The Strange Snow Lab
I woke up a little while later to the sound of banging in the room where we first entered. I was feeling loads better and Teacher looked better as well. Whatever that cloth thing was it trapped heat as well as that snow thingy outside. I hopped off the table where we had been napping and padded over to the door to peek in at Experiment. What I saw utterly baffled me.
He had a strange metal object in his mouth and he was hitting another bigger object with it. He set it down and examined a strange white slab quickly before picking it up and hitting another side of the object a few times. He set the object down again and looked with glee at his creation.
"There that ought to do it!" He exclaimed happily. I didn't know why of course but, eh, I got the feeling I was going to figure out very very quickly.
"Ah Shock! Good to see you up and about. Come here come here. I've got something you might be interested in," He beckoned me over with a hoof and as I got closer to him I noticed little red circles on different metal objects.
"Now I'm guessing you know us unicorns have magical abilities. We can use spells and whatnot to assist us in our daily lives," he started droning on and on about how magic was used. Almost like a mini-lecture. I started looking around and noticed the circles were sticking out a bit from the metal objects. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I pushed one in.
I jumped about three feet in the air as a loud voice came through the air. "Get on with it!" Experiment frowned at me now clinging to his back for dear life.
"I suppose I should warn you that I've hooked up a speaker set to help me figure out when experiments go awry? And that was just a little joke one to mess with ponies who drone on?" He deadpanned, "I guess in any case the point of the little lecture was I never learned a translation spell... And that's where this little device comes in!"
He lifted me off his back and I stared at the device as he called it. "This is a translator machine. It picks up voices that aren't in native Equestrian and translates them to Equestrian. It still has a few bugs to work out... after all I took the little speaker outside in the wind and got cursed at... I don't even know how that happened.," He looked out at the wind a bit confused, "Anyways to get it to work all you have to do is speak into this." He motioned to a small stick and set me next to it.
I picked it up and looked at him slightly confused. "Go on, give it a go." He encouraged.
"Um... Can't think of anything. " I tried to think of anything to say but some figures appeared on a screen. He looked at it and turned back to me.
"Did you say this?" He asked and repeated what I just said. I nodded quickly and he jumped in the air with glee. "It works! Oh this is a great day for science! It's kind of funny that this all happened because I never learned a translation spell. While there are tweaks to work out, I think I can safely assume this be added to my few inventions that actually work!"
"So.. you can understand me now?" I asked.
He looked at the monitor, winced, then turned back to me "Do you use that language in front of your mother?"
I tilted my head, unsure of what he meant... then he repeated what the translator said and I fell over...
"That's not really what you said was it..." I shook my head furiously. "Blast still needs a lot of tweaking... At the very least it works to some extent but not to an amount I'd like it to." He went back to tinkering with it, muttering all the while.
I hopped off the table and walked over to the room where I was sleeping before to check in on Teacher. She looked a lot better and a bit of the color had returned to her.
"She's going to be fine." I jumped a foot in the air at Experiment's sudden voice behind me and turned to him.
"Hehe, sorry about that Shock. But she will be. It'll take awhile though. The wind out there can be very brutal but this laboratory traps heat very well," He shuddered at some memory and levitated me onto his back, "Come I'll give you a tour of the labs. I need to take a break from that little device for awhile. Kept giving me really bad translations... When there was nothing around. I suppose I'll have to get somepony else's help for that."
He walked over to a hallway that was nearby the main room and opened the first door in it... which lead to another hallway. After a bit he opened a second door and I saw a very brightly colored room. There were little things scattered all around it and it looked like something small had been messing around in here. I cautiously took a sniff and heaved a sigh of relief as I didn't smell those three around... Wait... Where were they then?
"This is a room for when little foals accidentally come here. Unfortunately this is somewhat close to the Crystal Empire and there have been times where children will leave the urban area and get lost during snowstorms. Some of them happen upon the Igloo-" igloo? Did he mean that weird thing we entered above the stairs? "-and being that this lab is full of highly delicate machinery they need somewhere to play during the time while the snowstorm rages. Thus I have them come into here until the winds die down and I can escort them back home."
The Strange Snow Lab has been renamed to Igloo Lab!
I nodded my head and felt the familiar feeling of the strange psychic attack lifting me onto his back again. He carried me back through the first hallway and opened the door closest to the lab. Inside was nothing like the metallic floor and walls that I'd seen before. There were strange wood structures scattered throughout the room. Some looked like they held things and others had cloth on them and looked very nice to sit down on. And right in the middle of it all was- FIRE!
I hopped off and made to bolt before I felt the psychic attack grasp me again.
"Whoa whoa whoa! What's the matter? This is just my little relaxation room," Experiment said with a puzzled look on his face. I started jabbing towards the fire and he got the hint. "Ah should've realized it by now. You're a woodland creature aren't you? Explains why you and your friend aren't fit for this sort of environment," He dropped me with a chuckle, "Not to worry Shock! That fire is kept at bay by a steel grate... and the fact that it has no fuel outside of the fireplace."
I tilted my head at one of his words. What did he mean by fuel? He caught my expression, sighed and face... would it be facehooved here?
"Something tells me you're going to need to learn quite a few things hmm? Well that can be handled later! Onwards!" He didn't pick me up so I wound up running behind him in his obvious excitement this time. Before we reached where he was heading I skidded to a halt sniffing the air.
As his hoofbeats faded I hopped up and opened a door like I had seen him do before and started following my nose. After navigating around a table and a couple steel sitting things I followed the scent over to a white object leaning up against a wall. I opened it up and felt my mouth begin to water... Foooooooood.
Experiment's view
I opened up the door to the little homely portion of my lab and turned to find that Shock hadn't followed me all the way here. Now I don't know if you're aware but that lab that I met him in was not the only lab I've got in this little complex. It was merely the safest. So you can possibly understand why I started to panic.
I turned around and began retracing my steps trying to find anything out of place that he could've done to get somewhere else. It was only a matter of time until I came across the open kitchen door. I peered inside... and began laughing. There was Shock munching happily on some cookies I'd stored in the fridge. What? They are amazingly crunchy when you do that.
"Pi?" Shock jumped as my laughter startled him and it was about a foot higher than when he pushed the button. I realized something pretty quickly. He was a mouse that could use electric attacks... and he now was on a sugar rush. I peeled myself off the wall again and started following the yellow blur that was now bouncing off the walls towards a room filled with... Hmm that might actually help there.
3rd perso- pony I meant pony
As Shock bounced away a loud screech echoed through the hallway. Experiment turned towards the lab muttering, "Who could it be at this time?"
He stepped into the room to see another pony looking at the machines he hadn't finished. The newcomer was a Pegasus that had a tan coat, a brown mane, and a cutie mark of a small bag and a dagger. In all honesty he looked like he'd be more at home somewhere in the desert. But the oddity of the coat wasn't what unnerved him. It was the appraising way he was looking over the stuff and what he was saying.
"Dunno why the boss wants this hunk of junk but all I gotta do is remember the script... That'll get this crazy coot out of he- And with my luck he's right behind me," the intruder turned towards Experiment with a grin on his face, "Heya knucklehead! The name's Jackal and I've got a message for you from the Khamer and Profiteur Merchantry! You didn't pay the mortgage! You know what that means right?"
"I'm afraid I don't-" Experiment began with a perplexed look on his face but was interrupted by Jackal, "It means you get to pack up your bags and hit the road Jack!"
"You didn't let me finish. I'm afraid I don't follow because... there is no mortgage on this place," he finished.
"Whaaaaaa?" Jackal's jaw hit the floor.
"I own it. No one else would have paid for it and I offered the Landlord quite a bit to purchase this land for myself and experiments plus early looks at whatever I was working on at the point. There's no mortgage because I never took out a loan on it," Experiment finished off this little lecture with a grin... It quickly faded when the intruder pulled out a dagger.
"Fine then. We get to do this the hard way. Hand over the deed and you get to keep your stallion bi-" -bop!-
Both stallions looked at the round object that hit Jackal on the nose and back towards the hallway. A flash of yellow, then silver, and then another ball soared across the room and smacked the intruder on the nose with another -bop!-. There was Shock at the entrance... atop a giant pile of plastic balls.
"What is that tiny yellow rat doi-" He never would finish that sentence. Shock bolted from the pile of balls and in ten seconds flat he was above the stallion's head with his tail glowing silver. Before he could utter something else, which I'm willing to bet wasn't "Oh dearie me," the tail swung onto his head and the last thing he felt was what seemed like an iron bat slamming into the side of his cheek. Then it all turned black.
A few minutes later
"I'm going to have to figure out what you used Shock. That looked like it hurt," Experiment shot a meaningful look at Shock who gave an innocent look. The attack had not only turned the side of Jackal's face purple with a nasty bruise but also sent him flying into a wall... admittedly the same wall that Experiment had been shocked into. Right now he was hogtied and lying in a corner of the room unconscious.
"Well for now we won't get any information from him. But I might as well send a letter off to my sister. When he wakes up we're going to have to figure out who this Khamer and Profiteur Merchantry is... and she is great with this stuff. In fact she manages to still scare me to this date" He shuddered, probably thinking of her then, and got out a piece of paper before realizing something, "Oh and she can probably help us cure your friend. I actually helped my sister create her main method of treatment. We worked together it's the only real reason it was finished."
Shock tilted his head slightly and Experiment chuckled, "She's a doctor. Probably one of the better ones I've seen. But her bedside manner leaves much to be desired... I do have one question though."
Shock motioned for him to go on, "How exactly did you get that massive pile of plastic balls in here so quickly?" Shock merely grinned... and began nibbling on another cookie.
"And ven ze patient woke up, his skeleton was missing and ze doctor was never heard from again!" The speaker was a female unicorn with a red mane, pinkish body, and a red blood cell inside a red cross as a cutiemark, who was operating on a rather heavyset stallion... His chest was open revealing his organs and yet he didn't seem to be feeling any pain. This probably was due to a beam that was being directed onto his chest from a machine hovering above the operating table. The two started laughing hysterically as she finished off the joke, "Anyvays... Zat's how I lost my medical license."
The heavyset stallion stopped laughing suddenly with a worried look replacing his smile. "Archimedes! A little to the left!" The mare called out and the beam shifted a little to the left. Behind the machine was a little Pikachu moving a lever. His real name was actually Sitrus. Red Cell, the unicorn, had taken him in before he had been caught by the guard. As thanks he was now working with her for a bit.
A letter shuffled through the mail slot and Red Cell picked it up, reading it as she returned to the operating table. "Well well well Archimedes! It seems my brother found some of your kin!" She looked up at the little mouse who gave a thumbs-up, "Ooh and a little conspiracy for good measure! Archimedes you must come of course. And Heavy! Ve shall finish zis quickly and you shall accompany me," she exclaimed, poking his rib... which broke instantly.
He cried out in pain as she levitated it out, "Oh don't be such a baby. Ribs grow back!"