Room 5350:028, 5350/F
50 000 000 052 09:21
Dear sir,
Oh no! Oh crap! Oh [insert generic swear word here]!
No, don't worry, no one has died yet. But there has been quite a lot of commotion on the Equestrian Situation. And the situation is not optimal!
Alright, enough panicking. Now let's come around and see what exactly happened (after all, this is supposedly a formal-ish thing!)
Late last night48 Eħurinze is sleeping in the middle of the night, with the tiny sliver of the moon halfway down its path. Nearly the entirety of Canterlot is devoid with activities, with only the fringe49 doing their usual stuff honoring the sub-princess regent.
Anyway, Eħurinze was having dreams about a magical glowy autonomous ball with certain physics-bending powers when problems begin to arise. Behind the doors of the Dungeon Office, a couple of things are being talked about. Abridged, it sounds like this:
OfficerThere's some kind of problem with that guy sitting in dungeon (19, 18) – Water Weathering Something-or-another.
Guard 1What?
OfficerThere's something wrong with the room.
Guard 2What?
OfficerThat's what I want you to find out.
Guards 1 and 2What!?
OfficerNow!
Guard 1What...
And so things happen. The guards go off to Eħurinze's cell.
Remember, this is in the middle of the night. The moon is still crawling slowly down the celestial sphere (it should be around 10° above the horizon by now)50 and Eħurinze is catching quite a lot of Zs. Therefore, he has no time to think when the door flew open at a rate of about 8.4 rad s−1.
For the next part, I'm going to make some slight adjustments to the writing style to allow it to capture more of the intense speeds that this is going in. Thus:
Imagine a Bullet-Time Cutscene...
The door flew into the candle, tipping it over. It was still lighted, which could only mean one thing. That's right, it started to burn the rope that's holding up the survival pack. This is bad.
Slowly Eħurinze gets up and sees the bunch of hooligans rushing into his cell. He has no idea what is happening (he's still very groggy and slowly crawls his way into the very corner of the cell to slowly adjust back into consiousness.
One of the guards walked slowly towards him, while the other one walked around the room looking for anything suspicious. When he looked around the door and noticed the survival pack, he's in for a nasty shock.
For while the cord was strong against compressional, tensile and unorthodox forces,52 against heat it is nothing and it only takes about three seconds for the heavy survival back to fall.
It detaches, and begins its descent,...
...and lands on its thinner sides with a decent thud.
The other guy simply cornered Eħurinze and starts to frisk him. He starts with his head, then down through the various parts of his body, with the appendages being frisked last. His, er, entities remain untouched, a tasteful move on part of the guard. Isn't having this job great?
The other guard snaps out of staring at the fallen item dumbfoundedly and begins to walk towards the currently-inactive survival pack. He still approaches it cautiously, careful not to attempt to disturb it.
He fails miserably. When he got about thirty centimetres away from it, it begins to shake violently and without any reason. He got quite a nasty fright and starts to motion away from it, but when he does he did it too late.
In the meantime, the guard that was frisking Eħurinze a couple of seconds earlier takes notice of the fallen item, and started moving towards the first guard. He was inching towards it when he was hit by a piece of toast.
It hit him right on the jawbone, knocking him out for a split second. A moment of
reconciliation later, he looks down at the weaponized breakfast, and back at the
machine. The bounded Eħurinze looks at the two guards puzzling over his survival pack,
and thought: I'm toast
.
Bemused by this strange piece of machinery the two guards continue to look at it with a silly look on their faces, and admittedly it is quite laughter enducing. But when the first one touches the survival pack, everything went wrong.
The thing about the survival pack is that while it is usually inert, when it suffers a strong collision (like, say, a heavy fall) then it becomes a little bit crazy: a bit like a "defence mode", if you will. The survival pack begins pelting the guards with various food and condiments, resulting in a meal fit for a king and any fur within range to smell like old laundry.53 It seems like it lasted forever.
And indeed, it is, because now we move back out of the bullet-time montage and back to the regular narrative. (I love these airs.)
So where was I? Oh yes, I was talking about the survival pack's one-sided food fight with
the two guard ponies. About a minute after this débacle started up, the situation quickly
went pear-shaped, and even the manager far back up the letter had heard the din and went
down to investigate, thinking
What the elephant and castle are those two doing down there?
He got his answer
relatively quickly.
He strides rather nonchalantly into the ruined cell and found Eħurinze gazing in no particular direction, the survival pack still leaking the finest Tokyo wine and Durohandis whiskey, mixing the two in what I could only guess a pretty appetizing drink. The two guard ponies were dazed but otherwise compeletely unharmed, but stinking like the highest of heavens and the lowest of hells at the same time. It's pretty funny.
Then, without warning, a scream came out of the manager, and it managed to deafen me for a couple of minutes and I had to put down my headphones to give those ears a rest. It clocked about 130, 140 dB? I don't know, that was pretty loud. I don't even know that ponies can yell with that amount of sound pressure.
You won't be spared from the juicy details though because I still got my eyes, and I could pretty much guess how it all went down!
After a couple of seconds of 目瞪口呆 a.k.a. Gratituous Chinese later, the manager snapped out of his own trance and started berating the guards for doing a nasty job, how they should suddenly appear in the Everfree Forest – your average Equestrian insults, really.
After a while of ranting (about six or seven minutes of yelling that was – that was quite a nasty scolding!) the manager turned his eyes to Eħurinze. He glared at him rather nastily, while Eħurinze did his none-too-good poker face stance. It was barely enough to pass muster (that is to say, the manager ignored him) and he continued on to examine the survival pack.
As expected, it's still spewing all sorts of food, drink and desserts. The manager took great interest in it, and decided that it must be taken "for science". He ordered the two guards to shower off in the cell's rather inadequate shower (no curtains, no control over the temperature, purity of the water less than 50%). He tries to lug the thing back to the office, but finds it to be nearly completely immobile. He left the cell for assistants.
(At this point we activated the failsafe so it becomes a block of do-nothing machine. Not so much as a case of secrecy as a point that the Equestrians will almost undoubtedly use the technology within maliciously.)
After a while (and after my hearing came back) the manager came back with a couple of other simple mooks, the survival pack is removed and Eħurinze is left alone again.
Basically, what we have to do now is to get Eħurinze out of that cell and out of that cell now. This is going to have a couple of problems that can get worse if we don't come to terms with it immediately.