The Amulet Job

by Rambling Writer

26 - A Rich Mare's World

Bon Bon’s mind crackled. “Alrighty then,” said the Doctor, “Thorax got into the security room just fine, and he and Sunburst are working on it. You all should get ready to go when Rainbow does her thing.”

“Alright,” said Starlight. “Gilda, you-”

“I know,” snapped Gilda, “I heard.” She picked up the bow on the roof next to her and twanged the string. “You don’t need to micromanage me.” She grabbed an arrow — a normal one, Bon Bon noticed, not an arctic arrow. “Now, here we…” She nocked the arrow and pulled.

Bon Bon had seen some strange things in her day, even some bipedal monsters and creatures, but she still found Gilda pulling the bow to be bizarre. How in Tartarus could she balance like that? Her entire body was vertical, she had only two legs on the ground, her other two legs were occupied with somehow keeping the bow and arrow in line with her eyes… She didn’t even need to spread her wings to distribute her weight. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if she’d been bipedal to begin with, but since griffons were quadrupedal-

“-go.” Gilda released the arrow with a twang. It whistled gracefully through the air before hitting one of the hotel’s windows and bouncing off. Gilda smirked. “Ha! Got the range right the first time. Easy-peasy.” She pulled the arctic arrows a bit closer to her. The first one she fired hit in almost the exact same location as the normal arrow, but when its arrowhead shattered, the magic inside sent a thin sheet of ice spiderwebbing across the wall. Gilda pulled and released several more arrows, and soon the entire region was coated with ice.

“Do you think we should’ve waited a bit?” asked Starlight. “What if it melts?”

“There’s enchantments in them to keep the cold,” said Bon Bon, “so it won’t melt for a while. We need as much time as possible for them to cool the windows down.” She glanced at Starlight. “Shouldn’t you know this already, Ms. Magic Student?”

“I study friendship, not magic,” Starlight said testily. “And when I do study magic, it’s in general, not its specific implementation in arctic arrows.”

“But you know how to travel through time, you should-”

Neither of them noticed as Gilda stuffed her head in the bag and moaned.

The argument was cut short as the opening notes of an overture sounded from the band down below. Right on time. Not being a fan of classical music, Bon Bon didn’t recognize the song, but it was pretty good. Lots of big, brassy sounds, but not so much they overwhelmed everything else.

After a few minutes of above average music, Rainbow Dash’s voice sounded in her head as she started talking with a staff member about… something. Bon Bon couldn’t tell; thanks to the design of the anklet, she could only hear Rainbow’s side of the conversation. Bon Bon wasn’t even sure Rainbow Dash remembered everyone could hear everything she heard. “Oh, shut up, will ya? I know what I’m doing. … But they’re not at the right spot in the song yet. … You bet I have enough time to get up to speed! … Uh-huh, because you know sooo much about rainbooming. … Well, yeah, I’ve been, uh, practicing. … Um, uh, outside of town! Yeah, so, uh, so you wouldn’t’ve seen it. I, I didn’t want my awesomeness to start being everyday and boring, y’know? … Well, how would you know? You weren’t there! … Are you s- That’smycuegottago.” In the distance, Bon Bon spotted a particular prismatic pony rocket into the sky from near the band. As the music grew louder and louder, Rainbow Dash flew away from town, then looped around and started accelerating back.

On the other side of the gorge, the band began crescendoing. The trumpets reached their brassiest, the drums boomed, the strings thrummed. And right at the peak, perfectly timed in spite of herself, was when Rainbow Dash rainboomed.

The compressional shockwave from the rainboom traveled much farther than the chromatic one. Even at this distance, Bon Bon felt it blow her mane back. It traveled over the guests at the casino, over the infiltrators on the roof, over the casino itself. Not that this was a problem; it didn’t do any physical harm to any of the individuals watching, and the windows were strong enough to not be affected by it.

Except in one case.

Thanks to the sudden temperature change, the glass in the windows Gilda had fired at with her arctic arrows had shrunk oh-so-slightly and become more rigid as it approached the ductile-to-brittle transition temperature. But the temperature wasn’t low enough to actually fracture them, not yet. To break them completely required a large external force.

Hence, the rainboom.

The windows all over the casino vibrated. Most of them held together easily, but the stress was too much for the iced-over windows. They shattered and fell right out of their frames, taking the ice with them. One of the hotel rooms was left wide open to the outside world. A way in.

“Nice shots,” said Bon Bon.

“Yep,” Gilda said without a trace of humility. She was already rummaging around in their bags. “Now, rope, rope… here’s that rope.” She plucked out a stake and a coil of rope. Starlight drove the stake into the building’s roof with magic and tied one end of the rope to the top. Another burst of magic covered the rope in something that almost resembled invisibility. Its color shifted to match what was behind it, but Bon Bon could still see the shape of the rope if she looked hard. However, it’d be fine from a distance (such as six stories down on the balcony) or if somepony was distracted by something else (such as a rainboom).

Gilda tied the other end of the rope, around one of her legs and the illusion spread to her, too. “One screech for good, two for bad, okay?” Aiming at the hotel, she flared her wings, pawed at the ground, and took a running leap over the gorge, the rope trailing behind her. Bon Bon could dimly make out her shape as a few quick flaps took her over through the broken window easily. The rope quickly went taut, and a few seconds later, a single eagle’s caw rent the air. A long pause, then another. Starlight quickly doused Bon Bon in not-quite invisibility.

Bon Bon nodded to herself, pulled the zipline hook out of the bag, and slapped it onto her leg, around the fetlock. As she mentally prepared herself, she took a few steps forward and looked over the edge of the roof. Hundreds of vertigo-inducing feet below her, the rapids roiled and churned. Some spray even made it all the way up into Bon Bon’s mane, wetting it oh so slightly. The sides of the gorge had been worn slick and smooth over the decades, offering no claw- or hoofholds. If you fell into that, you weren’t getting back out. Not ever.

Bon Bon had never felt restricted when she was forced to go undercover. Ponyville was a nice town, even without Lyra. It was out-of-the-way enough to not be busy, and yet not so out-of-the-way that it was stagnant. It had things going on without being too hectic (at least until it started getting weird after the Nightmare Moon incident). She wouldn’t have minded living in that quiet town for the rest of her quiet life.

But she’d be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy this life at least a little.

Bon Bon took a few steps back. She pawed at the ground for a moment. Then, grinning like a madmare, she ran and leaped over the edge, soaring over the gorge without a care in the world. She hooked onto the zipline so easily it barely bent at all from the added weight. The wind nipped at her eyes and bit at her fur as she coasted down the line, but she took it as a challenge and started laughing in glee.

Half a second before she reached the end of the rope, Bon Bon yanked on the hook, and yanked hard. She flew off the zipline, flipped, twisted in the air. She sailed into the room backwards; her front hooves hit the floor, then her back hooves, and she slid to a stop right next to the door on all fours. She smirked to herself. “Boom,” she whispered.

“Weirdo,” muttered Gilda. To Starlight, she hollered, “She’s good! Take the rope over!” She untied the end of the rope from around a particularly imposing bed.

As Starlight untied her end of the rope and levitated herself over the gorge, Bon Bon tapped her anklet. “Hey, Home Base. We’re in. What’s going on with the cameras?”

“Oh, so we’re ‘Home Base’, now?” mused the Doctor. “Sounds quite lovely, actually. I like the idea of-”

“Thorax just, he just finished planting the last seed a few seconds ago,” cut in Sunburst. “It’s, we’re prepping the last moments of the loop. We, we still need, give us a second.”

“But, really,” continued the Doctor, “Ponyville’s our actual home base, isn’t it? I suppose we’re more of a, ah, ‘Forward Operating Base’? Is that the term?”

“FOB, yeah,” said Bon Bon.

“Effff. Oooh. Beeeeeeeee.” Bon Bon could almost hear the Doctor grinning. “I likey.”

“And… there were are.” Bon Bon could almost hear Sunburst rolling his eyes. “The loops, they’re all set on your floor. You should be, should be good.”

“Great.”

Encased in her own aura, the rope and stake trailing behind her, Starlight floated through the window frame and alighted on the floor. “S-so, Sunburst and the Doctor, do they-”

“They’re fine,” said Bon Bon. “The loops should be running.”

“Should be?” said Gilda. “I don’t wanna stick my neck out unless they are.”

Bon Bon rolled her eyes and stepped out of the hotel room. “Hey. Guys. I’m out. You see me?”

“Let… me…” Sunburst clicked his tongue a few times, then chuckled. “Nope. You, you’re good. I can see you just fine on the, on the base feed, but you, you’re nowhere in the faked feed.”

“They are,” Bon Bon said to Gilda.

“You know I can hear you and him talking over my medal thingy, right?”

“Given how little you trust magic, you probably thought you were hallucinating.”

“Well, excuse me if I-”

“Hey!” Starlight stepped in between the two of them, hooves held up. “Will you two shut up? We need to keep moving, and we’re not gonna get anywhere if you keep arguing!”

“We’re not gonna get anywhere if you keep telling us to make nice,” said Bon Bon.

“This- This is different!” protested Starlight. “It’s- Gah!” She stomped out of the room. “If you’re gonna argue, at least walk and argue!”

Bon Bon threw a death glare at Gilda and followed Starlight out.

---

Swell. Absolutely swell. Two-thirds of the infiltration group already wanted to kill each other, and they were barely past step one. If Starlight was being honest with herself, she was sorely tempted to slap some mind control magic on them, if only to get them to be quiet for two seconds on end. But, of course, based on her luck from the last time she tried that… Well. Nothing good could come of that.

“-like relying on things I can feel, not some mystic mumbo-jumbo!” hissed Gilda.

The hallway was empty, just as it was supposed to be. Unfortunately, that just meant the only things Starlight heard were Bon Bon and Gilda. She could see the elevator bank way over there, and it was taking all her self-control to not gallop down there, pry open the doors, and hurl herself down the shaft in the hope that the lasers were already deactivated.

“That ‘mystic mumbo-jumbo’,” Bon Bon hissed back, “has centuries of study behind it, and-”

The Doctor’s voice trickled into Starlight’s head. “Wow, uh, please tell me they are not going at it as bad as it looks like they are.”

“Worse,” mumbled Starlight. “At least you don’t have to hear them.”

“Ooo. Uh. Wow. Um. Woo. Yeah.”

“So how’re things going over there?” A segue so awkward you could hear the gears crunching, but Starlight was willing to do anything to get away from that topic. The elevator bank was closer, but not close enough.

“-can’t do anything to fix it if something goes wrong!” said Gilda.

“Um, not bad, not bad at all,” said the Doctor. He sounded honest, at least. “Sunburst’s talking Thorax through hijacking the elevators to get past the laser grid- You know, of all the places to put a classic like the laser grid, why an elevator shaft? Yes, I know, to stop ponies from rappelling down, but it’s such a blasted waste to put it all vertical and awkward like that.”

“And it won’t go wrong!” said Bon Bon.

“Makes it harder to get through,” said Starlight, “and that’s really the whole point of it, isn’t it?”

“I suppose,” sighed the Doctor. “Still a shame.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Gilda, “but I have no idea how-”

They were at the elevators. Starlight half-expected Bon Bon and Gilda to walk right on past it as they argued, but they both stopped at the doors without any signs of ceasing their verbal assaults. Starlight cleared her throat. “So, uh, how long until Sunburst and Thorax get into the elevator controls?” Please don’t be too long, please don’t be too long…

“Uh, still looking like a few minutes. It’s a bit more complicated than we expected, but we’re carrying on.”

A few more minutes. Starlight wasn’t sure she could take one more minute of Bon Bon and Gilda sniping at each other. She clenched her teeth and took a deep breath. “Well, just tell me when it’s done, okay?”

“Will do.”

And so Starlight was left alone with her two bickering partners-in-crime. She put her hooves over her ears, but that didn’t shut them out enough. Think, Starlight. How can you get them to shut up? You’re the protegé of the Princess of Friendship. You can figure this out.

Ideas came. Ideas went. None of them were very good. But since it was all she had, she picked one at random and decided to run headlong with it.

“-and I like being able to have some control over my own problems,” said Gilda, “so you can-”

Starlight stepped in between Bon Bon and Gilda and gave them both a telekinetic smack on the head. “Alright,” she said as firmly as she could manage. “We’re in the middle of a high-risk operation and you two are bickering like foals. What’s up?”

“Are…” Gilda blinked twice. “Are you honestly trying to sit us down and talk about our feelings?”

“Yes. I. Am,” said Starlight. “It’s better than just sitting around, talking about how much you hate each other.”

Bon Bon and Gilda exchanged glares for a second. “Fine,” whispered Bon Bon. “I’ll go first. Starlight, I-”

“No,” said Gilda suddenly. And a bit sheepishly? “This… This is on me. Totally. I… I like being able to control stuff, and that- thing with Gus, that was… really the most I’ve been able to contribute this entire trip.” Her voice grew a little wistful. “It felt nice.” She blinked and shook her head. “And now I- just have to pray that you nerds all know what you’re doing, because I sure can’t look at anything and see. Frigging magic…”

“That’s- That’s it?” asked Bon Bon. “You’ve been acting like- that just because you wanted something to do?”

“Well, duh.” Gilda rolled her eyes. “Something like this, I wanna feel like I can make my own decisions, so if this all goes sideways, at least it’s my fault. I mean, I’m stressed! What did you expect from a random schmuck deciding to break into one of the most secure vaults in Equestria?”

“Gee, I don’t know, a little more professionalism? You chose to come here, after all.”

“Not really,” snorted Gilda. “Griffonstone, it- Friendship is spreading, but it’s not like griffons are going to stop being greedy morons overnight. Bits still matter. They matter a lot. And with all the bits Goumada conned out of us… Well. Griffonstone could fall apart without them, and no one else was going to get off their fat butt and go get them. Too risky. If I didn’t do it, no one would.”

Starlight and Bon Bon exchanged glances. Starlight had never imagined the situation would be quite that bad, not after the friendship audiences Twilight had gushed about. Maybe they were putting on a show for her. And Gilda had never exactly acted like she wanted to be here, after all. “Still,” said Bon Bon, somewhat slowly, “would it kill you to be a bit less-”

“Look,” snapped Gilda, “I know you gals are from Ponyville, a weird place in a weird country. That you’ve got a princess living next door who’s saved the world a lotta times before. That this is your whole thing. But you know what I am? I’m a frigging baker. I barely make enough bits to keep a roof over my head. And I don’t live in a town where you can go, ‘Giant monster trashing city hall? Must be Saturday. Ho-hum.’ I’m-” She clenched her teeth, curled a set of talons into a ball, and looked away. After a long pause, she mumbled, “Mfkrd.”

Bon Bon tilted an ear towards her. “Hmm?”

“I’m scared!” snapped Gilda, whirling on Bon Bon with flared wings. “I feel like any moment, some guard’s gonna come around a corner and this’ll all go right down the toilet! I am so far out of my depth I’m in the wrong pool altogether and I think I’m the only one who gets that!”

“I get that,” Bon Bon said, her hoof rocketing up.

“Oh, like you’ve been a ray of sunshine,” said Gilda. “You spent the first few days rolling your eyes, sighing, and going, ‘Uuuuugh, fiiiiiiine.’ During that time, the only real difference between you and me was our species.”

“…” Bon Bon opened her mouth, closed it, thought for a second, and said, “Fine. Point. But you haven’t changed much.”

Gilda snorted. “Of course not, I’m a griffon. Our natural response to a problem is to be a colossal jerk and hope it’ll go away in annoyance.”

“What about… What about that gray one, whatsherface, Gabby or whatever?”

“Gabby’s weird.”

“Right.” Bon Bon swallowed. “Sorry for snapping at you.” She tentatively extended a hoof.

“Sorry for, uh, being a snap-attable jerkwad.” Gilda hesitantly grabbed Bon Bon’s hoof. A moment’s pause, and they shook. They withdrew their respective limbs quickly. They looked at each other, then looked away. Silence reigned. Gilda coughed and rubbed her arm.

“HOW ’BOUT THAT WEATHER, HUH?” asked Starlight.

But like a sign from heaven, the Doctor started talking again. “Alrighty. Elevators controlled. We should be good to go. Get one of the doors open, would you? Just so we can confirm.”

“On it.” Gilda worked her talons into the gap between one set of elevator doors and, with a deep breath, tugged. She only pulled them open an inch, but it was enough; Bon Bon pulled a crowbar out from one of her saddlebags, wiggled it into the inch, and levered. Gilda got a better grip, pulled harder, and it wasn’t long before Gilda was holding one door open, Bon Bon on the other. With a gulp, Starlight peered down the shaft.

The shaft was long, dark, and narrow; Starlight couldn’t see the bottom. Lights dotted the walls at every floor, but they were pathetic things that barely illuminated anything. Most of what little light there was came from the lasers. They were about five stories down, crisscrossing the shaft like a spiderweb and glowing red. No set of cables slunk down this shaft; the elevator must’ve been above her. Starlight looked up. A few stories above her, she could see the bottom of an elevator car.

“Do you see the car?” asked the Doctor.

“Yep,” said Starlight. She glanced at the floor number on the elevator doorframe. 10. “It’s at floor 15 or 16, I think.”

“Okay, uh, that’s good,” said Sunburst. “The data we’re getting says, says it’s at 15. So, uh, hang, hang on a second, and…”

Machinery whirred, and the car began descending. “Coming down,” Starlight said as she stepped back from the door.

“Alrighty,” said the Doctor. “Perfect. You’re up, Gilda.”

Starlight replaced Gilda at the elevator door. Gilda rolled her shoulders, then charged and jumped downwards into the elevator shaft. She went to the side, so the car wouldn’t hit her on the way down. She didn’t so much “climb down” the shaft as “drop down”; she’d grab onto something on the wall, let go with her wings flared, fall down a story, grab onto something else, and repeat. Before she reached the lasers, the elevator blocked her from view.

“How do you think she’s doing?” Starlight asked as she braced her hooves a little more.

“Fine,” said Bon Bon without a thought. “She’s whiny, but she gets the job done.” She shrugged.

Gilda’s voice came through the anklet and echoed up the shaft at the same time. “Alright, stop it!” Motors rumbled and the elevator stopped. “Yeah, we’re good! The lasers turn off to let the elevators by and we’ve got like five feet of clearance! If you could let it down just a little more, for like five seconds… Stop! Awesome! Starlight, Bonnie, come on down!”

Starlight took a deep breath, leaned into the shaft, and looked to the side. There was the service ladder. The completely vertical ladder. In the dark. She swallowed, lit her horn, and pulled herself over. Rung over rung, hoof over hoof, she descended, forcing herself to look down every now and then so she could see how close she was to the elevator car and something resembling solid ground. She gave a prayer of thanks when she finally reached the car’s roof.

Once everyone was on top, Sunburst lowered the elevator down through the lasers; the surfers stayed plastered flat against the roof, watching as the spells flicked back on just above them. When they had a good ten feet of clearance, the elevator stopped. Right across from them was the grille separating the public shafts from the vault shaft. It was big. It was thick. It was imposing. It was strong. It was no match for thermite. Everyone seized a roll of thermite tape and began tracing out a hole.

“Hey, Glimmy,” snickered Gilda. “Remember when you said this stuff was a bad idea?”

“Yep.” Starlight pressed a strip of tape around one of the bars in the grille. “Remember how I ate my words when this was suggested?”

“Yeah. The look on your face was priceless.”

The thermite burned through the grille in seconds and filled the shaft with a reeking stench. The vault elevator was brought up (Sunburst said it ran on the same systems) and the trio crawled through the hole into the adjacent shaft. Something in the back of Starlight’s mind buzzed. They had just gotten closer to their goal than they had ever been before.

As Bon Bon fiddled with the maintenance hatch on the shaft, Starlight glanced at the inside walls, the walls that ought to have been for the vault. Even in an elevator shaft, they managed to look thick. None of the infrastructure in the main shaft, just plain, hard metal. She poked a probe in. Layers upon layers of enchantments were stuffed into every possible cubic inch, warding off external magic intrusion. Twilight would have trouble getting through, even if she had a year to prepare. How long had something like this taken to build?

She explained this to Bon Bon and Gilda as they climbed into the car and rode the hijacked elevator up. Bon Bon frowned. “Hmm. So the only way we’re getting into or out of the vault is through the door, even if you use all the magic you can.”

“Looks like it.”

“Great. If something goes wrong, we’ll be bottlenecked.”

Ding went the elevator. “Can we worry about that later?” Gilda asked. “We’re at the freaking vault right now.”

Except they weren’t. Once the elevator doors parted, they revealed another set of doors less than a foot away, doors one would normally expect in a secret military base. Set into these doors was a numeric keypad.

“Fudgenuggets,” whispered Bon Bon. “Of course Goumada focuses all her security on the vault when she neglects everything else. Any guesses?”

“Money,” said Gilda.

“Can’t. It’s ten digits. I… think.”

“I’ve got nothing,” said Starlight. “And-” A quick probe. “No, the keypad and the door are just as heavily enchanted as the walls. And I don’t know what kind of signal the keypad sends out, so I can’t fake it in the system.”

“Thermite tape?” Bon Bon suggested.

“Not in someplace this tight. Besides, we don’t know how thick it is, so it might take a while to burn through.”

“Any chance Sunburst-”

“Magic the lock,” Gilda said suddenly.

Starlight sighed. “We said it’s-”

“Not the door, the lock. Or the frame. Like, the- hinges or whatever this thing has. It’s thick, there’s probably something like, I dunno, pistons holding it shut, right? Something that uses magic even if the walls don’t. If you zap them directly, maybe you can open the door without touching the keypad.”

It was worth a shot; Starlight was thaumatically probing the walls before Gilda was halfway done. The enchantments in the vault walls were indeed potent things, but they mostly kept magic from being used on them. Magic could pass through them just fine. Acting hazily on a sort of instinct, she followed the mana currents from the panel to a place in the walls, where-

Yes. There was an arcanic hole there, an empty spell waiting to be filled up with a load of magic so it could act. All it did was pull the doors apart, but it did that very well. Starlight decided to oblige it and filled it up with a load of magic. A clunk, a whirr, and the doors began parting. One couldn’t slap a magic-damping enchantment on a mechanism that needed magic to work.

But when the doors were just an inch apart, gale-force winds blasted through the crack, disrupting Starlight’s concentration. Everyone was slammed against the walls of the elevator by the force of the enclosed storm. “What did you do, Starlight?” screamed Bon Bon over the howling wind.

“Nothing!” Starlight screamed back. “Just- gimme a-” She reversed her spell to shut the door again. The wind cut off, leaving everyone shaken but alive.

Gilda shook herself down and flexed her wings. “Uffh. What was that?” she mumbled, pushing her headfeathers back down.

“The wind spells,” Bon Bon said, her ears going up. “Remember those? They were in the vault and we didn’t know what they were for. I guess this is what.”

“Swell. Any chance you can shut it down, Glimmy?”

“Give me ten hours, a hunk of iron ore, a chisel, a desk, and ten reams of paper to work it all out. I can block it with a shield, though.” Starlight paused. “Probably.”

“It’s better than nothing,” said Bon Bon. “Let’s give it a shot.”

Deep breath. Starlight managed the juggling act of holding up a shield while dumping magic into the pistons. The wind smashed into her dome like a freight train, but her magic held (barely) and kept out the worst of the blast. “It’s working!” she yelled over the howling gale. “I’ll go first, you get behind me!” She opened the doors just enough to squeeze through; Bon Bon and Gilda soon followed.

Starlight stumbled into a sitting position on the metal floor. Bon Bon was at her side in a second. “Are you okay?”

“A bit of a headache, but I’m fine,” said Starlight. “Don’t worry about me.” She deliberately broke away from Bon Bon to examine the vault.

And what a vault it was.

It was a giant, cavernous, sheer metal box, nothing more than four flat walls with a floor and ceiling, stretching several stories both above and below them and all across the interior of the hotel. Several small houses could’ve fit inside with room to spare. It was almost menacing in its size and simplicity. Sourceless wind screamed through the whole inside, making a tornado around the center. And in the center, suspended from the ceiling by a single beam, was the safe. It matched the vault in scale, an enormous steel cube about twelve feet to a side with a huge wheel opening mechanism. A narrow (and railless, of course) bridge connected the platform the trio was on with the safe.

“I get it,” said Gilda. “Ten bits says the code doesn’t just open the door. It also shuts off the tornado so you can cross the bridge without getting splattered against the walls by the wind.”

“Yep,” said Bon Bon. She tentatively stuck her hoof out around Starlight’s shield, only to yank it back in a second. “And that’s way too strong for us to get across in the open.” She glanced at Starlight.

“I can keep my shield up, but there’s an easier way.” Starlight cleared her throat and focused on her anklet. “Thorax?-”

---

“-Are you still there?”

“Nervous but alive,” said Thorax-Earth-Red, since he was both. He couldn’t just leave the security hub, unfortunately; something else might come up. Like this.

“You know those wind enchantments in the vault? They’re another defense measure. Any chance you can turn them off? I figure the signal to switch them on and off is going through there as well.”

“Probably!” added Sunburst-Unicorn-Orange. “It’s, it’s a very centralized system. Do you have a, another seed?”

“I think so.” Thorax-Earth-Red began rooting through his bag. They’d all packed plenty of override seeds, just in case. “Just in case” seemed to be coming up a lot.

“If you, if you do, once you find one, get the arcanoscope and-”

“Hey!”

Thorax-Earth-Red jumped and quickly shifted his griffon claws back to pony hooves. When he looked up, Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki was glaring at him. He quickly tried to sound nervous. It wasn’t too difficult. “Uh, yes’m?”

“Just what’re you doing in here?” snapped Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki.

Deep breath, Thorax-Earth-Red told himself. You can do this. “Maintenance,” he said. He fished out his clipboard from his saddlebags and held it up. As Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki snatched it away, he continued, “It’s, we were scheduled for a quick checkup today, and I’m right in the middle of it.” Sunburst-Unicorn-Orange and Starlight-Unicorn-Heliotrope were both talking, but he tried to ignore them, keep himself in the now.

Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki went through several emotions as she skimmed the clipboard, all almost too fast to catch. Anger, apprehension, fear, annoyance, and much more. “Didn’t you hear?” she said. “No one’s supposed to come into this room.” Her voice was so neutral that if Thorax-Earth-Red hadn’t tasted her rage, he never would’ve guessed how angry she was. Hopefully, that anger wasn’t directed at him.

Look at your mark. Keep looking at your mark. “Really?” Thorax-Earth-Red asked, not looking away from Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki. He tried to sound the this-might-be-bad-but-I’m-not-sure-yet nervous of an interrupted worker, and not the CRAP-THIS-ALL-JUST-WENT-PEAR-SHAPED-NOW-I’M-TOTALLY-SCREWED-OH-HIVE-OH-HIVE-OH-HIVE nervous of an infiltrator. “The guard at the door let me through just fine when I showed her the schedule.”

Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki’s brow furrowed. She looked up at Thorax-Earth-Red, down at the clipboard again. Thorax-Earth-Red tasted waves of suspicion cascading off of her. Eventually, she said, “She made a mistake. Checkup or no checkup, nopony’s supposed to be in here.”

“I never heard about that,” Thorax-Earth-Red said defensively. “I just-”

“You’re coming with me.”

Thorax-Earth-Red’s hemolymph froze. “…Sorry?”

“Standard procedure,” said Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki. “We just need to check you out a bit, be sure you really are who you say you are.” She handed the clipboard back to Thorax-Earth-Red. Or, to be more precise, she held it out to him and it fell to the ground when he didn’t take it, frozen in shock.

“Oh, oh, what?” Thorax-Earth-Red scoffed, trying to sound disbelieving. “That guard let me in, remember. You think I, I’m a changeling or something?”

“You might be. We’ve had problems with them in the past week.”

Thorax-Earth-Red’s thoughts became a combination of terrified screaming and the most colorful expletives he could conjure mixed into a near-unending stream of Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap- He only barely managed to hold his composure.

Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki tapped her earpiece. “Detail, this is Security Four. I found an intruder in the security room and need somepony to replace me while I take her to Goumada.”

Part of the reason Thorax-Earth-Red had never been a good changeling was because he had trouble thinking on the fly; he could make plans, but once they fell apart, he might as well just raise his hooves and surrender. Even with his mind working overtime now, he was having trouble thinking of something to escape that would still let him shut down the wind.

“It’s a long story, I can’t-” Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki fell silent and frowned. “No, she is a pony- I mean, she looks like a pony, but she might be a changeling- … No, I didn’t fall asleep on the job, not like you last week! Just send me somepony, stat!”

Maybe, if he’d knocked out Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki the moment he saw her again, then maybe he’d have a chance. But with guards already called, probably on the way, he wouldn’t have enough time. She wasn’t the kind to be bluffed into letting him stay. Every single idea of Thorax-Earth-Red’s stalled out midway.

“Copy that,” Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki sighed. She lowered her hoof and muttered something incomprehensible.

One last shot. “I-is this safe?” Thorax-Earth-Red asked, his voice squeakier than he intended. “I-I really don’t think you need to go that far, I can-”

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Watchful-Pegasus-Khaki in a nonchalant way that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “As long as you’re honest with us, we’ll let you go once we’re done talking to you.” She eyed him; Thorax-Earth-Red tasted a sort of vindictive happiness flowing from her. “You are being honest with us… right?”

It was all Thorax-Earth-Red could do to not gulp.

---

“It’s, we were scheduled for a quick checkup today, and I’m right in the middle of it.”

“Thorax?” asked Starlight. But she already knew what was up. Anxiety gripped her heart. “Frig,” she muttered.

“What’s going on?” asked Bon Bon. “This isn’t good, is it?”

Starlight swallowed. “I think Thorax got found out. We’re on our own.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Hooray for comedically excessive security measures.

[redmar]

This is getting tense and they really need to improvise a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if RAinbow decides to something reckless to help Thorax later on.

[_Undefined_]

Bon Bon had seen some strange things in her day, even some bipedal monsters and creatures, but she still found Gilda pulling the bow to be bizarre. How in Tartarus could she balance like that?

(insert obligatory Lyra Heartstrings joke here)

Well, given that it happened again while I read this week's chapter, I'm forced to conclude that I'm shivering not because the room is cold but because I'm nervous for our heroes. And I'm expecting additional shoes to drop, because it wouldn't be a heist story if there were only a couple of difficulties.

I have a prediction for what one of the story beats is going to be later on, but I don't want to say it in case I'm right. I don't want to get ahead of what's happening right now.

[Eroraf86]

10161037
I'd say Goumada is compensating for something, but I'm more mature than that.

[Curtis Wildcat]

A rich mare's world, huh? Money really is funny.

[Bugsydor]

Ooh! Multiple measures keyed to the same passcode. I'm going to have to remember that piece of dungeon design in case my party is feeling cheeky.

[Yoshifan30]

“Hey!” Starlight stepped in between the two of them, hooves held up. “Will you two shut up ? We need to keep moving, and we’re not gonna get anywhere if you keep arguing!”

Kind of reminds me when Starlight had to break it up the argument between Discord and Trixie lol

[Yoshifan30]

Starlight stepped in between Bon Bon and Gilda and gave them both a telekinetic smack on the head. “Alright,” she said as firmly as she could manage. “We’re in the middle of a high-risk operation and you two are bickering like foals. What’s up?”

Lol

“Are…” Gilda blinked twice. “Are you honestly trying to sit us down and talk about our feelings?”

“Yes. I. Am,” said Starlight. “It’s better than just sitting around, talking about how much you hate each other.”

And it looks like the future counseling Starlight is giving the talk between these two

[Yoshifan30]

Oh boy this is really not good okay it looks like Starlight Gilda and Bonbon are ready to proceed to get to the building Gilda shot the arrows including the ice arrow to the window hopefully enough cold to shattered the window and with the Sonic Rainboom it broke so now they can proceed into the building and Bonbon is having a blast jumping off the building and even doing some stunts which that's pretty cool but unfortunately Bonbon and Gilda are having a little argument and not the good time to have one so while they're waiting for the elevator Starlight wanted to talk to both of them what the heck is going on with them but it looks like Gilda was feeling a little nervous and scared and even thinking that she didn't do much and she really wanted to help the situation especially what's going on in Griffin Stone and she felt like she can't fail this mission which I feel bad for her that's how she felt but it looks like they got themselves through the elevator but now that's more security and apparently a wind power so they try to contact thorax but unfortunately he got found out by the security and now Starlight and the others are on their own now I was afraid this would not go smoothly

[Yoshifan30]