Inevitable (Applejack, Twilight)
Slowly, with exceptional care, Twilight's field lowered the slim gold rectangle onto Applejack's upturned left forehoof, then winked out.
"All right," the librarian cautiously said, then took a quick glance out the window at the heavily overcast sky before returning to her focus to the metal. "Now, according to the brochure, all you have to do is say the name of the periodical you want, and then either the page number or section. And since it would take at least a moon to get the one you want shipped... well, if you want to be the pony who gives it the first trial..."
Applejack gave the rectangle a rather dubious look. "An' this is an improvement 'cause...?"
"It could be any magazine."
"It could also explode."
"...that too. It's your call, Applejack."
The farmer looked at the rectangle. Then she looked at the International Library Exchange Request Form. All sixty triplicate-bearing pages of it.
With the urge to bolt riding in every tail-twitching syllable, "Gimme... The Protoceran Whole Seed Catalog. In Equestrian. Table of contents, iffin y'please."
The rectangle glowed -- and the gold flashed into white, with black text flowing down the surface.
"It works!" Twilight gasped -- then grinned. "It was seven hundred bits, but it -- Applejack?" Because she had just spotted the mixture of confusion and annoyance which was starting to narrow green eyes.
"This ain't a catalog."
"...sorry?" Another glance out the window. Back to the gold rectangle.
"Looks like somepony's diary."
Twilight's field jerked the dense metal back. "It's... oh, dear, it's... um..."
"Yeah."
"I didn't even know Caramel was dating again."
"He is."
"Or that he wrote down..."
"That's at least half the breakups, Twi. Y'gotta get into the gossip more often than y'do. An'..." The narrowing eyes went into full squint. "Y'know that picture of your brother which y'finally hung up in the loft?"
"...yes?"
"Don't look at it."
Twilight looked.
"Ah told you not t' --"
"-- I know!" Twilight accelerated into a half-gallop, raced past Applejack, came to a stop in front of her personal notebooks. Pinkish energy frantically flipped pages. "And these are recipes! And --" full gallop this time, stopping at the linguistics shelf "-- hoofball stats! I don't --"
This time, the purple eyes narrowed.
"She's at it again, isn't she?"
Applejack indulged in a long sigh. "Looks like. Y'want me t' yell this time?"
"No, I'll do it..."
And one last run, up the stairs to the loft, where her field flung the balcony doors open, and the unicorn galloped to the maximum altitude of "outside" she had available.
"RAINBOW!"
Which got her a snicker. "What?"
"STOP HACKING MY CLOUD!"
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This third chapter represents the single stupidest idea I've ever had and as such, I am very sorry.
Not sorry enough to keep me from posting it, but still really, really sorry.
I'm not sorry you posted it...
I always thought Rainbow Dash would make a good sysadmin or telecom engineer in another life. Aside from being the premier provider of cloud services to Ponyville—using lots of colors to go real fast sounds like the definition of wavelength-division multiplexing, and then there's Sysadmin Loyalty and Commanding in the War Versus Entropy to consider. (One can also make Morse code jokes about having a shorter brother Rainbow Dot, though those feel insufficiently awesome, honestly.)
I think the only reason you might have to apologize for this story is that gold is one of the elements that has significant narrative heft. You may regret expending the opportunity on this bit of silliness.
Oh well. No one said you couldn't double up, or assign this to a different one. Silicon, hydrogen, and oxygen all come to mind.
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It's the Element Of Stupidity.
On the Periodic Table Of Fiction, it comes right before "Surprise".
Oh, you.
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There's actually a good SF piece lurking in this base concept, set in a world where pegasi abilities are more focused on micro-manipulation of electromagnetics, allowing true cloud hacking -- or just twisting the datastream as it goes by.
If anyone wants to try writing that, I have no objections to the idea being used.
If eighty people already did, I won't be surprised.
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… see also my name. On a slight variant note, I have pondered Maxwell's-equations-related cutie marks on pegasi on more than one occasion, with the similar assumption that there's probably a dozen OCs with them already. (Now if only I had the combination of competence and energy to do anything more substantive with any of this!)
On an even more different tack, there's the classical element of air being associated with intellect and communication (in a hazy cluster of astrological and divinatory traditions). Though if Rainbow's involved, that or any of the above can fall prey to her disdain for the overt, consciously diligent side of intelligence if one doesn't carefully work around it. (The "can also be selfish and insensitive" side of the element association, on the other wing…)
Anyone got an image of Dash in a trenchcoat saying that she didn't ask for this?
I don't fully get it... I think...
All I've got is that...
The "golden rectangle" is some kind of book-retrieving-thing, which is hooked up to a 'cloud', and Rainbow Dash is messing with Twilight by messing with that, and the books in her library...
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That quote would probably go well with this picture: desustorage.org/derpibooru/imagedata/370000/369383__safe_rainbow+dash_scootaloo_lyra_lyra+heartstrings_artist-colon-dm29_coat.png
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She may not be saying it, but the facial expression sure is.
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It's essentially an overwritten setup for a pegasus-based cybersecurity pun.
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It's a play on how Google has this storage thing called the Cloud, which can then lend itself to pegasus related puns.
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'Cloud' is a buzzword for offsite web servers and data/information storage. It existed as such a word before Google even existed, let alone used the word for a few of their own services.
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Didn't know that. Thanks.
Twilight has just learned the first rule of data securitity...
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Cloud based storage in a world of Pegasus manipulation. Twilight, you were asking for that...
I hate you so much. So much.
I reviewed Inevitable from this story collection!
My review can be found here.
Moral of the story #1-If you don't control your storage medium, you don't control the information on that storage medium. (Short version: Cloud-based storage is stupid and insecure by its very nature.)
Moral of the story #2-Rainbow Dash is very, very lucky her friends don't start a retaliatory prank war, for which she should be grateful.
6409657 Does that trick in the comic actually work?
7594389 I don't know enough about computers to answer.
7594389 Something very similar to that works. I've needed to use it a couple times on my own home systems to break in when I forgot the admin passwords. It wasn't Linux I used at the time, but I wouldn't be surprised if Linux has an app that can.
7594389
Depends. Windows doesn't store raw passwords, and UNIX derivatives can be set either way (most systems default to a shadow file, which is hashes of the passwords instead of the actual passwords). If you know what hash was used, you could try to engineer a hash collision.
Better option is to remove or replace the password entirely if your substitute OS and/or repair console is one that either can bypass the login or doesn't read the passwords in the first place. Access Control Lists, file permissions, quotas, operation schemas, and other access restriction systems will also fail in that situation, so actually doing it would be overkill, but then again "there is no kill like overkill."
(The depicted lupine engineer has a very good reason for using such an overkill: the actual admin wouldn't be able to log in until they figured out what is wrong and repeat the trick themselves, which would delay any attempts at reverting her act of sabotage for a while.)
Okay even with titanium dragon's help I still don't get it...
There's also a Weird Al parody but it's not very good
I've heard of Cloud Strife, but this is ridiculous!
And, almost five years later, it turns out you called it.
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