Deadman sighed and walked down the hallway, back the way he came. With that out of the way, he really didn’t have anything to do for the rest of the day.
If he wanted to take up Luna on her offer, he would have to wait until the evening, and even then, he would likely not be occupied for the whole evening. Perhaps they had somewhere he could train for a while or a library where he could read up on some of the matters which he had noted earlier.
Flicking on his HRV, he noted that the royal guards at the entrance were still there. Perhaps they could give him some directions. He didn’t particularly want to risk seeing something that looks like a library in the distance and walking the entire way to the other side of the castle to find out it was a room for the entertainment of foreign dignitaries.
Opening the door at the base of the stairs, he began walking up the uncomfortably short stairs. Once he reached the top of the stairs, the guards instantly snapped back to attention.
He turned to the closest guard and said “I need a way to get to a library, some research needs to be done.”
The guard walked over to one of the doors leading into another section of the castle. “Sir, the nearest entrance to the library is down the hallway and to the right after about seventy hooves. You can’t miss it, sir,” he stated.
“Thank you for your assistance,” Deadman said while making his way over to the door.
When he reached the door, he took one last look over his shoulder before leaving the room.
Not far down the hall, he noticed there was a large set of doors along the right the wall opposite some windows into the gardens. Noting the location for future visitations, he stepped to the door and swung it open, revealing a very, very large library. Looking down the many, many tall aisles of bookshelves Deadman realized that he had no idea where he was to start. There was truly too much to do, and too little time to do it in.
Sighing, he walked over to one of the shelves and took a look at the spines of the books, hoping to find something that would interest him. It was then he realized he couldn’t read this language.
Staring at the shelf in front of him, he tried to puzzle out this logical conundrum. It made no sense that while their spoken language was the same their written language was entirely different. Perhaps he was in a section containing foreign books. He started walking through the aisles, and his hopes of finding something he could understand dropped more and more as he went through aisle after aisle with not a lick of English in sight.
Fucking hell, it looks like he had to learn another language. It was bad enough that he had to learn Russian to communicate with the survivors during his initial deployment to Balik, now he had to learn another written language too. At least he didn’t have to learn a spoken language as well.
Flashing his HRV, he noted that there was someone reading a book off by themselves roughly twenty meters off from his position. Perhaps he could glean some information from them.
Deciding on that course of action, he walked around the corner and with one glance down towards the pony sitting on a cushion at within a small enclave in the edge of the library he kept on walking without even breaking pace, hoping that she didn’t notice him. Down there was the inquisitive purple one, and there was no one to save him from the inevitable torrent of questions if he were to be caught. Luckily, she had a book in her magical grip and was far more interested in that than her environment. Perhaps if she wasn’t laying down he would have noticed her wings and have avoided this situation. However, there was no issue in thinking about what he should have done, he could only hope he could slink off now.
Just as he was rounding the corner he heard her say “Hi Deadman!”
Cringing internally, he turned around and said in a voice with faked friendliness “Good morning, Princess Twilight Sparkle, I didn’t expect to find you here.” He turned his head towards her before continuing “While you read you are quite quiet.” He caught the issue in his little bit of truth-bending too late. If he knew she was reading, he had seen what she was doing before, therefore he noticed her and remained quiet. Hopefully she would just pass it off as him assuming a logical action.
She nodded enthusiastically, and quickly chattered “I know, sometimes while I was young I would hide in here and no one would find me for the longest time because I kept on moving to find new things to read so I was always ended up forcing multiple people to search for me because I always would keep on moving so they would search again and and no one would find me for the longest time because-” He waited for her to break out of her mental loop. Perhaps she would be stuck like this long enough for him to just leave and say that he was going to get the medical staff.
“Anyway, enough about my childhood,” she finally said, crushing his hopes of a quiet escape into somewhere nice to meditate on further actions, “I prepared my questions, after Cadance pointed out that I should write up a list of my questions I got up early this morning to list down everything that I need to ask you in a notebook, and I was here waiting to hear about where you were from the guards outside of the room, but they said that you had disappeared from your room and no one knew where you were so I was worried that you had decided to leave to your home without telling anyone you were going so I came here to read and see if I could find anything about Blacklight Agents to figure but where your home was so I could send a message to you with all the questions but I didn’t find anything so I was a bit sad but then you showed up!”
“I appreciate your concern, but it appears that I am probably not leaving anytime soon,” Deadman stated, dreading how long this list of questions was.
“Well, would you be able to answer a few of my questions about you and your home for a while?” she asked, beginning what he felt like would be a long, long streak of questions.
“While I can’t answer everything, some things are rather strictly classified, I will answer as much as I can,” he said, neatly dancing around how little he wanted to answer her questions. However, to refuse, even politely, may deal damage politically, given her status. He was bound by protocol to avoid that.
“It might be a good idea to get comfy, I can’t imagine you want to be standing for the entire time,” Twilight cheerily stated and motioned over to the cushion beside her, her the book she was previously perusing forgotten at her side.
Deadman followed shortly, moving his way over to her and sitting down, his suit of heavy armour and greater statue sinking him a good deal deeper into the surprisingly deep cushion. “What is your first question?” he queried, wanting to jump right into it now. There was no need for further pleasantries.
“Ah, alright then, let us see here…” she trailed off before digging into a bag hidden on the other side of the cushion and shortly after pulling out a notebook. She floated the notebook in front of her in her magical grip before also retrieving a dip-pen and inkwell from her bag, also floating in her grip. The notebook then flipped open to the first page and she read out “Question one: How exactly are you able to get around with your helmet on? I don’t see anywhere in your helmet where you can see, hear, or even breathe through.”
“A series of sensors within my helmet detect the area in front of my helmet and relay it to the inside, where it is shown on a screen. A similar set up applies to hearing, there are devices which relay the sound to the inside. Air is let into the helmet after it passes through a set of filters, which ensure air cleanliness,” he stated, not stating the tactical advantages of each of these. The screen ensured he would not be able to be blinded by any sudden light changes as well as granting him the ability to see at night, the sound system allowed him to pick out noises more easily as well as avoiding most deafening excluding excessive damage to his body and suit itself, and the air filtration bestowed the ability to ignore biological weapons alongside most chemical weapons.
She scribbled down in the notebook, possibly below the question before asking “And why did you need these back home?”
“There was a great sickness back home and Blacklight devoted a large amount of resources to help assist with neutralizing the disease. Armoured up like this there was no point of entry for the sickness. This greatly helped with minimizing the spread of the disease,” he explained, carefully dancing around his exact role in the conflict. By the time Blacklight intervened on a large scale against SIV infected areas humanitarian efforts had already effectively failed.
“I thought your organization was a military one? They do disaster relief too?” she asked, cracking a smile. Sure, that was close enough.
“I suppose we do also do disaster relief, we definitely lightened up everyone’s load with our deployment there,” Deadman stated before nodding. Less SIVs and Order forces around, less things for the average civilian in an infected area to worry about.
“How noble,” the purple alicorn stated, tilting her head slightly to the right before scribbling down that answer too and going down the through her exceedingly long list of questions, wasting both of their time with questions about either completely inconsequential things or things he couldn’t answer. How she thought that he was going to answer about his family or the exact operations of his Agency he didn’t know. Although he could technically talk about the former, he preferred to not do so. As time went on, he began to lose more and more interest, before she said a question that interested him.
“You can’t be all business all the time. What is it that you do in your free time?” she questioned with a smile on her face. At least she wasn’t a hostile interrogator, although he didn’t like being questioned, her friendliness was starting to grow on him ever so slightly. Didn’t he already answer this question with Celestia, though? At least he knew that she didn’t leak information from their conversation earlier to Twilight. Perhaps if she went back to the friendly mare he talked with she could be his confidant here. After he made sure she wasn’t leaking any personal information to any others, of course.
“I tinkered with parts and things. Sometimes I took something apart and put them back together. Sometimes I built things from spare parts. It was a good time sink,” Deadman explained, deciding that this conversation had gone on long enough he came up with a plan before continuing “I would love to stay here to answer more questions, but I am afraid that I have to go now, but I have a bit of a gift… from my people to yours. Do you have a sheet of paper?”
“Of course!” Twilight exclaimed as she levitated a piece of paper in a purple aura from her bag over to him.
Grabbing the piece of paper from her telekinetic grip, he began searching around his pockets for his pen. He was sure he had one around somewhere.
It was then he found his ballpoint pen, in a small zipped up pocket. He took it, clicked the end to extend the tip, and leaned forward to use the floor as a makeshift drawing surface. He supposed that when one is able to levitate objects they really didn’t need to worry about having a good writing surface.
Gripping his writing implement tightly, he began sketching out the internal anatomy of the very style of pen he was using. First he made a rough sketch of the overall shape, then then made another sketch of the contained internal ink reservoir, and finally he made a quick diagram of the tip of the pen, as well as how it worked. Of course, he had to make that part of the sketch far larger in scale than the rest of the diagram, but it worked. He had taken apart quite a few pens when he was young to try and figure out how they work until his father got sick of the messes and found a diagram that explained it on the internet. Turns out that ballpoint pens used different methods to pressurize the ink inside.
The one he was sketching used a spring as he figured that it was the most simple way for it to work without having to depend on the ink formula heavily. For that part, at least. It still depended on the ink being quick drying and being not too thick or thin, but they could figure that out. Making a few more sketches, he detailed the way the mechanism for retracting the tip worked. Although that bit of the diagram he was a tiny bit more rough, they could probably figure that out.
Making a few final notes about the the structure of the pen, such as that the ball should probably be made out of a steel or brass, he clicked the end of the pen to retract the tip once more and slid it back into the same pocket from which it came before zipping the pocket back up.
Sitting back up, he held the paper out to Twilight, who took it from him in her magic, levitating it over to inspect it.
“What is it?” she asked, a curious tone in her voice. Somehow, she didn’t clue into the fact that it was a pen of a very similar design that he was just using a few seconds ago. Maybe she didn’t get a good view of it.
“A ballpoint pen. It uses a small ball and an internal reservoir of ink for efficient writing. It uses a very small amount of ink for the surface area covered, and it doesn’t need the ink to be refilled for a long period,” he explained, waiting carefully for his chance to get away.
Her eyes lit up at that, but before she could say anything and undoubtedly ask another question he said “Consider it a small gift from Blacklight to your government. However… I would advise you talk to the other princesses about what exactly to do with it. You might need to do some experimenting to get the ink working right.”
“I’ll make sure I will!” Twilight exclaimed, her tone telling him just what he needed to know. She had taken it on herself, she would probably be busy for a while with that. After all, she had an example of how a nicely made pen would work, something to aspire to with testament that it can be done. Perhaps she would forget the rest of her questions by the time she was done with the ink formula and the pen mechanics.
“Now I must sadly take my leave, see you at a later date,” Deadman said and rose from the cushion, walking away from her towards the entrance from whence he came.
“See you later Deadman!” Twilight said as he turned out of the enclave. As he kept on walking, he heard her comment far behind him “Wait a second, this isn’t in Equestrian!” That was his cue to get the hell out of here, he forgot about that after the session of questions. That particular problem would be dealt with later, he was not in the mood to have her jumping on him to either learn her written language or her trying to learn his.
“Deadman?” he heard her call out, and the distant sound of hooves hitting the floor. He hauled ass as quietly as he could out of the library, avoiding the source of the questions about his presence behind him. By the time he had slipped through the door he no longer heard the sound of her hooves on the ground, only distant calls from some corner of that fuck-huge library.
He sighed, and decided to go back up to his room. Looking back over his shoulder, he flashed his HRV to make sure that he was not being followed by the purple one any further, who was still looking through the library for him, he turned his head and charted out the most direct path to the room that he was given. Once he got in there, he would lock the door and wait out the rest of the day there.
Walking at a speed just slightly slower than that of a jog, Deadman made his way to his room, passing the occasional guard who seemed to tense up in his presence. That was a fair enough reaction, he supposed.
Taking a glance out the window, he noticed that he had somehow pissed away time to the later day. Raising his wrist as he climbed a set of stairs, he turned on the holographic screen and checked the time. The display read six thirty, he noted. He had skipped all three of the day’s meals, it appeared. Perhaps he could grab a meal with Princess Luna when he visited her court tonight. He found it odd he didn’t notice the missed meals, but he supposed that perhaps the fact that he ate late meal last night that was far larger than the average was to blame. He was used to those fucking nutritional bars that absolutely nobody liked and MREs, that stuff probably overloaded him a bit.
Noticing the door he recognized as leading into his room, he walked over to it. He thought that maybe he would have a bit of a bit of a break before he visited Luna. A quick nap may be beneficial. However, as he pulled the handle to open the door it didn’t open. It was then he realized his mistake.
When he jumped off the balcony he forgot to unlock the front door.