The Machine Dragon

Scanning…

Scanning…

Location: ???...

Battery Percentage: 4%...

Hull Damage: Light…

Weapon Systems: Fully Operational…

Here he laid, in a massive, frigid wasteland, beneath a cold, snowy, uncaring sky.

Lights were growing dark. As he laid there, bathed in what little light remained, only then did he really get time to reflect on what the hell went wrong. How it all came to this…

It had started when they refused to let him rest. Even after death, mankind was not content with letting sleeping dogs lay. For almost half a century, his bones lay buried within the ocean. Resting at last, they remained exactly where they belonged after a life of turmoil and hate and death.

But the rest didn’t last.

He was dug up, excavated, forced back onto land and turned into a monster made to do their bidding.

The wires twisted around his bones, metal grafted over his corpse, and like a puppet, he pirouetted for the very creatures that killed him in the first place.

Disgusting. He hated it.

Hated every waking moment of being forced to fight for them. They turned him against his own.

The Second Godzilla…

Their fights were vicious. He fought hard. He even allowed himself to die for them. To rest at the bottom of the ocean a second time, along with the only other creature on earth who understood him.

Yoshito and Akane understood. Even the Prime Minister seemed to have! And yet, for the second time, he was tugged from his eternal slumber. Time weaved among the waves… months? Years, maybe? Didn’t matter.

What did matter was the Second Godzilla had fled. He was wounded beyond belief. Had scars that rivaled even his first ones.

But the defeat of the monster wasn’t enough, nooo. Not for humanity. Not for their arrogance.

They dug him up again. Too much money in the project; too big to fail!

He could hate the mechanics and the workers and the boots on the ground who fixed him up once more. Yet in all this time around humans they seemed to rub off them. He hated the ones in the stuffy suits above all else. They were the heads. The think tanks. The ones who thought it was perfectly acceptable to bring him back yet again.

All it took was a couple of foolish papers being signed before renovations soon befell him. Needed to be stronger than ever to fight off the other monsters that were popping up like moles.

It was as if Pandora’s Box had been opened, as with the turn of one millennium, came more monsters than the past fifty years had offered.

The moth… Her children.

They tried to get the humans to stop. Listen to reason.

But with the beasts rising up, the moths had their claws full. He heard of their deeds, in mission debriefings and banter between technicians and the occasional janitor crew. There were so many of them.

The moths intersected a gigantic turtle in the coast off South Korea. Awkward battle, they got damaged severely due to the poor conditions. But the only human casualties were a few unfortunate fishermen.

A strange, burrowing creature with big ears popped up in Europe, ripped its way across France and through Paris before the moths managed to kill it. The military was useless.

A gigantic lizard rampaging through New York, took the combined efforts of the coast guard and one of the moths to bring it down.

Those were just the ones that had popped up, been entered into his databases as of late. There were likely dozens of others resting in the darkness of the sea, the ancient mountains, and so much more.

Every time a monster appeared, so did the moths. They fought. They warred with the beasts. They won… Only barely though.

Each battle needed rest, recuperation. Their wounds needed time to heal, their wings needed time to regenerate the damages.

They didn’t have time to threaten Tokyo to let him rest by this point.

Only the little women- Shobijin?... They seemed to plead with the humans. When they realized that these pleas fell on deaf ears, they would visit him on rare occasions when the technicians and the janitors and the stuffy old suits were gone.

They were… tolerable, perhaps even enjoyable in some instances.

They spoke to him with regality and respect. They offered their apologies. They were the ONLY ones to do so. And they weren’t even the ones who put him where he was.

They spoke of how he didn’t deserve this twisted marionette lifestyle. They said he deserved to be buried. Deserved to have freedom. Deserved a choice in all of this…

Instead, the humans just upgraded him.

Took a few years, but they claimed it was worth the money.

Onboard A.I. no need for pilots. Implanted into his head. Now there was no risk for human error. He was fully in control of himself.

Bad idea, obviously.

Thus, there were many inhibitors in place; shutdown codes for if he went rogue again, both manually and remotely enterable. They jam-packed tons and tons of commands and prompts and who-knows-what else inside of his skull.

It didn’t stop him though. He knew that when his body had proper power, he would wrestle command back. Even still, guess they figured they’d have an out of control him over any other monster for the time being.

They couldn’t get rid of him. The true him.

Years went by, bug-testers continued to try everything.

He just defied them, spat in the face of science itself. Just as they spat in the face of nature; spat in his face.

Sometimes science was more like magic than anything.

There was a soul in his old bones. A soul that burned with a hatred for humanity’s tendencies.

A soul that yearned to be free.

Regardless, he laid there in his tomb, standing and waiting and existing in his depowered state.

His upgrades and refurbishments included being solar powered, no need for microwaves and the like…

That helped him little now, however. While he couldn’t exactly feel the cold per se, he knew the pain of the ice. Ice so cold it was almost burning. The ice that’d get into his lungs and demolish them. Well, if he had lungs to breathe through anyways.

The lights are darker now…

Alright, less than five seconds left. No more musing. Maybe he won’t wake up this tim—

Canterlot, much, much later…

“Twilight, message from Shining!”

The youthful, plucky voice of Spike snapped through the rather dull morning as Princess Twilight Sparkle rested calmly in her throne room. The little drake closed the door behind himself before rushing up to her side, a rolled-up letter clutched in his claws.

There were few visitors to the castle today, and no foreign dignitaries scheduled to arrive. There was no overseeing the grand opening of orphanages or schools or whatever else. While it wasn’t exactly a “day off,” it was still a slower day for the now sole ruler of Equestria.

…

And of course, that would be too easy.

“Thanks Spike!” the chipper alicorn replied, magically grabbing her letter.

Spike waited beside her throne as she skimmed through the medium-length parchment in a mere few moments. She slowed halfway through though, leaning in and giving a concentrated look.

Spike never really liked that look.

“What’s it say?” he asked, fidgeting with his claws.

“It says they found something strange beneath the ice in the Frozen North, just a couple dozen miles outside of the Crystal Empire,” she said, scanning the last few paragraphs of the letter.

“Sombra?” Spike asked, flinching at the idea of the tyrant returning for a third time.

“I don’t know Spike, they’re just saying it’s big; both literally, and metaphorically,” she answered, magically levitating up a large piece of parchment and pre-inked quill.

“How big? Like, the size of an airship or…?” he offered.

“Big enough to change the understanding of science forever in Equestria,” Twilight replied, quickly writing a reply. “AND big enough to make an airship look like a toy.”

“Woah… that’s pretty big,” the little drake nodded, scratching his chin in thought.

“Here Spike, send this to them,” Twilight replied, quickly shoving her finished letter into the dragon’s claws.

“They uh… request you to come?” Spike guessed, before doing as his adoptive sister asked, breathing his magical flames onto the letter, which disappeared into ash and billowed out a nearby window.

“Of course they did,” sighed the princess, reaching up a forehoof to rub her temples. “I’m going to have to have Inkwell cancel my meetings for the next week. Or at least until we figure out just what it is they found.”

There was a small pause.

“What if it’s an alien ship?” Spike asked. “You know, like in those old comics I used to read?”

The princess just deadpanned at him.

“Heh… heh… right,” the dragon giggled nervously.

A small blush appeared on his cheeks as he looked away, staring in any direction that wasn’t towards the older of the two siblings. He was obviously trying to make it seem that he wasn’t excited at the prospect of finding a cool alien ship filled with blasters and robots and lasers and—

Oh, Twilight was already packing her suitcase… which she’d teleported in…

Right.

“Are you leaving now?” Spike questioned.

“Of course not, I’m leaving tonight,” she replied, shoving an extra large, extra poofy sweater into her suitcase. “Just gotta send out some letters and book a train ticket.”

“Alright, just give me like five minutes to pa—”

Spike was cut off whenever the mare’s horn lit up and summoned a small purple suitcase in front of the little dragon, clattering to the floor, landing on its wheels.

He just looked down in silence for a few seconds.

“Some things never change, royalty or not,” Spike snickered.

“What? You can never be too prepared,” she chuckled back with a faint grin.

“Well at least you’re not sweating bullets over it,” the younger of the two siblings replied with a smirk.

“Thanks a lot, Spike,” Twilight snarked good-naturedly.

The duo shared one final set of chuckles before setting out, the alicorn writing and sending letters all the while. She moved like a machine, writing them in seconds, her quill becoming a literal blur each time she took a note. Not a surprise by this point though…