Mare in the Metal Box

Chapters

Chapter 1: Steel Driving Mare
Chapter 2: Halls of Iron
Chapter 3: Everything that is Discovered...
Chapter 4: ...Is not Always Meant to Be.
Chapter 5: Metal Boxes and the Ponies Inside

Chapter 1: Steel Driving Mare

“Chem! Chem!” A voice echoed from the bulkhead, “Chem! You in there!”

The voice was all too familiar, a kind tone made harsh and raspy from throat damage, “Yeah! Hold on, got to-” as I talked, the temperature gauge on the large, yellow-painted, machine I was working with had started to spike, “Shit! Shit! Shit! Unclamp the coolant valve!” even before I finished shouting, the sound of a pony throwing open panels echoed from beyond the bulkhead, I quickly slammed the service panel on the machine shut and dove for the exit before I was either incinerated or frozen, and a more morbid part of my mind contemplated diving for the overheating machine, preferring a fiery death to the slow and cold one. As the machine started to turn a glowing red, a sudden chill entered the air, right as I managed to slam the bulkhead open.

Still trying to get to my hooves after slamming into the far wall, I heard the door close shut behind me and saw a large dark-silvery-grey stallion shut the bulkhead with all the grace and ease of an outdated diesel train barreling through a concrete wall… Not that I had ever seen such a thing, the only train in this place was the Central Line, and that was mounted in such a way that even a thaumic engine explosion couldn’t derail it. I had nearly caused such a thing!

With a sigh I let myself fall to the ground, grunting a bit when I felt a loose bolt against my side, “Celestia damn… My dad’s going to kill me,” I lied there as the stallion tried to put the service panel back into place, but his violent opening had left the metal bent and buckled. I simply stared at him as he tried to bend the panel back into shape, but failed. And it was at that moment the lights, enchanted quartz crystals in the ceiling and walls, cut out. I raised my head, and horn, and cast a dim golden-yellow light throughout the room.

My horn felt a little strange, a little tinny, as if I was attempting to cast a spell that wasn’t possible to cast, and the chills going through my body from my brief exposure to the magical coolant didn’t fully go away, though they were fading to nearly nothing. “Scratch that… The Liquidators will kill me.”

This comment got a look from the stallion, the Liquidators were not something ponies usually joked about. “W-What’s wrong,” he said.

“I got exposed to a little bit of the coolant-gas…”

“Petrochem… A little bit of exposure isn’t going to hurt, I’ve gotten a fair share of radiant thaumic energy exposure and I’m still fine.”

“Still… I don’t feel right.”

“Well then, we’ll go see Caustic. Do you need any help getting up?”

“No thanks, Boron,” I said, clambering up to my hooves. “We need to get back home,” I pumped a bit more power into my horn and golden light shone down the hallway. Everything inside the habitable zone was made from steel, kept together with big, scary-looking, bolts, and had rusted around the edges, but somehow, most likely through some kind of enchantment, the metal didn’t completely rust, leaving everything an orangish grey.

Marching through the corridors, despite their familiarity, was, quite frankly, creepy. Without power and only the glow of my horn, it was a little difficult to navigate, as pictograms, easy to recognize in the crystal-lights, were difficult to interpret in the hornlight, not helped by either myself or Boron’s unfamiliarity with this section of the City. The hallway was a little easier to navigate when following notable landmarks, the pipes in the ceiling were always a good indicator of where you were, and long hours of exploring the edges of the Habitable Zones, much to the dismay of my parents, had given me a good sense of direction. But I was still nowhere near as good at this kind of thing as Boron.

“Hey, Boron,” I said, he turned to look at me, “Why are you down here anyway?”

“Looking for you, there’s been a bit of a problem back at the Hub, some small mechanical failure,” He gave a little chuckle, “I shouldn’t have bothered you, if I didn’t you wouldn’t have slagged the engine.”

“If you hadn’t been there to dump coolant into the room, then there wouldn’t have been anything left of me to find, and we would have a lot more problems than just power failure right now… Thank you.”

“I-I’m just concerned about the power failure,” Aww, he was blushing… Too bad he’s a stallion, and way too old for me… “We’ll need to find another engine and reroute it to the Hub before the crops die and life-support systems fail.”

“And that’s probably going to be my job…” I sighed. Power failure was up there with disease as one of the bigger problems with life in the Hub, above it was thaumic contamination and below was Water Purification. I just hoped that my punishment for nearly detonating a highly unstable and critical thaumic engine wasn’t going to be too bad.

I followed Boron’s directions and we started to get closer to familiar territory, going down a few flights of stairs and following the metal plates that were bolted to the wall, arrows and other strange symbols had once been painted on them, but those had been painted over with a little yellow disk symbol, and after half an hour of trotting through the dark, it pointed us to large bulkhead door… Much larger than the height of the average mare, standing at nine meters tall, with a control panel on the right-hoof side, these doors were fairly common and marked internal divisions in the structure of the City. This particular door had been painted over with a large yellow symbol, it’s origin was unclear, but this large spiked-disk had served as the emblem of our home for centuries.

“Celestia damn it!” I shouted, uselessly tapping my hooves against the control panel, “The power’s dead in this section too!”.

Boron approached the door and gave a sharp knock with his hoof, “It’s Boron and Petrochemical, there’s been a power failure and we got locked out.”

The voice on the other side, a younger stallion, replied, “This is Photon Ray, you will need to wait, a chemical generator is being brought up to supply emergency power, ETA one hour.

Boron gave a sigh. “It’s dangerous outside the Hub, sure, it isn’t like we’re trapped outside the Habitable Zone, but we need to get inside, there’s a damaged thaumic engine, and for all we know it could be spewing hazardous energies throughout the City!”

His tone shifted to one of worry, and despite not seeing the colt’s face, it was clear he recognized the danger, “We brought up the generator earlier but the fuel is being kept in a secure location due to its flammability… I wish we could get it here sooner, but those are the rules, hazardous materials in large quantities can only be handled by official Liquidators.”

At this, I suddenly jumped to my hooves, “Is there a slot in the door! Any way for me to pass something to you.”

“T-There isn’t, these things are air-tight and thaumically shielded.”

I sat back down… The one time I can use my special talent, and a Celestia damn door prevents me. A slight weariness passed over me and I acted upon it, taking the chance to curl into a ball inside the protection of my maintenance barding, the lead plates on my sides, underside, and breast were hardly comfortable, but this wasn’t the first time I fell asleep in it. I closed my eyes, waited what felt like an eternity, and-

There was a loud screech of metal grinding against metal and the loud whir of a chemical engine, something I hadn’t heard in a decade. Through sleepy eyes, I saw the shadows of ponies, silhouetted by the bright light pouring in from the airlock.

“Door’s open…” Boron said dismissively.

“Yeah, I got that,” I said bitterly, shaking to clear my vision, and holding my hooves to my ears. The screeching died down and my eyes adjusted to the sudden light. The airlock was the same as when I passed through it earlier, except off to one side was a large contraption I had only seen once before, a series of half-rusted tanks, some boxy, some cylindrical, connected with rubber tubes and metal piping, that was spewing an acrid black smoke, and making a loud whir.

The airlock itself was a large cylinder, nine meters tall and nine meters wide, going back a good eighteen meters, forming a geometrically standard cylinder, there were controls mounted to the walls, with panels removed allowing cables to snake out from the walls to the boxy machine, said machine was flanked by two ponies.

I had only ever heard of them, and had never seen one before, at least not in their full barding, I'm sure I've seen one when not in uniform… They handled hazardous chemicals and machinery and were crucial to the survival of the Hub and all the ponies who lived in the City. They reported only to themselves and the leader of the Hub, the Minister, enforcing the laws when required, although, usually law enforcement was the job of every citizen of the Hub. Whenever some mutant abomination crawled its way out of the Uninhabitable Zone, they were the ones sent to deal with it. Wearing heavy golden-yellow trenchcoats that nearly matched my own fur, clearly plated with lead and thaumic dampeners, with heavy-looking lead helmets and boxy devices strapped to their sides, with backpacks instead of the standard saddlebags, a crescent-shape was engraved into their helmets and backpacks.

A pony came up to us, a unicorn, bright red mane and white coat, wearing the standard utility barding that both I and Boron were wearing, he was very young, still a teenager, must have only recently been assigned his job, “I am Photon Ray, while the situation may be critical, protocol still requires me to verify your identities.”

Both I and Boron nodded, “Good,” the colt said, and levitated out numerous thin plates of metal, “You are Petrochemical, female, unicorn, age twenty-four, yellow coat and black mane…” I nodded to each, “Your Cutie Mark is a barrel of chemical fuel,” I nodded again and started pulling off the pants of my utility barding, revealing the mark of a steel drum tipped on its side, yellow liquid flowing from its top. The colt nodded and his horn lit up, bright red letters appearing across the metal sheet. I stared at him, impressed, so young yet able to write all that down, I could bearly write my own name.

“And you are Boron Alloy, male, earth-pony, age forty-seven, dark silver coat and dark brown mane, your Cutie Mark is of white crystals growing out of a metal plate…” Boron nodded. The colt pulled out an old and battered metal plate, the writing covering it was starting to fade, and after reading, he continued, this time in hushed tones, “Umm… It says here that you are blacklisted from service in the Liquidators… But you haven’t been banned from the Hub, so I suppose it’s fine if I let you in.” The colt quickly glanced over at the Liquidators in the corner, but they were still focused on the chemical engine.

Boron gave a nod and Photon returned it, he trotted over to the airlock controls and threw the lever. Suddenly the whine from the generator became an ear-splitting screech and the lights flickered violently, sparks flew from the exposed wiring, and cables lit to incandescence. There was another titanic screech of metal grinding against metal and the door behind us closed. There was a brief period of respite, then the grinding and roaring noise returned as the door to the Hub was opened.

A massive cylindrical tunnel, extending a few hundred of meters in either direction, the tunnel was fifty meters in diameter, and every twelve meters was a metal platform that extended from the walls and formed floors, with hundreds of scrap-metal buildings built atop the platforms. In the very center of the tunnel was a scaffolding held in place by steel beams that extended from the ceiling to the bottom floor and from either side of the tunnel’s walls, this scaffolding extended down the length of the tunnel, and atop it was a long, massive, rusted, machine that looked like a rectangular steel worm, with a head made from pipes, cylinders, tanks, and spheres… The Central line.

The very bottom of the tunnel was filled with an acidic liquid, strong enough to liquify a pony, and as such, no one had ever gone down there. The airlock opened up to the lowest floor, just a few meters above the acid pool. The walls were practically lined with hundreds of pipes, some three times the size of a pony, others were as thin as a foal’s hoof, but it created numerous perches for pegasi, and even some houses were built along the pipes. There were three thousand ponies in the Hub and despite the sheer size of the tunnel it sometimes felt rather crowded, already there were dozens of pegasi flying around the upper levels and scores of earth ponies and unicorns trotting around the platforms and scaffolding, no doubt worried about the missing power.

There was the distant humming of chemical generators, and a few spotlights were illuminating the tunnel, but for the most part, it had all been thrown into darkness. I turned to Boron, “I need to go check in with Cogwheel, then my parents.”

Boron nodded, “And I need to see Hydroxide, report everything that happened and what we should do about the power situation… Plus, Mercury Vapour will have my head if I’m late.” The two of us said our goodbyes and rushed off to our respective bosses, Boron rushing off to the nearest flight of stairs, and I staying on the bottom floor and looking for the workshop.

The workshop was built into the wall at the bottom floor and was much larger than many of the houses built down here, so it wasn’t hard to find… Another clue was the huge herd of ponies that had started to crowd the building. “Cogwheel!” One shouted.

“What’s going on with the power!”

“What will happen to the farms!”

“How long until you get the power fixed!”

“Has the Minister said anything yet!”

“Why aren’t the Liquidators doing anything yet!”

“Why isn’t my house getting electricity!”

This was bad. I rammed my way into the crowd, most ponies didn’t wear anything when not working, and so, still in my utility barding, I puffed up my breast and tried to look important, it did have some effect as I managed to worm my way through the crowd a little faster than I expected, but panicking ponies did illogical things. Eventually, I came to the front of the herd, there was the door to the workshop, locked and clearly barricaded, through the window could be seen a scared brown pegasus mare in utility barding with a two-tone mane, shiny orange and dull green, like rusted copper, wearing a pair of reading glasses.

I went up and knocked a hoof on the window, the mare turned to look at me, recognition flashed in her eyes and she rushed to the door. I turned to the crowd, “Everypony, return to your homes! I will talk with Cogwheel, rest assured that I have everything handled,” I shouted in my best imitation of the Minister’s secretary when she gave a speech to the Hub, I was nowhere near as confident as I tried to sound, but it had some effect.

The door shot open and I rushed inside, Cogwheel proceeded to lock the door behind me. The workshop was filled with all kinds of machinery, all salvaged from different parts of the City, sometimes a pony working for the Liquidators or Minister would even come in with parts from some device out in the Uninhabitable Zone. A strange boxy device called a computer sat behind a pile of scrap metal, but no pony knew what it was supposed to do, and a long contraption made from pipes and metal plates, apparently called a ‘rifle’, was brought in by a pony earlier today and was now sitting in pieces on a workbench to the side.

I turned, only to be tackled in a hug by the much older and larger mare. “Chem! You were supposed to be back over an hour and a half ago, I was worried about you!”

“I got trapped outside the Hub when the power went out… Had to wait for a backup generator to be brought up.”

The mare pulled me tighter, “I-I shouldn’t have sent you out there by yourself… What happened out there, you feel a little strange…”

“Umm…” I blushed, “The thaumic engine, the one that hadn’t been working right, apparently something was wrong in the energy converter and some of the magical energies were flooding the engine with heat, I disabled the primary coolant pumps to inspect the energy converter myself, and apparently the secondary coolant pumps weren't working.”

“And you… Survived that?” Cogwheel stared at me, confused.

“You can thank Boron for that, he was there when I was testing the converter, he activated the emergency coolant system and flooded the generator room, you don’t want to know how close we were to an engine meltdown,” Tears of fear started to flow from my eyes, “I nearly killed everyone in the Hub.” I shivered, there were stories about thaumic engines exploding and causing kilometres of the City to be flooded with magical energies, such that those places were now part of the Uninhabitable Zone… Those were just stories though, no pony had seen one actually detonate, or been to the places where it supposedly happened, but just the rumours alone was the reason why no one tried moving a thaumic engine into the Hub or using the Central Line’s engine for power.

“But you didn’t” Cogwheel hugged me tighter, “You’re safe, and once we get the power back on, we’ll all be safe, and things can return to normal.”

“Well… Safeish, I got exposed to the magical coolant,” A look of shock and worry crossed Cogwheel’s face and she loosened her grip on me, “D-Don’t worry, it isn’t too bad, but I do need to see a doctor, right away.” I continued talking to Cogwheel, telling her the story of what happened to me after I left the workshop this morning. We must have talked for nearly half an hour, then suddenly there was a bright flash of warm light. At first, I thought something must have exploded, but the light didn’t go away, I opened my eyes and stared painfully at the glowing crystals in the ceiling.

“Looks like the power’s back,” Cogwheel said, pained and stunned by the sudden illumination after being in near-black. Slowly my eyes began to adjust when there came a voice from outside.

“All ponies of the Hub, gather by the Central Line!” Came a voice, commanding authority and obedience. Instinctively, Cogwheel and I let go of one another and marched out into the Hub. Roughly three thousand ponies were cramming themselves into just a small section of the tunnel, luckily Cogwheel and I were some of the first ones out as we piled underneath the Central Line, the pegasi were all perched on outcroppings that normal ponies couldn’t reach, or were simply hovering in the air, which made the air and walls into a blur of colour. Between the gathering crowd, a pair of ponies could be seen on the other side of the tunnel, one was nearly pitch-black, with a black mane and black coat, the other was yellow with a red and white striped mane, I waved my hoof at them.

When everypony was gathered, a figure stepped out from the engine of the Central Line, a mare in a heavy trenchcoat, adorned with a heart-shaped symbol on her flanks, where her Cutie Mark should be. Her fur was nearly the same shade as mine, a pale yellow, but her mane was a bright, vibrant, sickly, yellow. She commanded an air of dominance, and I felt the desire to bow to her, several of the others did, she was the Minister’s secretary, Sulphuric Acid… Unlike the Minister himself, who nearly never left the comfort of his home aboard the Central Line, she was a common sight, standing there, giving motivational speeches and telling everyone about how lucky they were to be alive, and how the Princesses were looking down at us from beyond the City.

“Ponies of the Hub! Due to a malfunction in one of the thaumic engines, we have temporarily lost power. But rest assured, we have activated one of the larger backup chemical engines, but we cannot afford to waste chemical fuel for long… So, because of this, we will be sending a mechanic to activate another thaumic engine somewhere in the City, and rerouting the power back to the Hub.”

There was a lot of chatter as ponies wondered about the day’s events, and who would be chosen for such a critical mission… Most likely one of the liquidators. Sulphuric Acid continued, “Now… A pony by the name of Hydroxide has confirmed that the cause of the destruction of the engine was a mutant creature that managed to get past the Liquidators patrolling the perimeter of the Habitable Zone… Apparently the abomination was killed when the engine overheated, incinerating the beast before the systems flooded the room.”

I felt both relieved and somewhat worried, why did Boron lie about the engine’s destruction… It wasn’t like I destroyed the engine on purpose. “This pony is commended on bringing this threat to my attention, there will be an increase in Liquidator garrison around the Habitable Zone. We thank the Princesses for their eternal vigilance in protecting ponykind, and in creating the City in which we all live! Praise to Celestia, the creator of ponykind! Praise to Luna, the first Liquidator and bane of abominations! Praise to Flurry Heart, the first Minister of the City and creator of the Habitable Zone! That is all.”

The herd slowly dispersed, but only after Sulphuric Acid returned to the Central Line’s cab. There were several ponies here who feared her more than they respected her, but it was her job… Outside the Habitable Zone, there was the Uninhabitable Zone, the part of the city infested with mutants, dangerous thaumic energies, and all sorts of environmental hazards… There were rumours of rivers of solvent, rooms filled with poison gas, hub-sized furnaces that a pony could fall into, and the further away you got from the Hub, the less oxygen you had to breathe, even being outside the Hub was considered dangerous… There were those ponies who wondered what existed beyond the Uninhabitable Zone, but that kind of thought could get you in trouble, after all, we can’t have ponies venturing out to their inevitable deaths just out of curiosity. The common belief was that the Uninhabitable Zone went on forever, but there were plenty of others who thought that there was nothing beyond the city, just an endless void… There were only three thousand of us, and while that number sometimes rose or fell, we always stayed around three thousand, we couldn’t afford ponies throwing their lives away on exploration.

That’s why her job required ponies to fear her, without respect it would be difficult for all these ponies to work together in harmony, and some ponies needed that fear to control… If we didn’t respect the Minister… It’s best not to think about it, chaos was the last thing this place needed, without the Minister ponies would be throwing themselves into the acid-pool below, ponies were stupid without guidance, and that guidance came from the Minister, and the Minister came from the Princesses.

I needed to see a doctor, but seeing my parents at Sulphuric Acid’s speech had changed that… I needed to tell them I was ok. I crossed one of the numerous bridges set between the two sides of the platform and soon found myself standing in front of my home. It had once been some kind of large tank, it was a huge cylinder set on its side, studded with bolts, it was about two thirds the size of the airlock, but still a luxury home, featuring two storeys.

I knocked on the door… The entire doorframe had been cut away from wherever it had come from, and then welded to the tank, this home had belonged to my grandparents, and their grandparents, and so on for as long as anypony could remember, but whoever first built it was evidently a master of materials manipulation, the welds looked completely natural. The door, once some smaller bulkhead into a room, not too unlike the one I had escaped through, out of the thaumic engine room, swung open and out stepped a pony.

“Hey, Hydrocarbon.”

My father bent down, this time I was prepared for it, and managed not to be thrown to the ground, instead, I was buried in a sea of glossy black fur and feathers. “Hey! Cat, our daughter’s back!” He shouted.

A dishevelled, but still bright and vibrant unicorn ran through the door… I wasn’t prepared this time. She ran right into me at full gallop and sent the both of us flying across the platform, “H-Hi, C-Catalyst,” I wheezed out.

“By Celestia! Where were you!”

“T-Trapped outside the d-door to the Hub”

Catalyst gasped, “We need to get you inside, and grab a bite to eat… Hydro, get some rice cookin’, right now!”

Hydrocarbon gave a nod. I continued, sarcastically, “Yay, more rice…”

We must have spent a few hours just talking and eating, rice is one of the only foods available in the Hub, but sugarcane is grown for important events, such as the appointment of a new Minister. Once they heard about my near-death experience and my safe return, Hydrocarbon spent no time in pulling out what little sugarcane we had bought this year. I was surprised how cold it was inside the house, and quickly threw on a spare blanket. I described how Boron had opened the thaumic coolant valve, and how I had gotten a little bit of exposure. “Tomorow morning, the first thing we should do is get you to the clinic, see if Caustic can reverse the effects,” Catalyst said. Once I helped clean, threw the trash out beside the house for the trash-mare, and used the outhouse, I returned to see my parents getting into their utility barding.

“Now that the power’s back,” Catalyst said, “We’ll need to make up for lost time, I might need to work all night… Nearly three hours of no oxygen production means an extra six hours of work.”

“And I need to check on the farms, make sure that we didn’t interrupt the plant growth too much,” Hydrocarbon continued.

“You should get what sleep you can… It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.” I Nodded and wasted no time in taking a cold bath and rushing off to bed, a fluffy mattress, made from the remnants of barding that was too damaged for repair, and stuffed with dead plant matter.

As I lay in the bed, I let my mind wander to places it doesn’t normally go during the day, I pull my pillow closer, some of the more important ponies, such as the Minister, get pillows stuffed with pegasus feathers, and blankets made from pony-hair, while most others get simple straw pillows, painstakingly crafted from leftover plant-matter. Mine was a simple bundle of cotton-cloth, more comfortable than the organic pillows, though a lot more expensive, cotton wasn’t grown much, and most of it was used in repairing damaged barding.

The first place I rushed off toward was the Clinic. It was built into the base of a large statue on the middle floor, it was made from copper, and surprisingly rust-free, putting one’s hoof to it you could feel the magic pulsing through the metal, preventing corrosion. The statue itself was massive, the top of the mare’s head almost reaching the level above, it was once of an alicorn, perhaps one of the princesses, but over time metal had been salvaged from it, the statue was now missing a wing and had only half a horn, her foreleg was missing, and had only half a face, not to mention the plates cut from her underside and tail.

Overall the clinic was a dour place, particularly with the skeletal princess outside. The symbol on the clinic’s door was the same as on the flanks of the princess-statue, but no one knew what the symbol was supposed to be, it was some kind of pointy polygon, but no one could agree whether it was one twelve-pointed shape or two six-pointed shapes layered atop one another, it was surrounded by five other spiky polygons. It looked painful… I don’t want to know how you would get a cutie mark in spiky-balls. Whatever it was, it was now the symbol of the clinic.

“Be thankful you came in here when you did,” The doctor, Caustic Burn, and his mate, Carcinogen, were treating a few ponies who were injured during the blackout, most had suffered only minor wounds, but one of the older stallions had fallen into the acid pool, and while a pegasus had flown down to save him, the stallion still had horrible burns down his side and leg. I wanted to let them treat the stallion before they turned their attention to me, but once they realized I had been exposed to radiant thaumic energy, the stallion was taken into Carcinogen’s care and Caustic rushed to my aid.

“The mutagenic properties of RTE is hard to pin down, being magic it’s difficult to predict how it will affect you, particularly since you’re a unicorn… According to my cursory scans, you were already starting to suffer some minor mutations,” A look of horror crossed my face, mutants had a certain reputation, every pony has at some point heard the rumours of the mutant creatures that existed beyond the Habitable Zone… W-Was I going to turn into one of them, would the liquidators need to kill me?

Apparently the doctor read my mind as he continued, “N-No, it’s nothing like what you’re thinking, that comes from constant exposure… The only anomaly I can find is that your core body temperature has permanently gone up as much as five to fifteen degrees, that’s why you feel so cold all of a sudden.”

“How does that make sense? I was exposed to thaumic coolant, shouldn’t that make me colder?”

“Magic is rarely so straight-forward, you’re a unicorn so you should be used to the oddities of magic… I think the coolant must have pumped the thermal energy out of the environment, and into you… Whatever it did, I believe the effects are permanent.”

I nodded, a bit sourly… I was, something else now, I wasn’t a pony, or at the very least, the same pony again. The doctor seemed to read my mind once again. “Look on the bright side, you won’t be suffering heat-based illnesses, like heat stroke, as easily as the rest of us… You were just at the wrong place at the wrong time, just be thankful that the mutant was more interested in the engine than you.” I nodded, but this time tinted with a bit of anger… Why did Boron lie to the Minister, lying was wrong, it was something no pony should do, and he just did it to the most important pony in the Hub… Possibly the entire City.

I gritted my teeth, the doctor stared with a strange expression… Clearly he couldn’t read my mind now, “No… It was my fault that the power failed!”

The doctor gave a sigh, “Petrochem, if even a quarter of what I heard about the mutants is true, there was no way you could have stopped it on your own… We were lucky the creature was killed in the engine’s meltdown.”

I stared at him, perplexed, was it really more believable that some clawed, toothed, tentacled abomination managed to sneak past the Liquidators and destroy a machine that has worked since the dawn of time, then some dumbass mare didn’t check the secondary coolant lines before cracking the machine open… “It was Boron… He must have told that mutant story to Hydroxide!”

The doctor lowered the device he was holding in an emerald telekinetic field and turned to stare at me, “Boron Alloy has been a friend of mine for nearly two decades now, he’s always been serious, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him make a joke… I seriously doubt he would embellish the facts, and lying is something foals do, no grown pony in their right mind would ever lie, particularly about something of such importance.”

I slumped to the clinic floor, minding the bloodstains, and growled… Whatever I was going to do next was forgotten… I needed to find Boron. The obvious place was his job, materials processing. I rushed out of the clinic as fast as the doctor would let me, he seemed intent on giving me a complete physical checkup, though I would be just as insistent if I were in his position, yesterday hadn’t been kind to me, and he wouldn’t rest until every little bruise and cut had been healed.

I galloped over to Materials Processing, a large room, four times the size of the workshop, unlike most of the other buildings that had been constructed from pieces of the city, this room was part of the city originally, and certainly not built by pony hooves as it was clearly part of the Hub since the day it was created. Part of me dreaded opening the door, the head of materials processing, Mercury Vapour, had a certain reputation, and just hearing of her exploits from Boron was enough to make me hesitate.

I worked with Cogwheel in the workshop on the lower floor, it was a place where ponies would send broken machines to us in the hopes that we could repair them, that was mostly Cogwheel’s job, I on the other hoof, was usually sent out of the Hub to find mechanical parts and salvage scrap-metal from parts of the City that no pony was using, occasionally a machine would break somewhere and I would be sent to repair it, or if it was something truly critical, like a thaumic engine, I was sent to inspect the problem before the Liquidators handled the repairs… This place on the other hoof, Materials Processing, was where things were made, not repaired… Well, made was a strong word, this place was more like another level of salvaging, many of the things that couldn’t be repaired were usually taken here.

The room was filled with ponies, a few of which I recognized as friends of my parents or Boron. Most were unicorns, in fact, a good majority of the Hub’s unicorn population was assigned here, but that didn’t mean that earth ponies, like Boron, and pegasi, didn’t have jobs in this place. The glow of dozens of horns illuminated the building a cacophony of colours, some were weaving fabric from freshly harvested cotton fibre, others were taking freshly forged screws and bolts and magically assembling devices of all kinds. Behind what I think was some kind of reinforced glass, ponies who’s bodies glowed with some kind of magic field were doing magical things with quartz crystals. In one corner, ponies were using an electric furnace to melt all sorts of metals and using magic to separate the alloys into their components, and in another, earth ponies were grinding up metals into powder, pegasi too were collecting the clouds of dust that hung in the air and gathering them into a corner, doing something to them that a unicorn, like myself, couldn't understand.

In the center of it all was a mare, tall and thin, an earth pony, with a vibrant bluish-green mane and silver coat. She turned, a wild look in her eye, and stomped over to one of the ponies working on the quartz crystals, “You!” She shouted, the pony turned, the fear in his body language was obvious. A few of the ponies on the other side of the room turned to look at what was about to happen and started whispering things to each other, however, most simply kept their heads down and continued working.

“That crystal should have been completed three-point-seven minutes ago!” The stallion raised his leg and was moments away from saying something when the mare slapped him across the face with her hoof, “Unacceptable! You have slowed production by six-per-cent!

“F-Forgive-”

Suddenly, the mare’s hoof flew downward, faster than the eye could track and was followed by a loud crack. The crystal the stallion was holding in his magic was smashed into the ground and with a pop and a burst of orange light, the crystal shattered into dust, “Do! It! Again! Better, faster!”

“Y-Yes-”

“Now! Now! Now! Now! Now!”

The stallion didn’t bother responding, instead, he quickly grabbed a crystal from a box and started tracing invisible magic through it. Mercury turned to the rest of the forge with a disapproving glare, “What are you hideous creatures doing! Each and every one of you is guilty of lowering our production rate! Work!” She yelled, then her eyes settled on the unicorn in the door… Part of me was tempted to run back the way I came, just from looking around at the Earth Pony workers, it was clear that Boron wasn’t here today.

“You! You are not one of my useless herd! What are you doing here!” She trotted up, the metal below her ringing with each step, “Each second you waste gawking is a second of my time wasted! Speak!”

“Umm…” I squeaked, “I-I’m looking for Boron Alloy, I-”

I didn’t think it was possible for Mercury’s expression to get any more maniacally angry, apparently, I was wrong, “That useless! Useless! Useless! Buck didn’t show up today! The blackout was bad enough! That was an entire two-hundred-and-seventy per-cent drop in production! These lazy foals will need to work thrice as hard if I’m to get even a single per-cent of that time back! And now that Celestia fucking waste of resources hasn’t shown up! This has led to an eight per-cent drop in efficiency! Eight-Per-Cent!” She yelled into my face.

I was about to continue speaking when Mercury’s eyes turned into pinpricks and she shot back around, “Fluorescence!” She shouted, “The copper is supposed to be cut into cables three meters in length! Not three-point-four!” She spun back around in an instant.

“Soooo… Boron isn’t here.”

“No! No! No! Unless a Liquidator shows up this moment with explicit orders not to, I’m throwing that lazy piece of horse shit out into the acid pool!” She paused a moment, breathing heavily, “What are you still doing here! Get out!" She shouted. Her hoof reached out to the side and I frantically backed up as I realized what she was about to do, the bulkhead door slammed shut as if it was as light as a plate of sheet metal with a deep metallic ring, “What are you ponies doing! Get! Back! To! Work!” Came Mercury’s voice from the other side, still loud enough to make my ears ring, despite being muffled by the door.

I spent the next few minutes searching every part of the Hub I could think of… If you were looking for an earth pony, chances were that they had been called into the farms. On the lower floor, on the opposite side of the tunnel from the airlock I had used yesterday, was another large door going deeper into the City, down a few flights of stairs you entered a massive building, not quite as big as the Hub itself. The room was filled with troughs filled with dirt, from the dirt, all sorts of plants were grown, mostly rice. Hydrocarbon was flying around, carrying bags of compost. Boron wasn’t here, the boss of the farm, Mycelium, proved that.

Life support, much like the farm, wasn’t inside the Hub Tunnel, but rather up a flight of stairs and passed a big door on the middle level. It was another large room, easily a fifth the size of the Hub itself, but still not quite as large as the farm. Here, flocks of pegasi were racing around, collecting the gasses that leaked out of machinery, flowed from open and broken pipes, and from the massive number of vents and air pumps all throughout the room. In the center of the room was a large cylindrical opening, like a massive pipe, that had numerous actual pipes going down its length, it seemed to go downward forever, a deep, black, emptiness… Mom had called it a well, but no one knew why it was called that, it was from down there that water was collected, although it had to be filtered before you could drink it. Catalyst was trotting around, her horn in the air, magic flowing around the room from where she stood. I didn’t bother her, whatever she was doing was important, and this was one of the most important rooms in the Hub. Those giant machines in the corner would turn massive amounts of water into breathable air, and air was something in short supply here. The pony in charge of this place, Electrolyte, flew down from his perch, a large pipe sticking out of the wall, and greeted me, confirming that Boron didn’t come through this way.

Up, above the upper level, on nearly the highest point in the Hub, up a staircase that led into a wall, was a smaller room, only about as big as my house. For the most part, ponies simply did what they were told, reading and writing was something that the ponies in charge needed, but not the others... I was more literate than most, being able to write my own name and a few cohesive sentences, and as long as the word wasn’t longer than three letters, I could read it.

The record center was thus a mystery to most ponies, here the ponies who could read and write were pouring over hundreds of plates of metal, magically painted on them were strange symbols called letters, in one corner record keepers were going over a large plate of yellow metal that had words painted in black on it, apparently something a someone had found out near the Uninhabitable Zone. In one corner, a young white stallion with a red mane was talking with a few other record keepers, though the content of their discussion mystified me. Most of the ponies in the record center were simply taking plates of metal whose writing was beginning to fade and restoring them. From what I could gather from their arcane conversations, the spell used to paint the letters to the metal plates would fade after a given amount of time, it was rare for a record to survive more than a few decades, but the record keepers tried to keep the writing as intact as possible, still though ponies would get words wrong, and some of the records were apparently completely different than when they were originally painted.

I certainly wasn’t going to be bothering them, I simply scanned the room and confirmed that Boron wasn’t here, but before I could leave a pony took notice and rushed to me. Young, tall for her age, she wore a large cotton saddlebag and a big pair of glasses that made her look equal parts smart and silly, she said, “I am Palladium Plate, I was ordered to give you this,” She pulled out a metal plate covered in writing, “Assuming you can’t read I will be reading it out to you.”

I nodded as she cleared her throat, “You, Petrochemical, daughter of Hydrocarbon and Catalyst, are ordered to gather by Airlock Three in two hours, with saddlebag and utility barding, and meet up with the team that will be looking for a replacement thaumic engine.”

Of course, it was my job… Sure, Cogwheel and Clockwork were too valuable to risk being sent outside the Hub, but it couldn’t have been one of the other apprentices, like Refinery Flare, I’d love it if he went away for a while. “Understood,” I said, a little bitter.

Author's Note

This chapter was both a little longer, and a little shorter than I intended it to be, I was going to split it into two chapters, with the first one ending when Petrochem fell to sleep, the second ending as she first stepped out into the City again, but I decided later to merge the chapters into one, cutting off what was going to be the ending of this chapter, and making that into the start of the next one.

I was mostly making it up as I went along, the idea originally coming to me out of nowhere while playing a game of Factorio. Took a bit of inspiration from Fallout Equestria and one of my favourite fics: H’ven Sent, amazing fics by the way, you should probably be reading them instead of this.

Chapter 2: Halls of Iron

“Utility barding,” I shouted to myself. Being alone in my own home felt rather awkward, putting on my utility barding though seemed to balance it out with familiarity. The lead-plated grey and orange cotton suit was made in two pieces, pants and vest, with attachments on the side for a variety of tools and other items, mostly ponies just used them for saddlebags, or if you prefer sticking something infinitely heavier and more armoured to your side, saddleboxes. Saddleboxes were generally cheaper than bags since metal was far more common around here, but I had managed to get mine free, mostly on account of being an apprentice to the two best engineers in the Hub, one of whom had taught me the spells used to cut and weld metal.

“Check!” I shouted once again at myself, just after I finished strapping the vest on. The cloth was thick, and hard to get used to at first, since movement in this thing when you’re only ten is a Celestia-damned nightmare, but a few years of consistently wearing it will get you used to moving in it, and it’s important to wear it if you’re doing a job like mine. The numerous pockets were tremendous in helping you to carry little bits that you didn’t want or need to put in your bags, and it had saved me from numerous bloody and potentially lethal cuts.

“Saddlebags and equipment,” I mounted my pair of saddlebags to the pair of side-attachments and mounted a saddlebox like a backpack. I took a few meters of steel cable, some copper wire, a screwdriver, and a wrench and threw them into my packs. “Check.” Anything else I’d need to get from the pony operating the airlock, usually a member of the Record Center. There were numerous things that most ponies weren’t allowed to carry inside the Hub... Weapons, like knives, bows, spears, and hammers, dangerous chemicals and explosives, and nearly anything magical save for your horn, and the only reason for that was because how critical magic was to the survival of the Hub… Well, that and from rumours Boron had shared with me, thaumic dampening rings were apparently really hard and costly to make.

I marched out, getting a few looks from the few ponies that were still wandering around the Hub… I probably looked silly going out with so many bags. Then my eyes locked on to a tall, slightly older stallion, with a sooty black coat and two-tone orange and red mane. I cringed a bit… “Oh no,” I whispered to myself… And now he was looking at me… “No, no, no, no.”

“Hey! Chem! Haven’t seen your pretty face in a while!”

“Heeey… Refinery Flare,” I forced a smile across my face, “Where have you been…” Wherever he went, I wish he stayed.

“Just up in Axel’s workshop… Yesterday was just horrible! The blackout and everything, you were probably huddled up in a corner crying, without some handsome stallion, like myself, to comfort you.”

I rolled my eyes, “Yeah… I need to go now, I’ve been assigned to finding another thaumic engine to power the Hub…”

“And here I was hoping we could go out, have some lunch… After all, you might not be seeing my sexy self for an entire week,” That caught my attention. Sure, I was glad he won’t be bothering me for a week, but ponies don’t just disappear for a week in this place… If they’re gone for more than two days, chances are that they died, and while Flare was annoying, I didn’t want anypony I knew dead.

“A week?” I said, surprised.

“Yeah, I don’t know how you’ll live without me… You see, with that horrible monster that snuck past yesterday, the Minister’s been needing more Liquidators, so I and a few other ponies from around the Hub have been reassigned. I’ll be taking a week of training up in the Central Line.” The Central Line… Its engine was the home of the Minister, and usually, his or her’s secretary, but the rest of the train was the headquarters of the Liquidators. Sometimes, as a foal, I would sneak out during the night and see strange flashes of coloured light coming from the train cars, usually accompanied by strange and distant noises.

“The pony that came by said something about me being ‘cheap and expendable’, but I like to think it was all thanks to my good-looks and magnificent physique… Though, I won’t be a proper Liquidator, just a recruit for now.”

“Yeah,” I finished, “Can I go now, I’m going to be late.”

He laughed, “Come on, those ponies aren’t going anywhere soon, it takes time to prepare for a mission like that, and I don’t think they really need you… After all, you’re just a mechanic, and going out there is a job for Liquidators, like me… They’ll just leave without you, we got all the time in the world,” He lurched forward and flapped his wings, grabbing me, and all my equipment, off the ground, a creepy, and rather shit-eating, grin on his face.

I had to fight the urge to smack him in a rather tender place… Which I did, lightly, just a warning kick. Clattering to the ground as he dropped me, I managed not to break anything of importance except my dignity, but I did gain a few bruises for the effort. “I have a job to do, and if you don’t stop I’ll hit again… Harder.”

“Well… As much as I’d love to get hit on by such a lovely mare, I’m afraid I have a real job to do… Go off and play in the ruins with your mare-friends, but I’ll be taking my leave.”

I grunted as he flew off, “Asshole,” I said, too quiet for anyone but myself to hear. Making up for lost time I galloped over to the airlock. There were at least six airlocks leading out of the Hub, the one I used was the one on the lower platform, on the right-hoof side of the Central Line, but there were two on each level, one on the right-hoof side, and the other on the left-hoof side.

The one I was heading to was thankfully on the lower level, this time on the opposite side of the tunnel. When I got there I was surprised to see a familiar mare, Palladium Plate… Her mane was still the same pale orange and her coat the same milky white, and her face still adorned with the same oversized reading glasses. Besides the mare was a beast of a stallion, larger than my father and even bigger than Boron. He wore a thick yellow trenchcoat with lead plates, far more heavily armoured than standard barding, and featuring a heavy-looking helmet. All around the stallion was a magical field, it only covered his skin, and didn’t extend outward, but, being a unicorn, I could feel it, Palladium certainly could, seeing her discomfort at standing right next to the buck.

The stallion had some kind of thick cloth around his muzzle, but a little bit of black mane peaked under his helmet and the rest of his face was a dark, pale, blue. He certainly wasn’t a unicorn, unless he had a horn smaller than that of a foal, but I wasn’t sure if he was hiding a pair of wings under his coat, doubtful, but possible. “You are late, explain,” He said in a deep, neutral, tone.

“Ran into a rather bothersome stallion, he slowed me down.”

“Your failure to show up at the given time has been noted, and will be going on my report to the minister, civilian.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t bother the big guy too much, he’s just a little on edge because of how important all this is!” Palladium said, cheerily.

“Your unnecessary chatter will be going on my report too.”

Not knowing what to say, I turned to face the stallion again and asked the first thing that popped into my mind, “Soooo, what’s your name?”

“I am Truncheon Trauma, a Liquidator under orders from Hydroxide and Sulphuric Acid, I am here to provide protection and ensure that the job is done correctly… That is all you need to know.”

“Palladium, what are you doing here?”

Before Palladium could answer, the stallion said, “She has volunteered to be here, that is all… It is not our place to question the mission, only see that it is completed, and completed correctly, is that clear!”

It was Palladium’s turn to roll her eyes, “I decided to come along, the team needed somepony to paint pictograms, most of the old ones have already faded, and we will need to mark off dangerous locations, good places for scrap, and directions too and from the engine room, whenever we find it of course.”

I nodded, even a few of the signs I followed back to the Hub yesterday were dim, and hard to make out from the background metal… Although that could have just been the lighting. “So, do you have any idea where another engine might be found?”

Truncheon Trauma took a step forward, “The Record Center has identified a potential location in which we can find a functional thaumic engine, although the record itself is ancient and potentially inaccurate, and warned that near this location was a potential danger to the Hub, it is, unfortunately, our best lead on finding a working engine.”

“Correct, I reviewed the plate myself, I didn’t get much useful information, clearly the plate had been neglected for some time, but it did give us the approximate location of the engine room, about thirty floors down from here, and a good three hundred meters to the head-left of the Hub.”

Thirty floors down and three hundred meters away, that was a very long way away… That was almost outside the Habitable Zone, in fact, that was close to the very bottom of the Habitable Zone, which mostly extended thirty-five floors both up and down, with a few safe places that extended a little further, but usually not by much. If you were looking at the City from a vertical perspective, then the Habitable Zone was a more-or-less circle that extended five-hundred metres from the Hub, giving it a radius of a kilometre in most places… Of course, just like going vertical, there were safe spots further out, but again, not by much.

That was a lot of ground to cover, and the Liquidators kept it secure by using the welding spell to seal most of the exits shut, there were a relatively low number of ways one could get in and out of the Habitable Zone, why the Liquidators didn’t seal off the place completely was a mystery, to me at the very least… Truncheon probably had a better answer than I could come up with, but I already knew that getting information from him wasn’t going to be a fun or easy task.

We were ready to depart, the three of us trotting into the airlock, inside was a pair of knives. Apparently, Truncheon already had his, being a Liquidator, he was exempt from most of the rules of the Hub and it seemed that among them was the restriction on carrying weapons. There was also a massive bundle of heavy cable, “The cable meant to be plugged into the engine and route power back to the Hub I presume.”

“Correct,” Truncheon said, dismissively.

“Looks pretty heavy, who’s going to be carrying that?”

Truncheon turned his head toward me, staring with those dead blue eyes… “Oh Fiiiiine,” I said petulantly, “I’ll take it,” Throwing the six hundred meter long cable bundle over my back. “‘Have the little unicorn mare carry the cable’, says the big earth-pony stallion,” I grumbled under my breath.

The airlock began to cycle, a little less loud and sparky, this time the lights didn’t cut out, nor the walls shoot sparks at me, but the grinding noise was just as loud and painful, then the door opened, and we were out into the bolted steel corridors of the City. While only half-lit, the chemical engine not providing enough power to light the entire Habitibal Zone, it wasn’t as scary, with the familiar sight of corridors, buttressed with I-shaped beams, every meter kept together with the large steel rivets, the floor below us a grating under which pipes ran… It was just like when I was a foal, exploring the Habitable Zone… Little did I know that my fillyhood hobby would become my job.

A few minutes passed as we trotted forward, with nothing else to do I turned to Palladium, “So, how exactly did the Record Center come across this engine?”

“Well, Copper Core was-”

“Silence!” Truncheon shouted, “Follow and keep your mouths shut.”

Palladium rolled her eyes, then continued in a whisper, “After we were told by one of Hydroxide’s ponies to find anything documenting a thaumic generator, we set to work looking through all the plates to find anything… Copper Core, another of us Record Ponies, started looking through some of the oldest records that hadn’t faded completely, afterwards he said that he thought any modern record wouldn’t have the kind of thing we were looking for on it, since we’ve been scouting the Habitable Zone since the beginning of time.”

“You know, that’s something I don’t really understand… If we’ve been here from the beginning of time, since Celestia created the City, why do we need to scavenge? If she’s looking down at us from beyond the City, with all her infinite power, why isn't she just creating everything we need?”

Palladium looked back, scandalized, “Haven’t you been listening to even a single thing Sulphuric Acid says in her speeches!” Truth be told, no I really didn’t, she was the representative of our leader, and that was all I really cared about… It was a sensitive subject though, many of the ponies in the Hub took the Minister and his secretary's speeches to heart, and my father had scolded me a few times for not listening.

“O-Of course! I-”

“Silence!” Truncheon yelled, a growl in his throat.

I continued, realizing that my voice was raised, once again returning it to a bearly audible whisper, “Of course I do, I just wanted to hear it from you, to know what you think of the matter.”

Soon we encountered a stairwell going down, with Truncheon in the lead, we descended, following the pipes and cables, held together with steel beams, that comprised the walls. Palladium replied, “Well, she’s giving us a mission, a test, see how well we can survive, see how long our lives last, and what we accomplish in it… If we’re loyal to the Hub, and help it survive, give birth and teach our children so they can continue our duties when we die, then she’ll accept us upon our death, and we can return to life on the day when our struggle, and the struggle of our distant descendants, is done and the world is perfect.”

I kept my thoughts private, I knew how seriously some ponies took history, and I knew that defying history was an unspoken taboo in the Hub, so I didn’t want either of the ponies here to hear what I thought of the matter. It was more like Celestia was waiting for us all to die… Nothing ever reappeared once it was scavenged, and while we could make what was scavenged last decades, even centuries, sometimes things would be destroyed for good, or otherwise abandoned, and steadily the Habitable Zone was starting to run out of salvage, and with how dangerous the Uninhabitable Zone was rumoured to be, there was no way we could last long if we were to be forced to scavenge from that place.

I also hated that part about us having foals to carry out our work… I didn’t intend on having one, and so did others in the Hub, but those were more vocal about their decisions and were generally bullied or abandoned. The only one who really knew I was more interested in mares was Boron, since he seemed to be one of the few able to keep a secret. And as much as I wanted Refinery to back off, I was afraid his reaction would be a bit more extreme than others.

We continued down the stairs until Truncheon came to an abrupt stop, I, in the middle, was quick to follow, but Palladium had trotted right into me without realizing and I had bearly caught her in a telekinetic grip before she sent all three of us tumbling down.

“The stairs are out in this section,” Truncheon said, monotone as always, “We’ll need to go back up and find another way around.”

I trotted up and saw past the stallion in front of me, a good chunk of the staircase had gone and an entire floor’s worth of stairs was missing, the closest solid ground being the landing two floors down. Palladium groaned, although I was unsure whether it was from her near fall or the fact that we would need to go marching back up countless flights of stairs.

A thought struck, and I opened my saddlebag and retrieved my steel cable, “Umm, how is that going to help us?” Palladium asked, however, from his body language, Truncheon caught on instantly.

He pointed a hoof toward one of the metal beams, “Attach it there,” I nodded and jammed one end of the cable to the beam, my horn grew a little brighter and from the tip sparks flew, the metal cable’s tip started to glow the same yellow as my magic, and not just from the telekinetic field, the two metal parts started to flow as if liquid and merge together into a cohesive whole. “Make sure to attach it in such a way that it can bear our weight without breaking… And, if you can, knot the cable so it can provide better grip when we climb back up.”

Soon, the cable, woven into a series of knots every meter and welded on tight to the wall, was dangling down to the platform below. “Are you positive this can bear our weight,” Truncheon said, for once showing a little bit of emotion besides anger.

“Look, if I was in the front of this group, I’d just climb down and have faith in my own abilities, but I’m not in the front, you’re in the front, and I can’t climb over you.”

Truncheon gave a grunt and carefully gripped the first knot with his forehooves, I followed once he had made it to the bottom. Once I had made it to the landing, I gave a little telekinetic help to Palladium, clearly not used to doing anything this physical. “Should we cut the cable down,” Palladium said, “We might need it later.” I nodded and the tip of my horn started to glow, a little beam of light flew outward and twisted in the air, cutting with as much precision I could muster from this distance.

My cable was a few centimetres shorter, but I felt much better having it with me. Palladium and I continued our whispered conversation, Truncheon could clearly hear us, and while he didn’t mask his annoyance, he had given up trying to get us to stop. “So, as I was saying, I like to think that the City has no end, at least not one we can reach, it extends outward in all directions without limit.”

“But how do you know that for sure, have you ever gone outside the Habitable Zone?”

Truncheon turned his head, “You are aware talk like that can get you in trouble back in the Hub, it inspires curiosity.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a little speculation!” I retorted, Truncheon continued marching on without a reply.

“Well… To be honest, this is the first time I’ve left the Hub, I’ve wanted to do it for a while, get a chance to learn a bit more about this place, but it’s just too dangerous.”

We finally reached the correct floor and marched out of the stairs. After we passed through a little antechamber that was absolutely filled with pipes, valves, and tanks, we opened out into a large circular room with a round vaulted ceiling. Hundreds of pipes, large and small, came from the walls and extended down a large central shaft, they were also going up into the ceiling, in which the shaft continued upward for as far as the eye could see.

After carefully making our way between the pipes, we left out of a door on the opposite side of the room, coming into a long room, more like a hallway, with huge cylindrical machines with glass windows looking in, they were connected to all sorts of smaller machines that looked vaguely like pumps, electric motors, and other similar devices. I noticed that Truncheon was examining the tanks very closely.

“Palladium, make sure to mark this place down, these tanks still contain some chemical fuel, and the parts from the pumps could prove valuable.”

Palladium nodded, pulled a plate from her saddlebag, and started writing down directions. I simply put my face up to the nearest tank… With a little spark of light from my horn, I could see that the tank was half-full of a yellow liquid, I felt a strange sucking sensation on my horn as I pressed against the tank’s hull.

The feeling was familiar, but my mind struggled to remember where I had first felt it… I wanted to remove my barding to look at my cutie mark, the yellow fluid was the same as was on my flanks… I remembered the day I got it.

Ten Years Ago.

I marched down some old corridor with a pair of ponies to either side, they both wore the stupid barding mom made me wear every day… They were both unicorns like me, and both had little metal plates floating along with them, I couldn’t understand why, all the plates had on them were a few strange symbols.

The spell, they wanted me to use it… I had only used it once, it was a few days ago, a holiday, no one knew the celebration’s name, but it had been a tradition since the beginning of time. Dad had gotten the sugarcane! I didn’t get to eat it often, but it was amazing, so sweet, and much crunchier than rice.

As dad slowly levitated it over to me, I reached out with my magic, I didn’t want to wait… When my magic touched it, something snapped inside the plant, but I couldn’t feel the same energy as I would when using telekinesis, this was something different, it wasn’t the same as if I had grabbed the plant and broke it in two, this time I could feel more things breaking, lots of things, more things than I could count… It was like the plant wasn’t a solid object, but more like a massive pile of tiny rods all stuck together, and each second billions of these things were snapping apart. Some parts of the broken rods seemed to boil away and float through the air, while most of it started to move more like a liquid.

What I saw with my eyes was just as strange, the plant seemed to shimmer yellow for a second and quickly grew darker, turning a dark black, as if it had been burned and turned into ash, but it didn’t float away as ash did, instead the air above it seemed to shimmer as if hot air was being shot up from it. Dad, shocked, dropped it and it fell to the ground, cracking apart. Still, hot gasses seemed to rise from it, and a pool of thick black liquid started to flow from what was once a plant.

I was just as scared as I was excited, a new spell! I had never heard of something like this, all the spells the other foals used were all the same, no one had created a spell in as long ponies could remember! I entered a room, a bare metal room, not a single pipe or cable in sight. I turned to see the ponies levitate over a series of plants and a strange bit of whitish-red material, I stared at the adults, “What do you want me to do?”

“Cast the spell, and put the resulting materials,” The stallion paused as he levitated over a series of glass containers, “In these… We want a sample of it when it’s solid, and when it’s a liquid…”

I nodded, and lifted the first thing, a small pile of rice grain, closed my eyes, and tried to see the rice as a big pile of tiny little rods all stuck together… This time I noticed that the rods weren't perfectly straight, but rather had tiny little branches sticking off them like they were a feather, or covered in miniscule hairs… I poured a bit of magic into the rice and tried to break apart the rods.

When I did, the magic started working all on its own, and started breaking the rice apart, some of the rice was now floating away into the air, and some was now starting to drip away like liquid. I clamped down on the magic, and in doing so accidentally stopped the telekinesis, but the magic inside the rice was gone. When I opened my real eyes, I could see that the rice was now a pile of hard black stone… It did look a lot like ash now that I thought about it, but it certainly didn’t smell anything like it.

The adults all looked excited and started putting half the black stones into a glass jar. “Good, now try turning the rest into a liquid.”

I lifted the black rocks and poured magic into it again, now I could feel the rocks slowly turn limp in my grasp, like it was a thick cloth, growing softer by the second… Soon I wasn’t holding a rock anymore, but rather a thick black liquid. I poured the goo into another container and saw one of the adults cast some kind of spell on the glass, making a series of symbols appear across it.

Following my instructions, I set to work on the next plant… Sugarcane. I was tempted to cut it in half and take a little for myself, but I knew my dad wouldn't like it if I didn’t follow the adult’s orders. So, disappointed, I lifted the plant and cast the spell again… This time I didn’t hold back, I poured as much power as I could manage without depleting myself too much. The plant broke apart much faster than before, in less than ten seconds it was black goo, I wanted to stop the magic being pumped into it, but I was too awed at what happened next. Quickly the goo turned into a gas, I couldn’t see it, or smell it, but I could feel something in my grip, the plant was there, just now it was floating in the air.

The adults looked confused, I tried to explain what I felt, they replied by asking me to put the gasses into a glass jar, and so I did. Something dawned on me right then… If I could turn the plant into a rock and a sludge and a gas, could I do it in reverse?

Next, I raised the cotton fibres… As expected, it turned into a black rock, then into a goo, then into an invisible gas. I pulled and twisted the magic, trying the process in reverse, and when I did, I noticed that tiny droplets of liquid were forming in the bubble of gas. The bubble slowly created more and more of the liquid, until the bubble of gas was gone and a sphere of liquid remained… This wasn’t the same black goo I had hoped it would be, rather it was a transparent yellowish-orangish fluid… I was disappointed, but one of the adults seemed intrigued, the other looked worried. In the flurry of emotions and the calm that came with spellcasting, I didn’t notice the tingling on my flanks.

I tried the thick slab of red-white stuff… The adults called it meat. It acted the exact same when I used my magic on it… After putting a bit of the rock, a bit of the goo, and a bit of the gas into their respective jars, I tried reversing the process again, but it had the same effect, creating a yellow fluid.

One of the adults whispered something to the other, then turned back to me, “We would like you to cast the spell two more times, is that ok?” I nodded, I was starting to feel tired, whatever this magic was it took a lot out of me. “We would like you to try casting on these.” He levitated up a small chunk of black rock and some kind of bug, a cockroach he called it. I reached out for the cockroach first, and-

Something was wrong, I felt my magic flow off the surface of the cockroach as if it couldn’t get a grip on it, it was like the little rods inside it were constantly breaking and reforming on their own, so much so that my magic couldn’t break a rod before it broke itself and reformed… I failed…

I tried the rock, hoping that I wasn’t a complete failure, I reached into the rock and… The rock wasn’t the same as the other things had been, this one wasn’t comprised of the little rods that the others were, this was something else, it was more like the rock was a bunch of little grains, dots, that were all stuck together… I poured in a bit of magic, but nothing happened.

“I-I can’t do anything, the magic doesn’t work… Have I failed? Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no, you didn’t do anything wrong… We expected that neither of those things would be changed…”

“Y-You mean I didn’t fail?”

“No, quite the opposite in fact!” He gestured to me… To my flanks. I turned and saw something, a patch of colour that wasn’t there before, a cutie mark! It was a metal barrel, the barrel was tipped on its side and spilling a yellow fluid across the fur of my flank. I didn’t mind the numbness in my horn, I didn’t hear what the other ponies were saying, I just got to my hooves and started running around in circles, chasing that little barrel.

Behind the excited little filly, too quiet for the foal to hear, the two stallions turned to one another, “I’ll go inform Petrochemical’s parents.”

“Yes, you should… I’ll collect the samples.”

“I don’t know whether to be proud or scared of the filly… Either way, I hope that yellow stuff isn’t what I think it is.”

“Only one way to find out.”

The excitement of the day was only soured when, that night, one of the two adults came to my house, I was asleep at the time but awoken when I heard the door open. Wondering what was going on, and not wanting to awake my parents if they were asleep, I silently crept to the stairs and peered down into the main room, standing there was one of the adult unicorns from my test talking with my father. I didn’t catch the full conversation, but from what I did hear, they were excited about the spell and wanted to run a few more tests, I was so excited I wanted to get up and run around in circles, but mom could still be asleep… Then the unicorn finished by stating that I was never to use that spell again without permission.

The group passed the room full of tanks and through several more rooms and corridors, full of the empty hulls of machines, clearly scrapped ages ago. We entered into a room, and the first thing we noticed was the floor, namely the fact that it was half-missing. “Looks like something collapsed in this section” Said Truncheon.

“We’re getting close, the instructions mentioned something dangerous around this area,” Continued Palladium.

Something did indeed collapse, the massive rends in the floor went down at least three or four floors, and were punctuated with collapsed and broken machinery, from either this floor or the ones below. From the lack of dust compared to the rest of the room, it must have been recently, at least in the past year. “I don’t think this is the danger those instructions mentioned,” I said. In the distance, past the destroyed room, I saw that the far door was open, and inside was a familiar-looking machine, a large rectangle with some kind of large studded sphere on one end, and a series of tubes and tanks, thaumically shielded glass portholes glowing with faint energy from within… It wasn’t painted yellow like the last one, but that was the only difference.

“I agree with Petrochemical, these are clearly recent damages, we shouldn't go through this room.”

“Why not! The engine is right there!” I said, pointing my hoof toward the thaumic engine in the distance, “We can just trot right over there, the floor isn’t that badly damaged.”

“Petrochemical, I would not do that if I were you, we do not know the structural integrity of this room’s floor.”

I scoffed, I had encountered rooms just like this and they had all proved safe to pass through, metal didn’t just give out beneath you at random, “You’re just being paranoid… I’ll trot over there, plug in the cable, and come right back here,” I stepped out into the room and toward the generator, the floor gave a creaking noise of stressed metal, but didn’t budge in the slightest.

“Petrochemical! Come back here!” Truncheon said, trotting after me. I was nearing the center of the room, right next to one of the big gashes, when Truncheon stepped out into the room himself, the floor gave another croak, this one lasting a bit longer and sounding a bit louder. “Petrochemical!” He shouted, I paused for a moment to look back at him. Palladium was looking a bit worried.

“Chem! Just do what the Liquidator says!”

Truncheon, in exasperation, stomped his hoof on the floor… With the full strength of an earth pony behind it. He left a big indentation in the ground, and only realized his mistake when from below came a loud creek, followed by a bang, and the floor below us falling a bit… It didn’t move all too much, only bending down a meter or so, but it broke my balance, and I fell over, falling toward the large gash in the floor. “Oh fuck!” I yelled as I tried to get my balance back before I went tumbling into that hole.

I managed to hook my hooves around the edge of the opening and hang on, “Chem!” Shouted Palladium, “I’ll save you!” She galloped into the room herself. Her horn started to glow and I felt a weak telekinetic field wrap around my midsection, then Palladium stomped her way into the room, and the floor gave another buckle. With her concentration ruined, and the floor breaking my grip on the floor’s edge, there was nothing to stop me from falling down.

Author's Note

So, for context regarding the directions mentioned in this and future chapters, the ponies in the Hub don’t have the concept of North, South, East, and West… Instead, they use the train inside the Hub, called the Central Line, as a compass… Essentially, Head is their equivalent of North, as the Head refers to “ahead of the train”, Tail is South, being toward the “tail-end of the train”, with Left and Right being East and West, as in “left or right of the train”, generally, whenever a character says to go left or right, unless they’re specifically referring to an object or person, they’re saying to go east or west.

And for those who didn’t understand the cockroach test, I hinted that the insect was still alive by the fact that hydrocarbon chains were moving around and undergoing chemical reactions inside it, thus the: “it was like the little rods inside it were constantly breaking and reforming on their own”, line.

Chapter 3: Everything that is Discovered...

Chapter 3: Everything that is discovered…

Truncheon Trauma… Lithium Lance… Xenon Glow… Iodine… They would be trouble. Sulphuric Acid stood alone in her office, an antechamber before one entered the Central Line’s engine cab. Inside there, the minister sat, ignorant of the world around him… These four were all going to be trouble once Hydroxide had his suspicions confirmed.

“Hydroxide… That arrogant little buck! Thinking he knows what was better for the Hub then I do,” Sulphuric Acid whispered to herself. Truncheon was the perfect Liquidator, loyal, strong, and obedient… But that was also his problem, he would follow Hydroxide, not her. Lithium was young and naive, bearly a mare at sixteen, she was easy to control, but all too open to questioning orders, and still carried that foalish curiosity… Xenon-

Sulphuric Acid’s train of thought was derailed when there came a knock on the door. She growled in her throat and stood up, turning to face the door and trying to force a smile to her face. “Come in.”

Sulphuric Acid was bearly able to keep her smile when she saw who had barged into her office. The stallion wore a simple utility barding, however it was painted yellow rather than the standard grey. His mane was a pale blue and his coat stark white, clashing a bit with his red eyes. “Hydroxide,” Sulphuric Acid said, her smile faltering a bit.

“The Liquidator Recruits have arrived, all twenty of them are currently in waggon seven, awaiting orientation.”

“Goooood,” She said in a drawn-out tone, “I will oversee their orientation personally, you just return to waggon three.”

“Umm,” Hydroxide was about to reply… Why couldn’t that damn stallion just follow orders like he’s supposed to! “Ma’am, it’s the job of the Liquidator Captian to oversee-”

“I know that!” Sulphuric Acid replied, a bit louder than she intended, “I-I know that,” She tried to regain her calm, “It’s just that these are strange circumstances, and I want to see that everything goes smoothly.”

Strange circumstances indeed, there was no way a mutant could get past the garrison, let alone destroy a thaumic engine… She had inspected the garrison patrolling the edges of the Habitable Zone personally, and those thaumic engines were constructed in such a way that they could probably survive having a portion of the city collapse atop them… Someone lied to her, and she couldn't have ponies doing that. It was probably Hydroxide, but she couldn’t be sure.

Perhaps she should talk to this ‘Boron Alloy’ stallion… An ex-liquidator, he must have done something to get expelled from them… Another potential troublemaker. Whoever damaged that engine was smart enough to understand how to, a pony, a saboteur, an enemy of the Hub, a pony that would need to be dealt with… Harshly.

Whoever was the cause of the blackout, she almost wanted to thank them, it gave her the perfect excuse to recruit more liquidators… Now she just needed to make sure that these ponies were loyal to her. As she marched out of the cab, she passed Hydroxide, pausing only a second to glare at him.

Pain. It erupted across my back as I fell, bouncing off of collapsed machinery and rolling down collapsed floor after collapsed floor. My barding was most likely the only thing stopping me from breaking my back on the fall… Soon I stopped falling and managed to open my eyes. Gasping from the pain of movement, I stared upward to see that I had fallen a very long way, I counted at least five floors, but it was hard to tell how far I had actually fallen, since I had rolled away from where I had originally fell and couldn’t see the bolted ceiling of the room I had come from.

I needed to get up, and tried to struggle to my hooves, but my entire body stung. There were a few gashes in my barding from where bits of metal had cut at me as I fell, a few were bleeding. I looked around for anything that could help me, nothing but metal… I was about to give up and wait for rescue or death, whichever came first, when I noticed a box lying on the ground not far from me.

I had no idea what the symbols covering the box meant, but I had seen a box with those same symbols back at the clinic… It was worth a try. I raised my horn, ignoring the pain that built inside it, and reached for the box. Unclasping the latches, I threw it open and found… A thing.

It almost looked like the welders earth ponies used in place of the welding spell, there were surprisingly few of them, but I had seen a pony using them once or twice. This thing had some kind of handle on the side so it could be carried in the mouth, it was short and boxy, with a grooved spike on one end that reminded me of a unicorn’s horn, and a hatch on the other, inside the hatch was a vial of glowing red fluid… Something magical.

I lifted it, no idea what it did, but if it was inside a medical box it would help me… I was guessing the spike was the end that actually did something, the arrow on the side helped with that assessment… What if it was a weapon? I paused as I aimed the device at my head, from this perspective it almost looked like a spear… I hesitated as my magic started to press down on a button. It will either kill me and take the pain away, or heal me and take the pain away, either way, the pain is gone.

Something crashed in the distance, a result of my falling down, and the sudden noise shocked me into pulling down with my magic, pressing the button… I did not expect the vial to go flying out the back of the device and into the air. Thinking quickly, I grabbed the vial in a telekinetic field before it could fall and break, and put it back into the device… That’s when I noticed that there were several buttons on this thing. I pressed another one, pointing it at my head again.

There was a low whining noise as red light started to creep up the grooves cut into the horn-like spike, the light reached the tip, and in a burst of magical energy, powerful enough I could feel the energy resonating with my horn, a beam of crisp red light shot from the horn and right into me… I felt the energy flow through my body and where it passed pain vanished… I quickly pulled off my barding and saw that many of my bruises and cuts were gone… Not gone, upon closer inspection, they were still there, just less severe than they had been, the cuts were smaller, and the bruises fainter, but still present.

None the less, I tried again to get to my hooves, and while I grunted at the pain, it didn’t send stinging barbs to force me back to lying down. Standing up now, I took a moment to inspect the device a little more closely, the vial of red liquid was empty now, a bit disappointing, that could be useful later… But I was alive.

Staggering around, I took notice of where I had fallen… It was some kind of room, small, with a few old metal desks, there was some giant machine in the corner, but that was most likely something from one of the levels above that had fallen down here… There were holes in the floor down here too, luckily I hadn’t fallen into one of them. Peering down the holes, I noticed, much further down, there was a pool of glowing green liquid, possibly some kind of magical acid. “So that’s what caused all this…”

There were several boxy machines laying around, they were similar to the box-machine lying in the workshop, computers, I think they were called. Looking around, I saw what looked like a doorframe, however, the door was missing and in its place were thick-looking plates of metal. Turning to see where the other door should be, I saw that it was open… Back there, it was dark, very dark, nearly the same pitch black I found myself in yesterday.

But, it wasn’t pitch black, there was some light source back there, something green and dim… And moving, getting closer. My mind struggled to understand the situation, but I quickly lit my horn and started casting the cutting spell, slicing off a part of the desk. Even abandoning precision and elegance, the spell still was taking far too long then I would have liked, and once my horn lit up, the little green points were rapidly getting bigger and bigger.

Soon, I saw what those points really were as it got closer and closer to the light… Eyes, the eyes of a pony, swollen green spheres set into a face. It once had the head of a pony, now the head looked rotten, swollen, and lumpy… From the creature’s mouth dripped a thick, glowing, green sludge that simmered away when it touched the floor, and it only had an ear on one side of its face, where the other one should have been was a big lump that glowed a faint green within.

The pony moved on three legs, one was rotted away at the knee, leaving just a bony stump, as such its movements were slow. Its tail was devoid of hair, and Its back was dotted with big glowing lumps like its face, almost like its body was covered in alien acne, with acid rather than pus.

When the creature was about to enter the room, my spell broke a part of the metal desk away, a long thin rod with a spiked end… The creature stared at me with it’s blank, green, eyes, then suddenly lunged, throwing itself forward with more speed than I thought possible. In fear and desperation, I threw the metal pole between me and the attacker and managed to block its bite.

The mutant started chewing on the metal rod, and I felt my telekinesis strain to keep the rod still. Then, a few seconds later, as I was desperately looking around for something to help me, the rod I was holding snapped in half. The sudden and unintended change to the rod broke my telekinesis, and the creature lunged at me again, so I threw myself to the side. It rammed its head into the plated up door and spread the glowing acid across the doorframe, just as I managed to regain my hoofing. I ignited my horn again and searched for the two halves of the rod I had used, finding them right as the mutant turned to face me again. Launching one of the two makeshift knives as fast as my magic could thrust it, I jabbed the thing in the back, right in one of the glowing pustules.

The abomination let out a howl of pain and dodged to the side, opening its maw for me to see the glowing tunnel that was its oversized throat. I was ready to dodge again, and bearly managed to avoid a spray of enchanted acid that launched from the creature, melting away desk and floor.

I kept on running around the room, stopping when I found myself right behind a cavernous hole in the floor. The creature took its opportunity and opened its fanged mouth again. Thinking quickly, I raised my other metal spike and flung it right at the monster’s face. I missed the intended target, its open mouth, rather I hit it lower than I intended to and impaled its slightly elongated neck.

The creature tried to scream, but all that came out was bubbling, acidic, yellowy-green froth, as the creature writhed in agony. The mutant was now standing in a puddle of its own acid, and all I had to do was watch as it melted away the floor below it. It fell through, and I rushed up to the hole to see what had happened to it. It impacted the ground in the room below, still a good three-meter drop, and had ruptured a few of its acid sacks in the process, however, this floor was a bit more corrosion resistant then the last one had been… Perhaps the magic that kept the walls from rusting away was a little stronger down there.

Before the creature could escape, I raised my horn, and with all the telekinetic strength I could muster, I dragged over one of the desks in the room and dropped it down the acid hole… Down below was a rather satisfying impact that sent splatterings of green fluid in all directions.

“Soooo… You’re Boron Alloy?”

“Yes ma’am…”

Sulphuric Acid sat atop her sofa in her office aboard the Central Line. Across from her was a stallion, large, with a shiny dark grey coat and brownish mane. “Interesting… I should have expected a pony like you to be involved in a conspiracy.”

Boron tried to keep his neutral expression, but broke it to give a slight look of shock… Concern… Something, whatever that something was, it was hard to tell… Clearly a skilled liar, how long had this conspiracy against her Hub been going on? Who was leading it? Most likely Hydroxide, but he would face justice some other time, for now, all Sulphuric Acid cared about was finding out who this saboteur was.

“Conspiracy? I’m unaware of such a thing…”

“Conspiracy! It is clearly not some brain-dead mutant’s fault that the thaumic engine was destroyed…”

“Yes… That,” Boron looked a bit thoughtful and most definitely worried, “A pony by the name of Petrochemical, an engineer working for Clockwork and his mate, Cogwheel, was told to go inspect the thaumic engine, due to fluctuations in the engine’s efficiency… Presumably under orders from Hydroxide… When I arrived, following my orders from Mercury Vapour, I found the mare working on the generator, testing the output… Then, the mutant attacked. Many of the engine’s access hatches were open due to the mare’s inspection, we ran, the mutant must have been drawn to the engine’s thaumic signature, and without the access panels properly closed, the mutant must have done damage to the engine’s internals.”

Sulphuric Acid nodded… This was a lie, no pony would be stupid enough to open up a thaumic engine for inspection while the device was operational, at least not without thaumic dampeners, or a full T-Hazmat Suit. The question was, how much of what the stallion was saying was truth, and how much was lies.

She wanted to talk to Hydroxide, see if this mare was really following his orders or not… No, the buck was already suspicious of her as it was… Petrochemical, as likely as Boron was to be the saboteur, she couldn't leave anything to chance, she needed to figure out more about this mare. “That is all, just wanted to confirm the story myself… You are free to leave.” Boron gave a nod and politely headed out the door.

A moment later, a pair of Liquidators, ones she knew well, ones she knew were completely loyal, entered the room. Both were older stallions, unicorns. “You two, what do you know about a citizen by the name of Petrochemical.”

One stallion looked nervous, the other looked intrigued. “Well…” Said the first, “We were both there when the foal got her cutie mark, roughly ten years ago.”

I raised my horn, the glow of the cutting spell forming at my horn’s tip… It was a bit of a shame that the spell didn’t work on living tissue, or else it would have been useful, at the very least, in causing pain to the monster. Whatever the case, I couldn’t stay here, I was safe for now, but Celestia knew how many more of those abominations were down here.

The spell jumped like an arc of electricity from my horn to the metal plates barring the door, and in a few minutes, I had cut half a pony-sized hole. Soon I was through, on the other side was a very small hallway that led to a staircase, this staircase headed both up and down. Two floors above, the staircase was blocked, a large metal panel closed off the entire shaft as if someone had just magically moved a chunk of the ceiling into the stairwell.

I turned, pulled the chunk of metal I had cut from the door, and used it to block the doorway once again… It wasn’t perfect, but I think I did a good job at restoring the blocked doorway to the way it had once been. I repeated the processes on the plates blocking the stairs. I had fallen down seven or eight floors I discovered, as I soon found myself on a corridor that led to the thaumic engine room.

I opened the door and went to work finding the port in which to plug the cable. Suddenly there came the sound of a door opening and I immediately grabbed the nearest sharp object, a jagged piece of metal, and pointed it at the pony that came through the stairwell door… Truncheon could only rear up in shock as the jagged metal lodged itself in his armoured coat. Looking around for his attacker, he was again shocked to see a little yellow and black mare, with pinprick-pupils and a wild expression, holding up the cable as if it were a weapon.

“Petrochemical?”

“Truncheon?”

“Petrochemical!” Came the high-pitched voice of Palladium. She ran into the room, I tried to find another shard of metal, but the next thing I knew I was tackled in a hug.

“We thought you had died… What happened, report!?” Asked Truncheon.

“W-Well-” I said, struggling in the grip of Palladium, “I fell down about eight floors-”

“Into the Uninhabitable Zone!”

“I-I think so… There was this mutant pony that shot acid at me, I bearly managed to kill it.”

“You managed to kill a mutant?” Truncheon said, disbelievingly… He looked like he was going to try to argue with my claim’s legitimacy, but then his eyes settled on the chemical burns all over my barding, my numerous scratches and bruises, and the piece of metal he still had stuck in his coat. As he was saying this, Palladium finally let go and turned to inspect the engine.

Truncheon continued, “So… How did you survive the fall then, that should have broken your back?”

“Well,” I said, opening my bag telekinetically, “I found this device that healed me…” I pulled the healing tool from my bag, the little boxy device with a handle, a capsule stuck into a slot in the back, and a horn-like needle on the end.

Truncheon looked… Mad? Shocked? Confused? “Y-You aren’t supposed to have that! Where did you find that!”

“This?” I said, “I found it in a box next to where I fell… Without it, I probably would be dead now.”

Truncheon gave a grunt, suspiciously he said, “I’ll be taking that… Now.”

I nodded, “It’s useless now anyway, seems to have only a single shot.” Truncheon looked both relieved and disappointed. Eying the machine, he carefully used his hooves to inspect the device before putting it away in his bag. “What was it anyway?” I asked.

“Nothing you need to worry about… Just help us get this engine plugged in.”

I nodded, a bit confused as to why Truncheon seemed so protective of the device. I grabbed the cable and returned to the engine, finding the port, and slotting the cable in.

Author's Note

Not much to say regarding this chapter, it’s a bit shorter than I want it to be, but none the less. Next chapter will primarily be focused on the events going on regarding Sulphuric Acid, Hydroxide, and Boron.

A quick note about spells: Most of the spells the Hub ponies have access to are designed to not work against living creatures, after all, you don’t want to accidentally weld a pony’s blood vessels together, or cut off a limb… So there was no way Chem could use the cutting spell in combat, same with her petroleum-transformation spell, hence why the cockroach in the last chapter wasn’t transformed into kerogen or petrol.

Chapter 4: ...Is not Always Meant to Be.

Chapter 4: ...Is Not Always Meant to Be.

Hydroxide sat alone in his office, drinking his daily ration of rice-wine, something only Liquidators have the privilege of, even the Minister didn’t get any… An oddity, as usually the Minister had even more rights than the Liquidators.

There came a knock at the door, peculiar, as usually, ponies came barging in with requests or concerns, all of which usually came to mean nothing... Already the day was full of oddities, and why did the stallion get the feeling that they were only going to get worse. “Come in.”

In came another stallion, another Earth Pony, and a good friend of his. “Boron, this is a surprise… What brings you to the Central Line?”

“Sulphuric Acid… She called me into her office not much more than an hour ago and interrogated me… She believed that I was part of some conspiracy against the Hub, and right after telling her my story regarding the events that led to the blackout, she seemed totally placated…”

Before Boron could continue, Hydroxide said, “Yes, she’s been a bit crazier than normal… And it’s been more than just her normal mood swings and tantrums…” As he said this, he poured half his remaining wine into a tin cup he had drawn from a locker and slid the drink to Boron.

Boron nodded as he took a sip, “What’s worse, I don’t really think she believed my story… In fact, I’d bet my cutie mark that she didn’t.”

“I’ve never trusted that mare,” Hydroxide said, in a grimmer tone than normal… He questioned the Minister’s judgment when she was appointed secretary… Hydroxide wasn’t an idiot, he knew he was smarter than a good deal of the citizenry, most simply accepted that the Princesses made the city as a test for ponykind to face, and one day complete… But Hydroxide didn’t buy into that ideology, there were too many holes in the logic, and he knew that survival inside the Hub wasn’t possible forever… He had pushed the Minister to expand, to send out the Liquidators to reclaim and repair parts of the City that were currently in the Uninhabitable Zone, to expand the Hub, and divine some of the secrets of the city… Such as where the fresh water in the Well comes from, or where the waste went once it was dumped into the Pit.

Sulphuric Acid, on the other hoof, believed that the real threat were the things that existed outside the Hub, such as the mutants, the machines, and the crystal… She wanted to close the Hub’s gates, and, through faith and prayer, ponykind would somehow survive…

“Unfortunately, if she is planning anything, there’s little I can do, she may only be the Minister’s Secretary, not the Minister himself, but that means she still has command over me, and I have no way of talking to the Minister without going through her… The Law of Command is clear on that.”

Boron chewed his lip in thought. “I’m aware how critical the law is to our survival, but if she does anything to endanger the lives of my fellow ponies, tell me.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know.”

The airlock’s cycle was just as loud and painful as it was when leaving. The door screeched as Palladium and I trotted back into the Hub, Truncheon had taken the rest of the cable and was now finding the transformer, whatever a transformer is… I was just relieved to not have to carry the cable anymore.

“Photon?” I said. In front of me, in the airlock, with his metal sheets, was the same little stallion as before.

“Yeah… Since the other record center ponies have other things they need to do, I got stuck with gatekeeper again… Ok, Petrochem, yellow coat, black mane-”

Photon continued marking down information, I didn’t really understand why, but I suppose that was the reason I wasn’t working in the Record Center… That and the fact that I didn’t know how to read or write. Once he had finished with my information and turned to Palladium, the tall mare bolted forward and wrapped the little buck in a hug.

“P-Palladium!” He said, blushing, “I-I have a job to do-” After a few seconds the mare did let go, but not before planting a kiss on Photon’s cheek, much to the embarrassment of the stallion. Once he had finished recording his information, he trotted over to the gate and hit the switch again.

The Hub was as it always was, quiet and still, yet cramped at the same time… Massive, yet feeling so very small. Palladium was quick to go her separate way, and so I trotted off back to the workshop. There weren’t many ponies out right now, it was rather late, but I still had an hour or two before the lights were shut off and ponies went to sleep.

The workshop was rather quiet, and the curtains, sheets of metal attached to hinges that swung down, were closed. Approaching the door I gave it a sharp knock. “One moment,” Said a voice, sounding older and more refined than Cogwheel, not to mention unquestionably male. A moment later, standing in the doorway, was a stallion… Not quite as big or tall as Boron or Truncheon, in fact he was a little skinny, not quite to the same extent as Photon, but was certainly tall and a little frail-looking. His coat was the colour of rust and his mane a shiny grey, face adorned with reading glasses that made him look almost like a male version of Cogwheel.

“Good evening, Clockwork,” I said.

Clockwork stared at me, “Well, you should come inside, there’s still a good two hours left in the day, and I have a few motors I need to scrap for parts… I should also get that old pump repaired for Electrolyte.”

“Where’s Cogwheel, she was in here this morning.”

“One of the chemical engines used by the Liquidators apparently broke down, and she got called up... “

I nodded, “So, what do you need?”

“I could use a hoof in getting these burned-out motors scrapped… You think you can get a few screwdrivers from the cabinet over there?”

I nodded again, “ We should probably try to salvage as much of the copper wire as we can, I’ll also grab the wire cutters.” I flung open the tools cabinet, and retrieved eight screwdrivers, one of each type for the two of us, and a pair of wire cutters. Passing half the tools to Clockwork, he set to work on one of the motors, unscrewing it and going to work pulling it apart. I gathered the other motor and did the same. Within only half an hour we had completely scrapped the motors and Clockwork had turned his attention to repairing some device, I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I didn’t care all too much.

Being left with nothing to do was normally ungodly boring, but for once I enjoyed it, a relief from the events of the past two days. I gathered my things from a private shelf I had marked, here I stored the little bits and pieces I tinkered with when there was nothing else to do. A few loops of copper wire, some bits of steel, boxes of screws, bolts, and nuts, even a trio of perfectly cut quartz crystals, one was a cube, one a dodecahedron, and one a triangular, four-sided, pyramid.

I gathered the pyramid crystal and started weaving my magic through it, closing my eyes as I felt my way through the residual magic crystals tended to soak up. In a few minutes, I had inscribed the crystal with the appropriate spell-matrix, the cutting spell, and began mounting the crystal to a makeshift metal frame. My recent experiences reminded me how useful the cutting spell could be, and seeing the medical device that had saved my life gave me a good deal of inspiration… I next retrieved a bundle of wire, not the copper wire, that was for electricity, and I didn’t have any thaumaelectric converters on hoof, so I needed to use something magically conductive, not electrically conductive, it was more efficient anyway, not as much energy lost in the conversion.

The bundle of wires was made from a silvery-green metal, mythril… It wasn’t the best material for the job, it was like trying to make an electric cable from iron, alchemical silver was much better, but I didn’t have any, so this would have to do. Part of me started getting aroused at the thought of having a bundle of crystal-fibre cable.

I mounted the dodecahedron crystal to the bottom to act as a magical battery, again a bit disappointed that I didn’t have a thaumaelectric converter, that way it could be recharged from any outlet, but my horn was good enough for now. I didn’t work with magical devices all too often, usually, that was my master’s job, but Cogwheel had once shown me how to work with quartz and how to make magical storage devices, thus the battery was easy enough to prepare.

I’d have to finish the cutting device tomorrow. All the crystals and wiring were in place, and I had finished welding the activation button on to the frame when Clockwork set the machine he was working on away and started closing down the workshop. I set off back toward my house, not wanting to be caught outside when the lights shut off… That was a very good way of getting lost, even with light spells.

I was lying in bed when I heard a knock at the door… My parents were still working, making up for lost time in hydroponics and life-support… At first, I assumed the knock to simply be them returning, but then came another knock, louder and more aggressive. I huffed and pulled myself out of bed, wondering who would be knocking at this hour.

When I arrived at the door, I peered out through the porthole, surprised to see… Something… It looked vaguely like a pony’s face, it was black and had little glass circles for eyes, where it’s mouth would be was a disk with various openings. I was taken aback, when I remembered a rumour about some of the more elite liquidators having some kind of mask that helps them breathe in toxic environments… Upon a closer look, I could bearly see the eyes of a pony behind that mask.

Confused as to why an elite Liquidator would be knocking at my door, I pulled it open and asked the first thing that came to mind, “Is something wrong, is it the thaumic engine again?”

I was even more surprised to see two other liquidators flanking the leader, both had simple cloth masks in place of the thing the leader was wearing, much like what Truncheon had. The leader, a big and strong mare that would out-buff any normal stallion, barged in and drew her knife… I stood there, stunned.

“Petrochemical, under orders from Minister Crystal Resonance, I am placing you under arrest for the destruction of valuable Hub property.”

Author's Note

I'm aware that I said this chapter was going to be a long one, but I found a good place to end it, and I wanted to get something out sooner rather than later, so I guess next chapter is going to be the long one... Sorry for how short this chapter is.

Chapter 5: Metal Boxes and the Ponies Inside

Sulphuric Acid sat in her office… All her previous rage had given way to cold, calculated, hatred… That foal had escaped! The saboteur had escaped, no doubt plotting more disasters to undermine her Hub! Worse, she had a hostage with her, a pony from the record centre that had been operating the airlock she escaped out of... The good news was that she was nowhere to be found inside the Habitable Zone, one of the patrols along the border had seen her fleeing, so at least Sulphuric didn’t need to fear that the pony was going to wreck the newly activated thaumic engine… Now, a proper garrison of Liquidators would need to be assigned to guard the engine, but that only gave her more of an excuse to increase recruitment.

The worrying part was not the mare herself, she didn’t pose an immediate threat to the Hub, rather it was the method in which she escaped… The cell was lined in cold iron, so she couldn’t have used magic to escape, and a single mare without a weapon was no match for a properly trained Liquidator… Even with telekinesis, it wouldn’t have helped her all that much, as everything inside the room was bolted down to prevent that exact scenario.

There was only one conclusion… There was a traitor in her Hub.

Nineteen Hours Earlier

I awoke to find myself inside a room, last night a pony, a liquidator, burst into my house and I found myself a captive of the Minister… Why? The cell was made from some dark metal, I raised my horn, intending to inspect the material, however, the moment my magic made contact with the metal, my horn started to tingle, my head started to ache, and my magic failed.

The guard didn’t even turn to look at me… Although it was hard to tell… This room was only large enough for two ponies to stand side-by-side, and half of that space was taken up by the bed, a squishy block covered in fabric, somehow more comfortable than my bedding back home… I’d pity the pegasus placed inside such a cell, there was hardly enough room to raise one’s wings. The door was the standard bulkhead doors, complete with porthole, the only difference being the dark metal the door seemed coated in, and the metal mesh over the porthole.

Outside, just beyond the porthole, was a guard sitting at a table, playing some game involving little metal figures of ponies. No sound penetrated the cell, and I was left to think. The liquidator had said I was accused of destruction of Hub property… There wasn’t much that I could think of that was important enough to imprison someone for the destruction of… Most of those things were in Life Support, breaking one of the air machines, even unintentionally, was a rather severe crime, and of course, killing the plants in the farms meant fewer rations for everyone… But the real danger was breaking a Thaumic Engine, with how unstable and potentially disastrous a meltdown is.

“Wait!” I whispered to myself… Did they really think I destroyed the engine on purpose! That’s absurd!

Outside, I stared through the porthole to see another Liquidator trot into the room, the two turned to one another and started talking, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying, surprise was evident on the guard’s face.

There came a knock at the shed’s door, and Boron turned his head, surprised to see who was knocking. “Hydroxide?” He questioned, rushing to open the door. “What’s going on?”

The shed was small, a scrap-metal building just behind Hydro and Cat’s home, inside this shed was the sum total of Boron’s worldly possessions. Most of them either gifts from the family who had saved him from a life of homelessness or relics from his life before that. On a makeshift metal ponnequin was a tattered yellow greatcoat with lead helmet and plating, the plating equally old and battered, with several repairs featuring more common metals, such as steel. On a hoof-crafted metal desk was a rubber mask with air filters, one of the glass lenses was broken, but nothing could be done about it, glass was harder to find than lead, and most of it went to making the quartz crystals used in crystal thaumaturgy.

Hydroxide took in the room, it only now occurred to Boron that this was the first time the stallion had seen the shed, “Boron… Sulphuric Acid has gone insane! She’s ordered the execution of a pony!”

Sputtering Boron turned to his former master, “W-What! Who is it, what could they have possibly done to warrant such-”

“Petrochemical.”

Boron’s eyes went wide, realizing that this was partially his own fault, “When!”

“Tomorow-”

“Do something about it!”

“I’ve tried! Celestia damn it! I’ve tried! But she won’t listen, she thinks that the mare was the one who destroyed the thaumic engine!”

“Have you talked to Clockwork or Cogwheel?”

“No-”

“Then I’m going to.”

At that, Boron marched out of the shack, pushing the other stallion out of his way and running out the door. “Wait!” Shouted Hydroxide, “You’ve been a good friend of mine for over a decade, and I know exactly what you’re thinking.”

“You won’t be stopping me, if that’s what you’re planning.”

“No… I have something to help, something one of my Liquidators had recovered from last mission.”

Somewhere, kilometres away and thousands of floors up, a room, made from arcane crystals and the finest metals, held an ancient and intricate piece of arcane machinery, older than the city itself. Inside the crystal, hundreds and hundreds of spell matrixes lay dormant, waiting for an activation signal. The machine once ran on its own, it’s purpose was to serve as a defence mechanism, absorbing the magical energies of every living creature and using that power for itself, with that power it would prevent any major disasters from threatening the lives of the magical creatures in the world, as any major decrease in living creatures would result in less energy for the machine… Like a predator scaring away the scavengers from its meal…

However, something had gone wrong, and the machine now lay dormant… Six encrypted signals are required to activate the six primary processing matrixes, each of them controlling a separate function of the machine… Until recently, the neurological sensory mechanisms had not found signals strong enough to initiate the activation sequence for even a single of the processing matrixes, but now, one of the millions of individual signals was starting to grow stronger.

The machine hadn’t been completely dormant, approximately eighty-seven-thousand hours ago the machine had detected a very short increase in one of the background signals… A pulse of magic that had been enough to activate some of the secondary functions of the machine… Now another signal was starting to grow power.

Loyalty had been detected.

Marching down the length of the train known to the ponies of the Hub as the Central Line, was a stallion in an old and battered liquidator uniform, his face covered by a scarf and glasses. He marched toward the armoury, in the fifth wagon, he had talked the liquidator’s captain into letting him have some extra time to train with some of the more advanced weapons the liquidators had at their disposal.

He used the key, old and battered just like his own uniform, to unlock the armoury door. Inside were hundreds of devices that most ponies outside the liquidators had absolutely no knowledge of… He found a hoof-full of devices small enough to hide in a saddlebag, searching among them for the cleanest, least damaged of the bunch.

Continuing down the line, he eventually came to the very back of the train, where he found a series of tiny rooms behind bulkhead doors. A guard was sitting at the desk… With any luck, she’ll be one of the less obedient guards. With a very deep and gravelly voice, he said, “Shift change, I’ll handle the prisoner…”

The mare guarding suddenly stood up… The stallion in the coat tried to suppress any signs of shock as the mare ran toward him, he was sure the mare was about to capture him as an intruder. Even more shocking was the hug the stallion found himself in.

Up close, the stallion could now see that the mare’s coat was a pale white, with a silvery-white mane and pale, nearly white, blue eyes. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou! You have no idea how boring it is to wait here!”

“Umm… Yeah…”

“Well, I’m off… Oh, you should really get that coat repaired, looks like it hasn’t been taken to a workshop in a decade.”

“Umm… Yeah…”

The mare disappeared out the door, and once he was sure he was alone, Boron took his mask and helmet off and turned to the cell. The only ponies who had the key was the Minister and the Secretary, both of whom were at the front of the train, in a place way too secure for him to safely sneak into… He didn’t have a horn, and even if he did, the cells were impervious to unicorn magic. But he didn’t need a horn to perform magic, and while the cell’s interior is lined in the magically resistant metal, the outside certainly isn’t.

Drawing a rudimentary contraption of metal, gemstones, and mythril wire, he stuck the device’s tip into the lock and pulled the trigger.

I raised my head at the sound of the door opening, outside the current guard had left and a new, large, guard, in a rather tattered and old coat had taken her place. He approached the door, and a mixture of concern and hope started to creep into my mind, that turned to worry when a bright yellowish-orange light erupted from the lock, a second later accompanied by a muffled snap-pop. Soon, the door swung open and I found myself standing before the stallion… His hushed voice silenced my worries, “Petrochem, you need-” He started to say, voice as rough and raspy as ever.

I grabbed the stallion and tried valiantly to crush him in a hug, despite the armoured barding and earth pony strength. “Chem!” He loudly whispered, something in his voice made me let go of him, “We need to get out of here…” I looked up at him curriously, “You’re scheduled to be executed tomorrow…”

“W-What, why!”

“Sulphuric Acid, and possibly even the Minister himself, believe that you had destroyed the thaumic engine on purpose, and it appears they aren’t willing to be lenient.”

“No! That can’t be right, I’m sure if Hydroxide-”

“Hydroxide has already talked with Sulphuric, and if anything, he made it worse.”

“Well… What are you doing here then! Surely you must be following someone’s orders.”

“No, I’m here to get you out regardless what anypony’s commands are.”

“Y-You mean you disobeyed the Minister!”

The stallion gave a long sigh, “Petrochem, I learned a long time ago that you can’t necessarily trust your superiors… I lied about the destruction of the engine to Hydroxide because I wanted to avoid this exact situation… But it appears I had no choice in the matter… This was bound to happen one way or another.”

There was an uncomfortable pause before I replied, “W-Well… What are we supposed to do…”

He gave another sigh and unlatched his saddlebags, passing a few devices that I carefully lifted in my telekinesis. I recognized a spare saddlebag and my utility barding right away, another was a rubber mask with a filter on the muzzle, the same as what I had seen that one liquidator wear, and there was a device I remembered from my mission the previous day.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, raising the horn-tipped boxy medical device and the five glowing red vials.

“That thing is a long-range potion injector, or a potion gun, it’s used to deliver the effects of a loaded potion over a range of a few meters, it also has the side-effect of making the potion’s effect nearly instant… Hydroxide had the device, given to him by Truncheon after he had returned to the Hub yesterday... As for the vials, the clinic has a few in storage, and with Hydoxide’s help I was able to get Caustic Burn to hoof a few of his stock over… Use them sparingly.”

I nodded and turned to a similar device held in my telekinetic grip. A rectangular plastic box, extending from one end was a hoof-width glass tube with a crystal core, leading to a sharp metal spike, this one featuring no grooves, unlike the potion gun. It had a very similar mouth-handle on one side, and on the back was some kind of cable receptacle. What was obviously a crystalline battery extending from the bottom, “And this?”

“Be careful with that!” He nearly yelled, swatting the device out of my magic and carefully holding it in his hooves, “Honestly… I’ve never gotten the chance to hold one before, I’ve only seen some of the more senior liquidators use these, and they’re a well-kept secret outside the liquidators… It’s an energy pistol… From what was explained to me back when I was with the liquidators, these use a thaumaelectric converter to convert electric energy into magical energy, the magic is then used to cast a spell that breaks apart molecular bonds, it leaves the target a pile of atomic dust, kept from reacting with itself by residual magics and causing a fire or explosion that could harm the user… It even works on biological material, unlike most other spells.”

“S-So… I-It’s a w-weapon?”

“Yes…”

“W-Why are you giving it to me?”

“You can’t stay inside the Hub… Hell, I wouldn’t even stay inside the Habitable Zone if I were you, and you saw how dangerous it was outside first-hoof…”

I didn’t want it, especially with how dangerous it was, but the logical part of my mind, still screaming at Boron for his disobedience against the Minister, knew that I would be better off with it. Boron continued, “See the lights on the battery,” He pointed with a hoof, “If it ever turns red, that means that you’re running out of power, and so make sure to recharge it regularly if you can reach a power outlet.”

I nodded, “Now get going,” He finished, “I’ve wasted enough time already, you need to get out of here.”

After a pause, I said, “O-Ok, lead the way.” Boron just shook his head.

“I-I don’t know what to do next… I would suggest just cutting through the walls, but that would take too long and draw way too much attention… I’ve heard rumours of a few secret doors, but I wouldn’t know where to look for them, and it would be ungodly stupid to use one of the main airlocks… If I just had a bit more time I could plan… Something. But I don’t have any more time, so you’ll just be left on your own from now.”

“Y-You’re c-coming too... R-Right?” Any semblance of confidence I had started to develop suddenly shattered.

“No… After hearing what Sulphuric Acid had planned for you, I can’t leave the rest of the ponies here, they could be in just as much danger, and breaking you out certainly won’t help the situation.” I nodded, as much as I needed Boron’s help right now, he had a very good point.

“For that matter, I can’t be seen helping you, if they knew I broke you out I’d either have to take the fall or run and doing that would leave the ponies here without any help… I’m sorry.”

I nodded… It was all I could do, my throat had gone dry and my mouth had closed up… There was nothing I could say, even if I wanted to. Boron looked sickened as he marched up to the back door of the Central Line, stuck a device I recognized as my magical cutter into the door, and bit down on the handle, eliciting a snapping-popping noise from the door before throwing it open.

Boron galloped through the open door and disappeared from sight. I paused for a moment as I wondered where Boron had gone, and how I could escape from the Hub, then there came a muffled noise from somewhere behind me, “Lithium, it’s shift change... “ Came a mare’s voice, as the door further into the Central Line started opening.

The mare on the other side had only moments to process what she was seeing before I lept out the back door and slammed it with a reverberating metal clang. Immediately I realized my mistake as I heard the mare gallop forward and a magical pressure start pushing against my own telekinesis. Damn, she was a unicorn too.

I couldn’t hold the door forever, and pushing against this other mare was a constant drain on my magic… I started pumping more and more power into my magic and switched the spell matrix, suddenly there was a flash of light. The overpowered welding spell was directed only by the shadow of the telekinesis I had just dispelled, thus when I opened my eyes, I saw that the entire door was fused to itself and the doorframe.

There came a loud knock, and a shout from behind the door, and I turned to run down the length of the track. In the distance was the massive wall of the Hub, a giant cap that closed the ends of the cylinder, apparently they could act as doors, and be opened into massive tunnels that moved all throughout the city, but were sealed shut… Whatever the case, I certainly wasn’t going to be escaping through them.

I was further confused at where Boron had gone when I noticed that there was no bridge from the Central Line’s tracks to the Hub’s platforms. The hooves pounding on the door grew alarmingly louder and I stared out to see the central platform, far enough away that I wasn’t going to try jumping any time soon…

There came a loud reverberating boom and the door behind me buckled in, another few hits, particularly by an earth pony, and the door would break free… I had heard stories about some unicorns trying to levitate themselves, I had tried once before and found that it was a really good way of draining one’s magical energy, but there are a few who have done it, even if it was only for a few moments before the spell broke… There came another loud boom and one of the door’s hinges broke free.

But, what about levitating something else to use as a platform, it certainly isn’t as hard as moving a living creature, who, even when trying not to, makes all kinds of little unintended movements that make holding a telekinetic grip much harder, but there’s still the issue of weight… Another bang and the door broke free.

A unicorn and a pair of earth ponies came marching out of the waggon, drawing knives from their pockets. I caught the door as it fell in my telekinesis and levitated it over the edge of the rail. The unicorn hurled her knife at me in a streak of cyan, I applied a little telekinetic pressure, not so much as to break my concentration on holding the door still, but enough to change the knife’s trajectory just enough to miss me. I started running toward the group who stood still and waited for me to run into them… As if I was dumb enough to run into a herd of knife-wielding ponies.

At the last moment I swerved right and lept out over the edge of the rail, landing on my door turned floating platform. Suddenly there was an incredible weight on my magic and a sharp stabbing pain at the base of my horn, the spell broke and the door and I was sent tumbling down. Reacting with all the speed of thermite I kicked forward and reached my hooves out to grab the railing of the central platform… And I missed by a millimetre.

Thoughts raced through my head as I fell, and a sudden pain in my side, accompanied by a sickening crunch, broke them from my mind… This wasn’t the same burning feeling as I would have expected from falling into the acid pool.

I flopped around and saw that I had landed on the lower platform of the Hub, nearly missing breaking my back on the railing. The door made an impressive splash when it impacted the acid pool, and that, of all things, was the thing to restore my lucidity. Realizing that the crack earlier was most likely a broken leg or rib, and that I certainly wasn’t going to be moving with such injury, I drew from my bag, with what little strength I could muster, my potion gun and loaded it with a healing potion, remembering the way it had worked when last I had nearly died from falling.

I slid the potion vial into the back of the gun, pulled the trigger, waited for what felt like a painful eternity as the gun charged, and felt the cool energy wash over me as the gun administered the potion… Four left, best not get too injured in my escape attempt… Better than dying though.

As I unsteadily got to my hooves, feeling a numbness in my right foreleg that was slowly transforming back into a deep aching pain, I heard some shouts from above and saw the liquidator ponies go marching out of the Central Line over to the central platform, heading for the stairs. “Shit!” I muttered, and looked around for anywhere to go.

I hadn’t landed far from an airlock… It was dumb, there was a record centre pony in there who was probably going to record all my information, take up all the time I had, and more than likely try to stop me if she had any idea why I needed to go outside this late… But it was the only path I had left. I reached the airlock as the unicorn and her liquidator friends got to the bottom of the stairs. “I need to get out! It’s an emergency!” I shouted as I pounded on the airlock door.

“P-Petrochem?! Is that you!” Came a colt’s voice from the other side.

“Open up damn it!”

“R-Right away!”

The airlock door began to cycle as another knife was thrown in my direction by the blue-magic unicorn. I focused all my telekinetic strength on the point of the blade, shock and dumbfoundedness mixing in my mind as I stared at the knife, now held in a golden-yellow field, mere centimetres from my eye.

Still holding the knife in my telekinesis, the door opened and I rushed into the airlock room. The little red and white stallion stared at me in shock, “Chem? What’s going on!”

“You there! Colt! Apprehend the mare! She is a prisoner of the Minister and scheduled for execution tomorrow!” Shouted the unicorn mare.

“C-Chem?” Photon said, worry evident in his voice.

Shit, the Liquidators had already caught up with me. Behind me I saw the mare and her little team galloping up to meet me. My mind raced to come up with a way out of this situation, I stared at the colt, clearly confused… “Photon, I might need to hurt you, but just play along,” I whispered to him.

He just stared at me confused as I drew my recently stolen knife from my saddlebag and pointed it at his throat. “Stop, or the kid gets his throat sliced!” I yelled, trying my best to sound confident, the adrenaline giving my voice the much needed boost.

The liquidators halted in their tracks. Good. I reached out with my magic and grabbed the switch, a dozen emotions battled for supremacy on the unicorn mare’s face as I pulled the switch and started the airlock’s cycle. Eventually, anger won, and she growled before yelling, “Come back here! Hand the kid over-”

I drew back the knife and launched it with all my telekinetic force at the mare, aiming between her breast and foreleg. She gave a pained gasp as the knife punctured her coat, moving right between the lead pauldron and breastplate, eliciting a blotch of deep red. She growled again, this time with some obvious pain as she stopped to pull the knife from her coat, winning just enough time for the door to finish closing. There came a blood-chilling yell of rage from the other side, and something striking the airlock door, but I didn’t wait around any longer, pausing just long enough to use the welding and cutting spells to thoroughly ruin the airlock’s controls, promising to myself that when this all got sorted out I’d help in the repair effort.

Meanwhile from his perch on the catwalk just below the Central Line, Boron muttered to himself, observing the herd of liquidators running off to other airlocks, “Wow… That was pretty damn ballsy.”

Deep, dark, in a place far below the industrial sectors of the city, near the automated underbelly, an abomination roamed. Electric blue eyes glowed, illuminating a silvery creature of fur and scales, electric sparks flying from razor teeth. This creature was hunting for sustenance… Nothing as simple as physical food, but rather the magical energies that keep such magical entities alive

This creature too was being hunted. In the large atrium that formed this particular room, there stood another beast, while it bore some obvious marks of femininity, this creature was far from pony standards, a muscular body adorned by aquiline wings bearing all the markings of a predator. This was no ordinary feral animal, as it held in its grasp a machine, a weapon.

With a pull of a trigger, there was a flash of multicolored light, and the abomination had ceased. The death of this beast brought hope to the she-creature’s tribe, with luck, they would persist another week. With her duty complete, the she-creature dropped to the floor of the atrium and, with claws like meat-hooks, started flaying her kill.

Once I had explained the situation to Photon, we continued on through the Habitable zone, with a goal of getting as far from the Hub as possible. “So, what exactly are we going to do?” Photon said.

“We! You should be trying to get back to the Hub, not following me around!”

“Well, I can’t just leave you here on your own! I want to help, and from how it sounds, I doubt Sulphuric Acid would just let me back into the Hub, if you were locked up just on a rumour that you had broken the T-engine, then I doubt I’ll be any better off if I somehow ‘escaped my capture and wandered back on my own’”

“You have a point, but none the less, I think it would be safer if you stayed in the Habitable Zone, I’m more experienced being outside the Hub, and as you are now, you’ll only be a liability.”

“Then teach me… Or something… Thanks to you, I can’t go back to the Hub, and I’m safer with you than without, I can help Celestia damn it!”

“Help? You’re a unicorn colt, barely a stallion, you spend all your time among metal plates doing nothing but talking!”

“I can read and write! Unlike you, and that could help!”

“How is that going to help, we’re surviving, not record-keeping.”

At that, photon lifted his hoof and pointed to a plate of metal bolted to the wall, a series of symbols and an arrow painted on it, “That says: Industrial District Railway Hub, 500-meters…” If we were stuck out here and lost, that can point you right back home.

“But I can’t go back home.”

“So, use the sign and go in the opposite direction… What would happen if you saw a sign above a door that said something like ‘Warning: Unstable Thaumic Explosives, don’t touch’, for all you know it would be an invitation to a warehouse of fresh sugarcane!”

“There would be a pictogram on the door!”

“Good luck finding those outside the Habitable Zone, we don’t do much exploring out there.”

I rolled my eyes, he had a point, “Fine, but it won’t be my fault if you trip and fall down a pit.”

The two of us continued, all the while I lamented my luck, getting abducted by the Liquidators, getting chased out of the Hub, and getting stuck with a frail little stallion…. Celestia, couldn’t you have at least given me a pretty mare instead!

We eventually arrived at a doorway that had been sealed shut with thick metal plates. My horn lit up with the cutting spell and started slicing my way through, “What are you doing?” Asked Photon Ray.

“I think we've reached the edge of the Habitable Zone, keep an eye out, don’t want any liquidators to see us.”

He nodded and I continued cutting... Failing to spot a pony hiding just around the corner of a corridor. Soon I had removed enough metal to climb through, Photon following right behind. We found ourselves in a surprisingly comfortable room, on one wall was a series of massive boxy machine with hundreds of wires extending from the boxes, there were a few devices covered in dials and glass screens and plenty of thaumic crystals… Even if I couldn’t see them, as they were buried inside the machinery, I could feel the magical energies they emitted, luckily this place wasn’t too saturated in magic.

I set my saddlebag down and started getting out my barding, with all the running I had yet to find time to put it on. It was a little bit of a painful experience, with a recently mended broken leg, but I had hastily put on both the jacket and pants before I flopped to the floor, using my now empty saddlebag as a pillow, and tried to sleep.

“Chem, what are you doing now?” Asked Photon.

“Used a lot of magic, ran a lot, now I just want to sleep.”

“Sleep, here? We’re only barely outside the Habitable Zone, the Liquidators will find us.”

“I welded up the door again, plus it’s a big city, and the liquidators are too scared to go outside the Habitable Zone, they won’t find us.”

“Room full of magical explosives… Chem.”

“What does that have to do with anything…”

“I was pointing out how your judgment seems a little flawed by referencing our previous argument.”

“Keep your references to yourself, I’m sleeping now.”

Despite having closed my eyes, I could feel Photon rolling his. He was just being paranoid, why couldn't he see that… I curled up into a ball, wincing a bit at the pain in my foreleg, and let my exhaustion claim me.

Sulphuric Acid sat in her office, thinking… The mare, at the very least, wasn’t dumb enough to stay anywhere near the habitable zone… The further you went outside, the more dangerous it got. Sulphuric Acid started to smile as thoughts passed through her mind… This could serve as another excuse to recruit more liquidators, since, with a dangerous vandal and colt-kidnapper on the loose, there will need to be more protection around the borders of the Habitable Zone… Plus, there was no way a mare like her could survive a day outside, Acid was considering just letting the mare get chewed up by the city itself.

But that wouldn’t look good to the citizens, they will want justice for the kidnapped colt… Luckily, there were a few potential troublemakers that needed to be dealt with, preferably sooner rather than later… Send some less than trustworthy liquidators out there, best case scenario, most of them die, but one or two return with the colt to show the ponies of the Hub how brave and strong their liquidators, and by extension, their minister is… Worst case scenario, they all die and she could use it as an excuse to increase the recruitment of liquidators again.

Smiling, Sulphuric Acid stood and said to the guard outside her office, “Bring me Lithium Lance, Xenon Glow, and Truncheon Trauma.”

Author's Note

For reference, the Energy Pistol is essentially a cross between a Fallout Plasma Pistol and Warhammer Laspistol.