“Hey!” A black-and-white kitten wearing a yellow hard hat and carrying a clipboard ran across the factory floor toward where Twilight and friends were trying to get their bearings. “You all can’t be here! This is a restricted area!”
“Oh, my,” Fluttershy said. “We’re so sorry! We were with the tour and, um, we kind of… got lost?”
“Lost. Perfect. That idiot Victor needs to keep a tighter leash on his tour groups,” the kitten muttered, before turning to Fluttershy. “Relax, it’s fine, no harm done. See that door over there?” The kitten pointed a paw. “Just go through there, take the first left, and you’re all set.”
“Thank you so much.” Fluttershy turned as if to leave.
“Not so fast there, sugarcube.” Applejack moved to block her path. “We still got unfinished business here.”
Fluttershy whimpered.
“Yes, I’m sorry, Mister, er, Kitten…” Rarity began.
“Alonzo,” the kitten replied. “And seriously, you really can’t be here.”
“Well, you see, Mr. Alonzo,” Rarity continued, “the thing is, we’ve come all this way hoping to get a glimpse of your central reactor. They say it’s quite a marvel of engineering, you know. And who knows when we might have another opportunity like this again. So if you would kindly point us in the right direction, we’ll be out of your fur in no time.”
Alonzo groaned in frustration. “Look, lady, what part of ‘restricted area’ do you not understand? If you all don’t turn around and leave within the next five seconds, I’m calling Security.”
“Welp,” Rainbow Dash said. “We tried the nice way. Now it’s time for my way.” She darted up and jabbed at Alonzo with her hoof. “Listen up, fuzzball, here’s how it’s going to go. You’re gonna take us to the central reactor. We’re gonna shut it down. Then, you’re gonna go back to wherever it is you came from and forget all this ‘working in a factory’ nonsense. Because you’re a kitten, and kittens don’t work in factories.”
Alonzo rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that ain’t gonna happen.” He turned and walked briskly toward a large red button labeled “SECURITY” on the far wall.
“Hey, get back here! I’m not done with you yet!” Rainbow dashed off to intercept him.
“Tough cookies, ’cause I’m definitely done with—hey!” Alonzo skidded to a stop when Rainbow cut him off. “Step aside, bright eyes!”
Rainbow narrowed her eyes. “Make me.”
“Fine. You asked for it.” Alonzo took a step forward, and bopped Rainbow on the head with his clipboard.
“Ow! You little jerk!”
Alonzo bopped her again.
“Cut that out! Or else!”
“I’ll stop when you move.” He bopped her again.
“Oh, that’s it!” Rainbow growled. “You’re asking for it, pal!” She raised a hoof.
“Uh, Rainbow?” Applejack said. “You’re not really aimin’ to pick a fight with a kitten, are you?”
“He started it!” Rainbow retorted. Then she thought about what she was about to do, and looked down at the adorable little black-and-white kitten with his tiny yellow hard hat, and looked at her hoof, and looked back down at the kitten. She let out a frustrated sigh and lowered her hoof.
Alonzo smirked. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. Now, if you’ll just take a couple steps to the right so I can reach the—”
A red light blinked on just above the SECURITY button.
“Oh. Never mind. Looks like someone else beat me to it. Probably Jonathan up at the front desk. I bet he’s been keeping tabs on you bunch since you walked through the front door. He’s got this weird obsession with the security feeds, watches them like it’s some kinda soap opera or something.” Alonzo shrugged. “Well, I’d better get back to work, then.” He turned, paused, turned back. “One last word of advice, because most of you seem like decent enough ponies: get out of here as quick as you can. Security doesn’t play nice.”
“Hey, wait!” Rainbow shouted at the kitten as he turned away to inspect a conveyor belt. “You’re supposed to tell us where the central reactor is!”
“Forget it, Rainbow,” Twilight said. “They’re clearly not going to be cooperative. We’ll have to find it ourselves.”
“Hey, maybe this will help!” Pinkie Pie shouted from across the factory floor. She was hopping up and down and flailing her hooves and pointing at a conveniently-placed map attached to the wall.
The rest of the girls rushed over, dodging kittens and conveyor belts along the way.
“Wow. Finally, a bit of good luck.” Twilight traced her hoof along the map. “Let’s see… aha! Here it is! In Sector 7-G! Down this hallway here, then through the second door on the left, past these two rooms, down these stairs, then three right turns, and we’re there!”
“That’s… quite some distance to cover,” Rarity remarked. “We’ll have to move quickly if we want to get there before Security catches up with us. And with the way that kitten was talking, I would prefer if that didn’t happen any time soon.”
“Right,” Twilight said. “We can’t afford to waste any more time anyway. Remember what the tour guide said? Once this factory’s running at full steam it’ll be able to pump out more cookies in twenty minutes than Pinkie Pie made all day today! I don’t even want to begin to imagine the consequences! So let’s get going!”
She pulled the map off the wall and led the group deeper into the factory.
~ * ~
“…And that concludes our little tour,” said Victor the tour-guide kitten. “Those of you who are interested in taking home a souvenir, maybe a box or two of our delicious fresh-baked cookies, feel free to visit our gift shop.” He looked up and blinked. “That’s strange. I could have sworn there were more of you when we started.”
Flitter, Cloudchaser, and Bon Bon, the only three ponies left, looked at each other and shrugged.
“Yeah, that is kinda weird,” Cloudchaser said. “Maybe they all went to the bathroom or something.”
“That, or they got bored and wandered off,” Bon Bon suggested.
Victor groaned. “Well that’s just great. My first day on the job and I lose half my tour group.”
“More like three-quarters, actually,” Bon Bon pointed out. “I think there were twelve of us at one point.”
“That’s even worse! And if they got into a restricted area…” Victor groaned again. “They’re probably going to dock my pay for this. If they don’t outright fire me, that is.”
“So, good luck with that or whatever,” Flitter said. “I’m gonna go see if they got any snow globes. You girls coming?” She trotted off toward the gift shop. Cloudchaser and Bon Bon followed, leaving poor Victor alone with his worries.
“I could really go for some catnip right about now.”
~ * ~
“We’re getting closer!” Twilight exclaimed, leading the group down a drab gray hallway. “The stairs down to Sector 7-G should be just past the next room, and—” She skidded to a stop in front of the door at the end of the hall, sealed with yellow tape. The posted notice proclaimed the room beyond to be closed, and warned of dire consequences to any foolish enough to enter.
“Twilight?” Rarity said. “Is something the matter? Why have we stopped?” Then she saw the yellow tape, and the notice, and all the skull-and-crossbones stickers. “Oh. Oh my.”
“Um, maybe we should go back?” Fluttershy suggested quietly.
“Nah,” Rainbow Dash said. “Let’s bust on through! Whatever’s on the other side of that door, I’m sure we can handle it if we all work together!”
“I don’t know what to do!” Twilight said. “On the one hoof, all the warnings and yellow tape tell me that going into that room is a very bad idea. But on the other hoof, backtracking to the last fork and trying to map out a new route will take time we don’t have. But on the other hoof, what if it’s something really dangerous, like a poison gas leak? We wouldn’t make it five steps! But on the other hoof, the longer we spend wandering around in here, the more likely our chances of getting caught by—”
“Come on, girls!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed, bouncing past the group and bursting through the door in typical Pinkie Pie fashion, without stopping to notice all the obvious warning signs. “Let’s get a move on!”
“Well, I guess that solves that dilemma,” Applejack remarked. She and Rainbow Dash followed Pinkie into the room.
“Wait!” Twilight shouted. “You all can’t just go charging in there without… oh, who am I kidding.” She went in after them, leaving Rarity alone to try to coax Fluttershy through the door and into the unknown.
“Please don’t make me go,” Fluttershy said in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Fluttershy, darling, it’ll be fine,” Rarity assured her. “If there were anything truly dangerous in there, Pinkie’s Pinkie Sense would have warned her and she would have never gone in.”
“Are you sure?” Fluttershy said, slightly less quietly.
“As sure as one can be about Pinkie Pie,” Rarity said. “Besides, what Rainbow Dash said before was true! Why, together, we’ve faced Nightmare Moon, and a full-grown dragon, and an army of changelings, and any number of other terrible things, and we’ve always come out on top! Whatever is in that room, we have almost certainly seen worse before.”
“Well, if you say so…” Somewhat emboldened by Rarity’s little pep talk, Fluttershy gathered what little courage she could, took a deep breath, shut her eyes tightly, and stepped through the doorway. When nothing bad immediately happened, she dared to open an eye ever so slightly and sneak a peek.
Crates. Nothing but stacks and stacks of crates, filling the room almost to the ceiling, turning it into a maze of sorts.
“Huh,” Applejack remarked. “This ain’t nearly as bad as all them warnings on the door were suggestin’.”
“Yeah,” Rainbow Dash agreed. “It’s kind of… boring.”
“I don’t mind boring,” Fluttershy said. “Boring is so much better than scary or dangerous.”
“According to the map, we’re in Storage Room B,” Twilight said. “And it looks like the central reactor is one floor directly below us! We’re almost there!” She looked up at the towering crates and frowned. “Now all we have to do is make our way through these boxes to the other side of the room.”
“What do you suppose they keep in all them boxes, anyway?” Applejack wondered.
She didn’t have to wonder for long, because at that moment, a stack of crates collapsed suddenly in front of the group, spilling cookies everywhere.
“That answers that question,” Rainbow Dash said.
Twilight stepped forward to inspect the cookies closely. “I wonder if these came from Sugarcube Corner, or Sweet Apple Acres.” She nudged a misshapen, slightly burnt cookie with her hoof. “Then again, these look a little irregular. Maybe they’re the cookies from the factory floor that didn’t pass the quality inspection. I wonder…” Her horn glowed slightly as she prepared to cast a spell, then fizzled out with a shower of sparks.
“Whoa!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed, jumping back. “What was that?”
“I don’t know! I was just trying to pick it up for a closer look! The spell failed for some reason!” Twilight tried again, and again the spell fizzled out. “Something in this room is blocking my magic!”
Another shower of sparks, followed by a gasp. “Mine too!” Rarity said.
“What could cause somethin’ like that?” Applejack asked.
Twilight thought for a moment, then her eyes widened. “Oh no. We have to get out of this room, fast!”
“What? What is it?”
“Chaos magic! The cookies have chaos magic in them! And we’re surrounded by boxes and boxes of cookies, stacked all the way to the ceiling! This place is so oversaturated with chaos magic that it’s interfering with even the most basic of unicorn spells! And at such high concentrations, there’s no telling what—”
Twilight was cut off by a loud crash from behind the group, as a second stack of crates tumbled over. Fluttershy squeaked and jumped into the air, and the rest of the girls huddled close together.
“I don’t think we’re alone in here,” Applejack said quietly.
A few seconds of silence.
“All right, whoever you are,” Twilight Sparkle said loudly, not quite managing to suppress the faintest tremor of fear from her voice. “There’s no point in hiding. We know you’re in here, so come on out and show yourselves.”
One of the piles of spilled cookies shifted slightly, eliciting startled jumps from the ponies.
“Th-there’s something moving in there!” Fluttershy squeaked.
For a moment, none of the girls dared to move. Finally, Twilight gathered her courage and stepped forward. Using her hoof, she poked and sifted through the pile, looking for any sign of whatever had caused the cookies to move.
“Be careful, Twilight,” Rarity whispered. “There could be anything under there.”
“I don’t see anything,” Twilight said quietly. “Just cookies. No sign of whatever was—YAHHH!” She yelped and jumped back suddenly.
“What?!” Rainbow shouted. “What is it?!”
“One of those cookies just… looked at me!”
A pause.
Applejack raised an eyebrow. “The cookie did what now?”
“It looked at me! I-It has an eye! One big eye right in the middle! Then it blinked!” Twilight paused. “Or maybe it winked. I’m not sure what the proper term is when there’s only one eye!”
“Twilight, dear, that’s preposterous,” Rarity said. “Surely you must have imagined it. Cookies don’t have eyes, and they certainly don’t oh dear Celestia it’s coming this way.”
Sure enough, the unusually large cookie emerged from the bottom of the pile, rising to its, well, for lack of a better term let’s just say feet, and slowly shuffled toward them, its eye darting back and forth, lingering on each of the ponies for an instant before focusing on the next.
“Ugh, that’s gonna haunt my nightmares for months,” Rainbow said. “Let’s get the hay outta here before any more cookies come to life.”
“You mean like those cookies?” Pinkie pointed to the right, where several more unusually ambulatory cookies were shambling across the floor aimlessly. Three of the cookies took notice of the ponies and turned, slowly advancing toward them.
The ponies huddled closer together as more and more cookies rose from the spilled piles, surrounding them.
“Well, it looks like the cookies have achieved sentience,” Twilight said, locked in a staring contest with that first sentient cookie. “Possibly a side effect of prolonged exposure to high concentrations of chaos magic.”
“Do you suppose they’re dangerous?” Rarity wondered.
“I don’t think I wanna stick around to find out,” Rainbow said.
“I just hope they aren’t too mad at me for eating so many of their brothers and sisters,” Pinkie Pie remarked.
“So,” Applejack said, “time to run?”
“Sounds good to me,” Twilight said. “There’s an opening to the right. We run on three. Ready?”
The others nodded.
“One.”
The first cookie, as if sensing their intention, shuffled toward them a bit faster. The ponies edged slowly to the right.
“Two.”
The cookie opened something resembling a mouth and let out an unsettling guttural growl.
“Three!”
Twilight made a break for it, followed closely by her friends. They left the slow-moving sentient cookies behind and fled deeper into the labyrinthine stacks of crates.
They didn’t make it very far before running into a second, much larger swarm of sentient cookies.
“Geez, how many of these things are there?” Rainbow Dash said.
“Well,” Twilight said, as the cookies slowly advanced, “there were about ten thousand from Pinkie’s place, plus maybe another ten thousand from Applejack’s farm, plus however many more they’ve manufactured here since the building went up. Which, judging from all the crates they have stacked in here, is a lot.”
“So, we’re in trouble, then.”
“That would be a fair assessment, yes.”
“Of course.” Rainbow sighed. “Say, Rarity, thanks again for waking me up from my nap earlier. I’d much rather be here getting eaten by zombie cookies than sleeping on a nice comfy cloud.”
“Oh, shut up,” Rarity snapped.
For those of you who are curious as to how the girls have been able to wander around inside the factory for so long without running into anything remotely resembling Security, well, it would really be easier to just show you…
~ * ~
Deep in the bowels of the factory complex, behind a door labeled “SECURITY CENTRAL COMMAND AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY”, in a small room lit by a single flickering light bulb and the glow of numerous monitors, a gray kitten sat on the floor, absentmindedly batting around a ball of bright yellow yarn. Behind him, beneath one of the monitors, a red “SECURITY BREACH” warning light blinked, unnoticed, until a second kitten entered the room.
“Oi! George! How long has that been going off?”
The kitten on the floor looked up, blinked. “Who’s going off now?”
“The alert, George! Security breach!” The second kitten, mostly black except for his white paws, glanced at a nearby monitor. “A big one, too, from the looks of it! A veritable pony parade, traipsing about in Sector 4-C!” He narrowed his eyes. “You did see the alert, right?”
George blinked again. “Oh, hello, Bill. How long have you been back for?”
Bill groaned. “You’re hopeless, you know that, George? I ask you to do one thing for me: watch the monitors for five minutes—just five minutes, George!—while I run off to the litter box. And I come back to find there’s been a level-four breach and here you are sitting on the floor playing with a ball of yarn! You know we’re not supposed to take those out of the break room, George!”
George blinked. “…Right. Sorry about that, Bill. I got distracted.”
“Distracted is putting it mildly. You’re downright oblivious!” He pointed at the blinking red warning light. “You probably wouldn’t notice if the entire monitor wall burst into flames right behind you!”
A few moments of silence passed as the two kittens stared at each other.
“So,” George said presently, “with you being back and all, you won’t be needing me to keep such a close eye on things anymore, right?”
Bill mashed a paw into his face and shook his head.
“Right. Lemme know if you need anything else, then.” And with that George went back to playing with his yarn.
“Hopeless,” Bill muttered again. Stepping around George, he made his way to the console with the blinking red warning light, and pressed a series of buttons. “There. That’s handled, finally. Better late than never, I suppose. Almost feel sorry for those ponies, but then they’re the ones who broke into a restricted area, brought this upon themselves and all.”
~ * ~
FMCW TACTICAL ENFORCEMENT DRONE: SERIES 409
*** WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ACTIVATION OF THIS DRONE MAY RESULT IN SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH, AND REDUCED PAY FOR THREE MONTHS ***
LOGIN REQUIRED
USERNAME: billbailey
PASSWORD: ********
LOGIN ACCEPTED
CONNECTING TO CENTRAL COMMAND SECURE NETWORK..........
SECURE CONNECTION ESTABLISHED
DOWNLOADING 6 NEW FILES..........100%
PRIORITY TARGET LIST UPDATED
PRIORITY TARGET: PONY DESIGNATION “TWILIGHT SPARKLE”
PRIORITY TARGET: PONY DESIGNATION “APPLEJACK”
PRIORITY TARGET: PONY DESIGNATION “RAINBOW DASH”
PRIORITY TARGET: PONY DESIGNATION “RARITY”
PRIORITY TARGET: PONY DESIGNATION “FLUTTERSHY”
PRIORITY TARGET: PONY DESIGNATION “PINKIE PIE”
INITIATING STARTUP SEQUENCE..........
REACTOR..........ONLINE
SENSORS..........ONLINE
WEAPONS..........ONLINE
ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL
MISSION PARAMETERS SET
SEARCH AND DESTROY MODE ACTIVE