Author's Note
First story on this site. Please ignore the abrupt change from 3rd person to 1st person about halfway through, there was a bit of a time gap in writing this. Further chapters will be all in 1st person.
1. Entry
Major Marvin Kens looked through the one-way glass at the… creature sitting in one of the two large, plushy chairs and wrapped in a blanket. It… or well, she, looked like she hadn’t been very comfortable in a long time. Being dumped out of the airlock of a fleeing MANTIS ship will do that. Beside him, Captain Sebas “Fleshwound” Tien poured over the data recovered from the aforementioned fleeing MANTIS ship.
“Well?” the Major asked.
“Well she’s lucky to be alive. Not only is whatever her species is, incredibly sturdy, but MANTIS didn’t immediately kill her.” Sebas responded. “And speaking of species, I had the Doktor dig into our archives of old Earth mythology. Positive match for mythological creature #382.”
He flicked the screen of his datapad and brought up the archive page in hologram form.
“Pegasus… winged horse. Only one problem, Captain: No wings.”
“Not any more, no. But this is from the ship’s security logs.”
He pulled up a video file to show the Major. It showed the MANTIS ship’s loading bay. A few seconds into the footage the creature spontaneously appeared, looking surprised, and possessing a pair of wings the same shade of light blue as her coat.
"She managed to evade capture for some time after this, until she flew into a dead end and was cornered by half a dozen Crawlers."
“And so the bastards stripped her of her means of escape.” The major tipped his cap slightly to cover his eyes. “Now the only question is what do we do with her?”
“Well sir, we should definitely keep her. MANTIS had enough interest to not kill her immediately upon capture, and I intend to find out why. Plus… I’ve got a hunch that something good will come of her.”
“Then I leave her in your care, Captain. I’ve come to trust your hunches, so I expect payoff from this.”
“Sir.”
They both gave a salute, and the major exited the room, no doubt intent on retiring to his quarters. Sebas set down his datapad and looked once more through the one-way window. The creature was starting to look weary, she’d been sitting alone too long and probably anticipating something happening. He should probably get in there and move her to more permanent living arrangements.
But then his attention was pulled away from the creature as the door opened once more.
“Ah, Sebas, good zat I got here before you left.” The Doktor said, closing the door behind him. "I passed Major grump in ze hallvey, heard about how you intend to keep her. Vell I thought zere may be problems if you can't understand her."
"Understand her?"
"I reviewed the security footage ve recovered. It is hard to tell, but the noises she makes… there is structure, meaning, in zem." He bent over and simultaneously wrapped an arm around Sebas and pulled a device from his coat pocket. "But I think I have just ze thing for zis."
The device was a metal cube, with a screen and some buttons lifted off a handheld game console on one face, and a series of antennae jutting out the opposite face. The first thought through Sebas’ mind was How did he have that in his pocket without those long antennae getting crumpled? but naturally, the answer was Because he’s the Doktor.
“So, is this some kind of communicator?”
“Ja. I decided zat since ve are probably coming to zat point where ve vill be encountering more alien species who don’t use All Common, a universal translator vill be necizary.” He said, shoving the device into Sebas’ hands. “Zis prototype is designed to vork with your neural implants. Thought is transformed into a signal, transmitted to your conversational partner, and visa versa. Intent has no language barrier.”
Sebas thought about that explanation for a moment.
“Well, what if the other creature doesn’t have any neural implants though?”
“Nein, nein, it is no problem. Zere are many ways I could explain zat part, but for now, just trust me, Captain Sebas.”
“Alright.” he sighed.
Sebas untucked his shirt from his pants and pulled one of the few loose cables away from the implants that ran up his spine and plugged it into the device. Instantly the screen lit up, though the only thing on it besides the colorful background were labels for the two buttons below it; The one on the left being “Transmit” and the right one “Receive”. It was simple enough.
He walked over to the door and punched in the code on the keypad beside it. The door slid open with a slight mechanical hiss, then closed tightly behind him as he stepped inside. The creature sat up slightly and eyed him suspiciously. He pressed and held the left button.
“Hello,” he said. “I mean you no harm.”
“What’s in your hand?” She asked, pointing a hoof accusingly at the Translator.
Her voice was a little hoarse, and it was clear that speaking caused her some pain.
“It’s a device that lets me understand you. My name is Sebas, may I know yours?”
She turned her head away from him for a moment, glancing at the floor.
“It’s Rainbow Dash.” She answered.
“Rainbow Dash.” Sebas repeated. “That’s a lovely name. Miss Dash, I can assure you no one is going to hurt you anymore. You’re in kind hands.”
For one reason or another, she cringed at that. Sebas went to ask if something was wrong, but she held out a hoof.
“I’m fine. Just… thinking about my friends back home.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Sebas asked, finally taking a seat in the other chair.
“Not really.” She grumbled. “Those jerks did something to my head and I’ve been having nightmares ever since. Made me dream about one of my closest friends chopping me up and baking me into a batch of cupcakes.” She explained with a shudder.
“Yeah, that sounds exactly like what MANTIS would do.” He sighed. “We in TRAK are trying to stop MANTIS from hurting more people. If it would be ok with you, we could use anything you’re willing to tell us about your time in MANTIS captivity.”
“If it means taking them out, I’ll tell you anything.” She replied almost instantly.
Sebas smiled at this. He stood.
“Well then, why don’t I get you somewhere a little more comfortable than this Observation Room?”
Dash nodded, and as Sebas scanned his hand to open the door she shook herself free of the blanket and hopped down from the chair. As they exited the room as a pair, he noticed that she was about eye level to his navel, and mused that just a few short years previous and she’d have been staring at his chin instead. Guess Julie was right, I really have grown… and the Doktor is still that much taller.
When they stepped through the door, the Doktor was leaning against the opposite wall. Wordlessly, he stood and held out a hand towards Sebas. His meaning clear, Sebas disconnected the translator from his plug and handed it over. He removed the front panel and took one of the components from within, pocketing it before returning the device to Sebas.
“So, vhat have you learned so far?” He asked.
“Well, her name is Rainbow Dash, and she’s willing to help any way she can, but I’ll have to get more information later.”
“Rainbow… how apt.” The Doktor put a hand on his chin and bent in half to get a closer look at her. She took a step back. “But you can barely see it through the tarnish on her mane.”
“The first thing I plan is to give her a good old fashioned shower.” Sebas admitted.
“Good on you.” He stood up straight. “Vell, I have to make a more dedicated transvater, so I vill leave you to care for her.”
As the Doktor left, Dash looked up at Sebas.
“Who was he?”
“That was Herr Doktor.”
“Sounds germane.”
“Maybe. Sometimes he drops the accent, so I think it’s just part of his cover identity. C’mon.”
Sebas led her out of the room and down a hall. Dash seemed apprehensive of the sterile white walls. He almost didn’t notice when she suddenly stopped behind him. She stood up on her hind legs to look out a window. She gave a sigh and looked over at him with sad green eyes. He came over to see what she had been looking at. A small Flight of starfighters was flying past outside.
Seeing the ships and Dash’s longing expression, Sebas had an idea.
“Change of destination, come this way.” He waved her towards a different side hall.
At the end of that hall they stepped into an elevator and rode it down to the ship’s hangar. Stepping out of the lift, Sebas waved down the dockmaster -he didn’t know for sure whether or not that’s the name of the actual position, but it’s what the dockmaster wanted to be called.
“Taking my Skipper out for a short tip.”
He nodded and logged my departure in the system. I led Dash over to my personal spaceship -a 1380 StarSkipper. One-man vessel, but Dash is small enough to sit on my lap in the cockpit. The Skipper accepted the signal from my implants and opened for me. I turned back and saw Dash crouched low with a cautious look about her, almost like a frightened cat.
“What is that?” She asked.
“It’s a spaceship. We’re going to take a ride in it.” I knelt down and held out a hand to her. “Trust me, I’m a competent enough pilot.”
“Pilot? You’re going to fly? Fly out… out there?” She took a few frightened steps back away from the Skipper. “I can’t- I can’t go back out there!”
Before she could get very far, I reached out and wrapped both arms around her barrel in a tight hug. She thrashed around, flailing her legs to try and escape my grasp. I couldn’t let her run wild on the ship, someone would end up trying to chase her and that might bring back bad memories of being with MANTIS.
“Rainbow Dash, calm down!”
“NO! I can't, I'll die!”
“I swear to you it’s perfectly safe!” Dash’s frantic flailing slowed. “You’ll be alright inside the ship, and we’ll only be in space for a few moments.”
“Y-you promise?”
Once she stopped flailing completely, I unhugged her.
“Yeah.”
“Pinkie Promise?”
“Uh, sure.” I held out my pinkie finger to her. She looked at it confusedly.
“What’s that supposed to do?”
I looked down at my hand. Suddenly I felt rather stupid.
“Oh, duh. You don’t have hands, so that’s obviously how your kind would do that. How does your kind Pinkie Promise?”
“You, uh, you do it like this. Follow along and repeat after me. Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.” She made a series of simple motions with her hooves, culminating in jabbing her hoof into an open eye.
“That doesn’t look too hard. Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye-ow!”
Dash chuckled at my misstep as I rubbed the eye I’d just accidentally shoved my thumb into. I stood up.
“Alright, alright. Now that that’s done, want to come aboard?”
I grabbed the side of the Skipper and swung into the open cockpit.
“Yeah, just don’t break that promise!” She jumped up, landing on the edge, like a cat, before stepping down onto my lap. “Breaking a Pinkie Promise is a good way to lose a friend, forever.”
After a few seconds of silence, she glanced around, almost disappointed nothing happened after she said that. Then she sighed and laid down across my legs. I plugged my Neural Adapter into the back of the seat and closed the cockpit.
“You better brace yourself, this thing is fast.” I warned.
“Can’t be that fast if somecreature like you is- WOHA!”
At that moment the catapult engaged and sent the Skipper flying through the hangar and out into space. In the brief moment we were still in the ship’s atmosphere, Dash was launched backwards into my chest. My body flinched, but it was my mind solely that was piloting. When we entered zero-g I put an arm over her to keep her from floating around in the cockpit.
Dash looked completely stunned as we flew from the ship to a nearby desert planet. If I had to guess, the sheer scale of everything was a bit overwhelming for her. Once we touched down on the planet, I landed briefly to make sure she was ok.
“Dash, you alright?”
“Y-yeah, I just… I haven’t gotten to feel that for a while.”
“Well, if you liked that,” I smirked, “You’re gonna love what I do next.”
I pulled the Skipper back into the air and slowly pulled forward. I gradually increased the speed, and while we were still going relatively slow I sent a quick override command and opened the cockpit. Going faster, wind battered against us, and Dash leaned into it, a smile stretching across her muzzle.
I was starting to push the Skipper’s in-atmosphere limit when I was alerted to a foreign energy seeping into the machinery surrounding the seat. I could just barely hear Dash’s excited laughter over the wind as the Skipper began accelerating out of control. Speed and wind kept building and building until…
BOOOOM!
An almost deafening sound split the air starting from the engine, and through the rear-facing cameras I saw a rainbow-colored shockwave.
Grabbing back control of the Skipper, I put us down in the middle of a large sandfield, the ventral stabilizers sinking about a foot into the sand as we landed. Dash turned around to face me, a huge grin on her muzzle and stars in her eyes.
“That. Was. AWESOME! Your ship pulled off a Sonic Rainboom!” She said, but then her expression turned more towards concern. “Uh, dude? Your face is bleeding.”
I reached up with an ungloved hand and felt my face. The large wound that dominated the left half of it was indeed seeping blood.
“That’s… probably fine.” I said. “It’s from the wind battering against us when we were flying. Agitated the exposed flesh.”
“Hey, you said your name was Sebas, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Could we be friends, Sebas?”
I finished wiping the blood from my face and held out a fist to her.
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
She bumped my fist with a hoof.
Once safely back on the HMS Greyfox -what Sebas called the big ship we were on to start- he brought me to his personal chambers, where I’ll be staying until they figured out why MANTIS took such an interest in me, or until they located Equestria, whichever comes first.
The room wasn’t really big, only about the size of my Cloudominum’s bedroom, which would have been just fine except it was supposed to act like an entire house.
This turned out to be less of a problem than I thought. Sebas told me “Watch this”, pressed a button on a thing by the door, and the whole room shifted around. The rug was sucked into a wall, the bed folded up, and a bathtub rose from the floor. I played off the surprise of this, but I’m a bit out of practice and he saw right through it.
“Let’s get you clean.” He said, chuckling.
I propped myself up on the tub with my front hooves and watched as the tub filled itself with soapy water, then absolutely did not yelp in surprise when Sebas grabbed me around the barrel and lifted me into the tub. A soothing calm washed over me as the warm water soaked through my matted and dirty fur down to my skin.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see him take off his gloves and move around back of me. I let out a satisfied nicker as he massaged his fingers down into my coat, working the sudds deeper until-
“Ah cold!” I shot to my hooves and spun around on him. “Why are you wearing one of your, your hand-shoes!?” I pointed a hoof at the offending hand.
He looked down at his metal-clad hand with slight confusion.
“Oh whoops,” He muttered, getting up and grabbing his gloves from where he discarded them. “That must have come off with the glove again.”
And then he reached into one of his gloves and removed… his hand? It looked limp and empty, and he slipped it onto his hand over his hand-shoe…
“What.”
“Sorry about that, I keep asking the Doktor for a cover that fits better, but he’s always out of synthetic skin for some reason.” He knelt back down next to the tub and showed me both of his hands. “Look.”
Both hands now looked mostly the same, but looking closer there were definite differences. His right was mostly smooth, with large wrinkles around each joint, while on his left the wrinkles were less pronounced, more natural, and had a slight red tint to them.
“My left is real, but the right is a metal prosthetic with a rubber cover.”
“Geeze, how much of you is missing or made of metal?”
He sat back and began untying one of his boots.
“Well, aside from what you’ve already seen and commented on, about 50% of my spine is mechanical, and both feet are as well.” he finished removing the boot, revealing that his leg ended in a sort of metal nub with three thin “prongs” coming off the front. “These were done intentionally -unlike my hand- they’re part of the Neural Bypass I was using to pilot my Skipper, as well as my Arc-Self.”
I stared at his foot for a while, before looking back at his hand. When I first saw him, I never would have imagined that his hand was fake. We had prosthetics back in Equestria, but even the best ones weren’t as good as his. Sure, a fake leg could let you walk just fine, but if you lost a horn, or a wing? The only way you’d be flying ever again would be in a hot air balloon.
“How good is that hand? I know it looks good, but it works right, right?”
“Yup. Good as my old one.” He demonstrated, running through a series of simple motions, before ending by having it spin around completely.
“So, do you think you could maybe, uh…” I gestured towards my sides.
“Well, I don’t think the Doktor’s ever made a pair of wings, but I can ask him the next time I’m in the lab.”
“Thanks.”
“Now,” He got up onto his knees and moved closer to the tub. “Can we finish what we came here for, then?”
We probably got a little carried away, and what was supposed to be a simple cleaning became an impromptu grooming. After what I’m told was oil and grease was washed out of my coat and mane, I was dried and brushed. Then, completely unprompted, he leveled my hooves with a knife and braided my mane.
I have no idea where he learned how to do either of those things, because stallions don’t know how to braid hair, and they certainly don’t know a thing about hoof-care. Great, I’m starting to sound like Rarity.
“Rarity.” I sighed. “Aj, ‘Shy, Twilight, Pinkie…”
“Hm? What’d’ya say?”
“Nothing, just thinking about my friends back home.”
“You want to talk about it?”
I didn’t answer. We sat in silence for a good couple minutes, before Sebas broke the silence again.
“If you don’t that’s fi-”
“N-no. Do you think, they think I’m dead?”
“Well, I’m not going to sugarcoat things. Yes, they probably do. You’ve been away from them for two years by now, after being taken away through what I can only assume were mysterious circumstances. I guess, the best thing to do is hope your friends believe it’s you when we get you back home.” He stood up, brushing off his pants for a bit of flair, and extended a hand towards me. “So, to tie you over until we find your home, why don’t I introduce you to some of my friends?”
I thought about it, then stood and completed the gesture.
“Not exactly keen on the way you worded that, but what the hey.”
Just then, a series of tones rang out through the ship.
“Attention crew, minor MANTIS presence detected on nearby planet. This ship will be landing shortly for resupplying and field testing.” An artificial-sounding voice came, then those same tones again.
“I… almost made that out.” I said.
“It was an announcement saying we’ll be landing. I’ll probably have to go out in my Arc-Self to test whatever contraption the Doktor’s created lately to dispatch MANTIS troops more efficiently.”
“So we’re going outside? Great, I’ll finally be able to stretch my w- legs.”
“Legs?”
“Legs.”
Author's Note
Shorter chapter than I hoped. Sorry.
