Pegasus Device

Chapter 1

Any final words, you miserable, worthless whore of a foal?

...You have... beautiful eyes.

---

Get everypony out of this room. Seal it off. Lock it down. No one goes in unless I say they can.

But Ms. Dash-

Do as I say! Use the backup devices for now. The main theater room is to remain off-limits to everyone!

Ms. Dash, what do you want us to do with the foal?

GET OUT! Just leave me be. I’ll deal with this meat sack.

Yes, Ms. Dash.

...

Oh, Scootaloo... Why? How could you fail me like that?

“I’m telling you, Rainbow, I need more engineers. We can’t continue to keep this facility up and running with the skeleton crew you’ve provided us! It’d be a damn shame to watch the entire new Factory fall apart because you’re too cheap to recruit me an employee or two.”

“Come now, Hide. What do you expect me to do? Toss an ad in the Cloudsdale Gazette? ‘Wanted: Engineer to help maintain foal disembowelment machinery and other devices of mass murder for the purpose of manufacturing rainbows. Competitive benefits. Serious applicants only.’ We can’t just hire someone.”

“Oh for Celestia’s sake, Rainbow! Have you even looked at this building? Ten engineers cannot properly maintain six different floors of high-efficiency weather creation machinery. Not to mention we still need to keep the old Factory from falling apart in order to keep this whole thing operational....”

“Hide. Walk with me.”

Rainbow Dash rose from her seat, groaning slightly. The last two decades had been long and stressful from managing the Cloudsdale Weather Corporation. The company had flourished under her leadership, mostly thanks due to her undying loyalty to Cloudsdale. She had managed to spread pegasus-controlled weather far beyond Equestria’s borders as well; working under her was the best way to travel and see the world.

Hide followed his supervisor, sighing deeply as she lead him out the door. They stepped from her office into a cramped, dimly lit hallway. The walls were perfectly smooth, featureless clouds, broken only by the occasional door. Dash’s efforts to control her tone of voice were very clear to the stallion, yet she remained calm as she spoke. 

“Twenty years ago you operated this facility flawlessly, Hide. What the Tartarus happened? Why can you no longer do the job we pay you to do? Mind explaining this to me?”

“Because twenty years ago I had three times the staff I have now and a facility about one-tenth the size and complexity as this one is. Ignoring the backup machines, we only had the one Pegasus Device to keep running. Since then, most of my staff has been involved in industrial accidents, received “disciplinary action,” or simply gone insane.”

“You’re insane, Hide. I’m insane.”

“Yes, but we recognize that. So on top of being reduced to my luckiest workers, we’ve got not one, but six devices to keep running. Those alone take all of our work hours to maintain!”

“Hide, take a look around. See what I’ve built. What do you see in this room?”

“I see the Kevlar and steel fibre mixers.”

“Yes, exactly. We developed these machines to infuse clouds with textiles, rendering them both completely solid and lighter than air. Construction companies across the globe buy out our stock in them. Heck, the whole Cloudsdale Weather complex is even made out of them!”