Mare Do Well: Rebirth

by MagnetBolt

Chrome Buster, Part 1

Principal Withers swallowed, trying to see anything in the dark warehouse.

“Hello?” he called out, his voice that stage-whisper that came out when a pony was torn between trying to catch somepony’s attention and trying to remain hidden. “I-is this the right place? I was given an address, and the door was open…”

He trailed off to silence, staring at the shadows around him.

“I really hope this isn’t the wrong warehouse,” Withers whispered.

“Mister Withers, thank you for coming to this meeting,” said a pony right behind him. Withers jerked forward, tripping over something in the gloom that squeaked and ran away before he could think too much about it. Withers crawled a few paces in blind panic before managing to get up.

“When--” he gasped, turning to look.

“Please calm down,” the pony said.

Withers relaxed when he saw the face, even if it was through a tablet screen.

“I’m sorry I can’t be there myself, but I have to keep up appearances,” the pony apologized.

Withers glanced up at the silent form holding up the tablet. They were a massive pony, a head taller than he was, and heavily muscled. A long black trenchcoat concealed their form, along with a hat pulled low to obscure their features. He dismissed them as one of his employer’s thugs. The pony paying him certainly had enough of them around.

“You managed to avoid the police,” the pony noted. “That’s good. You were the only one at the school who knew about my investment. The Etherite was being shipped to shell companies and I’ve managed to tie up those loose ends nicely.”

“It was close,” Withers sighed. “If you hadn’t warned me I would have been caught along with the rest.”

“It was close,” the pony agreed. “So close that a lot of the Etherite never got shipped at all. So close you didn’t have time to purge all the records. I told you to burn everything.”

“There’s nothing there to tie it to you!” Withers promised.

“I know,” the telecommuting pony agreed. “I’m very cross about the Etherite shipment, though. It was seized by the police and it’s being transferred to the government. Do you know how bad that is, Mister Withers?”

“It… it’s going to be difficult to get it back?” he guessed.

“If it isn’t tainted. If they don’t figure out what I want it for. If it isn’t destroyed because somepony has more fear than common sense.” The pony sighed and shook their head. “At least I can clear up things at the school and make sure nopony knows I was involved.”

“It’s already cleared up,” Withers said. “The only pony that knows anything is…”

He swallowed, dread crawling down his spine.

“Is me,” he finished.

“Goodbye, Mister Withers,” the pony said. The tablet went black. Things went black for Withers a moment later.

---

“I feel like a celebrity,” Mare Do Well said, as they stepped out of the limo.

Bon-Bon nodded. “It’s pretty unusual for us, too.”

“Really?” Lyra grinned. “This is what I always thought being a secret agent was like. Put on your nicest suit, drive in a limo, now I just need a martini and it’ll be perfect!”

“It’s a little early for a martini, but I think I could get a mimosa if you’d like,” said the mare there to greet them. “Welcome to PrinTecca. Or back to PrinTecca, really. You’ve been here before, and we’re all grateful for that.”

“You must be Doctor Kaiser Roll,” Mare Do Well said, shaking her offered hoof. The mare felt genuinely pleased to see them. “It’s nice to meet you. We got your invitation, obviously.”

“Please, you can just call me Roll,” the mare said. She was the orange-red of ripe grapefruit, her mane pink light enough it was almost white. Loopy glanced at the dress she was wearing under her tailored lab coat.

“You’re making me feel under-dressed,” Mare Do Well said. “That’s not from off the rack.”

Roll chuckled. “It’s a special occasion, so I thought it was best to wear my best.” She shook Lyra and Bon-Bon’s hooves. “Don’t worry, it isn’t a black-tie event. Why don’t you follow me in and I’ll show you what we’ve been working on?”

They trotted inside. The PrinTecca building was, just like before, a facade of fine marble and gilding over the utilitarian labs and modern construction in places where they didn’t need to impress investors with a first impression.

“After the accident, we started thinking about our next steps. We lost a lot of progress on the project we’d been putting together-- actually, I’m not sure, were you aware of what was in the lab that was destroyed?”

“Not really,” Mare Do Well said. “Sorry. I’m not very technical, and I was distracted pretty badly while I was in there.”

Doctor Roll nodded. “Understandable. From what we’ve heard about the pony you fought, you’re lucky to be alive. You being here minimized the damage she did and probably saved us millions of bits.”

She led them back through the labs, and Mare Do Well felt like a VIP getting the big tour. They caught glimpses of labs and fabrication equipment and meeting rooms.

“What we’d been working on was the next big thing - synthetic ponies.” Doctor Roll grinned and stopped in front of a window set into a wall. The lab on the other side was obviously set up just for stops like this, with a headless, pony-shaped frame walking on a treadmill while scientists took notes.

“Why?” Lyra asked. “Wouldn’t a simpler design be easier to produce?”

“The simple answer is that Equestria doesn’t have a lot of infrastructure,” Doctor Roll said. “It would be easier to make a machine that was just a box on wheels, but they have trouble outside of a very controlled environment. Think about just walking in here. You had to exit a vehicle, navigate into a building, go up a few stairs, and so on. That’s without opening doors or interacting with anypony. A box on wheels would get stuck at the first set of stairs it found, and it would need a way to open a closed door, and to do anything useful it would need to have a way to operate tools, and so on and so on.”

“Is it really that hard?” Bon-Bon asked. “How does making it pony-shaped help?”

“Everything is already designed for ponies to use,” Doctor Roll explained. “It’s hard for a box on wheels to get out of a limousine or open a door, but they’re designed for ponies to use. If your machine is pony-shaped, it’s equipped to navigate those problems by default. If it needs to use a tool, every tool we’ve ever made is already designed for a pony’s hooves.”

“So a synthetic pony like you’re designing doesn’t need anything special in the environment,” Mare Do Well said.

“Exactly,” Doctor Roll said. “Unfortunately, most of our prototypes were destroyed. We’ll rebuild, better than before, but we wanted to do something useful with what we could salvage, and there was just enough left for this!”

She dramatically opened a door to a brightly-lit room somewhere between a theatre and a meeting room, even if it had been dressed up as a lab. Ponies in suits stood waiting anxiously, watching them enter. At Doctor Roll’s nod, the curtain was pulled back from the stage.

It could have almost been a pony in full-body armor painted Canterlot white and detailed in blue and gold. Its head was held high, but the face was a blank canvas, an art-deco shape between a hoofball and the front of a train made out of smooth black glass, too tight to be a helmet. Lights flickered on, and lines of neon picked out two crude eyes and a smile on the glass surface.

“Greetings,” the machine said, raising a hoof in a salute. Its voice sounded like two or three ponies speaking at the same time to make a chord, a single note as long as a pony wasn’t paying too much attention but definitely artificial. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”

“Meet Steel Braver,” Doctor Roll said. “He’s been optimized and tuned for extreme situations and bursts of power.”

“It’s… nice to meet you?” Mare Do Well said, unsure of what she was supposed to do.

“We want to give back to the city, and this is the way we can do it,” the Doctor explained. “I’d like to ask you to train him.”

“Train him?”

Steel Braver put his hoof down. “I have been programmed to be a hero, but I know I have a lot to learn. It would be an honor to work with you and learn what you know.”

Doctor Roll grinned. “How about we get a few pictures for the press release?”

---

“It’s a very nice facility,” Steel Braver said, looking around the repurposed subway platform. “I particularly like all the merchandise you have of yourself.”

“Those aren’t mine,” Loopy said. “I’m not that vain.”

“Oh.” Steel Braver was quiet for a moment. “I hope I get merchandise someday! Would you like me to clean up? I am programmed to be a hero, but my base design was for a public servant and I am fully equipped for simple manual labor.”

“Sure,” Loopy said. “And can you turn off your ears for a little while? I need to talk with these two in private.”

“Don’t worry,” Steel Braver said. He saluted. “I’ll be out of the way until you need me.” He lightly trotted off, hooves clanking on the concrete.

“Okay, so, explain to me again why this is a good idea,” Loopy whispered, turning to Bon-Bon and Lyra. “This is a secret lair!”

“It’s not that secret,” Bon-Bon reminded her. “It’s in the public record. Besides, what else were we supposed to do?”

“We could have told them no,” Loopy said.

“Aw, come on,” Lyra said. “He’s cute!”

“He’s a machine with a screen for a face.”

“I know!” Lyra giggled. “It makes me want to hug him.”

“I was kind of expecting a synthetic pony to look just like a regular pony,” Loopy said. “But he’s definitely a machine. I guess that crazy guy from a while back was almost right about them, but he got the details wrong. I think ponies would notice if Steel Braver put on a wig and pretended to be a pop star.”

“Making something look like a living pony isn’t as easy as you think,” Lyra said. “You’re just biased because it’s easy for you to do it to yourself.”

Loopy nodded a little. “Maybe you’re right.”

“The important thing is, we need to keep it where we can see it,” Bon-Bon cut in. “I’m not sure PrinTecca is telling us the whole story. If there’s something wrong, or some kind of scam, I want it close enough that we can do something about it.”

Loopy shrugged. “I think I understand.”

“And if it really can help?” Bon-Bon shrugged. “We can use it. Even if all it does is walk around and sweep, I won’t say no to a janitor.” She looked over to where the synth was cleaning. It had found a mop and bucket somewhere and was cleaning the floor very professionally.

“Fine. But what about tonight?” Loopy asked.

Lyra shrugged. “You’re just going to be escorting some boxes. It should be even easier than taking it on patrol. If something goes wrong, you won’t have civilians around that could get hurt.”

“Is there any chance PrinTecca knows what we’re doing and this is a setup?” Loopy asked quietly. “I mean we’re moving that weird stuff from the mine…”

“Etherite,” Bon-Bon said. “It’s a magical ore, from what I understand.”

“It’s really interesting stuff,” Lyra said. “Crystals naturally capture magic in their structure, but Etherite actually incorporates it. It has all sorts of uses, but usually, it’s only synthesized in the lab or found in tiny deposits.”

“I know, I know, it’s a fortune,” Loopy said. “Stop trying to tempt me to run off with it.”

“I’m not sure where you’d sell it,” Bon-Bon said. “There’s no market outside of science labs.”

“You mean like the science labs all over the city?”

Bon-Bon shrugged. “If you see ponies looking to buy a ton or two of magic spicy rocks, let me know. They’ll be our number one suspects for who was funding the school.”

Loopy snorted and walked over to Steel Braver, who was polishing one of the glass display cases. She tapped him on the shoulder and two fins on his head raised up like ears perking to attention.

“Hey, you ready to learn how to be a hero?” Loopy asked.

“Yes, Ma’am!” Steel Braver saluted. “Ready to follow orders.”

“Great. And can you show me where you found this stuff?” she pointed to the mop and bucket.

“In the janitor’s closet.”

“We have a janitor’s closet?!”

---

“So our goal is to ensure that these crates arrive safely at secure government storage?” Steel Braver confirmed, putting a hoof on one of the wooden boxes. The train was already in motion, gently moving down the track at ground level - the government hadn’t felt a need to invest in the elevated monorails yet. It was one less thing to go wrong tonight, so Loopy wasn’t going to complain.

“Yeah,” Mare Do Well said. “SMILE is a government organization, so we’re providing security. Because the police were involved in the cover-up of the mining operation, we can’t really trust them to do the job.”

“Oh.” Steel sounded sad about that. “That’s too bad. I was taught that the police are trustworthy ponies and that if I had any questions I should approach a uniformed officer to ask them for assistance. Is that not the case?”

“In general that’s good advice,” Mare Do Well said. “There are a couple of police officers I’m pretty sure I can trust. If you meet Officer Beeswax or Detective Arabica, they’re both really decent ponies and you can absolutely trust them. I just don’t know many of them well enough to say anything else.”

“I’ll remember those names,” Steel said. “Thank you.”

“Now, you remember what we do when we arrive?” Mare Do Well asked.

“We ensure the crates remain sealed when they are put into secure storage,” Steel Braver said. “And then we ensure the secure storage is sealed and locked before we leave.”

“Right,” Mare Do Well agreed. “It’s an easy job, but you’ll still want to be careful. We need to make sure all the crates get moved, that the workers don’t swap any crates around, that everything is really locked, and anything else we can think of that could go wrong.”

“It sounds like you don’t trust the ponies moving the crates. Shouldn’t you trust ponies until you have a reason not to do so?”

Loopy couldn’t keep a serious face at that. She broke down laughing and patted Steel Braver on the shoulder, holding on after a moment to keep her balance.

“Oh, oh wow,” she said, trying to hold back giggles. “You really are a good pony.”

“Technically I am a machine, but I greatly appreciate the sentiment.”

Something slammed into the top of the train. Mare Do Well and Steel Braver both looked up. Steel Braver’s ears started glowing.

“I’m detecting something large on top of the train,” Steel Braver said.

“Hero lesson number one,” Mare Do Well said. “Nothing ever goes the way you planned.”

A shower of sparks rained down as something started tearing through the train’s roof like a very hot knife through steel. It was much like a regular hot knife through butter but infinitely more dangerous.

Something big dropped through the roof, and Steel Braver pushed Mare Do Well back and out of the way of the hot metal and massive shape. Steam filled the cabin from rain hitting the hot metal, and a pony in a black trenchcoat stood up in the wreckage, taller and bulkier than Steel Braver.

The synth stepped forward. “Sir, you have broken into a secure area,” Steel said. “You are under arrest. Please lay down on the floor and we will place you into custody.”

The big pony turned and threw a punch. Steel Braver moved with the speed and precision of a well-oiled machine, which was the only reason he caught it instead of getting punched right in his glass face.

Steel was forced back, hooves squealing and raising sparks against the floor.

“He’s pretty strong, huh?” Mare Do Well asked. She jumped to the wall, then kicked off it to get more velocity when she hit the big pony’s face, knocking the fedora off his head. It felt like she’d kicked a solid block of lead, and she dropped to the floor, backing up and limping on her damaged hoof. “What the buck?”

“I do not believe this is a normal pony,” Steel Braver said.

The big pony had a steel bulkhead for a face, just blank metal in the rough shape of a pony’s head. Red light flashed out of a hidden seam, and it switched from pushing against Steel Braver to pulling, yanking him forward. The synth stumbled, and the bigger machine slammed its head forward, cracking the glass of Steel’s face and knocking him to the ground.

“Inferior,” it rumbled, its voice a bass-boosted buzz of electronic sound.

“Leave him alone!” Mare Do Well shouted, jumping at the bigger synth. Something moved under its coat, and the costumed hero buzzed to the side, barely avoiding a white-hot blade on the end of a chain launched out of the synth’s shoulder, right through the coat it was wearing.

It lanced through the air and punched into one of the wooden crates before snapping open like a bear trap, biting into the crate and pulling it towards the synth in the coat.

“You’ve got a few tricks,” Mare Do Well admitted. “So do I.”

She charged up a psychic blast and threw a wave of disorienting magic at the synth.

It waited a moment as if expecting something to happen. Nothing did.

“I guess that doesn’t work on thinking machines,” she said sheepishly.

The big synth grabbed part of the roof that had fallen around it and swung it like a bat at Mare Do Well, catching her on the side and hitting her into the far side of the train to land among less important cargo, smashing through crates like they were balsa wood.

“H-halt and sur-surrender,” Steel Braver stuttered, getting back up, the neon lines that made up its face flickering and distorting. The other synth ignored him, a chain launching into a second crate.

Steel Braver grabbed the crate, trying to yank it back. The bigger machine pulled harder, and the wood cracked, Etherite spilling all over the train car.

The big synth made a sound like a very angry engine turning over and kicked Steel Braver hard enough into the wall to dent both the metal hero and the train. Mare Do Well crawled out of the debris she was stuck in, and could only watch helplessly as the synth jumped out of the hole in the ceiling, a ton of steel and circuits leaping like it was weightless.

“Nothing ever seems to go as planned,” she muttered. “I hate being right.”

Comments

[Xanni]

Steel Braver's Mark isn't described, but I think surely it must be the PrinTecca logo.

[Dorath]

So ... Black trashed PrinTecca's synth labs to make sure his synths went to market first, he's behind the School, and I'm betting that he's using the etherite in his synths ...

Is anyone else thinking Bubblegum Crisis/AD Police Files?