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Contraptionology!

by Skywriter

Chapter 20: 20 - The Link Between Apples and Honesty

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* * *
Contraptionology!

by Jeffrey C. Wells

www.scrivnarium.net

(with gratitude to the pre-reading powers of Akela Stronghoof and S.R. Foxley)
* * *

Part Twenty: The Link Between Apples and Honesty

It was full nautical twilight when we finally arrived up at the Ridge, and the Discord Grove was nothing more than a mess of shadow against the invisible horizon. Also present: the proud, cannon-like silhouette of one last massive contraption. Going off the reports that Derpy-eyes had given us, I figured that had to be the Mayor's Winter Wrap-Up machine. If it was fully convolved, which it probably was, Grower only knew what it was capable of doing.

"Can you see him?" shouted Dash, as we tore through the night, coming up on our target. "Can you see Discord?"

"No!" I shouted back. "Getting Nightmare'd cleaned the last of the Large Hadron Cider out of my system! Don't worry, though – I think there's gonna be enough of a blast radius once we fire this lizard up that we won't need to worry about being too accurate!"

"SQUONK," said Iggy, gazing sternly ahead.

"Roger that!" said Dash. "What's our approach vector?"

"Take us high!" I said, rising up in my cloud-saddle and pointing with my hoof. "We gotta get ourselves above that thing's mind-control aura! The Discord Grove is gonna try and defend itself by distracting you from your purpose, by making you dissatisfied with how optimized your other projects are! Whether they already work or not!" Sure enough; already, even at this distance, I could start to hear the first inklings of nagging voices in my head, reminding me that I ain't yet figured out the real link between Apples and Honesty, and oughtn't I get on that, instead of wasting my time burning some silly ol' grove of lemon trees?

Holy Mother of Taters, I thought, what I wouldn't give for one full hour without anypony else inside my head except me. I pressed my necklace tight against the hair of my throat with my hoof, feeling the jewel warm against my hide. It was a comfort, but a small one. "I just don't know if my Element alone is gonna give me enough protection, here!" I hollered, over the noise of cloud-scooter thunder and Rainbow's buzzing wings.

"Thankfully, we've got two Elements!" said Rainbow, cockily, tapping her own neck. "Honesty and Awesomeness!"

"Yeah, about that!" I shouted. "Dash, you do realize that all today and all yesterday, you've been getting that wrong, don't you?"

"Really?" said Dash, in a scarce-can-believe-you tone of voice. "I'm not pronouncing 'awesomeness' correctly? Am I stressing the wrong syllable or something?"

I shook my head. "Never mind!" I said. "When this is over, we'll talk! Just concentrate on getting us above that grove, quick! I'll feed Iggy the sauce and chuck him at the trees. Then, we swoop down, you grab the Mayor, I'll get von Danger, and we'll all hightail it out to minimum safe distance quicker than hogs to a slop-call!"

"Hogs," said Dash. "Slop-call. Got it." And as the susurratin' whispers in my head rose once again into the mad frothing bubbles of lemon punch science poison, we streaked up to the Ridge, and towards our last fight.

* * *

As soon as we got in range of the grove, our eardrums were assaulted by a hide-peelingly loud electric megaphone, wielded by a figure at ground level. The Professor, naturally.

"Attention interlopers!" came the thick and chunky accent-ridden voice of Stranger von Danger, as a dozen blazing-hot magnesium spotlights surrounding the campsite flared to life. "You are flying into restricted airspace! Unless you are participants in the Science Fair, accompanied by your projects, you are not welcome here at my camp!"

"Bite down on it, Professor!" shouted Dash. "We don't got any science fair projects! You know as well as we do the whole thing was just a setup for one of Discord's dumb games!"

"It is as I suspected," said von Danger, shaking his head and ignoring Dash. "No pony among you was even able to complete my assignment! No pony... except my schöne Frau here." The Professor gestured down at Mayor Scroll, who clung to the Professor's hooves like some kind of conquered wench of a barbarian god. Her artificial hair-graying had been washed partially away and her mane was a streaky-pink mess.

"My schmookie-wookie bundle of scrupulous academic loving," she said, dreamily.

"Such a beautiful mare," said the Professor, stroking her coat. "And brilliant, as well! Her remarkable Winter Wrap-Up machine is everything a good contraptionologist dreams of producing. Congratulations, little cabbage."

"Go on, please," she cooed. "Call me by the name of more and different vegetables."

"Can we bomb them, like, now?" said Dash, her lip curling in disgust.

"Just a mite closer," I muttered, willing myself and willing myself hard to put the little stein of hot sauce up to Iggy's mouth. My hooves wouldn't budge. It weren't as though they were frozen, exactly, it's just that every time I went to do it, my brain went spinning off into exciting new directions, a hundred thousand different experimental variations on the plan to somehow, somehow, match up my talent to my power. Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty. Shouldn't be all that hard, right? Surely with my titanic super-enhanced mental acuity, I should be able to come up with a simple link between two admittedly unrelated concepts. Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty.

I gritted my teeth. Once I feed this hot sauce to this ro-bot, I thought, it won't matter no more. I don't actually care about the answer to this stupid question. I could go the rest of my life and die content without ever knowing the link between Apples and Honesty. Yesterday, I thought it would make me happy, make me feel like I was a whole, unified pony. Well, I didn't need none of that no more. I had my friends. I had my hat. And the thing that would make me happy right now wasn't some sort of mystico-hooey self-help carnival glass nonsense. What would make me happy right now was an acre of pie, a good long soak in the washtub, and about fifteen hours of shuteye.

Didn't matter. I couldn't let it go. Thanks a bundle, Discord. And as Dash roared the cloud-scooter into position, I found myself weak and helpless as a foal, unable to accomplish the simple task of bringing one hoof over to the other and feeding a lizard. I just could not get my head to come to bear on the problem.

Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty.

"All right, we're in place!" shouted Dash. "What are you waiting for, cowpony?"

"Higher," I grunted. "Dash, can we get higher? I can't shake this science curse!"

"I can get us higher," replied Dash, crooking her wings and soaring us up to a fairly dizzying height. "How's this?" she said, peering uncertainly down at the Discord Grove.

"Higher?" I said, struggling to stay focused and failing every time.

"Okay, too much higher than this, and I am gonna start worrying about accuracy," said Dash, clucking her tongue. "I'm not gonna have come all this way just to have you whiff it. We only get one shot with that lizard, after all."

"You do it, then!" I said, thrusting Iggy and the magnetic stein forward. "You were my first choice for this job anyhow!"

"Hey yeah, I'm the stupendously radical one, right? I gotta say, I'm not feeling any of that dumb ol' science curse at this altitude." She twisted around on the scooter and reached back towards me. "So, sure! I'll take that lizard off your hooves."

There came the sharp noise of feedback from the Grove below. The Professor's bullhorn again. "Before you drop that contraption, fast blue pony," came his crackling, distorted voice, "you should probably ask yourself why you were Applejack's first choice."

"How's he even hearing us from down there?" said Dash, squinting.

"It's Discord!" I said, thrusting Iggy even more strenuously forward. "Discord can hear us fine wherever we are, and the Professor's just dancing on his strings! So don't listen to him! Just take the lizard!"

A chuckle rang out from the airspace surrounding us, wheeling crazily in the sky and setting our ears spinning dizzily trying to track it. It was that same familiar hatefully-silky voice that had greeted me when I first achieved the Ridge this afternoon. The draconequus. Discord.

"Oh, very well," said the voice. "Puppet-mastering does eventually become tedious, after all. Question still stands, Rainbow Dash. Why, might you ask, were you so valuable to Applejack's master plan?"

Horsefeathers, I cussed, inwardly. "Take the lizard!" I demanded. "Take Iggy!"

It was no use; Dash was lost. She weren't as free of Discord's will as I had hoped. Turning the cloud-scooter round and round, trying to keep up with the voice's frenetic gyre – and you're crazier than I am if you think "frenetic gyre" is something you'd ever catch me saying any normal time in my life – she called out to that devil. "A.J. wanted me on point because of my mind-blowing radicalness!" she said, a worm of doubt entering her voice. "Right, A.J.?"

I scowled. To Tartarus with it all. "Ain't exactly true," I admitted, the Citrine Apple of Honesty gleaming at my throat. "But I reckon it's time to come clean, y'all."

"I'll save you the trouble," said Discord's voice, briskly. "Applejack thought that you would be immune to the distracting effects of my beautiful Grove because of how completely you failed in your science project, Rainbow Dash. In short, she thought you were too mind-numbingly stupid to be vulnerable to me."

"You think I'm stupid?" said Dash, sounding hurt. "Really?"

"We'll hash this out later," I pleaded. "Honestly, we will. Right now, I need you to take this lizard, feed it some hot sauce, and drop it. That's it."

"Oh, yes," said Discord. "Not that she's much of one to talk, but Applejack thinks that you're quite dim, Little Miss Sunshine. But she's very much mistaken, isn't she?" Discord's voice spun straight into my ear, buzzing there like a skeeter. "Like most ponies who are dismissed as unintelligent, the issue isn't her mental faculty. She's merely working on the wrong problem."

My eyes went wide. My stomach dropped out from under me. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. "Dash," I said, hastily, "whatever that monster says to you next, whatever you do, do not lis—"

"Rainbow Dash," whispered Discord, "your Element of Harmony isn't 'Awesomeness'. It's 'Loyalty'."

The last word echoed and dripped off Discord's imaginary tongue like black honey. Dash startled, blinked, and just like that, her eyes were totally consumed by the brain-fizz. "Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh!" said Dash. "Loyalty!"

"Please," I begged, my last little bit of hope draining away. "Don't do this, R.D."

"Loyalty!" she practically shrieked, totally unhearing. "I wasn't supposed to link lightning and awesomeness! I was supposed to link lightning and loyalty! A.J., we gotta scrub this grove-burning plan so I can whip out some blueprints, already! I've got about eighty different ideas for electric loyalty machines that I'm just dying to try!"

I snarled at the invisible voice of chaos, even as his laughter bubbled up around me. "Never mind!" I said, pouring every last scrap of my will and determination into feeding Iggy the hot sauce. "I can still do this by myself! You just watch me!"

"I think not," said Discord, to the noise of a lazy claw-snap. Down below us, the Professor's bullhorn squawked to life once more.

"Dear little sweet potato," said Professor von Danger, "please to engage the Winter Wrap-Up device, yes?"

From this great height, I could not hear the Mayor's response, but I didn't really need to or nothing. The sight of her machine firing itself up was reply enough. With a sense of terrifying finality, the massive, heavy barrel of the Mayor's contraption swung around and came to bear on our position. Screaming lights of colorful pastel hue erupted from its wicked-looking maw, a horrible vortex of springtime.

"Madam Mayor," said Discord and Professor Danger, simultaneously, "clear this gloomy sky."

The Winter Wrap-Up machine blazed once and loosed a shrieking blast of concentrated sunny weather through the night at us. It had no effect on either me or Dash other than a brief shiver of warm contentment, but to the cloud-scooter, it was another story. The Mayor's device had, earlier today, eradicated every single cloud in the Heartland save for the one that Stranger Danger had been keeping around for punctuation purposes, the same one that was currently supporting me over, yes, another certain-death drop. The amount of energy that sizzled through our cloud in that instant was equivalent to about a thousand strong pegasus kicks. That discharge could have cleared the entire sky in one-tenth of a second flat. Our one lonely cloud didn't stand a chance.

Dash did not so much as move in the air as the cloud-scooter evaporated out from under us. Her pegasus wings kicked in without her even thinking about it, and the whole event didn't even scrape the surface of her fierce planning. For Dash's earth pony passenger, though, who was only even in the air at all because she was sitting on that cloud, it was a different story. Once again, gravity seized me in its claw and I found myself plummeting through the air like a brick. My third of the day, as promised.

"There has got to be one perfect way for me to demonstrate my Loyalty to my friends!" I heard Dash say, as I began to fall.

"Save me!" I yelled, tumbling away through the air.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said Dash, pensively tapping at her mouth with a hoof as her Element necklace flickered to black. "But couldn't I find a better way to do that with a contraption or something?" And then her voice was lost to the distance of altitude.

Right, I said to myself as I plummeted through the air, glancing at the mechanical salamander (who, for his part, did not seem to be particularly perturbed) and the electromagnetic tankard, both still nestled in the crooks of my opposing hooves. Gonna die again, probably. If I can just get this lizard to eat this sauce, I go out in a blaze of glory, taking the Grove out with me as I fall. If I can't, well, everything's for naught. I didn't fancy my chances at surviving a second unsurvivable fall, not two in one day. And all these narrow escapes, all these heroic feats, well, they'd amount to nothing in the end.

I had to feed the lizard. I had to. But to my utter despair, I just couldn't get my brain to work. Even with death on the line, it just wasn't as important to me as finding the link between Apples and Honesty. Dad-gum stupid rassafrassin' science punch. Dad-gum stupid rassafrassin' Applejack for powering it up with her jealous lies. Dad-gum stupid rassafrassin' everything.

"Iggy," I said, trying the only idea I could think of, the whipping wind practically stealing my voice. "Can you scurry up my leg or something? Crawl over to that tankard?"

Iggy cocked his head at me. "SQUONK?" he said, clearly not understanding. Dumb stupid non-Equuish-speaking contraptionoid lizard. Buck you and the horse you rode in on, which I guess was me, come think.

All right, I thought, mustering up. Last few seconds of life. Dose the lizard. C'mon, A.J. You can do this.

Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty.

I gave 'er one last mental heave, put every scrap of willful stubborn bullheadedness I had into putting my hooves together.

It wasn't enough. Iggy remained unfed, and thus, unburning. At the last, I had failed.

The hard surface of the Ridge rose up before me as the Nightmare's words echoed in my skull. These are your last moments on this earth, Applejack, and you will know despair.

I prepared to hit ground.

I did not hit ground. I hit something much more forgiving. A padded skyhook of some kind. It took my weight, bounced crazily in the air, and held.

I pried my eyes off the earth and looked up into the whirling motion of some sort of contraptionological flying machine, all decked out in candy-stripe paint. At the control station: a pink mare of my close acquaintance, shoving for all she was worth on four hoof-driven pedals, the energy of her eager, ferocious movements carrying itself through an eye-bending mess of chains and gears and eventually driving the rotor that was keeping us aloft.

"Hey, Applejack!" said Pinkie Pie, lifting a pair of brassy-looking goggles from her eyes. "Do you like my gyrocopter?"

"Pinkie," I said, "How—"

"Simple!" she said. "Right after you left, my tail started in on a-twitchin', which always means something is gonna fall out of the sky! And when I realized that you and Dash were planning to get way up high in order to drop Iggy on the Grove, I put two and two and two together and realized that the thing that was going to be falling out of the sky was Applejack! So I real quick rigged my gyrocopter up with a comfy passenger seat and a skyhook and then I invented some nightvision goggles so I could see in the dark to fly after you, and, wow, it looks like I was just in time, too!" Pinkie peered down at the too-close-for-comfort lemon trees. "Is that the Grove?" she asked. "It looks very grovey."

"Second unauthorized aircraft!" came the Professor's bullhorn. "If you are not a Science Fair participant in the presence of your science project, this area is verboten!"

"Well, it's not verboating to me!" replied Pinkie, proudly. "Because I'm always in the presence of my science project! Hi, evil corrupted Professor Danger! Don't worry, we'll have you back to normal in a jif!"

"How on earth does a gyrocopter link balloons and laughter?" I asked, clambering up from the skyhook onto the 'copter's second seat.

"This?" said Pinkie, removing one hoof from a pedal for a second and gesturing around at her flying contraption, before quickly replacing it. "This isn't my science project! This is just something I whipped up so I could hang with Gilda the Griffon and Rainbow Dash one day! My real science project is much cooler than this, and I can talk to you freely about it now, because in addition to modifying my gyrocopter and inventing a pair of nightvision goggles, I rigged up my lemonade pitcher with a speaker and got Twilight to release me from my Pinkie Promise!"

"You did all that in... how long, exactly?"

Pinkie shrugged a shoulder. "What can I say? I'm efficient, I guess. Anyway, once Twilight's out of my pitcher and reinstalled in her good old unicorn body, I'll have the added benefit of being able to communicate with my lemonade!"

"It sounds like the best of all possible worlds," I said, dubiously.

"I know!" said Pinkie, repelling my sarcasm like rainwater off of an umbrella-hat. "And all we have to do to make it real is for you to fire up Iggy and drop him on the grove, and then it's VICTORY PARTY TIME!"

"Oh, I do so tire of all these last-minute theatrics," boomed Discord's disembodied voice, from above. "Mayor Mare," he said, "can you perchance set that cannon to eliminate something other than clouds? Little buzzing mechanical insects, for example?"

"I could summon a pegasus-style tornado!" said the Mayor, leaping back onto her contraption's firing couch, her eyes swimmy with punch and chaos. "It's an integral component of any properly-executed Winter Wrap-Up! Clears the icicles right off the trees! Let me just fiddle with the settings here for a moment..." The Mayor's contraption began to emit an ominous hum.

"Uh, I think that's your cue, A.J.," said Pinkie, nervously eyeing the Mayor's big gun. "Now's when you feed and drop Iggy. Remember: Victory Party. Huh?"

I stared down at the Grove, still clutching my bizarre cargo of lizard and stein.

Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty.

"You're gonna have to do it for me, Pinkie," I said, abruptly.

"Sorry, A.J.," said Pinkie. "No can do. Gotta keep my hooves on the pedals here. What's the problem, though?"

Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty. Apples and Honesty.

The ominous hum from the Winter Wrap-Up machine grew to a threatening roar. The barrel of the cannon began to glow with the sharp glint of raw, unbridled air power. Smoke plumed around its tip.

"A.J.?" asked Pinkie, a little more insistently.

"Pinkie," I said, my eyes fixed woodenly on the Discord Grove. "I need to find the link between Apples and Honesty. You found the link between Balloons and Laughter. You did it before you even went to bed last night. Tell me how you did it. Tell me what you built."

"Is that what this is all about?" said Pinkie. "Geez, A.J., I didn't build anything!"

"Huh?" I said, looking up.

"The Professor didn't tell me to construct a contraption," she explained. "He told me to find the link between balloons and laughter! All I had to do was look down at myself, and there it was!"

"Pinkie," I said, thunderstruck. "You mean—"

"Yep!" she said, smiling at me, huge and bright. "The link between balloons and laughter is... me! Because I like balloons, and I love laughter, and I am where they intersect. It's no more complicated than that, A.J., and it never, ever, has to be."

"The link between Apples and Honesty," I murmured, my eyes wide. "It's me. It was me all along."

"Okay!" said Discord's voice, sounding suddenly rattled, off its game. "Tell you what. How's that tornado coming, Mayor?"

"Just have to keep fiddling with the configuration," said the Mayor, dreamily, her fully-convolved obsession with perfection gripping her mind like a vise. "If I could just... make it... a little more efficient... then we'd really see something special, here..."

"It's me!" I shouted to the sky, my powerful voice shredding and burning the last rags of the science curse out of my brain. "I am the link between Apples and Honesty! Y'all have no power over me!"

"Ha ha," said Discord, unevenly. "Ha ha, ha ha. Oh, Applejack, you card, you." The voice of Discord zipped down small and focused in on Pinkie. "Pinkie Pie," said Discord. "You know you've always been my favorite of you little ponies, right? After all, we've got so much in common. You like candy? I like candy! You like to laugh? I like to laugh! You like crazy super-hyper randomness? Pinkie, I am the undisputed overlord of crazy super-hyper randomness!"

Pinkie fixed Discord – the direction his voice was coming from, at least – with a stony glare.

"Discord," she said, "I understand now that you were the one pulling on the Professor's strings. I know that, all this time, it was really you talking to me, not him."

"Yes?" said Discord.

"Do you remember yesterday when you tried to tell me that my friends' weirdo behavior was just a product of them being excited about science, and that everything was fine?"

"Yes...?" said Discord, again, all craven and uncertain this time.

"Do you remember Pinkie-Promising me that?"

The voice fell silent.

"Discord," said Pinkie, in a dangerous whisper, "nopony breaks a Pinkie Promise."

"Wait," said Discord, babbling now. "Pinkie Pie, Applejack, I can assure you—"

Pinkie glanced over her shoulder at me. "We're done here," she said. "A.J., light this candle."

"Got it," I said, allowing myself a hint of smug; after all this hoo-ha, I thought I deserved it. With no more than the usual effort involved in such a thing, I held Iggy to the magnetic stein and gave him a big gulp of unnatural, impossible hot sauce. Instantly, his little copper cheeks puffed out and he turned bright red, already almost too hot to hold. Steam began leaking out of his little ro-bot ears.

"SQ— SQUONK," said Iggy, struggling to contain a powerful force welling up inside him, a struggle we both knew that he would lose.

"See you when the smoke clears, tiger," I said. With a simple underhoof toss, I chucked that lizard into the heart of the Discord Grove. Discord screamed, a harsh, animal sound, but we did not stick around to hear it. Pinkie wheeled the 'copter about and took off at full speed toward Professor Danger, now staring in shock at the bright copper-pink missile streaking toward the heart of his place of power, and she nabbed him by the back of his lab coat with the skyhook. One wheeling arc toward the doomed Winter Wrap-Up machine brought us in range of the Mayor, who was promptly and almost reflexively scooped up by von Danger, in turn. Our last objective complete, we soared off into the dark, Pinkie working the pedals on the gyrocopter fast enough to make the chains smoke.

We were rocked, almost out of the air, by the huge, blinding conflagration of Iggy the Salamander's fireball, which melted what was left of the burnt-out quarter of Everfree into silica glass and pulverized the still-smoking Winter Wrap-Up device into shrapnel. The Discord Grove managed to withstand it for a brief moment, the demon trees standing hard and black against the eye-searing light of the explosion, but they did not stand long; the quick succession of fire and shockwaves first charred, then burned, then utterly obliterated them, their remains melting into the glass of the soil, and just like that, they were no more.

Below us, the Professor yelped in startlement. "Meine Sonnengöttin!" he exclaimed. "What am I doing here? Why am I in the air?"

"Woohoo, Professor Danger!" said Pinkie Pie, breathlessly, still working hard against the pedals.

"L— Liebchen?"

"Welcome back to the real world, Professor," I said, lounging back against the gyrocopter's passenger seat. Pinkie really had made that thing pretty comfortable, actually. All nice and padded and everything. It was all a pony could do not to sink down into it a bit...

"Do you remember anything about the past few days?" asked Pinkie. "Anything at all?"

"I... I do not know," said the Professor. "One minute I am refreshing myself after my long journey with a little wild lemon I have found in the burned-out woods, and the next, I am flying around like a crazy pegasus!" Von Danger took a moment then to look down at the bedraggled, befuddled form of Mayor Scroll hanging beneath him, clutched tight in his hooves. The Mayor looked back up at him, just as confused as he was at the position she found herself in.

They shared a look.

"I remember her, though," said the Professor, with solemn tenderness. "My schöne Frau."

"Schmookie?" said the Mayor, blinking up at him all doe-eyed.

"Aww," said Pinkie Pie.

"Oh, puke," said Rainbow Dash, swooping in from above. "You know, craziest thing, Applejack. When that grove went up, I realized something: I don't even care what the link between lightning and awesomeness is!"

"Loyalty," I murmured, my eyes slipping shut.

"Yeah, yeah, that," said Dash, dismissively. "Loyalty and awesomeness. I still am pretty ticked that you think I'm stupid, though."

"I'm sorry, Rainbow," I said, my chin falling to my neck, my mouth barely able to form the words. "Y'ain't stupid. You're... you're smart in your own way."

"Thanks!" she said, proudly, as Pinkie finally got satisfied with her distance from the calamity that had finally claimed the Discord Grove. She pivoted the gyrocopter around in midair and we all hovered there for a moment, the light of the fires washing our faces with orange. It was a good feeling.

"So anyway, A.J.," said Dash, turning to me, "what happens next?"

I did not immediately respond. Dash, and Pinkie, and the Professor, and the Mayor, and Discord, and the Nightmare, and the Grove, and Twilight Sparkle, and Ponyville, and heckfire, all Equestria... it all seemed about a thousand miles away, and slipping fast.

I tapped my hat down over my eyes.

"Sleep," I said.

And with that, the thrumming of the gyrocopter's rotors carried me off into dreams.

Next Chapter: 21 - Epilogue(s) Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 15 Minutes
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