In the morning I found myself staring down a scope at the bank in stark silence, while Pumpkin was prone next to me staring down the sight of her own grenade launcher as well as we eyed the front entrance of the bank we were supposed to get into. I was whistling at the level of security. "This reminds me of that time we first met." I muttered after that, and Pumpkin Scoffed.

"You mean when you were running away from the building starting to explode and machines were going completely bonkers thanks to your friend alongside a crazy metal pony that was tearing the place apart?" she looked at me and I could tell that through the mask she was giving me an incredulous expression, "I sincerely hope you're not planning on blowing this place up as well." she stopped and pointed with her hoof, "Oh, look at that beauty, a Sentry grade two!"

The machine in question was a neon pink tripod that reminded me eerily of the ultra sentry that we had fought way back with the rogue AI. It was in similar design, but its tracks had been replaced with wheels and instead of a heavy canon and laser gun, it was armed with dual laser chain guns. No wonder it was still alive and in working order. Few things would want to mess with it, let alone the horde of Mr.Gutsy models that were also hovering around the bank, both patrolling it and guarding it from intruders.

She emptied her grenade launcher of all but two of its six rounds, and inserted four silver ringed rounds into her launcher, "Wanna see a magic trick?" she asked, and I nodded. She momentarily raised her mask enough to show her grin, before readjusting it back over her face and took aim. The steady P'tunk noises then started up as four pill shaped explosives dropped down into the machines midst.

They erupted in electrical explosions, and while it damaged the robots, it didn't quite kill them. "Uh... Pumpkin..." I said uneasily.

"Wait for itttt." she nickered out the last word slowly, and I slid a bit more back down the roof so that if or when we started getting shot at I'd be more out of the way of the initial burst of return fire. However, what I saw, wasn't what I expected.

The machines turned on each other, Mr.Gutsys started shooting each other, and the pink Sentinel opening fire on all of them. All of them were instead of screaming anti-zebra sentiments giving generalized statements against invaders and infiltrators with no particular racist pretense or another as they shot plasma, burned flamer ammunition, and fired lasers at each other. Two Mr.Gutsy robots tried torching each other to death, which took several minutes until they both overheated simultaneously and fell to the ground as glowing hot shells. unsurprisingly of all of them it was the sentinel that survived, with over a few dozen plasma shots had melted quite a few holes in it. I was surprised it was still standing and shooting wildly at the fallen gutsy bots. I brought Ambush back up and shot it. Then it fell.

I looked at Pumpkin afterwards and saw she was giggling with a childish delight, "Pulse emitters at a right frequency makes machines go completely nuts!" she chuckled a bit more, "Especially if you have the right electrical charge so that they don't turn off instead."

"Didn't you want to scavenge them?" I asked with a bit of mixed curiosity.

"No..." Pumpkin paused, but then elaborated, "Well, yes. I did want to salvage them, but a Mr.Gutsy is hardly the most stealthy thing here, and while they may of been useful back in Vanhoover, I wouldn't want them clunking around while those Snow hounds are around. They'd just attract unnecessary attention and it would of taken far too long to reprogram all of them..." She stared at the broken pink sentinel, "Well, would of loved the Sentinel on our side, that would of made quite a sight, a neon pink dual laser chain gun wielding sentinel firing a cascade of bolts at whatever looked at us wrong. But it can't exactly fly.

"Can't it?" I asked, and she shook her head, "No. Not without a lot of extra work in programming it, welding parts together from the Mr.gutsy robots, and reinforcing it to balance both its own weight, recoil, and mass for a platform that it wasn't made for. Though... hmm..."

That being said she still looted its arms, and several of the parts off the machines themselves, claiming that they were still useful, and that my talk had given her a bit of inspiration to work on whenever we made camp. She went into a series of techno-babble about how she could take intersecting parts of... well she lost me after that but it did sound very scientific and like an improvement I guess. Frankly the only words I managed to make out that gave any indicator of what she was planning to do was 'drone' and 'turret'. Well at least if it was on our side I guess. A few minutes of scavenging got us some flamer fuel, and plasma ammunition to use from the gutsy robots if we ever came across any plasma weaponry. As I expected, Pumpkin had immediately called dibs on the flamer ammunition, claiming she could put it to much greater use than I could, a fact she proved again when we entered the building to solve the problem of a locked wooden door by... burning it down.

Several dusty grey crystalline hallways lined with marble flooring greeted us as we left the main lobby of the bank and numerous more doors guarded by yet more Mr.Gutsy units were the main guide we had as we delved deeper into the bank. Occasionally we would search a desk or two in more important looking offices in case we needed a key card or on the off chance we would find an identification chip to bypass the remainder of the security. But after the third wave of machines we sort of resigned ourselves to clearing them out. I didn't really mind but Pumpkin only had so many rounds that could effectively hurt the hardened metal armor that made up the crazed robots, and the more she used the more reserved she became about using more ammunition.

Noticing this I dismounted my shotgun from my battle saddle and tossed it to her with the ammunition that went with it. It took her a few minutes to mount it on her own saddle but with it gone I was able to... Well... I attached a certain pistol to the inside of my winter coat. Getting used to the unfamiliar weight and presence of Grey's gun in its hidden spot under my winter coat while adjusting Cloak to my mouth, the chain trailing on my belt as I went forward. We traded precaution for surprise, taking down another pair of machines with a combination of gunfire and starmetal knife through the chassis.

The room those two had been guarding was far different than the marble and crystal rooms we had gone through before, instead of marble, rotting wood decorated the ground, and the walls themselves had been plastered over with wallpaper that was once of a more flowery design. The center of the room was decorated with a large sturdy looking metal desk that covered three sides around a moth eaten swivel chair...

Which so happened to have a dead skeleton of a unicorn in it who was head first against the keyboard of a terminal that decorated the desk. Behind the unfortunate corpse was a large amount of file cabinets, some in disrepair, others which we found out contained long since rotted away papers. Pumpkin began work on the terminal, finding it operable enough to try digging some information out of while I searched the desk itself. There was a few cabinet locks, but searching the dead skeleton (Which had been pushed off to the corner of the room as Pumpkin commandeered its chair), provided a set of keys that left trial and error for finding which key went to which lock.

The fifth key opened the locked desk's first drawer, providing access to an armored briefcase with more locks. Great. Going through the keys again it took another five minutes to find the right one and open that. My expectations had been something valuable would be inside the briefcase, and I was not disappointed when it gave ready access to around half a dozen or so memory orbs all unmarked and in their own cases. Shutting it I disengaged that particular key from its key ring and put it to my own, and strapped the briefcase to my empty shotgun holster after locking it. Whatever they were, it was behind two layers of locks, which means it must of been important... Right?

Well in either case I'd have my reasoning either accepted or denied by the time we next made camp hopefully. I wasn't about to pop into one of them now while we were in the middle of hostile territory. Let alone when we were meeting another associate of Roggars that could of been just as dangerous as Sombra-

So you know his name...

Great. Roggar was paying attention.

I'm always paying attention. Though I wonder what the memory orbs show you, keep in mind there is more to people than they appear. Be they equine or otherwise.

Thanks for the lecture Roggar. I thought with some mild amount of sarcasm. Like there was much to say about a pony who got overthrown for his tyranny hundreds of years ago and ruled his kingdom a thousand or so years ago.

And a changeling, public enemy number one of the prewar kingdom of Equestria is any different? ...There is more to this than it may seem. It is not my place to share his history, but it is more... Difficult to understand past a first glance. Give him a chance.

Give him a chance? Those ponies gave him a chance, and something had happened to make them want to try and gut him with shanks in another memory orb. What was up with that? Huh?

A Changeling of all people should know that not everything has to be as it first seems. I would recommend viewing those memory orbs you found more to learn the whole story before passing judgement.Though it is understandable if you do not wish to forgive him you do however need the former king of the Crystal Empire for finding the artifact you need in order to free your people.

Nothing as it seems? Fair enough. The chance would be given, but I was still going to be suspicious until proven otherwise. His chance would be given, but I'd like to hear it from the horses mouth why he was a tyrant. There would be a long discussion about that, and how he was still alive after all this time. Seriously how does one stay alive after what? over a thousand years and several apparent deaths?

We were moving forward, a large metal door of a bank vault was between us and our new guest. The thing was rusted, worn down, but still too sturdy with thicker metals to simply blast open. But then again we didn't need to blast open the door and I did have a certain knife at my disposal. Cloak, was a great asset, but even it took a long time to cut through solid metal. Both me and pumpkin had to push against the sturdy blade to make a slow dent which became a finer line as we shoved it into one of the supporting beams that kept the giant door on its hinges. About a quarter of the way through an old siren began to whine pathetically calling for security that was either long dead in the case of ponies, or more recently dead in the case of the robots. That and the noise sputtered out after a minute or two as its reserve power fully drained leaving it as broken and drained as the rest of the wasteland outside.

The sound had gone relatively unnoticed, a brief mercy I guessed. Considering the noise was rather quiet. I imagined it must of been terribly loud back in its heyday of working operation. Briefly I wondered what this would of been like back in the pre-war. Perhaps we would of worn strange masks to hide our identity from security cameras, and brought fancy tools that went beyond the need. Course fancy tools would require experts to maintain their care and operation in the field. Maybe there would of been an epic gunfight or two complete with a chase by chariot as guards and robbers went about trying to capture and evade each other. The thought had gone on to what sort of armor I would of chosen (probably some form of reinforced tuxedo with body armor plates rigged underneath), before we burst through the first seam of the large door and began to work on the second one of the three giant load bearing support structures. Theoretically after we cut the main side bearings and the lock itself, we would be able to push it inward with a shaped charge.

I wasn't a genius in regards to bank layouts, though this one seemed pretty defensible. Designed in a round about fashion to provide intruders who got past the internal security a hell of a time fighting their way back out, almost like a flytrap. Whoever had built this bank had paid additional attention to the well fare of its employees as well as each office also had a thinner but still sturdy metal door that in itself had an emergency lock for the inside that couldn't be accessed from the outside without taking out the entire door. A feat that was difficult due to the use of crystals as a building material. As each door became shut the various straight hallways would become easy kill corridors from the lack of cover. A few of these doors had been locked on our way inside, but most of them had collapsed from rust and time over the hundreds of years without any form of maintenance. It was one of the reasons why we didn't even have to cut through the previous boss's office door was because of its worn down nature and the metal being brittle as well from the constant cold invading the Crystal Empire.

This brittle metal, which even as it as now, finally gave way as its final support was cut and with a bit of a surprised groan from the metal we had to step back as the door decided to collapse by itself. Well not by itself... Something had pushed it from the other side...

Xp Footnote: 15% until level up

Next Chapter: Chapter 50: A Somber Reunion Estimated time remaining: 2 Hours, 6 Minutes