The Traveler

“Any last words, scum?”

“Yeah. Tell your Princesses I’ll be back.”

“That’ll be hard to do if you’re dead, human.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

The pony scowled, and then backed away from the scaffolding. It had been rather hastily constructed since their gallows weren’t high enough, but it would serve its purpose. Kris’s ship had reportedly been tossed off to some badlands a couple hundred miles away, so the pissed off guard below had half a point. The human was a bit more concerned about the condition of his ship, however.

The FTL Drive had completely backfired after the engines got shot up, and the ensuing explosion destroyed whatever else was inside the onboard locker, which meant that he was effectively marooned on a Gamma Sector planet with nothing. Well, almost nothing; the matter manipulator that had proved to be the most useful little device time and time again as buried under the remains of his house in the middle of that rather nice forest, and there was a small chest full of highly important things in the cockpit. Since his broken arm and rather screwed up leg would soon be healed, Kris still had far more of a chance than any of these little pastel midget horses knew.

The human turned around. A rather large crowd had gathered to watch him die after he had caused the untimely deaths of many of their own, and they were all shouting and jeering and generally trying to make a point about them being better than him, and for pastel midget horses they were doing a decent job. The blatant xenophobia of literally everything here was astounding.

A few offers had been made that could have prevented this. Some Griffons from who-knows-where had tried to negotiate his freedom in return for serving their government as what sounded like a spy or assassin of sorts, but it had been refused. It was the same for an offer to be turned into a pony and take on a normal life, which was probably the most god-awful idea of them all, and Kris had heard many god-awful ideas in that holding cell. It was a shame his deal with that purple one – Twilight, if his memory was right – had been ignored on the grounds of ‘too many deaths to be just self defense.’

It was a little embarrassing. Plenty of trees in the forest, but they all had to be used to shore up defenses on his house, and by the time that was done, it was too late to keep cutting them down for wood to make coal. Bringing his ship within range of a being with the power to move a star was probably the worst thing he had done, and now he was sitting here with a noose around his neck for letting his anger towards the ponies for destroying and stealing all he had done. If the ship had just held for a little longer, he could have gotten to the nearby moon to keep harvesting coal. Dammit, he should have gone there first. Oh, well. Wasn’t his first dumb mistake, and it certainly was far from his last.

The guard walked over to a comically large lever, wrapped his hooves around it and pulled. The trapdoor beneath Kris opened up, causing him to fall through. Something jerked at his neck after a split second of falling, and everything went black.

{[(<^>*|><=><|*<^>)]}

A machine within the remains of a once-proud vessel rumbled to life. Despite the damage sustained, this particular machine was still functional.

A skeleton was quickly created, using known data and a copy of DNA to recreate everything from marrow to the osseous tissue. It soon looked like an extremely realistic Halloween decoration had been sealed within the glass tube.

Next were organs and muscles. A copy of DNA was once again utilized to grow the organs within the skeleton as well as to get all the muscles into the right place. Some consider cloning amoral and flat out wrong – for an adventurer among the stars, it is an indispensible advantage.

Finally, everything that was left was created; skin, hair, nails, and anything that might have been missed before. A pair of metal doors slammed shut over the body as these things were grown. When they opened, a human male roughly thirty years old had been formed. He was, however, currently mindless as a baby, but that would be changed. Memories were inserted into his mind. His name, age, history and survival abilities came first, being the most important, followed by more recent things: his nearly two week long expedition on Equestria, which had ended in his execution. The location of his destroyed home in the middle of the Everfree Forest. His learned tactics for fighting a pony.

The metal covers retracted, revealing a survivor that had been in the exact same position many times before. The glass panel opened, a green light signifying that everything had been done correctly and that it was now safe to proceed. The freshly-minted human stepped out. The chest in the cockpit had indeed survived. Within its deceivingly small size, it held a set of Scavenger armor, a hunting knife, some food, and a few crafting materials. The human put the gear on as he walked out of the hole in the rear of his ship.

All was not lost. It was easy to acquire steel and such for reconstruction, and the printer in the back could handle the smaller and more technical things that he simply couldn’t slap together on a table. Failing that, distress beacons weren’t that hard to make.

Kris sighed. This felt way too much like déjà vu.