Occupational Hazards
Occupational Hazards
MLP:FiM
By: Kestrel
The Canterlot Wonderbolt Compound towered over the three young fillies on their way to the front doors. Each Cutie Mark Crusader was in pure awe as they came to the entrance. Even though only Scootaloo was a pegasus and only she would likely completely appreciate their visit, the grandeur and size of the building had Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom’s mouths agape.
About a week ago, Scootaloo received a letter from her idol who had just recently become a recruit in the Wonderbolts and was now living there full-time. In the message, she had asked Scootaloo, and by extension, her friends if they wanted to come down for a tour. Needless to say, the girls accepted.
Once they entered into the compound, it didn’t take long for Rainbow Dash to come to greet them.
“Hey girls!” Rainbow called out. “I hope you guys have been having fun without me at Ponyville.”
Scootaloo scuffed the floor with her hoof and made an exasperated head motion while the other two smiled and nodded.
“It’s been about twenty percent less cool with you gone,” Scootaloo told her honorary big sister. Rainbow gave a sheepish smile to her little apprentice.
“Well, then we’d better start making up for lost time, starting with this tour,” Rainbow replied. “You’ll get to see what I do now.”
“Yippee!” Apple Bloom yelled out, with Sweetie Belle eliciting her own cheer of approval.
Rainbow started making her way toward the large double doors in one of the main hallways of the compound. Scootaloo, Sweetie, and Apple Bloom all followed in a single-file line behind the lead mare. As she arrived at the doors, she halted and made a head motion into the room to show her little friends.
“This is our mess hall, where we eat nothing but almost raw food cooked by our expert chefs,” she droned, having to force the sentence out of her mouth. She also had to push back the terrifying memories of the nearly unbearable food she ate during the tryout phase of her testing, holding back a gag. “Say hi to the guys over there.”
As the three fillies looked in, they all nervously waved a hoof at some of the recruit squads gathered at the tables, enjoying their lunch. All the Wonderbolts present gave polite waves and friendly smiles back. Starstruck by celebrities, the crusaders shuffled on out to avoid embarrassing themselves.
“Heh heh,” Rainbow laughed. “I was just like that the first time that I came to see these guys with Soarin. It’s definitely tough at first.”
The afternoon sun beamed down brightly and radiated warmth to the four ponies as they exited the compound out the back, opening up to an expansive training field, consisting of a track as well as the aerial obstacle courses.
“Wow, y’all have a running track?” Apple Bloom asked. “Ah thought the Wonderbolts only practiced their flying.”
Rainbow gave a polite shake of her head, disproving the little earth pony.
“Nah, the Wonderbolts have to train their leg muscles and be quick on their hooves too, so we can take off faster,” Rainbow Dash explained. “You should have seen my wingmate Star run the track a few weeks ago!” she laughed. “It took her ages to complete a lap, she’s fast, but she’s smaller than you guys, and without her wings, she can’t make a stride at all!”
The fillies all shared their laughs with Rainbow as she commenced to roll about on the grass. They all stopped moving for a moment to enjoy each other’s company, but the sun’s rays filled them with vigor and Rainbow soon jumped back to her hooves.
“Alright, enough rest,” she announced. “Let’s get back to the tour!” To reply, the fillies all let out a collective cheer, loud enough to be heard by any of the Wonderbolts in the vicinity and causing one of the current flyers training in the air to lose his flight due to covering his ears and not focusing.
The poor stallion crashed into a nearby bush and the leaves of the plant shook violently. He was angry! Rainbow took the stallion’s inability to see beyond the leaves to quickly shepard the crusaders back into the building before he started to yell at them.
Later, she took them on a visit to squad Foxtrot’s barracks, showing off her office and leading her around to introduce her friends to the squadmates who were there. As usual, Squall merely turned around at the sight of the fillies and huffed and pouted until they went away. He wasn’t too good with foals, big shocker.
Dash tried to introduce them to Matteo, but Sweetie Belle couldn’t bring herself to move closer than she had to. The crusaders exchanged greetings with the hulking gryphon while skirting around him. Though slightly disheartened that Sweetie Belle was too scared to see him for the softie he was, Rainbow figured it would just take time for Sweetie to find her courage.
Apple Bloom came to the entrance to Twister’s room and began to walk inside. Springing to action, Rainbow immediately grabbed the earth pony and flew her away, before boarding up the room with some tape.
“No! no, no, no, we are not going in there,” Rainbow said quickly, hoping to spare her young friends from the insanity within. Sighing and saddened, the fillies all shuffled out of the barracks, Rainbow being unable to shoo them away faster than she could with a grimace on her face.
They all stopped to play a few games of team ping-pong in the rec room, meeting more ponies in the Wonderbolts until they were assailed by the likes of Surprise, who quickly dominated the scene.
Even four on one, the tour groupers couldn’t best Surprise. And just when all hope seemed lost, something even worse happened…
“Heya everyone!” Twister announced, popping out from an inexplicable black hole in the floor that wasn’t there three seconds ago. “It looks like you damsels are in need of some jolly co-operation! I’ll slay this ping-pong witch with my trusty master paddle!”
Putting on a knight’s helmet, he turned to face Surprise only to be nailed in the face by a serve faster than lightning. Twister laughed maniacally and returned the favor with his own serve, literally lighting the ping-pong ball on fire with his serve.
As the two outrageous ponies duked it out in a mortal duel of paddles, Rainbow and the other three fillies backed away slowly, the creep factor going off the chart in a matter of seconds.
With the rec room lost to madness, Rainbow decided to continue the girls on their way.
Their tour continued with a visit the weight room and exercising briefly, seeing the medical bay, and a visit to the office of the great Captain Spitfire, complete with an extremely boring lecture over the history and training of the Wonderbolts, the girls finally began to round out their tour by descending to the basement.
Rainbow opened up the doors to the workshop and a whole new world of things came into view. While the rest of the compound was blue and had various things and places devoted to physical training, this room had no paint and had nothing but machinery as far as the eye could see.
The first thing they noticed outside of the initial contrast to the rest of the compound was the clatter and noise behind a wall. Turning the corner, Rainbow came to see the Wonderbolts’ engineer, Rivet. He removed his goggles and started to stretch. Sensing that something was amiss, he turned around, jumping out of his seat when the four ponies had seemingly appeared from out of thin air.
“And this, girls, is Rivet, our engineer!” Rainbow declared, trying to make Rivet feel proud of his contributions, but he just shied away behind a wing as the mare tried to talk him up. “He makes all of our training course junk and also has helped us out with a lot of other equipment.”
“I-I don’t know about that, I just do my job, it’s not much…” Rivet mumbled as he looked away. Rainbow rolled her eyes at the small yellow stallion. He never took any credit, even when it was so obviously his. One would think with a gear for his cutie mark, he’d know how important he was to the Wonderbolts’ ‘mechanism.’
Since she knew she wouldn’t get any more out of him, she decided to take the tour of this room she so seldomly visited into her own hooves. As she led the amazed fillies around, Rivet followed, unable to voice his discontent with the little ponies in his workshop. This was no place for them to be.
Suddenly, a loud siren blared throughout the compound. Rainbow stiffened and her heart raced. It was the emergency siren! She and the other Wonderbolts would have to sortie out immediately to take down a threat to Equestria somewhere. Rivet, meanwhile, stumbled back and fell out of shock from the unexpected blast of noise.
“Sorry girls, I’ve got to go right now!” Rainbow exclaimed. “Rivet!” she demanded. “I need you to watch over these fillies while I’m gone. I’ll be back as soon as I can!”
With a rush of wind, she took off from her spot and flew at a high speed to convene with all the Wonderbolts to receive briefing before sortieing to move out. Rivet, in an impressive show of speed, rushed to the door and tried to hail down the mare before she flew out of sight to no avail. Stuck with three fillies and having absolutely no help, Rivet did what any upstanding and strong male model would do at a time like this: faint!
When Rivet came to a minute later, the three fillies were standing over him. Picking up what was left of his dignity, Rivet lifted himself to his hooves and brushed himself off, fixing his posture. The initial shock of being saddled with sudden foal care had worn off. On the inside, Rivet was still nervous, but he did his best to put up a brave front.
“Alright girls, don’t worry, everything’s fine and Captain Dash will be back soon,” he began to quickly explain. “You all are going to sit tight in here. Oh! And no messing with any of the equipment! Any questions?”
The three fillies looked back and forth between one another, all sporting confused expressions. Keep their hooves off the equipment? What in here wasn’t equipment? Finally, Scootaloo raised a hoof.
“Yes?” Rivet questioned her.
“Yeah… why are you like, the only pony on the Wonderbolt compound who isn’t super cool?” she asked, sounding more like a remark than a question. Rivet’s self-confidence took a nosedive in his chest. He suddenly felt like giving up and crying into his pillow when he went to sleep.
“Hey!” he retorted defensively. “I do cool things too!” Rivet was somewhat indignant. It was just like little ponies to not even think about what they couldn’t see. Who else would have made all the things that the flight teams practiced on? “Nopony else thinks it’s cool either…” he added quickly and under his breath. Forcing a smile despite his irritated state, Rivet bid the fillies farewell and returned to his work.
As he returned to his workbench, he could hear the three fillies chattering about their tour in behind him. While the noise bothered him, he concluded it to be better than them directly pestering him.
Tuning them out, he set back down to work. Taking a screwdriver in his mouth, he picked up a screw and placed it into its hole. He was putting the finishing touches on a hydraulic piston meant to launch out at Wonderbolt recruits during their training cycles.
A few more minutes and then… done! Having replaced the protective casing on the inner workings of the machine, it was ready for use. Come to think of it… he had a captive audience to show!
“Hey girls!” he called out.
Silence.
That couldn’t be good.
Rivet walked out into the entry area where he had talked to the girls just three minutes ago. Maybe they could have just quieted down and taken naps like good little fillies? Maybe. He turned the corner. Probably not. He heard a sudden crash. Definitely not! Rivet took off at a sprint toward the noise.
Oh no, oh no, oh no! Not my machines!
Racing around as fast as his little legs could carry him, he rounded the corner to see Apple Bloom standing amidst the wreckage of his new moving ring machine that flyers were supposed to go through. He had just built that a week ago! Rivet glared harshly at the young earth pony.
“What? Ah wanted to play with the hula-hoops,” she answered gingerly, showing a sheepish grin.
“Hula-hoops!? These are highly technical rings meant for aerodynamic drills!” he yelled in anger. “And that machine you wrecked was supposed to be for a new course that needs to be completed in two days! Now I have to pull an all-nighter to fix that one!”
Rivet was absolutely steamed. He had just deliberately told her and her friends to stay out of things, and he was already one machine down in less than ten minutes.
“Go back to the lobby, and sit down,” Rivet said through gritted teeth with an awkwardly placed and clearly forced smile. His left eye twitched slightly as his face reddened and he stomped his hoof impatiently on the ground. “You need to go think about what you did, little missy!”
The little filly sighed dejectedly as she walked away with her head slumped down. The cute little red bow she wore seemed to sag with her. As she passed Rivet, she reached up a hoof to wipe a tear from her eyes. Rivet’s heart just melted and broke.
“Okay, I’m sorry… Just, please be more careful,” he sighed as he regained his cool. Rivet really loved foals and looked forward to the day he’d have his own. He was just really dedicated to his work as well. The stallion decided he’d have to make sure not to be overly harsh on them.
“O-okay, Mister Rivet,” she said with a sniffle. Rivet decided that he could give her a little apology… In the form of a ride!
With a sudden yelp from Apple Bloom, Rivet had scooped her up and placed her on his back and took to the air in a very controlled flight path to avoid all the various hanging obstacles. The little filly’s sorrow fell away as she cracked a huge smile.
“Whee!” she exclaimed. “This is so cool! No wonder Scootaloo likes Rainbow Dash so much.”
“Woah!” another filly’s voice exclaimed. “I want a ride too after I get off of this one!” Rivet glanced around nervously. Another ride? This place wasn’t an amusement park. It was a professional area full of dangerous things that should be left out of a foal’s reach.
Rivet pinpointed the voice of the filly and locked onto the little unicorn riding the conveyer belt like it was a common escalator. The filly had been distracted, so she didn’t notice what had made Rivet’s heart stop: she was headed toward the furnace that heated the metal he worked with!
Dumping off Apple Bloom on his chair in his office area, he raced toward Sweetie Belle, dodging every obstacle with near perfect execution. He could fly through the place blind. Sweetie reached up with her hooves as he approached.
“Cool!” she squeaked in her high-pitched voice. “My turn!”
Rivet landed on the conveyer belt and picked up the filly, putting her onto his back. With her sight now turned around, she noticed just how close she had come to danger and let out a scream. Startled by the ear-shattering noise, Rivet’s composure was broken and he tripped.
Scrambling to his feet, he took flight before they could come any closer to the flames. It felt really hot up close, so he pushed off and took the filly with him. He quickly came to the realization that the heat wasn’t dying out. In fact, the heat was only getting hotter. It started to burn! He turned around to see his tail was caught full of embers, singeing his poor tail.
Taking a dive, he placed Sweetie on the ground and dashed off to submerge himself in his nearest raincloud on hoof.
He jumped into the cloud as it came into his view and felt the immediate relief of water soothing his burn. Now that his physical burn had faded, his ire began to stoke once more, and he lifted his now damp head out of the cloud and fixated on Sweetie Belle.
“Hey you guys, look at me! I’m gonna do something Rainbow Dash does all the time on Nightmare Night!” a brash voice sounded out from above.
But before he could let out a single word to scold her, he noticed the orange one heading for his high voltage clouds at the top of his cloud testing area! He couldn’t seem to catch a break!
Bursting from the cloud, he splashed water all over the surrounding floor and raced toward the filly. Her wings were thankfully still weaker than his were, despite having a rather frail body. As they approached the clouds, arcs of electricity surged across the fluffy texture.
Before Scootaloo could reach the clouds and try to move them to pull her prank, Rivet caught her by flinging out his hoof to catch her. He started to fly back down, forcefully nudging her along every few yards.
“Yowch!” Rivet cried out as a lightning bolt found its way to his plot. “Yowowowowow!”
His poor plot stung like as if a bunch of Everfree bees had found their way to him. He was glad it was him rather than his charge, but why this kind of thing always happen to him!?
To add insult to injury, Scootaloo laughed hysterically at Rivet’s plight. Rivet let out a small whimper, unable to speak for the moment, still recovering from the shock, both literally and mentally.
As he landed, his legs wobbled and he fell down, earning a small bruise on his chest since he couldn’t manage to catch himself on the way down. His wings flapped wildly, but they were at least still working.
He had thankfully managed to earn a few minutes of rest. After he recovered bodily function, (thank goodness he didn’t have to use the bathroom earlier!) he surveyed the rooms, seeing Scootaloo snickering back at him when saw her, earning a frown from the abused stallion. In the entry area, Apple Bloom was reading up on one of his repair manuals, which excited him greatly to see a young one taking an interest in his work.
But where was the third? She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. This could only mean one thing for Rivet… pain.
He cautiously made his way into the testing area, avoiding the pieces of the moving ring machine that had been decimated only some fifteen minutes ago. The stallion let out an extremely masculine scream in the most stallionly falsetto ever heard as he witnessed Scootaloo attempting to try out the firing piston made for testing out training armor.
With a sudden burst of speed, Rivet soared over to Scootaloo and pushed her out of the way, earning himself a bludgeoning to the face, and he fell to the ground with his vision in a haze…
“Ow… what happened?” Rivet asked himself as he woke up from his little nap.
The three fillies were standing over him quietly, just staring at him.
“What? Is there something on my face?” Rivet asked the three little ponies as he got back up on his hooves. Each of the three girls gave a different sort of bodily reaction. Apple Bloom looked away, avoiding eye contact. Sweetie Belle pondered how to put her thoughts exactly. Meanwhile, Scootaloo just came out and said it.
“Yeah, you miiiiight wanna take a look in a mirror.”
Rivet made his way over to the nearest reflective metal in the room and saw the damage. His right eye was blackened from the hit he took. Sighing to himself, he merely took a piece of cardboard and duct taped it in place as a makeshift eyepatch.
Eying the girls with an unamused expression, they all just slowly shuffled back to the waiting area. Rivet finally had peace once more. With silence achieved, he settled back down to the nearly completed project he had been working on. For about five minutes, things went smoothly until he heard another disturbance.
Walking out to a once more empty room, he groaned and began his search anew, with a dogged lag in his steps.
Turning another tight corner with an obstructed view, Rivet thought to himself that he really needed to try to clean the place up once more. But suddenly a sharp thought ripped straight through his brain, and more specifically, his hoof as he lifted it up with a yelp to realize he had stepped on a nail.
As he entered the workshop repair room, he was the picture of a foalsitter in way over his head. He had suffered a black eye, a small scorch, a lightning strike, had his machines broken, and stepped on a nail. It couldn’t get much worse than this.
Sitting over the broken ring machine, Apple Bloom was working hard at trying to fix the poor, wrecked device. Rivet limped over and smiled. Despite all the pain and suffering he had gone through, he was happy to see the young earth pony be so responsible.
“Hey…” he started. “You want some help with that?” The filly jumped in surprised, but turned to see the ragged engineer and smiled with the screwdriver still in her mouth. Rivet picked up a wrench in his and set about guiding her through the steps to putting the machine back together.
In about an hour, with only limited interruptions to check on the other fillies, Rivet and Apple Bloom had repaired the machine she had broken a little while ago. The two ponies clapped their hooves together in delight, right as Scootaloo whizzed past them, causing a big crashing sound followed by laughter from Sweetie Belle and another crash, crushing Rivet’s good mood.
Rivet ran out, disgruntled by the other two fillies as Apple Bloom just laughed.
“I think you’re the best Wonderbolt here, Mr. Rivet,” she said to herself. She followed her newest friend out to join him in a chase against her fellow crusaders.
“Geez, I’m bushed…” Rainbow heaved out as she stepped through the doors to the compound, with rips and tears in her flight suit. She made head motions to her squadmates to come join her. “Come on, we’re still just fine, it was only a couple of Ursa tearing up the countryside, don’t be such foals about it,” she huffed. The others all limped in with groans as Rainbow moved her head from side to side, popping a few joints.
“Rainbow Dash!” three little voices cried out. Rainbow snapped her attention forward once again to see the Cutie Mark Crusaders barrel around a corner with grins on their faces. Rainbow met them with open arms and flashed a winning grin at them.
“Sorry about having to bail out on you all!” Rainbow apologized to the girls. “Things got a bit hairy with a couple of huge Ursas. But don’t worry, Equestria’s safe now!”
“Wow, Rainbow, you’re so cool! I can’t wait to grow up and be a Wonderbolt just like you!” Scootaloo exclaimed.
The doors flew open once more and a small mare with a light colored coat and a tri-colored mane walked into the scene. Rainbow smiled at her and herded the fillies over to her, much to the mare’s immediate embarrassment.
“Oh, you guys should totally meet one of my new friends, Shine Struck. She’s the leader of one of the other squads on the compound,” Rainbow explained. She noticed Shine’s expression and remembered her friend’s personal space. “Oh, right… she’s kinda shy,” Rainbow admitted sheepishly.
“It’s okay…” Shine replied. “I’m working on it, and your friends are pretty cute little fillies.”
Shine gave a convincing smile and looked quizzically around.
“That’s weird though… Didn’t you say you left them with Rivet?” Shine asked. “I don’t see him anywhere.”
At the mention of Rivet, Rainbow looked up and around, just noticing his absence. After a few more scans of the entry room, Rainbow just gave a shrug to Shine.
“I don’t know where he is, he was supposed to be watching them,” she said, motioning to the cheering fillies. “Well, they’re all safe and I did kind of push them off onto him, so I guess he did an okay job in my book.”
Shine thanked Rainbow for the help that she did manage to give, which wasn’t a lot, and made her way to the only place Rivet would likely be, the workshop.
As she neared the door to the workshop, Shine noticed a lot of things that were just… off. There were paint marks all over the ground, random tools were strewn about, and did she smell… pancakes? Rivet was usually a messy, but he had a method to his mess, this was just weird for him.
She opened the door and her mouth dropped. There were so many things broken, left out, and covered in pancake batter. Rivet would have never let this happen. She was starting to get legitimately worried for her friend and first technical boss.
She took to the air, but stayed low to the ground. With all the things on the ground and walls, she didn’t even want to chance looking up.
Shine rounded each of the tight corners of the workshop and witnessed more and more carnage.
Finally, Shine Struck came to a wall near the back of the room and saw her objective. Rivet was stuck to a wall, spinning around on a gear. He had a fixed scowl on his face, with his hooves crossed over his chest. Shine had to stifle a laugh.
“Rivet! What the hay happened to you?” Shine exclaimed, desperately trying to hide her laughter. Rivet just narrowed his eyes at her, flawlessly keeping his expression whilst spinning on the gear, his vision constantly inverting.
“Shine, I really don’t want to talk about it…”