Tick-
Tock.

Tick-
Tock.

Tick-
Tock.

The annoying sound buzzed through Frost’s head, though he was mostly unconscious, he could still hear that atrocious noise.

Tick-
Tock.

Gah, he just wanted to desperately throw a wrench or something heavy at the damn thing. Why wouldn’t it shut up!? He felt the ticking noise grow absurdly close. The chitter-chatter of the rotating mouth saws and little pincers and other knick-knacks pierced his ear and drew him from his temporary slumber. He groggily woke up and barely muffled a scream at the horrendous shape on him. Whatever the hell it was, it seemed to be made of metal that was intricately bent and twisted to interconnect with other parts. Small valves and tubes and other gears rotated, puffed and bubbled inside the clockwork abomination. It swerved its head at him and chittered a bit. A glowing red eye examined him. Drops of a sticky white liquid dripped from its mouth. It angled itself and spat a blob of the stuff which covered his mouth and obscured the bottom of his sight. It crawled off of from and jumped upward. He suspected they were hanging upside down...But where?

Around the same time that Frost awoke, so did Sierra. She handled the situation a bit better, by keeping her eyes nearly closed and her mouth hanging open uncomfortably, but her deception proved fruitful as the clockwork beasties pass over and around her. They seemed to be slightly intelligent somehow, a theory that was confirmed as she saw some of them probe her friends. They poked in every nook and cranny and even took clipping of mane hair or feathers from their wings. It was quite unsettling. She moved a bit forward so she could sway and hopefully see more of the creatures. She ignored the spider-like construct that spat the web on Frost’s face. She examined the ones close to her. They seemed to be arachnid-like in appearance. Some resembled scorpions while others were more spider-like. The smallest ones, she noted, were barely a foot high and seemed to operate solely on clockwork machinery. The medium sized ones, about 3 feet tall, were more complex as they had gears in their torsos that helped them moved and tubes throughout their bodies that pumped in some kind of liquid she supposed. Perhaps oil? The large ones were bigger than a pony, about 4 ½ feet tall. They had a spider torso that was run by gears, cogs, and small machines that let loose puffs of steam sometimes and their upper torso was straightened up and seemed to be formed of a body case run by some complex machinery. They had long hands made of gold with long sharp appendages at the end. Some had scissors and some had axes. She shuddered as she saw some blood stains on one of the weapons. It was disturbing to think of who had been the victim to the deadly guillotine. She turned her head a bit to look at the others. Hawke, Frost, Glade and Scorch were in the same room as her...But where were the others, she wondered. She shook her head and tried to remember what happened earlier. She last recalled Frost bashing in one of these clockwork creatures. They went off to search for the others. One by one, their group started to get picked off. It was turning into a nightmare. They went into some chamber and…

“The leader…” she muttered as the memory slowly flowed back to her. Below the ship there was a chamber with a massive clockwork monster with a huge eye in its back. They tried to escape from it, but they got captured and tied up by the little ones. She recalled the massive construct seemingly assembling the little ones out of parts it scavenged. As to where it found so many parts, it was tough to say. One of the scorpion constructs paused chattered a bit. It turned to her. She shut her eyes tight and hoped it didn’t notice her. Unfortunately, she wasn’t that lucky…

Several Hours Earlier

Frost repeatedly smashed the construct corpse over and over. He did not like getting spooked, snuck up on, or getting hit.

“I think it’s dead.” mumbled Sierra. She wasn’t entirely sure if these machine thingies could be dead or killed, but since it wasn’t moving and the noise was silenced, she assumed it was dead so to speak. It had been barely a minute after they got attacked following their investigation of the stranded ship. At first, everything seemed fine, but then they found unusually cleaned skeletons and a weird ticking noise above them. Shortly afterwards they were attacked. Frost bravely fended off the thing and commenced beating it to pieces. It took a while for him to be finished.

“You done yet?” she drawled. He grunted and smashed the corpse once more before tossing aside the ruined cudgel. “Yeah, keep your bow one, I’m finished.” he retorted. He kicked the scraps one last time and walked away. “So, what’s the plan, blue?” he questioned.

“First off, don’t call me blue. Second off, we have to get the others and get away from here. I don’t think we’re the only ones who got attacked.” she warned.

Frost grunted and sifted through some parts. He paused as a cold feeling went through him. He raised his hoof and looked at it. Blood covered it, the crimson shimmering under the early moon. “What in the name of Tartarus…?” he hoarsely whispered.

Sierra didn’t hear him as she looked around the area. The ship was hauntingly silent. Something was obviously off and she didn’t like that. She didn’t hear Scorch’s rowdy voice or his loud hooftsteps. She couldn’t hear Hawke’s quips and Southern drawl. Neither did she hear Glade’s infectious cheerfulness or Hero’s solemn, stoic, grim and all-in-all dark demeanor. Damn that colt is cute she thought, but quickly dashed the idea before it got stuck in her head and she started doing stupid stuff.

Frost wandered back, looking a tad bit shook up from a suspicious he desperately hoped wasn’t true. Sierra gave him a curious look, but decided not to prod. Frost was a tinkerer, a surgeon, and a bit of a mad scientist. If anything was enough to spook him, she REALLY didn’t want to know what it was then. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

Frost shrugged her question off. “Of course I am!” he snapped. ‘Now let’s get moving.” He trotted off with a determined look. He was hellbent on learning what it is he found and how it was connected to the skeletons he and Sierra found. His deepest fear was that somehow the machines were collecting ponies and using them as parts for the machines, but he highly doubted it. Possibly out of fear or out of sorrow that ponies would be subjected to such atrocities. He shivered, not only from the thought, but from the chilly winds. The ocean wasn’t exactly the warmest place in the universe at dusk. “Hmm...Dusk...That certainly rolls off the tongue nicely.” he mused. It would be a fun name to share with that nameless colt who practically saved their flanks again and again.

Sierra rolled her eyes as Frost descended into one of his deep thought comas. She set out on her own. It would take him a while to realize the world around him...Or until he got attacked. She hoped it would be the former. They already had enough trouble in the past hour. She followed some small scratches in the ship. It would be pretty hard to claw the petrified wood, but something did nonetheless. Or, it could have before the ship became petrified. Either way.

She listened closely for any unusual sounds. None occurred yet, but she still had her suspicions she was being watched. It was difficult to ward off feelings such as that. She followed the tracks to the front of the ship. She could just barely make out the lines of a square-shaped floorboard that could be opened. Possibly leading to some secret place or a stash or something! She tried prying it open, but it wouldn’t budge. She’d need something like a crowbar or a paddle. She looked around for any tools she could use. Nothing was around except pieces of wood. Possibly from hoes or shovels. “Why did they take the metal parts?” she wondered as she grabbed a few and began using them to pry open the little door. It refused to budge and she grew slightly annoyed. She angrily tried a few more times until the plank was flipped out violently, smacking her hard in the face as it shot back. She groaned and held her broken nose. That would sting like a hydra…

She shook her head, causing small droplets of blood to fly and splatter across the floorboards, and she went and peeking into the dark opened. She reached around inside and pulled out a lantern. She checked it. It was one of those with the little rocks that lit up when exposed to magic. She tapped magically-infused flintstone against it causing the rock to flitter and light up. She put it back into the lantern and shut the little door. She slowly peeked inside the little room and dropped to the floor. More skeletons were here. She yelped a bit from the crunching noise they made as she stepped on them. She examined them. Like the skeletons from earlier, these were picked clean as well. She carefully stepped over them and made her way to the doorway. She opened it and it creaked from age. She peeked in and had to suppress a very loud gasp or a cry of horror.

Hanging from the ceilings were dozens of cocoons. Some had living ponies, trapped in hibernation with eyes, skin or flesh missing from their faces while some others were stripped down to the bone. More of the little constructs ran about, carrying metal parts or flesh pieces. The machines all Ticked simultaneously and Tocked equally. The hollow noise rang out through the galley in a haunting way. It did not help to abide the ominous atmosphere. Sierra realized that a single mistake would alert them to her presence and possibly lead to the loss of her life. Or worse. she thought as she stared at the cocoons, her stomach doing backflips. She was ready to lose her lunch if not for the gripping fear. She took a deep breath and readied herself to act if she was discovered. She hid behind a crate on a stairwell near the door. She sucked in her breath to slow down her heartbeat and she peeked out. The machines were hard at work gathering “parts” for whatever purpose. They seemed to go down chutes on the far left side of the room. She analyzed the distance and the crates near it. Assuming the ones on the cocoons didn’t find her, she would be fine. Though with luck like hers…

She slipped down the staircase as stealthily as possible though she looked more like a very lanky cat as she flowed down the steps. She gagged slightly at the sight of a tiny clockwork spider that was using its front blades to carve out a ponies eyes until they slipped out with a *shlick*. Both blood and some eye fluid dripped near her. She sucked in her breath and walked over it to the next crate. Her rear left hoof unfortunately stepped in the good and she gagged again. For once, she was slightly happy her nose was broken as she could barely smell the horrid stench of rot and other bodily fluids that permeated through the air. She hurried over to the last crate and stared down the chute. She didn’t see any constructs make their way out yet so for all she knew they gathered down there en masse. “Well, Allons-y I suppose” she muttered as she recalled a phrase than an unusual stallion used in her old home town. She leapt down the chute. It was cold and dark and with more than several painful bumps that sent her upward into the ceiling with a painful bump. She continued tumbling down the dark claustrophobic chute for a while until she was spat out onto a wall which she was painfully sprawled out on before she fell into a big pile of metal. “OUCH!” she yelped. More than several of the metal pieces were either oddly shaped or sharp. Needless to say, it hurt. A lot, but at the moment, that was the least of her problems.

When Sierra opened her eyes, she saw a gargantuan metal tarantula on the ceiling. A huge orange eye glared at her from the middle of the construct. It dropped down and landed on its legs with a mighty crash. She hastily back up against a wall, shuddering in fear of what it would do to her. The arachnid picked up several pieces of metal and held them up. The eye shot an orange beam that began fusing the parts together. Very small and slim arms came from the legs and formed the more delicate parts on the miniature construct. The arachnid tossed the ball into the air and it erupted into 5 tiny clockwork spiders that charged Sierra. She ran off in fear. The little machines chased her eagerly. She finally let loose a scream as larger machines followed her. She saw more...Organic parts inside it. Blood was poured into a wheel in one of the constructs as it very slowly followed her. It had a rail-gun-thingy on an arm which shot projectiles at her. One flew past her head and imbedded in the wall. It was a bloodied tooth. She screamed even more as she tried to find any form of exit. She desperately clawed at a wall until a net shot out and wrapped around her. She struggled as she tried to get away and the last thing she saw was a large metallic leg slamming down on her face before she blacked out.

Meanwhile, Frost decided to do some investigating of his own. He did not manage to get as deep into the hive as Sierra did, but he did find some traces of what happened to the remaining ponies. He opened up the empty book and looked at the scattered pages within. Most of them referred to something as living ponies fused with metal. They were all hunted down. One of the more crazily written notes. One of the notes had the word “THE TICKING WON’T STOP! MAKE IT STOP!” written all over. Another note described the first fifty ponies who were captured. It mentioned cocoons deep below. Parts being salvaged to form the Archmecha. Flesh being turned to metal along with bone. It was quite chilling what he read. Determined to prove it wrong, Frost wandered ‘round the ship until he found stairs that would lead him to the lower deck. “Place was probably populated by crazy cannibals who made that robot thingy.” he muttered. There was no way that flesh and bone could be made to steel. Let alone living machines making traps and harvesting ponies. It was all just phooey in his opinion. He opened a room and his jaw dropped. Inside, Scorch was wrapped up tightly by a trio of the little clockworks. They chattered loudly as they saw him. He growled and levitated a bench and bashed them off. He paused. “...Why is the place so warm suddenly.” he heard a loud whistle. He slowly turned and had a powerful bar smack his across the face, sending him flying into a wall. “Owwwww…” he groaned and tried to get up. The steam-powered clockwork construct charged him and smashed him against the wall a few more times. He moaned from the pain. He tried to get up again and was met with an axe to the side. He howled from the searing agony and collapsed yet again. Little spider clockworks moved to him and wrapped him up and took him off to a room.

The present

Sierra still had her eyes shut, praying she wouldn’t get found, but she was nonetheless picked to be next. The constructs muffled and blinded her with web and took her off. She began to sweat from nervousness. Wherever she was going, it wasn’t good. She heard her friend’s voice.

“Hey, let go! Dammit, I said let go!” yelled Hero.

She felt a slight rush of satisfaction that he was alive, but it was fleeting. She took in deep breaths through her bloodied nose, and waited for whatever to come. She was convinced her friends would save her. But judging by their current situation, she was reluctant to admit it was probably hopeless.

Aurora preserve us… she prayed. Her blood ran cold and her hopes were dashed as she was dropped on the ground. She was next. And no one was coming to save her...

Author's Note

I'll be releasing part 2 later this week.