conduits beside the doors we had come through, to be stretched between periodically placed lamp stands, leading off into the darkness. Red Tape paused to poke a couple of switches, and the lamps lit, illuminating the continuing corridor. The floor was twisted and canted and the walls buckled and heavily oxidized. What remained of the basic structure was unlike any stable I had seen. Holes indicated where equipment had been removed from the walls. One thing did strike me as odd. Despite the obvious damage, it was all very clean. There was no litter, no debris, nor any stray rocks. "Come this way," Red Tape instructed, walking into the damaged area, hooves making dull thuds on the metal floor. We followed. At first I was too busy studying the unusual structure to notice Lee, but when I did glance across at her, I saw she was both fascinated and puzzled by what she was seeing, as if she knew what should have been here, but wasn't seeing it. She had walked ahead of us, and it seemed to me as if she knew exactly where she was going. If it had been Teresa, that would have been understandable, because she had been down here before, but Lee; Lee, who had no memory of her pony life as my mother? "This isn't a part of the stable, is it?" I asked. "Bingo!" Red Tape responded. "This is the secret. This is what the miners stumbled upon." "An older bunker of some sort?" Lana queried Lee stopped, swiveling to face us. "This is my ship," she stated. "We are in my spaceship." I just about choked. I was too busy trying to catch my breath again to notice what the others were saying, but they were certainly taken aback by her statement. Red Tape looked at us. "Well, there you have it folks, we are in her spaceship." I looked doubtful. "Are you for real? I've been hearing about her spaceship for years. She'd wake up, forgetting who she was, wanting to know where the bloody thing was. You mean to tell me the thing really exists?" "Look about. Clearly it does," Red Tape said. "We had to get the starmetal in her head from something alien, didn't we? Starmetal comes from the stars, doesn't it? We are currently in one of the biggest lumps of starmetal in Equestria. This ship was also the source of the technology we used to build your cyborg bodies, although that did take many years for us to be able to replicate with any real success." "There are other ships like this around Equestria?" Saffron asked. "You said it was one of the biggest pieces of starmetal." "I have no idea if there are other ships, or if the other starmetal finds were meteorites," Red Tape said, "but I am not prepared to say it is the biggest when I don't know that for a fact. If one of these starmetal ships fell to Equestria, there may well be others." "This thing looks like it's been buried for centuries!" I observed. "It's a total wreck." "The stable historians think it appeared around the time Nightmare Moon was banished. Records from the time, while somewhat sketchy, hint that there were events of unknown nature around that time. She must have got tangled up with some sort of alien technology, or else how could 'stars' aid her escape? We also have a lot of items in ordinary every day pony life that simply don't make sense. Take for instance the handles on cups, door handles, seats with backs, just to name a few." "Doors need handles..." "If they were named for pony usage, they would be door pedals. We do not have hands. Now consider if some new, excitingly alien event occurred, how many ponies would copy what had been found, simply because it was new or fashionable? I don't know if this ship or another was responsible, but it was a theory strongly favored by some of the historians who worked in this stable," Red Tape suggested. "So you're saying the starmetal in this thing could have been partly responsible for Luna turning into Nightmare Moon?" I asked. "How would I know if it did? The records we had access to were not that specific. It would explain why Celestia was so eager to cover up its more recent discovery. For all we know, it may well have been her that buried it in the first place," Red Tape replied. "So since its rediscovery, it's been corrupting ponies again?" Demi asked. "The pod pony? The Overmare? Even you?" "I don't think so. That corruption was our own. If it had been because of the starmetal, can you imagine the sort of horrid monster I would be by now?" "Instead, you have taken to trying to redeem yourself," I commented, "so yes, I can see your point. And let's not forget Loopy Lee. She's mostly harmless. She doesn't have any desire to become a ruler, although she does exhibit that other rumored trait of starmetal, a desire to kill." "I do not!" a sharp voice from ahead responded. "Not any more than you do, anyway!" I shrugged. "You have me there. Comment retracted, although I will say you are a lot more willing to kill than my mother was." "As are you," Lee responded. "Indeed." She had me there. Sparing a raider's life so it could kill others was not showing mercy or kindness. If anything, it was selfishness: preserving one's own "purity" at the cost of other's lives. Looking back, there weren't any raiders I had shot that I would not shoot again, given the chance, although there were a few I let go while with my mother that really should have been executed on the spot. "Sad, isn't it?" Demi interjected. "We live in an age where a good pony is not determined by if they have killed, but by who they have killed." "Too true, too true," Saffron agreed. "Sorry to interrupt this philosophical discussion, but I want to know where Anne is. And where are my robots?" Lee directed her question to Red Tape. As I was standing here, in plain sight, I can't have been the Anne she was asking about. "You mean your virtual Anne, don't you?" Lee nodded. "As you know, many of the names in this stable came from the log files from this ship," Red Tape said. "The trend was for our researchers to name their children after those mentioned. Matchbox, Mouse, Cameron, Raine, Sonya, Sandy, Teresa, Anne, and Lee for example." "Even Matchbox? That one sounds like a regular pony name," I commented. "Matchbox was a very small computer," Lee explained. "I used to wear it on my wrist. You could think of it as a sort of Pipgirl, if you want an equivalent in your world, although in the case of Matchbox, it was sentient. Speaking of which, I would like to know what happened to that too." Red Tape shrugged. "I don't know. It was only mentioned in the log files. We never found it. Nor do we know what happened to your virtual human, Anne. A few of the others we can guess at." "Oh, yes, I guess you could. You would have found their corpses, wouldn't you?" Red Tape nodded. "We found four bodies, including yours." "Blondie, Ralph and Vince. They died trying to defend the ship, although perhaps were destroyed would be a better way of putting it, as they were androids... robots," Lee confirmed. "The three human passengers were able to escape." She paused, glancing around at the decayed condition of the corridor. "That was a long time ago, wasn't it?" "Those three we found were not living beings?" Red Tape asked. “We did notice differences between their bodies and yours, the most significant being there was nothing in their skulls, leading us to believe they had fully organic brains." "What?" Lee spluttered. "That goes contrary to what I knew! Dammit, why is nothing ever simple?" I almost laughed. "You must have come from a pretty rough life," Lana sympathized. "It wasn't that different to this place actually, meaning Equestria in general," Lee admitted. "Different place, different time. Lots of people who disagreed with each other, fought each other and killed each other. And guns, always guns." So this thing in Lee's head was beginning to understand. I wondered if it would ever reach the point where it realized it was just a machine living on a dead girl's memories, whatever physical form that girl had taken.. "I can't believe you haven't found any of my mousebots," Lee commented. "There were dozens, even hundreds of them." "Perhaps they were removed by whoever first discovered the ship centuries ago. Perhaps they left before it crashed. We did not even find any that had been damaged or destroyed." Red Tape stated. That was when Lee turned and galloped away. Within moments, she had disappeared into the depths of the ship. We could hear her for a little while longer, then silence fell. We stood there, as if we had been switched into sleep mode. Eventually it was Red Tape who broke the silence. "That was unexpected," he said. "Was it?" I asked. "The poor girl has had her world totally ripped out from under her. She has just found out she can't ever go home, and that her family and friends are all gone, long gone." "So what do we do with her, or it, considering it isn't really alive?" Red Tape asked. "She's self aware, and can clearly still feel emotions. I have no idea if she has a soul somehow trapped in there, but should that even matter? It isn't as if Lee's an inanimate object that has simulated life signs, like Sea Mist's foal-doll. This personality has been fighting to be free for years. It never absorbed any of my mother, always reverting back to this version of Lee whenever it could," I said. "And now that she is free from the influence of my mother's brain, she does remember what is happening from day to day." "Perhaps we are looking at this the wrong way," Demi suggested. "She is still a member of the team. She is the only Lee I have ever known. Maybe we need to be asking her what she needs." "Excellent point," I agreed. "First things first though. I'm going to see if I can find her, and I'm going alone." You would think I was used to exploring weird dark tunnels by now, but this place was a whole new level of weird. I was inside starmetal. But then, I guess that wasn't as disturbing as discovering starmetal was inside me! Apparently the flexible sections of our cyborg bodies were also made from a type of metal created after studying some of the weirder types of metal in this ship. There were metals that could flex like skin, yet were strong enough to deflect most bullets; there were metals that could contract like muscles; there were metals that could be shaped and controlled, like that used to make my blood sucking tubules. And of course there were the regular types too, rigidity and malleability varying dependant on type. I had more in common with this spaceship that I liked to admit. Where exactly Lee had gone, I had no idea, so I had no choice but to explore. There was too much shielding for my Pipgirl to locate her. This spaceship of hers no longer had a main door, or whatever its entry hatch was supposed to be called. We had entered the ship where it merged with the stable, some part of the ship perhaps lost to the mining equipment that had discovered it, or to whatever had caused it to crash here in the first place. The corridor in which we had been standing wasn't particularly long, and I soon found myself at some sort of junction, with stairs leading up, as well as doorways opening to other areas on this level. I went through the door to the right, finding myself in a curved passage way that had once been separate from the room it wound around. The wall had been made of some sort of transparent material, most of which was missing, the odd remaining section clinging to parts of the structure of the ship. Finding the doorway, I walked into the circular room, and surveyed it. There was one bed of sorts, made of short segments connected together, though its structure had long since failed and it had collapsed around its centrally positioned supporting pylon. Circular marks on the floor indicated where other similar beds had once stood. More marks, empty bolt holes, and openings through which pipes and wires dangled showed where substantial amounts of equipment had been removed. I wondered if the equipment had been removed before the crash, or if the ponies of Stable Lab Four had stripped it in order to reverse engineer it. I suspected it was the latter. Having a moment of inspiration, I called up the local mapping function of my Pipgirl, and was rewarded with the label "Med-bay". I wondered how much of the equipment had been repurposed for use in our stable. More than likely, that auto-clinic was based on technology taken from this room. I left the med-bay, again following the curved passage, finding it terminated shortly after at an open door. I found myself standing in a shallow but wide room with observation windows along the far side. The windows were set too high for me to see through, so I had to rear up to reach the sill, then bounce and pull myself up to get a good look inside. The lights that the stable staff had installed inside there created a complex array of highlights and shadows as they illuminated the strange equipment within. Balls on rods extended towards each other. Petal like shields were folded back from their multifaceted cores. Hoses, cables and hydraulic rams held it all together in a spider's web of functionality. My Pipgirl listed it as "Portal/jump-gate generator". So this was some sort of space-faring engine, in effect a huge, alien version of a teleporting alicorn's horn. Lee wasn't anywhere around here either. I dropped back to the floor, and returned the way I had come, as it was obvious anything beyond that room was machinery. Arriving back at the junction, I headed up the stairs, and into the room at the top, although "room" was an inadequate way of describing it. It was circular, with differing levels of floor radiating out from the center, and an impressive domed ceiling. It was on par with a stable atrium for size. To my left was another set of stairs, leading up to a raised platform, so I ascended it, walking around the desks and equipment to the front of the platform, allowing me to look over the whole room. The desk itself had been too tall for me to see over, its seat at the height we would usually put our table tops. In front of me, at the center of the circular room, was a cylindrical projection, housing some weird sort of seat on which you would have to lie, surrounded by many controls and gauges. Like the engine, this portion of the ship had not been stripped, although it was obvious that ponies had been investigating it. Perhaps they were trying to work out how to get it to function as a complete unit. My Pipgirl labeled this room "Bridge". This was the heart of Lee's spaceship. I dropped off the platform, and walked around the outer ring of the floor, observing the complex equipment, before returning to the corridor junction and descending the stairs. Directly across from the stairs to the bridge was another corridor leading further into the ship, so I followed it. To one side, I found what appeared to be crew or passenger quarters. It was quite spacious, and the fittings that remained suggested it was meant to sleep only three ponies... er... humans. Even with the larger size of these alien creatures, this ship allowed plenty of space. I imagined the amount of energy that would be required to put a comparable section of a stable into space, and could understand why ponies had put so much effort into trying to unlock its secrets. Clearly Stable Lab Four had researched much more than just cybernetics. It could explain why the advances in cybernetic development was only in recent years. Moving on beyond that, I found the kitchen and meal area. Like the med-bay, this room had been stripped, although enough of it remained to make identifying it without referring to my Pipgirl possible. The corridor ended, the wires and lights passing through into a scary open volume, the floor well down below me, if indeed it could be called a floor. It was curved. I had the feeling that this was part of the "works", not really meant to be accessed by the passengers. My E.F.S. showed no signs of life in that direction, so I turned and made my way back to the junction. For a moment I wondered if Lee, now being a non-organic "life" would show up at all on the E.F.S. Then I remembered robots of Equestrian origin registered. It had to be the amount of metal in these walls that was blocking the signal. I could hear the others were now up on the bridge, so I climbed the stairs and counted heads. Lee wasn't among them. I greeted the others, then returned to my search. In this ship, I was at the disadvantage; Lee knew this place and I didn't. Wondering if perhaps she had doubled back, and left the spaceship, I headed back towards the stable, passing a doorway as I did. I hadn't noticed it last time I passed this way, perhaps because the stable added wires and lamps did not go into it. I glanced at my E.F.S., seeing an amber mark, indicating that there in the dark was a solitary figure. I walked into the room, my eyes adjusting to the extreme gloom, and there, lying on the floor against the far wall was Lee. I approached, and settled down before her, nose to nose. She looked at me, her tear filled cyber-eyes reflecting a little of the light coming in through the open door. "It used to be pink..." she said. "This room. This was my room, and it was pink, even the carpet. My bed used to be right here, and..." She nodded towards a dark opening behind me; another doorway, leading into an even darker area. "my clothes used to be in there, and my private bathroom. Now it is empty, picked over and stripped like the rest of this ship." I felt she was pausing for me to reply, but what could I say? I could sympathize, but I could never understand. This Lee had experienced what Stable Lab Four had done to my mother and I, but at a different order of magnitude. Who was to blame? I didn't know. Perhaps even she didn't know. I recalled my mother's dreams about aliens breaking into the ship and attacking her. Lee quitely spoke again. "I am so lost. I don't know what to do. I don't know if there is anything I can do. I have nothing left. Not my body. Not my brain. I don't think I even have a soul any more." Wow. The chunk of starmetal housing Lee's personality had finally come to see the truth. The persistent delusion of her still possessing a brain was gone. "You have us," I responded. She remained quiet for a few moments, then finally spoke, softly. "Yes, I do, don't I." "So that is what a human looks like," I commented. We were in one of the labs outside the structure of the crashed spaceship. Stable-Tec equipment had been interfaced to the ancient storage device that had been salvaged from one of the ship's consoles. We were sitting around a monitor watching as a little of Lee's former life played before us, complete with subtitles in Equestrian. The human Lee creature was definitely alien to my eyes, her body having no hair on its skin. She did have a gorgeous mane though! Instead of hooves, the ends of her limbs divided into groups of even smaller limbs, long, graceful ones on her forelegs, which she used to manipulate things. Those on her rear legs she kept hidden in shoes most of the time, indicating that they were really not that useful to her, apart from assisting her maintain her balance. Her forelegs were most unsuitable for walking on! I figured that was why she remained upright, and why our pony Lee kept going bipedal. The nearest equivalent we had to fingers was unicorn magic. Even the inherent magic in our hooves and tails that let us use them to manipulate things came nothing close to the delicate control she had. Most of the time she wore clothing, Lee explaining that in her society to go around naked was taboo. I wondered what genetic mutation had cost them their coats of hair. The human Lee wore a bracelet on her arm. While it did not function like our Pipgirls, it bore a distinct physical similarity. I could see where my mother took inspiration for the physical design. Also frequently appearing in Lee's logs were the little robots she called Mousebots. They were funny little angular things, usually fitted with some sort of tool or manipulator, not unlike those on the floaty sphere robots of Stable Four. Apart from the similarity of the tools, no other aspect of their design had appeared in this stable, or elsewhere in Equestria for that matter. Apart from these images, there was no trace of them to be found. After we had watched the segments of Lee's human life, Red Tape switched the playback to a series of shorts, each featuring another of these human creatures. As each appeared, he gave their name. Thus it was I got to see the creatures after which I and other members of our stable had been named. The video section featuring Anne was very different to any of the others, being recorded in a virtual environment. Perhaps it was a good thing we never had interactive memory orbs. Can you imagine how much of our lives would have been wasted lying on our beds with our horns pressed to them, and our minds wandering far off places? I had asked Red Tape if there was any chance we could somehow put Lee back together in her original body. It was an idea fraught with problems. Technical issues aside, some tall alien creature walking around the wasteland would not only have issues with nothing being made to accommodate her form, but also the general fear others have of the unknown. More than likely, ponies would shoot at her on sight. "It isn't going to happen," Red Tape stated, ending my speculation. "There is very little left of the original body. Not to mention that her starmetal brain was inert while in it. Chances are if we tried to move it back, it would shut down, and we would not be able to reactivate it." I thought that in itself could be a blessing for her. Were there any morality issues in shutting her down, or helping her to keep functioning? Was this like the funeral we had held? Were we doing it so we could feel right about ourselves, no matter what became of Lee? I didn't know. Really, I was just doing what I felt was right. To emphasize his point about the impossibility of rebuilding Lee as a human or robotic facsimile of such, Red Tape led us into one of the laboratories we had passed earlier. Within it we found the remains of Lee's original body. Any of the organic matter had long since decayed and been disposed of. Her original bones survived because they were coated in some sort of metal, although they were still cracked and broken in places. The cybernetic systems had been removed from the body for examination and reverse engineering. This process was ultimately destructive as ponies broke the systems into their component parts in order to understand how they worked. Most of the human cyborg’s cybernetic modules had been located in her pelvic region, suggesting like us, she had become sterile when converted. One of these modules had been the inspiration for the artificial intelligence that operated as the brain to the cybernetics interface in the bodies of all cyborg ponies. Another pair of modules removed from the same area had proven to be an alien form of levitation device suggesting that Lee had once been able to hover or fly. In that case, as ponies had already developed their own magic based levitation system, they had studied it for the sake of knowledge alone. Really, our only available course of action was to rebuild Lee as a pony, and our best bet was to use the auto-clinic that had stripped her of her flesh in the first place. With the assistance of Red Tape and Duct Tape, I was able to purge the spoiled bio storage bank attached to the auto-clinic. The bio storage in the secret levels had survived, so we extracted a random sample: female, RNA modified to be radiation resistant and free of disease, coloration unknown. I suspected the sample was related to the work done on Bukov. The sample cartridge was inserted into the purged bank, and the sample set to grow. The machine would control all aspects of the growth, ensuring that no living pony would be created by the process - just the skin and organs that were required. Lee would then be placed in the machine for an extended period while organs were transferred, and her new body was grown around her cyberframe. Normally a patient would be unconscious for the procedure, but with Lee's brain being non-organic, she would have to suffer the whole process conscious. Maybe we would have to sit around telling her stories. When the auto-clinic was finished, a new pony would step from within; she would not be my mother. Now Lee, Lana, Duct Tape, Red Tape and myself were sitting, staring at the auto-clinic, our preparatory work completed. It was just a matter of waiting for the bio storage system to finish cultivating the parts needed to complete Lee, and that was going to take at least a couple of days. Why Lana had joined us down here, I didn't know. Saffron had brought her down earlier, then returned to the surface to look after the shop. Demi was helping him. "Put me into the machine, please," Lana suddenly requested. "Huh?" I asked. "Are you sure you want us to do that? It tore Lee apart last time we used it. We are only thinking of using it again because the damage is already done." "I'm sure," Lana insisted. "I've been thinking over all you have told me for a while. It only cut Lee up because she was already dead, causing it to go into cyberframe maintenance mode. I'm not a cyborg, and I'm not dead. Also, you, Lee and Red Tape have spent hours going over the auto-clinic to make sure it is functioning correctly, so I should be safe." "Yes," I agreed, "we have checked it out. We've also added a manual abort function, but if we use that, the machine simply stops, and you could be trapped inside bleeding while we struggle to get you out." "I am prepared to face the risks. I'm not just doing this for myself," Lana explained. "I've been looking at the map of Equestria, and thinking about our proposed trip to Friendship City. It's too far away. If we have to escort each Stable Four mare out there, we will lose at least one or two to raiders or other attacks. Mares with injuries like Helvetica's would need to be towed or carried the whole way. That makes them, and us, more vulnerable. If we only take one or two mares per trip, it will take us years to get all the mares treated, and by then it may be too late for some of them. We've already abandoned the idea of bringing a specialist doctor back with us, because assuming they even agreed to come, they would not be able to bring the equipment needed, and Stable Four has nothing to offer on that front. This place is a lot closer, and even it was hard enough to get to with my wheelchair breaking down." I thought about what Lana was saying as I looked over the auto-clinic, remembering the horror of it skinning Lee, and how quickly it had acted when it decided there was no pony to save, then I looked back at the beautiful, paralyzed aqua mare, where she was sitting, staring at me, hope and determination in her big cerulean eyes. "I would be devastated if it killed you," I offered. "I wouldn't be too happy about it either, for the few moments it was happening, anyway," Lana responded, "but ultimately, the thing is designed to heal and fix crippled limbs, and I believe that is what it will do. What happened with Lee was a freak occurrence that no pony ever predicted was possible, thus the machine was never programmed to deal with that situation." "Let her use the machine," Red Tape said. Was Red Tape willing to risk it, with his determination to not lose any other pony to this stable? It seemed so. If I wanted any sort of guarantee, this was the best I was going to get. That was when I realized my attitude to Red Tape had changed so much over the last couple of days. I was judging him as a new pony, somepony I had only just met, and was offering him trust as if he had never done anything to warrant otherwise. There was hope for us yet. "Okay, Lana. I hope it does help you. You have my best wishes and prayers," I said. Beyond that, and my hoof on the abort button, there was nothing else I could do. Immediately, the crippled aqua mare removed her modified Pipbuck. "I'm ready," she said. We helped her into the operating chamber of the auto-clinic, and closed the door. Red Tape took his position at the control panel, and manually started what had previously been a fully automatic procedure. The door locked in place, sealing Lana inside. I sat at the viewing window to the chamber, my hoof near the abort button, and intently watched things no pony should be forced to see. The machined carefully lifted Lana in its manipulators, then injected her with a sedative, and she went limp. Then, out came the probes and knives... Footnote: Keep working at it, another level isn't far away. Perk: None. Special thanks to the team of proof readers.