Space Captain Pinkie Pie

by terrycloth

15: Fixing Tess

Twilight and Pinkie Pie followed Chance into the storage room with the pool, and watched as he lowered the unconscious Tess into the water.

“I wish the water was less opaque,” he said. “I’d really like to watch the process more closely.”

“As far as I can tell, the cure is always instantaneous,” Twilight said. “You’d better pull her out before she drowns.”

Chance reached down and dragged out a sopping-wet moon pony. There was no sign that she’d ever been a unicorn. “Well, that was anticlimactic.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a long gray wire, which he plugged into the side of his head, just behind his ear, then reached down to search for the corresponding port on Tess’ head.

“What are you doing?” Twilight asked, grabbing the end of the wire with her magic before he could insert it.

Chance looked back at her, confused. “Fixing her.”

“I can’t let you do that,” Twilight said firmly. “She specifically said that she didn’t want you working with her implants.”

“This is not up for discussion,” Chance said. “I can’t have a twitchy moon pony waving around a mining ray.”

“It’s bad enough that you have implants that control your emotions,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Nothing I’ve heard about them makes me like the idea at all. But maybe, maybe, there’s a good reason why you need them. You never got to finish that explanation and I’m certainly not going to force you to justify it now that time is critical.”

“It won’t take long, if I leave off the candy-coating,” Chance said. “Feral moon ponies are monsters, created by evil wizards as slaves. I can’t risk Tess reverting to her true nature. Before I put a deadly tool in her hands, I need to make sure the bindings that keep her evil soul in check are secure.”

Pinkie Pie snickered.

“Really?” Twilight asked. “Evil wizards? That’s what you’re going with? How ignorant do you think we are? You’re clearly from an advanced technological society with little if any magic.”

Pinkie Pie laughed out loud, and fell over on her back, wiggling her legs as she laughed.

“Fine, laugh at my metaphors,” Chance said. “Tess is my best friend, or at least my best friend left. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for her own good.”

“Betraying a friend’s trust is the best way to lose a friend,” Twilight said.

“FOREVER!” Pinkie Pie added, staring at Chance intently, if still upside down.

Chance scowled and calmly started dragging the end of the wire towards Tess’ port, pulling against Twilight’s magic. “As her captain, I have the authority to alter her implants however I see fit,” he said, muscles straining as his hand started to move. Twilight’s eyes widened, and her horn brightened with an overglow as she pulled harder against his inexorable advance.

“As the ship’s medical officer, I have the authority to override her consent when she’s not in her right mind,” Chance continued, his heart beating faster and his breath quickening as his glands pumped adrenaline into his system. Twilight grimaced and closed her eyes for better concentration as he pulled against her magic with impossible strength, but she was the strongest unicorn in Equestria, defending her friend from a terrible fate, and she would not fail.

“And as a sneaky weasel,” he said, reaching over with his other hand and smacking Twilight’s horn, disrupting the magic. Twilight screamed and collapsed from the backlash, holding her hooves to her forehead. The wire clicked into place in Tess’s socket. “I don’t need your permission to do what needs to be done.”

There was a purple flash, and the wire disappeared. “Ow,” Twilight said, eyes slightly out of kilter.

“Is your horn smoking, Twilight?” Pinkie Pie asked, leaning close. “It smells kind of like lavender.”

“Darn it!” Chance said, leaping at the ponies, knocking Pinkie Pie aside and pinning Twilight against the floor, his claws at her throat. “We don’t have time to play around. What did you do with it!”

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Twilight said, meeting his gaze. “And you’re not getting your little wire back until and unless Tess agrees to let you work on her.”

“Don’t test me,” Chance said, snarling. His claws dug painfully into her neck, almost breaking the skin.

“Your behavioral implants are working as designed, which means that this anger you’re showing is a trick,” Twilight said, confidently. “Besides, killing me would render this entire exercise pointless, since not only would you no longer have any reason to build a ramp, but even if you somehow got to the ground without me, Celestia would not forgive you for hurting her personal student.”

Chance sighed, and released her. “Fine, you win. But we’re both going to regret this, Twilight.”

Twilight got to her feet. “Some stands have to be taken, and I will never regret doing what’s right.”

“Just spare me the moralizing and leave me alone,” Chance said, closing his eyes and panting heavily. “I went into overdrive for a second there, and I need time to recover. And time to try to figure out if I can forgive you for forcing the issue like this. Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not going to jeopardize the mission, at least not any more than you already have. But I’m not sure if I’m going to want to talk to you, once we’re done with this.”

“Chance…” Twilight said. “Argh! Fine. Be a big jerk.” She turned and stomped out. Pinkie Pie made a very fake angry face at Chance, and did a rather bouncy sort of stomp to follow her.

Once they were both gone, Chance reached into another pocket, and pulled out a backup wire. He plugged it into the port behind his ear, and was just about to connect it to Tess when it suddenly vanished in a purple flash.

“Nice try,” Twilight said, from the doorway. “I can do this all day.”

“Well, that was my last wire,” Chance said, rolling his eyes. “Congratulations, you’ve doomed us all.”

Tess glowed purple and floated out of the room, over to Twilight and Pinkie Pie. “We’ll be taking this,” Twilight said, “at least until she wakes up.”

“Then you two can argue about it when Tess is actually awake to hear you,” Pinkie said. “Are you going to do the magic arm-wrestling thing again? Because that was the best part of this rehearsal.”

===

The unconscious Tess was laid out in the cake fort, guarded by Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie, with Twilight and Chance standing to either side, ready to do battle. Chance glanced at the bound and gagged pegasus under the table. “Good to see you’re consistent about taking the moral high ground,” he said.

Twilight tore off Derpy’s gag with her magic. “Derpy, do you mind being tied up?”

“You tied me up so I wouldn’t break stuff, and I haven’t broken anything since I’ve been tied up,” Derpy said. “You’re really smart, Twilight!”

Twilight replaced the gag, and smirked at Chance. “See? Consent.”

A few minutes later, Tess finally regained consciousness. She blinked, sat up, and saw the two still glaring at each other. “What’s going on?”

“Chance tried to fix your behavioral implants while you were unconscious,” Twilight said, seizing the initiative. “Despite your express lack of permission!”

“Come on, Tess,” Chance said. “Mining ray plus twitchy implants equals friendly fire – you don’t want a repeat of the ultra-lightning-spear, do you?”

“Ugh,” Tess said, putting a hand to her face, although at least half of it was from the translation of ‘taser’. “Fine.”

“Yay!” Pinkie Pie said, tossing confetti into the air. “Every pony wins!”

“What?” Twilight asked. “Just like that?”

“He’s kind of got a point,” Tess said, her voice tired. “And after being turned into a unicorn and back, worrying that he might turn on my hormones just seems kind of petty. But you’d better not!” she added, glaring at Chance.

Chance coughed, and held out his hand towards a grumpy-looking Twilight. With a purple flash, a pair of interface wires reappeared. “For the record,” he said, as he hooked himself up to Tess, “if I’d known she’d cave that quickly, I wouldn’t have tried to do it while she was out.”

While every pony watched, Chance and Tess sat and stared at each other. Tess’ stare was blank while Chance’s was thoughtful, and when she didn’t react to Pinkie Pie waving a hoof in front of her face, it was clear that she was effectively unconscious again.

“So how long is this going to take?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Do I have time for a nap?”

“I’ve already recentered all the dials,” Chance replied, distantly. “I need to figure out what set them out of whack in the first place or it’ll just happen again, when I don’t have a super-critical mission to convince her to let me back in.”

Pinkie Pie’s ear twitched. “I know this… I know this… oh!” she said suddenly. “She said she didn’t want to forget about her friends!”

“That makes sense,” Chance said. “If she was fighting a trauma intervention…”

“What happened to your friends, anyway?” Pinkie Pie asked. “Did Nightmare Moon gobble them up?” Twilight and Rainbow Dash giggled for about a second and a half, before realizing that Chance wasn’t laughing.

“Why don’t I go ahead and tell you the story, while I search through the implant logs,” Chance offered. “It’s not a long story, really. I was going to show you the recording, but…”

Derpy whimpered, under the table.

===

Two space-suited moon ponies – one twice the height of the other – entered the ancient moon temple rather casually. The large one was carrying a huge, blocky mining ray over one shoulder, the small one was staring at a small, portable screen. The temple had six stone walls, covered in luminescent runes, but no roof, so the glowing disk of the Here to Help was clearly visible against the star-studded sky. Tess had done an excellent job of piloting, and the ship was locked into place by its anti-gravity field only a few hundred feet away from their target.

-The energy readings are definitely coming from the statue,- said the small one: Warp, the ship’s engineer. -Let me mark a target, and then make a bore hole gradually. We want to find the source of the energy, not destroy it.- She walked up to the statue dominating the center of the room -- an angry, rearing horse, with outstretched wings and a huge, voluminous stone tail, and a long, sharp horn emerging from its helmeted skull.

-Odd,- she said, after waving her little screen all around the statue. -The readings are strongest in the tail.- She made a mark on the statue’s flank, right next to an engraved symbol of a crescent moon. -Try here, I guess; we might hit a power conduit but it’s unlikely to be anything vital.-

-You want me to shoot the horse in the butt,- replied Wolf, the large one, as he unslung his mining ray and aimed it one-handed at the statue.

-Carefully!- Warp said. -While I hide behind one of those pillars.-

Before she could get to the indicated cover, Wolf pressed the button on the side of his mining ray and shot an impossibly bright beam over her shoulder, hitting the statue right in the center of its moon. His pulse was only a fraction of a second long, but the spot it hit glowed brightly, and brilliant, white cracks started to crawl across the statue’s surface.

Warp, who’d thrown herself to the ground after nearly being shot by the mining ray, scrambled backwards from the gradually exploding statue, ending up cowering at Wolf’s feet.

-Get out of there!- came Chance’s voice. -Tess, get them out of there!-

The Here to Help tried to approach the temple, but its antigrav was not meant for fine maneuvering, and its path was unsteady and jerky, and didn’t really get it any closer. -I don’t think I can without firing the retros and frying them,- Tess complained. -Do you want me to just crash? I think I can crash.-

-Do something!- Warp cried as Wolf dropped his mining ray and pulled her to her feet. The two of them turned to run…

…but they had no time. Their back and forth communication took only seconds, but the statue’s transformation was just as quick, and instead of a statue, there stood a jet black mare of darkness, with a nebulous, sparkling mane and tail. As Warp and Wolf ran for the doorway, the creature dissolved into a blue cloud and swallowed them up in a whirlwind of night, then flew from the temple and rose into the sky.

-No! NOOO!- Tess shouted, firing the engines at last and trying to ram the cloud that had just eaten her friends. Lightning shot from it, engulfing the ship and sending it careening out of control, into the side of the temple.

===

“And we don’t really know what happened after that, since both of us were knocked unconscious in the crash,” Chance said. “When we woke up, all our exotic matter was gone, and most of the ship’s systems were fried. Tess spent two months wiring together everything that still had a working computer into a makeshift network that could access the library and control the parts of the ship that still worked, while I was out on the surface exploring. Nightmare Moon shot down our probes, but four of them were still in decent shape, and I set them up at the edge of the moon so that we could see what was going on.”

“So it was Nightmare Moon,” Twilight said. “YOU freed Nightmare Moon? YOU were the stars spoken of in the prophecy?”

“Duh,” Rainbow Dash said. “I figured that much out as soon as I saw their ship crashed into that spooky moon temple.”

“Nightmare Moon did gobble them up!” Pinkie Pie said, eyes wide. Then she tilted her head and squinted. “How do you think they tasted?”

“We don’t know that they were eaten.” Twilight said. “In fact –“

“We do know,” Chance interrupted. “Nightmare’s mane and tail might be strange and mystical-looking to you, but we’ve seen molecular machines before. The glow and the sparkles are from the coherent light they use to coordinate within the swarm. You horn works the same way – your ‘magic’ isn’t really very mysterious. Why do you think Tess is so sure that you’re vergers?”

“However you might think that magic works, being swallowed up in her sparkling mane and tail is not how Nightmare Moon gobbles ponies up,” Twilight continued. “It’s how she teleports. If Warp and Wolf vanished into the ‘swarm’, all it means is that she took them with her when she returned to Equestria. They’re probably hiding somewhere on the surface right now!”

“I don’t know,” Rainbow said. “Wouldn’t some pony have noticed a couple giant weasels skulking about?”

“Not if they’re sticking to the wilderness because they don’t speak the language and don’t want any pony to panic over a pair of giant weasels skulking about,” Twilight said.

“Eee!” Pinkie Pie said, grinning widely, eyes sparkling. Every pony looked at her. “You’re going to find your friends! Tess is going to smile again, I know it!”

“How will we find them if they’re hiding?” Rainbow asked.

“We’re not sneaking or hiding,” Pinkie Pie said. “We’re going to make the biggest light show ever when we smack down right on top of a whole thunderstorm. They’ll find us!”

“I don’t suppose any of this helps you fix Tess,” Twilight said, looking over at the moon ponies, still wired together.

“Yeah,” Chance said. “It helps. If they’re still alive, then she’s not locked into a cycle of helpless self-recrimination. I can cancel the trauma intervention, and let this new information keep her from falling into depression. But if it turns out they’re actually dead…”

“They’re not,” Twilight said, confidently. “You’ll see them again.”

“And I’ll throw the best ‘welcome back’ party ever!” Pinkie Pie promised.

Comments

[Rowyn]

Yay! The giant space weasels aren't dead, they're just dragged into banishment on Equestria and imprisoned in the place they were banished to!

Maybe Twilight can ask Luna what happened to them, if they make it back to Equestria.