Chapter 9
It had been ten minutes since Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle had gone to fetch Doctor Nightly and Nurse Redheart to tend to the wounds of the Cultus Mechanius Templars, Apple Bloom had opted to stay behind to watch them, she sat next to the broken combot, ready to give the robot another kick should the Templars try anything funny. They sat in almost complete silence, with the exception of the groans from the wounded support Saracens. The Templars were completely silent, though, Apple Bloom figured that probably had something to do with the helmets they wore muffling the noise.
‘Little Filly?’ The templar leader asked. Apple Bloom turned and looked directly at him, but she said nothing. ‘Could you come here, and take off my helmet? Please?’
Apple Bloom considered the request for a moment; she got up and trotted over to him. She figured that it wasn’t in his best interests to hurt her. After all, should anything happen to her, Doctor Nightly and Nurse Redheart wouldn’t help them, and they’d bleed to death. Apple Bloom stopped a few centimetres away from the leader and looked him over. She pulled down the hood of his cloak. Noticing instantly how to take the helmet off, she pressed at the release tabs with her hoof. The helmet hissed loudly and then opened up with a small pop before falling off completely.
Apple Bloom gasped and took a step back when she looked at the leader’s face. He was an earth pony stallion, this much, she had already known, his coat was a dark crème colour, and his mane a light chestnut, but his eyes... his eyes stood out. They were unlike anything Apple Bloom had ever seen. For one, they were pitch black, and instead of normal irises, there were small red dots in the middle of them.
That was when Apple Bloom realised, they weren’t real. ‘What’s wrong with yer eyes?’ she asked.
‘I was born blind’, the leader said simply. ‘As was my father before me, and his father, and his, blindness has long been a history in my family’, the leader said with a cough. ‘I lived the first eight years of my life completely blind. When I was old enough, I had these implants put in. Can you imagine what it was like seeing for the first time? The first thing I saw was my father. I was terribly frightened of him, until I realised that he was my father, I am who I am because of the Cult’s technology, anywhere else, I would still be wondering around in the dark’.
‘Who are ya?’ Apple Bloom asked.
‘I am Chapter Master Xerxes of the Manehattan Cultus Mechanius’, Xerxes said. ‘When one of my Templars told me that he had discovered that the Everfree Plains Missile Base was still operational, I had to come and see it for myself, more importantly, we had to secure it before Archimedes came to take it for himself’.
‘Who’s Archimedes?’ Apple Bloom asked.
‘Long story...’ Xerxes said with a cough. ‘Too long...’
Apple Bloom’s ears perked up, the sound of hoof steps approached. Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, Doctor Nightly, Nurse Redheart and Nurse Tenderheart, along with several other members of the hospital’s staff rounded the corner with stretchers. Nurse Redheart and Nurse Tenderheart snapped to work, completely ignoring anything that wasn’t the injured.
‘Tenderheart, help me get them out of these suits! They’re too heavy to move them in’, one of the other unicorn doctors, a caramel coloured one with a light brown mane that Apple Bloom didn’t know the name of said.
The only one who didn’t seem to be focused on his work was Doctor Nightly, he was more concerned with the open door to EPMB, he slowly walked towards it, past Apple Bloom, whose protests to leave it alone fell on deaf ears.
‘Why do I feel like I’ve been here before?’ Doctor Nightly asked. The black unicorn’s amber eyes peering over the inside of the Missile Base
‘Doctor Nightly!’ Nurse Redheart called to him. ‘We need your help over here!’
Doctor Nightly snapped out of it, he shook his head and went back over, kneeling before Xerxes. ‘I’m Doctor Nightly, and I’m here to help you’.
‘Uh huh’, Xerxes said.
...
‘Doctor Nightly proved to be a bit of an issue in the early days’, Scootaloo said as she leaned back in the chair. ‘After he and his staff took Xerxes and his group to the hospital, he plied us with questions about EPMB’.
‘We kept to our story that we didn’t know anything about it’, Sweetie Belle said. ‘Just that we were out playing in Whitetail Wood, and happened to come across the cave, and we found the Templars like that’.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders had the full group’s attention. Part of the story that they had mentioned had specifically caught the attention of Vinyl Scratch. ‘Did this Xerxes tell you any more about this Archimedes pony?’ she asked.
‘Xerxes? Nope’, Apple Bloom said. ‘All he said was that it was a long story’.
‘None of the templars would tell us anything about him’, Sweetie Belle added. ‘One of the Saracens though...’
...
‘Archimedes? What do you want to know about him for?’ One of the Saracens, a unicorn by the name of Neon Lights asked. Her coat was a bright cyan, her mane was cobalt blue, almost matching her Saracen robes, and her eyes were a bright orange.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders were sitting in the hospital room which contained all of the Cultus Mechanius Saracens, in a private ward sectioned off from the rest of the hospital; Doctor Nightly didn’t want anyone wandering in with questions about these new ponies. He’d gone to the police and asked for several uniformed officers to keep access restricted. For once in their lives, the isolation didn’t extend to the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
‘We heard Xerxes talking about him, sounds like he doesn’t like him’, Scootaloo said.
‘Heh’, Neon chuckled. ‘Kid, nopony likes Archimedes, and for good reason, he’s ‘in charge’ of the Fillydelphia chapter of the Cultus Mechanius, he calls himself chapter master, whether he should be is a matter of opinion’.
‘What happened?’ Sweetie Belle asked.
‘I really shouldn’t get into it’, Neon said. ‘We’re not supposed to talk about it with outsiders, suffice it to say, Archimedes isn’t too popular, and it wouldn’t be wise to go around asking questions about him, got it?’
The Cutie Mark Crusaders looked disappointedly at Neon, however she refused to budge, and eventually they gave up and left Neon alone, and reconvened outside in the hallway. ‘You think this Archimedes pony is important?’ Scootaloo asked.
Apple Bloom nodded her head in affirmation. ‘Xerxes said he’d wanna come take EPMB fer himself’.
‘He can’t do that! We found it first!’ Sweetie Belle cried out.
‘Exactly, that’s why we ain’t gonna let nopony take it away from us, not Archimedes, not Xerxes, not nopony’, Apple Bloom said. ‘Ah got an idea’.
Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo snuck out of the hospital through an open window and made their way back to Whitetail Wood, entering the cave and making their way into EPMB. The door was still open from when Xerxes and his templars tried to take it; the trio trotted inside and shut the door behind them. ‘Ah know Ah saw somethin’ in here befer’, she said as they made their way back to the control room, where they had left the piles of books, Apple Bloom dug through them looking for a specific one. ‘Both Xerxes and Archimedes wanna use EPMB fer something or another, who knows what? That ain’t important, we’re gonna... oh, wait no, that’s the wrong book... we’re gonna use it fer somethin’ that they ain’t’.
Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo looked at each other in confusion. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘Easy!’ Apple Bloom said, as she finally found the book that she was looking for. The minifacturing plant, and you! ‘We’re gonna make things! Things the ponies of Equestria will want! We’ll get popular support, and then tha Cultus Mechanius will be subject ta our terms, not theirs!’
‘But we’re just kids!’ Scootaloo argued.
‘Exactly why we can’t let anypony know it’s us that’s doin’ it, they ain’t gonna take us seriously otherwise!’ Apple Bloom said. ‘Ah can already hear Applejack now... “Yer just fillies, what do ya’ll know about runnin’ a business?”’
‘But we DON’T know anything about running a business!’ Sweetie Belle said.
‘We’re gonna learn!’ Apple Bloom said, pulling out another book and sliding it over towards Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo. ‘Same way we learned how ta works all the other stuff here’.
Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle leaned over the book. ‘Macroeconomics: so easy a foal could understand?’ Scootaloo questioned.
‘Come on guys, we ain’t ever backed down from anythin’ before, have we?’ Apple Bloom asked.
Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo looked at each other and shook their heads in the negative.
‘Exactly! So why would we start now?!’ Apple Bloom asked. ‘What do ya’ll say? Cutie Mark Crusader Business fillies?!’ she asked again, extending a foreleg forward.
Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle looked at each other. ‘Cutie Mark Crusader Business fillies’, Sweetie Belle said, putting her hoof in.
Scootaloo looked at the two of them for a moment and smiled. She put her hoof in as well. ‘Cutie Mark Crusader Business fillies’, she added.
Apple Bloom smiled widely. ‘Great! Now, that we’re business fillies, what are we gonna call our business?’
‘Well, I overheard some of the Saracens talking about how the Cultus Mechanius mostly works in manufacturing technology, if we’re going to compete with them, we should have something to do with technologies’, Sweetie Belle said. ‘What about... the New Technologies Company?’
‘That’s stupid’, Scootaloo said. ‘It needs to sound cool! We need to get ponies on our side! We’re not just selling them technology... we’re selling them the future! What about something like, The Future Corporation?’
‘That doesn’t sound cool’, Sweetie Belle said back, rolling her eyes slightly.
‘Wait! Ah got it!’ Apple Bloom said. ‘We’re gonna be making technologies of the future... so how about FutureTec?’
‘It’s short...’ Sweetie Belle said.
‘It’s to the point...’ Scootaloo added.
‘It’s perfect!’ Apple Bloom said with a grin.
‘All right’, Scootaloo said, returning Apple Bloom’s grin. ‘Looks like FutureTec it is then’.