Opening Every Door
At school the next day, Sunset Shimmer stabbed at her exercise books with pens. She incinerated innocent chemical samples. She smashed volleyballs hard enough that the opposing team dived out of the way.
Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle tried to just stay out of her way in class, but at lunchtime Twilight sidled up to her and asked, “Do you… want to talk about it?”
“I don’t… like… to lose,” Sunset answered through gritted teeth.
Twilight sighed. “I know. But what can we do about it? She made it pretty clear we can’t go after her.”
“I know!” Sunset snarled, and then looked down. “Sorry, Twi. I’m not mad at you, just at her.”
Twilight leaned back against the cafeteria chair, replaying the previous evening’s events in her head. “Those robots were so strange,” she said after a minute. “Clearly engineered for combat, and yet also clearly derived from household appliances.”
Sunset frowned. “Yeah, I thought that,” she replied. “And I feel I’ve seen that kind of thing before. Something like a cooker, or a…”
“A toaster,” the two girls said at the same time.
“Micro Chips,” Twilight breathed, her eyes narrowing. “Yes. It’s just like that time his toaster robot went haywire during Flash’s gig.”
“And that robot used to be small and cute,” mused Sunset. “You gave him a good telling off about that. Did he ever explain why he’d made it so big and aggressive?”
Twilight stood up with determination. “No, he didn’t. But I think we might have found a pretty big clue.”
Sunset joined her, her lunch tray abandoned. “Sounds to me like we need to have a little chat with our friendly nerd. Don’t you agree?”
They found Micro Chips in the school’s chemistry lab. Sunset marched up to him and said with fake cheerfulness, “What’cha doing? Devising a new alloy for a blender robot’s lethal blades?”
He jumped, knocking over his work and scattering nuggets of unidentified stone. “Sun… set Shimmer. Hello.”
Closing the door behind her so they were alone, Sunset said, “Let’s not beat around the bush. We know you’ve been supplying robots to that villain with my face.”
His eyes widened and he looked to the side. “I, um, don’t know what you’re–”
“Cut the baloney, MC,” interrupted Twilight Sparkle viciously. “We already defeated your toaster automaton when it rampaged through the school a few weeks ago. Then yesterday we dismantled an overgrown coffee dispenser and saw a microwave on treads. I identified seven design commonalities between the three, four of which I’ve never seen in any production-ready droid apart from these three. We know it was you. The question is, why?”
Micro Chips seemed to be at war with himself for a few seconds. Then he looked at Twilight and shouted, “She sees the potential in my designs!” His eyes were blazing as he continued, “Not like you, Twilight Sparkle. You just always saw yourself as superior to me! So I went to someone who could take my creations and really use them!”
“Use them for criminal purposes!” Sunset growled. “You know she’s stealing stuff with them, don’t you?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “Numerous aspects of our current legal system are outdated. Copyright and patent legislation are completely unfit for purpose, so I hardly consider it immoral to take from industrial targets.”
“What about from people like Twilight?” Sunset glared daggers at him. “Somehow that thief found out that Twilight’s happy suburban house concealed a number of advanced technologies…” She trailed off as a horrible thought struck her. “Wait… Was it you who told her about Twilight’s inventions? Are you the reason Twilight was robbed?”
Micro Chips went pale. “She robbed you? Oh… oh no, I… I never meant…”
“Did you tell her about Twilight’s lab?” Sunset Shimmer insisted, with steel in her voice.
“I… I mean, I might have mentioned her…”
Sunset smashed a fist onto the desk next to Micro Chips’s experiment. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t knock you to the ground right now,” she said through gritted teeth.
Micro Chips was backing away from her in a satisfying way. “Because… I thought you’d changed and weren’t doing that kind of thing any more?” he babbled.
Sunset took a deep breath, and felt Twilight’s hand rest gently on her back. “...Good answer,” she grudgingly admitted. “But MC? You screwed up badly this time. We do forgive you. I guess. But we are not happy.”
“U-Understood,” he replied, straightening his glasses.
“Come in,” said the figure behind the desk in her customary superior tone.
The boy stepped in more purposefully than usual. Sundown inspected his expression. He was still scared of her, but he was motivated by something.
“Micro Chips. I’m glad you came by – I had something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Is it those girls who attacked you?” he asked bluntly.
“It’s related to them, yes. Did Twilight tell you she’d come to try to take her machinery back?”
The boy adjusted his glasses. “Not exactly, but I inferred it from what she did say.”
Sundown stood up and walked over to Micro Chips. “You didn’t tell me she had magical powers.”
Now, at last, he had the good grace to look embarrassed. He quickly rallied and replied, “I didn’t know you were going to raid her lab! If I’d known she was the ‘target’ you were talking about, I’d have shared all the information I have.”
“Well, better late than never,” Sundown sneered. “Time for you to fill me in on all you know about their abilities. Oh, and I’m expecting another visit from them before too long, so I need you to beef up the remaining defenders to handle the threats they provide…”
“Okay, I think I’ve got something.”
Twilight Sparkle gestured to one of the three large screens in front of her main workstation. Sunset Shimmer put away her phone and came over to stand behind her, squinting at the displayed image. “What am I looking at, exactly?”
“I was curious where else Sundown has visited. After our friend Micro Chips’s comment earlier about ‘industrial targets’, I thought I’d see if she’s raided any of the tech companies on the Canterlot Business Park. Only one of them has made any public mention of disappearing stock, so that gives me a location and a night to start from. I started by just checking the on-site CCTV cameras from the night in question.”
“Good thinking. Did you find her?”
Twilight grinned. “Not at first. All the main cameras don’t show any visitors. But, well, remember the same was true for the camera in my lab. So I started looking closer. And look at this.” She brought up a video feed. The view was from a camera mounted somewhere high, overlooking a central access road shared by several corporations, late at night. “Watch the light levels, and this truck here,” said Twilight, playing back the video at high speed.
Sunset stared at the flickering images on Twilight’s screen. “...The truck just disappeared from the parking lot.”
“Yep. And the positions of birds, and the ambient light: they all show a jump at this moment. It’s been edited, but whoever did it was sloppy.”
Sunset nodded. “Same as they did to your camera feed. But why does this help?”
“There’s more,” Twilight said. “I checked all the CCTV cameras and they all have the same pattern. So I thought I’d look for other cameras. And there’s a traffic camera at the next intersection that’s been misaligned and happens to be pointing at the business park entrance. Check that at the time the other videos were edited, and…”
“Bingo,” breathed Sunset. The feed was grainy, but it clearly showed a figure riding on one of Micro Chips’s robots up the road.
“Now this is the camera whose feed we were looking at earlier.” Twilight indicated a high pole which the robot on screen was approaching. Then...
“Whoa! Did she just… zap that camera with something electrical?”
Twilight rewound the clip a few seconds and zoomed in. “She’s definitely firing some kind of energy at it. And now she just stops for a minute to play on her laptop.” Twilight fast-forwarded briefly. “I’m curious how she gets through the main site security gate though. It’s not especially secure, but it might tell us – oh!”
“Or… she might just zap it with the same thing she shot the camera with, and make it open for her.”
“...It makes gates open, and it also does something to cameras to allow editing the recording. From short range. Via an energy blast?” Twilight frowned. “I… can’t think of a physical mechanism that would allow–”
Awooga! Awooga! A piercing siren filled the air. Sunset jumped and looked around. Twilight also jumped, but immediately directed her full attention to the computer, bringing up several additional windows and typing rapidly into a console.
“What’s going on?” shouted Sunset over the alarm.
“Hacker alert!” said Twilight, her voice betraying her distress. “After the theft I added an audio indication of any remote login with my username. If it goes off when I’m not here it doesn’t matter, but if it goes off when I am…”
“... It indicates the hacker has your password!” Sunset gasped.
“Or did.” The noise stopped and Twilight nodded in satisfaction. “I changed my passphrase and terminated the remote connection. Now she can’t get in aga–”
Awooga! Awooga!
This time Twilight looked utterly shocked. She slowly turned her head to the ‘Connections’ window, where a new line had just appeared.
“No!” exclaimed Twilight. Sunset couldn’t remember a time she’d seen Twilight look as enraged as she did right now. “Get out! This is my domain!” She stabbed out a couple of quick commands, and the siren stopped… for a few seconds, when a new connection appeared. “How are you doing this?!” she exclaimed.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Twilight turned her head to snap at Sunset, “That tone is not helpful, Sunset!”
“It wasn’t me!” Sunset exclaimed, holding up her hands.
“She’s right, it wasn’t – it was me,” said Sunset’s voice smugly from the computer speakers.
“Sundown. What do you want?” said Sunset shortly. “And Twilight, can you turn off that alarm? …Thanks.”
“I just popped in to see how my favourite superheroes are doing,” Sundown’s voice sang gaily. “Maybe see if you had any more inventions for me.”
“You already stole all my best stuff!” shouted Twilight. “Why are you back in my systems now?”
“I heard that you were threatening one of my minions earlier. And he eventually got around to telling me that you all had already beaten one of his earlier robots and filling me in on your magic powers.” Sundown’s voice sounded rather irked. But then she cheered up as she announced, “Ooh, what have we here? The blueprints to a robot dog? Eh, I’m sure Micro Chips can add some lasers to it or something.”
“Hey, leave Barbie alone!” Twilight objected. “And how are you in here, anyway?”
Sundown purred, “Oh, I shouldn’t give away my secrets, not when we’ve only just met.”
“It’s Equestrian magic,” Sunset said flatly. “We’ve seen a video of you zapping doors to open them and cameras to access them. Earth technology doesn’t have sparkly energy beams. Let me guess, sometime in the past month or two you found a normal mundane item with surprising powers and you gradually figured out how to use it for more and more evil things.”
“Hey! Less of the ‘evil’, please.” Sundown sounded affronted, but also unnerved. “But apart from that… Okay, I can recognise when someone has valuable information. How about we strike a deal?”
Sunset exchanged a glance with Twilight. “I’m listening?”
“You tell me everything you know about my Master Key, and I promise to leave you and your families alone.”
“Now, I’m sure you can offer us more than that,” Twilight said, to Sunset’s surprise. As Sunset watched, Twilight muttered under her breath, ‘Master... Key? Master Key...’ Then she suddenly started typing furiously.
“Oh?” Sunset really wished she could slap the amused smirk off Sundown’s face, even though she couldn’t even see it. “Sure, let’s negotiate.”
Twilight briefly paused her typing to wave a hand at Sunset, which she took as ‘You take care of this, I’m busy’. Sunset cleared her throat and said, “Well, let’s start with you giving back all of Twilight’s hardware that you stole. Along with the guarantee of immunity for us and our friends, we could trade that for a crash course in Equestrian magic and its powers and dangers.”
“Aww. You want me to give back the laser razor? Hmph. Fine.”
“And… you never log into this computer of Twilight’s again. Or access it in any way.”
“... This information had better be valuable. All right. You have a deal. Come by my place tomorrow. Bye-bye.”
A few seconds of silence followed. Eventually Sunset asked, “Is… she gone?”
Twilight checked. “Yes, as far as I can tell. I’m shutting down all external network connections now, just to be sure.”
“So we’re safe to talk?”
“Yes.”
Sunset released a long slow breath. “What was that all about?”
“When she said ‘Master Key’, I realised the common factor in everything we know she can do. It grants her access to anything, physical or electronic. So I set up a three-phase combined authentication challenge rotating every millisecond. I don’t believe her promise never to try logging back into this machine, but I’m pretty sure she won’t succeed now.”
Sunset pondered for a moment. “I wouldn’t really think Equestrian magic would be able to hack passwords…”
“Remember Vignette’s phone,” Twilight pointed out. “Her mote of Equestrian magic used the existing camera-filter app as a baseline.”
“Ugh, good point.” Sunset rubbed her eyes. “I’d forgotten about that particular piece of techno-magical weirdness.”
Twilight turned in her chair to face Sunset. “So… are we really going to go and teach her about magic? I’m fairly sure an invitation like that from a supervillain has to be a trap.”
Sunset smirked. “Obviously it’s a trap. But if you’ll recall… I never told her quite what form our crash course in the power of Equestrian magic would take. The kind of lesson that Rarity gave Vignette seems quite fitting.”
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It's things like this, Micro Chips, that proves Twilight really is your superior in every way.
It always the nerd
"You're right."
"Phew."
"Now I only do that to people who deserve it."
"Um..."
10499363
Pre-reformation angry-for-no-reason Sunset is hard to watch after the character grows on you by the end of the Rainbow Rocks....
....post-reformation angry-for-incredibly-good-reasons Sunset on the other hand
Yes! Bully him! :D