//------------------------------//
// Plus, Fluttershy Was a Spy 
// Story: And Then, Twilight Was a Marine 
// by totallynotabrony 
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	Fluttershy felt like she was drowning.  Her eyes snapped open and she coughed, spitting out a fizzy, slightly bitter beverage.  Above her was a worried face, sporting reddish whiskers and framed by more locks of the same.
“What’s your name, lass?”  His voice carried plenty of accent.
“F-Fluttershy.”  Her chest heaved, attempting to regain her breath.
The face, of what she realized must be a man, nodded and gently let her head down from the position in which he had apparently been force feeding her from an amber glass bottle.  The label on it read Killian's.
He moved a few steps away and gave Fluttershy room to take in her surroundings.  She sat up on the bed and looked around.  The place appeared to be a small hotel room.  She could hear the sounds of a city outside the curtained window.  It seemed to be evening.
Fluttershy knew she had to figure out what was going on, to see if this situation was important to what her friends were trying to figure out, or if it was just a random event in the life of whoever she had replaced.  She asked, “Who are you?”
“Call me Mick.  It’s easier to pronounce than my name, and close enough regardless, despite being on the wrong side of an ethnic slur.”  The man shrugged.  “I’m a private contractor working for the United States National Security Agency.  The NSA assigned me to work with you as your intoxication specialist.”
Fluttershy frowned.  “Intoxication?”
“Aye, the Killian’s.  Apparently me being Irish is qualification enough.”  He shrugged again.  “I’m the one who keeps you in the stuff so you can pass undetected.”
Fluttershy leaned forward, sensing this was important.  “Undetected by what?”
“Security guards or polygraphs.  If you’re Fluttershy, then you don’t know anything, so you’re not lying when you say that you don’t know anything.  We use it to smuggle you into places.”
“Smuggle me where?”
“Well, right now we’re in Shanghai.”
“Where is that?”
“China.”
Fluttershy swallowed hard.  Yes, this was important.
Mick checked his watch.  “It’s about time to be going.  We have to be there after nightfall, so all the nerds will have gone home for the day.  Or at least most of them.  Hackers never truly sleep.  It doesn’t matter that it’s Christmas Eve.”
“Hackers?” Fluttershy asked, getting up.
“Electronic bandits.  Thieves that don’t need to break into your house to steal your valuables.  Total arseholes.  It’s the NSA’s job to catch them, patrolling the internet, using digital forensics, jaming with the console cowboys in cyberspace.”
“Oh, okay.”  Fluttershy nodded.  “What’s Christmas?”
“A holiday.  The Chinese don’t celebrate it, but they do manufacture most of the stuff that people who do buy for the event.”  
Mick paused, continuing the pack things up, and changed the conversation to a different subject.  “We’ve managed to track a major group of hackers to this city.  One of them must have gotten a little sloppy and we actually identified the building where they operate.”
“What will we do?”  Fluttershy asked quietly as she got off the bed and began to help him clean up the room.
“The internet is great, but there’s only so much we can do, especially if they’re prepared to counter our hacking.  Sometimes we need a backdoor.”
“Like…bypassing the main defenses?”
“That’s right.”
Fluttershy finished packing all the gear that looked like it was sized to fit her.  She slung the pack over her shoulders and followed Mick out of the room.  The two of them went down the hallway and got into an elevator.  Mick pushed the button for the ground floor.
There was a few seconds of silence as the elevator started to descend.  Quiet music played in the background.  Fluttershy shifted a little on her hooves.  She looked at the panel of buttons.  “Can you hack that?”
“Huh?”  Mick glanced at the panel.  “I suppose so, although if it’s not connected to the internet it would be more difficult.”
The entered the hotel lobby, crossed it, and went out the door.  The weather was chilly and a few snowflakes drifted down from the night sky.  Everywhere Fluttershy looked, there seemed to be a holiday atmosphere.
Mick quickly corrected her on that.  “Like I said, it may look like Christmas here, but that’s just because they sell it to us.”
“Did they…hack Christmas, too?”
“Sometimes it seems that way.”  Mick sighed, but then smiled.  “This is a perfect opportunity for your cover, though.  Let’s take a walk and do a little sightseeing.”
They strolled down the street looking at the decorations.  Fluttershy would occasionally stop and ask Mick if he could hack something.  When she asked about a bushel of plastic mistletoe, he sighed with exasperation.
They paused at a street corner.  Mick looked around and then knelt down to Fluttershy.  “Here, I’m going to put this receiver in your ear.”
He poked it in carefully, the tufts of hair concealing the small device.
“What is it for?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you later.  Right now, we just need to get you into position.”  Mick pointed down the street to where two men in uniform stood.  “I want you to walk that direction.  Those guys will probably stop you.  Just talk to them and be polite.”
“Okay.”  Fluttershy began to walk, just as she had been instructed.  She was a little nervous, but nothing indicated that she was in trouble.  Yet, anyway.  As she drew even with the men, they stepped towards her and said something in a language she didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry?” she asked.
One of the men switched to recognizable speech.  “Why are you passing in this direction?”
“I’m just sightseeing.”  It was true, after all.
“What is your name?”
“Fluttershy.”
The two men consulted a small device and appeared to be rapidly poking buttons.  Fluttershy wondered if it could be hacked.  Based on the trouble they seemed to be having, perhaps it already had.
After a few minutes, one of the men turned back to her.  “Are you just a tourist?  Do you plan to hurt the Chinese government?”
“Oh no, I would never hurt anyone!”
They continued to give her a critical eye for a few more seconds and then waved her through.  Fluttershy continued on her way.
“You did well, lass.” said Mick’s voice in her ear.  “Don’t give any indication that you can hear me.  Just keep walking and take a right on the next street.”
Fluttershy did as she was told.  Mick continued talking.  “Your earpiece has a small GPS beacon in it so I can track you.  That will become more difficult as you go along, with interference and such, but I’ll help you as much as I can.  Open your bag.”
Pausing to take off the backpack, Fluttershy discovered a black suit inside.  It was not quite a Dangerous Mission Outfit, lacking the cute bunny ears, but she supposed it looked stealthy enough.  With instructions from Mick, she slipped it on, instantly feeling more hackery and secret agenty.
“Okay,” said Mick, “Look for the nearby office building.  It should be mostly white in color, twelve stories tall, and with a lot of windows.  It’s also surrounded by a wall and has soldiers guarding it.”
“Oh my,” Fluttershy murmured to herself.  She easily spotted the compound he was talking about.
“I want you to go inside,” Mick said.
Fluttershy nearly squeaked in surprise.
“They aren’t expecting a penetration from the air.  Actually, they're not expecting a physical penetration at all.  That's the beauty of this op - old school gets things done.  Nerds don't expect non-internet attacks.  Now get going.  You’re wearing black and it’s night.  You’ll be fine.  Just fly to the roof.”
Fluttershy gulped and forced her wings to spread.  She hesitantly took to the air, carrying the backpack.  As predicted, none of the guards looked upward as she drifted overhead.
She gently set her hooves on the rooftop.  Mick spoke to her again.  “There should be a door nearby.  It leads down to a bank of cooling systems that keep their security servers in check.  If we force the cooling to stop, it should shut down the computers to keep them from overheating.   When that happens, our software should be able to get past the security and into their deeper systems.”
Fluttershy wasn’t sure how that worked, but decided that the man who spoke the technobabble probably knew what he was talking about.  She quietly opened the rooftop door and descended the stairs inside.  She realized this must be the literal “backdoor” the NSA was looking for.  
Mick’s voice was scratchier now, more indistinct.  “I need you to find the…” a burst of static cut in “…cooling system.  It should be…” more static.
Fluttershy poked at her ear, trying to improve the reception.  Mick continued.  “…bomb.  Small one, just a poof, really….trying to see what they’re doing.  Something…Equestria Project…interested to know…”
That caught Fluttershy’s attention.  This must be the server farm where the malware and hacking appearing on the Ponynet was originating from.  She had to stop them!
While Mick’s directions were unintelligible, Fluttershy decided that to be sure, she had to take out the most pieces of equipment possible.  He might have said something about just the small ones, but surely he wouldn’t be mad if she did more than he asked?
She carefully moved through the maze of whirring machines, eventually finding a staircase that led lower.  On the next floor, there was even more equipment, including tall computer banks and associated gear.  Mick’s instructions had gone completely silent by this point.
There were large tanks around the room that connected to a network of piping.  Fluttershy couldn’t read the foreign labels, but surmised from the pictograms that it contained some sort of coolant, maybe liquid nitrogen.  That seemed like something vital to the cooling system.
She dug into her backpack, finding a small device with a magnet on one side and an electronic timer on the other.  She pressed the button and it started counting down from three minutes.
Fluttershy quickly affixed it to the main valve of the piping.  She looked around, trying to remember which direction she had come in from.
“Oh dear.”  Fluttershy’s head whipped around, looking frantically for the stairs.  She darted towards the corners of the building, looking for a way off this floor.
Finally finding the stairs, she shot up them and then faced another challenge of picking her way through the field of cooling pumps and condensers.  She didn’t know how much time was left when she found the door to the roof, and decided the best course of action was to get airborne, and quickly.
Seconds after her hooves left the roof, there was a small pop as the detonator she’d planted went off.  It was immediately followed by a whoosh as all the pressurized coolant was suddenly released.  It flooded the computer rooms, shattering rapidly spinning hard drives and icing motherboards.  
On the upper floor, the pumps were instantly starved of coolant but hadn’t been able to shut down quickly enough and began to explode in showers of metal fragments.
The sudden loss of load on the building’s electrical grid overpowered the remaining floors and they each blew out their circuit boxes with showers of sparks.  The whole building, the data is computers contained, and all associated systems, went dark.
Everywhere in the city, people looked up from their holiday decorations and turned towards the distant explosions, thinking them festive fireworks.  It was the perfect atmosphere for the season.
Fluttershy turned to look back at the carnage she’d caused.  A smiled played at her lips.  “Yay!”

And that's how the NSA saved Christmas.