Pegasus Device: Reckoning

“Hey, hey, hey! Come on buddy, watch your flockin’ step!” The deep voice boomed, stressing ‘buddy’ like buh-dee. Stormy Night was shouting too, but his voice had been drowned out by the burly stallion next to him.

“Oh, uh, sorry!” A smaller stallion pleaded, flitting out of the way. “I just had to lock the converters in place so I was-”

“Nobody cares, featherbrain. Out of the way, this is heavy!”

Stormy Night and his coworker glared at the other worker until he had moved out of the way, then continued to lug the huge contraption in their hooves towards the wall. They set it down as gently as one can set a five-hundred pound mass of machinery, and then he got to work pulling straps out of the cloud wall and ratcheting them down to the floor, securing the device. “That ain’t going nowhere,” he said proudly.

His deep-voiced coworker had gone off somewhere else, and Stormy flew over to the checklist on a nearby desk. He muttered as he read each one in line, following each task with a soft “check”. He got to the last item, and then nodded and set the clipboard down. “Computers stowed and desks locked. Nice.”

A mare’s voice crackled through his communicator. “Command to Squadron Five, sitrep.”

He tapped his radio with his chin and responded curtly. “Squadron Five to Command, final task in progress. ETA fifteen minutes.”

“Colonel says make it ten.”

“Understood.” He chuckled after turning his radio off. He would do it in five, but had to play these games with his crew. Too loose with your replies, and you’d find yourself on smog-clearing duty. Too rigid, and no pony would want to play with you. Stormy Night busied himself, powering off and unplugging loose computer peripherals before stowing them away in pre-formed cloud compartments. Once everything was safely in its home, he closed the cupboards and desk drawers, secured each one with a strip of grey sticky tape, and shook it hard for a minute to make sure nothing was loose. Satisfied, he tapped his radio again.

“Squadron Five to Command. All tasks completed. Requesting further directions.”

“Understood Squadron Five. Stand by.” There was a pause and Stormy Night waited expectantly, looking around the warehouse.

He was in one of the CWC Auxiliary Factories; specifically the headquarters for Trotland activities. The warehouse he was in opened to the sky outside, and was normally filled to the brim with various utilities used by the Corporation for weather manipulation. He looked at the Cloud Condensers, large boiler-like things with rows of recursively looping pipes, now bolted down in series on the floor. A vat of liquid thunder towered over them, with more safety straps and cushions around it than Stormy had ever seen. In the centre of the room was a series of three tarped, mastaba shaped devices, with a cylindrical bulge off to the side of each. These were the Chaos Conversion Generators, and their presence here reminded him of what was to come.

He stopped for a moment and thought about how quickly life had changed for him. Just over an hour or so ago, he was laying in bed, his next shift still a good four hours off from starting, before every internal alarm in the Auxiliary went off at once. The cacophony had ended shortly after every pegasus in the building was roused, but he could swear it was still repeating itself in the back of his mind.

“Contingency B is now in effect. Clear. Clear. Clear. Contingency B is now in effect. Clear. Clear. Clear…” it had gone, over and over, with shrieking whistles and strobing lights to highlight the importance. He had heard it before, plenty of times, in practices and drills, but he never really believed it would occur during his lifetime. The Reckoning was serious, he knew- but they had a hundred years to deal with it, didn’t they?

Apparently not, he thought, floating slowly around his workplace while he waited for instructions. He ducked through an opening in the floor above him, double checking the other squadrons’ work for any clear mistakes. He felt strange. He would be leaving the communities he had gotten used to, the few friends on the ground that he had made during his shore leave, the special cuisine he had come to love. He ran a hoof gently across the wall while he wandered, grateful at least that he didn’t need to leave his home. No, that would be coming with them. Or rather, they with it. His radio squeaked, and he stopped.

“Squadron Five leader, we have a report from Squadron Two that one of the relocation engines did not pass pre-inspection. Are you able to assist?”

Stormy Night looked back at his flank and the wrench and ruler displayed proudly on his side. “On my way, Control,” he said, before flipping in the air and diving through the cloud floor. He made his way down to the first floor of the factory and sailed out through the open bay door before circling around to the bottom of the cloud the whole facility rested on. There were three cylindrical objects here, dwarfing the pegasus with their massive size. He flew over and met up with the squadron leader who was in the middle of barking orders at various ponies.

“Which one, and what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Speak up, inky,” The leader yelled to Stormy Night, referencing the mechanic’s charcoal hide. They were under the building, after all, and a rush of wind and the roar of the two functional engines had eliminated every trace of Stormy’s quiet voice.

“Which engine, sir!” he shouted back, “And what step of inspection failed?”

The mare pointed at the engine affixed at the four o’clock position above them. “No ignition, obviously. We think it’s the spark plugs, but it’s only a guess.”

Stormy nodded and grabbed a tool bag from one of the other squadron’s ponies before heading to the engine in question. The massive barrel was affixed to a circular base coming out of the bottom of the factory, which could pivot and spin the engine for steering. The cool grey metal shone in their work-lights, and he slid a hoof along the steel with the same longing he had with the factory walls above. These had been his babies, his main responsibility after basic weather duties, maintaining the relocation engines for this very moment. He opened up a large panel and double checked all of the settings. Satisfied, he slid the choke down and, pressing his ear to the cylinder, held in a large red button and listened.

Tic tic tic tic tic came the reply, and he nodded. There was a fuel delivery failure. He slid the choke back up and closed the panel, and then clambered up the engine to where it met the mount it was affixed to. Squeezing in, he popped a lock on another panel and shoved it back. Before him was a mess of wires and tubes, carefully guided around and away from a huge driveshaft. He dug through the cables and found a large, clear hose. It was stained slightly yellow, and he moved along towards the exhaust of the engine while carefully examining the hose inch by inch. When the extent of his reach ran out, he set everything back carefully and replaced the panel, and then slid open the next one. He pulled the hose out again and noted it was free of discolouration. He went backwards now, tracing it towards the fuel tank, when he finally pulled a section out that had a jagged tear.

“Flockin’ pigeons,” he sighed. He reached into the bag and pulled out a set of shears. Moving quickly he cut out the chewed portion of vinyl and pressed the two new ends together. Doing his best to hold the ends together with one hoof, he pulled out a roll of bright yellow tape and then wrapped the ends together. He tore the strip off the roll, smiled once at his work, and then closed the engine up and slid down into the air.

“Try her again, sir,” he shouted at the waiting pegasi around him. One of them, a stallion with a cartoon explosion on his flank, moved forward and performed the same actions at the ignition as Stormy Night had.

There was relative silence for a moment, but then a deep ‘whoom’pushed all the floating ponies back an inch and a flow of yellow--and then blue--plasma blasted out of the exhaust. It dimmed down and light whoops could be heard from the pegasi.

The voice of the squadron leader who had shouted at him came over his radio. “Command, this is Squadron Two. We have all three engines idling now. Requesting further instructions.”

“Understood Squadron Two,” Command responded. “Stand by.”

Stormy Night hovered in the dimming light of the setting sun. He looked to the east and saw, just past the horizon from his high perspective, thunderheads beginning to form. He frowned, and a pang of guilt twisted his stomach. He shook his head and turned to the west, admiring the sunset.

“Squadrons One through Six, all preparations have been completed. Prepare for departure sequence at twenty-hundred hours. Squadrons One and Two, first shift is on leads. Squadrons Three and Four, first shift on side patrol, and Squadrons Five and Six, first shift on rudder. Shift change at oh-two-hundred hours.”

All six squadron leaders squawked their acknowledgements in order, and Stormy Night headed up to the east side of the factory’s foundation, sighing. Six hours of pushing this brick, he thought. And then we get to pull it. Great. He smiled though, despite his complaints. He had been away from Cloudsdale for ten years now, and longed to see his home again. Letters to his parents had never been enough, and though there was a lot of work before him, seeing them again would be worth it all.

He settled in between the deep voiced stallion and the smaller one that had got in their way earlier, resting his forehooves on the edge of the cloud with the others. There was a tense silence in the air now, the roar of the engines--designed to make moving the massive factory possible in the first place--blocked from their senses by the building between them. They waited, hovering in place, for the order to come through.

As Stormy Night waited, he glanced down, far down below him, to the tilled fields and small houses now glowing in the night. He could see--just barely--some of the villagers had come out and were watching the swarm of pegasi as they had buzzed around their hive.

“Squadrons of the Thirteenth Primary, move out!” It was a stallion’s voice coming through the radio now, a wolfish baritone that always gave Stormy Night a smile when he heard it. It was the commander of their regiment, Colonel Sundown, and his voice somehow matched exactly what Stormy Night knew he looked like. There was something about the Colonel, and his ‘old-school cool’ style that Stormy had always appreciated. On his order, he kicked off, pressing the cloud with his squad mates, and slowly it began to move to the west.

Stormy Night looked to the large stallion next to him, and tapped him with a hindleg to catch his attention. “You think we should like, at least let them know?” he said, tilting his head in the direction of the village below.

The stallion looked down and then back at Stormy, shaking his head. “It’s better for all a’ us if they’re confused,” the deep reply came. “Might mess us up if they’re angry.”

Stormy Night nodded softly, not sure if he believed it, but continued beating his wings and pressing their load away. There wasn’t much they could do to help the earth and unicorn ponies below anyways, he figured. He turned his eyes away from the village and stared ahead, thinking of Cloudsdale.

Farmer Shetland stood in the middle of his field, rubbing his tam o’shanter on his chest as the last rays of sun disappeared behind the hills to the west. His neck was craned up to where the Weather Factory had been for the last ten years, and watched as scores of pegasi, in various rigid formations, started to move their base. His right ear twitched, and he frowned.

The Auxiliary Factory had only been around their area of Trotland for about a decade. He remembered clearly the struggles of farming in rural isolation; prone to the whims of Nature for most days--save for the rare special occasion where a contingency of the weather ponies from Edinbreigh would come out to ensure celebrations were held in ideal conditions. And then, the Cloudsdale company had come over from far-away Equestria, promising hoof-crafted weather, twenty-four seven, all on a rigid schedule, for a modest trade of bits and food for their employees. It was a big occasion for him and his farm. His little village had been selected to supply the Corporation’s workers, and they would base themselves near his land.

Perfect growing conditions, for a tithe. He argued against it back when he was younger, but couldn’t disagree that it had helped his family and neighbours prosper. Sure, they had to give away a lot of their profit and crops, but they were able to grow and sell so much more with the ideal weather that they had still gained wealth. And yet, the pegasi seemed to be pulling away now with nary a notice. He snorted, and pawed at the ground in much the same way his Pappy had. Did some blasted mail-pony from the city forget to deliver a notice? Was there some issue with the payment this month? He did his dues, and now they were abandoning theirs.

Or perhaps, the idea creeped through his mind, perhaps something is terribly wrong. It had been ten years since Nature was given--mostly--free reign over this land. If the weather manipulators were to just up and quit…

A tug on his fetlocks broke his train of thought, and he looked down to see who it was. It was his youngest child, a yearling named Celtic. Celtic had never been alive to see this world without the Factory hanging silently in the air, a thousand metres above them, ever present.

“Pappy?” The colt said, his voice still a weak squeak. “Where’n they taken the fact’ry? How’re we gonna keep the early snow from taking our crops next month?”

Shetland stared into his child’s eyes, hoping to alicorns above that his own eyes didn’t show the concern he was feeling. He blinked, and forced a smile. The wrinkled eyes comforted the colt, and Celtic looked away from his father and up to the factory.

“Well, m’boy, kin’t says I know wheres it’s goin’ ta. But dontcha worry none, boy. We plowed these fields in rain afore and’ll do it again.” Shetland looked up at the distant pegasi, now black specks no larger than the stars behind them. “And we’ll getta keep all the bits we earn, too. Off ta bed wicha, now. We kin figure things out in th’ morn.”

Celtic nodded happily and pranced back to their farm house, relieved. But Shetland didn’t share his son’s relief. A gust of wind, far too cold for the early autumn evening, rustled his fetlocks. He stared unblinkingly at the weather factory until it finally dimmed from sight, standing alone in his field save for the scraping sound of dead leaves on dry dirt.

Behind him, to the east, thunder rumbled.

Luna meandered through the dark halls of Canterlot Castle, her mind elsewhere. Each hoofstep echoed off the marble floor, calling out and receiving its own, lonely reply. The sun had just set, and the tumultuous black clouds that had been rolling towards the mountain all day had finally arrived. A hailstorm, the weather ponies had reported, would need to occur to set some other regions to the north back on track. It was not the type of night that Luna enjoyed, but she had her duty, and didn’t complain. Elsewhere, her sister slept solidly, in a dreamless sleep after a long day of paperwork, diplomacy, and crisis management. It was a gift from Luna to Celestia, a comfortable rest; a sleep so deep she would be free from the disruption of thunder and hail, set to a timer so she would wake only as early as she absolutely needed to.

A soft rumble met Luna’s ears, but she didn’t hear it. She was away; her thoughts open to the world around her, though focused mainly on the castle village on the mountain plateau. Dark and stormy nights brought dark and stormy dreams, and she was slowly working through a dreamscape of scared fillies and colts, reassuring each that her moon still shone behind the clouds, and her sister’s sun would be there to light the morning.

Her muzzle twitched, and her consciousness sharpened over a particular child; a unicorn trapped by barking dogs of shadow. She hastened towards this mind and entered it as the first spatterings of rain fell on the balcony nearest her.

Manifesting her form, she came down to the colt and found him cowering. Eight hounds of void growled around him, their barks coinciding with crashes of thunder.

“Be not afraid,” she announced her presence. “Thunder is naught but noise, and cannot harm you.” She reared, and brought her hooves down on the creature in front of the colt, and it vanished into nothing. She whipped around then, blasting the remaining dogs with bolts of moonlight, and they too puffed away as if they had never been. Luna reached down towards the colt, offering a hoof up.

“P-p-princess Luna?” he asked, still trembling. “Is it really you?”

“Perhaps,” she replied, hiding a sly smirk. “Or perhaps it is simply the courage you have within you. Rest now, little one. Tomorrow will be bright and warm.”

The world around her wavered and twisted before breaking down, and Luna found herself fully in the castle. The storm was louder now, and she felt as though there were a circle of her own beasts shouting at her from outside. Shaking her head from the last vestiges of half-sleep, she noticed she was near the Throne Room, and entered it to peak outside one of the alcoves.

The storm was directly over the castle now, and the racing wind howled through the room like a dying hare. She made it to the balcony and stepped back in concern. The hail was coming down hard, like grapeshot from above. The large spheres of ice were bombarding the battlements so hard that the marble was chipping. Luna creased her brows. The forecast we were given said this would be routine, she thought. I will have Sister look into this tomorrow. Inadequate reports could hurt somepony.

She walked slowly through the room and drew the heavy curtains over the windows, quieting the clamor outside. Satisfied with the peace and quiet, she made her way to her throne and dropped to her haunches, resting regally. She surveyed the empty room, lit only now by her scintillating mane, and rested her eyes.

Her mind drifted again, and found that many more foals were seized by nightmares now. A pang of frustration shivered through her detached soul. There would be harsh words for the Weather Corporation detachment in Canterlot tomorrow.

A particular fit of terror caught her attention and she darted to it, getting there in time to see an adult, a fully grown mare, wrapped in fear. She did not recognize this pegasus, but she did recognize the environment around her. It was dark, with no windows, a maze of metal and rubber and plastic and cloud, lit only by a deep red glow as if Tartarus itself had infused itself into the core of this place. It had been a long time since Luna had seen the rainbow factory in this state, almost two decades, and she was curious as to who it was that would be dreaming of such an evil place that had been hidden to most minds. A worker, perhaps? An old employee?

Luna hovered just outside the bubble of dreamspace, watching curiously. The mare had a lilac coat and a short, glacial blue mane, and was running fast down the non-existent hallways of the old factory. Her hooves clanged on the metal grating, echoing around her. Her eyes were closed and head was down, racing forward, ducking and sidestepping and jumping around obstacles that were not there. Luna watched as the mare risked a glance behind herself and shrieked, pushing herself faster, but from what Luna could not see.

The mare seemed to be lost, or the world she had put herself in was purposely locking her in. She would spin around corners and come face to face with a bare wall, and then turn around and run the other direction just as aimlessly. Finally, a massive, nondescript grey door appeared and the mare stopped, skidding forward without moving at all. Luna moved forward to touch the mare, to find what troubled her so, when the mare reached out to the door and grabbed the handle.

Screams and anguish filled the dream, and filled Luna’s essence, and even she found herself shocked at this development. It was not just the mare’s scream, not just any pony’s scream, but the wails of a hundred, of a thousand, of a million ponies. She lept towards the bubble, her horn blazing white and ready to eviscerate the entire dream. It was not a healthy nightmare, and not one she could simply reassure one against, or fit some aimless aesop into. Right as she reached it, however, it wavered, twisted, and broke down. The mare had awoken.

Luna wasted no time in her brief respite of the dream world, sinking back into it. For a moment, she could hear the rain and hail fall through the thick curtains, but the sound faded away as she faded in. She waited for a moment, looking around for any sign of the strange pegasus, hoping that if perhaps she had gone back to sleep she could be consoled or gifted a pleasant scenario to rest the remainder of the night too. They didn’t appear, and so she cast her mind back out to carry on her work.

She focused on one of the more violent dreams and flitted into it. The foal here, an earth pony filly, was trapped in a vortex of clouds so dark they may have been smoke, thrown around aimlessly with water and lightning. The filly’s high-pitched shrieking was loud enough to pierce through the thunder and roaring wind surrounding her, and again the goddess of night felt unnatural concern. Luna’s manifestation dove into the globate maelstrom and grabbed the filly, holding her tight to her chest. The foal looked up at Luna in awe, and the clouds released from their sphere and dispersed just as violently as they had been spinning. In a setting of a rolling field at night--one of Luna’s favorite’s for calming nerves--she set the filly down.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I… think so… Are you Princess Luna? Did you save me?”

“Yes, child, and I have indeed helped you.” Not every dream needed to be a lesson. “Do not share your gratitude with me, however.” She looked to the moon above the two of them and smiled. “But on calmer nights, take but a moment to appreciate the world around you.”

“Thank you, Princ-erk!” The filly shot to one side as if pulled by a great force and then vanished, and the dream-world around Luna imploded in an instant, sucking down on itself like a pop-can being crushed. Luna’s mind was dumped back into the aether, confused and shaken. What had woken that foal so suddenly? As the thought completed itself, a wave of nauseous worry and fear washed over her like a migraine. The town beneath the castle was radiating terror, and Luna’s empathetic consciousness vibrated in the pain of it all.

A sudden jerk brought herself out of the dream, and she found herself on the cold floor beside her throne. The small moment of confusion between sleep and awake felt like forever to her as she struggled to make sense of what was happening. It waned, and she pulled herself to her hooves, looking around confused. And then-- another shake. It was small, but it came along with a noise that filled Luna with more fear than of the Tantabus escaping. It was not so much a noise, though; she couldn’t hear it. It was too low a pitch, too loud a volume. She felt it through her hooves, and her legs, and her spine, and her mane. It was an awful sense of solid bedrock cracking in two.

The castle lurched, and Luna barely caught herself. With a sinking feeling she noticed she was no longer standing on a flat angle, and she realized that the foundation of her home had started to separate from the mountain. Lightning then struck one of the alcoves, destroying the balcony outside, and with it came that shrieking banshee of wind and rain. The massive curtains were sucked from the Throne Room, and outside Luna could see most of the decoratives of the castle had been obliterated by apple-sized hailstones. The castle shook again, but did not stop, and Luna took off racing down the twisted, vibrating hall as raw mountain let go of hewn stone.

There were no longer echoes as her hooves pounded on slanted marble. Pillars in the halls and roofing over exterior additions had already given way to the storm, and Luna ran and jumped and dived and slid around the obstacles before her like some sort of sick video game brought to life. She might have enjoyed it, if her life and the life of her sister’s had not been in jeopardy.

By the time she made it to her sister’s room and blasted open the door, she was hovering in place over a forty-five degree angle of a floor. The duties of daylight were difficult and exhausting, and Celestia’s gifted sleep would have been enough for her to rest through Tartarus itself, so it did not surprise Luna when the still-laying alicorn, her fear dulled by the lens of drowsiness, looked up confused at her terrified sister.

“What’s going o-” She said, before the castle rocked like a ship at sea, pressing Celestia onto her bed. There was another awful, hideous thock of splitting stone, and the battered roof slammed down on to the room as if driven by magnets.

Luna stumbled in the air, but not from the moving castle. She reached a weak hoof forward, feeling as though everything had stopped around her. She could feel, in her soul, a sudden loss of light and warmth, and she screamed.

“Celestiiiiaaaaaa!!”

Grief had not yet completely set in when the building issued one final complaint and gave up to gravity. Luna could not tell if the noise around her was hailstones or the shredding of rock. She shook her head. She could only mourn if she got out alive. She looked around now, seeing the rotated hallway sliding slowly down around her. A collapsed section of wall just a few metres away shone with the wet reflection of a hundred lightning strikes a minute, and she cast a quick spell covering herself in a magical shield.

She took off and shot out through the hole, the missiles of ice bouncing harmlessly off her shield. She rocked in the air, jostled by indecisive winds and blasts of thunder. She moved to clear away from the castle, and briefly lost consciousness as the air seemed to disappear beneath her.

The fog in her eyes cleared and she found herself being spun helplessly in some sort of mega wind spout. Her shield held though, saving her from the mass of ice that would have crushed an unprotected pony. In the moments her body wasn’t whipped back and forth, she could see the mountain her home used to occupy, and though she was determined and strong, she could not stop tears from falling as she saw a dozen tornadoes climbing up its face, lifting whole houses from the village and obliterating them against the rock. No matter how Luna tried, she could not gain purchase with her wings, and her stomach felt like it had been lassoed and yanked ever downwards.

She slammed against something hard, and her shield exploded into a billion shards of magic, but she found herself solid and still. She rolled over onto her back, groaning. She savoured the moment of peace, but then a creeping thought entered her beleaguered mind.

Why am I not being hailed on?

She opened her eyes, and saw above her most of the castle she had just escaped. The jagged remains of towers and walls and a million pounds of stone and glass seemed to hover above her, rotating slowly in the air as if weightless. It appeared to remain in place, though as it gained in size in her perspective, she knew it was not truly motionless.

She sobbed once, and closed her eyes, calling forth a dream.