My Little Engineer

by Soren Mercer

The List

“Vinyl, please make note: tremors from before has me worried that our crash may have struck a fault line in the planet’s tectonic plates. I need to set up some seismic reading equipment for some more in-depth information. I should have blueprints installed in my suit’s for use.” I began as I swiveled around in the seat that I had dove to during the tour with C1 when the ship had violently rocked. “A side note regarding that, the locals seem to be well aware of the state of the shifting since C1 didn’t show fear to the shaking, instead showed irritance towards the event. If I can establish some kind of translation with them, if at least through writing, then I can ask them for what they know.”

Standing and turning to the holographic display. “Unaltered is the galaxy map display. It seems to either remain frozen in the the Andromeda system or, and rather unlikely, we’re actually still in the Andromeda system on an unregistered planet. How we managed to land on an unregistered planet in one of the most well documented systems is beyond impossible so I’m keeping my options open.”

Turning to towards the back of the ship but remaining in the slanted bridge, “Medical procedure to fix the pink pony’s leg proved highly effective and it has been established that the ponies’ bodies do actually rely on the higher concentrations of xenon in the air. The scans that I had the auto-doc secretly performed shows that their respiratory systems, as well as their circulatory system and a yet unknown system all rely on this excessive xenon concentration in order to properly function.” I turned to a terminal at random and pulled up the completed auto-doc scan of the pink pony.

“Sir, I’m reading increased gravitational movements originating from the encampment. Should I log the changes?” Vinyl requested in my earpiece, interrupting my own report.

“Sure, let's see what’s changing. Can you trace the origin to its specific origins?” I requested, looking up at the overhead display as the new information began to scroll across the screen.

“No, not without first repairing the scanning equipment.” VI replied before remaining silent. I shrugged an eyebrow in reply.

“Biological scans shows that the pony exhibits enhanced strength over the human recognized versions with almost a seventy-eight percent increase in potential strength. Would like to get biological scans on the other subspecies but I don’t expect to be able to get away with accidentally shooting another one and repairing them to get the scans. Designating the regular-looking ponies Earth-Ponies for lack of creativity and I’ll just refer to the others as their Mythological counterparts. I’ve still yet to give a label to the three with both wings and horns as no Mythological comparison exists. Surprisingly Vinyl suggested I call them Horny Pegasi before she began to automatically run her self-checks. I don’t know for certain since I’m not an VI programmer, but it sounds like she’s…” I took a second to scratch at my furry neck as I reconsidered the impossibility of what I was going to report next. “I think she’s somehow evolving into an AI…”

I stood in silence, essentially pausing the recording until I spoke again or gave the command to end the recording, and exited the bridge to stand before my freezers containing my personal goodies. I had some bacon, some alcohol and other treats frozen for the rare occasions when I’d happen to defrost on my birthday, all saved up. Over 75 years and I still had yet to actually defrost on my birthday.

Moving past the cryo-pods and towards the back of the ship, I retrieved a free welder from a tool storage rack set into the production services and held the tip up to the refinery and assemblers. “Another note on the to-do list, I need to think about setting up a permanent base of operations on the ground to get production up and working. Nothing against this planet or it’s inhabitants but I don’t really want to stay here very long and I need materials to fix up my ship; I suppose the more correct term would be rebuild the ship. Most of the critical components are all damaged to the point that I'll have to start from scratch.

“If and when the Rosetta Stone program devises some kind of translator for me to use, I’ll see about getting to work at prospecting for resources before I set to mining. I can’t imagine that they’ll be too impressed if I just suited up in the Miner-class and took off with a drill in hand.” I was interrupted when a bout of ground shaking quakes rocked the ship once more, setting me to my hands and knees as my balance was faltered and I couldn’t remain upright.

“Okay, first on my list of shit to do: get that seismic equipment up and running.” I decided and took off towards the hangar to change into my Worker-class suit. “Final note: I’ll be scavenging the broadcasting equipment from the ship to build the thing since they don’t seem to be capable of making any important connections as of yet. End recording.” I ordered as I stepped into the automatic Suit-exchanger for the machine to do all the work for me.

Once the two halves of the exo-suit were properly locked together and behaving properly -the knee joint that C3 had damaged had been replaced- I stepped out and ordered up my grinder to begin breaking down the empty DeadTech crates scattered around the bay for their parts, setting the bits into the occupied ones.

Having broken down everything non-essential into it’s components and stored them away, I broke the seal in the hangar and let the air mix into it’s two portions of heavy xenon and light xenon composition in order to quickly shoot myself up on top of the ship before a thought suddenly occurred to me. With a mental sigh, I remembered that both the laser and normal antennas were both underneath the bridge which was currently buried and shredded upon impact.

“God dammit!” I shouted with the suit unintentionally amplifying the expletive as I nearly punted the grinder in my hand across the ship. The noise had drawn the attentions of the ponies nearby, likely worried that I was issuing some form of declaration of war. Holding a hand up as a sign of good will, I dropped the hand once more when I saw the ponies all calm and return to their business and traverse the length of the ship towards the bridge.

“Quick note on to-do list, I am forced to build a proper production shelter in order to craft new communication components since the existing ones were all stripped off in the crash. I’ll begin by tearing down the engines and nacelles for their parts and steel in order to set up a bunker of some kind to house the Reactor and Refinery. Both Reactor and Refinery will have to be stripped down to nothing and rebuilt with other parts cannibalized from the rest of the ship, meaning I’m likely not going to be leaving the planet on the Anubis.” I sighed in defeat again as I turned back towards the hangar upon realizing that I'd sealed up the hole in the bridge’s glass I'd made earlier.

Entering into the hangar, I left the hangar open and entered into the airlock between hangar and the rest of the ship with my grinder at the ready. Putting my grinder back in the pack with the help of the VI driven power-frame, I loaded up my backpack with as much steel plates as I could carry from the main cargo container before stepping back out into the hangar and jumped from the lip of the ramp.

Landing with a heavy thud, I approached the silently established meeting zone with the locals and waited with a wave of the hand to get someone's attention. Eventually, C2 and C3 approached with C3 carrying a couple large rolls of what looked like paper while C2 carried the same table as before in her magic. Raising an eyebrow, both creatures set their items down and took a seat at the table with eyes waiting patiently for me to sit as well.

To start the non-conversation, C3 unrolled the first of the rolls to show what looked to me like a bunch of circular squiggles all singled out and lined into a row. Was this their alphabet?

“Sir, I believe that if this is their alphabet, I can give the Rosetta Stone program a jump start on translations.” Vinyl announced in my head, surprising me at the complex sentences it was giving me in the suit beyond the typical power or energy level warnings.

Working myself down to my knees, I took an offered feather dipped in ink before raising my head towards the pair in uncertainty. C3, grinning eagerly and shifting around on her hooves, dipped her nose at the page before before mimicking writing beneath the glyphs. I shrugged back before writing out the Advanced Human Alphabet while the Rosetta Stone program began making the comparisons.

As soon as I had all 38 characters written out, the Rosetta Stone program alerted me to having completed a very basic comparison based on the archaic English language, consisting of only 26 letters and their combinations. Sitting back, C3 took the page and let her eyes roam over it all, likely committing everything to memory.

Setting a second page down, C3 began to write in their language -translated digitally by my suit-, “Do yogh undersant mee.”

I took the quill back and wrote back, “Mostly, do you understand me?” I set the quill back down and turned the page to the creature. She looked it over, her eyes flying between the alphabet page and the words before looking up at me and nodding. I sat back with my hands on my knees in surprise before sitting forward and picking up the quill again.

C3 turned the page back to me and waited eagerly while C1 and C4 both approached from behind them.

“I have questions.” I began simply, keeping to the more simpler English language.

“Ask.”

“Quakes, why you not worried?”

“Already know. Planet unstable, breaking apart.” C4 replied after giving the translation a look over.

“Shit.” This was said verbally and to myself rather than written out before I put quill to parchment again. “Need to mine resources, where do?”

“Why mine?”

“Need resources to build, ship insufficiently equipped after crash.” I replied and sat back. C1 through 4 sat back, leaving me out of their conversation while they conversed about whatever it was they were talking about.

“What need?” was the next sentence written out and translated from their language.

“Lots of Iron, Gold, Platinum, Uranium, Silicon, Cobalt, Magnesium…” I replied textually and was interrupted when the page was torn from my grasp.

“Don’t understand names, atomic numbers?” C3 requested and raised my eyebrow again.

Taking to writing the numbers out in tally-marks organized by fives, “26, 27, 12, 14, 28, 47, 79, 78, 92.” I turned the page back to the ponies and let them look over the numbers before they glanced back up at me in further confusion. I sighed and held my hands up to tell them to wait while I returned to my ship to switch out the load of steel plates for whatever raw resources I still had.

Returning a few minutes later with only a few pounds of each material, I sat back down at the table and began lining each resources up on the table with a roll of paper stretched out before them and wrote out each name again.

A few minutes of the ponies testing each material with glowing horns, no idea what that was supposed to accomplish but it apparently had something to do with the gravimetric readings Vinyl had been getting, and C4 began writing out each translation for the lower numbered elements but left the other’s blank.

“Don’t have names for other elements, didn’t even know they existed.” C3 explained, dropping my head in frustration. “Don’t know if they exist in our planet.”

“If I can build something, I may be able to locate them in the crust. Will take time and I need to build outpost on land. Ship to be torn down for parts.” I wrote back, hoping for permission to begin building while my suit put the elements away in my pack.

“Build what?” C1 requested with a raised eyebrow.

“Production facilities to mine and process raw resources into workable materials.” I wrote back, my back already beginning to protest at hunching over for so long. Sitting up right, I managed to at least stretch my back enough to relieve some of the pain before having to hunch back over and read what was written.

“Land belongs to others, cannot set up here. Other land can go to, possible to move materials?” C2 wrote down and spun the document to me to read. I gave a half hearted chuckle in reply as my suit began going through every land-based or atmospheric vehicle blueprint I had downloaded from the galaxy-wide internet. Some of the other prints that I had merely bookmarked instead of actually downloading remained greyed out, showing a disconnection from the internet where I was.

“Not problem, still need to build vehicle. Can do in hangar. Probably.” I wrote back and selected a VTOL ship I liked and had virtually modified to work better than the base version. “Material requirements lesser than large ship but still significant.” I added as a second thought before I had fully turned the page around.

“As long as don’t disturb land, fine.” C1 nodded back with a smile before moving to stand. I held my hand up and took the quill back to write something else down.

“Need help to grind down parts. Too much work by myself, have extra tools for volunteers.” C3 gasped and stared up at C1 pleadingly as soon as she had translated my words, nearly jumping on her back to plead for approval. “Will be hard work, not science venture.” I added, settling C3 but making C4 and C2 chuckle.

“Fine, how many workers?” C1 wrote back.

“Eight capable of carrying grinder.” I wrote back and pulled my own bright green tool from my pack to let the creatures get an idea of what a volunteer would be carrying. C3 picked up the tool in a field of purple -firing off Vinyl’s gravity sensors in the process- before hitting the switch and startling herself. I caught the tool by the tail end and hit the switch again while C1 glared at the smaller one.

“Need volunteers to carry parts as well, parts heavy.” I wrote down under my last request as my frame dropped my grinder back in my bag. “With frame I can carry 4000 pounds of weight.” I wrote down as a second thought.

“Wanted to ask about frame and suit, why wear?” C2 inquired while C1 and C3 walked off to get volunteers having read my words.

“Atmo toxic. Gravity too strong.” I wrote back simply, drawing silent ‘ahh’s from the two remaining ponies.

“Food toxic too?” C4 asked textually, I nodded back.

“What I separated out was otherwise edible versus inedible, Xenon contaminated everything, made inedible regardless.” I explained. C4 took the quill and circled the word Xenon before dropping what I assumed was a question mark.

“Gaseous element, atomic number 54.”

“Another unknown.” C4 sighed as she wrote out her response. A few minutes of silence and nothing being written down, C1 reappeared with C3 and what I figured were some of C3’s friends -the pink and orange ones specifically- accompanied by a few guards in their armour and decked out in large saddle bags that hung from their sides. Of note, most of them were unicorns but a couple of the ones with bags were the other types, two of them pegasi.

“Volunteers. Construction ponies on order from nearby towns.” C1 explained and nodded back to the gathered. I shrugged and stood with a bit of work before motioning everyone to follow me. With conversation otherwise completed, the table and writing equipment was cleared away while my new group of helpers all marched behind me.

We had a lot of work to do.

Comments

[SoralTheSol]

What do you mean by "Planet Breaking Apart"? Do you mean Celestia doesn't understand techtonics or that Equestria is only held together via magic duct-tape and prayer?

[Radioactive Dragon]

can carry 4000 pounds of weight

2 tons

[Vitae]

7608985
I like to think of equis as a old chevy.

Throw enough ducktape and go to church enough, she'll keep rolling.

[0Z0mbie]

7895890
Now now now if you put too much duck tape and it will start gaining magical properties (at least in equestria that is)