//------------------------------//
// Chapter 6 - Battery 
// Story: Fred Walsh's Adventures in Equestria 
// by Baguettedood 
//------------------------------//

Chapter 6

“That prophet pony ends up being right with his predictions in the end, but he’s just way too insane for anypony to take him seriously enough to actually consider what he’s talking about. You know, that prediction was eerily similar to Predictions and Prophecies. Guess it must’ve made its way into the book somehow.

“Anyway, science! I hope the pocket calculator helps out with Equestria’s scientific advancement, so long as I didn’t end up screwing something over. Then again, changing things with time travel shouldn’t be possible. It screws with your mind, but I think that predestination is the most likely thing to happen. That’s why time travellers never meet their past selves. The conversation would end up giving both past and present traveller the creeps.”





The door of Canterlot Castle’s blue guest room opened with the same quiet squeak as before, and Fred Walsh walked in, accompanied by some earphone wires and a hand crank. He hoped to MacGyver a battery charger for his wrist computer before it drained. Fred shut the door and walked the short distance to the table on the right side of the room, then deposited the wires and crank onto it. He briefly was distracted by the vanity mirror also residing on the table which doubles as a desk, reminding him that he hadn’t yet examined the other half of the room.

‘I suppose the work can wait a few minutes.’ Fred twisted his head to gaze behind himself. A few seconds later, the rest of his body joined him. Continuing from where left off – the balcony on the far side of the room, opposite the door – he continued examining counter-clockwise.

He almost missed it, but Fred spotted a door roughly 2/3 of the way around the room. The door was painted to blend with the wall design, so it appeared camouflaged. ‘Hm, wonder what’s in there…’ He stepped over to the door for a closer inspection. It seems to have been constructed out of wood, as most doors are. The handle was made of brass and similar to the latch type on some Earth doors, but modified – at least from Fred’s point of view – to compensate for pony physiology. He turned the latch.

Fred opened the door slowly and peeked inside… It was a bathroom. 'Well, that was anticlimactic. Necessary, though.' He closed the door shut once more. He didn’t need to go at the moment.

The last object native to Fred Walsh’s semi-temporary room was a canopy bed with a wooden frame. As with the rest of the room, it followed the same ‘theme,’ being blue on both the frame and covers. He sat down on it for a moment to test it. ‘Rather soft, probably filled with feathers. Nothing seems to be poking through, though. It’s probably enchanted with something that prevents feathers from poking out.’

‘Well, that concludes the tour of the room.’ Fred returned to the desk, now being used as a workbench, passing through the centre of the room which was empty and clean. Back at his makeshift workstation, he began his work on MacGyvering a generator.

Fred started by using his fingernails to expose some insulation on the wires. He had already removed the speakers back at the lab. Since they were old rubber iPod earphones, they were easy to dig into. Fred wrapped the formerly-right earphone piece of the cable around his right hand’s index finger twice to give himself some grip on the cable. With his other hand, Fred used his thumb and middle fingernails to slice the rubber insulation from the cable. The rubber split and was pulled off in seconds. He undid the bindings on his index finger, then wrapped the left earphone cable around it and repeated the procedure.

Fred removed his finger from the cable and grabbed the other side, realising that the audio jack was still attached. He checked to see if it would fit in the wrist computer at all; the power input was larger than the audio jack, “So it should be capable of providing current… Assuming it even works.”

Since Fred ripped the hand crank off the torch, some wires came with it, and it was clear where he could attach the leads of the makeshift wire. He didn’t have any solder (or a soldering iron for that matter); he instead opted to twist the exposed wires to make a connection. Now that both wires were connected and the audio jack sitting in place, Fred grabbed the hand crank and placed it on the edge of the table, with the crank on the outside. With his left hand, he held it down; with his right, he began to turn the crank at a reasonable, but consistent, speed.

After about ten minutes of constant cranking, Fred stopped to check on the battery in the wrist computer. He tapped the home button and ran a battery widget app. With a smile and a nod of approval, he read the battery level: 62%. For a hand crank generator, it was a fairly efficient one. Still, there was a long way to go to reach 100%. Fred turned off the display and kept cranking.