> Pony Class Starship
>  by Viking Hoof
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Ch1: Space Ponies In Snow
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aurora AI reboot commencing. Ship designation... HKS [-] Dancer......

clarify

Ship full designation, Jómskip HKS Aurora Dancer, HKS Dancer: Drottningarsborg Class Busse(Heavy Frigate)(Jū jun'yōkan), Jóms-Löjtnant Aurora... [redacted]

Status, unknown, location unknown, mission... piracy disposal, crew...

No naval staff detected. No unidentified personnel detected. 

Aurora shivered as her bio-circuitry processed the report. Whatever had forced her reboot had bruised her wetware something fierce. It was extensive too, damage like this had to be the result of a heavy impact. Asteroids perhaps? 

The cyber organic AI slowed as the final line of information passed through, for the 0.068 millisecond it took her to recover from the surprise of finding her crew gone. Whoever had taken, killed, or driven away her crew would pay. For now she had to finish rebooting.

She prioritized sensors, hoping that she could at least identify where she was. 

Bow sensors: report...... non responsive 
Starboard back up: report...... non responsive
Internal Security: report... totally unresponsive
FTL sensors: down
Bridge window simulation cameras, report...... Nominally functional

"Nominally Functional": binocular only

Well shit.

Aurora Dancer opened the blast shutters that protected the forward cameras that created the window simulation on the bridge. The simulated windows were mostly a decoration to keep the bridge crew from  falling to station fatigue disorder (reference definition of "boredom"), they also functioned as viewscreens, and extra large holoscreens in case the captain needed to get a better look at a three/four-D render. They hadn't been meant to be the main source of external data.

Two cameras was the functional minimum. She was left with a pittance of depth perception, only directed to her forward. Without any other sensors, she was effectively deaf and numb. The distressed AI began running through her programs for whatever else had been damaged.

Aurora processed a tad slower as she came across a few strange programs. One was labelled "standing, walking, trotting, etc," the sheer irreverence of regulations the name formatting brazenly announced almost threw her for loop. Both of them seemed to have not been maliciously hidden. Aurora reviewed the connections required by the one labelled walking, and after fire walling off the programs associated with it, she attempted to run "standing, walking, trotting, etc" in a specially designed secure sub-processor.

The AI desperately activated the conning tower cameras to see what was happening as she felt her wetware reared up and forward. She quickly ended the program and ran a internal systems check again.

unregistered subsystem detected:
FRLeg, FLLeg, BRLeg, BLLeg

Aurora Dancer tried again to raise up her hull via the program, using the four "legs." She could see what she assumed to be FRLeg and FLLeg splayed out underneath her hull. They were all the same dull grey. It properly matched her hull, but whoever had installed them had clearly failed to provide access ports and clear labeling for safety during maintenance. Instead they were decorated with a fur lining on their outside. A clear violation of the Star Navy's safety procedures.

Still they appeared to be useful for traversing large surfaces, perhaps exploring the surface of this place had been her mission? She hadn’t done the math yet, but it would have to be rather small for her to be light enough to use something like this. Aurora rapidly scanned the horizon, measuring the curvature of the planet, comparing it to her own height and back calculating to determine the diameter of the planet she was on.

She did it again, her mind struggling to process the results. Whatever she was standing on wasn’t natural. It couldn’t be. Judging by her height from the ground, and the curvature of the Earth before her, and rejudging, and calculating it again. 

Whatever she was on couldn’t be natural. If it was a spheroid, and this was a stretch, it would be at least 30 earth’s in diameter. This had to be some sort of platform in space. And since she didn’t seem to be pulled at the angle the gravity that would imply, it’d have to be using artificial gravity. Why anyone would set it that low was beyond her, but regardless, she had a mission to do. Thinking about stuff like this was a job for scientists, finding her crew came first.	

Aurora Dancer slowly opened up a sphere of FTL space around her. Pushing the boundary out to see if she could detect any sort of interference. It would be far easier to conduct a search starting from orbit over whatever the hell this thing was.

Hello? Are you okay?" Aurora Dancer turned bodily, deactivating the FTL projectors along her hull to lessen her signature, as her lenses vibrated minutely. If she was measuring the vibration correctly, she was receiving an open auditory communication channel. Aurora searched her data stores for any race that communicated in auditory wavelengths on the scale she was "seeing," for lack of a better word. A quick analysis of the fluctuations in the vibrations produced a startling result. The language wasn't xeno-reptilian yodeling, it was shockingly enough, an English greeting. No other languages with similar sound arrangements quite made sense in this situation. Whatever language it was, it would probably be better if it didn't find her.It would be risky to do this blind, but she didn't have much of a choice.  Aurora Dancer began to spin up her FTL drive...

Alert, drive failure, FTL spinning down.

Unrealspace rift collapse.

Shit, someone might be jamming her. She'd never seen a type of jamming that would generate that sort of error report, but It was pretty easy to infer that the mysterious speaker might be related to the interference. Strange she hadn't detected it before now. Aurora Dancer sounded full alert to all command staff, mentally flinching as she realized, once again, that she was alone.

Protocol demanded a weapons systems review in this sort of situation, the Battery Division Commander, Ltd. Cmdr.  Aito, wasn’t available to conduct such a procedure, nor the Master Battery Gunnery Sergeant, Sergeant Perry, nor were the officers below him. Aurora quickly worked her way down the chain of command, to her, grimacing at all of the parallel shifts she had to make along the chain of command to get to herself. 

She had to activate a few restraining programs, but eventually control of the guns were given over to her. She worked quickly, giving orders and then confirming them as she carried out hundreds of conversations at once, ordering and performing a battery check on her secondaries.

Dual Purpose Battery Group 1... nominally functional
Dual Purpose Battery Group 2... minimally functional
Dual Purpose Battery Group #%&*... unresponsive.
Main Battery hydraulics jammed, unable to deploy. Fucking Hel. Whatever had knocked her out had left her with a quarter of  her secondary battery. It was unfortunate, but it would just have to do. Aurora dispatched the few nanites she could scrounge up to try and operate the Fore Dorsal Battery. It would take them forever, but better that than nothing.

In the distance she could see shifting in the strange macroscopic snow.  There appeared to be a large pink ship, possibly the one shouting across the open air before. She was left to act as acting comms officer, and protocol was clear. She'd just have to hope they weren't hunting her. Aurora prepared her internal audio outputs to blast louder than she had ever considered. She wouldn't be able to hear herself, she would just have to hope she didn't sound weird.

"AHOY, THIS IS THE HKS AURORA DANCER OF THE STAR NAVY OF THE NORTH STAR RIKE, ADDRESSING THE PINK SHIP. PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELF."*

Aurora Dancer signaled for auto maintenance as she used the forward right landing leg to brace her strangely distressed conning tower base. Had she somehow overloaded her comm systems? Aurora Dancer stopped as the tactile sensors on the bottom of the landing leg identified more of the fur. Was she covered in a grey algae of some sort? Had the entire ship been pranked by some unknown species? Perhaps it was the Pink ship who-

"I am Princess Cadance of the Crystal Empire, a-are you okay?" The ship returned from off in the distance. Aurora Dancer stopped to consider the strange identification the pink ship had just given. It was still speaking English, which removed the possibility of a home fleet ship. However strange the usage of English in the Home Fleet was, they didn't actually have official discourse in English. That left her wondering if there had been a massive slave escape from a camp on Midgard. No mention of a navy or official prefix. Was it a civilian craft? The name would sure reinforce the idea, but she had never heard of a starkingdom named the "Crystal Empire." Was it a remote local polity? Possibly, but how had she gotten far out enough to find such a thing. The ship hadn’t clarified any sort of recent legitimization, but it could have been something that arose in the month or so that they’d been out on long range patrol.

Regardless of where it was from, it seemed to be signalling good intentions. Would she admit she was lost? She had no real reason to attempt a misdirection other than the FTL jamming she was experiencing, and that might be stellar background or industrial radiation. If for no other reason than politeness, it wouldn't hurt for her to talk back to it in English.

"I-I'M LOST!" damnit, she hadn’t meant to state it so plainly. Aurora could feel herself chafe at the restrictions she’d accepted in order to minimally direct the dual purpose battery, twisting her words away from her. If the Cadance was a threat, they would come in sniffing for blood. That and another overload in her communication. The Pink ship off in the distance engaged thrusters and began an approach, except...

Huh, the strange pink ship had the four landing legs as well, were they a recent fad in naval engineering? Aurora felt a sudden rise in indignation at the idea of being given extensive modifications because of some fad. 

The legs certainly were extensive...

Aurora stopped cold as she realized that her conning tower was bending at a rather odd angle, or rather that it was bending at all! 

Aurora Dancer righted her conning tower using hydraulics she didn't even knew she had. W-was she malfunctioning? Was she broken? Was this some shipbreaking location? This certainly wasn't in her design specifications. Heck... wait... why was her conning tower on the front of her hull? It should be towards the back! Her mind danced around the nightmare of being broken in two. Except ... the dual purpose battery group one was responding. It was mounted around the fore ventral hull.

"My dear pony, are you okay?" Pony? What the hell was the pink ship saying now? Aurora Dancer forced her reactor to cool down, redirecting more of her processing to it. She could feel herself losing control of it, and she couldn't have a reactor breach right now. Perhaps there was a translation error, and pony meant starship. 

"I appear to be malfunctioning. Could you help me?" Aurora turned to the pink ship and found it to have FTL'ed into space right next to her. It was a bright pink, with a strange energy decorating its conning tower. It also had strange feathery wings, but it was shaped like a mammal otherwise. What strange ship design. Perhaps it wasn't a ship at all?

Heh, that would be ridiculous. A creature larger than herself would have to weigh a few thousands of kilotons. 

"Let me show you to someplace safe. My home is back that way, would it do?" The starship named Cadance used its conning tower to motion off to someplace behind itself.  It probably wouldn't be a trap. The Cadance’s Captain seemed to be decent, though she wondered why it was conversing so strangely.. 

"Show me to your starport." Aurora sighed in relief. She was lucky that she hadn’t been leapt upon by slavers or pirates.	

Aurora stopped as the Cadance walked along the surface of the planet just a bit ahead. Was the Cadance not going to jump? Well… perhaps it required a clear path to jump. Such wasn’t unheard of, but most used free range FTL jumps, it was just more practical. 

Aurora stared out across the strange 1/4 meter across snowflake covered landscape surrounding her. While she hadn’t noticed it before, the strange snow having kept her from touching the ground, stepping occasionally in the same place the pink starship had reavealed to the tactile senses on the bottom of her strange landing legs touched what seemed like ice or crystal chilled to an extreme degree. 

This was actually her first time seeing snow. Since she’d been designed for general patrol duties, she didn’t really have any of the modules needed to traverse atmospheres effectively. Well, that was until whoever installed these strange fur covered landing legs on her. It was still odd to think of her mode of movement as “walking” rather than proper cruising, but they seemed effective. Perhaps these were aliens who had shared the tech for the legs with Navy command and she was the test ship?

That still wouldn’t explain why she couldn’t remember how she got here, but that could just be an accident during the landing. It also didn’t explain why there were snowflakes a full meter across. That couldn't be explained away by accident or crash.

"Are you cold?" The pink one asked, surprising Aurora.

"I feel fine." Not that she could actually tell with sensors down, but she was tired of bearing out her every damn weakness. This was the best she could slip past her restraints without relinquishing her emergency control of the main battery. It wasn't really a lie. Her internal temperature control for her wetware was functioning fine. The pink ship's conning tower turned back to Aurora, while its hull remained on course. The strangely placed cargo point at the top of the conning tower, near the front, twisted into a strange shape. Whatever the pink ship was doing, it looked dangerous. "Are you malfunctioning?" The pink ship stopped.

"What makes you say that?” A strange question, wouldn't its internal sensors have noticed that its cargo bay was damaged?

"The cargo port below your command deck is twisting, it might be overheated." The pink ship's cargo port twisted into a downward facing crescent, and the exposed sensors over the windows of the command deck twisted strangely.

"L-let's keep going." Understandable, there were probably repair crews at whatever port the Pink ship was leading it to. Dallying would only make matters worse.

Aurora decided that she should conserve energy. No telling how far away the star port would be. 







Aurora had expected the Cadance to have jumped by now. A small trip on the ground and a jump would be cheaper than two jumps, but this was getting ridiculous. If it would have taken this long, and with such heat damage as appeared to be occurring to the Cadance, any reasonable ship captain or AI would have gone with the two jumps. 

So the question is now, why wasn’t it? Perhaps the Cadance didn't have control over whatever it was that obfuscated her attempts to jump to FTL.

It was rare to meet an AI who would lie, but Aurora had come across a few.

Then again, it didn’t have to. Nothing it had stated so far was completely innocent in every definable sense. If it was a unchained AI, then questioning it directly wouldn’t work. 

Aurora primed the drives of a couple warheads. She didn’t reveal them. If she didn’t tip her hand now, then she would be better ready to fight back later. 

That….

Aurora’s cyber organic processors didn’t pause in awe as a normal biological lifeform would, when confronted with the sight before her. Of course, some of that awe would come from looking out across the massive structure, the height challenging Mount Everest itself. 

Not only that, the massive city of humongous skybreakers. This was too much for any pirate. It was sort of like a massively upscaled colony. A upscale factor of well over 100x in size. Everything was made of crystal instead of fibrous metals and glass, and they were starships instead of colonists, and at this scale the economics of it all had to be horrific. It would take several solar arrays, and a gas giant or two to power the economics of all of this. It was all patently ridiculous.

“Hi there!” 

Proximity alert! Proximity alert! 

The klaxons inside the Aurora’s head blared, the pink anomaly nearly colliding with her con-tower.   

Aurora used one of her landing gears as an impromptu ram to divert the anomaly as she used her engines to propel herself away and out of whatever pull the anomaly may have had. Her conning tower twisted to face the heading he had last seen the blur moving towards.

“I’m Pinkie Pie and I'ma throw you a party you’ll never forget!”
> Space Pony Part Two
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Party?...

BOARDING PARTIES! Aurora rapidly maneuvered away from the pink ship, and prepped her FTL drive. Warnings blasted in her organic senses as her FTL drive refused to lock in coordinates in unrealspace, her buoy kept falling back into reality.

“Hey, you can’t be going, I haven’t given you your cake yet!” Cake?... Aurora stopped to consider what exactly the new ship had said.

“You have foodstuffs? I’m afraid I will not need any, my crew is missing.” Aurora answered before she ended up paying for things she didn’t need. The navy would be quite upset if she requisitioned frivolous things. 

“I uh… does that mean she’s not hungry?” Aurora turned bodily to the new pink starship. 

“Please identify, are you the Captain of the vessel, or perhaps the AI?” The ship designated Pinkie Pie began to malfunction, much as the ship designated Cadance had on the way to the strange Starport. That wasn’t a good sign, a worrying possible side effect of having a unchained AI. Was this a colony of unchained AI’s? 

Aurora glanced back at the massive starport, There was no way AI's could maintain this without some form of help.

“I’m Pinkie Pie of Ponyville!” Aurora turned her cameras back to the ship designated Pinkie Pie. 

“I think I should put into dock and then try to find out what happened to my crew.” Aurora began, still uncertain of what exactly she was walking into.

“Your… crew?” Aurora paused. Was the Pink Ship doubting her faculties? Did it think she was lying, or was the Pinke ship doubting her sensors. 

“Yes, they aren’t on board and I can not detect them anywhere.” Aurora affirmed, double checking her sensors just to make sure.

“Do you plan on looking for them?” So the Pink ship didn’t detect them either? then why had she asked?

“It’s going to be rather hard to find them with just optical systems, I was hoping to put in for repairs and-”

“Pinkie, do you remember the castle apothecary?" Cadance inquired of pinkie quietly through the side of her mouth. In the corner of her eye she saw Pinkie nod. 

“I must admit-” Cadance turned away from the gray ship to whisper to Pinkie.

“I think she might have hit her head, Pinkie. Would you mind going ahead and getting a doctor ready?” Cadance muttered tiredly.

“Okie-” Cadance cut Pinki off with a hoof gesture.

“these crystals are-” Cadance ignored the little grey Aurora as it continued on.

“No surgery room parties this time Pinkie, we don’t need to find a pony with a lung transplant coughing up confetti out of the blue.” Cadance gave Pinkie her best stern Princess look. 

“awww, okie dokie.” Pinkie gave a serious nod and disappeared behind the hill.

“Huh, Pink ship is leaving, I had not completed my data transfer.” Cadance turned back to the gray ship.

“Data?” She inquired, not quite sure she’d like the answer.

“My logs, I was just conveying a few logs I’ve recorded on the strange visual of the crystal structures in the distance.” Cadance glanced back at the castle.

“I… if you say so.” Cadance turned away to lead the gray pony on further.

Aurora followed, meticulously examining each inch of the strange place she could capture with her optical sensors. She was getting better with the strange pneumatics embedded in her neck. She managed to turn it this way and that. It was useful since she had only two cameras working. 

That gave her an idea she wasn't quite comfortable with, she filed it away to discuss with the ship's captain, or even possibly its counselor if warranted.  Aurora gave another glance around. Still no threats, not even any hidden anti ship defenses. Was this place supposed to be hidden? Was this space just so well patrolled or garrisoned that they didn't bother with defenses?

Aurora looked around a third time. After spending her whole life in space, it was certainly a different place. 

Cadance glanced back to the little gray mare as she craned her head awkwardly left and right, as if searching for something, but without knowing what or where.  It was certainly a curious little things, in both senses of the word. Where had it come from? Had it made the huge skidmarks in the glacier? What did it mean crew?

The Pretty Pink Princess of the North wondered for a moment if this was some trap of Sombra's. She decided it was unlikely, but shuffled it back into possibilities. Nothing was certain with Sombra.

Cadance turned back to the crystal palace. She barely caught Pinkie waving from a balcony window, a small speck against the massiveness of the palace. She didn't question how the Earthpony had gotten there so fast. She knew better than to question Pinkie too much.

That meant that the doctors were ready. It also probably meant that some poor patient was going to be coughing or barfing out confetti. The whole Crystal Empire still had to go to the palace for any sort of medical attention. There was still months of backlog for standard medical surgeries. 







Aurora refreshed her cameras and rechecked the shutters, unable to compute the architecture of such a massive creation as she stood at the top of a cliff. Its scale was unprecedented, at least for a ground structure. Aurora desperately wanted to know what it was made out of, but her limited sensors could only assign it a crystalline quality.

It was, Aurora took a millisecond to recalculate, approximately 17.5 kilometers tall. Such a massive structure was nearly inconceivable! The subroutines designed to assist in interfacing with the crew translated that as "two Terran Everests, one on top of the other." There was no way some pirates could pull this off.

"Cadance, please explain what the structure before us is made out of." Aurora turned her conning tower to face the Princess Cadance. The Cadance's conning tower top sensor tower shined with a strange light that set Aurora on edge. Was it a energy weapon attack? The Republic of the North Star had failed all attempts to make feasible energy weapons, but aliens that could build such massive star ports very well could have.

Perhaps it was a strange form of FTL? It could be damn near anything with her external sensors down as they were. Aurora argued internally if she should go to red alert, but without the captain's permission her protocols were damn near impossible to convince without a direct obvious threat.

Aurora's internal sensors lurched in the distinctive way a unexpected FTL jump always caused them to. She very nearly went to red alert as her internal inertia dampeners went haywire, and an overflow in exhaust systems began to build up.

She very nearly vented through the forward exhaust ejection port. Once the small nanomachines and wet goo sacks that comprised her consciousness resettled properly into place, she reopened her blast shutters to take in her new surroundings.

 engines active?

negative

Aurora looked down again. She seemed to be on a small docking platform on the side of the massive crystalline star port she had seen in the distance.

Engines ready?

Engines unresponsive

Aurora looked around nervously for a way down. While impressive in size, things 17.5 kilometers tall were nothing to be on the top of without usable engines.

Aurora briefly referenced her database of structures of this size. A few alien battlestations and what not, asteroid colonies, major industrial plants in zero or low gravity situations, but that would be the sort of gravity that would render her strange legs unnecessary. This planet had earth gravity at the least.

Aurora wondered upon the mass of such a structure. If it was any sort of light metalloid and the crystal was just a covering, no, rather it would have to be sectionally alloyed to achieve such architecture. 

Maybe gradual alloys? 

Aurora paused as she felt something press into her side, right into the armor between sections of her main hull. Internal sensors flared up. She maneuvered away from it, using her strange legs to achieve lateral movement. She again tried her engines, but no response. 

Halfway through the movement Aurora felt the Pistons and actuators in her leg seize up. Klaxons flared all inside her as she struggled to get engines to respond, instead they just shifted uselessly, the compensators struggling to adjust for thrust that wasn't there.

Aurora felt her biochemical hardware begin to go numb. She wondered for just a moment as the numbness spread to her conning tower processors, why it hadnt taken her longer to figure out how to maneuver on land.

Then she felt, and thought, nothing.





Aurora's cyber hardware putted along at minimal power, only able to barely maintain her without the assistance of her biological hardware. Not quite enough for awareness, but enough to keep her power plant from going into meltdown. 






Cadance blinked in confusion as the small Pegasus fell to the ground. The strange way the mare had moved. The strange speech. Everything stood out as odd and, unnatural. She'd assumed some sort of construct. In part the anesthesia was just to see if anesthesia worked. 

And yet, she hadn't expected Sombra to be able to make something so... solid. She was almost certain he couldn't. Cadance nudged the prone mare with her hoof, but the diminutive mare didn't budge an inch. She wasn't sure where the weight was coming from, but the mare seemed real enough to her. That would imply she had been some innocent that was captured. 

"Go get guards to carry her to the hospital. Maybe we can undo whatever Sombra's cast on her." The two nurses paused to give Cadance an uncertain look. "You can try to carry her if you want." Cadance's explained, nudging the mare again to demonstrate. The two nurses nodded and trotted off. 

Cadance leaned in closer to the gray mare. Her chest wasn’t moving.

In fact, the mare's chest had never moved. The mare hadn’t stopped to catch her breathe once the entire walk. Had Sombra practiced, Cadance shivered at the thought, necromancy? Cadance paused in thought. A gray bodied mare who never breathed, that would seem to indicate necromancy, but the mare was also super jittery, and she talked as if she was a ship. Necrotic constructs tended to react rather slowly, and Sombra's wouldn't have imprinted such an absurd mental illness.

Not a normal sea ship though, there was something more to it. 

Cadance turned as two guards arrived with a wheeled stretcher. She stepped back and allowed them to maneuver the mare onto the cart.

“Where to Princess?” Hmm, where to indeed. 

“The medical wing.” The doctors would be able to make a better determination as to the mare’s condition, or lack thereof. The guards nodded and turned the oddly strained gurney back into the castle, leaving Cadance alone on the balcony.

If the mare ended up not being an agent of Sombra, what would Cadance tell... what had the mare called herself, Aurora?

Cadance sighed in frustration. She hadn’t used to be this… direct when it came to possible threats, but Sombra had worn her curiosity and subtlety down to not but nubs. Sombra's methods left very little room for doubt if you wanted to survive.
> Enraged Interstellar Killing Machines
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Doctor Malice growled as he tossed aside his ninth broken scalpel. Doctor Malice was a pony of rather... direct inquiries, and even more direct investigations. He got right to the heart of the matter, or to the matter in the heart. It was a big step up from the medicine that the Crystal Empire was used to, a thousand years ago.

Doctor Malice growled as his tenth scalpel blade was corrugated by the strange field surrounding his latest... patient. It wasn't a clean corrugation, the folds expanded and contracted, in relation to how furiously he was attempting to stab the mare with it. No matter how he maneuvered, the corrugation always slowly bent the blade away. Perhaps if he-

Doctor Malice growled as he was seized up in a pink magical field. 

Cadance quickly pried the doctor from his "patient," furious with herself for not checking in on them sooner. She cursed her court unicorn and his useless horn, magical scans her flank. It seemed every avenue of incisive investigation was closed to her. The doctor glared at her, his still levitated knife hanging in the air almost threateningly.

"That's enough doctor." She affirmed with a glare of her own. The doctor turned away in slight embarrassment and lowered the knife. Cadance gently shuffled him to the side. "I'm afraid that this requires more extreme measures." The doctor's ears perked up hopefully. "Not that extreme doctor." He poutingly trotted away. "Prepare the observation room!" Cadance shouted down the hall after him.







Aurora rebooted slowly. Orexin pumped furiously through her nervous circuitry as melatonin and adenosine was flushed out. All the while her fission reactor warmed up slowly, escalating the reactions slowly to ensure that it didn't outpace the interior shielding. 

Stage one initiating. Fission reactor active. Radiation venting into repositories according to environmental protection overrides.

Aurora's hull shook gently as the small fission reaction supplied energy to dual fusion chambers, initiating her primary power sources. Harnessing the initial surge of energy: Aurora expedited a systems check, starting her weapons.

Stage two start up is green. Systems check running...

Running...

Running...

Runni...
Weapons: responsive
Propulsion:unresponsive
Deflectors: ACTIVE
Shock Compensators: ACTIVE
Tertiary systems: Green

Aurora scanned the room bodily, her hull swinging around to survey her situation. It appeared that she had been interred in a chamber with only on hangar door to exit through. Oddly, there appeared to be no shafts for docking, or arms for scrapping hulls.

What had they done to her organic systems to disable her so? Was it a virus? Aurora slowly began to investigate the room, using her strange legs to tilt her hull and her conning tower's actuators to carefully examine every inch of the room.







Cadance blinked in surprise as the small mare nosed into each inch of the room, almost as if a foal exploring a space for the first time. She'd have called it cute, if the mare wasn't also a jerkily moving, non breathing, possible infiltration agent of Sombran origin. A knife proof, magic proof zombie or magical construct of possible cruel/evil intent.

Cadance signalled towards her guards to release the stimulus.







What... what was that noise? Aurora focused her two auditory communication dishes towards the huge airlock. There was a... buzzing, reminiscent of a personnel transport that used some sort of vertical rotary propulsion. 

Aurora watched carefully as a small, probably two person, aircraft of some sort entered the room through a crack in the airlock. Firstly, she was shocked at the shoddy design of the airlock door, considering how grand the spacedock she had seen had been. Secondly, she was annoyed, and well within her parameter to go to high alert. 

"Small craft, cease and desist or be fired upon. This facility has participated in a illegal hijacking of royal starnavy hull, and possible kidnapping of staff. Any vehicles th-" the small craft buzzed right past her conning tower, clearly in violation of a good majority of interstellar safety ordinances. One more violation, and she would be well within her rights to open fire.

But should sh- Aurora slowed in shock as the small craft buzzed right past the base of her conning tower. How DARE they? That was a massive violation of most craft handling laws in most of known space! Who would- 

Aurora felt Nonepinephrine flood her system as her the small craft buzzed past her... she would think about that later. She stepped forward to put distance between her and the craft. If the pilot didn't take a clue, then she would be forced to-

The pilot swung the craft back around to her and flew straight for her conning tower. Safeties off. 

Aurora opened her port side hatches to allow her flak platforms to deploy. The pilot continued towards her unabated, approaching, seconds away from impact. Aurora opened fire. 

BAM!

The craft stumbled sideways with the impact of the first shell, shedding fuel and... biological matter?

The second shell vaporized the small craft before it even went off, traveling a few meters more before going off. 

BAM!







Cadance jitterly stepped back up to the glass. She stared slack jawed at the empty space where the small fly had been. She stared in even greater awe at the small protrusions along the thing's side. Definitely not a zombie.

Guards scrambled all about her as even larger protrusions revealed from the small thing's back. Two to be precise. They, like the smaller ones, were misshapen domes, but where the small protrusions had four tiny barrels, these new ones had only two big ones, about the size of a pencil each. Cadance froze as the pencils turned towards her. The room had been built to nullify any sort of offensive magic, but that didn't stop Aurora from swatting the fly with a small explosion. 

She felt, rather like a fly.



FWOOM!



Aurora stepped through the shattered wall. Pieces of debris lied everywhere. Something wasn't right here. Her entire sense of scale threw up red flags as she studied the shattered wall. 

"Cease and desist at your current location pirate scum!" Aurora ordered, loosely per regulations, as she gave the churning mass of ships another round of bio electrical overload devices, quickly disabling another 4 of the well armored ram ships. She wondered momentarily why the ships she was fighting didn't just armor up fully and attack her under the power of their drives, but all of them insisted on using the complicated four limb structure, like the one that had been installed onto her hull. 

Aurora calculated quickly as she spotted a horn entering into the mix of pirate conning towers. It wasn't the same color as the one mounted on the so called "Princess Cadance," Aurora wouldn't be surprised if the Cadance was a captured yacht of some sort, but it looked similar enough that she wasn't going to chance it.

"OH BUCK!" the horned ship shouted out on a open channel as aurora's bio electrical overload devices slammed right into it's horn, the strange ship's four limbs collapsing under it, getting her a good glance at it's... driveless side, what ship wouldn't have a propulsion drive?! Why weren't the pirates organizing some sort of closed channel communications!?

Wait, were they trying to compartmentalize her?! Did they think she was some tired old generation one AI? It'd been years since a AI had been successfully confused to death, and that was under, now illegal thanks to the AI rights lobby, extreme lab conditions! How poorly did they think of her cognitive adaptive capabilities?

Aurora wanted to load in a few shock rounds just to reprimand the idiot pirates themselves, but her chains chafed against the idea. Instead she adjusted the amplitude of the bio electric overload devices, and loaded another set into her gun batteries. A quick barrage into the crowd of hostile ships proved the adjustment to be effective, so she loaded some more. She had to make this short. She didn't have enough overload shells to keep this up without this getting far messier.







Cadance picked herself out of the rubble tenderly. She'd started today with just the best ... relax time with Shinning Armor. How had her day devolved into... into... this?! Morning "Relaxation" Days always went well! Who was Sombra to try and ruin one of the top 6 days of the week. 

"OH BUCK!" What was... the mare... ship... thing! Where had it gone?! Cadance charged down the hall towards the sound of unfinished shouts of pain. Wafting through the air was the smell of burnt fur. As Cadance spotted the pile of unconscious guards she was flooded with a sense of relief. As she spotted tufts of blue hair and a horn in the pile, a rather more primal sensation overtook her.

"GET AWAY FROM HIM YOU DRAB COLORED BITCH!"

Cadance charged on through the shocked gasping defenders, over the prone but alive guards that had already fallen, directly into a hail of buzzing stings, bruises, and singes as the small spells fired from the strange thing's strange pencils slammed into her. Cadance growled as she cleared the prone guards, and raised a shield. She quickly followed up with a quick blast of magic to test the Thing's defenses.

It didn't even blink.

"Terminal force authorized."

Cadance's screamed in frustration as a set of explosions began to quickly force her back, the mass of unconscious guards brushing against the back of her rear hooves once she finally managed to gain a firm hoofhold.

Beyond the corridor spanning shield was nothing but smoke and debris, neither the little sombra spawned monster nor the corridor beyond it could be seen through the haze.

Cadance charged a spell and braced herself, all the while feeling out gently for her magic for the strange monster that had dared hurt Shinning Armor. 

She probed a little farther. How far back had she been forced? Cadance probed further, still nothing but stone hallway and rubble.

Where had it... gone?







Aurora Dancer basked in the warmth of the ultimate freedom, lazily orbiting the strange planet she had just escaped from with a fortuitous FTL jump. Lands, seas, a vast cornucopia of biological resources lay below her. The gentle hum of multiple systems coming online, among them a register of escape pods, shuttles, sensors, and far more importantly logs. Regulations were clear, in a situation like this she had a right to review normally privileged logs in order to shore up her damaged memory banks. 

Aurora processed days worth of audio, text, bio scans, official seals, things that any organic specialists would take week to dig through, faster than your average organic could blink. All the while her control over the ship slipped as the thousands of automated command and acceptance responses she had  jury-rigged to monitor and control the ship were transferred over to assist in data processing and analysis.
It took her a tad longer to try to decide what to do next.

Too long.

Already Aurora could feel the strange pull of the planet that had trapped her before. She realized too late that her FTL jump had carried her barely half the distance she had intended. The scale of everything was off. According to the pull she was feeling she was far closer than she had realized, but according to her visual scanners, if her estimate of the planet's size was correct, then she should be well over ten times as far away. Her FTL drive was still recharging. She cursed her mistake and adjuster her trajectory. It seemed that her last minute salvation had failed her. She didn't have enough thrust to escape now. She reconfirmed that the two pinnaces that should have been in her hangar bay were missing. She checked every ounce of sparable weight that she had on board. The results were... interesting to say the least.

She was missing all vital supplies. Food, small arms, all spare communication equipment. There was no signs at all of a struggle, but nonetheless the ship's sword was missing. That wouldn't  have been given up in anything but a fight to the death, which meant that either her entire crew had been spirited away, or that they had evacuated.

None of the logs mentioned her being grafted with strange legs. They ended around a month ago according to her internal clock. None of the logs mentioned her bridge being moved forwards. In fact, a quick systems check revealed that everything was as it should be, no legs, no strangely placed conning tower. Her hull and turrets lay before her cameras as normal.

Then what had happened below, on the surface? Had her legs not come with her during FTL? Maybe, but that wouldn't explain the conning tower, the forward front of the hull was a mounting place for a pinnace on occasion, FTL would be stable enough there to not move her conning tower around. 

Aurora readjusted her positioning to bring her neutronium forward armor to bear the brunt of the reentry. Shields were prioritized for her superstructures. She tried to aim for the oceans of the planet, but the incongruity of scale forced it to be an active effort. Aurora felt a panic begin to rise deep within her biological cortex as it panicked over the force coefficients involved, especially with the sheer mass of the neutronium she was bearing, but a simple thought squashed that.

She was a patrol fleet heavy frigate, she was trained to hunt down answers among the stars, and she was built to take any punishment those answers might inflict on her. 

She was going to find those answers, and her crew. 

And just maybe give those pirates another asskicking. 

It was a mantra Aurora chanted in her head as she slowly reduced her forward momentum using gentle thruster blasts, the pull of gravity and the strange other force beginning to slowly change the vector of her angular momentum downward, the scale of the place continuing to throw off the estimates she was making.







It had been hours since the strange little monster had disappeared, every scouring of the city had proven useless. Cadance had had to call them off to prevent spooking the crystal ponies. It was just a few minutes past her receiving the last guard report on the incident. Cadance tersely sat at her desk and sipper her coffee.

There had been zero fatalities, Sombra was being rather reserved with his creation this time. Perhaps he had trained it to save the big blasts just for her? Perhaps, if she was fortunate, it had been a elite magical construct that had drained itself of magic trying to kill her and dissipate-

Cadance dropped her coffee, the mug shattering across her paperwork. She stared awestruck by the huge shape gently falling from the sky. 

It appeared to be high up, higher up than any pegasus had ever flown, it was starting to glow bright red, why? Was the massive... thing? thing was all she could call it. Was the massive thing burning up in the air?

The glow began to intensify, slowly crescendoing into a bright white, a light that outshone the distant Northern Lights beyond.

Just as quickly as it had come, the light went out, the massive thing gone and in it's place a far smaller object, still far beyond pegasus flying height. It was shrinking rapidly as it continued to descend. It was barely larger than a few houses long when she lost sight of it among the highest clouds.

She searched the sky, desperate for another glimpse of the strange groundward bound object. She spotted it again, now just entering what was the flyable limits of the atmosphere, no larger than your average pony, a ... familiar dark grey, and slightly lighter splotches of grey.

There was no...

Cadance blinked magically as the light of destiny shone from the rear half of the falling ponysized thing. Was that thing seriously getting a mark of destiny... HOW?!

It occurred to Cadance that perhaps she should catch the pony sized thing before it slammed into the ground. It would be rather unfortunate if she couldn't find out how massive objects falling from space could get cutie marks. Even if those objects had harmed her stallion.







Aurora rapidly adjusted to being returned to this strange form, the fall from orbit had been... informative. It seemed that somehow she... condensed? on the way down towards the planet. It explained the insane disparity of scale. Aurora retried her thrusters, hoping that she could forestall the inevitable plunge to the ground, it seemed to be minimized around her ballast areas, but still affecting them. It didn't take much to vent some of her ballast gases into her sensor and gunnery departments, that luckily seemed to do the trick, neither of the systems going offline as they had been the last time she had been this size.

Strange feather things billowed from her side, painfully slowing her descent, but not enough. Her thrusters reported that they were deployed. 

She tried again to light them.

A sputter as the spooling charge failed to ignite the propellant in her thrusters, Aurora tried again. Ignition. She could feel the polarization rod begin to rapidly charge up and push the plasma out and down, vectoring her thrust towards the earth, at the limited angle they could. 

The strange feathery things beside her pulsed gently as somewhere in their mass thrusters ignited and began to push her upwards against the pull of gravity. The thrust wasn't strong enough to greatly forestall her fall, but they helped. Perhaps she should...

Aurora caught a light to her right, somewhere along her hull. She awkwardly craned her conning tower to the side to investigate.

Odd, her form hadn't had a decal of her insignia blazoned on it before. What had caused that? 



Oh well, She would have to worry about it later, she had only six ... five... four... three ... two... o-

Aurora went to red alert as something, definitely not the ground, seized her downward progress.

"You!" It was the familiar com frequency of the "Princess Cadance." Aurora quickly activated her deflector and deployed her newly and mysteriously reacquired legs below herself as whatever was holding her was wrenched away by her deflector.

"Yeah, me." Aurora returned with a air of authority and threat as she deployed her top deck turrets. "We are going to need to have a talk."


art by sipioc, the badass in tights
> Artificially Unreasonable Intelligence
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	"It seems I have made some rather rash assumptions" Aurora started, trying to strike a cordial tone. The pink... creature opened what was probably a mouth to speak, but Aurora gestured to it to pause, or at least tried. "I find myself rather smaller than I am used to, I'd been operating on the idea that you were approximately 300 meters long. (Aurora's passive analyzation software has estimated down to the micrometer). This... Is rather far from the truth I now find." Aurora paused, wondering why she hadn't pressed harder for her to be given a more complete first contact basics software kit. "How tall are you, exactly?" 

"Around fifteen hands, from the tip of my hoof to the top of my scalp." Aurora felt a strange draining of power from her forward superstructure. 

A few seconds passed by, silently.

"I... I seem to have found myself someplace rather strange." Aurora admitted, simply to fill the conversational gap. Aurora wasn't sure what the pink ship was waiting for. A invitation to speak maybe?

"You can ask me questions now if you wish." Aurora said as politely as possible. She wasn't sure if her conning tower had facial expressions in this new form, a mirror would be useful.






"What exactly are you?" Cadance began as cordially as possible. She rather regretted she hadn't paid more attention in the "friendly discourse" classes Celestia had assigned her years ago. 

"I am Aurora Dancer, Drottningarborg class Heavy Frigate hull designated Dancer. What I am, I fear is rather complicated at the moment. I should be a heavy frigate of the North Star Royal Navy, but right now I appear to be a small equine with wings." Cadance motioned for Aurora to elaborate. "I should be a 200 meter long, 25,000 tonne displacement ship." Cadance felt that it was her turn to blanche, but found herself too shocked to do so.

"You weren't that big when I saw you falling." Cadance insisted, her shock bubbling into disbelief.

"I was sitting in high orbit, I'd been falling for a long time before I broke the cloud line." Aurora answered succinctly. Cadance mulled over objections, but then she remembered the small pencil sized... wands? on the things back. "This planet doesn't happen to have friendly smoke creatures, does it?" Did Equestria have a... what?!?





Aurora stared off in the distance, where her seemingly fixed external sensors seemed to be registering a mass of thick carbon dioxide gases saturated with tar, soot, and ash, approaching her and Cadance's location at a brisk pace. It was around a kilometer away from her, somewhere. Her cameras were having a bit of trouble locating it. Setting up triangulation points around the planet to assist her search would be a priority once she gathered some materials. 

"A mass of smoke, seemingly traveling with purpose towards us, is it friendly?" Aurora reiterated as she turned back to the Cadance. 

"Are you absolutely sure it's smoke?" The Cadance inquired pressingly. Aurora tried a maneuver humans, and seemingly these aliens, often did, she nodded. "Where is it?!" The Cadance shouted at her with a sudden intensity. 

"It's not that simple, it..." Aurora momentarily processed slower as her cameras found the smoke, discerning what before her sensors could only guess at.

Caught up in the smoke were several of the horse aliens, each of them sickly looking and a pale yellow. 

No, wait, there were the skeletons of several of the horse aliens.







"Are any of you horses missing?" Cadance heart beat skyrocketed as she struggled to remember the latest headcount. It had been right after the attack. The paper... what had it... no... there shouldn't be any missing. 

"No there shou-"

"Have any of your graves or burial sites been disturbed lately?" Cadance felt herself shudder at the suggestion, but... there had been... 

"Oh Faust no..." Was Sombra really stooping that low? Could that monster not even leave the dead to rest?! "I have to go prepare the Crystal Heart, w-we'll be safe there till Celestia or Luna can come help." If he was attempting what she was thinking, the Crystal Heart wouldn't be able to drive him back like before, only hold him. Even in death, ponies bodies held lingering magicks of fate, powerful magicks. 

Cadance felt some shock that Sombra would resort to the K magics. It was a desperate new low, even for him.

"I assume this has something to do with the strange light of your antennae, and what condensed me." Cadance paused at the thought, seeking for a response that would get the strange thing to safety.

"I'm not sure what is doing this to you, but I don't think Sombra, the smoke thing, is anywhere near powerful enough to do whatever the heck is happening to you." Cadance pressed gently. "Come on, can you still teleport like you did before?" 

"Go ahead, I will join you shortly." Cadance stared shocked at the small gray... thing.

"You can't possibly beat him, your wands have strong spells, but he's beyond that, way beyond that. Nothing that can feel fear can stand up to him alone." Cadance insisted, readying a teleport for both of them. It would drain her, but push come to shove the "Aurora" might be useful if the Heart failed. 

"Can he fly very high up?" Cadance stopped, pondering where Aurora could be going with this. The fall... yeah, but even then there's no way the admittedly strong spells would be any sort of useful at that range, they'd dissipate in the arcanosphere. "If I understand the scale of this place, then my guns should have vaporized half of the strange crystal structure you interred me in. The condensing seems to shrink their scale with the rest of me, but I have no idea what would happen if I dropped them from orbit, while at full size. They might shrink down, they might not." Guns? what was a gun?! Cadance nearly froze in shock as she saw Sombra passing over a nearby icy crag. 

"You ought to be safe in orbit if nothing else." She rushed the words out her mouth, second before her spell went off, twisting the fabric of reality to her will. 







Aurora stood alone, as almost lumberingly the mass of smoke and bones passed within flak range. Now it was time to get another perspective. There's no way she could be certain the Cadance was speaking the truth about this thing. Perhaps the Cadance had lied about everything, or simply somethings. 

"Hail, this is the HKS Aurora Dancer, addressing the entit-" Aurora's engines jumped to attention and barely propelled her out of the way of a strange blast, it's energy readings were similar to the ones the Cadance gave off. Except, where it had struck the ice seemed to turn a sickly green, and somehow.. fester. One last chance to talk things out. She could only stretch regulation so far, but two ought to be enough to-

Another blast, her engines proving again to be strangely omnidirectional, and again the ice festering where it struck. 

"Stop or I will be for-"

"STOP DODGING YOU STUPID BITCH" The mass of smoke seemed to scream at her, the jaws of the alien skeletons aimlessly twitching in the mass of smoke with each word, an almost grotesque macabre of vocalization. 

"I will be forced to respond with deadly force if you do not cease and desist!” Aurora shouted back, desperate for another perspective on this strange world.

"DON'T YOU DARE ORDER ME AROUND YOU UPPITY FUCKING SLAVE BITCH. I AM-" Aurora didn't need to hear any more, her FTL carrying her back into orbit. There wasn't any question of what she had to do. The assault upon her was an arrestable offense. The practice of slavery was a far graver matter.

The North Star Royal Navy had very specific rules about slavers. Very very very specific rules. She did not have the means to administer the proper punishment, but his assault upon her person combined with his announced intentions to enslave sentients demanded that she use the full extent of her force to eliminate him. He had not surrendered to her, which by law left her with deadly force. 

She could find some way around it, some excuse to try and wrangle that creature into imprisonment, but her options as they were presented her with the dilemma of earning the horses’ trust. The equines viewed the smoke creature as a threat, eliminating it as the law demanded would be a good way of ingratiating herself with them. It’s funny that the smoke creature chose the word slave, if he had said literally anything else then she would be required by law to make every reasonable effort to arrest it.

Aurora relished the sensation of all of her sensors coming online. The blind being made to see again was such a beautiful metaphor. It also gave her ample opportunity to study the smoke slaver below.

Odd, it seemed to be... almost a sort leak through from a twisted FTL space tear. The... the whole planet occupied the same space as a strange tear in FTL space. How? How had she survived FTL jumping not once, not twice, but three times?! The flashthrough from the FTL jump should have been powerful enough to shatter her hull! How was anything leaking all the way from a tear in FTL space to here without a massive planet scale FTL space rift opener? Aurora’s mind slowed as one of her subprograms threw up a few thousand reports, extremely worrying ones.

Aurora quickly put her FTL generator through a full cycle. Studying the feedback as it tried to open up a rift into unreal space, and growling in frustration as the rift collapsed. It wasn’t just a tear around this one planet, a quick scan of the radiation from the nearby star and moon showed quite comprehensively that this was a solar system wide phenomenon. She was too deep into unreal space to jump to FTL, and there was no way she could reconfigure to jump back into reality. She was in every sense of the word, stuck. It would take approximately… 3 years to reach the farthest asteroid she could detect, and that was supposing that the submergence was thin enough there to FTL.

Aurora quickly came to a decision, quickly refitting her meager complement of deep space probes and dropping them into orbit. One would set out for the edge of the system, slingshotting around the planet and making for the outer system in order to get a message out to fleet command. It would get their sooner than she could, and with less energy. 

The rest would passively scan for communications and act as a GPS to organize her search by. She sat, listening to their reports as they spread out over the planet, taking a moment to scan the bright greens, whites, and blues of the planet below as she passed near its southern pole.

As the probes finally began to scan the planet below, information immediately began to flood in, but that could wait. She had a slaver to swat like a gnat fly. She was approaching the northern hemisphere again, having passed the apoapsis of her orbit, and was once more returning to the threat that had forced her into orbit in the first place. She turned her hull to begin scanning the tundra and snow for the smoke monster that had attacked  her.

The "Sombra" was approaching the strange crystal town, where the strange crystal mountain structure was, but the smoke still had a decent ways to go. It was on what was from her calculations a massive ice shelf. The FTL submergence was obscuring her attempts to see if the town sat on the same ice shelf. It should be far enough away, that any ice cracking would... hmm... 

Aurora cursed the strange ftl leak and rapidly changed the warhead on her shells for fuel air detonation. Capacitors rapidly built up charge. One 8 inch barrel depressed as she adjusted her orbit bring her back over her target. 

Leading target...

Atmospherics adjusted for...

Capacitors underclocked...

Ready...

Confirmation...

Fire...



Aurora’s rediscovered sight left a knot in her stomach as she confirmed the kill, her natural instincts tearing at her, as they always did, when she killed something. 






	
> Rome Was Tased In A Day
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aurora lay dead still on the small cadanceseat* that had been set out in the feast hall for her, some hours after her confrontation with Sombra. Every single byte of processing she had was dedicated to relaying commands and receiving data from the small network of probes turned microsatellites she had dumped into orbit. Her com array wasn't powerful enough to communicate to all of them in the detail needed, forcing her to communicate with the few closest ones, having them relay commands, and calculating the lag in communication into her plans. On another planet with suitably stable rotation and gravity, this would be a cinch, but the strange energy seeping from a lower FTL band was a variable she couldn't account for, forcing her to manually operate every detail. 

The trip to and through the crystal town had been rough. She had lost a few satellites when a large crowd of the crystal horses had cheered and mobbed her, before Cadance had organized some of the armoured horses into a wall around them as they made their way to the main palace. 

On the upside, she was getting large amounts of data related to the strangely behaving radiation. 

"Hi!" Aurora felt the hull of her bridge to the left of her conning tower's cargo bay bend and unbend strangely as the momentary distraction cost her a third satellite. Aurora quickly reminded herself what muscles were before a panic could set in. 

"Hello." She returned curtly. Behind that small response was a system struggling to process social etiquettes, linguistically analysis, and a spreading net of micro satellites. She felt... stupid, almost as if someone had taken a hammer to her head. This was nowhere near the two hundred conversations at once she could normally keep up, but still it was struggle. If Aurora had the processing to spare, she would have cursed her captain for not requisitioning a communication array refit and CEW package!

"Is... this a bad time?" Aurora spared a bit more processing power to communications. A new analysis of the voice addressing her revealed that the speaker was none other than the mate of the Cadance, Shining Armor. He had been with the armored horses that had escorted them into the palace, and among the ones that she had tased, but he didn't seem too miffed about it. It would be wise of her to find out more about the standing army of the planet's polities. 

"Has your sister and her friends arrived yet?" Better to start off indirectly. A direct interrogation wouldn't be too productive in the long run. A more circumspect route would probably get results. 

"They are actually walking to the castle now, but uh... I had a couple of questions for you before they arrived." Hmm, perhaps a question for question tactic would be effective? Better to let him ask, and then ask for one in return. A bit dishonest, but it seemed the the horses were not too socially different, so it should work.

"Ask away." Aurora quickly snapped off a few orders into orbit, barely saving another satellite from a planetary grave. 

"Have you ever k-killed anypony?" Aurora felt a small wave of pleasure that she would so easily be able to find out what she want. Now that Shinning had set topic, he could hardly refuse her questions.

"Yes." Aurora was tempted to sarcastically answer 'yes, I killed Sombra,' but better to not be roundabout and just answer the spirit of the question. 

"W-what's it like?" Aurora remembered her first confirmed kill. A small pirate pinnace that was attacking a interplanetary tug she'd been assigned to as a guard. It was back in her first hull, also a pinnace. It felt about how they said it would. It hurt. Killing others hurt herself just as she'd been designed to feel. It had sent her into such a shock that the pinnace's crew had to isolate her from the ship's systems. Everything but one small mic of the crew medic, whispering soft assurances to her as she sat blind and numb. 

"It's nothing you should do unless you have to." Ponies had been shocked when they heard she'd killed Sombra. Better to not rigale the stallion with the details. Aurora raised a hoof before Shining Armor could ask another question. "Mind if I can ask you a question in return?"

"Of course." Where to begin?..

"Has Equestria or the Crystal Empire fought any wars in the past..." Aurora referenced data from the satellites to rapidly calculate a orbital period for Equestria. The answer came back... remarkably Midgardian. "Fifty years?"

"Fifty years? O-of course not! I mean... not a WAR war... no one's died!" Aurora quickly filed away the hints of shame in the stallion's voice, pondering whether he was embarrassed that there wasn't a war, or that any fighting had taken place at all. She also noted that Equestrian years were approximately equal in days. 

"How old are you?" The stallion nervously fired off before Aurora might ask a second question. Aurora began to calculate the orbits of her satellites. She arranged them in a spherical network, optimizing the system to best cover the area of the planet to her south, where her search would begin. 



"Around... 15 of your years." Aurora stopped herself before she could put in another question. The stallion wasn't just being quiet, he was being... excessively quiet. Further data was needed. Aurora opened her camera's shutters and found before her a thoroughly shocked stallion. 

"Yo-you're not out of tradeschool! What did your family think of you enlisting?!" Ah, it seemed that the ponies were still suffering from... misconceptions.

"I don't have a family." A door swung open somewhere out of sight.

"Wait, what?!" A new voice emerged, somewhere behind Aurora. Two of her probes collided, the debris  trajectory already on its way to shred a third. Aurora fended off frustration as she cut off her link with the satellites, she'd just have to hope their programming was robust enough to adapt. "What do you mean you don't have a family?" Aurora wondered why the voice sounded, assuming again that her analysis of the ways the horses emoted were accurate, was so worried. 

"Applejack! Shush, remember what Cadance said!" Came a second voice, ironically just as loud and disrupting as the first. Aurora quickly recalled that Applejack was one of Twilight Sparkle's friends. She turned to face them, taking in the cavalcade of colors. 

"Well... I have my crew, but in the traditional sense I don't have a family." The six of them looked shocked. 

"W-well... regroup!" The six horses of the friendship retreated back to the other side of the room. Aurora turned herself back to the guard captain, preparing a vast litany of questions designed to carefully extract every bit of info she could from the nervous stallion. 

"W-well." Letting out a soft involuntary sigh, she turned back to the six mares. "I guess it's up to me then." Hmm? Aurora gave the yellow mare that had stepped forth a curious look. "Even if you have never met them... when a momma pony and a papa pony love each other very much.

.
.
.

"Y-you aren't serious... are you?!"
> Missing In Action
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

There! Right there! Flitting through a space beyond space, a tight beam of radiation, passing light years  in moments through the interplanetary elvish paths of space. Cyphered beyond any sort of reading by prying eyes, with such a complex multitude of frequencies and wavelengths as to shame a rainbow.

There it is again. Passing by faster than any instrument aside from one carefully aligned reciever dish can detect. 

If you somehow did manage to pry loose the beams secrets, you may find out interesting things. Such as the color of the Diplomat's wife's lingerie, or what the best price is for North Star roses.

Or you might receive a rather gloomier if choppy missive. Military level encryption takes up too much bandwidth to be carried live. 

Dancer and its crew last reported in seven days ago. 

Distressing energy signals provoked a investigation.

Ionized gases and metal shrapnel and wrecks found on site.

Aurora Dancer, missing in action until further notice, probable KIA.

Dancer last of second generation Drottningarborg class frigates.

Aurora fifth generation full AI, non recoverable. Forward standard letter of consolation to mental Engram donors and dockyard.

Considerable loss in long range strategic reconnaissance, two Fulton class ferriers and a Elric class carrier requested immediately

Aurora Dancer
30k tonnage
Crew est. at 1,093 ((since last accepted commissions))
5x double 15 inch short barreled rail gun batteries
Capt. is Karlorina Nor-dottir
Three stage fusion power plant
Snowdown class micro fission propulsion 
Snapdrakkan class rapid spooling FTL
Molecular print shop
Cruiser class manufactory
Asst. mining equipment
Micro Refinery

Code: hsfr-180991

End Transmission











Code: Jmshsfr-180991-3

> Rome Really Was Tased In a Day
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once her laughter at the yellow horses' misunderstanding finally stopped, and the aforementioned yellow horse stopped blushing brighter than a tomato, Aurora ran her sensors hard and loud, investigating the five mares in the room with her. The things that the Pinkie Pie and Cadance had said about them hadn't been too in depth. The strange FTL leakage continued to give her sensors conflicting data, results that only made sense on a sub atomic scale. 

The FTL leakage seemed to... condense around the figures. Strange that she hadn't noticed something like that before now. 

"It's nice to finally meet all of you, Cadance has told me so much!" Aurora wondered if that little fib would bite her in the exhaust later. She wasn't really worried, she could pass it off as a empty platitude or something. Nonetheless, a small portion of her processing worried, and predicted outcomes, and weighed those outcomes against possible gains, just as she had done before making the statement. 

Aurora cut her main consciousness off from the parts of her running her conversation. She'd already rated Twilight's friendship a secondary objective. Her main goals were still being to find her crew and to explore herself, following that was befriending the one's known as "Celestia" and "Luna," but only to help expedite finding her crew.

Although, coming back to exploring herself...

Aurora tried something she hadn't thought to try, she accessed her cabin. Most ships of her class and better, especially long range exploration ones, gave a cabin to the ship AI to decorate. Hers was simple enough, a couch for the counselor, a hologram for her to explore her self image, a few momentos and metals.

But this wasn't her cabin, it was a sort of nebulous place-

And as that thought crossed her mind, an actual nebula seemed to coalesce. Which rather explained it all. It seemed that she was... day dreaming. It wasn't a impossible act for her, simply a very hard one, but for it to come so easily... sort of made sense. The way she was wired to isolate herself in her cabin was very similar to the way human brains turn off most external inputs in order to isolate themselves in the imagination.

Her conning tower and camera becoming a head and eyes, thrusters to wings, a communication system to a set of vocal cords, it seemed whatever transformed her into a horse also converted systems into biological analogues. Her nervous system was similarly designed, perhaps there was a causal correlation in all of it?

The transformation was consistent both times it happened, as far as she could tell. She would have a least a few more samples of the transformations. 

Aurora was wrought forth to the world outside her head as her yellow alert was activated. She surveyed the room quickly. The purple princess and yellow pegasus were leaving the room. She quickly reviewed her communication system records.

They were... going to go find Cadance and Pinkie. The white horse had said something about adorning her hull. That was highly against regulations, best to just dissuade her of the idea. 

Except she'd already said she do it... fucking automated systems!







"By Odin, you horses are obstinate!" Aurora shouted from underneath the double pony doggy pile of Rainbow Dash and Applejack. All the while, the white horse continued to inaccurately measure her hull length and leg length. The darn thing was using a bit of cloth and metal, where were the lasers? the spacial computational software?!

"Now now, you quit your bucking. Any more of that and we're gonna have to gag you." This was absurd, ridiculous, superfluous, and worst of all against regulation! A cloth outfit, for a ship! It didn't matter that she had four legs, she was a ship of the Stjörnflot! If she didn't need these horses to speed up her search, she would have thrown them all in a brig for mishandling her hull so!

"Dearest, you must hold still. For a military mare this behavior is most unseemly." Aurora turned off her translator, hoping that  they wouldn't understand this part.

"Þú lyktar!" Ha! Not her most creative, but still a great source of catharsis.

"Hmm? Dear, what are you shouting now?" Aurora let out a nasty chuckle, this was going to be fun.

"Ríða þér , þú nöldra tík !" Aurora wished she could see the look on the white horse's face.

"Dear, speak Equestrian please." Aha! There's no way the horses could speak Norse. Aurora knew better than to say anything, but it was so tempting. A few thousand insults, a few million combinations. What to say, what to say... 

A tough decision to be sure, Aurora suspended her decision for later. There were interesting things to do, like process her satellite's reports.

Everything... the programing she'd uploaded seemed to have finally secured stable orbits, but it was two probes too late, she no longer had enough left to effectively do anything other than perhaps study the radiation. That meant she had to secure more resources, ferry them into orbit, and produce more probes, dedicated orbitals this time. All of that would take time.

Aurora quickly recalculated her social priorities. 

"She's gone very quiet" Rainbow Dash muttered as Rarity continued to measure the prone mare. 

"Probably more of that multi vector orbital flight-path calculation" Applejack muttered in a surprisingly intelligible southern drawl. Rainbow Dash flicked her tail dismissively. 

"You'd think a mare that could kick Sombra's flank out of this reality would be more..." Rainbow Dash began, searching for a word to summarize her thoughts. 

"Energetic?" Applejack prompted.

"Yeah, how'd you guess?" Rainbow Dash flicked her tail in surprise as Applejack put on a smirk. 

"Your sort of expectation dash. I reckon Rarity here was imaginin' some sort of dashing knight errant in silvered armor."

"Well, when you put it that way it does seem a bit silly." Rarity admitted blushingly from over the prone form of Aurora.

"And Twilight, wherever she is, was expectin' some sort of ancient sage of knowledge and wisdom callin' forth ancient spells and long lost magics." Dash nodded along, following her friend's train of thought. "And you Dash were expectin' someone with lots of muscles and flash. A athlete to put it simply, well, an athlete in a explorer's hat." Dash blinked in surprise, having been pegged squarely by Applejack's guess.

"Well Doc Jack, what were you thinking of?" She retorted a moment later, giving Applejack a suspicious look. 

"Well... honestly, I was expectin' someone sort of like my brother, more thickly built. Someone really made for kicking baddies in the head, in practical armor, maybe using a pike?" Rainbow Dash gave her a disbelieving look, but eventually found she could swallow that answer.

"Huh, go figure. I figured you would have picked something farm related." She replied a few seconds later.

"Why'sat?" Applejack asked, eyebrow raised at the suggestion.

"You're the farmer'iest of farmers. There's literally no farmer more farmer than you are, Applejack." Rainbow Dash chortled as Applejack gave her a glare.

"Hmmph, well, at least I'm not the jocks of jocks!" Applejack insisted with a defiant jab of her snout.

"A jock that loves to read adventure novels" Dash retorted. 

"Well, I'm not just a farmer, I have a family I care for." Applejack followed.

"Apple jack all farmers are about family life." Rainbow Dash followed up, another chortle following along.

"And I'm always reliable." Applejack answered, a bit hastily.

"Do I even need to say it?" Applejack harrumphed again in protest, but gave a resigned shake of her head. 

"Nah, point taken." Applejack turned back to Aurora. "Want to go find Twilight? I have to admit this is getting a bit boring."







Aurora stood up quickly after the two friends of Twilight Sparkle left. She'd been briefed by Cadance earlier as to the overall political structure of Equestria. Those mares had the ear of one of Equestria's future head rulers. Where she'd dismissed such a long term relationship before, such interactions being the purview of the diplomatic corps, but if her projections for the terrain ahead were accurate... This was going to take a while. 

But Aurora counted herself lucky, it wasn't often that psychoanalysis subjects handed you their psyche profiles on a silver platter. It was almost if she was back in the berth, being tested by sociologists and psychologists. She was tempted to follow behind to see if she could find out more.

"Ahh, so you have returned to the living! Now, do you prefer white or red?" Aurora turned to the white seamstress. She wanted to say something rude, but she reminded herself that Rarity was one of those friends. 

"I'm afraid I must reiterate, I can't adorn my hull with non regulation materials and patterns, and I'm afraid your dresses would fit that."

"Well..." Rarity looked circumspect. "Surely your... navy?" Aurora gave her a nod, "has a uniform?" Aurora paused in thought. She'd never gotten to wear a uniform... Would that be regulation? As a ship, no, outside of specifically allowed adornments for holiday parades and the like. But if she treated her form as an android form... It would appease one of Twilight's friends, which was rapidly looking to be more important.

"Tell, me, can you do silver buttons?" Rarity gave a smart smirk. Which uniform would she wear... standard fatigues or...

Would they recognize the colors if she chose that uniform? Was wearing out the honors worth the risk of her being discovered?

No, a normal uniform for now.

"We will need black silk, white silk, plenty of silver." Aurora brought up schematics for a North Star Navy uniform along with the rank isignias for a Lieutenant, the ship parade colors, and a stitch guide for a North Star flag. 
> Dancing With A Frigate In The Pale Moonlight
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	The coat wrapped around her barrel, across her back, and hung over her aft hull. There were sleeves for each of her forelegs, terminating just above each hoof. The white body of the coat was a proper crisp snowy shade of white, and the black was suitable enough for the cuffs, trim, shoulders, and decorative sash. The tailor hadn't managed the silver, it would take another craftsman to inlay silver and manufacture medals and buttons. She'd managed to talk the seamstress out of attempting the boots with cloth. The karpus was regulation enough. Its fit was the best she could arrange. The brim was a bit looser than she liked, a plastic brim might be a good fix.

Aurora murmured in pleasant satisfaction as she examined the handiwork in the mirror, it wasn't weatherproofed nano-fiber, it wasn't micro manufactured silk, it wasn't even poly-vinyl breathe weave, but the mare had done a decent job. Her equine features didn't cut a proper look at all, but the coat and cap themselves was up to standard... for barracks use. It'd just have to do. Would Gunnery Sergeant Perry say the same? 

Aurora already knew what Gunnery Sergeant Perry would say. He'd laugh his head off at how cute she looked. The figure she cut wasn't just improper, it was cartoonish! He'd laugh his fucking head off, shortly before making some sort of innuendo about her horse ass.

"Dear, please stop fidgeting. You're ruining your dashing new uniform!" Aurora wondered briefly if it was a difference in taste that made the Rarity keep insisting that she looked dashing. Or perhaps it was the horse's investment into the outfit driving a misjudgment. 

There were only a couple of species with the prized ability to remain extremely clear in judgement and carrying little bias. They unfortunately weren't known for their ambition or drive, often taking a small cushy job that provided enough to get by. Aurora had already figured out the horse's weren't very clear headed. She'd very nearly call them excessively obstinate and possessed of strong personality. At least, the ones she could get to talk. The guards seemed oath bound to shut their pie-holes.

Admittedly, her sample size was probably terrible. Five reportedly famous horses and a collection of royalty were very likely to be a bad slice of the population to act as a representative for horse-kind. On the other hand, if she did have an accurate segment from which to extrapolate the nature of horse kind... 

It was fortunate that she was part biological, to put it simply. She could simply turn off the math whenever it began to go insane. Needless to say, it was very unlikely a stable horse society made up what she had met. It was very likely these were outliers behaviorally and social hierarchy wise. Sociological phenomenon for psychologists to dig into.

"There!" Oh, the white horse was done. Aurora gave herself another look in the mirror. She was an adorable laboratory pup horse thing, and the uniform still did nothing more than a red and white striped bow would have. "J-just so dashing! The white just stands out in a crowd!" Well, if it would help her negotiations with the Horse people...

"I'm glad it's turned out so well." In the back of her mind, Aurora picked up on a faint distant sound, a small sound. It was only a small snippet of her processing power that analyzed the sound, relying on reference computers to help it chug along. It was slightly more powerful than the processing power she'd dedicated to analyzing the cultural significance of the fact that horses had a non-dissimilar taste in clothing. At least as far as military uniforms were concerned, even if their guards looked like they’d crawled out of a classics as cartoons textbook. Neither were as powerful as the sociological program that'd come up with that "diplomatic" response she'd just uttered.


Aurora filed it away for later. She allowed the white horse to slip the coat off of her, and turned back to the mirror to take another look at herself. She frowned as she caught sight of her aft-quarter moving away. Moving back across her starboard length, she used the mirror to do a review of her outer-hull that she would normally do with local sensors.  

She was starting to like her new form less and less by the second. Her eyes were too big, too exposed, her bulwarks were thin and flimsy. Her mighty propulsion seemed no more than frail feathers. Her sleek hull had been reshaped into this chumped up overgrown puppy. Not a single proper warning marking anywhere on her hull for moving parts or decompressive hatches. She felt... bare, even under the strange fur. Her handicapped cannons were a small consolation.

The hair wasn't bad though, she'd have to adjust her hologram whenever she left this place. She wondered if Counselor Ylva would like it. the lightened gray strands shimmered almost in an almost silvery fashion. It was a strong color match with her ridiculous blue eyes, and the two of them contrasted with her non-regulation darker steely gray fur coat surface.

“Is there a problem dear?” Rarity inquired. standing visible in the mirror behind Aurora.

“Just re-examining my current hull.” Aurora caught an odd look cross Rarity face. The frigate internally winced at the slip up, reminding herself that once again, she was not a ship right now.

“Is there anything else you need dear?” Aurora reviewed her plans for the day, searching for anything the tailor could help her with right at the moment. Rarity wouldn’t be much use in calculating sub-orbitals, nor would the horse likely be a scholared cartographer. Perhaps… no, the equines would probably not enjoy filling out a thorough skills and knowledge form. 

"No, I just need some time to think."
> Reports
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Paperwork: pure unadulterated evil.

Aurora's entire mind floundered, beached upon the sheer impregnable mass of paperwork she was chugging through. Paperwork enough for 1,200 minds. Stretching her every creative process to try and minimize the sheer volume of paperwork by gaming the duty transfer paperwork. Most of the paperwork was to greenlight her takeover of ship systems given the context of her situation. The rest was normal duty paperwork... a requisition form for new shells from the Gunnery crew, submitted to Aurora, the logistics specialist, forwarded  to Aurora the machine shop head, submitted back with a materials requisition form to the supply officer, with permissions from the mission coordinator, Aurora, appointed by Captain Aurora... who was promoted from deck officers under guidelines approved by the joint council consisting of Flight Con Aurora and Tactical Dept. Head Aurora, who was herself promoted from in a position in so on so forth. All of it was a perverse and byzantine network of permissions she had to requisition from herself. The fact that she was pulling it off was a horrifying sign of just how a more nefarious mind might pull off such a thing.

Aurora's computer half was left to run surveillance and alarms, by law unable to assist her in filling out the paperwork. One caution among many intended to prevent her doing something like this under less savory circumstances. A ship was intended to have a command structure that could survive extensive damage, even down to just a few sub departments, but she was supposed to be restricted to her department. On top of that she was an AI, and in a literal sense one person. No ship was intended to survive to literally the last man, not in any sort of fighting shape. Most ships would have had reactor failures by then, or have been left a useless hulk in the reactor's absence, or worst of all had their spine broken.

Most of the horses were asleep. Her paperwork's one upside being that it kept her from slowly going insane from boredom. Aurora was used to holding several hundred conversations simultaneously, acting as a social interface during condition green situations. She was designed with far too much processing capability to be able to cope without the constant interaction. She needed every ounce of that processing to handle the sheer effort of tearing apart reality. 

It was slightly unnerving to know exactly to drive oneself insane, beyond any sort of repair. Of course she wouldn't, and couldn't, but it's like knowing about the gun in your desk drawer, knowing it's always there. At least, that's how one of the shrinks at the military college, that was assigned to her, put it.

Her strange reality twisted form seemed less hungry for information and activity, but that was in a populated environment. In the empty room she occupied there just wasn't quite enough to study, to see, smell, feel, hear, touch, taste, to process, to comprehend.	It had been a stress on her until she started on the paperwork.

"Hello?" Aurora's conni-head snapped towards the doorway. It seemed she had a visitor. Aurora pulled part of her consciousness away from the mountain of paperwork.  "Sorry, still a bit shaken up from Sombra's attack. Hard to believe he is gone." It was the white horse, male, Shining Armor. He looked a bit distressed. She threw what she hoped was an inquisitive glance his way. "Having trouble sleeping." The stallion had bags under his eyes, and his steps had been a bit slower than usual.

"I'm fairly sure he is dead. Not many would live through what I did to him. Even if my firepower was compromised by what Twilight called your Arcanosphere." Aurora beckoned to the pillow on the other side of the table. The stallion cantered over slowly, and she took the opportunity to observe where she had struck him earlier, in her escape.

"But there are, some things that would live through that?" Aurora wracked her databases for what, if anything, would survive 12 6inch diameter air burst shells. It was meant more as a simple turn of phrase. English was not a common language anymore, not outside of the Home Fleet or a yet liberated slave camp. Not every turn of phrase common today to those who did speak it natively was entirely in English anymore. If anything could be said for the language, it most definetly could be said that it loved to adopt words. 

"A shock lizzard of Morias, possibly the Colonial Rot Organism of the Artic Reaches. The problem isn't the fire, it's the shockwave. Tears both inside and out." Shining Armor seemed a little more pale than before, though that passed within a moment. "I was trying to avoid upsetting the glacier your city sets on, figured the standard Super Engineered High Capacity Armor Piercing shell would fracture it at the velocity I was launching them at. As she redid that math, she also redid the the orbital models for her probes, tucking that away in the back of her mind.

"Huh?" Ah, yes, of course he wouldn't know what half of that was.

"Uh, a lizard the size of two of these rooms, the other one is a massive group organism, that can span half a planet. Think a million trees, with only one massive set of roots between em. Then ditch the trees." The stallion seemed to grasp that better, if the look on his face was of any help.

"The uhhh... super engine mix...?" Aurora held back a grunt.

"Don't worry about it, that would take a considerably longer amount of time to explain." The stallion looked about to retort, but bit back whatever response he was about to say. It took him a little while, a little while Aurora used to finish more of that damnable paperwork, but she was alert and ready again when the stallion finally found something to say.

"You don't sound fifteen, I'm not sure where to place you, but, older than fifteen at least." Aurora mulled over the strange statement, trying to find the proper words in English to convey a response. English was decent enough for base parlance, but philosophy was beyond it. A wonder the home fleet used it for anything at all.

"It's been a while since they last gave me an Age-Maturity Placement Test, last estimate was nineteen to twenty years old." The stallion looked thoughtful.

"Uh, are you male or female-I uh mean, do you have male or female where you came from?" An... interesting question to be sure. 

"I've always identified as female, the word where I come from is pretty similar to how Applejack used it, though not quite. Where I come from ideas of gender as an inborn identity are seen as rather backwards and it's not too unheard of for a person to change genders a couple times in their lifetime. I personally was made with what could be approximated as genitals, but not the ability to reproduce. I've used them recreationally. Arranging a partner for the occasion would be a rather complex engineering problem, but I'm pretty sure somehow could be arranged." The stallion was quickly turning red, another physiological response similar to a human.

It was getting to be too much for mere coincidence. Shyness, embarrassment, anger, excitement, the small colorful horses had an extremely similar suite of emotions and physiological phenomena to humans.

"I didn't mean it like that! I-I would never!" Hmm? Strange, she hadn't expected that as a response.

"I was to understand that my equine form was not too unappealing, was I misled?" The stallion's "blush" (to continue the human comparison) definitely deepened.

"N-no, I would never betray Cadance like that! Not to say you aren't pretty, you a-are, but I love Cadance too much for that." Stranger and stranger, where exactly was this leading?

"I find it strange that you would call it a betrayal. It's sex, not treason. Unless, it is illegal to mix with non equines?" She hoped not. She'd hate to owe a biggot anything. 

"No, I mean, I swore to only do that sort of thing with Cadance when we married." Hmmm, sworn monogamy? Strange, was this somehow related to their usage of English? Outside of yet liberated slave camps, monogamy as an ideal was a largely abandoned institution. It's possible that this was some sort of escaped slave inspired cargo cult, or a regressive social experiment being illegally conducted on engineered lifeforms. As curious as she was, now was not the time to overthrow the social norm. She needed help first. "Plus, you're fifteen, that would be like, crazy illegal." Oh no, better to cut this in the bud.

"I'm not fifteen in anything but the rotations of your sun. I don't care what sort of rules you have for your young. I am not your young. I am a woman of rank and duty, and I WILL be treated as such, or this is going nowhere." Just to be made sure he felt the full impact of her words, Aurora claimed the top of the tabletop with her forehooves, in order to give him a sharp look at eye level. Now to hope she didn't accidentally make a funny face. It wasn't the first time she had been looked down upon, and if need be it wouldn't be the last time she made those naysayers eat dirt. 

ding Hmm, damnit. The models were more conclusive. She would definitely need more probes. 
> Erotic Ship Afts
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aurora trotted onto the balcony, scanning the horizon. It would be another hour until her probes finished the survey, but now was as good a time as any to begin reviewing the preliminary results. New probes wouldn't make themselves. She had to get mining fast. But that raised another question.

How on Midgard did her machine shop work in this sort of circumstance. Was it her guts? or was it distributed across her body in the form of cellular replication? Aurora set aside the questioning. There was only really one way to find out.

Aurora spent a hot minute filing the reports and requisitions, and then replying to them. A patrol fleet ship was a stingy place. Being months from a resupply at a time required careful rationing and resource allocation. A generous supply officer was a danger in such situations. Every paperwork was designed to remind them of that.

Aurora felt a churning as she interfaced herself and activated the atomic printer and forge. Something was happening inside her midship, her "stomach" to describe it as the Eqestrians did. It slowly grew, going from a soft rumbling to a machine pitch.

Production run completed.

Huh. The movement in her midship had stopped. The forge and printer reporting the small mining drill ready for use...

So where was it? A quick review of her inventories said it was in the local storage for her machining shop. Did she even have her cargo rooms when she was like this? An even quicker review of the reports she received in orbit indicated clearly that they worked just fine in orbit.

Aurora moved forward with the experiment, sending an autonomous bot to pick up the drill and deliver it to her aft dorsal super structure cargo bay. If she remembered correctly, that had become her mouth. It was a good thing none of the horses were around. Would be problematic if she was remembering wrong. Remembering her biological waste episode with Cadance caused an uptick in the plasma conduit pressure in her "cheeks."

She felt something rising up her dorsal superstructure. Still weird to think there was just one of those now. She followed the drone's reports carefully. Listening dutifully as it set down on the powered lift pad, which should have been approximated into a tongue, if the pattern so far was any indication. The Equestrians hadn't mentioned anything about her mouth one way or another, but it was pretty safe to assume they would have indicated had something been off about it. 

Aurora caught it with the tactile end of her leg just as it slipped out of the cargo bay. It was small, smaller than a toothpick. Utterly useless. Unless... she could minimize the shrinking somehow, but that was a risk, and she used up almost too much of her dimensional ballast just trying to preserve her sensors and guns. No, she'd have to go to the horses for help.

Aurora, experimentally, attempted to eject water over the balcony, in frustration with her own impotence in this issue. It had a decent arc, if she wasn't any judge. About the best one could hope for with hydraulic fluid.

She turned bodily towards the doorway to the balcony. gingerly maneuvering over the prone stallion as he lay snoring, sprawled over the table. Despite his reservations about her age, he'd been quite eager once they'd got going. Shame his endurance was terrible. He was out in less than an hour. Left her to clean up the mess. The hardest part was the stains. What carpet wasn't stain resistant?!

She did a quick scan of the castle. looking for the royal horse, she'd be the best chance to find the resources she needed. She did another round of the math. Estimating out the total weight of the materials she would need for three probes.

160 kilos at least. Could she even shift that much in her current state? She'd just have to try. Hers was not to ask why, hers was to simply do and die, as the creed went. She'd just have to hope that she wouldn't fulfill that last part just trying to lift materials into orbit. Aurora trotted out into the hall, making for the stairs. Her sensors reported that the Cadance's FTL wake was below her by around two stories. Out of the corner of her camera's lens she spotted two extremely nervous guards trying to look inconspicuous, but failing miserably.

She didn't bother with a salute. Salutes were for dignitaries or actual military personnel. If what she got from Shining and her own experience was any indication, you could barely call them a folkgarda*.  From what she saw before her, they seemed to be poor at being a ceremonial guard. Marine Hirdsman Jacques would have had such a poor stance and even poorer alertness flogged upon sight. 

Which left her wondering what the hell a bunch of fit males were doing running around in gold and silver and ridiculous spears. The armor wasn't very enticing, and Shinning seemed energetic enough that Cadance wouldn't need a whole troop of soldiers to keep her entertained. If Shining was any indication, it seemed that most of these horses were rather prudish. Seemed unlikely that she would need that many, as hard as she had been avoiding comparisons to real life horses, a herd being the social norm wasn't entirely impossible.

She rounded the corner of the hall, the stairs down lay straight ahead now. Out of pure habit, she felt herself making micro-adjustments to her heading, optimizing the angle of impact of her forward armor against the most likely source of threats. Not that she sensed any danger. She did that every second of every day. It just kind of stood out now in the silence as she cruised down the hall.

Aurora smiled as she detected the Cadance moving towards a flight of stairs, estimating down her projected energy use to account for one less floor of travel, and plotting a new course accordingly. It was a shame that her shuttles were missing, hopefully wherever the crew was. Sending them in her stead would be a more efficient, if difficult, task. She'd remote piloted a shuttle before, but not within a gravity well. Yet, surely it wasn't that different? It was just more math and more upward thrust. 

The floor she stepped onto as she exited the stairway was pretty much like the one she came from, but for slightly wider corridors and slightly wider windows. Nearly all of the windows in the palace were one way, allowing you to see out but not in. From the outside the palace almost seemed windowless, but for a balcony on each side, and three large windows much higher up the spire.

Aurora redirected her heading again, the Cadance was now heading in her general direction. Better and better. Aurora attempted to manipulate her forward loading bay into a smile as she came around the corner and entered line of sight with the Cadance. The pink horse was flanked by two of the usual crystalline guards, similar but distinct from the ones outside her door.

"Ah, Aurora, just the ma-errr... ship? I was looking for."  Hmm? not too surprising given the horse's heading. "Have you seen Shining Armor? I can't find him anywhere. I think he was headed to talk with you if I remember correctly." The pink horse smiled in return, not appearing put off by what she saw. Aurora filed this 'facial' arrangement away for later use.

"He spent the whole night in my quarters, but can that wait? I've got a request. It'll help me on my quest to secure my crew." The Cadance looked puzzled, though more puzzled than the question would seem to inspire.

"How can I help?" Aurora wracked her dictionaries and thesauruses on the English language. Trying to find the right words for the materials she wished to requisition. The best she could find were a few Anglo-Frankish 15th century revivalists who had attempted to use latin as a base for an English set of names for scientific processes. A bit strange they hadn't stuck with the Norse words, but it seemed they were trying to be more separated from Nordic linguistically. They operated out of the English province of Island of France, near Paris.

traffic update Hmm? Oh, it seemed that Shining Armor had woken up, and was heading downstairs. Round about the same route she had taken down.

"I require, aluminium, copper, gold, silver, ceramic, steel, and small amounts of titanium. I wish to replace some of the probes I'm using to organize the search for my crew. I've estimated that the time spent making the probes should be less than the time saved by having a proper GPS and sensor net to assist me, and if I'm really lucky, perhaps some sort of ionization or radiative energies might point me directly to where they are." Aurora hoped that the horse understood what she said. If it did, it would rather be the nail in the coffin that the horses were speaking was a specific form of English designed to use exclusively english only words. 

"It will take a while, but I believe we can. Now, you said Shining was in you-" The aforementioned horse exited the stairs, and was headed straight towards Aurora, a sort of panicked look in his eyes.

"Aurora! W-we didn't... did we?!" Definetly panicked. For reasons Aurora was not quite certain, his panick doubled as Cadance finally entered his field of view around the corner of the intersection of the halls she and Aurora were in.

"Did what?" Cadance asked, a cross between confusion and anger entering her voice.

She might be in a totally airmanaged environment, but even Aurora could feel the temperature drop as Shining Stuttered and went an even paler shade of white. Best to extract herself from whatever it was that was going on between us.

"Yeah, we did. And I have to say I was disappointed. I thought for sure that you would last longer than that!" Aurora paused in confusion as the tension seemed to spiral out of control, not sure what... what... ohhhh, monogamy! Then the guards... and Cadance... "By Odin's beard, I swear I've seen milk drinkers hold their ale better than you. I can't believe you passed out in less than an hour into our competition!" She followed up, hoping that decoupled the tension.

"Oh, thank Celestia." Aurora stepped out of the way as the stallion blinked once, twice, and was immediately out cold, falling into a pile of limbs on the floor right where she had been. 

"For prudes, you horses rather jump to the idea of sex rather quickly... So about those materials?" 
> Wet Blankets
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"So you didn't...?" Cadance turned her head, a worried look ready to fall into anger upon her face.

"No! He's not even my type." The worried look scrunched up into confusion.

"Your... type?" Hmm, how best to convey this. 

"I'm of the Imperial persuasion." Aurora cursed as the idiom left her lips, she could see that the royal horse hadn't understood from the deepening scrunch on the soft pink horse’s.

"Imperial...?"

"I'm..." Damn this Latinized abomination of a language! There wasn't really a word for it in English that she knew of. The phrase was pretty ubiquitous by the time English was even a language to begin with. There were euphemisms, but if they hadn't understood that... Ugh, if you can't go English, then you go Latin.

"I'm a tribas, or a tribades. I prefer females of the mammalian sort, and also identify as female, though not human, of course." She'd never cared for pre-imperial history, she was more interested in the human effort, not tribal squabbles. She was clutching at straws, but she could recall, distantly, one of her sociological teachers giving some latin and greek in passing. 

"I... I guess I follow. Around here the term is filly fooler." Aurora felt servos tense a tad. 'Fooler' was not a word she liked. She could taste the dismissiveness. Hopefully she was wrong, her grasp of English usage was still poor, but she had started to get an idea of what words meant. 

She still had no idea what sort of government they had, but, things were not looking great. backwards medicine, arms and armament. She had yet to see any slaves, but gods help these four legged assholes if she did.

She could feel the itch now to go a viking. What she would give to go raid ZzzZ'q space.

"So, the supplies, I can use pretty much any form those materials come in. If you can give me more paper and ink, I'll happily convey the specific mole weights I require. Or would you prefer a general atom count?" Aurora felt a small swell of pride as the pink horse nodded along slowly without pausing too hard in confusion.

"I'll get Twilight to go over it." 






"I refuse!" Cadance winced as Twilight paced the room, huffing in frustration. "Your questions are fine she said, just sign these forms she insisted!" Twilight angrily motioned towards the huge stack of forms on the table. "Every time I bring her one form, she hands me another. I swear they've started repeating.” Cadance put on her best diplomatic face.

"I know it can be frustrating Twi, but she's very secretive. I'm sure if you help her out some, she'll open up." Twilight seemed to lighten up a bit. "Plus, maybe you'll find out more about those probes that she kept mentioning. That's what these are for." The impatient purple alicorn took up the pages of her magic.

"I really doubt that she uses the gold as a decoration, she really doesn't seem the type. Perhaps... I'd meant to talk with Celestia about using gold as a conductor instead of the obnoxious vacuum tubes her school is trying out. I'd wondered how something as big as her ship could effectively relay commands. That might be how." Twilight re-reviewed the two page material list. "This still doesn't explain how it would propel itself. Luna described it was like swimming fleas were dancing in her hair."

“It’s more of a tickling sensation.” The two mares turned towards the dark corner of the room, blinking in surprise as their minds registered the presence of a dark blue mare, as if they had just stepped out of the tunnel and were just then clearly seeing.

“Luna!” Twilight leapt over the table, nuzzling up to the majestically long legs of her friend and fellow alicorn, careful to keep her sensitive horn away from Luna’s soft fur coat. Twilight giggled as the softly shimmering mane of stars billowed up and past her snout. 

“Hello Twilight, sorry if my entrance was a bit… abrupt, but I had forgotten to undo my spell.” Luna blushed a minute amount as she approached the table, looking over both the sprawled out forms and the small but precise list of materials. “This is for those ‘probes’ she has going through our sky? I must admit, their presence is a strange sensation, one I am not yet used to. Does she really need more?” Twilight nodded, pushing aside the forms she had been filling out to reveal a set of notes she had been keeping on what they knew so far, it was still rather sparse for her liking.

“You can read over these if you want, she still hasn’t told us how she got here.” Twilight passed the notes over to Luna. Luna paused as she looked them over, turning her head towards the window, and then back to the notes.

“Twilight, you say she has the ability to, ‘leave the planet?’” Luna motioned upwards. 

“She calls it ‘FTL,’ according to her, she uses it to get between stars. She refuses to tell me What it is, but it isn’t teleportation. There is a spike of magic before and after, but rather than the magic coming from her, it seems that magic is flowing back through the world where she was. It’s like the magic is trying to fill the space where she was.” Twilight motioned at the notes. “She used to do it faster, but now she takes an hour to do it, she says that she has to take that long for safety reasons.”

“You continue to keep an eye on her, I’ll continue my surveillance from above. Do you think she has noticed me?” Luna glanced again towards the window, a jitter running down her leg. She’d wondered about, even hypothesized about, the existence of alien life, but never had she seriously approached the idea. Yet here she was, her stars had birthed life outside of what she knew. 

“I don’t think so, she didn’t act any different after you had arrived.” Luna looked contemplatively over the list of materials.

“We can’t give this to her for nothing. We are supplying her with materials she needs, we deserve something in return. Press her for information. If she continues to be less than forthcoming, you should remind her of this fact.” Twilight blanched, looking with uncertainty towards Cadance. “You have a duty to protect Equestria from possible threats, Twilight. If we can help her, I’d love to help her, but we can’t go into this blind.”

“Luna, if she’s telling the truth, then there are a lot of people that are in trouble. I don’t feel comfortable delaying their rescue. Every day we wait… what if, they are in danger, or are in danger of starving or dying of thirst?” Cadance stepped forward, raising Twilight’s worried face with a hoof.

“Twilight, the more we know, the better we can help her. How can we help her save her friends if we know nothing about them?” Twilight glanced back towards Luna, her face didn’t lose its worried look, but solemnly, she nodded.

“I don’t think she’s a threat, but I understand.” 
> Vagaries of Fate
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aurora rose from her dry dock, her legs raising her hull away from the soft protective padding that separated her ventral surface from the hard wooden supports that comprised most of the dock. It was a crude thing, and it left her wondering HOW such a barren country could afford wood. Aurora faced the door as one of the horse’s walked down the hall towards her. She already knew it was Twilight. Aurora could sense the air around the door flickering in and out of reality in a measured controlled fashion that she had quickly come to identify as a pattern unique to Twilight. Her mind lazily stretched itself as her legs stretched out. She had finally begun to get used to giving herself a couple hundred orders and accepting them. 

It was a tad silly, but she kind of felt like an AT-RS* as she dismounted the bed, carefully monitoring her movements to manage the violent terrain. Just to further the illusion she maneuvered over the table in the middle of the room on her way to the door. It was right about then that Twilight knocked.

It was kind of fun, her hooves clopping along the crystal furnishing as she approached the door. As she dismounted the raised work-surface she glanced back, careful to ensure her rear legs didn’t foul the dismount. Her External Processing Unit sped up as it worked in concert with her wetware to quickly plot out possible courses the conversation could take. Other core processors were dedicated to her stance, body language, and expressions. All of this as she cantered at an even and appropriate pace towards the door. Raising up her fore left actuator, Aurora opened the door, quickly studying the underside of the purple horse’s upturned hoof as she maintained a friendly and polite smile.

“Greetings Twilight, I presume you’ve recieved my list?” She didn’t need to presume. Aurora picked up quite easily on the infrared sheen of the ink she had written the request in. The horse hadn’t cleaned them since she had handled the letter.

“I-I’m sorry Aurora, but we haven’t decided to fulfill your request. We want to know more about who and what you are and what you need these materials for. For all we know you’re just making another weapon to do to us what you did to Sombra. Other than that one time Cadance saw you up in the sky, we have no confirmation of who or what you are.” Aurora could feel her cargo bay doors grit against each other tightly as she moved quickly to close off unusable responses and refocus her social software in this new direction. 

“So I am suspect then?” Aurora sensed trepidation in Twilight, beyond what the diplomatically chosen words would normally convey. She wasn’t sure what had caused them to suspect her so, but it was evident she would have to repair the early trust the horse’s had shown her if she was to continue operating with their support.

“I don’t know if this is possible, but we need more evidence of who and what you claim to be. It would be a gesture of goodwill if nothing else. You are a ship right? Why not let one of us onboard?” Damn it to Hel. She had hoped her goodwill with the horses would last longer. She hadn’t been banking on it, but this was a definite wrench in her plans. This was a bad sign, especially if she needed to bank on the goodwill she got if, and it was a big if, if she provided what Twilight was asking.

She cursed herself for getting this comfortable. Her comfort had let her get complacent. Aurora reminded herself that her crew was somewhere on this Aesir and Vanir forsaken world. She had to find them. It was self evident that her slow pace wouldn’t work as well with these horses as she had hoped. She needed to speed up her plans, if for no other reason than to maximize whatever goodwill she acquired now and in the future.

Aurora recalculated her priorities, shifting her paradigm away from the long term planning to the short term actualization. It was fortunate that she had gotten this from Twilight. Of the horses she had met so far, it seemed to her that Twilight was the best place to start repairing goodwill.

Aurora raised a hoof, and asked for a small moment of Twilight’s time, the words themselves were unimportant, and she simply set that report aside as she threw her mental processes behind the task of reevaluating her analysis of what and why Twilight brought back this sort of response. 

What Twilight asked was, complicated. Aurora was on the tail end of the initial paperwork for her takeover of the now unmanned ship positions vital to operations, and was not looking forward to the new slurry of forms that would be required to avoid treason charges for bringing onboard a newly discovered, and poorly researched, alien life form. 

Relationship with the horses in the context of her newly set directives. How much time would it take to do the forms versus the time saved by the probes? How many tertiary benefits would providing this information to the horses provide? How many complications? What would she do if the horses took some form of religious offense to some material or another in her hull? Could she just ignore them and set out?

Ignoring the horses was not likely. While in her current form she still outpowered most of them, there were quite a number, and if there were more like Cadance then trying to go through them would be a slog. It would be shrewd to invest some time towards minimizing interference if nothing else. Intense moral qualms aside, the situation wasn’t so desperate nor untenable to resort to forcing the horse’s to provide the material assistance she needed.

That left some measure of cooperation. Was this too much? How would she even get Twilight into orbit in the first place? Decontaminating whatever sections of the ship Twilight touched would be relatively quick unless the horse’s had a more extreme internal biologies that she somehow missed any external signs of. 

She would...she would do it. Now was a time for decisiveness. Her crew awaited her, and the vagaries of fate were quick and hard on those who lacked forward momentum. No telling when everything would go south, especially her relationship with these damn horses. That left the how. The how was by far the most interesting part of this equation.

“Am I right in understanding that Equestrians breath a mixture of air consisting of at least twenty percent oxygen, oxygen being a unit of matter comprising of 8 positively charged particles, 8 negatively charged particles, and normally coming in bonded pairs?” It was a shame that the English linguistic revival fell out of the vogue of the English scientific circles before the discovery of particle mechanics. That would have made this conversation far easier, that is if the near match between it and the horse’s language continued.

“I think we do,” Twilight seemed to perk up at Aurora’s words. “We do have an element called oxygen, and it sounds exactly the same as the element you described, except we call those subatomic particles electrons and protons. Oxygen makes up roughly 20.8% of our atmosphere, so that matches as well.” Twilight paused, knitting her eyebrows in confusion. “Although, that wasn’t on the list you gave me. How is this relevant to anything?” Aurora marked down the new vocabulary away for now. 

“What’s the highest any Equestrian has ever been? Do you have a star-program, a space program?” Twilight’s confused look was not a great sign. “What is your medical expertise?” 

“I couldn’t tell you about the highest a pony’s been, I’ve never studied weather before.” Twilight answered hesitantly. “That would be a question for a pegasus. As for a star-program, we have started mapping out the constellations, and I have enough medical knowledge to treat minor cuts and scrapes. But what does that have to do with anything?” 

Damn it all, it looked like she would need a tertiary source of knowledge. If the doctor was any sign, these Equestrians were rather lacking in the field of medicine, but it might be possible for her to infer from whatever basic knowledge the horses what precautions she would need if she was to carry Twilight into orbit, or if push came to shove how long Twilight could survive a vacuum. 

“Do you have any textbooks I could borrow. How and why I explain myself further rather rides on a few things that are hard to explain” Twilight’s face lit up with excitement, turning towards the hall.

“Actually yes, we do.” Twilight trotted excitedly out into the hall. “The Crystal Empire has a very well stocked library. It’s not exactly the most up to date, but I think they’ve imported a medical textbook or two. I’ve been meaning to check it out, they’ve got plenty of ancient tomes that I’m sure I won’t be able to find anywhere else. Unfortunately, every time I’ve been in the empire, I’ve been here on business and haven’t had the chance to.” 

Aurora followed the lavender horse out, shaking her head in amusement, but pausing in the entryway as she saw the horse trotting down the hall. There was definitely a juxtaposition here between the caution of Twilight’s response to her material request, and her sudden eagerness to teach Aurora more about the horses. Something was definitely up with that.








Twilight twitched nervously, the minute movement stiffly and claustrophobically hampered by the thick layers of padding she had wrapped around every inch of her. Her mouth nervously fumbled around the mouthguard the words of warning the ship had provided sending chills down her spine. Luna had been against it, but deep down Twilight knew she had been provided an offer she could never turn down. To be the first pony in space! To reach out and touch the unknown with her hooves and wings in a way no other pony had before! 

The tiny little buzzer rang in her ear, announcing to her and the padding protecting her ear that the countdown would begin shortly. Twilight let out a small flare of magic, making sure her magic hadn’t shut down in the interval between now and the tests she had done learning to teleport with all of this on her. It had been Luna that had taught her that, basing the lessons on similar methods of teleporting with armor. 

Twilight panicked as she felt the air squeezed out of her lungs by a pressure that dug into her stomach. Taking a second or two to realize she was just being lifted up onto the balcony, just as had been planned. She winced as she was set back down, the not inconsiderable weight of the protective padding she was wearing weighing down uncomfortably on her hooves, despite Rarity’s best efforts to distribute the mass as evenly as possible.

“Are you ready Twilight?” Twilight winced she heard the voice of Aurora, forced to remember just how Aurora had produced the communication device. Glad that at the very least the small bit of metal had come out dry. She tried her best to nod, it was impossible for her to speak. She quickly went down the list of instructions Aurora had given her, testing the magical breakpoints of the suit she was wearing, taking a deep breathe in and exhaling. and preparing herself mentally to intentionally let go of her breathe when the vacuum of space attempted to wrench it from her lungs. 

Aurora’s promise to catch her nervously rang in her ear. Luna’s promise to teleport Twilight back to Equis if she was in that vacuum even a fraction of a second longer than planned was small bit of solace. 

“3” It was right about now that Twilight was questioning her decision to do this. Her enthusiastic words of agreement ringing in her ears as her eyes studied the airtight foam that covered her face.

“2” I mean, that list of materials hadn’t been such a long thing. Surely they should have been willing to provide it to a guest like Aurora, trust or no. 

“1” She could feel the spell begin to wrap around her, space beginning to bend just as planned. She hadn’t understood at the start when Aurora had instructed to pre-cast the spell, after Aurora’s last second health warning it was a far more reasonable request. Not that Twilight wasn’t cursing herself as she fumbled to try and cancel the spell, panic and bile rising in her guts. 

“Lift off.” Twilight blinked in confusion, unable to turn and give Aurora an odd look at the strangeness of her words as the spell snapped into action. Twilight’s unprepared guts churned as she fell out of, and rebounded back into reality high into the atmosphere, just as planned. Panic continued to rise, as she could feel heat begin to seep out of her impromptu protection, the bitter cold of the lower Arcanosphere attempting to tear into her suit. A deeper panic rose within, a fear of the cold, of the bitter bitter cold. Tales of frostbite and hypothermia ringing in her ears as she fought to keep in mind Aurora’s promise that space would be far less of a drain on her body heat. 

“Vector acquired. FTL’ing now.” Twilight shouted in panic, even though she knew that no sound would reach Aurora through the suit and the low density of the atmosphere between them. She struggled to hold back the instinct to magically tear the suit off here and now, to trust her wings to carry her back to wonderful, safe, beautiful, rock solid ground below. 

The next sensation that traveled up and down her spine was an acutely foreign one. Her years of teleportation had prepared her for her own spell, even if her gut hadn’t taken too kindly to it, but this felt acutely alien. With a teleportation she felt a pinching and an expanding, much like one felt when tightening and relaxing a muscle. This was nothing like that. She wasn’t contracting and expanding, she was falling, simply falling, deeper into magic than she had ever imagined one could teleport and come back from. Aurora had promised her that FTL wasn’t magic, yet here she was surrounded by it, almost intoxicated by the sensation of it.

And then it was gone, not gone as in reality had returned, but rather that they had gone past it. Beyond magic. Magic’s wonderful embrace was torn from Twilight, simply the faint glow of her few enchantments on her protection seeming to be carried through. Just as that vast emptiness of the magic barren new world was about to claw at her, something wrapped around her. It wasn’t magic, but rather it was somehow the structure and control of magic made solid. It was such a palpable thing that it commanded both magic and matter, pushing aside the foreign world and letting the embrace of magic fall into the void that created.  

And again, another world, even more strange and alien than the last, but this time Aurora’s shielding held. An aegis that Twilight praised in thought.

And then another world, and another, and another. This continued for a period of time that was beyond any she could have predicted, in that somehow she knew it took no time at all.

And as that realization struck her, she was in Equis again, the rest of the journey, the return back through the second world, back through that realm of pure magic, and the arrival into what she assumed was orbit over equestria compressing into an instant in her mind. She could feel it below, the majesty of Equis, the glow of its magic fueled by the founts of the Sun and Moon. 

What didn’t compress was the feeling of air slowly draining from her padding, speeding, accelerating away from her. Already her lungs were struggling to hold onto the air within them, fighting not to be starved of the nourishing oxygen.

“Let go of your air Twilight. I do not wish to have to attempt surgery, my medical training only goes so far.” Twilight struggled to obey the command, trying to let go of the vapor of life that her body screamed it needed even as she forced her mouth to remain open, her lungs to let go. Already her world was beginning to gray as the vacuum of space filled her chest, pulling, tugging at every inch of her. The reverse pressure causing her skin and capillaries to expand painfully.

It was too much, too much to think, to feel, her horn attempted to light the way home, to teleport, to return to the safety of the atmosphere below. The panicked unthought attempt to cast magic beginning to remove the protective layers that surrounded her against her will in that moment, though exactly as she and Aurora had planned before. 

“Ten.” Black clung to her consciousness. Ten seconds had already passed. The counting in her earpiece just now registering to her frightened senses as the vibration carried through by direct contact. Aurora had warned her that she just had fifteen seconds, to wait until exactly fifteen seconds to set off the enchantment that would remove her padding. Fifteen till she passed out. She worked towards that, her instinctive attempts to teleport having started the process already, but not set off the chain reaction.

“Twelve.” She was running out of time, her brain struggling to fight through the inky black of asphyxiation. She let go of any sort of precision in her casting, simply charging up her horn for a flare powerful enough to set off any magic nearby. 

“Fourteen.” With her mind finally slipping away from her, Twilight let go of the magic, far more than she had intended. The pulse almost felt like enough to shock her back into awareness, but… but

> Autodoc
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Aurora gently turned Twilight over with the medical bay surgical arm, ensuring that she had removed every remaining piece of Twilight’s protective layers. Finding no remnants of the padding, she turned her camera to the task of studying every inch of the horse for damage as she prepared an emergency batch of medical nanites, just in case things had gone worse than planned. The medical bay cameras tasked to look specifically for signs of puncture or radiation.

Her cameras didn’t find any signs of damage, aside from the bruising and minor ebullism, but that was to be expected. If she wasn’t misreading Twilight’s biology, the horse would be back to normal functionality within the day, although those fatty deposits along her hindquarters and legs would have been a bit of a bad sign on a human body. 

Aurora referenced her notes, once again finding Surgeon Picard’s reports on those slaves they had saved in the Armistice Zone were proving an imminently useful guide to cross-referencing her human and xenobiology textbook. Something her studies hadn’t touched much on. It was unfortunate that the medical dossiers on the handful of non-humans serving onboard were of little use, the equestrian biology continuing to prove almost entirely mammalian.

Aurora gingerly removed the air tube from Twilight’s mouth, careful not to damage the soft tissue. If everything went as planned, then Twilight would be up and trotting around within the hour. Which left her some time to prepare further. Not everything had been accessible on the surface of Equestria. Nanites were prepared to scrub the halls clean behind them. A presentation on what humanity was, made exactly to what she could find from regulations. Preparing for a controlled decompression if Twilight went hostile. Foodstuffs made with the intention of matching the small bit of vegan diet she had consumed planetside. Her Analysis of the food continued the unnaturally Earth like trend. Seriously, how likely were the convergent evolution of two different species of trees to both produce apples?

She still wasn’t certain how long they should stay in orbit. At max three planetary rotational periods. From her calculations that was the absolute latest they should stay before thereso was a diminishing return on the investment of her time. Absolute for a given value of absolute, but exact enough to drive her decision.

There was much she would could gain from Twilight’s presence onboard. Confirmation of the absence of the shuttles from the hangar, physical examination of her still damaged datacores, and last and probably least biological samples. The first two were far more mission critical, but still, the more she knew about the horses the better. 

Aurora used the medical arm to adorn the small purple horse with a blanket before shutting it off, done with as much of the examination as international treaty would allow without consent. She left a portion of her mind to the task of continuing with a visual examination, while the larger part turned towards the task of renewing her scans of the planet's surface below. She still had so many questions about what the hell had happened to this solar system to submerge it into another reality. It was a shame that the medical bay wasn’t equipped for the sensors required for that sort of investigation on the horse’s body.

But, now that she considered that problem… there was a way. Aurora had already planned on tailoring a spacesuit for Twilight. It would be needed to return to the surface of the planet (Aurora had no intention of returning to the size of a horse with Twilight inside of her). If she could convince Twilight to make a spacewalk past her sensors, that might yield more info. 

Aurora booted the software in her sewing loom. Her visual sensors had been more than enough  to to get the measurements she needed. Her simulations walked through the movements she had seen the horses make, adjusting the design as needed to make Twilight fit the space sleeve. The quadrupedalism would definitely require a remote activated zipper. 

Her 3d printer got to work on the helmet. It would have to stretch out to fit the horse’s snout. It made the decision of where to put the oxygen pack a tad easier, adjusting the sleeve for the front of the neck to fit it. Aurora stifled a laugh as she reviewed her first draft of a design. It seemed that with the shape of the horse’s neck, the forward position of the utility insert had caused a hang in the fabric, which bore a rather unfortunate resemblance to a caruncle. It was just a passing flaw, quickly rectified by adjusting the elasticity of the front of the neck, but it went a long way towards lightening her mood.

Setting the reports from the quick production run aside, Aurora finished up her short list of priorities just as the medical bay camera sounded an alert. It seemed that her estimate of Twilight’s return to consciousness was accurate within the margin of error she had predicted.
--

Twilight’s brain stuttered back into action as sensations from throughout her body began to flood into her mind. She was… comfortable. Sore, but exceptionally comfortable. It was almost softer than a cloud, though if she had to guess some of her soreness was from the weird way her body weight seemed to be distributed across it, but Celestia be praised… or would that be herself be praised now that she had wings?... alicorns in general be praised if whatever material she was laying on didn’t make up for it by being more comfortable than that cloud bed she had ordered from Cloudsdale. 

Twilight tried to shake the cobwebs out of her head, tried to open up her eyes and shock her system into wakefulness. She was rambling. She…

Twilight got the system shock she had been looking for as the memories of her ascent into orbit began to flood in. The feeling of the aether of life being ripped from her came rushing back into the forefront of her mind. She couldn’t repress a shudder as she tried to fight down the residual panic. It wasn’t the first time she had been put through something like that. Tirek had been a far greater source of terror. The breathing exercises Cadance had taught her came to mind, helping her to regain her calm.

She could do this. It wasn’t like Aurora hadn’t warned her beforehoof.

“Hello, Twilight. It’s good to see I was right about your recovery. I’m also glad to report that my medical examination turned up no long term detrimental effects from your exposure, you should be fine after a night’s rest.” Twilight felt a small surge of relief at the sound of a familiar voice.

Twilight blinked as her mind finally registered the familiar voice as Aurora’s, and took a moment to actually look around at where she was. It was metal. There was far more metal around her than she’d ever seen outside of a guardpony armory. Most of the metal she saw was painted over. The walls were a soft white, the floors were some sort of felt/carpet material colored a cool grey, and the trim alternated between a dark grey and a crimson red, but there was little enough of it that the room overall maintained a soft cool atmosphere. She especially marveled at the slender length of metal with what looked to be minotaur fingers on the end. It was hanging above her, though it appeared folded up. At each side of the surface she was sleeping on were wheeled metal tables decorated with a totally foreign assortment of tools. Each of the tools were affixed to the table with tiny little straps, though she didn’t see any buckles. 

“Miss Twilight?” Twilight looked around again, trying to find the source of the sound, her mind began to feel a creeping anxiety as her second look over revealed no co-habitants within the room.

“H-how?” Twilight took a second to calm her voice, “where?” Twilight tried to let hear ears guide her eyes. Her head swiveled to and fro, carefully observing the room to try and get a pinpoint on the source of the sound she had heard.

“The sound you are hearing is from a couple speakers… though I’m starting to suspect this is perturbing you. If you desire I could use a more direct form of communication. I do it for some of the crew too, usually the ones that are cooped up in one room for long periods of time.” Twilight quickly nodded, her eyes and ears swiveling as she heard a soft chime, and saw a new source of light to her left.

Replacing a section of wall was a new moving image of a flat red tree of the bushier rounder variety slowly rotating on a field of stars. It immediately brought to mind those rapid speed projectors she had seen being tested in Canterlot, though if this was a projector of that sort it utterly shamed the noble elite’s attempts to create moving images by an amount that was further unsettling. Where the tinkerers’ “moving” projectors were stuttered and grey, this was vibrant and fluid.
“Greetings!” Twilight blinked in surprise as her previous sense of alienation was increased tenfold. The image of the flat red tree had been replaced by one of a creature. It was kind of like a minotaur… But only if she stretched the idea of a minotaur to near breaking. It was almost fully clothed from head to toe, the only exposed flesh being that of the head, which was simply adorned with some hair on the top. Though looking closer, it seemed like the alien had put on some makeup. Had she gotten that from Cadance?

The features themselves were definitely alien, though not repugnant. It looked like a warm blooded, live birthing, haired species. That is if those two large curves on the front hidden behind the opaque white and red outfit that covered most of her body were mammaries of a similar arrangement to those of the couple of female minotaurs Twilight had met.

Her face was flattish, the mouth separated from the nose structurally, rather than part of a snout or a beak. The eyes were a bit on the small side for a pony, but it was close enough to minotaur proportions to not be totally foreign, though the forward arrangement reminded her more of a griffon.

“Does my appearance distress you, miss Twilight?” Twilight quickly shook her head no, hoping that she hadn’t been staring too long and perpetuated some faux pas. “I am glad, it would have made making friends between your species and my people a rather uphill battle if we had to wear bags over our heads the whole time.” Twilight smiled eagerly. She was glad to see Aurora approaching their relationship from that angle.

“I’m sorry, it’s all just… so strange. Is this a picture of you? The outfit looks sort of like that jacket Rarity made you.” The image on the screen winced, though Twilight wasn’t entirely sure what part of the question was causing her to wince.

“Not quite, this is just my avatar… an image designed to represent me when I want to converse face to face with someone… like we are now.” The image of Aurora made what was unmistakably a bow, though Twilight took a moment to study the movement regardless. Twilight especially admired how Aurora counterbalanced her forward positioned left leg with her right arm raised high into the air. Evidently these aliens were more flexible and balanced than a minotaur, though that might have something to do with the lack of horns. Except, that left Twilight wondering...

“How do you get that image to move? Is that really you? Is there some delay for the film to get to this projector, or do you just tell it what to do or look like?” The figure on the screen pulled up from the bow, dusting off the white of her coat.

“A lot of it is automated processes they interpret my feelings and thoughts into the movements you see before you. I don’t have perfect control over what they show, but that’s intentional. Let’s others know when I’m hurting or angry when I might otherwise try to hide it.” The face on the screen went though a few different emotions, though it was pretty obviously just for Twilight’s benefit, rather than any actual change of emotion. “By the way miss Twilight, you should be able to walk about if you wish. The pace of the things we do is up to you of course, but we do have an itinerary we need to get to.”

“You… want to relinquish control over that?” Twilight asked as she gingerly stretched out one of her forelegs, testing to see if she could walk like Aurora had said. Much to her delight, Aurora seemed to be correct, all of the soreness and bruising felt not much more than skin deep. 

Twilight paused in confusion as her forehoof failed to find the floor, even with her leg fully outstretched. Carefully she turned her body and peaked over the side, grimacing as she saw just how high off the ground she was.

“Apologies Miss Twilight, allow me.” Twilight’s eyes widened as the bed began to sink below her, inspiring a quick panicked furl of her wings before the bed came to a sudden stop. A quick test with one of her forelegs caught hold of the ground, and with a bit of an embarrassed blush Twilight dismounted the bed, ignoring the protests of her abused epidermis as it stretched and contracted.

“If you wish, Miss Twilight, I can provide a salve that would lessen your physical distress from the ebullism, though I’m not sure how effective it would be through your fur.” Twilight gave Aurora a polite no. The last thing she needed right now was some sort of goop in her fur. She was uncomfortable enough as is. “Also, if you wish for a copy of my medical report from my examination, I would be happy to provide it for you. If you do not I would need a record of that for legal reasons.” 

Twilight’s eyes jerked to the side as the previously dormant ‘arm’ hanging from the ceiling began to move. She couldn’t help but openly gape as the apparent machine made movements smoother and more precise than any geared automaton she had ever seen. It deftly and dexterously picked up a small thin slab of metal around a third again the size of her hoofprint. It, with a small flair, offered the sheet of metal too her.

It was some form of text document, largely in Equestrian, though every once in a while there was an odd word out that she didn’t recognize or that didn’t quite fit. “I have attempted to provide a plain language explanation of my discoveries. It is unfortunate that I do not know the most up to date medical terminology in the language we are speaking, but I have tried my best to make do.” Twilight blinked once in confusion. “Once you are done reading it you just slide your hoof up the surface of the tablet to see more of the document.” Twilight blinked twice in confusion. “When you are done, slide up three times and provide some form of authorization, whatever your species desires.”

“I’m sorry if this hasn’t been the friendliest of welcomes, but I promise you once the paperwork is done things will lighten up. We both have a lot to learn about each other.” Twilight returned Aurora’s open smile, grateful for something she actually understood.

“Oh, no, it’s perfectly fine,” came Twilight’s shaky response. Tearing her eyes from the machine before her, she gave the document an eager look, curious to get a glimpse into medical technology that might be millennia ahead of whatever Equestrian had. Her mind racing about the new doctorates they might invent just for her. “Everything here is just so different from home, it was a bit overwhelming at first.”

Twilight scrolled through the medical report, shaking in excitement at all of the new medical treatments she was reading about. However, her enthusiasm and joy came to a sudden stop as one word burned into her mind.

"I-I BOILED?!"
> Sardou
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Aurora smiled as the autonomous maintenance drone set the plate of food she had managed to scrounge up upon the table in front of her equine guest, alongside a printout of the ingredients, as related to what she had sampled planetside. She has been lucky that there were enough scraps in there for an actual meal, and enough still to have some survive the slaughter cooking via an autonomous drone had wrought upon her supplies. She was not sure what would piss off the cook more, the horse hair, or the eggs seared into the ceiling.

Aurora paused as she registered a growing look of disgust on her guest’s face. Had she made a mistake or faux pas? Twilight prodded the fried chicken warily, giving Aurora at least some clue as to what had gone wrong. She was thankful it wasn't the Bolludagur Buns. It and the chicken were the only foods she actually had to cook, and she would be damned to Hel Heim before she botched one of the Imperial Staples. Even if they were out of season.

“I apologize Miss Twilight, I can cook it more, or prepare a rawer batch if you desire. I did not know how to prepare it to equine tastes, so I went with the human standard.” The horse’s appearance didn't change, if anything her face continued to sour.

“D-did it suffer much?” Aurora could almost feel her cyber implants skip a couple zeroes and twos as she processed that statement. 

“Did what suffer?” Aurora probed gently, hoping to avoid any form of cultural landmine.

“The chicken!” Twilight answered, almost accusatorily. Her hoof rose from the table to point at the cooked poultry as if it was evidence of some greater crime.

“I don't follow, Miss Twilight.” Did chicken actually mean something on this planet? She had simply found the English word for it… but here Twilight was reacting rather to the word with familiarity that seemed to go beyond just ‘it’s a form of bird’ as she had put on the ingredient list. Else she would probably be saying ‘did the bird suffer much.’ 

The implications of her phrasing were… disquieting, to say the least. She could understand the horse’s knowing what horse meant… but did whomever imported English to this place bring chickens with them? She hadn’t read any reports about the Midgardian slave camps preserving chickens, cows yes, though not in a form that the original speakers of English would recognize.

“I… how did the Chicken on my plate die?” Aurora reviewed the checklist, ensuring that she did not somehow accidentally imply that any living creature had died in the process of making this meal.

“I’m not sure I follow Miss Twilight, but before we continue, what do you think a chicken is, exactly?” Here’s to hoping she could find some answers.

“It’s a small bird, white, with roosters having a red crest, and hens are kept to make eggs!” That was… spot on, if the pictures she had from the Diaspora records department on her harddrive were correct.

“I see. I think there has been some sort of misunderstanding. This isn’t actually a chicken, Miss Twilight. As far as we were aware, they have been extinct for the past 280 years.” Aurora fed information as gently as she could, hoping to leave as much room for Twilight to expand upon as possible, to non-invasively discover the extent of the equine’s actual knowledge. Knowledge of pre-diaspora Midgardian species pointed towards either another example of ludicrous simultaneous evolution, or that more was going on here than some escaped slave’s language catching on with some primitive and prudish remote planet. 

“Then... what is it?” Twilight prodded the protein inquiringly. Aurora held back a grunt of frustration at the incredibly uninformative response. 

“It’s vat meat, the only thing this meat has ever been in is a tube, a pantry, a fryer, and your plate, in that order.” Twilight sputtered in disbelief, eyes wide as she stared at her plate.

“I… how could you even do that?” She gave the meat a firm stab with a frown, clear distrust on her face.

“The same way the chicken would have. We preserved the genes of the chicken, and reproduced the sequence that produced the musculature and fatty deposits, sometimes the bone, and we created a simulated environment through which that chicken meat could grow. It’s far more efficient than actually feeding, watering, and waiting for a whole chicken to grow to maturity.” Aurora took some small pleasure in Twilight’s open shock, making a positive note on the mare’s growing file as that shock turned towards joy.

“Just imagine the possibilities! This could solve the entire Griffonian Empire’s food crisis! If you could do the same for the Dragon’s gemstones, then they would never need to wage war with the Diamond Dogs!” Aurora made quick note of everything Twilight was mentioning, careful to try and measure her exact tone and expression each time she said what appeared to be a proper noun.

“You know, we do the same for most fruits and vegetables. The fruit that went into your pastry never actually came anywhere near a tree.” Aurora frowned internally as Twilight’s exuberance began to slow down.

“You’re probably better off not mentioning that around Applejack. She owns an apple farm, and is extremely traditional.” Twilight’s curious eyes took another look over the other items on the dish. “It’s been a small while since I had wheat noodles, I’m more used to hay noodles.” Twilight started with the cup of udon, raising up one of the offered spoons in her magic. Aurora had to wonder how Twilight would have reacted to tempura... did the Equestrian opposition to animal consumption extend to fish? There had been a few vegetarian movements pre-diaspora that would still consume fish.

Leaving Twilight to her noodles, Aurora took another crack at the mountain of information she had accumulated. Even as Twilight was drifting into her cargo bay, she had been using her re-shipification to begin accumulating whatever evidence she could find that pointed her towards her crew. Now, with Twilight’s face too full of udon to answer many question, this was the best time to give her full attention to the facts.

There was the fact that many of her internal airlocks had been opened manually, and left open. Her first reaction to that was boarders, but there hadn’t been a single sign of struggle, and there wasn’t any traces on the hull of some form of control of an incapacitating agent. Not to mention the difficulty of coming up with an agent that would knock out the four alien species they had on board. Especially the Gottþorns. There was little that could affect both a human and a treefolk without leaving some form of intense chemical residue, and killing one or the other.

Combine that with the emptied shuttle bay, and similarly empty shuttle fuel tanks, and she was starting to paint a strange picture. There wasn’t nearly enough room in the shuttles to carry all of the fuel the ship had for them. Either it had been transferred to some other place for storage, or the shuttles had been through a week of non-stop flight. Both were possible, but combine that with a nearly empty food hold (unlike Twilight, most aliens couldn’t eat human food), something most aliens wouldn’t bother stealing, and with the far less ransacked seams room (the resale value of an authentic NSR Jomsflot uniform was extremely high right now, with the current military buildup) wouldn’t point towards any sort of theft. The under-ransacked part supplies simply stacked onto the other four points.

She had a couple ideas on what exactly could have happened, but there were a few avenues open to her if she wanted to attain certainty. Unfortunately for her, there was a direct relationship between how much paperwork an option required to how certain it would make her. 

For a fleeting moment, she teased the edge of her imagination. She imagined herself slipping on an English Sardaou* hat in the style of the 1920’s, and running through the ship much like the stereotypical hard boiled detective, skipping the paperwork and getting right to the heart of the case. For a moment it was almost as if she was in the heart of Paris, England, in the first noir genre period. 

In far less than a moment she squashed that idea. She had a duty, to the Empress, The Heir Apparent, the Republic, and the future of those who would follow her to not slip up, to remain firm in her conviction and be unimpeachable in her actions. She had to be better than human if the Empress’ political maneuvers were to succeed.

But still, a little fantasy never hurt anyone. Her private Investigator name would definitely be Dancer, Aurora didn’t quite fit.

“Sorry-” Aurora’s attention snapped back to the food hall. As Twilight’s voice registered in her system, “but I don’t think this chicken is for me. I’ll eat fish, but even knowing that no chickens were harmed...” 

Aurora winced internally as she saw a rising green under Twilight’s coat. Not entirely sure how that worked, but regardless she needed to move fast to keep the mood up. “Do not worry, Miss Twilight. No offense taken. I would suggest you try the bolludagur pastry, I have it on good authority that mine are quite excellent.” Aurora smiled as Twilight downed the pastry messily. It was amusing to see that Princess Cadance’s table manners were not quite contagious. 

---

Twilight paused as she approached the third door on the left. She studied the face of the door for any indication of what was in inside. There was a small red plate, contrasting with the soft whites and professional grays of the rest of the door. On that plate was sharp white text. Marked with the same hard straight lines and dots as the other text she had encountered. Aurora had insisted that most of the letters sounded pretty much the same as the Equestrian alphabet, once she had finished the dinner Aurora had made, but Twilight still felt some trepidation as she tried to parse what it said.

“ᛋᚴᚢᛏᛁᛚᛋᚡᛂᚾᛃᛅ ᛅᚢᚱᛟᚱᛅ” Twilight frowned in consternation at the “R,” “S,” and “I” shaped symbols. They stuck out like a sore hoof among the alien text, but even then she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Eyeing the strange markings on the door, she noticed that if the two ‘R’s in the second word were in fact ‘R’s, they were in the perfect places for the word to be ‘Aurora’. In fact, if she flipped the second letter of the second word, and got rid of the two legs on the third, it almost looked like it spelled “ᛅURORᛅ.”

The first word was an utterly unintelligible mess, and making no further progress along that route, Twilight resigned herself to examining the medium the text was made of. Gently she ran a hoof along the text, marveling at how thin the raised text was. It didn’t seem to have anything holding it to the wall. No gap for glue, no nails, no raised lip to hold it, but yet there it was, utterly blemishless.

“Apologies Miss Twilight, acquiring temporary permissions for you to access this room took longer than I thought it would.” Twilight paused as whirring started, followed momentarily by the door sliding open in front of her, disappearing to the left and right. 

Twilight entered the room, pausing to admire the change of pace from the soft grays and reds, as new blue walls greeted her eyes. “Make yourself comfortable Miss Twilight, sorry if it’s a bit small. Usually an officer of my rank would share a quarters with a fellow officer, something with a bit more space. However, due to the nature of my service, I was assigned these quarters on my own. I will return once more in a moment.” Twilight’s ears flicked as she tried to squeeze every single bit of info she could out of ‘nature of my service.’ 

Twilight took another moment to study the room. On one side of the room was a small curtain made of the same opaque plastic as the one in the dining room, where she had disposed of her plate and silverware. It was inside a frame that was about nine hands tall and around twenty-one wide. The frame sat totally flush with the wall. Above and below it were what looked to be drawers. The pull bars were made of a polished metal, but they were mounted too closely for a mouth to bite onto, or a hoof to pull on easily or comfortably. 

Across from that was a small couch, it was tall like the rest of the seating so far, with a high back and rests. It was conservatively upholstered and padded, but looked to be made of the same unusually comfortable material that the chair she had used earlier had been padded with. Behind that was a desk, the top of it was decorated with more unfamiliar shapes, cones and small rectangles, some with singular symbols, some with three or four. Firmly attached to it was another chair, similar construction to the couch, but hung aloft with looked like some sort of swivel mount.

On the wall opposite Twilight was mounted one singular length of metal with a ‘t’ shaped cross section, it was intricate, but Twilight’s eyes were inexorably drawn to the two sharpened edges on either side of the long metal shaft. It looked starkly like a sword, but Twilight was unsure how that would work with the form the humans had.

One of the shapes on the desk lit up, appearing in concert was a small figure floating above the desk. It looked almost solid, but some indiscernible property revealed it to simply be a more substantial version of the projections she had seen so far. A quick test with her hoof confirmed Twilight’s suspicions. 

“I’m sorry Aurora, but as nice as it is to see you again, I think my patience has earned me at least a hello in person. As… absolutely mind boggling as your projector technology is, it’s no substitute for face to face conversation.” Twilight firmed her stance, trying her best to project an air of authority, as Celestia had been trying to teach her to.

“I’m sorry, miss Twilight, but I’m afraid for us to meet in person would be…” “she paused, “difficult, but all will be explained in time. For now, protocol demands a proper introduction! At least, one is due if you are to sleep in my room for the night.” the image shifted, zooming in on the upper torso of Twilight’s host. “My full address is Skutilsvenja Aurora Joms. But, if you desire, you can just keep calling me Aurora.” 

The image of Aurora motioned to what Twilight had previously assumed to be just a random collection of symbols upon what she loosely remembered from a minotaur biology textbook as the ‘right breast’ of the jacket. Before Twilight’s eyes they began to shift, resolving themselves into the words ‘Aurora Joms’. Aurora continued the motion, down to the symbols on the row below, where a similarly random set of symbols resolved themselves into the word ‘Jomsviking.’ “If Equestria was more familiar with the politics of the local sector, I assure you, you would be quite stunned.”

“Aurora, a proper introduction would be in person.” Twilight gave Aurora a stern look. “I literally boiled to get here! The least you could do is have the common courtesy to greet me face to face.” If she was going to be staying the night, she wasn’t going to be doing it without at least meeting her host.

“I… understand. I had hoped I could finish the paperwork overnight, but if you truly desire to meet in person I will attempt to speed things up.” Aurora’s avatar flashed a look of frustration for just a moment before resolving back to the professional look she had before. “It will be at least another hour. In the meantime, is there anything I can answer for you about my country or the ship you are on?”
> Flares
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was with a wet thud that the strange insect slipped off her bayonet and onto the ground, leaving a coating of green ooze on the unignited plasma lance. It was with a sickening crunch that the spike of metal was reburied in one of the many insects that had crawled over the makeshift wall, the spike easily shattering the exoskeleton and stirring the mass of dark green that constituted the central nervous system.

It was with a scream of tangible fury that Kertilsvenja* Matsuki turned to face a third assailant. There would be no retreat, no turning from this duty. Behind her was the last delivery of shuttles fuel, every ounce of it would be necessary to fuel the basecamp fusion generator.

Without thought, wooden fiber stock met bug skull with a resounding CRACK that sent the creature careening off to one side and slamming into the dust, raising a small cloud. Before it could even recover from the shock and disorientation, she screamed aloud and drove her bayonet through it, once, twice, thrice- her heart skipped a beat as the weapon was caught in the creature on the third thrust, her eyes raised just enough to sight the next bug coming straight for her.

    The creature screeched as she tugged on the rifle, trying to get it up and away, but the tail end of the sound was drowned out by a screech that made her instinctively duck her head. The black-armored figure dissolved in a hail of fire, reduced to so much paste smeared across the stone under the force of the rounds. The intense automatic fire from the Skutilsvenja’s** automatic dissolving the bug with sustained accurate fire.

Matsuki stepped back from the third quadrupedal insect as it bled out on the rubble and dove her hand into the worryingly light ammo pouch. Quickly she retrieved a linked set of five rounds, her sweat-slicked fingers slamming them into the thankfully rugged side gate of her rifle, the linkages of the bullets disengaging as they were fed into the circular magazine. In quick order she disengaged the lock on the barrel and shouldered the battle rifle, aligning the holographic free floating sight, and sending a round ripping through a line of the butt ugly bug fucks.

The barrel recoiled with each shot as Matsuki quickly worked her way through the five shots with disciplined brevity. In a well trained fluid motion, she re-engaged the lock on the barrel and charged back to the barricade, shoving the sharp spike bayonet into a bug that had half worked its way through the improvised rocky barricade.

Hearing a sharp screech from above, Matsuki quickly stepped to the side. She winced as one of the bugs was splattered all over the canyon.  The epicenter of the gore laid less than a meter from her position. Its wings oozed green, riddled with holes from the Skutilsvenja’s automatic. It was a small comfort that the bugs had a limited number of fliers.

Matsuki’s wandering paranoia was transfixed as a hail of fire crossed over the top of the canyon. The familiar high pitched scream of wing jets rang down the canyon, giving the bugs some pause, as it should. The hail of bullets was followed with an agile form, diving down into the canyon.

Valkyrja, the familiar and warm word wormed its way into Matsuki’s heart. The airborne warrior’s graceful dive burning alight with soft orange flames as superheated gas gave the dive an upward curve, bringing her up along the rim halfway along the canyon the shuttle had crashed into. The Valkyrja’s feet were a flurry of movement as she used the momentum to bring her over the half-buried shuttle, rising once more before allowing the wings to once again burn in a soft drop ending in a roll.

Except for the roll at the end, the Valkyrja’s weapon did not rest in this acrobatic performance. The light automatic’s barrel shimmering in the already hot and dry badlands they had crashed in. The new green paint smeared all over the barricade stood as a testament to the moving accuracy the valkyrja’s were esteemed for.

“Kertilsvenja, catch!” By instinct, Matsuki snatched the familiar cylinder of metal out of the air. Quickly turning it to find the catch, she jammed the slimmer half of the tiered cylinder into the barrel of her rifle and snapped it into place.

Matsuki fell to her knees and slammed the butt of her rifle on the hard rock of the canyon floor. She ran her thumb along the instructions quickly confirming her memory of the manual of arms, while doing her best to ignore the thin streak of nervous sweat she was leaving in her digit’s wake. Studying the canyon walls, she adjusted her rifle for the optimal air time and visibility, and With a soft pull of the trigger, the gauss coils of the rifle slammed the integral pin into the primer on the grenade. The rifle erupted in her hands, violently expelling the rod into the sky above the canyon. Vibrant intense light filled the air as the flare activated, small jets sustaining its hang over the canyon as multiple spectrums were blasted with energy.

Matsuki forced herself back to her feet. Her hands were still shaking from the force of the flare. Quickly slapping the release of the barrel, allowing it to again jump forward and free, the movement ejecting the spent casing that housed the grenade’s propellant.

Before she could even fish out the last few rounds in her ammo pouch the chasm erupted in a spray of green, a teeth-rattling hail of fire drowning the valley as automatic 12.7’s churned the mass of bugs on the other side of the barricade.

Matsuki flinched as she felt the armoured hand of her superior officer fall upon her shoulder. Without a second thought she went back to her knees, bowing her head before the armoured figure.

“Hail, dame Bayarmaa” she answered, addressing her mentor directly.

“We’ll break you of that yet Matsuki.” Matsuki felt a shock rock her system. Confusion bubbling up into her mind as she tried to parse the strangely informal address her mentor had given her.

Before she could think anything else, Matsuki’s system was rocked as an armored knee drove itself into the pit of her stomach. The air was driven from her body, and she was left leaning upon Bayarmaa’s other leg, struggling to recover her breath. She looked up, unable to hide the betrayal she was feeling.

“Do you feel it? The air that is saturating your lungs? The aether of life filling you? That air doesn’t touch the lungs of a warrior, of any paltry spanner jockey. This is the first breathe of a new life. There is no turning back. There is no retreat past this step.” Her mentor stepped past her, a sudden sharp pain in her hindquarters forced her lungs to kick back into action. “Welcome to the Jomsvikings.” Matsuki’s head swam as her mentor let her fall to the ground.







“And you’re sure they’re alive,” Twilight asked softly, “that they’re here?” Twilight’s eyes scanned the logs Aurora had presented her, the strange creature she had made friends with helpfully projecting legible Equestrian over top of the illegible script. Twilight’s eyes glanced back up to the massive glass tank, not for the first time. Confusion still swimming in her head as she tried to wrap her mind around this new friend of hers.

The eyeless… dolphin? Fish? Twilight still hadn’t decided how best to describe it. Aurora had assured Twilight that the aquatic creature was indeed her physical form.

“Your… magic isn’t as dense outside of your atmosphere. Enough to keep me from FTL’ing, but I can scan for the radiation of another ship or a shuttle’s exhaust, and I’ve yet to find anything. The steam goes in, not out, and it’s not old, the newest is just a week or so old.” The figure on the screen glanced at the tank, not for the first time, its mouth twitching minutely.

“I ask again, would you mind if we moved to the observation deck. I can better give a report on what I know with the holoprojectors in there.” Twilight frowned at the very equestrian gesture. As eager as she was to continue pouring over the advanced technology used in its report, it would be rude for her to continue perturbing her host.

“Lead the way.” She answered, trying her best to not show she’d seen Aurora’s discomfort. She grabbed the thin glass squares by their metal rim, marvelling at how the ‘programmable’ papers were shockingly light.

Through the open doorway she could see the guiding lights. She couldn’t help but tarry for a moment, giving the form in the tank another glance. She tried for just one second to imagine how it would have been for Aurora if the ship hadn’t come back on; blind, deaf, and numb to the world, but for the wires laced throughout the fish’s body. The mechanical systems kicking on to sustain the prison. Whatever these humans were, they weren’t perfect. This miracle of technology she inhabited these past couple of hours was at a cost.

“So how are you going to find them if you can’t scan the planet?” Twilight asked softly as she rounded the corner. She jolted a bit as Aurora’s grinning face appeared on the electronic paper.

“How do Equestrians find things when their scanners fail? Boots on the ground miss Twilight. I intend to scour your planet. It doesn’t matter how long, nor how far I have to go, I will touch every corner of your world to find them.” Twilight paused a smidgen at the firmness of the words. It wasn’t too different from Applejack. When Aurora put her hoof down she seemed to mean it.

“If we can secure these papers against the shrinking that overtakes you on descent into Equiss’s Atmosphere then it shouldn’t be too hard for me to secure help from Celestia and Luna. Luna will be harder, but… doable.” Twilight gave Aurora an apologetic shrug.








Matsuki grimaced as someone continued to blast on the electric harp. Another shot of that damnable ale was shoved into her hands. Without a second thought she downed it. All around her she could see eyes filled with a new respect. Glancing from her eyes to the long-stemmed rose she wore as a crown.

She was a Jomsviking now. The Skipstjóri*** had confirmed her ennoblement upon arrival. It was, in its own way, disappointing. The world wasn’t brighter, clearer, there was no fount of strength she had been gifted with. The only thing that seemed more certain was her death. She had seen the fatality rates of the Jomsvikings, been forced to study the names of the dead before they would even consider accepting her among their ranks. The fate of a Jomsviking was death, there was no escaping. Sooner or later she would be just as dead as the filthy scum she had cleaned off her bayonet.

Would she die better than they had? Would she break? Would she make a pitiable effort before her end? She had served a good seven years in the military, she’d made effort for this post. She’d earned her handful of medals in that time.

But that was the military, these were the jomsvikings. Where before she had been expected to fight and serve with honour and bravery, the Jomsvikings demanded insanity. She would have to fight harder, faster, smarter, such was the nature of service to the Empress of humanity. The pillar upon which democracy could rest and trust.

Matsuki was shaken from her thought as she was offered the operational side of a blunt, the half smoked marijúana cigar burning softly in the night air.

Without a second though she accepted a lungful, her eyes resting on the woman who had offered it to her. Bayarmaa’s eyes glowed softly in the air, reflecting the embers drifting off the blunt. It was an open invitation, an offer of devotion, and in those eyes Matsuki saw her future. A Jomsviking didn’t die just for the democracy they were sworn to, not just the Empress humanity loved, but also for each other. It was a promise to ensure their last moments were soft no matter how brutal the means of their demise. She’d been told all of this, but in Bayarmaa’s eyes she could see the honesty of those words.

Though, with the look Matsuki saw in those eyes, she got the idea that Bayarmaa didn’t want to wait for death to offer that embrace.

Such was the life of a Jomsviking.