In a mission consisting of exploring an abandoned building for valuable materials and tools left over, Littlepip, among with her buddies Velvet Remedy and Calamity, walked in the empty and dark hallways to the sound of the echoing clip-clop in the broken tiles and the unsettling sound of radroaches climbing up the walls.
 
Being in a area that used to be workshops for building machinery, they had high hopes of finding valuable tools and wiring… and most of all, circuits. Harder to make after the big electronic hardware factories were left over and decayed, multipurpose integrated circuits and processors were one of the most valious things you could find.
 
In a hallway knot, the group stopped for a little rest. Velvet started checking on a medicine cabinet to see if the medical material was still useable and the medicines hadn’t expired as Calamity digged behind counters, in bins, under tables and in discarded cabinets for ammo and bottle caps. Littlepip looked around, just afraid that the rusty lead pipes with chippy red paint on them that labyrinthed over their heads wouldn’t fall down. Which seemed like too much to ask, judging by their state.
 
Looking at the cracked, fallen tiles and the darkened signs with texts and pictograms that stood for numerous dangers, she identified the kind of machinery that was inside each room.
 
“Hey! Do’ja think we need an x-ray machine, Velvet? Is’ radium any worth?” Calamity looked inside the broken glass of a thick metallic door and asked about the value of the machinery that Littlepip was already analyzing.
 
“Yea, add more radioactivy. Just what we need,” Velvet responded and Littlepip rolled her eyes as she systemathically ignored the rooms with the signs warning of the presence of elements with unestable mass numbers.
 
“Hey, Ah’ was jus’ tryin’ to be some helpful.”
 
Velvet closed the cabitet with a metallic bang.
 
“A few bandages and codein cough syrup. You’d expect them to be more ready for medical emergencies.”
 
“Seriously? A place where they can easely tear a limb off in a small, tiny slip and they only have some bandages aroun’?”
 
“Maybe they actually lost a limb and used all their supplies there. Either that or someone looted this place before,” Littlepip said to the pegasus as she kept walking down the next hallway, which was getting darker.
 
Arriving to an area lit by a weak but surprisingly still working orange emergency light, they found a wooden door which had been wrecked in half and to the ground in the middle, under a mountain of thin debris and its own splinters.
 
Peeking inside, Littlepip’s eyes went wide.
 
“Jackpot!”
 
Between more debris, tools and bolts that laid on the ground and a couple small puddles, there was a machine that was barely rusty at all. The machine seemed to have robotic arms arching over its flat surface, which made her assume it was some sort of engineering desk. Those arms were extremely useful, and probably controlled by a computer.
 
She had just won the looting lottery. Processors, fast access memories, hard drives, complex wirings, the biggest motherboard she had ever seen… she couldn’t help but fantasize about whatever was inside, she was sure she would find more processing power in that machine than in all the pipbucks she had ever seen.
 
As her friends started peeking inside from a distance, indentifying what was happening, she was already trying to contain her smile as she turned the switch on telecinetically. Just as she expected, nothing happened, the machine was not working.
 
With the corner of a sharp chunk of a metal plate that sat nearby, she started unscrewing the machine, slowly opening it.
 
The amount of boards and connections she had found wasn’t disappointing at all. She had found a treasure and her friends started coming in to check it out as well. Calamity started asking “Somethin’ good? Somethin’ good?” without a verbal answer.
 
First things first, she started checking on the wires. Unplugging a port, she looked inside it, finding every pin in an almost impeccable conservation state. With her eyes fixed on it, she took a piece of cloth and wiped them a little with the same care a mother would caress her foal.
 
She unplugged a bunch of wires of different colors at once, being amazed at their clean state. She held hooffuls of wires against her chest with a happy expression, but also letting some fall on a nearby puddle.
 
A spark went unnoticed.
 
The sound of fans turning on caused the ears of the group to perk up and Littlepip looked at some tiny green and red ligths on the motherboards turning on.
 
Calamity pointed his guns and the rising metallic tentacles and hands as they projeted shadows over them.
 
Littlepip’s pupils shrank as the hands pointed at her.
 

 
“H-hey!”
 
Calamity couldn’t hold his laughter back and he started kicking the air as he rolled around.
 
Littlepip was also kicking the air, but not because she was having fun.
 
“Stop laughing and help me!”
 
She asked for help behind the reddest blush her face could produce.
 
Not laughing like Calamity, but managing to look more serious as she covered her giggles with her hooves, Velvet closed her eyes as the spectacle was too much for them.
 
The machine pressed the diaper against her, ready to tape it, and shook a rattle over her head to distract her and attempt to stop her fussiness.
 
“Sorry, it’s just so… so…”
 
Velvet burst into giggles, causing Littlepip to roll her eyes and grumble. After the tapes were done snugly around her flank, the machine popped a pacifier in her mouth with one hand and clapped the sweet-scented talcum powder out of the others before retracting the robotic arms and leaving the, to the scanner of the machine, big foal be.