//------------------------------//
// Chapter 12: The Brave and the Fool 
// Story: My Little Apprentice: Apogee 
// by Starscribe 
//------------------------------//

Second Chance heard it like a voice, though it was not a voice. "Installation Complete. Performing Startup Sequence." As though she had been abruptly plunged into a sensory deprivation chamber, her senses were suddenly cut from her, and she was floating bodiless in the void. She would have screamed, except that the Nanophage had stimulated a state of sleeping immobility in order to protect her from herself.

It was a good thing too, because panic rose in her. The being now named Second Chance had seen and felt incredible things in the void between spaces, things no organic being was ever meant to feel. Celestia had taken those memories away at last, but she had not taken away the horror. Millions of human lifetimes of isolation, neither living nor dead, and she felt renewed terror in the void.

But it was only temporary. Her vision was the first to return, and it seemed little different for the change. There was now an Infolink overlay at the bottom of her field of view, currently the bright green that was its default color. Right now it only read, "System Startup Sequence," but she knew that would change.

This was the moment, then. Hiding out in her guts and neutralizing toxins was a fairly simple task. But establishing the complex changes to her brain chemistry, building the sub-processors that would supplement her own intellectual abilities, that had taken more time. Senses she hadn't had and sub-dermal radio transmitters and receivers all had been constructed now. Would it work with the body of a pony? Would it kill her?

Sound came next, then smell, though there wasn't much for the former to tell her and she usually ignored the latter. Smell might be important for natives, but Chance had never used it much. It was easier to simply file away the sensations when they grew too intense instead of attempting to analyze them.

Of course, those were not the only senses she had anymore. Magnetoreception was the first of the new senses to flood into her brain, making for a very strange complement to the perception of thaumic fields that had already been developing slowly as she practiced magic. Actually both senses were virtually identical, with an almost visual image of "energy" that flowed in different patterns with different strengths. It was hard to say which sense came more naturally, though after all this time in Equestria the magic was almost more familiar to her.

She assumed that the radio senses came next, though of course there was nothing more there than the background static and she quickly shut that out. There was no internet here, there were no quantum databases for her to reach. Just her own mind, a mesh network of one.

"Startup Sequence Complete," said the voice into her senses. "WARNING: μFabrication cannot be responsible for the effects of any Nanophage products on subhuman species. This species varies from registered genetic profiles by 11%. Neural pathways differ from registered profiles by 5.27%. This product is not designed to uplift subhuman species."

"Then why are you telling me?" she asked dryly, speaking aloud. Of course there was no response. The Nanophage was not an AI except under the broadest possible definition, and the processors it had built within her brain would not be able to handle anything but commands it was programmed to accept. She couldn't ask it to reason out how it was possible an alien species living in an alien universe shared 89% of its genetic material with humans, or how the structure of its brain was a maddening 94.73% similar to human beings.

"User Note: Trichloromethane dosage of approximately 25 ml neutralized. Expect mild digestive discomfort as the waste material is discharged. For full pre-activation medical log, use the 'Medical Log' command. To start the Nanophage feature demo, please-" Her ears were assaulted by terrified screaming. A terrified filly, and one she knew well. Apple Bloom.

Second Chance tuned out the voice, and tried to sit up. It was at that point she realized she'd been painfully hogtied, and was unable to sit up. There was fabric on her face, a cloth sack of some kind. With casual magical effort, she pushed on the sack, shrugging it off. With the black bag removed, she could see the ground of a dim, dirty room. It was completely empty, swept clean in fact, aside from the pipes on the ceiling and mounted onto the walls.

Wait, had she just used magic? There was no time to consider it now, not with the awful sounds coming from outside. She searched for something she could use to cut her bonds, and found it in a sliver of sharp metal near the far wall. Despite having not been able to use her magic for the last few weeks now, her memory of how hadn't faltered. The length of ragged steel shot towards her, and moved of its own accord towards her bonds. With a little mental pressure, there was a loud snap, and she wiggled to her hooves.

She bolted for the door, kicking it open with a bang. The hall was dimly lit, though she didn't need mounted lights to see the source of the screams. A tablet computer was mounted to some sort of strange exoskeleton, and in its glow she could see the face of her friend, splattered with something green and twisted into anger and fear. One of her hooves moved up slowly, shaking violently.

Chance made her way out into the hall towards her friend, and very nearly tripped over a pair of bodies on the ground near the door. Guard armor, but there was no evidence of a guard within. The bits and pieces trailing green slime were black and chitinous, like some sort of gigantic insect.

There was no time to investigate now, not with the faint whimpering coming from her friend. Was that better than the screams? She rushed towards Apple Bloom, letting her thaumic senses expand as though they hadn't been stunted for the last few weeks. She sensed the problem at once, a terrible pressure forcing its way down on Apple Bloom's skull, as though the poor filly's head was coated in a thick layer of conscious tar.

Chance didn't know what the magic was, exactly. It didn't matter. She was not about to let some awful magic assault her friend. Chance had never learned any proper counterspells, not when she'd only just mastered levitation when she had lost her magic. That didn't mean she couldn't do something.

Under the pressure of her perception, Chance saw what she hadn't noticed at first. It wasn't just magic gathering around Apple Bloom's head. No, the patterns of magic were far too concrete for that. Too ordered, too regular. What she was looking at was a mind, a mind divided into two parts. A mind assaulting one of her best friends.

Twilight never would've stood for it, and she wouldn't either. Chance tackled her friend to the ground, or tried. Something had caught on the stone, as though she were anchored there. Her pressure wasn't hard, but it was also perpendicular to the direction that had been reinforced. With the sound of metal sliding on concrete, a pair of spikes came free, and they tumbled together to the ground.

Out! she thought furiously, trying to coax her horn into doing more than just levitating. She poured in all her anger and fear for her friend, all the frustration she felt after her week without magic. She poured it all in and more.

"Magic is an exercise of will," Twilight explained, as a dozen silver balls spun through the air around her. "There is no formal levitation spell because, like all spells, all levitation is only a desire to do something so strongly that your magic forces it to happen in the physical world. You're taking the vision of the mind and making it real."

"Are all spells like that?" Chance asked, pointing to the spell diagram in the book she had been trying to read. "This light spell, could I do it without a diagram too?"

Twilight nodded. "Many unicorns do. When Princesses Celestia and Luna move the sun and moon, they don't use diagrams either. Anything is possible if you have the will."

Chance had the will now, and she summoned it forth. She expected a glow, or perhaps a flash, but none came. Instead, and very much to her surprise, she heard a voice. The familiar, synthetic voice of the Nanophage speaking in her mind. "Thaumcraft node activated. Active spell module: translocation."

She felt a roar as all the magic she'd been building abruptly released from her horn, spinning and twisting into patterns more complex than any she'd ever imagined. More complex than any she'd ever seen, save perhaps the diagrams Celestia had used to purge her memories.

"Warp field stabilized. Excursus engaged." A crack of air like thunder shook them both, and Chance found the air painfully ripped from her lungs. It felt for a second as though they were going to be ripped right out of her body, even as the gray of her magic engulfed her and her friend but left the awful presence behind.

Their transit was practically instantaneous, and an explosion of terrible force answered the previous implosion as they appeared in the air of their hotel room several feet above the ground. The force shattered glass outward, ripped the door from its hinges, and flung the beds and everything else not bolted down several feet before dropping them unceremoniously from the air, covered from head-to-hoof in a thick layer of frost. Steam issued from the end of her horn like a gun fired on a cold day.

Chance found the effort of remaining conscious abruptly too much for her, and she did not sit up. The darkness that came now was a relief.


* * *

                          
It was a strange night in the Canterlot Archives, Secret Lore could practically smell it. Something was on the breeze, the winds of danger and change. Was anything happening in Canterlot above? Nothing he knew of, though he would’ve admitted more than a minor amount of disconnect with current events. He could count the living ponies he knew well with just his hooves.

That never really mattered to Secret Lore, though. There was enough of the past worth preserving that he never really felt regret not being more in touch with the present. That said, he was very serious about his charge. The archives held many ancient secrets, more than he could’ve studied in a lifetime. He had served nearly a century in the darkness of the archives, and still he discovered new passages and chambers almost daily.

There were no guards within the archives, none beside the ones that stood vigilant in the castle and city above, and Lore had no assistants. In all his years of service, he hadn’t yet found a pony to whom he could entrust the safety of Equestria’s history. Twilight Sparkle had come close; probably would’ve been the one if she’d been a pegasus, and Celestia hadn’t snatched her away.

As a result, he had nopony to take with him into the darkness. None besides the princesses knew the twisting maze that was the archives, as was the design. It was hard for an enemy to break in and steal when not even your friends knew the secrets they might come for. It meant there were no assistants to travel with him into the gulf, and whatever strange things he might search out he would have to find on his own.

Secret Lore sought out the areas most dangerous first, where awful things from the time of Discord and earlier screamed and roiled in the darkness. If any of Equestria’s enemies wanted to do her harm, that was probably the first place they would look. Yet Lore found all the old enchantments strong as ever, and the monstrosities they contained trapped. He passed the vaults of gold and silver and precious things, huge troves of (relatively worthless) precious stones, and the works of art no longer on display above.

Lore spent nearly an hour wandering the vaults, an hour he could’ve spent at home drinking tea and reading a good book. He turned around then, thinking of the Ancient Lands Penology waiting on his armour at home. He still might make it home to get a few chapters read before it was time for bed if he hurried.

That was when he smelled it. It wasn’t as though there was anything particularly unnatural about the smell. The Archives had always had their own distinct scent, of earth and mildew and rotting wood. This was something different, a smell he had only ever smelled in pegasus weather factories. It was the harsh, electrical tang of ozone, like a thunderstorm. Aside from weather production facilities, he knew pegasi could fly fast enough to charge the air that way, though he couldn’t imagine even the most skilled managing to move that fast in the tight quarters of the Archives. With so many unpredictable curves and turns, not even Lore would’ve dared such speeds.

What, then, could’ve caused it? Lore went from wandering between the most valuable or dangerous objects to following his nose. He was surprised to note the smell continued, growing stronger as he closed on the source. Had some spell escaped the academy above? Was one of the artifacts loose? Either way, he shuddered at the destruction it might cause if it escaped the archives. Whatever magic it was, it must’ve been powerful to avoid being grounded out this deep under the earth.

To his great relief, the smell did not seem to be leading him to any of the sections of the archives with exits to the surface. Instead, he found his path turning towards the burial catacombs, where many of Equestria’s ancient heroes had been interred. There was nothing dangerous to be found there, and all surface access to those areas had been sealed once all the living relatives of the dead and all their children had passed away.

Most of Lore’s fear that the spell could somehow be a living pony had faded as it grew stronger still, and he didn’t expect to find anypony at whatever dead end he found himself in. He would get a good look at whatever spell it was, then report back to the princesses so it could be taken care of by somepony who actually had the requisite skills. It wouldn’t have been the first time something had gotten loose, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

As he neared his destination, passing through the close cells of the upper levels, Lore was surprised as the strange silence broke with the quiet grinding of stone not far away. Could it be someone was lifting the lids to one of the great coffins? Why in all of Equestria would anypony want to do that?

Lore was no warrior, but he could fly quietly when he needed to. That was what he did now, lowering himself with the delicacy of a butterfly towards the source of smell and sound alike. If the intruder was a pony and not a spell, he needed to be positive he wasn’t seen. Any intruder was likely to be more capable than an aging old pegasus.

As Lore dropped into view of one of the oldest tombs, he saw that the intruder was no pony at all. She was not lifting the lid of an old coffin, but was in fact returning it to its place, slim body moving the 500 kilograms of carved stone with the strength of an earth pony. She was not an earth pony, however.

The intruder had lifted the coffin of Leo the Bold, and laid the body at her feet. Lore was immediately struck with how intact Leo was after the millennia he had lain in sleep. He’d been wrapped in a robe of some kind, gray and stiff but with no sign of decay. His skin was black and bubbled, like melted plastic. His hair had gone completely. Other than that, though, the body looked for all the world as though time had not touched it at all.

The intruder was everything Leo had been in life. Her skin was pale by comparison, lacking the unnatural bubbles and warping. Her hair was flowing, like a crimson curtain behind her as vibrant as the mane of any pony. She wore no robe, and instead had donned armor similar to that resting on the shelves for Leo. It was far smaller by comparison, lighter and thinner, and left her legs bare from the knee down. She had no tail to speak of, and whatever ears she had were concealed in the curtain of her hair.

Secret Lore should have fled right then. The Builders were an ancient, immortal, and pseudo-divine race, one well beyond his powers. He did not even consider that the intruder wasn’t on a benevolent mission. Rather, the intruder was greater than himself. A situation like this called for Celestia or Luna’s personal intervention.

But Lore had been reading about these beings his entire life. He’d visited meetings of the Precursor Society, and speculated with the best of them about how they might really be like. How could he flee from what might be the only Precursor to have visited equestria in a thousand years. Even if he found Luna (Celestia would have long gone to bed), and they teleported straight down here, she could easily be gone by then. The intruder already had the body. All a delay would get him was a missing corpse.

So instead of fleeing into the darkness, Secret Lore touched down on the stone with the soft clinking of hooves, and lowered his head respectfully to the intruder. “It’s been a long time,” he said, keeping his voice low so as not to startle her. She was tiny compared to the corpse, perhaps two thirds of Leo’s height and only a centimeter or two taller than Lore himself. Did that mean she was not an adult, or did Builders just have extremely pronounced sexual dimorphism?

“Many years.” The Builder’s Equestrian was perfect, her voice high and melodic. It was, he imagined, very much the way one of the princesses might’ve sounded in their youth. Confident, powerful, but also young and almost playful. He doubted Leo had sounded anything like that. “I have come for Leonidas.”

“How did you find him?” Lore asked, genuinely curious. “These caverns are a dangerous maze, meant to confuse our enemies. Not that… I’m saying you’re Equestria’s enemy. But I’ve worked here my whole life, and I still sometimes get lost in the Archives. I smelled your passage in a straight line – it doesn’t seem like you had to backtrack even once.”

True to the stories of the Builders, this one didn’t evade or try to dance around the question as some ponies did. She spoke simply and directly, just as Leo the Bold had always done. “When Leonidas came here from our world, he needed energy that you could not provide. He brought it within his body, in a material we call enriched uranium. This material radiates a form of energy I can detect. Once I learned the approximate location of his burial, I used radar to plot the caverns and calculated a path that followed the radiation here. It is a good thing you kept him buried here; his personal energy units had developed a dangerous radiation leak. Prolonged exposure would have killed any organic that spent too much time around him.”

Secret Lore considered that a moment, glancing again at the stranger. There was an alien beauty about her, he couldn’t deny it. Those limbs, lithe and thin like a pegasus, but as strong as an earth pony and as wise as the most gifted unicorn. Was that what made the builders so great? Had they all been Alicorns on the inside?

Yet despite all her honesty and grace, one thing about this meeting had begun to bother him. “We would have been happy to return his body to you if you asked. Why sneak in late at night? I know Princess Luna in particular will be thrilled to hear of your return.”

The stranger nodded, elegant red curls cascading down her face in the light of Lore’s lantern. It was hard to say which between the two was brighter. “We did not wish our return to be publicly known among your kind. Soon, perhaps, but not now. Asking leave would have by necessity involved announcing ourselves.” She shook her head, turning away from him and back to the body. “I’m very sorry. I had not intended anyone to be here.”

A shiver went through Lore at the apology. There was a tone of finality in that voice one rarely heard from ordinary ponies. Or sane ones, for that matter. “S-Sorry for what?” He took a step back, his wings fluttering in agitation. Should he run? Would it make a difference if he did?

“For what happens next.” She bent down, scooping up the corpse and casually snapping off the head as though removing heads from thousand-year-old bodies was part of her ordinary routine. There was no smell when she did, no ichor or filth. Only a few loose strands, like glass noodles hanging down from the point at which the head had been severed from the shoulders. She slipped the head into a pouch hanging from her back, then turned back to lift the monument back up. “My condolences, native. I regret having to kill you.”

That statement remained as true to what Lore knew of the Builders as anything else she had said so far. Her apology was sincere, too. As sincere as a pony might be to the ants trying to ruin their picnic, right before they crushed them under hoof.

Lore turned to flee, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. He felt a sudden, paralyzing energy course through him, an explosion of electrical energy that sent his body into useless spasms. The lantern hanging from his harness smashed as he fell and went out with a splutter, plunging the pegasus into sudden, total darkness.

The pain was excruciating, and for several moments he was conscious of nothing at all. When finally his perceptions returned, Lore found himself moving rapidly through the air. There was no sound of wings, though a breeze rushed constantly around him from all directions. Tiny claws seemed to be gripping his body in a dozen places, and it was these claws that held him aloft. He could still smell the familiar scents of the Archives, though it was mixed with something new and close. Plastic?

As his strength gradually returned, Lore tried to struggle free of his captors. He succeeded at first, only to invite the electrical assault a second time. As before he screamed in pain and impotent anger, but his voice went unanswered in the darkness of the archives. He did not try to escape again, hoping perhaps that by keeping his body limp and feigning weakness he might be able to conserve his strength and make another escape attempt before the Builder carried out whatever grizzly fate she had planned for him.

Murder? Could a Builder really have broken into the archives and now be planning to kill a helpless pony in cold blood to keep her secret? That anypony, much less a mighty eldritch being like a Builder, would be capable of such a feat was almost beyond belief.

Secret Lore would not be able to report what he had observed, however. When he had flown in the dark for what felt like hours, the near-silent things that transported him abruptly stopped moving forward. He looked around, but of course the darkness was complete and he could hazard no guess at where he had been brought. He didn’t struggle, but it didn’t matter. They shocked him one more time, making his body go limp and spasm about uselessly even as all those tiny claws abruptly let go.

Lore plummeted into the darkness far too fast to recover control of his wings in time. Even at its highest point, the hundred meters of the archive caverns weren’t nearly deep enough for whatever stunning spell the Builder used to wear off. So Secret Lore plummeted, and struck stone with a sick, wet thud.

At least it was a clean death.


* * *


“Don’t take me away, Princess! I’m not ready!”

For the second time that day, Chance woke to the sound of Apple Bloom’s voice. She opened her eyes immediately this time, fearing her friend might be in as much danger as she had been the last time. She wasn’t bound, nor had cloth been used to blind her. Rather, Chance was resting in a hospital bed, in a room large enough to share with a second pony.

Apple Bloom rested in the bed beside her. Princess Luna stood less than a meter away, looking down on the filly. Chance couldn’t see her expression, nor could she see any of her friend besides the top of her mane. “Fear not, young pony. I have not come to take you anywhere.” Chance let her eyes wander through the hospital room. This one was similar to the last one she had visited, though there was a distinct lack of locks on the doors or rune circles on the ground.

There were a few chairs against the walls, of the low-backed variety that ponies seemed to prefer. Only one was occupied. “T-Twilight?”

The mare had been dozing in her chair, but Chance’s words were all it took to rouse her to activity. She was on her hooves within a second, embracing Chance with all the affection expected of any mother. “Thank Celestia you’re okay, Second Chance!” Even in bed, Chance had rarely been hugged so tightly. All dignity at her returned adult memories was forgotten in the face of her adoptive mother.

“Okay?” She blinked. “Why wouldn’t I be okay, Twilight?” How much did Twilight know?

“The doctors said they’d never seen a pony with so little magic.” She broke the embrace, though didn’t move far away. “You were like a sponge someone had wrung out. What happened?”

“I think we’d both like to know the answer to that.” Princess Luna turned to face her, smiling down at them both. She flicked one wing towards the corner of the room, where what was clearly the remains of Apple Bloom’s ad-hoc exoskeleton had been piled up against the wall. “And many others. The proprietors of the Seaddle Mareiott, for instance. The owners of the chemical laboratory you were given to use.”

“And me.” Twilight didn’t sound peremptory, though. Only curious, worried.

Chance looked away, glancing past Luna to Apple Bloom in her bed. “Are you alright over there, Apple Bloom?”

Her friend answered, sounding more than a little weary. “Yeah.”

“You want me to tell them?”

“Yeah.”

So she did. Chance told them about the guards, about being led out of the laboratory and down the street to the water treatment plant. She told them about the spell she’d felt, incapacitating her, and waking up bound and blind with that awful voice threatening her. She repeated the message her kidnapper had given her, hoping that the wording or the message itself might reveal enough to bring the evil pony to justice. Though Luna nodded with apparent comprehension when she repeated the message, she had nothing to share (at least not with Chance) about her thoughts on who it might actually be.

Apple Bloom spoke up then, seeming to have recovered some significant portion of her strength. Chance listened with as much interest as anypony else in the room. She shrunk with horror as Apple Bloom explained she had been the one to trash the lab, stripping the useful components from their refining mechanism and everything else in the lab.

Chance couldn’t help be impressed at the exoskeleton now that she knew where it had come from. Her friend had built it in just a few hours using a random smattering of parts? Perhaps it wasn’t as overt as the magic unicorns did, but Chance couldn’t believe for a moment that magic hadn’t been involved somehow. Nothing else could possibly explain getting something functional without decades of schooling and planning. Right? The alternative was to believe ponies were orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans, which was far harder to accept.

She listened to her friend’s story of breaking into the water-plant, confronting the fake guards, and defending herself against them with her machine. That fight had an unfortunate conclusion for the guards, transforming them into the insect-like corpses Chance had discovered when she woke the second time. 

“I knew they were attacking you,” Chance interjected. “I wasn’t sure what they were, or how.” She turned, looking towards Luna. “If they came from the changelings Apple Bloom squished, why didn’t they die?” Her face flushed with fear. “Is that common when ponies die in Equestria? Do spirits usually linger on?”

Twilight and Luna shared a look, though it was the latter who answered. “Not often, Second Chance. As a matter of fact, the number of ponies capable of that feat was thought to be fixed.”

Apple Bloom was sitting up by then, and Chance could get a better look at her. She could see her eyes widen. “Wait, Princess, are you sayin’-”

Luna shook her head. “I’m very sorry, young filly. I can’t tell you anything about your parents. Only that the enemies you faced weren’t slain, and will be returning.” She lowered her voice, and seemed to be speaking more to Twilight than to either of them. “Clever, using changeling drones instead of trying to foalnap ponies from Equestria.”

“Explain again how you escaped?” Twilight sat behind Luna, looking between them. “It felt like a teleportation spell, but… I know I haven’t taught you how to use those. Did somepony help you?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Chance strained her memory for the specifics. “It was the Nanophage… it took this long, but it’s finally working. Somepony wrote a program to help unicorns with spellcasting I think. When I saw the pain Apple Bloom was in, I didn’t really understand what was happening to her, but I could tell somepony was trying to hurt her. My magic was back, so I just used all the magic I could. I put it all into a spell... and the Nanophage helped. Well… it did everything. Guess I must’ve been thinking about the hotel room, if that’s where it sent us.” She looked to Luna. “I don’t know how anyone could’ve written a program like that. Magic’s a complicated science. It would require a skilled software developer and a skilled spellcaster both. I don’t know of very many of those. Not even me.”

Twilight seemed to share Chance’s confusion. Luna, however, did not. “Do not let it concern you, Second Chance. My sister and I know of this.”

“You do?” Chance and Twilight asked, speaking with such close timing that one voice was hardly distinguishable over the other.

Luna nodded. “Another time.” She flicked an ear towards Apple Bloom, though the gesture was covert enough that the filly didn’t seem to notice. “The two of you have need of another day or so of rest, particularly you Second Chance. This ‘Nanophage’ may have helped you perform the spell correctly, but it could not create stamina your body did not possess. I advise against using it for spells you cannot already perform without it.”

Chance, however, was no longer smiling. “Luna, you said another… have I been asleep… is the contest over?”

The Alicorn didn’t scold her, didn’t shout or question her priorities. “I’m afraid so, young ponies.”

“Aww.” Apple Bloom glared down at her hooves. “I never even got ta’ see it all work.”

Chance shared Apple Bloom’s dissatisfaction, though for very different reasons. “The damage we caused… I bet it was pretty expensive.”

Twilight nodded, her expression matter-of-fact. “You’re really burning through my damage security. I should probably think of making some new investments soon.”

Princess Luna turned away from the two of them “No need, Princess Twilight. What happened here qualifies as a foreign attack on Equestrian soil. There are funds in every city for such occasions, untapped for hundreds of years.”

“Actually… I was thinking we could pay them back.” Chance sat up straight in bed, willing her hooves to move. They were still stiff, but getting better by the moment. “That is… if you think they’d take payment in aluminum.”


* * * 


Second Chance was surprised and thrilled to see the chemical plant had left their lab untouched since Apple Bloom had left it. Granted, she wasn’t nearly as surprised about that as she was to see Apple Bloom now had her cutie mark.

Apple Bloom was as surprised to learn about that as Chance had been. It’d been later that night, when Apple Bloom got up to use the tiny restroom connected to their shared hospital room. She heard the filly’s sudden screaming, startling her from the book she’d been reading. She let it fall to the ground and sprinted into the bathroom, terrified of what she might find. There were no vague invisible demons waiting inside, or even visible demons. Only Apple Bloom, the hospital gown hanging from a hook and her eyes fixed on the mirror.

Instead of blank coat, her flank now had an apple-shaped gear and a silver wrench, bright against the yellow. Apple Bloom’s screaming hadn’t been terrified at all, it’d been ecstatic. “I can’t believe it Chance can you believe it there it is look my very own cutie mark!”

She embraced her friend, nodding enthusiastically. “I guess you didn’t know this was here?”

Apple Bloom took a moment to recover her voice, her mouth moving but no sound escaping. “This is amazing!” She spun, taking in the mark from every possible angle. “The Crusaders will be so happy for me!” She froze, her face falling. “I guess… I guess I’m not a Crusader anymore. I hope they don’t kick me out of the tree house.”

Chance rolled her eyes. “Did you kick me out?”

“Oh yeah.” Her smile returned. “I wish I’d noticed at the time. I guess it must not feel like much’a anythin’.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t feel it either. Discord made sure I’d be unconscious through the whole thing.

Apple Bloom seemed to barely hear her. “What do ya’ reckon it’s for?”

“Engineering?” Chance inspected the mark, then glanced out the open door. “That exoskeleton thing you made was pretty amazing, maybe even cutie mark amazing. How’d you do that so fast?”

She shrugged in response. “I’d seen designs that looked mighty similar on yer tablet thing. At first I didn’t know how teh’ get out, like I might not get to ‘yah in time. But then I started really thinkin’ about it, and suddenly I knew. It wasn’t really building. I already knew what I had to make, I just had to figure out how to get all the pieces out of what we had in the lab. Guess I… messed it up pretty good though, huh?”

“I guess that must be what your cutie mark is.” 

“I guess you’re right.” Apple Bloom looked away, looking a little embarrassed. “Uh… could you leave, Chance? I wasn’t finished.”

“Oh.” Chance shut the door on her way out, tugging it shut with a faint burst of magic. It felt good to be able to do that again; a severed limb returned at last.

It took them much of the next day to repair their lab enough to begin the refining process at last. Apple Bloom had been Chance’s equal as they set everything up the first time. The second time, Chance felt like she’d been asked to do all her work drunk and blindfolded with as fast as her friend burned through everything. It was like watching some sort of magical wind for as fast as her hooves moved, making precision adjustments on machines she had never even seen before this week without a mistake in sight.

After the first hour, Chance relegated herself to refreshment duty, interjecting instructions but not actually trying to do any of it. Their audience from the days of the contest had shrunk down to just Twilight, who refused to let Chance wander out of her sight. As guilty as Second Chance felt to be pulling Twilight away from her home and her friends for an extra day, she felt greatly relieved that the Alicorn cared enough about her safety to stay with her. The death of two apparently immortal changeling drones was unlikely to dissuade kidnappers if they decided to return. An Alicorn princess, on the other hand…

Needless to say, there was no sign of any sort of danger during their day of work. By evening, the laboratory was hot with the glow of the electric furnace. Chance kept the tablet propped up against the wall, walking them through each of the steps of the process. As it turned out, earth ponies were more resistant to heat than unicorns, but Chance could still monitor the pressure and adjust the power on the burner while Apple Bloom poured and moved insulated metal pots from behind heat shields and mouth protection she probably didn’t need.

It was late in the evening before they had managed to complete the Bayer process, changing the huge tray of red powder into a huge tray of red mud and a smaller container of dry white powder. Apple Bloom poured the mixture into a bath of molten cryolite. Together they lowered the electrodes, and the final stage began.

“Are you sure this is going to revolutionize metal, Chance? I don’t mean to criticize, but it looks like you ponies have been working really hard.”

Chance was panting, though at Twilight’s words she tried to correct her breathing as quickly as she could. “I’m sure, twilight. This is just a lab, small enough for fillies to do the work. Purpose-built machines could process thousands of tons an hour. Like a metal assembly line. Or… okay, we might need to use strong earth ponies instead of robots, but it would be mostly the same idea.”

“If you say so.” Twilight didn’t seem nearly as bothered by the temperatures as Chance felt, and she could inspect the boiling vat without even the protection of a heat shield. “This feels like a waste of electricity. Just running it through the vat without powering anything. Would it still work if we switched off the power?”

“No!” The vat, bubbling with a good eighty pounds of molten metal, poured a series of near-constant bubbles from the carbon electrode, only to be sucked away by the vent. Good thing too, or they’d all be suffocating by now. “You can’t have electrolysis without electro.” She waved her hooves vaguely in the air. “Trust me. We need it.” Pause. “We still good on temperature, Apple Bloom?”

Her friend nodded eagerly from behind safety glasses. “Holding steady at 1000 degrees! How much longer do you think it will take?”

Chance answered by levitating over the vacuum apparatus with its short metal tube. She lowered it carefully into the molten metal, then filled the tiny crucible with metal collecting on the bottom of the container. “Get the mold!” Her friend did, a rectangular mold resting inside a larger container already filled with water. Chance turned the crucible sideways in her gray magic, careful not to splash any of the searing material.

The crucible would recover a total of 4 bars of shiny, pure metal. One went to the hotel, one to the chemical plant whose lab they had borrowed (along with the machines they’d modified and all their non-digital notes), which left one for each of the fillies. In exchange for a single sleepless night, they’d both become very, very rich.