Chapter 1 : Surprisingly Slow Start

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Dave shivered in cold morning air. It was barely past 5 a.m. and the bus wouldn't turn up for another half an hour, yet Dave always preferred being early to having even a ghost of chance of being late.

His thoughts returned to contract. It was lucrative, but came with a lot of strings attached. Never once in his life Dave had to sign stacks of NDAs this thick.
On the other hand, getting rid of the debt his engineering degree has put him in, and being paid VERY handsomely on top of that - it was quite the opportunity.

Dave yawned and habitually checked his watch for the umpteenth time.

By this time other folks started showing up at the bus stop. Most of them were freshly graduated engineers, but there were some people in military uniform and a bunch of formally-dressed old-timers that Dave couldn't place. His mind's wandering was suddenly interrupted by booming voice.

"Is that Dave Smith or my eyes are playing tricks on me?"

The sound of a familiar voice made Dave turn on heels and focus on tall muscular man making his way through to him.

"Boris! You rascal, you also got the offer?"

"You betcha I did!" Boris flung his hands up in cheering gesture, expressive as ever.

He then swung wide in a deliberately slow and exaggerated wind-up for their trademark over-the-top fist-bump. Dave reciprocated, lightly tapping his knuckles on a fist that was almost the size of his head.
Boris yanked his enormous hand away and shook it, while grimacing and blowing on the knuckles as if to soothe immense pain. His characteristic sense of humor hasn't changed one bit.

"Damn, it is good to see you again, man!"

"Likewise, my friend, likewise."

With Boris in the same boat, the day instantly got better.
The two chatted away, catching up on events since graduation.

"So it's just us? I was wondering if Jim made it here someho-"

HONK!
Bus driver was clearly running out of patience waiting for last two passengers to board.

"Crap, we better get on the bus!"

Endless, lifeless and completely featureless landscape of desert slowly drifted by in the window.

All of a sudden Boris looked around the bus with sly expression and motioned for Dave to pull off his headphones and lean in.
"I did some digging. This place we've landed job at - it has something to do with High Energy Physics," he whispered.

"Oh so these-" Dave motioned his head to suits on back seat "-eggheads must be nuclear physicists then."

"Yep! So, it draws insane amount of electricity off the state grid, AND it has several dedicated power plants. It's also guarded better than Fort Knox, but you already know that. What do you think it is?"

"Hmm, I bet it's some sort of new-generation particle accelerator or something. I'm not a physics expert."

Dave narrowed his eyes and stared into the ceiling intently before continuing.
"But then again - why'd they need greenhorn gunsmiths like us? I don't get it."

Boris shrugged "Beats me, man. I guess we gotta wait and see..."

Numerous checkpoints and one detection dog sniff-down later, bus has finally creaked to a complete stop having reached it's destination. By now sun was high and beating down mercilessly.
Uniformed men hurried everyone out of the bus and into the pleasantly cool building.

After dropping off luggage onto named carts, everyone flocked after the impeccably dressed but otherwise unremarkable company representative leading them on through the building.
Soon they found themselves in the large room with rows of seats, projector and dimmed lights.

Dave covered his face in desperation.
"Oh no, not another one of these briefings."

"What is it?" Boris whispered in surprised tone.

"Bigwig in a suit that's three years worth of my salary plus projector plus first day in company?.. Put two and two and two together, Boris!"

"Hmmmm, oh, I can see where this is going..."

"Yes, exactly, zero practical info and a lot of corporate speak for the classic 'we care for you, now work more for less' hogwash!"

Dave sighed heavily.
Hubbub in dark room was interrupted by representative tapping his glass of water with pen.
Dave winced in anticipation.

After making sure he's got everyone's attention, representative inhaled deeply but before he could even make a sound the door creaked open and short man in labcoat and a clipboard leaned in.
"I'm terribly sorry; We need to borrow someone with mechanical engineering background for a bit; It's kind of urgent!"

Dave jumped onto his feet and walked to labcoat at a brisk pace.
"MSME, Background in firearm industry, let's not waste time!" He shot out and turned to representative "If that's OK with you, of course."

Representative stared at Dave with slight disbelief at the insolence for a few seconds and then finally exhaled with a strange gutteral sound that Dave couldn't help but liken to the sound of a deflating balloon.
"OK, sure."

That was only confirmation Dave needed, so he slipped out of dark room before representative could change his mind.

Guy in the labcoat introduced himself as the lead assistant Mark, and immediately cut to the chase.
"So there's this mechanical issue on minus eighth floor, it crops up all the time, but entirety of maintenance crew came down with some sort of stomach bug. Today, of all the days!"

They entered the elevator and Mark hurriedly pressed the -8 button.
"We run preliminary tests today, and it's imperative that all of the doors work fine, if the test fails, the higher ups are going to have my head on the platter, and this is considering that we're running ahead of schedule by..."

Dave could not help but doze off under unyielding onslaught of largely unnecessary internal politics trivia, so when after a long elevator ride elevator doors finally opened with a beep and a click he jumped a little.
"...And this why you don't take peyote before visiting a water park! Oh, we seem to have arrived."

Wasting no time, Mark practically dragged Dave out of elevator and through set of twisty corridors before stopping in front of large metal shutters.

"This is the place," Mark swiped the security card and set of metal shutters opened with surprising speed.
He continued "So, long story short, you need to repair a door, just go forward and turn at the first left, you can't possibly miss it!"

Mark waved in the direction of new opening.
"Just go, sorry I can't show you in person, I got to report to superiors like THIS NOW!" He threw before vanishing into some doorway.

Mark pushed on but could not help but complain to himself.
"On nice. Now I get to do some janitor's job. Door repair, pffff! I can see my education is really paying for itself!"

After rounding the corner of featureless white concrete he exited into a tall passageway. Some sort of giant pipe was running along the passageway on the ceiling.
Dave looked around and finally spotted the door in question leading to next section of passageway.

"Well, at least Mark could have mentioned that door in question was a huge honkin' hydraulic blast door!"

Said door was half-shut and wedged firmly in visibly dented tool chest.

Dave ducked under door and crawled into the next section of passageway, hoping for tool chest to hold lest he be guillotined by door in half.

On the inside there were tell-tale signs of repair work in progress: ladder, opened access hatches on the wall, torn out floor tiles and finally a toolbox sitting squarely in the middle of this mess.

"OK, maybe it's a bit more advanced than some janitor's job."
Dave cracked a smile "But then again, I can easily imagine all janitors having PhDs in this place."

Finally some actual work was laid in front of him, and he took to it eagerly.

Mark pushed open the door to control room.
"Hey, Mr. Henderson, I've got good news, today's test will be on time!"

Man in central chair did not even bother to rotate to face Mark.
"Of course it will. We accounted for that darn door staying open and started the whole shebang several minutes ago."

"B-b-but I got a technician to go take care of it!.. He's in there right now..."

"You did WHAT!?"

Mark made an attempt to hide behind his clipboard.

Dave crawled out of maintenance hatch and carefully descended shaky ladder.
"Let's see if it works now," he muttered to himself, pressing the "open" button on blast door control panel.
Blast door started sliding up.

"Good, now - close Sesame!"
He gave mangled tool chest a punt, moving it out of door's way and pressed "close" button.
Door obediently slid down without a hitch.

"Looks like I'm done here. Heck, that was pretty quick, I might want to chill here a bit to skip this corporate nonsense. Can't imagine how Boris deals with this cra-"

Without any warning the lights went down. After a second in complete silence, low-power red lights kicked in.

"Uh-oh..."
Suddenly everything started shaking.

"OK. Remain calm," Dave said to himself. "No reason to panic yet; After all, blast door's inner guts are right here, and I've got tools."

As if on cue, with the particularly nasty shake, toolbox careened over the edge and fell down from ladder before bouncing into opened floor tile and plunging into depths below.

"OK. NOW I'm in trouble!"
Dave closed his eyes.
"Inhale. Exhale. Let's review options - what useful tools I got on my person?"
He started going over the pockets.
"Caliper - no, calculator - no, 6 inch knife - can potentially cut the hydraulics but let's not resort to that just yet, Phone-"
The shaking suddenly started gaining in amplitude.
"SCREW IT!"

Dave whipped out phone. He just had to dial Boris, and he'd come tear the door apart. They didn't call him Boris "Crazy Russian" Besnov for nothing. Even though he didn't like the nickname, the description was startlingly accurate.

He held phone with his shoulder and flipped open the knife. Long and slender, very stiletto-like, it was hard to operate it in mechanical guts of the door.

"Boris! I'm locked out in minus eighth level behind a five-inch thick hydraulic blast door, and everything is shaking like it's coming apart, GET HELP AND GET ME OUTTA HERE!!"

Incomprehensible swearing in Russian followed by "HOLD ON" signaled that his plea for help reached it's destination and help was on it's way.

Meanwhile knife finally found the proper tube and punctured it, painting everything around in pressured mineral oil.

Dave retracted the knife from alcove and wiped sweat off his forehead.
"And I thought I'm athletic! I'm sweating like pig in sauna!"

"Wait... it kind of IS hot in here..."

Engineer looked around and then finally lifted up his head.
"...Is that pipe up there supposed to be red-hot?"

One of assistants looked back at Mr. Henderson and just silently shook her head.
Henderson did not need explanation - system went over point of no return; they'll have to wait until it runs full cycle. Trying to cut power right now would be surefire death sentence to everyone in the building.
That poor technician is as good as dead now in that deathtrap below. It was either that or creating second Chernobyl, but this time with more exotic matter.

Henderson slumped down in chair in resignation.

Several levels above supremely angry Boris sped down the corridor, clad with power tools and even several shaped charges he "borrowed" from the construction crew.
Now he couldn't find the only damn elevator that could go to level minus eight. Or was it minus seven?
Rattling off another series of elaborate swears in Russian, he looked around. With every second passing he was only getting angrier - both at himself for forgetting important detail and at whoever designed the damn place.

Finally he saw a flash of lab coat down the corridor and sped towards it, power tools swinging around him on belts like a swarm of angry bees.
"YOU! I BET YOU KNOW WHERE THE ELEVATOR TO LEVEL MINUS EIGHT IS!"

For Dave it went from bad to worse: Not only pipe was yellow-hot now, bolts of electricity started jumping from it to walls.
"That definitely can't be good!"

Meanwhile amount of smoke in the passageway was steadily increasing, slowly turning it all to haze.
Dave could swear that in the center of the passageway the smoke was getting denser and denser.
It was really hard to look at. It felt like each eye saw it's own picture and brain refused to put it together into comprehensive image.
He covered his mouth and moved closer to center, waving his free hand to dispel dense smoke.

Dave suddenly found himself standing elsewhere. After looking around, blinking a few times and rubbing his eyes in sheer disbelief, he could conclude only one thing:
He was in fact standing in some sort of forest or possibly jungle.
"No way. I must be hallucinating. Was it smoke? The lack of air?"

Dave could feel his heart racing; He needed to get a grip.
"Stop; This is counterproductive. Let's work off assumption that everything is real. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale."
Air felt fresh, unlike a minute ago.

Dave pulled out phone with intention to call up some help - any help - but was greeted with "No signal".
"Great, just great!" he punched air in frustration.

On the other hand, he had an idea on how to check if all of it was real or not. A little thing that Jim taught him among other tricks to fight off recurring nightmares.
Dave quickly opened contact list and read first three contacts: Archie, Boris Besnov, Dad.
Then he focused on surrounding trees, on their details and shape, before opening contact list again. It still read the same.
"So this is not a dream. I don't even know if it's good or ba-"

His out-loud pondering was cut short by loud growling. The phone has hit the mud, but Dave was more concerned with making out what was hiding behind the foliage the sound came from.
Whatever it was, it was rather big, looked menacingly wolf-like and had freakish glowing eyes. Dave opened his knife with one fluid motion.
Not only the sight of polished steel did not scare the creature off, two more shadows appeared from the sides.

"OK, Plan B: LEG IT!"

Dave ran, avoiding branches, rocks and roots sticking out, while trying to hold knife at the most safe angle possible.
"So apparently I decided to skip running with scissors and started running with knives from get-go. What's next? Nitroglycerin?"
Why is it the life-threatening moments like these when the silliest thoughts come to mind?

Henderson was the first to find Boris, who just sat on the tool chest, hands crossed.
The power tools were strewn about, some with signs of recent use. Shaped charges were piled up in the corner.

"Ah, finally someone came down here. Maybe you'll be able to explain this-" Boris nodded in the direction of the door, which had numerous pock-marks and a square hole cut in it.

Henderson cautiously approached the hole and peeked inside the room carefully.

After scanning room, Henderson summed up, "There's nothing here!"

"Precisely." Boris stood up and now loomed above Henderson. "Where's Dave?"

The sun was setting. Two mares walked down the road from Sweep Apple Acres to Ponyville.

Twilight Sparkle held a freshly baked apple pie on her back and chatted with Applejack nonchalantly.

"Poor Spike was working himself to the bone last night, so I decided to get him a little treat for his efforts."
Applejack just smiled.
"You don't think I'm spoiling him, do yo-"

All of a sudden Applejack interrupted Twilight in rather straightforward hoof-to-mouth manner.

"Shhh! You hear that?"

Twilight turned hear head and strained her hearing. Were those screams for help? They surely sounded distressed.

"It sounds like they're coming from-" Applejack gasped "-the Everfree forest!"

Dropping apple pie then and there, both mares went into gallop.

Nearing the edge of Everfree forest they spotted the source of screams.
Some strange creature was hanging on the edge of a cliff, swinging what looked like an overgrown dagger or, perhaps, a tiny sword, trying to fend off three Timberwolves at once.
It looked strange but it was clear that it was in dire situation and pleading for help.

Not that Twilight needed any prompting.
The telltale magic glow enveloped weird creature just as it started losing grip on the edge.
"I've got you!" Twilight rang out.
And then the creature fell down like a rock.

Chapter 2 : Tea, Taboos & Technology

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Dave pried his eyes open. The ceiling looked unfamiliar. His whole body ached.
Fragmented memories danced in front of his eyes - arriving at the new workplace, Boris being Boris, the uptight representative getting ready to unleash yawnfest of the century...

"Sheesh, I haven't partied this hard since graduation."
He shifted uncomfortably.
"What did I even drink yesterday? I can't recall the party at all. Did I pull off cocktail-from-rocket-fuel thing with Boris again? Jeez! We need to stop doing that."

In a slow zombie-like fashion Dave rose in the bed and lazily looked around.
It appeared that he was in some sort of hospital. If nothing else, the x-ray images hanging on a glowing screen were a dead giveaway.
There also was new and somewhat uncomfortable detail: he was stark naked, save for bunch of band-aids covering various scratches.
"Not even a patient gown, what a bunch of cheapskates!"

Dave jumped to his feet and after a short search confirmed his worst assumption - dang medics didn't leave his clothes - or any of his belongings for that matter - in the room.
The only thing on bed stand was glass of water, which he immediately emptied, but no trace of any sort of clothing.

"So be it!"

Some fiddling later Dave fashioned a sort of toga from the bed's blanket.
For a second, Dave entertained himself with a thought that it might be more didactic to tell off guilty party while being angry AND butt-naked, but on the other hand, he didn't need public indecency charge.

Rubbing his eyes he headed for exit.
The door out of ward was strangely low, with door frame beam gently brushing strands of Dave's bed hair.
"Jeez, how cheap does it get?"

Once out, Dave strode down the corridor ready to angrily complain to the first staff member he finds and, more importantly, to get them to give his stuff back.

Or so he thought.
"What the?!"
Two colorful equines with strangely big and expressive eyes just stood there looking as surprised as he was.
Dave was the first to put surprise into words.
"Alright, now what the fresh heck is this?! What are you doing here? Horses don't belong in a hospital!"

Dave's eyes finally focused on the duo - one appeared to be of amber color and wearing a stethoscope, and second one was purple unicorn with pink streak in the mane.

"You can talk!" Happily blurted out the unicorn.

Dave nearly jumped out of his skin.
"YOU can talk?!"

"Of course I can talk-" unicorn remarked "-and so can everypony else."
Engineer just stared off in the space for a second before returning to reality.

"You know what? I'm just gonna roll with it. Not even gonna question it. No. Just no. Let's start anew. Hi. My name is Dave."

"Hi! My name is Twilight Sparkle and this is doctor Greymare."

Dave caught himself staring off in the distance again, trying to process what the heck is going on.
He had one hypothesis. It was ugly, but it explained everything perfectly.

The doctor pony just shook his head and asked matter-of-factly "Is that... a blanket?"

Dave's mind snapped back to the problems at hand.

"Well, if somebody didn't steal my clothes, I wouldn't be cosplaying Julius Caesar right now!"

Unicorn and doctor exchanged looks and doctor Greymare spoke again.
"Can you just... Not wear anything, Dave?"

Dave just stood there dumbfounded. It didn't seem that they had a concept of modesty.
"No!"
He pointed at the two to further emphasize his point.
"NO! How to put it? In my culture it's taboo to show up naked where other people might see you! It is forbidden! It is ILLEGAL! And also disgusting and dangerous! Now give me back my clothes!"

Twilight suddenly beamed and rubbed hooves while shaking in excitement.
Dave recoiled slightly, unsure how to react to that.
"What's her deal?"

"What a peculiar culture! This calls for a full scale research, and papers, dozens of papers. Oh, maybe even a book!"
Unicorn bounced up and down excitedly doing some sort of trot-in-place, much to Dave's confusion.

"Okay, okay! Twilight, was it? I'll help you with research, but, please, I NEED to get my things. Where are they?"

Greymare thought for a second and replied
"I do believe they were taken to the laundry."

"Oh no. OH NO!"

Doctor pony lifted one eyebrow
"Is there a problem with that?"

"YES! No time to explain, where's the laundry room?"

Dave burst inside the laundry room.
It was cramped and full of stacks of washed fabric, which permeated the air with characteristic smell.
Several washing machines were humming in unison at the back of the room.
Dave immediately started sweeping the room. The dirty laundry bins, much to his horror, were completely empty.
Finally his gaze fell on the table in the dead center of the room.

All of the things he had in his pockets were lined up on said table.
"Thank goodness," Dave exhaled with relief. His wallet, ID, wristwatch, headphones and engineering calculator were safe. Caliper and knife probably could have taken a rough wash, but Dave wasn't complaining.
Twilight and Greymare still were observing him from the doorway with same puzzled look.

"These things-" he pointed to the stuff on the table "-can't be washed. Don't know why I assumed nobody would take them out of the pockets."

Now that immediate crisis was resolved, he could go back to the original plan: getting his clothes back, finally dressing up as a civilized human being and stop parodying ancient Rome.

Seeing that Dave was eyeing the washers suspiciously, Greymare cleared his throat and said
"You've been here for a day and a half, Dave. Check the dried stacks for your... possessions."
Indeed, Dave could spot familiar socks with lambda-prints all over them sticking out from one of precarious clothe-towers.

Dave could practically feel the uncomfortably inquisitive stare burning his back. He turned around and sure enough, Twilight was there, peering at him with unhealthy amount of curiosity, interrupting observation only to jot some notes down.

"Sheesh, a little privacy?"

"Oh, right. Cultural thing!"

The door closed, leaving him alone in the room.
Dave sighed with a hint of a relief. Without colorful horses around, things almost started to make sense. Almost.
Now to find rest of his actual clothing in these stacks of freshly-dried stacks of bedding, towels and, surprisingly enough, other clothes.

"Okay, I'm done!" Dave called out, stuffing the last of his material possessions into their rightful pockets.
There was no answer. Dave rolled his eyes. Of course there wouldn't be. He obviously was tripping balls this entire time and now was beginning to come off whatever it was.
Swinging door wide open, he stepped outside.

Right beside door purple unicorn levitated a whole stack of paper and quill, scratching new notes with mind-boggling speed. The doctor, however, was nowhere to be seen.

"Nope, still tripping!"

Twilight was so absorbed in intense note-taking that she only noticed Dave when he leaned in and started talking right into her ear.
"Mind tel-"
"AAaaah!" Unicorn jumped a few feet into the air, sending papers all over the corridor.
"Sorry! I didn't mean to startle you."
It was a straight-faced lie, but Dave did feel a prick of guilt for startling her.

After she was done picking up all runaway papers in purple glowing stack, he repeat the question.
"Mind telling me where am I exactly?"

"Well, you see, strictly saying, before answering that question one should consider..."
Twilight's voice immediately took on an unmistakable tone of a lecture.
The reaction of Dave's brain was instantaneous, powerful and on-point; hardened by years of university practice, it zoned out droning sound of Twilight's descant fully and completely.

Some navigational fiascoes later, they finally found the door leading outside.
The sun was setting.

Seeing the sunset made Dave realize that despite only recently crawling out of bed, he was feeling really, really tired.

Twilight practically dragged him through some sort of town, never stopping talking even for a second.

They were heading to some sort of tree.

Twilight alarmedly zipped across the library, looking into every nook and cranny.
"Oh no, what will Princess Celestia say about my hospitality when she knows?"

Exerting a great effort to keep his eyelids open, Dave shot a question
"What is so inhospitable about this place?"

"I completely forgot that library doesn't have another bed!"

Dave briefly inspected room through half-shut eyes, spotting a place to sit down with least amount of books hanging dangerously above.
"I'm a-okay with sleeping on the floor. Just give me a pillow." He yawned and listed to the right.

"Are you really going to sleep on the floor in all your clothing?"

A small pillow fell on the floor beside him, which he immediately stuffed under his head. His eyelids seemed to grow heavier with each passing second.

"Eh, ain't no thang. I've had it worse," he slurred in sleepy haze before giving a jaw-crunching yawn and falling into slumber.

The morning light barely made it in the window, but Twilight was already up and toiled away, adding more meticulous notes to a piece of paper that at this point was more ink than paper.
Dave could be seen below, waving his hand before his eyes groggily.

"Is anything wrong, Dave?"

"You know, I kind of expected all this to go away."

"Why?"

Dave stood up and handed her back the pillow.
"I presumed whatever happened yesterday to be hallucinogen-induced trip and a part of huge prank from robotics guys."
Seeing Twilight's bewildered gaze, Dave hastily added
"Well, they haven't drugged anyone for their pranks YET but I wouldn't put it past them..."

The pause lengthened. Twilight tried to understand if this was a subtle joke or if he was being serious. Dave simply was reminiscing about the past.

"Good ol' Prank Wars at the campus..." he clapped his hands "Anyway. I don't know what is up with this place, nor do I particularly care. I'm missing the job and I should get home. How can I do that?"

"Good question! Do you remember how you got here?"

Engineer rubbed his chin in thought.
"So, I remember being at the job, then... something happens which I don't quite recall, then I remember some forest, some missing details again and then I woke up in hospital in this place. What is this place anyway?"

Twilight rolled her eyes "Didn't I go over this with you already? Maybe you have some memory-affecting ailment?"

"To be honest, I zoned out during your explanation yesterday, so you might need to give me a refresher on... just about everything."

Twilight looked nonplussed.

"I'm sorry, okay? I was tired!"

"Hey, you also told me that you'll help me with research!"

"That... I did. See? I remember! My memory ain't THAT bad! So research it is then - but! Make it quick, I still need to get home, somehow."

The prospect of research seemed to instantly cheer Twilight up. And also made copious amounts of paper and inkpots appear from the least assuming places all over the room, floating towards her.

"Whoa, how do you do that?"

Twilight lifted one brow. "Unicorn magic. Didn't you see me doing that yesterday? You took it in stride and didn't even ask me about it!"

"Look, I know better than inspect things too closely when tripping balls!" Dave pointed at flying pieces of paper "But really now, this is so freaking cool! Levitation! Real magic or not, this is cool nonetheless!"

Twilight barely managed to stop herself from rolling her eyes again.
"Of course this is real magic! You've never seen magic before?"

"Where I come from we DON'T HAVE magic. Of course there's so-called stage magic but that's just-"

Dave bit his tongue, seeing that his words gave Twilight a minor eye twitch.
"UGH! This is what I get for going with assumptions!"

Twilight practically jumped at her records and started crossing out entire pages in frustration.

Engineer silently observed Twilight's frantic destruction of hoof-written text, but that wasn't what was bothering him.

He had just got a nasty suspicion out of the blue, and currently was mulling over it, investigating it from every side. The implications were... nasty, to say the least. With all this magic and talking pony business, this place was unlikely to be on planet Earth. By this time just about every landmass bigger than palm of hand has been photographed by myriad of spy and commercial satellites. If place like this existed on Earth, it'd be known and flooded with either research teams or tourists. Likely both. Thus, he was unlikely to be on Earth, however gravity and air felt completely ordinary. A parallel dimension maybe?
He glanced at the various writing implements and sheets of paper floating in the air shrouded in some sort of glow. At this point parallel dimension explanation wasn't even that far-fetched.
Getting back home might be harder than expected, let alone getting to work on time. Maybe with the help of magic?

"Argh!" Twilight sent entirety of all paper with even slightest hint of a note into a huge crumpled paper ball and dunked it into a bin. Stacks of fresh paper appeared from the writing table.

"I am going to start over. This time, my approach will be methodical and scientific!"
The mere thought of methodical approach seemed to erase any hint of frustration and cheer Twilight up to the point of worryingly strong enthusiasm.
"Finally we're going to clear a lot of things up! To think, I don't even know what you are! I've never seen a creature like you! Let's start with this."

It was Dave's turn to look nonplussed. Going by the signs, it was going to turn into a biology lecture with him as unwilling lecturer. Best make it short.

He pointed to himself. "I am human."

Twilight's scribbling intensified and went on for much longer than Dave would assume would take to write that short sentence down.
Once the writing fit stopped, he continued "My species evolved from apes over course of millions of years. Do you even have apes here? Gorillas, chimps, monkeys?"
Twilight stared in the distance, then nodded before going back to furious scribbling.

"I still have no idea how you guys manipulate things with hooves, but monkey descent is where we've got our-" he displayed his hands in front of him, clenching and unclenching them "-opposable thumbs."

"Whoa, dude, you got, like, five fingers! That's freaky!"

"No it isn't!" Dave remarked offhandedly before realizing that wasn't coming from Twilight "Wait, who da heck is in here?"

Some purple short-stack creature jumped on the table and pointed it's thumb towards itself, "I don't think we're acquainted. I'm Spike. Spike the Dragon!" He sneezed up a small cloud of greenish flame, as if in proof of his words.

Leaving Dave to question his own sanity again, Spike turned to Twilight "Twilight, aren't you forgetting something?"

"Forgetting what exactly?"

"The tea party?"

"What tea party?"

"The tea party you planned a week ago? Right here on your schedule? With Rarity, Applejack, and, you know, rest of your friends?"

"Oh no!"
The stack of papers that previously majestically levitated hit the floor with dull thud and spilled in every which direction.

"But don't worry! This guy here-" small dragon pointed to himself with slightly smug expression "-took care of preparing snacks! So, just be sure to clean up your, heh, research environment, they'll be here any minute now."

It indeed didn't take long for guests to arrive. Dave watched as five more ponies arrives practically in the span of one minute, each more colorful than the last. They kinda cautiously bunched up at the other side of the room, at least until Twilight motioned them to take places.

Frankly saying, guests were unnerved by the odd creature that currently was awkwardly trying to sit down at the table.
It had strange proportions - wiry and gangly; it stood on two legs tall enough for it's chest to be at the eye level of your average pony.
It's muzzle was almost flat, save for it's oddly-shaped nose and disconcertingly small eyes that sat receded in the skull, as if they hid from something.
To make matters worse, it had no coat, except for patch of jet-black hair on top of it's head. The rest was smooth skin of the color that even Rarity couldn't place - it was this strange middle ground between light-brown and pink. As for clothes - Rarity gave them a once-over and averted her gaze - the clothes on that creature were a fashion disaster and a half.

Luckily, the uncomfortable moment was interrupted by Spike; he barged in, balancing quite a stack of various sweets and snacks and started placing them on the table with surprising speed.

Twilight looked at the Spike with a hint of a smile.
"Spike, aren't you forgetting something?"

"Like what?"

"Did you forget to prepare the tea for the tea party?"

Spike giggled nervously before squeezing out "Whoops" and evacuating the room post-haste.

Twilight smiled apologetically "It looks like tea will arrive a bit later. Help yourself to sweets, though!"

The awkward silence settled in. Everyone was intent on not addressing the elephant, er, human in the room.
Thankfully Dave had an extensive experience in breaking up awkward silences and turning them into awkward conversations.
He winked at Twilight and whispered loudly "Twilight, you might want to introduce me to your friends. Or something!"

It seemed to do the trick, snapping Twilight out of mental paralysis.
"Ah, right. Everypony - this is Dave-"

"Dave Smith, to be exact."

"-Dave Smith, and he's a human."

"What's a human?" the pony in a cowboy hat inquired in a rather straight-from-the-shoulder manner.

"Applejack! Don't be rude, at least introduce yourself!"

"Oh sorry for that. I am Applejack, this here is Rarity, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, and-"

"PINKIE PIE!" practically exploded pony who was, indeed, pinkest shade of pink.

"I've never seen anypony like you! Did you come from far away land? Oooh! Do they have ice-cream? Do they have cupcakes? Do they have ice-cream flavored cupcakes?"
Dave was slightly taken aback by the onslaught of questions from motor-mouthed gal, who also somehow managed to approach him in a blink of an eye.

"Pinkie, please!.." Twilight pushed the overly-enthusiastic pony away from Dave and back to her seat.

"But yes, as Twilight said, I'm human and I'm new to these parts. Neither of us is sure of how exactly I got here, or how I can get back to my home. But oh well, enough chatting, let's dig in!"

Dave held the cookie in his hand, turning it, staring at it intently all the while.
Twilight, who kept a close eye on him all this time, was first to notice.
"Is... Everything okay?"

Dave pointed to the cookie "I sure hope my chemistry is compatible, 'cause boy, these smell and look tasty! And I'm STARVING!"
He promptly took a large bite out of it.
"Deeee-licious!" The rest of the cookie followed the same fate, and Dave reached out for a second one.
"Here's hoping that I won't face any of this sugar chirality mumbo-jumbo side effects stuff. Just imagine," engineer held second cookie high "Here lies Dave, he died to a cookie!"
He gave off a hearty laugh.

No-one in the room laughed with him. In fact, everypony, even including Twilight, looked more concerned than anything, if not downright harrowed.
Dave finally noticed the quiet. It would appear that these ponies didn't have the concept of dark humor, or, maybe they lacked whatever it took to find it funny.
He shrugged "Well, hopefully that won't happen!"

At this precise moment Spike emerged, precariously balancing the platter that barely fit the towering tea set.
Twilight overtook with magic before the inevitable could happen - floating entire tea set up in the air and filling all the cups with tea in turn.
Once done, teacups slowly floated each to it's recipient.

Dave's teacup floated a bit too slow for his liking.
He reached out, but the teacup unexpectedly fell down and spilled it's contents on the floor.
"Ah!" Dave instinctively yanked his hand away, gathering looks of everyone in the room.

He held hands up apologetically "I didn't even touch it! Somebody, hand me a towel, please!"

Twilight floated neatly folded towel to Dave. Following teacup's lead, it fell on the table, just short of reaching Dave's hand.
Dave said nothing, staring at Twilight with silent inquiry.

She shook her head "I'm not doing this on purpose!"

"It's just like that time," Applejack pointed out.

"What time?"

"You know, when you were hanging off a cliff, Twilight tried to float you to safety, and, well, it didn't work."

Dave scratched his head. His eyes went wide with some sort of realization.
"I've got an idea. Twilight, can you unfold the towel and hold it in completely flat formation?"

Once the spread out towel stopped moving, Dave started slowly moving his hand towards one of its corners. Suddenly the corner sank, despite being still covered in magical glow.
He moved the hand away and the corner restored itself to its former position.

Dave let off a short laugh "Looks like I'm so non-magical that magic refuses to work near me! Or at least levitation..."

Twilight gasped and brought out the papers again. "We need to test this more!"

Applejack shook head in disapproval, "Goodness, only Twilight can turn a tea party into a scientific experiment!"

Twilight abashedly put the papers back, but not until she scratched a small note. Taking the opportunity, Dave wiped the spilled tea with towel and put the cup back on table.

"Darling, what ever do you mean, 'non-magical'?" Rarity chimed in.

"We don't have magic where I come from."

Rarity gasped in surprise, "No magic at all?"

"Aside from fairy-tales, pretending and wishful thinking, no."

"But dear, how do you... survive without grace of magic?"

"Just like we do without wings or supreme work ethic. Science, technology and industry."

Twilight, much to everyone's chagrin, whipped paper and quill back out. "But how do you advance science without work ethic?"

"I never said we don't have ANY work ethic at all. We're just not guaranteed to have any. Some people have it in spades. Some have very little- besides, laziness advances progress like nothing else!"

Met with glares of disbelief from all sides, Dave continued
"Don't believe me? Think about it. Lazy person wants to do the least amount of work. It just so happens that usually that's the most efficient way of completing the task at hand. Many things have been automated 'cause someone somewhere was feeling too lazy to do it all by hand!"

At this point the quill was moving so fast that Dave expected it to burst in the flames from all the friction any second now.

But it abruptly stopped and Twilight gave Dave look full of suspicion.
"Wait, how do you know about the traits of earth ponies and pegasi?"

"Well, I may have zoned out during your explanation yesterday, but I'm not a deaf amnesiac! I remember bits and pieces."
He turned to the rest of the guests.
"Oh, and talking about bullet points of yesterday's lecture - we also don't get these, what do you call them? Cutie marks?"

Twilight nodded.

"Yeah, those. We don't have 'em. We don't know our strong sides, nor if we have any at all. It's all trial-and-error, but most of people figure out something decent sooner or later."
He suddenly smiled.
"I was lucky. It became evident pretty early on that I am both mechanically inclined and have fondness of insects-"

Previously silent yellow pegasus, who has been introduced as Fluttershy, perked up with enthusiasm "You're good with insects?"

"You bet I am! Arachnids too, well, pretty much any kind of creepy-crawly. Kept a whole terrarium full of 'em, dorm regulations be damned! I especially adore the bigger ones! It's sad that they can't appreciate being cared about, but that has never really stopped me! Hah, by this time I can semi-consistently pet tarantulas without being bitten. I know, I know, they don't like it but sometimes I just can't help myself..."
Everyone exchanged somewhat uncomfortable looks but Dave and Fluttershy were too caught up in conversation to notice.

"If you come by, I'll be glad to introduce to all of my insect friends. They appreciate a good company."

"Wow, really? Thanks! I can't wait to actually meet them!"

By this time uncomfortableness at the table became so palpable that even Dave started picking it up. Clearing his throat he diverted the flow of the conversation.

"But yeah, entomologists don't earn much money, so my parents pushed me to become engineer, and, well, here I am!"
He frowned.
"Wait, do you guys even have a concept of money?"

Everyone besides Twilight rolled eyes at the question.
Dash held out her front legs "Of course we hav-"
Dave interrupted "That's fine, I'm asking just in case. Never know where the important differences between my home and here are going to crop up..."

He grabbed another cookie.

Amount of the food present on the table diminished significantly. Dave was practically picking cookie crumbs at this point.
"Man, I'm hungry! Cookies are all good and fine but I could sure go for a steak right about now!"

"What's a 'steak'?" asked Applejack.

"Why, it's well-cooked and seasoned cut of the finest-"
Dave stopped abruptly. The wickedness of asking herbivores for meat has dawned upon him. He was about to paint himself a Hannibal flippin' Lecter.
"-organic products. But now thinking about it, it's a rather specific recipe to ask for. What you guys get when you feel like you could eat a ho-"
He repeated the mental equivalent of slamming breaks.
"...er, a whole table worth of food?"

Dave carefully gauged reaction of everypony at the table. He was in luck: it appeared that his tell-tale shifty looks and suspicious stuttering went right over everypony's collective heads.
He really had to consider his words carefully from now on.

Meanwhile the guests managed to get themselves in the midst of arguing about which food joint would fit best. There were bunch of tasty-sounding suggestions, and also bunch of things that definitely weren't fit for human consumption, like hay or flowers. And then there was one suggestion to gorge himself on gems in jewelry store.

"I, uh... Well, I can't eat hay, grass or flowers. Gems are completely out of question!"
Hearing some actual factual information, Twilight produced writing implements, eliciting collective groan around the table.
"I'm not opposed to good salad, as long as it's nutritious," continued Dave.

The guests were getting ready to leave, Spike was going through final motions of cleaning the table, and Dave was just sitting there, unsure what to do.

"I assume you'll spend the rest of the day glued to his side," teased Dash.

Twilight wasn't even going to deny it, "It's a once-in-a-lifetime research opportunity! To observe and document something that has never been observed and documented before!"

Applejack was her usual level of blunt, "I dunno, you might be overdoing this, Twi. At least eat him eat somethin' first."

Dave's stomach started growling traitorously.
Taking it as a cue, Twilight motioned Dave to follow her.

Dave's expression soured.
"Look, before we go any further, I'm not comfortable with others paying for me. But it's not like I have any options to make it up to you, unless..."
He snapped fingers and started rummaging in his pockets.
"I know how to remedy this and give you some great research material!"

Dave took out wallet and fished out a hundred dollar bill before handing it to Twilight.
"This is how our money looks like. Depending on the state you're living in and prices, this could feed you for about 8 to 10 days, if you're careful with your spending. More, if you go full frugal mode. As for food - well, since it's a bit too early for icecream and hay is off the table, I guess I could go for a good salad or something. Do you know any good joint?"

"S-Sure, what kind of salad would you prefer?"

Dave didn't feel like playing guessing games with all these strange salad names thrown around just recently, so he shrugged, "Any salad, I don't care."

"Servings are kinda small..."
Dave was not exaggerating: the miniature bowl with salad could easily fit in his hand.

Twilight just smiled apologetically and went back to inspecting the ol' Benjamin.

Dave shook his head.
"I hope this isn't one of these posh restaurants where itty-bitty dishes like these cost a fortune, 'cause I'm going to need quite a few more of these to actually sate my hunger. Oh well."

He took fork and attacked bowl, practically inhaling it's contents.

Suddenly Dave grimaced and spat out some of the salad.
"whu-humbews! feit wwem!"

"What?" alarmedly blurted out Twilight, dropping the bill.

With considerable effort Dave swallowed and repeated.
"Cucumbers! Hate them!"
He contorted a grimace of disgust, eyeing green disks on the table.
"They're like the only vegetable I hate with a passion, and they just had to be in the first food I eat in days! Ugh!"

He spent next several minutes trying to fish out every single piece of cucumber out of the salad. Satisfied with the result, he wiped the fork with a napkin and dug inside the salad once again.

As Dave was gorging himself on one mini-salad after another, this time without sneaky cucumbers, Twilight continually bombarded him with various questions, filling in various blanks in her notes.

Dave readily responded, but often in the foggiest terms. He was on high alert, on the lookout for questions that could bring up anything even remotely potentially incriminating. He also carefully considered his choice of words, as even one word slip-up could be potentially catastrophic. Nothing screams 'friendliness and trustworthiness' like having dedicated word for systematic eradication of entire species.

After all, he absolutely needed to stay on the locals' good side if he was planning to ever get home.
Speaking of which.
"Twilight, tell me, who's the most powerful magician-"

"Wizard", corrected Twilight.

"-wizard in Equestria?"

"That would be princess sisters. They possess alicorn magic, which is much more powerful than regular unicorn magic!"

Dave gestured with a fork, "Hopefully powerful enough to send me back home. How can I meet them?"

Twilight almost choked at the question. Once coughing fit subsided and she regained her composure, she answered.
"It's a... slow process. I'll fill out necessary forms for your appointment, which has to be filed way ahead of time, and then there's chance it won't go through."

Dave winced, "Ugh, really? Bureaucracy exists here too? Looks like I might be stuck here for a while."

Twilight exhaled with relief. Dave took it at the face value. It was a lie, sure, but she needed to ascertain that it was safe to have him around princesses. Even though he seemed friendly, she needed to do more research first. Yes, more research...

After all, he was a strange and previously unseen creature with even stranger views. How he laughed at the possibility of own demise, it just gave Twilight shivers. And then there was this un-explainable magic cancellation anomaly. Never once has Twilight read about something like that, let alone experienced it first-hoof.

Dave wiped his hands and pushed a whole stack of bowls aside.
"Now I have a list of questions for you, Twilight."

Twilight raised one brow, but didn't answer.
Dave took it as a signal to continue.
"What is the currently considered to be state-of-the-art in science in... this place?"

The question took Twilight by surprise.
"What do you mean?"

"Well, the question is incorrect, I guess. What would be the most advanced field of study that exists here?"

"That would be Mathematics."

Dave facepalmed.
"Of course it is. Let's approach this from another angle. I'm an engineer. I use technology to make things and solve problems," Dave decided to omit his exact specialty in engineering.

"For example," he picked up an empty candle holder off the table and held it for Twilight to observe.
"See these lines? It means that his candle holder was turned on an industrial lathe."

He moved the candle holder around, getting feel for it's weight.

"From the color and the weight I'd say that this is most likely aluminum - which is a terrible choice for a candle holder by the way - or maaaaybe titanium or some alloy with similar density. Definitely not steel. Unless this thing is hollow."
Dave inspected bottom of the holder, then put it down on the rightful place.

"All of this tells me several things. First of all, that there's obvious need in steelworks to produce lathe parts and tool bits, precision machining tools to create transmission parts for lathe to carry out finish turning this smooth, and decent chemical industry to actually get enough aluminum from it's natural state back to being actual metal."

"Uh-huh," Twilight was still unsure where Dave was going with this.

"These are all pretty much things I work with, professionally. Except chemistry, I'm bad at chemistry."
It wasn't exactly the truth, though. He knew a thing or two about things that could burn or explode violently, but that was mostly 'cause he spent way too much time with Boris, who just wouldn't stop flexing his chemistry prowess.

Dave drew the bottom line, "So I guess my question is: which technologies are available here for, well, engineering things?"

Twilight squirmed in her seat, desperately trying to summon at least some semblance of memory, even if only remotely related to the topic. But alas - the industry was by no means her field of expertise.

"Hey, if you don't know, it's no big deal. After all, where I come from only handful of people bother finding out how most household things are actually made. Maybe you got some books on it?"

"I'll take a look," squeezed out Twilight almost apologetically.

"If you don't mind, I'm going for a walk, wanna see around the town."

Dave's scouting endeavor turned up a mixed bag of results.

On one hand, the residents were surprisingly friendly and helpful, considering they saw a human for the first time. Dave's appearance did earn him some strange looks on the streets, but that was to be expected with his admittedly alien anatomy and, more specifically, his height; with him towering over pony folk he stuck out like a sore thumb and naturally drew eye to himself.

On the other hand, there was not a single half-decent hardware shop in the town. Sure, you could buy hammer or a screwdriver, but when it came to power-tools Dave yearned for so much - they had none. Bummer!

Luckily one of shop owners mentioned that he could find more advanced tools in a bigger city. It was by no means a big lead but it was something.

And by now, Dave itched to construct something - anything!

Dave found Twilight half-embedded in the pile of books, quickly looking over books before discarding them in slightly smaller pile of books.

"No dice?"

Twilight just shook her head.

"Then don't bother, like I said, it's no big deal. Just drop it and let's clean up this mess."

Dave spun around, estimating total count of the books strewn about and whistled, "Wow. This is a lot of books. I hope you have a decent cataloguing system."

Noting the suspicious silence, Dave turned around.
"Twilight, why do you smile so devilishly?"

Chapter 3 : Mending Monetary Meagerness

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Dave sat at the table, absentmindedly poking at the remains of the dessert.

The situation looked rather dire, no matter how you look at it: No money, no place to stay.
Sure, he was laying it on a bit thick: Twilight was happy to provide him with allowance and a roof over his head, and the surprising generousness and kindness of locals provided at least some footing, but for Dave even the idea of leeching off their hospitality was extremely repulsive.

He was many things, but he certainly was no deadbeat!

However, there was one big issue with applying his professional skills: no tools. Just for about anything engineer needs some sort of tool, from a compact electric drill to a huge several ton lathe.
And that's not counting all the funky computer-aided goodness - from CAD with finite element analysis simulations to programmable CNC machines with costs dangling somewhere in upper atmosphere. Jupiter's upper atmosphere.

Dave snapped out of gloomy thoughts just to notice that he apparently constructed a miniature crossbow out of kitchen utensils and a rubber-band.

Whoops.

He hastily disassembled the incriminating evidence while trying to look inconspicuous, hoping that nobody saw his blunder.

What was he thinking about again? Ah, right, the tools.
He mentally went over his possessions one more time: a sizable knife, wallet with ID, caliper, tangled mess of wires with phone appliances somewhere in there, and an engineering calculator. Not much to work with.
If he planned to put together anything more complicated than toy crossbows, he would have to shell out for some decent tools. Drills, angle grinders, the whole package.
That's not even mentioning stockpiling required materials, mostly various steel.

"Dang it! Jimmy's expertise in get-rich-quick schemes would come incredibly handy right now!"

Jim was the last member of the 'Trouble Trio', apart from Dave and Boris. Thin as a rake and more devious than devil's dozen of lawyers, he served as a level-headed catalyst to most of Trio's antics.
In his free time Jim indulged in running extremely elaborate schemes for fun and profit. Their key part - Jim's pride and joy - was to leave the mark happy and none-the-wiser while taking their money and remaining perfectly within margins of the law. Could it even be called a scam at that point?

Dave didn't know the real scale of Jim's operations but he knew that Jim had enough money to pay for his education in full, and enough loose cash on top of that to decorate his room wall to wall with all sorts of freaky knives.

"Now that I'm thinking about it, Jim must have been some sort of con-artist prodigy."

Still, the idea of scamming the kind folk of Ponyville did not sit well with Dave, even it was fully lawful and left everyone happy.

Dave considered his options again, and found himself with only one immediately applicable one.
"I guess I can work as a handyman at first. Well, I've got a pair of working hands, and a sorta-working head on my shoulders, so sky's the limit!"

Dave was getting ready to search far and wide for potential jobs, but to his surprise, he didn't have to go any further than next room.
Turns out, Twilight had a decent suggestion.
"Oh, Applejack is working on some sort of construction project, I guess she could use another pair of hoofs, I mean, hands."

Spike joined in, "I recall Rarity needing help with gem collection too!"

"Alright, where can I find our fine ladies?"

The large map of town was brought to the table and several minutes of Twilight's admittedly very systematized and clear directions later Dave was feeling ready to navigate to first potential jobs.

It was time to get down to the some actual work. Finally.

It didn't take long to navigate out of town.

Dave breathed in fresh air with the thirst of solitary convict.
It was really nice to finally just walk outside, without prying eyes of somepony constantly documenting every little thing you do.

Still, Dave couldn't shake the strange feeling of being watched.
"Oh come on, Mr. Paranoid," said he to himself, "You're out of town, on the road in the middle of nowhere. Who could possibly be watching you? Naaah, even Twilight would need a telescope to spy on you! Chill!"

Adding a bit of spring to his step, he sped up his walking.

Meanwhile, at the roof of Golden Oak Library Twilight peered into hastily re-purposed telescope, leaving eyepiece only to scribble down her findings. The gait section of her observations was growing more complete and fascinating by the minute!

"Gait section? Seriously, Twilight?"

"Eeep!" Twilight jumped several feet in air, nearly knocking the telescope off the balcony.

Once both the telescope and Twilight found solid footing, Spike pouted, "Didn't you see enough of me walking around on my two already?"
Deciding not to press the issue, he continued, "Oh and I... may have gone a bit overboard preparing tea today and I hoped you would help me with not letting it all go to waste."

"Sure! Nothing quite like tea for productive research!"

With a bit of scouting, Dave found Applejack busy at work in the middle of a wooden building frame.

From the looks of things, she was trying to get a pallet of planks lifted to the top of the frame by the rope.

She pulled and pulled, but the stack of planks was too heavy, pulling her back every time. Judging by the amount of hoof-grooves it wasn't her third and not even fifth attempt.

She finally noticed Dave, and spat the rope out.
"Howdy!"

"Hello. I'm looking for a job, and Twilight said you need help with a construction project."

"Just raising this here barn," She waved to the entirety of the wooden construction, "I'm almost done with my part, just need to get this wood all the way up there."

"We could technically both pull it, but who would secure the weight at the top, then?"

This was a perfect opportunity to put some basic engineering knowledge to use.
"I got a better idea. Do you have two pulleys that could hold this weight? Oh, and longer rope too."

Applejack nodded and headed for house. After rummaging through half of attic, she produced two pulleys of hilariously mismatching sizes and a length of rope.

Confident smile crept onto Dave's face.
"Perfect."

Dave mounted one of pulleys on the top beam, and started feeding rope through second pulley, then through the mounted pulley again, and kept going, creating several loops. Satisfied with results, he tied one end of the rope of the beam.

Applejack's face displayed genuine curiosity with a tinge of puzzlement.
"What are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm just setting up a block and tackle."
Dave jumped down.
"Also known as polyspast! It allows you to apply less force when lifting heavy load, something we engineers call 'mechanical advantage'."

He continued on, as he worked the rope around pallet, "You still do same amount of work, it's just spread across longer time period. Can't really cheat physics."

Once the second pulley was safely secured to the stack of planks, Dave gently pulled the rope with one hand. The heavy pallet rose up in the air by few inches.

The apparent effortlessness of the lift took AJ by surprise.
"Whoa."

"See? This is how you work smarter rather than harder! Pulling is supposed to be six times as easy now - try it!"

"But if the rope is that long, I'll back up into that there fence while pulling it!"

Dave rubbed his forehead, estimating distance, "You're right, I should have positioned this differently. Dang... Actually, I could pull the rope and you could secure the weight. I can use both hands and just stand still."

He looked around. Apparently Applejack already climbed up and waved at him to start pulling.

"Well that was fast."

Indeed, they pulled off this in surprisingly expedient manner, and now Dave found himself walking back to town, weighing his honestly-earned bits in hand. The coins were much lighter than he expected for their size. Making a mental note to figure out a way to hold them efficiently, he stuffed them in the pocket.

"Strictly saying, er, thinking, I just screwed myself out of potential repeated payment."

"On the other hand, I introduced her to safer handling of heavy loads. Teach a man to fish, er, pony to lift..."

Now to find Rarity's shop.

Dave tried hard to find a word that he could use to describe Rarity's shop building but nothing seemed to come to his mind. The closest he could do was a cross-breed between "pompous" and "pretentious" with a hint of "unnecessary".
Whatever it was, it was radically different to other buildings in town, except maybe town hall.

Once Dave stopped doing the exact opposite of admiring the building, he pushed the door open.
The first thing he saw was the amount of sparklingly bedazzling dresses in all colors Dave knew, tons of that he didn't and a few that he was pretty sure weren't supposed to exist. Blinking profusely, he stumbled inside.

Chime of the bell alerted Rarity to a new potential customer.

Oh. It was him.
Perhaps the human finally understood the apparent lackluster nature of his garments and was seeking fashion guidance?

Dave could tell by subtle ways Rarity's giant eyes changed that his appearance was not up to her standards. So be it. He wasn't signing up for a model work.

"Hi, I'm looking for a job. I heard you need some help with gems?"

No, he was still hopelessly clueless.

"Yes, darling. There is a certain cave not far from Ponyville, where I used to go before all the time, however, with this season's collection..."

Feeling that the discussion went in unproductive direction, Dave coughed, interrupting Rarity.
"This cave, what needs to be done about it? In short."

Slight sign of displeasure appeared for a moment on Rarity's face. She was gracefully getting to the point, but the human apparently desired to cut to the chase right this instant.

She pointed towards lantern with some fireflies inside.
"You could take this lamp and go gather gems for my new collection."

Dave immediately lifted it up and started inspecting bugs inside. They were much larger than fireflies back on Earth, and that piqued his interest.
"Never seen a firefly, dear?"

Dave snapped out of bug observation.
"Gem gathering sounds nice. Are there any dangers in the cave?"

"Well, darling, outside of myriads of nasty, icky bats ready to swarm you at the drop of a hat..."

"Where can I get something to protect myself with? Us humans don't exactly get magic, claws, thick scales, sharp teeth or wings!"
Rarity tilted her head and asked with jokingly condescending tone, "What you humans are good at, anyway?"

Dave bit his tongue before he could divulge anything too sensitive; instead he pulled on the most exaggerated comically sour scowl he could and headed for exit.
"Being miserable and then finding a way out of that."
He closed door behind him and sighed. The offer seemed good, but he wasn't sure if he could take any more sass from this uptight lady.

Temptation to go and check out the cave first was great but Dave stopped himself. Caves can be dangerous and he needed a plan.
"OK, what am I going to need for this?"

Dave knitted his eyebrows; he was trying to remember any relevant information about caves.
"Rope, in case I encounter shafts in the cave. I guess I can buy it."

At this point any relevant information ran out. Dave started rubbing his temples in frustration.
"I need to think logically. I am going to collect bunch of rocks and haul them back. How am I going to carry them? A crate? Maybe a wheelbarrow? What about actually extracting said rocks? That one's a no-brainer - pickaxe can be rather versatile."

It seemed that he had to do a little shopping first.

Dave moved into the cave opening in a slow, carefully paced manner, trying to keep light as dim as possible.
Rarity wasn't exaggerating - the entire ceiling seemed to be in motion from sheer amount of bats hanging off it, rocking in sleep.

But what hid just around the corner had Dave bewildered, jaw ajar. Not only the gems in this cave were cut, they were coruscating vividly in the dim light of the lantern!

He expected to go on a wild goose chase tracking gems in the rough without any idea how they might look, but this certainly was much easier!

After emerging from the cave, Dave scanned surroundings before dumping gems from all of his pockets into sizeable wheelbarrow. Even though he didn't see a soul, in a fit of paranoia he covered unearthed gems with all the coils of rope he bought.

With few successful trips to the cave, wheelbarrow started getting dangerously full and Dave didn't even make a dent in the myriad of gems in the very first chamber of the cave.
Satisfied with the amount of gems, he grabbed wheelbarrow's handles, but stopped himself.

"Wait. Won't gems cut and scratch one another if I just dump them like that and let them jump around with every littlest pebble and pothole? That'll get me in trouble for sure."

The problem, as per usual, emerged from completely unexpected angle.

Dave paced around the accursed wheelbarrow.
"If only I had foam peanuts or one of these bubblewrap pocket sheets... Maybe I can figure something out? Ugh! I got a mechanical engineering degree, not packaging engineering degree!"

He rubbed his eyebrows in annoyance.
"Think. Think! What can I use to prevent scratching? Mud? Hay? Crumpled newspapers? Maybe sand? No, sand's pretty rough, was it, like, seven on Mohs scale or something? Can't risk that. And I can't go shopping either, leaving this unattended just begs for trouble."

Dave wiped his hands off his shirt.
"If only I could wrap them in some kind of fabric..."

He stood still for a second and then sound of a head slap resounded through cave entrance.

Rarity pushed the boutique's door open, and froze up, eyes wide.

Gems, hundreds of gems! They were evenly spread out across boutique and roughly sorted by color and size. Almost every horizontal surface in sight had some sort of gem lineup resting on it.

Dave sat across the entrance, clutching the wheelbarrow. He had a creeping suspicion that he went a bit overkill.

Navigating carefully across gem minefield, Rarity voiced her concerns,
"Dave, dear, I'm not sure I can pay you for all these gemstones!"

"That's fine, I'm not saying it's all-or-nothing kind of deal. Pick whatever you need for your collection, and I'll hold on to the rest."
Dave nodded towards wheelbarrow.

Despite Rarity's concerns, Dave walked out of boutique with only handful of gems. The other handful was several heavy bags with bits that gems earned him, now placed in a wheelbarrow that he rolled, whistling some tune.

"Rarity might be one sassy lady, but she sure pays well."

Weighing the bags in his admittedly strained hand, Dave wondered the equivalent in dollars. Would it be in the ballpark of thousand? Maybe ten thousand? Five hundred dollars? Local economics still was plenty weird for him.
One thing was for sure: this was definitely way more profitable than some farm work. It was a bit upsetting that applying his engineering skills earned him less than basic manual job, even though he went completely overboard with gem gathering.

In fact, it was outrageously more profitable. Extremely suspiciously so. Making that amount of shiny coins in such short notice - it almost felt unfair, like he didn't really earn it. Did he just inadvertently abuse the goodwill and kindness of someone who just couldn't say 'no'? This situation reminded him more and more of a certain uncle...

Addressing no-one in particular, Dave burst out, "Fine! I'll find a way to make it up for her!"
His guilty conscience seemed to be placated with the promise. For now.

On the bright side, with this kind of money, he could now attempt to solve some of the looming problems.

Dave headed for the town.

Once last of the bags was stuffed under separate bed that Twilight so generously provided him with, Dave wiped the sweat off his forehead.
"Man, with all this running around in the sun, I'm drenched. Would be nice to get a change of clothes."
He looked around nonplussed as if his surroundings were to blame.
"IF I ACTUALLY HAD ANY!"

"So. Getting clothes. Normal human clothes. In this crazy backwards horse-land. Sounds like a challenge..."

He technically could brave his barely-suppressed guilt and go back to Rarity, but he definitely didn't need any diamond-plated underwear.
Besides, just hearing the ordeals that he would put all of the clothes through on a regular basis would probably give her a heart attack.
She couldn't be the only tailor in town, right?

It'd be probably faster to go and ask Twilight for direction but being completely reasonable and self-sufficient adult Dave was, he decided to comb the town for clothier shop by himself. By the second hour he realized error of his ways thoroughly, yet adamantly refused to go get help. After all, at this point only small part of town remained unexplored.

The tailor shop, sure enough, hid away on precisely the last street he decided to check out. Typical, really.

With a grunt of displeasure, Dave headed inside.

Frankly saying, it took some time for Twilight to actually notice the bags under Dave's bed. Which was surprising, as the bags stacked so high that they propped up the bed into a slanted position.

Looking around to confirm Dave's absence, she game the bags a little kick. Tell-tale jingle of coins gave out the contents.

Twilight's brows flew up. Just what Dave was up to?

Half an hour of pure awkwardness and embarrassment later Dave emerged from the tailor's shop.
No, seriously, how do you explain a concept of underwear to somebody who doesn't have the need for it?

The situation was particularly exacerbated by the tailor mare who got very confused by the "the pants STAY ON" concept.

On the flipside, he'd get a set of decent clothes soon. Hopefully.

His current garments seemed to have dried up, with unsavory trails of salt proudly displaying like some weird abstract art print. Great.
The awkwardness of this predicament increased tenfold with the grandiose return of faint but persistent feeling of being watched. Frowning, Dave forcefully evicted that feeling; he had things to do and places to be.

For example, now that this little apparel-themed detour was done, it was time to pay a visit to town hall, but not until he grabs one of the problem-solving bags.

Somewhere halfway across the town, mare with light aquamarine coat lowered her binoculars. The day suddenly got a lot more curious.

Heavy bag of bits hit the table with dull thud.
"How much would it cost to get a plot of land for a cottage?"

Mayor Mare looked a bit confused. Realizing that he forgot to factor in location of the plot, Dave hastily added,
"It does not have to be in the center of the town, on the contrary, it'd be good if it was out of the way, as I'm planning to set up a workshop, and I don't want noise to bother anyone."

Mayor tilted her head even further.
"You don't have to pay for that."

"I, uh, what?", Dave stammered in surprise.
Evidently, it was Dave's turn to get confused. He was getting ready to jump through all sorts of legal hoops with inordinate fees.
"Are you for serious? Not that I'm complaining, but isn't there some sort of legal procedure tied to obtaining plot of land or something?"

"Well, maybe in Canterlot or some bigger cities..." Mayor Mare shrugged with a polite smile.

Dave left town hall content and slightly confused. One thought seemed to bother him, though.
"Either inhabitants of Equestria are too kind, or I just used up all of my luck in a single day and I'm going to live miserably for the rest of my days."

Not long after, Dave marched across the particular plot of land he had his eye on since his walk to Sweet Apple Acres.
He was closely followed by Hard Hat and bunch of other stallions of similar talents.

Luckily, the construction crew was not that expensive to hire, and as an added bonus, here you didn't need to pander to HOA's slightest whims.

Dave paced around, outlining imaginary zones.
"Hmm, main building will go here, with supply sheds here here and here, here's a neat place for a range, here a foundation for backup generator could go, all of it ferroconcrete, of course, oh, also gotta have good distance to the entrance to establish kill-zone..."
Construction ponies tailed him, outlining rough building plans and getting considerably confused and mildly disturbed by Dave's mumbling.

It was almost evening when Dave returned to Golden Oak Library.

Twilight seemed to give weird looks to his poorly-hidden riches. She didn't say anything, but her muzzle was displaying concern.
Dave preempted the question.
"What? Turns out fetching three wheelbarrows worth of best-looking gems pays well."

Twilight seemed to be too enthralled in thought to answer. Finally she snapped out of it and started writing something on a lengthy parchment.

Dave yawned.
Whatever. There were more entertaining ideas on his mind than explaining his funds.

To be exact, he had a perfect payback for her excessive research shenanigans. He just had to put himself into the workload mindset.

Twilight awoke with a start.
Dave stood, towering over her, pulling on some sort of makeshift gloves. His eyes gleamed with a spark of madness in the morning light.
"Wake up, Twilight! It's TIME FOR SCIENCE!"

The magic word got her attention.

Next four hours went by in a blur. Dave managed to find more and more new ways to test this strange anti-magical property of his, with Twilight only pouring more gasoline into the fire with her additional test suggestions and cross-validation. They tested with pieces of string and paper, towels, metallic, wooden and ceramic objects, heavy objects, light objects, while standing, while running, while jumping - anything went. One time Spike, intrigued by the noise, wandered into the room, observed the organized chaos of rapid testing for a few seconds, and silently backed out before he could become part of a next test.

Finally, Twilight plopped on her haunches and leaned against the wall, panting heavily.
"Phew! That was... something!"
She levitated thick stack of notes on tests to the table.

Dave steadied his breathing and summarized his own observations.
"Hmmm, that was interesting. Apparently magic cannot move me, or anything within certain distance of me, yet this magic glow thing remains."
That was about as far as his observations went.

"Pretty much," shot back Twilight.

Suddenly Dave turned back to Twilight and grinned devilishly.
"Ready for round two?"

"What?" yelped Twilight.

Dave began emptying his pockets and putting all of the extracted items on the table.
"Now, we will cross-test with all of these," he said as his grin grew ever wider.

"Oh nooo!" squeezed out Twilight, but lifted herself back up again, readying herself for more testing craziness.

"Oh yes," Dave's grin at this point looked more like something you'd find on a shark, "And kick up the pace, Twilight, we're facing combinatorial explosion here!"

Spike, who has been attracted by the intrigue of sudden quiet, knew that it was his cue to evacuate room once again, which he did immediately.

It became evident pretty soon into cross-testing that all of the items bore exactly same properties that Dave himself did. Seeing how the results turned up the same every single time, they put off testing all of Dave's personal effects for later. Possibly much later.

By this time, even Dave started getting worn out, despite his today's tidal wave of enthusiasm, so he more than welcomed a good opportunity to take a breather.

"To think, we haven't even eaten yet!" exhaled Twilight with a slight concern.

"Who needs food, when you can have"- Dave grasped at air, as if he grabbed something substantial -"answers!"

His gesturing along with really exaggerated facial expression made Twilight snort and break into series of giggles.

"But seriously, let's get some grub before stomach grumbling gets too obnoxious."

Now that stack of sandwiches was thoroughly destroyed and stack of notes grew considerably, it would be optimal time to grab a breather.
Dave planned that by this time Twilight would get worn out by nonstop testing, but there seemed to be some miscalculation on his part. However, it could be remedied easily.

"Wait, it just hit me. We've tested only levitation."
Twilight beamed up and her eyes went wide. That didn't escape Dave.
"Yes - exactly. What about other magic? How many spells can you do? Can you do a list?"

Twilight's squeeeing was heard at least in half of Ponyville.

While Twilight's library could lack books on industry or machining, there surely was no shortage of various magical tomes, grimoires, how-tos and even coloring books for aspiring magic wielders.

"Let's start with something simple," declared Twilight, and her horn lit up.

"Whoa-whoa-whoa, what spell we're talking about, here?" Dave cautiously held hands in front of him.

An orb of magical light appeared in front of Twilight.

"Oh."

Dave waved his hands around and even through it, but nothing changed. The light shone dimly, unperturbed.

Dave and Twilight exchanged intrigued looks.
"You expected it to go out too, right?"

"Yep."

Dave waved his hands at the light some more and faced Twilight.
"But yeah - tell me what you're going to cast next time. I expected something harmful and got this instead," he pointed towards the light.

"We can do stun blast next, if you want."
Dave audibly gulped.

Bed creaked under Dave's weight.
"If I fall, I don't wanna fall on the floor," he explained his choice of test location.

He moved around, picking the position with the least risk of hitting his head on any surroundings.
Unsatisfied with the safety of the best result, he covered his head with hands, placing them this way and that, trying to cover temples and the face at the same time. Finally he settled on one particularly awkward-looking configuration.
"Alright, hit me."

The beam made contact with Dave. Nothing happened.
Still covering his head with hands, he muttered, "Are you going to cast it or not? I think I'm about to get a cramp."

Twilight cast it again. Then again. Then with full force. And once more, with feeling.

Dave's patience finally ran thin, and he opened his eyes and turned to see what Twilight was doing. That was when the full-power beam hit him squarely in the forehead.
He blinked for a few seconds, and then shrugged.
"Should I be feeling something?"

Twilight crossed off another spell off the list. All of spells she cast so far did absolutely nothing, disappearing without a trace within this strange invisible shell that surrounded Dave and his belongings.

Just poof - and gone, no matter how much power she pumped in the spell. It was almost insulting. Her slowly growing frustration was currently battling with curiosity. Dave's incessant quipping did not exactly help the matter, either.

She sighed and moved on to the next item in long, long list. Oh, this one is ought to be interesting.
She narrowed her eyes. "How about a... sleep spell?"
Her horn lit up for a second.

"Doesn't seem to be working," Dave shrugged in trained motion.
Suddenly his jaw went slack, eyes rolled back and, with a loud snore, he started dangerously lurching to the back.

With a full-body twitch he snapped out of the dream's embrace and made several steps back, barely managing to restore his balance.
"Whoa-"

Twilight's eyebrows flew up. "That's weird!"

"I know, right? At this point I expected for everything you throw at me to just... fizzle out."

Twilight shook her head, "No, it's not that; well, that too, but spell was supposed to put you to sleep for at least an hour!"

"I mean-" Dave yawned, "-it does make me sleepy, but not too much."

Triumphantly, Twilight put a first check mark across the sleep spell on the list. Thinking back to it, it was not exactly a complete success, so she added a question mark next to it.

It went on like this for some while. It was only when Twilight reached mind spells when Dave drew the line.
"No, no and no. None of this mind affecting mumbo-jumbo. I need my head fully working and operational! What if you mess up!?"

Twilight looked at him, pleading.
Dave did not relent.

"No means no, Twilight!"

Dave frantically searched for something - anything - to divert her attention to before she would get any more ideas or take matters in her own hooves.
"But! I've got a new experiment in mind, you game?"

"Sure!"

"To add credibility to the experiment, we'll pull a blind test. See that book over there? Lift it up with magic."

"That book? Ha, you got it!"
The book flew up in cloud of magic.
Twilight raised her brow. "But hey, isn't the book too far away from you for this effect to occur?"

"Exactly."
All of a sudden, Dave outstretched his hand and wrapped the palm around Twilight's horn.

The sound of book hitting the table confirmed his hypothesis.

"Hey!"
Twilight shook his hand off her horn. She was not amused in the slightest.

"Sorry!" Dave apologized, yet he was not sure what was the true source of Twilight's disapproval - magical appendage grappling, potential damage to the book or something else completely unrelated.

"I couldn't help but notice that magic seems to emanate from your horn," Dave started with his reasoning slowly, "so I wondered if you could do these magic things with me holding the horn? Well, you saw the result."

Sudden particularly unpleasant thought pushed itself forward. What if this was a big no-no in pony culture? He REALLY didn't think this one through.
"I hope that wasn't weird or anything." Dave tapped index fingers, suddenly looking shifty-eyed and mighty embarrassed.

Twilight tilted her head, perplexed by Dave's sudden mood whiplash.
"It's weird, but not weird-weird. Like grabbing somepony by an eyebrow," she clarified.

"Thank goodness," Dave exhaled with a relief. "Anyway, I think this will conclude our today's research. It's almost evening and I got some errands to run."

Dave couldn't believe his eyes. He blinked a few times and even rubbed his eyes to be extra sure.
"Damn, these guys work fast!"

The plot of land that was just grass yesterday already had bunch of concrete patches with supports and walls sticking out. One of the storage sheds had already been fully built and currently was being painted.

He gave Hard Hat a nod of approval and continued his stroll towards tailor shop.

He made a mental note to pay an immediate visit to local equivalent of a laundromat. If his quest for fresh undergarments and unrelated apparel happens to end in success, that is.

Library door swung open, with Dave barging in, barely visible behind a whole heap of clothes.

"What up, Twilight? Figured this anti-magic thing out yet?", he excitedly inquired, his voice slightly muffled by towering fabric.

"Not yet, but I have some theories. I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject first, though."

Dave finally found a suitable place to dump his cargo, and faced Twilight.
"Mine? Why?"

"Well, you seem to have the grasp of the scientific method-" Twilight gave a few rolls of hoof "-and your insight may prove really valuable."

"Okay then. I think it's something to do with the matter. Whatever me, my stuff and my entire world built of - it's... uh... non-magic-conducive or something. I dunno really. It's just a hunch."

"Just a hunch, eh?" Twilight peeked in her notes: this theory, blunt as it may be, fell surprisingly in line with her own observations.

Dave shrugged.
"Well, I'm not one of those PhD toting eggheads, so I don't know first thing about creating proper theories, but Earth-matter-is-anti-magic doesn't sound like a sound theory. After all - magic fizzles out all around me, not on, like, skin contact. Tiny pieces of skin and hairs that flake off me all the time, along with skin oil thing don't seem to have the effect either, otherwise anything I'd touch would be magic proof. And then there's semi-working spells like sleep spell. Too many holes for a waterproof theory, and thus it's more of a hunch."

Quill in Twilight's magic reached ridiculous speeds. She was mostly just being polite when asking Dave, but he indeed happened to have some serious insight.

"Anyway, I see you are a long way off from creating Grand Unifying Theory of Why The Fracking Heck Human Stuff Be Sorta Immune To Magic But Not Quite. So get to it! I expect to see at least 3 volumes by the morning," he dropped with a playful wink and headed to his bed.

Chapter 4 : Reclaiming Radio Receiver

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Dave yawned and stretched. Judging by distinct lack of alarm signal, it wasn't time to get up yet, and he could savor some sweet sweet sleep.

Wait.

Could it be that the phone's battery went dead? He couldn't remember plugging it in to charge last evening.

Letting out a begrudged grunt, Dave pried his eyes open.

Once the world has come into focus, Dave started, nearly sending the pillows to the floor.
Twilight was hanging over him, eyes wide, trying to catch every little detail. On both her sides tall stacks of notes balanced, ready to come crashing down at a moment's notice.

"Oh. Right. I'm still... here. With... you." Dave finally remembered the predicament that he found himself in recently.

"Good morning! I'm almost done with volume three!" cheered Twilight, still keeping the eyes on Dave, who tried to find refuge in blanket. Either she didn't understand his sarcasm yesterday or understood it a little too well.

"Twilight, do you mind turning around or something? I need to get dressed and I'm definitely not comfortable with you peering holes in me."

"Oh, right! Sorry!.." Twilight finally turned away. The sound of vicious quill-on-parchment scratching signalized that she would be occupied with notes for now.

Dave rolled out of bed, and started pulling on garments with surprising speed. The adrenaline from the semi-startling awakening still hasn't worn off.
"You also should know that watching people sleep is considered creepy where I'm from."

"Right! Of course! I- I mean, same here!.. Sorry!"
Twilight stopped stuttering, inhaled and tried to mend the situation.
"When I research, I tend to get... a little carried away..."
She let out a nervous giggle.

"I noticed," deadpanned Dave.

This type of attention was starting to get considerably creepy. On one hand, Dave could understand Twilight's desire to know more, and compared to SOME people he saw during student years, her... insistence on research was rather tame, even charming, in a way. On the other hand, he was feeling more and more like a lab rat with each passing minute.

The only saving grace is that he didn't get dragged off to local equivalent of Area 51, assuming they even had one.

Speaking of fortifications...
Dave had some workshop-related news that could possibly hurt Twilight's feelings, so he had to choose his words carefully.

"Oh, yeah - before I forget, I will be moving out soon. Hard Hat is almost done putting together workshop-slash-house for me."

Out. Standing. Subtlety of a sledgehammer, smoothness of P12 sandpaper.

Twilight wilted at the news and suddenly took great interest in the wooden floor, digging at it with her hoof.
"Is it because of my research?" she asked quietly.

Oh no. Damage control team, on the double!

Dave knelt and reassuringly put his hand on Twilight's shoulder, prompting her to lift her eyes from oh-so-peculiar floor.
"No, of course not. I'm not mad at you or anything. I just need a lot of place for my professional work. Besides, I don't see myself working in the library with machine tools, you know, the things that go WMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM! CLANG! WHIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRR!"

Dave's exaggerated expressions and gestures with onomatopoeia mimicking heavy machinery got a weak smile out of Twilight. Whew. Crisis majorly averted.

"Feel free to drop by any time you want. On one condition - tone down the research shtick a bit, will ya? I mean, you're nice and all, but I can't even pick my nose without you writing a freakin' PhD thesis on it!"

Dave suppressed strong urge to slap himself. His mouth definitely was working against him today.

Contrary to Dave's expectations, Twilight's face lit up, "What does 'picking your nose' mean? Is that human-specific thing? I need to document that!"

"See? That's exactly what I'm talking about! Look- just forget I ever mentioned that."
Twilight's pleading expression was almost too much to bear.
"Okay, maybe I'll explain later. Let's grab a bite to eat first."

Twilight observed the kitchen silently.
Situation was getting out of hoof. Dave showed much more agency than anticipated. It was kind of worrying.

He also was hiding something.

What was that nose picking thing even? You couldn't tease her with knowledge and then go back on her just like that! She will get to bottom of this!

Meanwhile, Spike and Dave just finished wrestling for the last cookie - the scuffle lasted longer than one would expect, as where Dave excelled in reach, Spike made up in mobility. In the end they settled on splitting it.

Munching on his half of the cookie, Dave narrowed his eyes. He had distinct nagging feeling that he forgot something important. What was he thinking about? Twilight's creepy research practices? No... Towers of notes stacked precariously over his head with no regard for safety? No... His inability today to defuse potentially emotionally devastating situations? Definitely no... Check phone battery charge? That's it!

He tapped the pocket where phone should be and froze in pre-panic state. The phone wasn't there.

He slapped his forehead hard enough for the sound to startle both Twilight and Spike.

"Right! I dropped it in that dang forest!"

Dave went through the rest of morning routines on autopilot, his mind iterating on various options to retrieve the phone. The phone in question was essentially indispensable for his work.

Having access to considerable computation power and bunch of engineering apps would be nice, but it wasn't the main goal here. After all, engineering calculator could do most of the tasks, powered by nothing but itsy-bitsy solar panel and able to go on for months without charging.

The most important part was getting to Mandala.
Mandala was the name of a rather sneaky book reading, storage, sharing and indexing app. It's exact origins were shrouded in mystery, but it was pretty much given that nerds from Computer Science branch had a hand in this.

The app, or, to be precise, app and its ever-growing database file were traditionally passed down to freshmen from seniors. It was a real treasure trove of illicitly-acquired books, technical literature, research papers, standards and even bunch of patents that otherwise would've costed a fortune and a half to get your hands on legally. There was even an extensive collection of classical literature in plaintext, snuck in by some Data Science buffs under the guise of language corpus sourcing.

All the data was heavily compressed and even more heavily encrypted - which made app a horrible battery hog for sure, but apparently original programmers wanted to steer clear of any copyright infringement charges by any means necessary.

In essence - Mandala was a whole wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. While it was not nearly as broad as Wikipedia per se, books had much more deeper coverage, especially of all topics engineering.
Dave was pretty sure that there was enough combined engineering knowledge to build anything from space shuttle to nuclear power plant, provided you actually had time to read all of the books.

And now it resided somewhere in Everfree Forest. A place where Dave already got almost munched on once.
He needed to get it back - and fast. Battery charge wouldn't last forever. In fact, it's probably running dangerously low right now.
If he was going to get it back in working state, it would have to be today.

But how?

Dave's deep-dive deliberation continued all the way up to the workshop. Every half-decent plan required time, a precious commodity he could not spare at the moment.

Technically, he could ask his newfound pony friends for help, but... It was complicated.

Fluttershy and Rarity would be straight out as being too timid and civilized to actually deal with beasts that are out for blood.

Pinkie didn't fit the adventurous profile either.

Rainbow would probably approach the suggestion with her typical bravado, but how well would she hold up in a real fight? There's no telling, and gambling with her life didn't seem like a great option.

Applejack could probably kick the ever-loving snot out of these wooden wolves, but then again, there's many of them and she just ain't got no flight nor magic.

He could ask Twilight... If she caught the whiff of news that the phone has enormous collection of books - human books, even - she'd probably move mountains to get to it. Dave knew from recent experience that she had a lot of spells at her disposal that would make short work of wooden beasts. Heck, she could pave a six-lane highway through the forest if she was destructively creative about it. Would be a great option, but on the other hand, Dave could forget about seeing his phone ever again. The Mandala database had an outrageous amount of books - enough to last several lifetimes without repeating a read, and that's not even mentioning other things stashed on the phone, like Dave's favorite movies and tons of music. With Twilight researching the crap out all of that, heat death of the universe didn't seem that much of a distant point in the future...

Slightly disgruntled by another dead-end plan, Dave swung open workshop door. Looks like Hard Hat and the rest of construction crew were just about done. There was even some furniture to boot, a detail Dave didn't remember ordering. That was really thoughtful of them!

Dave's gaze fell upon stack of unused sheets of metal and slid to a nearby stallion rounding up his operations with what Dave unmistakably determined to be oxy-fuel torches.

And just like that, alternative solution presented itself.

"I see you have welding and cutting torches. Mind if I-" he rolled several bits through his fingers "-borrow them for a while? Wanna do a little project with all this spare metal."

On his way to buy a cartload of door hinges and bunch of other parts for his sporadic metalworking project Dave stumbled into some creature that was completely unlike the pony folk. Gears in Dave's head rattled and groaned. What was proper name for this type of creature? Half bird, half big cat... Was it a griffon or hippogriff?

While he was submerged in the thought, said creature tried to push him away but lacked the mass to put into the shove, leading to Dave only slightly rocking in place, but otherwise not moving.
"Move it, beanstalk!"

Wow. That was kind of rude and unexpected. Not that it hurt Dave on personal level - far from that. It's just that for a second he felt like being back home, on sinful Earth.
And as they say, when in Rome...

Dave retorted on autopilot before he could stop himself, "Who you're calling beanstalk, feather-brain?"

Not the brightest of ideas, considering the sharp talons on his immediate interlocutor, but Dave wasn't even surprised at this point. It fell perfectly in line with today's agenda of bad ideas and words just coming out wrong.

Judging by griffon's pupils shrinking into pin points, his trash-talking skills haven't rusted a bit. Granted, he wouldn't hold up a candle to Jimmy, who could make just about anyone see red with a mere couple of words, as well as he could disarm a brewing fight; but Dave prided himself on eloquently throwing some light trash talk where someone like Boris would throw 40 pounds of fist.

There was a second or so of complete silence. And then griffon practically exploded.

The street quickly emptied, sans some curious ponies peeking out from a safe distance.

Previously gentle and soft-spoken human seemed to barely show any restraint delivering verbal lashing to his rude opponent.
The griffon miss wasn't far behind, compensating for repetitiveness of her repertoire with sheer volume of her insults.

Sometimes human would spit out suspiciously innocent-sounding phrase, but the more you thought about the phrase, the less innocent it got. These seemed to tick off the griffon the most, to the point of not being able to articulate herself correctly.

The exchange continued for a while, threatening to grow into full-out fight, but then it sort of fizzled out, much to everypony's relief. The loud griffon took to skies, and human continued his stroll as if nothing happened.

Despite walking away with a facade of polite smile, Dave wasn't happy with the whole ordeal.
At the rate the current day was going, it'd be better for him to shut up completely for the rest of the day, lest he provoke another incident of similar caliber.

Still, it could be considered a beneficial shake-up and a good vocabulary exercise. It's not often you get to tell someone to get defenestrated.

Hopefully ponies that got in the crossfire of ear-withering innuendos wouldn't hold the whole thing against him. The poor bastards.

Dave stepped back and cracked a crooked smile.

The result of his metalworking efforts looked like unholy spawn of medieval plate armor and a F-117 stealth bomber. Pointy and angular, without a single curve, it looked like real life low-poly model from some 90's 3D game with rainbow heat tint accentuating welded edges. By some account, it could be even considered stylish.

However, nearby flanged mace that Dave welded together from steel rebar and remaining scraps of metal sheets, looked nothing but ugly. But it didn't matter, as long as it got the job done.

Dave turned his critical gaze back to armor.

Every single joint was protected almost in paranoid fashion. The shoulder joints were particularly painful to cover fully and properly, and some freedom of movement had to be sacrificed in process. The access to the jugular was simply nonexistent, covered by what armor expert would classify as bevor.

This left feet and hands as only unprotected parts. Feet already had enough protection in form of Dave's heavy-duty steel-toed boots, complete with kevlar soles and even additional metallic inserts shielding tendons.
Hands, on the other, er, hand, weren't in such luck. Making a gauntlet from sheet metal with nary but welding torch was nigh impossible, so Dave opted for just welding on some plates in general shape of a fist, turning it all into an armored knuckleduster. It would trade off some arm mobility for protection, but still leave enough room to get a proper grip on the mace.

Finishing his nitpicky observation, Dave mumbled, "I guess it's time to try it on."

It took some tricky maneuvering, unconventional belt usage and colorful language but in the end Dave managed to pull it off. Well, pull it on, to be exact, but point still stands.

Clanging horribly, he paced around, getting feel for the suit of armor. All the redundant metal that went in additional protection was weighing him down considerably, making motions sluggish. However, it also added considerable 'oomph' to the mace, as Dave found out after few tentative swings. Whoever was going to be hit by that would definitely feel it. The weight still was a problem, however.

"I better not fall down. If I go down, I'm not getting up without help. Or at least without a nearby tree. Or I could just go turtle mode and crawl out of the forest."

Dave wrinkled his nose.
Whilst this still was a tremendously stupid idea, at this point he simply ran out of smart ideas and was going with the least stupid idea out of the bunch.

Dave reasoned that it was best to start unrolling his frantic escape from the last known point.
It didn't take long to locate familiar cliff. Getting on top of it, however...

By the time he reached the top, Dave expended his pent-up obscenities vocabulary twice and was going for a third lap and some improvisation to boot. Taking a minute to steady his breathing, Dave headed into the forest proper.

Retracing steps was surprisingly easy - just following glaringly obvious breadcrumb trail of boot tracks in the mud and branches broken during his previous expeditious retreat.
But his unwelcome clanging intrusion could not last unnoticed for long.

With loud growling familiar Timberwolf pack announced their presence.

Dave carefully assessed tactical situation to the best degree that observation slits in helmet allowed him.

The pack approached slowly but surely, pushing him from different directions, gaining only a handful of inches at a time yet at startlingly steady rate.

Dave grabbed the mace with both hands, "It's time to go medieval on your wooden asses!"

Wide horizontal blow swept the least careful Timberwolf, sending it tumbling. And then it got all sorts of hectic.
The rest of pack jumped forward, clawing, biting and trying to push Dave off balance.

The apparent leader of the pack was even bright enough to bite Dave's armored leg full-force, snapping it's own jaw off and sending it flying somewhere in the bushes. Dave swung his improvised rebar mace once more, launching the unfortunate and very confused wooden creature in the same bushes. This turn of events seemed to shocked the pack into a mild retreat, but they weren't dissuaded from the fight just yet.

Not squandering the moment of respite, Dave immediately turned the the offensive around. With a monstrous overhead swing, closest Timberwolf was turned in a piece of modern art imprinted in the mud. Trying to pull the mace out of impromptu installation, Dave could see magic wisps escaping splintered wood from below the metal.

Finally yanking the mace out of the mud with a mighty pull, he waved welded abomination around threateningly.
"Who else wants some!?"

The clearing was empty. And only rustling leaves hinted that remainder of the pack decided to turn tail.

"Apparently lumberdogs don't like being pancaked."

The wave of strength and anger that had washed over him started to ebb. Dave leaned on the tree for support, breathing heavily, feeling his heart beat somewhere in the region of throat. The adrenaline comedown was not pulling any punches.

He tried wiping the cold sweat from the forehead, forgetting for a moment that he wore armor, attaining naught but some metal screeching.

Some movement just in the corner of his eye made him flinch and scramble for mace.

"What in the..."

Branches and driftwood comprising his recent addition to the world of modern art could be seen freeing themselves from the mud, and slowly rolling into the thick of the forest, enveloped in faint glow.

"Frickin' magic," Dave spat out through teeth.

Glowing eyes showed up several more times, peering from shrubbery, but every time boastful wave or two of flanged mace quickly sent them scrambling back to the safety of the forest depths.

"Looks like they have learned to respect the steel. Just you wait, you'll learn to respect fire too!"

As far as Dave could tell, it was the right clearing. The one where he appeared several days back.
Boot prints in the mud seemed to concede, just abruptly stopping in the middle of clearing.

In the center of the clearing there was a little mound of small sticks and pieces of wood that piqued his interest.

Wasn't it right where he dropped the phone? Brushing the wooden bits aside, Dave was greeted with a faint red light denoting phone's low charge.

How peculiar.

Gilda wasn't having a nice day. First this annoying pink pony messin' about and refusing to get lost, then that uppity ape, and now this party with annoying pink pony again. At least they didn't invite that lumbering idiot. The mere thought of another encounter got Gilda fuming out loud.
"Yeah, that watchtower weirdo better not show up! If I see him again I'm so gonna kick his-"
Her eyes focused on some gleams in the back of the room.

Could it be? No, it couldn't. But it was. It was that towering ape again, this time clad in metal. He gestured and swung some mean-lookin' mace around, apparently entertaining some guests with a combat story while greatly enjoying himself. Great. Just... great. This day was definitely conspiring against her.

At least it couldn't get any worse.

Or so she thought.

Door to the workshop has closed with a quiet click, and Dave immediately leaned on it, breathing heavily and clutching phone in his shaking fingers.

This was another proof that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The enemy in this case was Pinkie who somehow managed to spot him on the street and then proceeded to practically haul him to some party that he was apparently missing, not listening to his protests.

Normally Dave wouldn't be the one to pass up any half-decent party, but today he just could not afford to spend time getting down. Any and all pleas went straight over Pinkie's head, though.

And while the party was admittedly better than half-decent, it would be even better without the rude griffon that Dave tried to ignore to the best of his abilities, even as going as far as trying to blend in by retelling his today's raid into the forest to several guests. His precautions were largely unnecessary as griffon was already pretty occupied, finding herself on the receiving end of an entire series of pranks.

Noting the pattern, Dave even tried to use them as distraction in attempt to slip away, but alas, every attempt to leave the party early was put out of commission prematurely by the pink menace who somehow inexplicably knew when Dave was about to sneak out. There was just no winning with her.

So he played along and continued blending in with the crowd, until opportunity showed itself, or as the case might be, showed herself out. With rude griffon storming off and party starting to break down, he finally managed to skip under the radar, escaping the unexpected prison of partying.

And now he was at his new home.
"Temporary home until I can get back to Earth," he corrected himself.

Putting phone and mace on workbench carefully, Dave got to taking his armor off.
It was infinitely easier than putting it on - most of it held on several latch locks, and with them unlatched it all came off nicely with few tugs. The rest held on belts, but they were easy enough to undo.

After enjoying a minute-long hot shower, Dave felt ready to tackle the whole issue with the phone.

"First, gotta formulate a plan."

In short, he had to figure out how to charge the damn thing. Technically, USB standard could shine some light on how much voltage and where he'd need to feed. Standard that he wouldn't be able to read for long - so he'd better write it down in case battery dies. Standard that may not be there at all.

With a sigh, he woke the phone.

Eighteen percent charge. Not bad, but could be better.

Not wasting a second, he turned the brightness to lowest setting and punched in terms in Mandala's search field.

The search crunched through compressed and encrypted data, and the charge percentage started to dwindle right before Dave's eyes.

"Come on, come on..." he muttered as if pleading could speed up machine. Unfortunately the search remained cruelly unperturbed in its pacing, displaying loading animation with cold detachment worthy of a role in machine uprising movie.

Waiting in this sort of tension was getting really nerve-wracking really quick.
Was there even a USB standard in the database? What if there wasn't? No, there had to be, good half of university would be up in arms if it was gone.

His mind returned to the problem as a whole. Finding USB specifications wouldn't actually get him that far into solving it.
For there was a completely uncalled-for bonus challenge: he had to re-invent part of SI system to actually be able to measure voltage. Somehow.

Dave rubbed his temples.
The more he thought about the issue, the more annoying his inadequacy grew. Electrical engineering just never clicked for him, no matter how many times he went over the textbooks. It was embarrassing in respect to his grasp of other disciplines. Strength of materials? No sweat! Explaining quantum mechanisms that drive stimulated emission? Easy as pie. But ask him Kirchhoff's laws and he'd draw blanks if not start babbling as a loon.

As Jim would put it, "It just wasn't his forte". And if he was struggling while working in the lab armed with multimeter and adjustable power supply while under watchful eye of a professional, he'd definitely have trouble without all of that.

It was a miracle how he avoided flunking related disciplines. Well, less of a miracle and more like lots of help from electrically-inclined friends and mile-long cheat sheets, plus copious amounts of luck.

But forgetting skills for a minute, how was he going to measure things exactly? Weren't SI units chosen pretty much arbitrarily? Sure, there was a link to various universally-true anchors, like second being who-knows-how-many shifts of energy levels in atoms of super-cooled cesium, but where he'd get the equipment to measure something like that?!

Dave's increasingly more panicked train of thought got derailed by search finishing.

"Yes!"

Dave clenched his teeth, squinted his eyes and got down to writing down.

An hour later he threw the pencil aside and rubbed his right wrist that felt like it was on fire. The unpleasant feeling was swiftly joined by a headache. An entire day worth of misadventures started catching up to him. Every major muscle ached, angry at him for armor-induced abuse. Chafing from the belts wasn't particularly pleasant, either. To cap it all off, the sleep bore down on him unrelentingly.

"Screw it. Tomorrow, I'll solve this... Tomorrow," he mumbled and just dropped onto the bed, asleep even before his head hit the pillow.

Dave sat in the bed, rocking and swaying head, disoriented. Today's awakening was rather unpleasant.

It was one of these nightmares where everything felt like submerged in glycerine - motions slow, images blurry, but you still feel the creeping dread, as if you're being watched by something you can't see while it can see you very clearly. In these kind of dreams tension never snaps, never gives you the luxury of being simply jolted awake.

Dave shook head and stretched, shedding last bits of sleep.

Handful of days. It took only a handful of days for nightmares to be back. He almost started to hope that this colorful land could ward them off for good. Almost.
At least it wasn't one of them recurrent nightmares yet - those weren't blurry, on the contrary, they tended to be clear and stand with you for a long time.

Sprinkling face with some cold water to wake up completely and chase gloomy thoughts away, Dave groaned. Soreness from yesterday's armored antics hasn't gone away just yet. Not a great start for the day.

Phone's charge indicator still glowed with faint red - the battery made it through this night. Good.

With careful inspection of yesterday's scribbles a plan started formulating in Dave's head. At this point he pretty much came to terms with fact that he had much bigger chances of burning or even exploding the phone than charging it with his bumbling about.

The only remaining practical solution was to put the pride aside and ask a professional for help.

So a trip to a big city it was. Great.

In his search for train station, Dave got nearly trampled by Rarity, who took off in the rough direction of Carousel Boutique with all signs of severe distress. And her mane looking kinda strange. Which may or may not have explained distress.

Looking in the direction she came from, Dave spotted some sort of congregation in front of a stage that wasn't there yesterday.

Thanks to Dave's height compared to average denizen of Equestria, he could see the stage clearly all the way from the back of the crowd.
Some performer in wizard cloak and hat stood on scene and addressed crowd.

Seeing familiar rainbow mane, Dave pushed forward. The more he pushed forward the more ticked-off he felt.
The arrogance in the air was so thick Dave could practically taste it.

Did he mishear it or was the performer mare referring to herself in third person AND was insistently calling herself The Great and Powerful?
That's some ego, alright...

Emerging to see familiar faces, Dave could not contain his curiosity. "What is even happening over here?"

He had to stop the trio with a gesture; Applejack, Rainbow and Spike talking so emotionally at the same time were just unintelligible.
"You!" He pointed at Spike. "Sum up what's up in a few words."

"Trixie is using magic to pick on others! You gotta help!"

"So, it's some unicorn being uppity with magic? Great, I've got just what the doctor ordered! Correction: I AM just what the doctor ordered."
Rolling up his sleeves, he approached the stage. As soon as he started climbing, he found himself snagged on something.
Dave looked back. Twilight was trying to pull him back by his jeans, jaws locked tightly.

Once he stepped away from stage, she released fabric and just silently shook her head, eliciting a groan from Dave as well trio behind her.

"Fine, be a buzzkill!" he threw over the shoulder and walked away from the whole performance.

Dave closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.
She probably had a good reason to not let him do that. And antagonizing residents, even if they're arrogant, was not the best idea anyway. Especially after his recent griffon incident.

Besides, he still had a train to catch, and phone's charge was slowly ticking down.

"Are you deaf?! The Great and Powerful Trixie demands you on stage! This instant!"
Trixie stomped on the wooden floor to punctuate her demand.

"Nope, not interested!"
Dave kicked up the pace and rounded the corner.

"Jeez! It's like she's deliberately asking for it."

Unbelievable. Not only every town and city name was some sort of groan-worthy horse pun, they also were plays on Earth city names!
At first Dave even thought that train station staff ponies were messing with him. But then again, how'd they know names from Earth?
There simply was no way this all was a coincidence, this had to be parallel dimension shenanigans.

Dave sighed in exasperation. This place had too much logic for being this crazy and just when you thought that you found a method to it's madness, it'd get even crazier.
At least steam engine train was logical and train carts weren't too crazy either.

It's a good thing he didn't look out of the window that much, otherwise seeing pony variant of Statue of Liberty would have probably made him flip out.

"Electricians are all there," croaked the stallion and pointed toward one of doorways.

"I don't need an electrician, I need an electrical engineer, somebody who can make an electric appliance from scratch."
Custodian simply pointed to the same doorway and returned to mopping the floor.
"Makes sense."

Dave quietly closed door behind him, scanning the room he emerged into. He was a bit surprised he could get so far without any appointments or anything.
It was all in confidence, in rock-solid display that you, in fact, belonged here. Nobody tried to stop you as long as you moved with a purpose. Looks like certain aspects of corporate culture were universal.

"Alright, I need someone who's good with electrical engineering for a quick, somewhat tricky but"- he shook a ruby of considerable size in the air for everypony to see -"well-paid odd job."
That declaration gathered him several pairs of curious eyes from their respective workplaces.

As soon as bunch of interested ponies gathered round his table, Dave continued.
"So. There's this device"- Dave held up the smartphone -"it connects, or should I say, used to connect through this here cable to a power source."

Dave put the cable and the phone on the table and started pacing back and forth before the volunteers.

"What I need is you to construct several units of some sort of charging device to feed power with precise voltage and amperage, preferably from any standard outlet. Here are my scribbles from the standard that describes the necessary values."

He put papers on the tables and turned on the heels for dramatic effect. Next part was important and it's best he stressed this as much as he could.
"However! These are in units that may or may not be different to what you're used to. So you'll have to figure this out. Fret not - you got a lead in form of the device feeding specified voltage when you connect something with high enough capacitance to it, whatever that means. You can find related info on page two, under OTG section."

As he went in depth, more and more ponies left, heading back for their workplaces.
One of remaining ponies lifted up eyes from the papers and said, "Sounds easy enough."

Dave was waiting for it. Of course, it'd be a easy-peasy job for someone whose talent is electrical engineering. But it wasn't so simple.
"Now the catch. This is one-of-a-kind device. If you fry it, then there won't be a second chance. You also won't be able to peek inside - it's glued together tight and it's fragile enough that it'll likely break if you try to take it apart. The chip-work is so dense and delicate that you won't be able to repair it either. Or maybe you will, I dunno, but I wouldn't risk it if I were you. Battery's on last legs, so you might want to get to it sooner than later."

He leaned in on the sole stallion remaining near the table so closely that he could see sweat forming on his forehead.
"And I value this thing very much. Some wooden dogs recently found that out the hard way. So try to not fry it!"

He clapped his hands and smiled, shedding the ominously tense look he just had.
"Should be easy for a professional. I'll be back in an hour. Remember to not mess up! Oh and- don't use magic. This thing messes with magic."

Dave left the unicorn stallion to eye the phone and wonder what he just got himself into.

"Probably should've given myself more time than just an hour. Now I gotta juggle all of this like no tomorrow."

First, Dave planned to visit the library. On the off chance that the tragedy happens, he wanted to make sure that there was access to some semblance of engineering books.

In stark contrast to Twilight's library, public library of Manehattan had entire wings dedicated to technology and manufacture. Splendid.

Satisfied with results, Dave was more than ready to approach the main course of planned big-city activity. Tooling up.

Sight of shelves with powertools extending into distance elevated Dave's spirits immensely. Zipping around shelves like a child at candy store, he left no tool overlooked.

But power-tools were just appetizers. Main dish would be proper machinery. It was the main reason Dave hauled bags stretched taut with bits all the way here.

In search for machine tool goodness, Dave delved deeper in rows of industrial implements on display. And then he saw it. The shining beauty.
It had 6 spindles, and the multitude of moving parts inside only began hinting on it's capabilities: polygon turning, power skiving, milling on several axes...

Sound of hooves against concrete approaching him snapped Dave out of awe-filled contemplation. His chin felt strangely chilly - did he start to drool?

Wiping his mouth just in case, he turned to face the source of the sound.

It was a mare in blue coveralls. She bore overly polite, if slightly smug smile.

"Interested in this model?"

"I don't plan on mass-producing anything just yet. And I'm pretty sure this beaut's cost is through the roof."

"Oh, like you wouldn't believe," mare giggled. Her smile grew to be a little more genuine.

"So, I'm mostly after metalworking essentials now. You know, lathe, mill machine, box-and-pan brake, that sorta thing."

"Well, in that case, you might be interested in..."

Diode Bridge wasn't sure what to make of the device the recent visitor left in his custody. He carried out the request of strange creature rather quickly, after overcoming initial nervousness of high stakes, and now was turning the shiny rectangle this and that way, curious to discern it's purpose. Whatever it was, it looked high quality, well put together with no obvious way to open it. There was one additional round socket, and one of flat sides had what looked like several lenses. It almost looked like some alien technology from pulpy science fiction, although with less pulsing lights and beeping. Maybe that creature was an alien after all, but it definitely didn't act like one. I mean, alien just barging in like he owned the place, speaking same language, demanding somepony to fix his electrical appliance, paying with gemstone? On a second thought, that's exactly what an alien would do.

"What was your name, again?"

Stallion twitched, nearly dropping the device. How did somecreature so tall even manage to sneak up on him unnoticed? Alien invisibility fields?

"I'm Diode Bridge," he squeezed out.

Dave took phone in his hands and checked the battery status. Much to his relief, it was displaying that it was at 35 percent and charging.
"Well, congratulations, Mr. Bridge, you just earned yourself a hefty payday."

Replacing small pile of chargers with one ruby, Dave said, "Name's Dave, by the way. In case we work together in the future."

Wow, now that was definitely an alien-sounding name. Wait, 'work together'? What could he work on with some alien, a heat ray? A flying saucer? Would he mind elaborating?

Ah, rats, the alien already left!

By the time Dave boarded train back, it started getting dark.

All available space on Dave's seat and seat immediately opposing it was taken either by boxes or various stacks and bundles of metal blanks. Dave himself was squeezed all the way in the corner, smiling like a total loon and lovingly cradling some sort of reciprocal saw.
Shame about lathe and other machine tools, though. They'd arrive in a few days by delivery.

On a midday train his heap of stuff would probably gather a lot of weird looks, but this late there was barely anypony on the train. It almost felt like he had entire train for himself.

The landscape sliding by the the window, coupled with finally listening to music, put Dave in soothing, contemplative mood - just going with the flow of the endless trees, lush hills, cliffs, trees again, flying bears...

"Wait, what?!"
Dave propped up window glass with his forehead, intent on finding out if he was going crazy or not. The unusual sight defied all odds and stubbornly refused to dissipate, appearing to be genuine.
"I leave town for ONE DAY, and there's already some sort of Unidentified Flying Bear sighting going on! Is this normal?! Is this what ponies do when I'm not looking?!"

The window glass remained silent to his questions.

"Looks like Twilight has some 'splaining to do..."

Chapter 5 : Supersonic Steel Slug Solution

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Twilight breathed in with a full chest and smiled.
Fluttershy's cottage always seemed so peaceful, so in-tune with it's natural surroundings, that merely passing by the meadow filled one with relaxation and brought the peace of mind.

Twilight happily creaked the front door open.

She was greeted by a sight that made her blood chill and her skin crawl.

In the dead center of the room stood Dave. Which wasn't all that particularly terrifying, if not for a little detail. He was covered head to toe in various bugs.

Myriads of moving bugs.

Twilight found herself unable to pry her gaze from the crawling carpet coating Dave, consisting of endless spiders, millipedes, pill bugs, crickets, mantises, wasps, stag beetles, stick bugs, butterflies, house centipedes...
Her face twitched, reflexively trying to contort into a expression of revulsion, but her brain was too occupied going into overload attempting to process every single arthropod specie that was present clinging on to Dave's clothing.

To drive the last nail into the coffin of sanity, Dave was giggling with this childish glee while toying with them and calling them cute and adorable.

Suddenly the human locked his eyes with Twilight, ruining her hopes of quietly backing out of this nightmare unseen.
"I-I think I... will check in on you... l-later," she stammered out, eyes still big as dessert plates.

The door nearly slammed shut, but slowed down at the very last moment, closing with a quiet click.

"What was that about?" Dave said to no-one in particular.

Fuzzy spider perched on his sleeve raised first pair of legs in a shrug.

Fluttershy peeked in the room with curious expression on her muzzle.
"Did I hear, um, Twilight's voice?"

Dave nodded carefully as to not shake off anyone off his head.
"She suddenly left. I don't know what her deal was."

He returned to administering tiny pats and abdomen-rubs and the look of slight concern on his face dissolved into glowing giddiness once again.
"But anyway - it was absolutely wonderful - not to mention therapeutic - to pet appreciative chitinous friends of yours. Where I come from I'd be bitten and stung like a million times already!"

Dave gave Fluttershy a big, warm smile full of elation.
"Thank you, Fluttershy."

Flustered pegasus looked away with a modest smile.

It all started innocently enough, with holding and petting a fluffy spider, and then mantises apparently expressed desire to join in on the fun to Fluttershy, and it all quickly went downhill from there. Not that Dave complained - he'd gladly play with bugs as long as they behaved. Heck, even if they didn't!

Dave slowly rotated wrist and peered at the watch.
"Holy guacamole, time sure flies! I'd love to dandle the cutie crawlies some more, but I'm expecting a big delivery today, and it should arrive very very soon. Please help me untangle everyone safely."

"Eat yo heart out, Amazon! Call back when you can quadcopter THIS!"

Dave had to admit, he was thoroughly impressed. He definitely did not expect the lathe and other machines to be air-delivered via a squadron of pegasi. Their trip took longer than expected due to particularly nasty black cloud, but otherwise entire thing went without a hitch.

Dave dove into new machinery, self-indulgently inspecting shiny purchases, hooking them up to power and oiling this and that.

Arrival of new instruments was something Dave really looked forward last few days, to the point that he couldn't sit, stay or lay still. It didn't help that last few days were just so bland.

Well, outside of two incidents.

First being Pinkie kicking down workshop door and declaring that Dave is not to move anywhere because party is underway. Nobody warned him about "New in town" party shtick and apparently Dave managed to virtuously evade the pink party mastermind at least three consecutive times by being sneaky, switching locations, and even using other parties for cover. In Pinkie's words. Still, it was nice to goof off for a bit, even though Twilight was at it again, this time trying to grab Dave's saliva samples sneakily.

Second incident was less crowded but in no way less awkward.
It all began with his guilty conscience rearing it's ugly head once again, demanding him to do something about his debt to Rarity, and that particular day seemed as good as any.

But it was not meant to be, as his visit to Carousel Boutique to see if local fashionista needed any help was relentlessly derailed from get-go.

"Sweet Celestia! What is that on your face?!" Rarity raised a forehoof to her head and dramatically fainted on one of her ubiquitous fancy sofas.

Slightly panicked, Dave ran his hands across his face to feel for abnormalities. Only one thing stood out as new.
"That's a beard."

Recovering surprisingly quickly from the faint, Rarity looked at him with equal measures of worry and confusion.

Dave elaborated, "Look. Humans grow facial hair. Some faster than others. I'm on the faster side."

Rarity continued batting eyes at him, as if he was missing some obvious point.

Dave stroked unruly hair on his chin, "What, you think I should shave it? No way! I'm trying to grow some respectable beard 'n' 'stache here! Even Spike is envious of my progress, dunno why, but he sure is!"

The mysterious silence card got played once again by Rarity as she scanned him up and down. Was she also upset at him for getting clothes elsewhere or something?

Unable to take any more of silent sass, Dave threw hands up in exasperation and exited the shop.

Well, that visit went swimmingly. And he forgot to offer help, to boot!
Now thinking back to it, few last days weren't that bland, but boredom teaming up with waiting for something sure could dilate your perception of time to heck and back.

Dave picked up closest shiny metal part, trying to make out his reflection. Was his beard really that bad?

Unsatisfied with visual inspection, Dave mumbled, "Probably should shave before the visit to Princesses."
Speaking of which - he should probably check in with Twilight, and also ask her how the Royal appointment papers are going.

It was uncharacteristically loud in the library - the gang was all here, discussing something very actively. Dash aggressively zipped around, clearly agitated.

Clearing throat to get attention, Dave greeted everypony and declared the goal of his intrusion with his usual straightforwardness.
"'Sup, gang! I just popped in to ask how the papers are going."

"The papers? Oh, right... the papers." Twilight's eyes got shifty all of a sudden.

It goes without saying that papers did not even exist in reality, and it was just a thing she came on the spot to... well, keep Dave in place. Who knew that he'd leave the observation zone by other means? Why did she even think that this little lie wouldn't come up later? The human definitely wanted to return home, and now was intently watched her, expecting answer that she couldn't give.

The help came in form of Applejack.
"Sorry, Dave, but we've got a Dragon problem on our hooves."

Thankfully that seemed to divert Dave's attention.
"A dragon problem? Did Spike set the library on fire again?"

That remark earned him a glare from Twilight. Oh, right. He wasn't supposed to mention Spike's recent coughing mishap. Whoops.

Completely oblivious to Twilight's reaction, Applejack continued, "No, no. There's a huge dragon snorin' up a cloud of ash. We need to get him to do lil' bit of relocatin', is all."

Dave mentally went over the news. Huge dragon. Relocating. Well, that can only end in tears. But more likely, ashes.

So he put on a facade of enthusiasm.
"Dragon, you say? I'm coming with you! I always wanted to see a real dragon."
Spike would probably take offense at that but he was nowhere to be seen. But just in case Dave added, "Big, huge dragon, like, with wings and stuff. By the way, how big are we talking about, here?"

Dash swooped down to Dave's eye level, her forehooves crossed, "Well, duh! He produced all this smoke, so at least as big as a house!"

That arrangement didn't sit well with Twilight. After all, this task was given by Celestia to all six of them for a reason.
"Are you sure you want to come?"

"Of course I'm sure, I'll just be careful and stand out of harm's way. Besides, you have a plan, don't you?"

"Yeah... A plan..." She dragged in not very convincing manner.

With a whip of left hand, Dave checked his wristwatch.
"Great! Listen, I've some errands to run, how much time till we move out?"

"We'll meet back here in less than an hour."

Dave did some quick calculations in his head. No, just a gun wouldn't be enough. What would be enough, then?

The answer was, naturally, more gun.

He quickly caught up with pink mare bouncing merrily ahead of him.
"Pinkie! I need your help!"

Pinke slowed down and faced Dave, still bouncing up and down excitedly.
"Of course, Dave!"

"You see, I need to know where I can buy fireworks and helium. Know a good place?"

Pinkie stopped bouncing, freezing in midair with confused expression. Dave to the best of his abilities tried to ignore this blatant disregard for laws of physics.

"Helium?"

"Yes, the gas that's used to make balloons float and if you breathe it in, it makes your voice all squeaky and funny."

Pinkie's face lit up and she resumed bouncing.
"Oh! It's in the party supplies shop just around that corner! Same as fireworks!"

"Thank you, Pinkie, you're a life-saver!"

Pinkie raised her hoof in educative gesture,
"What can I say, with party planning, you've got to be prepared!"

Hearing no response, Pinkie looked around confusedly, but Dave had already vanished.

Dave's loud complaints bounced around the workshop.
"They want to evict a dragon. A flippin' dragon! Huge honkin' flame-breathin' dragon!"

They were like kids, absolutely secure in thought that nothing bad is going to happen to them and that things will work out, somehow.
For a moment Dave balked at aptness of comparison.
Innocent. That's the thing! They weren't privy to solving their problems with violence, and didn't really expect to encounter it either!

He switched the lathe power on. It was time to make something very deadly.

But him getting back into his true medium was yet another problem. He still needed to stay on the good side of local populace and generally avoid showing himself in... negative light.
Last thing they needed to know was that Dave could very well be described as deathmonger, constructing and peddling instruments fine-tuned to make killing fast, easy, convenient and, worst of all, horribly efficient.

Dave scoffed. That last thought sounded a bit too much like comments he used to get from certain parts of his extensive family.

The whole situation was bogus - it was playing helpless gentle doormat versus saving their lives.

"Well, I can't just let them go get themselves killed," he reasoned out loud.

Technically, the problem could work out on it's own. From what he could gather, they were some sort of local heroes. Surely Twilight had some plan. They couldn't be this recklessly suicidal, could they? No, they must have some sort of ace up their sleeve.
An in case they don't, well...

Dave looked at threading that slowly appeared on rapidly rotating piece of steel pipe.

There were options.

Dave showed up lugging some strange contraption. It looked like a long pipe, about as thick as a hoof, connected to the center of a long metal drum, slightly thicker than the pipe. Two really inconvenient-looking handles were attached to it. The whole thing swayed back and forth, attached to his back by a long belt.
Was it some sort of his new invention?

Dash smirked. Just another thing Ponyville desperately needed, a crazy inventor of all things wacky. It was pretty gutsy of him to go into Everfree all alone, though, she had to give him that. Gutsy for an egghead, that is.

Dave himself looked even scruffier than usual, covered in some machine oil stains; a pair of ear defenders swung on his neck.

The rest of the gang pulled up rather quickly.
And not a moment too soon, as Dave was getting tired of shuffling around, balancing his steel burden. There was actually nothing preventing monstrous steel slug from just sliding out of the barrel, so Dave constantly reminded himself to hold the contraption in certain manner to prevent exactly that. The awkward shuffling didn't go unnoticed by Twilight, who inquired about the device immediately.

"Oh, that. It's a special tool I made that may come in handy. Or maybe not..."
Every word technically true, just the way Dave liked it. Playing dumb was the best strategy for now.

Strangely enough, this explanation satisfied Twilight, and she returned her gaze to the map. Well, it was a relief that dealing with dragon squatter came higher on list of priorities than pestering Dave with really inconvenient questions.

Dave glanced in the direction of their upcoming trip, estimating the distance.
Hold the phone. It has only now hit him that smoke was emanating from almost a needle-like mountain with it's top stuck somewhere in clouds.
They were going to climb that?
"Dang it! Twilight, you could've mentioned the whole mountain-climbing thing earlier, I'd at least pack rope with me!"

"Aha," came her answer in the most bland and detached tone imaginable.

"Ugh, forget you."
Dave turned away with a wince, as his hand found itself being magnetically attracted to his forehead. This was already shaping up to be a terrible trip.

Soft whimpering snapped him out of it.

It was Fluttershy, huddled up on the ground, trembling. Every audible mention of a dragon made her visibly shrink and whimper again.
Apparently only she understood full implications of delivering eviction order to a giant fire-breathing reptile.

The sight of frightened little ball of yellow fur and feathers would leave only coldest hearts indifferent.
Dang it, Dave! You can't just bear down on Fluttershy, cradle and console her just because she got a little scared. Show some poise! Keep your composure!

A second later he was gently stroking yellow fur, comforting Fluttershy and assuring her that's it's going to be okay.
Trembling subsided but Fluttershy still looked like she was going to have a heart attack any second.

Dave blew on his pained fingers and reached for another crevice, grumbling.
"Are they part mountain goats or something? I can barely climb an incline so steep and they walk up like it's no big deal! My simian heritage just ain't doing me any favors today."

Colored figures shuffled somewhere above, steadily growing smaller, while he barely made it ten meters off the ground. The one-shot wonder hanging off his back didn't really help either.
Thankfully he bet everything on said one-shot wonder and didn't put on the armor. Besides, armor would be extra-suspicious, and admittedly wouldn't save against a sustained fire breath.

Every now and then guttural noise which Dave presumed to be a dragon's snore rocked the entire mountain.

Suddenly the voices came from above.
"Yeah, I'm okay, still climbing! It's a bit steep, but I'll be there!" Yelled back Dave, and then added quietly, "Eventually."

Incoming scraping noise made Dave look up in caution. A second later Applejack whizzed past him, sliding down the cliff-face completely nonchalantly. Upon successful landing she started pulling someone out of the bushes. That someone turned out to be Fluttershy, who hid in the bushes instead of climbing all this time - a wise decision, all things considered.

Now that pegasus' cover has been blown, Applejack was looking straight at Dave.
"Hey, get down from there! We'll take another way, 'round the mountain."

Fine, so be it. Dave carefully returned to the firm ground.

"So, lead the way."

Another, particularly thunderous snore rumbled the environments and Fluttershy fell over, all four legs locked up in air and her eyes firmly set in rough direction of constellation of Orion.
No, they definitely were part goats. What was the name of that subspecies of goats that tended to freeze up when scared again?

With a sigh, Applejack picked up pink tail in jaws.

"Dang it, Applejack, you're just going to drag her through the mud and rocks like that?"

Applejack spat out tail and retorted, "Hey, 's not like I have much options here, do I?"

"I guess I'll have to take matters in my hands then..."

Procession emerged from behind the rocks, with Applejack leading the way and Dave following, cradling Fluttershy in his hands and rocking slightly under combined weight of a mare and metal device. Fluttershy's fear-induced paralysis still hasn't worn off fully, but at least her two-thousand yard stare was gone.

"Somebody, help me, dang it! I can barely feel my hands!"

Dash helped getting Fluttershy back on her feet, while Dave shook his arms around, trying to get feeling back in them. Pins and needles indicated that feeling will soon return to numbed fingers. The day definitely didn't intend on getting any easier.

One avalanche and one trivial but potentially deadly jump later, the source of dark smoke revealed itself - a moderate entrance to a cavern with thick, almost viscous clouds seeping out.

On the final stretch to the cave the smoke grew progressively heavier, and Dave couldn't help but liken it to ash clouds produced by volcano eruptions.

"Dang, this smoke is thick! Try avoiding breathing it in!"
Dave pulled the collar of his shirt over his nose and pressed fabric down with a hand.
"It might be dangerous."

"Dangerous how?" Mumbled Twilight from under the hoof covering her nose and mouth.

"Depends on what this smoke is. It could range wildly from being just abrasive particulate to being toxic and producing acid rains," came the no-less-mumbly response. "Well, in either case, smallest animals would be first to feel the negative effects. First ones would probably be birds with fastest metabolism, so if you see birds dropping out of the trees, you know it's time to LEAVE."

Dave couldn't see it, but Fluttershy's complexion quickly approached that of a paper.

Dave was about to mention watching out for passed out animals on the ground as a sign of creeping clouds of suffocating gases, but decided that it'd be too morbid. Besides, it was a dragon, not a friggin' volcano.

Having reached the small area directly in front of the maw of the cave, ponies huddled up and considered next course of action.

Tuning out the hubbub from the rest of Team Dragon Eviction Notice, Dave found a shady place to lean in some rocks and half-shut eyes to concentrate on possible ways to approach this situation.

Ideally he would like to either avoid the whole reptilian perforation business or do the dirty deed unseen. Otherwise it would get messy. How do you even headshot something a size of a house in a discreet manner? Like, without creating a crimson shower for everyone in the vicinity. Hmmm. 'I killed the dragon and now it's raining blood' would be a badass Death Metal band name! No, dang it, Dave, got to snap out of it, concentrate!

If Twilight had a plan, it'd be a great time to voice it. Dave looked around, but Twilight was nowhere to be seen.

Oh crap.

Did she go inside, all alone? Was she stark-raving mad? What happened to 'safety in numbers'?

Well, she wasn't there with the group anymore, and there weren't many possibilities for her to vanish.

Dave jabbed a finger at the the remaining group.
"All of you, stay here. I'm going in."

Hoisting up his contraption, he disappeared into the cave entrance.

It was hazy in the cave, but Twilight's silhouette approaching him was immediately recognizable. Which was a huge weight off Dave's shoulders.

"I tried asking, but he just wouldn't listen..."

"Let me try my hand at persuasion. Oh, and you all better plug your ears, this is going to be loud."

Twilight tilted her head, "Loud?"

Dave just gestured at her to go.

It was roughly a minute since Dave went deeper into the cave, and it was awfully quiet since then.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," mumbled Twilight, hooves still over ears.

But then, as if in response to her words, entire mountain shook with roar of angered dragon. The deafening roar was cut short by even louder thundering crack.

With a clang, the Dave's device flew out of the entrance, bounced off a cliff-face and rolled a bit before coming to a halt against a rock. Dash audibly gulped.
Much to everypony's relief Dave energetically walked out of the cave, unscathed. Not saying a thing, he made a beeline for the metallic cylinder contraption and casually hauled it back to cave.

Uneasy quiet reigned once again.

Finally, the dragon waddled outside. Dave followed him closely, waving the pipe thing around and hurrying the dragon along.
"Outta here, big boy! Come on, take your stuff and leave, before I banana-slap you into the next century!"

Finding the purple pony that bothered him not so long ago, dragon addressed her, pointing a claw towards the human.
"Why this one is being so mean?"

Seriously now, the dragon was going to complain to bunch of ponies about him? What is this, kindergarten?

Fluttershy landed on the dragon's nose, wing still flaring up in agitation.
"Because smoke your snoring produces is spreading across Equestria, already endangering innocent little creatures, and soon-"

"Yeah, Fluttershy, you can take him from here."
Wait, what? Dave did a double-take. Was Fluttershy - the timidness herself - telling off a dragon? Today is already went all sorts of weird, best not to dwell on it too much.
Laws of physics leaving for a smoke break, ponies climbing cliffs like goat-spiders, supersonic steel slugs veering off course wildly...

The sound of massive wings flapping returned Dave to reality.
"Eh, and the dragon was less cooler than I expected..."

He clapped his hands, making still-angry Fluttershy jump.
"Alright, let's get back to Ponyville, we still have to rinse this soot off everything!"

Trek down was much easier, and much more cheerful than uphill struggle. Dave merrily whistled some tune, and the pipe contraption rhythmically swung on his back, freshly reattached handles dangling in the air.

Trouble came from the least expected side. Applejack making small-talk.
"So, Dave, how'd you 'persuade' dragon anyway?"

Twilight's ears immediately turned to him, like a pair of radars.

"Ah, well..." Dave's eyes shifted frantically.

Uh-oh. Well, there goes my big softie facade now. Could still try talking my way out of the issue, however.
"I'm not quite sure myself..."
Ah! Technical truth, the best kind of truth.

"Dave, can you tell me more about that tool you've made and it's role in persuasion?" Twilight asked, levitating a quill and piece of parchment in front of her. Twilight packing writing implements didn't even surprise Dave at this point.

So, playing the fool again. Dave pulled on doofy smile.
"What do you want to know?"

Twilight was practically fuming - about an hour of questions, cross-checking and scrutiny, and she wasn't getting anywhere. Figuratively speaking, as during that time they most definitely have already reached the outskirts of the town.

It was hard for Dave to keep straight face and hold back the laughter, even though his reputation and quite possibly nearest prospects were hanging in the balance.

Brushing with mathematicians definitely had it's perks - especially in form of picking up an infuriating skill of providing answers that were as correct as they were useless. Completely. That, coupled with dumb but effective tactic of providing truthful answer, but to a slightly different question, let Dave send Twilight on a wild goose chase for entirety of the trip back. Plus, occasional remarks and questions from Rarity and Applejack, but especially Pinkie tended to derail Twilight's train of thought, making it almost too easy.

Not understanding how situation resolved itself appeared to irritate pedantic unicorn immensely.
"You're answering my questions, but that's not what I want to hear!"

Dave grinned on the inside. Twilight walked straight into that one.
"Can you stop and ponder what you just said for a second, Twilight? How then am I supposed to respond to your questions? Am I supposed to sing and do a little jig?"

Twilight just groaned in frustration.
Getting to the bottom of things with this human was way harder than one would expect. How could he even remain so obfuscating and obstructive while providing detailed answers to her questions? Annnd, he's gone. Great.

Dave tossed and turned in bed.

This was stupid. This entire day was stupid and very rife with ways to get dead quick. But, in the end, he was still alive, as well as the gang, heck, even dragon got off scot-free.

Still, one thing kept bothering Dave. With some effort memories of the moment were summoned.

As one would expect, Mr. Dragon didn't like the sound of the "you're being evicted" news. Ear defenders helped, but the roar was so loud that you could hear it through the bone and tissue anyway.

Dave barely remembered aiming outside of catching an eye within sights and pressing the trigger. The following moments, in contrast, imprinted themselves in memory with perfect clarity.

Dave just peered at the handles that remained in his hand, stupefied.

It wasn't the lack of his gun that puzzled him. If anything, handles disengaged as planned, letting the bulk of the gun take the insane recoil with itself.

It was the aftermath of the shot. He expected a lot of possible outcomes - red mist, gray matter shower, perhaps a Krönlein shot? Or gun simply exploding, reducing him to consistency of a chunky salsa.

Instead dragon winced, ducked his head and clutched his ear-holes with claws, as sizable rocks fell down, giving him a bonk every once in a while. With every stone hit dragon lowered his head lower and lower until it was planted firmly on the ground.

Then, riding the wave of gutsy inspiration, Dave found himself scrambling for gun once again and lugging it to the dragon, who still cowered, expecting more rocks to fall.

Holding the monstrous gun under the arm, Dave pressed still-warm barrel against the scaly nose of a dragon.

"You. Outta here. NOW."

Facing the horribly loud gun the second time, Mr. Dragon was way more amenable. It really helped that he didn't realize that said gun could only shoot once.
And the rest, as they say, was history.

But there was one piece that didn't fit the puzzle.

What the heck happened to the slug? The shot somehow went into the cave's ceiling... Dave was one hundred percent sure that he co-axially aligned sights with barrel, and the sights were no less meticulously aligned with dragon's eye. The slug still somehow magically missed.

Was there magic involved?
Dave grasped his bearded chin.

Unlikely. What about other reasons?

Lack of rifling wouldn't even matter here - distance's too short and muzzle velocity was supposed to be in ballpark of several thousands of feet per second. It simply couldn't veer off course.

Perhaps his arms just twitched when he pulled the trigger...

Well, either that or dragons here could deflect steel projectiles going at, like, Mach 5 with their eyelids or something.

The night didn't bring the much-needed rest.

"Ugh, great. More blurry unsubstantial nightmares with feeling of being watched." Dave yawned and shook his fist at ceiling, "At least gimme some real nightmares so I can rip 'em to shreds..."

Perhaps it was time to check out how good their local coffee is. Oh right, he didn't find it on the last shopping run.

Do ponies even have coffee? On one hand, it'd be a fast-track to horrible theobromine poisoning, but on the other hand, Dave definitely saw Pinkie ingest borderline unhealthy amount of chocolate with no adverse effects, however, on the third hand, it was Pinkie, the Party Incarnate who seemed to operate exclusively on sweets, so all bets were off.

Whatever. Tea will also do. Weren't tea leaves more caffeine-rich than coffee beans? Strong tea it is, then.

Fueled up on the searing-hot rejuvenating juice, Dave cheered up considerably and rubbed hands in excitement.

It was time to try out some ideas from yesterday that he didn't have time for.

"MWAHAHAHAAHA!" cackled Dave evilly, raising his hands towards the ceiling.
Lightning illuminated the workshop, and soon enough the rolling thunder reverberated through the building.

"Okay, that's another bullet point off my bucket list. 'Laugh like a mad scientist in a thunderstorm', check!"

Dave tapped on checkbox on the phone and kicked back on sofa. It was barely past midday, results of his successful experiments proudly sat on coffee table and now boredom started to settle in. Sure, he could watch one of movies stored on the phone, but at the moment he craved something more... interactive. Sadly, all of Dave's favorites in this regard were left behind on his laptop, which, in order, was also left behind, residing who-knows-how-many parallel universes away from him right now.
"Shoot! Could definitely go for a few rounds in one-point-six... Oh, what am I saying, no way I'd be able to connect to internet from here."

Indeed, even if he had laptop, he could forget about his typical pastime of non-stop fragging in online shooters. Unless someone figured out how to route TCP/IP through dimensions, that is.

Dave shifted to a more comfortable position. Thunderstorm outside grew more furious by the minute, with raindrops fiercely drumming against glass and metal.

Well, if resting on his terms was not an option, then he at least could be productive. He mentally unfurled giant scroll of practical problems requiring solution.
Since when it became a scroll? Twilight's way of thinking definitely rubbed off on him.

"Let's see..."

Scour town to get coffee or at least some sort of cocoa beverage. Sure, but not in this weather. The drink of gods would have to wait.

Find a way to repay Rarity's kindness. Again, not in this weather.

Figure out some sort of protection. This one was interesting.
There was certain source of disquiet in the knowledge that one third of local population could end Dave in a single kick. The second third wouldn't be able to fry him directly, per se, but they surely could just drop a boulder on him just as well. Dave wasn't sure about pegasi but they probably could do their own brand of nasty, too. The only saving grace is that mere thought of doing any of these acts would scare your average pony to half-death.

And that's just ponies - today's encounter clearly showed that there were much bigger threats lurking about.

While offense may have been lauded as best defense, no military power was in a hurry to get rid of armor.
Dave gave a set of armor in the corner a stink-eye. The dang thing was heavy and very clunky, but it got the job done.

The blunt strikes would still be dangerous, unless he mounted armor on some kind of very rigid chassis.

"Hmmm, maybe a tank?"
Imagination quickly conjured image of tank getting crumpled by magic like paper. With Dave still inside.
"Yeeesh!" He chased away the nasty visage, "Okay, any sort of armored vehicle is out of the question."

He looked at his hands as if trying to gauge the size of invisible magic-messup field he for some reason had.
"Unless... Hmmm..."

It was silly. It was impractical. It was an idea that he'd previously laugh at, along with any engineer worth their salt within earshot. It was also freakin' awesome.
He whipped out paper and got to drawing, grinning ear-to-ear.

Chapter 6 : Undjentlemanly Ungulate Undoing

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Dave hated going to dentists. The bright blinding light, whirring of drills, the smell and taste of heated enamel, the texture of fresh fillings, it all just made him want to shrivel up and die.
For this exact reason he tried to keep his teeth in superb condition, paying extra attention to oral hygiene to minimize the possibility of surgical intervention.
Ever since settling down in the town, he put even more effort in maintaining his teeth. After all, the only option is pony dentist - and how much practice could they have with human teeth? None, that's how much!

But still, it was about time for him to go for a checkup, and it would better to figure things out with local dentists before any sort of real issue comes up.

It was almost Dave's turn now. However, pony who went before him has been in there for an hour already and all the waiting was putting the engineer on edge.
"Well, Shuffle, what you got for me in stock?"

Dave turned on shuffle mode and switched to next song. Sound of familiar hour-long EDM mix filled his headphones and the nervousness started to retreat, beat by beat.
The pony in the seat across him - Vinyl Scratch - seemed to have same ideas, rhythmically nodding her head with ears plugged shut by her own pair of massive headphones. Suddenly she perked up, pushed one headphone ear aside and started listening in on music emanating from Dave.

"Interested in human music? Here, you can have it while I get my teeth checked." He put the phone carefully on the seat and handed the headphones to Vinyl.
Door clicked and a pony emerged with half his head bandaged - never a good sign - before groggily stumbling out of dentist's office.

"Come on in!"

Dave sighed and stepped into the door.

Frankly saying Dave was expecting the unicorn dentist to freak out, but not only Dental Gloss wasn't too surprised with having to inspect and possibly operate on someone other than a pony, he also took great interest in his teeth.

"Remarkable! It's not often you see someone with teeth this small, neat and tightly packed."
Dave would like to object but having mouth full of dental instruments wasn't exactly conducive to chit-chatting, so he contented himself with an eye roll.

"You seem to be in great dental health. There are no fissures or caries."

"Thank goodness." Dave started inching off the seat - the pony ergonomics made it uncomfortable but thankfully not unbearable.

Dental Gloss turned back to patient and put hoof on Dave's shoulder, prompting him to stop.
"Now if you don't mind - I'd like to take a closer look at each of your teeth and take notes on your anatomy. This way it'll be easier if you require, say, emergency treatment."

Dave crossed his hands with resignation and hopped back into dentist chair.
"Alright, fiiiiiine. I'm just hoping my teeth won't NEED any actual emergency treatment."

After about an hour Dave stumbled out into the corridor, rubbing his jaw. Dental Gloss sure was a workaholic on par with, or maybe even worse than Applejack.
It was this moment that he noticed that all of Vinyl's hair was standing on end and there was this unmistakable two-thousand yard stare only slightly hidden by thick purple glasses.

"Oh crap!"
In a single bound he crossed the distance and ripped his headphones off her ears.

No reaction. He put two fingers oh her neck.

Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

"No fibrillation... Wait, I'm dumb! There's not enough voltage to electrocute!"

It occurred to him to check the phone.

Of course. Of course it had to be Meshuggah. Thanks, Shuffle!
Dave buried his face in hands.

Hospital doors slammed open and all that couple of startled patients and staff could see in the doorway for a second was a print of industrial boot basking in the morning sun.
"Make way! Coming through!" Dave announced, pushing forward with resolve of freight train, grown mare in his hands.

He practically froze passerby nurse in her tracks with a piercing gaze. "Which way is ER?"
She could only nod in the direction.

Once the catatonic mare has been safely placed on a hospital bed, attending nurse got to work, checking vitals.
"What happened to her?" Nurse asked.

Dave, who was a perfect image of unstoppable determination just a second ago, found himself gasping for air, as words seemed to elude him all of a sudden.
"Uhhh... I-I don't know, cultural shock maybe? I accidentally let her listen to certain unconventional music band from my world."

"Can't be. You're pulling my hoof," nurse answered, incredulously.

"What, you don't believe me?"
He held out a pair of headphones. After all, he could pause the track instantly, should things go wrong.

Dr. Greymare was enjoying a pleasant morning that usually would preclude a really nice day. Usually.
His hopes of having a nice day only lasted till he was caught in the corridor by one of his more... unusual past patients.

"Doctor, we have a problem," Dave motioned to the half-opened door behind him.

Behind the human, inside the room there were two mares with hair standing on end and two-thousand yard stares.

It took Dr. Greymare a while to convince Dave that both victims of human music will be fine. While that was true, doctor's intent was chiefly to get the human out of ward lest another incident should occur.

Finding himself outside of hospital, Dave paced nervously back and forth.
Who knew that djent was this bad for ponies? And out of all the songs, it absolutely had to be that one song by that one band. In fact, Dave was willing to bet it was another of Shuffle's antics.

Dave ran a hand across his face in frustration. With every such mess-up it became harder and harder to execute original plan of "Lay low, play harmless cute teddy bear while trying to contact authorities to get yourself outta here". To add fuel to the fire, Vinyl was probably the only one who shared his love for electronic music in entirety of this crazy town, and he just went and messed everything up out of the blue. Way to go, pal!

Should probably get her some card or a little present to let her know it was an accident. Dave recalled a very fitting option being sold at Sugar Cube Corner. So it was decided - the only additional purchase would be a 'Get Well' card, but finding where one could actually buy such a card would prove troublesome in Ponyville's non-sequitur arrangement of shops and goods sold by said shops. Who even sells sofas and quills in the same shop? Why this particular combination? If this happened on ol' good Earth, Dave would immediately point out the daring marketing strategy to make the shop stand out, but ponies didn't seem to be so... insidious as businessmen back home.

With these thoughts Dave walked towards sweets shop energetically. It didn't occur to him that streets that usually were bustling with activity at this hour were suspiciously empty. Almost barren, in fact.

While approaching Sugar Cube Corner entrance, he got nearly trampled by six of his friends making an expedite egress out of shop.
There were some accidental head-to-stomach hits. There were some euphemisms hissed under breath, and finally, there were some poorly-coordinated attempts to pick up Dave and dust him off.

Shaking unhelpfully helpful hooves off, engineer finally obtained upright position once again.
"Jeez, what's wrong with you gals today?"

"No time, we'll 'splain on the move," Applejack dropped before renewing the pursuit.

The news of Apple Bloom's apparent kidnapping, or as Twilight put it, foal-napping, sent Dave into eye-twitching fit.
His right hand instinctively lightly slapped a certain pocket, making sure that the large knife - all things considered, probably the deadliest thing on his person - resided where it should.

If there was one guaranteed way to invoke Dave's ire, it was messing with the weak and helpless, especially with kids. Though granted, it was kind of hard-wired into most humans - kidnapping bow-adorned ball of energetic curiosity that Apple Bloom was would infuriate even Boris, with his dubious flip-flop moral compass. But definitely not Jimmy. Jim was a special case.

These grim news also explained why Applejack alternated between expressions of resolve and despair.

Sense of uneasiness crept in as they went deeper in the Everfree Forest - thankfully, that particular part of the forest was nowhere as dense packed with dangerous creatures, at least according to both Applejack's and Fluttershy's accounts.

"There she is!" Dave whispered loudly, pointing into thick fog ahead.
With some squinting, a mohawk-sporting figure could be indeed seen ahead of them.

Engineer crouched and faced the group.
"Alright, here's the plan: you go ahead and draw her attention and I'll flank her."
Not wasting a second, he darted into thick vegetation.

Twilight stared back in confusion, "You what her?"

Rustling of the leaves was her only answer.

"Great."

Having dropped exceptionally cryptic rhymed warning, Zecora started retreating in fog, content with her sage-like appearance.

At this opportune moment large figure suddenly burst out of the bushes and crossed distance to zebra in one bound.

Zecora found herself hoisted up in air and facing the sky, leaving all of her four legs dangling in air.
Someone or maybe something bellowed into her ear, "I don't know about beware, but you're not going anywhere!"
She kicked and flailed around in panic, but the perpetrator held tight and was just out of reach.

Her hood slid off, leaving Dave with face full of monochromatic mane.
He spat out the hairs that got in his mouth, "Dang, your rhyming is catchy."

Dave's legs shook from stress and he let out strained grunt as zebra swiveled around trying to wriggle out of hold.
"Guys, get Apple Bloom, I can't hold her forever!"

"I'm here!" came high-pitched and vaguely familiar voice.
Dave tried peeking out from behind the zebra's mane, but was unsuccessful in seeing... just about anything, really.

"So Apple Bloom is safe?"

"Yea!" came Applejack's voice.

"And you," he addressed zebra, "didn't steal her away?"
Zebra just shook her head.

"Um, sorry about that then..."

Dave dangerously lurched forward, but managed to put held zebra back on her fours safely.
"There you go."

He grasped his back and inhaled air through teeth sharply.
"Ugh, I'm going to feel that in the morning."

Twilight and Applejack arched brows almost in sync.

"I'm OK!", he waved reassuringly, still hunched over.
Despite his words, when he straightened out something in his back gave a nasty-sounding crack and Dave's face contorted for a split second.
"See, totally okay!"

Trip back to town was uneventful, except for Dave grasping for his back every now and then, and Applejack telling off Apple Bloom non-stop.

Pinkie was first to break the ice.
"So, Dave, what brought you to Sugar Cube Corner this morning?"

The slight smile on Dave's face evaporated in an instant.
"Oh. Right. I wanted to order one of your 'I-am-sorry' cakes. I messed up big time today. Actually, make that two cakes."

"I don't mean to be prying..." began Twilight.

To which Dave immediately quipped, "Of course you don't."

"...but what happened?"

"Well, Vinyl Scratch was curious about human music and, well, one thing led to another and now she's catatonic in the hospital. Greymare said that she'll get better very soon, though."

"Cata-what?" Inquired Applejack.

"Unresponsive," Twilight blurted out, clearly too lost in her current train of thought to bother with sugarcoating terminology.

"Oh," was Applejack's response.

Remaining part of the trip to local Confectionery Central was spent in silence. Dave was so coated in thick gloom that even Rainbow looked several shades less colorful.

Obtaining the cakes from Pinkie, Dave was about to make a beeline to the hospital, but was stopped in his tracks by a hoof on his shoulder. It was Pinkie, standing on the counter and giving him widest and warmest reassuring smile yet.
"Cheer up! I'm sure it will turn out fine! After all, you didn't mean for this to happen, you can always say you're sorry!"

Dave's glum expression lightened up a little and he even cracked a smile of his own.
"You're right, no time to sulk, gotta make things right!"

Pink mare jumped down behind the counter, and continued bouncing up and down in place.
"Be sure to tell me how it turns out!"

"Sure," Dave shot back over a shoulder.

It didn't take long for him to return. In fact, it took him exactly one thousand three hundred and thirty two bounces, according to Pinkie. And she never messed up her counting.

The spring in his step, beaming smile and lack of cakes betrayed impending good news, but Pinkie like nopony else knew how important it was to let people share good news at their own pace.

Dave leaned in on the counter, causing it to creak in protest.
"I've got good news and... good news! I guess I'll start with good news as good news can wait."

Waiting out a bit for dramatic or perchance comedic effect, Dave dropped the news.
"Both nurse and Vinyl made full recovery! And they're not mad at me!"

"Yaaay!" Pinkie gave Dave a congratulatory hug mid-jump, causing him to grasp for his back once again.

"And Vinyl Scratch liked the human music, you know, the EDM thing she was interested in. It's a shame that I got delayed so much that hour-long mix switched to some track of heavier genre, djent in this case. But it's all good now."

"Uh-huh!" Pinkie didn't know many of the words Dave just said but nevertheless was still excited for a friend.

"Oh and they loved the cakes, so I guess I have you to thank for that, Pinkie!"

Pinkie's cheeks did the impossible and became even more pink with the blush at the compliment.

"The only thing that was concerning, well... Vinyl asked to listen to that dreaded track again. I politely declined, for obvious reasons, and that's not counting Greymare peering holes in my back. Anyway, it's getting late, I should probably go hit the sack."
Dave waved goodbye to her.
"See ya around, Pinkie!"

"See you!" She waved at him back.

Evening air sure had a way to submerge Dave into a reflective mood.

It was truly a weight off Dave's shoulders to learn that both mares were pretty much back to normal, if still a bit shaken by the experience.
But otherwise they held no grudges against him. After all, as Pinkie said, he didn't mean for this to happen.

But both mares were alright and in the end of the day, it was all that mattered. Oh, and getting Apple Bloom back to her sister.

Concrete hovered close to Dave's face. Dave's face betrayed no concern of proximity to such a material; instead, it was contorted in exertion.
With a grunt Dave pushed the concrete away, launching himself up in air, immediately following it up with barely-audible clap and catching himself just in time to not hit the ground.

"Hah, at least my hands still got it!"

Eleven reps of clap push-ups later he was ready to beg any passerby pony to put him out of his misery. Luckily for psyche of local population, there weren't anypony around this early in the morning.

Still on the ground, Dave shuffled and turned to his back. The 10 lap run weighted with armor beckoned him, promising more pain and possibly some gains. Well, more like loss of fat, but good all the same.
With a sigh he got up. Getting back into workout routine was going to be a ROYAL pain, especially since all the equipment in local gym was strictly pony-oriented last time he checked. Thankfully he knew a thing or two about calisthenics by virtue of hanging out with muscleheap Russian.

The whole ordeal was kick-started by simple realization that he was getting out of shape, and the sugar-rich diet had already resulted in him taking on a couple of pounds, despite his allegedly much-envied ability to just annihilate any amount of junk food without any consequences to his physique. Knowing how easy it is to slip into complacency, Dave took rather drastic measures, adopting the old workout routine and diet.

Yesterday's encounter with local zebra clearly showed that he lacked proper core strength and his leg muscles were completely out of whack too. Boris probably would have taunted him mercilessly about skipping leg day, if he was present, that is.

Besides, it would be a long time before his recently-drawn grand project would be built, so growing some muscular strength was a decent alternative for the time being.

After swinging by the workshop for parts of armor to act as additional weight, Dave started doing warmup stretches for upcoming parts of the exercise. It was then when he noticed his pony friends making their way to his plot of land, looking mighty weird. Rarity looked like Komondor, Pinkie wasn't far behind the dog looks either, with her tongue hanging out, Twilight's horn looked... bent? And Rainbow Dash couldn't stop flying upside down and experienced seemingly unpredictable bouts of turbulence. There was one exception: Fluttershy looked exactly like her usual self.

Twilight found a bit of relief in the fact that Dave apparently shrugged off the mysterious curse, as opposed to her apprehensions. Seeing that Dave didn't turn up at the library with some ridiculous magic-induced sickness, she assumed the worst. After all, certain spells did affect him, often with completely unpredictable results.

It didn't take long to explain the core of the issue with the curse laid upon them by the treacherous zebra.
Fluttershy's particular flavor of ailment left quite an impression on Dave - if clutching for heart and calling out for sugar-coated religious figures at the sound of her deep voice could be considered as such.

But upon hearing about the Apple Bloom disappearance, all traces of jocular attitude vanished from Dave in an instant, replaced with a scowl of brewing anger. He hit palm of his hand with other hand, balled up in tight formation, and squeezed down on it, producing sickening crackling sounds.

The color drained from Twilight's face.
Did he just break all of his human fingers in anger? That must have hurt!

Not paying apparent attention to self-inflicted injury and not saying anything, he disappeared into his workshop.
Assorted clangs and other sounds of rummaging could be heard from the inside for a bit before Dave dragged out bunch of metal implements into the daylight and dumped them into existing metal pile.

The only thing immediately recognizable was flanged mace; rest of heaped gleaming metal pieces offered no hints to their respective purposes.

Meanwhile Dave fussed about, reducing said heap by picking out and strapping various bits of metal to himself with considerable speed, working his fingers as if nothing has happened to them, much to Twilight's relief.
"So yesterday we got blatantly tricked, and today we're paying a visit to our local kid-stealing Registered Hex Offender, huh?"

Once he was done putting leg and arm armor, Dave picked up particularly large piece of metal that was almost as tall as him, and fastened it to his metal gauntlet.
"Was messing around with riot shield concept lately."
That earned him some bewildered looks. Oh, right, it's likely that violent protests and consequential suppression thereof don't exist here.

"Whatever, let's move out already."

Dave, Twilight, Rarity, Pinkie and Fluttershy all pressed against the bark of a house-tree, carefully listening in on what was going on inside. Rainbow Dash was nowhere to be seen, but that was unsurprising with her current condition. Dave banked on her returning once curse has been lifted.

They circled around the house, propping up the house-tree wall, in various stages of readiness. The most ready was Pinkie, who, despite tongue hanging out, was so in-character for a grizzled cop that she was only a black helmet and bulletproof vest away from completing the SWAT operative image. The rest were more or less clueless.

Satisfied with inspection, Dave slowly crept up to the door, stopped and quietly whispered to ponies stacked up behind him.
"Okay, everybody - get ready. Once I enter, we split up and sweep the building."

The engineer proceeded to fish out box of matches and some sort of cylinder from one of his numerous pockets, and now intently fiddled with it, encumbered by his shield.
Once one end of cylinder lit up, he opened the door and threw it inside the house, slamming door shut behind it.

There was a second or two of silence, then a loud bang came from inside, followed by startled vocalizations from Zecora.

"Go-go-go!"

Almost yanking the door off it's hinges, Dave rushed inside, holding his tall shield in front of him with mace at the ready.

"Ponyville Fast Response Team! Get on the floor! Hooves behind head!"

And it would be rather striking entry, if it wasn't for Rainbow Dash flying headfirst into his back, sending both tumbling to the floor.

Suddenly Dave's shield became his impromptu snowboard, sliding him right into the...

"Oh no!"

CLANG!

...right into the cauldron.

The non-human part of entry team didn't fare much better - there was no small amount of everypony stumbling over everypony, with Rarity being first one to tangle in dreadlocks and meet the floor, initiating the chain reaction.

Twilight was having none of it and hopped back to her hooves only to have the wind knocked out of her by Rainbow, who just couldn't stop, acting like a jet-powered wrecking ball zooming through the room at the most unpredictable trajectories.

Just as Dave recovered from his face-to-face meeting with cauldron, he saw what he definitely didn't want to see.

The remaining two cylinders rolled right into the hearth.

"Oh crap! Take cover!"

There was another resounding bang and a blinding light.

"What in the hay happened here?"

Apple Bloom found Zecora's house in absolute shambles. Not a single creature was left standing inside, not a single element of decorum left unbroken. Everything that was previously hanged on the walls now resided on the floor, but to make up for that, the ceiling now boasted a mace embedded in it as some extravagant chandelier. Not even the cauldron escaped ubiquitous destruction - it was toppled over, had a considerable head-shaped dent in it now, and the brew got spilled all over.

The silhouettes of bodies strewn about were groaning on the floor, rubbing their bruises.

Dave sat against the wall, shaking his head, trying to merge two pictures into one. He caught himself with absentmindedly petting none other than striped owner of the house, who was similarly out of it.

Retreating the traitorous hand, he wagged a finger at it with remaining hand and gave it a stern look. No fraternization with the enemy will happen today!
Wait a second. Apple Bloom does not appear to be happy to be rescued. In fact she doesn't appear to be kidnapped at all. This begged the question - did kidnapping happen in the first place?

"Twilight?"

With a groan purple floppy-horned head peeked out from behind the cauldron, scanning area and evidently having same trouble focusing on the source of sound.

"Twilight, I swear to god, if this is another misunderstanding..."

With Zecora's help all puzzle pieces fell together. No kidnappings or hexes, just a series of very unfortunate coincidences.

Needless to say, Dave was nonplussed and a bit mad with whole double-misunderstanding thing.
He turned to Twilight, "Morale of the story?"

She tentatively glanced at the green book that apparently contained the cure.
"Don't judge book by it's cover?"

"-yes, but also-" Dave lifted one of industrial boots and pointed to it for all to see "- WEAR PROTECTIVE CLOTHING!"

Rarity chimed in, slightly muffled by dreadlocks, "But dear, who could have known that the plant was poisonous?"

"It's not about knowing that you will encounter something for sure, it's about preemptively ensuring... eh, you know what, whatever. Who cares?"
Dave sighed and returned to contemplating the wrecked house. Fixing it up is ought to be more fun than messing it up was...

Pinkie was first to walk back in the Zecora's house. Her tongue indeed was back to normal, as promised.

She looked around in awe.
Every surface shined and gleamed, and the whole place almost didn't reek of industrial cleaning agents. Furniture was repaired, shelves reattached, knick-knacks glued together and reinstated back to their rightful places almost pedantically. Even the accursed cauldron had it's dent evened out and was polished to a shine.

"Wow, Dave! I thought you'd need help with this, but you did it so fast! You're really good at this whole cleaning thing!"

"Hah, you've never had to clean up a whole dorm's worth of after-party with mere minutes before The Inspection's arrival!"

Pinkie leaned closer and asked in hushed tone, "The Inspection?"

"Back at uni, when The Dean of the Campus was in a particularly foul mood, he'd grab at least two heads of faculties - who also technically were deans, but they weren't The Dean - and go for a walk, or more like, a prowl. Woe is you if you get busted breaking ANY rules by The Inspection, no matter how small or insignificant. That brought an untimely end to many a party, and got many, many people expelled over littlest things."

Pinkie was thoroughly filled with reverent terror. The Inspection sounded like a truly horrifying enemy of all things partying.

In the resulting silence Applejack let her opinion be known, "Whoowee! You really did up the place!"

Fluttershy, Dash and Rarity just stared at the restored dwelling with curiosity.

Zecora sounded amazed and concerned in equal measure, "My home you have polished to shine; the work you've performed is... fine."

Twilight was the last one to enter, "Since this is a more or less controlled environment, and we got antidote on hoof..."

Something in Twilight's tone made Dave go very alert.
And for a good reason - a bunch of familiar blue flowers floated in air towards him, coated in purple magic.

Particularly sly, perhaps even guileful expression streaked across Twilight's face.
"Science still doesn't know how humans react to Poison Joke..."

Dave jumped from chair and held it up as improvised shield, "Oh no, Twilight, no you DON'T!"

Chapter 7 : Foray For First Firearm

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Dave's eyes fixated upon slowly swinging bouquet of Poison Joke, dimly glowing in embrace of Twilight's magic.
He gulped and clutched the chair tighter. Looks like hard-won polish, shine and order he was conjuring into Zecora's house for the last hour was about to be trashed once again. And the adorable rhyming zebra was so happy to see result of cleaning efforts...

"Ugh, screw it. CATCH!"
With a swing he sent chair flying towards the ceiling in an arch.
Knowing full well that Twilight was too busy concentrating on the predicament of air-borne furniture, Dave dive-rolled to the side, circling around the research-crazed unicorn.
Finding himself back on his feet again, Dave sprung towards the door, bursting outside and slamming it behind himself.
Who knew that his brief dabble into parkour fad would ever pay off?

Not saying anything, Twilight floated chair back to its proper place, and headed for the door, blue flowers in magic grasp.

Everypony inside exchanged looks of disbelief.

Pinkie was the first to put collective confusion into words.
"What... just happened?"

Dave carefully observed entrance from his hiding place, trying to avoid making any sounds.
The door swung open again, with a small fleet of flowers floating outside and turning from side to side, as if searching for target. Twilight trotted outside next, scanning environment for movement. Rustling of nearby bushes attracted her attention, but once she had approached thick shrubbery, the rustling started moving away from her, causing her to pick up the pace.

Meanwhile, behind her, Dave lowered himself down from the branches of a house-tree and silently disappeared back into the house.
Thank goodness it didn't occur to her that apes literally evolved to climb trees. Whatever wildlife had the misfortune of hiding in these bushes was sure in for a fun afternoon.

Holding a finger to his lips to hush any possible yelps of surprise from the girls, the engineer motioned for them to come closer and practically whispered,
"What has gotten into her?"

Applejack put it bluntly, like she always did, "I 'unno! She never did act like that. That just ain't right!"
Several nods confirmed that it was, in fact, first time something like that happened.

Hair on the back of Dave's neck stood up. Uh-oh. Bad sign.

SLAM!

"AHA! I knew it was a trick!"

It didn't take a tactical genius to tell that Dave was screwed. The windows were too small and the only way out was blocked by ticked-off unicorn. The blue bulbs of Poison Joke inched closer.

Then, much to everyone's surprise, Rainbow Dash zoomed forward in a blink of an eye, positioning herself between cornered Dave and Twilight. Poison Joke flower halted mere inches from her muzzle, petals squirming in indecision.

Shifting her piercing gaze from the bulb to the unicorn, Dash held one hoof out in accusatory gesture.
"Snap out of it, Twilight! Is that a way to treat your friend?"

Rarity chimed in, trying her hoof at talking some sense into her friend, "Twilight, dear, you're just not yourself today!"

At the sound of accusation Twilight blinked and looked around. Even Pinkie and Fluttershy had disapproving looks on their muzzles.
Her proud posture faltered, eyes widened at realization and the accursed bouquet hit the floor with a dry rustle.

The treacherous blue plant laid upon the floor triumphantly, with everyone present in the room giving it a wide berth, taught by rather unpleasant hooves-on experience of its effects.

The closest to it was Twilight, who sat on her haunches dejectedly, head hung low with ears flat against it.
She already received a pony equivalent of a kick in the shin and a stern scolding from Applejack, reminding her about nature of friendship.

Dash was also quick to remind her that anyone plucking a hapless passerby pony from the street for experiments would be rather close in description to a villain.

But Dave was worst of them all - he sat on a chair that he planned to use as a shield not so long ago and just... looked at her. He wasn't looking mad or angered, just disappointed and a little sad.
After all, she did break a promise to tone down on research, but it was so easy for her to get carried away when new, potentially breakthrough knowledge tantalizingly hung in front of her, ripe for picking - just stretch your hoof out and grab it!

Meanwhile Dave pondered highly philosophical question of what he was going to have for supper.
No, seriously, the only good source of protein were eggs and he was getting sick of them no matter how creatively he cooked them. You can only do so much without salt, and local pepper barely stung to be even considered...

The philosophical conundrum pondering was interrupted by the sound of silence, meaning that the girls were done with scolding, or, perhaps they expected something from him.
Resurfacing from thought-immersion, first thing that Dave saw was Twilight's sorry state. Did the girls overdo it?
Dang it, Dave, you really couldn't pick a worse time to contemplate possible food combinations! Stop thinking with your stomach for a minute and fix this mess! Just concentrate...

"Look, guys, I know that technically I should be upset the most, but there was only slight probability of danger for me. As you all know, magic sorta works on me but sorta doesn't, so the chances were that that thing-" he pointed to blue bouquet with tip of his shoe "-wouldn't do anything."

"However, there was a chance that it would've worked on me. Naturally, I'd want to get rid of it. But what if it was the cure that wouldn't work on me? Imagine being stuck like that for the rest of your life..."
Twilight froze up at the implication.

"But we successfully avoided testing that 'hypothesis', thanks to all of you. No harm, no foul, right?"
He shrugged with a smile.
"Where I come from, we got a saying - 'It is human to err'. It means that mistakes happen. Important part is realizing your mistake and taking a lesson out of it in order to avoid repeating it. And she just got carried away before she could consider all possible outcomes. Right, Twilight?"

Dave ruffled her mane in an encouraging manner. She lifted her eyes and smiled weakly.

While Twilight had a serious problem with understanding boundaries, she thankfully lacked that maniacal glint that Dave had misfortune of observing back in university - scientists sporting that glint couldn't be argued or reasoned with. All they cared about was making science happen, whatever it takes.
However, if left to own devices, situation like this was bound to happen again. Scientists gonna science, you know?

"However this is not all. I am partly to blame for this, too."
Some confused looks were exchanged at that statement.
"As you all know, research is important for Twilight. I should know - couldn't walk five feet in Golden Oak Library without Twilight going through another PhD-worthy stack of paper! And lately I've been kinda yanking her chain, so to say, deflecting her questions and generally not helping her with research."

He scratched back of his head, looking at the Twilight apologetically. Her ears perked up and small glimmers of hope shone in her eyes.
"And I did in fact promise you to help with research. So some concessions will have to be made. So here's what we're going to do: If you see something interesting you want to know more about, write it down in the list. We'll put aside a part of some weekday to resolve accumulated questions, and generally do research in civilized, prepared and professional manner. How does 'Science Saturday' sounds to you?"

Twilight beamed.
"Thankyouthankyouthankyou-"

"But please remember that from now on I want you to always explicitly ask my consent to being a part of your experiments. Okay?"

She nodded vigorously. Good!

Whew. Drama: averted. Thank goodness. Still no idea how I managed to talk my way out of this one...
Defusing the drama was more of Jim's specialty in Trouble Trio, but with him around, one couldn't help it but learn a trick or two. Hooray for observational learning!

"I think we all learned a valuable lesson today, or two. Anyway-" Dave checked his wristwatch "-it's getting late and I propose that we get a move on unless we want to wander the forest in the dark."

Applejack pulled him aside, as everypony else was getting ready to leave and said goodbyes to Zecora.
"Dave, that was... mighty kind of you."

"What can I say? Twilight isn't bad or evil, she's my friend who just made a mistake, and that didn't cause any harm in the end. Besides it was her - and you, of course - who saved my life recently. That ought to count for something, right?" Dave smiled.

"I reckon," she smiled back.

Finally safe in the privacy of a workshop, Dave leaned in on the paper-covered table. It was time to sum up today's experience.

First of all, experimental flashbangs worked flawlessly, it was everything else that went sideways. Mental note - make more of these.

It also was yet another visit in the Everfree - and those started to came up surprisingly often lately. Having met it's local fauna and hearing plenty of stories from town's old-timers, Dave wasn't exactly enthusiastic about visiting the forest unarmed. Mace was good and all, but putting some distance between oneself and one's potential expert taster would be way better.

"I need a friggin' gun," he drew the bottom line.

Dave tapped his chin, staring at the ceiling in thought.
"So we're talking guns. Firearms, to be precise. What would be potential applications? What do I want out of them?"
Spinning in place, he gestured to air.
"First, a gun would have to be concealable - but that's not a big problem, I could hide anything short of shoulder-fired missile launcher in baggy clothes and nobody would ask a thing! And if even if they did, I could always pass it off as weird human anatomy or obscure tool..."

"Second of all, I also want it to handle non-lethal ammo in case of more SWAT-style shenanigans or if Twilight loses it. Doubt that they have 'stand-your-ground' law here..."
Though, Dave reasoned that possibility of Twilight getting too frisky again was pretty slim. She looked downright devastated by guilt, especially after Dash drew villainous parallels. Poor mare.

"So we're talking non-lethal ammunition, or as some smartasses like to call it, 'less-than-lethal' ammunition."
Dave was not sure what exactly upset him in latter wording of a concept, but something in it just made him lose his rag.
"Beanbags have too low of a range, so it's either rubber bullets or rock salt ammo, and I couldn't get any of the salt... What was up with that? Even in food joints - what he initially mistook for saltshaker was actually stocked with sugar."

Dave forced his eyes open. It sure was getting late for engineering work, and concentration was first to suffer, allowing mind to wander free.
Having set up some tea, he returned back to planning.

"So, ability to handle specialty ammo, size smaller than Stinger. Mandatory repeating action."
Giving the once-over to a lineup of various machine tools present in the shop, he quickly added, "Plus, no stamped nor forged parts..."

"Machining everything will take some time, time that could be spent better..."

It was time to decide - either funnel all resources to this one crazy expensive project of his or solve immediate problem of gun absence.

Despite asking himself, Dave already knew the answer to the question. Big projects, despite being incredibly exciting, promising and what-have-you, tended to be just that - a long haul.

When it came to engineering projects, Dave knew how to strangle his excitement and keep level head when picking his battles, so for now he'd settle with just making some decent guns. Ha. Decent. As if!
It may have been easy back home, where making a decent gun could be as easy as playing mix-and-match with some parts, but here he'd have to re-invent action, rifling process, centerfire cartridge, the whole nine yards.

At the same time he was pretty confident in his abilities regarding putting together a gun of almost any complexity within reasonable limit - at least as far traditional firearms went. It was mere question of time and resources.

Out of everything, what bothered him the most was cartridge. What was taken for granted on ol' good Earth had to be built from ground up in this crazy land. And the scale of the problem was rather big.
It's not like you could just walk to nearest mall and stock up on ammunition here.

The cartridge itself had to be centerfire obviously, since there was no real point in downgrading to anything else and rimfire generally required a lot of tinkering to get it to behave at high chamber pressure loads.

And it sure was a long way to actually mass-producing center-fire cartridges.

Sipping a refreshing dose of a hot tea, Dave allowed his eyes to close, picturing the cartridge production cycle. He'd have to create entire set of machines to automate all of the deep-drawing, annealing, trimming, turning, tapering, priming and loading.
All of this had to be done with rather high precision too, unless he'd like to run into bunch of nasty issues like wrong headspacing down the line.

"Nah, not anytime soon!"

For now he'd settle with machining re-usable bullet cases of a large caliber. After all, with growth of a caliber the amount of problems it couldn't solve started rapidly approaching zero.
Having spun shells was a terrible waste of metal, but at least they would be re-usable, as long as metal fatigue doesn't rear its ugly head.

"What about propellant?"

After consulting with Mandala search results it became glaringly clear that smokeless powder was well beyond Dave's humble chemistry skills - cooking up nitrocellulose would be tricky enough, let alone any of primer compounds.
"I could take an easy way out - poach fireworks for propellant, and whatever party poppers use for trigger could act as a primitive primer. At the very least it worked for the light gas gun..."
Dave gave bulky pipe contraption in the corner a stink-eye. The potentially dragon-slaying one-shot wonder that was born in a fit of insanity didn't seem to be in the mood to even grace that glare with a response. Fine.

"So, the upshot: repeating action, preferably semi-auto, can handle specialty rounds, big bore, doesn't require stamped or forged parts, lots of safety margins... Oh and size smaller than Stinger."

There was one decent, time-tested configuration that he had in mind.

Rolling up sleeves, he muttered to himself, "How did it go? Something-something para bellum?"

Dave was in shock.
Dash's lifeless body laid on the ground, splayed in unnatural pose. Dark red puddle under her slowly grew, staining blue fur and feathers.
Fluttershy, inconsolable in her devastation, cried out through tears, "Why? Why would you do this?"

Dave stumbled back, undercut by accusation.
"I-I would never..."

He suddenly became sharply aware of the fact that he was holding a shotgun in his hands. Startled by sudden development, he dropped it on the ground with a dull clang.
He backed away from the body.

His thoughts raced, breaths became frantic.
"How could this happen? I'd never- I'd never-"

Dave could feel himself starting to hyperventilate; his heart pounded so loud it was deafening.

"No, this can't be; Something is wrong."
Mustering the last bits of resolve and self control, he squeezed out, almost whispering through teeth, "And the world keeps going round..."

Suddenly he was looking at himself from the outside. Everything started slowing down.

Dave hunched over, trying to catch his breath and get heartbeat under control. Looks like the code phrase worked.
"Jesus skateboardin' Christ! That was... something, alright! Phew... This has to stop."

The scene froze and started losing color rapidly. After only a second, it looked like a sepia-toned photograph. As a matter of fact, it was one.
Dave crumpled it and rolled it between his palms before materializing thin bottle and plopping the resulting ball in there. He made sure to cork it tight.
The ball quickly lost cohesion, becoming viscous, tar-like substance, floating in the bottle.

With a wave of hand, dark and smudged surroundings changed to a long warehouse that seemed to stretch into infinity. Shelves held hundreds, if not thousands of bottles just like the one in Dave's hand.

He put the bottle on nearest spare shelf. Small label immediately appeared on it, indicating contents.

"Well, here's first persistent nightmare I got in here. Woo-flippin'-hoo. And here I hoped change of environment and the positivity of this place would stop this. As if!"
He let out a bitter laugh. Who knew that first nightmare would be so unrelenting to require a magic word to break out?

It was then that Dave felt that familiar tingling sense of being watched.
He turned around, and, with off-handed wave, sent the warehouse collapsing into some indeterminate point in the distance, a second wave came and muddy darkness around them suddenly took on shape of a Dojo. Cheesy, but as Jim mentioned countless amount of times, the mindset and mood of a place played important role in shaping dream further to your ends.

Dave narrowed his eyes. The intruder, no longer in hiding, had the appearance of a tall unicorn with wings - so, an alicorn - with a crown and dark blue coat.
This was something new. Usually they looked like horrendous monsters or somebody Dave knew. This one was just off the wall. Not a good sign.

"Another one, so soon?" He spat out.

Today's round one was sudden and cruel, almost too much for Dave, and now there was a second helping?!

All of anguish, regret, stress and pain of first encounter bubbled up, fueling the anger, the righteous fury of a man singled out by persistent nightmare condition.
The anger welled up, washed over him and spilled out; ripples and bulges ran along the room's walls and ceiling as if enormous pressure bore down on it. The wooden supports started to creak, threatening to give in to the unseen force. Varnish on wood bubbled, seared by unseen heat.

"Well, there's miscalculation on your part, nightmare."

He poked himself in the chest with a thumb, bellowing in anger, "I. AM. NOW. LUCID."

Suddenly the ceiling straightened back out. The room looked like it never saw the pressure nor heat of the outburst.
The sudden blast of anger was replaced by more confident, almost insultingly smug tone.

"So whatcha gonna do? Make my teeth fall out?"
His teeth shot out of mouth and started rotating in a ring around his outstretched index finger.
With a sound not unlike that of a racking shotgun a second set extended from his gums, good as new and considerably sharper.
"Way ahead of you!"

The mare shifted a bit, perhaps in discomfort? Curioser and curioser! Usually personified nightmares devoid of their native context - as Jim called their scenery - would just stare at you with this creepy smile before suddenly attacking. Some of them put on an act. None has been subtle so far.

He took aim with his finger gun. The teeth stopped rotation and started buzzing in place like angered bees.
"Come on, nightmare, surprise me."

Without saying anything, mare turned around and walked out in the door that nonchalantly popped in existence. As soon as door closed, it disappeared like it was never there.

"Huh."
Dave lowered his finger gun in surprise.

"Well, then. Can't say I expected that."

He woke up with a start.
Apparently he drooled all over technical drawing of a revolver.
"Dang it!"

Clumsily wiping slobber off the drawing, Dave raised it in morning light, inspecting what his tired and sleepy mind came up with yesterday.

Finding current half-awake himself largely in agreement with hist past half-asleep self, Dave put yesterday's forgotten tea to be re-heated and got back to drawing board, er, table.

As far as Dave was concerned, revolver was the best option - they were robust, tested-and-true approach for powerful rounds and allowed one to keep the spent cartridges for reloading, at the cost of low ammo capacity. Additionally using a revolver would trivialize handling of duds and creation of specialty rounds.

Of course it was revolver, not a pump shotgun! No stamped parts allowed! Goddamn nightmare couldn't even get this detail right. In retrospect it all was silly.
And yet, the memory of the scene conjured up a sinking feeling in the pit in his stomach without a failure.

He frowned.
"Gotta snap out of it. Gotta switch back to work headspace."
As they say, time heals.

Running over specs again, one thing in his own notes made Dave do a double-take.
"Man, with caliber kicked up to just shy of a twelve gauge, this would make one hell of a concealed-carry..."

"Maybe I can even improve on the design..."
Pencil in his hand started its dance, and soon the technical drawing saw revision number two, then three...

One of interesting design hurdles was safety.

After several iterations Dave settled on a design that was amalgamation of several approaches, resulting in mechanism that would only disengage when the gun was held by human hand and trigger was indeed pulled.

While back home presence of a safety on a revolver would be highly unusual, in a world where said revolver could be easily stolen away via telekinetic powers that one third of population possessed, having paranoid-grade safety suddenly made a lot of sense. After all, it'd be embarrassing to get shot with your own gun...

Luna ruminated on the events of past night.

She'd been keeping a close eye on a certain creature's dreams for a while now. They oftentimes were completely unlike the dreams rest of her subjects had, and she could not help but steal a glimpse at them every now and then between her duties. When she did, she would see enormous towers of stone, glass and metal that seemed to touch the sky, cities stretching as far as eye can see, gleaming with dazzling lights. Sometimes it would be these furless apes celebrating, competing or even fighting over reasons not immediately clear. Sometimes it'd be a sky full of metal, twisted in curious contraptions, interlocked and woven in a single gargantuan mechanism basking in golden sunlight. How much exactly of this was memory and how much of it was fantasy Luna couldn't tell. Dreams tended to be fickle and unpredictable after all.

But all of that changed literally overnight. That fateful night, which is to say, happened mere hours back, the creature was suffering from a nightmare. It already had some bad dreams, but not like this.
This time, Luna could clearly pick up fear, regret, anguish and guilt - all genuine and... overwhelming. Emotions kept emanating from window into the dream in almost dizzying waves. Not wasting another second, Luna dived in it headfirst.

The events that followed unfolded in a barely a minute but they brought Luna one surprise after another.
Only few things from that experience could be said for certain.
First, the creature seemed to know Element of Loyalty and Element of Kindness personally. The nightmare revolved around it unwittingly bringing harm to Element of Loyalty, and that fact has brought the creature a great deal of suffering.

Second, creature somehow rejected the nightmare and forged the dream around it, before imprisoning said nightmare in a glass vial through means that remained unclear. It appeared that it has done so many, many times, both from the practiced ease of nightmare incarceration and amount of similar bottles Luna got a glimpse on.

Then, the ape creature mistook her for another nightmare - which was not all that unexpected, as her sudden appearance would often give even subjects that were familiar with her a bit of a fright.
But instead of fear, it got swept up in anger and got ready for fight, bending the dream to it's purpose in a vulgar display of power.

There was one another creature with similarly whimsical control over surroundings...
Curious. Truly curious.

If the creature was in contact with The Elements, then perhaps her dearest sister could shed some light on the issue? With Day Court minutes away, it wouldn't be hard to find her.
And indeed, she found Celestia right by the door leading into the grand chamber where Day Court traditionally has been hosted.
"Sister... we found interloper most peculiar!.."

But as she explained, it became more and more clear that her dearest sister was not overly impressed by the news...
"I am sorry, Luna, but I am sure my star pupil would have written me about something like that. Perhaps you are mistaken? It's a dream realm, after all."

"But sister!.."

The doors behind Celestia closed with a dull thud.
Luna knew like no other just how much work has to be done in the Day Court, and yet the dismissive response left her hurt and fuming.

Perhaps she could talk to the creature directly.

Weighing result of his work, Dave let out an impressed remark, "Dang, what a wrist-destroyer!"

Despite the comment, the gun felt oddly pleasant to handle. He looked down his sights threateningly.
"Do you feel lucky, punk?"

The wall did not answer. Well, if it could, it would probably consider itself very lucky for the sole reason of complete lack of cylinder in revolver's metal frame.

"Moving on."

Hours blurred together as Dave juggled tasks of finalizing frame, machining the cylinder and loading and priming ammunition.

A prolonged series of paranoid proof testing sessions with overpressured cartridges later, Dave was ready to take matters in his own hands. That is, to shoot it at the range and finally get the dang thing sighted in.

Picking up some paper targets he prepared earlier, Dave headed to impromptu shooting range, practically vibrating with anticipation. It was finally, finally the time to test the promising revolver monstrosity in person.
Putting in a pair of earplugs and covering them with headphones, Dave uttered "Surprise me, Shuffle" and switched to the next song.

It took a bit to recognize the muffled music.
"PI Magnum show theme? I didn't even know I had that! Oh, you spoil me, Shuffle..."

With a heave, Dave hoisted up the hefty piece of gleaming steel and took aim.

Rainbow Dash yawned and stretched in the warm beams of evening sun. Nothing quite like catching a small nap on the cloud after a job well done.
A sharp thunderclap made her lift her eyelids, if ever so slightly. A stormcloud? After all that cloudbusting? No way! She must be hearing things.
She closed her eyes and kicked back, only to be jolted back up by another thunderclap.

"What the?!"

Whipping head from side to side, Dash saw only clear sky. And yet another thunderclap broke the peaceful silence.

"That's it! Looks like some stormcloud is up for hoof-to-everything meeting next..."

Jumping off the cloud, she took to flight, scanning the sky for the location of the loud cloudy perpetrator. But the sky was clear, just as Dash remembered before taking her rightfully deserved post-cloudbusting nap.

Another crack of thunder was enough for her to zero in on the source. Was it coming... from the ground?

"What's up, Dave?"
Dash literally dropped out of sky and hovered few feet in front of him, upside down and with intrigued expression plastered all over her muzzle.

"Jeez!"
Dave quickly pointed the pistol up, then realizing the blunder in muzzle safety presumption, immediately pointed it to the ground. The picture of a recent nightmare helpfully stood before his eyes.

Meanwhile, Rainbow spun into upright position, only growing more impatient.
"What are you doing?"
Her mischievously curious tone didn't bode well. Inquisitive little thing!

"Uhhhh... Nothing?.."
Dave's eyed darted around. A distraction? Unfeasible.
Exhale. Get ahold of yourself. Step one. Get rid of incriminating evidence.

Engineer hastily stuffed bulky revolver in one of bigger pockets. The weight quickly pulled the coveralls askew, only attracting more attention to the mysterious metallic device from Dash.
"What was that shiny thing? It looked neat!"

Congratulations, Dave, you made it worse!

Remain calm.
"Well, I was testing one thing I made. I'm sorry if it's too loud, I'm going to try to make it quie-"

Without paying any apparent attention to his carefully-picked words Dash zipped up close and fished out the revolver right out of the pocket.
She eyed her catch carefully.
"Hey! Goddamnit, Dash, it's not a toy! Give it back!"

Dave tried snatching it right back but she just flew a bit farther away, rotating shiny metal implement this and that way, inspecting it and even giving it a few tentative sniffs. Her muzzle scrunched up at the strange smell.

Seeing Dave fuming, Dash stuck her tongue out at him and continued trying to uncover mysteries of Dave's... whatever it was.
"So this was making all this noise? I don't get it. What is this?"

She looked right into the barrel of the revolver and Dave could feel his entire body clench.
Picture of blue pegasus splayed in a dark red puddle came back with a full force.

Dave slumped down for a few seconds then sprung up and crossed the distance between him and Dash in a heartbeat. Dash bolted back, but Dave manged to get a solid grip on her hind leg and pulled her down with surprising force.

Yanking the metal contraption out of her hooves with free hand, he pulled her low enough for their eyes to level.

"Never touch my things without permission! Get it?!"
Dash's smartass comeback stuck in her throat. Dave bore an expression Dash haven't seen yet. A very angry and stern expression.
She tried looking away, but Dave was not relenting.

Mischievous spark in her eyes went out and she practically went limp, Dave letting go of her hoof in surprise.
"I... I... O-okay..." she stammered out.

Lethargically flapping her wings, she slowly hovered away.

"Great, now I made Rainbow sad. Barely avoided one mess just to stumble into another. I just can't win, can I?"

Dave tossed revolver on the workbench. It didn't even need that much ironsight adjustment. Accuracy has been surprisingly good for button rifling, especially considering he eyeballed the twist.
Normally squeezing out good performance out of what Dave would consider practically cavemen technology would warrant some excitement or at least a smug smile. But not today.

"Dang it!"
He threw arms up in frustration.

Why Dash had to get so damn cocky? Was it 'cause he played saint with Twilight earlier?
How could he not?.. The sight of these large eyes being on verge of tears squeezed his heart with icy grip.

And who could've known that local braggart, self-proclaimed badass and leading mischief specialist would take it that bad?
Dang emotionally vulnerable tiny horses!

Whatever. Temporary integration plan stays the same: be polite, be courteous, but most importantly - be boring and non-threatening. There's enough eyes on my person already. Huge, colorful and adorable eyes full of curiosity, granted, but they can easily turn judging.

Funny, usually it was Dave-the-mediator who had to rein in outbursts from two other members of Trouble Trio. Is irritability a sign of slowly losing it?

Stop. These thoughts won't lead anywhere practical. Got to take your mind off it somehow.

Dave looked at the revolver with slight disgust. No more work today.
Might as well watch some favorite movies before hitting the sack.
"Do I still have Dollar Trilogy?"

The unseen fabric of the dream rippled, and a new window appeared in it.
Now came the moment Luna been waiting for with certain amount of trepidation.
Not allowing herself a second's worth of hesitation, she stepped in the dream.

The surroundings were smudged and blurry, and even sounds were somewhat muffled.

Inside the central viscous pillar, the creature floated, without a move; balancing precariously on the edge of lucidity.

Luna had already seen this particular flavor of dream when observing the creature previously. Akin to dreamless sleep, it kept the creature from wreaking lucid havoc on the dream.

Maybe a little help is order?
It would be a risk, of course. The creature wasn't so friendly last time they've met.

With a flash of magic, slab of gelatinous substance parted and collapsed to the unseen floor soundlessly.

Flashes of blue made Dave blink. What was he thinking about? Ah, it didn't matter. What mattered is that he was stuck in something sticky, viscous and disgustingly cold to touch.

A familiar dream.
Concentrating a little, Dave willed himself to obtain small amount of forward velocity. Why swim though jelly when you can float though it? Gotta remember not to abuse flight. Flying in dreams lead to excitement and too much excitement lead to waking up prematurely.

Thin membrane gave in and out on the floor Dave slid. Turning on his back and lifting his head slightly, first thing he saw was the column.
It was tall, semi-translucent and looked like glycerine was given oddly chaotic and whimsical form.

"So that's what it was."
Still lying, he lifted his hands in air and got to work.
With an offhanded gesture, gelatinous pillar disappeared inside of a containment bottle, was immediately corked and equally offhandedly thrown into a miniature portal labeled "Nightmare Disposal".
Hopefully this works on this particular kind of nightmare.

Something unceremoniously barged in his field of view.
Familiar deep-blue equine stood over him, studying his face closely.

"So you're the one who got me out?"
The mare only nodded.

"Thanks. You're one strange dream..."
He picked himself up and dusted off non-existent dirt from his knees.
"But I guess you're okay... as long as you don't try to bite my face off."

The deep-blue mare giggled in her hoof at that notion.

"Who are you, anyway?"

The mare assumed a proud posture, head held up high. Must be the whole royal shtick, with crown, and all.
"We art Princess Luna, Guardian of a Dream Realm."

Yep, totally royal shtick. And what's with the old-timey speak?
Dave knew linguists that would literally strangle anyone for butchering Middle English that hard.

Well, that's a strange dream that just got stranger.
But then again, it's the weird dreams that tend to be the most interesting and memorable ones, so might as well humor Her Majesty and roll with it.

"Pleased to meet you, Princess."
Materializing a fancy hat with even fancier feather sticking out, he took it off his head and bowed in a elaborate movement, swinging the hat.
"I'm Dave Smith, local engineer and, well... dreamer of this dream."
He put the hat back on his head, where it promptly disappeared.

Luna allowed herself a little smile. 'Tis an amusing creature.
"Tell us more about thyself."

"Well..."

The more Luna asked, the less she felt she understood.

Practically every fact about this human creature would be mundane if it wasn't twisted into some topsy-turvy logic.

Despite making a trip across dimensions, he insisted that he's just "normal everyday guy", and wasn't living any sort of exciting life before this.
His species seemed to not possess any sort of magic, yet achieved unthinkable feats, like planting the flag on their Moon - a fact that was mentioned so nonchalantly that she had to ask him to repeat that.
The nightmares were his frequent guests, but his conscience wasn't guilty nor he had a looming fear. If anything, he conjectured that it's just something that just happens to him, no matter stress level or state of mind.

It just didn't add up.
Luna shook her head.
Why would it have to add up for a traveler from another dimension in the first place? If anything, all this added strangeness only proved that entirety of it was genuine.

Gently steering course of discussion towards dreams and namely his affinity to controlling dreams only complicated things further.
There was even a brief tour into the warehouse - much to her surprise, Dave was not making a big secret out of his techniques or anything.
Several dozens of questions and one particularly cynical act of disregard for gravity later, Luna got her curiosity somewhat satisfied. At least, for the time being. Nevertheless, the irritating sense of confusion grew with each answer.

As far as she could tell, no magic was involved, instead of it there was reliance on certain internal logic cultivated by prolonged training. It included innumerable rules and exceptions to said rules, ways to break and bend those rules to one's whim, exceptions to exceptions, loopholes...

His methods did not make a whole lot of sense, but one could not deny the results, which were right there, lined up on shelves.

Perhaps it was just one of those things that just are, and that would consistently defy attempts to explain them.

Overall, their chat was rather pleasant. Sometimes he'd get caught up on some topic and proceed to get carried away, going off on tangents and peppering all of this with sudden remarks, corrections and trivia facts and bunch of jokes that were as funny as they were inappropriate.
"...And I best not get into politics! I hate politics, they generate so much BS that it's unbearable."

"What doth this have to do with apid behinds?"

Human appeared to be confused for a second, but then chuckled.
"Oh, you!"

Luna shook her head. At times it was really hard to understand the human.

"But anyway, shouldn't you already know all of this, being inside my head and all?"
Dave tapped his temple with a finger.

Before Luna could even answer, he straightened out and asked in a tone that was quite a bit less jovial than it was moments ago, "Hold up. Can you feel it?"

It didn't particularly feel like anything.
Luna focused. There was slight movement of air in warehouse, and the air was also a bit cold.

And then there was this subtle, lingering dread of impending doom.

Her tilted head and worried look told him everything. Answering the silent question, he made a hand wave,
"Yeah, that means current dream is about to take a nosedive into nightmare territory, hah!"

Despite previous statement, jovial attitude found its way back in his voice.
"In reality I probably turned about in my bed in some weird fashion and now my back is freezing. At least that's usually the reason for this happening - my body subtly telling me to wake up and find a way to get warmer."

"Normally one would consider it to be a bad thing to have a nightmare, but when I'm lucid I just turn that into entertainment."

Ah, a perfect time to introduce our honed craft of thwarting nightmare apparitions!
"'Tis our duty to protect Dream Realm. We're no stranger to taking fight to nightmares," Luna proudly stated.

"Really? That's pretty cool!"

"What doth temperature-"

"Nevermind that, Princess, it's just a silly figure of speech! It means... Uh... Well, Dash would definitely explain it better, but it means a whole slew of things, in this particular case cool means-" Dave rolled words around, picking the best description "-something that is considered interesting and worthy of respect and admiration."

"Sorry to interrupt that train of thought, but I better set up the battlefield, otherwise we'll be swimming in monsters in a minute."

Dave did something with not-claw manipulators of his, and surrounding environment changed.

It was a featureless plane where the light seemed to come from every direction, despite distant yellow blur hinting at presence of sun.
Everything felt muddled and slightly out of focus. Even the ground was hard to concentrate on - you could tell that it was there, but looking at it directly revealed nothing but soft darkness.

Intrigued by the change, Luna inquired, "What be thine intent?"

"Well... As you know, the frozen-bum-induced anxiety will soon manifest in form of nightmares. But here's the thing: as I concentrate less and less on dream environments, terrors grow more generic and weaker yet more numerous. And in this place, there's not enough context for nightmares to latch on to. Perfect place to deal with a horde of 'em. All we have to do is wait a bit."

Leaving blue mare to inspect the surroundings, Dave turned around. It was time to summon PT!

He hunched over and bent his knees, lightly tapping them with both hands, as if beckoning something.
"Come on, boy! We're gonna see some action, finally."

In response to his call, featureless ground shook and suddenly erupted.

Luna preferred to hang back, observing the scene and occasionally firing a beam or two at emerging monsters that came a bit too close for comfort.

She had never seen anything on this scale - new and new monsters of wildly varying breeds just kept materializing out of thin air.
Despite astonishing speed at which they appeared Dave clearly didn't need any help dispatching them.

Currently he hollered a battlecry as he rode a giant armored millipede into a small army of what Luna correctly identified to be zombies, except they were Dave's species, as opposed to ...

One of lopped off zombie parts sailed in a wide arc, landing at her hooves and wrecking that train of thought. Without too much of a delay the accursed bodypart dissolved into smoky wisps.

Well, at least it was a strange relief to know that living dead were more or less universally considered a source of nightmares.

As the horde got comparatively thinner, Dave rode the armored millipede out of it and to Luna, passing her by and stopping.
Of course, Luna stood proud and strong and totally had not jumped back with a yip when the icky multisegmented thing headed her way. That was definitely not a thing that happened in that dream.

That human creature waved at her, "Oh, I am so sorry I left you out, I'm kinda used to handling this alone and I got a bit distracted."

He gestured to the hordes of monsters trying to close in.
"They're going to keep coming until my dumb body in real world decides to listen to my commands and finally wraps itself in blanket. And that can take awhile... So come on, hop up, I'll give you a ride, it'll be fun!"

Luna still eyed the giant insect tentatively. Its every appendage was clad in steel and terminated in sharp point. She'd only get a glimpse on mandibles, but she had little doubt these were as armored and sharpened as well.

"Don't worry about PainTrain. He doesn't bite!"
Dave scratched his chin in a comical fashion and added,
"Well, at least he doesn't bite passengers!"

The giant millipede turned its head to face her, revealing two large and unusually expressive eyes, partially obscured by armor. Yes, the mandibles indeed were covered in steel and razor-sharp!
When she turned back, there was a separate admittedly comfy-looking seat mounted on the wide back of millipede, to which Dave waved in inviting manner.

The eccentricity of the specimen was something to behold. But at the same time it was kind of endearing.
With a gentle flap of wings Luna placed herself on what could be easily the most extravagant chariot she rode.

Upon feeling added weight PainTrain shuffled, but Dave was quick to calm him down.
"Easy, boy," he said as he pat the millipede on the back affectionately.

Unexpectedly adorable purring sounds emanating from the overgrown insect caught Luna off guard.
"Wha?.."

Dave turned to her, with smile ear-to-ear.
"Ain't he a cutie pie?"

---

Luna slung one spell after another. A group of demons got pancaked by a hilariously disproportionate weight. Nearby gathering of freakishly green monsters looked in abject terror as literal moon - albeit scaled down - rolled towards them, leaving steady stream of wisps in its wake. That creature - Dave - was right, it was entertaining!

"Str-r-r-rike! You're pretty good at this," Dave smiled at her, flashing pearly whites.
Luna allowed herself a modest smile. Frankly saying, she was experimenting at this point - there simply has not been a need to fight an entire army in the dream realm.

The legs of millipede became a single steely gray blur, and it was only now that it hit Luna that they were moving way faster than they were a minute ago, and the speed was picking up.
Amalgamations of horn, tooth, tentacle and claw whizzed by as Dave continued to rain barrages of colorful fire upon hordes. Giant razor-sharp mandibles clicked non-stop, turning everything in the path in wisps of smoke.

Luna continued with her hard-hitting spell experiments. Prolonged beam from her horn traced a wispy trail through battlefield. Not bad, but could use some more oomph! Once more, with feeling! And more explosions!

Satisfied with making a decidedly large clearing in the horde, Luna looked around. There was just so much more of... everything in this dream. So much speed, so much more carnage and thrill! None of the dreams she spied human having earlier even came close to this. Was he trying to impress her?

She stole a glance at Dave who floated in air port-side of PainTrain, bringing down untold disasters at the monster-carpet that practically coated this featureless plane at this point. At the moment he, in a perspective-defying feat, picked up sun and started... ripping away small pieces and raining them down like meteors? Now that's him blatantly showing off!

That talent of his could be of great help on nightly duties of keeping dreams of her subject calm, peaceful and terror-free.

"Oh no!"
Dave's voice came from somewhere above.

Luna spotted him floating far above in the air, being pulled up towards a growing white glow by an invisible force.
"I got too agitated. Dang it, it always happens."
His face twisted in a pout.

He pointed to the light that continued drawing him in.
"That's me waking up. I'm sorr-"

The blindingly bright light consumed his body and the dream fell apart.

Dave sat up, rubbing his eyes in annoyance.
"Damn it, and it was a neat dream, too!"

Gunner in the Works

by Hyperaggressive Porridge

Chapter 1 : Surprisingly Slow Start

Chapter 2 : Tea, Taboos & Technology

Chapter 3 : Mending Monetary Meagerness

Chapter 4 : Reclaiming Radio Receiver

Chapter 5 : Supersonic Steel Slug Solution

Chapter 6 : Undjentlemanly Ungulate Undoing

Chapter 7 : Foray For First Firearm