The Birth of a Rebellion

Frost stared at the white ceiling of her flat, slowly counting the small cracks and places where the paint had peeled. Forty-two, again the same result. She felt silly doing this, but it helped her to hold her frustration as the idea that came to her head yesterday started to seem unfeasible.

She had been awake all night, staring directly into the darkness of the room, only cracked by thin streams of light that sneaked through the blinds. She had gathered together all the information she had about the C.M.A. headquarters building. It’s plans, any password she could remember and the guard shifts... She tried to discover a flaw in the security that she could use to sneak inside. There was none.

From what she could remember, a month ago more or less, a security breach in the accounting archives made the company revise their security, and they did it thoroughly. All the ventilation systems entrances were secured with energy fields. Nothing aside air could go through them without the security system noticing and turning on the alarms. Those fields just detected the presence of anomalous bodies inside the ventilation system, so any intruder would not be harmed; not by the fields at least... Every other possible entrance was guarded by a guardspony and almost every door at the labs was closed with a password lock’s whose password changed every week. It seemed an enormous inversion in security and secrecy for a company that seemed to have nothing to hide, and even though Frost found this pretty suspicious, she didn’t dare to make any questions. Now perhaps she could also find some answers…

Frost shook her head. She had to focus on the task ahead if she wanted to succeed. Her objective was getting in, stealing the notes of the project and the three prototype crystals and vanishing into the night. Each extra second she spent in the facility would mean a higher risk of being discovered, so she would have to be swift.

Once she chose her objective, she spent the rest of the night trying to guess how she would get into the building, until dawn, when she started slowly counting.

And now, Frost still was staring to the ceiling of her flat, unable to find a way to break in the facility. After a few moments lost in her thoughts, she started counting the small cracks and places where the paint had peeled. Forty-two, again...

Crimson sat in front of his studio’s desk staring at the white blank page that was in front of him, slowly changing its colour and turning to a rusty orange as the lights of dusk got into the room. Besides him, enormous piles of discarded books, tossed away in the frantic seek of information about the mysterious Commander Star.

He hardly slept that night, haunted by the possible meanings the threat of the policepony could have. As the sun rose from the horizon, he decided that he had to distract himself somehow, so he chose to take a look into his history books in search of information on this pony, unable to spend one more second inside his bed. The search had been exasperating, and lacked of any positive result.

All the history books that had information on the period of the war between Celestia and Nightmare Moon spoke about the fact that some ponies followed the princess of the night in her ‘unjustifiable uprising’ against her sister, but none of them clearly stated how many nor their names.

Far away from getting relaxed, this search got him on his nerves. He had to make his mind busy with another thing. Trotting away from his studio’s desk, he headed to the kitchen, where he started to boil water to prepare a coffee. It was when the whistle of the coffee maker started when Crimson realised that everything was silent… Too silent for Manehattan, even on a Sunday morning.

Something was wrong.

Suddenly the door was tore apart as several uniformed ponies broke into the room.

“Manehattan Police! You are under arrest!” One pony among the group yelled loudly. Under his assault uniform, Crimson recognised Crafty Tail, who wielded a sinister grin. “Take him down!” he yelled to the unicorn by his side, pointing Crimson with his hoof. Crimson knew that pissing him off actually was a bad idea.

Reacting fast to Crafty Tail’s order, a uniformed unicorn prepared with his horn what Crimson recognised as a stunning spell. The glow around the unicorn’s horn took a spherical shape, changing from its originally pale blue colour to a bright red. Crimson had read about this spell before, it was used to disperse mobs a couple of centuries ago, but its use was prohibited because an inexpert use could result in the objective’s pony blown up into a red mist.

“Crap!” Crimson yelled as soon as he saw the spell prepared, jumping behind the sofa just in time to see one shot of the stunning spell striking the opposite wall, where several shelves full of books simply vaporized into thin air. Definitively that wasn’t an expert use of the spell.

Crimson gazed around searching for an escape route, but unless he jumped through the window, he was trapped. The sound of the hoofs approaching made Crimson shiver.

“Mister Zephyr! It’s a pleasure to see you again! It’s nice to see that you followed my advice and remained in the city… On the other side it’s a pity, I would have enjoyed chasing you.” said the policepony, pleasured by the situation. “Have you got any complaint about the legality of this assault? I’d like to show you this order, signed by Celestia herself… Hidden behind that sofa I doubt you’ll be able to see anything at all, why don’t you come out?!”

Crimson knew that the order was surely a bluff, but anyway he would have to obey. More than ten ponies wearing the standard police assault armours stood between him and the only exit that didn’t mean jumping several meters to the floor. At that moment he wished to be able to teleport away. Crimson sighed deeply, resigning himself to arrest.

“It’s not necessary!” said Crimson rising one hoof over the sofa “I surrender! Just tell that unicorn to dispel the stunning spell! I wouldn’t like to have my head blown up…”

After a few moments of silence, Crimson heard the buzz of the spell fading away and the red light that coloured the room vanished. He still waited behind the sofa, trying to gather the courage to jump through the window. If he wanted to run, that was the moment. He felt the steps of the policeponies getting into the now overcrowded living room.

“Damn, I just can’t…” Crimson lowly muttered.

“Ok, the spell is down, now come out slowly…” He felt his voice approaching step by step. “No unicorn tricks or I’ll be the one who blows your head up!” the policepony menacingly said as Crimson slowly rose from the floor and walked to the middle of the living room.

“Come here, mister Zephyr. You and I are going to have a long conversation in the police station” said the brown coated pony.

Suddenly a cloth bag covered Crimson’s face and immediately after he felt a painful blow on the side of his head. Stumbling a bit, he felt his equilibrium vanishing and the tentacles of unconsciousness grabbing his mind. As he fell to the floor, he felt the taste of blood inside his mouth and he was able to hear the laughter of the policepony.

“There must be a way! No system is perfect… The energy fields are the key… they trust too much on them, so ,if there was a way to unlock them just for enough time to get me in, it could be done…” Frost muttered to herself as she walked to the balcony of her flat.

The sun rose long ago, and it was approaching the horizon again. The whole day had passed and Frost she still was clueless of how she would do it. She had spent her time trying to guess how pass by the energy fields unnoticed and after finding herself unable to do it, she decided to take the risk and obtaining the original designs from Ponytec’s archives.

Abusing a bit of her position inside the company, she got one of her workmates to bring her the designs of the security energy fields, not without receiving a whole bunch of annoying questions first. Using as an excuse that she was trying to improve the energy field’s circuits to be more efficient, she got them from the untrusting pony.

She tried to find how disrupt the field in a way that her intrusion wouldn’t be noticed, but those energy fields were probably far too sensible to attempt that. She was running out of ideas and, what was more important, running out of time. The passwords would change tomorrow, so, even though she could get inside, she would be unable to move through the building. It was tonight or never.

Sitting on the balcony with a coffee cup steaming between her hooves, she gazed over the wonderful view over the city, coloured in orange and red by the light of dusk. Her flat was just in front of Central Park, a lucky strike that was part of her contract as a reward from the company for her achievements in C.M.A.

Even though the flat was small and abused of the minimalist conception in its decoration, it had all she could possibly need. A living room, a studio with a wide desk to do her design tasks, a kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom, all lighted naturally by the sunlight that poured inside through the wide windows the house had. She didn’t need more, nor ever coveted it.

After watching the sun set and drinking in a long gulp the now cold coffee, she headed to the studio, turning on the reading lamp to reveal a pile of plans and designs. Inspecting the designs of the energy field emitter once more, she hit the wooden desk with her hoof, frustrated. They were impossible to trick, the design was fail-safe. But she hadn’t earned her cutie mark for nothing. Her special talent was creating machines. Creating them, designing them and making them work, that was her passion, and few ponies understood them as she did. For a moment she looked at her monkey wrench over a blue lightning cutiemark. She wasn’t going to surrender easily.

Inspecting the stack of papers again, she noticed a little folder hidden under several designs she hadn’t seen before. On it, it could be read ‘Maintenance’ written on red letters. Opening the folder she found some designs to the maintenance panel and other tools used for the maintenance processes. She smiled widely as she realized that she had found right what she needed.

After picking her saddlebags from the wardrobe nearby the entrance, she headed to the studio’s desk, and opening it she took out a flashlight, a small rod with a red crystal at his tip that served as a wielding torch and a small toolbox.

With a smile on her face, she headed to the door. She was ready to make the ponies of C.M.A. forever remember the day they decided to take her merit away from her.

Crimson gasped as he felt the frozen water hit his face. He tried to open his eyes but he had to close them quickly, blinded by the bright white light that surrounded him. His jaw felt sore and the headache he had was almost unbearable. After emitting a small grunt, he felt someone approaching.

“Finally our guest has awakened!” Said a voice that Crimson knew he should recognise. Slowly, memories from recent days started to rise from the blur of his mind, and opening his eyes he found Crafty Tail.

“Ughhh, where… Where am I?” Crimson (grunted?)muttered, raising his head to take a look (at)to the room. He found himself in the middle of a white room, excessively illuminated by fluorescent lamps, tied to a chair placed in the exact middle of the room. In front of him, a gigantic mirror substituted a piece of the white wall. In that mirror, Crimson saw his reflection. He could see his bruised jaw even under his red coat, already turning dark. After that, he followed his reflection up through his face. The scar of the manticore attack was burning again. He barely recognised his reflection.

“Welcome to the Manehattan’s city main police station’s.” said the brown stallion who now wore the same brown gabardine and sunglasses he used in their first meeting. “You are in interrogation room number three, mister Zephyr! Do you know the meaning of interrogation?”

The policepony slowly walked around Crimson, who slightly nodded answering Crafty. He laughed loudly as he turned his face to Crimson’s ear.

“I don’t think so, mister Zephyr.” He whispered.

He walked behind Crimson, who followed the movements of the policepony using the mirror in front of him. Crafty Tail grabbed the only other single piece of furniture in the whole room. Dragging it, he (Crafty Tail) placed the chair in front of Crimson and sat on it. Taking off his sunglasses, he put them away inside the pocket of the gabardine, and started to stare at Crimson with a malicious grin.

“Do you know what my especial talent is, mister Zephyr?” he said as he took a pack from his pocket and placed a cigar between his lips. Turning it on with a mach, he exhaled the smoke directly to Crimson’s muzzle, who sneezed slightly.

“My special talent is to find other ponies. Ponies such as you, mister Zephyr, who think they can change things. I have been commanded to find all kinds of criminals. Traitors, conspirators, rapists… An endless list of pony waste that should be killed or imprisoned forever!” These last words spat from the policepony’s mouth with infinite despise.

“I find that you, freethinkers, are the most amusing ones. If somepony gave me a bit for each time a pony such as you, traitors who think Celestia’s reign should end and ponies should rule themselves, tried to convince me that ponies are good by nature, I could have retired long ago. But then, I show them the truth. I love when I show them this world’s nature, and show them what Celestia’s reign is protecting them from. Their will turning into dust between my hooves…” he said, biting his lip and grinning in an almost psychotic way.

“There are ways to bend the will of a pony, until it shatters, turning them into a miserable blob of tears and moans. And, at that precise instant, is when they let me know everything, as you will, mister Zephyr.”

Crimson had his stare locked with Crafty Tail’s, trying to avoid his expression showing the fear that grew inside him.

“Mister Zephyr, do you know why you are here tonight?” He asked.

Crimson bit his lip, but still held his gaze.

“You shall be the one who tells me, mister Tail, because I have no idea” Crimson finally answered defiantly, after gathering all the valor he could.

“Good, good… Crushing the will of the arrogant ones is a pleasure that I don’t usually have the luck to taste! Now, let me tell you your purpose in this life, mister Zephyr. Since I got some recognition among the ranks of the police, Celestia has used me to find the trash of this society. I love that feeling, you know? Chasing criminals... They always think that they are smarter than you, that they can escape, trick me into their traps, or try to disappear just by going to other cities… But you know? They all were wrong. I’ve been chasing the enemies of Celestia for fifteen years. I’ve chased pegasi, earth ponies and unicorns, mister Zephyr. I’ve even got the pleasure of hunting a changeling spy. But there has been one pony who has escaped my grasp several times. You know who I mean right?”

“I have no idea who you…” Crimson tried to say as he received a punch directly to his jaw. A thin stream of blood started to flow from his broken skin soaking his red coat and the metallic taste of blood started to fill his mouth.

“Wrong answer, mister Zephyr. I’ll spare you the pain of trying to lie to me. I’m speaking of Black Claw.” He said while he grabbed Crimson’s jaw with his hooves, strongly pressing on the open wound. Crimson couldn’t avoid emitting a slight grunt that made Crafty Tail grin again. “That damned unicorn has been the only one that has ever been able to trick me, killing several policeponies during my raids to capture him, and always escaping unpunished.”

“This has become something personal. It started as another job, but that damned unicorn is playing with me. He teases me, usually appearing in public places, just to make me go to chase him. And when I arrive, he just stares at me. He knows I never go alone, and always avoids my traps. He decided to play with me, and I’m not going to lose. I’m going to find that traitor, and you are going to help me.” Crafty Tail said, approaching his face to Crimson’s, locking his stare. Then, Crimson spat at his face, dyed red as the mix of spit and blood flowed over his light brown coat.

“Screw you! I’ll tell you nothing!” Crimson answered defiant.

“Very well, mister Zephyr.” He said while he spat his soaked cigarette and cleaned his face with a piece of cloth he took from his gabardine’s pocket. “As I said before, crushing the will of the arrogant ones is a pleasure.”

After saying this, Crafty Tail stood up from the chair and started to drag it to one corner of the room. Once he finished, he started to roll up his gabardine’s sleeves, and stood in front of Crimson silently. It was going to be a long night…

The outskirts had always been a silent place during the night, and that night it wasn’t different. The few streetlamps scattered in between the several factories and warehouses barely discovered the track that the white coated pegasus followed among the sneaky streets. Covered by her black Ponytec uniform, her coat didn’t shine under the moonlight, allowing her to slip away from any undesired witness among the shadows. Her saddlebags, heavy with the equipment she carried inside, clinked with every hoofstep.

The C.M.A. lab building, lit from behind with the light of the moon, rose as a gigantic shadow near the Manehattans docks, which filled the air with the stench of the sewage and the burning coal from the old steam boats.

Frost approached one of the walls of the large building, taking care of not being seen by any of the guards that patrolled the surroundings. She had learned their paths and timings by heart while she worked here, usually staying until late night inside the labs with no other occupation rather than looking through the window while she waited for her experiments to give any results. Now this remedy against boredom proved to have another uses.

With care, she started flapping her wings, slowly rising from the floor only to fall again. The weight of the saddlebags, full of tools, was something she hadn’t taken into account. She only had a margin of thirty seconds to get to the emergency stairway before the guard arrived where she was. Biting her lip, she started flapping her wings again with all her strength, now careless of any noise she could make. Sweat soaked her mane and coat as she arrived to the metal balcony that served as a base for the emergency staircase, landing heavily.

Frost stuck to the wall and held her breath just in time to avoid the light from the guard’s lantern that pointed right where she had landed. After a moment staring at the place where Frost hid, the guard just shrugged his shoulders and kept his way.

The sneaky staircase led her directly to the buildings roof, where the entrances to the ventilation systems were. Stealthily approaching the box where the maintenance panel was, assuring that no guard saw her, she took out the screwdriver and the welding torch.

The lid was closed with a simple padlock that Frost just decided to melt with the wielding torch. After, she started to unscrew and open the lid. Inside she found all the circuits that controlled the signal emission between the main security system and the energy field. Taking out some wires and a bit of solder from her saddlebags, she started to make the bypass. Finally having

After half an hour of endless dragging across the ventilation system only accompanied by her flashlight, she arrived to her office in the C.M.A. Kicking a bit the grille just below her, she forced it open, and flew inside the room smoothly.

The office was sober and simple. A desk, a couple of chairs and a filing cabinet were all the furniture she had in there. All the drawers of both the cabinet and the desk were open, empty(emptied of every sign of her presence). Two brown cardboard boxes lay on the floor filled up with the few personal effects she brought to the C.M.A., but there was no trace of her investigations. Mister Steelskin didn’t lie after all; they had fired her indeed…

Frost approached the door of the office and, slowly opening it, stuck her head out. The corridor was dark, barely lit by the moonlight that got inside through the small window at its end. There was no sign of any guard around so, closing the door behind her, Frost started to stealthily trot toward the labs area, a floor beneath her. If her investigations weren’t at her office, they probably were inside the strongbox of the lab, together with the four gemstone prototypes.

The labs were basically a huge industrial premise, divided into different zones by temporary brick walls that were built and knocked down almost every week to adapt to the needs of the investigators. Several staircases rose from the labs leading to metallic footbridges, held up by concrete columns high over the labs, communicating the offices floor with them. Frost stepped toward the footbridge that joined her lab with the offices floor when she saw a light far inside the labs.

“No pony should be here this late…” Frost muttered as she headed toward the lighted zone, crouching and hiding inside any shadow she found.

It took a couple of minutes to arrive to the place where some floodlights illuminated a clear space. In the middle, a device similar to a rod with a long and thin red crystal at its tip was being manipulated by a pony. More precisely, by Frost’s research team leader. A lab coat covered his green coat and a couple of dark goggles protected his eyes from the sparks of the soldering process. As she approached, she could hear him murmur to himself, intensely focused on the machine. Frost smiled slightly as she realised he was struggling with one of her circuits. The other investigators often said that her way to do things usually was illogical, but they still worked perfectly, and that usually pissed them off. Ignorance frustrated them.

Finally the investigator raised his head from the control panel, doing a triumphant gesture with his hoof.

“Damn Frost Cloud and her incomprehensible circuits… At least I’m pretty sure this time it should work…” he said as he approached another panel, far away from the device.

Frost shook her head in disbelief as she saw that the strange device had one of the prototype gemstones attached. The gemstone started to glow in a light blue colour as the blue coated unicorn manipulated the panel in front of him. Finally, the red crystal started to glow. Each second it passed the red gemstone glowed with stronger light, until the light of the floodlights paled under the red light coming from the gemstone. Frost covered her eyes, and suddenly she heard a blast coming from the device. was and felt the air .

Frost opened her eyes when she felt the light fading. The tip the red crystal steamed as the last remains of magical charge left the crystal. From her hiding place, she could see the research team leader approaching the device with a grin on his face, but not actually looking to it. He stared a point further away. Following his gaze, Frost found a melt wall on the other side of the room.

“The Princess will be pleased…” said the investigator.

Frost knew she (would never be able to get)(have access to) the gemstone attached to the device, so she headed swiftly to the lab where she actually worked. At least there should be three left.

The lab was only lit by the moonlight that got through several scattered skylights, making the strongbox shine as it reflected it. Frost approached it and introduced the password. Luckily, they haven’t changed it yet. With a slight click, the strongbox opened, revealing several folders that contained the investigations Frost Cloud searched and two gemstones.

“Wait… Where’s the third one?”

She gazed over the lab, searching for the remaining gemstone. One slight glow coming from a newly designed blast furnace caught her attention. As she approached the machine, she felt the air turning hotter and hotter.

“This shouldn’t be turned on without anyone watching over it…”

Starting to sweat, she approached the panel that gave access to the internal circuits of the furnace. Sweat run over her forehead, and soaked her coat and mane. The heat increased with time, and this wasn’t a good signal. Picking her screwdriver, Frost opened the metallic panel and looked inside. The gemstone glowed intensely inside as it overloaded with magical energy the whole circuit that seemed to be melting under the uncontrolled flow. Frost stared with her mouth open and time seemed to stop as she realized the security circuit, the only thing that avoided those damn gemstones to explode while functioning, was not there.

“The security circuit isn’t… Damn!” Frost said as she slowly stepped back from the hot device. Her mind raced through a million ideas only to let one rise above them all.

Run, you idiot!

Recomposing herself, she started to desperately looking around, trying to find an escape route. Going back through the ventilation system wasn’t an option; she would spend too much time to do that.

Throwing away her tools, she emptied her saddlebags, picking both gemstones and her notes about the investigations and filling them again. The skylights weren’t and option either; their reinforced crystals would be too hard to break…

She started flying toward the closest footbridge, giving a final glance to the melted glowing piece of metal in which the furnace had turned, raising in the middle of it the sparking gemstone. Frost was able to see cracks on its surface, slowly growing bigger.

Frost ran to her office, remembering the window at the end of the corridor. When she finally arrived to the corridor, she heard a loud crack behind her. She knew what had happened… and she knew what came next. Her heart raced inside her chest, beating violently as the adrenaline filled her body and time around her seemed to slow.

As she started to run toward the window, everything around her shook violently, trembling before the explosion. She could feel the heat behind her, but she didn’t care. She only knew she had to run.

Covering her face with her hooves, she jumped through the window, propelled by the flaming blast that followed her. Spreading her wings, she tried to control her fall, only to shriek as the pain that she felt though them made her feel numb. Her right wing was burnt, she knew that, but she realized that what came was going to be worse.

Opening her soaked eyes, she saw the brick wall of the warehouse swiftly approaching and bit her lip. She tried to remember why she was here.

You know why you are here, at this moment. And you know that you don’t regret it.

She closed here eyes again, and with a grin in her face she waited for the inevitable impact to come.