Life imitating art.

"Hey...Turner," a voice called out to Peter from inside one of Mr. Discord's utility rooms. "Come'er, I gotta talk to you about something." The voice belonged to a another guy who leaned casually against a giant dryer that was long since shut down and now just an addition to his collection of junk. He had a bright red leather jacket and jeans with timber wolf brand boots on, very out of the newly imposed uniform. It had been only a few hours since the assembly and already the halls where filled with solemn eyes that gazed sadly around at everything the school had become. Posters mentioning the disciplinary actions and the consequences for defiance and even the most minuscule of infractions.

"Do I know you?" Peter asked as he cautiously entered the utility room, more cautious of the patrols seeing him enter than the boy in front of him.

"Name's John, John Sweetstuff, and I don't know about you but something about today just doesn't add up." He said making his way down the corridors of the service tunnel with the other one in tow. "I mean, the whole student body comes back on Monday, and suddenly the whole place turns into a second Crystal Prep...maybe worse, with that...girl Starlight Glimmer at the wheel and the whole thing based on some Dr. X in a lab coat even I never heard of before. Doesn't add up to me." He said as they made their way to a steel door with a sliding window near the top. John knocked on the hard steel and the window slid open with a pair of big eyes behind glasses looked at them both.

"Who's that?" The "eyes" asked glaring at Peter.

"That voice...I remember you...Tw...Twilight Sparkle? is that you in there?" He asked before the eyes vanished behind the sliding door; It slid open and the familiar girl who had previously for all intents and purposes insulted his interest in comic books the first day they meet.

"Peter? Peter Page-Turner?....oh Peter I...I never wanted it to come to this!" She broke down into tears and sobs before flinging her arms around him and hugging him tightly. Listen, you've got to hear me out on this...Maybe if you only knew what we're up against, you'll understand. With that, Twilight lead the two off them into what at one point had been a steam control room before the central heating had been converted to electric coils in lieu of the oil system. The ancient boilers and heating controls long rusted and covered with dust and cobwebs, but the room was far from empty.

Others where darting to and fro; running extension cords around the room plugging in computers and equipment. Twilight lead Peter and John to a few chairs that had been salvaged from upstairs and arranged like a class room, a screen, projector and another computer ready. "Please take a seat and just roll with me on this." They took their seats as did to Peter's surprise; Gilda, Rainbow Dash, and also Rarity, Trixie Lulamoon and a few others. Most of them the students more like Twilight, smart and inventive, then what where the other girls doing here? He thought. Peter took note of the Long Grey skirts and large grey shirts with white ties they'd been forced to wear.

"Hey Gilda, you look pretty good all things considered." He said with a chuckle.

"Don't push it Pete I'm in no mood." She said pouting and folding her arms over her chest in annoyance.

"Hmmph Sorry, just trying to make the best of this situation." Peter retorted back before Twilight raised her hand for silence.

"Everyone settle down, settle down." She said getting behind the computer and starting both it and the projector to display for all to see what she had. "As I'm sure you all know; my....Former "friend" Starlight Glimmer has enacted what she calls "Protocol eleven," A system of young adult behavior control and modifications through the use of border line unethical forms of disciple and behavior control."

"Get to the point egghead!" Gilda Shouted as the projector clicked a few slides of images of the students in school as they where after the changes.

"I'm getting to that," she said with a slight annoyance.

"Be lucky I'm restrained enough to call you "egghead" heh." She said raising her hand to a fist bump from Rainbow, which she gladly gave her.

"As I was saying;" She said clicking her projector to a familiar face of, "The man responsible for this. we've been told his name is Professor Freud, and that his work was published by Yale, but what "Principal Celestia neglected to mention, is that a few years ago; he as almost disbarred and dismissed from the university for trying to publish work that the board of the university called ""fascist" and borderline abusive on the raising of children and young adults." She said as the slides showed him in front of a long council table in a hearing and clippings from university newspapers.

"So all he's doing to us? None of it is legal at all?" Trixie cried out in shock.

"He tried to get a grant approved to conduct this protocol on several schools in the country, but not only did no school agree to his plan. Yale refused his grant."

"Then why is this happening to use here? How did he get Principal Celestia to agree to this AND the money to do it?" Peter asked as she continued the slides.

"I'm afraid...that's where starlight comes in...I should know because until I realized how...unethical and wrong these actions are, I was her closest confidant." Twilight said in almost total shame at her words. "You see here's why Starlight and Freud are able to be doing this...well one way at least."

Five Minutes later.

"NO WAY!" Gilda snapped as Twilight told them all about the professor being her father; how her status as a student allowed her father to act his plan on Canterlot High, and even how he used her and Starlight's magic to forge documents that would make it seem like everything he did was legal.

"The papers we made are total forges, but there's one thing that he forgot to do when he tried to get the official papers, professor Freud forgot to destroy the letters of rejection and his court documents from his disbarment hearings. Even though he barley escaped being disbarred, the official decision was a ban on practicing psychology on living human subjects...its like someone being allowed to study medicine and make documented research but is not allowed to conduct any of it on a living person or be a practitioner in general."

"And yet the quack is using us for guinea pigs right under the Ivy league suits stiff upper noses, right?" Gilda Said casully flicking a switchblade out and tucking it back into the handle.

"Thought you didn't like using hardware that's got an edge?" Rainbow asked her.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures Dash, so when do I get to castrate the bastard?" Gilda answered with her blade clicking out again and glinting on the overhead fluorescent lighting.

"WHOA! WHOA! WHOA! easy there uhhmmm..." Twilight said trying to think of a comparison to a tough girl archetype.

"X-23." Peter chimed in as a saving throw.

"Yeah, whoever that is." Twilight finished feeling slightly chastised. "As I was saying; the papers exist in his home office of Freud manor, several documents that if delivered to the board of Yale, it'd be enough to have him put away for the rest of his life, and Starlight inherits the Freud estate and fortune...maybe then a healing process to get her see that more can be done when..no I mean friendship matters more than the ego of the...no wait that's not it either."

"I think that's total bullshit!" Gilda yelled tossing a throwing knife square at the head of the picture of Frued on a cork board. "When has holding hands and singing songs of friendship ever worked for anything? I don't know what candy land saccharine world you live in egghead, but I've seen the real world and it isn't pretty. It bites you bite back hard, even if it means sacrificing everything that makes you human." She said retrieving her blade and tucking it into a pouch she had under the skirt they issued her.

"Gilda...Remember what I told you?" Peter said placing a hand in hers and looking into her big expressive yellow eyes. "We go in gung-ho intent on seriously hurting him, and we're no better if not worse than Freud himself. We sneak through; rifle through his desk for some papers, and have the evidence to see him rot, and sure we broke some laws in the process but no one gets hurt...well maybe a little hurt but no one we know or anything that ill land us in the clink for life like disemboweling him and cutting an ear to ear to ear smile on his face."

The way he said that last bit with an almost nonchalant and even cheeriness to it made everyone present (even Gilda) look at him with cringes of confusion and mild disgust.

"What? I was going for the scenes in Married with children, where Marcy would often be against things like guns like a full blown soccer mom before going on about mutilating the neighborhood peeper with gardening tools, with a hint of Daredevil's no killing, all justice philosophy." He said giving an Alfred E. Neumen face and shrug. They where a bit confused but they understood.

"Anyway...This won't be easy, Freud has developed an extensively complex and intricate home defense system, some of it is hyper lethal stuff that can get you killed...so if anyone has any second thoughts I'll understand if you don't want to go with this I can try to talk to Starlight into getting the..."

"I'm going in." Peter said taking one look at the picture of the manor, it felt so...cold and unfeeling. It's almost like the house spoke volumes about the one who owned it, and the exterior showed that this was no place for a girl like Starlight...maybe that's what drove him to take on the task Twilight was offering.

"My associates and I have some...equipment prepared for our to aid in this endevour, if you'll follow me I'll show you what we cooked up in the workshop."

"So...This is like my costume?" Peter said picking up the black tactical costume and holding it in his hands. "Cause this looks more like a Leon Kennedy cos-player babe." Peter and Twilight stood in front of a workshop table in the school auto shop, only it wasn't a Mustang that the ones inside it had been working on. The table held a black tactical suit that actually did look like the one Leon Kennedy wore in resident evil 4, hell they even threw in a leather jacket to boot!

"Don't let the the simplicity fool you, this suit contains some of the most technologically advanced body armors in the world within the interior."

"And it was a chore to make so don't take it so lightly darling." The ivory rarity said as adjusted the ring on her finger. Peter had to admit the Star sapphire costume she wore really fit her. "What is it that makes it a suit of body armor Twilight?" She said as she helped Peter into the suit. As she did Twilight picked up a thread of coiled and twisted bits of wire.

"This." She said smiling happily.

"What? Chicken wire? How's that supposed to help me?"

"This isn't chicken wire, its a sub apparel armor. A highly dense and tensile material, Graphine, a carbon based sheet made from locked carbon particles. It has a tensile strength of a hundred thirty thousand units and only weights barley a gram, at the layers of thickness packed into your suit, its bullet proof up to high speed 5.56 millimeter assault rifle rounds. We might someday implant it under the human skin someday. just be careful around electricity, it's...bad

"Twilight; I'm a little rusty on the whole good bad thing, when you say, bad. What do you mean like how bad are we talking?" Peter said as Rarity zipped up the black tactical suit.

"Super conductive, and you'll become a human battery if shocked with it. That kind of bad." She Said giving his cheeks a little pinch while puckering her lips.

"avoid faulty wiring; alright that's bad, important safety tip got." He said taking the leather jacket and slipping into it.

"I take it you don't have formal weapons training so please try and bear with me on a few of these implements." She said as she unrolled a roll of Gore-Tex tarp and revealing some more gear on it.

"I thought you said this was a non violent recovery of some documents?"

"No I said this isn't an assassination, and that we're not going to kill anyone on this mission. Now this," She said picking up what looked like a police flashlight. "It conceals a high focus cutting laser, same kind used by M.I.T. engineering majors." Twilight pressed the light button on it while aiming the light at a wood board in a vise. It made a thin red beam shoot out from the fake bulb as she cut the board in half.

"Effective offensive weapon?" Peter asked tucking it into his belt.

"Wouldn't recommend it but....It can sever a human femur all the way through the bone in twenty eight seconds." She said with a strange sense of thrill-meant as she proceeded to pick up a grappling hook attached to a cable. "We couldn't rig even a basic CO2 compressed pistol to fire the rappelling line but the cable is high tensile strength grappling wire, supports up to a ton a single wire strand." She continued picking up a tiny headset. "Standard issue two way radio, hands free to stay in touch with me." Then a mini digital camera. "Standard but nearly unbreakable, and finally a skeleton king with super flexible pins that can undo and fit to trip any number of three or five pin tumbler lock." "Please try and return some of this equipment in pristine condition. It wasn't cheap to make."

"This is it?, a key; a camera, a radio, a laser and some armor?" Peter asked tucking all his equipment into the belt.

"The resources of a high school are highly limited, so you'll have to improvise and provide you're own further supplies." As Twilight said this, the shop door opened; with Gilda in her own jacket and the switchblade, butterfly knife, buck knife, a shaving straight razor, a pair of polished polymer tonfa at her hips. Her bokken topping her gear off.

"I'm going with him." She said tying her domino mask around her eyes. Behind her was Rainbow dash; she had a humanized version of power pony Zapp's costume on with a few tears in the fabric along the sides and midriff, and metal claws pined into a pair of black gloves, and a cattle prod in the belt of her left hip and a black re-loadable gun of high strength mace holstered in her right.

"I second that notion." She said smiling at them all.

"I warn you all...there's a chance the security system of the manor IS designed to kill intruders"

"Damn Castle doctrine and stand your ground laws." Peter said.

"and even though he'd be willing to go that far, with us, no guns and no killing, In and out of the house in twenty and then its straight to the authorities to have Freud arrested, fired, tried and locked up." Twilight finished.

"I'd make a joke about where's the fun in that, but...I understand you entirely Ms. Twilight." Gilda said reaching out and shaking her hand.