a cryogenic experiment goes wrong, throwing two ponies into the world of chaos eqeustria's turned into.
Bluestone and Stormy Skies participate in an experiment hosted by Stable Tech, on cryogenic storage. Stable Tech however, has very different plans, the two end up in the guts of specially designed Stable four. the two stay lying in sleep for over a hundred years, waiting for the long dead to wake them.
Stormy and I were on our way to the latest way we were going to try to make bits, experimentation, not smart, or safe, but it sure payed well. We weren't hustlers or anything, we just needed it to keep throwing our parties, the crowds might have stopped laughing as often, but thats why we threw parties in the first place. It was getting hard to throw them though, Eqeustria would never admit it, but on top of the tension between the zebra nation and Eqeustria, we were going through what my economics teacher called a "depression", man he'd be proud I remembered that.
As stormy and I walked, we talked about a bunch of stuff that I've forgotten at this point honestly, but it probably wasn't important anyways. So after a good bit of time, we reached our destination, and it was not what I'd expected. The address we'd been given was being used for a festival, except, it wasn't about any season or pony, it was for technology. They probably should've put some tarps over the gadgets in case it rained, but at least it looked cool.
A pegasus with a pair of glasses taped in the middle and a lab coat stained with something blue, but also somehow frosted in places came over. "Welcome, are you Bluestone and Stormy?" We said yes and he continued on, "Excellent, now the letter said to come here because, well, there are enough stories with spies for you to figure it out. So, I will be leading you to the actual destination if you'll just follow me."
The stallion started walking away before we responded and so instead we just followed, as we followed him we saw a few soon to be great inventions. We saw the latest prototype for the terminals, a mess of wires that was supposed to be the next variation of pip bucks, I think at least. After we left the festival we walked along a small cliff until it sloped down to the ground that it was previously towering over, and thats when we turned around and saw it, concealed by the cliff on the edge of town, and not visible from above since it was built into the cliff, the tan pegasus's previous statement about spies suddenly seemed a lot more ominous.
the building itself was about three stories tall, had no windows on the bottom floor, and had excessive windows on the third. As we came closer, we could see more than the side that obtruded from the cliff, and realized that it was really a massive building. The one door we could see was made out of heavy steal and didn't look like it could be opened. But when we actually reached it the stallion didn't seem concerned at all, instead he placed his hoof against a spot on the wall indiscernible from the rest and a muffled buzz sounded from inside the building.
The huge doors slid open, revealing a white hall way that looked like an office reception area, except it had what appeared to be a fax machine in the corner, and there was a a terminal in the wall that had the layout of a video games options menu.
The receptionist merrily greeted us with a "Hello! Its a pleasure to meet you, I'm merin-grad, this'll seem odd at first but I'm going to have to ask you to scan your face in the fax machine." The looks on our faces must have been priceless because she laughed and said, "See I told you it would sound weird."
Even though we were skeptical we scanned our faces with the fax machine, with each scan the terminal screen said, 'processing.... Downloading.... Scan complete! Scan uploaded to data base!' and then reverted to its original state. After Storm and I had scanned our faces the receptionist said, "wonderful, now any time you need to leave, you just have to do that and you'll be home free!"
After the confusing whatever tat was we continued on into the building, once we had exited the receptionist area the interior had become that of a hospital mixed with a school, some doors looking exactly like that of an operating room, and others looking like if you stepped through them teachers would be yelling at you for being late. The strangest were the heavy metal doors interspersed throughout the halls. We didn't enter any of those rooms, the room we did enter however, was amazing.
The walls were white, terminals painted to match, two elevated areas, and the railings were even made of glass. On one elevated area, there were a bunch of terminals and scientific instruments I couldn't hope to figure out, and on the other stood two cylindrical pods with wires coming out of every crevice. The room itself however, was very cold, and the pods edited a sort of steam that was cold instead of hot, so when we were offered blue and yellow barding, we gladly put them on, we were so glad we didn't even ask why it felt like there were meal plates sewn into it.
after we'd gotten into the uniforms of sorts, the stallion who'd led us here told us the truth, "I'm not the one who sent tat letter, Applejack did. And before you start asking questions, lets let applejack have a chance to explain." He nodded at a mare sitting behind a terminal near the back of the room and she levitated over a recording device, the stallion activated it.
Applejack's voice started playing through the speakers "Now, I don't like being lied to, so ah won't lie to ya either. The truth a' why y'all are here is that Eqeustria might be close to something bad, something very bad. The barding ah've given ya' is to protect you if Eqeustria turns out worse than ah' think it will, but thats probably not gonna happen." Applejack pauses for a short time, "You are going to be frozen, and your going to be frozen until we're able ta' have zebras in the same towns as ponies. The reason YOU of all ponies are being frozen, is simple. Your good ponies, and if Eqeustria turns for the worse, I need ya to remember that. You might be our only hope."
The recording ends and I look at the pods again, this time knowing what they're meant to do. "I'll do it."
My sister looks at me grimly, "are you serious?" I simply nod, "Well now I have to do it. Can't leave you alone wherever you end up." I smile, she always has my back no matter what.
As we enter the pods I look at the stallions name tag, 'Dr. Harrington', then the mare's 'Dr. Amethyst'. He starts talking again, "now, all you have to do is relax, and let the machine do its work." The pods door closes with a hiss, and the machine starts its procedure.
a feminine AI says, "Vitals, level. Hatches, secured. stasis in, five, four, three, two, one................"
I was wet, and very cold, and on the floor. When I got up, I knew something had gone wrong, hint number one were the two skeletons in the corner, number two, was the unnecessary furniture piled against the door. As I looked around I heard a hissing, and then a feminine voice said; "emergency protocol initiated; opening pod 2". I watched the pod opening, mist pouring out, and trotted over.
My sister suffered the same fate I did, a fall, except I was able to pull her to a sitting position against the wall. Thats when I noticed something I hadn't seen, the holsters on our jumpsuits. I was okay with barding laced with lead, but holsters too? They didn't want anything going wrong, or we weren't who they were meant for, or I was looking to far into it. After I'd seen the holster, I noticed the simple wooden door on the opposite side of the room, and I went over to open it.
When I opened the door, what I saw was truly frightening, not only did they give us barding, but attached to the room where we were frozen was a room full of supplies, it looked like it was meant for two ponies. The only thing wrong with the scene was the massive amount of food wrappers strewn about the floor, most likely from the two ponies outside. The closet; in total, contained a flashlight, four batteries, two knives, two pistols, two saddlebags, and an assorted supply of drugs and potions, all the potions looked like healing potions, but the weren't as bright as I remembered them. They had truly expected all-out war, they never expected peace.
Most of these I'd never herd of before, I mean, Buff-out, Dash, Rage, Buck, Stampede, Steady, Fixer, Mint-als, Party time Mint-als. I had no idea what any of these did, we were frozen long enough for Eqeustria to make nine separate drugs. After viewing the display of drugs I focused on the last things in the closet, the pistols, they were not like any I'd seen before, but neither were the drugs.
the two pistols were both magazine-fed, and after checking the rounds piled up in the corner, I could safely say they were 9-millimeters. as I was inspecting the pistols, I heard a groan, and holstered one before going to check on my sister. she was awake now, and she did not look happy.
"Why am I whet and cold?" she was glaring at me as if I'd gotten her wet.
"Well, sister, how do you unfreeze something?"
"You defrost it of- oh, never-mind." she turned red and looked down.
"So," I started, "we were in there for a REALLY long time." She looked at me, questioningly.
"what do you- oh. thats what you mean." She'd spotted the skeletons, the two had died holding each other.
"Yeah" I put the second pistol in her holster, "Thats why your taking this, and this." I holstered the knife in her suit as well.
My sister looked back to me, "Do they have anything?" I shrugged and went over to check on the corpses. The first thing I noticed was Dr. Harrington's name tag.
"oh." Thats all I could get out, because with him here, I know that whatever happened wasn't long after we were put in stasis. Dr. Amethyst was the mare he was holding, and judging from the wrappers in the closet, and the barricaded door, they hadn't gone peacefully. My sister had started to cry, she'd just sat down next to them and started crying. I noticed an audio recording next to them, a different one than from when we were first frozen, and decided to play it.
the stallions voice started pouring out of its tinny speakers, "The Mega-spells have been dropped, we didn't think they would do it. But they did, and we could here it. a boom that could be heard even down here. and now the experiments have escaped, and we've barricaded the doors. We should never have made them, they're just monsters, thats all the are." He takes in a shaky breath, "We won't make it, your really Equestria's only chance."
The recorder is moved around in the recording, and then a amethyst starts speaking "you can use the pip bucks in the closet, they should help you, and you can take our files from ours once they're on." Amethyst has a coughing fit and Harrington starts speaking again.
"just stay safe, your all thats left." The recording clicks and stops playing, I'm crying too now. The two of us sit there for a while before we move at all.
"We should sleep, and then we should go." My sister just nods in agreement and lays in a corner of the room, I follow and lay her her, and somehow sleep finds me.
Perk added: 'sympathy', you have sympathy for ponies in difficult situations, this opens dialog options with specific characters and makes those characters more likely to side with you.
I awoke to a rattling door, and an empty stomach, my sister still sleeping in the corner. My hunger had sharpened my perception, and I noticed that a few of the terminals had their back panels unscrewed, wires hanging from their openings. as I trotted over, doing my best to ignore the scratching at the door, i tried to turn on the nearest terminal. Its screen lit up, the only problem was that it was only showing code.
With that terminal out, I checked the next two terminals, both dead. The last terminal I checked was one with its back removed, it seemed pointless to check. But when I did, the screen lit up! And it had words I could understand on it!
Initiating....
Procedure complete, welcome, Dr. Harrington.
Seeing his name made me remember the recording he and Amethyst had left us, the fact that they had recorded that before giving up was worthy of more than laying in this room forever, they deserved better than that. I decided I'd try to bury them, well, if I got out of here. I cringed at the thought My sister and I might not make it out of here, mentally scolding myself.
But it was true, the scratching at the door proved it. But I couldn't think like that, these two ponies never gave up, why should I? giving up would have made their hope pointless, and I didn't want to betray them, even if they'd already died. I shook my head, this could wait till later, right now I had to find out what happened. The computer screen displayed its greeting message, and gave me three options; experiment data, diary, and a corrupted file.
Not knowing what the corrupted file was, I selected it, and was given a screen saying, 'this file is corrupted, please select a different one.' I selected the experiment data, not comfortable with reading his diary, and began to read. The experiment was headed by the ministry of Wartime Technology, Applejack, to see if ponies could potentially survive for short periods of time under cryogenic stasis. When the war became full blown and the Megaspells got involved, Applejack decided the risks of extended cryogenic-stasis were less than the gains of some pony remembering what Equestria was before the war.
Many of the original Scientists left the project because, they didn't want to be blamed for us being in stasis too long, but Dr. Harrington and Dr. Amethyst were two o the few who didn't leave. The two alone weren't sufficient to keep the machines under observation, and more scientists were assigned to the project. A few scientists planned for the worst and stocked the closet with food, ammunition, and weaponry. The file ends saying that we were going through stasis better than expected, and that we might be able to stay for hundreds of years, and checking the date on the terminal, we'd done just that, we'd stayed in cryogenic-stasis for just under two hundred years.
That explained a lot, why the glass had enough dust to look like it was painted gray, why the terminals' white coats looked like they were overused t-shirts, and it even explained why the pods had malfunctioned, two hundred years without maintenance was simply too long. The things it didn't explain were the creatures still being alive after hundreds of years being trapped in a building, and why the lights were STILL on, two hundred years and the lights had only dimmed.
The experiment data giving no hints as to what happened with the megaspells, I was forced to read Harringtons diary. I started a few weeks before our experiment began, hoping it wasn't explicit. He wrote about the two of us being great people for the experiment, talked about our parties, and said we only tried to bring people up. A few days after he wrote about how hard it was to assemble the pods, each apparently having to fit us perfectly to stop the sickness that should have come with stasis.
He then wrote for an entire week about how his relationship with his mare-friend was going. After two days writing about her, he wrote her name, Amethyst. After writing about his mare-friend he started talking about how coworkers weren't supposed to be in relationships and how hard it was for him to hide it. He had literally wrote about Amethyst for an entire week.
After he writes all of that he writes that they finally removed the policy, and provides a download for security footage of a ding hall somewhere in the building. He continues writing about his observations during the experiment, one of which was that when we had frozen we were facing straight forwards, but somehow after week two we were facing each other, and the equipment for reading magic levels had started picking up more magical activity than usual.
There were three more entries in his diary, one dated three weeks after the others. I selected the third to last one, in which he wrote about his recent engagement to Amethyst, and how happy he was when she'd said yes. The second to last one only contained hints of the happiness from the last one, it starts with the two's plan for a honeymoon in the crystal empire, but fades into worries about the tensions between the zebra and pony nations, and that he was becoming worried that even if war didn't break out, we'd be their only hope.
The last one was written as though whoever was writing it had lost hope, in it he talked about the booms they'd heard and felt, and about how the radiation shielding of the building should protect them. He talked about how Amethyst had to repair the computer, and how some of the experiments had escaped, and from the sounds he could hear, had taken revenge.
the last words were directed to us, "Bluestone, Stormy. I am writing this without much hope of writing another, and want you to know that whatever happens to us, you can't let happen to you. you have to survive, you have to remember. There is a sky wagon in a garage on the third floor, its attached to the dining hall near the edge of outside of the building. Take care, and goodbye, Dr. Harrington"