Victor looked up as Sally came in. "Hm? I'll be out when I have a solid to report."

Sally clapped him on the shoulder. "You've been working on that pile for hours. I thought you'd at least have taken a coffee break." She chuckled softly and sat down next to him.

Victor grinned. "I'm close to figuring this out. I think." His grin turned to a weary sigh. "This whole thing is, to put it mildly, complicated. The notes the moment this started are intense, and not all of them are proven." He swept some papers aside to get at others, leaving the surface a mess in his wake.

Sally's head shook slightly at the mess Victor was making of his once clean office. "What does all that even mean?" She looked over the notes he was picking up, trying to see what had him excited. "Was there a clue in all that of what we should be doing?"

He huffed, slumping a moment. "If they had a clue, they would have been all over it. Nobody involved in this seemed to have wanted to be involved in it. So, that's why I'm still hear, sorting. I'm teasing out the clues, to find out which ones we should try to chase, and which ones look unlikely."

Sally chuckled softly at that. "So, it's a big pile of nonsense." She leaned on him a little bit, her head against his shoulder. "Why don't you go get some rest, Captain?" She stood up and pointed to the door. "That's an order."

"You don't get to give me orders." Despite that, he was getting to his own feet. "Keep everyone else out of this room until I get back. Don't want someone to wander by and shuffle my papers."

"Yes, sir." She saluted. "I'm sure nobody would dare go against the wishes of the good Captain Victor." She chuckled softly and started walking just behind him, seeing him to the door and out of the room. "Sleep well."

Luna replaced him the moment he was out of earshot. "Is there good news? He looked quite fatigued, but not all that pleased."

Sally sighed and looked back to the mess on the desk. "I'm not sure he learned anything, really. Or at least if he did, he was unwilling to say as much."

Luna peeked around Sally to the riot of papers. "My friends risked much to fetch those. I do hope something comes of this." She spread her wings, using their lift to get her over to the desk and look it over herself. "It seems quite a mess. Is he usually this disorderly?"

Sally chuckled softly and shook her head. "Not this bad, and don't touch a thing. He doesn't want whatever order he has being messed up."

Luna looked over it all quietly. Her horn lit up as she took in the sight of each scrap of paper, lingering a long moment on each before moving to the next.

Sally watched with great confusion, her head tilting. "Does it make sense to you, alien pony princess?"

"Of course not. There's nothing magical about my ability to read." She lowered herself to the desk, her eyes narrowing. "Is that an 'a'? Why does this person write in such horrible penmanship?"

Sally snorted, holding back a proper laugh. "Probably because it was written by a doctor under pressure, so double the poor writing all in one. I swear, the moment you get a doctorate, your writing's shot. Do we need to find a translator?"

"No." With a flash of light from her horn, the papers began to lift and sort themselves, then lay out flat upon the table in a more orderly manner, each one flipped around to face upwards.

Sally hissed softly. "He's probably going to flip a gasket. They were in some order he wanted, and now they're in your order. It's a nicer looking order, but it isn't his."

Luna smiled up at her. "I do apologize. I was merely hoping to speed this process along by getting them into an easily readable state. If he gets upset with me, I will take the blame, of course."

"He'll be plenty mad at me for not guarding his stuff like I just promised I would." Sally shook her head slightly. "We'd best have something good to tell him when he gets back. I hope you find something."

"I'll do what I can. You go keep watch of our friends." Luna sank to her haunches, going through the papers more methodically than Victor had been. "Hm." Sure, the references to modern things eluded her, but not all of it.

Sally headed for the door. "Good luck. Don't break your brain with too much thinking. It's dangerous around these parts."

***

Sally headed out, finding Fluttershy at the door. "Today's my lucky day for running into our pony troops." She reached out and patted Fluttershy on the head. "How are you doing? It's been quite a while since I saw you last."

Fluttershy smiled at that. "I was just checking up on my dogs." She pointed to the outside door. "I let them out for some exercise."

Sally cringed at the idea. "They going to be quiet out there?"

"I told them to be." She lifted in a brief flutter to the door before peeking out the door. No sounds came back other than her being pounced and knocked back into the room with a dog atop her, licking her face.

Sally laughed softly at the display of affection. "Looks like you're quite the dog trainer."

Fluttershy giggled, pushing up from under her canine friend. "I've had a little experience with all sorts of animals, and I think we all just get along." She hugged the dog and sent it back out to join its friends. "But they're being quiet." She nodded firmly. "See?"

Sally shook her head slightly. "That's adorable. But seriously, we're happy you've helped our friends stay safe and sound." She waved to the outside. "You're going to go out to play with them?"

"Well..." She blushed with a wriggle. "If I do, they'll keep licking me. Which is a nice thing, how they show they appreciate me, but I don't want to be wet."

Sally laughed gently. "You're an adorable pony princess person." She patted Fluttershy gently on the back. "I won't tell you what to do. Just make sure they're quiet, alright?"

Fluttershy inclined her head. "The princess is there." She pointed to the office with Luna. "I'm just a regular pony. Not a princess."

Sally stared at Fluttershy a moment. "You know what, I believe you. You aren't princess material. I'll leave you be to your doggy friends."

Fluttershy waved a wing out the door, summoning her dogs back inside. "I'll get them back in their kennel. You're all such good dogs." She hugged and was hugged by, her canine friends.

***

Victor stretched, rubbing his eyes, but not yet opening them as he felt the world around him coming to focus. The sound of rain on the roof was pleasant as the storm continued. But the work he'd left behind pulled at him, and got him to his feet even if laying there felt better.

The door opened and Luna came in, floating over the paper she'd taken from his desk, reading intently, chewing her lip. "Ah, thou are awake, good."

He blinked down at her a moment. "Princess, what do you have there?" He gestured at the paper she was looking over. "What are you doing with it?"

She floated the paper before his suddenly awake and alert eyes. "This." She pointed a hoof to it. "I cannot stop thinking of this event as described on this page." She read aloud from it, "'The event is an ongoing process that has transformed nearby organisms into zombie-like creatures.'" She glanced up at Victor, who was now looking over her head. "This is the event we are currently in, is it not?"

Victor's eyes flicked back to the papers. "I'll look it over again, and let you know if I find anything."

Luna nodded at him. "Very well, I shall help in any way you need." She tucked that paper and drew out another. "This one." She floated it towards his view. "It speaks of attempts to 'curb' the process, something about a vaccine?" Her head cocked a little at that. "I find this jargon to be dense. Does it make sense to you?"

Victor snorted at that, shaking his head. "I'm not a medical doctor. That's not exactly my area of specialty. I'm doing my best to figure out which documents may actually have meaning for us." He snatched the paper from the air. "A vaccine, if it worked, would make someone immune to whatever this is, so they couldn't turn into a zombie. We don't have the materials to even hope to manufacture a vaccine, so even if they found one, it won't help us, unfortunately."

Luna sighed and shook her head. "And I'm no scholar of science. We need a doctor or someone else who would understand this better."

"Doctor?" Angel perked up her ears. She did a small hop to clear the room towards them. "Ask Fluttershy?"

Luna blinked at Angel, blank a moment. "Fluttershy? Oh! She is something of a doctor, a lay doctor. Still, perhaps there is wisdom in your words, my dear."

Victor blinked up at Angel. "I, um... okay. If you want to bring her up to speed, be my guest."

Angel smiled and nodded to him. "Can ask?" She fled the room with awkward steps and long leaps, not wanting to crash against the ceiling on the way. She descended and found Fluttershy playing with the animals. She smiled and joined in, petting the dogs, but then raised a paw towards Fluttershy, her eyes locking on to hers. "Fluttershy. Need help?"

Fluttershy looked at her curiously.

Angel pointed back at the stairs she had just taken. "They need you. Need doctor."

Fluttershy nodded quickly to that. "Of course, I'll come right away. Are they hurt?" Her eyes widened a little more. "Oh my, they are? Oh no." She looked at the animals around her. None of them were injured, so she waved goodbye to them and quickly zipped up the stairs. "Where's the hurt creature?"

Luna waved Fluttershy closer. "We need a medical opinion, but not about an injured creature." She gestured at the papers. "There's a vaccine mentioned here, but we don't know if it works."

Fluttershy looked over the documents with a sigh. "Um. Okay." She landed and held out a hoof. Once the first paper was given to her, she scanned over it. "Oh my. This is a lot of medical words."

Luna nodded. "Can you make sense of it? The rest of us are without medical training of any kind."

Fluttershy nodded. "Yes, um, some of it. I'm not a doctor either, but I have some familiarity." She laughed with the memory. "When an animal was really hurt, I brought them to Doctor Fauna. But I could patch them up if it wasn't too bad." She quieted down as she focused on reading the documents, flipping through one page at a time, trying to make sense of it. "This is... this is really confusing, Luna. But it's talking about how they were trying to make a vaccine." She turned a page over. "But they were also trying to stop the, uh, zombies that were already there from causing trouble. Even if everyone was fixed, the zombies already there would be quite a mess to deal with."

Luna nodded quietly, looking over the pages in Fluttershy's hooves as best she could. "That does sound like what we are dealing with." She glanced at Victor and Sally. "There were efforts to both fix the problem, and deal with the mess."

Victor took a slow breath. "Tell me you can see something we can use, please."

Fluttershy sighed and nodded. "Maybe. This looks simple enough." She tapped at the page. "But I'm not sure we have everything we would need. Um, give me a piece of paper and I'll write this down a little easier to understand. It's a spray, I think. Spray it at the zombies and it should hurt them, make them not move, if it works properly. But there's no guarantee that it will work."

Luna grinned at her. "I think we all knew this was going to be a gamble, but if you've found us something, let's take a look and see if we have everything necessary." Her horn glowed just a moment, paper appearing beside Fluttershy. "Please, do write it down so we can all see it."

Fluttershy looked over the words before her, mouthing them as she tried to figure them out, making notes as simply as she could. She had a little bit of help from Victor, who hovered nearby. The two quietly argued when they reached complex words, but, together, they worked out the recipe in every day english.

"So simple, but it won't be easy." Victor had a hand to his head. "We have the ingredient list for some anti-shambler spray. The paper was talking like this was something new, untested. Not sure if they ever got the chance to even try it out, which means it could end up doing not a damn thing. But we don't really have a choice."

Sally chuckled softly at that, gripping his shoulder. "We never did have a choice, Victor. Come on, we've got a mission. Let's go figure out if we can make this, and how well it works."

"Right." He took the simplified recipe and stuck it to a cork board where everyone passing by could see it. "Then we need to start collecting these ingredients. Some of them may be around here, so start with that, check off what we already have."

Toby and Angel both nodded at each other, grinning and getting ready to leave. "Find things. We go. Now." Toby was already headed towards the door, not waiting for anyone else.

Luna appeared before them with a flash of magic. "Hold yourselves! My speedy friends, we should do as Victor requested. Search the stores here before we set out, so we know what we absolutely need to find."

Author's Note

But will it even work?

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