Half Spoken Fully Understood

Spitfire had to be pulled out by the parachute tether. Nobody was quite sure what to do with her. She just sat in the cargo bay, as scientists without a clear goal in mind rushed about, lacking in leadership--as their supposed “leadership” was sitting in the cargo bay in shock, or gushing over the new alien find with a camera.

It took a long minute or two before somebody had time or wits to notice that Spitfire was actually not responding and nopony else was doing anything about it. The actual trigger for action was somepony shouting “What did it do to Spitfire?!”

Later, Spitfire would deny remembering having to be wheeled up to the medical bay with the whole group following behind. She remained unresponsive until they actually got there. The first thing she remembered is hearing somepony say:

“Get the MT scan out here! We need to know what it did to her brain!”

She sat up to find a good portion of the ship’s crew surrounding her bed, looking at her with interest ranging from scholarly to medical.

Then one of the crew she couldn’t quite remember spoke to her.

“Spitfire?” she said. “Are you still in there?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we’re gonna need you to tell us what happened down there, because from our perspective it didn’t look like much.”

It took Spitfire a while to collect herself again and remember what they were asking about. She just couldn’t wrap her head around it.

“It, that thing, it spoke to me.”

About half the room started talking at once. It took Pablo speaking up and taking control of things to calm them down.

“What did it say? Was it some sort of spell?”

“Did it try to brainwash you!?”

“What secrets of the universe did it reveal?”

“Was it a lottery number?”

It took the group a long while to calm down, which fortunately gave Spitfire more of a chance to catch up to where she was now. Not enough time to fully process what had happened down there, but enough for her to get her bearings as to the situation.

“It told me my name...”

This time there wasn’t an uproar like Spitfire was predicting.

“Then it pointed back at itself and gave me Firelock’s.”

Pablo was the first to break the silence.

“What?”

“It wasn’t some kind of mind magic. It spoke to me in broken English*.” Spitfire repeated.

“Uhh… Well if you’re fine, I guess we should get down there and… interrogate it.”

As the shock faded, Spitfire wanted to know what was going on... no, she NEEDED to know what the Tartarus was going on.

They found the creature slumped in its cage where it had been at first. Spitfire couldn’t get over how pony-ish its movements were. The slumped, clawed trunk-like appendages, its wedge-shaped body flopped over, with all those strange upright scales. Its head mostly seemed to arch up from behind its body like it was operating a standing forklift. That somehow seemed apt to Spitfire: the creature seemed very… designed, like this thing was designed to run directly into the line of fire, except for its head which Spitfire could only call “the one that should go on the big brain alien.”

It looked over at them with its three segmented eyes with the armored lids half closed over the eye. Even its head and neck were armored the same way its body was. It had no visible ears, but it’s face remained surprisingly expressive despite the armor plates. The creature sighed as they came in, and Spitfire noted that the armor plates puffed out a bit and stayed that way, on its face and down the center of its neck.

That really hammered home that this thing was designed to take a bullet. The whole creature looked like it was made so that you couldn’t get a head-on shot anywhere along its body at all except from directly behind it. Even the scales were articulated such that they looked like they could flip forward if need be.

As she walked down the stairs into the cargo-hold, Spitfire could only guess as to what it meant when it had told her that it was Firelock. Was this a mutagenic process? Magic? Some sort of mind transfer?

Things went wrong when they actually reached the cage, where the chattering scientists behind her started trying to communicate with the creature. It was pretty clear to Spitfire that the creature couldn’t speak well enough to answer one tenth of the questions thrown at it.

That was when they all observed a great indication that a rilok was becoming agitated: all of its scales started to stand up, then it started to rattle them together. This did have a silencing effect. For all of three seconds.

The group from Canterlot were not used to field work. They were put together for their being on hoof firstly, then their expertise. Not to say that these weren’t some of the top minds in their fields, they just weren’t the most wilds-aware. By approximately 3 hoof-steps from the alien by Spitfire’s estimate, which meant she had a good vantage point behind the crowd for what happened next.

The rilok raised one of its thick clawed trunks into the air and slammed it down, not only rattling but causing an alarmingly large dent in the cage.

Now Spitfire was the farthest in front of the group.

The monster in the cage pulled its trunk out from the indent it made in the cage floor and pointed it at Spitfire and crackled out again in its animal-like voice.

“Sssseak, hhh-” It made a hacking sound in the back of its throat. “Hhhh-er. NNNNNN, NNNO Otthher.”

Reluctantly, Spitfire walked forward to meet the creature. Who, rather than speaking, motioned her to talk with its trunk.

“Assuming that is you in there Firelock, how did this happen to you?”

“Rrrrun, ffffffly, dddrooopp icce cccrahs, ccccattuud.”

That was not terribly descriptive, Spitfire thought, but how else to get this thing to communicate?

“Does anybody have a pen and paper?” Spitfire asked aloud.

Unsurprisingly, there was a set proffered by nearly everypony in the room.

“Okay, if you really are Firelock, could you try writing that down?” Spitfire said rolling up the paper and sliding it through the grate alongside the pencil.

The creature silently picked up the pencil and paper with it’s ponderous trunks, rolled the paper flat on the metal floor and began to write. This was possibly the most informative thing the creature had done so far.

It grumbled as it wrote, clearly frustrated as it got letters wrong. Spitfire could hear a small army of pencil scratches coming from behind her when the creature successfully used the eraser at one point. As it went on, its hackle of scales went up, as it got frustrated with writing in a clearly unfamiliar way.

However, eventually the piece of paper and pencil were pushed out to her again. Naturally, it looked like somepony had been writing with a pencil loosely tied to the end of a stick, but the end result was something like this:

“Flew away from aliens, chunk of ice dropped on back, crashed, captured, woke up like this.”

Or, at least, Spitfire had to assume that was what it said, as the hoofwriting was terrible. Granted this was trunk-writing, so she didn’t have a good fix on what a good standard for that was.

“How can you show us that it’s really you in there?” Spitfire asked before starting to roll up another piece of paper to shove through the grate.

However, she stopped when the creature tapped on the metal grate to get her attention and spoke again.

“Sssssow.”

Everypony pulled in close, as the creature turned its side to them then it flopped over on it’s side. Spitfire noted that even the underbelly had those same balloon scales, like the neck and face. Everypony’s eyes were drawn to a pouch on its belly that slowly opened up.

Inside was something that would keep Spitfire up at night. She could hear a few ponies beside her speak an expletive out loud.

There, clear as day, as the scaled underbelly opened up, closed off underneath a layer of film and attached to the inside of the rilok itself...

Was a pony brain.

*AN: The native language on Equis. Nobody knows how it developed everywhere alongside other languages.

Author's Note

Sorry this one took so long to edit, bad things have been happening up here.