The National Offices of Archives and Securities was like a museum of papers; boring, useless, and uninteresting to anypony, which in turn would not make it a target of any sort of strategic value, which, to Ole Timer was completely fine by him. He enlisted into the Japone army and had an incredibly uninteresting and uneventful career, which lead to his uninteresting and uneventful placement at the original door to the vault of the National Archive building. The years went by and nothing seemed to change, Ole Timer would wake up every morning and kiss his wife goodbye, walk to work, and sit at his desk with his lunch until he would go home that night, day in and day out, for year upon year. It was easy, it paid well, and most importantly, it got him away from the missus without actually having to do work.
They tried to let him go once, said that since he had done his service for so long and declined promotion so many time that the military would discharge him, but when he woke the following morning he kissed his wife goodbye and walked back to his post, the gate guards not even noticing that he had returned. Ole Timer had become one in the same with the National Archives, so much so that the manager eventually gave him his job back but said that he was under the employ of the custodial staff.
It was the perfect old job for an old pony, just sit at his desk and read the newspaper next to a Plexiglas door. But today was not to be a good day.
It was late that night, the slow and easy end to an easy day. Ole Timer had lined his pens up in a nice row, made sure his name plate and other materials organized neatly in proper configuration, and had been watching the clock on the wall tick away until he was done for the day. But in the span of a heartbeat it all changed.
Like the distant roar of thunder, the alarms throughout the building sounded, buzzing down each hall until his own followed suit. Ole Timer’s eyes shot awake at that moment, and then relaxed once more. “Just a fire drill.” He said. Being a guard, he was exempt from them. All he had to do was secure his area and wait for it to end. He calmly walked to his door that separated his entrance to the vault and the rest of the building, looked through the clear Plexiglas around the wooden frame and pulled the deadbolt to the locked position.
After securing his station, he waited… and waited…. And waited… and waited while the alarms buzzed and made his ears begin to ring. As he sat at his desk he began to wonder if his alarm was just broken. After a good while, Ole Timer heard a pounding at his door and, as he glanced over, and saw three repairponies waiting.
He approached his door with a relieved smile and unlocked it, but as he did he had an odd thought pass through his head, “Why are they arming the maintenance staff with body armor and automatic weapons now?”
As soon as the bolt was free, the door slammed open, missing Ole Timer’s nose by a hair, and then subsequently slammed shut behind the three. The leader of the three locked the door, pointed at the old stallion, and said, “Whatever you do, don’t let anyone else through.” Before running off.
Ole Timer wandered back to his seat and sat down in admiration over the three ponies as they ran down the hall towards the vault. It made him proud that some ponies still took these drills seriously, it was something that he would have done more if he was twenty years younger.
Then he smelled something, he sniffed, and sure enough he recognized an odor in the area, smoke. “Wow,” he said aloud, “they’re really going all out for this drill.”
Then he heard a sudden “BOOM” split the air, and a rock to the building’s foundation. “Gee, that felt like a real explosion. This is the most exciting drill I’ve ever been in!”
Ole waited a few moments longer, and soon after he heard the steps of a pony coming towards him from the hall that lead to the vault… but when he thought about it he recalled three ponies running down the hall to begin with.
He watched down the hall and saw, to his surprise, it was not one of the ponies he had seen run down the hall returning to him, but instead a pony wearing a dirty white tuxedo and a white mask crying a single tear of blood. In that instant his aloof denial of the situation turned into widespread realization of the truth, that this was not a drill.
The intruder, sliding around the corner to maintain his momentum, saw Ole Timer and returned to his dead sprint down the hall. Ole Timer looked into the eyes of his mask and saw nothing, noting beneath the exterior besides a dark abyss of pain and suffering, and in one glance the old pony was set into a panic.
Ole Timer rushed to the door that he had spent most of his life protecting and threw the deadbolt open, and slammed on the door to make it open, but did nothing but smear his sweaty hooves on the clear glass. He pounded as hard as he could into the glass and wood, but did nothing but cement the reality of the situation, that he was trapped.
Knowing that his fate was sealed, Ole Timer turned around with his back to the glass and cried out in a pitch that was more fitting of a filly than an old stallion.
Tuxedo Mask, charging with the force of a runaway train, sprinted as fast as he could towards the old stallion, who blocked his freedom. Although his disposition looked hostile, the fact of the matter was, fleshy barrier or not, he was not going to let the locked door stop him. One pace away from the door and the pony that covered it, Tuxedo mask buried his head low, put his shoulder forward and dove into the old pony. Like a cushion, Ole Timer took most of the impact between the spear of an attacker and the wall of glass behind him, but never the less found his back being used as hammer to break through the door.
Luckily for the old stallion, counter to what he had been lead to believe, his doorway to the Archive depository was actually made of tempered glass and not Plexiglas, meaning that as he broke through the hardened substance with less force that what he had though, and instead of being cut up by dangerously sharp shards of glass, the broken remains of the door instead turned into small specially designed spheres of glass. In short, after being used as a battering ram to get through his guarded doorway, Ole Timer was left with nothing but a few bumps, a pain in his chest, and one crazy story to tell his grandfoals.