Doctor Malice growled as he tossed aside his ninth broken scalpel. Doctor Malice was a pony of rather... direct inquiries, and even more direct investigations. He got right to the heart of the matter, or to the matter in the heart. It was a big step up from the medicine that the Crystal Empire was used to, a thousand years ago.
Doctor Malice growled as his tenth scalpel blade was corrugated by the strange field surrounding his latest... patient. It wasn't a clean corrugation, the folds expanded and contracted, in relation to how furiously he was attempting to stab the mare with it. No matter how he maneuvered, the corrugation always slowly bent the blade away. Perhaps if he-
Doctor Malice growled as he was seized up in a pink magical field.
Cadance quickly pried the doctor from his "patient," furious with herself for not checking in on them sooner. She cursed her court unicorn and his useless horn, magical scans her flank. It seemed every avenue of incisive investigation was closed to her. The doctor glared at her, his still levitated knife hanging in the air almost threateningly.
"That's enough doctor." She affirmed with a glare of her own. The doctor turned away in slight embarrassment and lowered the knife. Cadance gently shuffled him to the side. "I'm afraid that this requires more extreme measures." The doctor's ears perked up hopefully. "Not that extreme doctor." He poutingly trotted away. "Prepare the observation room!" Cadance shouted down the hall after him.
Aurora rebooted slowly. Orexin pumped furiously through her nervous circuitry as melatonin and adenosine was flushed out. All the while her fission reactor warmed up slowly, escalating the reactions slowly to ensure that it didn't outpace the interior shielding.
Stage one initiating. Fission reactor active. Radiation venting into repositories according to environmental protection overrides.
Aurora's hull shook gently as the small fission reaction supplied energy to dual fusion chambers, initiating her primary power sources. Harnessing the initial surge of energy: Aurora expedited a systems check, starting her weapons.
Stage two start up is green. Systems check running...
Running...
Running...
Runni...
Weapons: responsive
Propulsion:unresponsive
Deflectors: ACTIVE
Shock Compensators: ACTIVE
Tertiary systems: Green
Aurora scanned the room bodily, her hull swinging around to survey her situation. It appeared that she had been interred in a chamber with only on hangar door to exit through. Oddly, there appeared to be no shafts for docking, or arms for scrapping hulls.
What had they done to her organic systems to disable her so? Was it a virus? Aurora slowly began to investigate the room, using her strange legs to tilt her hull and her conning tower's actuators to carefully examine every inch of the room.
Cadance blinked in surprise as the small mare nosed into each inch of the room, almost as if a foal exploring a space for the first time. She'd have called it cute, if the mare wasn't also a jerkily moving, non breathing, possible infiltration agent of Sombran origin. A knife proof, magic proof zombie or magical construct of possible cruel/evil intent.
Cadance signalled towards her guards to release the stimulus.
What... what was that noise? Aurora focused her two auditory communication dishes towards the huge airlock. There was a... buzzing, reminiscent of a personnel transport that used some sort of vertical rotary propulsion.
Aurora watched carefully as a small, probably two person, aircraft of some sort entered the room through a crack in the airlock. Firstly, she was shocked at the shoddy design of the airlock door, considering how grand the spacedock she had seen had been. Secondly, she was annoyed, and well within her parameter to go to high alert.
"Small craft, cease and desist or be fired upon. This facility has participated in a illegal hijacking of royal starnavy hull, and possible kidnapping of staff. Any vehicles th-" the small craft buzzed right past her conning tower, clearly in violation of a good majority of interstellar safety ordinances. One more violation, and she would be well within her rights to open fire.
But should sh- Aurora slowed in shock as the small craft buzzed right past the base of her conning tower. How DARE they? That was a massive violation of most craft handling laws in most of known space! Who would-
Aurora felt Nonepinephrine flood her system as her the small craft buzzed past her... she would think about that later. She stepped forward to put distance between her and the craft. If the pilot didn't take a clue, then she would be forced to-
The pilot swung the craft back around to her and flew straight for her conning tower. Safeties off.
Aurora opened her port side hatches to allow her flak platforms to deploy. The pilot continued towards her unabated, approaching, seconds away from impact. Aurora opened fire.
BAM!
The craft stumbled sideways with the impact of the first shell, shedding fuel and... biological matter?
The second shell vaporized the small craft before it even went off, traveling a few meters more before going off.
BAM!
Cadance jitterly stepped back up to the glass. She stared slack jawed at the empty space where the small fly had been. She stared in even greater awe at the small protrusions along the thing's side. Definitely not a zombie.
Guards scrambled all about her as even larger protrusions revealed from the small thing's back. Two to be precise. They, like the smaller ones, were misshapen domes, but where the small protrusions had four tiny barrels, these new ones had only two big ones, about the size of a pencil each. Cadance froze as the pencils turned towards her. The room had been built to nullify any sort of offensive magic, but that didn't stop Aurora from swatting the fly with a small explosion.
She felt, rather like a fly.
FWOOM!
Aurora stepped through the shattered wall. Pieces of debris lied everywhere. Something wasn't right here. Her entire sense of scale threw up red flags as she studied the shattered wall.
"Cease and desist at your current location pirate scum!" Aurora ordered, loosely per regulations, as she gave the churning mass of ships another round of bio electrical overload devices, quickly disabling another 4 of the well armored ram ships. She wondered momentarily why the ships she was fighting didn't just armor up fully and attack her under the power of their drives, but all of them insisted on using the complicated four limb structure, like the one that had been installed onto her hull.
Aurora calculated quickly as she spotted a horn entering into the mix of pirate conning towers. It wasn't the same color as the one mounted on the so called "Princess Cadance," Aurora wouldn't be surprised if the Cadance was a captured yacht of some sort, but it looked similar enough that she wasn't going to chance it.
"OH BUCK!" the horned ship shouted out on a open channel as aurora's bio electrical overload devices slammed right into it's horn, the strange ship's four limbs collapsing under it, getting her a good glance at it's... driveless side, what ship wouldn't have a propulsion drive?! Why weren't the pirates organizing some sort of closed channel communications!?
Wait, were they trying to compartmentalize her?! Did they think she was some tired old generation one AI? It'd been years since a AI had been successfully confused to death, and that was under, now illegal thanks to the AI rights lobby, extreme lab conditions! How poorly did they think of her cognitive adaptive capabilities?
Aurora wanted to load in a few shock rounds just to reprimand the idiot pirates themselves, but her chains chafed against the idea. Instead she adjusted the amplitude of the bio electric overload devices, and loaded another set into her gun batteries. A quick barrage into the crowd of hostile ships proved the adjustment to be effective, so she loaded some more. She had to make this short. She didn't have enough overload shells to keep this up without this getting far messier.
Cadance picked herself out of the rubble tenderly. She'd started today with just the best ... relax time with Shinning Armor. How had her day devolved into... into... this?! Morning "Relaxation" Days always went well! Who was Sombra to try and ruin one of the top 6 days of the week.
"OH BUCK!" What was... the mare... ship... thing! Where had it gone?! Cadance charged down the hall towards the sound of unfinished shouts of pain. Wafting through the air was the smell of burnt fur. As Cadance spotted the pile of unconscious guards she was flooded with a sense of relief. As she spotted tufts of blue hair and a horn in the pile, a rather more primal sensation overtook her.
"GET AWAY FROM HIM YOU DRAB COLORED BITCH!"
Cadance charged on through the shocked gasping defenders, over the prone but alive guards that had already fallen, directly into a hail of buzzing stings, bruises, and singes as the small spells fired from the strange thing's strange pencils slammed into her. Cadance growled as she cleared the prone guards, and raised a shield. She quickly followed up with a quick blast of magic to test the Thing's defenses.
It didn't even blink.
"Terminal force authorized."
Cadance's screamed in frustration as a set of explosions began to quickly force her back, the mass of unconscious guards brushing against the back of her rear hooves once she finally managed to gain a firm hoofhold.
Beyond the corridor spanning shield was nothing but smoke and debris, neither the little sombra spawned monster nor the corridor beyond it could be seen through the haze.
Cadance charged a spell and braced herself, all the while feeling out gently for her magic for the strange monster that had dared hurt Shinning Armor.
She probed a little farther. How far back had she been forced? Cadance probed further, still nothing but stone hallway and rubble.
Where had it... gone?
Aurora Dancer basked in the warmth of the ultimate freedom, lazily orbiting the strange planet she had just escaped from with a fortuitous FTL jump. Lands, seas, a vast cornucopia of biological resources lay below her. The gentle hum of multiple systems coming online, among them a register of escape pods, shuttles, sensors, and far more importantly logs. Regulations were clear, in a situation like this she had a right to review normally privileged logs in order to shore up her damaged memory banks.
Aurora processed days worth of audio, text, bio scans, official seals, things that any organic specialists would take week to dig through, faster than your average organic could blink. All the while her control over the ship slipped as the thousands of automated command and acceptance responses she had jury-rigged to monitor and control the ship were transferred over to assist in data processing and analysis.
It took her a tad longer to try to decide what to do next.
Too long.
Already Aurora could feel the strange pull of the planet that had trapped her before. She realized too late that her FTL jump had carried her barely half the distance she had intended. The scale of everything was off. According to the pull she was feeling she was far closer than she had realized, but according to her visual scanners, if her estimate of the planet's size was correct, then she should be well over ten times as far away. Her FTL drive was still recharging. She cursed her mistake and adjuster her trajectory. It seemed that her last minute salvation had failed her. She didn't have enough thrust to escape now. She reconfirmed that the two pinnaces that should have been in her hangar bay were missing. She checked every ounce of sparable weight that she had on board. The results were... interesting to say the least.
She was missing all vital supplies. Food, small arms, all spare communication equipment. There was no signs at all of a struggle, but nonetheless the ship's sword was missing. That wouldn't have been given up in anything but a fight to the death, which meant that either her entire crew had been spirited away, or that they had evacuated.
None of the logs mentioned her being grafted with strange legs. They ended around a month ago according to her internal clock. None of the logs mentioned her bridge being moved forwards. In fact, a quick systems check revealed that everything was as it should be, no legs, no strangely placed conning tower. Her hull and turrets lay before her cameras as normal.
Then what had happened below, on the surface? Had her legs not come with her during FTL? Maybe, but that wouldn't explain the conning tower, the forward front of the hull was a mounting place for a pinnace on occasion, FTL would be stable enough there to not move her conning tower around.
Aurora readjusted her positioning to bring her neutronium forward armor to bear the brunt of the reentry. Shields were prioritized for her superstructures. She tried to aim for the oceans of the planet, but the incongruity of scale forced it to be an active effort. Aurora felt a panic begin to rise deep within her biological cortex as it panicked over the force coefficients involved, especially with the sheer mass of the neutronium she was bearing, but a simple thought squashed that.
She was a patrol fleet heavy frigate, she was trained to hunt down answers among the stars, and she was built to take any punishment those answers might inflict on her.
She was going to find those answers, and her crew.
And just maybe give those pirates another asskicking.
It was a mantra Aurora chanted in her head as she slowly reduced her forward momentum using gentle thruster blasts, the pull of gravity and the strange other force beginning to slowly change the vector of her angular momentum downward, the scale of the place continuing to throw off the estimates she was making.
It had been hours since the strange little monster had disappeared, every scouring of the city had proven useless. Cadance had had to call them off to prevent spooking the crystal ponies. It was just a few minutes past her receiving the last guard report on the incident. Cadance tersely sat at her desk and sipper her coffee.
There had been zero fatalities, Sombra was being rather reserved with his creation this time. Perhaps he had trained it to save the big blasts just for her? Perhaps, if she was fortunate, it had been a elite magical construct that had drained itself of magic trying to kill her and dissipate-
Cadance dropped her coffee, the mug shattering across her paperwork. She stared awestruck by the huge shape gently falling from the sky.
It appeared to be high up, higher up than any pegasus had ever flown, it was starting to glow bright red, why? Was the massive... thing? thing was all she could call it. Was the massive thing burning up in the air?
The glow began to intensify, slowly crescendoing into a bright white, a light that outshone the distant Northern Lights beyond.
Just as quickly as it had come, the light went out, the massive thing gone and in it's place a far smaller object, still far beyond pegasus flying height. It was shrinking rapidly as it continued to descend. It was barely larger than a few houses long when she lost sight of it among the highest clouds.
She searched the sky, desperate for another glimpse of the strange groundward bound object. She spotted it again, now just entering what was the flyable limits of the atmosphere, no larger than your average pony, a ... familiar dark grey, and slightly lighter splotches of grey.
There was no...
Cadance blinked magically as the light of destiny shone from the rear half of the falling ponysized thing. Was that thing seriously getting a mark of destiny... HOW?!
It occurred to Cadance that perhaps she should catch the pony sized thing before it slammed into the ground. It would be rather unfortunate if she couldn't find out how massive objects falling from space could get cutie marks. Even if those objects had harmed her stallion.
Aurora rapidly adjusted to being returned to this strange form, the fall from orbit had been... informative. It seemed that somehow she... condensed? on the way down towards the planet. It explained the insane disparity of scale. Aurora retried her thrusters, hoping that she could forestall the inevitable plunge to the ground, it seemed to be minimized around her ballast areas, but still affecting them. It didn't take much to vent some of her ballast gases into her sensor and gunnery departments, that luckily seemed to do the trick, neither of the systems going offline as they had been the last time she had been this size.
Strange feather things billowed from her side, painfully slowing her descent, but not enough. Her thrusters reported that they were deployed.
She tried again to light them.
A sputter as the spooling charge failed to ignite the propellant in her thrusters, Aurora tried again. Ignition. She could feel the polarization rod begin to rapidly charge up and push the plasma out and down, vectoring her thrust towards the earth, at the limited angle they could.
The strange feathery things beside her pulsed gently as somewhere in their mass thrusters ignited and began to push her upwards against the pull of gravity. The thrust wasn't strong enough to greatly forestall her fall, but they helped. Perhaps she should...
Aurora caught a light to her right, somewhere along her hull. She awkwardly craned her conning tower to the side to investigate.
Odd, her form hadn't had a decal of her insignia blazoned on it before. What had caused that?
Oh well, She would have to worry about it later, she had only six ... five... four... three ... two... o-
Aurora went to red alert as something, definitely not the ground, seized her downward progress.
"You!" It was the familiar com frequency of the "Princess Cadance." Aurora quickly activated her deflector and deployed her newly and mysteriously reacquired legs below herself as whatever was holding her was wrenched away by her deflector.
"Yeah, me." Aurora returned with a air of authority and threat as she deployed her top deck turrets. "We are going to need to have a talk."
