N.

I don’t even want to imagine what your agents told you about my situation, but it’s nowhere as serious, I promise. It does worry me, though, that they knew we were coming. You should send your agents out to ask some questions. The sniper missed, although I’ll definitely be limping for few weeks despite receiving quick field surgery assisted by what little access to magic we have left. My leg will heal, and I had my bodyguard tell me I would look even more imperial with a cane.

I think she watches movies too much.

I wish I had more time for this message, but we’ll be returning home tomorrow, and the doctor insists that I have a proper night’s sleep, and there’s still one issue I want you to look into. The ambush was well prepared. We scouted out the site afterwards and found several griffons not killed by gunfire. They were killed by claws and fangs, and there was no trace of the attackers. The recent spy reports from Equestria suggest the migration of several groups of changelings, and I definitely don’t want them here in the Empire unsupervised no matter their motives.

Do you think it’s Guiding Light and the dreamlings, king Beard’s northern hive, or someone else? I doubt it’s Chrysalis’ hive, since our contacts in Canterlot report her still being there, although she’s known to still have operations past the borders of Equestria. Anyway, the painkillers are kicking in, so I’m stopping the transmission before I start babbling.

See you in few days.

C.

Thirteen walks through the chain link gate into the inner courtyard and takes a deep breath. After being cooped up for another day and night in her cell, the cool air makes her smile at the black sky. One quick look around later, she spots her minotaur friend sitting on the ground by the monkey bar, an unusual occurrence in itself as he’s usually been exercising most of the time. To compound the feeling of the situation being a little strange, Magpie isn’t flying around, instead opting for some light stretching on a bench nearby. In short, everyone seems to be less active and much more relaxed, as if holding their breath.

With the exception of one small happy blur trotting towards her like a dog jumping through a blanket of snow.

“I’m so happy you’re finally feeling okay!” Three stops in front of her, suppressing his hugging instinct when he tilts his head from side to side, noticing that Thirteen still hasn’t regrown her secondary belly plating, “Are you feeling okay?”

Thirteen takes a second before giving him a small smile.

“I think so.”

“And your belly?” Three trots around, carefully poking her side.

“I’m not regrowing my armor until I deserve it.”

“But-”

“That’s my decision to make, Three,” she pats his head as he frowns. That in itself is enough to make Three’s tongue stick out of his mouth, “Pat head, receive blep,” muses Thirteen.

“Sooo...” Three furrows his brows and she feels his mental touch, “Can we go on with the plan? Mister Magpie told me they’d let you out today, and I can’t keep re-digging the tunnel forever without the wardens noticing me occasionally disappearing underground for few minutes. The unicorn brothers said they have a friend ready as soon as the prison goes dark.”

“Do you have a fake suppressor?”

“In my foreleg. The unicorns have theirs inside bread balls, which is super smart because they are ready to go at any moment while still having a snack in case of getting peckish.”

“Okay, let’s see if we can do this. Follow me.”

Thirteen cuts the communication, nods to a darker hiding place in the middle distance between the evenly distributed crystal lamps hanging on the courtyard walls. A spotlight from one of the four towers in each corner follows them for a while, but when the only thing the pony sees are two changelings sitting by the wall and chatting, the cone of light picks a different target.

“Alright, let’s switch the damn things,” says Thirteen.

A hole in Three’s leg opens, and the drone finds his face pressed against Thirteen’s chest chitin in a tight hug. He’s not sure what Thirteen is planning, but if it involves a hug, it can’t go wrong, right?

Her chin above Three’s head, Thirteen squeezes out a drop of acid created by Gem’s recipe which lands on Three’s suppressor, melting a narrow cut in the ring within seconds. Moment later, Thirteen pats his head, slipping the fake suppressor on and wiping off a bubbling smudge of goo and metal before it can drip down into Three’s eyes. Judging by lack of any undue reaction from the wardens, the whole switcheroo has gone unnoticed.

“All done,” Thirteen lets out a sigh of relief.

Three’s smiles from ear to ear as he connects to Thirteen’s hive link properly.

“I’ve missed this,” he says, “Finally, proper talking doesn’t hurt my head anymore.”

“I assume we’re doing the unicorns next, right?”

“Yep. Then I’ll use the tunnel softened dirt I’ve been preparing to get to the power power control room, break in through the wall, and destroy the core. That should turn all the lights off and open the underground cells because the fans delivering the air down there will stop working.”

“Wait, is there no reserve power circuit? I haven’t talked to Six much but that’s basic security.”

“There is but it’s hidden in the walls and under the floor. The unicorn brothers said that anyone who would break the main core would go for the central power core and completely miss the secondary routing. Hiding in plain sight, in a way. Don’t worry about that, worry about the baddies who will come out once the cells open.”

“Alright, what do you need me to do?”

Less than fifteen minutes later, Three’s love-enhanced hooves break through the reinforced side wall of the supposed power core room. It’s barely lit by dim, red glow coming from its center, but that’s enough for a changeling to see with absolute clarity. After taking a deep breath, he pushes himself halfway through the hole and looks around for anything resembling motion sensors. Finding nothing that could even remotely be considered security by Brauheim standards, he pushes forward with both forelegs, squeezing himself out like a cork from a bottle followed by a stream of dirt. He shakes the dust off, still gasping for air. Breaking through the wall took longer than he’d expected and even his shapeshifted lung capacity was stretched to the limit in order to do it in one go.

All that aside, he’s here and now and everyone is counting on him.

The power core room is a simple square with bare walls, a raised pillar in its center surrounded by various control panels, and a thick, circular vault door which Three’s drone senses immediately identify as something he’d never get through no matter how hard he tried. Similar to what dwarves used in Brauheim, actually. Unbreakable with force.

The middle part of the central pillar is made of reinforced glass, a much better material to avoid energy surges than anything metallic, and it gives a good view of the humming pyramid-shaped crystal slowly rotating in the air that must be the power core itself. However, his senses quickly tell him that he’s definitely not strong enough to simply break the glass.

“Now… if I were the central power coupling, would I be in the bottom part or the top part?” Three mutters to himself, his knowledge of power grid systems being tested.

Circling around the room, Three shapeshifts his foreleg into the tip of a screwdriver and starts opening any panel he can find, usually revealing a clump of cables.

Should I just start indiscriminately breaking stuff? Nah, the good ponies might need to get this place back in working order to catch the real baddies. I just need to make sure this stays shut down while we get out, that’s all.

With that in mind, instead of cutting the cables after changing the composition of his hooves to something a lot less conductive, he starts disconnecting them instead. It takes longer and it’s riskier, but simply breaking stuff would reflect badly on boss, and boss is the best and doesn’t deserve anything bad.

Eventually, the humming stops and the hovering crystal drops on the solid bottom of the pillar, losing its light and plunging the room into almost total darkness with the exception of Three’s eyes and the pink runes on his body.

“Okay okay okay, someone’s bound to come check up soon. Now, the secondary circuit,” he taps the wall near the floor nervously, listening for any hollow spots. When he finds one, he straight up just fuels his hooves with love and digs through the concrete.

“Yaaaaaaaaah!” an electric shock throws him across the room where he lies, blinking with his tongue out. As it turned out, hooves for digging aren’t the same kind of hooves for safe manipulation of high voltage cables. Thankfully, chitin in general isn’t the best conductor in itself.

After stumbling back on all fours, Three wobbles back to the wall, shapeshifts his hoof again, and this time brings its sharp edge of straight down, severing all the cables at once. The current only tickles a bit after proper precautions and the room finally goes completely silent with the exception of Three’s breathing. There’s just one last thing left to do. After tying all the cables into tight balls of knots, Three grabs the unscrewed panels of all the control boxes around the central pillar and fastens them all back into their right places. The main power circuit will be easy to fix afterwards, but it won’t be possible to do so instantly.

Just as he hears clicking from the massive vault door’s locking mechanism, he takes a long breath and dives back into the hole he’d come through before, disappearing into the soft dirt like the small, chitinous drill that he is.

As the guard turrets go dark along with the wall lamps, all activity in the courtyard stops for a moment.

Having been sitting by Thirteen’s side, Magpie grabs her foreleg.

“Eep!” she twitches.

“Grab the minotaur and get to the tunnel. Once Three’s out, take the route underground to the meeting room where we met Gem. I’m going ahead,” hisses the griffon.

“Can you see in-”

“I’m part cat, part eagle. What do you think?!” he’s already running towards the chain link gate back to the prison.

Two wardens stop him by the entrance as several other rush out, all looking like fireflies with the badges on their chests being the only tiny sources of light. Magpie looks down at the electrified blackjacks jabbed into his chest.

“Guys, I’m the only prisoner running back in,” he points at the dark sky, “The pegasi flying away now that the magic dome is gone are the bigger problem, or maybe the-”

Magpie winces as the shockwave followed by impacts of chunks of masonry scatters the silhouettes of prisoners all over the courtyard.

“Screw whatever that was!” he curses out loud, pushing past the stunned wardens.

“Hey, stay where you are!” he hears behind him and ignores it completely.

“Yes, your priority reeeally should be the unarmed guy running back towards his cell while there’s just been a huge explosion,” mutters Magpie to himself, “The world is full of idiots.”

There’s chaos inside the prison as well. With the cells unlocked, even the prisoners scheduled for outside at different times are now grouping up. Magpie ponders involving himself with a group of five currently kicking a warden to death but chooses not to. The warden chasing him can take care of that after all.

Several hallways later, he’s already passed three unconscious prisoners still smelling of ozone after getting heavily electrocuted, but unfortunately no stun baton he could use himself. Thankfully, the prisoners to whom the prison now belongs don’t seem too inclined to finish off any personal grudges, leaving the griffon’s path to the stairs leading into the lower levels mostly open.

“One of those glowing badges would come in handy right now,” he mumbles as he descends the stairs to rather eerily silent darkness ahead where not even his eyes are of much help. However, after some sneaking downstairs, he sees faint light where he recalls being a guard room separating the two lower floors from the rest of the prison. The door from the stairs is open but the one leading further into the complex is closed with two heavy, steel latches.

By the door sits a crystal earthpony warden who can’t be more than in his early twenties, the dancing light of his badge clearly showing he’s trembling. His eyes are locked on the closed door but he quickly turns around and points a stun baton tied to his foreleg via a cloth loop at Magpie.

“S-Stay where you are!”

“Colt, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not here to hurt anyone if possible,” Magpie looks the earthpony sternly in the eyes, “But I won’t hesitate either. You’re new to this, so listen,” the griffon points behind himself while not letting the earthpony out of his sight just in case he proved prone both to bouts of panic and stupidity, “The prisoners up there are killing everyone who even remotely looks like warden. Hell, I think even the lunch lady is in for a nasty surprise unless she’s gotten out already. The way I see it, you have three options. First is the dumb one - you try to stop me and have me return to my cell. Your damn legs are shaking more than a crack addict without his fix so I doubt you can do it even while armed. And even if by some miracle you did it, the second you’d get up the prisoners will swarm you and shove that baton where the sun doesn’t shine, which in the current state of the world gives them a lot of options. Choice number two - you give me that baton and the badge, then you take that uniform off and either get out with the prisoners pretending you’re one of them or get to the guards who are surely on their way and tell them one of the escapees stripped you.”

“A-And number three?” asks the earthpony as Magpie takes a breath to continue.

“You help me and end up a hero when the guards arrive. Two of my friends are locked in there with the worst psychopathic scum your little Empire managed to produce,” he points at the closed door.

“But they’re there for a reason.”

“They don’t know why and neither do I. The royals decided we were involved in the sky going missing without explaining anything,” Magpie decides to play on the heroism and hormones to deal the final blow to the young pony, “They’re both mares, one a country girl and one a pacifist to her core, and I’ll be damned if there aren’t some other assholes in there who get off on raping fillies while flaying them alive and laughing. So, you give me that badge and that stun baton that I know thousand times better how to use than you do. Then you let me in, lock the door behind me, and don’t let anyone out until I come back with them. I doubt the prisoners from upstairs will come here. That way, you’ll be the one solely responsible for keeping the worst elements still locked up once the guards rush in to stop all this, AND you’ll save two exceedingly hot mares from a terrible fate. Got it?”

Magpie doesn’t move closer until the trembling earthpony nods and then slowly gives him his badge and the baton.

“But be careful...” the pony looks down at the floor, “There were other wardens on patrol there. Some of the screams I heard… couldn’t be real.”

“Stay here, lock the door behind me,” Magpie gives the baton a practice swing after tying a piece of torn uniform around his neck and fastening the badge to it to avoid having to hold it, “Oh, and in case a minotaur and two changelings come from upstairs, tell them to stay here and wait for me, but if they insist they want to go in, let them.”

Not waiting for an answer, Magpie opens the two latches, pulls at the thick door, and slinks in through the crack.

“Close it!” he hisses and a moment later he hears a thud followed by a series of clicks.

In contrast to the commotion upstairs, the darkness and silence here are downright oppressive even for someone used to night shifts. Taking a deep breath to steel himself, he heads towards where he recalls the interrogation room being.

The first cell on his right makes him frown. The door is open but instead of seeing anything inside it looks as if there was a light-absorbing sheet of ink in the doorway. With his quick glance, ripples appear on it like on a vertical surface of a lake. It seems to reflect a distorted version of himself which shrugs just like the real griffon.

Magpie passes by. In complete silence, the blackness swirls, and shadowy version of the griffon pounces out, trailing the ethereal inky blackness like a cloak behind himself. He opens his sharp beak to rip Magpie’s back open and lunges forward.

The dark griffon’s advance is stopped by Magpie spinning around and ramming the baton straight into his beak and to the back of his neck with both forelegs.

“Click,” the smirking griffon winks at his shadow mirror image and flips the switch on the baton to its maximum position.

Screeching and the choking stench of burning flesh immediately drowns out any other sensations, but Magpie keeps pushing into the creature’s throat as it shifts before him and gradually turns into some skinny, spindly equinoid the yellow eyes of which roll back into its skull as it crumbles on the floor and stops moving.

Magpie looks around, catching retreating movement from the nearby cells from the corner of his eyes.

“Anyone else?” he asks out loud, twirling the baton by the loop on its end. Hearing no response or further movement, he adds, “No? Good.”

He doesn’t chuckle to himself, he doesn’t taunt anyone further. He has a job to do and so he heads forward through the hallway.

Three wiggles through the last pony length of the soft dust just as the ground shakes, pushes against the exit of the tunnel, and stops when his hooves fail to go through thanks to something hard and heavy. His lungs are burning because he didn’t have time to take a proper breath down in the power core room due to the incoming wardens. Focusing love into his forelegs, he digs a little to the side through the hard ground and then up.

Nothing. The hard barrier is still there and it feels like more reinforced concrete just like the walls surrounding the power core.

He needs air. Desperately.

Shapeshifting his hooves in order to get through tough materials, he pushes himself upwards while paddling them like a swimming dog.

The barrier is suddenly gone, which leaves Three halfway out of the ground, flailing like crazy while gasping for air.

“Three!” chitinous legs clamp around the small drone and pull the rest of him out.

“Whuh- haaah- what’s- haaah- going on- huff?” Three’s turning his head around in an attempt to understand the chaos in the courtyard.

Prisoners are running around or away through a hole in the northern wall. Wardens are pouring out of the entrance to the prison, blue flashes, zapping noises, and the sharp smell of burning hair immediately announcing them using their batons against the inmates fighting back.

Most importantly, though, the unnamed minotaur is currently busy holding a massive chunk from the missing wall which he lets go as soon as Three’s out of the tunnel mouth.

“Thank you!” Three smiles at him in-between long drafts of air.

“No problem, tiny. What now?” the minotaur dusts his hands off.

“Well, you helped us as much as you could,” Thirteen speaks up, “It wouldn’t be fair if we wanted more from you.”

“Filly, I promised I’d help you get your friends out and I’m not seeing any striped changeling with ‘ass to go to war for’ here, as that annoying griffon called her,” the minotaur crosses his arms on his broad chest, “So let’s stop wasting time.”

“We’re supposed to meet them all by the interrogation room downstairs,” says Three.

“Magpie already went down there alone, but then all the wardens poured out and there are supposed to be the worst kind of criminals now unlocked underground. We don’t even know if they didn’t just shove him back into the cell.”

“Then let’s not stand here and speculate,” the minotaur starts running towards the entrance to the prison, “Friendly, friendly!” he raises his hands as the wardens swarm around him and the changelings, “I’m making sure these two are okay,” he nods to Three and Thirteen behind him.

“Hi!” Three waves his foreleg with enthusiasm, “I want to tell you that you’re all doing a great job taking care of my friends and that you’re soon going to have real food because princess Candy-”

Thirteen grabs him and puts him on her back,

“We’re going back to our cells. Is the place safe? I wouldn’t want to run into anything from the underground section,” she interrupts him.

“So far, nothing has crawled upstairs through the guard room,” the warden in charge nods to the one on his left, “Escort them back to their cells. They aren’t locked anyway, but other than few optimistic idiots trying to use the situation the guys inside have it handled.”

One warden takes point, leading the changelings and the minotaur to their cells, and one walks behind Thirteen. As they pass by the cafeteria, an earthpony lunges through the door at the warden in front, ramming him into the opposite wall of the hallway.

“Go!” the minotaur points ahead and bolts. The warden in the back reacts a lot faster than Thirteen, rushes past her to help the stunned leader, upon which a stream of inmates from the cafeteria swarm around both of them, kicking, biting, and thankfully leaving the changelings alone.

“Excuse me, excuse me, just coming through...” Thirteen squeezes between the furious prisoners, “I’m harmless.”

“And don’t be too harsh on the wardens,” adds Three, barely heard over the screaming, “They were doing their best to make sure you turn your lives around and-”

Thirteen doesn’t hear the rest as it gets drowned out by a high-pitched screech of a warden whose stun baton has just been rammed someplace private.