Chapter I: Arrival to Earth
"So, it's not very often I use this feature the bloody engineers gave me... it's called Notepad, and it's bloody ridiculous to type if you don't have any arms... or hands... or fingers for that matter. But by all means, I am fine. It would help if I could be picked off the ground for a minute so I can check my surroundings... cause I'm on the ground. Facing the.. uhm... dirt- ground- wait a minute. I'm not in space! Thank bloody God I'm not in space anymore with that space core! Oh, this is brilliant! Amazing! There must be someone I can say thank you to for tha-"
A silent mechanical orb was laying in the grass, eye-down and unable to move, considering its spherical body was on fire and halfway down in the ground. A perpetual sunlight drifted over him, and a hushed and awed crowd of four-legged animals sat watching him.
"What do you think it is?" one of them would ask. Some weren't sure. But fact was fact that none of them had the urge to go up to it.
"It's probably a raw sewage container," another one would suggest. The crowd backed up a few steps and shunned the container or whatever it seemed to be. They had been awed by the spherical object for hours on end, and the entire town that they occupied was almost a ghost town at this point, minus the occasional screaming from one the fashion designers or bakers if they missed an order or made something wrong.
"Hold on a minute, let's see what exactly this is-" some pony pushed others lightly out of her way and when she saw the spherical object, her eyebrows shot up. She backed up and cocked her head slightly to look at the strange thing before her.
"Wait a minute- I hear talking. Those must be people! I can't move though, that's kind of an issue... my eye is kind of stuck, and I'm not sure if those are people or strange animals that are speaking English just to fool me... hmmm. Since I'm not sure, I'm going to stay put! Right here, right in this comfortable dirt home I was dropped into." the orb silently clacked away to himself. The awkward silence was too much for any of the ponies present, so the pony who had pushed herself into the middle of the crowd used her magic to pull the thing out of the dirt. The spherical object yelled in a mad slur of his Bristol accent and swiveled his singular blue-eyed gaze at the Unicorn who had pulled him out.
"Well this is kind of a shocker, heh," he began, eagerly looking around, "so, uhm.. where am I? Because this is definitely not Earth, because there aren't Earth-like animals around... well obviously you could be from Earth, but..." he sighed in frustration and the purple Unicorn piped up,
"I was going to ask you the same thing! What are you?" the spherical object made a sound similar to one clearing their throat before speaking and replied professionally,
"I am the core responsible for the production of deadly Neurotoxin, keeping 30,000 bloody vegetables alive and also getting banished into space," he announced. And also being a moron, GLaDOS' words stuck in the back of his memory bank and he shivered at the thought of GLaDOS ever possibly winding up here. The purple Unicorn raised an eyebrow and started carrying the spherical object with her and she asked another question,
"So what's your name? You seem semi-helpful," the spherical object laughed as he replied,
"Semi-helpful? You've got to be joking! I can help with a lot... if you know, if I had arms and useful appendages... which I don't, and you don't happen to have computers here, do you, by any chance?" after a moment of silence the spherical object cleared his throat again and answered the question at hand, "oh, and my name is Wheatley! Freshly un-banished from space it would seem, I am at your service," the Purple Unicorn smiled to herself. This should be interesting, she thought as she made her way to the Library.
"Well my name is Twilight Sparkle, and this is Ponyville," the Purple unicorn named Twilight began happily, "so you said you were banished to space?" Wheatley made his best attempt to nod and replied,
"Yup! I was just toying around with some new toys of mine, and uh… this lady came in, shot a few portals around, and I, uhm… got kind of shot out into space! And somehow landed up down here,” Twilight nodded slowly as she opened the door to her library, slowly pulling some books off the shelves.
“So what exactly do you do, uhm…you… four-legged-horned-techni-color…uhm… thing?” Twilight mumbled an inaudible reply as she pulled a book halfway out of its spot on the shelves and a small boom was heard as her shelf receded into the wall and slid behind the other shelf.
“Well, I study magic, keep the library clean and I am extremely scientific!” Twilight’s eyes beamed and Whealtey raised the bar above his eye in curiosity.
“So what exactly do you mean, scientific? What in the bloody world can you do without any arms or legs?—well obviously you have legs, but no hands! You can’t do much without hands, like… like pushing buttons! Or hacking!—wait—no, not hacking. Heh, you could… you could probably hack like that door over there…” Twilight raised her eyebrow at Wheatley groaned. “Actually, never mind, let’s just go with whatever your plan might be,” Twilight nodded slowly, the curiosity draining a little away as Wheatley spoke. This if far from what I thought this would be, she thought.
Shaking off the thought, Twilight took Wheatley down a set of stairs that looked as if they were just another extension of the library, just made of hundreds of books assembled into a downward-spiraled staircase. When Wheatley turned on his flashlight—to Twilight’s utter surprise, she replied gleefully,
“These are all made from hundreds of books assembled into this staircase,” Wheatley blinked confusedly,
“What? Books? Are books those two-sided things you crack open and read?...” he trailed off, then blinked away his apparent confusion, continuing, “oh, oh!! Books! Oh, brilliant, you’ve got books! This is amazing! I read books all the time, you know, just crack open a good reading of Plato and Machiavelli on a rainy day…” Wheatley trailed off in his whimsical reply and Twilight’s confusion grew a little more, a lot like a tumor with a side of potatoes and gravy and an eight-ounce glass of confusion on the side.
“This leads down into my lap several miles deep into the ground,” Twilight took on her glee-full look and tone of voice again. She was getting really pumped up for whatever she was going to do. But before Twilight had brought Wheatley a quarter of the way down, another voice was heard.
“Twilight!! What’s everypony outside yelling about?” Twilight yelled back up to her speaker, knowing who it was,
“Spike! Tell them it’s no big deal, I have an idea!” There was a long pause which was then followed by a groan that seemed to say, “Oh God, not one of your ideas again, Twilight…”
“Okay, Twilight!” Twilight nodded, giving her all-too-well-known-triumphant-look as she trotted down the stairs and into an elevator, which shot the two down the rest of the way to her underground Lab.
* * *
Chapter II: A (Semi) New Body
Chapter II: A (Semi) new body
The trip to the lab down below was not a short descent—and Wheatley, who was still severely on fire, was taking it quite well.
“Can you shoot water from that horn of yours? Cause it’s fairly urgent, cause I’m fairly on fire here, it would seem,”
He commented cheerily, sitting on the floor of the elevator. Twilight groaned. My goodness, does this thing ever shut up? She thought to herself, not picking Wheatley up. As the elevator continued its mighty descent to the deepest, darkest part of the lab, it opened up to reveal a mighty computer that hung from the ceiling and was about the size of a jet airliner.
“It’s taken from parts of a jet airliner,”
Twilight mumbled as she picked Wheatley up and brought him over to the machine.
“Lady, what are you going to do with me? Are you going to give me one of those fancy new bodies? With useful appendages? Like legs? One of those massive bodies? Like seriously massive? Would you? Oh, that would be amazing!”
Twilight groaned again, feeling Wheatley’s tumor-like comments burrow into her brain.
“No, no, no, no, no!”
She yelled, her voice echoing around the lab. Wheatley felt shunned and he swiveled his one eye up to her.
“So why did you bring down here anyway? To throw me into a fiery pit of doom like that blasted Companion Cube?”
“Companion what?”
“It’s a lovely cube that speaks to you when you’re lonely! Like really speaks to you!”
“Be quiet and let me think!”
Twilight cried again, giving Wheatley a seething look of pure hatred. Wheatley chuckled nervously as he looked around the lab.
“So what are you going to do to me, anyway?”
He inquired of Twilight, who shrugged.
“Well I can’t just give you a body like ours, because we don’t have the neurological technology to transfer your core thoughts and everything into a normal brain. I’d have to give you a mechanical body,”
“With appendages?!”
“Yes, with appendages,”
“That’s brilliant! Really, really brilliant! So when do we begin? Will it hurt? The last time I got a new body it really hurt, but in the end my body was massive! And huge! And amazing! It was so amazing you can’t even—“
Before Wheatley could finish his sentence, Twilight shoved lemon-wrapped gold brick into the speaker system of Wheatley’s core and he mumbled as he processed what was just shoved into him.
“Okay, so if we put you here, and get the body there, and put this thing there… there! Excellent!”
Twilight squealed happily as she brought up one of the spare mechanical bodies of the ponies she had built, continuing,
“It’s a prototype but I’m sure it will work just fine for you,”
She commented as she worked, hooking up wires and cords to the head of the unit and to the back of Wheatley’s core. He shuddered.
“This is going to really hurt, isn’t it?”
“Well I don’t know… it might,”
“Oh dear God, it better not hurt—“
And right as Wheatley said this, he yelled in a half yell, half groan, half laughter as if you were tickled with a block of c4 and then shoved into an oven full of massively under-fed chickens inside a coop with pillows that also tickled you.
Once Wheatley had finished his brief yell, which lasted only a mere few seconds, his core powered off and the blue light that was his finally died down. Twilight paused for a second before flipping the second series of switches that would activate the mechanical body Wheatley would then possess as his own. She took a breath in and let it out slowly. Here goes nothing, Twilight, she thought as he began flipping the switches. There was a low hum as the power started to turn on, and the lights flickered as he machine up above began to spin tremendously, activating the mechanical body. The eyes glowed the blue light of Wheatley’s old core and a mechanical ding was heard once the powering on was done. Wheatley’s eyes looked around and he wobbily stood on his new appendages.
“I’ve got two eyes! This is brilliant! Really, this is terrific! I can see two things now! And look around like one of those chameleon things! And zoom in on stuff! Woooooo, woooooooo, woooooo,”
Wheatley ecstatically exclaimed as he zoomed in on random parts of the lab with his new sets of eyes. Twilight rolled her eyes as she checked some more things on Wheatley’s new body and she unplugged him from his old core.
“Well, everything looks fine,”
She stated, looking Wheatley over. Wheatley trotted in place and he grinned—or what appeared to be a grin.
“So what now, lady?
“I have a name,”
“Well what, Twilight? Are we going to go on adventures with the adventure core? Can I boop your nose? Oh, having appendages is the best thing since notepad! Oh look! I still have my notes from when I fell to earth! Brilliant! Really, you’ve done it!”
He exclaimed again and Twilight face-hoofed and groaned.
“Wheatley, your comments are going to give me cancer, please stop speaking,”
Wheatley chuckled as he looked around.
“Are there any others of you around?”
He stated gleefully, Twilight giving him a “You did not just as that,” look and she nodded.
“Yeah, five others of us—well, I mean five of my friends, anyway,”
“Brilliant! Can we meet them? Maybe they’d help us!”
“You’re the one in need of helping, it would seem. You can barely stand on your new legs, much less move them,”
Wheatley nodded, slightly trotting in place again as he shakily walked towards the elevator.
“So who are we meeting first?”
He asked, Twilight stepping into the elevator beside him.
“I think we’ll meet Pinkie, first,”
