"Nnngh... oh, dang, is that the last screw?" Doc Zed wiped a bead of sweat from his brow as he relinquished his magical grip from the screwdriver. "Thank friggin' Argent... at least it'll be a lot easier to fix now than it was before."

The stallion smiled as he stepped back to admire his work. And indeed, he had done quite a job with the control panel laid out before him. While it had previously been a confusing maze of buttons and levers, some of which were cryptic or redundant, Doc Zed had worked his organisational magic and knowledge of efficient space control systems into a brand new control panel of his own design. It had taken him hours to pull apart the old one, with its dense clusters of tangled wires inside—evidently, whoever had created it hadn't intended for anypony else to be digging around inside.

Once he'd gotten the externals of the old panel out, though, putting in the new one had been a cinch. Sure, he'd had a bit of a hard time since he forgot to label some of the wires before ripping them out, but he just had to test those ones as he was hooking them up to the buttons. Now, after several hours of work, the new console was all hooked up, pristine and ready to go. The mixture of buttons and levers and switches with messy labels above or below them had been replaced with simple buttons that lit up when pressed, toggling the light to show if its function was currently in use. The labels on the buttons were now more clear, too, outlined in simple terms such as 'Headlights', 'AI', or 'Back Thrusters'

Doc Zed jumped up to the plastic seat and sat there for a moment, admiring his work. He honestly had never done anything quite like this before—maybe a few console repairs, but nothing this big. Casually, he reached forward and pressed a button marked 'Windshield Wipers', and the windshield wipers began swooping across the newly-replaced windshield—the first repair he had done on the ship. He pressed the button again. The light flickered off, and the wipers stopped and fell back to their place at the bottom of the window.

"Good, good," he murmured. He tested a few other buttons, including the heating, air conditioning, and autopilot. That last one lit up red when he pressed it—that meant that there was either insufficient power to run the autopilot program, or that there was some sort of mechanical issue with starting it. Doc Zed sighed.

"Friggin' A... I'll figure that out later." He stood up and hopped off the chair, walking out of the room and down the hall. "But for now... I have the power hooked up, so I can hopefully bypass that locked door down below to see if there's anything in the damn room. Assuming that's what's behind it..."

He whistled as he descended down the ladder and then trotted briskly through the room and hallway below, his hooves clinking on the metal. In just a minute or so, he stood directly in front of that door, the one with a keypad to the right. Without more than a passing thought, he punched in four random numbers: 6-4-2-5. And then, to his surprise, the little screen lit up green.

"Well, I'll be. That saves me some time..." Doc Zed murmured. The door in front of him slid leftwards into the wall, revealing darkness inside. The stallion took a few steps in and reached his hoof to feel around on the left wall for a light switch. In a moment, he found what he was looking for and flicked the little plastic switch up, illuminating the room from above.

On the back wall of the room were parts of what obviously was the ship's main engine, pistons unmoving but, from the grease that coated the metal, they looked like they had been not hours before when he'd flown the ship in. He didn't pay attention to this, though; what interested him more was the table in the centre of the room and the small comlink box affixed to its surface.