Phase 2: Cyborg Confusion
Hyper Future Pony
Phase 2: Cyborg Confusion
There was one thing that Alita simply couldn’t get enough of. The view out of the hospital window was simply breathtaking. The sights were unlike anything in her dismal world. Trees were a rarity in the Scrapyard; the whole industrial concrete and metal environment seemed to be corrosive to anything that lived. The more innocent it was, the greater the relish it took in snuffing it out. The surrounding countryside was a monotony of endless rolling plains covered with vast industrial farms. Only things useful to the Factory were allowed to survive for over a thousand kilometers around Tiphares.
Coming from such a sterilized environment, the beauty of even a simple place like Ponyville was almost too much for her. The green fields in and around the town were decked with a wonderful variety of flowers in all the colors of the rainbows. Butterflies lazily fluttered around in the warm afternoon air.
The trees were a sight to behold themselves: wonderfully colorful fruit trees, tall and stout oak trees, and even tall pines! All of it was so strange and fantastic. Earth had once held such treasures, as the fragmented remains of human records testified to. But so much of it had been lost that now it seldom lived except in books.
Alita sat on windowsill of her hospital room, her back resting against one side of the frame while she watched the golden sun slowly set. While the room itself was silent, the sounds of the hustle and bustle of Ponyville life filtered its way in. The way the bird song mixed with the cheerful voices of the ponies below was almost like music.
Twilight simply watched from inside the room. She’d never seen someone so transfixed by a sunset before. Which puzzled her greatly.
The gears in her head whirred incessantly, as she thought about just how alien her visitor might be. For all Twilight knew, Alita came from a world without a sun. “Could it be possible?” she asked herself. It seemed strange to think about, and highly counterintuitive, but she honestly couldn’t rule it out. This was the sort of thinking that made her brain hurt. So much that she almost missed the stream of silent tears running down Alita’s cheeks.
“Is…Is that crying?” she thought. Twilight moved a little closer, silently sneaking across the lacquered wood floor.
Her eyes hadn’t be betrayed her. Alita was crying.
“Hey, are you alright?”
Alita startled, nearly falling out of the window. Deftly catching her balance, she whipped around to see if there was a threat behind her.
The purple pony could perhaps be a fearsome creature, even if she didn’t look it. But she seemed friendly, even concerned. With a sigh of relief, Alita concluded that the Twilight Sparkle creature was not a threat. “Oh, it’s just you. Don’t scare me like that.”
“I didn’t mean to startle you…sorry,” the sheepish lavender pony replied.
Alita smiled. It was a thin smile, but still a friendly one. There hadn’t been a lot to really, honestly smile about in her life for a while. Most of the happy moments she’d thought she’d found ended up being snatched away moments later.
Her overture seemed to work. Twilight smiled back, her awkwardness melting away. Encouraged, Alita extended an open hand to Twilight, hoping that gesture could cross species and culture gap. It seemed to work, since Twilight inched closer. Alita beckoned her closer, flicking her fingers back to her palm a couple times in succession. The universal “come hither” gesture seemed to work, since Twilight hopped up to sit in the windowsill across from Alita.
“You don’t have to be shy,” said Alita, “I don’t bite…well, at least without good reason, and you seem like a friend anyway.”
Twilight’s ears perked up. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she crossed off “Peaceful first contact with aliens” from her bucket list. “Oh, I’m so glad! I mean, I’ve never seen anypony quite like you, so I had no idea what to expect.”
Alita nodded silently. She was looking out the window at the sunset, occasionally glancing back to Twilight while she talked.
“It’s quite the view, isn’t it?”
Alita nodded again, letting out a wistful sigh.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, and stop me if this sounds stupid, but is there a sun where you’re from? Where is that, by the way?”
What kind of a question was that? Alita stared at Twilight for a moment, cocking an eyebrow in confusion. “Oh, there’s a sun alright. It’s just that I haven’t stopped to appreciate it for a long time. And honestly, this seems like a nice place…certainly a lot nicer then where I am from. I might as well consider this a vacation.”
The stump of Alita’s right arm caught Twilight’s attention with that comment. The state of Alita’s body, and the unnatural look to the wound really drove home her comment. Twilight winced looking at it, and then remembered that it wasn’t polite to state, sheepishly covering her tracks by asking a new question. “So…that’s interesting. It must be quite the view to move you to tears though.”
She was a little bit embarrassed that Twilight noticed, and the blush on her cheeks showed it. “Oh, it wasn’t really that…” she sighed, watching the sun finally dip below the horizon, giving a beautiful red glow to the clouds scattered across the sky. “It’s just that there was a boy I once knew… he would have loved to have seen this view. But he’s gone now.”
Awkward…
Twilight winced. “Oh…I had no idea. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”
“Hey, don’t be.” Alita grinned, trying to wipe the sadness from her face. The last thing these people needed was her dumping all of her angst on them. She’d persevered as along as she had by keeping moving forward, and getting back up every time she’d been knocked down. “Besides, I think I’ve done enough moping for a while. So, I’ve got two questions for you, Twilight Sparkle.”
This monkey’s mood whiplash was epic enough to almost give Twilight actual whiplash. “Okay, shoot.”
“First, I am starving: where can we get some chow? Honestly, I could eat hay at this point—which is not part of my species’ usual diet, I’ll let you know. Second, you’ve been staring at my wounds pretty hard: I take it that this isn’t a usual sort of thing around here?”
“You are sharp as a tack, monkey,” said Twilight, embarrassed that she’d been had. “Well, I think we can still get food from the hospital cafeteria. I’ll order us something good if you like. And, yes, it’s not often that someone comes in here as injured as you are. Frankly, I’m surprised you’re not constantly writhing in agony.” Twilight’s overactive imagination sprung to life, puzzling over just what it would have taken to take someone apart like that. “Do you mind if you ask what happened to you?”
Alita chuckled. “Oh, I guess…It’s kind of a strange story. I’ll tell you after we’ve gotten some food. Just get what you think is good. My body is built to subsist off just about anything.”
Twilight laughed as well, happy to have her guest warm up to her so well. This Alita was a strange creature, but still quite friendly. “Well, that’s good. I was afraid you’d have strange dietary needs, like eating raw flesh or something hard to accommodate.”
Alita’s mouth hung open slightly, as she raised a finger to interject, but then decided against it. Dropping the omnivore bombshell in a community of herbivorous prey species could probably wait.
Twilight disappeared for a few minutes. She returned levitating two identical trays of food. Oblivious to her new friend’s reaction, she trotted in happy as can be. “So, I got us some hay fries, fresh salad, hummus and corn chips, and some peach pie for desert. I hope you enjoy it.”
Alita sat there, absolutely dumbfounded for a moment.
“Um…how exactly do you do that?”
Twilight nonchalantly set down one of the trays on Alita’s lap. “Do what? Oh, that’s right…he’d already mentioned that you didn’t have magic where you came from. Which, I might add, I find hard to believe. How does anything get done without magic?”
“Machines mostly. Though occasionally there’s some manual labor to be done.” Alita nibbled at the hay fries, trying not to be impolite. It was about as tasty and nutritious as saw dust to her, but she figured she’d at least make the effort.
“The doctors here were pretty baffled by you and your friend.” Alita winced at hearing “friend”.
“Oh really?” Alita replied nonchalantly, trying her best not to be alarmed at the prospect of a war criminal like Desty Nova running amok among this quaint, arcadian world.
“Yeah, none of them have any experience in treating monkeys, so they had to send for Doctor Barns. He’ll probably be here soon to take a look at your injuries; maybe he can help you.”
Welp, looks like that awkward moment was coming. “Yeah…about that…you see, I don’t really—”
The door swung open, interrupting Alita’s confession. A disheveled, middle aged male earth pony limped in. He wasn’t dressed in any professional attire, and his slightly grizzled face seemed to be frozen in a perpetual melancholy.
He approached Alita and studied her for a moment. He flashed an impish grin for a moment, before prodding at her with his cane, and not gently. In spite of his obvious fleeting joy at messing with a patient, there remained a clinical detachment as studied her reactions.
“Ah, you must be Doctor Barns!” said Twilight. “So…do you think you can help him?”
That was plenty to distract Alita from the doctor’s prodding. She glared incredulously at the unicorn, but too taken aback to say anything.
“No, I’m quite happy to say there’s nothing I can do here, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m sure the bar has already missed me enough as it is.” With a smirk, he turned towards the door.
“Wait, I don’t understand…you’re supposed to be the expert here on the hard cases, and you’re the only one with any experience treating monkeys,” Twilight half shouted. “Why can’t you help?”
“I’m a doctor, not a mechanic.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Your friend here is an oversized clockwork toy. Though, and I grudgingly say it, a very finely constructed one. So I suppose I can’t fault you for failing to see the obvious.” Doctor Barns, balanced on his cane, watching for Twilight’s reaction.
“Do you really mean that?”
“Actually, I really don’t. I just thought I’d give this whole politeness thing a go. Oh, you meant whether it’s an automaton…I’m serious as a heart attack on that one.”
Alita left her perch like flash, and in an instant she was towering looming over the scruffy doctor menacingly. “Look pal, I don’t know where you get off on treating people like this, but it’s not happening on my watch.”
Rather than fear, the doctor seemed to be best by ravenous curiosity. Alita wasn’t sure what to make of it as he circled her, examining her intently.
“Now that’s very interesting…so I guess I was wrong in a way. She’s more than a mere windup doll it seems. Maybe a golem, but those are just creatures of legend anymore.”
This was going to be a tough one to explain. Even in her own time, a world half-empty that was pervaded by the scraps of advanced technology of a bygone golden age, at best Alita only dimly understood how her own cybernetic body functioned. Trying to explain cybernetics to these rubes, who seemed to have steam power at best, and tended to rely on magic would just be impossible. Even the doctor, who more or less recognized her for what she was, had clumsily fumbled for an inappropriate metaphor to make sense of it. She was neither a clockwork windup doll nor a golem brought to life by magic, but that seemed to be the only way that anyone in this world could make sense of it.
“Well, Twilight,” said Alita, pausing a moment to rummage around for the right wording to explain things. “Well, this is going to be difficult to explain, but please, bear with me. What the doctor is saying is somewhat right. My body is almost entirely artificial, and the only part of me that is still flesh and blood is my brain. Everything else has been replaced by machine. And where I’m from, there are a whole lot of people like me.”
A heavy silence fell over the room. Dr. Barn looked on with practiced disinterest, but Twilight’s keen analytical mind puzzled and puzzled.
“I…I don’t understand.” Twilight began thinking out loud, pacing back and forth nervously. “So…if he’s shaped like a monkey, but his body has been replaced by machine, how is he still alive?”
“Um, Twilight, I’m not a ‘he’…” Alita tried to interject.
“Shouldn’t his brain require blood to function? And if it requires blood, wouldn’t he require a heart and lungs as well? How can you make those out of gears, levers and pulleys? It just doesn’t make any sense! And how does he move without anything powering him? I thought he said there was no magic where he came from? And somehow he eats and breaths very much like a pony…you can’t make machines like this…you just…just can’t. And if his body was replaced, that means oh dear I think I’ve gone cross-eyed…”
Indeed she had. Twilight soon deflated, wilting to the floor.
Alita hobbled over to Twilight, kneeling down to check on her. “Hey…are you alright?”
Twilight just laid there on her stomach not answering. Finally, Alita patted her head ever so gently, fearful of her own strength. “I said ‘are you alright?’”
Twilight finally acknowledged, looking up at Alita’s face. “How do you work?” she asked meekly.
“I really wish I could tell you, but I really don’t know too well myself. But, if it helps, I guess I could show you what’s underneath my skin.”
Alita opened the release on her chest cavity, grimacing at the inherent morbidity of her project. She was literally spilling her guts for someone who had been a perfect stranger a few hours ago. It was a difficult operation with only one hand, but still manage able. Her chest opened, almost like a zipper, along a seam in the middle of her torso. The two sides of her flexible outer armor parted with minimal difficulty, revealing the sterile internal machinery.
“It’s a lot like the inside of any animal…just less messy I guess.” As she talked, she pointed to the various visible components. “These two cylinders, arrayed symmetrically, are my lungs. They work very much like yours, but they also carry a small reserve of compressed oxygen, so I can function in areas without air for a while. This one between them is my heart. It’s connected to my digester, as well as the lungs. Really, their only purpose is to keep my brain alive.”
Twilight studied the anatomy demonstration silently for a moment. “That really doesn’t tell me how you work…but thanks for trying.” She smiled with palpable relief. “So what’s that one?” she asked, pointing her hoof at a compact, well armored sphere in her lower torso.
“Well, that’s probably the hardest one to explain…that’s my fusion reactor.”
Twilight’s smile twisted with confusion.
“Ah yeah…well, it takes Helium-3, and through inertial confinement, causes a nuclear fusion reaction to occur. The Helium-3 combines with deuterium to produce electricity, which powers my body.”
“I am pretty sure those were words, or at least they sound like words, but I literally didn’t understand anything that just came out of your mouth.”
Alita shrugged, before closing her chest cavity and helping Twilight back to her feet.
Alita walked back towards her favored perch in the window, but Twilight waited, watching her walk with rapt curiosity. It was amazing how she could walk so effortlessly on just two legs. Bipeds were pretty rare in Equestria, and Twilight hadn’t really noticed until now just how complex of a balancing act it had to be.
Alita’s legs were quite long compared to her upper body, and while her feet were larger than a pony’s hooves, they seemed inadequate to balance such a high center of gravity. But as she looked closer, Twilight started to see just how it worked. It was almost too faint to notice, but what looked like muscles and tendons beneath Alita’s artificial skin were constantly adjusting, ever so slightly shifting her weight and always keeping her center of gravity over and in between her feet, whether she was standing or walking.
As Alita walked, she seemed to roll from the heel of her feet to her toes, shifting each leg forward like a pendulum. This was a lot different from the plodding gait that Spike walked at. And for some strange reason, Alita’s hips swung from side to side a bit, in time with the pace of her steps.
“Are you enjoying the view?”
“Yes, actually it’s quite interesting.”
A giggle followed. After a short bout of confusion, Twilight realized the trap she walked into. “Nonononono…not anything like that! It’s just, well…you walk funny.”
Alita giggled again. “You really are high strung, Twilight. Don’t worry, I was just teasing you. It’s just that I don’t get checked out a lot by other girls. Especially aliens.”
“Wait a minute…you’re a girl?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you that for a while now.”
Alita resumed eating her meal. It was difficult doing it with only one hand, but the hummus and corn chips were delectable. She munched loudly on them while watching Twilight try to extricate herself from the embarrassment.
There could only be one conclusion reached from this. It was time to abruptly change the subject and never speak of this again. “Well, what a coincidence, I’m a girl too…So you’re like a robot, right?”
“Not a robot, a cyborg. My brain is still human.”
“Are humans like a type of monkey?
“I guess you could say that. So, why’d you think I was male?”
Alita’s catlike grin was perhaps more unsettling than dwelling on the embarrassment. “Well, it’s just that you don’t seem…well, very feminine compared to us. You’re not smaller or more delicately built than your friend was. And your voice doesn’t sound very feminine…too husky and serious.”
There was an awkward silence for almost a minute.
“I always knew I was a tomboy, but I didn’t think it was this bad. So, I guess this will be your first lesson about humans, Twilight.” Alita set down her plate on the window sill, and motioned towards her body. “My body is artificial, but it is designed to look normal in shape. I’m actually quite feminine in shape. Hell, it even has breasts, though they’re absolutely useless!”
To underscore her point, Alita poked at the supple mounds on her chest. “These aren’t going to be much good for nursing babies.”
“Breasts? You mean like…mammary glands? Teats? The things a mother feeds her infant with?”
“What else would they be?”
“Give me a break, how was I supposed to know? For all I knew they were a flotation device!”
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- MyPeculiarSelf · 9.7k words · 42 8 · 1.4k views
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The end was quite lol worthy
I am as shocked as the rest of the readers to find a Gunmm crossover, and I once again hope that James Cameron doesn't forget that he promised me a movie.
And this thing just suddenly reappeared. Completely forgotten, yet it pops back up in my unread favorites list.
You forgot the crossover tag.
2150022
Damn straight
2150099
It didn't exist when I first posted the story, so it wasn't forgotten. Nevertheless, tag added.
The crossover point happens in the first Battle Angel and not Last Order right?
2150314
Wierd.
2150351
Yeah. Though I'm taking the opportunity to be creative and weave together the flashbacks from the end of the original with ones from Last Order, because I thought they fit the tone well even if they had been soft-retconned by Last Order.
at least we don't have to deal with vampires.
2150314Lies.
Such a good anime.
First time I've seen this anime/manga as a crossover here and finding decent fanfiction for this series is near impossible. So sad its been so long since this was updated.
Alita!!!!😍