Pieces of Me (SI, Mass-X-Over, RFC, Warning: Rated Hard-R)

[MarshalGraves]

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Tombstone Machinists Corporation

In Association With SpaceBattles Forums

Shamefully Presents

Pieces of Me

A MarshalGraves Production

Chapter Two: Building A Better Cattrap

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Mirrors are strange.

You might not think it so, but they have personality. They have their own loyalties, their own balance, if you will.

Some mirrors tell the truth, and reflect your image accurately. Some lie, and make you look skinny, tall, fat, small. Some mirrors are unbreakably steadfast, forged from material stronger than any living being could ever hope to be.

Some shatter like spun sugar.

Would you be surprised if I told you that they have a sense of vengeance, of justice, of bloodthirst? That whole ‘seven years of bad luck’ you’ve heard of isn’t exactly a myth, you know.

That’s the mirror out to get you.

How else can I explain how I found myself in a world I didn’t know, in a time nobody had ever seen, in the middle of a war nobody had ever known? Stolen from friends I didn’t realize I never wanted to leave, and given to a world that had had only a passing glance from me in the hopes of giving myself a lifeline from the depths of my self-mutilation.

I didn’t remember My Little Pony too fondly, I’ll admit. I had to work, so hard, to remember any little detail of the show, and everything I knew, or thought I knew, anyway, was useless.

It didn’t matter much, in the end. My mirror wasn’t quite done with me yet.

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The thing about Equestria you need to realize is that magic is fucking everywhere.

I showed up, out of nowhere, and made a promise to their princess to win a war for her in exchange for help getting back to what I now realized was my home. My tank top was a filthy ruin, my fatigues all-but-trashed, my boots broken, and even my right arm acting up.

Less than a week after that, and I was scouting a location for a forward operating base on the border, roughly three hundred miles away, in a brand, spanking new set of fatigues, complete with sleeveless t-shirt and a jacket. And new boots. All thanks to magic.

My arm was still giving me trouble, though. I hadn’t had time to settle in properly and establish a workshop, so I was going to have to deal with the biofeedback electrocuting me for a little while longer. Though, I will admit, it was fucking irritating when my arm’s internal capacitors would discharge externally and make it look like I had spontaneously joined the Charade Brigade.

Stop. Right there. Before you ask me why I didn’t just ask Celestia for a workshop and some tools, and maybe a little magic help in repairing the damage, let me remind you of a couple of things. One, as awesome as a biomechanical prosthetic arm looks and sounds, it’s still a handicap. Two, I was a stranger in a strange land, and I was never going to be anywhere near as trusting as Michael Valentine (up your fuck~ing gee~eeek!). And three, I was in Equestria, the land of literal sunshine, smiles, rainbows, and friendship-is-magic-glee.

My arm represented everything wrong with the world I had come from. Violence, abuse, disdain of another living creature...that arm was nothing but bad mojo. And in a world full of empathetic creatures, nobody, especially sweet, innocent, cake-addicted Celestia, deserved to know that there was a litany of agony written across my body.

I don’t think I could take it if I made that nice mare cry. Even if she had trolled me into leaping my way to the front lines.

Right, so, there I am, scouting out a location near the base of the mountains. There were a couple of pathways heading up, no real roads to speak of, so it would doubtless make travel difficult for every pony but pegasi. There’s a reason the Swiss are only ever really invaded by accident.

Leading up to the mountains, though, were the myriad of reasons why I wanted this location secured as our FOB.

First, the gentle-rolling foothills established a great pre-made trench network that, with a little bit of earthworks, would make for good defense in the event of incursion. No, I was not planning to fail, I was hoping for the best, but planning for the worst. Too many generals have gone down in history for being fucking morons, I was not planning on Iron Hoof being one of them.

Oh, did I forget to mention that? I wasn’t leading our troops. Did you honestly expect me to? Yeah, sure, and my name’s Gary. No, I was technically a ‘foreign advisor attache’ to the current head of the Royal Guard, Captain Iron Hoof.

Ah, Iron Hoof. No-nonsense unicorn, slate-gray with a black mane and blue eyes. He kept himself trim and strong, he was nearly as large as I vaguely recall a certain Apple stallion from days long gone, and his mane. Oh, lord, the best thing about him was the multiple fucking military buns he kept his mane in. Like, remember Mulan? Yeah, his mane was kept in that style. His cutie mark was a side-on spartan helmet, with a couple of spears crossed behind it.

Sounds like a badass old warhorse, right? He was. He really, really was. Five minutes around him, and I already felt like I was back in Basic, hoping against hope this monster of a DI didn’t notice me. Of course, being the fucking alien I am in this world, that was never going to happen. Especially since I was going to be his XO in all-but-name.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, though? You put this hardass hoofbreaker anywhere near old Earth, and he will find Broadway. And he will own it. I shit you not, the quickest way to get on this stallion’s good side was to start singing a musical within earshot.

...I still remember Phantom of the Opera Day.

Right, so, where was I? Ah, right, rolling foothills, trench warfare, planning for incursion, more reasons I wanted this for our FOB. Right.

Reason number two was the relative nearness of this part of the border to no less than three pony ‘towns’ on our side. At least one or two were about as close to a town in a spaghetti western you could get and still have a viable population, but there were roads and a railway system close enough to the location to serve as a viable means of procuring supplies and rations.

You do not go to war on an empty fucking stomach. Just, full stop, no.

And finally, the third reason I wanted this location is because it was near the mountains, which had gems in them. I wanted those shiny little fuckers, and I wanted them bad.

Wait, back up, let me explain.

The day after I arrived, Celestia had gone off to do Princess-y things, no, I do not know or care what she did, what’s important is that she gave me free rein of the palace apart from bedrooms or personal chambers. And the city outside. Yes, it was a cage, but it was a big cage, and there was a library.

I’m a nerd, sue me. Like you’re not here with me. Pot, kettle, skull.

So, I went to the library, and started reading up on, what else, dragons. Interesting fact, did you all know that before Spike was hatched, Celestia had had his egg for centuries? Yeah, kept it in the library, in a glass case near where she kept what few books on dragons her library had.

….Okay, so I may have opened up his egg’s case, and cuddled him for a little bit and told him about how awesome he was going to be, shut up, you’d do the fucking same. I mean, it’s Spike’s egg. No way I wasn’t going to tell him he was going to be an awesome goddamned dragon. Yes, I am well aware that that statement is redundant. Dragons, therefore awesome, are awesome.

Right, so, I decided to kill some time by reading up on dragons. I wasn’t allowed anywhere, and I was still wearing my ruined-as-fuck CAF fatigues, so I decided to pass the time the only way I could. That was when I discovered that dragons eat gems.

Why is that fascinating, you might be thinking? It’s just a clever little bit of fun written for a kids’ show, a dangerous one, considering dragons equal awesome, and thus are prone to imitation by children, and eating gemstones is fucking stupid, but just a little cartoon detail, right?

Wrong.

I was in a real, living, breathing world, and dragons ate gemstones. This is important for a number of reasons. First, it implies that there is such a glut of gems in Equestria, or at least Equus as a whole, that they’re all-but-useless as coin-of-the-realm. They’re food. You only sell in bulk at Carbon Costco, if you catch my drift.

But second, and more importantly to me, is their properties. What makes them such good food, and fuel, for a fucking reptilian king of awesome?

That took some looking into, but after a couple of hours, I found that the gems in Equus have an entirely different structure compared to those of Earth and Cor. First off, they’re carbon and silicate, sure, that makes them incompressible and ridiculously hard, materially-speaking, just like our gemstones, here, but it’s the structure of the atomic lattice. It’s entirely different.

Our gemstones have atomic lattices in reinforced geometric shapes, usually triangular, tetrahedral, or octagonal bonds in a crystalline pattern. This makes them ridiculously strong, despite being made of what amounts to compressed ash.

Equus gems have random atomic lattices. Their bonds are weird. They don’t form predictable, repetitive chains. They form organic, grown random linkages. The gems are like organic life. They form, they grow, they mature, and they do so rapidly. This makes them structurally weaker, undeniably, but it also makes them...let’s say nicer on the gut.

They weren’t inimical to life on consumption because of these bonds. As a matter of fact, their atomic structure aside, the absolute most important part of Equ-Equusian...Equestrian gems is what happens when they’re being digested. You expose one of these gems to high-potency dissolution agents, like, say, hydrochloric acid, and their atomic lattice alters itself rapidly. It straightens out, starts taking on geometric form in tiny, atomic groupings, and opens itself to bonding in atomic chains.

It takes on traditional gemstone properties, more familiar tetrahedral ones, as it moves through the body and attaches itself to the body’s growth proteins, where it takes on even more metallic properties. It’s like calcium for dragons, and sure as fuck explains why the bastards are so strong.

But that’s not the important bit.

You don’t need to digest food in your stomach. Any acidic-enough compound is capable of breaking down foods into base properties. Fire does it, to an extent, as well.

Why, you ask, is this important? Simple.

Gemstones in Equestria were, in a very real way, Koprulan minerals.

Geek. Up.

Oh, for the love of Night...okay, in Starcraft, you build a base. You start off with a resource-gathering point, and ship your workers out to collect Vespene Gas and minerals. Both of which are native to the Koprulu Sector. The minerals are what I’m talking about.

When exposed to an SCV’s fusion cutter, or a probe’s plasma torch, they begin to realign the minerals’ chaotic structure into a more crystalline-metallic formation, which they refine further into neosteel plates, for Terran structures, or ...whatever Goauld-inspired bullcrap the Protoss use to make all their shit gaudy-ass-gold.

The Zerg, though? Their hive eats those minerals and makes what I now realize are basically baby dragons.

Fucking. Awesome.

So, why did I want gems? You do the math. I was an Engineer, in what was about to be a war, and I had recently discovered that the gems here were like fictional mineral deposits from one of my favorite games and stories ever. I had blueprints burning behind my eyes, connections forming in a tech-chain that was shortened immensely by the mere presence of these gemstones. I could make neosteel. I could build Terran technology.

You’re goddamned right I was going to build a goddamn Command Center.

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I still don’t like fire. Okay, fine, that’s putting it mildly. Fire still made me break out in a hive-inducing sweat. I fucking hate fire. Fire is mean and evil and painful and it hurts.

Why am I talking about my pyrophobia? Because that was literally the only way I had to talk to my new unit.

Once I was done scouting the location for our initial FOB, I headed back to camp. It wasn’t much, just a campfire, a pup-tent, and my camp gear, but I was used to less. Never built a campfire before.

Unfortunately, magic has rules. Always does. Sometimes the rules change based on what world you’re in, in my experience.

I already went over the rules of magic in Cor. In Equestria, magic is fucking weird. Multiple schools, from wild magic to nature magic to arcane magic, but they all have rules.

Unfortunately for me, in Equestria, the modern radio did not exist. Oh, broadcast radios existed, but for military applications, you couldn’t beat magic as a form of communication.

Problem? I was not a unicorn.

Telepathy is a spell in Equestria, but it depends almost entirely on a school of magic that requires a Night-blasted horn. I am a cat. I have no horn.

Worse, the unicorn that would be in my unit, stallion by the name of Captain Iron Hoof, perhaps you know of him? Yeah, he was in the capital training his troops while I was scouting. It isn’t his fault he didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to communicate, it was my suggestion to head out here after looking over the survey maps.
Fucking magic being fucking everywhere.

So, I had to send a scroll to Captain Iron Hoof in a way that simultaneously made me want to squee, and scream. Hence the campfire.

I’m not going to lie. At this point, I’ve been an engineer for roughly six years. I have worked in forges, I have sparked off gunpowder more times than I care to remember, and I have stuck bits of myself in fires by accident. My own, internal magic was literally made of fucking fire. I should be over this, right? Right.

Wrong.

In the forge, the fire is usually hidden inside of a kiln, if it’s not an electrical or plasma kiln. Sparking off gunpowder is a quick, sudden explosion that like as not requires prying me off of the goddamned ceiling, anyway. And I never volunteered to put bits of myself in fire, that was usually the Elves throwing fireballs and napalm spells at me.

I don’t like Elves, by the way.

As to my internal magic...I never used it when I had a choice. Right now, though, I did not have a choice.

I scrawled out a quick note about the results of my survey, studied it over, proofread it some more, made some minor edits, cleaned up the language a bit, made it more formal, scratched it all out, grabbed a new parchment, made myself a report-style form-letter, filled it out, copied it over, proofread it, double-checked how much parchment I had in my messenger bag, decided I didn’t have enough, and, with a sigh, stopped procrastinating.

Oh, shut up.

I closed my eyes and, for the first time in Equestria, called my magic out of my core. It crept along, quietly, slowly, before racing for the easiest channel through me and into the environment. Because of my accident, and the nature of my Ethereal Self, this manifested in a spiritual channel of mana through a limb that did not exist any longer. This meant that my right arm, my mechanical limb, had to be specially designed around my Ethereal Self, so that it could manifest my mana, as it was the path of least resistance.

The end result is that my right arm looked like it was covered in burning fire.

This was my mana’s purest expression. If I filled my entire aura up with my mana, I’d probably look like I was a super saiyan, what with the blond hair and the aura of furious fucking flames.

Anyway, my arm lit itself on fire. I could feel it, the heat dancing across my right side, licking out, eager to eat, to consume, to burn. Before I could start panicking, I opened my eyes and grabbed the scroll, weaving the spell Princess Celestia had taught me before teleporting me out here. The fire on my arm turned green, touched the scroll, and incinerated it, the ashes blowing towards the lonely mountain in the middle of the plains far, far to the southwest.

Then, I allowed myself to panic.

My arm was on fire. Again. My mana could not harm me, not in this expression of it. It was my own aura, suffusing myself in preparation for spell creation. It was me, my magical self, rising to the surface.

That did not stop my heart from believing it wanted me dead. I remembered every instant of those three burning days. The horror of agony that would not allow me rest. I could find no surcease of flame licking my wounded arm, taking more and more of my flesh and crisping it to ash.

I could smell the smouldering fur, all over again, slowly turning into the crisp, actinic smell of burning flesh, a cooking scent not unlike gamey chicken filling my nose. I could hear my own screams burning my ears, tearing my throat to bloody bits as my eyes filled with the orange, blue, white, and yellow of my own arm dissipating into crackling and popping energy.

I relived those three days in three minutes before my mind caught up to itself and relaxed its hold on my magic, letting it fall back into dormancy in my Ethereal Self.

It sucks. It really, really sucks to have magic, to be able to create fucking miracles out of nowhere, and be unable to use it without reminding yourself of the worst goddamned experience in your two lives. I still have days where sparking off a quick little spell freezes me up, deep inside. The fire is a part of me, it always has been, since I was a nine-year-old kitten.

Shut up. These are manly tears of shame, not anything sad or moomoo or whatever. Ass.

So, anyway, I sent off my evaluation of the site to the good Captain, and set about policing my camp. I was just getting everything situated into a ruck on my back when my surroundings lit up with a bright white luminescence and bam! Instant deja vu.

Apparently, the Princess had decided my report was either insufficient, or she needed me back home, for a given value of ‘home’, as I appeared once more in the throne room in a flash of light, a Princess in front of me, Iron Hoof on my left, and a couple of guardsponies behind me.

At least this time I was fucking conscious. Didn’t stop me from making my surprise known to one and all, though.

“Bucking Tartarus, lady, are you trying to give me a heart attack! I thought you wanted my help, not my corpse!”

Fuck it, man, she’s not my princess. My princess is a fiery-hot redhead with a zest for life and mischief. And punk rock. I respect Evelyn.

Celestia, at this point, was a fucking obstacle. Her and Iron Hoof, the bastard pony glaring at me with his laser-like blue eyes at my obvious disrespect of his beloved diarch.

Said diarch was, of course, seated upon her throne, gazing down at us with those magenta-violet-whatever eyes of hers half-lidded in sadness. If she was irritated with my…’informality’, she didn’t let it show as she replied, “I apologize for the untimely teleport, Sergeant Graves, but, given the circumstances, I thought it might be best to bring you back as swiftly as possible.”

With a shrug, I tugged my stetson off of my head with my right paw and curved my clawtips through my hair, spiking up my bangs again before resettling the only vanity I had ever indulged in back on my head. I looked up at the white mare and gave another shrug, releasing an explosive sigh as I shook my head. “Okay, look, you got something to say, say it. Like you said, time’s up, move fast, we need to get this manure spread.”

Seriously, even now, that was fucking irritating.

Anyway, Iron Hoof spoke up, at that point, giving me a royally-irritated sniff as he reached into his saddlebags with his magic and pulled out a bunch of maps and diagrams. He inclined his head towards the princess, who took them in her own magic and began to look over them. Me? I still have no idea what was on those pages, I was just an ‘attache’, not an actual enlisted soldier of hers. They looked like troop movements, but fuck if I know what the meat of them actually was.

“This is particularly worrisome, Captain. Are you certain that the pegasi saw this much movement?”

“I am, Your Highness. They may be unused to reporting events of this particular nature, but I trust their word, regardless. The Wonderbolts are some of our best weatherponies for a reason, my lady.”

Oh, right, that’s a thing. Pegasi control the weather in Equestria, save for a few places where wild magic is more powerful. Note I said ‘Equestria’, not Equus. Pegasi weather-services are typically unwelcome in other kingdoms. Bad enough Equestria controls the cycle of sun and moon, but to capture the weather, as well? You may as well hand your kingdom, empire, whatever over to the ponies. Your cultural distinctiveness will be added to their own. Resistance is futile, you have no chance to survive make your time.

Oh, so you got that one. Good for you. Describe a tribble for me. Hah!

Anyway, Celestia spent about a minute looking over those documents, then sighed and retreated into the Royal ‘We’ again. Honestly, at this point, I started to wonder if maybe Twilight Sparkle had been responsible for pulling this stick out.

“If this is accurate, Captain, then it would seem we have little more than four months before the griffons take Us to outright war. Given the reports Our economic advisors have given Us of the rate of withdrawal from Our trade agreements, and the number of airships leaving Equestria’s airspace, We fear We must hoof up our own preparations. Sergeant Graves?”

…..Airships? Griffons have airships? No, wait, hold the fucking phone, airships? …This becomes a thing I desperately need. I mean, come on! I want a squadron of airships. I want a whole bunch of them. I’ll name them ‘Agrius’, ‘Highwind’, and ‘Bahamut’, and I’ll crew them with red pegasi. Exclusively. Because Red Wings, bitch! Airships!

Are people talking to me? Oh, right, that’s a thing.

I immediately moved my eyes from studying Celestia’s cutie mark (shut up) and met her magenta eyes. Now that I wasn’t occupied with the whole world-hopping thing, and was, in fact, quite bored listening to two people talking around me, I noticed something I hadn’t the last time I spoke with Celestia.

Every time she looked me in the eyes, she flinched. Just a little, and it was only really noticeable in the wings, but her feathers would ruffle up just a bit, and her eyes got just a tiny bit sadder.

“Yes, Your Highness?”

The ruffling stopped, but the sadness remained, lacing her voice as she addressed me, “We must ask, Why have you not joined Captain Iron Hoof at the training academy to prepare Our ponies for this war?”

Ah. I should have figured this would come up.

“I apologize, Your Majesty, but to be honest, I could not effectively train your troops for many, many reasons. Primarily, though, the fact of the matter is, I’m bipedal, and your troops are quadrupedal. I have no idea how I would conduct a battle if I were to be turned into a pony, here and now, and I have no idea how to adapt my own kingdom’s tactical manual into a quadrupedal fighting force. My training would actively harm your troops, in that case.”

Captain Iron Hoof’s stern expression actually made me hold my muzzle shut to keep me from laughing uproariously, the way his jaw dropped and his hoof came up to literally ring his helmet.

“I never thought of that….”

So, that was why Iron Hoof spent an entire week looking like I got my jollies by kicking his in. Good to know he thought I was a lazy-ass, duty-derilicting procrastinator!
Have I mentioned that, regardless of my desires not to see Iron Hoof fail to conduct a war, I fucking hated his ass like I hated fire at this point in time? No? I hated that fucking pony like I hated fucking fire at this point in time.

“While that does make a great deal of sense, We are forced to wonder what you have been doing with your time, Sergeant Graves, and how it will assist Us in surviving and winning the war to come? Need We remind you that Our assistance in returning you to your home requires Ours to be in a fit state?”

Wow, PA, much, Celestia? I tipped my hat’s brow down over my eyes, mostly just so I could roll them in peace, as I replied, “Your Grace, Captain, I’ve been scouting locations around Equestria near the border so as to study up on the landscape and what tactics the griffons might be likely to attempt first, as well as scouting prime locations to start building a mobile command center.”

Iron Hoof picked up his jaw (no, literally, he used his hoof to shut his jaw) and turned towards me, that stern look right back in his eyes as he gruffly spoke, “You are wasting your time looking for places to build command tents, boy.” He looked back over to Celestia, snorting, “Honestly, Your Majesty, your troops will be ready faster and with less irritation if we don’t rely on this...outsider.”

Right. That one...yeah, okay, that one fucking stung.

“Tents, Captain? Who the Tartarus said anything about tents?”

Fucking goddamnit, I hate this. Even ‘hell’ was being scrubbed into something kids can say without pissing their parents off. Fucking Hasbro.

“What else could a ‘mobile command center’ be, ‘Sergeant’.”

I reached into my messenger bag (I was not calling it a saddlebag, damnit) and pulled out a metal dowel. It was irregular, and pocked in strange places, but it represent the fruits of my research into gems, so far. I mean, I didn’t exactly have a proper forge or anything set up, so getting a two foot long dowelish sort of configuration going was amazing. I tossed that over to Iron Hoof, who caught it in his slate-gray magic.

“Try to bend that, Cap.”

He did. He spent a good two minutes on it, pouring more and more magic into it, but all he got for it was the tiniest bend. I actually picked it up, right out of his magic, and tucked it back into my messenger bag. “That was neosteel. Very durable, very strong, and very, very light, if manufactured properly.”

The captain nodded slowly, looking confused. “...What does that have to do with the price of tea in Chineigh?”

...Chineigh? The fuck is...anyway.

“My ‘mobile command center’. I can build it out of that.”

The captain rolled his eyes and vocally-sneered, “Ooh, a tent made of metal. Will it require three shingles, or will two suffice?”

At that, I took my hat off and ran my flesh paw through my hair down to the base of my braid, ignoring the twitch of my right wrist. I didn’t bother to hide my eye-rolling.
“It won’t be a tent, you twit. It will be a mobile construction yard with living quarters, war room, and sensor net. The command center is practically an entire firebase on its own.”

Celestia cleared her throat and raised her eyeridges at me. “This does sound like quite the boon, especially with the properties of the metal you say you can build it with, Sergeant. However, it sounds like it shall be quite large, and regardless of lightness, it will be exceedingly heavy. We wonder how you make something like this...command center...mobile?”

Here, I grinned and put my hat back on. “Oh, that’s easy, Your Highness. It’ll fly."

I quite enjoyed the floored look on both of their faces

"Admittedly, detaching the docking clamps deactivates a great deal of the command center’s fringe benefits, mostly due to grounding issues, but hey.”

I spent a moment just soaking in their disbelief, and took out the blueprints and the relevant texts I knew I'd need from the library to show the math, and then spent the next two (boring) hours showing off my work, proving the concept, and outlining the resources I needed.

Have I mentioned I fucking hate bureaucracy?

Anyway, Appleoosa was about to get a bunch of train-loads of gemstones, setting me up for phase two of my grand plan to win a war against an enemy I had no intel on outside of fucking library books.

Still, it was mostly enjoyable, as I explained how a Terran Command Center actually worked. The looks on their faces throughout the whole discussion...just magnificent. I wondered, for a moment, how they’d react when I turned up wearing Raynor’s CMC-400 Powered Combat Suit.

….But that’s for later.

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Whenever I was in Canterlot (that’s the big city on the lonely mountain smack-dab in the center of Equestria, in case you were wondering), I had to keep myself to myself, outside of Royal summonses. I mean, for obvious reasons. A war was about to pick up, and there’s a strange non-pony that isn’t even a minotaur wandering around, carrying loads of weapons?

Yeah, either I’d get blamed for the war, or I’d freak the ponies out. Or both.

It made for some seriously boring times, though. I literally had to be waited on hand and...er...hoof and hoof? Wow, that one really doesn’t work, does it? I couldn’t even say that I can engage in hand-to-hand, anymore, what with my paws (and yes, they do have pawpads, see? I put padded leather in my faux-sleeve to emulate pawpads for my mechpaw.) and ponies...yeah, it’s just not cricket. Hoof and muzzle? Bah.

I had to call on servants for the castle, and I could only go out and about, even to the Royal Gardens, at night, when everyp-...when all the ponies were asleep.

No. No, I am not saying it. I am not fucking saying it. Shut up, no, I will not say it! Goddamnit, I am not saying ‘everypony’!

...

...

…..I will find you. And I will kill you.

Right, so, anyway. Because of all of this nonsense, I kinda got into the habit of either being out and about in the wilderness, doing my scouting, or being in the castle. It kinda migrated to the point that I was sleeping through a chunk of the day, waking up in the afternoon and doing my dailies, and heading out at night to try and ease the cabin fever.

“Discord, buddy, I think I’m going crazy.”

….I was very, very bad at easing the cabin fever.

“I mean, come on. I know she’s got legs for days, but seriously, I always thought I was a boob cat.”

….Really, really bad at it.

“And don’t get me started on that mane! In my first life, a girl with that thing would immediately be labelled ‘con-girl’ or ‘die-hard lesbian’. Which might be the case, I don’t judge. But damnit, dude, she’s a pony. I am bipedal. Why the hell do I find that...wait, the hell?! I can say ‘hell’?! What the fuck, man?! Fucking...oh, Light, I can swear. I can fucking swear! Discord, man, I could fucking kiss you!”

….Shut up, I had volumes.

So, okay. I was in the gardens talking to a statue. The statue. The statue of Discord. Which was currently wearing my stetson.

Like I said, I’d gotten into the habit of meandering around the gardens at night, when I didn’t have anything else to do. This was the night after I’d sold Celestia on my command center, and I was still waiting for the first shipment of gems to come in. Iron Hoof had grumbled his superior way off to whatever Royal Guard Training Academy was running his classes, and Celestia had meetings on top of meetings that afternoon, so I ran off and hid for a few hours until the moon was up.

Also, no, seriously, Luna had a fucking point way back when. Almost the minute Celestia lifted the moon, every single pony in Canterlot closed up shop and buried their muzzles in their pillows. I am almost certain I heard a great disturbance in the Fluff almost half an hour to the fucking minute after the moon came up.

I’d be pretty damn pissed off if my people literally could not wait to miss my greatest work and a labor of love.

Once I heard the Poofening of the Pillows, I ran out into the gardens. I wasn’t about to wake the Big Mare on Campus up to teleport me out to a campsite with no gems to work with, I still didn’t have a workshop available to fix my arm, and I was getting really, really fucking tired of staring at books or walls, so I ran my psycho little tail out into the gardens.

I may have pissed off a few budgies or whatever, but fuck it. Fluttershy wasn’t around, and right then, I didn’t give much of a fuck. I needed AIR!

And that’s when I found Discord’s statue. He looked exultant, happy, as he had been celebrating his nascent ‘victory’ when the Elements of Harmony sealed him up tighter than my old family’s wallets on my birthday.

No, I’m not bitter, why do you- fuck off.

At this point, I think I need to go a bit deeper into how my Voltan-gifted memory works. I love engineering. Absolutely adore it. Could do without the math that goes into it, as I hate routine, but eh. Take it where you can.

My memory is perfect. Absolutely, steel-trap perfect. At least, it is when I give a flying fuck about something. When I was in Corenna, I could literally have built my old Mirage from scratch. That car was my life for a long damn time. It stuck in my mind perfectly. Star Trek, Star Wars, a whole hell of a lot of fanfiction...I could remember every single line, every word, because those were pieces of me that were important. Blueprints on my old Toyota, even after a casual flip through the manual? Steel trap.

Other stuff? ….eh. By this point, I had forgotten almost the entire class of every single year I had spent in school back on Earth. I could name like, two people, mostly because I had dated them. Co-workers? Forgotten. I was even forgetting the later chunks of Supernatural, because, seriously, that show developed Run Fatigue in the worst way.

My Little Pony was new, and it had saved my life for all of a month before it finally failed and I decided to see if I could replace ‘oxygen’ on my list of physical necessities. It didn’t have enough time to really soak into my memory. I had bits and pieces, and almost all of them centered around Discord.

And that’s only because of Q. John de Lancie is a God.

More of it was trickling back. I identified it as something I cared about (because I was fucking in Light-benoosed Equestria) and my memory was clearing it up, dusting it off, and putting it on a shelf. This was actually a bit of a problem, because no mortal, no matter what, has an unlimited amount of ‘shelves’ in their mental storage.

I had to lose something to get MLP. It would later turn out that I could no longer remember my family’s birthdays and quite a few holidays from Earth.

Eh. I can’t remember much about it, but fuck Labor Day, anyway. ...That’s got something to do with reproduction, right? Fuck you don’t look at me like that bitch I will Night-damned gut you.

So, I remembered Discord. I had a vague notion, at this point, that he was aware inside of his prison. He knew things, as soon as he got out, he really shouldn’t have, being a thousand years displaced.

Either that, or he Q’d up a manual to get himself up to speed. Which I do not put past him.

But right now, at this point in time, I needed a friend. An actual friend. Not a pony. Not a queen-in-all-but-name looking down on me for being a warrior or a cat-furry. Not a prissy little wannabe that had ‘fought’ his way through the ranks of a peaceful little town’s peaceful little Royal Guard with a superiority complex as large as the sun.

I needed a friend, and I remembered that Discord did, too. Given that, at this point, I figured either he was in a hell of ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’, or he’d get the cliff’s notes later on, when he woke up, I might try and get a head start on Fluttershy’s later redemption of the blighter.

That, and, as we have already covered, sanity and I are, at times, best described as ‘ships passing in the night’.

“So, is it because the fucking Queen of Hearts ain’t here? Or is it because you are? Whatever, fuck it. Now that I’m aware that I can swear, holy hell, I can swear. I’m going to figure this out. Dude, this is awesome!”

...Okay, it took a little while for me to finish swearing the air blue.

I told him all about me. Everything. I told him my life story, both of them, what I could remember from Earth, anyway. I ate up like, three hours just talking about Star Trek and StarCraft. I ate up another couple of hours summarizing my life on Cor. I talked about Callie, I talked about Sasha, I talked about my arm.

“...I mean, what did I do wrong? Why did she just…do that to me? I gave her my heart and my soul, I was willing to do anything for her. I loved her, man, I really did, and she just goes and throws me away? Why the fuckis ‘X threw me away’ my life story?”

….I cried. I let it all out. I vented, I ranted. By the time the moon was hitting the horizon, signalling the end of Night and the resurgence of Day, I was wrung-out.

“...thanks for listening, Discord. I have to head out, now. Sun’s coming up, and Celestia doesn’t want me offending her delicate little people’s sensibilities. I’ll be back, though, man. Tell you all about the Koprulu Sector and the ongoing adventures of Jim Raynor and shit next time, alright?”

I clapped him on the back, looked around to make sure nobody was looking, and gave him a hug. He needed it, more than I ever did, if he really was aware in that stone prison of his. On top of that, I whispered, “Hey, Discord. Look me up when you break out of here, bud. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that nobody deserves to be alone. So, if I’m around when you’re out and about, look me up, alright, partner?”

I gave him another clap on the back, grabbed my hat, and walked off. If I had stuck around for just a few moments, back then, I’d have seen a single teardrop squeeze out from between a couple of stone eyelids.

...I might be fucking with you. I admit it. I might not, though. Do you know? No. No, you do not.

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It took a couple of days for the shipment to come in, mostly because of the other, extra bits I had included that weren’t actually in the blueprints for a Terran Command Center. I needed a refining forge, a kiln that could get the gems hot enough to begin the molecular rearrangement, and a bunch of tools to handle it. I needed an industrial press (I had to modify a few printing presses with hydraulics at first), I needed tobacco like nobody’s business, I needed etching acids...yeah.

With those, though, I began to work. Celestia had tried to force a bunch of work ponies on me, to make it go by faster (no way this was getting done in under a month, minimum) but had balked when I pointed out that it was not uncommon for command centers under construction to be subjected to acids so volatile that an explosion of them could strip flesh from bone and reduce a fully-grown and well-armored individual into a gooey skeleton in seconds.

No, I did not tell her that banelings were not, in fact, a thing, but what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. I didn’t lie, I just failed to tell her that said volatile acid was usually employed by my enemies trying to keep me from expanding my base.

...I fucking hate Zerg Rushes. Hate.

It took me two long, sleepless days just to get enough neosteel forged and refined to my standards to start laying the foundation. Once I got that done, I had to shift to using some of the gems and some sand to start making circuitboards. Fortunately, computers are, in fact, a thing in Equestria. They’re barebones as hell, despite whatever hoops Twilight Sparkle made hers jump through, but I managed to program the auto-builder in the Command Center’s foundation to help out. I just needed the gems.

Oh, right. Forgot to explain that bit. In StarCraft, when you build Terran, you build fast. Not as fast as Zerg builds, but a hell of a lot faster than Protoss builds. From a gameplay standpoint, it’s all about the balance, but in practical terms...terms I now had to live in...Terran has the best design philosophy ever.

When you build a structure in SC2, you get to see certain effects that impacted the lore of the game, which, in turn, impacted their real-world execution. The Protoss actually build their structures on their homeworld, and teleport them through their Warp Gate Psi-Matrix to locations where they are needed. Only two Protoss structures do not need the Psi-Matrix’s pylon network to be warped in, their Nexus and...well...Pylons. The Zerg use massive organic hives to terraform the ground into a purple-grayish goo called ‘Creep’, which simultaneously nourishes them and turns the ground into a soft sort of mishmash that turns matter into biomass, which they use to generate more creep and build more ‘buildings’.

In all seriousness, the Zerg could reduce an entire planet into a pulsating life-form that exists only to spawn more zerg and conquer more planets in a matter of weeks. It’s fucking terrifying to think about.

Terrans, on the other paw...ooooh, Terrans. They’re crazy. Like, literally, terrans are goddamned psychos. Their combat philosophy is ‘get into the combat theatre and build shit while shit is fucking with us’. No joke. Protoss are ready to warp in as soon as they have an energy field produced by a pylon or one of their motherships. Zerg burrow into the ground and eat a chunk of your planet before you realize you’re in the middle of a discount Tyranid colony. Terran? What you see is what you fight.

They’re hardasses, through and through.

Now, the thing to realize is, why the fuck would you drop into combat and start building something? That takes weeks, if not months, and that’s a lot of bullets, blades, and glaive-wurms to fend off, right?

Well, the Terrans designed their buildings to make the process easier. An SCV (Space Construction Vehicle) is already a force-multiplier, being able to lift about a half a ton or so at a time and still move. Their fusion cutters are, contrary to gameplay, holy fucking shit deadly weapons and awesome at welding, and the buildings themselves each possess an ‘auto-builder’, a framework built into the foundation that helps assemble the building in a pre-made pattern.

It makes for all the barracks and command centers and whatnot to be pretty ‘samey’, but fuck it if it’s not effective.

The problem I was running into was I needed to program and set up the auto-builder, which was taking more time than I had figured on, given Equestria’s little issue with a less-than-passing familiarity with modern technology.

Like, no. Have you ever tried making your own circuit boards? How about your own circuits? It’s difficult and time-consuming, and it took me six days to get enough prepared that I could program the damned autobuilder.

Once I had that done, it was all a matter of feeding gems into the refining press and feeding the raw neosteel into the foundation. And also lifting a lot of sheets of metal for the autobuilder to weld into place.

….Yeah, I probably should have built an SCV first.

Now, at the end of about a week and a half, I actually got the command center to a decent point, where I could start leaving large amounts of neosteel in the hopper and heading back to Canterlot for a nap or five so it could fiddle with the innards of the command center. I was a little leery of this, but Iron Hoof and Celestia had apparently traced out an alert ward-scheme on the area while I was a little busy fucking around with printing presses, so I felt fairly confident in continuing my visitations to Discord at night. During the day, when the auto-builder had time to spare before it needed my attention, I actually went about sourcing other raw materials I needed.

No, seriously. I needed graphene-based oil (which was conveniently the only oil the ponies had readily available, but they called it ‘rock oil’) which I could then refine as close as possible to fullerene as I could without the command center’s fabrication facilities.

Yeah, this command center? It was going to look nice, but it was going to work like crap. I needed to build this sucker just to build a better one, later on. At the rate I was cadging and adapting technology into Terran tech, I’d need at least seven or eight command center iterations just to get to baseline StarCraft.

And baseline StarCraft would be the first command center capable of fabricating SCVs. I was at least a year away from my precious, precious SCVs. And once I had one of those, I could build a supply depot and a barracks.

...I’ll explain later.

This was my pattern for about a month, by the way. One month out of the four Equestria had before the griffons finally got up off their duffs and felt confident enough to come screaming over the borders. One month that I had used to fabricate seven-eighths of the most powerful military structure Equestria would likely ever see. One month to get it built enough that most of its fabricators were online and usable, if only in their base states. One month to get what I really, really wanted out of my command center.

Security and familiarity? Pfft, no. I needed a construction bay.

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The thing you never see in RTS games is the inside of the buildings you construct. You see the outside, you see the units coming out of them. In the really good ones, you see the buildings have animations that trigger under certain conditions, like production or damage.

But you never see the inside.

The command center is impressive. Another thing that hits you in the teeth when adapting something like this to real life is scale. Like, no, seriously, the scale in StarCraft is fucking broken. On the map, the Minotaur-classBattlecruiser, the epitome of (playable) Terran engineering, is roughly ten times the size of your standard marine, whereas in cinematics, the fucker is damn-near city-sized. In actual fact, according to the blueprints in my head, the Minotaur-class is 1,103 meters long, 654 meters wide, and 258 meters tall.

The command center suffers similarly. Some depictions have them as large as football fields. Your map has them take up a space roughly twelve-marines large and three marines tall. The actual command center, though, that I was building?

...Yeah, I had to make that one a bit smaller. Three-quarters of its actual size, the one I was constructing was about 1200 square meters of space, forty meters long, and about thirty wide. Four stories tall, each story about three meters, so twelve meters of height. So...the football field thing's not exactly off-base, now, is it?

Yeah, I was grateful for that auto-builder.

Anyway, the interior that you don't get to see in the game? That shit was nice. The bottom floor was a foyer with two corridors leading around the sides, a massive hangar in the center for construction, ten ‘rooms’ for storage of raw materials and completed SCVS.. The three floors up were devoted to the more...warlike pursuits. In fact, the entire top two floors were the sensor net and computer and analysis sections. The second floor was...pretty much offices with a big war room in the center. I loved the war room. It had a massive table with a holographic map display connected to the sensor net.

So awesome.

Anyway, I wanted this command center for the first floor, and the first floor only. I needed fabrication facilities. It took some doing, but by the end of the month, I had managed to cobble together an auto-doc for a procedure I’d been putting off for a year back in Corenna.

My arm is a mess. You know it, I know it. I hadn’t replaced or repaired it for over a month, and even before then, I was due some serious maintenance on it back when I hugged Bakuda’s baby.

At the end of the month, I finally bit down on the bullet and decided to improve it. Especially since it would be neosteel. The problem is, neosteel does not mesh well with organics unless those organics are Zerg. Or dragons, but whatever. It doesn’t corrode. You need baneling acid to corrode this stuff, seriously. It’s atomically-sealed. It bonds very, very well with itself, and with vespene gas, and that’s about it. This wouldn’t be much of a problem, except it makes lubricating it ridiculous. You build something from neosteel, you lubricate it from the inside. And no, blood is a terrible mechanical lubricant.

My old arm, I was lubricating with WD-40 equivalent from the outside. Occasionally, I’d slick up the inside of my sleeve with the stuff and that’d keep me going for a week or two before I’d need to replace it. The neosteel? Nope. It seals up really nicely, so I’d have to use an internal lube. This is a problem, because an oil pump would have to be externalized from the arm, somehow, because of the compact space. I couldn’t just have little pockets where I put oil in, because then they wouldn’t reach the entirety of the arm. Basically, if I wanted my arm to work and look like an arm, I needed to put an oil pump somewhere.

My solution proves how insane I am. I built an artificial heart.

The neosteel arm took me a week to design, even with the help of the command center’s fabricators. I had to figure out how to make the heart connect to the lubrication network inside the arm, design the network to reach every joint and cable without making so much noise it made hiding the bastard pointless. I had to design the heart to be externally-sealed, but internally negotiable. I had to design connection ports that ran through my own body so I could replace the lubricant where and when possible without exposing it to my delicate innards, while also making it possible to remove the limb without also needing to replace the pump.

This is where I got really crazy. I programmed the auto-doc to perform three different surgeries. One, it had to open up the right side of my back and install my artificial heart in piecesthrough my ribcage. I did not want to wait to repair my arm, which I had discovered had developed a short up in the internal capacitors in the shoulder, which was constantly electrocuting me and spazzing the arm out, and I did not want to have to cut through my biosteel-reinforced skeleton. So, installing the heart in pieces. Once that was done, it had to connect several more hoses and lines through my shoulder and my upper arm, seal them, drain them, and clean them. Third, it had to connect the arm to my nervous system. This wasn’t too bad, but the new arm required a new mounting structure, which necessitated the creation of another two access ports. These ran from the pump-heart towards my back, and out to an access panel I was implanting in my skin. This would be bolted to my rib cage and my shoulder blade.

Coincidentally, this also meant I had to increase the weight of the plates I had reinforcing the other side of my ribcage by about a dozen and a half kilos. And yes, while they were good ‘emergency body armour’, their primary purpose was to offset the weight of my fucking metal arm so I didn’t develop scoliosis or something.

...You know, looking back, I think I might be a bit of a masochist.

That took up the entire third week of the month. The arm and pump were constructed, the auto-doc was programmed and triple-checked, and I had just filled the hoppers of the auto-builder to carry on for the final week of construction. I sent Celestia a letter (I was getting better at it. I only went into a fugue for ten minutes after I sparked it off, this time.) stating that I would be working with my command center to get ‘a really fiddly bit done, and done right’, and I should be up and about in about a week, I just needed to make sure nothing went wrong.

Yeah, I know. I taunted Murphy, and he kicked me in the jaws. And the balls.

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It took me a couple of hours after I sent the letter to Celestia to get ready for the surgery. Completely apart from psyching myself up to do my first surgery on my actual, physical body since I had constructed my first automail arm, I was also having to psych myself up to do my first solo surgery on myself.

I was seriously missing Agrias, at this point. Anyway, there were a load of checks the auto-doc’s computer had to run through, and I had to undress, disinfect, and anesthetize myself.

Fuck no, I am not letting a fucking machine hit me with anesthetic, are you nuts?!

Anyway, I was in my boxers, just about to lay down on my belly and let the auto-doc start when I remembered I had a major problem. I didn’t realize what it was, so I sat up, leaving the auto-doc in standby, and looked around, trying to figure out what I had forgotten.

I was stripped down to my skivvies, including the fur sleeve? Check. Auto-doc had run through diagnostics (three times)? Triple-check. The pieces of the artificial heart were tagged and ready for the auto-doc? Check. The new arm’s pieces were on stand-by for the auto-doc to install? Check. Anesthetic button and IV were set up and running into my left wrist? Blissfully sweet check.

I reached up and scratched at my muzzle with my right paw, and that’s when I remembered I had to remove the mechanical arm I had on before I could put myself through the surgery. Rolling my eyes, I disconnected the IV (left the needle in my wrist, though), and padded out into the main hangar to get my toolkit. I swayed my tail a little in the breeze brought on by the open SCV bay doors leading outside, picked up my toolkit from where I'd left it by the hoppers, and turned around before freezing solid where I stood.

The hangar bay doors were open. I had not opened them. I clenched the bare metal of my paw into a fist after letting my right paw pat down my bare thigh, looking for a weapon I knew was not there. I turned around to face the intruder, wondering, for a brief moment, if this was finally going to be the moment where I died.

You ever have one of those moments you swear feels cinematic and dramatic as hell? Yeah, this was one of those for me.

It was like a slow rotation. I spun on my heels, the empty construction cradles lit from a source behind me slowly, so slowly, spinning to make way for more well-lit walls laden with tool chests and power equipment, then the edge of one brightly-lit portal framing a large, horned equine with a flowing, waving mane. It took until that silhouette was centered in my view before I realized what, or rather who it was.

Celestia, backlit by the sun, carrying a wicker basket of something in her magic. Her horn was shining just enough to let me see the expression of shock, sorrow, and pain as she gazed upon the hideous, scarred, broken, incomplete body before her, a body I had refused to show her, or anyone. A collection of agony and misery I had kept hidden as best I could since Sasha had discovered it years ago.

She read it, every word of a litany of pain whose author had not stopped writing since I was a newborn kitten. Every scar, every injury, every burn that had taken my fur and replaced it with pinkened wrath was being seared onto her magenta irises. Every missing chunk of muscle was written into her eyes by a tireless author of misery, burned there as surely as they had been burned away from my body.

And then she saw where my arm ended, and machine began.

There is no fucking with you, this time. Celestia’s violet eyes welled up as she gazed at me. She looked upon my missing arm, looked into my slitted green eyes, and just as I saw that familiar flinch and ruffle, she turned and she ran.

….at least she hadn’t thrown up in my command center.

It hurt, though, you know? It hurt like ten different kinds of hell. Someone as peaceful, as beautiful, as motherly as Celestia, Princess of Equestria, Solar Diarch of the Two Royal Pony Sisters, had looked at me, and run away.

I felt hideous. I felt filthy. The old familiar disgust with myself rose up, filled me, and tore me in two, deep down in my soul. She hadn’t even said a word. I guess a broken, old soldier like me just isn’t good enough, right? I retreated into my surgery chamber after closing the bay doors again, and set about removing my arm.

It was habit that saved my life, right then. If I hadn’t taken my arm off to maintain it a hundred, no, a thousand times by then, I probably would have ripped it off and done myself some irreparable damage. As it is, the procedure was so rote that, before I even knew it, the arm was off, I was laying down on my belly, and trying very, very hard not to see the salty droplets hitting the floor beneath me through the hole in the headrest.

It was just one more piece of silvered glass hitting the floor and breaking. Just one more moment out of a million moments that had taken my heart and turned it to...well, not to stone. I kept trying to say I didn’t care, I kept trying not to care. It never worked.

I never was any good at hardening my heart. Never was good at being made of marble. I had two hearts, now. One was made of metal, rubber, and fiber, and one was made of glass. Pitted, cracked, and blackened glass that could no more resist a hammer than my metal arm could play the piano without me. My artificial heart, my oil pump, was more human, more normal than the one I had been born with.

The first incision was a blessing, because it distracted me. It carved my body open like the haunted look on Celestia's face had carved my soul. It tore my body apart like Callie had my spirit, like my best friend Henry had, like Aislygn and grandma had. It tore into me and let me lie to myself, that the tears were from physical pain, and not from the gaping, open wound I had had for a heart for two decades, by now.

I had scared off Celestia with just a glimpse of my body. I had hurt Celestia. My existence had hurt the sweetest, most wonderful, and subjectively most attractive pony in Equestria.

...I didn’t use the anesthetic. I didn’t deserve to.

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