Author's Note
First off, the origin for Cadance in this story is NOT going to follow the MLP comics.
Most of the rest should roughly parallel canon--except for where it doesn't.
I hope you enjoy.
Finally Found!
“…And lastly, 450 bits for the upkeep of the parks,” Shining Armor tiredly muttered as he finished reading off the list written on the budgetary scroll. “Annnd—that completes this year’s budget,” he said with a sigh of relief.
“How many of the parks does that cover?” Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, aka Princess Cadance, absently inquired as she reviewed and signed off on the items.
“All of them, fortunately,” her husband replied, stretching out his back to pop the kinks that had developed from hours of sitting in their office.
“That’s good,” she said, nodding in approval and smiling at his display. She had just learned from their physician this morning that she was pregnant, and she had spent most of the day thinking of a good way to surprise Shining with the news.
Perhaps let him know while in the middle of reenacting how I got pregn—?
However, a knock at the door to their chambers stopped any further thoughts she was developing in that direction.
“Apologies for interrupting, Your Highnesses,” their crystal pony assistant, Polished Gloss, addressed them as she entered. “An external guard patrol reports they found another one. Encased the same as before.”
“Uh—how many does that make just this month alone? Ten!?” Shining groaned. “One thing you can say about King Sombra, he was very prolific in making enemies. Not very imaginative on how he went about executing them, though. Although, I suppose that was the only thing we can find admirable about him: he was consistent. Not the sort of pony to do much experimentation, looking for more efficient means to commit crimes.”
“Only this one appears to be the skeletal remains of a dragon,” Polished Gloss said, “killed in the act of leaping to attack, it seems.”
“A dragon?” Cadance asked with surprise. “I didn’t know there were any dragons involved with fighting him!”
“And skeletal remains, you say?” Shining asked, puzzled. “That’s rather odd. Their scales are just as resilient as their bones and shouldn’t rot away. Certainly not being encased in crystal like that. The poor creature must have been hit with some blast to strip away the flesh the instant before Sombra encased it. Ask the guard to come in to give his report, please.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” she replied, stepping back to motion to somepony beyond the entrance.
“What are you thinking?” Cadance asked Shining as the sergeant came in.
“Maybe somepony fighting alongside King Sombra?” Shining surmised. “A blast strong enough to strip a dragon of its flesh would take too much out of any unicorn, even one as powerful as King Sombra, before he could follow up with his standard crystal spell. And on top of that, there’s the effort it would take to pose the poor creature’s remains for le dramatique before encasing it? That’s not like King Sombra’s style at all, at least so far as we know. Yes, Sergeant Conundrum? Report, please.”
“Yes, sir!” Conundrum said saluting. “We were conducting a standard recon in our assigned sector, about fifteen leagues beyond our border out along vector 237…”
Out of the corner of his eye, Shining noticed how Cadance reacted with a surprised start.
“…when we came across what at first appeared to be another of the usual remains of King Sombra’s victims,” the sergeant continued, oblivious to her reaction. “Of course, details are always hard to make out due to the darkness of the crystals. Fortunately, for most of those encounters. But in this one, there appeared to be the skeletal remains of a relatively young dragon that was caught in midleap when it was killed.”
“And you could see its bones?” Shining pressed.
“Yes, sir. At least, we think so,” he replied. “We did think it odd, since we do know that dragon scales are just as strong as their bones. Even odder was, well it was difficult to make out, but it did look like it was wearing some sort of armor, too.”
“Armor!?” Shining asked perplexed. “Since when do dragons ever need to wear armor!?”
“Well, sir, that was our conclusion based on what we could see. It might be something else, we just don’t know,” Conundrum explained. “Of course, it might simply be a type of dragon we’ve never seen before because we could see it had feathered wings.”
“FEATHERED WINGS!?” Cadance exclaimed in shock.
“Yes, Your Highness,” Sergeant Conundrum confirmed. “Strange looking feathers, at that. Plus, the trailing edges seem to have some sort of glow to them.”
“Cadance?” Shining inquired, concerned about the strong reaction his wife was having.
“H-how—how old would you say this dragon was?” Cadance pressed, standing up. Shining could tell that she was trembling in shock.
“Hmm—Hard to say. Based on its size, probably close to that of the current age of Spike the Magnificent. Maybe something like a decade older, or so.”
“Take me to him! Now!” she commanded. “And summon Doctor Quartz!”
“Cadance? Do you know anything about this?” Shining asked her.
“Part of me hopes it is what I think it is,” she said, looking back at him as she followed Sergeant Conundrum out through the door. “Part of me prays that it’s not!”
On their way out to the locale, Cadance told the entire team about how King Sombra had taken over the Empire, of her harrowing escape after her parents were killed, and of the ones who helped her get away. She told them there was much more to the tale of the ones who helped her, but suffice to say, they weren’t dragons—
“Well—not exactly—although anypony seeing them should easily be forgiven mistaking them for such,” she explained. “They were actually metallic golems that had been constructed by a friend who had perished just prior to King Sombra’s usurpation.
“When King Sombra killed my parents and took over, they all fought to get me out to safety. We had taken shelter in a cave for a few days immediately after leaving the Empire,” she told them, “while we tried to wait out his search parties for a more opportune time to make good on our escape. I do remember it was about fifteen leagues out and around vector 240 as measured from the Castle, give or take.
“However, we were eventually located, and we had to fight a pitched battle to get away.
“After the Empire returned and we rescued the Crystal Heart, I came out here several times alone trying to locate the site, but I could never find it again. Sergeant Conundrum’s report of this latest find along 237 at fifteen leagues is quite close to my recollection, and I do remember that no other remains had ever been found out this way before now. If this is him—”
As was typical in the immediate environs just outside the Crystal Empire, the area was a frozen wasteland of bare icy and snow-covered rocky ground, liberally mixed with more icy and snow-covered rocky ground, a confusing cluster of ravines cutting the earth into collections of narrow trails among small hills with sharp steep cliffs, where no life-giving plants ever grew. Suffice to say, the region was the literally the ultimate definition of “bleak”. However, that’s didn’t mean the land was lifeless. Far from it. There was plenty of life out there. Just not the kind any sane creature would ever want to meet.
Fortunately for the pony guard teams that had to patrol the area, such life was quite sparse, although one never knew when one of their less-than-friendly neighbors would come calling to visit for a meal or two. And so, they remained very alert whenever they needed to venture out.
The patrol, led by Sergeant Conundrum, was especially on edge to protect the Royal Couple, so they kept a wary eye out for anything that might like to try to make a meal from the available options at the site.
Trying to stay out of everypony’s way, Shining Armor and Princess Cadance stood on the ridge overlooking the scene in the ravine where a cluster of eleven huge crystal obelisks which nearly filled the shallow canyon as they jutted up from the ground. Most of the crystals were intersecting the same relative volume of space. Everypony could just make out the shadowy figure within that volume of space that had been encased from over a thousand years ago, and it certainly bore a remarkable resemblance to something that no sane, or even insane, creature would ever want to meet under any circumstances.
At the base of the cluster, Doctor Quartz, the preeminent pathologist as well as an expert on crystals, performed his own closeup survey of the structure and the being morbidly encased inside. With so many corpses left trapped in such crystals scattered about both within and without the Empire at the end of King Sombra’s reign, quite a lot of ponies made it their specialty to develop the skills to respectfully recover the remains and give them proper burials. Doctor Quartz was one such pony.
“Oh, dear Faust, it is him!” Cadance softly sobbed, burying her face in his mane. “This is where we were the last time I saw him!”
“The one who got you out of here?” Shining asked.
“No, the others got me out,” she replied looking sadly back down at the being trapped within the monstrous crystal structure. “He stayed behind to buy us time to get away. They let me know he had been—stopped—however it was they knew of it. I’m afraid it was a trick known only to them and their creator. Later, they came back with Aunties Celestia and Luna, hoping to get him free, leaving me at the Castle of the Sisters. They—they didn’t make it. My aunties told me their remains were buried after King Sombra cursed the Empire to disappear. It’s going to be rather difficult, I’m afraid, to locate where they’re interred. But we’ve got to try! He should be buried with his brothers.”
“Doctor Quartz!” she called out. “It’s vital that we recover him intact so that we can show our proper respects.”
“Of course, Your Highness,” he called back, nodding. “I fully understand. I’ll do my best, but this is an exceptionally large crystal—well several crystals—that King Sombra used on him. This is going to take some time to find the right locations to start cutting.”
Quartz turned back to the monolith—or rather the polylith—to continue his examination.
In addition to the number of crystal obelisks used, there were a number of other anomalies with this case that were unique to anything he previously encountered, or that he had heard about from his colleagues in the Victims Recovery Operations Field Guard Branch, of which he was the ranking member.
There was, as the patrol said, an odd glow coming from the trailing edges of all the feathers in the dragon’s wings. Dragons, for one, did not have feathered wings, like pegasi, griffons, hippogriffs, or harpies. But try as he might, he had a hard time believing what she said as he listened to Princess Cadance recount the event on their way out here. She insisted this victim wasn’t exactly a dragon. Standing there looking up at the entombed being, it sure looked like a dragon from what he could see of it. He shook his head clear of thoughts that had nothing to do with what was needed to recover the creature’s remains, however.
Certainly nothing about the crystals themselves should account for such a glow,[/] he thought to himself as he paced about the crystals and some of the dislodged stones from the ground from where the crystals had erupted.
These crystals are much the same Dark Magic imbued semiprecious stones as any other that King Sombra used to entomb his victims, if just considerably more of them and the size used. But given that he was actively fighting a dragon, creatures that have both an appetite and the ability to eat crystals, these factors shouldn’t be at all surprising.
Although there is a bit more refraction and opacity than what is normal, he noted with a puzzled frown as he put a hoof on the nearest surface. Especially, the closer one looks toward the dragon, he considered as he peered deeper into the matrix. It’s as if the index of refraction is gradually increasing the closer it gets to the body of the victim….
Eh? he wondered as he felt a strangely timed vibration pulsing through his hoof. He put his ear up to the crystal.
Tink!
Tink!
Tink!
Tink! Crackle!
Tink!
Tink!
That’s not right, he thought as he looked back up at the dragon. Then he frowned as he realized the index of refraction was slowly but noticeably increasing, even as he watched it. Puzzled, he went back to listening.
Tink!
Tink!
Tink!
Tink! Crick!
Tink! Crack! Crickle!
Tink!
Timed? Like clockwork? he wondered.
Tink!
Tink!
Tink!
His eyes went to pinpricks as realization suddenly struck him. And then he was running for his life!
“RUN! RUN! EVERYPONY TAKE COVER! RUUUUNNNNN!” Doctor Quartz started screaming.
The next moment, there was a tremendous explosion.
Then there was a loud continuous roaring noise that had nothing to do at all with the sound of an explosion.
Venturing Into The Purview Of Perverts
Author's Note
Hope you enjoy.
Venturing Into The Purview Of Perverts
As soon as Steve Roman returned from his job as the senior computer forensics specialist at the FBI CJIS Facility near Clarksburg to his home that was close to halfway between Fairmont and Morgantown, he went down into the basement and opened the vault he had down there to resume working on his private little project. It was something he hoped would one day make him multimillions with just a few thousand dollars’ investment.
Nominally, it would be perfectly legal for him to carry it out. It was just a morally dubious task, however. Except that some of the details for helping in his moral dilemma were not only illegal, but they were highly so. Even just thinking about some of his ideas was considered a crime, nowadays.
Sitting at his home office desk in the southeast corner of the basement, he tapped his chin in thought as he pondered how best to hide the AI subroutine that he intended to have hardcoded into the surplus RAPTOR he was rebuilding. He stared at the large module that sat partially disassembled, with gaping openings, that mocked him by looking back at him—a neat trick given there weren’t any eyes in the RAPTOR Pelvic Assembly.
He leaned back to recall the issues he had considered which finally led him to seek this venture.
He might have been just a computer geek, and while the world never changed its attitude toward geeks since geeks first evolved long before computers were ever invented, he was no fool like Hollywood frequently liked to portray them.
The Internet, aka the World Wide Web, had originally been created by geeks to allow the military echelons to easily communicate with one another. Then, under the advice and suggestions from those same geeks that built it, the Army soon allowed the DARPA project to be available to the public for communicating in a similar secure fashion, especially to allow communications between geeks in colleges and universities.
Ostensibly, it was intended to improve general society overall by allowing college students who were going to be the designers, programmers, and engineers of the coming Computer Age to exchange thoughts and ideas regarding puzzles, and to develop solutions to their problems.
However, it soon became the free roaming domain of perverts, fraudsters, and criminals—in other words: politicians. And as happens whenever politicians become involved, various Games are created to take and maintain control over those who were ruled. Games that criminals are very adept at creating. Games that allow them to become rich while denying any opportunity for any ordinary person to partake of such potential wealth.
But Steve knew there were still ways of getting rich—mostly by skirting the law without actually breaking the law—but it still involved their Games.
Funny how the most lucrative of the Games was also the most fruitless of the Games. The quickest way to the top was also the quickest way to the bottom. And it almost always involved sex.
Steven knew he’d never be able to earn a decent-looking wife as his own physical appearance was only marginally better than the fact that he was a geek—that factor alone was more than ten strikes against him. But if he were to somehow get enough money from an invention, then both his looks and the fact he was a geek would quickly be overlooked. He just hoped that if he ever did get married, that she wouldn’t be a conniving backstabber that so many wealthy men always seemed to attract. Such a problem such as that would be Future Steve’s concern. Current-Steve faced two problems, a few suppositions, and several questions.
The Primary Problem was: how to make an invention that would allow him to accumulate enough wealth without attracting the attentions of the wrong sorts of people?
First Supposition: to make quick wealth, it’s got to involve sex.
Second Supposition: to avoid the wrong sort of attention, it can’t involve sex.
The Secondary Problem was: what can be done to solve that Catch-22?
Third Supposition: solution for Secondary Problem has to involve sex without involving sex, which incidentally solves Primary Problem for generating wealth.
Question: so, what is sex without sex?
The logical answer was of course: masturbation.
Question: what sort of invention can one make for masturbation?
Logical answer to that question: sex toys!
Question: so, what sort of sex toy can be made that hasn’t already been invented?
Logical answer: that is the trick to find!
One just had to be clever enough to figure it out.
Steve had smiled when he asked himself that question months ago, because the Answer had been obvious even back then: the AIs that were being designed in colleges and universities already!
Like DARPA when it was laying the foundations for the Internet, the military had sought out the brightest minds in the schools to develop combat robots that could be deployed to fight the wars they wanted to engage in. And like how the Internet had been usurped by the politicians, the AIs being developed were repurposed to be new elements in their Games.
In the meantime, the military went through their own assorted toys almost as fast as politicians would tire of theirs. Which meant there were plenty of damaged and decommissioned military AI devices now littering the landscape. Getting such surplus devices would certainly be a huge cost saver than designing something from scratch.
Now rich politicians make for rich perverts. And rich perverts always loved to expand their fetishes and tastes into the weird and bizarre. As a result, there were plenty of AI sex toys already floating out there in the market. All Steve had to do was design one that was strange enough to whet the appetite of people with exceptionally peculiar tastes.
Ironically, one such bizarre design frequently used by the military was the Recon Attack Predator Tactical Operations Robot, or RAPTOR, as it was popularly known as. Given that it greatly resembled the creatures featured in those old Jurassic Park movies, they had quickly grabbed the public’s fascination when they were introduced and held onto it for years beyond the normal useful lifespan of such devices.
After all, to many, velociraptors and other Dromaeosaurids were popularly considered to be very sexy creatures.
Even more ironically, Steve had never once saw anything like them being made into “private home security” as so many of the AI sex bots were being marketed as.
And so, he found it rather disturbingly odd that he was potentially the first person to seriously consider turning that idea into a reality. If it were truly the case that no one else had thought of it first, it would be a fluke of universal proportions. Instead, he considered he was very likely just one of many people currently looking into the idea, but that simply no one had tried to capitalize on it—yet. But there was no doubt in his mind, there was someone out there who was preparing to do so at some level—in which case, the first one out the gate would be the winner in this race.
Of course, Steve was no fool. Naturally, the stranger the fetishes of his potential customers had, the more abusive the perverts tended to be. He didn’t really want to sell off his devices to just any stupid wealthy twit who wouldn’t take proper care of it. Or worse, simply damage it to the point of destruction just because they were rich enough and could get away with it.
So, Steve sat there at his home on the outskirts of town as he poked and prodded the Pelvic Assembly circuit modules of the dismantled surplus RAPTOR, Serial #37871-22471, one of five that he had purchased the month before, pondering how best to design, write, and test, then create a hardwired program version onto a chip, and then hide the anti-abuse self-preservation subroutines into the unit in such a way that no one would ever find it, but one that could allow the RAPTOR to act in self-defense, if it needed to do so, and allow it to escape and return to him for help.
He recalled hearing about how so many other designers had been caught and hauled off to prison for merely contemplating what he was planning to do. But he also was aware of the flaws and mistakes all those programmers made that allowed computer forensic specialists, like himself, to find their illegal subroutines.
He also thought it fortuitous that he was able to utilize a couple of built-in voids that happened to be in appropriate locations—assuming such voids truly were just happenstance and not actually something the original RAPTOR designers had ideas of their own in mind for future potential modifications—so he was able to easily repurpose those voids to contain the artificial sex organs he had planned to use.
He, naturally, preferred to think about equipping each of them just with an artificial vagina. But he certainly recognized the need for selling the units for members of the opposite sex, and even to those of his own sex who would appreciate something made specifically for a woman. The hard part had been to cut an opening into the armored casing beneath the tail for receiving the vaginal assembly, then constructing the hinged doors, their metal labia, as he jokingly called them, that would serve to protect the soft-tissue orifice. Behind the armor plate he had cut into, there was a perfectly sized void to accept that module.
Further below that location, there was an existing access plate sealing off a circular opening already built into the RAPTOR that led to another unused void which was large enough to accommodate almost anything that he could imagine—and he could imagine quite a lot—principally, a highly articulate metal tentacle that could be retracted, rolled up, and sealed inside when stored, but would still extend out and perform as desired when in use, with an appropriately tough vintex coating, the nonallergenic replacement for latex, for plenty of protection and pleasure of the customer.
Yeah, he sarcastically thought grinning, it’s highly doubtful that the original designers didn’t have something like this in mind when they created these guys way back then! Also, he still needed to find a convenient route to install the necessary plumbing that was needed to allow the units to perform self-cleaning functions after use.
Now, however, all those installations would have to wait. His immediate concern was finding the proper connections into the AI systems for tactile sensations and motor controls. With all the old weapons systems removed, there were plenty of open comm ports available for repurposing. As well as the thousands of still utilized functioning ports, such as external tactile sensory input. It was with them that Steve finally figured out a puzzle that had eluded him for years: the stupid reason the military retired this popular model.
To maximize profits, the builders had used substantially substandard components that resulted in the sensors frequently having excessive variances in the tolerances for inductive, capacitive, and resistive impedances to their signals. Mapping out those errors eventually forced him to take the same shortcut that the military had evidently settled on: simply establish a baseline map for each individual RAPTOR, store the file in a long-term storage register, and just let the onboard AI deal with it all—a horrible waist of computing resources that slowed down the overall system. Still, the final resulting combat performance of the machines was way better than any human could ever have achieved.
“Ah! Found another one!” he exclaimed when his renewed probing located one of the many circuits that he was keeping a continuous look out for, and the text suddenly began scrolling on his computer monitor. “And it looks to be a major hit, too!” he happily cheered.
It scrolled too fast for him to get full details, but it was soon clear from his skim-reading skills that this code was the set of instructions related to the LethalLock™ subroutine that had been added to all decommissioned RAPTOR systems sold by the military surplus facilities. “Oh, fuck, yeah! I’ve been looking for YOU, like since forever, bitch!”
He made sure the code was fully copied over into one of his computer’s hard drives before he removed the probe. He then made a note specifying the location of the probe point so that he could follow that circuit path back to the computer chip that contained those instructions. Once finished, he then resumed probing about, looking for other AI subroutines—
“Steve! We’re detecting gunfire from outside,” a call came through on the intercom, interrupting his work, from one of the four functioning RAPTORs keeping watch upstairs. “Consensus supports it seems to be coming from the vicinity of Todd Collier’s property!”
Instantly, he set down the probe and reached for the desk drawer where he stored one of his personal guns, a 9mm auto, a full clip for it, and a Bluetooth headset. In a well-practiced smooth motion, the pistol was loaded, armed, and locked in under a second as he ran up the stairs from the basement. Just before he reached the top of the stairs, he donned the Bluetooth headset with its built-in HUD goggles, earpiece, and microphone in their proper places.
“Alpha! Charlie! Delta! Come with me and lead the way! Echo, hold the fort!” he called through the Bluetooth device out to the RAPTORs that he had left intact and powered up as he ran for the door. The three named units directed him outside through his home’s front door on the east side of the house into the moonlit night while the fourth stayed inside to protect the house from any potential intruders.
Outside, he had to slow down and be cautious. There were two possibilities: the shots either came from his neighbor’s house across the road that ran between their properties, or they came from either of the fields surrounding their houses. Steve crouched low as he slowly walked, having flicked off the safety for the 9mm when he left the confines of his home while the RAPTORs flanked him on either side and Charlie took point ahead of them. Despite the infrared heads-up-display, he couldn’t see any movement as he ventured out.
“Any suggestions as to where those shots came from?” he quietly asked.
“87% consensus is that shots fired came from 057 degrees,” Alpha responded through his Bluetooth, and Steven had to use a few seconds to mentally convert the direction.
Roughly northeast—just as they had reported earlier, directly toward his nearest neighbor’s house standing across the main road that ran between their homes.
“Let’s go,” he softly said, and they steadily advanced forward.
They had just reached the edge of the road when Steve saw two figures start running from his neighbor’s house.
“Sic’em!” Steve called out, and instantly, two of the RAPTORs on either side sprinted across the road and onto Todd’s property to intercept them.
In mere seconds, there were screams coming from two people as more than a quarter ton of flying metal suddenly landed on each of them.
He followed Charlie as the unit advanced on the house. A third figure suddenly appeared in the backlit doorway, but one Steve could clearly see wasn’t his neighbor as the individual was far too skinny, and had raised his hand—
“DROP THE GUN!” Steve shouted.
A shot rang out from the stranger and Steve heard a ping from just ahead of him, but he immediately fired three shots past Charlie back at the invader who instantly fell back.
Coming up on the individual, he saw it was someone about the age of a college kid, but the person was so filthy and greasy in his appearance that Steve doubted he was really a student. Three wounds center chest assured Steve the guy wouldn’t be giving anyone any more problems, but just as he had seen in plenty of cop shows, he kicked the kid’s .22 out of the guy’s reach across the kitchen floor.
“TODD!? IT’S STEVE! ARE YOU OKAY!?” Steve called out. A low moan came from the stairs leading to Todd’s basement.
“Charlie, are you damaged?” he asked the RAPTOR accompanying him.
“Damage is insignificant,” Charlie reported. “Nanoprobe repairs are already being undertaken. Surface photovoltaic functions in the affected area have been isolated to prevent compromising electrical supply. Performance capabilities unimpaired.”
“Then come with me and relay a call to 911,” Steve instructed as he led the way downstairs. “Alpha, Delta, what are the status of the other two?”
“They are not going anywhere,” Delta responded through his Bluetooth.
“Good!”
