Dawn of the Vanguard

by Mystic Song

The Precipice of Entropy

Author's Note:

Proofread and Edited by the extensive skills of JBL.

Claws of magic sunk into packed dirt. Behind curved goggles, six pairs of wide slitted eyes scanned a cavernous empty room, and found themselves in uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory. While Strike Team One did hail from Dissimulare and were used to the underground terrain, they did not specialize in information gathering. They worked hard and fast, attacking targets with brutal strength and killing them with cruel speed. Silent infiltration was not a major aspect of their particular wheelhouse. Alec brought these facts up to them as he explained that even with these handicaps of all the teams, they were the most likely to succeed.

Of all the Dissimulare teams that came to Equestria, only they had some specialization in using stealth underground. That wasn’t anyone's fault. Dissimulare was an underground city hidden under the roots of a horrific sprawling forest. If ponies were to get past the natural and unnatural traps of the forest into the main cavern, stealth would have useless. At least, the type of stealth that they would normally use was useless in this situation. They did not need nor could they use guerrilla tactics; this was not their base, nor was it their home.

The hoof-worn paths below them told them that much.

They were in enemy territory; everything here was of the enemy. Each wooden shelf, the strangely designed chairs, the small gas lamps with nozzles that wouldn’t feel right in their hands—everything in this base was made by a disquietingly foreign enemy that could detect and neutralize their magic.

His stomach flipped.

Krane breathed through his nose, the sound painfully loud in the terribly still cavern. While being nervous was okay—honestly, he would be worried if he did not feel any apprehension in this situation—allowing that nervousness to affect his actions were not. He unhooked one hand from the dirt allowing him the ability to signal his teammates.

“Books.”

The shelves were as good a place as any to start searching. They wouldn’t be able to read anything, but the shelves were right above a table covered in what seemed like illustrated loose-leaf plans. It was perfect for someone like Alec to look over.

A dark-toned hand waved briefly in front of him before signing, “Feathers.”

Krane had met Deon on the first day of Boot. An acorn-brown twig of a guy who had ran away from his family’s logging company. Almost pure-black irises flicked to his back and the loud green insect wings that clung to it.

Right. Buzzing around like a plague of insects would be ill-advised. Magic leaked from him and his chitin disappeared into dyed brown and grey feathers. Deon gave him a tight nod before spreading his own feathered wings to feel the drafts in the cavern. Natural air currents ruffled his feathers in patterns that told him how they should fly. Krane was the first to drop as he released the relative safety of the ceiling and led his team in a high glide. So high that at points Krane swore he could feel his hair kissing the uneven ceiling. Their glide directed them to the largest bookshelf in the room, and they landed on the wood with little effort.

Arden, the final member of their team, landed on the wood and crawled to the edge of the shelf. He peered down at the plans below, giving himself, and Alec back at base camp, a good view at numbers and graphs that Krane did not understand. Of all of them, Arden was the most qualified to study the pony machinery, being a magitech mechanic himself. However, due to the way that Arden was shaking his head, Krane had to assume that this was out of his league.

“Of course it was they can’t read the ponies orthodoxical language.” The thought crawled around his head and poked at the unease tracing his body.

Krane squashed the thought with a quick click of his tongue and gained Deon’s and Arden’s attention. Information was secondary to their mission; they knew that going in. Move on. He pointed farther into the cavern to the claustrophobic hallway and took to the air with Deon and Arden flying close behind him. They glided just under the ceiling and then flipped up, claws sinking into the packed dirt. With a pulse of magic, the soles of their boots became covered in a layer of sharp spikes, allowing them better purchase on the uneven terrain. They pulled their wings tightly against their bodies and crawled across the ceiling, keeping to the dancing shadows created by the sparse torchlight. The main hallway branched out sporadically, each small offshoot seeming to be designated to one door. At each door, one of them dropped to the ground and squeezed underneath to ook inside the room.

Empty. Papers. A room that was full of scrap metal. Nothing.

Pony.

Something tightly clutched the inside of Krane's chest. His breath came out ragged and for a moment just a moment, it felt like soft hands were weakly trying to grip his skin. As fast as the feeling came, it left, and it was just him staring at the dangling foreleg of the pony.

A mare. Calico. Her toffee-brown tail dusted the ground from which her bed was suspended. It twitched with her as she murmured in her sleep. On her flank was a picture of a magnifying glass that became hidden as she twisted in her sheets. Leaving that room took longer than was necessary. His skin prickled up and down his back. Deon and Arden watched him from their perch on the ceiling.

He brushed the sickly feeling off and joined them on the tightly-packed ceiling. He was wasting time that they did not have.

It was apparent from the contents of the next few rooms that they had entered the residential area of the base. The place was thick with sleeping or quietly conversing ponies, all of them too preoccupied with themselves to notice the three diminutive humans crawling around their base.

Alec’s monotone leaked into their ears, “Seven hours until extraction.”

Deon shot him a look and indicated sharply down the hall with a movement of his head.

Right. They did not have the time to look at each slumbering member of the Demon King's army. Time was limited and the device had to be destroyed.

They took to the ceiling on painted wings and danced in between the bedroom lights. On either side of them, ponies slept unknowing of their presence. No one saw them. No one knew that they were there. Quiet. Quiet. Quiet.

“What the hay do you mean that the militia disbanded?”

The shout stopped them short. They flipped around to get a clear view of the two ponies below them. A purple-maned and yellow-coated stallion was speaking to another stallion, albeit this one had a dark blue mane and muddy-orange coat. Muddy-Orange stood stoic in the face of Yellow’s rage. Yellow paced, with sharp turns and stomps that dislodged sprays of dust from the ground. Muddy-Orange looked on, his jaw tense and eyes narrowing as Yellow continued through his rampage.

They did not have time for this. Krane pointed further down the hall, and they slowly crawled across the ceiling, using the rising tension and the resulting shouting match to hide their passage. If what was happening was important, Alec would have told them to stop. Alec, their makeshift hub, heard and saw everything they did. If Klein focused on the open mic, he could hear the soft scratches of pen on paper.

They continued to push through the base. Their advancement halted briefly every time they came across a wandering pony. This careful but constant motion let them pass by recreational rooms undetected.

The deeper base was a different matter.

There was a pony at the top of a steady decline. He looked down the hall, face blank and body unmoving, dull bronze-coloured armour almost blending him with the dirt around him. It was obvious that he was guarding the entrance to the important parts of the base.

Getting past him would have been tricky if they were from anywhere other than Dissimulare. But they knew carved out caves and pressing dirt. They knew the earth, and so they dug up.

Earth moved in slow waves around them. It was a claustrophobic endeavour if you weren't used to it, plus the fact that it was pitch black. Small bits of dust fell from above as the earth buckled and breathed around them. The only thing keeping them from being crushed was their own sure movements.

Was it wrong that Krane revelled at this sensation even in this situation? Perhaps he was just homesick. Or it was because since entering the base a few hours ago, it was the first time the murky feeling of things twisting around his organs and pulling finally let up.

Deon and Arden felt it too. They were trying to hide their discomfort like the good soldiers they were, but they could only ignore the tension rippling through them and the scratching for so long. None of them had hidden the first shudder that ran through them that well.

He would have to remind them that these emotions would just get them killed. None of them could work to expectation if their minds were clouded. And with that in mind, he pushed through the floor of his tunnel into the hallway.

Spinning around, he found that the way was clear. He knew that they were short on time, yet Krane allowed himself to wallow in this moment. His head was in enemy territory and his waiting teammates were buried alive in the ground around him. Safe.

But they weren't safe. Not really. Not yet.

Breathing out slowly, he pushed his head further through the floor of his ever-collapsing tunnel, and out of the base’s ceiling. From what he could see, the larger tunnel declined further into the ground. Flickering lamplight stretched the few shadows eerily across the walls.

If he thought about it too much, the shadows looked like fingers reaching out in all directions. Each natural flicker of light seemed to make these fingers contract and relax in a haphazard way along the sloping walls. Contract-relax, contract-relax, contract-relax.

Scratch. Scratching.

His wings switched quickly, feathers to green chitin that beat a coded message against the collapsing tunnel walls. Just as quickly as the initial switch happened, he went back to his quiet feathered wings.

Two heads popped out near him. Arden wiped the dirt away from his goggles before pointing down the tunnel. Krane nodded before sharply pushing himself out of his tunnel and out into the open air. His wings shook the dust off, and with one soft beat, he righted himself and clutched the ceiling. He sunk easily into hard dirt, listening for the soft thuds of his team following him before crawling across the ceiling.

With each body length of movement, Krane felt sicker. The pulling sensation got stronger the deeper they went.

The downward slope continued at a gradual pace. The air stuck to their faces, stale and musty. Every so often, they heard small clumps of dirt dislodge around them and fall to the ground in craggy piles. Whoever built this base had little knowledge of the composition of the ground around them. The floor of the tunnel was wet and they had used sporadically placed wooden beams, which looked to be growing mould, to hold the whole structure up.

Arden’s wings buzzed against each other, creating sharp notes that died quite suddenly in the gritty mud walls. A simple message, “Unstable ground, no big movements.” The confirming clicks washed over him and disappeared into the nether of the tunnel’s sloped walls.

A few more meters, a sharp turn to the right, and the tunnel evened out. What lay before them was a small lobby-like area with a few folding chairs scattered about or leaning against the walls.

At the end of the lobby stood a solid wooden door.

He scanned the door up, down, looking at the weak hinges that held it up. There wasn’t enough space for them to crawl under it. There wasn’t enough space around the door for them to glimpse into the room. If they waited long enough, sooner or later a pony would either exit or enter the room. Standing around and waiting would be better than trying to enter such a room blindly.

The watch on his wrist barely vibrated, and he glanced down at the muted face. The digital clock face displayed one hour and twenty-two minutes, the amount of time they had already spent in the base. Alec’s hushed voice whispered to him what he already knew.

“Five hours,” the cold operative said. What he didn’t say twisted around in Arden’s head.

You have five more hours to search before you need to leave. Either turn around or find another way in.

Arden and Deon looked at him. His two teammates knew that going in blind was incredibly dangerous. They also knew that they did not have the time to wait for a pony to maybe, perhaps, come this way and open the door for them.

Krane clicked out, “Dig through.” Before they moved, a sharp afterthought that had his wings buzzing in place came to him. “Come out through the wall, not the floor.”

He did not want to think about what horror coming out of the ground, between a pony’s hooves, might bring.

If Arden and Deon understood his line of reasoning, they didn’t voice it. Instead, they got to work burrowing through the wall and stomping the removed dirt into the ground outside of the room. A few minutes and a tentative push, and his face poked through into the room. Wet dirt stuck to his face, giving the impression of a random bump in an already uneven wall. He blinked, carefully wiping clumps of mud away off of his goggles, allowing Alec a clear view into the room.

The room that they found was misshapen. Stunted walls sloped into a lopsided point that was barely a ceiling at all. Random harsh divots marked where clumsy pickaxes and unpractised shovels were used. The water runoff was worse here as if whoever made this room wasn’t quite done with securing the foundation. These pitfalls of construction were thoroughly ignored by the sole occupant in the room. A pegasus pony jumped over interconnected wires and upturned boxes to reach the multiple valves and dials on, what Krane could only assume was the blocking device. It was a machine that seemed to be more of an organized mix match of panelling, levers, and all things that felt wrong.

He could feel the hairs on arms raise and his teeth clench as the machine continued to release that maddening scratching pulse. Yes, they could feel the dampening effects grow as they came closer to this room. But. Being exposed to the full brunt of the miasma that crept from the machine, through the room, up the walls, and over them… it burned. It was as if there was a hand grabbing the magic within him and slowly pulling. Not enough to hurt, but enough for him to feel that something wanted to tear him apart.

Arden growled low beside him, a multitude of curses that blended together escaping his mouth. As he scanned the machinery, clumps of dirt fell away from his head.

“How long will it take to disassemble it?” Krane asked as Arden pulled half his body through the wall.

“An hour, two maybe.” Arden’s face pulled down into a sharp frown. “Depends on what you want me to do to it. If you want me to smash it, anyone can do that lickity-split like. But the ponies will know that we were here, and they would look for us as they make a new one.” Arden’s eyes switched between the machine and the pony that looked like it was having a hell of a time trying to keep it functional. “Not to mention… that.”

Deon dug his hands into the soft soil of the wall. “Let’s avoid that. Unless you don’t want to avoid that.”

He knew what Deon was implying. There were three of them and only one pony. A pegasus who had its back turned to them and did not have the sky to its advantage.

It would be easy. Kill the pegasus, dig a deep hole in already sinking and collapsing dirt, and destroy the machine. With how badly maintained the room was, and how little it appeared that ponies knew about building underground, it could be years until somebody thought to dig down. By that time, this base would have already collapsed.

The pegasus mare messed around with the dials of things that he couldn’t begin to guess at. Her medium-length auburn mane was tied into a loose bun and her sandy brown coat glistened with sweat. Displayed on her flank was two screwdrivers arranged in an X. At least they looked like screwdrivers—the handles were too long and looked like they would fit strangely in human hands.

What were the chances that she was the sole creator of the damping machine? Should they kill her anyway just to weaken the pony’s forces?

Krane licked his teeth. Would the satisfaction of killing an enemy pony be worth a chaotic escalation to this stalemate?

“Our purpose here is to disable the machine, not to draw attention to ourselves,” Krane said carefully. “We don’t know what connections she has to the people here, and what repercussions her death might bring. In the long term, we want to create as much damage as possible—we can’t do that in a sudden burst of conflict. We don’t have enough resources.”

They had about three-hundred humans in total, with about seventy-five of those being actual combatants. Zachary said that their number of enemies were possibly in the tens of thousands.

An all-out frontal assault would be suicide.

“What would be the next option be then?” Deon asked.

Arden chewed at the inside of his cheek. “If I had time, I could twist it up in a different way. Make it so that they think it’s still working when it doesn't. Pull some wires or what-have-yous until this feeling stops.”

His words opened up a break in their speech, a break they spent watching the creaking, sickening machine work. The pegasus continued to work, completely unaware of the three humans watching her. She cursed under her breath as the machine began to hiss out a jet of steam.

“We’re talking about that now then?” Deon asked offhandedly as if he hadn’t been mad-dogging the machine like it was a rabid dire bear. “A real piece of work that thing there is, isn’t it?” His smile was more a baring of teeth than anything remotely pleasant. “It’s a torture device, the same thing they put on Zachery, right? Feels like my magic is being pulled from my body. Probably ripped up his lines—”

“Deon,” Krane said firmly, “that’s enough. We can’t get any work done with you ruminating on rumours.”

Deon broke his gaze away from the machine. “Rumour isn’t rumour if it’s true. You saw the pictures. He looks like he was suffering from severe magic exhaustion. I’m surprised that he didn’t keel over before his picture was taken.”

“Be that as it may, the fear that those rumours spread will interfere with our mission.”

Deon levelled him with a look. “I’m not scared, I am rightfully cautious. We should consider all the possible outcomes before we act. If that means we wait a little longer before we act, then so be it.”

“I’m just waiting for one of you to tell me something I don’t already know,” Arden said leadingly. “Maybe for someone to answer my question.”

Krane shot Deon a glare. “I was just about to do that if we are done distracting each other?”

Deon held his Krane’s look for a beat before he looked away. “I suppose we are.”

“Good,” Krane said before turning to Arden. “First priority is to break it. If you can mislead them, do it, but don’t waste time with it.”

Arden sharply saluted before pushing himself into the room. Krane watched as he kept his altitude low his green wings beating fast as he flew over to the machine. A sharp buzzing sound following closely behind him.

Krane realized Arden’s mistake when he was nearing the halfway point to the sitting machinery. There was a pattern to the machine's loud mechanical churning a pattern that was broken up by the sound of Arden's wings.

The pegasus’ ears twitched, an unconscious response to the sound of an insect getting too close to her general area. She looked up from her work, a puzzled look on her face. Then her face contorted in annoyance.

Arden still hadn’t noticed.

Beside him, Deon cursed. Amber light bled over Deon’s arms as he pulled himself out of the wall. Deon landed on the room’s floor, and his wings beat out a single syllable.

“Throat.”

Which meant that he, Krane, had to collect the body before it made too much of a mess. Not ideal. Nothing about this situation was ideal.

From experience, most ponies had terrible hearing. Why the hell did this one hear him? Unless…

Krane’s eyes snapped toward the searching pegasus’ mark.

Having good hearing would probably help when working on machines. Arden was always telling them to shut up as he tried to listen for the kinks in the machines he had to fix. He himself never heard anything wrong, but Arden would always mutter about a loose belt, or bolt, or whatever the fuck.

Why wouldn’t a pony mechanic have the same skill?

The pony frowned as her head swivelled around the room, trying to see whatever it was that was disturbing her peace.

Deon hadn’t made his move yet. They were both waiting for her to see or not see Arden. There was still a chance to salvage this situation if she didn’t see him. As he said before, a sudden escalation was the last thing that any of them wanted.

“Though,” he thought as the pegasus’ eyes narrowed, “we don’t always get what we want.”

The pegasus looked directly at Arden, who had finally realized his situation, and then turned back to the machine. “Bugs… of course there would be bugs here,” she muttered as she took apart loose panelling. “I’m in a crummy underground base working on this garbage machine. Why not add bugs to this mess?”

Krane stopped at the pegasus’ words. Was the pony near-sighted?

Deon looked at him. He, in turn, considered the pony who had pushed her head into the machine, and then he looked at Arden who was hovering in place a little closer to the ground. “Just to clear this up a little bit,” Deon said, clawed hands flexing, “are we going to take out the pegasus or not?”

Krane opened his mouth to speak. A wave of absolute agony crushed him, and his world threatened to grey out.

He slammed his mouth closed and swallowed down a scream. Pain like molten lead seared through his veins as it felt like his body was pulling itself apart at the seams.

Then, it left.

A dull humming echoed in his ears as he tried to bring his breathing under control. The droning died down, and there was someone shouting in his ear. Alec was saying something, but it felt like his head was underwater and everything sounded muffled.

In the corner of his eye, he saw Deon pushing himself off the ground. Thankfully they were both still small. Whatever that was screwed with their magic, but not enough to disrupt the spell they had cast.

If we weren’t from Dissimulare and had to use amulets, the spell would not have held.

Unimportant thoughts. Where was everyone?

Deon was staring at the pegasus who was still mostly inside the machine. She cursed loudly at whatever she was working with. The muffling in his ears had died down and he could now hear Alec clearly. That pulse that hit them had affected the topside team as well. He couldn’t hear what the other teams were going through, only Alec’s frosty words as he switched through multiple conversations.

“Krane,” Alec’s voice was directed toward him. “What is your status?”

He shook the last bits of confusion from his mind. “The pony did not notice us. The pulse may have been a mistake, a lucky shot at most. We are still in cover; the disruption did not affect our magic. Deon is getting up; he appears to be fine. I think we can continue.”

“Krane.” This time Alec’s voice was sharper, harder than he had heard the mostly monotone man before. “I lost visual on Arden. What is his status?”

Arden was flying when they were hit by that pulse. Krane searched the air for him and found the mechanic bobbing up and down in the air. His wings were beating out of time, more random twitching than anything that could conceivably sustain flight. He was clutching his head, not really looking where he was going as he stuttered around in lopsided circles.

“Krane,” Alec pressed just a bit harder this time, “what is Arden’s status?”

Krane’s throat tightened as he watched Arden drop out of the sky.

The mechanic spun haphazardly through the air as he fell like a leaden weight. A few aborted flaps of his wings kept him from crashing into the ground at terminal velocity, but he did crash. Arden stayed down, his wings twitching every so often as he clutched his head tighter.

Krane’s mouth felt dry and his first words stuck hard at the back of his tongue. “Arden, Arden’s down. We are going to pull him out.” His own wings started up. “He was too close to the machine.”

He felt his wings start up a sharp buzzing coming from his back as he focused on Arden’s body. His movement was stopped as Deon’s hand tightly clutched his ankle. Krane was barely able to look in Deon’s direction before he was dragged to the ground. He tried to get up only to have Deon roughly pushed his body flat against the floor.

Krane spat dirt out of his mouth, and snarled, “What are you doing?”

The admonishment that he received was less of a ‘shhh’ and more of a low growl that undulated inside of Deon’s rib cage. He heard the soft swish of feathers and felt Deon’s body heat before he realized that Deon had changed his wings from chitin green to brownish-black feathers.

He blinked behind dusty goggles and looked at Deon’s stony face and looked up to see the pegasus staring at them.

Her eyes were bright green, a colour that wasn’t in any way human. Then again, nothing about a pony was human. Its neck was too long. Its eyes were too big. The very skeletal structure of its skull was horrific to look at if what dozens of textbooks told him held true.

The pony was staring at them.

Her huge eyes were squinted and her wings were half raised in caution, an automatic response because the pony had to know that its wings wouldn’t get it far underground. If it got worked up, if it realized what they were, it would start stomping, crushing everything under its heavy hooves as it panicked.

A few meters away from the machine, a few meters away from the pony, Arden’s body twitched.

The pegasus walked away from the machine, unknowingly positioning herself alongside Arden’s prone body. She lifted her front hooves high above the ground as she inched closer to them. She tilted her head from side to side as she struggled to identify them.

“Ah, hello, bug thing! Is that you?” she asked.

Krane swore that his heart was going to break through his ribcage.

The pegasus stopped walking forward. “Wow, you’re a big one aren’t you?” She quickly sputtered, “Not saying that you’re fat. I’m not that mean, nah.” Her wings lowered as she waved her hoof in what was probably supposed to be a placating manner.

The wind from her movements tussled Arden’s thin wings. Arden finally began to slowly drag himself away.

“Listen,” the pegasus was speaking again, “I’m going to be stuck here until morn’ trying to fix this thing to do… whatever the hay they want it to do. Little bug, do you mind giving me some company?”

She watched them. They remained still. Her smile started to shrink. Krane could feel Deon’s claws pressing into his back. The pegasus now looked sad.

Was she waiting for them to respond to her?

She pouted and spoke, “I mean you don’t have to keep me company.” She looked down and away. “The King knows that bugs are complete vagrants.” She froze, her eyes once again squinting as she tried to make sense of Arden dragging himself away.

Deon wings immediately puffed up and he clicked out a sharp meaningless nothing. The pony’s head turned to them as Deon rubbed his feathers sharply together. Feathered wings could hardly be compared to chitin. However, if one were to shutter them fast enough, and the barbs and vanes cut against each other just right.

The pony blinked and smiled. “Ah, so you will stay with me? Thank you. You don’t have to stay the whole night, but it would be nice if you could tell me when you leave.” The pegasus turned around and went back to the machine. “My name is Cinnamon Sprocket, but you can call me Sprocket.” She paused, before looking back at them. “Hey, bug, is it okay if I call you Faceless?”

Deon’s wings hummed again.

Sprocket seemed to take that in the affirmative, and she smiled. “Neat. You know what, little bug? You’re pretty cool.”

The room was once again filled with the sounds of maintenance as the pony went back to work.

So quiet that Krane almost thought he didn’t make a sound, Deon hissed out a swear.

“Krane, this whole situation is fucked,” Deon basically whispered into his ear. “We need to pull out now.”

What Deon said was pure truth. They couldn’t work when at any second the pony might get something accidentally right and kill them. The plan was already haphazard—doing anything further was completely idiotic.

But.

“Arden is getting up,” Krane said, his voice a little sharper, a little more stressed than he would like.

Deon turned back in time to see Arden shakily get to his feet. Their mechanic swayed on jittering legs, his first step almost sending him back to the ground. His second step seemed to be less laboured, and with that same hitching jaunt, he continued his walk to the machine.

“Oh hell,” Deon said, a true frown marring his face, “he’s still going to try to dismantle this thing by himself, isn’t he?”

“Looks like it.” Krane wrapped his arms and legs in a thin pulse of magic, enough to quickly create claws, but not enough to deplete his reserves. “Deon, I want to ‘see’ whoever might come into this room before they see us.”

Deon laid still for a moment chewing at the inside of his mouth before he released the magic around his arms. Magic curled around one of his legs and he drove that leg into the wall of the room. He paused before letting a thin tendril of magic coiled around one arm. He shoved that arm directly into the ground.

“This here?” Deon said slowly as he watched as the pegasus started to hum a song as she worked. “This makes me nervous.”

They both watched as Arden got to the machine. Their mechanic craned his head up at the machine before he pulled himself into one of the many panels that the pegasus had left exposed. Before he left himself to be engulfed into the foreign machinery, Arden turned to them and stuck both of his thumbs up in the air.

Krane waited until he could no longer see Arden before he replied, “It makes me nervous too.” They were already in the shit; it just didn’t make sense to lie. “Focus on the ponies around us.” He reached up to his earpiece and hesitated before he spoke, “Alec, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job. Don’t tell us how to do ours. This machine has to be destroyed.”

The static-filled disjointed voice of their sole intelligence node came through the near-obsolete equipment, “You’ll know if we see any activity.” The low buzzing sound of open connection continued and Krane could just see Alec mulling over his next words, “Tell the specialist mechanic not to repeat this behaviour.”

“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me twice,” Krane muttered, releasing his connection.

Completely unaware of the conversations going on around her, the pegasus continued to work.

Comments

[nighters]

blast from the past I got anxiety from this chapter!!!

[Starlight Nova]

If the main OCs in this story were voiced, what would they sound like?

[kitsune5000]

I was just thinking about this story yesterday! Now I have a new chapter!

[More Dakka]

Wow has it really been a year since the last chapter? Where did that time go?

[Frazzle2Dazzle]

Nostalgia, pure and true, this is a good story! Can’t wait for the next chapter, whenever that might come!